Fall Video Game Preview (i.e., the one with GTA 6)

Survival/Action-Adventure
Available October 1 for PC, PS5, and XBX

Years ago, some of the developers behind Little Nightmares left Tarsier Interactive and formed their own studio, Section 9. More than half a decade later, we're seeing the fruit of their labor: End of Abyss, a spooky sci-fi adventure in which players must explore an abandoned underground complex and defeat the horrible creatures that lie within. End of Abyss seems to maintain the vibe of Little Nightmares while giving the gameplay a more action-oriented bent. This one is also billed as a Metroidvania, meaning exploration and backtracking through its creepy environments will be a key part of the experience.

Action/Sim/Horror
Available October 1 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

A space station falls into a black hole, and now everything is weird and the station is stuck in some kind of time loop. it's up to the player, as one of the station's janitors, to get things under control and prevent what's happening on the station from destroying the rest of humanity. While all that sounds cool, the real hook in this first-person adventure may be its immersive sim aspects, where everything you do will have some greater, long-term impact on the station. The way you play, and the specific actions you take, will influence the ship as a whole and the behavior of the baddies who inhabit it.

Aerial Combat
Available October 2 for PC, PS5, and XBX

The latest flight sim in the Ace Combat franchise takes us back to its fictional version of Earth, in which the player will have to fight a desperate defensive war against an overwhelming enemy, while also serving in a starring role in your country's war propaganda. It's an interesting conceit for a video game story in particular, because it means that if you die, it really might actually be game over for the war effort. How meta. This is the first new Ace Combat game since 2019, and if that seems like a long time, that's because it is—the franchise had never previously made it longer than four years without dropping something new.

Shooter/Adventure
Available October 6 for PC and XBX

The first Gears of War prequel since Judgment all the way back in 2013, E-Day —a cover-based third-person shooter like the other main-line games in the series—takes us back a few decades to the day the Locust first emerged from their holes for their invasion of the surface, while also tracing how Marcus Fenix and Damon Santiago got through it together. It's an event that's been talked about over and over since the original Gears of War, but one that's never been explored in a game before. In addition to its story campaign, E-Day has classic-style 4v4 competitive multiplayer modes, and an expanded version of Horde Mode that supports up to 12 players in co-op.

Racing
Available October 6 for PC, PS5, and XBX

It's surprising it took so long to get another proper title in Star Wars' Racer series. We've had more than two decades of nothing since the original Racer and its superior sequel, Racer Revenge, dropped around the turn of the millennium. That means Galactic Racer, made by folks who worked on the Need for Speed and Burnout franchises, has a whole lot of nostalgia to live up to. Galactic Racer adds courses on planets from the newer movie trilogy and TV shows, and even includes other types of vehicle options: You'll find all sorts of swoop bikes and airspeeders to go along with those classic podracers. It certainly looks like a proper successor to Racer, but looks aren't everything.

Action/Survival Horror
Available October 8 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

It's certainly interesting to make a first-person action game out of Hellraiser; it's not the most action-oriented movie franchise, after all. But the setup pretty much makes sense. You play a guy who has to venture into the Labyrinth, in the dimension of the masochistic Cenobites, solving puzzles and battling monsters in order to rescue his girlfriend from eternal torture at the hands of Pinhead and his pals. Don't expect Hellraiser: Revival to be a shoot-em-up, though. Combat here is up close and personal and, in the usual Hellraiser fashion, pretty gross. It's like Resident Evil dressed up in Doom's clothing.

Survival Horror/Metroidvania
Available October 8 for PC, PS5, XBX, NS2, and NS

Someone has gone missing in a weird small town, and a guy who travels there to investigate ends up going down a surreal and messed up rabbit hole. In video game terms, that's a tale as old as time. But this blend of Twin Peaks -meets- Alan Wake -meets- Silent Hill bizarreness isn't usually delivered as a 2D Metroidvania, and so there's a good chance that Silver Pines, the very first title from a small team based in Scandinavia called Wych Elm Games, has more to offer than that well-worn premise might indicate.

Tycoon
Available October 13 for PC, PS5, and XBX

After seven years of post-launch updates and DLC, Planet Zoo is finally getting a sequel from the simulation experts at Frontier Developments. Planet Zoo 2 doesn't promise to revolutionize the zoo sim franchise, but instead it looks to expand on the first game by adding a broader selection of animals, some additional biomes—including support for aquatic species—and the ability to create large-scale nature preserves. But a simulation game like this lives and dies on how well, you know, the simulation part works, and the first Planet Zoo, with its intricately-programmed animal behavior, drew raves from critics for that aspect in particular. Fingers crossed that the sequel has a slightly easier learning curve, though.

RPG/Soulslike
Available October 13 for PC, PS5, and XBX

From One More Level, the studio that brought us the Ghostrunner series, comes another first-person soulslike with a very different bent. With Valor Mortis, the devs have swapped out the more typical post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting of Ghostrunner for something weirder: an alternate version of Napoleonic France that's been torn apart by a plague that's turning everybody into monsters. If that didn't sound amusing enough, you also have the spirit of Napoleon in your head, voiced by French film star Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), guiding you as you fight throught he evil hordes of baddies. While we never really know for sure if a game is going to be good, Valar Mortis seems guaranteed to at least be interesting.

FPS
Available October 14 for PC, PS5, and XBX (later for NS2)

This particular sub-series of the Warhammer 40K franchise began as part of the "boomer shooter" trend—modern first-person shooters that make use of a '90s aesthetic. Boltgun, though, is really an homage to Doom specifically, from the look of the environments and enemies all the way down to the choppy weapon animations. As such, Boltgun II looks basically the same as the first one did at a glance, but the sequel offers larger and more open environments, and you can choose between playing as the returning protagonist from the first game, or an optional additional player character who's quicker and more agile.

Metroidvania
Available October 15 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS

Castlevania has been such a prominent brand in gaming for so long that it might be hard to believe that there hasn't been a new title in the series, spinoff or otherwise, since Lords of Shadow 2 in 2014. Belmont's Curse, which is a new mainline series entry focused on the adventures of Trevor Belmont's daughter Rose as she battles monsters in Paris, isn't a fancy big-budget 3D action game like Lords of Shadow. Instead, it's a classic-style 2D title with a focus on exploration, in the vein of Symphony of the Night, which is generally considered the best in the franchise.

Action/RPG/Survival
Available October 15 for PC and PS5 (comes to XBX in spring 2027)

This co-op survival RPG, in which players must build a base and craft tools to support their excursions into the mysterious and dangerous Shroud, was a big hit when it was first released in Early Access, and now it is finally hitting 1.0 after more than two-and-a-half years. The big full release will unlock a whole bunch of new areas for players to explore, expanding the map in a major way and giving the main storyline an ending. It's that story that sets Enshrouded apart from the many other survival-crafting simulators out there, because it's more like an RPG with heavy survival components, rather than the context-free crafting simulators that most games like this tend to be.

Virtual Life
Available October 15 for PC, PS5, XBX, NS2, and NS
Rescheduled from September

The Harvest Moon franchise has been in a tough state since Natsume took over the name back in 2014 and decided to put its own spin on the classic game series. Most new Harvest Moon games since have performed poorly with critics, though the 2023 title Winds of Anthos gave fans hope that Natsume might be turning things around. Those hopes are now pinned to Echoes of Teradea, which looks gorgeous and seems to have all the elements it needs to have to make for a great Harvest Moon game. But given the series' recent history, we probably shouldn't assume the best. We'll still hope, though.

RPG
Available October 22 for PC, PS5, XBX, NS2, and NS

We've got an absolutely fascinating package here, as Square Enix has taken its decade-old mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius —which was free-to-play and heavy on gacha microtransations—and repackages its story into a more standard, all-inclusive retail release with more robust gameplay mechanics and a very pretty HD-2D pixel art style. Final Fantasy Resonance is a throwback for the franchise not just because of its retro art style, but also because of its turn-based battles. There hasn't been a new turn-based Final Fantasy among the main series or spinoffs in over a decade.

Sports
Available October 22 exclusively for NS2

It's been two whole decades since Wii Sports took the world by storm in 2006, and Nintendo found a low-key winner when it revived the series as Nintendo Switch Sports in 2022 by making use of the Switch's Joy-Con motion controls to let players mime participation in various sport activities. But that title didn't have that many of the games that were included with the classic Wii Sports titles. Switch Sports Resort fixes that by bringing back favorites like table tennis, archery, and boxing, while also introducing skateboarding and thumb wrestling—the latter, being pretty conceptually hilarious, has already become the main topic of conversation about this game. There's nothing revolutionary here, but that's not the point of these games at this point anyway.

FPS
Available October 23 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

After Activision dropped two Black Ops titles in a row, Call of Duty finally returns to the globe-trotting adventures of Captain Price with Modern Warfare 4. This time out, Price is on the run because he assassinated the evil General Shepherd at the end of the MW3, and the world is on the brink of a global conflict after North Korea invades South Korea. Alongside the campaign, we've got the usual array of multiplayer maps and a major update for Warzone. But the biggest new wrinkle here is DMZ, a new extraction mode in which squads of three compete for loot and complete story missions. A new extraction shooter is a risky proposition at this point, as demonstrated by the failure of Bungie's Marathon to get much traction. But an extraction mode attached to the new, fully-featured Call of Duty will probably have a better chance at success.

Arena Brawler
Available November 3 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, a 2002 fighting game released for Xbox and GameCube in which you can pit any of a number of famous kaiju from the Godzilla movie franchise against each other in the midst of destructable city stages, was a game seemingly lost to time. But thanks to the devs at Pipeworks, who rebuilt the entire game in Unreal Engine 5 and updated it a bit for modern sensibilities by adding online multiplayer and smoothing out some of its rough edges, a lot of folks will get the chance to try out this unusual brawler for the first time. Just keep in mind that even though Destroy All Monsters Melee is a pretty unique game, it's not exactly a beloved classic–the original version of the game earned a 73 Metascore from reviewers, who found it very novel but also quite shallow.

Action
Available November 5 for PC, PS5, and NS2

This Japanese action roguelike (pronounced like "Cry Me Light") is basically a warped retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which a group of dead girls have to compete to kill the Queen of Hearts and repent of their sins. The core appeal with this title—which is a standalone thematic sequel to a pair of other Furyu Corporation titles, Crystar and Crymachina—is the characters and the visual novel storytelling, rather than the gameplay. So your mileage is likely to vary based on how much you like visual novel games.

Open-World Action
Available November 5 exclusively for NS2

It's Nintendo, remaking what might be the most beloved video game ever made —and also, ranked by Metascore, the best game of all time. There's no way this could possibly go wrong, right? Well, the first time folks got to see the new version of Ocarina of Time in action, there was a lot of discussion about the art style—like, "does Link look weird and uncanny?" kind of discussions. That may just be part of the price of remaking a Nintendo 64 game, since it was always going to be a bit awkward seeing those visuals with so much more detail. But the success of this remake of the greatest action-adventure game of all time isn't ultimately going to hinge on whether Link looks a little too real if it's otherwise amazing.

Compilation
Available November 12 for PC, PS5, PS4, XBX, and XB1

A compilation of 16 old Barbie games may not sound like the most thrilling package on its face, but this is actually a fairly unusual thing. Barbie Rewind includes games released between 1991 and 2007 for NES, Game Boy, PS1, GameCube, and GameBoy Advance, as well as one SNES title, Barbie: Vacation Adventure, that is actually being released for the first time as part of this collection. While it's doubtful that every single one of these titles will be fun to play in the present day, the package represents a fascinating slice of gaming history, since none of these titles has ever been re-released before. There's also a virtual Dreamhouse available for decorating, and the compilation comes from the studio behind the similar recent historical package Atari 50.

Open-World Action
Available November 19 for PS5 and XBX

It's been a very long 13-year wait for the eighth mainline GTA game, and the first to return to Vice City since 2002. Like GTA V, the new game will have multiple player characters, but this time it's a couple, Jason and Lucia, who have to work together to survive a conspiracy they get stuck in the middle of. The lengthy gameplay preview that Rockstar released on Netflix made it look like the absolute best version of this franchise we've ever seen: It's gorgeous and technically stunning, and the action looked amazing. So it's pretty easy to see why it's taken so long to get it done. It's worth wondering, however, whether "the best version of GTA" is going to make us happy in 2026. So much about the gaming landscape has changed since GTA V was released on the Xbox 360 (yes, it really was that long ago), and the open-world genre has matured a lot with newer titles like Rockstar's own Red Dead Redemption 2 and CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. Now we get to find out if GTA has grown up as well.

RPG
Available December 3 for PC, PS5, XBX, NS2, and NS

Dragon Quest's Pokemon -ish sub-series, in which players wrangle monsters in order to use them in turn-based battles, continues with its fourth entry. The Withered World follows Dragon Quest V heroes Bianca and Nera as they wrangle monsters to help them survive Witherwood and find a cure for a mysterious illness that both their fathers are suffering from. Despite the apparent seriousness of the scenario, the Dragon Quest Monsters spinoffs are lighter and more whimsical than the main series is—and that is reflected by the fact that our player characters are the child versions of Nera and Bianca.

Platformer
Available December 3 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

Recently pushed from October to a December launch, this side-scrolling platformer is a remake of 2013's Rayman Legends. But it's not just a gussied-up new version like so many video game remakes tend to be. Instead, Rayman Legends Retold modernizes the existing content, bringing it up to today's standards, and also adds plenty of new material, including new levels, a new realm, several musical stages, a new story with voice performances, proper four-player online co-op, and even some new 3D sequences. This will be the first new Rayman game since Legends came out 13 years ago, so the hope is that it'll serve as a reboot for the franchise as a whole.

Real-Time Strategy
Available December 3 exclusively for PC
Rescheduled from September

Nine years after the last Dawn of War game, Warhammer 40k's real-time strategy series returns with a new title by a new developer. After Relic Entertainment made the first three Dawn of War games, King Art Games took over development on this one—somebody at Games Workshop must have loved King Art's novel 2020 RTS Iron Harvest. Dawn of War IV takes us to the planet Kronus, which fans will recall as the site of the Dark Crusade expansion from the original game, where players can choose to play through four different campaigns, one for each other factions that are relevant to the plot: Space Marines, Orks, Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Necrons. With that much story packed into a single game, Dawn of War IV might have as much appeal for Warhammer lore nerds as it does for strategy fans.

Action-Adventure
Available December 10 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

Attack on Titan 3 is an odd title for this game, which is not really a sequel to either of the previous Attacks on Titan. Instead this new one supplants those two games entirely, retelling the entire story of the anime series from beginning to end. In essence, this is THE Attack on Titan video game. Players take on the role of an anonymous side character who fights alongside the main heroes from the show using ODM gear and takes part in the main story without being its focus. The question is whether the improvements to the series' gameplay will be enough to warrant making players go through the early parts of the plot yet again.

Rhythm
Available December 10 for PC, PS5, XBX, and NS2

It's been quite a while since we got a new standalone, instrument-based rhythm game like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Fortnite Festival has great charts and gamepad support, but it's a free game with obnoxious FOMO-based monetization, and Clone Hero is serviceable, but its fan-made charts just aren't that great compared to those made by actual pros. But now Guitar Hero creator RedOctane has risen from the ashes 15 years after being shuttered by Activision, and its team of rhythm game veterans have been working on Stage Tour, a new title which'll come with 90 songs, and will support instrument peripherals as well as offer gamepad-specific charts for folks who don't want to buy any plastic guitars—something Guitar Hero and Rock Band never had. It all looks great on paper, but Stage Tour has a heck of a legacy to live up to.

Action/RPG
Available December 11 for PC, PS5, and XBX

This isometric action RPG will have been in Early Access for about two years when it finally has its 1.0 release, which will add a new Duelist class and add two acts to the game's story, finally bringing it to a close. Path of Exile drew raves when it launched in Early Access in 2024 for its well designed and challenging combat, which is more hardcore and an almost soulslike experience compared with the similar-looking-but-more-casual Diablo IV. The real question for this launch is whether Grinding Gear Games will ramp up the monetization after Path of Exile 2 hits 1.0. While the Early Access version was paid, the game will go free-to-play once it launches in full.

Want more games?
For a full list of all major upcoming game releases throughout 2026 and 2027, visit our frequently updated Game Release Calendar.

We also have individual release lists by platform:
PlayStation 5 release calendar >
PlayStation 4 release calendar >
Xbox Series X/S release calendar >
Xbox One release calendar >
PC release calendar >
Nintendo Switch 2 release calendar >
Nintendo Switch release calendar >
Meta Quest release calendar >