Top PlayStation 4 Games 2023

Rime’s superficial beauty and interesting mysteries provided enough enjoyment to make me willing to put up with its shallow and familiar elements under the hood. While nothing about Rime is necessarily bad, you can find more interesting versions of nearly every single element of it in other, better games.

While not as groundbreaking as the original, Wrong Number brings more of what made Hotline Miami so great: puzzles, fast-paced action and a soundtrack that can't be contained.

Another in a long series of big, ambitious games whose potential greatness is visible just beneath a grimey layer of bugs, Dying Light 2 Stay Human could very likely become the stellar zombie survival adventure it’s meant to be someday. For now, though, it’s best added to your backlog unless your irritation with crashes and technical issues is outweighed by eagerness to dance across rooftops with its excellent parkour, which – when everything works – is an unforgettable way to explore the last city’s open world and join in the post-apocalyptic stories of its many weird and distinctive characters. No patch can fix the forgettable main plot or the protagonist I couldn’t pick out of a police lineup even after 80 hours in his shoes, but Dying Light 2’s streets tell their own stories.

Lara Croft is a fully realized tomb raider, in this exhilarating, third-person, action-adventure romp to stop the Mayan apocalypse.

'Watch Dogs' delivers big action and creepy thrills by way of its innovative hacking, even if the story falls a little short.

Atomic Heart is a deeply ambitious, highly imaginative, and consistently impressive atompunk-inspired attempt at picking up where the likes of BioShock left off – something it’s done with a lot of success. It certainly makes missteps, chiefly with an irritating leading man and a self-indulgent habit of using the same tired tropes it tries to make fun of, but this stern, superpowered, and stringently solo shooter has worked its way under my skin despite these flaws. Atomic Heart didn’t always blow me away, but it definitely has the ticker to punch well above its weight.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 builds on its predecessor’s framework to create a super-satisfying park management sim with the occasional raptor attack.

Nier Replicant deserves praise for its clever characters and unorthodox setting, even if the gameplay and level design can get repetitive by the end.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey has everything it needs to be bigger and better than Origins. But in practice, it's mostly just bigger.

I enjoyed myself just about every step of the way through GreedFall’s epic, morally complex tale of exploration and swashbuckling. The Technomancer was disappointing, but I still wanted to see other games try the ambitious things it was attempting with more success - and GreedFall delivers on that promise. There are still glitches, awkward character models, immersion-breaking re-use of assets, and a general bugginess that keep it from being unambiguously excellent, but I have a feeling this is going to be a crowd-pleaser for those of us who still shake our canes and talk about how the genre peaked a decade ago. We may have to eat our words before long.