March is nearly over, and what better way to spend the final days of the month than curled up at home and playing video games? Welcome to Kotaku’s weekend guide, where we give you a few suggestions of cool games you can play right now if you’re avoiding your backlog or just want to add another game to the pile. You’ve worked hard all week, so you deserve some time to yourself to play good games. Here are our recommendations, gift-wrapped and delivered straight to you.
2 / 5
Play it on: PS4, PC, Xbox One
Current goal: Raise Hell
With the Devil May Cry anime coming to Netflix next week, I’ve got Dante on the mind. Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening was a formative game for me as a pre-teen, and there aren’t many character action games that have lived up to that high for me. It kinda spoiled me on the genre, really. Series that don’t have that same vicious challenge and campy style don’t hit the same. It’s my go-to “challenge” game, and not even a Soulsborne matches the satisfaction I remember feeling as I landed blows on Dante’s twin brother Vergil in the game’s later boss fights. DmC: Devil May Cry, 4, and 5 didn’t quite hit the same for me, but I probably should give 5 another chance. More than anything, though, I want to go back to the old PS2 games, and luckily they’re readily available thanks to the HD Collection on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. — Kenneth Shepard
3 / 5
Play it on: Switch
Current goal: Find Nelson and his missing squad
Spring always gets me in the mood for a good JRPG and the Xenoblade series, with its focus on vast bucolic landscapes and massive wildlife, always feels like an especially good fit this time of year. I picked up Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition last week and instantly got into the MMO-lite groove of exploring its sprawling alien planet. Things have been slow going, however, due in part to all the games coming out this month (including but not limited to The Last Berserker: Khazan, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Cataclysmo).
So I’m excited to dive back into it more deeply this weekend. I’m still less than a third of the way through, but man, it holds up surprisingly well. There’s very little that I miss coming from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and I think it looks great and runs exceptionally well on Switch despite the aging hardware and lack of a major technical leap from the Wii U where the game was previously trapped. It’s Jurassic World meets mech-infused “go slay god” anime sci-fi vibes and I have a feeling I’ll be slowly chipping away at it for the rest of the year, especially if it secretly runs at 60fps on Switch 2 as currently seems to be the case. — Ethan Gach
4 / 5
Play it on: just about anything
Current goal: Bring some justice to the streets
Lately I’ve been on a kick of revisiting Capcom’s incredible beat ‘em ups of the late ‘80s through the mid ‘90s, or in some cases playing through them for the first time. This past week, a friend and I played the company’s excellent pair of licensed Dungeons & Dragons brawlers—Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara—via the compilation Chronicles of Mystara, and I was so impressed by their satisfying combat, their bevy of secrets and alternate pathways, and their incorporation of inventory systems and magic items. Now, this weekend, I want to go back to the game that kicked off Capcom’s genre-defining run of beat ‘em ups: 1989’s Final Fight.
When I think of the quintessential beat ‘em up, I think of Final Fight. I remember how incredible it was to see this game in an arcade or at a nearby laundromat or convenience store back then; those massive sprites, those crunchy digitized voice samples, that hard-hitting combat. It was one of those games that you knew instantly would change a genre forever, transforming and refining the core principles established in earlier games like Double Dragon and Renegade into something more immediately accessible, appealing, and unforgettable. I haven’t played Final Fight in many years, and the friend I’ve been playing these games with lately never has. So this weekend, I think it’s time for Metro City Mayor Mike Haggar to once again hit the pavement, pile-drive some members of the Mad Gear gang and, before all is said and done, confront the true source of evil: a wealthy and powerful man, overseeing his criminal empire from the top of a glass tower, far above the dilapidated streets and subway cars that define Final Fight’s incredible depiction of a city on the brink of ruin. — Carolyn Petit
5 / 5