The 10 Best Videogames at Redbox (August 2015)
What do you do when you want to play a game right now but don’t want to buy it? GameFly can take a while to get a game to you. PlayStation Now doesn’t have a lot of recent releases and requires a good internet connection. Video stores don’t really exist anymore. Redbox is your best bet to rent a game at a moment’s notice and at an affordable price. Redbox currently has about 25 games available, according to their site, but not all are worth your time or money. Let us help you out with our list of the best games currently available at Redbox. Depending on your tastes, you’re all set with any of the games below.
10. MLB 15: The Show
Platform: PlayStation 4
It’s not just the almost overwhelming commitment to recreating the sport that makes MLB The Show the best on-going sports series. It’s also the endless expanse that opens up before you when you start yet another season, the trance-like rhythm you fall into game after game after game that can’t be matched by the shorter season of football or faster action of basketball. It’s the role-playing progression of the Road to the Show mode, where you level your handmade player up to the Majors. And yes, it is Sony’s fastidiousness in turning this game into a videogame, with all the details in both play and presentation necessary to make it feel as real as a videogame currently can. MLB 15 is one more year of greatness in a hall of fame career.—Garrett Martin
9. Evolve
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Evolve isn’t just a four-person co-op game. It’s a four-person co-op game where you’re trying to take down a massively powerful monster controlled by a fifth friend. The game commits to that premise, plopping you and your fellow hunters in enclosed maps mostly devoid of enemies and forcing you to track that single formidable beast. It’s elegant in its own way, but requires a bit of strategy to stay alive and take down the other side.—GM
8. Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Playing these games feels like chasing the horizon. There’s always more loot to gather. There’s always a plot complication that drives you further along a path. There’s always more interesting ways to do more damage to healthier enemies who you are racing against to prevent them from doing too much damage to you.—Cameron Kunzelman
7. Mortal Kombat X
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Mortal Kombat X is fascinating in how parts of it seemingly want to get away from the nasty elements that made the series a household name and yet the gravitational pull of legacy and expectation is too strong. Mortal Kombat X is, in the end, no matter how much it wants to persuade you otherwise, just another Kombat game. It also happens to be one of the best ones.—Maddy Myers
6. Ultimate Action Triple Pack: Just Cause 2 / Sleeping Dogs / Tomb Raider
Platform: PlayStation 3
This combo includes three of the best action games of the last generation. Just Cause 2 is a gleeful, destructive romp through an endlessly destroyable toy box; Sleeping Dogs is GTA set in an interesting culture and with a story that aims for more than juvenile shock tactics; and the Tomb Raider reboot, as our former Assistant Games Editor Maddy Myers wrote in her review, “feels like the first step on a shaky path towards a better franchise.” It’ll take you several dozen hours to play through all three games, but if you’re just looking for variety this is a hard deal to beat.—GM
5. Saints Row IV Reelected – Gat Out of Hell
Platforms: PlayStaion 4, Xbox One
A little gaming literacy goes a long way in getting the most out of Saints Row IV. It manages to riff off of classic games like Metal Gear, Streets of Rage and even the old Atari tank-battle title Combat in clever and endearing ways. Saints Row IV is incredibly aware that it is a Video Game, capital V, capital G; it explicitly embraces the bizarre, juvenile and often incomprehensible logic of the medium, and revels in it. Here’s a toy box, Volition says, go smash some stuff together. Can do, Boss.—J.P. Grant
4. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
When I think of my time in Witcher 3, which is still going, I think mainly of the quest for Ciri, your adoptive daughter. I think of mages with freckles and villagers working fields after your drive away their tormenters. I think of it as a game which says that all we have is each other, as family and friends. As people, whose lives are short but brilliant. As a game that says that what makes life worth living and struggling for isn’t trying for perfection but our common imperfections. It’s aspiration by way of mundanity and I don’t know that I’ve played anything quite like it.—Ian Williams
3. Minecraft
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
We tend to go through life consuming products, following leaders and settling for what’s given to us. Our games play into these tendencies: we’re told what to to strive for, how to get there and when to feel satisfied. Minecraft releases us from these obligations and gives us the freedom to grow bored, overwhelmed, thoughtful, creative and accomplished.—Richard Clark
2. Bloodborne
Platform: PlayStation 4
Bloodborne is a distillation of everything that worked in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. The combat is fast, less clunky and more risky. Yharnam is a stunning world worthy of hours of exploration, and, perhaps most pleasant of all, Bloodborne is a game that knows when to end. It’s a deeply challenging game set in a fantastically realized gothic nightmare, an adventure of the highest quality for those willing to undergo the game’s trial by fire..—JG
1. Fallout 3
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Fallout 3 is, hands-down, the richest, deepest, most captivating game world I’ve ever explored. You’ll have that same feeling of awe you experienced after reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices at the end of Lord of the Rings. Middle Earth really did exist, if only in the head of a mad artist dreamer from Oxford, England. The world of Fallout 3 must never exist. Consider Bethesda Game Studios the Ghost of Christmas Future.—Jason Killingsworth