The 10 Best Games at Redbox (December 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 30 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. Star Wars Battlefront
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
The stunning visuals and fantastic audio are nearly as faithful to the original trilogy as Alien: Isolation is to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece of a film. The hum of the lightsaber, the farty brett brett sound of the X-wing’s lasers, the detailed character models and the splendor of Endor’s forests—all of it feels authentic and is, in that regard, rather impressive.—Javy Gwaltney
9. Halo 5
Platform: Xbox One
Halo 5 steadfastly holds onto a kind of Unreal Tournament style of combat in most of its playlists. Everyone starts with the same weapons, and through building knowledge about the game you can plot the best routes to the best weapons pickups. There’s no pre-planning on what kind of build you might go for other than what the level itself will provide you with. It’s a pure meritocracy out there in the killing fields, and for better or for worse that’s what you’re left with.—Cameron Kunzelman
8. Mortal Kombat X
Platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4
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
7. Just Cause 3
Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Just Cause 3 embraces the absurdity of videogames as enthusiastically as any game this side of Saints Row. It might be glib in its destruction, but its sense of humor and the energy of its open-ended approach to player movement might defuse whatever cultural or sociopolitical complaints one might have. Basically it’s ridiculous, in a fun way, with the kind of logic you’d tap into while playing with toys in your childhood backyard.—Garrett Martin
6. State of Decay
Platform: Xbox One
The theme of any zombie fiction worth reading or watching is that, when there are so few people left in the world, each life assumes an importance well beyond its usual preciousness. State of Decay made me terrified of losing even a single individual because I understood this lesson, and thus it’s as perfect a simulation of a zombie apocalypse as it needs to be.—Dennis Scimeca
5. Until Dawn
Platform: PlayStation 4
Horror game Until Dawn is genre-changing across the board, and I literally cannot wait for other games to pick up even 1% of what it brings to the table in terms of narrative and design innovation.—CK
4. Uncharted Collection
Platform: PlayStation 4
Uncharted 2 is one of the very best games of the last generation of videogame consoles. Yeah, there might be a horrible disconnect between the charming Nathan Drake of the cutscenes and the wanton mass murderer of the game itself, but few games have aped the look and feel of big budget action movies as successfully as the second game in this series. That’s not to say the first and third ones are skippable—all three games maintain a solid baseline of quality, and this collection includes all three in their PlayStation 4 debut.—GM
3. 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
2. Fallout 3
Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
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
1. Fallout 4
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Fallout 4 is built on mystery and discovery. We can charge through the main storyline as quickly as we’d like, but the true power of this game comes from exploring at our own pace, uncovering its secrets in no certain order and at no set time. Unlike a book or a movie, we can follow a specific subplot as far as we’d like before switching over to another one. We can jump between stories as we see fit, focusing on what interests us the most while ignoring whatever bores us. We can bend the story around our own preferences and desires, at least to a point. This world might be dead and emotionally sterile, and this apocalypse might be just like every other one we’ve ever seen, but its stories can still surprise, and that’s something you can’t say about most games.—GM