Games that Slay in Novel Ways

Just Cause 4 (Square Enix, Xbox One, PS4, PC)

Let the Battlefield games portray war as hell. In Just Cause 4, war is hilarious. The franchise has always celebrated the chaos of anything-goes gameplay in a sandbox world, and this latest installment ups the ludicrousness. You once again play as Rico Rodriguez, suave secret agent fomenting unrest in a banana republic full of weapons depots and oil refineries just begging to be blown up. Stealing cars, jets, helicopters, and boats is about the most boring thing you’ll do here.

Your antihero is equipped with a grappling gun, parachute, and wingsuit that, when used together properly, facilitate some of the silliest moments in gaming. Grappling enemies to vehicles is bush-league improvisation. Your standard weapons come with a hardware store’s worth of attachments that add another layer of unpredictability to your assaults. Fasten balloons and boosters to a hot-dog cart, for instance, and you’ve just salvaged your own bomber aircraft. Transform ordinary light poles and radar towers into catapults. Bungee balloons and wind-generating turbines to enemy tanks or soldiers, then stand back and admire the mayhem. There is method to your madness: The more chaos you inflict, the more insurgents you’ll enlist in your cause.

Of course, you can also just hijack an F-15 Strike Eagle or an Apache gunship if you’d rather not use your DIY armada. You’ll need these speedier craft just to traverse the landscape. Everything just screams more and bigger. Based on South America, the world features four distinct biomes — deserts, grasslands, alpines, and rainforests — with their own frightful weather, and you can actually wield natural disasters as weapons. Install titanic wind machines to steer tornadoes into enemy lines. Bring avalanches down on enemy convoys. Commandeer an armored storm-chasing car to drive through hurricane-force winds that scatter pursuers. Just Cause 4 will appeal to every player type in the cultural spectrum, from social-justice warriors to gung-ho bros to Weather Channel nerds.

Shadows: Awakening (Kalypso Media, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Hitting at just the right moment for loot-starved players jonesing for Diablo-style dungeon crawling, Shadows: Awakening offered a totally metal twist to the action-RPG formula. Instead of a party of characters as in most role-playing games, you control a demon who can morph into multiple characters as well as hop between the mortal realm and a hellish shadow plane.

Insurgency: Sandstorm (Focus, Home Interactive, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Absolute realism trumps gung-ho fantasy in this first-person shooter created for gamers who crave a depiction of modern combat that could inflict post-traumatic stress. The heads-up display doesn’t have a health bar, map, or even an ammunition counter. Your arsenal of modern weapons is suitably realistic — and deadly — based on true-to-physics ballistics.

Earth Defense Force 5 (D3 Publisher, PS4)

When you don’t have an entire weekend to mobilize a Call of Duty or Just Cause campaign, Earth Defense Force 5 is the perfect low-time investment, high-frag return. In this case, you’re blowing up insectile aliens — and human doppelgangers — in more than a hundred fast-moving missions you can play solo or with a couch-potato comrade in split-screen co-op.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (Activision, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

If you’re sick of the historical hooey of most war-themed shooters, this sequel cuts to the chase and delivers unadulterated multiplayer-only combat in war zones from every era — including a fictional zombie apocalypse. Players can choose from four distinct gunmen with customizable skills based on their killing sprees.