7. Super Meat Boy Forever (Team Meat)
Eight years after Super Meat Boy gave us panic attacks with its nutty fast-paced platform violence, Super Meat Boy Forever pitches up with a revised development team (sans Edmund McMillen, who does his own thing now) and a revised premise. Forever is an auto-runner where you control Meat Boy's jumping and attack power, and judging by the PAX West trailer, it has learned plenty of lessons watching every mobile developer in the world plug away at this genre over the last decade. The last game to successfully morph into this genre was Super Mario Run, so we're excited for how this one will turn out.
8. Shenmue 3 (Ys Net)
We all thought it would never happen, and frankly we're still a bit sceptical about Yu Suzuki and his team's ability to pull off Shenmue in a world where people's expectations of things like graphical fidelity, game length and production values have skyrocketed in recent years, especially on a relatively modest Kickstarter-seeded budget. But there's also a part of us that will always be out on those docks looking for sailors, and if Shenmue 3 is somehow a disappointment, you'll have to carry us out of it on a forklift truck.
9. Crackdown 3 (Reagent Games/Sumo Digital)
Bounding around collecting agility orbs and then climbing the Agency Tower in Crackdown was one of the quintessential Xbox 360 gameplay experiences, and it's high time the series was brought up to date. Originally pitched as somehow tied into cloud computing in ways that made destructible environments ever more compelling, we currently know relatively little about Crackdown 3 besides that and the fact it will inherit a lot of its predecessors' sandbox elements. After a couple of delays, we're starting to wonder whether it will ever make it out of development, but whenever it does we'll be waiting. Please be good, please be good!
10. Code Vein (Bandai Namco)
When we first saw the trailer for Code Vein, we thought we might be looking at a new science-fiction themed game from Dark Souls creator From Software, and Bandai Namco certainly hasn't shied away from those comparisons. Set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia and drawing on various vampiric and supernatural ideas, this third-person role-playing game has fierce physical combat at its core and a distinctive anime-inspired art style. Can director Hiroshi Yoshimura deliver something with as much depth and invention as Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki? Hopefully we'll find out in 2018.
