Death Stranding 2 definitely, without any hesitation. In my opinion the original has one of the best modern open worlds along with Breath of the Wild. In most other modern open world games, you’d want fast travel because the world itself is just set dressing and travel is just padding for quests. In Death Stranding, travel is satisfying gameplay in itself. The story is kind of ridiculous but the ending still hit me. Although, the story’s impact is carried by Mads Mikkelsen’s acting and only really ramps up at the last chapters.

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was good because it wasn’t an open world game. It was series of heavily scripted levels that you go through in a very linear order. Which is why I found Stalker: Call of Pripyat far too empty with too much time spent sprinting through open fields backtracking to the bars.

I’m not interested at all in Stalker 2. It’s just the kind of game that once you get used to the franchises’ atmosphere, it loses its appeal since the tension and mystery of the first encounter never returns. The ruins the mutants just become normal and what’s left is a rather clunky, grindy, and kind of boring FPS. The increase in production values actually makes it more generic to me. The NPCs being buggy and having bad voice acting was actually what made them entertaining.

I’m skeptical about Repo Man but I’ll still be paying some attention to it. It’s clearly trying to bait the Dishonored audience left disappointed by Death Loop but the dev studio has no history whatsoever.

I was only ever interested in Dead Island 2 when Yager (Spec Ops: The Line dev studio) was developing it. The first Dead Island was carried by that one trailer. I found the original game itself to have rather janky combat and was all around mediocre to bad in quality.

Dying Light was so much better that its shocking that it has the same devs as the first Dead Island. With one difference, they were under a different publisher. The fact that its sequel’s devs are under Deep Silver like the first game really isn’t inspiring any confidence. Volition under them developed some of blandest open world games to have ever been made, Agents of Mayhem and the Saints Row reboot.