Top 7 Games From E3 2021 You Shouldn’t Overlook

E3 2021 has come and gone (wow, bet you didn’t think we’d be saying that this time last year, huh?) and while some were a bit underwhelmed with this year’s offerings despite the fact that the past year has made it exceptionally difficult to work on…well, just about anything, we have to admit there are lots of upcoming games to get excited about. Plenty of big franchises were shown off including Halo, Legend of Zelda, Battlefield, Far Cry, Metroid, Overwatch, Mario Party, and The Outer Worlds. Expansions, DLC, or other new content was announced for ongoing games like Among Us, Fall Guys, Call of Duty, For Honor, and Rocket League. Plus…umm, there’s a Borderlands movie in the works, I guess? Oh, and there’s new IP like Redfall, Starfield, Deathloop, …and presumably some non-Bethesda games, probably.

Though we’d never shame you for being most excited about one of those games mentioned above – this writer personally agrees with the E3 2021 Awards Show voters who selected Forza Horizon 5 as the game they were most excited about – there were plenty of other games at E3 that weren’t given the same spotlight. We’ve said it before and we’ll probably say it again (because we’re creatively bankrupt…er, because continuity is important) – we here at FilmIronic love to highlight under-hyped video games. With so many games showed off at this year’s all-virtual showcase, it was hard to narrow the list down to our usual top 5, so we just… decided not to. Turns out you can pretty much do a list of the top however many you feel like, who knew? So, in the interest of proving we definitely aren’t running out of ideas for list formats like we may have just implied, here’s our list of the top 7 games you shouldn’t overlook from E3 2021. Starting with our usual honorable mentions…okay, maybe we do repeat ideas sometimes…

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Games we’ve written about before

Okay, so as we mentioned in the intro, we’ve talked about games you shouldn’t overlook before, and no surprise, several of those games showed up at E3 2021, including Back 4 Blood, 12 Minutes, Psychonauts 2, and Elden Ring. Rather than repeating ourselves, we’ll just link to those articles here and here so you can go read our frankly brilliant descriptions again (because you totally already read those articles, right?) and remind yourself of just how right we were all along.

Party Animals

Have you ever played Gang Beasts, the zany multiplayer brawler from 2014? Well, Party Animals is that with some gameplay updates, new maps, and a cast of characters that happen to all be animals, including a butt-wiggling corgi and a pig with a mohawk wearing punk cuffs. In fact, I’m so confident that it’s clear why you shouldn’t overlook this game from that description alone (and the trailer above) that I’m actually not going to write any more about it.

Unpacking

Look, sometimes you want a 40-plus-hour RPG or a deeply engrossing shooter to pour your time into. Other times you want a super chill puzzle game about unpacking your stuff after moving into a new place. Guess which one Unpacking is?

Evil Dead: The Game

Bruce Campbell is a national treasure.

What, you need more than that? Fine, Evil Dead: The Game is a multiplayer horror game based on the film franchise that sees players controlling boomstick-wielding survivors like Ash Williams or the army of Deadites trying to make their lives decidedly un-groovy. There, that should be more than enough to get you hyped for this title unless you’re holding out for the video game reboot of Bubba Ho-Tep or The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. or something.

Now to the top 7!

7. Slime Rancher 2

We’ll kick this list off with the game that is probably least likely to get overlooked, at least considering how well the original game sold and how cute and accessible it is. The fact that it’ll be on Xbox Game Pass on console and PC upon release also helps. Real talk: the original Slime Rancher is probably my wife’s favorite video game; she’s definitely put more hours into it than any other game that I can remember, and her immediately saying “Yeah, we can play that” when I first showed her the trailer is probably the best endorsement she’s ever given a video game. It’s not hard to see what she found appealing in the trailer: there look to be plenty of new slime types, items, and secrets to discover, all while retaining the charm of the original game. Even if you consider yourself more of a “serious gamer” than my admittedly non-gamer spouse, there’s plenty to recommend in this farming life sim, which can be played as chill (“I’ll spend a couple of hours looking for new slimes”) or as hardcore min/max (“I’m gonna breed the most valuable slimes to get my ranch fully automated and unlock all the upgrades as soon as possible”) as you like. Plus, are you really the kind of person who doesn’t see the appeal in rounding up a bunch of animated slime balls, force feeding them until they poop, and then selling the poop to buy upgrades that allow you to feed them and harvest their poop more efficiently? I’m not sure such a person exists.

6. Tails of Iron

As a fan of the Redwall books growing up, I’ve long dreamed of what a video game adaptation of that franchise might look like. And while I’ll admit the long-delayed Tunic still gives me some hope of combining one childhood favorite with another (The Legend of Zelda, namely), I must admit there’s something oddly appealing about the idea of combining something very kid-friendly like medieval fantasy involving cuddly animals with something ominous, foreboding, and decidedly more grownup-oriented like Dark Souls. That’s where Tails of Iron seems to reside – the hand-drawn visuals look to have been pulled directly from a storybook for children…right up to the point where frogs start getting their throats slashed and heads chopped off. The story sounds familiar to any fantasy fan – a great king’s son must protect his kingdom from falling to a looming evil – but you just know with Doug Cockle (best known as the voice of Geralt from The Witcher franchise) as the narrator, there’s going to be some dark twists and turns along the way. The story trailer doesn’t give much of an indication of gameplay, though it is apparently a punishing 2D action RPG, and with a promised release date sometime in 2021, we definitely hope to see more of this game in the near future.

5. Cruis’n Blast

Speaking of flat-out nostalgia bait, anybody remember the arcade mainstays Cruis’n USA and Cruis’n World? Okay kids, an arcade was a place that had a bunch of video games where old people used to go when they were young and still remembered what joy was. Anyway, if you clicked on either of those links above, or just know anything about how the passage of time works, you’ll realize that those old games are pretty tough to get your hands on these days, and they probably haven’t aged that well even if you could afford to. So a new game in the franchise is a perfect way for those who remember to experience some of that old fun again while hopefully appealing to a younger audience who may never have had the pleasure of popping wheelies and backflipping over dinosaurs in a colorful, cartoony racing game. As a gearhead, I’m pretty excited to see the array of Corvettes included in the game, and as a fan of absurd “vehicles” in racing games, I’m even more excited to unlock the (drivable?) shark, unicorn, and triceratops. Plus, it’s a Switch game, and how often are those overlooked enough to qualify for one of these lists?!

4. OlliOlli World

If your experience with skateboarding video games never extended beyond the Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Skate franchises, you’ve been missing out on one of the best, most chill, easy to pick up but difficult to master indie franchises out there. OlliOlli and its sequel are classic “just one more try” indie games, and although the art style in World looks to have shifted a good bit from its more pixel-art inspired predecessors, it definitely seems to have nailed the vibe of those games, if the gameplay and music shown off in the trailer are anything to go by. I should also point out, if you can’t wait until winter of this year or just prefer your skating games to be 3D and also extra absurd, there’s always SkateBird, which is scheduled to release in August. Consider that a bonus game. But don’t forget, OlliOlli World looks rad.

3. A Plague Tale: Requiem

Okay, we’ve officially reached the end of the cutesy, colorful games on the list and begun the serious games for serious gamers part of the list. And hey, what’s more serious than running from a deadly swarm of rats in plague-infested 14th century France? But like, in a fun way, right? A Plague Tale: Innocence was one of the best games of 2019, and fans of the stealth and survival horror genres had to be excited and horrified in equal measure when the reveal trailer for its upcoming sequel debuted at E3. The jump to next-gen consoles has only increased the potential for absolutely massive waves of roiling, chittering, gnawing rats to unceasingly pursue any vulnerable, squishy humans through the filthy streets, seeking to tear flesh from bone and devour victims alive. If that sentence didn’t make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, I’m not even sure what to say. I feel kind of icky and I wrote it. Given the state of the trailer and the fact that the original game released in 2019, Requiem is probably over a year away at this point, but don’t sleep on this title – it figures to be well worth the wait, especially for those who experienced the heart-wrenching journey of Innocence. And hey, with plenty of time before the sequel releases, if you never got around to the first game, there’s no reason not to give it a shot while you wait.

2. Life is Strange: True Colors

Life is Strange has been a personal favorite of mine for a long time, and despite the fact that there have been two mainline entries, a prequel spinoff, and a free playable demo that was its own sort of mini side game, the series has never really gotten its due, probably because it’s one of those dreaded “narrative-driven” “experiences” that are “emotional” and “good” and “not just about blowing stuff up and shooting people in the face” and garbage like that. True Colors feels like more of the same but with a major new feature: the ability to experience other people’s emotional states through colors. Okay, it’s maybe not as flashy or obviously cool as being able to rewind time, but the ability to transform part of the world based on how a character is feeling seems like it will open up many interesting possibilities for gameplay, and protagonist Alex’s ability to possibly absorb some of the emotions of others promises to add some complexity to the choices you’ll be forced to make as the game goes on. Plus, using empathy as a sort of superpower is the kind of thematic choice that we should all be able to get behind – couldn’t we all use a little more understanding sometimes? Nah, never mind, where’s the shooty pew-pews at?

1. Atomic Heart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixcnY0fm80c

As I mentioned above, I’m a huge Life is Strange fan, so it takes something really special to knock it off from the top spot on this list, but a super weird alternate reality Soviet Union shooter is apparently the exact right combination of elements to get the job done. Add in the fact that this game has been teased since at least 2018 and each time a new look at it is released it looks even more bizarre in the absolute best way possible, and it’s easy to see why this game is so anticipated and yet so easy for the casual fan to forget about. It’s here for one brief, fleetingly gonzo minute and then it’s gone again, back into hibernation until its developers can cook up another frustratingly short peek into its bizarro world of androids, Soviet propaganda, improvised weaponry, and strange technologically-derived plasmid-like powers. From what we’ve seen of the game so far, there’s hints of Bioshock, Control, and Prey mixed with a Fallout-esque take on the Cold War era mixed with modern (or even futuristic) technology. Basically, what I’m saying is I have absolutely no idea what this game is and it looks freaking awesome.

So those are our picks for the games you should be paying more attention to following E3 2021. Did we miss one of your favorites? Is there a little-known game that you’re super hyped for? Leave a comment below, give us a follow on Twitter @FilmIronic, and be sure to check back every day for more entertainment news, reviews, and features!