10 Upcoming Action Games to Keep on Your Radar in 2026

4 hours ago 1

Published Feb 6, 2026, 1:40 PM EST

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

I’m not the most attentive person, and sometimes, the days can get away from me a bit. Luckily, that’s one of the perks of being obsessed with gaming: I can mark the passage of time based on new game releases. It’s a mutually beneficial setup; I’m always keeping new games in my thoughts and perpetuating the hype train, and it also helps me to compartmentalize everything else happening in a given month.

10 Upcoming Co-Op Titles to Keep on Your Radar in 2026

This year is shaping up to be a massive year for multiplayer fans

There are a lot of games already slated for release in 2026, as in any year, of course. Now that we’re past the January drought, new titles are going to start launching rapid-fire, and it can be tricky to keep it all square. For the sake of our collective mental health, let’s narrow the scope a bit to just action games, and highlight a few standouts in both the indie and big-box spheres that are on the docket for the next few months.

The only hard rule here is that the game in question must have an announced 2026 release window. “Coming soon” or “to be announced” dates don’t count.

10 Resident Evil Requiem

Two Flavors of Resi in One

Resident Evil has long been one of Capcom’s definitive cash-cow IPs, even more so in recent years with the remake releases and newer titles like Village. While some of the marketing for the next mainline title, Resident Evil Requiem, has been a little weird, such as highlighting the watches the protagonists wear, I have no particular reason to assume this game won’t be a certified banger.

Requiem is slated to be kind of a combo meal of the two dominant Resident Evil flavors: our new protagonist, Grace, tackles things RE7-style, with a more methodical, claustrophobic vibe in her sections, emphasizing avoiding encounters and solving puzzles. On the flip side, Leon’s sections are high-octane action in the same vein as the Resident Evil 4 remake, with his new weapon of choice being a metal hatchet that can counter all kinds of attacks.

Requiem has been cagey about its precise plot details, which is good, because I don’t want them spoiled, but based on promo materials, we seem to be building on some kind of greater mystery surrounding the collapse of Raccoon City circa Resident Evil 2. We’ll know for sure when Resident Evil Requiem launches on February 27, 2026.

9 Scott Pilgrim EX

After All These Years

Way back in 2010, Ubisoft released the official tie-in game for the movie adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Despite common logic dictating that licensed games are all bad, it was actually a really great sidescrolling beat ‘em up with fun mechanics and awesome pixel art graphics. No one thought about Scott Pilgrim for a long time afterward, but with the release of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off in 2023, the series was in the public consciousness again, which meant it was a great time for another game.

This new game, Scott Pilgrim EX, is another sidescrolling action brawler with an entirely new story penned by series creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, in which Scott, Ramona, and other playable characters need to venture across a version of Toronto that’s been fractured across time and space. Rather than the previous game’s linear format, Scott Pilgrim EX uses a larger interconnected map, not unlike River City Girls, dotted with stores and sidequests to build out your characters.

The game is slated to have a comparable degree of love poured into it to the original, with pixel artist Paul Robertson overseeing the spirtework and chiptune band Anamanaguchi returning to bloop out a new soundtrack. It should be quite the nostalgic rush when Scott Pilgrim EX launches on March 3, 2026.

8 Homura Hime

Everyone Loves a Flaming Katana

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Crimson Dusk

March 2026

I consider it something of a duty to highlight any noteworthy new entries in the under-represented character-action genre. We can only replay Devil May Cry 5 so many times, after all, and some new blood can help to keep the genre invigorated. Fiery, you may even say, which is my very clumsy transition into talking about Homura Hime.

This new character action game from Crimson Dusk and Playism follows the titular “Flame Princess,” a powerful exorcist armed with burning katanas, as she’s dispatched to rescue the world from a gaggle of devious demons. Homura Hime uses a combination of traditional character-action mechanics, with a big focus on stringing together flashy, high-flying combos, and 3D bullet-hell mechanics, with large projectiles flying about in intricate patterns. If you’ve played NieR: Automata, it’s a similar kind of vibe.

I played the demo for Homura Hime during a previous Steam Next Fest, and quite liked what I saw, from its pastel Shinto Japan aesthetic to its fleet and fiery combat. We’ll see if this particular princess is cooking with gas when Homura Hime launches on March 4, 2026.

7 Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse

If You Like it, Put a Hat on it

Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse

The fun thing about indie games is that they’re always bouncing ideas off of each other, either concocting something entirely new or trying novel combinations of concepts that already exist. The upcoming Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, feels like a Frankenstein of Hollow Knight and Dead Cells, with a pinch of village-building sims thrown in for good measure.

Never Grave follows a young witch whose soul has been stolen by an ancient witch, leaving her a revenant forced to wander the world. With the help of a cursed hat, she delves into a deep, randomly-shifting dungeon in search of answers. The witch herself can learn a variety of combat and movement abilities, gradually opening up the map, while her hat can be used to traverse cramped spaces and take direct control of enemies.

When you get stomped, you’re sent back to the dungeon’s entrance, where you can use accumulated materials to help rebuild the local village. The more the village is improved, the more your own capabilities improve, and your personal build takes shape. It’ll be a great day for dungeon-running when Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse releases on March 5, 2026.

6 Mouse: P.I. For Hire

Nyeh, See

If there are two things I love in the realm of entertainment, it's hard-boiled detectives and wacky rubber-hose animation. Given their respective intended audiences, you might think these concepts are mutually exclusive, but that’s quitter talk right there, and Mouse: P.I. For Hire is no quitter’s game.

This wacky first-person shooter features hand-drawn animations reminiscent of 1930s-era cartoons, telling the story of mousy detective Jack Pepper (voiced by Troy Baker, surprisingly), a former soldier seeking to untangle a web of corruption consuming his entire city. There’s a very deliberate dichotomy between Jack’s noir detective attitude and the cartoony nonsense he gets into, from chugging spinach for a super-charged punch to popping skulls with a laser powered by a little psychic brain.

The game is slated to have 20 levels, but these levels are nonlinear, with a combination of detective sleuthing and unlockable abilities opening the way to intrigue and secrets. I’m excited to see if this black-and-white cartoon shooter cuts the cheese when it launches on March 19, 2026.

5 Pragmata

Cybernetic Daughter Simulator

Returning to Capcom’s neck of the woods, 2026 is slated to be the debut of Capcom’s first entirely new IP in a hot minute, and it’s not doing things halfway. This new game, Pragmata, is slated to pull out all the stops in both the visual and gameplay departments to create a new kind of hybrid action shooter and quick-thinking puzzle gameplay.

Pragmata stars armored-up everyman Hugh, who has found himself stranded aboard a lunar space station overrun with robots spurned on by a hostile AI. His only ally is Diana, an android who looks like a young girl with all kinds of secret functions. Working as a team, Diana can hack enemies remotely to expose their weakpoints, allowing Hugh to gun them down with his futuristic firearms.

Pragmata Preview: Experimental Combat That's All Hack, No Slash

We've waited quite a while for hands-on with Pragmata, but it was worth the wait.

Admittedly, the initial reveal of Pragmata didn’t do much for me because it didn’t really illustrate its core gameplay loop. When I played the demo that was released in December, though, I finally picked up what the game was putting down, understanding the puzzle mechanics of Diana’s hacking and how they lead into Hugh’s shooter mechanics. I’m eager to see what Capcom is cooking here when the game releases on April 24, 2026.

4 LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

The Arkham Game We’ve All Wanted

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

It’s been over a decade since the last proper entry in the Batman: Arkham series. No, Suicide Squad and Gotham Knights don’t count. I’m talking about a game with its signature stealth predator missions and free-flowing melee combat, and no dumb live-service nonsense getting in the way. Remarkably, though, it seems like we’ll be getting one of these games again very soon, and from a very unexpected source.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is the first new LEGO Batman game in a hot minute, which is cool in itself, but more than that, it’s slated to be a fusion of the large-scale LEGO games made by Traveller’s Tales and the Batman: Arkham games. You have a full LEGO depiction of Gotham City to explore, complete with goons on patrol for you to either pick off from the shadows or engage in a no-holds-barred beatdown. Of course, since it’s a LEGO game, it’s a lot sillier than the Arkham games, but that’s not a bad thing.

The game is meant to be an anthology of Batman’s major career accomplishments, with lots of different bat suits to try on, as well as LEGO versions of nearly every Batmobile to take for a spin. You can get that Batman action you’ve been craving when LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight launches on May 29, 2026.

3 Icy Tower

This One’s for My Fellow Millennials

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Johan Peitz, Anders Svensson

2026

The early 2000s were the last bastion of freeware games, tiny titles released for little-to-no money for curious netizens to enjoy and share around. One of the big names from that age was a little platformer called Icy Tower, a game which I lost more or less an entire summer to in my youth. I am nothing if not a starving addict, so when I heard down the grapevine that Icy Tower was making a comeback, the hungry neurons of my brain started firing off.

This revamped version of Icy Tower follows the same core gameplay loop as the original: you start at the bottom of a tower of platforms and need to keep jumping up until you fall below the screen, with said screen gradually starting to scroll up at increasing speeds. By running along the surfaces of the platforms, you build up momentum to perform higher, wackier jumps to increase your combo multiplier. It’s a deviously simple framework that will grab your brain and refuse to let go.

The new version is a complete remake, with new sprite art, a live-recorded soundtrack, and some quality-of-life features like earnable kickbacks that save you when you fall. Icy Tower is slated for release some time in 2026, and I’m already getting the shakes just thinking about it.

2 Control Resonant

Let’s Get Weird With It

With the release of Alan Wake 2, Remedy has done a lot to properly cement its burgeoning interconnected universe of games, including the likes of Alan Wake and Control. Since Alan Wake got its sequel, though, that means it’s time for the pendulum to swing back in Control’s direction, and what a swing Control Resonant is shaping up to be.

In Control Resonant, Dylan Faden, brother of FBC director Jesse Faden, is being deployed into the heart of a paranatural calamity consuming Manhattan, mutating its residents and twisting the very fabric of space-time. While Resonant still has the original game’s emphasis on exploration, rather than its third-person shooter stylings, it’s slated to be more of a hack-and-slash action game, with Dylan’s weapon of choice being a shapeshifting cudgel called the Aberrant that can transform into a myriad of blades and hammers.

As Control Resonant exits the noneuclidian confines of the Oldest House, it’s shaping up to be an action-adventure of much greater scope, with weirder, more numerous enemies and entities. I can’t wait to start doing some paranatural pest control when the game releases some time in 2026.

1 Marvel’s Wolverine

He’s Still the Best at What he Does

With the smash success of its Spider-Man games, Insomniac has long-since proven that it knows a thing or twelve about bringing beloved Marvel Comics heroes to life in an ideal format. The developer’s next challenge will be making a game for a hero who hasn’t had a title all to himself since 2009: Wolverine.

Marvel’s Wolverine brings Insomniac and Sony Interactive Entertainment together once again for a slightly more… visceral experience as James “Logan” Howlett, better known as Wolverine of the X-Men, travels the world to learn more about himself and elude those hunting him. Compared to the Spider-Man games, Wolverine will have a much greater emphasis on combat, focusing on fast and vicious claw attacks that tear enemies to shreds. The game doesn’t have an ESRB rating at time of writing, but I have a sneaking suspicion this isn’t going to be one for the kids.

The game is slated to have appearances by Wolverine’s many allies and enemies like Mystique and Omega Red. Oh, and don’t worry, he’s wearing the yellow suit, as he should be. Tear into Marvel’s Wolverine when it launches in late 2026.