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isomeri

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Game of the Year 2019

It's March and I still haven't written this damn list. So let's get it over and done with, shall we?

While I'm still playing games from 2019, most notably Modern Warfare, I've finally finished all the games I started last year that I still intended to see through to the end. I think that I will look back at 2019 as a year of a few very notably interesting games, while the malaise of the looming consoles certainly took it's toll on the general catalog. Still, I had a heck of a lot of fun with many many games last year, and here are some of them. First, a few specific mentions.

Best Music: Control

Runners-up: Metro Exodus, Death Stranding

Best Looking Game: Metro Exodus

Runners-up: Death Stranding, Control

Best Audio Design: Void Bastards

Runners-up: Death Stranding, Outer Wilds

Most Relaxing Game: Crackdown 3

Runners-up: Death Stranding, Wattam

Game My Girlfriend Found Most Interesting To Watch: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Runners-up: Death Stranding, Control, Metro Exodus, Super Mario Maker 2

List items

  • The Metro games have always intrigued me on a conceptual and artistic level, but technical difficulties have on three occasions halted me progressing more than half way into the first game in the franchise. After seeing the first trailers for Metro Exodus and its promise of a wider look of the Russian countryside, and on a train no less, I couldn’t resist giving the whole Metro thing one more try.

    During the past few years I’ve had an increasingly difficult time enjoying both shooters and open world role playing games. The formulas and the combination of the two has slowly been diluted to a tasteless broth of mediocrity. Even though Metro Exodus has all the elements of those games I’ve gotten bored of, it manages to raise itself high above the rest with a beautifully crafted world, fun characters, and pleasant pacing. Oh, and a big beautiful train. I like trains.

    After klonking my way through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway a few years ago, I’ve grown more and more fond of this side of Eurasia. Metro Exodus manages to expertly depict both the beauty of the Urals and the Siberian woods, as well as the dilapidated feel of places like Pripyat and the outskirts of Irkutsk. I really appreciate it when a game manages to capture the feel of a location well, and Metro Exodus really excels at this. The good russian voice acting gives a nice wrapping to the ambiance too. I really wish that more games would fearlessly both take place and be voiced in non-traditional countries and languages.

    It shouldn’t be understated how good this game looks and sounds. Some screenshots I’ve taken in game could almost be snapshots in my travel albums and the sound design from music to mushy footsteps is thoroughly enjoyable.

    The gameplay is certainly not for everyone. The guns are mostly inaccurate and sometimes laborious to use, navigating around can take too long and you’re always at a slight disadvantage against your enemies. For me though, all this adds to the hopelessness of the predicament Artyom and his train family find themselves in. Speaking of which, I didn’t expect to feel so attached to characters who were not really familiar to me previously.

    All and all I just feel that Metro Exodus has a lot of heart to it. It feels unique and interesting and fun and strange but familial at the same time. I’m really sad that I only got this into Metro on what seems to be its last iteration. Maybe I’ll go back to play the previous games. Probably not. But hopefully we’ll see more brave and particular games like this from 4A Games in due time.

  • It’s not very surprising that I ended up liking Control a whole bunch. I don’t think that Remedy’s put out a game which I haven’t liked, and molding together bits from Max Payne and Alan Wake (two of my favorite games of theirs) was a sure-fire formula for success.

    All of the three games at the top of this years’ list have very distinct atmospheres and aesthetics. Out of all the games this year however, Control excels the most at the cohesiveness of its look and feel. Every piece of written content, dialogue, every weapon and level and sweet piece of Finnish tango fits beautifully into place like a jigsaw.

    For some reason I don’t feel as much of a need to talk about this game as others. It’s just plays very very well, looks fantastic outside of some technical issues, handles its themes with care and brought so many hours of joy to my autumn.

  • I guess I was one of the few people who actually thoroughly enjoyed playing Death Stranding. I finished playing it three months ago and I’m still thinking about the damn thing.

    Hiking around the wasteland of the United Cities of America was some of the best traversal I’ve experienced in any game ever. Was carrying all that junk around laborious? I guess a bit, but only if I neglected to plan for the cargo I was going to need ahead of time, took too many risks rushing through the terrain and generally got sloppy. Otherwise hiking or driving from place to place filled me with some of the satisfaction I get from traveling or walking in the wilderness.

    Few games last year looked or sounded better than Death Stranding from a technical standpoint, and some pieces of the art design and music selection were very inspired. Considering that for most of the game what the player sees is just wide open nothingness, that nothingness was pleasing and sometimes very impressive to look at for tens of hours.

    The first larger and totally justified gripe I had with Death Stranding was the BT stealth and combat sequences. In some places they provided for some nice variety and tension, but most of the times I just felt that black tar slowing my way down for no good reason in a game that was already about a dozen hours too long.

    And the second gripe? Well it’s the thing that also made this game so memorable and interesting. The awful and cringe-inducing story that still managed to keep me surprised and intrigued the whole way through. What in the past I would have taken as Kojima’s signature melancholic and obscure writing style manifested in this game as straight awfulness. Most of the characters were painfully simple and their paths through the game were obvious and predictable from their first introductions. The dialogue either made me laugh out loud when I clearly wasn’t supposed to or just stare blankly at the screen waiting for any particular 17-minute cutscene to end.

    Yet, I couldn’t look away. While the storytelling in Death Stranding is straight up bad, it’s at least surprising and entertaining. So many games I played in 2019 had much better stories than Death Stranding, yet this is the story I decided to spend the most of my time following to the end. And while what waited for me at the end was predictable and deflating, I didn’t regret one minute of my journey.

  • Ace Combat 7 has been my most anticipated game of recent years by a long shot. The PS2 games in the franchise left a huge impression on a young boy like myself who always wanted to be a flyboy but knew he was too tall to become an airforce pilot. The plots of those games were perhaps my first touchpoint with anime-as-hell storytelling, along with Metal Gear Solid, and they just felt good to play and looked great. That’s why after the misadventures of the 360/PS3 era, the return to Strangereal and a more classic gameplay style tempted me oh so much ever since the first trailers of Skies Unknown showed up a couple of years back.

    And you know what? Ace Combat 7 manages to mostly nail every part of what made those PlayStation 2 games so great. The story is dumb, grandiose and melancholic, but manages to be quite engaging and provides a nice framework for the “shoot those guys” gameplay you end up doing for a few hours. Speaking of gameplay, flying these jets around feels really good and quick and it’s nice to see just enough weight added to the flying without making it too sluggish. It’s a very pretty game too and a great sounding one as well.

    Simply put very few games make you feel like you’re flying an actual fighter jet in combat without having to invest in a ton of PC hardware and software. Ace Combat 7 is just really fun and exciting and I really hope that Namco will dig out the will and funds to continue the franchise into the next generation.

  • I don’t like scary games. Where as I don’t mind getting my nerves pushed for a couple of hours with a scary or otherwise entertaining horror movie, playing through an entire game full of stress and horror is usually too much for me. Games, as I’ve learned, are much more of a vehicle of escapism and relaxation for me than other forms of art and entertainment. When I sit down after a stressful workday, I simply don’t want to elevate that stress with spooks and scares. This is why me playing through Resident Evil 2 and enjoying it during one of the more stressful periods of my work and personal life in recent years is a huge surprise and compliment.

    I never really played any sizable chunk of the original Resident Evil games, with RE4 being the first and only completed game in the franchise before now. This is why I can’t really comment on how valiantly RE2 follows the formula set by its predecessor. What I can say however, is that everything from the metroid-like construction of the police station map to the way the story progresses and the characters talk are extremely nostalgic of the PlayStation era.

    The combat and graphics are certainly not stuck in the past. Aiming is just cumbersome enough to make every shot feel like a decision and not a click of a button. The game runs very well on my now almost a decade old PC. And the way atmosphere is constructed through subtle audio and music mixing is well done indeed.

    Having RE2 this far up my list is probably the biggest personal surprise of the year. If someone like me who doesn’t much care for the genre ended up liking it so much, I’m certain that most people would absolutely adore Resident Evil 2.

  • I held off playing Fallen Order until the very end of the year, and was glad to see what a little treat I’d left myself to tide over the holiday break. I’ve not had much experience with games of this type before, you know the Souls and Sekiro’s and such. The closest I’ve perhaps strayed is last years’ God of War.

    Luckily though, I very quickly started to click with the methodical combat and more punishing respawn system. Star Wars games have often had the same problem as superhero games, where playing as a Jedi has felt a bit like fighting as an unbeatable superhuman against frail droids and clones. Playing a mix of Jedi Master and Jedi Knight difficulties, I found the game appropriately challenging and it was nice to see that even a couple of Stormtroopers were able to knock me down if I got too sloppy.

    The audiovisual presentation of the game is mostly spot on, excluding the annoying bugs and performance issues even on an Xbox One X. The story and characters managed to be quite engaging, and I actually found the references to the prequel movies to be quite refreshing. All and all I can’t think of a better Star Wars game I’ve played in years, definitely not on this generation of consoles.

    Perhaps the best thing I can say about Fallen Order is that for a childhood fan of Star Wars, playing through this game rekindled my love for the franchise for the first time since the disappointments that were the recent set of Disney led movies.

  • The first few hours of The Outer Worlds reminded me of my first experiences with the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises. That fizz of exploring new worlds and characters, building your skills and arsenal and looting the hell out of some bandit camps. Unlike Bethesda’s recent attempts though, The Outer Worlds manages to remain almost completely free of bugs and jank. The writing of smaller side stories also exceeds that of its rivals and the gameplay flows more like a loot shooter than a clunky RPG.

    Even though the bit-to-bit writing was engaging and entertaining, as the main story dragged on over what I gather was roughly the halfway point, I started to lose interest in what I was doing and why. It didn’t help that the combat simultaneously became stagnant and unchallenging. Despite not making it to the end of the adventure, I had enough fun in the fist dozen or so hours of The Outer Worlds, that I do not regret my time spent with it one bit and would gladly recommend the game to even casual fans of the genre.

  • I should like this game a lot. I mean, all the arguments I’ve heard for it being one of the best games of the last few years sound good. They sound like things I should and do respect in games.

    Maybe I just picked this game up at the wrong time in my life or something, but for some reason the exploration and clue-driven storytelling just didn’t manage to keep me digging in. I do really like how detailed the world is, how the physics based flight and movement works, how certain scientific themes are handled and much more. But in the end Outer Wilds is a game I respect and want to show to other people more than I really feel like playing myself.

  • Even though Void Bastards doesn’t shy away from highlighting the games it’s been influenced by, it still managed to be one of the more original things I played this year. The strong aesthetic is carried throughout the way the game looks, sounds and feels with brilliant cohesiveness. It’s all very fun to play as well and I easily found myself jumping from derelict ship to the next, losing my sense of time in all the best ways. However after coming back to the game again and again for a few days, I didn’t manage to find much to keep me refreshed and interested. The experience is very much the same at hour 5 as it is in the first 15 minutes. It would be interesting to see this concept fleshed out in the future, and I sincerely hope the developers get to work on a sequel.

  • It’s been a whole three years since I last was revving chainsaws and plugging holes in Gears 4. I was hoping that a longer break would have given me a good thirst for some Gears business, but unfortunately the formula’s become pretty stagnant now ever since the slight refreshes of the last two games. While the open-world environment grants some variety and a sense of scale, I feel that this less linear approach also makes the storytelling and environments lack a sense of focus. The game is pretty and sounds nice, but to me nothing projected on my screen was particularly memorable or achieved the kind of graphical leaps that I’m used to from this franchise.

    All that being said, Gears is still a heck of a lot of fun, and I did enjoy turning off my brain for an hour a day or so to shoot my way towards the upcoming last installment of this trilogy.
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