I played a lot of games this year. Huh, wonder why that could be. Mystery for the ages.
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This game fucking rules. Yes there are parts that are too stretched out, yes it feels a little dated in structure and in side quests, but the combat, the art, and the characters all feel so perfectly refined and updated to make sense in a modern format. I never wanted it to end. If there's anything I really wish it did better it's the post-game content, which feels as quickly thrown together as I could imagine it being. The fact they couldn't even throw you back in the world and let you fight a few new bosses and harder enemies is kind of a bummer. I absolutely cannot wait to see how they build out the other party member's combat styles and how they handle the more open structure of the rest of the original game (please just throw me in a huge open world/overworld structure with these mechanics, I'd play that for a hundred hours, seriously).
Okay so I really love this game but holy fucking shit it's so long. Like, easily the longest game I've played in I don't know how long. Maybe ever, just for pure time to finish? Like, not an open world game or a multiplayer game where you just can kind of fuck around for hours doing nothing. Purely just for the story, this game took me 150 hours to finish. And it's insane, but even then in a lot of ways I didn't want it to end. I loved the characters, the story, the world, the style, everything. I don't think the characters here top Persona 4's, but damn this team is great at building a world and characters you just want to hang out with, and that's something I think more games could take to heart. Great, fleshed out characters can carry a game well past its technological limitations, and I wish there were more games comfortable enough and confident enough in their writing to let us just chill with characters and really get to know them. I constantly feel like it's insane how you can play a 50+ hour game and barely feel like you know the characters beyond 2-hour-movie level plot points and character development. The benefit of story in games should be allowing the player to do whatever they want with those characters, not just move the main plot forward, and I love these games for that.
I came into the Souls series with Dark Souls, so it was great to finally go back and see the roots of one of my favorite games of all time with a fresh coat of paint. I don't love all of the redesigns of the enemies, some end up feeling like they came out of DOOM more than a FromSoft game, but I still feel from a gameplay perspective you couldn't have hoped for a much more faithful translation, for better or worse. There are a few bosses here that I'm really amazed didn't get a mechanical overhaul (looking at you Maneaters), but I kinda love seeing such beautifully rendered monsters slide awkwardly around the environment and slowly try to work out how to make their way over to your character to hit you in ways only a game made by a small team over a decade ago would. The bosses are fairly weak (you can tell they were really still figuring out what was interesting about the combat in these games), but the environments feel like some of the best and most well-considered in the entire series. Realizing what's going on in Upper Latria is an experience I'll remember for a long time. And while there are a lot of gimmick bosses here, I think the boss arenas and concepts are much more unique and actually fun to figure out than most of the ones found in future Souls games that usually end up punishing you harshly for not getting what you have to do right away. They do a much better job of telling a story with bosses across the board here than other games, which I really appreciated.
So good early on, but any super popular multiplayer game always feels like it comes with a time limit on it. After the first month or so people will inevitably get so savage at it that it becomes unfun. And as soon as you start taking it seriously, the rough spots of certain mechanics and games really start to show themselves. The grab mechanic really shows how bad the lag can be sometimes. Nothing's worse than losing a grab the tail game by having the tail teleport from you to another player 6 feet away. And some games seriously need tuning, or just to be removed. Early on I thought I hated the multiplayer games, but quickly I realized that at least those are guaranteed to knock out a full team's worth of players, unlike the fruit platform memorization game that never knocks out more than 2 people, no matter how many start. Any time that game comes up (or the moving walls game, or the rotating cylinder one if it comes up after the first round or two), you know this match is going to automatically take 10 minutes longer.
Yeah this didn't come out this year but I mean come on. What is there really to say about this game? It's a great excuse to get a bunch of friends together and yell at each other for a few hours over drinks, and lord knows we all need more of those this year. This is lower in my list than it should be because I have to play it with an Android emulator on my Mac and the movement controls are all jacked up. Give me a proper Mac (or Switch, or PS5) version!
They've done such a great job of building a story into the roguelike structure in this game, it's actually incredible. I never thought I'd see the day I'd be coming back to one of these games for the plot, but here we are. Doesn't hurt that it's one of the best-feeling roguelikes ever made, too. That being said, there's little stuff that I always wish Supergiant would be able to grow out of in the ways they make their games that no one else seems to mention. I always feel like they depend a little too much on what would be concept art for other studios, rarely fleshing out graphics or having much in the way of animations for even most enemies in their games. What's there is always gorgeous, but I always wish they had the time or budget to do more with the incredible art direction that's always present. Enemies barely animate, in a sort of goofy, "we-used-to-make-pc-tactics-games" way that I always feel hurts my ability to read their wind-ups on attacks, but even moreso, it just... makes the game look a little cheap. I felt it a little bit more in this game due to how far the camera is zoomed out from the action. Really feels like they recognized that 4k is becoming a standard, and rather than going for more detailed character models and animations, they said... what if we just zoomed the camera out more? I feel like people don't talk about this stuff with them out of knowledge of how small a team they are, but with games like Dead Cells out there doing completely unique, incredibly beautiful takes on a similar style and structure to this game, and doing it in the first game with a brand new studio, I'm just having a harder and harder time giving them a pass on this stuff. You have great artists working on your games! Invest in your art! But even with those small quibbles, this is my favorite of their games, hands down.
What is there to say about this game? It's great and could not have come out at a more perfect time. Had a ton of fun playing, but even moreso visiting my girlfriend and friends' islands (who played for way longer than I did, and I have around 70 hours in the game) and seeing their creations. I really only fell off the game because, honestly, I didn't want to turn my island into a city. I liked the feeling of living on a deserted island with just enough personality to say it's mine. I liked having no fences, I liked keeping large parts of the island natural, and the more shops and villagers and whatever got added, the less I wanted to keep going on the progression. And once you decide that, there just isn't that much left to do in the game besides fishing and looking for fossils, which, hey, if you're really into that more power to you, but once I caught my 300th bass I didn't really want to spend my time that way either. But I do love making shirt designs and hats and stuff, so maybe I'll get back into that at some point.
Probably the most instantly enjoyable fighting game I've ever played on every level. It's beautiful, the character designs are all fun and distinct from each other, and there aren't so many that you feel instantly overwhelmed with character matchups and where to start learning. Just pick up and play, mash out some combos, and you can start to feel confident in what you're doing in minutes, while also building a solid base to start learning more complicated combos and tactics from there. So great. Only disappointment was the story mode, which from seeing some brief video seemed much more promising than it ended up being. If they'd built full scrolling, beat-em-up style stages, had some more unique enemies, and made some cutscenes, this thing could really have been something. Maybe someday we'll get a fighting game that actually has an interesting single-player that does more than stitch together fights with cutscenes, but until then this is the closest we've gotten, I'd say, so that's something. Also, man, what a bummer it is that this game's competitive scene will probably be completely dead by the time in-person tournaments start happening again. This game had such potential to pull in new players and players from all sorts of different scenes. Even just the few exhibitions I've seen in Japan have been super fun to watch. Here's hoping it can manage to survive through next year and we can get some real competition.
Incredible. Feels so good to finally have an actually good Tony Hawk to play on modern consoles. I have to admit though, the levels in 1 and 2 are just not my favorites. There are some great ones in there, but they're really not built for the full, complete toolset that's included here. Sure, Warehouse is timeless, but man, I know I'll play 10 times as much of this game whenever they get around to adding the levels from 3 and 4 (because you know they're going to. They have to).
Cool excuse to go back to one of my favorite games from a couple years ago. Really dig Miles and the new cast of characters here. I think from here on out the only open world, fill in the map icons style gameplay I'm willing to accept is going to be from games that actually try to make moving through the world engaging and fun on its own. I felt absolutely no pull to even try Ghosts of Tsushima this year after hearing it was an open world-ass open world game (with mediocre combat to boot), but I'm more than happy to idly swing around the city and happen upon random crimes and weapon caches for hours on end. Make it fun to move through your worlds, game devs! Also have to note, this is the second Sony first-party game this year to: 1. Feature a section where my character has to nervously, precariously cross an out of service crane from one skyscraper to another, and 2. (I can't remember fuck what was it shit)