ForceCommander does Let's Plays on Youtube on a almost daily basis and streams on Twitch on the regular.
A lot of the games on this list were recorded and can be found on the Youtube and Twitch channels.If the german language doesn't intimidate you and want to know more about the games and ForceCommander, feel free to take a look!
Also, this Top 10 list also exists in video format on my Youtube channel. Where as this post exclusively lists Honorable Mentions, the Video features my Flops of the year!
I return to present to you my favorite games I PLAYED this year. Across all platforms, it have roughly played 150 games and I must say: This year hasn't been that exciting to me compared to the previous two (Last year's Top 10 can be found on GiantBomb!)
There are multiple reasons as to why thats the case. As this is a hobby, not my profession, I just can't buy and play all the games. Also, when I am looking at other people's Top 10, I see a lot of games I couldn't give my support just yet. I understand the maker's decisions in general, but if it result in them lying, talking down and/or breaking promises, it doesn't feel right to me to then reward them for their behaviour.
Most souls-like games are frustrating to me. They often times feel unfair and intentionally annoying. I never could enjoy the tTriumph of a successful Boss take-down as it was always overshadowed by the bullshit I had to endure.
Remnant: From the Ashes managed to be a souls-like that I actually enjoyed. It looked at what made these kind of games fun and what didn't, to then created an overall far more enjoyable experience.
The first important point is the focus on guns. It allowed a more varied approach. It felt far more manageable to fight these enormous Monstrosities as you weren't forced to engage with them in close combat anymore.
Ranged combat also added an additional element you have to learn. Ammunition is limited. Bonfires restore them, but being too trigger-happy in between them will punish you. So melee weapons aren't entirely superfluous, you have to incorporate them into your fights, but they aren't your only option.
But it also brings a negative aspect: Boss Fights always take time to beat. Even when you play conservatively, you will run out of ammo at some point. There are Ammo Boxes that restore some amount, but since its a consumable you might not have, Bosses regularly spawn additional minions to give the player a chance of regaining some ammunition.
Means a lot of Bosses have phases where they spawn new guys, which can be a bit boring and can lead to being overwhelmed by them.
What Remnant: From the Ashes realized is that a lot of mechanics in these games are actually bad. They added Quality of Life Improvements like: Bonfires are close to fog doors / boss fights, allowing re-fights far more quickly. No punishments like loss of currency after a death. Co-op simply being an option and not reduced to a random summoning. Also everyone gets the dropped loot in co-op.
Especially the first two points made fighting bosses fun. No more stretching of time where you have to dodge your way through all of these trash mobs that now have respawned. No more fear of losing all your stuff just because the boss dared to use some bullshit you might not have been prepared for.
Another great idea are Traits. A RPG-like mechanic that allows to allocate points into categories like more Stamina or Health whenever you reach a level up. At least in the beginning.
You will quickly realize that the game tracks a lot of hidden statistics which can also lead to gaining more Trait points.
The same goes to unlocking more trait categorizes. Most of them can be unlocked by beating bosses.
Now we immediately go to the next point: Every created character generates its own world. Or rather: Which bosses you encounter. While the words stay the same, two player might encounter two different Bosses at the same location. Which can drop different equipment and traits.
Here is where a lot of interesting things come into play. Like coop: Now there is a(nother) reason why you should play with someone else. To get the stuff from their bosses. It will also lead to entirely different build and maybe even playstyles, since the traits you can acquire allow for some pretty substantial buffs. It almost feels like a rogue-like.
But its important to note: You can generate a new world with your existing character. You aren't required to start a new one or play with someone else in coop. Another great addition!
Since I mentioned worlds: They are bad. You start in a ruined town, go into the sewers, followed by a desert (I hate deserts in Videogames) and other pretty standard, if not boring, settings. They aren't pretty, they aren't exciting. Maybe something to improve upon in the future.
Even though its a laughable subject in these games, lets talk about it anyway. Story. There is one, just they decided to keep this odd way of telling it. To the point that I just didn't bother. I remember a point where you encountered a diary filled with 10-15 pages full of exposition. You can't bring a game to such a full stop. Thats boring.
Overall this was a big surprise to me, as I had already given up on a genre that is filled with gate-keeping elitists that don't allow innovation or fun and engaging gameplay.
I hope that we will see more games like Remnant: From the Ashes in the future.
A visually stunning first person metroidvania , exploration, puzzle game that sucked me into its charming world from the get go. Its a game where you constantly question yourself "Is something hidden here?" or "Can I actually go there?" to then being greeted by a message that you found a secret.
Early on, secrets are chest that can contain Power-Ups, but later its mostly coins, which can be used to buy even more Power-Ups. These Power-Ups allow you to reach and do challenges you couldn't before. And thats basically the game. Explore, do puzzles, aquire Power-Ups to reach new places you couldn't before.
It has enthralled me to the point where I didn't just finish it in a few days, I played through it to 100%. Even late into the game I kept asking myself these two questions mentioned at the beginning and the game kept on delivering. But let it be said that the later hidden chests and secrets can be truly challenging.
The only somewhat negative point is the humor. Most of it is okay, but there are a handful of "geeky references" as well as some internet memes.
Otherwise I can only recommend to give this game a try for yourself. Its a game that is easily descripted, yet I feel you have to experience it to fully understand where it is or isn't for you.
The next game of Lucas Pope, the maker of Papers, Please. Once again, we got a game that sounds incredibly boring on paper: You work for an insurance company and have to documents damages in a book.
In reality we got a eerie mystery where you have to make use of a magic pocketwatch that allows to travel to a fixed point in time of the past to learn about the situation of the long lost ship named Obra Dinn.
What stays the same is that you have to take notes in your book. You start with a list of the crew, a handful of photos and that pocketwatch. With each jump you have to make use of the the few lines of dialogues you can hear and the limited area you can move around in to complete your damage assessment.
The magic of this game simply lies in watching the scenes, unlocking more and more of the ship's areas as well as more points you can jump to with the pocketwatch and slowly but surely figuring it all out.
Its a game where you can logically figure out the fates of each and every person on board of the ship without having to rely on randomly guessing. You just have to pay attention. A lot of attention. Almost no jump will easily tell you the person's name, or even sometimes the fate. You will have to look at many different jumps mulitiple times, check the pictures over and over and watch for every little detail to finally reach the right solution.
What made the game a bit more challenging are two points: The graphics, which are intentionally kept monochromatic. You can choose between a couple of them in the options menu, but even with the ones you tolerate, the graphics are strenuous and can be obfuscating. Not ideal if you are looking for details
As well as: Whenever you jump back to a certain moment in time, you only have a small area to move around. There is one situation in particular where your movement is limited and have to look through a hole in the wall.
This was a thrilling experience since the game goes to places you initially won't expect. This is another game where you have to just give it a try, only this time to mainly figure out whether or not you can get along with the graphics. Its not everyone's cup of tea.
Whenever I hear people talk about their favorite Tales JRPGs, they mention three games. Symphonia 1, Abyss and Vesperia. I played all three of them as well and never understood how you could mention Vesperia alongside the other two. The first two were excellent and Vesperia just wasn't.
Let me go back in time and go into detail. I initially played Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360. The incomplete version, as the later released PS3 version had more content.
While playing, I encountered three problems.
1) Certain characters where either insufferable or acted hilariously stupid
2) The way the story played out was incredibly stupid
3) The game flip-flopped between being incredibly easy in random encounters and stupidly impossible during boss fights.
After multiple tries of advancing the game and getting more and more frustrated, I stopped playing and declared the game as bad.
But after learning, years later, that so many people spoke positively about the game, it started to nag me. "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."With the release of the Definitive Edition, I finally had the opportunity to look at the game again and prove them all wrong!
Oh boy were they right.
With roughly 120 hours of playtime, I saw not everything, but still a lot of the game and can clearly see why the game is so beloved. Yet I question why I disliked it so heavily back then.
Where certain characters truly that bad? Actually. Yes. But only one in particular. Carol. He is a whiny dumb baby that, even after a lot of character development, seemingly is stick in being the annoying brat that always just cries and acts like a coward. But there is an excuse: He is like 5 years old.
Is the story really that stupid? Back then, my gripe was that the person everyone was trying to kidnap always declined the smartest option, only for them be kidnapped again only a handful of realtime minutes later. Now I understand that there is a reason to why this option was never taken. Also that it wasn't the smartest one.
Was the game truly that difficult? I still am not sure what happened back then: I remember having to turn down the difficulty and even having to rely on two players kiting the bosses back and forth to beat them. As I have now played this game again, the problem must have been that I was simply underleveled. Yet even at the time, this wasn't my first JRPG. So at some point I should have realized that this is the problem.
But there is more, another problem thats connected to the story: The always kidnapped person was my only healer.
If you just hear this: "Only having one healer that regularely isn't in your party because of story reasons" should , even if you ignore maybe being underleveled, be indeed a be a problem. The truth is that a lot more characters can heal, maybe not to the same extent, but for some reason I never unlocked their healing capabilities? Could be another sign of being underleveled.
But thats still not all: I also remember that the Healer would regularely die. The more modern Tales games allow you to customize your party's behaviour by setting simple commands beforehand. Like "Only attack with magic", "Only use heal items when under X Health" and so on. I am pretty sure I have played around with these options back then, yet it never worked. So my guess is: Either I was too stupid or it didn't work correctly with the Xbox Version (I lean torwards the first option)
Yes this game is great. Entertaining story, interesting characters, a lot to explore and do. My favorite little part: Skits. Whenever something happens, regardless of how important, a skit can trigger. In a somewhat simple, yet fully voiced scene, pictures of the characters talk to each other over all kinds of topics. Hearing them talk about what food and the like isn't the most thrilling, yet it helped immensly fleshing out the characters.
If you like JRPGs and for some reason haven't played that one yet. The Definitive Edition is the ideal version to give it a try. Its truly one of the best Tales games!
RimWorld is the perfect combination of survival, base building, and colonist management. The game was released as an Early Access title in 2013 and was one of the few games that felt like a full experience from day one. They used the five years in Early Access to add more and more content, improving an already impressive game.
What makes many survival games annoying to me is how frequently you have to take care of it. No five minutes can go by without you having to stuff your face with multiple full-course meals or else you get punished for not tending to it.
With base building games, they often suffer from having no way to figure out how to make stuff. And the only way to get these information: look it up in a wiki. This is bad game design. Either make the required materials visable or add a way to learn receipes. But just not doing anything and hoping for players to figure it out themself, is lazy.
Management aspects often times can't find the balance between being too complex or too simple.
RimWorld tackles all these three tasks to my liking. Its not about finding enough bear asses so you can avoid starving for five minutes. Its all about what your colonists are capable of. Your colonists have different skills, traits and backgrounds. Skills determine how good they are at things like fighting, cooking or socializing. The better the level in each category, the faster and better they can execute their task. There is technically no limit to how many skills one colonist can have. If you want to, you can let someone work as a Farmer until he masters it.
Traits and backgrounds influence basically every aspect of a colonists life. It might make them a better cook, but they get hungry more often. Or you have a pacifist that won't fight, even if they are about to be mauled to death. Or you get someone that just likes to set fire to all and everything.
Solving the hunger problem for your colonists depend on whether or not they are skilled enough. If they are, let your farmer plow fields and harvest food like rice and potatoes, haulers transport the goods to a chef who cooks them into meals. Hunger problem solved.
Obviously I am skipping a few steps here, like building a stove, having an area where you can store your meals without it all rotting away after a few hours etc., but once you understand and set up the neccessary tasks, Hunger is neither the problem nor focus anymore in any normal situation.
Base building isn't without its tricks, but just being able to look at the build menu and seeing all the currently avaiable options and what you need to craft them makes the start a bit more convenient.
The challenge comes later on. Most likely when others attack you. There are factions on this planet and they all operate a bit differently. Tribe factions are often only equipped with bows and wooden spears, which feel adorable compared to your hunting rifles, pistols and shotguns. But they come in numbers. Even these simple folks can destroy you if your base isn't build with ways to defend yourself.
Now if you think that applying your Tower Defense skills by building chokepoints and placing traps would help you, then you are right. Until the next faction's attack isn't an Assault but a Siege.
Now the management aspect is most likely the more difficult one to learn at first, but it offers a simple and complex setting, which allows to get started even if you don't understand all of it at the beginning.
You manage your colony routines by setting priorities. While something like sleep, injury and fires should always be the highest regardless of skill, you appoint your colonists to what they are good at.
If someone is good at building your furniture and you want that person to do that whenever possible, give them a high priority in construction. Now when there is nothing to construct, you define the next priority, just a bit lower. Just don't let them do everything. Space it out to all colonists as good as possible.
Might sound tedious, but its a task you do once at the start of a new game and whenever a new person joins your colony.
What a lot of these games have a problem with is that once you know what to do, the game is basically solved and can run without your input.
Good luck with that in RimWorld. Because Storytellers exist. They are like Left 4 Dead's AI Director. Depending on which one you choose, alongside a diffculty, different events can trigger. Some start it nice and slow, only to ramp it up once you are settled in. Or you go pure chaos and let Randy Random do its thing.
The Director has a lot of influence. How about a raid when you are barely ready to defend yourself? Or a lovely blight that will destroy your crops, coupled with a Solar Flare and a pack of manhunting donkeys?
Setting up a base is easily done but what the game throws at you makes it challenging and difficult to manage. Once shit hit the fan, your colonists die and your supplies are running low, it all can easily spiral out of control. Because your colonists' needs need to be satisfied. When the situation is dire, you can't have your chef go on a food binge, eating away the remaining meals. You also can't have two people get into in argument that can only be settled by fists, which might lead to heavy injured or even death. Or that damn Pyromanic feeling like setting it all ablaze. Again.
Now is there something that you don't like? There is most likely a mod for that. The community has added a lot of new or different modifications that can improve the game to your liking.
I have played a total of 440 hours so far, roughly 200 of them this year and I can already tell you: At somepoint next year I will get the desire to start a new colony and will easily add another 200 hours to the game, if not more.
Its such a fantastic game.
Hearthstone has its problems. For a long time they were deadily afraid of balancing cards. In a digital card game. Or the recent Blitzchung scandal, which Blizzard has handled poorly through and through. Also like almost every other Trading Card Game, the pricing model is horrendous.
Why this game is in this list is because of two reasons: The presentation is still the best and the Dungeon Run singleplayer mode exists.
No other TCG managed to make its cards come to life when played, as well as how easy it is to watch someone stream the game and learn everything you need to know as it displays every neccessary information.
The singleplayer mode doesn't require paying multiple hundred of dollars with each new release to be able to keep up. You have an upfront cost of roughly $15. After that, the whole mode is unlocked to you.
This mode is now in its fifth iteration. Each of them managed to improve on the formular, with a few caveats. The game mode is basically a Roguelike. You choose your Hero, a Hero Power and a deck with a small amount of cards. You fight a total of 8 AI enemies and whenever you beat one, you add more cards to your deck.
What makes this a Roguelike isn't just that your deck is growing in size. You also add extra play conditions through Anomalies before starting the game and treasures during your run.
An Anomaly affects both players and, at least with Tomb of Terror, can make it quite a bit more diffcult. Like summoning minions for your opponent whenever you play one or the game deals damage to all minions at the end of each player's turn.
Treasures, both available as passives and actives, influence only the one who has or plays them. A Treasure could be a minion that can steal cards upon its demise, or a passive that heals you and your minions at the end of your turn.
Then they added Bob the Bartender with the previous update. Its a friendly encounter that allows to tweak your existing deck / cards by either improving or even removing them or adding a little batch of new ones with a little buff like increased stats or decreased mana costs.
The Dungeon Run mode is Hearthstone turned to 11. Every run is different and sometimes a bit whacky, but you still have to play it smart, as the enemy also gets stronger with each victory in a run.
The only negative point with the current version of this game mode are sadly the Bosses. They gave them a ton of health (300) and whenever they lose 100 HP, they start a new phase. This results in them getting a new Hero Power, a new deck and to draw a few cards.
The idea is that you aren't supposed to beat them in one run, but rather multiple. They keep their current Health and phase upon defeat.
Its a neat idea but it just doesn't feel good. Even really strong decks can easily be destroyed by them, as they don't have to worry about playing smart. So something like a burn deck simply doesn't work.
But otherwise its a game mode I just love. I play it everyday and will only stop when they release the next version of it.
Baba Is You is the most innovative puzzle game I've ever played.
What makes this game so impressive is how it presents its puzzle and how different it is to solve them. In Baba Is You, every map spells out the conditions of the elements present. At first you might think that this isn't neccessary. If you play first person shooter and run into a wall, you are fully aware that you can not get past it by running directly into it.
Baba Is You will spell that out for you. WALL IS STOP. Now whats important is the next point: If you can reach those words, you can interact with them. So if a wall is in your way and you can easy reach the condition WALL IS STOP, then you maybe could push the STOP word out/away and the condition is lifted. Now you can just walk through every wall in that level.
Zhe main point of this game is to manipulate these words and learn what each of them is capable of doing. The game will gradually introduce more words and ways in how you can use them. A simple example would be that you can use a single IS word for two conditions. One horizontal, one vertical.
Is this game difficult? Yes and no. It certainly can be a game in which you breeze through a couple of levels in a row, only to be stuck for half an hour on the next one. I played through the game plus a few "post game" levels in less than 40 hours and the main things you have to remind yourself: "Do I know what each word is capable of?" and "Why are these words/conditions in this level?"
This is a game where you have to be willing to be open about trying things you learned and things you suspect might be possible.
If you like Puzzle games, you have to give this game a try. The game manages to make so much out of what feels like so little.
There was a little bit of fear in me after witnessing the catastrophe that was the story of Yakuza Kiwami 1. As a big fan of Yakuza Zero, even now I am hurt about the events that transpired.
Luckily, the second game (third if you count Zero) is such a great game in almost every aspect. The story is fantastic and reached Yakuza Zero levels at times, the sidestories are varied, wacky and hilarious just like in the previous two games, we learned more about Kazama's past and meet new good people like Kaoru Sayama as well as bad ones like Ryuji Goda. Majima and Sotenbori are back. Goro Majima gets a goofy sidestory and minigame as well as a more serious standalone one! Kamurocho looks better then ever with the graphical update used in Yakuza 6. Its amazing how much better it even looks compared to Yakuza Zero and Kiwami 1. Random encounters now transition instantly, now more loading times, which also means you can just run away from them and the game resumes as normal afterwards.
If you loved Yakuza Zero, you will love this game. If you were a bit disappointed by Kiwami 1, you will be blown away by this one.
Yet there is one red mark I have to give this wonderful game. Sadly its a big one. The fighting feels bad. Important: Feels! If Kiryu slam some lackey against a wall and he follows it up with a fist to the face, the previous two games made that look impactful, at times even unpleasant. Seeing this happen in Kiwami 2 looks two bodies made out of jelly colliding. In 0 and Kiwami 1, I had absolutely no problem fighting one random encounter after another. It just looked and felt so good to fight them. I don't think there are many, if any, games that have reached that level of satisfaction for me. Kiwami 2 simply missed this perfect mix. There is no magic. Even the ragdoll physics don't help. Which says a lot. Ragdoll physics are great in most games.
Otherwise I can't really say much more of it. Its another great Yakuza game. If you are interested, start with Zero, then endure Kiwami 1 as much as you can, then go over to another good game in the series with Kiwami 2.
Pokemon finally reached the consoles. Everyone was waiting for this moment. The moment we leave the handhelds behind and aren't shackled by their limitations anymore. We have seen what this magic could look like with games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Yet as we came closer and close …[truncated]
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