ForceCommander uploads german Let's Plays on Youtube on an almost daily basis and streams, if he weren't sick or injured for most of the year, on Twitch every Friday!
My Top 10 of 2020 also exists in video format on my Youtube channel, with the little extra category of my my disappointments of the year, but this written list also has something exclusive to it: the "Honorable Mentions". Games that didn't quite make the list but I felt the need to highlight.
What a year. The three previous ones already felt like we started to drift into some kind of bizarre alternate timeline but 2020 has been the rotten cherry on top of a very bad-tasting cake.
The one positive aspect, at least for this Top 10 list, was that the lockdown allowed for more time to play video games. Where I played around 90 and 150 games in 2018 and 2019 respectively, 2020 jumped to an astonishing 185, with 57 of them seeing credits. That is a lot more, but its also a bit deceiving.
I played through a lot of shorter games or quickly jumped off of them, thanks to the, if I were to give out awards, Game Service of the Year with Xbox Game Pass for PC. At the same time, I still managed to play a lot of NBA 2k20, with 720 hours played at the time of writing this list (which didn't happen all this year).
Before we start: I need to highlightthat my Top 10 list includes games I PLAYED this year. This is still just a hobby for me and I am not able or willing to buy and play every new release.
Granted, I haven't tried a lot of them myself, but fitness videogames never truly found the right balance between the two. It was either bad at the fitness part; not explaining the exercises, not caring enough about the (right) execution, or the game having problems registering your inputs.
For the videogame part, it was often times nothing but a training video that requires a controller to navigate the menus. Once you have acquired the know-how, you could technically just turn off the game, as it adds nothing to the experience.
Now comes Ring Fit Adventure, another Nintendo game that tries to make use of its unusual peripherals. Wii Sports was fun, but there are a lot Tennis gifs that show how it wasn't truly about fitness. Obviously I would have welcomed another Wii Sports but that game was nothing but a party game with familiar sports games.
After its release, Ring Fit Adventure was apparently more than that. The GiantBomb crew kept talking about it so positively that by the end of 2019, I finally decided pulled the trigger.
I love it. While I don't mind exercising, it can be pretty boring on its own and its up to your own willingness to continue doing your exercises. The game tries to tackle this in multiple ways:
First, its a RPG; Your player character has stats, levels up, gets stronger and unlock skills. You can buy, find and equip new clothes that come with different effects.
The second aspect is the gameplay and the story that is being told. Everything is about fitness. Everyone in the world is into fitness, from the normal citizen to the Big Bad. Even his minions are fitness equipment come to life. Its a goofy and funny world.
The third part: How you exercise. It once again makes use of Nintendo's controller, this time the joy-cons. Instead of having to hold them in your hands at all times, the game comes with a plastic ring and a leg strap. Both hold one of the two-set joy-cons. Either one or both of them are used to register and judge your inputs. Its not perfect, there are some ways to cheat the system (but since its a game about fitness, you only cheat yourself out of the exercise), but overall the system works surprisingly well.
Now we heard what the game is and how you execute the fitness part. How do those two parts connect? I mentioned skills: To beat your enemies, you can acquire and equip different kind of skills. Think spells. Some do a lot of damage and have a long cooldown, while others can hit multiple targets but can be used more frequently.
Those skill are your exercises. Enemies are color-coded and correspond to a different category of exercises. Red focuses on arms, blue on legs, yellow on stomach and green on yoga poses. Using the right technique on your enemies deals extra damage. The game does a fantastic job of changing it up as well as forcing you to use different "attacks" because of its cooldown system.
This changes things tremendously. Its not just about doing your 10 reps because "fitness". Now you want to do them because you need to beat up this yoga mat before it can heal all of its friends. You look forward to be able to use the arm exercise that is currently on cooldown because it deals a huge amount of damage.
The game does everything it can to help you. Whenever you start and end a session, it has a warm up and cool down video. Whenever you choose a technique, it only lets you proceed after checking on your posture and if your ring and leg strap are properly equipped. Then it shows you exactly what you need to do and will highlight what you are doing wrong (it also penalizes you by dealing less damage to the enemies). It regularly mentions to take breaks, to drink water. Its incredibly user friendly for every level of expertise.
Its such a good game... which I barely got to play at all. When I bought it in 2019, I injured myself during warm up, delaying the start of my fitness journey to next year (My Advice: if there is something in the warm up or cool down that you don't want to or just can't do: Don't do them. Its just a video that, unlike the gameplay part, doesn't rate you at all.)
Then in 2020, more problems of various natures popped up and so my streak of playing every day stopped at two month and I sadly could never really pick it up again for the rest of this year. Sucks, but that is not the game's fault. I am looking forward to 2021 when I am hopefully am able to exercise again with the help of this great game.
Hideo Kojima's departure from Konami was received with mixed feelings. What will he and his team now do since he isn't shackled to Metal Gear Solid anymore? What results are we to expect after we learned that he always seems to go over his budget and Sony maybe not allowing him that kind of freedom anymore?
The result was this game. A stark contrast to Metal Gear; From a stealth action game series with a weird and sometimes eerily accurate story to ... a game where a dude walks around pretty-but-empty-looking landscapes?
Hideo Kojima and his team at Konami were always known for being odd. Be it the stories told, the characters featured, the unusual inclusion of gameplay mechanics, or just the focus on details no one else seemed to care about to include in their games. But even by comparison: Death Stranding felt weird and out of place from the get-go and many people, me included, were not sure what to make out of this.
I saw both extremes; the biggest Hideo Kojima / Metal Gear Solid fans calling Death Stranding one of the worst games they have every played, as well as the other side that hated the Metal Gear Solid games and were positively surprised about how much they loved this game.
I myself waited for quite some time. Even as the PC version came out I was unsure what to do.Until I heard the following description: "Its a walking truck simulator."
That was the moment I decided to give it a try.
After having now played 25 hours, which is far from being finished, I truly enjoy playing postman and "rebuilding" this hostile world. But I can not say you a thing about the story and where it will go, as it just hasn't shown that much of it yet.
What can I tell you about the story? It started with our world as we know it being hit by the Death Stranding event. This entailed two things: Rain, now called Timefall, will age everything it gets in contact with. A young adult can be turn into an elder in mere seconds and materials will start to rust after too much exposure.
The second change infected us humans. If one were to die, they would shortly after blow up like a Nuke. This forced the population of the world, but specifically for this game, the United States of America, to isolate themselves. Instead of living in cities and communities, many vanished underground or into huge bunkers.
The only ones still outside are those that were truly brave enough. One of them: Postmen. People that made deliveries from one shelter to another. You, the main character named Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus, is one of them.
Through circumstances he is getting tasked to unite America once more and he does so by delivering packages and using some new technology that makes everything floaty during its connecting process. People may now live separated, but that doesn't prevent people from dying. So what to do with a dead body? The world has figured out that burning the corpse is a way to not get nuked into oblivion.
But that doesn't mean that you can just push granny into the fireplace and be done with it. Whenever a body gets burned, the smoke invites the second danger caused by the Death Stranding event: BTs. They are invisible beings that are highly dangerous.
At the same time, this stuff inside humans caused something positive in some of them. Some of them acquired supernatural abilities. People with abilities are categorized into tiers, but so far I have only encountered three and I couldn't tell you what two of them can actually do.
Lets talk about gameplay. Imagine how Hideo Kojima's last game Metal Gear Solid 5 works; With its loadout system, how the areas and its open world looks like, how you approach enemies and how missions play out. There are similarities in Death Stranding to be found, so its not entirely wrong to compare the two, but the core gameplay loop is totally different.
It starts with your loadout. You are a big boy. You don't go multiple times to bring the groceries home. You do it all at once. Thanks to all the dangers in this twisted world, you do want to load up on as many packages as you can. Packages come in different sizes and you can decide where you position them. Most of them are on your back, but other options also exist, which influence how fast and flexible you can move around.
Now that you carry all the grocery bags, you need to focus on your balance. Be it with a controller or keyboard and mouse, you have two buttons to shift your balance to the right, left, or center (when you hold down both). Since this is a desolate world, clear footing is rare(r). You will traverse through a lot of uneven terrain and any kind of angle you approach needs to be carefully calculated.
If you think about MGS5 again, you can just sprint anywhere without a care in the world, no problem. But what happens when you do that in Death Stranding? Running down a mountain with three times your weight in boxes on your back? You will stumble, fall and all your cargo comes loose. The packages will go everywhere, get damaged, maybe even destroyed, or fall into places that are hard to reach.
Remember: You are a postman. Your clients expect to get their deliveries in good conditions. In other words: You are not supposed to be a fall guy.
This game is about inventory management, planning out your route and avoiding danger. But what happens when you can't avoid it? As Timefall happens all the time and is especially in story missions constantly prominent, you can't get away from it. The player character thankfully wears a fancy rain jacket that automatically protects your body from harm but from what I have played so far: Not your deliveries. These come in two steps: Packaging and the cargo itself. Its okay to deliver a completely destroyed package, as long as the contents inside are in good condition.
Thankfully you can craft Repair Sprays relatively easily to survive even the harsher situations, so as long as you plan somewhat ahead and take enough of them with you, this should be manageable.
BTs are another problem. They are mostly invisible, appear in large groups and, next to the strange substance in human bodies, also react to noise. Thankfully you relatively quickly learn how to fight back or, what I felt was far easier, just sneak past them. Sneaking can be accomplished through crouching as well as holding your breath. The second you push the button to hold your breath, it drains your stamina and you can't balance yourself anymore but from the encounters I had so far, it never turned into a problem.
Next we need to highlight how you can sneak past or attack something that is invisible: There are ways to reveal them shortly, as well as making use of two additional items your character has equipped: A sensor, which can generally be used to scan the area to find dropped/lost items or previously tagged enemies (more about them shortly) or, in a BT situation, turn passively/automatically towards the closest BT and "pulsate" to symbolize when you or it gets closer.
Alongside you will also make use of BB. A baby in a jar. It can help you detect the BTs as well, but when exposed to too much stress, they stop functioning. There is supposed to be more to this but as of right now: Its just weird.
As I have already alluded to: There are other enemies: Humans. So far I know of two: Terrorists, which I have not truly encountered yet, and Mules. Mules control territory and rely on stationary sensors to find and hunt you down. Or should I say: What you deliver. They love packages and just want to steal your stuff. Which means: If you have nothing on you, the sensors will ignore you.
Each Mule camp's domain is rather huge, so its difficult to avoid encountering them/their scanner while on a mission. You could always run, which works, but is not without risk, as these package-snatchers are extremely dexterous with their electric spears.
Fighting them? If you can avoid detection, you can just restrain them thanks to that one handy item: Rope. If they are already charging at you: You unlock fairly early a non-lethal (remember, death means getting nuked) weapon called the Bola Gun. To keep this short: It shoots some kind of wire/rope that entangles them.
Mules are a hassle, as it feels like there is always a group of them between you and your destination, but not only are they relatively easy to take care of, you can also take back what they have stolen and they "offer" you something rather helpful: A Truck.
A simple truck can be found in Mule camps and they are such a game changer. It speeds up the delivering process by a lot: You can carry a lot more packages, don't have to worry about falling over and even with Timefall active it takes a long time for the trucks to rust away and stop working. Over time you will get access to other vehicles, like Bikes, but those you have to build yourself.
In this world, its all about 3D Printing and if you have the reputation and materials, you can build them from every bunker or city. But there is more: You can build infrastructure. Together with other people. This game actually has a multiplayer component. Whenever you connect a city/bunker/outpost to the network, you also are connected passively to other players. Now you can find packages lost by others and retrieve them, build roads, bridges, recharging station, etc. which can then be used by you and other players.
Its such a great feature that I couldn't stop myself from building every road-section I could find so far. It feels great when you get notified that other players made use of the things you left behind.
I enjoyed what Death Stranding has offered me so far. Its not your typical cookie-cutter AAA game and while I am still far from finishing this game and giving it a final verdict, its unique- and strangeness has impressed me a lot.
I already tried to play through the original Wii version. Multiple times, in fact. I started it. Over and over. But for various reasons, I never got too far. Just last year I looked at it again and wanted to give it another go, but by now its not that enticing anymore to play a 480p Wii game.
Thankfully Nintendo announced and released an improved version, with better graphics, higher resolution and more content as well as some quality of life changes.
Now I had no excuse anymore. This time I will finally play through this fantastic game for real!
While I once again am far from seeing credits, I truly like how different this game is from other JRPGs. The story starts with two giant robots fighting endlessly and by the end, killing each other. Over the span of many, many years, life started to blossom on these now-dead machines. One robot houses all kinds of different beings, like beasts or sentient humanoids, but on the other one: Robots called Mechon.
You quickly learn that these robots continuously attack the Humans, actually named Homs, and are rather effective at it, as they are immune to most kinds of weapons and attacks.
One exception you encounter at the start of the game is a human called Dunban and his sword: The Monado. His efforts allowed the humans to win the on-going war and prevent total annihilation. But it came with a price: The Monado is a sword that doesn't accept to be wielded by just anyone. A normal person would just lose control over it, almost like going berserk. While Dunban is one of the few who can use it, he actually still suffers strongly from it, sacrificing his right arm at the end.
Now comes the actual main character into play: Shulk, a tinkerer who loves to scavenge for useful mechanical parts as well as studying the Monado. As you can guess: He will be the chosen one who dares to challenge the Monado and find out the truth about it and many other things.
But it doesn't just happen right away. The war was won and the Mechon suffered heavy loses. Life was peaceful. At the beginning you just have a dinky, rusty sword and you do your thing alongside helping other Homs of your home, Colony 9.
During this time you get a first taste of gameplay and I must say: I enjoy this game's combat over almost every other JRPG. I realized that the "Don't want to use this health potion because I might need it later" also extends to combat. I will always avoid using the good spells as I might need them / the mana during boss fights. Which means most normal fights are incredibly boring.
Xenoblade Chronicles DE's combat can be compared to a MMO. You have a hotbar where you can slot a limited amount of skills into and using them costs no mana! Every skill just has a cooldown. Means you can go nuts every fight! Its so nice to see good attacks more regularly and not just spam A until the enemy goes away.
The game also features a MMO-like quest system but had the genius idea of automatically turning in most quests upon completion. As you will accept a ton of simple "kill X" or "collect Y" side-quests, its great not having to go out of your way and find every quest giver again just for some simple reward.
Be it through combat or quests, you are rewarded with money and three kinds of EXP. One increases the level, another can be invested to improve your combat abilities and the last one progresses some kind of skill tree that hasn't seen all that much use during my time yet.
Especially with the points you accumulate for your combat abilities, you have to start putting some thought into your characters. Shulk comes from the get-go with a lot of skills at his disposal. For example he has positional attacks, like reducing an enemy's defense when he attacks from the side or dealing a lot of damage when attacking from behind.
At the same time, he can also heal. As your party early on only has one other companion, a bulky friend that fights with a shield/lance combo-weapon, you might think of focusing on healing him, right? I quickly realized that the positional skills can be devastatingly strong and the third character joining your party is a actually a real healer.
Focusing your character to be a healer early on might be a mistake. I can't imagine the game being too punishing about "skilling wrong", but I still spent some time making sure I have some idea in mind what I want to accomplish with my characters.
One system that is as interesting as it is odd is the Affinity chart. Here you can see the relationships between your party members and have ways to improve them. Over time you can unlock special conversations between characters and they can get better at a crafting minigame. Pretty normal, but the game also has a giant grid for every other person you encounter. To give an example: When you accept a sidequest from a young boy to repair an item he broke that belongs to his mother, the chart shows who he and his mother are, displays their relationship status as well as other small information. When you finish the quest, the agitated mother is now happy again.
From what I have played so far: Thats it. Its a neat little something that comes with no real reason or benefit beyond meeting every person possible and filling out the map. Since most NPCs are one-dimensional, there is also nothing to learn or attach yourself to. Not bad, just odd.
After doing some work for the Colony, the Mechon return far earlier than expected and with Dunban out of the picture you have to defend yourself and the whole colony. Now you learn the second way on how to fight the Mechon: Every character comes with a Break and/or Topple skill. When you break a Mechon, it stumbles and when you follow it up with a topple, it falls over. After that, everyone can damage it.
Not only do I not see the logic behind this, its also rather annoying to use in combat. Shulk only gets a Break and your Tank-Buddy gets a Topple. Outside of linked attacks you can't control other characters and while they are doing a generally good job of using the right skills at the right time, skill cooldowns or other occasions might delay it to the point that the Break debuff wore off before they could use a Topple.
Without to spoil too much: Dunban tries to help as much as he to defend the colony, but he quickly breaks down as he wanted to use the Monado. Shulk then takes over and is immediately far better than the already great fighter Dunban. From then on they continue to fight as good as they can, but at the end they encounter a Mechon far scarier than anything they have ever seen before. They manage to repeal the scary Mechon but not without paying greatly for it, to the point I feel like many other games wouldn't dare.
From then on Shulk with the Monado on his back and his Bulky-BFF start the hunt for the Mechon and leave Colony 9. On your travels you start visiting new areas, meet new people, with some joining your party, and unraveling the story and its mysteries behind it.
Initially, after seeing how huge and impressive the starting area was, the next two locations where rather dull; The mines were narrow and brown, while the swamp... was a green-brown swamp. Would you imagine that my first impression of these areas changed quickly after? What was housed in those mines was impressive and the swamps gave me goosebumps once I witnessed it suprise. Every other location I have visited wasn't that unusual at first, but the game managed to either put a twist on them or was simply impressive from the beginning.
There are a few more things that need to be mentioned: The Monado makes it easier to fight Mechons for everyone in your party, but its sadly not something that happens automatically.
A surprising amount of weapons and armors change the appeareance of your characters and there is also a transmog system (You can choose how to look regardless of what items you wear, as long as you found/unlocked them).
Next to the annoyance of fighting mechons, your character spam voice clips during combat. Every move comes with a quip your characters WILL say. Be prepared to hear "Hammer this" over and over from your Brawny-Bro.
I know that I still have a lot of game left but unlike with Spelunky 2, Death Stranding and Xenoblade Chronicles already showed what they are about and I feel confident in already giving them a rating.
Over the last few years I started catching up on popular games I have been missing out on. In 2017 I played through my first The Legend of Zelda game with Breath of the Wild and have since then added A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time (3D).
From 2017-2018 I devoured all three Mass Effect games and also endured the one who dared to use the IP's name.
In 2020 I played my very first Metroid with Zero Mission, as well as took on my very first Final Fantasy game. From what I can tell: The Fanbase loves and hates every single entry but I decided to go with the "Classic" VII as its also the first one that made the jump to 3D.
When it comes to playing older games at a later date, there is always the fear of it not having aged well. You didn't experience certain things as they were maybe new or the golden standard of that time. There is no nostalgia to shield you from the fact that some things aren't as good anymore. I can jump into Ragnarok Online no problem and have fun, but someone else will look at that pile of korea-grind-trash and will not understand …[truncated]
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