by barrabas
Showing 1-10 of 10 items
I enjoyed the original Hades quite a lot. I loved the art, the characters, and the story. As for the gameplay itself, it was fine. I liked it enough to beat the game and make it to the surface several more times. Hades 2, I like a lot more than the original Hades. All the stuff I loved about the first, I love just as much in the second, and the gameplay I'm enjoying much more than the first. In a basic sense, the gameplay isn't that much different from the first. Both games are isometric action games where you have a dash, an attack, a special, a super, and a cast. As for why I like playing Hades 2 more than the original, I think it comes down to two reasons, both of which are personal preference. One, I just like the weapons way more in Hades 2. They gelled with me more than the ones in the original. Two, I think the cast mechanic in Hades 2 is much more fun than the one in the original. That being said, Supergiant Games took something that was already at the top of its class, made me personally enjoy the one area of it I wasn't quite as high as others on much more, and then made it twice as big. This all combined to make Hades 2 my personal favorite game of the year.
If you had told me last year that someone was going to make a roguelike spin on Myst, I'd have told you that they are out of their minds. I still think they might be, but what they made was genuinely one of the most impressive games I've ever played. This game consisted of a series of mind-blowing moments happening over and over again as the layers of puzzles upon puzzles unfolded over time. All of it is somehow working in a pseudorandomized run-based environment. I played this game until I reached credits, then I played for 20 more hours, then I reached a point (i.e. found a thing) where I realized if I was going to keep playing, it was going to be another 40 - 60 hours. At that point, I uninstalled the game and deleted all the notes I had taken because I realized if I was going to continue this game was going to consume me, and there were other games I also wanted to play. Still, this is easily one of the best experiences I had this year.
I don't think I have too much to say on Dispatch that hasn't been said 1000 times before. This is just a fantastic story experience that honestly feels more like you're playing through a popular show (positive) than a video game. I'm not a game developer, so I don't know titles of specific roles, but whoever was working with the voice actors while they recorded their lines deserves a lot of accolades for their work in this game. Obviously, the voice actors themselves deserve credit as well, but I don't think you get this consistently good of a performance from a group of people that also included many people who are not normally voice actors if they weren't extremely good at their job. Also, this is the second year in a row where I feel a genuinely funny game made my top 10 games of the year list (it was Thank Goodness You're Here last year). I said then, and I'll reiterate now, that having a game that is genuinely funny is rare. Here's to hoping it's becoming a little less rare.
I've loved fighting games for as long as I can remember, and every time a new collection of classic fighting games comes out I'm pretty quick to jump on it. This is by far the best collection of classic fighting games to date. I was guaranteed to like it no matter what, as Capcom vs. SNK 2 is my favorite fighting game of all time, and I haven't had a way to legally play it since the ps2 generation. However, the reason I say this is the best collection of fighting games to date isn't just because one of my favorites is in it. This is an extremely well-curated collection of diverse yet fun fighting games that all play very well online. You have the Capcom vs. SNK games, Project Justice, Plasma Sword, Power Stone 1 and 2, and even the arcade version of Alpha 3 Upper that they somehow added the handheld exclusive characters to post launch. Each of these plays very differently from one another, and they are all very fun in their own right. The one exception to that is Capcom Fighting Evolution, which is still an interesting inclusion for game preservation reasons, but it is clearly the weak link here. As far as classic fighting games are concerned, the amount of variety and quality this package offers is off the charts.
One of the best experiences I ever had playing an online game was Ghost Recon 2 on the original Xbox. It existed in that brief sweet spot where xbox live voice chat had yet to completely devolve into a nightmarescape of people saying the worst shit ever, or blaring garbled music through their shitty headset mics. You could actually find people communicating constructively in open lobbies. I have many fond memories of working with strangers online in GR2, calling out the map grid locations we were spotting enemy team members on. ARC Raiders is the first game I've played in a very long time that brought back some of the feeling I had playing GR2. While ARC Raiders is a multiplayer game where you can fight other players if you wish, it is not a competitive multiplayer game in the same vein as GR2. Where it reminds me of my time with GR2 is that it's one of the few shooters I've played where people actually behave like normal people. I play mostly in solos, and while you occasionally run into people who will just gun you down on sight, and that's part of the fun, most people are shockingly friendly in this game. More credit should probably go to the community than the game itself in this regard, but this, combined with what is a very well crafted fun to play shooter, made for one of the most unique and interesting experiences I played this year.
I do not think the people who made this game could have picked a title that made this sound any more like a Wii era shovelware game if they tried, but it's far from this. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a very light-hearted RPG, on top of a animal crossing style game, on top of a Breath of the Wild lite open world game. It's each of these separately. As in, they aren't mixed together; they are each one of three distinct worlds in the game you are hopping between. It's impressively large. I spent almost all my time in the rpg part of the game, barely touching the Animal Crossing or open world area stuff, and I still enjoyed the game immensely. This came out for me in a time when I could have really used something more colorful and light-hearted to play, and that helped it really hit for me. It also helps that I'm a sucker for a good job system in an RPG.
I don't really have much affinity for Dune. I've never read the book, and the last time I saw anything Dune related was the television series in the early 2000s. I don't think this game made me want to dive into the Dune universe any deeper, but it was a very fun survival game. The sandworm was a fun constant threat that you always had to be aware of, but it was implemented in a smart way where there were well-defined safe places from it for building and exploration. The mmo nature of the game made the world feel more alive with other players. The quest system made it so I always had a defined goals I was working toward. I didn't quite make it to the pvp endgame, which I'm honestly not that interested in, but I greatly enjoyed the time I spent with this game.
I think I'm in the minority in that I don't rate Pokemon Legends Arceus nearly as high as some. It still managed to make my top 10 list for 2022, but overall, it's my least favorite Pokemon game on the switch. It was a game that really emphasized the "gotta collect them all" nature of Pokemon, and I've never cared about that, even as a kid. I just want to get my one little squad of guys I like and go battle other trainers. As such, I ended up enjoying this game much more than Legends Arceus as it emphasized the part of the series that I like. However, I do think that there is probably a happy middle ground somewhere in between the two. As for the stuff new to Legends Z-A itself, while the real-time combat system was a breath of fresh air, it wasn't actually my favorite departure from the franchise in the game. The thing I really loved was how this game's equivalent of gym leaders kept being part of the story even after you've beaten them. I really hope they take this and integrate it into the main-line series. I'd like for gym leaders to remain more story-relevant in the games rather than disappearing until a refight in the postgame.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, with its years' worth of additional content, was always going to be a game that would be nearly impossible to follow up. I think the only two real options Nintendo had in this matter would be to let the series go on hiatus for a while so the fervor for a new one could build up, or swing for the fences on something very different for the series. I am glad they went for the latter of the two options, as it's the more interesting one; however, they may not have swung hard enough as the open world in this game seems largely superfluous. All that being said, I did very much enjoy the one way in which I felt the connected world shone through, knockout tours. I've probably spent 90% of my time with this game just playing knockout tour online. These very much felt like a breath of fresh air to the series in a game that is otherwise overshadowed by its predecessor. I don't know that I could recommend someone dropping $80 on this game on the knockout tour mode alone, but it saved this game for me.
It's pretty hard to deny that Tribute Game's previous beat-em-up, Shredder's Revenge, is a better overall package than Cosmic Invasion. However, I ended up spending way more time with this game, getting all the characters to level 10 and unlocking all their alternate colors. I can chalk this up largely to me having little nostalgia for the ninja turtles, but a great bit for 90's era cartoon superheroes. The game references a lot from the MvC games, in particular, seems aimed right at me. The IP the game is based on aside, this is another great beat-em-up in a genre that seems to be finally expanding past it's arcade roots into the modern gaming ecosystem.