A new ranked list of the best games I play this year. Because I broke the other one by going over 100 somehow. Thankfully I'm still using science to make these decisions.
Showing 1-10 of 96 items
A fun, colourful and beautiful JRPG that was... much longer than I expected. But its epic length ends up being well warranted. Characters and enemies have awesome designs by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame. I honestly get a lot of enjoyment in seeing elements that remind me of certain characters and designs from DBZ. Of course, I think they're appealing even without that type of appreciation. Unfortunately the environments in general don't look as good, because this re-release is based on the Switch version. But that's okay because it's a good time, even if it seems very traditional for a JRPG. It helped that I haven't played one of those in a while. But really it just does all those traditional JRPG things extremely well with a high degree of polish and charm. It being so fun and colourful was a breath of fresh air for me, as someone who gravitates towards realistic and gritty games. Finally, for all the criticism the original soundtrack received, this orchestral version is fantastic, even if the overworld music is repetitive. Every time I loaded up the game I had to listen to the entire title screen music track for how awesome it is, and the rest follows in that path.
It's an incredible open world fps zombie parkour survival game... any more terms needed? This is from 2015 but it holds up extremely well, other than some odd performance bottlenecks on PC. They were still supporting it up until this year, crazily enough. As many have said, the story can be a bit meh but it's just such a well realized city, and the parkour and combat mechanics are so fun that just running around the city is a good time. Even the DLC is fantastic, moving to a rural area with a great buggy to drive.
This is very similar to the first one - an elegant wargame that distills the challenges of weather, supply and sharp timetables into an accessible framework, while straddling the line between puzzle and simulation. It also improves on almost every aspect of the first one, with more depth, a better difficulty curve, and more cool alternate history scenarios. I spent 80 hours going through the campaign and took the trouble of getting a gold medal in every scenario, and I loved doing it. For anyone new to the wargame genre I might recommend trying the first one, though, since that one's a bit less complicated. I found this one could get a bit cumbersome because they introduce different command posts for different national armies, which might be a bit too much for a first timer. But as it is, it's a great ramp up from the first one.
A AAA third-person shooter take on the roguelite genre. Was unsure about whether I'd enjoy yet another from this genre right now, but it went on sale and I really wanted a nice PS5 exclusive. Thankfully enough is fresh here to make the genre tropes enjoyable. Kinda reminds me of Nier Automata with its third person shooter bullet hell gameplay. Does a good job building a very strange universe and doling out interesting loot and upgrades to draw you into another run. On the other hand, the articles criticizing the game for lacking a save and quit feature are absolutely right. A good run can easily take 3 or 4 hours if you go far. And even if you can get shortcuts, obviously you want to scour each floor to get enough powerups to handle the later levels. Apparently you can put your console in rest mode as a workaround, but I never tried it as I didn't really trust it, and I usually give myself a lot of time to get through a run. Even if I have the time it can really drag, though. I already had this game hard crash my PS5 so I'm not that positive on using rest mode with it. It looks like they eventually added save and quit after I beat the game, so now is a great time to jump in. Even when the marathon sessions dragged, I still felt compelled to give it another run each time because it's still a great game. Every run I made some good progress somehow, whether reaching a new level, getting crucial upgrades, beating a boss, getting a new weapon, learning something strange about the story and on and on.
I saw some criticism about this being a mediocre open world game, but I think it's great so far. Surprisingly good story and characters elevate this over Dying Light for me right now.
A top down shooter with a pretty high difficulty curve, I really loved this game for about 30 hours, so it was well worth the admission. It was that type of addiction where I could scarcely stop thinking about how awesome it was when I wasn't playing it. You play as one soldier in an army and gradually develop more tactical decisions as you level up, but death comes quickly. Fast respawns help you get the hang of it, and the AI on both sides really help make battles fun and get you to make interesting tactical decisions. Yet I really expected to keep loving it longer, especially with two WW2 campaigns. Unfortunately my interest fell steeply when my attempt at the WW2 Pacific campaign ran into some pretty frustrating balance issues. And every campaign playthrough happens on the same maps, with some variation in spawns, but not enough to get me playing through fully another time. Maybe I'll return, but I thought this game would have a longer runway for me. It feels like a similar issue with Brigador, where the game's core combat and mechanics are really amazing and addictive, yet the lack of more maps and modes, or some sort of interesting variations, make the game wear out faster than it could. Obviously 30 hours of fun is great value, but with some more good content I could see myself enjoying so much more time with it. Perhaps I will attempt some of the WW2 content again sometime.
A cyberpunk ARPG dual-stick shooter that distinguishes itself with fantastic style and worldbuilding. Graphically, walking through the cities is a real Bladerunner-esque treat. The world definitely borrows much from established cyberpunk and sci-fi but puts enough of a twist that it's genuinely fascinating to learn about this bizarre alien techno dystopia, whether through lore text dumps or even through random conversations by strangers on the street. For me, this is what truly set it apart. Then the action part is good too. It has a cover system that always feels a bit awkward, since you're not really sticking to cover per se. But the guns feel and sound great which goes some way to making it more fun. You end up unlocking some pretty crazy weapons that help in this regard. I wish it took a bit more from Diablo et al and used procedural loot, whereas you really just find one type of weapon and upgrade its damage. A lot of unlockable abilities also weren't too interesting. I would say the action is more than competent, but doesn't really reach the heights of a Diablo 2 or 3. But that's ok because the world pushes this over the edge to make it a great experience.
This basically perfected what Duke Nukem achieved with the Build Engine and it was a joy to play. Love the concept of making a modern game in a super old engine, and this shows how well it can work.
It's just a stupid digital hockey card trading app, and yet it single handedly got me back into watching hockey. During the playoffs it was practically the only "game" I was playing. The daily fantasy contests use cards and ended up being a fun way to learn about each team and follow the games, especially in the playoffs. And while I thought digital cards were a pretty dumb concept verging on a scam, I found that it actually has a lot of advantages over physical cards in terms of the aforementioned contests, free to cheap entry prices (especially compared to current highly inflated physical card prices), new daily cards and weekly sets and having lots of people to trade with at all times. Also, apparently these can hold some value on ebay if you really want to sell them, though I'm not doing it for that. It also wouldn't be long term considering these aren't NFTs (yet...) and live as long as the app. But really, I just enjoy collecting cards and finishing sets. It's not like I would get anything of lasting value if I spent the same minimal budget on physical cards, that's for sure. The daily missions, collecting and trading ending up having an appeal kind of like an idle game, or at least what idle games seem to be since I don't play those. But it's just the satisfaction of continual accumulation. All in all it's kind of surprisingly enjoyable and I appreciate it for getting me back into an old hobby.
A great, elegant wargame-ish puzzle game. Not too fiddly, and they actually make dealing with supply issues fun, and critical. Didn't entirely "beat" the campaign because it has a weird system where "victory" actually ends the game because it wasn't a good enough victory... so why call it victory? I would replay the missions to get them perfect but Unity of Command 2 looks like such a cool sequel I'd rather move onto that. Perhaps I'll return to this one, and the expansions, after that. But really, I think the campaign system could be different - instead of requiring perfect replays (where you can play for half an hour and barely miss out on capturing that last city due to a bad die roll), have the degree of victory influence the next mission(s). (And it turns out the next game basically does that.)