My Top 10 of 2020

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.

Honorable Mentions

• Spelunky 2 - One of my favorite Roguelikes is back! If you enjoyed the first game, you will also love this one. Its more of the first game: More areas, more stuff to unlock and find.
  But it didn't make the list as I just haven't played enough of it yet. I currently have clocked 16 hours and thats by far not enough to form my true opinion about it.
  For example: I hear people say that this game is a whole lot harder than Spelunky 1, which surprised me. Sure, despite getting 100% of the Achievements in the first game, I had to crawl my way through the somewhat familiar first world, but I expected that going into the sequel.
  Fail each area over and over until you learn enough about it to start the process all over with the next. I don't want to dismiss their claims as them being bad but rather that I currently have to accept that I just haven't seen all of it. Maybe it will get disgustingly difficult further down the line.
  2021 will hopefully be the year to spent more time with Ana and the search for her Parents and me being able to define how Spelunky 2 compares to its predecessor.
  
  
• Night in the Woods - A young woman returns prematurely from college and wishes to reconnect with her parents and friends from her hometown. But even though she was only gone for two years, everything changed.
  This game accomplishes something many other can't: Write believable, real characters.
  This isn't a Hollywood story where everyone is beautiful and (about to be) successful. Everyone has their own problems which they have to either fight against or, more often, just accept.
  Everyday live can be mundane, but this game's charming characters, vibrant autumn-colors and the more-and-more unsettling story can make even those moments truly magical.
  
  
• Katana Zero - Its a 2D Hotline Miami. Thats the best short-description I can give this game. Challenging gameplay accompanied with a great soundtrack and bizarre story.
  There is more to it, though. The kill-or-be-killed gameplay feels a whole lot better in 2D than with Hotline Miami's top-down perspective, as well as the excellent use of Bullet Time; Slowing down time allows you to dodge enemy attacks as well as reflect bullet back more easily.
  It feels so good to clear an area by making use of your Katana, throwables you find in the levels, the limiteded amount of time you can use bullet time, as well as general skill to then see a CCTV recording replaying it all in real time, making you look completely inhuman.

10 - Ring Fit Adventure

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.

09 - Death Stranding

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.

08 - Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

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.

07 - Final Fantasy 7 (Original)

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 what makes me like that game so much.

When you first start Final Fantasy 7, two things jump directly at you. First are the graphics that range from still good-looking pre-rendered cutscenes to these odd-looking, Michelin Man-like, player characters running around in a totally different artstyle used for the backgrounds. Its not bad, but its interesting to see that the game dared to use different styles for the characters in the overworld, battle screen, as well as cutscenes like the one where they escape from the city, Midgar.

Second aspect is the story. Many other JRPGs start with an Abilitease and/or slow build-up, like Xenoblade Chronicles that does both. Final Fantasy 7 is tense from minute one. The main characters don't need to slowly catch on what bad things are happening. It feels like you immediately jump into chapter 2 and what you do is important. Do or die. It was really unexpected and I liked that.

As in JRPG tradition, the story always ends in not just beating up a big bad so he isn't being a meanie anymore, but rather stopping a God and/or preventing total destruction of the world. Final Fantasy 7 isn't different in that regard, but what happens during or alongside it was surprisingly complex to the point that it took me some time to fully digest what I experienced (I recommend watching this speedrun as it not only a really good run, the commentators also thoroughly explain what happens in the story).

The next point can sometimes be a big problem: How important are the characters in your party, their involvement and development, as well as the non-playable characters you interact with. As much as I loved Persona 4, after unlocking Yukiko, the fourth playable character, I mostly already have found my playstyle and focused it around those first three characters. Every other member that joined afterwards I basically ignored, as they felt like they were too late for the party/story progression, changed the dynamic of the group (Looking at you, Teddie), or didn't bring anything to the table gameplay-wise that I actually could use.
Final Fantasy 7 has a a few hidden characters that don't add anything to the story (one of them even supposedly did something that actually didn't happen during my playthrough, as I encountered that person super late, almost at the end of the game) but even then every character has their time to shine and I general enjoyed the way every good and! bad person was written.

The fighting is, as I mentioned during the previous entry with Xenoblade Chronicles, not my favorite, but its totally serviceable to play even all these years later. A curious system I didn't spent a lot of time with is the Materia system. Your weapons and armor have slots where you can put different Materia into. These Materia give you access to spells but also come along with debuffs. I made use of them as good as I could, but as I read up on it afterwards, there were things I either didn't find or just didn't play around with long enough to discover.

The game also comes with quite a few extra activities like Chocobo breeding but as I was recording this game as a weekly series for my Youtube channel, I couldn't take my time and truly focus on it, but from what I can say: They seem to be surprisingly complex and if you truly wish to, you can have a lot of fun with them.

Final Fantasy 7 is to this day an amazing game. As with the other game series mentioned earlier, my journey of Final Fantasy games will continue in the upcoming years and I am already excited to see how much I will like the other games and were, at the end, I will position myself in the fanbase.

06 - XCom: Chimera Squad

After the restart of the XCOM series and its two excellent games (even though the bullshit thrown at me in War of the Chosen was infuriating) coming from it, we finally get another one. The story in this spinoff continues on from the ending of XCOM 2 but focuses on a special task force and a single city on earth.
Even with Advent stopped and dissolved, Aliens are everywhere, as they have been living for many years on earth already and have become part of earth's population.
There may be no big bad around causing terror this time, but as many of the new species need special living conditions and a general unrest persists because of the end of Advent rule five years ago, an assassination of a political figure causes new problems. To investigate and solve this case, the newly established Chimera Squad is brought into City 31.

Unlike the mainline XCOM games, Chimera Squad comes with pre-made characters. As a big fan of creating and naming your own characters, this was a big disappointment, but as the budget was most likely not on the same scale as the mainline games, this was somewhat excusable.
Sadly the way these characters were acting was not. A bit to chipper, a bit to quippy. When the lives of citizens are on the line I don't want to hear them act like Borderlands characters.
What I liked about the Agents was the diversity. As it was fitting with all these Aliens now living on Earth, Chimera Squad is made of Sectoids, Mutons, Vipers and all the others you blasted in the face in the previous two games. Every character comes with its own set of skills and I was genuinely surprised how many different playstyles you could find and use.

To figure out who was responsible for the murder, you start investigating three different factions operating in City 31. Each faction comes with their own story, motivations and enemies they deploy in their missions. To tackle these task, you develop new equipment, train your operatives and have to take care of a city unrest management "minigame". Just like with the main games of the series, you get offered multiple missions at once and only one of them can be done. As we are operating in only one city, each mission done or ignored influences the unrest of the different districts. If ignored for too long, more and more problems will pop up until the game is lost.
I never was the biggest fan of the base building mechanics of the previous games but Chimera Squad struck for me the right balance between it been manageable but still challenging. Its fun to calculate whether or not to choosing rewards over increased unrest.

In combat, Chimera Squad tries two new things. Every encounter starts with a breach phase. Maps can come with different points of entry and depending on the character's skills or items you brought along, you can start the fight in an advantageous situation. During the breach, depending on where and who started in what order, you might get the drop on your opposition. This first turn can already be used to deal a good amount of damage but you also already have to start to strategize. Sometimes it might be smarter to not open fire and rather make your Agents run into cover, as the enemy you fired upon might survive and retaliate.

After the breach, the second change shows itself: The timeline. Unlike the other games, where both sides were taking turns, now every combatant is visible on a timeline and acts accordingly, it adds an refreshing layer of strategy to the game. Depending on the order you let your Agents breach the site or combat abilities you can use, the timeline get arranged or changed.
I want to emphasize again that this has such a huge impact on the way you play the game: Breach with your tanky unit first but deal less damage in the first few turns, or sent in the heavy hitters first with the risk of taking more damage?
Now its also not just about taking out the most dangerous opponent in the triggered cell anymore. Sometimes it might be smarter to focus on a weaker foe as it might act earlier in the timeline than your next agent and that could pose a threat.

I can't decide if these changes should be adapted to the mainline games, but it was such a breath of fresh air that I actually played through XCom: Chimera Squad multiple times - and interestingly enough: Depending on the order in which you investigate the three different factions, things might play out differently. A faction tackled last, which by the final mission was imposing and a serious problem, can come across as unprepared and unorganized if done sooner.

I can say that it was fun to finally play the different Alien races, not having to manage some kind of base where every decision might mean you can't catch up all of the sudden anymore and be forced to restart the entire game, and how diverse and interesting the general situation of City 31 and earth was portraited.

05. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Up to this point I had not much interaction with the Animal Crossing franchise. I bought Wild World for the Nintendo DS at the time the handheld was relevant and remember not liking it at all.
Even for the time it had bad graphics, clunky controls, feeling incredibly limited by the tiny inventory and by day 3 I already got the impression that I had seen it all and there was nothing really to do besides picking weeds. Sticking a few more days around to witness some seasonal event that didn't look like it was worth investing my time, I decided to give up on the game.

Unlike The Legend of Zelda or now Final Fantasy, Animal Crossing at the time just didn't seem appeal to me. As you can expect, I then didn't care much for the initial announcement of New Horizons. It certainly looked great, but as I expected the gameplay to be roughly the same, I knew to spent my time elsewhere.
As we got closer and closer to release and the hype around the gaming community started to rise more and more, even I started to question my decision. But I stayed firm. After the game finally got out and everyone and everything went nuts, it only took a few more weeks until I gave in and bought it as well.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is truly a far far superior game than Wild World. It looks fantastic, was given a Nintendo-typical great soundtrack, is incredibly fun to play and oozes with charm. For the first two month after release I religiously played this game every day for a total of 175 hours.
And then I stopped.

Before we get to that point, lets start at the very beginning of the game. I might be misremembering, but Wild World started with a "Here is your house, you owe me now, see ya" and you were left to your own devices.
New Horizons' start is great. You arrive at a deserted island alongside two villagers, you chill with Tom Nook and his cronies and decide to start living on this island. From then on out, the game accompanies you for quite a while, giving you new goals to focus on while giving you enough room to do whatever or whenever you want to.
What started with living in tents, turned to houses. You start expanding by building bridges, additional houses so that new villagers can move to your island, a museum, a shop to buy furniture, clothes, and so on. You slowly see your small island getting bigger and bigger and that, with a little guiding help, to your own liking.

Alongside you start to develop a routine. Hit your trees with the "soft" axe to get the crafting materials wood and/or fruit, hit all the stones to get more materials, look for digsites to find fossils, catch fish and insects which can all be donated to the museum or sold at the shop. While you are already there, look at the daily rotating new furniture and clothes, talk to all your animal villagers and be delighted about how adorable they all are (Minus Hippeux. Get off my island, you green sicko)

At some point you actually reach the point where they roll credits (which I counted as a game played through) and one of the big goals gets crossed off the list. The game obviously isn't over but, minus the huge debt you might still owe Tom Nook, you are now truly free to do whatever.
One of those remaining tasks is to go from a three to a five-star island. As I was, comparatively, still a few weeks behind, it was truly fascinating to see what other players, like Abby from Brooklyn, accomplished.
I wanted to do that as well! With my own ideas of course, but before that I wanted to make sure to have the right villagers on my island; Everyone was supposed to have their own little area, something personalized.
So I started a little terraforming: Built roads, relocated everyone's houses and tried to find the right balance between man-made and a natural landscape.

Now I just had to wait for the villagers I don't want to move out and those I do want to move in... and thats where it all broke down for me.
I call it the NBA2k effect. Its normal that you slowly start to learn how the game works; how does the AI reacts, what classes or spells are worth pursuing etc. With NBA2k and I guess New Horizons, its more like looking behind the curtain and slowly realizing that this seemingly good game actually has a lot of problems.

The first two villagers you start your journey with? Everyone might get someone different, but they are limited from the two of the eight personalities pools. A jock and a sisterly villager. Every villager joining afterwards during the story is also limited to the remaining personalities. You get one of each, with a smug one always coming in through the camp visit. I find that incredibly disappointing. In more than just one way.
Maybe it was the right decision by Nintendo, but I would have preferred for a bit more randomness. It could have been some really cool storytelling if people where starting with only dogs or only smug villagers.
At least in theory. While there are eight personalities and each comes with two sub-categories, they all feel and act the same. Now you all of the sudden realize that you actually don't want multiple people of the same personality and I would even go as far and say that interacting with anyone is incredibly disappointing.

I always hear people say that there are unique dialog options, only that they are hidden very very deep and you have to talk multiple times with them before they trigger. I never truly checked it but thats such a disappointment because their normal dialog is incredibly bad. They ALL say the same. They all focus on what you have been doing. At first this might feel nice, they acknowledge you doing stuff. Only that they can't stop talking about it. Every villager, with their first line of dialog, might highlight that you have dug up something. Then they, after being somewhat rude about being talked to again, might talk about you hitting trees. Then, after reminding you that you once again talk to them, might say something incredibly uninteresting. And this goes on and on and on.

Its tiring. Sadly, we are not done with the problems: You are limited to ten villagers. This might be okay, seeing how they shit the bed with their personalities, but this has been a limit since their first game. This is a Nintendo Switch game in 2020 and we still can't have more than ten villagers? To add to this: There are eight personality-types. Means even if you try to space it out as good as you can, you will have duplicates.

Next: You have absolutely no control who lives on your island. You can't just boot someone. You have to either wait for someone from your island to have a random thought-bubble pop up over their head, which is limited to one person per day, or you have to hope that a random visitor appears, which also I believe is limited to once per WEEK. I had for multiple weeks the same person, which I was very fond of, asking, day after day if she is allowed to leave while someone like Hippeux, Enemy to Mankind, happily stuck around for a very long time.
Whenever I got a campsite visitor, it was either another ugly animal nobody wants or, when they actually were interesting, they wanted to boot someone I didn't want to lose (Yes I know you can manipulate their decision by turning off your game at the right time, but you should have to do that).

When you actually get someone you don't want on your island anymore to leave, you have exactly one day to go look for someone else. To do so you can travel to other, semi-random, deserted island and find new villagers there. If you can't find a suitable candidate during that one day, the game just forces a random villager onto you. Horrendous. Utterly unacceptable. You wait for weeks. Wait for the right person to finally leave only to be punished if you can't find the right person immediately? For a game that is about the freedom to do whatever you want, this is incredibly against that philosophy.

There are other problems. This game starts off with being a bit like a survival game. You craft your axes and shovels but the quality isn't the best, so they break over time. Sadly even with the highest quality tools at the end, they still break. This wouldn't be so bad if the crafting system wasn't intentionally made to be a hassle: You can't craft more than one item at a time. You always have to carry the required materials with you, even if you and the crafting station are in your own home, where you can store things.

Buying clothes is limited to one outfit at a time. Want to buy two hats? Buy one, see your character leave the dressing room, listen to the owner thank you for your purchase, then interact again with the dressing room, listen to the owner being surprised that you want to try something on, buy the second hat, leave the dressing room, listen to the store owner thanking you for your purchase.
I get why Nintendo does it. There is some charm to it, I get it. But the game is being a bit too intentionally stupid about it.

Whats sadly also inexcusable, as much as this is typical for Nintendo products, is the online mode. You can visit other people's island. To do so, you have to open your gates at the airport. This way, anyone from your friendslist could potentially now visit.
You can also limit it to a code, which you then, for this duration of the gates being open, can share with whoever you wish. I actually don't mind this system.
But the way they constructed the rest is surely the work of someone who has no idea of what they were doing: Whenever someone visits your island, the game has to go into a loading screen, followed by a small animation of an airplane icon landing, followed by showing who just entered your island. Then the gameplay resumes. If another person decides to come by, the whole sequence I just described repeats. Over and over, for every new person.
Oh and if during all this time you do something, like buying something from the island's store you are visiting, and the game for some reason encounters a problem, like a loss of internet connection or their servers being bad, all progress is lost. Have fun going through all that again.

This could be my game of the year. Easily. It does so many things right but once you have seen and realized the inner workings it dies by a thousand tiny to medium sized cuts. Animal Crossing has added a lot of new content over the last few month but I just can't bring myself to return to the game, as the game's fundamental systems are just too frustrating.

04 - My Time at Portia

I already took a look at this game in 2019 but could quickly tell that this Early Access game needed a bit more time to especially take care of its performance problems. As the game was on Xbox Gamepass for PC, I didn't mind to just stop playing and maybe, if it hasn't left the service by then, return to it at a later date.
In November of this year, I decided to take a little break from Xenoblade Chronicles to check out a few more games and, among others, decided to give My Time at Portia another chance. Now, easily 60+ hours later, I am honestly surprised by not only by how much better this game has become, but also what a "3D Stardew Valley" has and has not done similary.

Both games start with the main character inheriting a piece of land and traveling to a small remote town to begin their new life. Where Stardew Valley makes you a farmer, My Time at Portia defines you as a Builder. Your Workshop comes with a rundown house as well as a worktable and an assembly station. Over time, when you have money and the right materials, you can upgrade and expand your workshop.

To make money, there aren't really many options to choose from. You can, just like with Stardew Valley, plant crops and raise animals, but these options/their products will hardly make you any money. Its wiser to keep them and use them for further production.

The main focus lies in commissions. On a weekday, starting at 8am, you can enter the Town Hall and find contracts on the commission board. They are differentiated by rank, as well as story and radiant quests. You can only accept one story and side commission at a time, but if you are able to fulfill them during the same day, you can pick up additional tasks.
Here comes the meat of the game. The smaller tasks are often times easily done with your worktable. You can just combine the required items and immediately receive the needed end product to complete your commission. Simple. Bigger tasks, be it high ranking side missions or story ones, will take longer. Much longer.

Before we continue, lets cover how you get materials: Through your worktable you can craft PERMANENT tools like a Sword, Pick Axe and Logging Axe and using them will cost stamina.
The game features a simple but extensive combat focus. You can attack, you can dodge roll and most non-boss enemies are stun-locked the second you hit them. Over the time this felt more like I have become product tester for my mouse. It would have been nice to make this part a bit more exciting.
You can get stronger by equipping better weapons, armor, accessories and unlocking combat skills through level ups.
The Logging Axe can be used to chop trees and where the Pickaxe can be used to destroy rocks, it can also be used in "relic diving", in the so-called abandoned ruins. There are multiple to be found throughout the game that allow you to find materials like ores more effectively, as well as find relic left behind by the previous civilizations.
Yes, this game plays in a "recovered" post-apocalypse. Its not "Fallout 3 ruined" anymore, but people still fear the past and recover and try to figure out a lot of unknown technology.

I mention this now for good reason. As you may encounter Commissions you just can't do yeet. Which is a problem because there is a time limit associated to each contract and you need to get going. You might have the materials, like ores, but no way to do anything with them. Here comes the Research Center (and the ever-stupid Church of Light) into play.
As you go ruin diving, you regularly find, as I like to call them, AOL trial discs. These data disc can be given to the Scientists of the Research Center and, given some time, they might find something useful. In other words: New crafting stations like Furnaces, cutters and grinders.
Depending on how many discs you gave them, you can get different results as well as how long it takes to actually find something. The result are random though, so its vital to start researching as quickly as possible to avoid the situation of not being able to complete your commissions because Research gave you a cooking station instead of the needed power generator.
It can be a bit annoying, but I feel that this is a fitting system to the story that is being told.

Now, even with all the new workstations unlocked and built, production still needs time. There are a lot of little parts needed for the bigger projects and you really have to plan things through, maybe even start producing in advance, trying to predict what metals might be used more than others, just to be able to be ready for anything that comes your way.
One thing they did right, and I only mention this because Animal Crossing New Horizons does not do this: Everything that is stored in the boxes on your workshop area can just be used. Only the assembly station requires the items to be in your hand, as you manually construct them.

When you finally completed your assignment, turning it in rewards you with money, workshop reputation and, if the commission comes for a villager, relationship points.

Here comes the reason why I enjoyed being a builder much more than being a farmer in Stardew Valley. While the produced goods for radiant quests just vanish, story missions do not! The world actually evolves. It starts with something simple as building additional light posts, as the Mayor received complaints about certain areas feeling unsafe. Once you build and install the lights, they stay.
One of the first big projects is a bus system. You built the buses and bus stops and once finished, you can see them drive around and you unlock a fast travel system. There are some really neat ideas later on and it was such a joy to see the town of Portia expanding.

That said. Its not all fun. Bad things happen in this game and while the people of Portia aren't hostile towards each other, they do express their different opinions. For example the Church of Light is strictly against reviving the technologies of the old and will happily dispose of your AOL discs in exchange for some flower seeds.

Just like in Stardew Valley, you can interact with the townspeople, like talking to them, where a lot of them actually have a lot of voiced dialogue that responds to what currently happens in the story. You can gifting them presents, which can raise or lower your relationship with a person. Everyone likes different things.
Relationships can, once they reach a certain threshold, go up in rank. What once was a stranger can become a Buddy. A buddy to a Best Friend. Or from Friend to Boy/Girlfriend.
I was actually surprised how many romance options there were and that there are more male than female options. Reaching a new level can unlock new interactions, like hugging and kissing, as well as to be able to go on dates.

But there are two more interactions I need to highlight. You can play Rock, Paper, Scissors as well as go Sparring with them. Almost every character is capable of fighting and utilizes their own fighting style. That is pretty cool, as there is also a Fighting Tournament happening every year.
At the same time, the girl I wanted to romance wasn't a particularly good fighter, so it felt like I was just beating her up each day to get two additional points of relationship out of her. But I guess its at least funny that she summons chickens to fight alongside her in the second match.

It needs to be mentioned that Portia is considered a small town. When you compare it to Stardew Valley and Pelican Town. Pelican Town is TINY. Portia, over the course of its game, easily features more than 60 characters. I truly enjoyed meeting all these different characters, as they all feel unique and interesting.

Now lets talk about some of the problems this game has:

• While I was surprised about how good some of the voice acting was, there are also some that were clearly picked for budget reasons.
• I personally haven't encountered the performance problems from last year anymore but the game still freezes for a few seconds whenever it needs to load a cutscene, and there are a surprising amount of them.
• I am, in general, never a big supporter of stamina system, as the daily time limit itself already is one. Thankfully there are mods that you can use as long as you don't use the Gamepass version.
• I only touched on it slightly but there is a EXP & leveling system. Basically everything you do rewards you experience and upon a level up you get more Health, Stamina and a Point you can invest into the one of the three skill trees. Sadly every skill tree houses options that are pretty underwhelming.
• There are also quite a lot of purchasable items later on that serve absolutely no purpose. Not in crafting, not as gifts. The developer clearly had planned much more but has since then seemingly abandoned these plans as they have announced a second game, My Time at Sandrock.
• It also needs be added that the console versions, from what I read, are incomplete and suffers from a lot of bugs and glitches that might crash your game or ruin your savegame.
  If this game has peaked your interest: Play it on PC.

I was completely blown away by this game. There aren't many games anymore where I play so much in one sitting and My Time at Portia is one of them. Its far from perfect, but even then it was such a charming experience that it even wins against better performing or more polished games.

03 - Hearthstone Battlegrounds

Its not the first time Hearthstone appeared in one of my Top 10 lists. I was never a big fan of the "normal" ranked mode, as it always felt like a game of "who paid more". Sure there are some streamers that claim otherwise, but they balance out the bad starter cards by being not only being better players, but also by playing an unhealthy amount, which a normal person just would/could not do.

I always preferred their other modes. For a long time that was the Tavern Brawl. Its the normal mode, but with wacky rules! A lot of them even gave you (randomized) decks to avoid the collection aspect. Sadly at one point these wacky rules became pretty unoriginal as they just ran out of material or started to focus more on deck building.
Then I fell into the rabbit hole of the Dungeon Run. It was basically a Roguelike. You start with a simple, pre-made deck and with every win you could add more cards and sometimes even treasures, which could have a huge impact on the rest of your run. Over the years they added and refined a lot of aspects and it became, for the most parts, better and better. I don't even want to know how many thousands of hours I invested into just this Roguelike gamemode, but at some point even I was burned out.

Around November 2019, the entirely free game mode Battlegrounds was released. Since this is basically Blizzard's attempt at an Autobattler, something that so far hasn't really clicked with me, I didn't pay much attention to it. I looked at it once, made a video as a first impression and moved on.

Until roughly at the middle of 2020. I randomly checked out some Hearthstone streams and stumbled upon a Battlegrounds-only streamer. I started watching, learned a lot of important strategies and things to look out for and became eager to play it myself and since then I am back to playing Hearthstone on an almost daily basis.

Most of these Autobattlers follow roughly the same rules; Every player fights indirectly against each other until only one is left standing. Between fights you can spent a currency to recruit units that belong to some kind of class or tribe, and the more of the same kind you have on your board, they synergize. You could also invest your money to upgrade the amount and qualities of units you can choose from. If you manage to get the same unit X-number of times, you can upgrade it to a better version. But its important to note that every player recruits units from the same pool. If every one picks the same Fighter, there might be not enough to upgrade it or trigger synergies with the other Fighter units anymore.

Hearthstone Battlegrounds does all that as well with two extra mechanics: At the start of the game you have to choose a Hero that comes with its own Hero Power. This could be a simple "Pay 1 to give all Demons +1 Attack and +1 Health" that can be used once per round, passive onces, or Hero Powers that can only be activated once during the entire game. As you can image, balancing this isn't easy. There are clearly some that are better than others, but that doesn't mean its impossible to win with a Tier 4 Hero. Sadly the game has a Pay2Win element; the Tavern Pass. If bought, you can pick from four instead of two heroes at the start of the game.

The other element is the leveling / upgrading of the tavern tier and the extra reward you get for "tripling" a unit. Whenever you upgrade the tavern tier, the next refresh (pay currency to shuffle out the current units you can buy for a new random set of units) can be really important depending on the hero you play and tribe you pursue. At the same time people have figured out a pretty safe way to level and I must say that I love this system a lot more than the other games I tried. Some kind of interest system that rewards saving currency was always annoying and confusing. There is none of that in Hearthstone.

The tripling not only makes the now new "golden" version stronger, it also allows you to discover (choose from one of three) a unit from the tavern tier one above you. Means often times, even when there is a triple waiting for you, you might not want to go for it. You rather want to freeze (You keep the currently recruitable units until next round) and wait until you reach a Tavern Tier that allows you to get something game changing.

The other aspect is the battle phase. The order your minions attack is determined from left to right. Here you already need to strategize. If you have two weak Tabby Cat beasts and a Scavenging Hyena, that gets stronger for every friendly beast that dies during combat, you want to send the Tabby Cats in first with the hope that the now buffed Scavenging Hyena is able to do the job and win the round. After positioning comes attacking. Who attacks first is decided by who has more minions on the board. If both have reached the maximum of seven units, its random.
Next: What your minions attack is mostly random as well, unless there is a unit with taunt or cards that say otherwise (there are only two so far that ignore that rule).

As in Hearthstone tradition, there is a lot of RNG in this gamemode. There is an add-on called Hearthstone Deck Tracker that has a calculation feature called Bob's Buddy. It determines in real time how your warband (thats what your crew of units is called) fares against the opponent's in thousands of simulated fights. Pretty cool to know that in thousands of fights you had a 100% chance of winning... and pretty infuriating if you lose despite the odds being at 0.1%

Sadly, there is one big problem this gamemode has since its release and Blizzard did nothing so far to fix it: The damage. Whenever a fight is decided, the winner deals damage equal to the Tavern Tier the Hero is on, plus the tavern tier the minion came from that survived. If you are even slightly decent at the game, the length of games gets shortened immensely. With the most recent patch they added spells/treasures as a seasonal event/trial. You would get to discover one every 4th, 8th, 12th and 16th round. At higher MMA, you might never see the 12th round spells. Games are already over at that point as players can deal way too much damage, way too early.

I love Hearthstone. Its not only polished, it also feels so familiar thanks to its Warcraft ties. Battlegrounds is like Heroes of the Storm for me. It knows where to trim the fat and what to focus on. Its the right Autobattle for me.

02 - Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

I was never a big fan of Horror games. This isn't because they are too spooky or I am scared of the stupidly-loud jumpscares, its because they often times tell the strangest stories that are filled with the oddest symbolisms, feature unlikeable or stupid characters, or are intentionally restrictive; Bad controls, no combat options or if there are any, the protagonists either acts completely incompetent or can't actually fight back, because of either extremely limited weapon durability or ammo scarcity.

Resident Evil 2 avoids doing all of this. People claim that there is ammo scarcity, but as long as you don't expect to Rambo your way through the game you should be fine. Its not a "If I miss this one shot I will not be able to proceed later on and have to restart" kind of game some might imagine.

The game tells the story of two people, Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, who are traveling by car and bike to Raccoon City. Leon does so to start his job as a Police Officer and Claire to find her brother, Chris. As both decided to make a stop at the gas station just outside of town, zombies appeared. They meet, protect each other from zombies and, together, jump into the first available car and decided to flee by driving further into the city.

There, they immediately get separated but both somehow manage to reach the Police Station, a supposed refuge from the sudden outbreak. Gameplay-wise, we already had an interesting choice here: You can play as either as Leon or Claire and both have their own weapons they can use and situations to solve. Its just odd that both are running around this Police Station but never meet each other unless the game says so. You will quickly realize that some things just don't work this way. Not horrible, but you will notice.

As you start playing, you quickly realize that this game manages to both feel new and old. The controls are certainly improved, but do not offer the same freedom a game like Metal Gear Solid 5 does. There are inventory limitations that only slowly or through exploration and puzzling can be expanded. The save system doesn't require ink ribbons anymore, but its an option that still exists on higher difficulties.

There are situations where it really helps to have a map, but the feature has been improved to the point where I would call it one of the best. Everything you need to know; what was in which room, which doors can't be opened, what key you need to open which room or which areas you haven't completely looted yet. Its all displayed. Its truly amazing.

The Police Station is massive and features a lot of unexpected features and its fun to slowly learn your way around. There are other areas you will go to later on, but nothing beats the Police Station.

I also enjoy that this game is the right mix of action and survival. Shooting a zombie in the head is the number 1 rule against zombies but there is no guarantee that this will actually kill them. Its somewhat random. Sometimes you pop their head immediately and they are done for, other times they might just get knocked down to get up again later, or you have to quickly realize that its not worth to empty your ammo into this zombie, but rather avoid it.

That you can't run away from most Boss fights in this game shouldn't be a big surprise, every game does that, but its still odd that for most of the game you could/should decide to avoid confrontation until the game says no.

I will also take some more time to talk about the Resident Evil 3 Remake. Its okay to play through once. Its just as gorgeous and comes mostly with the same quality of life improvements as RE2, but I still recommend to only pick it up if you can get it at a discount. Asking full price for a game that, unlike RE2, only offers one playthrough, has apparently a lot of cut content to make room for a new asynchronous multiplayer nobody asked for, is a bit disappointing.

I also was not a big fan of all the new mutated zombies that appeared. RE2 mostly has normal zombies with a few scary ones as either minibosses or late game problems, but RE3 is littered with them. Around every corner comes a new kind that is more annoying to deal with than the previous one. Also, to not spoiler too much: "That one boss" is so bad compared to the RE2 version.

The Resident Evil 2 Remake ranks highly in my all-time favorite list and I can only recommend to check it out. Even as someone that isn't fond of Horror games.

01 - Control

I am going to be honest: I was not the biggest fan of the game when they announced their decision to "delay the game" by a year. I can understand why both sides do these kinds of deals, but as a customer it felt like I was spit on. Treated as some kind of peasant that wasn't worthy. I exaggerate a little, but any interest or hype for the game went right out of the window and it didn't really come back once they allowed for everyone to play the game.

I waited, ignored that GiantBomb was raving about it, until the right price was reached to jump in.

I get now why they were so enticed by it. Its a truly fantastic game.

You begin the game in New York as the main protagonist, Jesse Faden, enters the Federal Bureau of Control in search for her brother. Immediately you know something was odd, if not everything. Jesse talks to something or someone inside her head and the Bureau is completely empty. No one at the reception, no one upstairs. Only the janitor that guides you somewhat cryptically to the elevator.

I will not go too deeply into the story, as this is one of the bigger features of the game, but you will learn that something broke out inside the Bureau and you are one of the few who can take care of it.

This game shines in its world building. There are things to learn at every corner, documents to read that make this world more and more complex. Normally I am not the biggest fan of stopping everything you do just to read some trivial message that was left behind but Control was so carefully and creatively crafted to the point that I just had to read and see everything I could find.

As this is somewhat of a horror game, I found it fascinating that this Bureau is focused on containing and studying what they have found. I loved that this game doesn't just shrug off the unknown as "spooky" and be done with it, but tries to learn and understand it.

The gameplay isn't as strong as the story or the world building. You can't take a lot of damage, your weapons feel inaccurate or limited, but the supernatural aspect of the game allows for some entertaining powers to be used. Nothing beats throwing a sofa at an enemy and see it and the ones behind just getting destroyed.

There is also a customization aspect. You can find and craft mods, which you then can equip for various boosts. Sadly, most of them are rather plain and your inventory is so limited that you basically have to stop every few minutes to throw out the trashy ones.

The level design is bonkers. Intentionally so. What at first looks like a boring office space will quickly be shifted and warped into all kinds of breathtaking moments.

The Ultimate Edition also featured the two expansions, the foundation and AWE. Where the foundation initially looked like an interesting concept with maybe a boring, repeating gameplay loop quickly turned out to be amazing through and through. AWE on the other hand was a big disppointment. It was supposed to connect Control with Alan Wake but I felt that nothing really clicked and to much was missing that made the main game and the other expansion great. Still worth checking out, but it just can't compare.

Control created a massive universe in a span of just one game and I truly wish for Remedy Entertainment to continue making use of it. Not through another Alan Wake game (even though I will finally force myself to play it in 2021) but by staying with the Federal Bureau of Control.