GOTY 2023 - WASHOUT EDITION
lowest to highest ranking, with lower meaning i have more to say about it/stronger feeling about it washing out
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as a warhammer fan and a boomer shooter fan, i legit had a lot of hope for this game. at best it's solid and kinda fun, if a bit shallow and unbalanced, and at worst it has absurdly terrible balance and map design (maybe inherited from actual boomer shooters having bad second halves, which is funny but also still actually fuckin bad, don't do that shit). is it fun to yell space fascist shit and murder demons and heretics? sure, but it does get old very quickly, and you soon start to notice the cracks in the wall, namely that the map design starts to fuck you over a LOT with melee rusher spawns in the worst places, ammo availability and the weapon/toughness counter system honestly mixing poorly (i ended up banking plasma and melta ammo a lot to exclusively deal with chaos marines because you kinda need to keep that shit ready for them, especially in later levels), and the initially-charming pixel graphics just blending together into an incoherent mess that is bad for the sort of snappy combat expected of you. in that sense, because i like boomer shooters a lot and the game making such a blatant play for boomer shooter fans on top of the 40k connection meant that i felt doubly disappointed, hence my distaste for the game and how it was my top washout for this year. better luck next time i guess
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i really want to like cp2077 a lot more than i did, honest to god. the aesthetic is divine, it's got a lot of content, and they did put in a lot of work towards salvaging that disaster of a release. that said, despite the fact that they really want to immerse you into night city, my biggest complaint about cp2077 is that when i played it after 2.0 came out, it still felt very artificial in a lot of aspects; namely how doing jobs and gigs didn't really do much outside of their immediate zones. if you raise hell and shoot up multiple gang hotspots, they should fucking do something about it even after the setpiece/encounter ends*, and the lack of this became extremely apparent when i was at the end of the game and realized i only had one mission where i had to stave off wanted stars from the cops. that's absurd, it really takes you out of the game. another is that the pacing of how missions are doled out is really strange, especially since the final mission pops up roughly halfway through the game and is clearly signposted, and yet there's still a shitload of storylines and content past the moment you can access the mission. it's very confusing in context of V's ongoing thing. finally, going back to the asterisk earlier: this issue was apparently amended in the truly final 2.1 patch, which is such a massive change to the experience of the game that i'm honestly kinda livid it didn't launch with 2.0, meaning that my first experience of this game, which i was hoping would be a complete one, is marred by a missing feature that probably would've changed my impression of it for the better. will i replay cp2077? maybe, if there's a director's cut or something, but right now i'm not particularly inspired to, nor do i feel like buying the dlc despite how good it is. shrug. i also really, really fucking hate a twist in the ending that's present in all of them and think it's such a shitty writing copout in service of the genre's vibes over the fact that cp2077 is a videogame with choices and shit, but whatever, that's very subjective
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this one hurts, man. coh3 launched poorly, and i was hoping them being upfront about doing a revamp of the campaign pre-release would help matters. alas, it was very buggy and had a lot of worthless features i saw no point in partaking of. come the latest patch, they went and improved a lot about the game, campaign included...but unlike, say, darktide, it just still isn't enough for me to be happy about the game. i fear for relic, this has been a bad year for em
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this one also kinda hurts because i actually like spice wars a lot and imo there's nothing truly bad about it. it's a dope slow 4x/rts hybrid, in the vein of sins of a solar empire, and has a really cool campaign mode and dope aesthetics. 2023 is just fuckin stacked man, and if i wasnt arbitrarily restricting myself to top 10 games, this would be a good 11th place game
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game is janky and cheap feeling af, but ironically it's a stronger survival horror game than either re4make and dead space remake because holy shit was i ammo starved. that said, it's certainly not stepping to either of them in terms of everything else about it, so washout it is
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this is kinda rough because i liked ES2 in early access and release made it a lot better, but i dunno...i just don't feel like playing it anymore? probably burnt myself out on it too much, should revisit one day
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dead space remake fell to re4make, and this game fell to aow4. it's neat and has a cool twist for your "territory" holding for a hex-based game that's technically a war game in many aspects, but as a game it just crumbles to aow4's open design capabilities and depth
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bought it for cheap, it's incredibly bland and boring. im shocked, far cry used to be like a benchmark for cool open world fps and fantastic visuals, and this game somehow has some extremely low res explosion sprites and...it just sucks man, but whatever. dead series
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i actually like starfield a fair bit (i like the aesthetic a lot, a more grounded and alien-less fiction is pretty rare in sci-fi and im fucking sick of mass effect) but yeah, gonna give it more time in the oven to cook and mods to get more ambitious. i can wait
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