Games of 2020
I played a lot of games this year. Huh, wonder why that could be. Mystery for the ages.
List items
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This game fucking rules. Yes there are parts that are too stretched out, yes it feels a little dated in structure and in side quests, but the combat, the art, and the characters all feel so perfectly refined and updated to make sense in a modern format.
I never wanted it to end. If there's anything I really wish it did better it's the post-game content, which feels as quickly thrown together as I could imagine it being. The fact they couldn't even throw you back in the world and let you fight a few new bosses and harder enemies is kind of a bummer.
I absolutely cannot wait to see how they build out the other party member's combat styles and how they handle the more open structure of the rest of the original game (please just throw me in a huge open world/overworld structure with these mechanics, I'd play that for a hundred hours, seriously).
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Okay so I really love this game but holy fucking shit it's so long. Like, easily the longest game I've played in I don't know how long. Maybe ever, just for pure time to finish? Like, not an open world game or a multiplayer game where you just can kind of fuck around for hours doing nothing. Purely just for the story, this game took me 150 hours to finish.
And it's insane, but even then in a lot of ways I didn't want it to end. I loved the characters, the story, the world, the style, everything.
I don't think the characters here top Persona 4's, but damn this team is great at building a world and characters you just want to hang out with, and that's something I think more games could take to heart. Great, fleshed out characters can carry a game well past its technological limitations, and I wish there were more games comfortable enough and confident enough in their writing to let us just chill with characters and really get to know them.
I constantly feel like it's insane how you can play a 50+ hour game and barely feel like you know the characters beyond 2-hour-movie level plot points and character development. The benefit of story in games should be allowing the player to do whatever they want with those characters, not just move the main plot forward, and I love these games for that.
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I came into the Souls series with Dark Souls, so it was great to finally go back and see the roots of one of my favorite games of all time with a fresh coat of paint. I don't love all of the redesigns of the enemies, some end up feeling like they came out of DOOM more than a FromSoft game, but I still feel from a gameplay perspective you couldn't have hoped for a much more faithful translation, for better or worse. There are a few bosses here that I'm really amazed didn't get a mechanical overhaul (looking at you Maneaters), but I kinda love seeing such beautifully rendered monsters slide awkwardly around the environment and slowly try to work out how to make their way over to your character to hit you in ways only a game made by a small team over a decade ago would.
The bosses are fairly weak (you can tell they were really still figuring out what was interesting about the combat in these games), but the environments feel like some of the best and most well-considered in the entire series. Realizing what's going on in Upper Latria is an experience I'll remember for a long time. And while there are a lot of gimmick bosses here, I think the boss arenas and concepts are much more unique and actually fun to figure out than most of the ones found in future Souls games that usually end up punishing you harshly for not getting what you have to do right away. They do a much better job of telling a story with bosses across the board here than other games, which I really appreciated.
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So good early on, but any super popular multiplayer game always feels like it comes with a time limit on it. After the first month or so people will inevitably get so savage at it that it becomes unfun.
And as soon as you start taking it seriously, the rough spots of certain mechanics and games really start to show themselves. The grab mechanic really shows how bad the lag can be sometimes. Nothing's worse than losing a grab the tail game by having the tail teleport from you to another player 6 feet away. And some games seriously need tuning, or just to be removed.
Early on I thought I hated the multiplayer games, but quickly I realized that at least those are guaranteed to knock out a full team's worth of players, unlike the fruit platform memorization game that never knocks out more than 2 people, no matter how many start. Any time that game comes up (or the moving walls game, or the rotating cylinder one if it comes up after the first round or two), you know this match is going to automatically take 10 minutes longer.
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Yeah this didn't come out this year but I mean come on. What is there really to say about this game? It's a great excuse to get a bunch of friends together and yell at each other for a few hours over drinks, and lord knows we all need more of those this year.
This is lower in my list than it should be because I have to play it with an Android emulator on my Mac and the movement controls are all jacked up. Give me a proper Mac (or Switch, or PS5) version!
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They've done such a great job of building a story into the roguelike structure in this game, it's actually incredible. I never thought I'd see the day I'd be coming back to one of these games for the plot, but here we are. Doesn't hurt that it's one of the best-feeling roguelikes ever made, too.
That being said, there's little stuff that I always wish Supergiant would be able to grow out of in the ways they make their games that no one else seems to mention. I always feel like they depend a little too much on what would be concept art for other studios, rarely fleshing out graphics or having much in the way of animations for even most enemies in their games. What's there is always gorgeous, but I always wish they had the time or budget to do more with the incredible art direction that's always present. Enemies barely animate, in a sort of goofy, "we-used-to-make-pc-tactics-games" way that I always feel hurts my ability to read their wind-ups on attacks, but even moreso, it just... makes the game look a little cheap. I felt it a little bit more in this game due to how far the camera is zoomed out from the action. Really feels like they recognized that 4k is becoming a standard, and rather than going for more detailed character models and animations, they said... what if we just zoomed the camera out more?
I feel like people don't talk about this stuff with them out of knowledge of how small a team they are, but with games like Dead Cells out there doing completely unique, incredibly beautiful takes on a similar style and structure to this game, and doing it in the first game with a brand new studio, I'm just having a harder and harder time giving them a pass on this stuff. You have great artists working on your games! Invest in your art!
But even with those small quibbles, this is my favorite of their games, hands down.
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What is there to say about this game? It's great and could not have come out at a more perfect time. Had a ton of fun playing, but even moreso visiting my girlfriend and friends' islands (who played for way longer than I did, and I have around 70 hours in the game) and seeing their creations.
I really only fell off the game because, honestly, I didn't want to turn my island into a city. I liked the feeling of living on a deserted island with just enough personality to say it's mine. I liked having no fences, I liked keeping large parts of the island natural, and the more shops and villagers and whatever got added, the less I wanted to keep going on the progression. And once you decide that, there just isn't that much left to do in the game besides fishing and looking for fossils, which, hey, if you're really into that more power to you, but once I caught my 300th bass I didn't really want to spend my time that way either. But I do love making shirt designs and hats and stuff, so maybe I'll get back into that at some point.
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Probably the most instantly enjoyable fighting game I've ever played on every level. It's beautiful, the character designs are all fun and distinct from each other, and there aren't so many that you feel instantly overwhelmed with character matchups and where to start learning. Just pick up and play, mash out some combos, and you can start to feel confident in what you're doing in minutes, while also building a solid base to start learning more complicated combos and tactics from there. So great.
Only disappointment was the story mode, which from seeing some brief video seemed much more promising than it ended up being. If they'd built full scrolling, beat-em-up style stages, had some more unique enemies, and made some cutscenes, this thing could really have been something. Maybe someday we'll get a fighting game that actually has an interesting single-player that does more than stitch together fights with cutscenes, but until then this is the closest we've gotten, I'd say, so that's something.
Also, man, what a bummer it is that this game's competitive scene will probably be completely dead by the time in-person tournaments start happening again. This game had such potential to pull in new players and players from all sorts of different scenes. Even just the few exhibitions I've seen in Japan have been super fun to watch. Here's hoping it can manage to survive through next year and we can get some real competition.
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Incredible. Feels so good to finally have an actually good Tony Hawk to play on modern consoles. I have to admit though, the levels in 1 and 2 are just not my favorites. There are some great ones in there, but they're really not built for the full, complete toolset that's included here. Sure, Warehouse is timeless, but man, I know I'll play 10 times as much of this game whenever they get around to adding the levels from 3 and 4 (because you know they're going to. They have to).
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Cool excuse to go back to one of my favorite games from a couple years ago. Really dig Miles and the new cast of characters here.
I think from here on out the only open world, fill in the map icons style gameplay I'm willing to accept is going to be from games that actually try to make moving through the world engaging and fun on its own. I felt absolutely no pull to even try Ghosts of Tsushima this year after hearing it was an open world-ass open world game (with mediocre combat to boot), but I'm more than happy to idly swing around the city and happen upon random crimes and weapon caches for hours on end. Make it fun to move through your worlds, game devs!
Also have to note, this is the second Sony first-party game this year to: 1. Feature a section where my character has to nervously, precariously cross an out of service crane from one skyscraper to another, and 2. (I can't remember fuck what was it shit)
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If I had to boil down my thoughts on this game to three words, they'd be "I get it". It's a meditation on violence. I got it two hours into the game. Hell, I got this from the first game, Uncharted 4, and half of every violent video game story in the last decade. There was no need to make us play this for 30 hours. I was so sick of playing by the end I didn't even care what happened to the characters anymore. Just wanted them to cut the last 3-4 hours into a long cutscene and call it a day. I was done.
You're Naughty Dog, one of the most acclaimed studios in the world, could've done anything. Why choose to make this for 7 years? Why choose to make people play this for 30 hours?
And even after all this, judging by the number of gif accounts I see on twitter making super cool looking John Wick-esque clips of Ellie murdering dozens of people forces me to believe they weren't even successful in what they seemed to be trying to do: make you feel bad for doing the things the game gives you no choice but to do. Which, increasingly, I feel like might just be impossible to do in a big-budget game. Barring any feelings they might want to illicit in you through giving every enemy in the game a name, or making people scream extra long when you shoot them, or making them blow up into chunks even more realistically this time, at the end of the day, the game has to be fun to play or people won't like it.
By the time I was half way through the game, I was done, then Abby's part starts, and, even despite the insanely obvious emotional manipulation that part goes through, I was pulled back in because, shocker, there was actually a plot beyond "murder more people".
But even after you finish that part it just. Keeps. Going. For. So. Long. And, worse, suddenly, the characters, factions, locations, everything go from painstakingly rendered over hours and hours of in-game documents and sheer time spent with members of all sides to paper cutouts and ridiculous, Zack Snyder-esque settings that are too perfect to be believable in the world they created up to this point. After doing a fantastic (if overly long and unnecessary in spots) job of rendering all factions involved in the story in Seattle, we're left with the Santa Barbera faction who are shown to just be bad, so it's totally cool to cut through them. They spent dramatically more time making you feel bad for killing the WLF's dogs than they do even talking to a single one of the characters here.
Side note, hoo boy the dog parts were silly. Are you really that worried people wouldn't feel bad about murdering dogs?? No one didn't feel bad about murdering the dogs, and if they do they're not gonna get the message by playing fetch with the dog once or like THREE SEPARATE TIMES. It just made me alternate between sighing, rolling my eyes, and actively laughing at the absurdity of trying to make the player feel bad for doing things they actually have no choice in. And don't even get me started on trying to give the same 5ish enemy character models different names that the other enemies will yell every time you kill one of them to make you feel bad there, too.
They abandon Dina's character completely, suddenly turning her into a simple housewife for Ellie to leave because she couldn't understand. This completely goes against everything we've seen of her up to this point, a badass who's seen just as much of how awful the world is as Ellie, if not more.
This all doesn't even get into how continuing to flesh out the end of the first game does no favors for it or this game. The end of the first game only works well in the moment and without knowing all the facts. The second you stop to think about why the Fireflies wouldn't even wait a split second to talk to Ellie about whether or not she wanted to do this was silly when you don't know anything about them, let alone when the game tells you they were good people! Look at what a good dad the doctor is, he'd definitely not even wait a second to talk to the innocent, similarly-aged-to-his-daughter girl he's about to murder! And that's not even getting into how dumb it is they'd have to kill Ellie immediately to get the cure. No tests, no biopsies to confirm the cure would work, nothing. Of course Joel would say fuck that! Just an all around dumb ending that only gets worse the longer you make us think about it.
Also worth noting, the only two Black characters in this game are murdered within about an hour of each other, one being the very angry and one of the only characters who isn't shown to have any redeeming characteristics, Isaac, the head of the WLF, who is shot and forgotten about instantly, and one being a huge, unspeaking Black man who Abby brutally murders over the course of 5 minutes or so. And I get it, nearly everyone dies in this game, and in other ways they do try to show minority and lgbtq characters, but it doesn't change that.
Also also, they use the Black Angels' "Young Men Dead" to punctuate the rampage Ellie goes on through the Santa Barbera campsite, and, man, I love me some Black Angels, but c'mon guys, 1. that song's so overused in media like this, and 2. you're not gonna top how True Detective used it. At least pick a different Black Angels song, they're a good band!
All this and I haven't even gotten into the gameplay, because it's fine. Just the most utterly fine stealth action/3rd person shooter I've ever played. Not really remarkable in any way, didn't really feel any desire to get better at it, just wanted to be good enough to make it through these encounters and not have to think about it too much. Other games have done everything they're trying to do here better, but that doesn't make it bad.
I will say though, the "take random 20-year-old pills you found marinating in a blood filled drawer to learn how to make smoke bombs" level up system just gets more comical as time goes on and these games try harder and harder to be completely realistic.
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Pretty disappointing after the absolutely incredible RE2 remake, but still fun enough to keep me going through the (blessedly short) runtime. It's just fun to shoot zombies and explore some very well crafted creepy police stations and hospitals.
It's definitely RE falling back into the same ridiculously over the top tropes that led them to go back to the drawing board with RE7, but at the end of the day that can still be fun, and there's definitely still more of the spirit of the series in this game than even RE4, which makes for a light, but not-completely-brainless romp.
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Fuck, I need to finish this game.
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Cool game, cool ideas, but damn guys, it's a tech demo. I think how positive the response to this game comes a lot from how little experimental work is done in games today, or at least how little is done in games that people play. And the devs should be rewarded for that, and I also honestly appreciate how it condenses its ideas into a small, bite-sized game, but at the end of the day... it's a platformer with some cool ideas and fairly generic style. It looks like if someone wanted to put Ratchet and Clank in a movie but couldn't, so they had artists put together something that looked like it at a glance.
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Love to watch other people play Spelunky, don't know if I'll ever get into Spelunky. I recognize how rewarding these games can be if you're willing to put in the time to get really good, but damn, I just don't think I have the patience.
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Love to see beautifully animated 2D games still being made in 2020. The combat feels great, has enough depth to the combo system to make you want to try out more characters while still feeling fun enough to just button mash through.
I have to agree with Jeff, the music here is just nothing to write home about compared to the greatness of the old games, and it just doesn't have the polish it needs to make a real impact.
Really hope the devs get another chance to build out a bigger, more modern take on the beat-em-up from this, but I'm not really sure how well this game did, so I'm left just wishing they'd been able to take more time building out this one.
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Over the years, I've become more critical of story heavy games. A lot of the time they end up feeling like they'd have been better off as movies or TV shows. I can enjoy a game that has an engaging story when the gameplay is also engaging, or if there's enough player choice involved. After about 6 or so hours with 13 Sentinels, I'm definitely not feeling that way about this game.
The pacing feels glacial because every line of dialog is treated as a separate piece of text you can button through despite most scenes playing out sequentially with no real dialog choices, and dividing out the combat into its own separate part of the game you can do whenever makes it feel like an afterthought. I'm sure the budget of this game wasn't massive, but if you couldn't even find the time or money to make sprites for the mechs why is this part of the game here? It's not bad, but I can't imagine anyone is coming to a Vanillaware game for some weird, vaguely rendered RTS combat.
I might try to push through it to see more of what people find so special about this, but I'm constantly feeling like I should just be watching one of the hundreds of anime movies or shows I have on my list instead.
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Extremely cool, but can't shake the feeling that anyone spending their time mastering the tools here could just take a slight step further and learn Unity or something that'd let them own their end product in a real way. The most I hope for with this game is that it'll inspire some people who wouldn't have had the confidence to get into game development through traditional means will get their start here and go on to make something truly incredible on their own, or be able to "get their name out there" using the platform here and move on to bigger and better things.
The most time I spent playing this was the original game made by the devs, which really is special. I just wish the original intentions of the devs were followed through on and people were able to export their finished product and sell them. Without that, the whole "free expression" theme of the game feels a little tainted.
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In case you ever wondered if id actually understood why DOOM 2016 was so good, here comes DOOM Eternal to make it crystal clear they didn't.
DOOM 2016 worked because it was so straightforward in every way, from the premise to the gameplay to the story, and it makes 100% sure you know what it's about right from the fantastic opening scene. Eternal adds too much of everything. Too much attempted character development of the Doomslayer. Too many new mechanics and weapons you absolutely have no choice but to cycle through. Too many jumping puzzles (which are just bad, so too much in this case is any).
The thing that made me stop playing was the Marauder enemy. It's been said elsewhere, but this boss comes out of absolutely nowhere and completely breaks the flow of the game. Suddenly none of your weapons work whatsoever and your flow is completely broken. You know, the flow? The thing this game is supposed to be good at? The thing that makes you feel like a badass demon killing machine? Yeah, not anymore. The game barely, BARELY maintained that up to this point with how you have be swapping weapons to get armor and health and ammo back constantly, and this enemy was just the last straw. With how easy it is to get completely shredded even by the weakest enemies, the Doomslayer ends up feeling like a less competent murderer than Ellie in Last of Us Part 2, and that's a problem, at least in my eyes.
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Played this again because it was rereleased on PS4 and I was so frustrated with DOOM Eternal and how overcomplicated and up its own ass it is with its mechanics. I needed a simple, fun, dumb shooter that actually provides the power fantasy that DOOM should have been. Man this game's so good. Give it a sequel!
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Finally got around to playing this this year. Something I realized while re-downloading it is I really think the box/launch screen art is a huge part of why I never got into this game originally. Generic knight guy standing awkwardly against a piss-colored sky didn't really make me excited to get back to it. God, video game box art is so bad.
This game turned out to be pretty much exactly what I thought it'd be: A fine, but shallow rehash of past Souls games. What I've grown to appreciate so much about From's games is how much they tend to change up every entry, and this game is the antithesis of that. So many references and slight remixes of areas and bosses from previous games, none of which are done demonstrably better than they were originally.
The saving grace of this game ended up being that I decided to play a twin blade build this time, which I'd never done before. Playing a Souls game without the ability to block whatsoever was something I'd never done before (Bloodborne exempted, obviously, but that game is built around that concept from the ground up). The variety in playstyles these games provide really is incredible, and it's something I think From has been breeding out of their newer titles more and more, which, as much as I love Bloodborne and Sekiro and how they were able to design around a more limited playstyle possibility range in those games, I do hope they keep experimenting with more variety in build types in at least some of their future games.
Update: Finished the game now and my main takeaway is that, while there are some really great bosses in this game, especially in the DLC, man do they double down on the troll-y aspects of the world design from the previous games. The Ringed City is just a miserable slog for the majority of the time you spend in the open areas. Every single section had some sort of annoyance, whether it's angels shooting magic bolts from the sky, or poison swamps, or giant wizards summoning archers that surround you and stun lock you to death. Luckily the bosses are more or less worth the effort. Darkeater Midir is a great, actually satisfying dragon fight (unlike most of them throughout the series), and Slave Knight Gael is a super fun multi phase fight at the end of the world with very little to it other than a straight up contest of skill between two very equally matched opponents, which is almost always the best kind of fight in any game.
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So fascinated by how many people are disappointed this collection didn't, like, completely remake these games when I've heard so many times that Mario 64 is the best game ever. If it's so good why do you think it needs a full remake?
Personally, the main reason I want to go back and play old games like this is to experience them as they were. I really don't get the obsession with remaking old games to look/play slightly better. It's so much more interesting to me to see what the original creative team was able to pull off back then with cutting-edge technology than a completely unrelated team of devs doing a relatively-quick reskin using pretty basic modern techniques.
Feels like people just not wanting to face that their favorite games haven't aged all that well, which, as a fan of all kinds of PS1 games, I will never understand. Yeah they're kinda weird and janky now, they were just figuring out this whole 3D thing!
All that being said, these do seem like the barest of bare bones rereleases. There are weird visual bugs even with the extremely slight updates they've done to the games, and honestly they don't run as well as I would expect for such old games.
Also, don't think I don't get the irony of me saying all this while Final Fantasy VII Remake is my favorite game of the year (and the Tony Hawk remake's in there too). In my defense, that game is so dramatically different it's really more of a sequel 20 years removed than a remake. It's also fascinating that so many of the original creative talents on the game are working on this as well, allowing them to make creative choices that no studio coming in to do a typical remake would ever dream of trying. And with Tony Hawk, honestly, they could have made Tony Hawk 3 in HD and I would've played exactly as much of that as I would have this remake, if not more.
I guess I'd say, I have no problem with remakes, and totally get why someone would want one in a lot of ways, but hey devs, when you do remakes in the future, could you just put out the original games too?
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