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lxm

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Favourite 2019 Games

Games that didn't quite make the list:

  • Dirt Rally 2 - A solid follow-up to one of my favourite recent racing games, but felt a little too familiar.
  • Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Another familiar sequel that kept me invested through a forgettable story with fun cover-based co-op shooting and looting. Division 2's Washington setting is also pretty fantastic.
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - I love the Dark Souls games (inc. Demon's Souls and Bloodbourne) and aspects of Sekiro were really amazing, but I just found the game more difficult than I was willing to put up with.
  • Disco Elysium - I'm still pretty early in this but was interested due to the incredible buzz it's generated. So far the amount of freedom offered in your choices is impressive but I've still found it a bit dry overall.

List items

  • I generally enjoy the yearly Call of Duty as a mostly mindless good time; running around, shooting guys, getting shot and leveling up constantly to unlock new stuff. This year's was a bit of a 'back-to-basics' reboot which really took it up on a notch on the production values. The campaign is also very good with some nice varied missions, a solid story and some great characters you actually might care about.

    While the multiplayer can be extremely frustrating when you're having a bad game, the drip-fed dopamine treadmill and satisfying gunplay make it a blast to play a majority of the time (particularly with friends).

  • Outer Wilds is so different from most other games in the way it lets you openly explore its galaxy from the get-go. With your progress being the ways you begin to understand each of its incredibly unique planets and unearth stories about the characters that previously inhabited them. I found aspects of the gameplay became frustrating as I approached the end but the overall experience was still incredibly immersive and filled with some of the best exploration I've experienced in a game.

  • The original Resident Evil 2 was one of the first games I got for my Playstation (the first console I purchased with my own money) and so it really holds a nostalgic spot in my memory. This remake really tapped into that nostalgia while also modernizing the game (apart from just visually) in a lot of smart ways.

  • Despite not actually being released yet, I've loved what I've played of Supergiant Games' (Bastion, Transistor) take on an action rogue-like. Hades stands apart from this crowded genre with fantastic dialogue and characters that stay fresh and help create an overarching narrative despite the repetitive nature of being a rogue-like/lite. Satisfying gameplay and interesting, varied upgrades make each run enjoyably different from the last.

  • I've never really been a big Tetris nut, having only played it in little bits here and there but I picked up Tetris Effect after hearing pretty much universal praise and was not disappointed.

    Despite Tetris being such an old and relatively simple game, the visual and auditory experience they've built around it is nothing short of incredible. Each stage is based around a theme or concept, many of which feel refreshingly optimistic and life-affirming, with the visuals and [amazing] music reacting to each of your inputs and interactions with the blocks. It's a game that needs to be played on a big screen with the lights off and the sound cranked.

  • Definitely my 'most-played' game this year, being on mobile, Epic Seven falls into the 'Gacha' style of RPG where you collect characters to level and build up through vast amounts of grinding and repetition. Epic Seven in particular got me hooked with gorgeous visuals (though it certainly had a few too many cringe-y character designs); each of the characters sporting fully-animated anime scenes for their special abilities, I enjoyed just watching the fights take place.

    Eventually however as I reached the 'end-game' content the grind became overbearing, requiring far too much of playing the same stages over and over for a tiny chance at improving your characters.

  • Even though it released last year on consoles, I played Red Dead on PC this year and was repeatedly blown away by the world that Rockstar had created. It's probably one of the most beautiful games I've played and I loved wandering off into the wilderness to explore, survive and generally just doing outlaw cowboy shit.

  • Control made a great first impression with its weird supernatural/paranormal world wrapped in a really striking brutalist style. The combat was satisfying with fun powers and weapons creating mass chaos as rooms are ripped apart in fights and debris was sent flying everywhere. The backstory and world building are also really well done and interesting but by the end I felt like the gameplay had overstayed its welcome and the story's conclusion felt a bit flat.

  • Mortal Kombat has always been a campy, dumb, ultra-violent and fun fighting game series. I don't know much about MK lore but found myself pretty wrapped up in the story throughout and having a great time fighting through challenge towers and unlocking things in the krypt. Ultimately I tend to drop-off fighting games fairly quick as I've never had the commitment to getting really good at them competitively but I had a great time with this one just doing single-player stuff.

  • Apex Legends released out of nowhere early this year and quickly became one of my favourite battle royale games. It had cool characters, snappy gameplay and smart innovations to the genre and picking up a win was just as intense, nerve-wracking and satisfying as any battle royale game. Some of that fun was marred, however, by some frustrating bugs, weak progression systems and the fact that only 3 people could play together, often leaving 1 person stranded in our group (or more often, the 4 of us going to play something else).
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