It’s a NEW YEAR, baby! You know what that means – the relentless march of death and misery continues apace, while I sit down and write some thoughts about every single videogame I have played in the previous year. I make a few exceptions – I don’t like to talk about games I’ve played as a competition judge, I obviously can’t talk about games that may or may not be under NDA, and there have been a few things I’ve dipped into for a moment to test something which aren’t really worth including here. But this is pretty much everything else.
I began the year unemployed and preparing for further pandemic lockdowns, so there’s a certain bent towards long, repetitive live ops games where I can grind repetitive tasks and make numbers go up. Games like these are cheap (per hour played) and can be an effective distraction over the long term – there’s no risk that you might suddenly finish them and need something new to play.
Aside from that, I’ve also spent a lot of time playing old games. I bought some wireless dongles for my SNES Mini and filled it out with a catalogue of good and unusual games – including some fan translations that I’ve never played before. High on the success of that project, I bought a Raspberry Pi and did the whole thing with that – I reached the point where I was trying to hack control pad support into DOS Box before I ran out of steam.
This was also the year that the legacy PSN stores were due to shut down, which inspired me into a two-pronged response: I spent about £30 of actual human money to pack my Vita with enough games for the rest of its life (such as Persona 4, Final Fantasy X, and various PS1 games) and then to balance things out performed some legally questionable acts with my PSTV that I will speak no more of. As fate would have it Sony seem to have cancelled the closure of the store anyway, although it seems inevitable that it will have to shut down eventually.
Monster Hunter Rise
The latest Monster Hunter game expands on the quality of life improvements introduced in Monster Hunter World, but don’t worry – you can turn most of them off.
I wrote a long review eight months ago and I don’t intend to repeat myself here (in summary: it’s good, but feels a bit short and easy compared to the 3DS games). I will add, however, that I am looking forward to the expansion DLC and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the return of Congalala.
Warhammer: Total War 2
I’ve got three short stories leading into this one:
- One way I’ve stayed sane over the last few years has been by throwing myself back into Warhammer stuff. I’ve painted up a few thousand points worth of Lizardmen and a number of boxed game sets. It’s been fun, but the logistics of arranging to actually PLAY a game feel much more complicated as an adult – even before you factor in the pandemic.
- On a similar note, multiplayer games have helped me squeeze in some social time during the periods of lockdown. Some of my friends and I have been combing our Steam libraries and replating old co-op titles together – you’ll probably notice it’s a recurring theme in this year’s list.
- On a personal level, I’ve interviewed for design jobs at Creative Assembly three or four times over the last 13 years, and usually come away feeling insufficiently knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of Total War. I’ve played half a dozen different games in the series but only a few of them for any serious length of time, and those were generally the older titles.
So, a friend and I tied these threads together by taking on a Warhammer 2 co-op campaign as a pair of goblins – I was the sneaky ambush master Skarsnik, while he was the irresistible green bowling ball Grom.
We started off by carefully picking fights with our human neighbours and expanding our territory, then fell into a prolonged period of fending off attacks from all directions while we squared ourselves up to deliver a paralysing invasion against the elves to the west. We turned around for home and steamrolled over the dwarves to the east, and then moved south into the Badlands to swallow up the other orc and goblin tribes. When Archaon finally launched his Chaos invasion from the north, our band of backstabbers swept up to meet him – crushing the remaining human cities caught between our armies, and finally drowning the remaining Chaos lads beneath a sea of green.
It took about two months, playing for around ten hours per week. I think the sheer length has to be my biggest complaint – in single-player mode there’s a “short campaign” objective set that has much more modest goals, but we were locked in for the full grand campaign experience. I would have happily stopped playing after genociding the dwarves, but the game said we were barely halfway through our objectives.
I also didn’t love that we both had to play as the same race. The world of Warhammer is full of ancient xenophobic grudges, but it’s also full of unlikely alliances and mismatched buddy comedy crusades. I can imagine there are technical and balance-related reasons why we couldn’t mix and match our factions – an Elf prince fighting alongside a herd of Beastmen, say – but it feels like something that should be an option, no matter how silly it could get. I feel like the real-time battles could benefit a lot from World In Conflict style mixed-faction armies that combine the strengths and weaknesses of different races, even if it might make the campaign metagame harder to manage.
But the battles were often a lot of fun. The experience of playing Total War is very different from an actual game of Warhammer – you have far more pieces in play, more scope for hidden information, everything runs in real time, and so on – but the way Total War structures your army as a collection of large units rather than individual fighters, and simulates systems like psychology, terrain and weather feels like a perfect match for the franchise. I would enjoy a more ‘authentic’ turn-based mode that replicates the tabletop game more closely, but I can understand why neither Games Workshop nor Creative Assembly would be very interested in making one.
We managed to watch each other’s backs a lot during the campaign rounds – using Skarsnik’s ambush bonuses to lay traps and defend vulnerable cities, while Grom intercepts enemy armies on the hoof and batters them to a pulp. As time went on and we figured out more of the UI, we started delegating control of individual units to each other – usually so the primary player manages the main body of infantry and artillery, while their partner takes a few cavalry units and focuses purely on setting up shock attacks from the enemy’s flanks and rear.
The most memorable fights were conjured into being thanks to the occasional bizarre decisions of the campaign mode AI, like when my friend was besieged by one general on horseback leading 19 units of trebuchets. I hooted with laughter as our terrified goblin militia was buried beneath a hail of boulders; meanwhile, the enemy general rode up alone to our city walls and stoically punched his way in through the gate – a deserving nominee for this year’s Chris Redfield award, were such a thing to exist.
The campaign metagame does feel a bit forced sometimes – it’s trying to produce satisfying battles in spite of your best efforts to pull ahead in the metagame, and trying to tell dynamic stories in a setting that was designed to be relatively static. Enemies will make army composition decisions that are just plain weird sometimes. They will attack you unprovoked and then heap enmity upon you because of the war that they just declared, even if you’re offering tributes and peace treaties. There are a LOT of weird little technical loopholes and exemptions that don’t make logical sense, like why the savage orc tribes don’t count as greenskins. I can understand it from a technical perspective – in terms of values in databases, and how they interact within the game – but as a player they just feel like errors.
Nevertheless, we enjoyed ourselves. We both bought a load of DLC in the sales (which is all forward-compatible with later games in the series) tried the new factions out in single-player mode, and pre-ordered Warhammer 3. I expect it will have many of the same problems, but also more of what we love. I remain optimistic that Chaos Dwarfs will eventually be introduced, but the real long shot I’m wishing for is a Dogs of War faction where you cobble together a rag-tag mercenary army and hire yourself out to the major warmongers.
Dawn of War 2
Hot on the heels of our Total War success, we jumped ahead to the 41st millennium and played through Dawn of War 2. It was full of interesting ideas – it comes from this era where Relic were trying to move RTS games away from base-building and towards small-scale tactical positioning – but I think it’s let down a little by the campaign structure.
You only have six different units to choose from in the campaign – close assault guys, medium range all-rounders, long range heavy weapons, scouts who can either snipe from a distance or sneak in to lay booby traps, a tanky armoured suit guy, and a captain who can basically specialise in any one role of your choice. Each unit is led by a named character, which gives them all an RPG-like point of focus for managing skills and equipment and interacting with the narrative. But they feel so similar – with the exception of your big clanky armoured Dreadnought, they’re all feel like generic gruff space marine guys differentiated purely by the size of their weapons.
As strategy games go, the campaign mode feels a bit flat – you might encounter tanks, cavalry, transport units or psychic wizard people among your opponents forces, but you won’t get to play with these toys yourself. At least, not unless you exit the campaign and play a skirmish battle, but that’s a very different ask.
Aside from that, it was fun! Relic’s squad-based system of unit management is very good – after playing lots of remakes of 90’s strategy games last year, I really appreciate having little squads of guys who can arrange themselves intelligently behind cover.
I think what this game would benefit from is something like the Home City system from Age of Empires III – let me do some more meaningful building and research and stuff between missions, customise my army composition, maybe do a bit of diplomacy and manage relations with other factions. It would make it harder to tell a tight story, but I think it would add a lot of strategic depth.
Sim City
I spent some time tinkering with my SNES Mini and bought a couple of 8-BitDo wireless controller dongles earlier this year. At a certain point I started playing through all the scenarios in Sim City, and I eventually managed to beat them all – including finally building a Megalopolis, after almost 30 years of trying and failing.
I have one single useful tip for anyone else who wants to achieve this feat: Learn how land value is calculated. Every other piece of advice branches out from that:
- Pollution lowers land value, so always build rail instead of roads, always build nuclear instead of coal plants, and keep industrial zones away from your residential and commercial zones.
- Land value gets a big boost at your cities ‘centre’ (calculated by population distribution) and then decreases toward the outer areas.
- Industrial zones aren’t affected by land value, so it’s best to place them all in a large ring around the edge of the map (where the city centre bonus is weakest)
- Gift buildings, airports, stadiums and parks can all raise the value of nearby zones. Some of these need to be physically adjacent, but others can be connected within a certain range over a transport network.
- There is some very specific logic behind how the value of an individual plot of land is calculated, right down to the order in which it evaluates neighbouring plots. It isn’t very essential to learn, but it might help to explain why buildings aren’t behaving the way you expect them to.
- Nobody really cares about fire stations until there is a fire, and nobody cares about hospitals or schools except if you’re trying to earn more Library gift buildings. It’s usually best to demolish all these and build something useful, like more residential zones.
The picture above is not my city, but it’s exactly the kind of design that the game forces you to bend towards, if you want to maximise population. And that kinda sucks, right? Playing the game normally, it’s difficult to push your population beyond around 200-300,000 in my experience; if you want to reach the heights of 500,000, you pretty much have no choice but to abandon ‘common sense’ and master the underlying algorithms with this kind of ugly assemblage.
What can I say? I love this game. I haven’t played it much since beating the final scenario, but I have no doubt that I’ll keep going back to it again for as long as I live. I don’t think any other city builder has managed to hit the same balance of depth and accessibility; and the more I’ve learned about the logical underpinnings of the game, the more I can see that the depth is often illusory. But that’s okay too. I long for someone to make another city-builder that feels this easy to get into, but with a more modern style of metagame.
Sim City 4
One excellent thing about Sim City 4 is that you can put your save game folder in Dropbox and synchronise it across different machines. It means you can play casual, ambient multiplayer games with friends – you each log in and play on your own cities in your own time, but your shared region stays synchronised, so the mechanical relationships between your cities evolve naturally over time.
So, earlier this year I jumped through all the necessary hoops to set this up on the family PC that my niece and nephew play on. I don’t think either of them have stuck with the game – it requires too much planning and patience for their young minds, perhaps – but I saddled up and tried playing the game properly to see how I would fare.
I did okay! I found that I only survived by occasionally turning my education budget off for a few years at a time while I paid off my debts (and this has knock-on economic effects which take a decade or two to fully recover from) but I have steadily climbed the hill to a medium-large city which is more or less financially stable.
I’m thinking about learning the game in more depth, as with SNES Sim City – I find city-builders very interesting, and I’m always curious about how they model such complicated, multi-tiered systems. But it takes a long time to feel these things out by hand. Are there any good books on the subject, I wonder?
Settlers 2 (with Return to the Roots)
I wanted to give my Nephew some sort of city-building game with lots of intricate moving parts that run together like clockwork, and some kind of strategic element. The Settlers games came to mind – I’ve always felt like they tap into the same parts of my brain as a really good cross-sectional diagram – and after poking around and checking out my options I decided to go with the original version of Settlers 2.
This may have proven to be a bad idea, as it turns out there are a number of technical hurdles you have to battle against to play it comfortably on a modern Windows PC. Many of these problems can be overcome thanks to a fan-made mod called Return to the Roots (which requires some of the original data files, available if you install the game from GOG) but the game is still sort-of unplayable under certain circumstances – particularly on maps where you need to navigate across water. It also doesn’t support the single-player campaign yet, sadly.
Still, it was fun to noodle around in skirmish games against the computer for a few weeks. I used to enjoy playing Settlers as a child, but I never played enough to figure out things like how combat worked, so it’s been interesting to come back to it as an adult and try to make sense of it all – especially when Return to the Roots is introducing its own quirks and bugs.
Mass Effect 3
When Mass Effect: Legendary Edition came out earlier this year, I fished my XBox 360 out of the attic and dusted off my old Mass Effect 3 Insanity mode file. I played through all three games extensively back in the day, but it has always stuck in my mind that I had two or three achievements from the Citadel DLC that I never got round to earning – I was living in India at the time, and I think that last DLC came out at a time when my 360 had gone back to the UK.
Insanity mode feels brutal at the best of times, and it’s particularly difficult in a mission that strips away most of your weapons and squadmates (the story involves your character being ambushed by space-terrorists while on shore leave, so a large slice of the action involves singlehandedly fighting your way out of a besieged shopping district armed with just a pistol). I did enjoy it… eventually, after spending a miserable few hours dying repeatedly as I got back up to speed.
The big emotional punch of Citadel comes from the way that your band of crewmates from all three games are reunited for one last, low-stakes mission together. I have to say, it just didn’t really land properly with me – it’s been almost ten years since I last played this, and more importantly my Insanity file is the one where I deliberately made lots of bad decisions, so many of my old buddies (most notably Wrex, the big lug) were absent. I feel like it would have gone down very differently if I’d been playing this through on my main file, back in 2013.
I still really enjoy Mass Effect, and I do still plan on playing through all three games in under 24 hours at some point, but – as I continue to slide down the muddy bank towards my 40’s – I’m starting to think I might split it up into three separate 8-hour sessions.
Also, in case you missed the news, there’s meant to be a new Mass Effect game coming out at some point.
Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown
Virtua Fighter 5 first came out 16 years ago and was immediately declared (by me) to be the best fighting game mankind has produced. It has yet to be dethroned. It is now back with another new version and I am extremely happy about this news. I resubscribed to PS+ purely so I could play it online again.
It’s disappointing that they’ve stripped most of the costume choices out (or perhaps it’s fairer to say “they haven’t reimplemented them all”?) but the lack of cosmetic options doesn’t really impact the core face-punching experience. I also still miss the quest mode from the original console release, although I do think it’s probably better to push players towards online ranked play.
I continue to main Eileen.
Tekken 7
I recently bought Tekken 7: Definitive Edition (75% off in the Christmas sale) and dug into it a little. I haven’t really played Tekken seriously since the PS1, and it’s nice to find that my muscle memory can still pull a few combos and command grabs out of the bag, but so far I’m feeling like the series hasn’t aged too well.
Maybe I’m just mentally comparing it to Virtua Fighter and Street Fighter – which both feel like much tighter competitive games, and (in my opinion) manage to look a lot better too. I’ve only tried a few characters so far, but fights feel slow and floaty compared to what I’m used to. Also the story seems to have become very silly – like they’ve got the classic eccentric billionaire hosting a martial arts tournament, but it’s paired up with some daft Metal Gear Solid style forever war ravaging the planet in the background – but only a fool would criticise the story in a fighting game.
I have a soft spot for Tekken, mainly because of what it represented 25 years ago. I do plan to keep playing for a while and brush up with a few characters (I used to like Lei, King and Nina, although my most reliable choice was probably Paul just because he could whip out a quick Phoenix Smasher in the blink of an eye and do huge damage on a counter hit) but I don’t see myself putting time into ranked play.
Pokémon Sword / Shield: The Crown Tundra
I remember sitting down with this sometime in the Spring and thinking I should crack through the whole thing and finish the new Pokédex. I did not see it through! I played for a few hours and got some way through the story, but then just… stopped. Something else came out and pushed it aside. Monster Hunter, probably.
Is it good? Based on what I played, it just felt like more stuff. As I wrote regarding the Isle of Armor DLC last year, there’s a huge problem in that the enemies in the game only scale up to about level 70. For a person like me who has a vast collection of high level Pokémon to choose from, the game is only challenging to the extent that you choose to let it be; once you look beyond that, there’s not a lot to get excited about.
Still, I would like to complete my Pokédex, so I’ll probably circle round to make another attempt next year.
I was definitely expecting some more DLC for Sword / Shield this year, and it never materialised. Now that the Diamond / Pearl remakes and Pokémon Legends: Arceus are out, I’m beginning to think maybe the developers have moved on? It’s hard to really rule out more expansions though – Diamond / Pearl were remakes, and Legends seems to be pitched on a slightly different arc to the mainline Pokémon games. Maybe these things are handled by different teams? I don’t know. I still think they should release some new DLC, but at this stage I’d be surprised if it actually happened.
Apex Legends
Apex Legends feels like a very good quality example of a genre of game that I am bad at.
I haven’t really gotten into battle royale games – I prefer the scale and dynamics of games like Overwatch or Team Fortress, where you have a particular role to perform within a team, in a smaller, more manageable space. So by my personal reference points, a game like Apex seems to combine the incomprehensible size and sudden deaths of a game like Battlefield with the pulse-pounding thrill of staring at a loading screen. I don’t enjoy it, but I can also see that one of the reasons I have such a bad experience of it is just because I’m not very good at it.
That aside, it does seem like a good game. I’ve spent some time watching people playing it on Twitch – trying to understand what I’m doing wrong, although most streamers I see are more interested in lulling their audience into an insincere parasocial rapport than explaining what they’re doing – and it does look more fun when you know how to play. Often when I’m thinking about what I would want in a game like this, I’ll look into Apex and discover that they’re already doing it; surely there can be few greater signs of quality!
Pokémon Unite
I’m not a massive MOBA guy. I’ve played a bit of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, and I’m interested in the competitive design elements, but I find them very complicated and stressful to play. Particularly to learn – there are few good ways to find your bearings when the only way you can play the game is to dive right into a live match and play it.
However, Pokémon Unite felt much easier to get into! I played it quite solidly for about two months and got reasonably good at it. It boils down all the basic points of the genre to their essentials, and doesn’t really screw anything up. That’s quite a feat! Maybe I just have low expectations after dabbling in games like Arena of Valor?
Pokémon Unite makes a few changes to the typical MOBA format to allow for being a mobile/console game – matches last 10 minutes, you have a reduced number of abilities available, and there’s a lot of auto-targeting compared to PC games. But it still manages to capture all the important match dynamics, like how you start by fighting in lanes and jockeying for small power advantages and then escalate towards big team brawls and boss fights that can swing the score dramatically. It’s good!
As far as the Pokémon go, I’m similarly unoffended. Some of the team roles (such as DPS) feel a bit samey, but others (such as Support – which is my usual area in these kind of games) vary a lot from character to character. I started out maining Snorlax (a big fat tank who can jump in and out of fights at his leisure) and later switched to Blissey (who can specialise in either buffs or healing – my preference has gone towards buffs because it helps a lot towards the end of the game, and can turn Blissey herself into an unexpected murdermachine).
If there was one thing I would like them to add, it would be a second tier of branches in the skill tree. At present you make three significant build choices during the match – which of your two special abilities to unlock first, and which specialisation path to pick for each ability. It would be nice if you could make a second specialisation choice during the later stages of the game, so players can react to their opponents a bit more and evolve the meta.
As for which new Pokémon I’d like to see, I think my first choice would be Wobbuffet. I’d be very interested to see a fighting style based on blocking opponents and actively reflecting their moves back against them, although I can also see that it might feel a bit reactive and hard to control. I mean, that’s Wobbuffet for you – that’s his whole bag, right?
Dicey Dungeons
I wrote about Dicey Dungeons in last year’s roundup, after playing intensely over Christmas and finishing the main game. I’ve dipped back into it a little over the course of 2021, but what really lured me back in was the free Halloween update – a new set of characters and dungeons to wrap my head around, which really put me back in the mood for rolling dice.
I quickly chewed through the new content within a weekend and had a good time with it, but what kept me playing for a few more weeks was when I circled back to the base game and set about unlocking all the remaining achievements. Beating every bonus round on hard mode was tough and felt very dependent on luck, but the weird, build-dependent ones like “deal at least 20 points of poison damage in one turn” pushed me into trying new strategies I would never normally go near. It was nice!
The Solitaire Conspiracy
Once I had finished with Dicey Dungeons I went looking for another short, single-player puzzle game to noodle with while watching TV in the evening, and I landed on The Solitaire Conspiracy. It’s a game I’ve had on my radar for some time now, but I had to wait until this year for them to release it on the Switch.
The game is – as I understand it – a variant of the Streets and Alleys variant of the Beleaguered variant of the Castle variant of Solitaire. (I’m not an expert on card games, but there’s something weirdly reminiscent of Covid’s branching mutations in their taxonomic breakdowns.) You can play Streets and Alleys in your web browser, if you want a sense of what that’s like.
What The Solitaire Conspiracy adds is that the face cards can be powered up to trigger special abilities when placed on a stack of cards – like reordering the stack, making cards of a certain value jump to the top or bottom of each stack, or reshuffling an ordered pile of cards back into the stacks. Some of these special abilities are nice and simple and obviously helpful, while others are far less friendly and need to be carefully manipulated to wring any benefit from – or in some cases, carefully ‘defused’ to minimise their damage.
I should also add that there’s a whole story involving cyberpunk spy agencies vying for control of the Internet or something, but to be honest I skipped every cutscene and have no idea what was meant to be happening. If I was to try and explain why, maybe it’s because they cast some well known games influencers as the main characters? I don’t know Greg Miller personally and have no specific beef with him, but his is a face I associate with the brain-curdling insincerity of award shows and media briefings; whenever it pops up on my screen, I get an immediate pavlovian urge to press buttons until it goes away again.
Personally I just bounced from one card puzzle to the next, and I did it all on hard mode (where the cards are dealt in a predefined layout, and you have a limited number of moves to clear the table). I enjoyed myself – the fact you can see all the cards face up means it’s a great game for people who like to plan out dozens of moves in advance. It’s basically an advanced filing simulator, which is exactly what my brain wants sometimes.
Catan
I wasn’t expecting a great deal from this – I played the Live Arcade version to death on the XBox 360, and I really just wanted a quick and easy way to play Catan with friends while travelling, in some future world where travelling with friends is a realistic prospect. However, I also picked up a few expansion packs which have added a lot of strange new rules for me to wrestle with – I had a good time picking my way through the Seafarers missions, and today I’ve been starting on Cities & Knights (which completely redesigns the development card economy – it feels like a whole new game).
I’ve been playing through the campaign (?!) and smashing every level on hard mode, but it can feel a bit fake at times. Every level seems fixed and pre-ordained (except for the contents of fog tiles) so you can optimise your strategy for each map through trial and error – somewhat removed from the usual experience of improvisation that you get from Catan. I also can’t stand how unrealistic the AI seems – on hard mode at least, the computer characters often seem to collude against the player as if you’ve personally offended them, even if another AI is close to winning the game.
Nevertheless, the new expansion content puts some interesting new twists on a game I already loved. Obviously it’s a game that’s best played against real people – a lot hinges on the social aspect of deciding who to trade with – but even just approaching it as an unfair single-player puzzle has been a fun distraction from mortality.
Stone Ball
After hosting a gaming party for my nephew’s birthday earlier in the summer, I bought a Raspberry Pi and set it up as a multiformat emulator box for future use. A lot of my focus has been on multiplayer games that are appropriate for a pre-teen audience, and while I was trawling through lists of hidden gems I came across Stone Ball – a sort of 2-a-side caveman football game (although now that I think about it, it’s probably closer to hurling). It’s the kind of game that would fit on a shelf next to NBA Jam or Capcom Sports Club. It is good.
What really sticks out is the beautiful rotoscoped sprites – the game’s art director has written up a fascinating blog post about the development of the game, including the animation. Mechanically, it’s fine; at least, we have not yet played it out to the point where we’ve found the dominant strategies and got bored of it. But visually, it’s a delight! I’d urge you to try it yourself – not just to watch a few videos, but to press a few buttons and see how it translates into motion.
Neo Turf Masters
Next on my list of “previously unplayed arcade gems” is Neo Turf Masters for the Neo Geo – a quick and simple golf game that has lovely chunky sprites and a quickfire arcade metagame. It was developed by Nazca Corporation at the same time as Metal Slug, but they were acquired by SNK soon after and then became focused on pumping out Metal Slug sequels until SNK collapsed in 2001.
I really enjoy the arcade mechanics – the way your stroke count is tied to your credits, so you have this constant pressure to complete holes under par in order to continue the round. I suppose what it really wants is for you to put a few more money in the machine after every few holes, but since we’re experiencing it like those futuristic alien archaeologists at the end of AI – picking over these ancient cultural artefacts, removed from their original context – it comes across more like a run-based golf challenge. Can YOU bring your handicap down low enough to complete a whole round on one credit?
Metal Max Returns
One of the major themes on my mind when I’m packing an SD card with roms is that of ‘games with unofficial fan translations’ – games that I would never normally have an opportunity to play, except with a bit of hacking and emulation. Metal Max Returns is one that caught my eye and did not disappoint.
It’s a sort of post-apocalyptic dieselpunk open world RPG – picture the setting of Tank Girl and a game structure reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda. You play as a spiky-haired JRPG teen who lives in a sort of Mad Max style shanty town where the only good job opportunity lies in bounty hunting radioactive freaks in the wasteland. The introductory dungeon-dive furnishes you with a scrappy little tank that can be hauled home, repaired and customised, and from there the world is your oyster.
My biggest complaint is that the game makes almost no effort to tell you what to do next – much like Zelda, it kicks you out the door and leaves you to figure the rest out on your own. I think the SNES game here is actually an enhanced remake of the original Metal Max for the NES, which perhaps goes some way to explaining this philosophy? I don’t mind saying that I have skimmed Gamefaqs to get some direction from time to time.
However, there’s a brilliantly bonkers amount of depth to explore in this game – the way you can equip your party with guns and armour, and then assign each of your dudes into their own vehicles, and then customise each vehicle, and then customise the software running on the vehicles’ computer cores… it seems ridiculous for a SNES game.
You can unravel its story threads in whatever order you like, hunting bosses out of order depending on which ones you track down first and how you’ve specced your party. The game world is structured as a series of locks and keys, and there is a certain predictability to the overall flow – you know the next area you can see on the map will be gated behind some kind of door, and that there’ll be a boss somewhere in your current area whose defeat will trigger an event that unlocks the door, and so on and so on.
Still, it’s a nice game to dip into for some exploration and tinkering – there’s a lot of stones to turn over, and a lot of knobs and dials to optimise. I’d give it a big thumbs up for anyone looking for a new SNES game to try, and for people who can’t be bothered with emulation I am pleased to report that they are still making new games in the series.
Get In The Car, Loser
I haven’t spent an adequate amount of time with this yet – something I’m going to blame on all the live games I’d had on the go this year – but I did spend a few hours playing through the opening bits and I am going to go back to finish it next year. Most importantly, I just plum love Christine Love’s work and I’d be failing in my responsibilities to you, dear reader, if I didn’t push it in front of your face. The good news is, you can look forward to me giving a more detailed summary next year.
Get in the Car, Loser takes a lot of cues from various Final Fantasy games, combining the queer teen roadtrip setting of Final Fantasy XV with a close reading of the combat mechanics of Final Fantasy XIII (which I must admit is one that I haven’t played yet; although I did buy a copy this year, purely as background reading for this game). It’s a far cry from her previous visual novels, and I’ve been very excited to see her tweeting updates about its development over the years.
The game is free (as in free) on Steam, with some paid DLC available which adds new bosses and storylines and outfits.
GTA Online
I started logging back into this just to pick up some free money and take advantage of in-game sales, but after a while I began poking at some of the new content (such as last year’s Cayo Perico Heist) and ended up making far more money by just grinding for a few weeks. According to my in-game stats I’ve earned a total of about $60 million over the last eight years, and I feel like half of this has been just in the last few months.
The main reason I still play GTA Online is so that I have a full toybox ready in case my friends decide to dip back into it for an afternoon, some day. When the pieces all come together – enough people, enough time – it’s a lot of fun! But to access the latest missions you need to sink a lot of virtual cash into buying properties and vehicles, and the only way to afford that is to either pay real money for virtual cash cards or grind through a few high-earning tasks over and over again. Obviously I opt for the latter.
The grind isn’t much fun. Griefers are still a constant pain in the neck. There are ways to fiddle your network settings to force your way onto empty servers, but it’s clearly not how the game is intended to be played – whenever I’m transporting a vanload of drugs around in solitude, I always feel aware that I’m cheating my way out of an intentionally unpleasant game experience.
However, I can report that it’s now a lot easier to make money than it used to be. For an initial outlay of just over $4 million you can buy a cheap motorcycle clubhouse, and a submarine containing a little helicopter with homing missiles. Once you’ve got all that, it’s quite easy to blow through the Cayo Perico heist as a solo player and make over a million dollars for a few hours work, which seems like a ridiculous rate of income compared to the other available options.
The thing I can’t believe is that it has a cooldown of less than an hour – it feels like it should be more like a ‘once per week’ activity, but you can chain them together back to back. My guess would be that the economy is spiralling wildly out of balance, but I don’t feel attached enough to the game to particularly care.
I probably would buy the game again on PS5, but I’d be very interested to know if all my belongings are going to transfer over. As I recall, there was a certain migration window from PS3 to PS4, but the way Rockstar have been handing out free gift money and making it easier to earn in-game makes me wonder whether they’d want to reset the economy somehow during the jump.
FFXIV: Shadowbringers
I can’t entirely explain what my thoughts were about Shadowbringers. I skipped every cutscene and have very little sense of what was happening, except for a general understanding of the villain and the final area of the game – which was the one point where I finally sat up and started paying attention. Still, I came away feeling like it was one of the best chapters of the FFXIV story so far.
All of my ninja’s combat skills have been completely redesigned, again. After a short session spent staring at a wiki and remapping my toolbars, the core experience was basically the same as ever – run through some fetch quests, get in the matchmaker queue for a dungeon run, watch a few cutscenes, and repeat.
The new areas were very nice to explore. I don’t want to give much away about the plot (well – it would be difficult, since I don’t really know what it was) but this expansion pack takes place away from of the core world of Hydaelyn, in the kind of strange, magically-warped dimension that lets the Final Fantasy designers mash all their favourite ideas together with wild abandon. There’s a lot of little references to Final Fantasy VIII in particular; some are very overt, such as the addition of the Gunbreaker class, but I feel like there are more subtle parallels between the setting of Shadowbringers and the Lunar Cry – a world drowning beneath an invasion of weird monsters, an ancient mage who was mortally wounded centuries ago but clings to life in a comatose state by sheer force of will while blighting the world with the dark magical energies of their dreams, and so on.
I was, for a few short time, up to date with Final Fantasy XIV. Then Endwalker came out a month ago, and now I’m slowly falling behind again. I’ve read that it’s going to the be the final chapter of the main story – that they’ll put an end to the Garlean war and pivot to something new in the 2023 expansion – and while I’ve never really cared much for the story, I’m curious about how the design of the live game and its economy will develop. Will they rebalance all the gear stats? Will they let new players drop straight in to the latest expansion? Will they ever add more Grand Company ranks? I look forward to answering these questions, sometime around July 2025.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light
I bought the full fat edition of Beyond Light last year – including the pre-purchase of four season passes – in anticipation of spending another year indoors. It’s been okay. I don’t love paying money for temporary content, but it is nice to have a premium-grade update scheduled to fall into your lap every few months
I’ve found in the past that playing Destiny without an active season pass can feel a bit pointless – everything in the game is steering you towards activities you can’t take part in, to earn rewards you can’t claim. It’s a different experience on the other side of the paywall, but I still have mixed feelings about it.
All four seasonal metagames had a similar kind of structure to them – you would grind one activity to earn currency to buy entry into another activity, where you would earn some rewards. I enjoyed some of them, but mostly I just felt like I was pushing myself through the grind in order to tick all the boxes and unlock all the rewards, to get my moneys’ worth out of the pass I had paid for. That’s not a good feeling.
The storylines were good in places, but I think Bungie want to save all their big plot developments for the next big expansion pack. As a result, the seasonal content seems restricted to telling short stories in parallel to the main plot – it offers references and hints as to what is to come, but doesn’t want to alienate non-payers by having anything really significant happen. One big running theme this year was about building alliances with enemy factions, which is a very interesting change in direction from the original game, but also doesn’t seem likely to matter much in the grand scheme of things – you make friends with one particular subdivision of one particular army of each race, and there are still countless millions just like them waiting for you to shoot their souls out.
Having said that, I think some special praise is due to the creative genius behind the Dares of Eternity update. Xûr – the travelling salesman who shows up in strange places on weekends looking to offload exotic weapons and armour – is now co-hosting some kind of quantum physics gameshow alongside a horse made of shimmering cosmic energy. On some level it taps into the same kind of hyperactive energy as my beloved Smash TV, but with Xûr delivering a dour, deadpan attempt at bantering with a horse who can only neigh and stamp its hooves. It’s very funny, at least the first dozen times you hear it.
Overall, I had a nice time with Destiny this year. I feel like I’ve rinsed my money’s worth of equipment and upgrades out of it – although in the back of my mind, I know that there’s no point trying to get on top of the economy when the whole structure changes every year or two. I’ve masterworked a dozen exotic weapons and finally picked up a Skullfort with decent stats, if that means anything to you.
I don’t think I’ll be doing it again, though. I expect I’ll buy a budget copy of The Witch Queen at some point, but I think I’m probably going to take next year off Destiny, on the whole – I don’t like playing without a season pass, and I don’t like that the season pass pushes you to grind so much, so the smart choice seems to be not to play at all.
Halo Infinite
I haven’t played a lot of this, but I have enjoyed it. It’s Halo. There’s a grappling hook now, and that’s fun.
I’m waiting for a co-op patch before I try the campaign mode, but I’ve had fun playing the multiplayer beta. It’s difficult in some ways to switch back and forth between Halo and Destiny – they’re very similar, but have a few key differences in the controls and the flow of a match – but I’m considering whether I should just switch to playing Halo more regularly as I roll off Destiny. It does still make me think of teenagers yelling heated gamer moments at each other over XBox Live, and I have a lot of doubts about their monetisation model, but perhaps I should give it a chance?
Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition
I bought a load of Beamdog’s enhanced Bioware RPGs on the app store a few years ago, and I decided to get started on one of them this year – something I can play on my tablet while watching TV, as a change from playing Final Fantasy games on my Vita. I decided to try Planescape Torment since it’s supposed to be good, and is also one of the few that I didn’t play on PC back in high school.
It is good. It is pretty good. I have enjoyed bits of it, and found the other bits tolerable.
I used to play a lot of Icewind Dale, and it often felt quite punishingly difficult to me. I like that Planescape Torment gets around this (a little) by allowing you to die and respawn and think things over before you return to your last location – minor spoilers, but basically you play as a sort of zombie man who canonically gets killed repeatedly throughout the game and simply comes back to life in a safe space and carries on with the adventure, much like in Destiny or Bioshock.
I think what I’d say is that – similar to when I was playing Command & Conquer Remastered last year – I enjoy taking a little holiday back to 90’s PC game design, but there are a few elements that I could live without. Combat in particular feels a bit fiddly and frustrating, possibly made worse by the tablet interface.
I am reminded of the time when I played Knights of the Old Republic on the XBox and thought it felt like Neverwinter Nights but with a slightly broken control pad interface… then, a few years later, played Mass Effect and thought it felt like KOTOR but with a really good control pad interface. What you’ve got here is something back towards the KOTOR end of the spectrum – it’s a good game, but I feel like I’m wrestling with the weird Frankenstein combo of a vintage PC UI on a touchscreen device.
It also reminds me of Jennifer Hepler’s comments about whether Bioware games should feature skippable combat (normally I’d provide a link here for context, but it looks like the original source has been scrubbed from the internet in response to the ensuing harassment campaign against her). I do find myself wishing I could just abstract the random street battles out to just some resource management and a few tactical choices, rather than simulating every sword stroke. I don’t love having to jab at my screen to manage who is targeting what, when the game could just say “Your dudes are well rested and have good gear, so… let’s assume you win!”
Advance Wars DS
A friend mentioned that they were replaying this earlier in the year and I decided to dig my copy out and see if I still had the magic touch. I did, of course. I beat the hard campaign with a solid A-rank – not my best performance, but acceptable.
We deserve a new Advance Wars. I’m glad Re-Boot Camp is coming out in 2022, although I’m not really all that excited about playing remakes of the original games. I’m the kind of Advance Wars fan who already replays them every couple of years anyway – I don’t need nostalgia! I need something new to chew on, and I can only hope that this remake is intended to gauge public interest in a full new game. I want balance fixes, new mechanics and – easily the least likely thing to come from a Nintendo game – a good set of modern multiplayer options for online play.
Tools Up
I think ‘slapstick co-op’ games are great for playing with kids with limited gaming experience – one of the best ones I found to play with my niece and nephew when they were starting out was Overcooked, which does get a bit stressful and complicated after a few levels, but starts at a nice low bar.
I bought Tools Up just because it seemed like another clear example of the same genre. You play as a team of handypersons, brought in to renovate a house – cleaning out rubble, painting walls, laying carpets, and so on. It has a slower pace than Overcooked, but there’s also a lot more that can go wrong.
Was it good? It was okay. I think the mechanics and UI get a bit fiddly for young players sometimes – it’s easy to slip on some spilled substance you didn’t see, and scatter a bucketful of garbage on the floor. You can only carry a few things at a time, and you can sometimes put things inside other containers to make life easier, but then someone needs to pay attention to how full the container is and empty it out from time to time. That sort of attention to detail is complicated.
It feels more advanced than Overcooked – something for players who want more depth to challenge themselves against. We didn’t play it for very long, but I can imagine us going back to it once the kids are a bit more experienced.
KeyWe
Top of my Christmas list was this hyper-realistic post office simulator, in which two kiwi birds hop, peck and butt-slam their way around all sorts of complicated office machinery to direct letters and parcels across rural New Zealand.
Similar to Tools Up, I saw this as being a chaotic co-op game to play with the kids – something a bit more rooted in platform game mechanics, and with lots of word puzzles and weird UI problems to wrap your head around, instead of simply a big clock and a lot of spinning plates. It’s silly and fun and a grown-up can help you out, but it also trains you in some general videogame skills like “looking at the screen” and “not whining at your team-mate”.
It’s great! We’re about halfway through and we all love it. The kids keep customising the kiwis with big bouffant rainbow feathers, which I hate, but it is a mark of my professionalism that I don’t stop them.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
I bought this quite recently just so it was on-hand for some Christmas multiplayer action. We played the Wii U version extensively, but everyone was still eager to come back to do it all again on the Switch. The game holds up! I don’t know what more there is to say about it – the whole family can enjoy watching Roy Koopa scoot off into the distance, regardless of how good they are.
Wordle
A very late entry to the list, being that I started playing it on December 30th, Wordle is a daily word puzzle that combines Mastermind with anagrams. All you have to do is guess the chosen five-letter word each day; the game marks correct letters in an incorrect position with a yellow square, and correct letters in a correct position with a green square. The puzzle lies in putting these scraps of information together and following the threads to the final answer – figuring out what other words you could make using your yellow and green letters, and factoring in what you know is definitely wrong.
One other thing worth highlighting is that, once you win, the game provides you with a block of text you can paste on social media to share your outcome. Because your guesses are rendered as yellow, green and grey square emojis, you can publicly compare your results to other players without spoiling the puzzle for anyone who hasn’t played yet today. That’s clever!
You can play it for free in your browser.
Since we’re talking about word games, I’d also like to draw your attention to Babble Royale – a sort of battle royale Scrabble game by Frank and James Lantz. I haven’t played it myself (hence, not technically on the list) but I have enjoyed watching Scrabble experts crushing people at the game on Twitch.
Onwards to 2022
First thing’s first: The one game that really weirdly isn’t on this list is Yakuza 6, which has been sitting patiently under my TV since the summer. I was planning to crack into it over the Christmas holidays, but I was so tied up with GTA and Catan and things that I never got round to it. I will kick myself if I don’t play that next year.
What’s catching my interest in 2022? Splatoon 3 and Breath of the Wild 2 seem like obvious pre-orders – well, Splatoon may not be so obvious, but my nephew is a big fan and this is our chance to finally play the game together. Bayonetta 3 is firmly on my radar, although it’s something I’d wait for a review of before buying – I’m a little wary of Platinum shifting from original titles to sequels. I’m sure I’ll play through co-op Halo Infinite at some point, once it’s out and I’ve found someone who hasn’t already finished it on their own – I might play through Halo 4 while I wait, and then swiftly delete The Master Chief Collection to clear some space on my hard drive.
As I said earlier, I’ve already pre-ordered Total War: Warhammer 3, and there’s a new Company of Heroes game due out this year too. Also I’ll probably be trying Age of Empires IV at some point. It sounds like a bumper year for PC strategy games based on old franchises – fingers crossed we’ll get a trailer for Command & Conquer Remastered Collection 2 at E3 this year. I doubt I’ll get round all of them, but there’s enough there to keep me busy for the next few years.
Two Point Campus is due out sometime, and I’m interested to see how that comes out. There’s a new edition of Blood Bowl coming – I’m a lifelong fan of the tabletop game, although I think Focus’s digital recreations get a bit too hung up on cutscenes and animations, when all I really want is a snappy, responsive game of chess – like FUMBBL, but on the Switch. Thanks to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge it looks like we might finally have a worthy successor to Turtles in Time, and Project Triangle Strategy looks good although I played the demo and did feel a bit bored by some of the dialogue.
What will I probably not be playing? The biggest one is probably Elden Ring – I find Souls games fascinating, but I’ve really just given up hard on playing them. Maybe I’ll try playing a friend’s copy and see how it goes, but I’m expecting I’ll enjoy it mostly via Twitch. Horizon: Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok both look like games I’ll get round to eventually, but perhaps in 2024 when I can pick them up for under a tenner. Metal Slug Tactics looks fun, but SNK is now owned by Mohammed bin Salman, so I feel like I’ll be giving it a miss. I’ll also be keeping an academic eye on anything involving NFTs, while avoiding them like the plague.
As far as “old” games go, I have copy of Raji on my Switch that I still haven’t started. I may or may not persuade myself to play Final Fantasy XIII in order to better understand Get in the Car, Loser. I’ve got Umurangi Generation installed and never opened, and Six Ages – the spiritual sequel to King of Dragon Pass. Also, I haven’t yet bought a copy of Humankind but I’m curious about how it stacks up next to Civilization, and maybe before the end of the year it will be discounted deeply enough for me to take a punt? Oh, and – how could I forget?! – the new A-Train game got a PC release last month, which I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.
This might be the year that I get a PS5 or whatever, but I’m still waiting for some games to make it feel worthwhile. I’d like to try that updated Final Fantasy VII Remake, but not so much that I’d pay £500 for the privilege. I’ll see how things look towards the end of the year, but I feel like we’re now experiencing the effects of the pandemic – games that were originally due for release in 2022 will probably be suffering delays after two years of working from home, so the drought of big new AAA type games could continue throughout the year. The games that do come out will probably be, often, games that were delayed from 2021.
Finally – and perhaps the most exciting part – I now have some number of little emulation boxes loaded up with weird old stuff, much of which I haven’t played before! I am going to make some time to play Ranma ½: Treasure of the Red Cat Gang and some of the Langrisser series.
I’m thinking about doing some streaming, or something. I don’t really see the point in streaming – mostly I just hate the idea of the audience thinking they have a right to speak to me – but I do like the idea of playing some old games alongside people and having a conversation about the game while we play. Assuming I can put together the right combination of game and co-host and dull technical stuff… maybe it’ll happen.
I hope you are doing okay and being kind to yourself. Considering you’ve just read 10,000 words of some guy’s opinions about videogames, maybe that’s something you should seriously query.
