 Before I do a video from the poll I put up for you guys, I realized I had to get my Games of the Year video done before Christmas. It was a weird year with a ton of shit delayed and quite a few games that were pretty big disappointments, but once I went back over my lists of video ideas, I realized the year actually did have a bunch of pretty great games. No big intro needed, we're just gonna do the top 12 games of the year. And then at the end, I'll give you my two most disappointing games of the year. If you like what I have to say, or at least how I sound saying it, do me and you a favor and like, share, subscribe, yadda yadda yadda. Alright, best games of the year after the intro thing. Number 12, Necromunda Hired Gun Titanfall 2 meets Doom Eternal on a barely double A budget in the 40k universe. One of the best feeling shooters around, but with not enough enemy variety or story to be all it really could have been. Still the 12th best game of the year ago and a hard recommend, I mean I loved this game. If you want more info, I did an entire video about this thing. It's very low budget, but so damn fun to run on a wall and turn mooks into mists of blood in slow motion. 11, Herot Herot is a great retro shooter in the mold of dusk, but it's not a clone. While it sticks pretty closely to the old school conventions, it does everything so well that it stands on its own as just a great game. It's a classic shooter in that it features winding levels you traverse to find keys to progress, but lots of games do that without being all that engaging. Herot has the game feel down solid, movement and shooting feel great, and the levels are big and complex enough to get lost in without being so big you get annoyed. They're perfect. When you combine the great levels, excellent enemies and balancing with smooth and fast gameplay you'll have a fun shooter, but what puts this on another level is its atmosphere. Set in a sort of Czechoslovakian communist dystopia, Herot's sound, music, enemies, ambient noise and drab spooky levels make the game feel dangerous and creepy even though everything is still pretty grounded. Pretty grounded. In a way, I'm not really even sure why I love this game so much. It's very simple, but the gameplay feels so smartly and carefully designed and the world and atmosphere are so creepy and unique that it just reels me in. I love this game and very much hope it sells enough to make the dude who made it a ton of money. Please buy this thing. It is awesome. Number 10 Guardians of the Galaxy You know what didn't totally suck? The Guardians of the Galaxy game. I know. It stunned me. I bought it kind of thinking it would be terrible and I'd be able to make a rage video about how terrible it is. Now listen, it is not without its flaws. Holy shit, it has so many flaws. It's one of those games that's always either too easy on normal and too frustrating on hard. I hate games like that. Balance your fucking game, man. And it just kind of feels clunky and annoying to move around. And the game takes way, way, way, way too damn long to finally give you enough tools to make combat not feel like ass. But by the end, once the game decides you've played long enough and are now allowed to have the actually fun abilities, it gets pretty good. Totally good, but pretty good. And before the game decides you're allowed to have fun, it has a really top notch story and voice acting to keep you going. I mean really top notch. Now I'm not a big fan of comic books or comic book movies. I find most of them boring as shit because I already know what's going to happen. There's a hero or heroes and then a bad guy comes and he beats the heroes and then the heroes really reach down inside to find their hero heart and then they beat the bad guy. Why do I need to watch a movie when the trailer tells me exactly what is going to happen? Out of all of these recent superhero movies, the only one I really, really loved was the first Guardians of the Galaxy and kind of the second, also really good. And a lot of that really has to do probably with just how great a director James Gunn is. Now the most amazing thing about this game is that its story is spectacularly good. It's better than the movies because it takes the time to really explore the characters in a way you just don't have time for in a film. Memorable, touching, exciting, suspenseful. It's just one of the best stories you'll ever see in a game. And it's gameplay is good enough to keep you from quitting before you see the credits roll. Number nine, the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077. Alright here we go. I am aware that the console version of Cyberpunk was a catastrophe and inexcusable. But I have a really nice PC and play basically everything there. On PC, Cyberpunk had some issues but nothing close to the disaster it is or was on console. I ran the game on Ultra with ray tracing on and the game stayed at 60 FPS. Yeah there were weird visual bugs every so often and the eye could get wonky but that's basically par for the course for huge open world games. Cyberpunk on PC is probably about the same level of buggy that you get in most new Bethesda games and as to the game itself, well I have a big long video about it here. But you know, it's one of the best of the Ubisoft style open world games out there. Not as good as the Witcher 3, but light years better than anything Ubisoft has done ever really ever. Since at least they've gone to the open world RPG type shit. The graphics are truly stupendous with character models and textures unlike anything else around. The story moments were as well directed as anything you'll see in a film and many of the missions are truly excellent. In fact the only reason it's this low is because it's simply not a good shooter and it's only a decent RPG. The leveling system and build variety is disappointingly vanilla and lame. The shooting is stiff and average. The movement is very average in a game about cyborg people. It's a decent and not great RPG and a slightly below average shooter with a slightly disappointing main story. But the side stories, characters, voice acting, dialogue, world design, graphics, cinematics and main mission structure are as good as anything out there. So Cyberpunk on PC ended up a pretty flawed game that's still pretty damn good. About the 9th best game of the year good. 8. Death's Door I wanted Death's Door to be even better. The whole time I played it I was like man I wish this was actually just a little bit better. It's combat and Metroidvania elements aren't as deep as I would have liked. And it's probably closer to the 2D Zelda games than it is to something like Hollow Knight. Death's Door is surprisingly challenging and does let you master the gameplay. My only issue was that I wanted a bit more growth over the course of the game. Hollow Knight plays very differently at the 20th hour than it does at hour 2. But Death's Door doesn't really ramp up its puzzles or combat at all. And then it annoyed the shit out of me that the game doesn't have a map. Like why? Why? What's with all these fucking games that don't have a map? That drives me crazy man put a fucking map in your game please for fuck's sake. Still. While those complaints kept it for being a top 3 game or one of the best games. What's here is so good and so charming. Enemy and especially boss design is excellent. The levels are gorgeous and the story is pretty fun. Combat and movement feel great and sound and music are wonderful. It's a game that will stick with you for a while after you finish it because it's got charm and atmosphere that's impossible to resist. With a slightly deeper progression system that allowed for more late game difficulty and variety in its combat, Death's Door would have rivaled Hollow Knight as an indie hit. Its simplicity keeps it from being an all time classic but it's so polished and charming and everything it does it does well. And that's why it was one of the year's very best games. Number 7 Doom Eternal Ancient Gods Part 2 DLC It's probably kind of silly to name a DLC as the 7th best game of the year but again I played the Ancient Gods Part 1 and 2 about 10 times each this year. The Ancient Gods Part 2 was an excellent send off to the best FPS game ever made. And while dialed difficulty back a little bit from Part 1 that was fine with me. On Nightmare difficulty the Ancient Gods Part 2 is still ridiculously challenging. Some people online complained about the story but I don't care about the story if I can doom dude seriously cares. The Ancient Gods Part 2 added some of the very best levels in the franchise, a handful of excellent new enemies, a heavier focus on mobility and platforming within the combat, a great final boss and the Sentinel Hammer which is better than the crucible that it replaced in every way. I also put about 15 hours into the Horde mode and while it's not exactly what I wanted it's plenty good. My only hope for the next doom is that they can read a competitive PVE Horde mode, let two players loose in a few arenas and have them compete for points and then a race to kill a boss. Either way a fitting goodbye to a literally perfect game. Number 6 Halo Infinite Halo Infinite's multiplayer is good but it's not fast paced enough to keep my attention so I'll just point out that it's a good feeling shooter with a time to kill that's so high I find it kinda boring. This is a ranking for the campaign. Halo Infinite's campaign has some serious problems. On the hardest difficulty some of the open world encounters are like downright bullshit and some of the late game encounters against mobs of vehicles are so obnoxious it drove me nuts. It's not necessary for every fucking encounter at the end of the game to have like 12 heavies and 4 tanks, it's exhausting, I think I'm gonna do a video on this game because the story is both really great at times and also a total mess at other times. I read that 343 didn't make the game a straight sequel to Halo 5 because they wanted this to be an entry point for new players and if that's actually true, holy fuck it is a total failure. I have played all of the Halo games and it took me like 15 hours to know what the fuck was going on. Still, while the plot is a confusing and convoluted mess at times and the game would have been far, far, far better just picking up where Halo 5 left off so I could see how that fucking ended, the voice acting, character moments and humanizing of Master Chief is really successful. It's surprisingly powerful to watch Master Chief deal with grief and regret. It's hard to humanize a huge green walking tank but that's what this game does. While the final boss is some fucking loser I do not know and do not give a shit about, the Brute Escarus was one of the more interesting and sympathetic villains in a game that I've seen in quite a long time. Finally, the open world could have easily been a total fucking disaster. Halo was always thrived on a steady pacing of massive set piece action, tight FPS linear level designs and occasionally wide open areas. And the open world formula makes pacing that kind of stuff kind of difficult. Far Cry 6 was one of the worst fucking games of the year because it's just a boring slog of repetitive shit. But Halo Infinite manages to avoid that stuff with two design choices. First, the entire game takes place on a map smaller than one zone of Far Cry. And second and most importantly, Halo Infinite is full of excellent straight forward linear action set piece FPS levels. If Far Cry just threw in a bunch of those, it would be great but there's none of those in Far Cry. And most important of all, Halo Infinite is a great, great fucking shooter man. The grappling hook is a game changer. You can whip yourself across the map faster than you can drive a warthog with this thing. It suddenly turns Halo into one of the best mobility shooters around. And even with that, the game still retains the careful tactical feel that it's always had. And second, you're blowing up a group of grunts by zipping to them with a shockwave AoE attack and the next you're carefully taking out dangerous enemies by smartly using cover and positioning. Infinite has a simple and satisfying progression system that is small but well paced and full of actually useful shit. You only need to grind two hours and learn how to move slightly faster while crouch walking. Instead, you find skill points to electrocute enemies with your grapple hook or to have double dash dodge. It's just a spectacular feeling shooter, punchy, fast, powerful, challenging, satisfying. It's still not polished, I fell through the map twice, checkpoints are a fucking mess and the dodge ability should always be equipped instead of having to cycle to it from a group of four abilities. Oh, and the game desperately needs a regular save system. I hate that games do this, just let me have a regular save system. You can still do autosaves but let me do manual saves. What the hell man, but still even with that Halo Infinite feels great to kill things in. And as I said in my Rage 2 review, if your game makes shooting things feel great then I am going to love your game. As far as I'm concerned, this new direction for the game is a smashing success. I loved it. Number 5 Resident Evil Village Seems like Resident Evil Village kind of flew under the radar this year. I don't recall what other people were saying about the game but in my opinion it was another huge success for Capcom. Resident Evil 7 was like a mixed bag for me. It started out great but its second half was kind of a slog and it had a real issue with no enemy variety and kind of like boring art direction. RE Village is a far more action oriented game and I'm sure that some people didn't like that but to me it was the perfect balance of action game and survival horror. You know I don't like boring shit. The game has a very large and open map, easily the largest in any of these games and its full of places to explore and loot. It also has a pretty great little progression system and well balanced enemies. The levels are gorgeous and unique and its tone is creepy and sinister all the way through. RE games rarely have great stories but this one is truly bonkers and does about as good a job as one can laying the groundwork for future games. It also does a pretty good job explaining why Ethan is such a boring nothing who's able to reattach severed limbs by dumping ointment on his stump. This isn't saying much but Village is pretty easily the most coherent and interesting story the series has ever had and its sheer size and scope is a big step up for the series. RE Village is a truly excellent game and Capcom after many years of floundering about is on a roll now. Village is fantastic. I absolutely love it. Number 4 Returnal Returnal's failure to have a save system at launch was total bullshit that significantly hurt the game. I had several multiple hour runs erased because the game crashed and that means starting over from the very start. It is also painfully slow to progress stretching a few levels out for hours and hours as you slowly unlock enough weapons and weapon perks to make the later levels less toxically annoying. The game has a bunch of literally random difficulty spikes that are straight up infuriating and many of the harsh negatives that come with parasites makes builds punishing and restrictive for no real reason and kinda like goes against the whole synergy system that makes roguelites fun. I stand by saying the game is far too hard early on and far too easy at the end. I stand by saying the game has a bunch of balance issues. I stand by my opinion that the daily run is a total mess that's bugged half the time with maps that don't have exits and it's asinine to only let you try it once a day in a game that is supposed to be a roguelike. And I stand by my outrage that a game expects you to run through 3 hours of intense gameplay to complete a run and doesn't have the decency to have a safe system like every other fucking long run the roguelite has. Returnalist pissed me off a lot, but it's also one of the smoothest playing action games of the last 10 years. Shooting feels amazing, the dash dodge feels downright perfect, sound design is perfect, music, anime design, art design, haptic feedback, it's all so damn good that I was willing to push through all this shit that made me rage. In fact, I ended up getting a platinum trophy even though it was locked behind a bunch of RNG bullshit because the audio logs are random spawns. Returnalist is so smooth and it's bosses are so damn cool and it just feels great to play it. I am so psyched for what they do next, the games seem to sell well so I deeply hope they get the budget to make a full-length action game, doesn't need to be a roguelite. Returnalist was a huge change from House Mark's arcade past, hopefully the next game is another giant leap. Number 3, Deathloop. I had a bunch of complaints about Deathloop, I think it's a bit too easy and I felt like the game actually could have been more ambitious even though I don't think I actually articulated what I meant by that criticism in my review which is here. Deathloop is played on much smaller maps than Dishonored or Prey. It's only a few levels and all of them are very very small once you know where you are going. I fully believe this is the case because the game was originally supposed to be far more of a puzzle that you had to figure out and at the time you were going to really need to search the levels to figure everything out. Arcane probably discovered by testing that the game was too complex and players felt lost so they eventually added so many waypoints and hints that the player actually does very little puzzle solving themselves. Instead, you mainly follow waypoints and the game tells you what to do. Now I stand by that criticism and it keeps the game from being the masterpiece I was hoping it would be. Still, when I take away my sky high expectations and look at the game as it is, Deathloop is still a wonderful title. Its art design is fantastic and its game feel is the best Arcane has achieved. While the world building and story isn't as good as Dishonored or Prey, it's still pretty damn good and it's got such charm and style you do feel totally engrossed in the world. I wish the characters and history of the world were better fleshed out and that the audio logs were as good as their previous games but it's still better than most AAA games we get. Most importantly, Arcane's games are totally unique. Deathloop is making Arcane style immersive sims except Arcane. With beef, Deus Ex and BioShock on very long, if not permanent hiatus, every game Arcane makes is a treat. Arcane probably makes the best blend of action game and immersive sim around. Maybe ever. Deathloop might not be as good as their other games but it's still pretty damn great. Ratchet and Clank Insomniac games is so fucking good it is insane. The new Spider-Man games are straight fire, with Miles Morales being one of the best damn action games I've ever played with an absolutely great story to boot. The PS4 Ratchet and Clank game was pretty damn good but Rift Apart is basically a perfect action game. I honestly could not find a flaw. Its graphics and art design is stunning, with the game seriously looking like you're playing an animated movie. The levels are so wonderfully designed and filled to the brim with secrets to find and areas to explore. Progression is perfect, so good it was a joy to get the Platinum Trophy. Weapons are awesome, the game is surprisingly challenging on the hardest difficulty and the game just plays smooth and flawless. With a great mixture of challenging boss fights, horde sections, and combat that requires tight dodging and being on your toes, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart is as good as an action game as you will ever play. Its story is pretty damn good too with top notch voice acting. Now while the game's story and visual presentation seems like it's made for kids, the truth is it's such an artfully designed triumph that it is a perfect game. I loved it, simply loved it, everything about it. Number 1 Demon Souls Some might think it's not fair to call a remake the game of the year, but Blue Points Demon Souls remake is so good I immediately started NG Plus upon finishing the game. Now I never played the original Demon Souls, I could not bring myself to spend 250 bucks on a PS3 for one game, and I was never able to find a working and non-virus infested ISO to run in an emulator, so for me, Blue Points remake is my only experience with the game. I came in nervous, because game feels such a huge part of what makes FromSoft Souls titles so amazing, but from the moment I started the tutorial level it felt like I was playing a From game. But Blue Point still deserves a ton of credit for its own work on this game, animations are spectacular, and all the small details that make Souls games the best in the world are present here too with Blue Point's own imprints. Graphically, this remake might be one of the most beautiful games ever made, and while some purists seem to be angry about certain enemy designs and texture redesigns, as far as I'm concerned, this game is amazing to look, and the atmosphere is spectacular. When you add in amazing use of the PS5's haptic feedback, you're left with the only game I played this year that felt like a truly next generation leap on consoles, maybe Ratchet and Clank too. This remake is so damn good I played it six times this year. Now, this top game ranking belongs at least half to FromSoftware, but Blue Point deserves a ton of praise for making the best Souls likes in Sekiro, and if the rumors are true that they're making a Bloodborne 2, holy crap man that's going to be awesome. Bonus Round My two most disappointing games of the year In A Bridge of Spirits Boring Bland Nothing Burger Gorgeous graphics and animated movie art direction, but doesn't overcome the crap combat, shit movement, boring levels just by the numbers crappy PS3 style action game. Pass The Ascent 70% of the time is spent slowly fucking walking around a big ass boring map. It alternates between decent enough but boring and frustratingly unbalanced. Great world building, boring story, not as good as Ruiner, so why even bother? Alright everybody. I don't know what's up next, I actually haven't looked at the poll, unfortunately the thing that seemed to be leading was why I hate the Nintendo Switch, so I guess it would be forced to do that. Anyway, I gotta get to any of the games coming in next year, and I do want to make a video on Vanguard, and then there's a bunch of indie games I've been playing, maybe I'll get around to making a video about those. Either way, I think I only made probably like 15, 16 videos this year, and I know they're coming less frequently than they used to, but you know, I don't know. It takes a lot of effort to make these videos, not this one, because it's pretty easy just to rant on a list, but generally it takes quite a bit of effort, um, I don't know. Thanks for watching everyone, I hope to see you next time, uh, like, share, subscribe, yadda yadda yadda. Bye.