I actually couldn't remember if I started playing Deep Rock Galactic this year or last year so I ended up not including it as a favorite. But I absolutely love it.
A Way Out is my #1 game from 2018. It's just a unique and finely crafted experience. It's not perfect but it really shines in using video games as a medium for its storytelling and is definitely a significant experience due to its nature as a co-op only game, giving a well paced campaign and pulls off a very meaningful twist at the end.
Spider-Man, Red Dead Redemption 2, Sunset Overdrive on PC, Soul Calibur VI, Far Cry 5, Monster Hunter World, Hitman 2, Frostpunk and Kingdom Come Deliverance were some of the games that I really liked as well in 2018.
Don't really have a least favorite personally. Yakuza 6 perhaps, but it's not completely awful, just a personal disappointment. The Quiet Man is more accurate on being technically awful so I'll just mention that here too, but it's an amazing awful experience that I'd be lying if I said I didn't got entertained in suffering through it.
Far Cry 5 can suck my ass. What a fuckin let down.
I'll loosely rank the games I played for the first time in 2018:
Celeste
Fantastic platforming, great soundtrack.
Hollow Knight: Godmaster
It's more Hollow Knight. A bit too difficult, but I also think it's cool that they dare to push the difficulty so far.
Assassin's Creed: Origins
Very good game and great DLCs, but probably only up here because I haven't played an AC game since 2. Still gets very repetitive and as impressive as the animations are, the parkour mechanics suck dick.
A Hat in Time
Fun game, and adorable as hell.
Subnautica
Great, love the environments and exploration but screw crafting and inventory management.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Haven't finished it yet, but it's pretty good so far.
Nier: Automata
Not finished, failed to capture me, might go back to it eventually.
A Way Out
Eh.
Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition
Terrible. Bad metroidvania with atrocious, painfully unfunny meme shit dialogue. I get angry when I think about this game.
Best: Red Dead Redemption 2. Of the games I have played in 2018, RDRII was the one I was most enthralled with. The world, the characters, the story; it all had me invested all the way through. My gripes with the game are minimal like the extensive epilogue and some story moments, but are overshadowed by the positives and overall I think this game far surpassed the first. Not only has Arthur quickly become one of my favorite video game protagonists, his performance is perhaps one of the best I have seen in a game.
Runner-Up: A Way Out. For its unique presentation.
Worst: Far Cry 5. Purely because of the incredible contrivances of its main story where the antagonists are conveniently able to overpower you as the story demands it and an ending that tries to be profound suggesting that you are the cause of everything that transpires throughout the game despite how obtuse this logic is in context. It was a game where I enjoyed the gameplay well enough, but with every development of the story I became frustrated with it. Plus, two very underwhelming DLCs (Vietnam and Mars) and a halfway decent one (Zombies).
Mixed: Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. I just completed the main quest last night and the game has left me with a mixed impression as both an Assassin's Creed game and on its own; and was an overall gilded experience for me. Shortly before playing this one I discovered that the modern day plot about the resurrection of Juno (something that has been built up --albeit in baby steps --across five games) has been resolved "off-screen" (in a spin-off comic) and pretty much abandoned in the games (which leads me to believe that Origins is more of a soft reboot of the franchise than just a simple continuation).
The emphasis on choice feels to me like just a marketing gimmick. Much of the choices are inconsequential or don't have a significant change on the world or characters (except how you deal with Nikolaos and Deimos). Romances in particular, seeing as you cannot interact with a character after that sub-plot is wrapped up (Roxana's is about the only one that was referred to later). I doubt the next game will refer to the possibility of Alexios having several illegitimate children running around (one being a descendant of both Leonidas and Odysseus, no less). Not to mention how lame the romances are and are usually "We've known each other for only an afternoon but I feel a connection between us." after doing a quest or two. There's even one that comes pretty much out of no where at the end of the Cult of Kosmos quest. Additionally, because they've announced that Kassandra is "the canon choice" as the misthios, playing as Alexios feels/is "wrong," so to speak and future games will likely refer to the events of this game as being Kassandra's actions (I have my doubts that Ubisoft will start implementing save transfers or something). It's rather counter-intuitive to the whole "player choice" thing. What they should have done is allow you to play from either character's perspective but the story remains intact (instead of switching their roles depending on who you play as) or have it tied to the whole time and equations stuff they talk about in the game instead of being like "Choose who you want to be, but one is our canon choice."
The story is fine for the most part, but its flow feels rough. Towards the beginning there's an unnecessary reliance on flashbacks that interrupt what is going on to show segments of the misthios's youth, which could have easily been consolidated to the beginning in the form of a cutscene following the prologue, instead. Later, there are flashbacks showing the mother that are completely unnecessary as they just reiterate what was already said by the characters without adding much. There's also this quest where you discover that Pythagoras is your real father and he guards the gate to Atlantis and is being kept alive by an Isu artifact and he then passes it down to the misthios who then meets Layla Hassan in the present timeline, which was cool and all (no, seriously, those moments are the kind of things I like to see in an Assassin's Creed game), but you're able to do it about half-way through the main quest; when it really feels like it should have been toward the end (I mean, true you can choose to pursue it, but I also didn't know it would play out the way it did). It got me interested in what's to come, but at the same time I am wondering why I should even bother with the series after they just abandoned the last seemingly big plot point and relegated it to spin-off material (as I mentioned at the beginning).
Finally, the gameplay is just repetitive. It's the same issue that was present in Origins (I could look over that somewhat, because I was more engaged with the characters and events of the story). If you're not doing the main quests or side quests (mostly fetch quests), you're clearing out camps, forts, animal dens, or tombs which mostly amount to "kill this and loot this," rinse and repeat ad nauseam. One thing I did enjoy about the gameplay was hunting Cultists because you can track them down or even come across them accidentally while exploring. It gave a better sense that "They are out there" pulling strings behind the scenes. On the Cult, though, I am greatly disappointed that memory corridors following a target's assassination were absent. They have been a staple of the series that, to me, personalized each target and gave them more character. Especially after Origins had some of the best memory corridor scenes in the series. I don't expect one for every member of the Cult, but certainly for the Inner Circle (also, kind of annoyed me that they're called sages but have nothing to do with Sages of Assassin's Creed lore).
Games I really enjoyed:
Red Dead 2 (seriously, this game was awesome)
Hitman 2
A Way Out
Celeste
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Forza Horizon 4
Let Downs:
Far Cry 5 (still beat it 3 times so ehh)
Fallout 76
Sea of Thieves (fun enough, just shallow af)
Guacamole
Favorites:
The World Ends With You: Final Remix
Smash Ultimate
Celeste
Deltarune (does that even count?)
Hat In Time
Mario Tennis Aces
TWEWY is definitely #1, I loved that game on DS and it's a great port (except the new content was a little iffy.) Sequel when
Letdowns:
Fortnite
Quake Champions
does Nintendo Switch Online count? 🤔
Best: Dusk - This game surprised me in a way that I didn't think it would satiate my appetite for doom:eternal with it's face-paced gameplay and amazing soundtrack.
Second Place: Assassin's Creed Odyssey - This is a mixed one for me because I played this first before origins and that may have skewed my opinion about it but I really enjoyed an open world assassin's creed game with its beautiful landscape that had me enjoying just riding everywhere and abusing photo mode. I also liked how they incorporated some Greek mythology into the game spread out enough that finding them was a treat.
Mixed: Assassin's Creed Origins - I don't think it's a bad game but I probably should have played this later on rather than doing so after a month of finishing Odyssey as I found myself getting bored easily(core game play didn't change from the two) as well as not being totally interested in Egyptian history compared to that of Greek history/mythology. I will say I had an issue with the cut scenes of the people you had to assassinate were hard to follow as it would jump around a lot even though people would be talking like your character making it feel disconnected when one moment he'd be seething with rage running at them, but the next he'd be confused even though the dialogue wouldn't inflict on that change.
Last Place: Far Cry 5 - This game started out fun with my friend and I but as the story progressed we found ourselves uninterested in being constantly captured by the antagonists brothers and sister when you'd be freeing the spot from them. It just felt awful to be taking on a horde of enemies with ease and suddenly when its all over, you'd just collapse on the spot just so the story can give life to the characters. It's a fun game to mess around in with a buddy and explore but that's not saying much.
Dusk:
Masterpiece. Setpieces are masterfully crafted scenarios with amazing scores to punctuate them, no cutscenes to break your flow here. Many throwbacks to other titles and whatnot. Loads of replayability with tougher difficulty level, and an amazing community on their Discord, with games happening every now and then on Duskworld and some shitposting.
Movement is slick and their simplified bunnyhopping is really fun to use and has an infinitely smaller barrier of entry for newcomers, guns all feel and sound really good, and the game constantly ups its game in terms of score and level design, every new level is heaps more fun than the last.
It's the best shooter I've played in more than a decade. It really needs more attention.
Celeste:
It's impossible to say more about Celeste, damn fucking masterpiece.
Divinity: Original Sin II:
Absolutely amazing, 70hs in playing this with a friend and he'd still be hyped and poking me about it every single time he saw me online, neither could get enough of the game. 100h+ of beautifully crafted content, with so many choices to make, ways to solve things, etc.
It's a masterpiece by itself, and it's only made better by dragging someone along with you. Hours of bantering, endless morality discussions and plenty of chances for back and forth about clever combat ideas, it was just as fun as a D&D campaign without the countless hours of setup and reading tomes.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance:
It's an Eurojank Simulator, it's really fun and really broken. But the Quests are great, the storyline is good, the atmosphere is impeccable, the combat takes a while to get used to, but it's really fun to play around with.
Bring a massive patience stack for it tho, also monitor computer temps because this one's a punishing one.
Bad Titles:
Honestly? I can't bring up any that I've bought into this year. So much good shit in the smaller indie titles and so many older titles I stumbled upon that I just can't give enough of a shit about the trash happening elsewhere.
My favorite is probably Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It's eurojank through and through, but it had this 'outsider artist' feel, did some things unconventionally, sometimes in the way you would be saying "wouldn't it be cool if they did xyz" as a kid but it wasn't technologically possible back then. I always was one to look past bugs unplanned features if they're not gamebreaking, and I love RPGs, so i really enjoyed it. When I played it I actually felt a bit nostalgic because it reminded be of careless days spend with oblivion when I was a kid, and there was just this feeling of impending adventure I haven't felt for a long time in a video game. I'd say it's the best RPG since 2010's New Vegas.
Another is Rimworld. I don't even know what to say about it, it just struck the perfect balance between dwarf-fortress-esque autism and accessibility. It really feels like a labor of love with meticulously planned balance. I would praise it for "outsider" mechanics too, but I can't really do that since the whole genre is so niche that there is no mainstream convention.
Oh, and thanks to the Epic Launcher giveaway i finally got to try Subnautica. I always heard people praise it but I didn't expect it to be so good. It's hard to be a fan of sandbox crafting survival games, and there really aren't many good ones out there (from the top of my head, Minecraft, Don't Starve and...?). I particularly liked how despite it being a sandbox survival game, it had focus and an overarching plot that you progressed through triggers made up of survival/crafting milestones. Similarly to KC:D, I felt like this game also tried some unconventional, "outsider" mechanics instead of sticking to the status quo, and it paid off. It was also some intense god damn shit at first, deep sea is scary. Between this and Rimworld, those two games made me start to like Sci-Fi in general.
HITMAN™ 2
Spyro: Reignited Trilogy
Subnautica
Enter the Dungeon: Advanced Gungeons and Draguns
Super Smash Brothers® Ultimate
No Man's Sky: NEXT
Didn't play many games this year 🤷
No Man's Sky for best comeback of all time holy fucking shit.
out of what i actually played in 2018 and found noteworthy:
DUSK - it took a bit of time but im glad someone was finally able to count to 3. i dunno what hasn't been said about DUSK at this point but i'll just say that i want of this. definitely encouraging me to play the original DOOM, quake, and blood all the way through holy shit.
THE MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories - this is the first proper game ive played from Swery65 and while i could nitpick about the janky controls THE MISSING is definitely has a weird charm to it, which i guess is the trademark for anything Swery touches. the last 30 minutes of this thing were probably the most gripping moments ive had with a game this year even if the themes didn't entirely resonate with me i think they were handled with the utmost care.
GRIS - absolutely stunning art style and immersive from start to finish.
Epic Battle Fantasy 5 - it's kinda funny to see how far this series has come since its Newgrounds/Kongergate days and that the developer is still using flash. still really humorous/well-written (to me at least) and a competent RPG to boot.
Far Cry 5 - the narrative shits the bed pretty hard but i really enjoyed this from a gameplay and open world standpoint.
Iconoclasts - you could argue this game gets a bit melodramatic with its narrative but i think it's a well designed metroidvania, definitely lots of time and care put into it.
My Favorite Games of 2018
Marvel's Spider-Man was, without a doubt, the best game that I played all of last year. The combat was superb, blending your basic brawler mechanics with environmental combat and webslinging antics. Every brawl, I juggled between punching all the bad guys and webbing them up and using them as human flails, and it never ceased to be cathartic. The webslinging is the most fun I've ever had just NAVIGATING a video game. To the point where I almost never used Fast Travel because getting from A to B was just so much fun. I thought the boss fights were excellent. Not the hardest but I just turned forty in November, and I don't like hard bosses anyway. I like boss fights that are challenging enough without ever feeling too tedious or frustrating, and Spider-Man rode that line perfectly. Each boss was intense but instead of being frustrating, they were just really fun and REALLY refreshing, especially seeing as how some of the Arkham games have handled their boss fights. The story was nothing new, but it was elevated by how great a job it did at fleshing out all the characters and having two really strong, memorable central villains, whose motivation was fairly understandable.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain remains my all time favorite video game for the PS4 and the all time best Stealth Action game I have ever played. I know that MGSV came out in 2015, but we're now in 2019 and I'm STILL occasionally replaying missions just for fun. For all its faults, there isn't a single game besides Pac-Man, Deus Ex, Tetris and MGS3 that can keep me coming back as consistently as MGSV continues to keep me coming back. That's because the gameplay is just so much fun. The controls are tight with incredibly snappy and responsive movements, allowing me to pull off some really impressive stunts in a pinch. The enemies are actually fun to get into firefights with for once, and even more enjoyable to bypass or mess with. I love most of the Main Missions and how much replay value each one has. I adored the boss fights despite their lack of variety and lack of difficulty. And I thought the Outposts were brilliantly designed, accommodating any given playstyle and having several entry and exit points, as well as several paths to a Point of Interest for any objective. I'm forty years old as of November. Only two games on this list make me feel like a kid again, and those games are Spider-Man and MGSV.
Far Cry 5 is a strange one. I don't like this game. I thought the single player was, actually kind of lousy with REALLY boring missions and found the characters to be rather one note. Yet, Far Cry 5 has a single feature that makes it not only worth buying, this feature alone could carry an entire game and I would pay full price for it. That feature is Arcade Mode. Basically, you can construct your own environment using every single asset from Far Cry 5, its DLC's, and other Ubisoft titles. The sheer amount of control you have for creating your own levels is dev-tool quality stuff and VERY intuitive! You can create your own missions for solo play, or create missions for co-op, or even levels for multiplayer. I only did Solo because I don't like multiplayer games anymore. But it was such a rewarding experience putting in tons of hours across the weeks to create a mission and then being able to play and replay that mission whenever I pleased. With just a LITTLE more hands on customization; being able to design your own guards, being able to customize the boss enemies or even just create your own boss, and having just a few more objective types for Solo creation, Arcade Mode alone could carry a game with near infinite replay value.
Soul Calibur VI is a really fun fighting game with tons of content, and a really good Create-A-Soul feature. I quite liked the two campaign modes, mainly the Libra one, and I have a bit of gleeful fun just creating characters and pitting them against one another. It's disappointing that CAS, strong as it is, also happens to carry a fraction of the cosmetics that the previous game had, because this was the biggest selling point of the game for me. And it seems like the Publisher would rather be conservative with the gear and sell it back in these upcoming DLC Packs. But as a game, it's still very fun and I don't need to be an expert in fighting games to have fun, which is just as well since I'm usually terrible at them. Each character feels wholly distinct from one another, and the combat just has a good feel to it, which can be hit or miss in these three dimensional fighting games.
God of War was another good game. I had fun with it and quite enjoyed the relationship between a refreshingly tamer Kratos and his son. The combat isn't as crazy as the original games, but I enjoyed it just fine, particularly just chucking my Axe at everything from afar. It was an all around great game, just not one I will ever be in any hurry to replay. Many were head over heels about this game and I can see why, it's a very fun game, but it feels like a commitment, whereas Spider-Man is a pretty refreshingly short game, which made it a lot easier to replay. Still an all around excellent game though!
Games I was Indifferent Towards in 2018
Metal Gear: SurVive is a game that I put a LOT of hours into. For the game to hold me for that long, it had to have done something right. And that something was the fact that it borrowed so heavily from MGSV, and actually managed to make a few improvements to the gameplay and controls. In my review, I gave SurVive a 7 out of 10 and I stand by that because I wasn't miserable, and I was coming back for more long after the credits rolled. But this is NOT a quality game. It's not even a METAL GEAR game. It's a dime a dozen Zombie Survival game that could've been REALLY good had Konami forked over an actual budget for the game and not designed it like a Mobile Game. Fighting Zombies just isn't as fun as fighting humans who possess a wider array of weaponry, tactics, and can actually pose a threat. Melee combat was rather dull. It worked better in service of the wider array of combat options SurVive had, and the Bow & Arrow was actually REALLY enjoyable to use, but there is absolutely nothing about this game that makes it worth coming back to. It's a Co-Op game with barely Co-Op features. It's a Metal Gear Zombie game with nothing that resembles Metal Gear to try and sell that spinoff idea. There's a Giant Monster stomping around all game long in the open world that you can't even fight. And there's absolutely nothing interesting about any of the characters or the story. What SurVive shows me is that there is real talent still lurking around within Konami. With a real 'AAA' budget and a more competent writer, these guys and gals could produce an excellent Metal Gear game. But SurVive is not that game. Not when the focus is tedious crafting, annoying inventory nonsense and grinding in favor of just really fun missions and open-ended scenarios.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is what I suspect will be another "The Witcher 3" scenario for me. As in an all around excellent game that just isn't for me. And like Witcher 3, it's because of the actual gameplay not being particularly exciting. A game can have strong writing, beautiful and expansive open worlds, with strong characters and great production value all around. But none of this matters one bit if the gameplay doesn't click, and I won't lie, I found RDR2 just kind of boring. The shootouts didn't feel particularly exciting. The missions so far have felt overly scripted and fairly one note. Riding on Horseback is more tedious than it is fun and the movement in this game doesn't feel especially responsive sometimes. I'm getting old and as such, I don't seek out video games for their rich writing. Usually, if I want that, I can turn to an Indie game, cinema and television, or just a book. There's nothing about RDR2's gameplay that leaves me grinning like an idiot the way Spider-Man did, the way MGSV did and the way God of War could occasionally do. And without that, I'm just ultimately indifferent towards this game. I'm not saying it's bad or even average. It IS an excellent video game and I believe all of the praise behind it is 100% earned. But I'd rather just jump into the action and not have every single mission open up with a slow horseback ride and a vague conversation about past events I'm not particularly interested in.
I think the only 2018 games id played were rdr2 black ops 4 and smash, though when i finally am able to spend money on games again i have a lot to catch up on.
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