henke on 26/12/2020 at 06:42
T'is the season, for best games rankings.
Henke's Top 20 of '2020. Paper Beast - WOW FACTOR AWARDA thoroughly surprising and delightful and terrifying experience. I'm glad I went in blind into this VR game by the creator of Another World, because it really made me feel like I was in ANOTHER WORLD! I unironically said "WOW" out loud several times while playing it.
19. Pro GymnastIt's a full fledged gymnast game, which is not something I knew I wanted, but apparently I did.
18. Microsoft Flight Simulator - TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDWell it's pretty much as perfect as a flight sim can be. I just wish it was more of a game as well. Once the novelty of flying over your hometown has passed there's not much to do here unless you really just like flying planes.
17. Kernmantle - THE HARDEST GAME AWARDI might be one of the players who has made it the furtherst in this physics-based 2D climbing game, and I haven't even beaten it. It's oddly compelling though.
16. Walking Dead: Saints & SinnersA robust open world zombie survival game that plays well in VR despite have a lot of systems and even some immsimmy bits. I'm looking forward to getting back to this once I get my new graphics card.
15. Wide Ocean Big JacketA nice n' chill vacation-adventure.
14. HavenOpen-world sci-fi adventure romance with turn-based-ish combat. Fans of the Saga comic book would probably like this.
13. Tetris Effect (Oculus Quest) - AUDIOVISUAL SENSATION AWARDYeah it's just Tetris but when you slam down a 4-liner on the jazz level and the score goes SKEBIDI-BEEE-BOP it makes me
feel things.
12. John Wick HexI was gonna make a turn-based John Woo shootout game until this game beat me to the punch. The animation is a bit wonky and the story isn't much to write home about, but the tactics gameplay is satisfying.
11. Watch Dogs LegionIt's Watch Dogs 2 but with more bells and whistels and fish and chips!
10. Climbros - HIDDEN GEM AWARDI loved this arcadey platformer/climbing game and few enough people played it that I'm still in the top 10 leaderboard for most levels. It's only 1,63€ right now so (
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084710/Climbros/) GO PICK IT UP if you wanna have a good time.
9. art of rallyThis was my chill-out-and-listen-to-some-tunes game for the last few weeks. Lovely arcadey rally gameplay to zone out to without the suspension-setting-up and tyre-changing and all that faff of a serious rally game.
8. Teardown (Early Access) - NO WAIT THIS SHOULD GET THE TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDDennis Gustaffson is like the new John Carmack, or something. There's really cool tech powering this thing, and the game ain't bad either! The heist-gameplay makes you feel like a criminal genius.
7. Deadly Premonition 2York's BACK, BABYYYYY! This is a wonky mess of a game but when it comes to story and characters, it is as engaging as its predecessor.
6. Golf On Mars - MY MOST-PLAYED GAME OF THE YEARJust got to hole 7000. It's Desert Golfing, but better. I don't know how to stop. Help.
5. Half-Life: AlyxI guess the highest compliment I can pay it, and the only metric by which it really should be judged is that it feels like a worthy follow-up to Half-Life 2.
4. Mafia: Definitive EditionThey combined the solid core gameplay systems of Mafia 3 with the storytelling of Mafia 1 and ended up with the best Mafia game so far.
3. The Last Of Us III really didn't want a sequel to The Last Of Us, because how the hell do you follow that ending without the whole thing just being miserable as hell? Well, you don't... you just make the whole sequel miserable as hell.
2. Hardspace: Shipbreaker - SURPRISE OF THE YEARI really didn't expect a game where all you're doing is sorting garbage in zero-gravity to be this engrossing, but here we are.
1. Snowrunner - GAME OF THE YEARIt's more Mudrunner but with SNOW instead of MUD! What, that's not enough to get your excited? Ok, it also expands on the rather minimalist mission-formula of it's predecessors to turn it into more of a typical open-world game with lots of tasks and missions that frequently intersect with eachother. This was my go-to chill-out game for much of 2020. Just crank some cowboy-tunes and head out on a long haul. Pure bliss.
Honorable mentions:Carrion
Cloudpunk
Sludge Life
Fall Guys
My Exercise
Disappointments:Desperados 3 - I loved Shadow Tactics but this cowboy follow-up just didn't grab me. Maybe because I played on PS4, the gamepad controls definitely feel clunkier than M+KB.
Ghost of Tsushima - The actual gameplay is fine, but the gameworld feels a bit too gamey with everything too close together, and also the story just isn't very engaging at all.
Wildfire - Yeah I dunno man. There's a lot of systems here. Maybe too many. It's all kinda a mess.
So, what was YOUR GAMES OF 2020?
Our previous Best Games Of The Year lists(
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=150275) 2019 | (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149432) 2018 | (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148501) 2017 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=147367) 2016 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146083) 2015 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144820) 2014 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=142865) 2013 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140656) 2012 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=137856) 2011 | (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134184) 2010
SubJeff on 26/12/2020 at 10:37
The only 2020 games I played in 2020 were The Last of Us 2 , which is obviously my game of the year, and Noita which had it's v1.0 release in 2020 despite being in early access for about a year, which I've had too many glitches with to really rate. I wish I had the time you have henke.
But I did finish Spiderman on PS4 in 2020, and that was great.
The Last Guardian I abandoned because I don't have the patience for janky controls, and Death Stranding (PS4) needs more time per session than I can spare right now.
So, grim as it was, The Last of Us 2. It may have been bleak and grim, but it felt real. I loved the characters, I loved Abby. It was such a refreshing continuation, leftfield almost, and maybe that's why it got so much flak. After the first one I thought no sequel was needed. After this, I want more.
Malf on 26/12/2020 at 10:48
Once again, games that were actually released in 2020 wot I done played are relatively few and far between.
So, in no particular order (or rather, if and when I remember them):
Half-Life: Alyx
VR has to offer me something very compelling these days in order to get me to move the furniture around in order to fire it up.
Thankfully, Alyx is absolutely brillo.
This, for me, is probably VR's killer app (alongside Superhot VR, but that doesn't have the graphical or narrative heft of Alyx).
It turns out that Valve can still make a very good vidyagame.
Oxygen Not Included
If any one genre can be defined as being "my jam baby", it's the colony management sim.
Truly excellent ones are few and far between, with many lacking the depth or complexity necessary to give an experienced Dwarf Fortress player that sustained dopamine hit they crave.
Oxygen Not Included definitely does not suffer from that problem.
Indeed, the main reason it still draws me back (and drives me away!), is that I regularly get my bases to a stage where I suspect that in order to continue, I need to stop being stoopid and level-up my brain.
There are lots of intricately and inextricably linked systems at play in the game, and full comprehension of each is required in order to succeed. I usually end up abandoning bases when excess heat starts to become a real issue, and I only play with the "training wheels" on by playing in easy mode so germs and disease are less dangerous.
Probably my favourite Klei game to date, even surpassing the sublime Mark of the Ninja.
Cyberpunk 2077
Despite being buggy (although nowhere near as buggy as some would have you believe), rather old-fashioned (it's very much a first-person Witcher 3-style open-world game), having less narrative reactivity than previous CDPR games (although still a shedload more than most other AAA games out there), and having some very broken systems (I'm looking at you AI driving, AI crowds, levelling and gear), it's still utterly compelling. So much so that having finished the story once already, I dove straight back in with a new playthrough.
Because while the story might not be the best, it's the closest we've come to a massive open-world immsim. Every single quest or mission can be approached in numerous Deus Ex / System Shock ways, through hacking, stealth, melee, guns-blazing or gloriously, a combination of all of the above.
See, a lot of modern immsims suffer from giving you lots of toys to play with, but then punish you for actually using them. Usually, this is through achievements or mission scores and experience rewards.
Hitman rewards seemingly endless guns that are fun to use, but drop your final mission score in the toilet. And if you murder a single person outside of you main target(s), you'll never get the coveted Silent Assassin rank. This ultimately trains the player to be overly cautious, even on subsequent playthroughs where getting Silent Assassin is no longer necessary.
Dishonored gives you lots of wonderfully lethal toys, but then berates you for using them with a poorly thought-out morality system (something they finally started to address in Death of the Outsider).
Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided over-emphasise and reward stealthy and non-lethal playthroughs, again invalidating a lot of the toys they give you access to. On top of which, you can go the whole game chasing the non-lethal and stealthy achievements, only to fail due to the game breaking at some point miles back in your playthrough without it telling you you've failed.
Not so CP2077! You can start a mission stealthily and non-lethally, but if things start to go a bit wrong, it doesn't punish you for whipping out the big guns (or swords) and dismembering every last goon in the joint. And hacking is gloriously OP, like being a spell-caster, but with tech.
There are some missions where non-lethal and stealthy approaches result in better financial rewards, but ultimately, these aren't tied in to wider reward systems such as experience or achievements.
On top of which, it is a magnificently beautiful game, steeped in neon and bright primary colours, something still woefully lacking in many mainstream releases outside of Mario games.
And that there ray-tracing is none-too shabby either.
Hades
Thirith bought me this for Chrimbo, and even though I've only been playing it for a day, I can already tell that this will keep drawing me back, much like my other favourite rogue-lites, Dead Cells and Streets of Rogue.
At this stage, escaping the underworld seems an incredibly daunting task, but I'm determined to get good enough to do so.
After having played and loved the aforementioned Streets of Rogue and Dead Cells, where they're more open in their level design, it's interesting to come back to a more Isaac-like room-focussed rogue-lite design, and it's a change I'm liking.
On top of which, the gradual drip-feeds of story and progression are very compelling.
I wasn't anywhere near as smitten with Supergiant's Bastion as many people were, finding it overly-pretentious considering how basic the gameplay seemed. But Hades has won me over (even though there is still an air of hipster pretentiousness there).
Post Void
A psychedelic, psychopathic, acid-fueled fever dream, this has the compelling small play-through, long play-time loop of previous monsters of this weird sub-genre such as Super Hexagon, Hotline Miami and Devil Daggers. And as with those games, it possesses unique visuals alongside pumping and compelling soundtracks (although the one in Devil Daggers shares more in common with something like Ape Out).
It is so very easy to get trapped in a loop of "just one more go" when the core gameplay is so narcotically addictive.
It's ridiculously cheap too, currently on sale for £1.56.
Games wot I started but didn't finish, but still really liked and really intend to finish at some point, honest guv:
Death Stranding (AKA Norman Reedus Simulator 2020)
Gear Tactics (AKA XCOM with Jocks)
Old Game wot I regret getting dragged back in to, but I still really enjoyed and was a tonic in this weird year of uncertainty:
Guild Wars 2 - I gave this up in 2013, so played through all the stuff I'd missed in the past seven years, and there's a helluva lot of game there.
It's far more generous and large than 99% of MMOs out there, but is still tarnished by seedy FOMO mechanics always pushing players towards spending money.
You can play without spending a single penny (outside of paying for expansions), but the game heavily pushes cosmetics as being the ultimate reward, with the predominant proportion only being available through the gem store.
And yes, unlike other MMOs out there, you can buy gems using either real-world cash or in-game gold. And in doing so, theoretically you could buy the expansions with in-game gold. But the balance is carefully tipped in favour of pushing the player to spend cash rather than gold.
Colony management sims wot woz good, but not as good as ONI:
Dawn of Man (Captain Caveman simulator) and Foundation (laid-back cartoony minimalist medieval citysim).
WingedKagouti on 26/12/2020 at 12:08
CARRION is the only 2020 game I've played, and I only got to play it this year because someone gifted it to me in a Secret Santa. The 5 or so hours it took to beat were mostly fun, with some "How the f am I supposed to get past that?" moments. But the only things that took more than 2 tries were due to impatience and/or execution errors.
froghawk on 26/12/2020 at 13:39
I guess the only 2020 game I've played is doom eternal, which was alright- not really my thing in a lot of ways. Havent touched a single thing listed in this thread.
henke on 28/12/2020 at 08:08
Despite loving DOOM 2016, I oddly enough have zero desire to play Eternal.
Quote Posted by Malf
Oxygen Not IncludedThere are lots of intricately and inextricably linked systems at play in the game, and full comprehension of each is required in order to succeed.
Yeah. :erg:
I did play a couple hours of this, and enjoyed it. Then I made the mistake of looking up a tips and tricks video and when I saw how efficiently the youtuber had set up his base with long neat rows of machinery I immediately because incredibly exhausted. Merely
thinking about what it would take to turn the simple base I had into
that seemed like
a whole thing. No thanks.
Malf on 28/12/2020 at 15:42
I started Doom Eternal and New Colossus a couple of weeks before Cyberpunk came out, but neither really grabbed me.
The both feel a little too gamey, if that makes sense.
They run beautifully, but I think I'm just not in the mood for straight-forward linear FPSes at this moment in time. Maybe I will be in the future, I dunno.
Twist on 30/12/2020 at 22:33
I don't know about "best" game, but my favorite game of the year is Spiritfarer. It genuinely helped me cope and that's all the sharing I can handle for now so yeah, Spiritfarer.
Nameless Voice on 30/12/2020 at 23:06
Desperados 3, Doom Eternal, Partisans 1941... I think that's all the 2020 games I've played, which once again makes a "top 20 games" rather hard for me.
henke on 31/12/2020 at 06:10
Haha no please, don't feel any compulsion to come up with a top 20. Just your top games is fine. How did you think Desperados 3 compared to Shadow Tactics? And did you play on PC?
Also thanks to Malf for reminding me about Gears Tactics, forgot to mention it in my OP but I guess it'd go under Honorable Mentions. It's mostly a slick adaptation of the XCOM forumla, with some nice new improvements to it as well. I still got bored of it tho, never finished it. But as far as tactics games goes I still liked it better than Desperados 3, tho not as much as John Wick Hex.