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As was done last year, high time to see what games kept people busy this year, who you feel were the big winners and the big losers or disappointments. As always, YMMV.

Farcry 5 - One of the two titles I was really looking forward to this year, but it ultimately was an okay but repetitive game with horrible endings and annoying NPC's. It also doesn't help that the DLC for the game is quite bad and all post-release events and support have been quickly dropped by Ubisoft as well.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - The other big game I was really looking forward to, as I really like the Tomb Raider reboot. Ultimately a short game, but one that finally pushed Lara off the grimdark path and (hopefully) back into the realms of a more cheeky treasure hunter instead of a cold-blooded serial killer.

Warhammer 40,000 - Mechanicus - Released not that long ago and quite surprisingly, a good 40k game for a change! Maybe a bit too short and a bit too easy once you get to the end, but fun nonetheless.

Special mention has to go to Payday 2, which received its final updates not that long ago along with an official ending and some kickass free heists to see you off with a bang.

This is a tough one for me, there are 3 titles that I feel could all have taken the crown were they not in direct competition with each other.

The first one is God Of War. Even aside from the fact that it's managed to take a frankly immature series and use it to tell one of the most well-realised, nuanced and emotionally charged stories in modern gaming, with amazing visuals and stunning voice and script work, it's just really bloody good fun. The combat is delightfully meaty, the boss fights likewise gloriously brutal and epic (though possibly there weren't as many as there could have been), and the mechanics of it all sync up so nicely. In terms of game-feel, it's perfected. There's only really one set of systems, specifically combat, but what beautiful and punchy and slick systems they are...


Next up, also on the PS4, is Spider-Man, a game that is possibly the best example of every element of a game working together to capture a pretty much unparalleled sense of fun. Whether it's the collectables or the traversal or the combat or the writing and voice acting, it distils the ultimate Spider-Man experience, in the same way that the Arkham games nailed the feeling of Batman. But where those were slow, predatory, tactical, Spidey is a chaotic whirlwind that's equal parts exhilarating, relentless and frictionless. After the years of hype since it was first announced, it fully lived up to the expectations and deserves to be the start of something truly special.


Finally, and possibly the biggest surprise on the list given that I've always found the franchise to be perfectly enjoyable but nothing special, comes Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I fell out of the series with Black Flag, came back on board with Origins last year (which, I should add, is a genuinely excellent game as well) and then Odyssey gets announced, and it's going to be set in ancient Greece, and it's a proper RPG now... Yeah, that pretty much ticked all the boxes for me. The RPG stuff really does feel like a missing link that finally gets put into place here, and takes you from a largely passive passenger on a Historical Murder Tour to feeling like you're actually a part of that living, breathing setting. It breaks down the last barrier between player and character, and lets you put your own stamp on the gorgeous slices of history the games have always served up. Also, Kassandra is just amazing, one of the best RPG protagonists since ME's Shepard or DA2's Hawke. Add in an excellent combat system, grand and epic storyline and one of the most breathtakingly vast and detailed worlds out there and you've got a genuine masterpiece. It may not do anything new for gaming as a whole, but even though it falls back on a lot of conventions (you can practically see The Witcher 3's influence peeking through the seams at times), damn, it does them well.


So yeah, really hard to pick between them. God of War was a revelation, Spidey was a dream come true and Odyssey was just a really nice surprise to cap off the year. AC is easily the one I've spent the most time with, though GoW and Spidey are much shorter games to be fair.

I will say that this year I don't really feel like I've missed out on anything. Last year, I was late to three absolutely brilliant games (Prey, AC: Origins and Horizon: Zero Dawn) and in each case, regretted not playing them sooner. This year, while Fallout 76, SotTR and Battlefield V are all on my radar and I'll probably pick them all up eventually, none of them are really going to compete with these three, where as last time both Origins and Prey retroactively made my GotY list after I played them.

It's particularly hard this year because last years' games were so great, they still dominate: Horizon ZD, Nioh, TW2, etc.

Some I'd comment on:
-RDR2 - In the running. It's not just GTA In The West. It's an actual RPG (in that you play a role, or in that it's telling a story, not in the 'dungeon hack sense). Great world. Great environment. Just great.

-Spider-Man - Not so much. An excellent game. Incredibly fun. One of the best games of the year. It seems to hit each note just right. But it doesn't really go the extra mile. It's a great game, but not a piece of art.

-COD/BF/TR/Fallout look more-of-the-samey to me. They're just the latest iteration with a little more polish but nothing stellar.

-I should note that AC: Odyssey and GoW3 are still on my backlog because 2017's games are still eating too much of my time.

What else came out that was even at Spider-Man's level this year?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To add on to that post, I felt a compulsion to necro last year's, becuase it's mostly last year's games I'm *still* playing.

(Managed to fend off that compulsion, though.)

Hmmm assassins creed odyssey was surprising to say the least, it’s an actual RPG... and good.

God of war 3 was excellent, bordering on epic, so it’s up there.

Other than that I’m not really sure, I played the crap out of battletech and TWW this year, stellaris and vermintide 2, all solid games in there respective genres.

Yeah, I'm going to have to go with AC: Odyssey as well, which I find annoying. [Though as aside, I wouldn't call it an RPG in any sense. No choices or any real RPG mechanics. Just go to marked exploration point and kill/loot] Not as a slight to the game itself, which was gold coming out of a series made of shoddy tin, but because everything I was actually looking forward to this year was so incredibly disappointing.

Battletech had a horridly terrible story and an amazingly dull and repetitive gameplay loop.

PoE2 Deadfire and Pathfinder Kingmaker were buggy messes with completely dropped balls on the story and RPG elements.

There were a couple decent expansion packs here and there (total warhammer 2), but by and large 2018 was a stinker for games.

Voss wrote:
Yeah, I'm going to have to go with AC: Odyssey as well, which I find annoying. [Though as aside, I wouldn't call it an RPG in any sense. No choices or any real RPG mechanics. Just go to marked exploration point and kill/loot] Not as a slight to the game itself, which was gold coming out of a series made of shoddy tin, but because everything I was actually looking forward to this year was so incredibly disappointing.

Fair point, I should have said it has some good RPG elements, I wonder if I was so surprised by this game as i had such low expectations

and yeah, so many of the big games this year turned out pure garbage, Battlefield, Fallout etc.

Battletech had a horridly terrible story and an amazingly dull and repetitive gameplay loop.

story was.... there, it was kind of meh, but I love the gameplay, horses for courses i suppose, just wondering though would you have prefered a mech commander type game, I would have.

PoE2 Deadfire and Pathfinder Kingmaker were buggy messes with completely dropped balls on the story and RPG elements.

I havent played any of those yet, been looking at pathfinder though, whats wrong with it?

There were a couple decent expansion packs here and there (total warhammer 2), but by and large 2018 was a stinker for games.

truth

Mech Commander? not really. I just wanted it to be more than 8 or 9 vs 4 skirmishes, where the enemies feed themselves to you piecemeal (or all spawn on top of you simultaneously in a few procedural generation errors) and you quickly get bigger and bigger mechs and the only functional approach is get the heaviest possible.

The story campaign also just hands out huge monetary allotments and free mechs which undercuts the difficulty immensely. The new career mode eliminates that nicely, but the core gameplay loop problem is still unaddressed.


Pathfinder: Kingmaker simply wasn't ready. There were game breaking bugs and non-functioning mechanics everywhere, to a degree that would make Bethesda and Obsidian blush. It still isn't really ready, despite months of bug fixing (and to their credit they're doing _a lot_ of bug fixing rather than abandoning the game). They've gone ahead with DLC which... largely looks dubious, though they just delayed the first one a week on the basis of not being ready.

Personally, the big problem in my view is they rather arbitrarily added numbers to monster stats and AC/attack bonuses (which is...doubling down a lot, as increasing strength and dex already does that), and don't seem to recognize what effect those changes have on the game mechanics which are almost pure Pathfinder tabletop rules (except sneak attacks, which are easier).

You can set it up so that monsters set to 'easier than normal' puts basic monsters at their base stats, but it doesn't apply to templated or customized creatures, which the game has a LOT of. Plus since its a computer game, there are more encounters with more enemies, so the assumptions that the TT game's mechanics are built around just don't apply. So the 'difficulty' is absurd, especially with the way they've chosen to piecemeal the difficulty modifiers and name them.

Plus, honestly.... the writing is very bad. Both grammatically (the fact that the staff is Russian slips into the grammar a lot- quite a few sentences just aren't constructed according to English rules) and the writing isn't all that compelling. There are companion backstories and even romance, but once you get them to regurgitate their background through the first conversation tree, there isn't much interaction. A few more lines of dialogue in their personal quests is about it.

Most of the quests don't involve real choices, beyond picking dialogue lines to shift your alignment- you're choosing how you are rationalizing your actions more than you are choosing different approaches. For example, there are five companions in the starting area. One will always come with you, you can get two others, but which ones depend on if you rationalize saving people in a good way or an evil way, and if you took the guard's supplies (and money) for chaotic reasons or lawful reasons.

Then there is the kingdom management, which... ugh. Basically you get event cards every month that you can assign one or two people to each. You have to do them, or you fail and the kingdom enters a death spiral. Except they're all d20 checks + a modifier. Iterative probability basically dictates you start failing eventually, and as you fail, your kingdom gets worse, and imposes a penalty on all the checks. Which kicks a death spiral in, where you just fail more and more the more you fail. Eventually the kingdom dies, the game ends (independent of your actions), or you switch management to 'automatic' mode, which can't fail but locks you out of all the kingdom management gameplay. Having the game just end because the endless procession of d20+X rolls churned out statistically average results is just infuriating. While you can raise the +X over (a lot of) time, the fact that it's basically a random number generator that produces 'end game: you lose' rather than consequences or problems to solve is just terrible design.

--
For Deadfire, it wasn't as bad as Kingmaker, but I had some incredibly annoying bugs (enemies that didn't die when dropped to 0, but instead became un-attackable and kept fighting, which recurred on a regular basis) and decided just to wait until all the DLC and patching was finished (final DLC is next week, so I may change my tune). I also disliked discarding big wilderness maps for mini-battle arenas for a lot of encounters. Plus the main story was an awful experience in playing a game to watch how the lead designer's masturbatory storytelling skills played out (badly, in fact), and they made a lot of mechanical changes from PoE1 which felt significantly worse (like armor and weapon penetration). The latter two aren't likely to change ever, so I doubt I'll feel more than ambivalent about the game. But the DLC for PoE1 was the best part, IMO, so I'm curious about experiencing this set.

Anyone got a good site that lists this years releases? I don't have any games that stick out in my mind has having been released in this last year, but I could be forgetting things!

Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_video_gaming

No real details, but it has multiple platforms and titles by month.

Glancing over it, biggest problem I see is older games rereleasing on a different platform.

gak, I forgot all about Vermintide 2.. Great game, massive upgrade over the first game, cannot recommend it enough if looking for a good coop game.

It's also made tricky when some early access games shift over to their 1.0 release!

That said the list makes me realise that this year has been a bad year for me in the PC world for new games! In fact it made me realise that I've picked up a few older games or DLC for games more than I have new titles this year.

There's been a few I've got my eye on; Total War Thrones of Britannia; Valkyria Chronicles 4. And a few on consoles that I can't get (due to lack of console) including Spyro Remastered (which I'm really hoping gets a pc release next year).


In fact based on this list I can only nominate one game for 2018 - BATTLETECH! Being as its been the only new game I've purchased this year! That kind of surprises me a lot, not that I dislike the game in the least, but that its the only new title I've picked up from the year!
Have to say that I've enjoyed Battletech for what it is, a medium paced mech tactical combat playing game with some mech management and team organisation built on top. It feels like a solid fun title and one of my biggest annoyances is more that I want more mechs to play with, than anything else (both more in terms of mech variety, but also in terms of number of mechs on the battlefield).

I also really love the artistic direction they've taken with it and it sits up there with a very few games that I feel have an artistically appealing direction beyond just "Ohh fancy graphics".




Otherwise this year has been more the year of DLC for me.
Stellaries has had several and has another coming out very very very soon- each of which has made for big changes in the gameplay. Adding more depth, refining features and generally, I feel, improving the game. I know that the 2.0 change to hyperlanes had a lot of contention, but personally I liked the change since it made defensive play more viable and removed the sense that the only thing which mattered in war was your fleet.
The game still suffers from the curse of most 4* which is that there is little reason to break your army up into smaller (more realistic) fleets and instead favours keeping all ships together (as much as possible) in a superfleet.

Total War Warhammer has rolled on with updates and added an undead vampire pirate faction; a great addition and honestly shows how much the CA team love the lore and setting that they've chosen to add a force which hither too existed only as a few FW models and a set of rules in White Dwarf. Game is still a king of strategy and honestly the only fantasy RTS in a VERY long time of any note (in fact it might be the best since Warcraft 3, which is honestly rather depressing to think about!)

Cities Skylines also got a great new DLC in the form of Industries. A DLC that I feel addressed the core issue of the game being rather too casual by adding in a production system and really fleshing out the detail of industry. The addition of multiple new and huge buildings as well as a production network and resource requirements really adds a huge layer of optional complexity to city building without taking away the casual element of fun that the game has always had. A very solid addition and possibly one of the biggest they've done for the game in terms of changing the core gameplay and influencing the games style.

Endless Space 2 also got a new faction and whilst I've honestly not invested enough time into the game its still turning out to be a fun solid addition; including the addition of huge behemoth ships. There's another expansion also on the horizon with a new faction and a stronger espionage focus

Endless Legends also got a brand new faction as well and it was great to see them turn back to update this charming fantasy game with a well rounded addition of a new creative force.
Both games I still hold up as being very creative, inventive and fun as well as having a strong visual style. The developers also get big points for their Games2Gether system whereby they pool opinions and votes from the community to help guide the direction of what is to come. It's a very neat way to not just get ideas, but also to let gamers have some say in what is to come with the game. A great way to bring their gamers and market research directly into the experience for the average person.



So in the end for me this year has been the year of PC DLC! With several games getting some big additions and some older titles seeing attention too. I'll also admit that I've passed by on some other big game releases so my experience is certainly not the norm.

The problem for me is that I so rarely play a game in the year it was released, unless it's a major release I've been waiting for. Anyway, going through that Wikipedia list of releases, I'm going to have to go with Return of the Obra Dinn as my pick for the year.
Although, I may change my mind after tomorrow when the new version of Katamari Damacy launches on the Switch.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
The problem for me is that I so rarely play a game in the year it was released

I'm playing Diablo 2 at the moment...

Forza 7 carried me through the first half of 2018, mixed in with my usual Paradox titles (EUIV, HOI4, Stellaris). Forza 7 didn't dramatically change or improve anything from its previous versions, but it was still enjoyable to race around in some of my favourite cars. Definitely not game of the year contender, but they've recently implemented new features and tweaked parts of the game in response to community feedback, so I do applaud them for improving the experience.

Horizon 4 has recently been eating up my time now that I have stable internet. Again, like 7, its the same formula as the previous Horizon games, but it does improve on 3 in a few important areas. The map is a big improvement (sorry Australia) which is pretty important for an open world racing game. It also caters to a wider audience and play style, encouraging and rewarding players for progressing in anything from painting and desinging liveries, to drifting and drag racing, down to ordinary track racing.

Battletech scratched an itch I forgot I even had. I played MW3 way back (its been almost 20 years, where does the time go?) and then mostly forgot about the MW universe. I almost got in on MWO, but World of Tanks had my wallet firmly in hand. Battletech brought me back in, and though my only real MW experience was from 3, which was clan invasion era, I loved Battletech for introducing me to the other parts of the timeline. Solid turn based tactical gameplay, with an enjoyable company management aspect and a great storyline and campaign. I just started the new career mode with harder difficulty settings to fix a few of my gripes I had during my first playthrough. I also had some fun playing against a friend and seeing who was the better mech commander (I lost).

And then I spent many a day alternating between EUIV, HOI4, and Stellaris. Stellaris is releasing a new expansion today, one which I've been eagerly anticipating, which looks to shake things up as much as their Apocalypse expansion. EUIV and HOI4 have been great, with some decent updates, I think Stellaris holds my attention longer.

If I was hard pressed to name one game my game of the year, I'd have to go with Stellaris. Now to wait two more hours for the expansion to drop.

Pc, I've mostly been playing total Warhammer 2, but that's technically a game from the tail end of last year. - I was just waiting for it to come down in price.

Ps4 I think it's probably Spider-Man, I didn't quite get into God of War as much as others. And I'm holding my opinion on Detroit for when I finish it

played a lot of games this year, I would have to vote for Red Dead Redemption 2 or Fortnite. Fortnite consumed a good 6 months of my life from around January to June or so, 90% of that time was spent on the Save the World version, not Battle Royale. I've moved on to other games since, but my fiance can't stop, and she's not a gamer at all. It was funny teaching her how to play when she hadn't touched a game controller in 20 years. Now I can't get her to put it down.

Gris, Gorgeous game, probably one of the best artistic games i've seen in decades.

Obra Dinn, gorgeous game, amazing detective game.

God of War, Fantastic Soundtrack, great father son game, really makes me happy to see Dark Souls is influencing Triple A again.

Spiderman, Way too polished for me to even consider it a triple A. It is very well done, some gimmicks here and there but is overall a great experience.

I would say, probably either Spiderman or Octopath Traveller.

The first one is probably one of the best Superhero games I've ever played, and just so much fun. The second if the ultimate nostalgia experience, but brought forward into 2018.

Just finished up the DLC for Spidey, and I think that tips it over the edge to definitively being my favourite game of the year over Odyssey and GoW...

Perhaps not an even fight since I've yet to touch the DLC for the former and the latter had none, but nonetheless Insomniac have made just the right kind of post-release content. Tells a story as interesting as that of the main game, keeps up the high standard of animation, voice work and scripts and introduces new gameplay that puts some neat twists on existing mechanics and mission types.

I just don't play games like I used to. I don't get long stretches to play so I tend to focus on games that have more focused gameplay like platformers and fighting games. That said, here's some great games I played and didn't finish:

- God of War: Combat didn't really wow me. Interesting, but dragged early.
- Octopath Traveler: Enjoyed it to start but once I got out of the opening quests I didn't have a ton of direction.
- Kirby Star Allies: Too easy. Mostly got it to play with my daughter and her friends.
- Overcooked 2: Picked up the original and BURNED through it straight into the sequel where we stopped mostly because we'd played so much already.
- Hollow Knight: Picked up with some other similar games that took its attention.
- Dead Cells: PHENOMINAL. Played it a ton. Just eventually burned out on starting over in the opening levels every time once I'd mastered them.

Games I finished:
- Dragon Ball FighterZ: The second most fan service laden game of the year. Fantastic fun.
- Iconoclasts: Kind of like if Treasure made a new Metroidvania game. Really well done story with fantastic sprite animation. Played this one straight through.
- Celeste: Hardcore platformer that uses its gameplay to tell an interesting story with some pretty important messages. Another game I played without much pause.
- Spiderman: The only real modern style game I finished. The swing mechanics kept travel exciting and the challenges were largely devoid of time sinks. Top notch story and gameplay. Fantastic game.
- Beat Saber: DDR with Lightsabers is a pretty perfect mix for me. I need to get more practice to clear the higher difficulties, but I get a PSVR for this more or less alone and am not disappointed.
- Overcooked: See above! Great multiplayer experience.

Games in Progress:
- Smash Ultimate: Working on the last levels of the story mode to unlock the remaining characters. Largely lives up to the name of being the definitive smash (at least for people that play something other than 3 stock Final Destination). More impressed with the story mode though, which is a treasure trove of gaming history beyond the massive roster. Seeing stuff like a fight against Blanka (green DK with Screw Attack) or a the Boss is an amazing love letter to gaming as a whole.
- Tetris Effect: Still working on this one. It's solid, enjoyable, but at its heart still Tetris. It feels slightly overhyped, but a great experience regardless.

Game of the Year?

Probably Celeste. It does so much with so little and is just a really compelling little game with an important message.

Go right and jump spikes?

I haven't played many games that were released this year because I'm still clearing through 2016/2017 games but out of the ones I have played, there are a few that stood out for me

A Way Out - played it with my wife and we both loved it. It was very linear but the two main characters were very well written and the set pieces were fantastic

Spider-Man - one of the few games I 100% completed this year. The mechanics were all solid and I liked the spin it put on some classic comic book characters

Beat Saber - An excellent VR game that gives you a real work out on harder difficulties. Great music as well

Jurassic World Evolution - probably my most controversial pick because it doesn't seem like many people liked it, but I really did. I loved Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis when I was younger and this feels like an updated version

Rimworld - technically it's been in early access for 5 years but it had it's official release in October so I'm counting it. The fact that I've put 231 hours into the game should speak volumes about how much I enjoy it. A brilliant strategy/survival/management game that feels like a soap opera in space

Honourable mentions include Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition, Vampyr, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Forza Horizon 4 & Subnautica

Voss wrote:
Go right and jump spikes?

It's an important skill in life.