While 2020 was the worst year in recent memory, there were some bright spots, and not all of them involved Fleetwood Mac and fruit juice. There were some good video games as well.
Here, in the order I played them (more or less), are the best games I played in 2020.
It’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into. It’s why I never expect frozen pizza to taste like a slice from Famous Ray’s in New York City. It’s also why I was initially thrown by sci-fi first-person, open world action / adventure game Cyberpunk 2077 (Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC, Stadia), which I expected to be a gun-based action-packed role-playing game like Borderlands 3, The Outer Worlds, and especially Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but enjoyed much more when I realized it was actually a futuristic Grand Theft Auto V.
Mel Brooks once said that sex was like pizza, even when it’s bad it’s good. Or maybe it was Sharon Stone. Whoever it was, though, they were wrong. I’ve had some truly terrible pizza, and I’ve watched enough Law & Order: SVU to know there’s plenty of bad sex. In fact, the only things that are good even when they’re bad are old sci-fi movies and third-person, hack & slash, action-oriented role-playing games that are blatant clones of Diablo III. Which brings me to Warhammer: Chaosbane: Slayer Edition, the Xbox Series X / S and PlayStation 5 version of a Diablo III clone that came out last year on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. While it’s not as good as Diablo III, and has a lot of problems, it still manages to be mindless fun if you enjoy button mashing your way to victory.
As someone who was a socially- and politically-aware teenager in the 1980s, I can tell you that living during The Cold War wasn’t always fun. Just ask me about night I thought New York had been nuked. But shooting people in the first-person shooter Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC) — that’s a lot of fun. And in no small part because of the game’s ’80s timeframe.
While a lot of developers have made fun Spider-Man games over the years, Insomniac really nailed it in 2018 with Marvel’s Spider-Man by adding depth, a solid story, and some stealth action straight out of Batman’s Arkham games to the familiar open world action we’ve come to expect from Spidey’s interactive adventures. And now they’ve done it again in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5), a semi-sequel / side story that features the friendly wall crawler from a different neighborhood.
Man, it’s not a good time to be a fan of realistic racing simulations. Just months after fans of Project CARS series were dismayed to learn that Project CARS 3 was eschewing its realistic approach for a more arcade-like one, fans of the DiRT racing series are now suffering a somewhat similar indignity with DIRT 5 (Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC), which is replacing rally racing with more straight-forward racing (and a capital “I”).
But while DiRT fans will hate this sequel, those into more traditional racing games (like me) will have even more fun with this than we did with, well, Project CARS 3.
It’s become cliché for gamers to make jokes about how their parents told them they were wasting their lives playing those damn video games while standing next to the sports car they just bought with the money they made in a video game tournament. But for anyone who wonders how professional video game playing became something that’s no joke, there’s Young Guns: Obsession, Overwatch, And The Future of Gaming (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview about it, writer Austin Moorhead discuss what prompted him to write this book, as well as the famous sports book that influenced his approach.
It’s usually a good sign when a game studio lets members of the media play their game long before it’s out or it even has a release date. Which bodes well for People Can Fly’s upcoming shooter RPG Outriders. Slated to be released this holiday for Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC by Square-Enix, the third-person sci-fi shooter was the subject of a hands-on preview event last week in Los Angeles, where members of the game and geek press got a chance to play the game’s opening hours.
What follows are my impression of the game, which I played on a “high spec” PC, but with an Xbox controller. Suffice it to say, spoilers follow.