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.
While fans of first-person shooters, survival horror games, and even sci-fi racing games have all gotten to play new versions of old favorites lately, the same hasn’t been true for people who want to virtually race real-world cars on realistic streets or race tracks. Which seems like a real oversight, if Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is any indication. Remade for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC, this new version of the 2010 classic is as much fun as the original, even if it does lack some of the depth of modern racing games.
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.
I have to be honest, the idea of reviewing a game console has always seemed, well, stupid. While there are plenty of factors to consider when deciding whether to upgrade when there’s a generational change — price, upcoming games, status of your current console, etc. — choosing between consoles of the same generation really just comes down to which one has the most exclusive games you want to play. If you like Gears Of War but not God Of War, you buy an Xbox. If you prefer Forza over Gran Turismo, you buy a PlayStation. And if your favorite games are Halo, The Last Of Us, and anything with the word Mario in the title, well, your kid ain’t going to college.
But when the good people at Microsoft sent me an Xbox Series X so I could continue my career as a freelance game journalist who writes reviews for multiple outlets, I thought I’d write a review of my new console, in part out of a sense of obligation, and in part because I’ve never done one before and wanted to see what it was like. And while it didn’t change my opinion about console reviews or how someone should decide which system to buy, I still found that I more to say that just, “Well, what games do you like?”
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 been eight long years since we’ve gotten a new Wipeout game (2012’s Wipeout 2048), six since the last F-Zero (F-Zero Climax), and eighteen since Star Wars Racer Revenge let us yell, “Now this is podracing!” unironically. And there’s no sign that will change anytime soon. Which is why I found myself being so forgiving when playing Pacer (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC), a futuristic and combative racing game that’s a rather blatant rip-off of Wipeout…and is just as fun.