Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew? It’s good. It’s the end of the year. By the time you’re listening to this, I’m probably morphed into my couch. I’ve grown, I’ve become one, a bit like those mushroom men in The Last of Us, who’ve slowly crusted into the wall. That’s very much the vibe I’m going for this Christmas holidays. Yeah, so for me, I was just watching the Mandalorian season finale yesterday. Again, time stamping the episode very firmly there. And Tamera Morrison’s reprisal of the Boba Fett role, where he looks slightly too chunky for the armour, slightly too overweight for the armour. Like he looks good, but slightly overweight. That’s my mood. I’m slightly overweight Boba Fett. That’s my end of 2020 vibe. Nice. So Matthew, it’s been a shitty year, and every podcast I’ve listened to doing a review of the year is obsessed with dwelling on the ways in which their chosen subject has morphed as a result of a kind of pandemic year. And I don’t think that applies as much to video games where it’s basically been a slow trickle of games that have been in the works for years and years, because that’s how video games work. But I was curious to know if you thought it was a great year for games or merely a good year. So as part of this episode that we’ll get to later, we’ve come up with top 10 lists. So I spent a lot of time looking over everything and going back over things I’d written and just reminding myself what I actually thought of some of the things from earlier in the year. I kind of struggled in that I had a mass of stuff that I quite liked to, scaled from, I quite liked it all the way up to, you know, I thought it was pretty damn good, but there was no like classic knockout sort of 10 out of 10 punch for me this year, where normally there is. I felt like I was quite happy and I played a lot of stuff I liked. Games kept me busy enough this year, but yeah, I didn’t think it was like necessarily like a stellar year, just a solid year. Yeah, I’ve been on TechRadar covering games this year a little bit, mostly covering the kind of console launches. And the thing that I’ve noticed is that basically everyone used games as a way to escape this year. And every console you can imagine sold out this year. And even like the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset just sold out because people were determined to have anything. I like the idea, even the Oculus Quest 2, even a VR helmet. That’s how desperate people were. Well, I do think the pandemic has been like surprisingly good for VR, just in terms of people really sort of seeing the merit of it. But yeah, I do think it’s partly motivated by the PS5 and the Xbox Series X selling out. But yeah, in assembling a sort of Review of the Year podcast, I made a top 10 too. And I would say that probably only four of the 10 games are games I truly love this year. I’m curious if your actual habits around games changed this year, Matthew. Did anything kind of warp the types of games you were playing? Was there anything about the circumstances of this year that led you to different types of games? Not really. I mean, the sad truth of my life is that a lot of my gaming habits are dictated by the job. You know, I play stuff for work, so I kind of play it to the rhythm that they come out. So things get more or less timed based on how busy they are. Obviously, my circumstances changed a bit this year in that I got shit-canned, I believe is the phrase. So I’ve had a bit more a bit more spare time, hilariously. The first thing I chose to play after I was made redundant was Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Syndicate from like whenever that was five years ago. I suddenly had this thing in my head saying, we should play all the Assassin’s Creed games. I don’t know why, but I kind of got halfway through that and then decided that was a tough plan and then review season kicked off. So I’d say no, I’m sure we’ll get to this. Like I haven’t kind of, I don’t dip into a lot of kind of games as service games. I don’t really have like a long ongoing relationship with any one game. So this year’s kind of felt quite similar to other years. If I’d still had my job and I guess I’d had my job for enough of this year that I can speak to this. One thing I did like this year as a journalist was that because of the lack of travel, the games industry had to adapt in quite major ways to actually get us the games to preview or whatnot. And I didn’t know that they were gonna do that. And then they did. So a lot of people started streaming demos, for example, which actually is kind of how it should have always been done rather than like flying 30 journalists to Paris, you know, just for us to play like an hour of The Division 2, having us sit at home and play, you know, five hours of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in an early build without all that extra cost and stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if that stuff continued on. Like it’s kind of annoying that this year sort of the job almost became kind of like, well, for a hermit like me anyway, like an ideal version of itself. So that’s a habit I would like to see continue on into the future. Just nice, easy access. Let’s not be wasteful. Although I obviously, when you do get to go to Paris, you get to go to some nice restaurants and eat onion pies, which is something I did on a very memorable Division 2 trip. Was that the press trip where we were sat in a cold garage and I complained all day? Yeah, you were just complaining about how cold the garage was and I was just dealing with wicked, wicked heartburn from the aforementioned onion pie. Yeah, see, I didn’t even know onion pie was a thing until that press trip. But yeah, I also recall being annoyed at, there was one room for the journalists, which was just the cold garage and there was some drinks and food. And then the influencers, quote unquote, went off to another room to do some kind of assault course thing, to film for their YouTube channels or whatever. Yeah, they always treat influencers sort of a bit like children. You know, we come along and just play the game and sit in a garage. They feel like influencers need to have a lot of flashy stuff to kind of keep their minds occupied. I guess otherwise they’ll start dunking on you with memes. So, yeah, it’s a dilemma. They’ll jeer us for being in our 30s. Yeah, I agree with you, actually. Ubisoft’s been particularly good for setting up those game demos this year. I don’t think everyone has. Like, I don’t think there were any PS5 game demos before that console launched, for example. Microsoft sent out the Xbox super early and good on them for doing that. But Ubisoft, I think, actually made sure people could play their games via streaming and have some good preview impressions. Yeah, it was good, yeah. I feel like we had as good access, or ironically better access, to like Assassin’s Creed and Watchdog Legion. Then we probably would have had, if this was a normal year and they had to make up the list of who they were going to invite to fly over to wherever. You know, it just felt, everything felt much more doable this year. Yeah, when I saw Outlet’s kind of grousing about like we didn’t get access to this game, it’s sort of, I kind of had a bit more sympathy because I thought, well, there is no finite limit on how much you can sort of stream a game to someone from an office. So, say a developer of a big AAA game this year decided not to let some Outlet’s play it before release, then it feels more like a calculated decision. So, yeah, it’s quite interesting to see how that’s kind of played out. But yeah, so aside from that side of things, Matthew, I’ve just found that my habits this year have been morphed by the experience of being from home. So, historically, I always play single-player games. Multi-player has only ever been a sort of an aside thing where I know like Rocket League, for example, is a multiplayer game I got into because you could play a game in five minutes and it was very cathartic and it booted really fast on my PS4. So, yeah, that was the reason I played that. I don’t know if I loved Rocket League. It was just very addictive. But this year, so late last year, I started playing more multiplayer games. I had a regular Sea of Thieves session with a few ex-PC gamer colleagues. And this year, that sort of became the centerpiece of my social life because there was nothing else to do. So, yes, Sea of Thieves for a long time this year was just, it was like the hangout space game. It was like going to the pub, like, you know, I’d go to like the off-license and buy three chocolate beers and then just sit on a Thursday night and play Sea of Thieves in my pants. And that, and doing the emotes in the game and drinking grog in the game and vomiting, that was the experience of going to the pub this year. It just was. And then that led me down a whole of more multiplayer games. And this will be reflected in my top 10 list, but I definitely leaned into the more social side of games this year. But over time found that it wasn’t really the same as a physical hangout. And I’ve been dialing it back to, now I just really play games one night a week with friends rather than three nights a week. And yeah, I think that’s how my habits have changed this year. I went in with such good intentions this year of thinking, I’m going to complete every fucking game that I’ve had in my backlog because I’m stuck indoors. I might as well finish Majora’s Mask. I might as well just do that this year. But I didn’t, I didn’t, I really thought I would. But I feel like when you’re confronted with nothing but being stuck indoors, you’re not necessarily in the mood to do all the things you think you want to do because your desires and thoughts just change. They’re just warped by the experience of being inside so much. So yeah, that was my experience. I also got into a very strange habit of hoarding old GameCube games on eBay this year. So I bought Lord of the Rings The Third Age two weeks ago. And I don’t really know why. Oh, well, that was why. Because someone in a GameFEQs post on a forum years ago said it’s a bit like Final Fantasy X. And I thought, I may or may not play that at some point. Therefore I bought the game. And that sums up the sort of like slow madness that I’ve sunk into. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, but… No, I just, you know, seek help, I guess. So I was going to ask then on that subject, was there any type of game specifically that makes more sense this year than other years for you? Yeah, I’m trying to work out if this is just coincidence or, you know, an effect of the year. But I played quite a lot of games where like meticulous planning and order and kind of control are big factors. And I really enjoyed them. And I don’t know if that’s like psychologically me trying to kind of impose order onto chaos. And I say that, it’s weird. Like the chaos is outside my house. Inside my house, things have felt relatively, relatively safe and chilled. So I mean, I don’t know. The challenge with this writing this year was not to make everything about COVID because there was this terrible habit. And I think most people did it of like talking about COVID as in like metaphors or trying to tie their game experience in just like I did just then by saying games about restoring order made me feel good. And looking back on some of those reviews, I think they might sound a bit weird in a couple of years time. And this is hopefully in the past. So yeah, I don’t know. And like I said, I feel like the kind of games which would support you throughout a year of lockdown would probably be those online games, like you said, and kind of games and services. And I didn’t really still, even in these conditions, didn’t kind of get into any of them. I definitely reconnected with a couple of distant friends in a few multiplayer games early on in lockdown, where everyone was like really keen to do, you know, family Zoom chats and all that. I played a stretch of Hunt Showdown with one of my friends in the States. And that was really, really fun, but still it didn’t kind of keep up. We kind of did it for a couple of weeks and then kind of sort of filtered out. So what about you? Did your habits change or do you think that’s mainly your like multiplayer thrust? I think that, yeah, that multiplayer thing is the main thing. I think I also really value the idea of service games that you could play in an almost kind of like idle way where you just farm some Destiny bounties or whatever. And then that was the game you played that day. And just having it on while I’m listening to a podcast, I feel like I did a lot of that this year. And that’s fine, I think. And I think that just speaks to, I want to do something just to not think about this situation. This is like staring at the ceiling, except I’m playing a computer game, technically. Yeah, great. All those hundreds of people who’ve worked to bring you this visceral immersive experience, which you have now likened to staring at the ceiling. Well, to be honest, with Destiny 2, I was farming bounties on Europa, the ice planet, a few weeks ago, and my girlfriend was watching me play and said, does anything happen in this game? And I was there thinking, it does, but not that often. Like, surprisingly, not often. I was thinking about how people talk about the Halo, I think it’s like 30 or 60 seconds of action followed by a pause. Destiny is not that. There’s like, I don’t know, there’s maybe about a minute per hour where it gets really intense. Otherwise, it’s all pretty like switch your brain off and just shoot at things. So I’m not sure that philosophy quite applies there. But yeah, that was about it. But towards the end of this year, I am now really in the mood for single player games. I’ve cleared my schedule, I’ve been off several friends. I’m now just focused on finishing a bunch of the games I kind of missed this year. And as we get into the top 10s, there’s definitely some glaring omissions in there. And we’ll talk a bit about our pile of shame for this year at the end of the year. But I’m not that impressed by my list. It’s a true reflection of what I played this year. But yeah, it’s not, there’s loads of games on Twitter that people talk about that I just have not played this year. So Hades is not in my list, for example. Hades being a Diablo-like, rogue-like sort of hack and slash game with loot and sexy Greek gods, I’m told. And that’s something that just bypassed me this year. I own it and I’ve been meaning to play it, but I just haven’t. So there’s quite a few of those types of games this year. So I hope people aren’t too disappointed by my slightly odd choices. I’m not sure if you want to preface your top 10. No, I’d go for a similar vibe. Like there is a top 10 structure and I have tried doing it in order of preference, you know, with one obviously being the best. But a lot of these are pretty interchangeable. Like they’re just a mass of things that I enjoyed. Yeah, it’s my preface. Okay, good stuff. Well, we’ll take a short break then, Matthew, in which some music will play and then we’ll come back and talk about our top 10s. Welcome back, Matthew. Oh, well, thanks for having me, I guess. Question mark. Yeah, so we’re going to get into our top 10 games of the year now. We’re going to start with you, Matthew, with your number 10, and then we’ll alternate, as they do in Chet and John’s Reassuringly Finite Gaming Playlist, which we stole this from. But yeah, kick us off. Yeah, so until a couple of days ago, my number 10 was Tetris Effect Connected, which I absolutely adore. I wrote a review of it for VGC, Andy Robinson’s game site, and you can read my thoughts there. Basically Tetris Effect, fantastic. I didn’t play it when it came out a couple of years ago. I only got round to it now. They’ve added an absolutely stonking co-op multiplayer mode, which I love. But that got knocked off by the surprise and recent release of Grindstone on the Switch, which is the Capybara Monster Mashing Puzzler. Are you aware of this game, Sam? I know the name, but it’s not a very evocative title, so why don’t you talk me through it? Grindstone was the secret star of the Apple Arcade launch lineup. I’d argue it’s probably the best game on Apple Arcade full stop. I played it last year when Apple Arcade launched. That was last year, wasn’t it? It wasn’t earlier this year. Oh, I don’t know, actually. Yeah, it had to be last year. And, yeah, so it’s a kind of grid-based puzzle game where you are a barbarian who has to chop through these colourful monsters, and you can move in, you know, up, down, left, right or diagonals, and you have to chain together like-coloured monsters. And when you chain together ten monsters of the same colour, it creates a little rainbow gem, which if you then pick that up, you can change colour of your chain. So the idea is to basically chain as many of these monsters together, using these rainbow stones to kind of build insane combos. And then it kind of piles on all kinds of interesting rules. So there are bits of scenery that you can only destroy if the chain is a certain length before you reach it. So it will say like, this wooden barrier, you need to have killed five monsters, and then you can break through this, because you’re kind of building up speed and momentum as you work through the chain. And then there are a certain number of monsters you have to kill to beat the level and kind of lead through this gate. But if you hang around, more dangerous monsters turn up, but there’s also chests, and you can collect keys to unlock the chests and get resources, and then you get upgrade materials, and you build items which play into advanced tactics. It has this absolutely amazing sense of style and momentum in that when you nail a massive chain, and it’s a very kind of casual game in terms of like, there’s no time or anything, you can sit there and really plot your movement around this grid, but the actual, when you trigger it and it plays out, it is just one of the most exciting kind of puzzle reactions, even though you know exactly how it’s going to play out, like the animation of him chopping through and he gets faster and all the sounds are blinging. And it’s one of the few games where like the better you play and the longer a chain you build, the reward is just this huge feedback rush, which I really love. And I guess it’s also sort of similar for Tetris in a way, like when you’re nailing kind of line after line in that game, it really kind of comes to life with audio and sound, but this has got this kind of cartoon charm to it. It’s incredibly moorish. Capybara are probably best known for, well, to me anyway, for Might and Magic Clash of Heroes, which is an absolutely killer kind of match three meets strategy game. A real original, I’d say, like a real kind of hybrid of stuff that comes out completely its own thing. It will probably feature very highly when we talk about 2008, I think is when it came out. So when we get to that list feature down the line. And this has got a similar thing, you know, that there’s a lot of bits to it that look familiar that you’ll kind of recognize, but it’s just pieced together in a really sort of coherent fun way, incredibly addictive. I love that it’s on Switch because I’ve only got an Apple Arcade on an Apple TV. I don’t have an iPhone or anything, but this is like a portable game, you know, it’s designed to be played in a little burst. So yes, it came out on Switch last week, I think. So I’m kind of crowbar-ing in a pick that would have been one of my games from last year. And yeah, it’s just, it’s fantastic. That’s fine, I respect that, Matthew. I forgot that Cappy Games made below that wasn’t exactly warmly received in 2010. Yeah, they spent so long on that. A long, long time. Yeah, it was something, because it almost felt like it was announced at launch of Xbox. Yeah, right. E3 2013, it was announced. And it’s kind of dominated, and it was quite different from everything else they made. And then this one sort of seemed to arrive out of nowhere. And it just, this is to me is like classic happy bar. This is everything that’s really great about the studio. I quite liked Below, but it was pretty experimental and a bit of a change of pace for them. But this, yeah, this was just perfect. I’m really, I was really worried it was going to be locked in Apple Arcade forever. So I’m glad that it’s kind of getting out there. You know, it’s quite pricey for like a, you know, something that you may consider a phone game. I think it’s about 15 pounds on the Switch, but there’s hundreds and hundreds of levels. I’ve never finished the original, you know, when I was playing on Apple Arcade, it’s an absolute mammoth, just endless game. And yeah, just a really great puzzler, but Tetris Effect is also good. Yeah, I like that the Apple Arcade thing means that developers don’t need to be locked into an exclusivity agreement, other than like a timed exclusivity agreement at most, seemingly. Yeah, yeah, it’s been a bit of a weird one that. I was really excited about it at launch to the point that I went out and bought one of those silly Apple TV boxes, just because there was exclusive stuff I really wanted to play on it. But it hasn’t really delivered much for me this year. Like I’ve somehow, I think I’ve kept my sub up. Yeah, I have kept a sub up to it. But yeah, that’s that’s been one of the more disappointing developments of the year that that service seemed to launch big and then kind of slightly fade away. Yeah, this is a bit this sort of Apple’s thing somewhat with services. I would say like just as someone who’s covered Apple TV a bit and they’ve had a few sort of good TV shows on their streaming service, Apple TV Plus, but nothing like truly amazing. And yeah, it doesn’t feel like something people talk about that much until there’s like a new Sofia Coppola film. And it feels like they’re in the same pattern of that with Apple Arcade, where one thing might come along you hear about every few weeks or every few months or whatever. That’s kind of it, you know. Grindstone is very much the on the town or on the rocks or whatever it’s called of the Apple Arcade. It’s a really beautiful looking game. I was looking up screenshots when you’re talking about it. I’d really never heard of it. And I would say the little squares in it remind me a bit of Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine or Columns, as I’m sure you’ll love to talk about that being a big Sega fan that you are notoriously. It’s got a really good comic energy to it. And it’s kind of quite comically gory as well. Everything sort of explodes into meaty chunks. But it’s really smart. Just a delight. Oh, cool. They look like slightly fucked up Etsy Pokemon, I would say. That’s how I describe them. Yeah, they sort of remind me of like germs a bit. They sort of look like bacteria. Yeah. Speaking of bacteria, actually, this doesn’t quite work because you’re actually playing a tentacle monster. Carrion is my number 10. By Phobia Games. I know you’ve played this too, Matthew. Yeah. I think I haven’t quite finished this, but I think I’m pretty close to the end. It’s a metroidvania game published by Devolver Digital who seem to have reasonably good taste in the stuff that they pick up and help promote. And yeah, you play this sort of tentacled monster that’s made of like decaying flesh going through this facility, killing sort of guards and scientists and sort of expanding and trying to escape going into these different new areas. Very traditional sort of metroidvania structure, but it looks amazing. It’s a 2D pixel art game, but obviously augmented by sort of modern visual effects. And so the way your sort of red sort of pulsating kind of creature moves, it kind of sticks tentacles to ceilings. And the movement is really nice and rotten to look at. It’s a really nasty looking game. And yeah, this is one of the games I’ve played on Game Pass this year. I’ve been subscribed to Game Pass for a year and I think I own too many games for it to be truly worthwhile for me. So I might I might pause it like mid next year until some of the bigger Microsoft games come out on PC. But yeah, I did nonetheless like this game. I don’t have loads to say about it. Just a really good spin on a Metroidvania when there are already so many of those around. And yeah, the perfect Game Pass game, I think. So I never I don’t think I ever would have bought this unless it was in a humble bundle or it was on sale for like three quid in a Steam sale. What do you think of it? Yeah, it sort of gets in, does what it says on the tin, delivers quite big monster action quite quickly, then kind of doesn’t outstay its welcome. I like that when it gets different sizes, it has different powers. The big carrion blob monster also has slightly big exhausted Boba Fett energy. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that’s probably why it resonates with you. It’s really kind of creepy how they bring it together. So you got like this sonar ability to find where your objectives are. And it’s sort of like, I know the idea that you’re moving tentacle monster thing is like this living thing that’s actually quite intelligent is quite disturbing. And the way that body parts just hacked off when you like attack enemies is just it’s really something. So I rate this game. It’s not that long. I don’t think I think I’m near the end. And it’s yeah, I just a really good pace breaker between sort of other bigger games, I think. So what’s your number nine, Matthew? My number nine is Unto the End, which is probably one of them, probably the most obscure game on my list. So I’d say this is from Tuton Studios. I played it on PC. It’s also on, I think everything Xbox, which definitely on Game Pass. It’s a little 2D side on. I want to call it Hack and Slasher. That probably paints an incorrect picture of it. It’s pretty better described as kind of Limbo meets like another world. Well, actually, they’re quite similar themselves. It’s kind of got the harder edge of another world. This game kills you quite quickly and it’s got combat unlike Limbo. So it’s a kind of 2D adventure, quite wordless. You just sort of move through this world. You have to kind of tease out all these kind of weird sort of arcane secrets. But it also has this very sort of thorough combat system, which is sort of built around kind of blocking high and low and reading enemy tells, kind of parrying and then hitting back. So I guess Limbo, another world, original Prince of Persia kind of mix it all together. It’s absolutely rock hard, but it’s not like a Dark Souls where, you know, you have this kind of quite flexible combat system that you’re dealing with. It’s quite rigid. The developer often likens it to kind of punch out in that it’s got this very arcade, you know, when this monster does this, there is an exact response to it. And you just have to react quite quickly in the combat. But the combat’s really fast. It kind of feels a bit kind of like desperate, it’s a bit of a desperate scrabble for survival. You can drop your sword if they hit you hard enough and then you’re like scrabbling for your sword and you can you can throw a dagger and then you have to pull it out the monster before you can use it again. There’s a lot of little things that make it feel quite kind of organic that make you panic. You know, there’s a there’s a large stretch the game Underground where where it’s kind of lit by the torch in your hand. And when you fight and you do like a heavy blow, you have to drop the torch. So you can only really see what’s in the little pocket of light around you. So these monsters will kind of retreat and they’re on the kind of edges of the torch lights. Very atmospheric, very simple due to the style. Some people really bounced off it and felt that it was a bit too trial and error that it was just kind of going, no, you didn’t work out the secret thing I want you to do. But I felt it was a bit more flexible than that. I just thought it was very atmospheric, again, one of these kind of, like Carrion is kind of a quite small, you know, a small shorter game you can really kind of get through, but it has a lot of kind of weird sort of idiosyncratic quirks that I really liked. Yeah, this was interesting and it’s on Game Pass and I really recommend you giving it a go on there because you kind of have to play it to kind of feel its quite unique rhythm. Yeah, I’m quite intrigued by its really kind of nice, stark visual style. Your character is quite small on screen, which I think is quite interesting. Yeah, I think that’s one of the problems people have with it because you’re trying to read these tales, but the monsters are very, very small. So, you know, I think they are, like, they broadcast what they’re going to do well enough, but it’s, yeah, it’s not a game that like nannies you, you know, there’s even a message at the start of the game that say, it doesn’t say, like, this game is going to kick your ass, but it says there’s some unconventional stuff in this. It is deliberate. You know, we hope you kind of click and gel with it because, you know, we’re going for a kind of specific vibe. I did click with it, but I know some people who really didn’t and absolutely hated this game, but I think it’s cool. Yeah, I would say that Game Pass is actually slightly underrated for how many indies it gets on there. You’re going to get one or two massive releases a month, but then they’ve had quite a good steady supply of games like Star Renegades is one I’ve got downloaded at the moment and CrossCode and stuff like that. And, you know, they seem to have some kind of deal with the publishers of I forgot the name of the publisher. They published a Night Call and Raw Fury. Yes. And so most of their games seem to launch on day one on Game Pass. So yeah, it’s definitely been a good year for them providing newer types of experiences for people who might not necessarily pay like 50 or 20 quid. All right, cool. So my number nine, Matthew, is Risk of Rain 2. Oh, I don’t know if you know this game. It’s a game that I hear loads of people talking about. I’ve never played it. If you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t really tell you what you do in it. Yeah, sure. So it is a 3D shooter rogue-like that you can play with up to four players. I think it’s four anyway. And you go through these. I don’t think the levels are procedurally generated. They’re just randomly. The loot is randomly distributed, but the maps stay the same, I think. And you go through each level. You’re looking for an exit. And when you activate the exit, a boss arrives. You have to destroy the boss and then you can move on to the next area. But the key thing is that you’re hoarding these items as you go. Add loads of different effects to your character. So there’s the basic ones that will improve your attack speed or your movement speed, let you jump higher, that sort of stuff. But the ones you really want are the ones that are like, for every X shot, a sticky bomb will get thrown onto an enemy. Or now when you shoot an enemy, they’ll be set on fire because you’ve picked up this gasoline thing. Or you’ve got a rocket launcher on your right shoulder that will just absolutely rain down on enemies while you’re fighting. Or when you open a chest, fireworks will launch that hit enemies nearby. So you’re stacking up all these items. So your very basic-looking character physically is wearing all of the items that you collect. Yeah. So by the end of the game, you are just covered in stuff. You’re like the Homer Simpson Carr of video game characters. Just really over-designed. And yeah, it’s cool. I’ve been playing this a lot with my friend Jay, who kind of got me into it. And I had a code kicking around when I was on PCGamer, and it was in early access for a while, but it launched this year. I think they’ve got some more big updates coming up. I don’t think it’s a great shooter, but it’s got really nice movement, and the different character archetypes you can pick up are really good. So you have a character who can do slow poison on enemies, and it’s more melee-based. The basic dude is a very zippy, sort of like ranged fighter with low health, and so on and so forth. I’ve just done a lot with the final character who’s called the Captain, and he’s got a little sort of commissar hat on, and it looks like he can fuck some shit up. I’m looking forward to playing as him. I think it’s just too hard on its normal difficulty setting. I don’t think I’m very good at it, even though I’ve played it for 20 hours now. But it’s another really good co-op game that I think is a bit underrated and doesn’t quite… Even though I know it’s sold well, it doesn’t quite get the same attention as some of the other big co-op games that people like to dip into. So yeah, risk of rain. I think you can buy a version on Steam that comes with multiple copies. And that’s the way to do it, really. I don’t necessarily think it’d be that enjoyable to play solo. But yeah, definitely want to share with friends. Is there any persistent stuff in it? Or is it every run you start with, you’re the same blank character? Or can you improve them as a base character? Every time you start, it’s the same. But the unlocking characters process takes a while. So basically, each time you unlock a new character, you’ve got a new build to try out. So you’re getting closer and closer to figuring out how you personally will finish the game. So I think that works in lieu of any sort of persistence. I just got the impression this year that Hades was massive because it was maybe the sort of the road like that really got the balance of persistence to randomness, like absolutely downright. Yeah, you know, which is I think is the thing which can scare people off. I’ve only played a little bit of Hades. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t feature in my list. But yeah, I wonder if what a lot of people clicked with was more like here’s like a rogue like for the masses. Yeah, I think you might be right. Also, I believe that people say that Supergiant spent, seemingly spent loads of money on voice acting. So there’s loads of well acted story that plays out across multiple runs, which, you know, if that’s what the Epic Games store money gets you, then hell, it’s worth it, right? Loads better. So good for them. But yeah, I am. This does lack that. It’s true that I don’t really love rogue likes as much as I used to. I mean, I paid a lot of FTL, but I burned out on that as well. And I think that, yeah, you’re right that having some kind of persistence just makes that that experience a bit more inviting. So yeah, what’s your number eight, Matthew? My number eight is Persona 5 Royal, which arrived at just the right time. This came out a couple of days before my birthday this year. We were in lockdown. I was feeling quite glum. I did the thing, the mortifying thing, which is asking for video games for my birthday when I’m 35. And there is there’s something. Listen, I’m not trying to cast aspersions on any on any on the hobby or anyone involved in it. But there’s something about like your wife’s parents having to go on to Amazon and look up Persona 5 Royal to buy you a copy, which is very, very kind of them. But I also like you look at the cover art and think this is not something an older person will look on and look on me kindly for. So yeah, and then I spent I took a week off or a week and a half of work and just sat there playing playing this. Absolutely fantastic game, Persona 5. I played a fair chunk of when it originally came out, but then, well, you know, it’s absolutely massive and I just didn’t have time for it. What I like about Persona 5 Royal is it feels much faster moving. Weirdly, as they’ve added tons more stuff, but they’ve importantly they’ve added lots of kind of quality of life improvements that just make progression in that game a bit faster. I don’t know if people listening to this are aware of the game. It’s kind of split between dungeon crawler and sort of social life sim and the decisions you make in the social life sim portion kind of improve you as a character and then you get the benefits of that when you’re doing the kind of RPG-ish combat in the dungeons. And your day is stuck in these very sort of fixed phases where you can do certain things in certain phases and the important change here is they’ve added what to me feels like quite a lot of stuff to like the end of day social phase where normally in Persona 5 you’d be too tired to do anything. Here there’s a few more activities you can do in your room. So you just level up a lot faster. You begin to get through the kind of side character content a lot quicker. So even though they’ve added stuff, you know, you can also go to your flat and do like pull ups and stuff on the rafters. And there’s a lot more automated stuff. You can ask people to do more stuff for you. It just it feels like a smoother game. Remove some of that. Remove some of the kind of the tedium and grind and just gets on with, you know, the joy of Persona 5, which is a really cool trendy thing. Too cool for me. Probably. It’s one of these games I play where I’m like if I met any of these characters in real life, they’d absolutely fucking hate my guts. Like I’m such a square. If anything, I’d be one of the people with a mind palace that they have to go and kill. What would your mind palace be in Persona, Matthew? It would probably be something themed around like Heartburn and Renny. Yeah, like a giant sort of like heart, like decaying heart sort of like with like Renny patrolling. Yeah, with like rivers of stomach acid. Yeah, that I have to take little gondolas along. And they’re just like the whole time. They’re like, this guy’s awful. That’s amazingly vivid. And so yeah, well, you know, if they’re interested in doing another remake of this, you know, I’m up for DLC. Yeah, it’s funny. When I played the original Persona 5 with my girlfriend, and she always makes the joke that like if you had a mind palace, me and the kitty, which is the cat Morgana in the game, would have to go around like hosing down your distorted desires. And I found that such a funny way of describing. That’s what she makes of me after being with me for several years. I found that prospect really funny. The idea that she has to go in there and kind of give it a wash every now and then, my mind palace. Yeah, so I was curious actually if this removed any of the kind of day limit stuff in that game, which makes it a bit annoying, where it’s like, oh, okay, I’ve done one thing this evening and the entire evening is gone, which is basically what being an adult feels like. But in the game, it makes it quite hard to, you feel like there’s a real ceiling on getting stuff done. Yeah, it doesn’t so much. It’s more that you can do something after school and then you can do something like pre-bedtime. And they’ve added a few more things that you can do like in your house or in this in the kind of the neighborhood surrounding your house. There’s a few more bits and bobs, which yeah, that’s what adds to it. So you can develop like, you know, you can watch TV and read a book. You know, you’re not too tired to watch TV or whatever, which I always thought was dumb. Yeah, like the tweaks are minor, but they’re noticeable. And you get to like the same point you got to in the game. You know, if you played the original, but you’re, you know, much more developed. They’ve also, they’ve added quite a bit to the, that kind of giant underground subway labyrinth. Is it Persona? No, it’s called Persona. Mementos. Yes, yeah. They’ve added like some extra sort of fetch questy stuff to give it a bit more shape. It’s pretty boring down there. Yeah, it now just moves a lot faster. If anything, like it was a reasonably easy game before and it’s quite easy now, like you can really storm it and get ahead of the difficulty curve very, very quickly. But I don’t know, do people play that game for super hard difficulty or do they just play it because they want to see like, you know, a cat wear a cool badge? They want to be a cool teenager in Shinjuku. That’s what they want to do. Yeah, so, and it does that and there’s a bit more of it. It’s super polished. It does get to the point where I wonder, you know, if people, you know, who actually invests in Persona on original release? Because you know that they’re going to do a much better version like a year later. Yeah. Um, I don’t know if that’s a curse. I’m probably not, you know, people seem to dig Persona 5, so. Yeah, I, if anything, I guess it probably makes it easier for them to bankroll future more ambitious games because, uh, Persona 4, I don’t think people necessarily remember that all of the kind of like dungeon crawly stuff is very rote compared to Persona 5, which obviously with the Mind Palace stuff has much more elaborate themed dungeons. And in Persona 4, it’s just not nearly as interesting. All of the Lifesim stuff is really interesting and has been throughout the series. Persona 3 had good life stuff too, but where it feels like the money has gone into is into making these, um, these really cool mind palaces to kind of unpick as well as a sheer amount of story stuff in there. Um, so yeah, I think it kind of works if, if they make more money and people are willing to pay it, then good for them. Um, yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. I’m glad to hear that’s on your list. Yeah, my number eight is Sea of Thieves. So all of my games this year are from this year, apart from a few live service games that released earlier, but have constant updates. So I think have to be part of the Game of the Year conversation just because they are an evergreen part of people’s lives and they change so radically sometimes that they are different games from year to year. And that’s definitely true of all the games on my list this year, apart from Sea of Thieves, which I played just so much this year. I think it had to be on here. But not that I blame Rare for this. It moves, it seems to change very, very slowly, which is fine because the fundamentals of Sea of Thieves are so good, just getting on a boat with friends and going off to do different adventures. I think there was some Ghost Boat stuff they added this year. I think they’ve added some more stuff recently, but I have burned out on this game so much. I’ve probably played about 100 or 200 hours of it at this point. I’m very close to reaching Pirate Legend. It’s probably more like 100 hours. Pirate Legend status, I basically just have like three more levels to go with one of the trading companies and I’ve done it. Maybe I should do that before the end of the year so I can say I’ve achieved something in 2020. Yeah, you became a Pirate Legend. But yeah, I think that it’s not treated like a live service game in the sense that Fortnite has obviously like completely changed the game on this in terms of the investment in making a game feel radically different every season. It’s not sustainable for all developers to do that so I don’t expect that from Rare. However, I’m glad to hear that they are moving to I think some kind of Season or Battle Pass model next year which will give people a different sort of continuity and different things to unlock and that is what I think it’s been lacking is another good progression system that’s not just I’ve gone fishing or I’ve done this quest or I’ve handed out a chest to this trading company it was very repetitive so yeah I’m pleased that it’s been a few years since the game released but they are finding ways to remix it because it is a great game and it is the quintessential game pass game right you don’t need to buy it you just have game pass you play it with your friends or whatever format you can play it on it’s all good I love that because there’s no like character development per se like anyone of any any ability or level level there’s no level cap to playing it you know that like you know a person who’s played 100 hours can play with a person who’s played one hour and it’s perfectly fine yeah I did have my best ever experience with it this year well we’ve been like bullied so many times by better players because like you say even though there is no there is no kind of like differential in terms of power there are hacks that people do to kind of like crawl in certain places or move quickly or Oh, right. Yeah, some players are just really good at, like, hiding on boats and stuff like that and finding quick ways to get on your ship and stuff. But this year, two players, we were just at a dock. We were circling an island, and two players from a little boat came to attack us. They were clearly very elite. They killed a whole bunch of us. But I managed to kind of escape and take a load of firebombs over to their boat and sink their ship while they were attacking ours. So once they were dead, they had no ship to return to. And that was a beautiful moment doing kind of pincer movement where the rest of the crew were just opening fire from the ship. And I was just there swimming in the water, turning up behind them and just throwing firebomb after firebomb. It was a really, it’s really good at creating those kind of moments where, you know, you briefly feel heroic or whatever. We also did have a really nice experience this year where we forged a fragile alliance with this really nice group of Spanish players, who I think like I killed one of them in the first instance and was like, because I was so wary of them, because anytime someone comes on your ship and pretends to be nice, that basically what they’re going to do is they’re going to steal a chest and walk and swim off and try and swim off and then it will turn into a fight. That happens 99% of the time. So this was the one time that someone reached out, they had voice chat on and they were like, hey, do you want to team up and we’ll go, we’ll go do one of these islands together. And we did. And it was weirdly moving. And I think it’s just because of the kind of year it’s been. But the idea that like, I don’t know, we didn’t know these people, but they were like, and even though I’d killed one of them, they were like, hey, do you want to team up? And we’ll go do this together and we’ll form an alliance. And then we kind of said farewell at the end, like there was a kind of fleeting friendship, like a friend you make in an airport or something. And it was, it was just weirdly beautiful. It was kind of like, I think it was early on in lockdown, so probably all going through some weird emotional shit. But yeah, that was my nicety of these experiences here. It’s just making a fragile alliance with some nice players and then talking to them on the voice comms and it not being like really uncomfortable. That was very nice. Yeah, very good. So what’s your number seven, Matthew? My number seven is Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition. Yes, another chunky Japanese RPG. Yeah, again, I loved Xenoblade when it came out back in 2010, shall we say. I’m a bit hazy on the dates. I really rate this game. This was a Wii exclusive JRPG from Monolithsoft, which is a studio that’s sort of a second part. Nintendo bought Monolithsoft many years ago. It was fabulous back then, despite the limitations of the Wii. You know, it was kind of a triumph of art design over kind of graphical oomph. Um, it sets… the world is set on the back of these two sort of titans who have kind of been fighting in the middle of an ocean and have sort of struck each other a death blow. And you’ll see you’re on the kind of corpses of them, but, you know, where you sort of start off down by the feet or on its thighs, and then you kind of look up to its sort of mountainous heads and different regions or on different parts of the body, but it’s just huge. The world is so big and the scale of it is so big. And this version is like a big visual do-over. So it’s just, you know, super attractive, you know, really bright poppy colors, you know, takes what was already a great looking game, but just kind of makes it all a bit better kind of close up. I really, really rate this. I think they are my favorite JRPG studio. I think they’re probably, I think they’re the best JRPG studio, you know, basically since the kind of golden age of, you know, Square Enix is feeling at Final Fantasy Golden Age, like I feel that they’re doing really interesting stuff. They’re making great games. They’re making them without too much fuss. They don’t hype them up too much. They just make these big old JRPGs. They come out, they work, they’re full of cool ideas, absolutely stonking soundtracks. And another part of this port is they’ve done big kind of orchestral reorchestrations of the music, which is already amazing. And you can flick between the two tracks as well. It’s a bit like that thing with the Halo remake, where you can switch between the classic and the new, except just for the soundtrack, which is nice. Yeah, just a really great game. More people should play it. I’m interested to see what they do next, because I really like Xenblade Chronicles 2, which was a Switch exclusive. They also, weirdly for this, added a chunk of the game, which was sort of cut from the original, or was like a prototype for the original. I think they made this area to kind of like show to Nintendo, this is the kind of vibe, and then that area wasn’t in it. And they’ve kind of gone back and made that into a kind of proper epilogue to the main game, with, you know, they got the voice actors back in, you know, it’s a big, you know, like 10, 15 hour chunk of game, which is pretty good going, considering they made this, you know, 10 years ago. Yeah, I just think it’s like a, a really sort of definitive port. That’s just a really great way of, of, of a real love letter to it. They’ve smartened it up in loads of ways, modernized it in, in some key ways. Yeah, I, you know, compared to, I think maybe it stands out as being a bit shinier and better just because they, we also had Super Mario 3D All-Stars, which I had toyed with putting on the list, but it, it was just a bit too basic as an actual, you know, I didn’t really, I didn’t think they showed it anyway near as much love as they did Xenoblade. So I’m rewarding Xenoblade with a place on my list. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, that’s, I, I pondered Mario too, but people were even pointing out there are issues that like ROM hackers have solved that Nintendo has not put into that new version of Mario 3D All-Stars. And also the kind of whole arbitrary, it’ll only be available till this date stuff is kind of weirdly soured me on it even though it’s a- Yeah, they’ve, it’s strange because they’ve done this before. I think I talked about it on this podcast. In fact, when they did the, they basically just re-released like a ROM of Super Mario Brothers All-Stars for like the 20th or whatever, 25th anniversary of Mario’s birthday. Well, it would have been 25th, yeah, 10 years ago. And it was just, yeah, really, really, really flat. And, you know, for a company which is so protective of its, you know, its IP, it’s weird how sometimes they stumble and don’t show them as much love as they could. I’m still holding out that they’re going to secretly add Super Mario Galaxy 2 as a surprise to that game, but that would probably take some of the sting off it, but, you know, who knows? Yeah, I mean, I think the Super Mario 3D World re-release next year will probably be more in the vein of a really good Nintendo kind of like, you know, sort of re-release. Yeah, for sure. I suppose then, just like one more question about this game, Matthew, like, I, this is a series that I have thought about playing. In fact, I own both this edition here and two. I was obviously planning to play them at some point and didn’t. What are they most comparable to for people who are like, who are interested in them but have never played this kind of Japanese RPG? Yeah, so they take a fair amount of MMO thinking in terms of the scale of the world and the kind of just being able to grind through these quests quite easily. Mechanically, it probably has a bit more in common with Final Fantasy XII in terms of it’s like a real time combat system. You control one character, there’s like a special bar you can build up where you take control of the whole party and kind of program in moves. It basically hinges around, there are certain attacks that can sort of stagger an enemy and then there are certain attacks that can topple them if they’re staggered and once they’re toppled they’re dazed. So there’s this sort of big focus on this chain reaction of kind of toppling them and then really hammering them then. So it’s about kind of jumping in and taking quite manual control at the very precise moment. I mean, it’s, yeah, I’d say that that’s kind of the vibe it’s going for. I think the thing which really differentiates it from most JRPGs for me is the world is so big and there’s like a real sense of exploration, which I don’t actually get from many JRPGs. Like, I feel like you go into an area and it’s quite fixed. It’s quite small. It’s a very specific thing to achieve there. Well, here, like, it really is. It kind of verges on, you know, open world in terms of kind of complexity of some of these areas. And you can do some weird platforming to find secret bits. It’s, yeah, it’s huge scale, very kind of punchy, fast combat. Not a lot of faff in it. It’s just very to the point. They’ve cut out, you know, you can fast travel like pretty much anywhere in the world instantly. You know, it doesn’t make you do a lot of busy work. It’s kind of really on your side. Yeah, I just felt like a studio. Well, felt like Nintendo looking at the JRPG genre and saying, you know, what are some of the kind of major reoccurring kind of kinks here we can iron out? And they did that, but mixed with this sort of balmy story and great soundtrack. Oh, good stuff. Well, yeah, I will definitely pay that at some point. Well, put aside 100 plus hours. It is massive. It’s a real kind of like a one off sort of studio for Nintendo to own or work with Monolith. Yeah, just sort of bizarre, but quite cool. They have a JRPG developer. Yeah, I feel in a way that they’re, because graphically what they’re doing is not the cutting edge, because it’s on Nintendo hardware, which is a bit more limited. It feels like they almost have the flexibility that Square Enix had sort of PS1, PS2 era, where they were just making a lot of games. Like, Monolithsoft have made quite a lot of games in the same time it’s taken Square Enix to make like two Final Fantasies. They’re just, they feel like very kind of flexible. They can respond really quickly. That’s because they’re not doing like absurd photorealistic things. You know, it’s, you know, maybe they’ll get to that point and it will spoil them again. But right now they’re in the kind of JRPG sweet spot. Good stuff. Well, my number seven, Matthew, is Star Wars Squadrons. Is this on your list? This isn’t. I haven’t played this. Yeah, I didn’t think it would be. I played this and liked it, but didn’t love it, actually. Like, I thought it’s a Star Wars space shooter, kind of a simulation game, but it’s not that complicated because obviously it is available on consoles. So everything you want to be able to do in that game, you can do using the controller, using a D-pad to move sort of systems around that sort of stuff, controlling, like, how much you put into shield and speed and all that sort of thing. So it definitely evokes the older X-Wing games very well, and by pretty much every critic has been called, like, a great modern successor, which I don’t disagree with. I think I hope the story would be a bit better than it is. Just off the back of playing Jedi Fallen Order last year, which was a really strong little bit of Star Wars, I thought, it just really felt like a legit part of that universe. The story did nothing for me this time, so you alternate between the different sides, Imperial and Rebels, and it’s set sometime after the Battle of Endor. So, yeah, but it’s because it’s primarily a VR game, all of the story is pretty much delivered by people monologuing at you. And it really reminded me of Anthem’s terrible story bits, where you are just witness to some irritating people talking, and there’s no real interactivity or sense that you’re a character. So I expect they did this so it feels more immersive in VR. I have not tried it in VR yet. I have an Oculus Rift S at home. I should definitely give it a go. But I nonetheless thought the story missions were very good. So it was really enjoyable just to see these kind of like nice, vibrant Star Wars locations and planets in the background while you’re doing these kind of like basic escort, destroy this, get out quickly and missions. And yeah, really straightforward stuff. But I’m glad it exists for sure. And in terms of multiplayer, I think I left it too late to get into the multiplayer. And now I fear going in and getting absolutely rinsed. But they have added, well, they added it with launch, was just an AI multiplayer mode. So you can just enjoy it offline infinitely if you want to. And so for some people that won’t be enough. But for me, it probably will because I really just like this for the Star Wars-ness of it. I like being in an X-Wing cockpit and looking around, and that’s exciting. And they’ve added more ships. They’ve just added the TIE Defender, which I think is from Rogue One, a Star Wars story, and the B-Wing, that really weird looking spaceship from Return of the Jedi. So yes, they’ve definitely put some effort into it. It didn’t cost much. Right now, if you’re listening to this, I believe until the 7th of January, you can get it on the Epic Games Store for £12, or around $12, $15 with the Epic coupon they give you, which is pretty cool. There’s free advertising there. They’re not paying me, I should make that very clear. But yeah, I’m glad this game exists. It didn’t blow me away as much as I hoped it would, but I think for what it is, it’s absolutely worth picking up. Yeah, I don’t really have any kind of connection to those older X-Wing games. I’d be a lot more interested in a new Rogue Squadron, or even, what were the ones on PS2? They were quite good. Is it Starfighter? Yeah, they’re okay. They’re alright. I kind of prefer the arcade Star Wars to me, because I felt like you can deliver the spectacle of Star Wars a bit more easily. I’m less interested in the nerdy specifics of the ships. I feel like I’m one of the few games journalists on the planet who can’t name Star Wars ships. When people are like, oh man, it’s a real negative point that this game doesn’t have, at the time of launch, a B-Wing or whatever. And I’m like, no idea. I know what an X-Wing and a TIE fighter is, but outside of that, no chance. You’re basically sub-tweeting me IRL here. Well no, it’s just a lot of my peers are super into Star Wars. And the iconography of it lights them up in a way I wish it did for me, but I just don’t have it. I think dogfighting in spaceships is my least favourite bit of Star Wars. So maybe this isn’t for me. I agree that it could have a bit more spectacle in the sense of Rogue Leader is obviously all spectacle. The GameCube game that we discussed in our first episode, I believe. Yeah, that was that sort of game. I missed that sort of game too and Battlefront 2’s campaign kind of hinted at it. But yeah, it feels like no one’s going to put the dots together and make that game where we fly in Star Wars spaceships, but on cool planets. That’s not going to happen. I don’t think it should. So what’s your number six, Matthew? My number six is Gears Tactics. Yeah, OK. So this came out this year on PC and then later on consoles. Yeah, so it came out I think around March on PC and then it was an X. It came to Xbox when they released the series X. It is also on Game Pass. This is a kind of Gears of War meets XCOM made by the Coalition with splash damage. This was just the most pleasant surprise of 2020. Here was a game that was announced to E3 last year as a trailer. It didn’t have any gameplay in it. I don’t think anyone expected anything of it. If you were to say they are going to do Gears of War, but it is going to be like XCOM, you would be like okay, whatever. But this was absolutely superb. I thought the way it sort of married the kind of core appeal of a turn-based tactics game with the iconography and also tone of Gears of War, but like tone mechanically, this is the really interesting thing about this game, is it’s a super aggressive tactics game. It isn’t about the tension and the danger in the way that I think XCOM is. It’s about like momentum. It’s about skills that give you extra action points. It’s about taking one turn and stretching out until you’ve killed 15 people with your squad of four. It somehow has that kind of rampage feel of Gears of War, but using the kind of mechanics and setting of a turn-based tactics game, which I thought was just so potent and enjoyable. It may even be my favourite Gears of War thing, just because the setting looks great when it’s shrunken down. I really like little diorama games, as you’ll see with one of my later picks. And yeah, it doesn’t take long to have real fun with the character classes in this game. The skill trees are actually meaningful. You can push each of the four or five classes in quite interesting directions. There’s great interplay between them. It’s beautiful. It’s so polished. XCOM, I think, as the king of this genre, has grown a little rough around the edges and doesn’t feel the need to tidy that up. XCOM Chimera Squad came out basically at the same time and was so ropey. I enjoyed it, but technically ropey. This was like, it felt like a real AAA version of this. Some people have been put off it because they’re like, I don’t like Gears. I like the kind of smarts of a Tactics game, but I don’t necessarily like the kind of bro action stuff of Gears. But this, it’s a really killer combination of the two. And I think both Gears fans and Tactics fans will really get a kick out of it. That’s a great endorsement. I’ve got it downloaded on PC and have been mean to play it. I did very much like how you said, it doesn’t really have much of the XCOM sort of out of level management stuff. It’s just level to level intensity. That’s almost something they could improve. Like it’s pretty sparse around the edges. And you think, well, the core of this is so good that like, it wouldn’t, it would obviously take some doing and some thought, but I can definitely foresee them making an even better version of this, which does do something more interesting with the kind of campaign structure, say, because the core of it is just, they nailed it, in my opinion. And I, you know, I am genuinely excited if they, should they get to do a Gears Tactics 2. I think that could like be absolutely stellar because its weaknesses are so obvious and it feels so fixable that, yeah, there’s like no reason this wouldn’t be improved. Yeah, quietly good few years for Gears content. Yeah, that’s like, it’s kind of kept its head down. It’s just getting good again. Like, this was a series I’d semi written off, but this and Gears 5, I love them both. Good stuff, Matthew. Well, my number six is Mafia Definitive Edition. So I don’t think anyone played this this year that I know. I did play it and I liked it. Well, it felt like it just didn’t get much attention and then when the next-gen consoles got here, it was kind of forgotten. And yeah, it wasn’t released on next-gen consoles. I was kind of curious about some of the games that released on current gen this year, but not next gen. I was there thinking, why not just have this on PS5? Then people will probably get more excited about it. But anyway, this was a remake of the 2002 game Mafia, City of Lost Heaven, I think was the name of the game, made by Illusion Softworks. And this new version was made by Hangar 13, who made Mafia III. Not very well received entry in the series, but I believe was made very quickly, relative to how ambitious it was. And certainly had something going on in terms of the environmental detail and capturing the time period. So this is a really nice remake of that old game, which was kind of like a more, like a narrative-driven, more mission-driven alternative than Grand Theft Auto, for example. But it was still set in an open world. It just wasn’t the kind of open world where you were necessarily killing pedestrians to see what the police do and making different systems butt up against each other. You could do that, but it was more, it was a bit too hard to do that, the original idea. And this is a really polished remake, and it really makes me realize that you just can’t play many games like this now that are just 12-hour sort of shooters, basically. And even though it does have some kind of bookend open world stuff that I didn’t, I couldn’t quite figure out in the free roam mode how to activate, I really enjoyed blasting through this story. I thought the cutscenes were really well done, and the bits of story I remember from the original Mafia, and there are some really memorable moments in that game, including quite a famous ending that is picked up on again in Mafia 2. This really just does it justice, I think, and it made me think that if Hangar 13’s next move is to make a Mafia 4, and people thought from an Easter egg in this game that they were hinting at that that was something they were going to do, I think they could do a really good job with it, because the shooting felt pretty nice, I would say. There’s a bit too much spray going on with some of the guns in this game, but it was a really, as a kind of cinematic, very cinematic presentation of it and the settings and how nice it looked. It was a really good looking game on PC, and so if you’ve ever enjoyed that series, I think most people have probably played two out of the series. This is just well worth picking up in the Steam sale this year. Yeah, no, I agree. I liked it a lot. It reminds me a bit of, or rather this game reminded me of it, of LA. Noire, where you build a huge open world, but then use it for quite a linear, fixed story, but it’s just an amazing background for that story. Yeah, and I don’t actually, Cyberpunk made me think about this too, actually, where it’s like, well, how much does it matter if the open world in question doesn’t really connect to the type of game you’ve made? And I don’t think it matters that much, because even in the games like Grand Theft Auto, you often end up in these kind of fixed locations, which don’t feel very open-worldy. And so, yeah, I think it’s okay to just have a really nice backdrop, even if you’re not necessarily using it or padding it out. So yeah, what’s your number five, Matthew? My number five is Yakuza Like a Dragon. Is this on your list? No, it’s not. I’m eight games behind in the Yakuza series. Possibly more. Well, this is a good place to jump in, because this is a new hero after Yakuza 6 wrapped up the story of… What’s his name? Kiryu? Yakuza Twitter is going to be so mad at you, Matthew. Oh, I know. I always get their surnames the first time. That’s him, isn’t it? I think so, yeah. Yeah, this is a new game, new hero. JRPG kind of framing to it. The narrative hook here is that the hero of the game is a huge Dragon Quest fan and sees the world as a JRPG, which is how they justify combat being turn-based. But it’s done with lashings of Yakuza humour, this great sense of style. It’s a really good game about old dudes. The first three major party members you’ve amassed are all 40-plus bozos, which I really like. It’s like a load of dads trying to solve this big conspiracy. But it’s got this pretty basic JRPG combat, really not any more complicated than, say, a Dragon Quest game, quite traditional. A few flourishes with a few timed button presses to block moves and add extra heft to things. It adds a bit of an arcade sensibility, I guess. And it’s got this great job system where instead of classes, you get different employment at the job center and your special moves are tied to your job. So if you’re the chef, you’re grinding pepper mills into people’s eyes and things. And you use one of those little chef torches that they use on creme brulee to set people on fire. And there’s an office assistant who throws stationery at people and stuff. And the impetus to grind through each character and class is to see what mad comic nonsense happens next. And all this is wrapped up with… It’s got that amazing sense of place. There are side stories with little funny side missions. It’s got a really good sense of humor. Surprisingly heartfelt. These games are always about super tough guys with hearts of gold. I just love that there’s lots of old people in this game. Not just the heroes, but all these aging heads of Yakuza clans who are all real badass. The game does wrinkly faces really well. It’s just a great jumping in place if you haven’t played before. Really big chunky game, take a lot of time, very funny. I liked it a lot. Does it still have the disconnect that I think people like about Yakuza where sometimes the cutscenes are extremely serious and sincere, but then it cuts back to the game and it’s just like, this is daft as all fuck? Or is it consistently silly because the main character seems fun loving? The character is a bit more fun loving. And it still has this thing where you have a super intense conversation with, oh, I’ve dishonored you and I’ve spent 25 years atoning for this and there’s nothing I won’t do to prove myself to you. And then five minutes later you’re recruiting a lobster as a party member. That’s amazing. If you were in this game, Matthew, what would be your weapon of choice? Would you have like a Renny Cannon or something? Oh, yeah, that would be good. I’m trying to think what my prop is. I’ve ambushed you with this. I should have asked you. I’ve got a terrible kind of like side satchel kind of man bag which I carry around with me. That would probably make for quite a good kind of lots of spinning attacks. I don’t really know what a games reviewer kind of ability would be. Mean tweets. Giving a 4 out of 10. You know, awarding scores to enemies. Well, there is a… you fight these sort of social influences because all the enemy classes are also like weird things and there are these people who are constantly filming the fight on their phone and things like that while you’re punching them in the face, which I quite like. There’s some weird oily men who like lube themselves up and sort of slip around as well. It’s pretty wild. That’s cool. As someone who’s only ever really enjoyed Yakuza from afar via memes, yeah, I’m pleased to hear that it’s still going and that this one somehow managed to position itself as like the one game you can buy on Xbox One Series X at launch. So, yes, my number five, Matthew, is Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Oh, I thought this might be higher for you. Well, I considered putting it on Most Disappointing Games. Oh, right. It was a real… I’ve got a real mixed relationship with this. So obviously, it’s a remake of the 1997 Japanese RPG. It was a mega seller and popularized the genre in… Well, in the US, it was already kind of on the up, but certainly in Europe, it popularized the Japanese RPG. And, yeah, it’s… This remake only covers part of the first disc and their way of doing it. It doesn’t sound like they’ve planned out how many games there are. It’s possible they’re just saying that publicly, and they do know how big the project looks. I imagine they would probably scope that out because they’re not idiots. They’re smart developers who have been making games for decades. And so this remake has been long anticipated. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler at this point to say it does change parts of the story. I think to the game’s detriment, so really early on, they throw Sephiroth into the mix, which I think completely undermines the original game’s very effective use of Sephiroth as an unseen threat. So you see things like the president of Shinra has been impaled, and then his son takes over, and then later on you see the Midgazalom that he’s killed, and I think he’s wrapped around a tree, the giant snake that you find in the overworld. And I think by introducing Sephiroth early, they have basically robbed you of that tension, which makes me wonder if they truly know why the game was good in the first place in some ways. But in other ways, it really excels. So I think the combat is possibly Square Enix’s best combat ever, a really good hybrid of you can play in real time, especially if you whack down the difficulty settings, you can play in real time constantly. However, I really enjoyed playing it, and I think either normal or the next difficulty up, and having it so I was constantly pausing and having to shift my material around and stuff like that. It’s a really good contemporary combat system that mimics the feeling of the turn-based combat in the original game. And it’s a real achievement, I think. There’s a couple of weak spots with it. I think that you get knocked down by enemies way too often, and they cancel your attacks, which is quite frustrating. I don’t think they quite sorted that out. But they made all the characters that are in this game feel meaningfully different from each other, to the point where it’s like playing a completely different game. So Barrett has obviously got a machine gun arm, so it feels like a shooter when you’re playing as him. He’s probably the least interesting, but some of his heavy attacks feel really good to use. And Cloud is obviously your swordsman. And Tifa is really well done in this game. Just a great kind of combo based fighting. And the way she moves is really satisfying. So they just thought long and hard about how to make those characters feel good and different. And it’s a way that it’s really enhanced over the original. Looks nice as well. But where they’re going with the story, I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it’s going to veer into Kingdom Hearts-esque nonsense. A few people have made that comparison, including the podcast Retronaut. So I don’t want to make it sound like I came up with that comparison. But it really has the kind of whiff of we’re going to do some bad lore. And it’s going to be really, really annoying when all you really wanted was a Final Fantasy 7 remake. And I don’t think I’d necessarily object to them tweaking the original game because some of the tonal changes here are very good. But yeah, I think future entries could just end up being a bit naff. And people just want to see all the cool places they went to in Final Fantasy 7. Yeah, it’s weird because I definitely feel the conversation around this, the stuff that I’ve seen people respond to most positively is where it’s done a really good job of aping the original. You know, I see a lot of people talk about the stuff where he used to disguise himself as the girl and all that. That stretch of the game I’ve seen a lot of people speak very fondly of. And that to me looks relatively unchanged as a general structure. Yeah, I think the tone of it, they tweaked to make it just like less… Obviously, it’s a very old game, so it’s just not going to date well in terms of the politics of it. It’s just really positive what they do with it, I think. And doesn’t sacrifice all of the things that made that memorable in the game. But here’s another lockdown-based point actually. So this came out right at the start of lockdown. Square Enix even had problems getting copies out in all countries at the same time. So Australia had copies weeks before it was out or something. And I think I thought in my head, this game will save me from lockdown. And you know what? It was not Square Enix’s responsibility to do that. I think my expectations were already high because it was the FF7 remake. But then I was also like, well, I’m stuck indoors now for months and months probably. This game will be the thing that saves me this year. My expectations were just way too high. And so when the game does kind of falter, it has some bad side quests in it. Just real kind of like, go here, do that. Go find children in a town, bullshit side quests. It falls down. But there are loads of ways in which this is really good. And I’m kind of hoping that the next few games, now they’ve established what the fundamentals are, they can just make content for it, basically. Make content for this cool combat system and make new settings to explore. Yeah. So Matthew, what’s your number four? That’s what we are, isn’t it? My number four is Doom Eternal. Oh, yes. It’s higher up on my list. Well, we’ll talk about it when we get to yours. What’s your number four? My number four is Command and Conquer Remastered. Oh, not on my list. I didn’t think it would be, yeah. This was just a kind of revamp of the 90s RTS games by Westwood Studios. Basically, their Petroglyph is the modern successor to that studio because EA, of course, famously closed down Westwood back when EA just seemed to buy studios and shut them in the noughties. So it was really cool. I think they’ve handled it really well, actually. They hired this producer who really fucking loves Command and Conquer to make this remaster in collaboration with the old developers, but also using these really talented artists at a studio called Lemon Sky Studios, I think it is, to just redo every single unit and tile in the game. And it’s just a really nice sort of like comfortable blanket of a game. It was really nice. I played every single campaign in Red Alert this year. I played 43 hours of the remaster total. I haven’t even touched the original Command and Conquer yet. But just playing Red Alert and reminding myself of, you know, how kind of weird and wacky all of the units are. And it’s really rare to find a game that is mostly composed of tanks and men shooting each other that’s got such a firm, funny, like personality led sort of tone. I just, it was so good at this Command and Conquer back in the day. So, yeah. I really wish I loved Command and Conquer because when I was a teenager, like all my mates were really into it. And I asked for Red Alert for Christmas and I got it on birthday one year. And I was so shit at it. I was just so bad. I couldn’t get through like three or four, past like level four of it or something. And that for me is basically like that experience has defined my relationship with real time strategy games ever since. Like it’s just a huge chunk of PC gaming I haven’t engaged with because I had this experience with what is largely considered to be one of the friendly and more accessible examples of the genre. And I just couldn’t do it. I just don’t have the brain for it. I wish I’d learned to play those games early on so I could enjoy what are probably amazing things now. But yeah, it brings back too many painful memories. I don’t want those painful memories remastered. Okay, that’s very enough, Matthew. So what’s your number three? My number three is Death Stranding. Ah, yeah. So you played this on PC this year, right? Yeah. This was a game I bought on PS4 and played for a couple of hours. Bounced off it massively back then. And to be fair, its weakest part is the first two hours, I think, because it’s so laden with cutscenes and all the bad Kojima stuff. But once you get through that, you get to all the good Kojima stuff or the good Kojima production stuff, because he’s obviously surrounded by very talented people. This game is the infamous Delivery Simulator, where you play a delivery man who is reconnecting the United States by moving between sort of disparate underground communities, delivering packages. It is a walking sim, but not in the sneery, dismissive way that people use it. It is a literal walking sim. The meat of the game is about navigating rough terrain and balancing and trying to not fall over. So it’s literally about the act of moving through the landscape. It’s not like… I wouldn’t say the simulation is super hardcore, but it’s more hardcore than you’re used to in probably any other open world game, in that you can’t just run up anything, you know, and the more stuff you carry, the more perilous everything becomes. It’s about evolving a toolset and using that to conquer this harsh environment by placing down shortcuts, ropes and ladders that can help you. And it’s incredibly chill. It’s absolutely beautiful. Like, it’s just trekking through a really nice environment. The story is weird as shit, but the more you play it, the kind of less offensive it became, I find, I found. Like, actually, kind of when you spend a bit of time in the characters, you realize, okay, there’s some logic here. It just throws a lot of crap at you right at the start. Yeah, just a really, like, singular thing, a great online sort of component to it in that the things you place in the world bleed into other people’s world. You’re like, it’s a big sort of asynchronous kind of shared experience. So you get this sense of all these invisible helpers, because you don’t see other people, but you get a sense of these invisible helpers kind of constructing shortcuts for you. And, you know, when you’re running away from a monster, and then you find someone’s already been there and left a ladder in a perfect place, you’re just like, oh, thank you so much. And it does create this sort of sense of gratitude towards other people you’ve never met. I think it helped that, like, I obviously played the meat of this during, like, a review window when not many people were playing it. And a lot of the stuff I came across had been placed by fellow journalists. So they were people I knew in real life because I recognized them from their gamer tags. And it was just quite nice getting Twitter DMs from, like, you know, tweets from Andy Kelly saying, did you build this zipline? It’s really helpful. And I was like, yeah, I did. And I did build, to be fair, I built what is, I think is probably the best shortcut ever in that game where I built a huge zipline network to get you over a mountain. So you could just sit on this zipline. It would zip you up and over it. It was a really… It was not only useful, it was like a beautiful scenic route. I put a lot of effort into that. I spent a huge amount of resources making it happen. And I like that other people found it and enjoyed it. Yeah, it just feels like a much better fit for PC, this game as well. I think what kind of bothered me early on was not that I, you know, obviously I bounced off those early hours, like I said, but I felt like a lot of the writing when this first came out with just kind of like people puzzled with it or kind of trying to get over the hump of the kind of hype they’d built up for Kojima’s next thing and actually having a little bit of distance. We talked about this last week, actually. Oh, no. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. We talked about this on a previous podcast. I’m just trying to remember the timeline of our own podcast. It was at some point in the last few weeks. Yeah, at some point I have talked about this, how having a bit of distance and letting that hype die down so you could just enjoy it for what it was and what it is I really, really liked. Just really, really good vibes, this game. Yeah, it’s a shame that not everyone can have the experience you had where they see their friends or people they know dropping stuff in the world. Because obviously it depends on enough people being interested in Death Stranding to play it. I mean, I certainly don’t know many people who have actually played it. So yeah, I think I also really agree with the point you made about how PC players are a good fit for it. So yeah, I don’t know if that’s necessarily because like there’s sort of types of simulator games where on PC they kind of really thrive like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and that kind of thing. But yeah, it certainly feels like there is a strand of, so to speak. And like the building elements are quite flexible. You know, it’s not like on Minecraft where you can build anything. But the fact that you are pretty free to place, you know, some quite sort of environment shifting things around. And, you know, it feels like you have a bit more kind of freedom and command. And it doesn’t explain a lot of stuff as well, which, you know, just lets you sort of figure it out. And it kind of trusts that you’ll get on with it. Yeah, it’s really, really good. And I think lots of people have responded well on PC. Like, you know, I always know on RPS, like the comments were really positive about this. And a lot of people were, like, pleasantly surprised. So maybe give it a go because it’s not necessarily what you think it is. Yeah, it’s really interesting to hear you talk about. I built a zipline and it was such a rewarding experience. And to just make the calculation in my head of, like, well, that must… It’s exciting to Matthew that that happened. But to hear it out loud, you’re like, how can this be interesting? But yeah, I will definitely… I will definitely get around to this because I have it on PC as well. And I hear the PC version is very good. Yeah, great. Yeah, really good port. All right, good stuff. Well, my number three, Matthew, is Doom Eternal. Yeah, so we’re pretty close in how we ranked that. So, yeah, I played this on Game Pass very recently, actually. And I think it feels… Someone said it feels like it’s from a parallel timeline to Doom 2016, where some of the same principles apply. But there’s a lot of platforming in this game, which is quite bizarre at first to get used to because it’s Doom. So you’re not really expecting to do these kind of like jump over these chasms and cling onto these like walls with grip on them, and then try and reach areas that way. So that feels different. Also, at the same time, the kind of resource management side of this game is very intense. So this was touched upon in the first game, where you do a melee kind of finisher on an enemy. I think Alex Wiltshire on Rock Paper Shotgun described it as being like a Resident Evil 4 kind of system, where you knock an enemy back and do a melee attack and you keep moving, sort of thing. But yeah, the kind of the sort of approach to getting ammo and shield and health in this game is just really kind of strange. You just are constantly switching between, I’ll set this enemy on fire, I’ll freeze this enemy, I will fire a rocket launcher, then I’ll have to keep moving for a while and just to stay alive. And then, okay, I’ll chainsaw through this guy. You are constantly going through the cycle of sort of like things you have to do to keep moving. And it works really well. It just means that it feels like fiercely strategic all the time, even though it can be unfair. What did you make of it? Yeah, absolutely. I’ve said this in a few places before, but it’s what I love about that system is it kind of pulls you into that combat. But in A, a very like immersive, visceral way, and B, like it just it demands that you play aggressively, which I don’t in most games, particularly shooters. I’m a very cautious player and everything Doom asks of you kind of goes against my natural instinct. But it kind of sort of teaches you to play it in the right way and teaches you to play it in this very different way and engage with a game in a style, which, you know, I look back on some of my footage in the videos and I think, wow, this doesn’t look like me playing like I don’t normally move like this in games. Like I don’t have that kind of arcade reflexes kind of built into me. But yeah, it draws that out, which I think is fantastic. I think compared to 2016, I think it just adds so much more to kind of further that game. I think there’s a much bigger focus on using all the weapons, which you didn’t necessarily have to do in 2016. It’s quite easy to fall back on a few favorites. While here, like certain weapons are just so powerful against certain enemies. And also ammo is generally sparse across the board that you are forced to just dig through every last bullet you have when you’re really up against it. So I feel like it’s a really good game at making you kind of play it every bit of it that they want you to play. You know, it’s like developers who really understand the heart of what they’ve made and have really kind of like sort of fenced you in that you have to connect with it. I know some people are like super down on the platforming, so they love the action encounters and then all of a sudden there’s this sort of weird kind of instant fail kind of monkey bar jumping across huge gaps. And like, I don’t object to any of the platforming. I quite like the scale it adds to the worlds because I think that’s the other flip side to this. It’s just like the level variety and the art design is amazing. You know, it really takes you on a tour of like dimensions and planets and heavenly realms and whatnot. And it has this platforming so that it can do these epic environments and then not just backgrounds. You know, you can get flung across a chasm and then you’re in a new place or whatever. And I just, I don’t know, I really didn’t bounce off that stuff. I didn’t find it that difficult, the platforming, which is maybe why it clicked better with me. But yeah, I just felt like a more complete package in 2016. Like the kind of framing of it with your little weird castle, sort of flying house thing that you live in. And like the mixture of enemy types and the environments. Yeah, I thought this was just absolutely great. Yeah, I completely agree with you on the variety of environments. You’ve got like ruined cities and like you say, these kind of like heavenly style realms, that last level where you’re being flung across massive chasms on some kind of like floating sort of space base. Yeah, like something from like Halo. Yeah, exactly. So there’s a real variety to that compared to the first game, which is mostly sort of like facilities on Mars and yeah, some really nice looking levels in the first one. But yeah, I agree with you. There’s that verticality as people say to the level design because of the platforming. So yeah, you feel like you’re always having to move up and down different levels to kind of stay alive or to reach different places. I actually thought the secret design in this game was fantastic as well. So I did every single optional encounter in the game and I did all of those Empyrean key things. Oh wow, hardcore. Yeah, so I really got into that. What I found hard at first, the game did train me into being good enough to do those bits. And I really appreciate that kind of like journey as a player because even though your arsenal expands, your actual skill set is the thing you need to step up in order to be able to do those extra challenges. So I love that. And I love the way collectibles were embedded in the environment. They were real puzzles to get to sometimes. Just really cathartic feeling game. Just a fantastic job. And like you say, when you meet the enemies who require you to use, say, like, you know, the laser rifle gun to knock their shield down, that sort of thing being made to think about like one enemy in the environment when there are like seven enemies chasing you and you have to focus on that one enemy while you’re being chased. It’s such a great, such a great pace to it. Yeah, they’re fantastic. I really hope they, I hear the DLC is good as well. They’ve released it. Yeah, apparently it’s absolutely rock hard. Yeah, well, I’m well up for it then. That’s the difficulty of it. I just found annoying at first, but really, yeah, really enchanted by it by the end. Just really enjoyed the intensity. So, yeah, great stuff by id Software. What’s your number two, Matthew? My number two is Half-Life Alex. Wow, OK, yeah, I’ve not played this, but I feel like many people have not played this. Yeah, I mean, I’ll say upfront, I’ve played a little bit of like VR. I’ve not played Masses, you know, I’m not like a complete addict. This is like by far like just the most complete VR thing I’ve played. It’s kind of feels like, you know how like Nintendo just know their hardware inside out and no one makes, you know, better games for their platforms than them. It’s a very similar deal here with Valve. Like they just know this stuff. They’ve just nailed it. It’s so nice in the hands. And then on top of that, it’s just a fucking great half-life game. Like, and a reminder of like what they used to do with these games and what they haven’t done for so long. How playful they are, how kind of compelling that world is. You know, you see all the kind of monsters and some of the characters and references or whatever, and you’re just, you know, you’re instantly there. And they’ve lost none of their kind of pacing smarts, the way that each level can have like a little mechanic, which, you know, some other developers would stretch to an entire game. But here they are throwing it away after 15 minutes, except this time it’s like VR mechanics, which are like even more precious. So to see them kind of throwing them away and just moving through it and toying with weapons. At the heart of it, you have a pair of gravity gloves, which is basically just a fix for so many problems in VR, in that you can just point at stuff and flick it into your hands. So there’s no like having to fuff around and move up to things. You can just stand in a room and play it as a pretty kind of arcade-y shooter, just pulling ammo and things into your hands. It allows really cinematic stuff where like you throw it and then you catch it in the other hand, slam an ammo in or whatever. It’s just a brilliant power fantasy, but also it understands that in a VR game where you have like total control over your hands, you want everything you can touch to do something. And it really does. That’s the amazing thing is like if there’s an object there and you think it will behave in a certain way, you probably will like in the starting area alone, you sort of start out in this kind of greenhouse and there’s all these like pens. You can pick up these felt tip pens and then just start like writing on the glass of the greenhouse and it’s all like permanent. And then when you wipe it with your other hand, it will wipe through the pen as it would on like a whiteboard. And you’re just like your mind is blown before you’ve even like seen an enemy or picked up a gun. It’s got one of the best modeled bread rolls I’ve ever seen in the game. You can pick up this bread roll and look at it and rotate it and carry it around with you and see how far you can carry this bread roll through the game. Which I don’t know why that stuck with me. I just like bread. Yeah, this is just so good. And I always feel bad talking about it because I know that there’s this huge like financial barrier to entry of owning a, you know, a decent PC and a VR headset. If you do have one like it’s just as close to a central piece of software as you can get really. It probably would be my game of the year. If it was, if it just had that like, if it wasn’t, it’s impossible one to say like if it wasn’t tied to the VR thing, but that is what defines it. But at the same time, I feel like there’s a bit of a smug thing being like, this VR game is my best game of the year. But yeah, I thought it was just so good. Yeah, I don’t know. I think the VR as discussed is sort of people are getting more and more into it. Obviously, there is a bigger barrier to entry with this and an Oculus Quest 2 game, because you can’t just play on a standalone headset. You have to have the PC hardware. Weirdly, my barber played this game. And I sort of asked me, oh, yeah, what do you do? And I was like, oh, yeah, sometimes I write about games and all this stuff. And he went, oh, yeah, I’ve just bought an Oculus Quest 2 and I’ve been playing Half-Life Alex. He talked to me about you stand on the roof of a building, you look up and you look down and just that alone, just the experience of it is so well, so well realized. And also to see City 17 in that detail when obviously it’s been, you know, more than a decade since Valve made a game set there. And so we’ve never really seen it beyond the visuals of Half-Life 2. So, yeah, you were just like, cut my hand, nerd. You just lost your tip. And, yeah, so I will play it at some point, Matthew. That’s my Valve title. Yeah, and this will be good for some, you know, the gulf between this and anything else I’ve played is so wide that, yeah, this will be solid for a long time to come, I think. Yeah, fair play to Valve for making a killer app as well. Oh, I hope they make a Half-Life 3 after this. I’m not one of those guys, but like, without spoiling it, at the end of this, it really makes you think, oh, they’re into this world again. Like, they’re into this story. They want to do more with it. It’s set up for more. I mean, god, they are so good at this stuff. Can Valve make something that’s not just some Dota Battle Passes? We will see. But yeah, that’s exciting stuff. So my number two, Matthew, is Apex Legends. Oh, I was wondering where this was going to turn up. Yes, so this was one of my true lockdown obsessions this year. And I really just amazed by what Respawn was able to achieve while mostly working from home this year in terms of rolling out new maps, new characters and new content generally, new guns, rebalancing, all that stuff with no real delays, just phenomenal work. And it sounds like there were some slightly troubled reports of how tough it was to work there early this year. But I believe they’ve been culturally changing to make it easier on the team because it’s a real moneymaker for EA Apex Legends, which I was a bit surprised to learn because on PC, even though at the start of each season it felt like there was a massive player base, it felt like it shrunk down to its veterans by the end of each season. And so we were just sorted into brackets with either really good players or people using Smurf accounts to basically like, you know, one shot noobs all over the map. And so I’m not really into Battle Royale generally, but I think that having Respawn’s expertise to bring the movement and the combat to life, you know, makes it feel like they’re other games, except you’re playing it with all these other players in a giant map. And that’s the key thing for me is just that sophistication in mechanics. And I think that Fortnite lacks that. Fortnite’s not really a good shooter. It has all the Minecraft stuff I don’t really care about. Even though I love a lot of the pop culture that’s being amalgamated into it, it’s kind of a, to me, it seems more like a flavorless mush, whereas Apex kind of has its own tone. I don’t, I mean, it’s not, the character designs are sort of, they’re a mixed bag really. I don’t think there’s, they have the kind of MOBA approach to, oh, isn’t it so wacky that this robot dances kind of, you know, variety of characters. But yeah, just a really great feeling game with really well defined character abilities. And yeah, I played this for more than 300 hours this year. There was a point where me and Phil Savage on PC Gamer were just playing this pretty much every single night from about, sometimes, the lowest point, I think, was when I messaged him at 2am saying, Are you around for a bit of Apex? And it was like, Oh, no, I’ve gone wrong. I’ve 100% gone wrong while being stuck at home for months on end. But I burned out hard on it because there was a point where I was just finding the skill ceiling. The way they matchmaking the game is that you tend to win a game and then they thrust you into endless matches with super tough players until you lose enough games that you’re bumped back down to. This is all invisible. You’re bumped back down to players who are more on your level. And then you might win another game and go up. So it feels like you’re just doing grueling game after grueling game before you can get to a game where you have a chance of winning. So I eventually just had enough of that. But some of my best experiences this year were landing on the moving train in World’s Edge and Apex Legends. The train and the party boat I’ve heard so much about. Oh, yeah, there were just hot spots to land on because there’s always good loot on them. It’s a moving train that goes around the entire map. So that alone is quite novel, I think, in a sort of Battle Royale shooter. But landing on that train and punching it out with tons of other players and seeing who can land first, who can grab the one gun, who gets beaten to death straight away, who dies before they even land, that sort of stuff. It was just the drama of it and the hilarity of it. It was a real gift. I just loved that. And then they took out the train and the party boat from the game, which is, I think, just such a stupid decision. I’m sure they have their reasons for doing this, but they took them out and made World’s Edge a worse map. And that was also another point where me and Phil actually both had this experience of like, we are too emotionally invested in this Battle Royale that we now feel betrayed when they make changes to their own game. So they took out a virtual train. And I was like, OK, I’m in too deep. I’m in too deep. I need to back off. It’s fine that they’ve done this. But yeah, I think this is what happens when a service game becomes like your emotional support through a pandemic. Yeah. And so it was inconsequential, really. But yeah, I will say I’ve had some phenomenal experience with this game this year, and I do really wish Respawn the best. They’ve made something fantastic. And hopefully over a period of many years, they’ll just keep growing and keep becoming, yeah, keep exciting people. So yeah, that was a little… I felt like a confession of shame there. I feel a weight has been lifted. So Matthew, what is your number one? My number one is Desperados 3. Wow, I did not see that coming. Whoa, there you go. There’s my wild card. Yeah, not cyberpunk. Yeah, this is the real time stealth tactics game by Mimimi, who made the wonderful Shadow Tactics, Blades of the Shogun a few years ago. It is a kind of a throwback to Desperados, but that era of like Desperados and Commandos, isometric stealth based maps where you use colourful character abilities to sneak past vision cones, distract guards, stealthily take people out, hide their bodies. There are several things here. One, I love westerns. I love cowboy games, and I really like little diorama worlds in games. Like I said, with Gears of War, it’s like a personal thing. So to see all these western tropes kind of shrunken down into these miniatures, that is just naturally very, very satisfying to me. That ticks a big box. The other thing I really love about this game is the kind of the sense of interplay between the characters and the fact that you can freeze time and program in moves. You can set up these absolutely like audacious kind of stealth moves, where, you know, as one pair of eyes is getting snuffed out, you’re dragging someone else into the bushes, all this stuff’s triggering. It’s the closest thing I’ve played to the sense of a kind of a heist being pulled off like clockwork. There’s not actually a heist in the game, weirdly, but I felt like every level was kind of like that. It’s really a game that feels totally fair in the amount of information it gives you. It’s got this amazing interface that just shows you what everyone can see, what everyone can hear, what any particular move is going to do, how things are going to behave. It gives you everything you need to know to pull off these amazing things. Yeah, it may be an odd one for a game of the year pick, but just to see something done so perfectly, I think it’s the best of its genre. I have mild nostalgia for the older Desperados and Commandos games, but for me, this was just executed perfectly, plus the thematic setting. I really like it. It’s a gorgeous game. It really takes you on an awesome tour of all these Western tropes. Good character abilities. They’ve added in this controversial voodoo witch, which a lot of people don’t like. They’re like, oh, magic shouldn’t be in this game. But it’s magic that’s very controlled and limited in the way that it is in Dishonored. You can do some cool things where you attach two characters. So what you do to one, you do to another, like Dishonored’s domino ability, and you can do some mild brainwashing. But you can have these immense powers, and it still doesn’t break the game. I think speaks to the ingenuity of the developers. Yeah, I just thought this was just perfectly done. It’s the game which made me just the most happy to play through it. You know, I’ve been picking way through it. It’s got a great, like, objective system where you can go back and replay the levels and try and achieve different things in them. Kind of like in a similar way to Hitman. Weirdly, this ticks a lot of my Hitman boxes too. Yeah, and in a year of just chaos, this was a game about, you know, like I said earlier, this is the metaphor. It’s about kind of taking control and just really executing something perfectly. And I just found it very, very rewarding. I think this is about as good as it got for me this year. Oh, nice. Well, I do remember Shadow Tactics being one of those games that was sort of like a cult hit and I heard similar things about how nice it is to see your stacks of characters just pull things off in unison. Yeah, yeah, I’ve got this and we’ll give it a try. What’s Formats on? Is it on GNOME consoles as well as PC? It’s also on PS4 and Xbox. I don’t think it’s on any of the Game Pass things, but buy this game. Tell me you want more games like this. I think they’re self-publishing their next real-time tactic-stealth thing that they do. I wish them all the luck. I think they’re just a really great studio. They really know what they’re doing. They know what they like. They’re really sticking with it. I’ll be intrigued to see what their next entry is. Before we move on to my number one, Matthew, I’m really curious to know that I know you played The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost Tsushima this year. How come neither of those made your list? Ghost Tsushima, I just fell massively out of love with it. I thought it was a game that made an incredible first impression but ran out of ideas after about four hours. And unfortunately, there’s tens and tens and tens of hours of it. I just found like I was doing the same thing over and over again. I thought it was very boring, even though it had nice coloured trees. I will give it that. The Last of Us Part 2, again, I really liked it. I thought it massively outstayed its welcome. If it was almost half the length and if people have played it, they’ll understand why that… It’s a sort of game that doubles up for some story reasons. And I just felt that the second half of it was just too similar. It was just dragging me through similar things. I just thought I found it all so bleak. Yeah, I don’t know. I do like Naughty Dog a lot. I much prefer Uncharted. I just prefer the tone. I like the adventuring spirit. I like the settings of it. I like the globe-trotting-ness of it. This felt a little too one-note for me in that regard. And also, I’m kind of a bit bored of some of their tricks now. Like, there’s some stuff they’ve been over-relying on. You know, I like all the stealth, the sort of quite cinematic kind of punchy stealth. That’s all fine. But it’s the sequences where they go, oh, this is a narrative sequence, and you’re going to walk around a peril-free environment and press X and find the prompts, and there’s going to be some bespoke animation, some comedy dialogue, and you know, it’s the character beats, which everyone else seems to respond really well to. But I find incredibly smug. I think they’ve driven that thing into the ground. It’s basically ever since Nathan Drake patted that fucking ox or whatever it was in Uncharted 2, and everyone went, oh, wasn’t that nice where the action stopped and you patted that ox? And they were like, right, from now on, it’s ox patting for like a third of the game. You know, it’s the old, oh, they’re playing Crash Bandicoot in Uncharted 4. Absolutely fine. But then it’s the, oh, you walk around the same house at the end of Uncharted 4, and I was like, no, thank you. And I thought this game went so heavy on that kind of, oh, isn’t this, isn’t this delicate? Isn’t this a delicate special character moment? And you’re like, yes, incredibly boring compared to the rest of the game. And I know that you can do this stuff and like find a new innovation. You’re meant to be the cutting edge and you’re just repeating yourselves here. Yeah. So that’s my thoughts on The Last of Us Part 2. I don’t believe you were truly fine with playing Crash Bandicoot within Uncharted 4. I bet you were livid. You know, it’s a garbage game. So the idea of these two people like, I’m having such a good time. Like, absolutely no way. Like, if Nathan Drake pulled out like fucking N64 and they fired up a bit of two player gold, I’d be like, yes. But that would be very off-brand. Now regular listeners of this podcast will know that I like to get Matthew to slag off PlayStation-era 3D platformers. That’s like a kink of mine, I guess. I just enjoy, I just know that as soon as you get started, that’s your fucking Spyro. How dare you exist, Spyro? That would have been a real burn if they’d gone for Spyro instead of Crash and they’re like, oh, this is great. Yeah, I must admit that I played about three hours The Last of Us Part II and I will play the rest of it, but I don’t know. There’s stuff in it that is amazing, like from a technical level, some of their level design. I mean, it’s incredibly ambitious. It is like powerfully cinematic while still being interactive in a lot of places, but I just, I don’t know. I just felt like it was the greatest hits of stuff I’d seen from them before. Well, hey, them’s the breaks, Matthew. Them’s are the breaks. Uncharted 5, please, though. I will play that. Yeah, I mean, hopefully. It feels like an Uncharted Lost Legacy sequel is the way to go there, doesn’t it? Yeah, so my number one Matthew is such a conventional, boring choice. I kind of hate myself for it. It’s Destiny 2. Actually, I’d completely forgotten that you hadn’t said Destiny 2 up until now. Yeah, because we’d already talked about it a bit earlier, but there’s a reason I put this on the list. So this year, a lot of players will know that Destiny 2 was full of stuff after a few expansions. There were a lot of quests and a lot of planets, and while it made the game feel quite amazing when you first turn it on and behold all of these different locations you can go to, a lot of the quests and rewards were a bit redundant, and so a lot of Destiny is just repetition anyway. So the idea that you were doing repetitive tasks to unlock pointless loot just didn’t really work anymore. So this year Bungie decided to shutter three planets, I think, and delete them from the game basically. Although if you’ve learned loot from those planets then you get to keep the loot in the new edition of the game. But I think this is a good move because it really flushed out your quest log and in advance of them doing this for the launch of Beyond Light, which is the latest expansion, they essentially gave you enough notice to get things done. Because raids are like the ultimate endgame activity in Destiny. If you’ve played an MMO, you know what a raid is. It’s a big high-level activity where you need multiple players, six in the case of a Destiny raid, and you go through a dungeon solving puzzles and fighting high-level enemies. Destiny’s raids are really, really good content. They’re level designers at their most imaginative. Usually it involves some form of carrying a ball, dunking it somewhere, killing a big troll-like enemy and then dunking another ball and doing it in a timeframe before your entire party gets wiped out by the enemy you’re facing. There’s a lot of those kind of activities, but I did every single raid in Destiny 2 this year, minus the one they’ve just released with the new expansion, with a group of people. Around the summertime, when I burned out on Apex, I kind of moved over to Destiny as my, well, this will solve all my problems game. And yeah, I must say it was a real pleasure to go through these. Some of the raids they’ve actually taken out of the game were really good. And I think it’s a real shame that they’re gone, because they were fantastic to kind of figure out. I mean, in most cases, we knew how to do it because the other players in the party had done them, but the actual learning of the process and putting these very intricate, sometimes having to form a line so that a beam of light could pass through every single member of the party to kind of conduct with another side of the room. That’s the kind of stuff that you have to do on the fly while you’re also shooting loads of enemies hitting you from different directions. I must say I really enjoyed figuring those out. They felt like team building exercises. They were intense enough that they did tax me a little bit. I felt like I accomplished something at the end. I really got to give it to Bungie. Those raids are fantastic. They also added a dungeon this year called Prophecy, which involves you going across a synthwave desert, lots of purple lights, and chasing this big monster man. There’s a really fun room where you go into this room, and it’s like a cube-shaped room. You can see different parts of levels on every side of the ceiling and the side of the walls and stuff. Then you basically have to dunk colored motes into one of the four arrows around the room to move to a different part of the cube. Eventually, once you’ve gone around the entire cube, you fight the boss and you move out of the cube, and then you’ve completed that part of it. Then there’s another part that’s basically Rainbow Road from Mario Kart, where you’re taking your hover bikes across this giant outer space racetrack. You can fall off so many times. Doing that with Phil and Tom, who I play the game with, that was so fun. Destiny has got a lot of horseshit in it. There’s a lot of bad quests and a lot of time wasted and pointless grind, but I found it a really good podcast game this year. It scratched several inches. I think there’s some real merit to it. Even though there’s a lot of nonsense in there and there are parts of it I just do not enjoy at all. Destiny was the game this year. I’ve only ever played the very basics campaign run through of Destiny 1 and 2 and I love hearing about the raids and I’d love to experience one, but I am just not willing to put in any time doing all the other bullshit before you’re ready for it and also just getting the group together. I’m very envious of it, but I think I can experience it vicariously through you, which is nice. Yeah, I’ll always explain the things that happen to you if you… Yeah, I also do. I like the fact that you showed me this document early on, which was like your roadmap of all the bullshit you had to do just before they deleted it that I think Phil had made for you. And it was hilarious because it was the work of someone who clearly played hundreds of hours and knew this thing inside out, but also it sheared this stain for all of it. It was so dismissive. It was just like, oh, yeah, you got to do this for 10 hours, but it’s crap. So watch out. It’s like, oh, fantastic. But this is its biggest cheerleader. This is how they feel about it. I know that its magical bits must be so magic, considering that I know its bad bits are so unloved. And yet people still do it. Yeah, their entire modes in the game, they either forgotten about or they don’t balance properly. So they’ve completely ruined Gambit, which is a really fun mode where basically two teams are doing the same thing. They’re trying to destroy this boss. You have to do it by you kill enemies, you pick up motes and you bank them in this moat bank. And then if you bank so many at once, you send a big enemy to the other side, which guards their bank and stops them from sending enemies your side. So it’s a race to kill as many enemies as possible. Send enemies to the side and you’re racing to get to the boss phase, at which point you fight the boss. But there’s also a really cool element where you can teleport from your map to the other players’ map. And while they’re carrying motes, you can kill the players before they dunk in order to get an advantage. I had just a couple of weeks ago, I had a run where I went over with Xenophage, which is this really powerful machine gun I have. You can hit enemies at a really high range with it. And I killed all four of their party members while they were carrying motes. And the sheer thrill of appearing in someone else’s game and killing every single human player without them realising you’re there or where you are felt so good, my heart races so fast when I go over there. But now they’ve made that mode not nearly as fun. It moves too quickly now and you can’t really change the course of it once you’re behind. But that’s an example of the game is so big that it doesn’t feel like they’re thinking properly about how every element of it works each time they update the game. So it’s definitely up and down. And the quest log thing was very funny. Phil audited my entire quest log, told me what to keep, what to ditch. And Phil is the biggest Destiny fan I know and he will say, like you say, entire parts of the game are bullshit. So it’s kind of like a Queer Eye process for my quest log. I will sort your life out. This will be good for your well-being to get rid of these shitty quests from year one of Destiny 2. I hope I can convey to people at home that I know there is a big portion of people who are just like, yeah, I’m a Destiny player and Destiny is the thing and whatever. But there was a real reason I fell in love with it this year. Just when you see that game at its best, it is pure magic and it is a good, also a good kind of like, I will just listen to five episodes of this film podcast I like while grinding for a sniper rifle I’d quite like to have. So yeah, it fulfilled both those needs. Hopefully that conveys it quite well. I think you’ve more than justified it. Well, we’ll take one more short break Matthew, and then we’ve got one final short section to go through as well. Hello, Matthew. Hello. So, what was the most disappointing game of 2020? I realize now that we should have done a whole podcast of you slagging off games that you played this year that you didn’t like as much as other people, because that was quite fun for Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part II. Most disappointing game? So I’ve picked Resident Evil 3, though it was fine. And I don’t know if my expectations were sky high. I often struggle with disappointing, because I don’t get too hyped for anything in particular. Like, there’s a couple of games I’d be heartbroken if they turned out to be bad. And this wasn’t one of them. But I thought Resident Evil 2, the remake, was just so confident and exciting and brilliantly done. I thought it was a real kind of… I like Resident Evil 7 as well, don’t get me wrong, but this felt like a sort of return to form in a different way. You know, it was the kind of… of those sort of third person over the shoulder, it was the best one they’d done since Resident Evil 4. And I just thought, oh, this is a team that’s really on top of this. And I know I think it was a slightly different team working on Resident Evil 3, but I just thought this was really, like, flat, it lacked any kind of tension. It felt really, like, linear and simple. And what I didn’t understand was that the standout Resident Evil 2 for me is I loved the Mr. X stuff, you know, where he was stalking you. And I thought, oh, when they get their hands on Nemesis, the famous stalking enemy, they are going to do some real amazing stuff with that. And he was shit. Like, he just turned up in these really scripted moments throughout the game, basically quit on events, half of them. And it had none of the brains, none of the smarts. I just don’t understand how they did what they did with Resident Evil 2. And then they made Resident Evil 3. So I guess, yeah, the disappointment was that I thought that they were going to supercharge Nemesis into this terrifying kind of pursuit thing. That would be on your heels for the whole game. It just isn’t that. Maybe, I don’t know if it… I’m not as attached to Resident Evil 3. I know Resident Evil 2 a lot better, so maybe it’s… I don’t know if it’s an inherent flaw of the game, but… Yeah, this one just didn’t do it for me. I think I did see someone saying that there was one part of the original game they just didn’t bring over. And it’s a very short game, this one, too. I’ve not finished it, but here it’s less than six hours long. Yeah. And it feels to me that Capcom earned all this goodwill with how good that Resident Evil 2 remake was, and then just threw it away on this kind of… like, also ran, like, extended DLC feeling thing that’s attached to a shitty multiplayer game no one wanted. Maybe that’s harsh, actually. I’ve not played that multiplayer game. It’s nothing special. Well, they’ve always struggled with Resident Evil multiplayer, haven’t they? They’ve never quite made that work. But I just think that why make that when you can just make another version of Resident Evil 3 that’s as good as that Resident Evil 2 remake, that feels as full-featured and well thought out, and, like you say, that does something interesting with Nemesis, because the Mr. X stuff is really bold in Resident Evil 2 remakes. They had to make that entire police station work with Mr. X pursuing you, so you could legit survive and still move around. But the entire location has to feel cramped and quite small generally anyway, because that’s how it was always designed. So it was a really, yeah, like you say, it was the best Resident Evil third-person game since Resident Evil 4. So, yeah, it was exciting at first, this is coming a year later, but it feels like no one is talking about this game anymore. No, it just came and just like instantly evaporated. Yeah, it’s a real shame. So whatever, yeah, whatever, if Capcom decides to remake, I know, Code Veronica next, hopefully just they do a better job than they did here. But rumors are that they’re actually going to remake Resident Evil 4, which seems a bit pointless to me, but it depends how they do it, I suppose. So my biggest disappointment, Matthew, was Marvel’s Avengers. Right. I didn’t even finish this. I always thought this game was going to be bad after I saw it at E3 in 2019. I said at the time that Marvel’s Avengers looks less than super on its first showing, which I think was my headline for the preview. A classic superhero headline. It was quite a critical preview. And during the hands-on phase, you don’t always, or not even hands-on, this is the first look, you don’t always see very critical previews of games when you haven’t played them. You don’t want to write them off too early because it’s unfair. But I just had a bad feeling about this. I think a lot of people did. That first trailer wasn’t very well received where they did all the A-Day San Francisco stuff. The character designs weren’t well received. They felt like knockoff action figures. And I think that is true in the game as well. I don’t know why the Spider-Man in Marvel, in the Spider-Man Insomniac game is so spot on. And yet these Avengers feel off-brand. I can’t work out why that is. I think it’s just there’s just some inherent, when you look at them, you have to believe that they’re the superhero. And for some reason with Avengers, you don’t quite do that. Now, there are definitely things that this game does well. The portrayal of Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel in the game is really, really nicely done and actually feels a bit like Spider-Man in place, I think, in terms of the solo storytelling. But the very, very poor decision to turn this into a Destiny-style loot game, just a terrible, terrible choice, made it a different time. Obviously, trying to cash in on a genre that has kind of died off. People don’t really want that sort of live-service play-it-forever type of game for everything, even like The Division 2 kind of struggled despite being the best version of that kind of game that I’ve played. I don’t know why you wanted to do loot in your superhero game when superheroes don’t have loot. They just have their costumes and they have launched with this very weighty plan. They always seemed flawed to say, oh, we’re going to keep adding free content constantly in the years following the game. And you’re there thinking, OK, my dude, but you have to make sure that the base game is actually good and actually exciting. And while there are things this game gets right, I do think the superheroes all feel distinctive from each other. Yeah, that’s the thing I would say for it. I think they do a reasonable mechanical job of representing quite a disparate group of heroes. Definitely. They all look and feel different. And the animation team at Crystal Dynamics did a phenomenal job. They all look really good the way they move. But the types of enemies you fight are really boring. Just fighting these AIM robots and that dude with a big head whose name I forgot on, who’s the main… Doctor Big Head. Yeah, Doctor Big Head. That was it. And I think it was telling that at the same time this game was kind of getting slammed by people pointing out how few players were actually playing it and the reports that hadn’t made all of its money back yet. There was an event in Fortnite where Galactus turned up and there were loads of Marvel superheroes running around. And you’re there thinking, right, well, whatever Marvel was thinking, they have timed this event at the same time the Avengers game is coming out. But it’s disappointing for sure. And so I don’t know why you could look at that Fortnite thing. You can see the potential of an Avengers game. I kind of wish that there’s a reality where this game felt more full featured, had better enemy types, a better main villain in the base game. But then the kind of post-game thing is that, OK, Galactus is coming. So in 12 months after we’ve added like six new superheroes, Galactus will turn up. And that will be a raid that you do with like, you know, the full Avengers team go in together to fight Galactus. And that will be the thing we do. And his army of AIM robots. But they never quite, they just never really, it never really felt like they had like, they saw people in the dream of being in the Avengers in this game. And when you are with other players in the kind of co-op environments in the game, because obviously some sections of the story are single player only, it feels quite janky and weird. You’re like in the lobby and there’s like a Hulk dressed up as a pimp, because they’ve unlocked the Hulk pimp suit. Yeah. And yeah, the loop doesn’t feel meaningfully interesting anyway, but I just think that there were so many mistakes made with this game. It’s a real bummer because when you’d see that leaked list of characters, they want to add to the game like Captain Marvel and Spider-Man and Black Panther and Winter Soldier and War Machine and all these great characters you love from the film. It just feels like it’s never going to get there unless they manage to somehow turn it around with the next-gen console version launch and I’m sure putting Spider-Man in it will generate quite a lot of interest. But yeah, what a real shame that this wasn’t a slam dunk. Based on the biggest intellectual property in the world right now, how did they get it on Matthew? Yeah, it’s sad. Yeah, so yeah, that was my disappointment of the year. But I kind of feel bad for the developers because… Yeah, I just want Crystal Dynamics to reboot Tomb Raider again. I just like Tomb Raider. You just want another very puzzly Tomb Raider. I just want them, yeah, jumping around them toons. I want to go around the world. I basically want Uncharted 5 also from them. Okay, good stuff. So yeah, Matthew, what’s on your pile of shame that you’re going to try and tick off in 2021? Well, I don’t know if I’ll tick this one off but like Animal Crossing New Horizons, I just didn’t play it. And I felt like I missed out on the whole conversation there. But I wouldn’t say it’s like… I don’t think I will go back and play it at this point. I think I feel like I should probably have played Final Fantasy 7 Remake because it feels like in the end of year discussions, it’s the game which pops up the most that I just don’t have a take on at all. Like, I watched Catherine play bits of it, but sort of switched off because she seemed to be squeezing through a lot of tight gaps to find urchins. And I thought, hmmm, this isn’t for me. That is at least 10% of that game. And I don’t have a massive attachment admittedly to Final Fantasy 7, but I feel like I should probably give it a go. The thing I probably will delve into at some point in the holidays, or maybe I’ll leave it until they’ve fixed it with a few patches, is Empire of Sin, which is the kind of gangster Prohibition era strategy game from Romero Games. Yeah, I love gangstery stuff. The idea of a kind of strategy game meets the Untouchables with kind of ex-commy bits, where you’ve got little hoodlums running around shooting each other Tommy guns. I love the pitch of this game. I was really, really excited for covering it, but by all accounts, it’s slightly rough around the edges at launch. I’ll let them tidy it up in true kind of paradox fashion and give that a go. But on the whole, there’s not a lot of things where I feel like, oh yeah, I missed out on anything. Yeah, I missed out on loads of stuff this year. So I did kind of avoid big single player games while I was, you know, investing time in the Apex and Destiny nonsense. But that’s coming to an end now. And I have started playing Ghost of Tsushima. And I will play The Last of Us Part 2, though I was hoping they’d add some kind of 60 frames per second patch to it. But it doesn’t know that’s going to happen, or at least not soon. Another one I bought this year and here is good from a friend is 13 Sentinels, Aegis Rim, which is by Vanillaware, the developers of, well, they’ve developed loads of cool kind of older games from like the PS3 generation and earlier like Odin Sphere and Muramasa the Demon Blade, which I’m sure you covered in lots of detail on NGamer, Matthew. And yeah, so they returned with this game that’s apparently like a hybrid of, it kind of is like a visual novel primarily, but has a lot of other interesting stuff going on. So there was also just a Polygon piece that went up about this saying the best PlayStation exclusive game of the year is something you haven’t played yet. It was a more eloquent headline than that, but I don’t remember what the headline was. So yeah, I’ll fancy playing that. And Miles Morales, Spider-Man, I’ve just retrieved my PS5 for my girlfriend after lending it to her for a month, looking a bit touch and go on whether I get it back, but it has panned out. So yeah, I’ll play that. So yeah, Matthew, my one final question in this last podcast of the year that we’re recording. What will 2021’s best game be? Oh, God. I mean, oh no, I’ve been really struggling with this one. Is it going to be another Hitman answer? Well, like the game I’m genuinely looking forward to, and it’s pretty, because it’s quite immediate, is Hitman 3. That’s super high on my list. There’s quite a lot of vague dates and stuff. You know, like if they were saying Breath of the World 2 is 2021, which I don’t think they have. Surely though. Well, if Breath of the World 2, let’s say theoretically that is coming out in 2021. That is the game I’m most excited for. I’m so intrigued to see what they do with that game, you know, given they’ve got this huge open world. Will they go to a different open world? Will they change it radically in some way? Will they, you know, reuse the same space and some clever means? You know, I have no idea how they follow that up because it feels so complete to me. I’d love it if they put in some ocean stuff. Like, I’d love to have a mix of Breath of the World and Wind Waker, you know, maybe branch out the world that way. Who knows? But yeah, Zelda, theoretically, of what we know is coming, Hitman 3 for sure. Yeah, it does feel like there is, it’s been a fairly quiet year for Nintendo in terms of big new stuff. Obviously, it’s had the Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity launch, but they didn’t develop that. So I think people are curious about what their in-house studios are working on beyond Animal Crossing. So yeah, I agree with you on Zelda, but I don’t know, do you think we could see a 3D Mario this year? Because they released so many things close together at the start of Switch. I think whatever happens is that when they start coming, I imagine we’re going to have a tidal wave. So you think, oh, we’re going to get another 3D Mario, we’re going to get Zelda, probably going to get another Mario Kart, like a proper follow up to 8. Because they only did the redo of 8 on Switch. It wasn’t original. I just feel like they could hit you with a second golden age within Switch. It would be amazing if they did. Super Mario Odyssey 2 feels like they’ve been mad not to, like a love for that game and it was so critically well received and it sold so well. They did it with Galaxy 2. I hope so. I hope next year blossoms into an amazing year. I’m not holding out much hope for Metroid Prime 4 because apparently that’s still in nightmare development town. Well, my choice Matthew is going to be Deathloop from Arcane Studios, this looping timeline assassination first-person game. So the Dishonored series is just kind of peerless. I think it’s the same developer, Arcane Leon, making it. So I think that that is just going to wow games critics and then sell no copies like Dishonored seem to do. But yeah, I think that they just always make really sublime first-person games in lovely environments with really intricate systems. They are masters of that. So very excited to see that. My only tiny concern with that one is that it seems a lot more action-focused than before. Why aren’t they just selling it that way? Well, that’s… yeah, I don’t know. Definitely the trailers have shown lots of machine gun and you’re running and you slide and you shoot a guy in the head or whatever. And I wouldn’t say like gun feel and kind of action is necessarily their strong suit. It’s interesting because when you watch a lot of the sort of Dishonored, I don’t know, like speed runners, they run around like they are Spider-Man basically in terms of their movement. It’s pretty phenomenal to watch. They’re quite big into the Aquabatsics. Yeah, maybe I’m just shit sick. No, no, I am too. But I wonder if they kind of look to those and thought, oh, what if we did make an action game that had this kind of pace? But yeah, I do agree with you, actually. The shooting is not really why you play Dishonored. So, yeah. I mean, I’m just interested. I like you. I have total faith based on their track record, but I am interested to see how that game actually like feels, you know. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for joining us for what turned out to be another super long podcast as we counted down some top 10s, but hopefully you enjoyed it. And yes, we’ll be back with another episode in a week’s time. We release new episodes on Friday. Thank you very much for listening. If you want to subscribe, that’d be great. We can be followed at Backpage Pod on Twitter. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Matthew, you are. I’m MrBazzill, underscore pesto. You can also email us your thoughts at backpagegames at gmail.com. If you send us correspondence, we might read it out. Thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back soon. Bye bye.