{"id":1143,"date":"2018-12-22T13:56:08","date_gmt":"2018-12-22T18:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/?p=1143"},"modified":"2018-12-24T11:18:27","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T16:18:27","slug":"games-of-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/2018\/12\/games-of-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Games of 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think 2018 was quite as good a year for games as last year was (there was nothing that blew me away the way Breath of the Wild<\/em> did), but there were still quite a few good games.\u00a0 I played close to 30 games that came out this year, and narrowing this list down took a bit of work.\u00a0 I’m definitely leaving some good games out of here.\u00a0 I know most of these kinds of lists go in multiples of 5 or 10, but there were 11 games that I wanted to talk about, so that’s how long this list is.<\/p>\n

We’ve hit a point where there are far more good games released each year than anyone could reasonably be expected to play.\u00a0 I still haven’t had time to dive into Return of the Obra Dinn<\/em>, the latest game from Lucas Pope, who previously made one of my favourite games of the past decade – Papers, Please<\/em>.\u00a0 I recently started Assassin’s Creed Odyssey<\/em> but I haven’t played enough to form many opinions.\u00a0 I bought God of War <\/em>during a recent Playstation Network holiday sale, and everyone says it’s great, but I haven’t had time for that yet either.\u00a0 The Red Strings Club<\/em> sounds like it could be really interesting.\u00a0 I’ve heard lots of good things about Star Traders: Frontiers<\/em>.\u00a0 I’m intrigued by what I’ve heard of Vampyr<\/em>.\u00a0 There just isn’t enough time.\u00a0 So I make no claim to this being any definitive kind of list.\u00a0 It’s just a bunch of games I enjoyed playing, and maybe you’ll like them too.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

11. Dragon Quest XI<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Dragon Quest XI<\/em> is very much a throw-back JRPG.\u00a0 It has turn-based battles where the player controls a party of four different characters with roles like healer, mage, and warrior, each with their own sets of pre-determined abilities (with a bit of latitude for players to choose as they level up).\u00a0 The story is about a band of plucky adventurers travelling across the globe, going from city to city in an effort to stop an evil force that threatens the entire world.\u00a0 It’s the kind of game that mostly doesn’t get made any more, but it’s very much my kind of game.\u00a0 There’s a lot that I like about Dragon Quest XI, <\/em>but I have to give special mention to the enemy animations, which are unique, full of character, and often pretty funny.\u00a0 They’ve also done a lot to sand away some of the annoying edges of many JRPGs; for example, the game regularly auto-saves, so you’re never going to lose a huge chunk of progress if your party falls in battle.\u00a0 Mostly it’s a very good game.<\/p>\n

It does have a couple of things holding it towards the back of my list, however.\u00a0 One is that it’s a very easy game.\u00a0 There’s not a lot of strategy required to win, even in boss fights.\u00a0 But the bigger issue is that, like most modern role-playing games, it’s just too long.\u00a0 I’ve played it for about 35 hours, and I gather that I’m only a bit over half-way through the game.\u00a0 How Long To Beat<\/a> has the game taking between 55 and 80 hours to finish, and there just isn’t enough here to justify that length. It could easily be half as long just by cutting down on the amount of grinding, and the player wouldn’t miss anything in the process.<\/p>\n

\n

10. Northgard<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’d heard good things about Northgard<\/em> for a while before I got around to actually playing it.\u00a0 I knew it was a real-time strategy game, but I thought it was heavily combat-focused in the vein of something like Warcraft<\/em>.\u00a0 It turns out that’s not the case at all.\u00a0 It’s much closer to a 4X game that plays out in real time.\u00a0 The most pressing concern in Northgard<\/em> is balancing food and lumber, not troop composition.\u00a0 Food is necessary, obviously, to support your growing population, while lumber is used for building structures and for heat.\u00a0 The latter is especially important because of the game’s defining feature, which is that once every in-game year, winter rolls around, and during winter you need far more heat and grow far less food.\u00a0 Because of that, you have to make sure you’re building and storing surpluses during the good months.\u00a0 You’ll often find yourself re-allocating workers during the winter months just to make sure your people don’t freeze or starve.<\/p>\n

That’s the core challenge of the game, but there’s much more than that to do, as you have to balance your financial economy, gather knowledge, explore new territories, and defend yourself from attacks.\u00a0 In a major break from most real-time strategy games, most of the combat in Northgard<\/em> is against small bands of NPCs that you need to clear out to take over new territory, although larger skirmishes against other factions are certainly possible.<\/p>\n

On the whole Northgard<\/em> turned out to be a game about growing your civilization while managing resources.\u00a0 It’s much closer to a Euro boardgame (think Agricola<\/em> or Puerto Rico<\/em>) than Warcraft<\/em>.\u00a0 And so I found myself unexpectedly quite taken with Northgard<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

9. Battletech<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As anyone who’s read my game of the year lists from other recent years would likely know, I’ve been a big fan of the recent Shadowrun<\/em> computer games.\u00a0 So when I found out that the studio that made them was working on a moderning-up of one of their other old tabletop games, Battletech<\/em>, I was pretty excited.\u00a0 Mechs just aren’t my thing in the way that cyberpunk is, so I didn’t like Battletech<\/em> as much as Shadowrun<\/em>, but it’s still a game I had fun with.\u00a0 Like Shadowrun<\/em>, Battletech<\/em> is a turn-based tactics game that draws pretty liberally from the more recent XCom <\/em>games, melding a lot of XCom<\/em>‘s <\/em> user interface design with the old Battletech<\/em> tabletop game.\u00a0 Tactical RPGs are among my favourite kind of games, so it’s no surprise that I liked this one.\u00a0 It’s a lot of fun to engage in battles of attrition with these giant robots blasting rockets at each other and slugging it out.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I didn’t put a huge amount of time into this one.\u00a0 I spend all day at work sitting at a computer desk, so when I come home from work I usually don’t want to dump dozens of hours into a game that will require me to sit in front of the computer even more.\u00a0 Still, this one was fun and I hope I can find some time to go back and give it more of an opportunity.<\/p>\n

\n

8. Ni No Kuni 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’m a really big fan of the first Ni No Kuni<\/em>, a game that combined the art of Studio Ghibli with the design sensibilities of older turn-based JRPGs.\u00a0 The sequel is, unfortunately, not quite as good.\u00a0 It’s lost a lot of what made the original so charming, like it’s melancholy story about a boy learning to cope with his mother’s unexpected death.\u00a0 The first Ni No Kuni<\/em> also had a neat and somewhat novel mechanic where the player had to travel between the “real” world that we’re familiar with and the fantastical world where most of the game takes place.\u00a0 In the first game it was implied, although never stated outright, that the fantasy world was actually a game in the main character’s imagination that he was playing to try to come to grips with losing his mother.\u00a0 The sequel all but abandons the connection between the two worlds, but it keeps a lot of the other things that worked in the first game.<\/p>\n

The art, as you can likely tell from the screenshot above, is gorgeous.\u00a0 The whole game looks like it was painted for a Studio Ghibli movie.\u00a0 The characters are unique and expressive and frequently quite charming.\u00a0 The story itself is fairly simplistic, but it’s also very kind-hearted in a way that I really appreciated.\u00a0 While there is a central villain to be defeated eventually, the bulk of the game is spent as protaganist Evan attempts to build up his kingdom by forming alliances with all of the various kingdoms across the globe, which he does primarily by helping people overcome their problems.\u00a0 There’s a moderately complicated town management layer where the player builds and invests in buildings in their castle town, staffs them with characters who have relevant skills, and tries to improve their kingdom to better face the challenges ahead.<\/p>\n

The combat has a lot in common with the Tales<\/em> RPGs, moving briskly as the player controls one character while the AI handles the rest of the party.\u00a0 It’s a pretty easy game on the whole, but it moves at a brisk pace that kept me engaged.\u00a0 I think my play time upon finishing the final dungeon was something like 35 hours, and I appreciated playing an RPG that respected my time by moving through its story and then finishing up.<\/p>\n

\n

7. Into the Breach<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I never really clicked with FTL<\/em>, the previous (and highly successful) game from Subset Games.\u00a0 Into the Breach<\/em>, on the other hand, really worked for me.\u00a0 I’ve heard this game described as “kaiju chess”, and that’s a pretty good phrase.\u00a0 “Turn-based Pacific Rim<\/em>” might be another good description.\u00a0 It looks like a tactical RPG, or possibly even a strategy game, but it’s much closer to a puzzle game, albeit a puzzle game that’s pretty open-ended in terms of how each puzzle can be solved.\u00a0 There’s not a lot going on visually in Into the Breach<\/em>; every level is on an 8×8 grid, the animations are simple, the graphics are somewhat plain.\u00a0 But it’s got a masterful user interface that conveys exactly the right information in just a single screen, with all of the information you need to make decisions right in front of you.<\/p>\n

It’s making, and then committing to, decisions that comprises most of the gameplay in Into the Breach<\/em>.\u00a0 You can test out most of your actions before committing to them, and enemies always telegraph their next attack, so it’s a game about optimising a limited set of resources.\u00a0 The game is typically about spacial manipulation.\u00a0 While it’s certainly possible, and sometimes advantageous to deal direct damage to the enemies, more often than not you’re trying to use abilities that will move things around on the board in order to negate enemy attacks and cause them to destroy each other.\u00a0 The most interesting twist is that your goal isn’t to defeat all the enemies, nor is it to avoid death for your characters.\u00a0 Rather, you have to defend the civilian population by preventing the giant enemy insects from damaging buildings.\u00a0 Keep the enemies at bay for a few turns and they retreat, leaving the population safe.<\/p>\n

\n

6. Yakuza 6<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For the longest time I thought the Yakuza <\/em>games were just “Grand Theft Auto<\/em> in Japan”, but having finally been convinced to give them a chance I now understand that that isn’t what they are at all.\u00a0 They’re not open-world crime simulators so much as they’re soap operas with a lot of punching.\u00a0 The Yakuza<\/em> games are like if you took the old school beat ’em ups like Double Dragon<\/em> or Ninja Turtles<\/em>, gave them a fresh coat of paint, and threw a melodramatic (but effective) story of warring crime families on top.\u00a0 Another way I might describe them is to say that they’re like The Bouncer<\/em> if it had actually been able to deliver on its promise of dynamic combat where you could use almost anything in the environment as a weapon.<\/p>\n

Yakuza 6<\/em> is the latest in this series of games, and it tells the story of series protaganist Kazuma Kiryu, now getting older and tired, trying to leave the life of crime behind once and for all.\u00a0 The first few hours of the story barely even involve any fighting.\u00a0 The early going sees Kazuma trying to take care of a baby, which requires doing things like taking him on late night walks around town and playing a baby bouncing mini-game that helps calm the baby’s crying.\u00a0 It eventually escalates, of course, and in true Yakuza<\/em> fashion it escalates to implausibly dramatic stakes.\u00a0 But it does something that far too few games do, which is taking time to establish its characters, setting, and stakes before kicking everything into high gear.<\/p>\n

And I haven’t even gotten into how weird<\/em> these games are.\u00a0 There’s an entirely optional real-time strategy game where you build up a gang to take on a rival gang that’s led by actual Japanese pro wrestlers.\u00a0 There’s another mini-game where you recruit people for a minor league baseball team that you manage.\u00a0 There’s a cat cafe that you can fill up with stray cats that you chase down on the streets of Kamurocho.\u00a0 It’s such a weird game.\u00a0 But a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

\n

5. Overcooked 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I had a ton of fun playing the first Overcooked<\/em>, so I was happy to hear that there was a sequel coming out this year.\u00a0 Overcooked<\/em> is a co-operative cooking game, but it’s so much more than that.\u00a0 It’s full of completely madcap humour, like mice who will steal cheese if you leave it out where they can reach it, or portals that you have to warp through to travel from one part of the kitchen to another.\u00a0 One level, seen in the screenshot above, has players split between two hot air balloons that rotate around each each.\u00a0 One side has all the ingredients, and the other side has all the stoves, so players have to co-ordinate to make sure they’re working effectively.<\/p>\n

And that’s one of my favourite things about this game: it’s impossible to win without co-operating.\u00a0 It’s not a game where one player can get really good and do all the work while the other players are along for the ride.\u00a0 If everyone isn’t doing their bit, the recipes aren’t getting cooked.\u00a0 That could be frustrating if you’re in a group of people with short tempers, but in my experience it’s an absolute blast if you play with a good group.\u00a0 I highly recommend getting one or more friends together and giving this a go.<\/p>\n

\n

4. Subnautica<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I am not especially into survival games, so I initially put off playing Subnautica<\/em> under the impression that it was in the same vein as something like Day-Z <\/em>or Ark<\/em> (apparently this was the year of me correcting misapprehensions).\u00a0 While there are survival game elements in Subnautica<\/em>, they’re not really what the game is about.\u00a0 In fact, it’s entirely possible to play the game with the food and water meters turned off, which is how I played it, and I found the experience much more enjoyable as a result.\u00a0 Subnautica<\/em>‘s world is hand-crafted, not procedurally generated, and it tells a composed, linear story.\u00a0 It’s a game about exploration with a story carefully woven in, sort of like what No Man’s Sky<\/em> became earlier this year.<\/p>\n

There are still many of the trappings of survival games.\u00a0 There are resources to collect and items to craft.\u00a0 Crafting vehicles is particularly important, as each new vehicle that you craft enables you to travel to deeper and potentially more dangerous parts of the ocean.\u00a0 Crucially, though, this is a game almost entirely without combat.\u00a0 You’ll craft a knife early on, but it’s really designed for resource gathering and not for fighting.\u00a0 There are big, scary things deep in the ocean, but your only choice is to avoid them or flee.\u00a0 I don’t want to spoil anything about the story, but I will say that it’s well-written and does a good job of motivating the player to continue to build and explore.\u00a0 But most of all, Subnautica<\/em> is a game about exploring a beautiful, terrifying ocean, and that’s an experience I’m completely on board with.<\/p>\n

\n

3. Hitman 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hitman 2<\/em> is everything the last Hitman <\/em>game was, but more of it.\u00a0 Which is fine by me, since I think it’s a great format, with lots of room to explore.\u00a0 I’ll just quote from what I said last year about the previous game:<\/p>\n

“[Hitman<\/em>] creates a series of interlocking systems and open-ended quests that really reward you for exploring, experimenting, and understanding how the game world functions.<\/p>\n

Each episode in Hitman<\/em> tasks you with assassinating somewhere between one to four characters who are going about their day-to-day lives across the fairly large levels . . . Each episode features a large, complicated location like an Italian villa or a luxury hotel in Thailand, and they\u2019re full of people doing fairly normal things on fairly normal schedules.\u00a0 Some of those people are clearly related to the central quest, like security guards in the hotel, while others are merely there to make the environments feel more alive, like shopkeepers in Sapienza.<\/p>\n

The fun comes primarily from two things.\u00a0 The first is figuring out how to reach the target(s), since they\u2019re never just wandering down an abandoned alley where you can assassinate them with ease.\u00a0 Usually this will involve some combination of sneaking as well as disguises \u2013 the best way to describe Hitman<\/em> is as a ‘social stealth’ game where you\u2019re trying to hide in plain sight.\u00a0 The second element that the game draws its fun from is the enormous variety of ways to interact with the world and characters.\u00a0 Each episode can be completed in a huge number of ways, and replaying the levels to try out different tactics is always a lot of fun.\u00a0 And once you\u2019ve mastered each episode\u2019s story campaign, there is a bunch of optional side content, like ‘elusive targets’ with their own mini-stories that you only get once chance to complete.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Hitman succeeds at setting up a toybox and letting the player create their own kind of havoc inside of it.”<\/p>\n

\n

2. The Banner Saga 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Banner Saga<\/em> series has been some of my favourite role-playing games of the past decade.\u00a0 The first Banner Saga<\/em> was my favourite game of 2014<\/a> was and the sequel was my favourite game of 2016<\/a>.\u00a0 So it is a bit surprising, to me if no one else, that the final installment is not my favourite game of 2018.\u00a0 And there’s one reason for that – the ending.\u00a0 The Banner Saga 3<\/em> falls victim to the same fault as Mass Effect 3<\/em> (another RPG series I love that botched its ending) by introducing major new plot elements at the last moment and giving me an ending that felt like it undid the choices I’d made and the story I’d been telling through the rest of the series.<\/p>\n

And that’s too bad, because the rest of The Banner Saga 3<\/em> is so good.\u00a0 Friends, it is so good.\u00a0 The unique tactical turn-based combat, with its clever trade-offs between armour and health, is more fun than it’s ever been.\u00a0 The story is well-written and full of emotionally resonant moments.\u00a0 The characters are well realised and many of them get fantastic scenes.\u00a0 There are truly difficult choices to be made, and the foreboding feeling of fleeing the apocalypse at the end of the world is palpable.\u00a0 The dual, intertwining stories work really well.\u00a0 But that ending, gah, that ending.\u00a0 So how do you rate a game that for 95% of its running time was the best thing you played all year and then ends on such a sour note?\u00a0 At #2, I suppose.<\/p>\n

\n

1. Monster Hunter World<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Monster Hunter World<\/em> is a game where you swing huge swords at towering monsters and use the materials you collect in order to build ridiculous-looking armour and even more ridiculous weapons.\u00a0 Do you really need to know any more than that?\u00a0 Well, all right.<\/p>\n

Monster Hunter World<\/em> is a weird game, with a ton of interlocking systems, a lot to learn, and not a lot of help from the game to learn it.\u00a0 It must be said that MHW<\/em> is an enormous improvement over previous Monster Hunter<\/em> games in terms of approachability, with a massively improved interface and a lot of quality of life improvements that make playing it less annoying and more straight-forward.\u00a0 But it’s still a game that is pretty much unlike anything else out there, and it takes some time to figure out how it all works.<\/p>\n

But once it starts to come together, oh is it a joy.\u00a0 “Most video games are too long” is a complaint I often make, but I’ve put dozens of hours into Monster Hunter World<\/em> and I could easily have fun putting in a bunch more.\u00a0 There are 14 weapons to choose from, each of which has completely different controls and combos to master, and they’re a lot of fun.\u00a0 I’ve put in a decent amount of time learning four of them, and while I wouldn’t say I find them all equally satisfying, it’s been fun to figure out which ones work the best for me.\u00a0 Monster Hunter World<\/em> has, unquestionably, the best combat system in any game I’ve played all year.\u00a0 The game is essentially just a long series of esaclating boss fights.\u00a0 Like Shadow of the Colossus<\/em> if it was more of an RPG.<\/p>\n

There’s so much more to say about why this is my favourite game this year that it’s hard to know where to start.\u00a0 The monster animations are incredible, maybe the best animation in any game I’ve ever played.\u00a0 They impart so much character and make the monsters feel so life-like.\u00a0 The environments and ecology in general are a real high point too, varied and gorgeous throughout.\u00a0 There’s the design of the armour sets themselves, which always kept me pushing to craft better and cooler gear.\u00a0 There’s the hilarious warrior cat companions.\u00a0 There’s the animation for the giant meals that get cooked before every quest you go on, which still make me laugh.\u00a0 There are rough edges in places, and it’s a game that requires patience to really understand, but there’s no filler.\u00a0 In a year when so many big budget games are full of stuff<\/em> just to fill time, Monster Hunter<\/em> World <\/em>only ever wants to be one thing – Monster Hunter<\/em> – and everything in the game contributes to making it the best Monster Hunter<\/em> possible.\u00a0 It’s not like other games, but it is unmistakbly itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t think 2018 was quite as good a year for games as last year was (there was nothing that blew me away the way Breath of the Wild did), but there were still quite a few good games.\u00a0 I played close to 30 games that came out this year, and narrowing this list down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1143"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}