8. XCOM Chimera Squad

While Chimera Squad is plagued with the interminable stench of being a “Cop Game” in 2020, a year where we’ve (thankfully) seen a rise in protests against state violence, it is not a game I can completely write off in good conscience. As much as its cop elements are hard to ignore, Chimera Squad is easily one of the mechanically tightest tactical RPGs I’ve played in a very long time, on top of it being an incredibly dense and interesting XCOM game. Each character feels like a finely tuned version of a class from previous XCOM games, so much so that they break beyond limitations of those classes to become wholly new, fleshed out characters.

My personal favorite, Patchwork, is a drone specialist who thematically fits the hacker archetype, a role historically for taking on robotic enemies and obstacles in other XCOM games. Patchwork is deceptively modeled to fit that role but becomes something else entirely: a walking god of lightning. Patchwork can zap enemies from a long distance which can put damage on a big foe, but also stuns enemies, taking them out of play for a turn. Her lightning effect also chains to nearby enemies, making her very effective against big groups of dudes. Shocking enemies is super satisfying and feels great when you make a big play that takes a ton of huge threats out of the turn rotation, softening up big enemies while also letting the rest of your team deal with whatever is left on the board for a turn. She’s incredibly useful in almost every situation, and an asset to any team.

The coolest thing about Patchwork is that she’s not alone. Her character is not unique in that she’s somehow busted or overpowered. Every character in Chimera Squad feels just as fully fleshed out and well designed. Some of them fulfill much different roles, for sure, but all of them feel unique, powerful, and they have fun abilities that interplay well with each other. Cherub can put shields on friendly units that let them take one attack for free. Combine that with Zephyr’s melee only focus and you have a unit that can run straight into the battlefield, punching people left and right, and being able to prevent damage multiple times per turn. Then, when the shield is popped by an enemy, Cherub gets a charge that boosts his own melee attack and makes it stronger.

This incredible interplay between mechanics and characters easily makes XCOM Chimera Squad one of the most gratifying games I’ve played all year. It’s a good game that’s worth being recognized despite its somewhat tonedeaf aesthetic trappings, because it’s just so well designed and so fun to play.

7. Black Mesa

While I have some misgivings about the expanded Xen area of Black Mesa finally completed in 2020, I still played through the game for the first time and enjoyed it quite a bit. What stuck out to me more than anything else was its use of brutal, mechanical spaces as level environments. The game forces you to make dangerous, death defying drops on thin pieces of piping just to find some kind of way to make it to the next area. It’s a sort of level design that feels agnostic to the player. The Black Mesa facility doesn’t exist like this to make it easy to get around, it exists because that’s just how you build a huge building with weird nuclear reactors.

One of my favorite setpieces is this one in a huge silo. There’s a small office area to the side of it, but all the ways in and out of there are blockaded. At the bottom of the silo is a giant fan. You can get to the fan through some scaffolding, but the switch to turn it on is under the blades. What you need to do is climb down the ladder under the fan, climb on your hands and knees over to the switch, turn it on, and then crawl back over the ladder while it’s slowly starting back up. There’s plenty of time to do it but I imagine the lowly janitor, forced to clean the fan, who accidentally trips that switch and is just stuck down there. If he tries to climb the ladder, he gets chopped up by the fan. There’s a huge pit under the fan that leads to god knows where. The best part about this is that it happened to me. I turned on the fan and just watched it spin on, wondering what would happen, if I just let it run. For some reason, the switch doesn’t turn the fan off. You can’t leave. You’ve already fucked up, you have to load an earlier save.

People who aren’t Gordan Freeman don’t get to load their saves. They have to work in this hellhole. If this were a more modern game, there would have been a failsafe or someone in your ear going “OK Gordon, get to the ladder before the fan starts!” But it’s not a more modern game, and this tiny interaction with a fan and a man says a lot about what the people who created this place think about the people who work there. It’s pure, brutalist, materialistic apathy. They don’t quite make ‘em like this anymore.

6. Among Us

Among Us is really fun it’s like Werewolf but they made Werewolf fun I think that the other players are sus but what they don’t know is I’m the imposter and I’m going to kill them all just like The Joker.

Among Us is very good but it also posits a hypothetical version of Among Us that I want to play that’s 8 hours long (on average) with 1 killer, 9 crewmates, an extremely long kill cooldown and tasks that are near endless to complete. I would like to play a hell version of this game with friends where finding a body is an almost traumatic experience. I want to go mad trying to figure out who the killer is, and whether there even is a killer or if this is a series of unfortunate accidents. I want to accuse everyone. I want to drive my friends mad to the point where they eject me into space. I wasn’t an imposter. I want them to feel remorse and regret after having to put up with me for hours yelling about how certain people are suspects despite the crimes being so far apart with no clear indication that they came to one conclusion that they had, that it had to be me. Basically I wanna play The Thing The Game. I would like that very much.

5. Final Fantasy 7 Remake

In a time of remakes galore, remakes as far as the eye can see, good remakes, bad remakes, remakes of everything under the sun, FF7R stands above and beyond what remakes can be in our modern era. What makes FF7R so special is that it manages to flesh out its source material to such extreme fidelity that the environments tell the story of a metropolis with unbridled inequity in a way that its previous iterations could only gesture at in the past. Tons of love, care, and attention went into making what was just the opening hours of a huge JRPG into a well crafted and polished adventure.

It’s no secret that I have misgivings about the ending of this game, and pretty much everything in this game that has to do with Destiny Ghosts, but it’s also a game that takes bold swings in not just recreating its source material, but expanding on it as well. Every new scene that’s added with Biggs, Wedge and Jessie is a treat. Every extra piece of dialogue that characterizes Aerith as a way more playful, but street smart buffoon is excellent. Every addition to the Wall Market that makes it way more like a living, breathing tourist attraction instead of a weird pit of creepy, horny dudes is sublime. Every new iteration on the strange designs and enemies that felt weird and arbitrary in the original game feel natural, playful, and charming. There were very few parts of FF7R where I didn’t have a big, doofy smile on my face. It captures the charm of the original with the fidelity and original ideas of a contemporary action game. It recognizes that Cloud’s weird edgy bravado is largely an act, and plays into his aloofness and inability to connect with other people. It’s such a well crafted idea of what a remake can be that I’m extremely excited to see how it tackles the rest of the game.

With how the game ends, it’s obvious what comes next isn’t going to be a full remake. It doesn’t need to be that either, it’s a game that should feel confident enough to make bold swings without needing to justify it with Destiny Weirdness. Still, there are parts of the original that I would love to see get the same treatment as this game that would feel genuinely disappointing if they were left out just to do something completely weird and different. I want to see the Temple Of The Ancients. I want to see Cloud’s breakdown. I want to see Wutai. I want to see Nibelheim. I want to see the gang just hanging out at Costa Del Sol. I would absolutely love to see the Gold Saucer and all the silly ways they redo every single weird minigame in FF7. Hell, I’d even love to see how it handles Fort Condor and the weird strategy minigame. FF7 feels so ready for reinterpretations and reimaginings that I trust this team wholeheartedly to do every inch of that game justice.

4. Nioh 2

Nioh 2! Nioh 2! Nioh 2!

It’s Nioh, but they did it again, baby! Nioh was one of my previous GOTYs, so I bet it’s not surprising to see it here. While I didn’t love it as much as the original, Nioh 2 is still an extremely fun game to play and manages to tell a rich story about friendship and betrayal. Also, it’s got an extremely buckwild ending sequence that made me shout “Oh Word?” I don’t know if I have a lot to say about it other than that it’s an extremely fun game that manages to do some really cool things with Nioh as a franchise.

While I’m sure Team Ninja probably has some apprehension about throwing out any elements of their combat considering how highly well regarded it is, I do hope the next game feels sufficiently different from these two. Nioh 2’s biggest weakness is that, while introducing a ton of new gameplay elements tied to your Yokai abilities and some brand new weapons, it still feels a little bit too much like the original Nioh. Still, keep up the good work! Great stuff! It’s been very fun chanting “Nioh 2! Nioh 2! Nioh 2!” at every opportunity I could. Very excited to start chanting Nioh 3. I know you guys aren’t making Nioh 3 but I’m gonna chant it anyways.

Nioh 3! Nioh 3! Nioh 3!

3. Crusader Kings 3

I’m pretty new to Crusader Kings and a lot of strategy games as a genre, and while CK3’s focus isn’t necessarily on doing a cool strategy on someone, it’s still a game that revels in political intrigue and telling great stories entirely through its mechanics. It’s a game where I can become a child king of Bulgaria and a bully at school starts tormenting me. That bully is also the prince of the Byzantine Empire. It’s a game where I can play as a murderous warlord king who loves war and not get very far in developing my empire, but when I take control of his duplicitous son, Huge Chad, I am able to blackmail every other nearby county into fealty. It’s a game about living the fantasy of being a ruler of a small, inconsequential track of land, and having all of the local lords all plotting to take it from you while the entire world passes you by.

It’s a game about marrying a chaste nudist for political gain, but then also falling in love with the court medic who had, just this last year, treated you with leeches. It’s a game that’s equal parts dead serious and completely silly, and I don’t think anything else can strike that tone without putting on some kind of ironic knowing smirk. Crusader Kings 3 is the least ironic game out there, and it treats every single real, actual historical figure like the bumbling, flawed humans they really are.

2. Kentucky Route Zero

The only reason this game isn’t my #1 is because I finished it after I had locked in my #1, and that’s just how it goes. I’m sure that Cardboard Computer would find that just fitting, because Kentucky Route Zero is about, among many other things, entropy and building upon the ruins of what’s already there. This game is truly beautiful. It’s a little hard to talk about and maybe even a little hard to recommend because, well, it’s a narrative game but it’s not about pushing a plot forward. It’s an adventure game but it’s not about picking up clues to solve puzzles. It’s a game about people, those who are alive and those who are ghosts. I could summarize the entire plot for you in a couple of sentences and I would not come nearly close enough to describing what’s so great about this game.

It takes place in 5 acts, with 4 interludes in between. One of my favorite pieces of game design is one of these interludes, titled “Here and There Along The Echo.” The entire interlude takes place in front of a phone. It’s an older push button phone and operates exactly as a phone does, which is comically unintuitive. Also in front of you is a number that you can call. Everything you can do in this interlude is truly delightful, and I sat for longer than I should have just listening to all the different things I could.

Kentucky Route Zero is about treasuring people, even after all the forces above our heads continue to let us down. It’s about finding the art people left behind, treasuring those closest to you, riding the roads late at night when nobody else is around, and knowing that you’re not alone. Even if it’s just you, even if you’re a human or an animal or something else entirely, even if you’re alive or if you’re not so alive, that there’s always going to be somebody who cares for you.

1. Umurangi Generation

I don’t know how to say that 2020 has been a unique and distressing year for everyone in a way that doesn’t sound like a useless platitude. It was terrible and violent and every single day felt like we, collectively, have been barreling headfirst into a future that is dark and terrifying and will only end in disaster. Umurangi Generation is a game that somehow manages to tap into this specific emotion, this existential dread, and lets you know that you aren’t alone. While I’m not much of a photographer, the lens you see through implores you to examine every single inch of Umurangi Generation’s meticulously crafted levels. It asks you to watch the final days of a dying planet, the inadequacy of a failing government, and the normal everyday lives of the people who live in each of its cordoned off, designated zones. It wants you to see how normal people still live, knowing that the end is coming, and its beauty is that it doesn’t fall into the trap of pure, depressing nihilism. People still hang out, have friends, make dance circles, and take pictures of each other. We’re all still living and doing what we can to live a normal life in progressively less normal conditions.

What I love most about this game is how Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of it’s clearest inspirations, but it’s a game working in conversation with its inspiration. Eva is about huge robots trying to save the world, only to hopelessly have every victory snatched out from under you. Eva’s quiet moments show sparsely populated city centers; huge cities completely empty because, after the first two Impacts, there’s barely anybody left. You hear cicadas, and more importantly, you don’t hear people. Everyone that’s left is in designated quarantine zones or in their own independent cities outside of NERV’s circle of influence. Umurangi Generation is a game that asks you to put yourself in the shoes of one of those people. You are not a protagonist; you are not Shinji. You’re one of the bystanders that has to sit by and watch Shinji do his best in the face of inevitable destruction. The mechs and the monsters you see in Umurangi are so distant from your station in life that the most you can do is take a picture.

In a lot of the environments of Umurangi Generation, you can find graffiti that tells the story of a people whose government has let it down time and time again. It’s hard for that not to resonate in 2020, where in America, a white supremacist leadership has only given its people a total of $1800 to somehow survive a lockdown that has seen many people lose their livelihoods and their homes. Umurangi, though, is not about the end of the world, it’s about the people who live in it. It’s about doing things for yourself that are fun and make you comfortable. It’s about finding beauty in the spaces in between, where people still live their lives. Much like the hundreds of thousands of in-game pictures the official Umurangi Generation Twitter account retweets from its players, it’s about creating something for yourself and enjoying it together with other people. Your friends, your family (found or familial), and every nice stranger you meet who’s going through it side by side with you.

And it’s about having a penguin as a sidekick, and that’s just wonderful.

The post Scott’s Top 8 Games of 2020 appeared first on Gamesline.

I don’t want to gloss over the abysmal reality of 2020 and its impact on everyone, but there also isn’t much I could say that you haven’t heard already: that you haven’t experienced already. Weathering such a year has exacted its toll on all of us, and I can only hope you and yours have taken care of each other in this hellstorm. For me, this past year was a time to dig through my backlog, to keep hacking away at digital art, and to try and make people laugh when the day’s work had them down. I will continue those goals moving forward because even though I’d say I met them spectacularly, they’re worth bringing into the new year once more.

While my list only features a few of the highlights in a dimly-lit year, these games helped me connect with my past, my friends, and myself, and I hope the connections you make going forward help you as much as these ones helped me.

V. Black Mesa

Many of my early childhood memories are watching my father play games on his computer. One of these was Half-Life, and I still remember him going down a spiral staircase into a flooded generator room, only to be ambushed by a headcrab zombie on his right flank. Every time I’ve replayed Half-Life and get to that part, the memory comes back and greeting that zombie with lead is like reaching into my past. While playing through Black Mesa, I felt more connections throughout my experience, as the Crowbar Collective team did a phenomenal job recreating and updating all parts of Half-Life.

Black Mesa isn’t a replacement for the original – both have their merits. Many old and influential games have been “remastered” or “remade” into more modern iterations. Some have been wonderful – some have been lacking. Out of all the remakes I’ve played, Black Mesa stands as the best example of how effective it can be to let your team take liberties with the source material. The Crowbar Collective has shown exceptional focus and an understanding of what made the original great. The lackluster Xen chapters in the original Half-Life, some of the most boring parts of that game, have been expanded upon to great effect and actually give narrative context that better bridges the gaps between the first and second Half-Life games.

Various touches throughout the game have simultaneously invoked those old memories of mine while forging new ones to sit alongside the old. My mind has two Half-Lifes now, and I couldn’t tell you which one I liked more.

IV. DOOM Eternal

I played DOOM Eternal well before touching DOOM 2016, though I had played original DOOM and DOOM II several years prior. I did end up playing through DOOM 2016 late last year, and I found myself realizing how mindless that game’s combat was. In Eternal, I developed various tactics for dealing with certain enemies. I’d use the Heavy Cannon’s scope function to snipe turrets off of Arachnotrons, weakening them and forcing them into melee range. I’d employ the Combat Shotgun’s grenade launcher to quickly dispatch Cacodemons whenever those funky meatballs showed up. It was a blast and I loved the dashing and movement mechanics they added. They felt like a logical step forward from the gameplay that I’d see later in my playthrough of DOOM 2016.

2016’s DOOM felt… sluggish by comparison. Like something was missing. I had just about the same arsenal as Eternal, but I wasn’t thinking much about which weapons I was using or what enemies I’d focus down first. As long as I kept moving and shooting I didn’t have much trouble, but the real issue was that moving was boring (compared to Eternal) and shooting was more intuitive than tactical (compared to Eternal.) I realize now that both of these approaches to DOOM worked. 2016 was more of an aesthetic overhaul of older DOOM games, while Eternal felt more like an evolution of the core gameplay into an FPS/Character Action hybrid. DOOM Eternal has more in common with Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, and that really clicked with me in a way that 2016 didn’t. I still enjoyed 2016, but I’m in Eternal’s camp without question. For me, I was sold on DOOM Eternal when the first Cacodemon showed up, looking like it was ripped straight from classic DOOM, and after opening it up for a Glory Kill, it made a hilariously cartoonish -pop- noise as I plucked its peeper out. Going back to DOOM 2016 and seeing how tepidly designed their meatballs are, the winner for Best Meatballs In Gaming is Eternal without question.

One last thing – the story elements in DOOM Eternal were more distinct than the ones in DOOM 2016, because Eternal both bought into and delivered on the lore set up by its predecessors. DOOM 2016 was content to stick lore snippets in menus, and focused on a story that may as well have asked “What if DOOM was in the MCU?” DOOM Eternal pulls from the entire library of DOOM history, enriching its story without sacrificing anything that makes DOOM fun or memorable. It sticks to “The Canon” without getting lost in its own guts about how special the franchise has been over the years. It doesn’t try to recreate DOOM like 2016: it tries to rip and tear its way into the modern era in new and refreshing ways, and it’s a wonderful addition to the DOOM catalog as far as I’m concerned.

III. Destiny 2: Beyond Light

I have long, long been a skeptic of Destiny as a franchise since its inception. Though that skepticism has always come from a place of having watched people early buy into it simply because of studio prestige. “Bungie made the Halo games, I liked the Halo games, therefore Destiny will be the new Halo games, and I will like them too and they will be the best games of all time and will single-handedly win video games forever, just like the Halo games did.” I played Halo 1 and 2, and enjoyed them, but never really got into the online multiplayer suites those two were known for. When people would claim that Bungie knew how to make shooting guns in video games feel good, I had no idea what they meant.

Boy oh boy, do I understand what they meant now. I’ve been playing Destiny 2 since Beyond Light launched back in November, and it all makes sense. I understand how this game has stuck around for so long, and why people enjoy it so much. I’m especially proud of a moment in the Last Wish raid where my friends and I were on a timer to kill the boss, as someone had died and we were out of revives. Using an exotic helmet, the Celestial Nighthawk, I activated my Super ability and shot the boss in the face with a single godkilling bullet that immediately took out the last chunk of her health instantly. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in a video game.

That said, I also don’t understand why the game is designed the way it is. I come from the world of Final Fantasy XIV, where getting to the endgame can take hundreds of hours for a new player, but once you’re there, you can pick and choose which upgrades to get and how to get them. Destiny 2 is engram lootboxes all the way down – even your highest-tier rewards can be squandered by the game randomly deciding to give you an upgrade in the wrong gear slot. The gameplay is undeniably solid (even if I’d like a bit more balancing of subclasses so that some no longer only feel useful in PvE or PvP), and while the upgrade grind is laughably unconscionable, the worldbuilding and moment-to-moment experience is fantastic.

As for Beyond Light itself, I think it was silly how the story instilled this uneasiness and apprehension with The Darkness being an even more present entity, and then gleefully forces you to use the new Stasis powers to kill story bosses. I even tried forgoing Stasis in favor of my Solar abilities since that felt more in line with my character, but they straight-up made the bosses immune to damage at a certain point until you equip the Stasis powers. It’s very jarring. I wasn’t even expecting a narrative divergence – I simply wanted some fun bonus dialogue or a hidden triumph for defeating the Beyond Light bosses without Stasis. But no, the dark ice powers are a Big Selling Point of a Product, so they had to make it enticing for players to try out. It’s a shame, but funnily enough my favorite story moments in Destiny 2 overall don’t revolve around the epic boss fights and Big Story Sequences. The game’s storytelling is so good when it focuses on tiny moments with characters like Eris Morn, the Exo Stranger, the Crow, and even the coin-pervert Drifter himself. I’m looking forward to playing more Destiny 2, and it’s been fun so far – but please somebody tell them to play other MMO-style games so they understand why relying on engrams and RNG for everything is a bad idea.

II. Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition

This is one of the best games, which I know because I played through the main campaign before dealing with Vergil, and it’s made all the better with the inclusion of Vergil as a playable character. If Lady and Trish were playable characters as well, this would be beyond perfect. As it stands, there really isn’t much more I can say that hasn’t already been said as the main game has been out since 2019. It says a lot that this game is in my #2 despite me never really being a fan of Character Action games (until now).

Vergil isn’t even my favorite character to play, but he’s apparently my best since I effortlessly S-ranked the first five missions of his campaign whereas it took me quite some time to get an S-rank in the main campaign. Judgement Cut End is absurdly satisfying to use, to the point where I don’t even know why he has two other finishers – it’s like giving a double-edged sword two additional edges. One of my favorite parts is how he has a meter that builds if you stand still or “RP walk” toward your enemies, and drains if you act recklessly or run around like a fool. It’s a genuinely inspired design point and helps to put you into his mindset as you play him.

If you have never been a fan of Character Action games I implore you to try this one out. It’s unreasonably fun and I had no idea how expertly crafted these kinds of games could be until I got my hands on Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition. Unchained levels of enjoyment, Smokin’ Sexy Style — that’s all there is to say.

I. Arknights

Rare are the games that have such a keen sense of style and detail in their presentation. Being a tower defense gacha game, Arknights was fighting on two fronts to keep me interested and engaged, yet its acute sense of direction and design had me coming back all year. Tower defense games have never held my interest for more than a couple hours at most, and Arknights takes that framework and bolsters it by turning towers into characters with a wide array of classes, skills, and specialties. There’s enough strategic depth here to satisfy all kinds of team compositions, and even the weaker units can be linchpins if you play to their strengths.

One of my recent feats was perfectly completing the third “Annihilation” map. These are large-scale encounters where the goal is to take out as many enemies as possible while dealing with various waves and enemy formations. You get rewarded based on how many enemies you can take out before 10 of them get into your base, and if you defeat all 400 enemies, you increase your weekly reward limit. Most of the strategies online involved using heavy-duty casters or characters with absurdly powerful skills, and while I could’ve invested the time and resources to build those characters up, I wanted to do things my way instead. It took me several attempts, but I slowly improved my score – 320, 335, 350, 367, 395, 396, etc. The linchpin hero responsible for clutching out those last 4 enemy kills was Jessica: a 4-star operator who is given out for free after completing the third tutorial mission. I didn’t need SilverAsh and his Truesilver Slash. I didn’t need Eyjafjalla and her tower of lava. Give me the catgirl with the 9mm pistol.

On the gacha side of things, it’d be easy to think that the rarest characters are the best, and while it is true that six-star operators can be very powerful, that isn’t always the case. Certain skills or passive talents can make lower-rarity operators on par or even better than their six-star counterparts. It never feels like a unit in Arknights is completely useless. Even the 2-star tutorial characters are useful for the game’s base management minigame, which even lets you decorate living quarters with furniture to make them look like pizza shops, noodle vendors, cafeterias, or chill zones.

What really won me over, though, was Arknights’ absolutely incredible UI design. Every facet of the interface, from menus, to tooltips, to font choice and iconography is the most congruent with its aesthetics and gameplay that I’ve ever seen in a video game. While crisp, clean, minimalist UIs have become something of a trend in modern games, they often lack a lot of character and coalescence with the rest of the game’s aesthetics. Arknights, being a tower defense game where most of the gameplay is interfacing with menus, had to nail this aspect in its entirety, and they did so flawlessly.

The post Spencer’s Top Five Games of 2020 appeared first on Gamesline.

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