![]() I’ve played most of these Forza games, and while they’ve always been fun, they’ve also always been weirdly disposable. FORZA HORIZON 5 Image: Forza Horizon 5 / Playground Games ![]() With Desperadoes 3 having just begun to fade into the background of my consciousness, this was a timely reminder that nobody is doing this stuff better than Mimimi Games. Having only just been released, this was a very late contender to make the list! This expansion landed very quietly ( how appropriate), bringing all-new missions to one of the great stealth/tactics games of our age. SHADOW TACTICS: BLADES OF THE SHOGUN Image: Shadow Tactics / Mimimi Games But the one thing it gets right - its colossal 128-player battles, which is what I’m here for - it gets very, very right. I get it, it’s thoroughly broken, and I have no idea if this game suffered greatly at the hands of the pandemic, broken management or both. Goty /PpwRdGfWF6- Luke Plunkett SeptemBATTLEFIELD 2042 They’re in no particular order, but if you absolutely need a “winner” here, then my Game of the Year was Lost Judgment, because: I still played some good video games this year, so let’s move on from all this gloom and celebrate them below. I think it’s important to recognise this in posts like this, to understand that alongside the good there’s a very good reason for so much of the bad, one that goes way beyond “oh there just weren’t many games for me this year”.Īnyway! Enough depression and disappointment. The pandemic has hit game development hard, and while we can try and pretend life got back to normal for a little while there, the fact remains games take years to get made, and every single title released in 2021 has been impacted at some point by serious challenges to the usual development pipeline. We’re living through rough times, and I think it’s OK to feel down about things sometimes, to take stock and recognise that video games can’t always be perpetually improving, that things can’t always be amazing. ![]() ![]() But for me 2021 was defined by these disappointments. This is supposed to be a celebration of the best games of the year, not a recap of how much everything sucked. Even sports games, my one guilty pleasure, had a very bad year: Konami’s PES series dug its own grave with a disastrous rebrand, NBA 2K now lives in the 7th level of hell and FIFA is just plain tired. Battlefield 2042 is fucking amazing when it’s fucking amazing, but an unfinished piece of garbage when it’s not. I don’t normally get excited about upcoming video games, but it looked absolutely perfect to me, a game that was ticking every single one of my boxes. Then there’s Humankind, my most anticipated game in years. And also maybe why I bounced right off Halo: Infinite, which felt like a game from 2001 dressed up with the open world tedium of 2021. Which might explain why I also did not enjoy Far Cry 6 one bit, even though previous games in the series had comfortably made my end-of-year lists. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s expansions just kept on coming, and broke the last patience I had for the Ubisoft Formula (go to this tower - > expose map - > have missions unlock). Instead it was a year marked by disappointment after disappointment, as the games I had been looking forward to spending the most time with crash-landed onto the market in pieces. I can’t remember a single game that truly got me hooked, that got me playing on nights and weekends outside work hours, that pulled me in like so many of my previous Luke’s Game Of The Year winners had. And when it comes to the games I like to play, 2021 was a historically barren year. This is my list, from my perspective, based on my tastes. Now is not the time for you to tell me there were very good video games. Turns out 2021 would be even worse, since this time around there weren’t even many “very good video games”. That’s what I said this time last year as I tried to exit 2020 with some optimism. A bad year with, mercifully, some very good video games”.
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