It was a return to nostalgia for me. My wife bought this for me for Christmas. I was worried that I would lug into a very dated game, however:
The gameplay is so exquisite and the track design so carefully thought out that it’s really an exhilarating game. The tracks never get boring because they sprinkle in just enough variation and style to keep them engaging. The tricks you can pull in a podracer do not break suspension of disbelief the way normal car games do when pulling amazing stunts. The flow is smooth and fluid even now.
Between the minimap, rearview, braking, air breaking to sustain airtime and cushion landings, self-determined boosting (rather than relying on external powerups or boost zones), and repair management you’re never not adjusting to something. The game keeps you busy while you’re flying along the track.
To boot, the obstacles and shortcuts are carefully distributed and used, playing into the themes of the tracks. Most are small influences, but useful or interesting. One track will force you to reconsider your playstyle for it, however. Despite that it’s not so jarring that you want to stop playing.
You also get a bevy of racers to choose from and the ability to buy and juggle upgrades and pit droids keeps your gameplay evolving. You can even be rewarded for being a skilled player by adjusting the finish placement payouts.
Unfortunately due to careful planning and purchasing, as well as a better sense of how to play as an adult, the game has some shortcomings. Instead of being neck and neck, I was regularly 7-12 seconds ahead of the second place racer, regularly unable to see them in my rearview. A complete lack of a story mode and a low difficulty bar meant I was done in three days even with limited play time and inconsistent access. While this could have been saved with an Online mode added, I still had fun completing Tournament mode and would gladly give this to anyone who wants high-velocity adrenaline with more complex mechanics than your average racing game.
Snowrunner (still)! Only a few missions left on Island Lake, then I can explore Drummond Island 🚚
I also played Pavlov VR a bit on PC to see if there were many more players from Christmas. Ran into a few new PS5 users that were fun. I hope the servers don’t die out, PC players are already a minority in the crossplay maps!
I just got an ergonomic mouse after struggling with wrist pain for most of the year, so I'm putting it through its paces in Pillars of Eternity. I'm loving it so far, but it gives you vague notions of "this is really tough, so come back later" for a few different areas, but I don't know how much later they mean. I'm nearly level 6, and I know the level cap for the game before the DLC was 12. Do they mean come back at level 8? Or level 12? Or 14? I've still got plenty of other areas to explore first, but I'd still like to know...you know? I've also only got 5 party members, so I'm on the lookout for a sixth.
I'm still trying to hit master rank in Street Fighter 6. Inching closer, in diamond 4 now.
I beat Wargroove 2. It's a solid iteration on the previous game, and I'd recommend it if you want more Advance Wars with the bonus of being able to play it on better hardware than a Switch.
Baldur's Gate 3 was my favorite for the year and one of my favorites ever. It was just too hard to top.
The levels / balance in Pillars can be a bit weird. If you do all the side content, or you're doing the DLC, when it's available, you're going to be overleveled. However, the game asks you once or twice, if you want to raise the enemies to your level, so they're still challenging. I didn't do that (I didn't help all those old ladies over the street, just so that some random bad guy gets some free exp), which meant a lot of the story fights were pretty easy by the end. There are still some fights designed for (near) max level though, which were really hard.
Thanks for the tip! I actually heard from some friends that the combat was pretty tough in this game, and so far it's manageable, but I will absolutely take a level advantage that I've earned if the game gives me that prompt, lol.
First, I did go back to Tunic and got the good ending, and I'm glad I did, because now the little fox was happy. I had to look up hints or the solutions to some of the puzzles though, some of those were just too cryptic for me.
Then I tried two Vampire Survivors-likes, Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors and Soulstone Survivors, both of which I played on my Steam Deck. Also, both are in Early Access.
I only did a few runs in Pathfinder. I might just be bad, but maybe the game isn't really suited for the Deck right now. There are tons of enemies that shoot small projectiles, that are just a pain to see on the small-ish screen, so dodging everything can be a pain. It also felt like the hit boxes aren't that good right now, but again, that might just be me, I didn't play the game for too long. I'd have to try the game on my desktop PC to check out how it plays there. One thing of note though, this game has local multiplayer, which might be interesting to some people. When you're playing alone, the second character sticks to you as a companion and just deals some extra damage. I also have to mention the menuing in this game, on controller it's complete garbage. Sometimes you select some menu category with triggers, change sub-categories with bumpers, sub-sub-categories with the D-Pad and then the actual thing you want to select with the stick. I had to constantly check where I was and what I had to press, which sucked.
The other, Soulstone Survivors, was a lot more fun for me. You get up to six weapons, and also upgrades for those weapons and generally for your character. In this game, weapons can have "tags", like melee, area, electric, whatever, and upgrades can affect one specific weapon, all of them or everything of a certain type, which can be neat. There are also tons of small QoL details, like highlighting which weapons get upgraded, a summary for your stats in a run or how much damage your weapons are doing. That last point is neat, because you can keep replacing your weapons, even when you already have all six, and if you don't want to, you just get a normal upgrade. When not in a run, there's just tons of meta progression with a gazillion different materials. You can unlock characters, weapons for those characters, a skill tree, something called runes, which I have no idea what they are, and maybe more. Menus also suck, although mostly because everything is just crammed full of stuff and a bit too small on the Deck. It's not as bad as Pathfinder though.
Next, a small game I saw while going through the Steam Discovery Queue, Froggy's Battle. This is a Roguelike, where you're playing as a frog on a skateboard, that's going around in a loop. You kill enemies by bumping into them, or with weapons you might get at the end of a level. The game is really short, I beat the boss after a bit more than ten runs, about 90 minutes, although there's a hard mode, which I didn't do. The main difficulty, in my opinion, comes from the controls, since you're riding a skateboard in a loop, so you'll end up upside down, which flips some of your controls. When the loop is filled with enemies, it can get pretty chaotic. The game has a bunch of different control schemes, so you can try to find whatever works best for you, so it isn't terrible. Doing sick kickflips, while wielding a magic wand, is pretty cool.
Finally, I started Diablo 4. I'm playing a Druid, because eventually I hope to punch everything as a werebear, although right now I'm punching stuff with stones that I summon from the earth. Even though I'm almost level 40, I'm still pretty early in the story, because I just run around in the world, doing side quests, going into the dungeons and whatnot. I'm trying to focus a bit more on the main story, just so I can get the mount and get around the world faster. While I am a KB+M elitist and mainly play on my PC, I also installed the game on my Steam Deck, and it runs really well on there. I turned everything down, except like textures, so it doesn't look as bad in closeups, but I'm basically always at 60fps, with room to spare. Only in the bigger city do I go below 60 sometimes, which is also pretty much the only time when I hear the fan turning up. Playing on controller is also neat, except for the menus (again). It also does have native ultrawide support, it's nice to have a modern game, where you don't have to look for patches or fixes, to fill the whole screen.
As for my favorite game of the year (that was released in 2023), it has to be Baldurs Gate 3, not much really came close.
On a bit of a side-scrolling trip these past few weeks: Mario Wonder, Metroid Dread, Yooka-Laylee, etc.
The two big(ger) games I’ve played this year are Street Fighter 6 and Mario Wonder which are both fantastic. I haven’t played BG3 or the latest Zelda or any other major releases, but my partner and I were all in on SF6 for weeks. Wonder, though, is a great throwback to what made us both start gaming: very easy to pick up and play, things to collect, and a tiny bit of grinding.
Probably a toss up between Hi-Fi Rush, Doom Eternal, and Guilty Gear Strive. I suck at fighting games, but I love learning all the unique mechanics of the characters.
Gartic phone has been the most consistently entertaining game i played this year, but that is probably because i only ever played it 3 times(3 gamemodes) yesterday.
I also played Celeste this year, which was really fun
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