2021 Games Wrap-Up (Patreon)

This most definitely isn't a “game of the year” list or a rating/ranking of games that came out in 2021. It's more just a way for me to say a few things about some games I played this year in a quick and loose manner. Most of these games didn't even come out this year, this year just happened to be when I played them. So right into it:

Avengers

Man, if there was ever a game that stank of managerial incompetence, it's Avengers. Plenty has been said about the casting, terrible dialogue, and “straight to video Avengers” feel to the game, but buried deep, deeeeep in there are some elements that are actually kind of good. I liked the main villains and their story, it has some neat set pieces, and some of the powers are fun to use. But any time I was remotely close to enjoying myself, the game would crash, fail to load a mission objective so I had to do the whole stage over again, the camera would freak out, the controls would stop working, the AI partners would stop moving, the AI partners would get stuck on the environment, the AI partners would jump in front of me and push me away from the enemy I was fighting, and any other number of flaws that show that this game is just broken at its core. I fully understand why you can't make super heroes feel as strong as their comic counterparts in a video game, but outside of Thor and maybe Captain America, every character in this game isn't fun to use. The Hulk, a character whose entire being is defined by his overwhelming strength and practical invincibility, dies in three hits, is terrible against bosses, is slow and obstructs most of the camera, and his only effectiveness is against mobs of small enemies where you don't actually need powers to deal with them and Thor is better at it anyway. The core loop of the Destiny-style “do a mission, get some better gear, and make some numbers go up” works extremely well, but that kind of grind when you're trying to work on 10 characters at the same time makes for a bad game. Your options are to spend hours and hours doing tedious work powering up all ten characters to get the most rewards and make them all useful or you just pick one or two characters and ignore the rest, which defeats the whole purpose of making a game built around a team of super heroes. Just think of how much money was spent on this project and what a mess it turned out to be and feel really, really sad.

Capcom Arcade Stadium

Definitely not a “2021” game seeing as how they're all from the 80s and 90s, but dang this was a great package. I wouldn't have bought most of these games on their own but getting them in a bundle got me to play a lot of new stuff. And most of it was trash, but it was fun to give it a shot or see it for the first time. You're basically buying 5 or so good games you want and getting 30+ things for free to experiment with. The Rewind and Fast Forward functionality in the package are things I just want for every game, and it's what makes the collection work so well and makes it worth your time to try some of the bad games in the collection. Progear and Gigawing turned out to be two games I'd never played before but I came back to them several times. I'm not really a fan of scrolling shooters, but two well-made ones with interesting gameplay gimmicks and absolutely bonkers stories got me really invested.

Castlevania Advanced Collection

This adds the Rewind functionality that was missing in the Castlevania Anniversary and Contra Anniversary collections so it's a better bundle for that, but ouch did nostalgia take some hits on this one. After playing Rondo last year, Dracula X is... a really bad game. Harmony of Dissonance is such a joyless take on the Symphony formula. The castle in Circle is such a pain in the butt to get around. But Aria of Sorrow is still cool! Hopefully they find a way to get rid of all the touch screen garbage from the DS games and they can release a collection of those, but at least I have access to all of them on their original carts.

Destroy All Humans

I was super surprised by this one. As far as “remasters” go, DAH is probably one of the best. That's not to say the game itself is great, but the amount of work the team put into this was really impressive. They could have just made everything higher resolution, but they put in the work to make new models, updated the controls, and added in a level cut from the original, although I could have done without the Rick and Morty reference out of nowhere. DAH is certainly a game of its time from how it handles missions, bad stealth requirements, awful side missions, having an abundance of collectibles but no map or way to tell if you're near them, questionable writing, and so on. And this is a game where the collectibles just unlock concept art, but the art is fun so I want to see it, but I'm missing one or two collectibles in almost all of the maps, grumble... DAH is dumb, but in many good ways. You can complete it in a few hours if you're just doing the story, so wait until it's on a deep discount and you want to listen to Invader Zim and a Bad Jack Nicholson yell at each other while you execute cheesy B movie sci-fi violence. Some times that is a thing you want.

EDF Wing Diver The Shooter

Also very dumb. Also very enjoyable. Also making me crack up while I write this just imagining that soldier shouting “Get some cake!”.

I'm also ranked #4 in the world on the Playstation servers on this game and I am both proud and ashamed of that. EDF is just so bad and so good.

I also played World Brothers but that was... meh. Super glitchy, ludicrously grindy and tedious, but kind of fun in spots. When it's not being... problematic?, the writing is surprisingly strong, and oddly informative on the economics of tofu. Some really fun characters and some amazing moments in the final missions. I definitely hope EDF continues the squad mechanic in future games because I loved that, just without the random loot box garbage to unlock and upgrade characters and weapons.

Maneater

Apparently I just went with “dumb and fun” this year, because that's what Maneater does and kind of all it does. It's a game where you play as a very angry mutant shark and it owns that.

Saints Row 3/4

Every couple of years I tell myself I'm just going to play through the story mode and then that always seems to turn into “I'm going to 100% both of these games”. The Remasters aren't great but they're serviceable. I ran into some of the same bugs I found in the original versions of the game and they introduced new ones (never put your system in rest mode while playing this game or saving might break!), but these are still damned fine games, except for some really bad DLC that is rarely fun to play.

That new Saints Row though, woof. If you told me that reveal trailer was for a new Watch Dogs game, I'd have no problems believing that. Really happy they delayed it by so much and I hope it turns out great, but expectations are very low right now.

Sega Genesis Classics

Another just superb collection of old games with fantastic implementation of Rewind and Fast Forward  functionality. Between this and the Capcom version, the Sega collection has far more good/great games and some absolutely stellar classics. Can't recommend this one high enough if this was your era of games or you have interest in what's available here.

Yakuza

I talked about the series a bit when we posted about Like A Dragon earlier in the year, but dang going from never having played a Yakuza game to now playing all the main series ones in about a year... I have some conflicting emotions and thoughts but it was a ride. Pairing some truly terrible gameplay and some absolutely fantastic characters and stories, I would say I love this series but also half the series is trash. Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1 are must-plays, just set the combat to the easiest level so you can burn through it as fast as you can and focus on what's important: real estate mini-games. Give Kiwami 2 a play if you're still in the mood for it. Pretend 3 and 6 only exist as summaries in Wikipedia. Forget that 4 and 5 exist.

So that about wraps the year up for games. I played some other things here and there but nothing that stirred any deep thoughts in me, or I've just forgotten that I played them so they can't be that special.

Next year in games is looking mighty underwhelming. We're a second year into a new console generation and there still isn't anything that looks interesting enough to warrant buying the new systems. I'm sure I'll pick up a PS5 several years from now when the next models/hardware refreshes are out, but it's going to take a lot of price drops and far more games to come out before I consider it.