âIt has been a bad year. A bad year with, mercifully, some very good video gamesâ. Thatâs what I said this time last year as I tried to exit 2020 with some optimism. Womp. Turns out 2021 would be even worse, since this time around there werenât even many âvery good video gamesâ.
Now is not the time for you to tell me there were very good video games. This is my list, from my perspective, based on my tastes. And when it comes to the games I like to play, 2021 was a historically barren year. I canât 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 Lukeâs Game Of The Year winners had.
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. Assassinâs Creed Valhallaâs expansions
just kept on coming, and broke the last patience I had for the Ubisoft Formula (go to this tower â> expose map â> have missions unlock). 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. 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.
Then thereâs Humankind, my most anticipated game in years. I donât 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. Only then it arrived and it didnât. Battlefield 2042 is fucking amazing when itâs fucking amazing, but an unfinished piece of garbage when itâs not. Even sports games, my one guilty pleasure, had a very bad year: Konamiâs 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.
Iâm sorry if this has been a downer. This is supposed to be a celebration of the best games of the year, not a recap of how much everything sucked. But for me 2021 was defined by these disappointments. Weâre living through rough times, and I think itâs OK to feel down about things sometimes, to take stock and recognise that video games canât always be perpetually improving, that things canât always be amazing.
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. I think itâs important to recognise this in posts like this, to understand that alongside the good thereâs a very good reason for so much of the bad, one that goes way beyond âoh there just werenât many games for me this yearâ.
Anyway! Enough depression and disappointment. I still played some good video games this year, so letâs move on from all this gloom and celebrate them below. Theyâre in no particular order, but if you absolutely need a âwinnerâ here, then my Game of the Year was Lost Judgment, because:
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1440979483360579584
BATTLEFIELD 2042
I get it, itâs thoroughly broken, and I have no idea if this game suffered greatly at the hands of the pandemic, broken management or both. But the one thing it gets rightâits colossal 128-player battles, which is what Iâm here forâit gets very, very right
SHADOW TACTICS: BLADES OF THE SHOGUN
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. 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.
FORZA HORIZON 5
Iâve played most of these Forza games, and while theyâve always been fun, theyâve also always been weirdly disposable. For a few reasonsâthe racing, the setting, the crisp visualsâthis one seems to have finally broken through, though itâs Far Cry-esque cultural tourism stuff remains a little on the nose.
UNPACKING
I hate moving house in real life, and donât ever want to do it again. I however love moving house in Unpacking, and have done it several times in a row after reviewing the game. Its insistence on putting everything in its place can get a little grating in certain spaces, but on the whole the way it was able to tell a storyâwhile still giving the player the space to tell their own storyâwithin the confines of an object-placing game was one hell of an achievement.
SABLE
Itâs really frustrating that the on-foot sections of this game are so terrible, because the rest of it is a simply magical experience. Evoking as many memories of Breath of the Wildâs loneliest moments as it does Moebiusâ iconic comic style, Sable is a game where the destination has rarely been more irrelevant, because itâs the journey thatâs the real star here.
HIGHFLEET
Iâm not normally someone who enjoys getting my ass kicked in a game, but like I said earlier this year, Highfleet does it in the best ways possible. Itâs been months since I last played it, but I still think about it a lot, especially with Dune still on my mind as well.
MINI MOTORWAYS
It didnât quite have the clarity of purpose that Mini Metro did, but the themeâand its gentle criticisms of the concept of motorways themselvesâwas only part of the appeal here. Mostly this was just a great way to enjoy more of Dinosaur Polo Clubâs meticulous puzzle design, which is able to present each challenge as a canvas upon which the player can paint their wildest (transit) ideas upon.
DORFROMANTIK
I like building cities. I like board games. I like chilling out. I like things that look nice. And so it came to pass that I liked Dorfromantik, very much
LOST JUDGMENT
I just love Yakuza games so damn much, and so any time one of them drops itâs an automatic contender for my personal GOTY. I especially liked Lost Judgment though because with the whole franchise at a crossroads it was simultaneously the best of both old and new
HITMAN 3
Wait, just how long has 2021 been? Hitman 3 came out this year? Jesus Christ.
Well, thatâs good news for this list at least, because just like the last couple of releases,this was a fantastic exercise in murderous dress-ups, combining tense stealth action with some genuinely hilarious puzzles. Puzzles involving dressing up, and murder. The best of which involved a grape press, though the entirety of the Berlin level will also live long in the memory.
