Games I played in 2021
This long long year is over, may it never return. The whole thing was honestly kind of a blur to me, enough so that I don’t actually remember a lot of what I did. So to take myself down memory lane, I’m going to give a short review of most of what I played this year, be it a new game, or something I played on stream for the first time.
Daemon X Machina
I like mech games, they almost always a fun time. And this one in particular was quite fun. A spiritual successor to the Armored Core games, made by some of the people who worked on said games, it is a fast paced game with a lot of customization that lets you build pretty much any kind of mech you want. It has a very colorful and anime esthetic to it to differentiate it from Armored Core games. It even has a decent story to it, a tail of people trying to fight over a zone covered in alien energy and trying to unravel the mysteries within.
I don’t know if there’ll ever be another Armored Core game since it seems that From Software has since moved onto almost exclusively Dark Soulsy games. But I do hope we get another one of these because this was fun, would recommend.
A Plague Tale: Innocence
I have a weird relationship with horror games. I don’t usually seek them out but when I do play them I usually enjoy them and I enjoyed this. Set in the middle ages, Plague Tale centers around a young girl named Amicia as she tries to protect her brother Hugo from the French Inquisition as they try to hunt him down for his strange powers. At the same time this is happening a huge swarm of rats are devouring the countryside and they seem to be drawn to Hugo.
The gameplay is a mix of stealth and puzzle solving as you’ll have to find ways around soldiers and rat swarms with a bit of freedom in how you can accomplish this, as some puzzles have only one solution while others can be dealt with in a number of ways. It’s not the smoothest thing at times as there were a number of points where the game felt kind of janky, but not enough to be a bother. Honestly the story was more of the highlight anyway, with the focus on the relationship between Amicia and Hugo as they’re forced to fight their way out into the world.
There is a sequel coming out sometime in 2022 and I will be looking froward to it. Another one I would recommend.
Outriders
Oh what the fuck was this mess. Outriders was a third person loot shooter made by People Can Fly that made a number of bizarre decisions. It was made to chase Destiny’s success but they didn’t really do that besides making it a shooter in space. They made it online only in spite of there being no reason to do that, the game lacks any sort of PVP aspect, only co-op. And because it was online only it meant that the game was subject to the stability of the games servers, which were not stable at all. In fact that’s what aborted my stream playthrough of the game as I hit a point where I couldn’t progress anything because the games servers would just crash non stop. It took them months to fix that.
Even besides that, the game had some bad decisions regarding gameplay. They had something called World Tiers that would increase difficulty the higher up you went with them, while also increasing the quality of loot drops you would get (Theoretically, the math on that was also broken). The problem with the World Tier system is that it’s the kind of thing that expects you team up with other people to deal with the difficulty but if you wanted to play on your own (Like I was) it made for an absolute slog. To make matters worse, the tiers were unlocked via and EXP system and when you died you lost EXP. And to top it all off, you wanted to access this games endgame content you had to unlock all the tiers, and not just the World Tiers, but the Expedition Tiers for the Expedition Mode that you unlocked by finishing the base story. And those required you to finish missions under certain tight time limits to increase the Expedition Tiers. So yeah, not fun.
As far as the rest of the game goes, the story was just a miserable slog as it’s begins with you as a part of the titular Outriders. A group explorers who are part of an effort to colonize a new planet because Earth has been destroyed. Except that once you get there it turns out that there’s an energy storm that wipes out electronics and the colony gets wiped out, you get infected with a mysterious energy and put into cyro freeze and when you wake up it’s been 30 years and everyone has been killing each other and slowly dying out and the story does not pick up from there. It’s just misery from beginning to end.
So yeah, would not recommend and I expect this game to meet its end whenever the servers are shut down. Probably sometime soon.
Shining Resonance: Refrain
I am endlessly fascinated by the Shining franchise. It went from being a pretty good Tactical RPG series to a mediocre action RPG series that did so badly that stopped being released outside of Japan for a number of years. Shining Resonance: Refrain was an updated re-release of Shining Resonance that A) Included some new content and B) was released outside of Japan. Was it worth it? Eh, kind of.
I can’t say that this is a bad game, as it’s very well put together. But at the same time it’s nothing special. The combat is decently put together, although somewhat janky as certain characters feel really off to play than others. The story is nothing notable, a very bog standard JRPG story about kids trying to stop an evil empire that’s trying to release a great evil. You play as Yuma, a young man possessed by the Shining Dragon, a powerful entity responsible for opposing Deus, the dark god of the setting. Yuma and the Shining Dragon are backed up by the Dragoneers, warriors who wield the Armonics, which are weapons that double as musical instruments. Which is an interesting gimmick admittedly as there are several gimmicks in the game that revolve around playing the Armonics to Resonate and empower the party.
A big focus of the game is on Yuma’s relationships to the rest of the party and you can expand on them by going on dates with the different party members and witnessing social events. In fact the game encourages this as doing this will give you character traits that can give you passive abilities during combat. I’m not really a fan of dating mechanics in games, but this was fine. The thing that mostly bugged me was the games story delivery via Visual Novelesque scenes where you just stared at characters faces while they described stuff that was happening offscreen. The quality of the storytelling here was really hit or miss.
I think all in all I would recommend this game, though it’s not a strong recommend.
Tell Me Why
Tell Me Why is an adventure game from DontNod Entertainment, the creators of similar series Life is Strange. This one tells the tale of twins Tyler and Alyson coming back to their childhood home after 10 years to sell it. They were split up in the past because their mother seemingly tried to kill Tyler for coming out as a trans man and Tyler was forced to kill her in self defense. As the siblings go through the house though they discover that like the Life is Strange protagonists, they possess a special power, in this case the ability to speak to each other telepathically and to conjure up manifestations of their old memories. They also discover that their mom wasn’t the transphobe that they thought she was and decide to embark on a quest to get answers about why she did what she did that night.
This is a very intense game, as the siblings go through some vivid memories and experiences as they come to terms with their past. But I quite enjoyed it and it resonated with me a good deal as a trans woman. I would highly recommend this one.
Moons of Madness
A puzzle based horror spin-off of The Secret World, Moons of Madness is set in future of the setting on a science facility on Mars, run by one of the setting many corrupt organizations. You play as one of the scientists, Dr. Shane Newhart, on the day when everything goes to shit as monsters and hallucinations start overtaking the red planet and Shane must find a way to survive.
I’m a big fan of The Secret World (Bad gameplay decisions aside) and so this was great for me. Unfortunately this game required better specs than my PC had so it turned into a blurry mess at times, but that’s on me.
I would highly recommend this one even if you’re not familiar with The Secret World as this was a good time.
Necromunda: Hired Gun
Based off of the Warhammer 40K spin-off of the same name, Hired Gun is a fast paced First Person Shooter where you play as Bounty Hunter going after a highly valued target and getting embroiled in a turf war.
The stories pretty underwhelming as it’s basically just going and harassing various gangs in search of the bounty. The gameplay on the other hand is quite fun, it feels like a mash up of Doom and Titanfall. It wasn’t always the smoothest thing to play at times but I would highly recommend
Othercide
Now here’s one that’s very much my shit. Othercide is a turn based action game where you follow The Red Mother, an immortal warrior who is attempting to help The Child, a fellow immortal who has gone through great suffering and has been given great powers by a living personification of Suffering. The Mother sends out her Daughters, personifications of her various skill sets to fight The Child’s various minions.
The game is quite challenging as even on the easier difficulty things are rough, most of the Daughters attacks are very high risk high reward as they cost health to use and your units can only recover some health between mission cycles and if a Daughter dies then she’s gone, unless you have a resurrection token, which you can mostly only get from very hard missions. In general the game expects you to fail a lot, but whenever you start over you can buy perks with a special currency earned doing missions.
Oh and the games visuals are all in black, white, and red. Very much my thing. I would strongly recommend this one.
Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements
Quest for Glory is one of my favorite video game series of all time. So having QFG inspired game is always good for me and this one delivers. And this was made by some of the people who did the fantastic Quest for Glory 2 VGA remake, so even more of a plus.
The games story is pretty decent although it does start off pretty slow but it does pick up once you hit the actual plot of the game. I will say though that this has one of my least favorite combat systems in any QFG game, as it basically amounts to running around in circles lobbing off spells. It feels really weird to use and control.
As far as QFG inspired games go, I can’t say this one is my favorite (Heroine’s Quest still holds that title) but this one is a sold second place. Would recommend.
Lost Kingdoms
So this one’s quite unique, an action RPG game that is also a card game. I was always familiar with this game but I had never actually played it until recently. I’d only ever played the sequel which is a far better game. But this one is pretty good.
From From Software, this game is about a Princess Katrina who takes up the Runestone, a powerful item that allows her to use the power of cards to summon monsters to do her bidding. The story is pretty bare bones, typical for any From Software game. The real meat lies in the gameplay, there’s nothing really like this series and it’s a shame that From Software gave up on it as quickly as it did. I don’t know, someone make a new one, or something like it.
As I said before, this ones not as good as the sequel, but I would recommend checking out this one.
Nox
This one I had just not played in a long time. A Diablo like from a time when that was a popular genre to emulate and when Westwood Studios was still a thing. The story of this one revolves around a guy named Jack who gets sucked from our world into the world of Nox where he takes up one of three classes in order to fight the Necromancer who unintentionally summoned him and to get back home.
As far as Diablo likes go this one is fine. It’s not as good as Diablo 2 but hold it’s own. It has some neat ideas like mana stones in the enviroment to restore your Magic and then some weird ones like it’s control (Instead of point and click, you point and hold to move). Also each class has its own story arc so that adds to the replayability.
I’d say give this one a try if you’re curious.
Death End re;Quest
Oh boy, what the hell? So this game has some of the worst aspects JRPG’s in it. Like Shining Resonance, this game delivers its story via Visual Novel like cutscenes. Unlike Shining Resonance though, this games cutscenes go on just short of forever. Seriously, this game is just chock full of endless meandering cutscenes, that take five minutes to say what could be said in one.
So the actual plot of the game is that Shina, a game developer who went missing a year prior suddenly wakes up in a glitchy bug filled video game that she had been working on before her disappearance. At the same time one of her co-workers Arata, gets a hold of a developer copy of the game that allows him to interact with Shina and the world and the two resolve to get Shina out of the game and into the real world.
But yeah, there’s about a billion cutscenes between them and freedom and it is a rough miserable road. It doesn’t help that there are several mandatory real world segments that are just more visual novel badness. Oh and to top it off, this game does its best to be quite edgy, as there are several false endings in this game where the protagonists suffer horrible graphic deaths. And the game encourages you to get them because doing so gives you stat boosts.
And the best part is that the first time through, you don’t get an ending. One of the villains just instant kills everyone and the game tells you to play through it again. And I didn’t because that was where I called it quits. This is the only game on this list that I didn’t finish. It was that bad.
To say one nice thing though, I did like the games combat system. It’s nothing special but they did have a gameplay mechanic where you can bounce enemies around like a ping pong ball and that really carried me through this game for a long time.
But yeah, don’t play this one.
Far Cry 6
So here’s something that’ll shock people, I actually like this game. I know that’s probably surprising considering how shit Five Cry and Five Cry: New Dawn were but it’s true.
I think a big part about why I liked this one is that they made the player character in this one, Dani Rojas, an actual character. S/he is very talkative, has their own personality traits, and has an actual presence in the story, unlike damn near every past Far Cry protag. They even do small things like sing along with the radio, it’s great!
As far as the story goes, it’s decent enough. There’s a lot more of a focus on the supporting characters in this one instead of on the villains like the last few games which also makes it a lot more tolerable. There’s also not been anything as truly offense or poorly thought out like the implications of Five Cry’s story were. I will say though that I’m not terribly knowledgeable about Banana Republic style nations that Yara is based on so there may stuff that’s just going over my head.
As far as gameplay goes, if you’ve play one Far Cry you’ve basically played them all. The only big changes in this one are the removal of the previous games leveling systems in place of either having all those abilities already or getting them via various equipment.
I can’t recommend this one because of shittiness of Ubisoft but if you wanted to know what the games like, now you know.
Halo Infinite
So I’m going to write a whole separate thing about this game and other two in its trilogy because hot damn do I have mixed feeling on the whole thing. But here’s the short version for this one.
The stories fine but it begins after a massive time jump and pretty much does not follow up on the last games ending at all as instead of fighting Cortana and her AI’s you fight the Banished, a group of Covenant separatists who’ve got super secret sequel hook aliens that they’re trying to free. It’s very jarring. There is some good stuff in there though, like Chief’s relationship with new AI “The Weapon” and the Pilot he gets saved by near the start of the game.
Gameplaywise there’s some fun stuff in here and some stuff I wish was better. It’s an open world game but the open world stuff isn’t as busy worky as some other open world games. On the other hand this game has the worst feeling selection of weapons in the entire series. Like a lot of them are bad in campaign mode and they become even worse when you have to use them in multiplayer against other people. And then there’s some scummy things they’ve put into the game, like they got rid of the Loot Boxes which was good but then they put in an iffy Battle Pass system.
In spite of everything I’d say that this is worth checking out, if only because the Multiplayer mode is free.
