I'll drop my top games here, and add to the list if I find time before the deadline.
- Death Stranding - The very last thing I expected Death Stranding to be was a total blast to play, with moving themes that are made concrete by all the fun stuff you're doing.
- Devil May Cry 5 - Devil May Cry is back, baby, and it's glorious!
- Astral Chain - Platinum does it again. An original twist on their classic action combat formula, this stylish cybercop action game lets you control two characters at once. The combat is so damn good, and I really enjoyed the variety of content. Platinum took a page from NieR: Automata and broke up the action with RPG-ish sidequests and conversation. It works. I'm going to return to this game throughout the year to hunt down all of the secret items and hidden missions, and play through the generous post-game content.
Full comments on GOTY picks:
Death Stranding - This game took me completely by surprise. I knew two things before I played it: 1) The gameplay looked kind of tedious on purpose, to make some sort of thematic point, I guessed and 2) a new world born out of Kojima's weirdness is worth the effort to see.
Well, I was half right, and totally wrong.
The very last thing I expected Death Stranding to be was a total blast to play, with moving themes that are made concrete by all the fun stuff you're doing. The basic gameplay loop is simple: You run through the world delivering packages to remote outposts, while avoiding enemies and corrosive rain. You connect these outposts to a futuristic internet. Each connection opens up more deliveries, and lets you build more and better tools for completing them. Some tools are for combat, some for traversal. Each connected area also fills up with structures and vehicles that other players have made. Progress becomes a cooperative enterprise.
This might still sound kind of dull, but
the sense of progression is phenomenal. You start by stumbling around on foot, trying not to break all of your packages as you use basic tools like ladders and climbing ropes to struggle through the terrain. You make a few deliveries, and suddenly you've got zippy electric bikes. You can build generators to recharge them, or use the ones that other players made. You can build huge bridges to span rivers and rocky fissures, then rebuild roads that stretch for miles. Soon, you have turbo-boosting trucks that let you transport huge volumes of material. Powered exoskeltons that let you lift heavy or run fast. Ziplines that rocket you over rocky or enemy-infested areas, up hills, down cliffs, across flooded chasms. Not to mention your bola guns, remote-activated shock grenades, and decoy packages filled with knockout gas.
Before you know it, you've created a full infrastructure and turned the wilds into your playground. You can handle yourself against any enemy. You're helping other players with dropped cargo and benefiting from their vehicles and structures. You've found the most fun, interesting, and efficient ways to get from one outpost to the next.
That's the gameplay component. I didn't even touch on the classic Kojima weirdness woven throughout Death Stranding, but it's wonderful. There's loads of sci-fi weirdness. Plenty of bittersweet reflection on life, death, and culture. Delightful cameos. An especially muscular Norman Reedus. An especially Hannibal-ish Mads Mikkelsen. Moody music. Charming details, like the faces you can make in the mirror for your transdimensional enemy-detecting baby pal, or the ways you drink your energy drinks, or Norman's reactions when you linger on him with the camera.
I could go on for much longer about the splendid gameplay and presentation, but
the brilliance of Death Stranding is this: the game is a powerful ode to human connection, one that sneaks up on you with its themes as you work through story-driven tasks as a delivery guy. You're in a post-apocalyptic USA, and the country is a ruin. Fractured and scattered, full of survivalists who are out for themselves. Then there's you: Sam Bridges. You go door to door, delivering the necessities of survival, and the comforts that brighten difficult lives. You connect people to the network, and as the network grows, the people thrive and you increase your ability to forge these connections with a vast and varied toolbox. You're bringing a fractured nation together, with your own two hands.
Devil May Cry 5 - Devil May Cry is back, baby, and it's glorious! It took ten years, but Capcom finally gave DMC4 the sequel it deserved. I won't go on at length here. It's enough to say that the gameplay is better than ever, the music rocks, and the story is full of great touches that are meaningful to longtime players of the series. DMC5 is a love letter to the fans, from top to bottom. It's packed with returning enemies, requested features, and fan-favorite gameplay elements from past DMC titles. It's both deeper and more accessible than prior games. It even spins gold out the straw of Ninja Theory's ill-fated reboot, just like DMC3 salvaged good ideas from DMC2.
In a great year for action game fans, Devil May Cry 5 is surely the crown jewel.
I'll give an honorable mention to Sekiro.
I don't want to tilt the poll in its favor by adding any points. I believe the game has serious technical and design flaws that make it far less user friendly than it should have been. However, Sekiro pretty much took over my life for a month, as I came close to 100%ing it. After getting the Return ending, I watched days of speed runs by great players.
I love the way Sekiro looks and sounds. I love the simple but effective story, the side characters, and their connections with one another. Sekiro truly has a well realized world.
It is not, however, a well designed action game. The massive hitstun and blockstun, combined with the well documented input lag of the console versions, almost ruined the combat for me. I was also terribly frustrated by how I was penalized for normal trial and error. Losing money and xp every time you're killed, in a game that is guaranteed to kill you a lot, is not fun. Lastly, I'm not a fan of oppressive gameplay limitations in my action games. Sekiro's combat options are heavily restricted by a few factors, including very limited slots for combat moves, and a tiny ammo pool shared by most of your secondary attack mechanics.
There's a fantastic game buried in Sekiro. Perhaps, with the right mods, we'll play it someday. In its current form, Sekiro is far from the best game of 2019.
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