So many games. So little time.
Seems like I say that every year, as my pile of shame gets bigger. I was once again much more of a game industry business writer and event coordinator this year than I was a game reviewer. But I did dip my toe into playing games enough to come up with my annual list of favorite games.
The competition for my time was more severe than ever, with more events to organize and more travel to do during past years thanks to the global nature of the gaming business. I’ll have to commit to being more of a portable and mobile gamer to keep up, but that will have to compete with my obsession of listening to science fiction books on Audible on my iPhone.
Yet I still believe that you have to play games to be a good game journalist and bring some authenticity to the subject. Remaining a part of these conversations about the best games is a way to stay wired into this community.
While on the road, I poured a lot of hours into the mobile gamed Total Battle, where I’m in a clan. Still, I managed to sink my teeth into games that commanded my wholehearted attention. I didn’t try to play exhaustively. Rather than focus on every new release, I spent my time on the games that I wanted to play and tried out some of the games everyone was talking about. This is a lesson I learned after playing Cuphead. There are many many great games that came out this year that I just didn’t play. So, take this list with that in mind.
We had a mix of both indie games, double-A games and triple-A games ship this year. There were some triple-A disappointments like Star Wars: Outlaws, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Skull & Bones and Concord. Just like last year the disappointments were Redfall and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
But having enough games to play or playing bad games wasn’t my problem. I poured the most hours into my perennial favorite, Call of Duty: Warzone, as well as this year’s title Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. But I also had a chance to play some nerdy and eclectic military sim games that I’ve always loved since I was a kid.
If you look at my list this year, you’ll see that Xbox had a fantastic year, but the other platforms held their own. That’s a reflection of its big acquisitions (like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda) as well as its investments in big titles over the years.
And I was ecstatic to see the success of game adaptations for the movies and TV, like Fallout, Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, Arcane Season 2 and Secret Level. Those adaptations helped spread the love of gaming culture far and wide into the global mass market. Sadly, the Borderlands movie was the disappointment on that front. We’ll get many more of these in the years to come.
I hope you are staying safe during the holidays with your family and friends, and let’s hope you can find the game to play and celebrate your gaming passions. And so here are my favorite games of 2024.
My previous favorites are here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011.
In each story below, the links go to any reviews or major stories about the games. Some of the videos are of my own gameplay. Here’s the list in reverse order.
Developer: 2×2 Games/Croteam
Publisher: 2×2 Games/Croteam
Platforms: Windows PC
Unity of Command originally came out in 2011 with an emphasis on the Western Front of WWII and Unity of Command II came out in 2019. But it was never on my radar. Then I met the leader Tomislav Uzelac at Reboot in Dubrovnik this year and I gave it a try.
The game is regularly updated and now it has more than 250 scenarios covering 250 battles during WWII. The newest one is a downloadable content (DLC) that covered the Soviet push to Berlin to end the war. Over the years, I’ve played a long list of similar hardcore war games like this, including I played games like Panzer General, Allied General, Combat Mission, Close Combat, Company of Heroes, and Steel Division 2. This game is a single-player turn-based game with some nice graphics and maps but nothing overly special on the cinematics or combat/movement animation fronts.
But I like how this one has a lot of nuance in each hexagon, with so many modifiers that affect combat. It’s got a complicated supply system that is hard to learn but critical for keeping your units on the board in fighting condition.
As your teams get more experiences, it’s important to upgrade their capabilities so they can provide supporting attacks, incorporate artillery, or attack across rivers. It’s a deep game that gives you a lot of chances to customize your strategy, in terms of how you use your strategic resources like aircraft and reinforcements. Each battle gives you a glimpse into the strategy of each side on the division level of the war, from small encounters in North Africa to massive battles on the Western and Eastern fronts. I’m still pushing into the Eastern front, but I highly recommend the entire game to fans in this space.
I’ve put in about 80 hours into the game on Steam. I highly recommend it for war game geeks.
Developer/publisher: Scorewarrior
Platforms: PC/mobile
I am certain no other game journalist will pick this game, considering it came out a while ago and it’s a free-to-play title that I play on mobile. But, for the second year in a row, I’ve spent more hours on this game than most of the games on this list year. I play it for a few minutes at a time when I’m at the gym or on the go. I was drawn in by the saw real-time battles in a fantasy setting. The real-time battles are on a rail but they’re fun to execute.
But the bulk of the experience is a strategy game where you build your city and armies to fight other rivals.
At first, I built up my city, then I ventured out with my soldiers to clear the monsters outside my gates. Then I started attacking monsters on the strategic map. All of this took a lot of time, and I occasionally spent money to speed things up.
Even after a couple of years, my might is around two million in this game, enough to qualify as a veteran. But there are many other clan players who are way above this. My chief became head of our kingdom this year, which has many different teams within it.
I’m still getting attacked by others and can’t successfully attack back so easily as they move and com from across kingdoms through portals. Those attacks wipe out my entire army and steal resources in a single attack while I was sleeping. But I can deal with that, as there is a troop revival function where you can pay resources to revive them for a week. The clan keeps generating resources so I don’t have to spend money to do this myself.
One of the reasons I come back is that the benefits of being in the clan are great enough to keep my city and status growing within the game. Sure, I’m running on a treadmill. But I’m a happy hamster, which is why this game is still on my list as a kind of mindless clicking fun.
Publisher: Gearbox Software
Developer: Blackbird Interactive
Platforms: Windows
This game debuted back in March 2024 on Steam and the Epic Games Store. The PC game was the latest installment in the sci-fi strategy series that first debuted with Relic Entertainment’s Homeworld in 1999. Blackbird, founded in 2010, reassembled the Relic team and made one of the biggest investments in real-time strategy to date to get this one off the ground.
The game had mediocre reviews, with a 74% on Metacritic. I suspect that players had a lot of difficulty with the task of navigating a fleet through 3D space and building your fleet at the same time. As far as real-time strategy goes, it doesn’t get more complex than that.
Some folks didn’t like the narrative. Homeworld 3 ventures into a fresh narrative within the Homeworld universe, combining story cinematics with missions in 3D space. Imogen S’Jet, a scientist and successor to Karan S’Jet, steps into the role of Fleet Command to unravel the enigmatic threat posed by The Anomaly, endangering the future of the galaxy. There are almost always giant asteroids or mega-ships or wreckage or huge structures where you can fight in space with some sense of geographic orientation.
I loved how they filled the void of space with this kind of terrain to give structure to the battles. And the battles were huge, and sometimes they were broken into different objectives so you could bite off a bit of the battle at a time. The range in ships available ranged from recon/fighter ships to huge capital ships and your own Mothership, which was the source of manufacturing for your fleets.
I wouldn’t say this is a hidden or overlooked gem. It has its flaws. But it’s definitely my kind of game in an RTS genre where there just aren’t enough games now. I was overjoyed to play Company of Heroes 3 last year and Homeworld 3 provided my fix for RTS this year.
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Asobo
Platforms: Windows PC, Xbox Series X/S
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a pretty monumental achievement in game development. On a technical level, it is so impressive, as this year’s title has 4,000 times more detail on the ground than the version launched in 2020, which had 15 million players.
This game is able to do that improvement because it is hosted in the cloud, rather than on the player’s local game. There’s a drawback to that I’ll mention in a bit. But one benefit was storage: the previous game could require half a terabyte of storage space with all the updates, but now, with the data in the cloud, the storage on your local machine is only 23 gigabytes.
The horsepower of the cloud enable some amazing improvements. I attended a preview event at the Grand Canyon and could see how much detail the game captured from the real world. The great thing about the game is the realism serves not only game fans but pilots in training as well. The added detail enables much more “digital tourism” where you can fly over places you only dream about seeing.
For metaverse fans and pilots and digital twin experts, it’s cool that the Earth in the simulation is really as close to a digital twin of the real planet as has ever been built. I heard a lot about digital twins from Nvidia — it supplies the chips to run simulations that let BMW build a digital twin factory to perfect the design before it builds the factory in real life. And Nvidia ambitiously is building Earth-2, a simulation of the entire world so accurate that it may one day be used to predict climate change for decades to come.
This was the first time — since all the talk of the metaverse — that I heard a game developer seriously talk about using a simulation as a digital twin of the Earth.
As I took off in my simulated experimental plane, I could see the hotel where I stayed and the Playa Bonita Mexican restaurant where I ate dinner the night before in Tusayan, Arizona, the town near the Grand Canyon. I could see why it felt the aircraft were buzzing the hotel as they took off. Then I flew over the seven mile road to see the Grand Canyon Visitor Center below, and then finally the points like the South Kaibab Trail where I hiked down into the canyon for 30 minutes to see the Ooh Ahh Point and the Bright Angel Trail that leads to two tunnels.
I later flew an F/A-18e fighter jet over the canyon and wound up hitting the side of the canyon wall. Then my fighter was putt-putting through the river (there are no fiery explosions in the flight sim). All of these things are just tiny pieces of the three million missions you can fly in Flight Sim.
In terms of detail, the game has 2,077 glider airports from around the world, 952 oil rings where you can land a helicopter, 84,184 helipads and much more.
While the teams couldn’t do everything to map all of the Earth, they focused on principles of realism, accuracy, the authenticity of flight and real-world data. Four different systems have to work together for an aircraft to fly. There are effects like heat, turbulence, lift, wind shear and more. The cargo you carry will impact a helicopter’s physics and the airflow simulation. You can look inside your aircraft and see things that are inches away or look out the window and see things that are miles away. You can see dust, smoke or the grass blowing in the wind.
One of the most fascinating things about the game is that it has a dynamic and living world. There are herds of animals on the ground, following their migration patterns. You can use a helicopter to herd sheep. Over the ocean, you can see ships sailing through bays and harbors that you can see from above. There’s live weather data that an impact the cloud systems and atmospheric lighting.
Sadly, the game had a very difficult launch, perhaps because it shifted so much burden to the cloud. Not even Microsoft’s Azure server infrastructure could keep the game online for all on the launch day. I am hoping they conquer the bugs that slowed down the game and players come back once it’s all fixed.
6) Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Ninja Theory
Platforms: Xbox Series X and Series S, GeForce Now, Microsoft Windows
The challenge of making a sequel is that you have to give players more of what they liked the first time around and yet also make things fresh. The tough thing for this game was that it took longer to make yet the play time was significantly shorter than the original. I finished it in 7.8 hours and others fans zipped through it faster. That was why Senua’s Saga was not as popular, in my view, than the original.
But I still think everyone should play it. It featured the unique and stirring performance by voice actor Melina Juergens. Once again, she plays Senua who is not a muscle-bound or super sexy hero. She knows how to wield a sword, and she suffers from psychosis, or hearing voices in her head, and the game expresses the condition in a kind of metaphor, where she can see demons — and in the case of the second game, giants, in the real world.
The game once again incorporates the advice of real world psychosis experts like Paul Fletcher at the University of Cambridge, as well as patients who have experienced psychosis. It helps people address mental health issues by immersing them in a story they can relate to, with a hero they can identify with, and give them the resilience they need to get through the journey.
Senua is unique not only because of how she looks, but because of what goes on inside her head. As she is living in a metaphor in a fantasy world, where the demons in her head can really be demons in the world around her.
To paraphrase a recent talk by Anita Sarkeesian, Senua is proof that the game industry no longer hates women. Rather, she is an embodiment of how far the industry has come.
Much more in command of herself than in the previous game, Senua, a Celtic warrior from Ireland in the Viking days, has allowed herself to be captured to trace a path to her enemies who keep enslaving her people. She wants to get to the bottom of why they keep attacking and put an end to it.
If you wear binaural headphones, you can experience what Senua feels. She hears voices and she stays within that reality to fulfill her quest. In Senua’s Sacrifice, she was preoccupied and enslaved by her darkness. She could not avoid the voices. In Senua’s Saga, she has a better grasp on reality where she is in control. The darkness, especially in the intimidating form of her deranged father inside her head, is still with her. But she can master it and control her fate.
The challenges are different this time, as Senua is investigating a new land which is bedeviled with its own monsters and demons — and giants from Norse legend. She must still use her different perspective — her ability to see the world in another way than most of us — to solve puzzles in the world.
The game’s imagery is gorgeous, whether you’re looking at the realistic rendering of Iceland or the super-realistic eyes and skin of Senua’s face.
The game has six episodes in six different sections of Iceland, a barren wilderness battered by the weather. It looks hyperrealistic, thanks to the developer’s careful use of Unreal Engine 5.
The game has some flaws, like how short it is compared to the original, which, ironically, seemed overly long. The combat scenes are shorter and fewer. You spend more time walking or engaging with the story than fighting, and that will disappoint the action players who don’t want to play a “walking simulator.”
The game still has satisfying and visceral combat, with waves of enemies coming at you. It also has hidden beauties embedded in the landscape and plenty of puzzles to solve. This game came close to being my favorite game of the year, but it just needed a more compelling story arc and the play length to with it.
5) Stalker 2: The Heart of Chornobyl
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: GSC Game World
Platforms: Xbox Series X and Series S, GeForce Now, Microsoft Windows
Stalker 2 had a long gestation, and I would give this game team an award just for getting it out the door. GSC Game World, based in Kyiv, labored on the game for seven years and talked about it for longer, as the first game came out in 2007 and the last one was out in 2009. Abandoning earlier directions, the developers created a plan and built a new team. They worked on getting the script right from the start. After six rewrites, they finally started moving forward.
Then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and further disrupted the project, forcing many on the 460-person team to leave the country and pick up somewhere else. The ordeal was captured in a documentary by Andrew Stephan and Microsoft.
Developers had to leave to go to war. Two associated with the Stalker games were killed. The electricity regularly went out and it still goes out in Kyiv, where the bulk of the team is. Missiles regularly rained down on the city and they still do, with anti-missile rockets intercepting the incoming missiles before they can do harm.
The game is built around the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the location of the tragic, real-world nuclear disaster in 1986 in Ukraine. Stalkers are the people who go into the zone to retrieve valuable artifacts and sell them. They’re a bit like the tomb raiders Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, except in radioactive sites. It’s a shooter game with serious combat, as so many of the enemies aren’t human.
This wasteland has become overgrown with plants and strange monsters, mutated by the radioactivity and forces of the anomaly. It is the perfect setting for a survival horror game. There’s a lot more horror tis time around from the outset, where you have to face an invisible monster. There’s a dark atmosphere.
If you’re into survival, this is tough. You never have enough bullets. It’s a long game. There’s a lot of monsters and human enemies too. The combat feels real, but it’s not easy, as you’re in a more realistic situation, like PUBG rather than Call of Duty. It’s not a bad way to spend the holidays, if you’re in the right frame of mind to be horrified and undertake a long journey.
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Developer: Saber Interactive
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, GeForce Now, Microsoft Windows
I hope I have done my absolution when it comes to Space Marine. Back when the first game came out, after I saw a preview while I was drowsy at the end of a long preview week, I wrote my piece up and made the disrespectful mistake of saying Space Marine looked like a copy of Gears of War.
I knew that Gears of War came out after the lore of Warhammer 40,000 emerged with its huge armored soldiers who fought against swarms of monsters. But Gears of War came out as a game before Space Marine did, and it seemed like Space Marine just copied what Gears of War had copied.
This was very similar to how Indiana Jones is coming out as a quality game so late after Uncharted and Tomb Raider, even though the Indiana Jones movies inspired those games. Now it makes you feel like Indiana Jones copied those games. Anyway, fans did not like my not-so-clever analysis. But I’ve now fully played the entire campaign of Space Marine 2 in co-op mode with my friend Mark Chandler.
It was an excellent experience. Now I’m standing from the rooftops and singing this game’s praises as one of the top four of 2024. The atmosphere of this third-person shooter game is equally compelling, immersing you the world of Warhammer 40,000, with its swarms of enemies, its beautiful sci-fi world and astoundingly powerful Space Marines.
You play as Titus, a lieutenant of the Ultramarines and you’re accompanied on missions by your fellow Space Marines Chairon and Gadriel. If you play co-op like I did with Mark, you replace one of them with a human player. I consider co-op to be a must for anyone who wants to get through this game in a reasonable amount of time, as you always need at least one human to have your back.
The game is a great slaughterfest, as it uses the excellent World War Z game engine to pit well-armed humans against swarms of monsters, some easy to kill and some very difficult. You always get that feeling of being cornered (and yelling, “My kingdom for a horse!”) and just barely escaping with your life. The hordes close in on you and you have to switch weapons to deal with bigger bosses. And the variety never really ends.
Once, you finally finish, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief and admire the slaughter of beasts at your feet. Now I think it would be wise of those Gears of War developers to copy Space Marine 2.
Publisher: Sony
Developer: Arrowhead Game Studios
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows
What if you took the most fun part of a gaming experience and made a game only about that? That’s Helldivers 2 in a nutshell. It’s a third-person co-op shooter game that debuted as an unexpected bombshell on the PlayStation 5 and Windows. It is set in the 22nd century and is a lot like a more satirical version of Starship Troopers.
The campy patriotic humor belies humanity’s desperate war against alien bugs and automatons, and the Helldivers are an elite force that drops straight into battle in the form of a squad of four, descending in landing pods from an orbital drop ship. As soon as you land, you call in extra weapons or ammo and then go to work taking objectives before the bugs or robots can swarm you.
As you take objectives and level up, you can bring down more heavy weaponry or call in support attacks directly on the enemy. It’s very satisfying to bring down an orbital strike on a giant spider-like monster as it’s about to gut your team members.
The humor continues as you can call down strikes that accidentally eviscerate your own team as well as the bugs. And like Space Marine 2, you have to deal with the swarms, but the maps are dynamic so you can replay them endlessly. The leveling up and the live service part of this makes it so there really is no end to the Helldivers 2 habit.
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software and others
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft Windows
As I noted recently, this game is the culmination of a big year for Activision, which had been loading up for this moment.
Ten game studios came together under the leadership of Treyarch and Raven Software and took four years to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with a team of thousands of game developers, instead of the usual three years.
They came up with the first Call of Duty that I’ve rated five out of five stars (after playing every single Call of Duty game ever) and one where my kill count is better than my death count.
The campaign is longer than some of the shorter ones and it tells a very good story about grunts and spies who defy the mendacity of their leaders. It has some quality hallucinogenic moments (where you’re fighting a lot of zombies) that is a kind of crazy Black Ops tradition that makes you feel like you’re playing something different.
The story takes you to many locations around the world and some of the combat scenes are very difficult. And it’s got great set pieces like riding a motorcycle out of the Capital building in Washington, D.C., to escape a swarm of bad guys chasing you down. The ending is tense and touching, something you don’t expect in a Call of Duty story.
The multiplayer is sweet and the weapons feel right. As you level up the sniper rifle, it becomes more powerful, but it’s never as weak as a pea shooter. And a big ammo drum on the assault rifle helps make up for the fact that you can’t aim as precisely with it. I haven’t felt the need to level up different weapons that would cause me to start at zero again when it comes to leveling up.
I’ve kept my XM4 all the way up to Prestige 1 level and am leveling up my sniper rifle still. I have a k/d ratio of 1.14 and couldn’t understand why I’ve gotten better. But then I realized this is the first Call of Duty to show up on Xbox Game Pass, and all of those subscribers are trying it out because it’s free to them. And they’re cannon fodder for us veterans. That’s even more fun. I’ll be shifting over to play more Warzone too, and perhaps get deeper into Zombies.
There’s no better way to spend the holidays, blowing things up.
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Machine Games
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft Windows
I feel like I’ve already written a lot on this game as my review dropped this week. I highly recommend this game to people who aren’t hardcore shooter players, even though it comes from Machine Games, the makers of the ultra hardcore Wolfenstein games.
This studio, owned by Bethesda (now part of Microsoft), took on the challenge of making an accessible game based on a beloved franchise. Troy Baker does a great job with voice acting for Indy, so much so that I can mistake him for a younger Harrison Ford.
You can turn up the difficulty on both fighting and puzzles to make the game more difficult for hardcore gamer tastes. But in my rush to play the game, I decided to play it on “moderate” difficulty for the fighting but “easy” mode for the puzzles. This gave me a navigation indicator for where I had to go to fulfill my mission, rather than spend a lot of my time looking for items in a random landscape.
The world of Indiana Jones feels like it is faithfully recreated, down to the 1930s look of Indy’s Marshall College. The missions are intriguing and they take you to exotic places like the Pyramids of Giza, the Vatican and Castel Santangelo, Thailand, Shanghai and the jungles of South America.
The fist fighting is so-so, but the whip is great fun to use as a weapon or a tool to enable you to cross chasms or climb barriers. It’s got a sense of humor and gives you places to explore and mysteries to figure out besides shooting every Nazi soldier that you see. I think of it as a rare accessible shooter in that way.
The relationship between Indy and Gina Lombardi, an investigative journalist looking for her sister, turns in an unexpected direction and it defies typical romance tropes. There’s a point where you think the game is just about over and it is an amazingly creative scene. But it turns out that you’re just peeling back another layer on the game and you’re going to be heading off to other places and unravel a wider conspiracy than you thought. That’s where this game crosses over from good to great, and it’s why it deserves five out of five stars and my pick as my Game of the Year.
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