Every Game I Played in 2024, Ranked
Another year, another ordered list of video games. I've decided to abandon the major distinctions on release year because who cares.
Continuing honorable mention: I played a fuckton of Dwarf Fortress this year, as in previous years. Dwarf Fortress: still rules.
2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023
14. Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster - 1991 / 2021 - Steam - ★★★
Look: I get it, FFIV is an Important game as far as RPGs go. It has a lot of cute moments and characters and that classic Final Fantasy charm. But as someone whose Final Fantasy gameplay experiences start with 5 and end at 12: Boy, this game lacks a lot of gameplay depth huh.
It still has all the typical-yet-interesting Final Fantasy boss weakness gimmicks, but there's an odd lack of the "building" aspect of RPGs. Characters gain levels and stats, and you can gear them up... but there's no actual decision making. Any unique aspects of equipment ("hey this one resists XYZ element!") do not matter when the base stat growths will fundamentally always matter more. It doesn't even take advantage of its large "playable" cast as you can't actually choose who is in your party at any given time. It is a very linear, hand-holdy experience that honestly feels incomplete when looked at with 2024-eyes.
I did enjoy my time by-and-large with FFIV, but particular towards the end I was forcing myself to finish it mostly out of a sense of sunk cost. I don’t think it has aged especially well.
That said: the Pixel Remaster aspect of it is a fine port. I do wish these pixel remasters included the stuff from the Advanced versions though. The Advanced version of IV even bothered to let you pick your party at the end!
13. Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus - 2018 - Steam - ★★★
I'm not sure whether Mechanicus is too long or just fundamentally missing some additional mechanic that makes it last into the double-digit-hours.
It's an enjoyable enough tactical game, with some really neat mechanics built around a dynamic action economy, but once you upgrade your Tech Priests and solve that action economy, everything goes off the rails. The difficulty curve is quite lop-sided; the first few missions were quite intense, but while the game keeps introducing more advanced Necron units to combat you, it's just not enough to keep up with what you're capable of. By the end it's trivial to twerk on even the final boss in a single turn.
Soundtrack is excellent, and I'm still quite interested in Mechanicus 2 so hey.
11. Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★
The sequel to 2011's most surprisingly decent third-person shooter, Space Marine 2 is... largely ok! Ironically it's a bit buggy at times, and it's definitely better suited towards multiplayer than singleplayer as far as the campaign goes. Said campaign is... well, it's a Warhammer 40K campaign. You run around and shoot at bozos while yelling FOR THE EMPEROR a bunch. Last time had Titus fighting orks and general Chaos dipshits, now he's fighting Tyranids and *specialized* Chaos dipshits. Could use more enemy variety, perhaps with more... tactical relevance to the units? As-is you have a few must-kill annoying units but otherwise the combat can be pretty brainless.
It's not groundbreaking, but the Warhammer setting polish present here is pretty good. Servo skulls and cherubs galore. It's still funny that they *insist* on every one of these games starring an Ultramarine, when seldom do they bother playing into any of the stuff that makes Ultramarines interesting. If you're just running around shooting games and going GRRR, that could be literally anybody. Yeah, Ultramarines are the default these days, but you could just make a new Chapter with some interesting gimmick, or bring in one of the more thematically or mechanically unique chapters then. Honestly: Should have been Dark Angels.
12. Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★
it's mahvel baby
Good collection, I enjoy dicking around in here with friends. Doesn't bring anything particularly stunning to the table beyond the included products, and I'm not exactly planning on grinding so I can get Wazzler'd into oblivion. Them going out of their way to fix certain glitches but then patching the game to add a toggle to enable the Juggernaut glitch is very funny, I approve.
Pricing is a lil whack for what it is, but hey that's modern video games. Where's a new Capcom Versus game?
10. Crusader Kings III 2024 DLC - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★
CK3's DLC for the year was "Legends of the Dead", "Roads to Power", and "Wandering Nobles."
Legends of the Dead added plague and legend mechanics. The plague stuff is good, though it's either devastating or easily defeatable with little in-between at the moment. There is some anachronistic aspects I wish they'd change (isolating one's self away from the plague is a modern idea that would be alien to the time), but I understand that it's hard to handle people trying to metagame the realism of isolation otherwise. The legend mechanics are straight up mediocre; the act of formally promulgating your legend and paying folks to share your legend is just odd, and said legend benefits mostly you in life rather than your descendants after your passing. It's also oddly different from the existing reputation mechanics while thematically overlapping a little to much. I get that information is itself basically a disease that spreads in similar ways mechanically (mgs2-memes.jpg) but I don't think they did a good job with it here.
Roads to Power revamped the Byzantine Empire to make it more historical and appropriately unusual, and also added mechanics for dethroned nobles to wander the world seeking fortune in various non-land-owning ways. This DLC absolutely whips, just so many cool mechanics to interact with. Is it still in need of polish and balancing? Yeah, Byzantium is perhaps too powerful if it doesn't get crusaded early, and landless nobility are often weirdly strong if played properly, but overall: cool. I've done multiple campaigns as a wandering noble, including one where I was a mercenary hired by a Byzantine duke to help them in their wars, got some land off of it, managed to take over their holdings, survived the fall of Byzantium to a crusade, lost it all in subsequent Byzantine civil war after the Empire was reformed, and then the family returned to mercenary work in Italy... which I managed to levy into getting a descendant to become King of Spain. Coooooooooool stuff.
Wandering Nobles is... weird? It specifically just adds some more events (always good) tied to travel, and added some new lifestyles tied into that. It's weird having lifestyles outside of the skill pentagram but hey, if Stellaris can get do it so can CK3.
My main hope for CK3 at this point is that they'll get a Custodian team like Stellaris that enables them to continue to polish and better integrate old content, since they seem to be doing a great job on Stellaris (which I've taken a break from this year.)
9. Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader - 2023 - Steam - ★★★★
Yep, another Warhammer game. Been one of those years.
Rogue Trader could have been even higher up this list. There's a lot about this game that I really love. It's kind of the best example of the Warhammer setting in a video game, managing to capture the totality of how really shitty the setting. It gets across just how shitty life in the Imperium is, the casual cruelty of life. It gives you the option to try to be a Nice Guy, but also explicitly points out that this is not really looked upon well and can outright lead to your death depending on how things play out. The plot is kind of whatever, but it has some great set pieces and fun characters.
Gameplay-wise, it's a bit uneven in terms of difficulty- kind of easy in the back half even at the higher difficulties (like I said in the Mechanicus review: it turns out, knowing how to game an action economy helps a lot!) Some characters just are stupid busted throughout if you use them correctly (cough Cassia cough), and the way the RPG mechanics work you're almost never facing a non-100% skill check.
Owlcat isn't the biggest studio, and the game in general lacks a certain degree of polish that must to stem from their team-size and budget. The non-cutscenes where you essentially read a summary of what the cutscenes would have shown are... odd, if ultimately tolerable. But frankly, I'm still tempted to lower this in the overall ranking because the amount of weird gamebreaking bugs I encountered even playing it an entire year after initial release is absolutely infuriating. There's certain mechanics that have a tendency to just shit the bed, causing quests to just not trigger which can combine with points of no-return to lock you out of content. That kind of thing drives me absolutely nuts.
Also, because I want to complain about it and hey why not: the load times are maddening. Traveling between planets requires something around 5 different loads, more if you trigger one of the RNG events that require your intervention, and they're just too damn long. It adds unnecessary tedium to what is already a long game. And hey, guess what is the mechanic that tends to shit the bed? That's right: quest starts that trigger only when you travel between systems! Great!!!
It's only the core quality of the game as a 40K experience that keeps it where it is in-spite of all that. Congratulations?
8. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★
Man, I am in two minds on this game. MachineGames is a fantastic studio and I really enjoy the tone of their writing. This is probably the best Indiana Jones has been in... 30 years? But something about this as a game just isn't fully clicking. The big selling point is that you are getting the experience of being Indiana Jones, which... sure?
The gameplay is serviceable; the first-person brawling is okay, if pretty bland. Since a lot of the game revolves around that: okay, not great. The exploration stuff is cool, and the puzzles are... well, they're video game puzzles. This is no Return of the Obra Dinn. But the experience of doing the puzzles is fun!
Honestly, the best part of the game may just be as a looking-around-and-looking-at-stuff simulator. You put loving crafted artifacts and news paper articles and books around and I'm going to stop and look at them and go "huh, neat!" Spent a not insubstantial part of the second-part of the prologue just looking at random museum pieces while ominous spooky man chanted in Latin a room away.
I guess to the answer the question of "Does this feel like Indiana Jones?" my answer would be "Perhaps too much." It does a great job of capturing the feel of the movies, the setting, and the feel of Indiana Jones action, but it doesn't bring much of anything new to the table. The game is best when its more evocative of the brilliance of MachineGames' Wolfensteins, with its amazing side characters, goofy cutscene shenanigans, and amazing setting-specific set pieces. I wish it'd lean harder into that instead of the films.
Unrelated to that point: It's very funny that Indiana Jones ancillary media has consumed most of the "interesting" historical artifact / archeology tropes, such that this one had to juice the story with five different gimmicks layered on top of each other. Not going to spoil any of it, but we're starting to approach the territory of "Indiana Jones and the Biggest Foot" which frankly I'm here for.
Anyways: Raiders > Last Crusade > Temple > This > Dial > Skull
7. Dragon's Dogma 2 - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★
Dragon's Dogma 2 is... more Dragon's Dogma? Honestly, this is my first time playing Dragon's Dogma myself rather than just watching others play it, and I enjoyed it a fair bit, but it is weird how little seems actually changed from the original?
It's a new world and a new engine, and certainly there's been changes to things like mechanics and quests and NPCs and adding new bosses etc... but so much of the game is the exact same, even retaining the old jank I've heard people complain about for a decade now. It's incredibly fun and even funny at times, but I think it could have used some more time in the oven, some more polish, maybe just more resources for the team to add to the experience. Also: could really do with a couple more enemy types. Things can get pretty repetitive after a point.
The decision to do essentially the same plot again when the "twist" of the original game was so well received is odd. The new elements they layered ontop of it to differentiate from the original only to make the core plot less interesting. The more I think about it, I think I'd prefer they have done something more unique in the vein of OG Dragon's Dogma rather than just completely carrying all the architectual details of the setting over to this release.
A shame that Dragon's Dogma 2 seems like it will never receive its own Dark Arisen.
6. Castlevania Dominus Collection - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★★
This collection bundles my favorite Castlevania games into a single package. Enuf said.
You should play Order of Ecclesia, it's a great game.
5. Satisfactory - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★★
I am very aware of my gaming habits: I'm a gorger. If I REALLY enjoy a thing, I shove it into my mouth until either it's gone, or I get sick of it and throw-up. This is why I avoid early access releases as a rule; I know I'll fill myself up on the appetizer and have no room for the meal. From afar, it was obvious that Satisfactory was something I was going to enjoy, and so I waited for the full release...
And hey yeah Satisfactory is an excellent addition to the "technology-tree time-hole" genre. Organizing infrastructure and automating a 3D factory layout that is constrained by geography and resource availability is awesome. There's some open-world exploration and mild combat aspects that are fine mostly as a way to add more technology-tree gating, but the focus really is on constantly tweaking or redesigning factory spaces to better use space and resources to produce widgets to advance progression or build *other* widgets that let you make other bigger things etc etc.
There was multiple times when hanging with friends on Discord where I made the offhand comment of "I should probably eat something..." several times over the course of an 8 hour period, as friends got increasingly exasperated at me time-holing myself ever deeper in factory optimization instead of making a sandwich or something. That's the kind of game Satisfactory is.
4. Balatro - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★★
Balatro is far better than it has any right to be. Why the hell is a run-based deck-building poker game so good? How does it manage to hold up after over 80 hours?
There's something Tetris-esque about how you engage with Balatro. It's a puzzle game that is zen-like it how it engrosses you. Failure is inevitable, you're just seeing how deep you can go with your luck and deck-building skill.
To voice a mild criticism: the nature of the RNG and the gameplay (cards) makes it hard to "outplay" certain bad rolls on Jokers, particularly early on. Truly good runs are very luck-dependent, and you often have to commit very early to a game plan (e.g., all-in on Flushes) before you know that you're going open the Jokers that make that game plan work. Nature of the beast, but it does lead to me leaning on the secret quick restart (hold R on keyboard) a bit too much as a result.
3. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★★
Elden Ring was nearly my Game of the Year in 2022, and Shadow of the Erdtree is a fantastic addition to it. There's amazing new bosses, weapons, and areas. As a Lore Enjoyer, I appreciate the additions made to the overall narrative and setting of Elden Ring, and the music is pretty excellent, a criticism I had with the base game.
That said, it does suffers from similar flaws as well: exploration is kind of weak, with big empty areas dotted with little nuggets of content. There's some bosses that are real stinkers, with tons of health and tedious attack patterns. Frankly, they ramped up this aspect here; it feels like they took the wrong lessons from Malenia. Also, good lord do I hate the Furnace Golems, what an obnoxious enemy.
But the good bosses are some of the best From has ever done, and the little mini-dungeons are far more interesting than anything in the base game. Playing through the DLC was a real treat.
The fact that there's an Elden Ring multiplayer run-based spinoff coming next year is absolutely mental. While that's not necessarily what I'm usually looking for in FromSoft titles, I'm all-in at this point.
2. Caves of Qud - 2024 - Steam - ★★★★★
If you encounter a dreamcrungle in the depths of the Moon Stair, beware their crungling gaze. If you you are crungled, you’ll be subsumed into a dreamscape where you’ll awaken as some other entity, perhaps a bear, maybe even a robot. If you gain sufficient experience in your newfound form, you’ll awake pleasantly enlightened, the dreamcrungle sated. However, if your original body dies as you dream, your temporary oneiric will come to a final tragic end, your mind dissipating into nothingness. A tragic end, but that is itself all too common in salt-blasted land of Qud.
Caves of Qud is the ultimate roguelike, perhaps the ultimate RPG. It is alternatively weird, goofy, and funny. You will die in so many inexplicable ways. But the knowledge you gain from those deaths will make you ready for future adventures, with different characters and paths. My current adventurer is a mutant tinkerer with four arms, each wielding an axe. He’s specialized in the art of multi-weapon fighting, allowing him to use his many arms to slice foes to pieces in a blink of an eye. But I could also be a potent psychic that dominates people, a birdman gunslinger, a birdman swordman, a cyborg knight, and so many more things besides. I could use a spray-a-brain to give life to a chair, then transplant my mind into that chair as my original body dies, continuing my adventure as the chair.
There are thousands of ways to build your character and progress through the world. The dynamic worldgen and mechanics interact in ludicrous ways. Almost everything on Qud is sapient and a member of an overarching faction. Who you befriend— or kill— can have wide-ranging and sometimes absurd repercussions. For awhile there I was persona non-grata with turtles, which made traveling through desert canyons an interesting challenge. But I can always rest easy knowing I’m beloved by dogs, welcome in their holy places.
For all the “wacky” aspects of the generated world, the setting and non-generated writing of Caves of Qud itself is quite excellent. The nature of Qud, a place both seemingly post-apocalyptic and futuristic, is one I leave you to discover. Live and drink, friends.
Also, as a weird side note: I’ve been playing exclusively on controller and it works exceptionally well? That seems like it shouldn’t be the case given its general aesthetic, but here we are.
1. Robot Alchemic Drive - 2002 - PlayStation 2 - ★★★★★
OK, look: I realize how fucking bonkers it is that Robot Alchemic Drive, a game from 2002 you have either never heard of or never thought about for longer than five seconds is my 2024 game of the year. Here’s the thing: RAD fucking rules.
RAD is best described as super robot QWOP. You control a giant super robot using an unusual set of controls where each joystick is mapped to the mecha’s arms, and the motion of the stick controls how the punches are thrown. The shoulder buttons give you manual control of each of the robot’s feet, stepping forward and backwards. Additional buttons and inputs enable special attacks like missiles, rocket punches, diving super kicks, etc. It’s a really bizarre system that makes up for half of the game’s difficulty.
The other half is because you’re not piloting the super robot. You instead control an additional character in the world who is operating it from afar, like Tetsujin 28 or Giant Robo. This puts the player character in the middle of the danger, forcing you to position yourself so you can actually see what you’re fighting while also keeping yourself as best you can out of danger. Sometimes the building you’re standing on gets knocked down under you. Sometimes you accidentally blast an alien robot so that it falls on top of you. You can sit on your robot’s (a “Meganoid”) shoulder, giving you the best possibly vantage of the robot you’re trying to control, but that also puts you at risk of getting punched off it and sent flying for three blocks.
So you’re awkwardly controlling a giant robot to fight other giant robots while you can barely see and the city is getting blown up around you, often by your own arsenal as you attempt to defend it. This is a problem, as you need to try to minimize damage to the city to ensure you get money to upgrade your Meganoid. Being careless also puts Nanao’s current place of work at risk, and nobody wants that.
Oh Nanao. A not-insubstantial amount of the game revolves around your childhood friend, Nanao, who is in the depths of poverty and working like 5 jobs. Her grandma, home, and workplaces keep getting destroyed, which doesn't help. Nanao, while nice, is the dumbest child alive who must be protected at all costs. A non-substantial part of the game is built around trying to protect Nanao’s workplaces, “accidentally” destroying businesses that threaten her livelihood, etc. On the flip side, if you are for some ungodly reason anti-Nanao (???), if you destroy Nanao’s workplaces consistently throughout the entire game Nanao will take her own life. This is an insane mechanic, but given the easy emotional attachment to Nanao: it certainly raises the stakes!
RAD’s writing is deliberately cheesy as hell, and it’s paired with a dub that is absolutely spectacular in how corny it is. They hired a company that exclusively made corporate instructional videos, zero audio direction was given, and boy does it show. It is one of the funniest games I’ve ever played, the writing and the voice acting together are just so unbelievably stupid. God I love it.
It is crazy that people don’t know or talk about RAD. The developer, Sandlot, exclusively makes Earth Defense Force titles now, with RAD all but forgotten. Part of the reason, I have to imagine, is that it didn’t run great on actual PS2 hardware— but emulated it runs like an absolute dream.
Is it a perfect game? Absolutely not. But it is by far the game that made me smile the most this year. An absolutely unique gaming experience unlike any other. Someone should port this to modern technology, put out PC or something, get it in front of more people because holy shit.
