This year seemed to me as a really great misery. The vast majority of stuff was a corporate completely useless commercial waste, remakes, reboots and remasters, or independent nonsense. I guess I am too old so most of these games are not for me.
Nevertheless, I finished a few games to the end. During the first lockdown, I finished Shakedown Hawaii on Switch, which I bought for children and then didn't want to lend it to them, which is an absolutely great pixelart variation on GTA I. But it's better in every way, and it's a divine parody of the eighties and nineties. It makes me a little nervous that my four-year-old daughter subsequently started playing the game and can spend an alarming amount of time running around the city with an armored vehicle. Another game on Switch and again pixelart is Carrion. Fantastic Polish horror movie vibe, where you control a monster fleeing from a secret laboratory, while the game has a fantastic 2D physics and is based around it. My daughter wanted to play it, but this one I forbade her.
I also finished Wasteland 3, which looks pretty poor, doesn't bring anything new to the RPG genre, but it was still great, because the ancient mechanics from the first Fallout still work and I enjoyed it a lot.
The highlight not only of this year is Cyberpunk 2077 for me. I did not expect anything from it. The beginning disappointed me tremendously, but then it became the best game in the last few years. Period. I played it on a PC and after hotfix 1.2 I didn't have even ONE game breaking bug or any major problem, apart from the annoying need to set up Czech subs after each run. The disappointment was the clickbait sensationalism of all youtubers and journalists who chased the views by showing the non-patched first version of the game, without most of them playing it at all.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a disappointment for me of the year. A perfect example of corporate waste without any inventivness and, full of boring repetitive nonsense. The biggest disappointment was that something like this has a better rating from critics and players than Cyberpunk in the end, and it sells well. Even more disappointing was the finding that the leadership of these corporations was apparently riddled with sexist pigs, embarrassing the entire gaming industry, fueling all these hysterical campaigns against players. I find it very sad that it turns out that such on the outside, woke company, is, in reality, itself crawled through what it is fighting against. But it is common for the one who shouts the most…
They keep convincing people to invest, and at one point people in the know, will know when to short that inflated value and sell sell sell. Which crashes its value. With no regard to what that does to the company. This is the age we're living in, where finance is more lucrative than actual production.
