2020 Game of the Year Awards

Game of the year; Resident Evil 3

I know I gave my game of the year award last year to Resident Evil Remake 2 and giving it this year to Resident Evil Remake 3 is kinda repetitive but hey I honestly think it deserves it! RE2make from last year had Mr X using the same gameplay as the original Nemesis from classic RE3 so for the RE3make modern Nemesis needed to change. I’ve heard other RE fans complain about the role new Nemesis plays but I love the shift in direction. Instead of chasing you down relentlessly, forcing you to plan out routes and avoid him, he now shows up at multiple points to move Jill to the next area. The key difference between RE2 and RE3 at there core is their pacing. Resident Evil 2 lets you explore the RPD, then the Sewers and lastly the underground lab slowly. You’re allowed to get comfortable in these areas. RE3 on the other hand is faster paced. Jill is being chased out of the doomed city. You start on the streets, end up in the train station and surrounding streets, move to the sewers, construction site, clock tower and so on. Nemesis now shows up to force Jill to move from one area to another never allowing her or the player to get comfortable in any one spot for long. I think this new role fits Nemesis like a glove and compliments the story almost perfectly!

Resident Evil 3 original is one of my favourite games in the series and the remake was everything I hoped it would be! An absolute modern classic!

Best Non-2020 game I played this year; The Outer Worlds

Why didn’t I play this last year??? New Vegas is my favourite Fallout game so when the same team set to work making an original IP I should have known it would be fantastic!

Everything that made New Vegas great is here but more polished, refined and just honestly better. I mean I’m here saying that Obsidion made a better New Vegas and as hard as that is to believe it’s true. I’ve beaten this game 3 times this year, once on the Xbox One, once on PC and once on the Switch. Each playthrough felt unique, each character I made felt fleshed out and the world was still surprising me on the 3rd playthrough! My only complaint would be with the Switch port as it’s a pretty big graphical and performance downgrade. This is a big game and although it’s playable on the Switch, which is amazing, it’s also far from the ideal way to play it for the first time.

Overall, this game is so good if I had played it last year then it would have bested REmake 2 as my game of the year.

Worst Game of 2020; Cyberpunk 2077

I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve not played Cyberpunk yet but damn it deserves a mention here just for its shit show of a launch. That’s not even mentioning the abusive crunch that CDPR put its devs through or the transphobia from the company. This game has done genuine harm to people via epileptic seizures and CDPR just responded by victim-blaming people with Epilepsy because a warning was hidden away in the EURL agreement. The same small-print document that CDPR joked about no-one reading at the start of the fucking document itself! Honestly, this alone makes Cyberpunk 2077 a fucking disgusting mess and CDPR an abusive dangerous fucking wart of a publisher. But on top of that, the game itself was an unpolished broken mess that put even Fallout 76 to shame.

I may not have played Cyberpunk 2077 but even I have seen how much of a broken detrimental mess it has been and it’s only been out a couple of weeks at this point. Jesus Christ, what a mess.

Final Notes

2020 has been a weird mess of a year. I mean between Brexit, Trans rights being eroded, Covid-19 and the numerous lockdowns across the UK and all the social tension making my mental health so much worse it has been atrocious. But then this year was also the year I got engaged to the love of my life and spent an entire year living with her. In that sense, it’s been one of the best of my life. So yeah, between all the terrible and all the great I don’t know what to make of 2020 overall. It has been hard, that much is for sure. Over 3 months have passed since I’ve seen my parents, sister and even longer for my uncle and I’m hella missing them. Seeing as we live 100 miles away from each other and we’re both in tier 4 lockdown it may be another 3 months until I’m able to see them again. I’m just so grateful to be with my amazing fiancée because if I was still living on my own, I don’t know how I’d have made it through 2020.

I think it says a lot that my final notes for 2020 barely mention gaming on my blog about gaming. Honestly this year “real-life” has just overshadowed gaming so much. I did play a lot of good games this year. I’d say the best game I played was the Outer Worlds, that shit is hella dope! Outside of that I also enjoyed Doom Eternal, RE3make and I’ve been replaying all the Halo games in time for Halo Infinite next year. In terms of gaming that would be my biggest change, to be honest, getting back into online gaming with the Halo Master Chief Collection. Well, here’s to 2021 and hoping things improve for people all over the world!

Thanks for reading and I hope 2020 hasn’t been too hard for you!