The Best Games of 2024

all right 2024 is a bit of a strange year for games I think very few of them felt like alltime Classics but there were over 20 games that I could legitimately make an argument need to be highlighted so while this wasn't as impressively topheavy as the last couple years I honestly think it was the deepest in the years that I've been making this list because there were so many games that were all deserving we don't have time for a long intro so happy holidays and here are the best games of 2024 according to the most important metric my personal opinion honorable mention Hades 2o probably a bit better than one but still on Early Access so it's not finished yet enotria the last song extremely janky but strangely compelling Renaissance Italian apocalypse Souls better than expected V Rising a game that's been out for years but fully released in 2024 a survival game but with actually good combat gets a bit repetitive eventually though Fallen Aces Doom one plus Thief probably too easy but A real blast Until you realize that Stellar blade amazing action game held off of the full list by extremely annoying open world segments a huge annoying open world and a ridiculous story that the game really really insists you care about for some reason but very fun combat okay now for the real list here are the top 15 games of 20124 number 15 astrobot I'm aware there was some kind of huge controversy that this one game of the year but I actually think that's totally defensible this game is insanely wellmade it really is the only game that's made those controller haptics matter but holy [ __ ] they really matter it is so cool that I kept handing the controller to my wife to check out and even she thought it was cool so that is very impressive just on the basis of the very fun PlayStation characters and the insane haptics and the ridiculous cuteness the game would be on the list but it's also a really great 3D platformer very possibly one of the best ever made it's really good it has a bunch of super punishing levels for like you know if you want to really play with the mechanic which I did it's not as good as Ratchet and Clank but it's pretty damn good good enough that I can easily see other people who actually work in the industry thinking this is the most impressive game made this year stupid controversy though why does anyone care about the awards I feel the same way anytime there's some huge arguments about someone getting snubbed for Sixth Man of the Year in NBA it just doesn't matter who cares about the Jeff Awards number 14 black myth Wukong um lots of people online seem to think that this was the game of the year I call [ __ ] on that man I think a pretty good game got caught up in a whirlwind of political discussions that made it something way more than it is leftists a couple years ago got all bent out of shape because the creative director isn't woke and then people on the right somehow made a developer from the largest authoritarian socialist state in the world into a based culture Hero on top of that Chinese nationalism centered around a classic work of Imperial fiction and this being China's first big AAA hit was a perfect storm nothing pisses me off more than the people who always get angry about politics and games clearly letting their politics influence their opinion on a game still the game is not even close to being one of the best of the Year Lev design is really amateur progression is bad enemy variety is bad the first half of the game is so ridiculously easy it can't even keep you [ __ ] engaged some of the late bosses are frustrating and the story is so so bad I'm sure the novel's amazing but the game has a million cutscenes man and they just make no sense all that said it definitely is a fun action game and the second half has much better level design the open world sections are just miserably terrible but the actually designs levels are quite good the action itself is fun and while the game is mostly too easy all the special attacks are cool and that kind of keeps you playing this developer will almost certainly make a great game soon but this one is just good this is where it belongs number 13 bow path of the teal Lotus 2024 was an amazing year for metrov vanas we somehow still have heard nothing about silk song and Moon Studios released the first couple of hours of a very good new game but it's a top- down souls likeee and not a Metroid B and even with that we got a ton of great Metroid Manas in 2024 now path of the teal Lotus isn't a perfect game it feels a little too slow to get movement powers and the game focuses way more on combat than it does platforming but the art style is amazing the level design is great the progression is more than good enough to keep you interested and boss encounters are challenging enough to be rewarding but not so hard they piss you off game field is topnotch and a map are big without being a huge chore to backtrack through just a rock solid Metroid Vania one of the year's best games 12 hellblade 2 I actually wasn't a big fan of the first hellblade game I mean I thought it was a technical achievement and had a very cool story but the combat was just bad and the puzzles became really repetitive by the end well hellblade 2 is just a better version of the first game the graphics are just absurd man facial animations are impossibly realistic textures and environments are stunning lighting is unbelievable the combat has been improved because you can Parry now and any game with a decent Parry is going to be at least engaging exploration is really excellent with tightly designed levels that feel much bigger than they are puzzle variety greatly improved you're not just looking at three symbols over and over the story is still the star of the show though here with a bunch of great characters and a really wonderfully designed worlds I highly recommend it it's now a decent enough action game to keep Meat Heads like me playing long enough to absorb the things that team ninja does best writing art animations World building and story a great game number 11 nine Souls nine Souls is a Metroid Venia from the Taiwanese Studio red candle games that would be the developer who was almost ruined because in they reclaimed narrative horror game devotion it included an Easter egg that pointed out how much XI Shing ping looks like Winnie the Pooh which caused nationalists to go ballistic and demand that the game be pulled and Taiwan be punished well the game was pulled in China and an international incident ensued the studio very nearly went bankrupt pretty cool China's pretty cool but they pulled through and decided to bet it all on an action Metroid Vania nine Souls has almost no PL platforming which makes it more of a blend of genres but areas only open up with new abilities and the game includes progression and map backtracking so even though the focus of it is combat it's definitely still kind of a Metroid Venia the gaming reviews was described as a mixture of searo and Hollow Knight and that's actually that's actually pretty accurate it's challenging without going over the top and I actually thought this might be the game of the year until the final boss the final boss of this game is so ridiculous ully overtuned it is comical and yet there are of course people on subreddits insisting that the fight's Balan because if you just spend 5 hours literally someone wrote this 5 hours learning the boss you'll eventually get it and that's perfect balance my God man you got to be kidding me dude the game has a bunch of insane difficulty sliders you can use which I never even had to consider until this one fight eventually I got pissed off and I lowered the difficulty just to get it over with and that kind of of disappointing ending which is the result of catastrophically terrible balance badly hurt the game in my eyes What Might Have Been a top five or at least a top 10 ends up down here as a result still this is absolutely one of the best games of the year and most importantly I don't have to feel like I'm supporting one of the worst governments in the world by enjoying it now the top 10 number 10 Dragon Age vilard vilard and ended up being exactly as divisive as I assumed it would be it had a politics controversy that's stupid and that was a major point of discussion for some reason but more importantly while the game has a really great story with fantastic characters the tone of the game is certainly less Grim than the first three games I've actually seen player reviews that say the voice acting is bad in Bard and that's insane the voice acting is some of the best you will ever see in games it is f fantastic the writing is great too but I really do understand players who loved the first three not liking how much less Grim dark there is in the tone this time now luckily for me I didn't think the first three games were very good so it bothered me way less the first three Dragon Age games have truly terrible gameplay and it's not just because I'm a heathen who can only enjoy Call of Duty I like crpg combat but only if it's good Dragon AG's combat was [ __ ] all three times and the graphics were bad vilard on the other hand has some of the best art design in gaming the graphics are perfect progression is so well polished gear is greatly designed and drops exactly enough the economy perfectly balanced it's just a really extremely polished AAA game it's like you know perfect right out of the box great action gameplay great characters great great acting good story just a rock solid AAA game if the game had actual choices you can make and had it kept that Grim Dark World and had it had the interesting factions of the first three games it almost certainly would have been the best game of the year but you know it's not a great RPG there are very few choices to make that matter there are no faction decisions to make and ultimately that makes it a great game but not the all-time classic it could have been but my hopes are high for Mass Effect 4 Andromeda doesn't count nine hell divers 2 I loved hell divers 1 and I played it a ton for years until eventually it became too hard to find other players online hell divers 2 is a masterpiece of a multiplayer action game it doesn't have a story but it's got World building Galore progression is great because ordinances are so cool you kind of just to keep unlocking the next one difficulty is perfect in that you can do the easy missions alone and most of the middle ones with just one friend but the hard ones are so hard you need to have a real Team Hell divers 2 requires real teamwork in a way most multiplayer games really don't if people are just running around doing their own thing you are all going to die the only thing keeping it this low is it somewhat repetitive eventually still I got like 50 hours out of it and it's a great game hell divers 2 delivered exactly what I expected and that's really all you can ask for number eight kill Knight kill Knight is a twin stick shooter arcade game that you play to like rise up the leader boards this game obsessed me like very few other things in the last few years I played it hours every day keeping myself in the top 100 and then the top 50 on the leaderboards the game is so absurdly difficult that you can only get good at it by playing each level over and over and over until you memorize every spawn react exactly correctly use all of your tools at the exact right time manage your cooldowns perfectly and your resources and keep killing in the most over-the-top way to keep your multiplier up getting hit even once can ruin a run and when you finally beat all the levels and unlock more weapons and loadouts and beat the final boss the game then asked you to beat all the levels consecutively and climb the leaderboards on that this game is so intense it it literally hurts your [ __ ] hands it's that intense the only thing that finally stopped me playing this game is that I got a really nasty bone bruise on my wrist at work and I was in a brace for 8 weeks by the time I came back I had dropped out of the top 100 and that was depressing and then other games came out but now that my wrist is fully healed once the you know big releases start thinning out I will get back to it an absolute Masterpiece of a twin stick shooter and the only reason it's not number one is because I think it would be crazy to put a niche arcade leaderboard game above the big games coming up on the list still man this is the game that obsessed me most by like a country mile this year hell Knight so great buy this thing man it's amazing number seven Prince of Persia the Lost crown so this is one of the best Metroid vanas of all time it is insanely hard in spots but it's at least Fair always it can be really frustrating in places but in the same way the hardest parts of talonite are frustrating this is a huge beautiful Metro avenia that has it all great progression a good story beautiful graphics and environments extremely difficult platforming like seriously unbelievably punishing platforming really ult combat and just absolutely topnotch great boss fights I hope it was profitable enough for Ubisoft because I really love Phoenix Rising too and they took that thing out back behind the shed and shot it I would love another 3D action Prince of Persia game but this is easily one of the best Metroid vas ever and one of the year's best games and man I hope they make another one this was awesome number six Space Marine 2uh I really despised this game for the first two missions I thought it was just way too hard and using the middle Mouse button to aim might have worked in the first game but it felt absolutely terrible in this one I don't know what made me do it but at the start of the third level I switched to a controller and it like changed everything Space Marine 2 is an almost perfectly designed action game on the hard difficulty it is balanced to Perfection it's hard enough that you will die high but not so hard it drives you nuts the game clearly feels designed for a controller though man like if you played this like me and tried to do masing keyboard man it's so much better on a controller the only shooter I've played on a controller in God knows how long the other great thing about this thing is that it really is a throwback there's no real progression no RPG mechanics it's just a fantastic action game with a great story interesting characters and some of the best 40K World building around graph are great beautiful and the insanely ridiculous amount of enemies in screen is amazing the game is brutal and visceral and a technical Marvel parrying felt impossible with a mouse and keyboard but it was so damn satisfying with a gamad I didn't play much of the live service part of the game but I'm sure that's great too a sequel that's better than the original in every way if you didn't get around to this one you are really missing out number five shad shadow of the earth tree elen ring continues to be a weird thing for me man from soft is the best developer in the world so everything they make is great and I love souls combat I play like every Souls game man like I put a not Tre of the last song on this list and that's pretty Jank but like I just really like Souls games and the art design from software best in the world by far no one's even close but man I just don't like the open World stuff and the final boss of the DLC was just another disaster of visual noise and particle effects and constant attacks and like Dodge spam I ended up using a great shield and Scarlet rot Because by the end I just couldn't be bothered to actually learn the fight Elden ring and its DLC are amazing games and they still left me disappointed but you know what it's probable that I felt this way because their last game Saro is the greatest video game ever made this is not even Up For Debate Elden ring I played four times the DLC I only played twice those are the least I have ever replayed one of the modern from games so you know I guess that means it's a bit disappointing to me still I mean it is kind of crazy to sit here and be like Oh I'm really disappointed I only like these games enough to play them four times but you know the Heart Wants What It Wants shadow of the UR Tre is the fifth best game of the year number four salako I don't know how well this game sold but it should have sold like 20 million copies man salako looks like an old school shooter but it really plays more like a mixture of halflife one and an immersive Sim level design is perfect and progression and exploration are absolutely amazing now the game is really really difficult but that's what keeps it so engaging and all those immersive of sim elements are just great the game is full of key cards and passcodes to find and secret entrances there are just a ton of crazy interactions the moment I fell in love with this game was when I was exploring the hospital level I came to an MRI room and I saw that you could press a button to start the scan and I was like hm at first I thought it was just like how you can like flush all the toilets and run all the sinks and all that but there was a teddy bear in the room and I was like you know what let me put the teddy bear in the I tube and do a scan of them and then nothing happened that didn't do anything but when I came back into the room to check stuff out I noticed that there were like four soda cans on the ground so I picked up all the soda cans and threw them into the MRI tube and started the scan again and it exploded and it opened up a secret area behind the MRI machine and I was like yes that is perfect the game has a ton of environmental destruction which is really cool and makes fights also like super hectic and engaging the game is really fast- based combat mixed with super slow burn exploration the environments are so carefully crafted and just exploring the map is one of the best times I've had in gaming recently salako is a masterpiece if this thing was made with modern graphics and had better feeling Gunplay it would probably be my favorite game of all time buy this thing immediately if you haven't played it just an absolutely perfect game number three Indiana Jones in the great circle I find myself wondering how well this game ended up doing the great circle is a really interesting thing all the previews made it really difficult to understand what this game was this is a studio known for making fast-paced shooters that are like weirdly married to stealth and cinematic stories but they were clear that this was not a shooter they kept saying it was a quote authentic Indiana Jones Adventure or that it was quote an adventure game and after playing it I understand what happened because the truth is the great circle is an immersive Sim light now it really is super simplified immersive Sim because there are no powers or abilities and the progression is very minor but still this is an immersive Sim the game revolves around stealth puzzles wearing disguises exploring carefully crafted levels finding passwords and safe codes it has got all of the MIM elements ments but it's also supposed to be made for a mass audience and feel like an Indiana Jones movie so it's simplified there's enough progression to keep you interested but it's all very minor stuff like that the game has shooting and you can definitely go loud in a bunch of sections but there's other sections where you just can't use your gun and anyway your gun has like 12 bullets and you reload each bullet individually Slowly by hand it really is quite a Triumph the way they balance this thing fights require you to constantly find and pick up weapons they break after like two or three hits you'll beat someone over the head with a shovel and break it over their head and then you pick up their gun and you kill two guys with that and you turn it over and break the gun over their head then you pick up a club and keep going it's chaotic and hectic and surprisingly challenging they also really stuck to their guns in the difficulty there is no manual saving here it's all checkpoints so no quick loads to do perfect stealth if you're spotted you have to figure it out and survive and if you don't you're playing the last 40 minutes again tough nuts once or twice this really pissed me off but I respect them forcing you to live with your choices I kind of wish Dishonored just straight up did not have the option to save I think it would make the game better the puzzles are also no joke in this game while the MIM elements sometimes feel like baby's first Thief game the puzzles are legit challenging platforming and exploration are topnotch and most importantly this is the third best Indiana Jones movie ever made it is just fantastic the actor they got sounds exactly like Harrison Ford it's uncanny fantastic level design although I'll tell you there's an awful lot of backtracking that's a little bit annoying but you know great hectic combat the great circle is a rare thing an extremely unique blend of genres and a really ballsy game to make and release I give Bethesda and Microsoft a ton of credit for letting machine games make such a unique game this really does combine most of the things they're great at cinematics are topnotch as always the stealth is fun level design is great I'm curious if they'll take a crack at a full immersive Sim at some point because the great circle is a worthy entry into a genre we don't get nearly enough of number two stalker 2 yes stalker 2 was buggy as hell at launch so was the original stalker yes I did have to use mods to fix two different quests that totally broke and eventually I did use a mod to lower the armor on blood suckers because they're just ridiculously tanky and yes stalker 2 is absolutely hostile to you as a player fast travel is rare inconvenient and expensive combat is just ridiculously punishing the game loves telling you how many times you've died every time you got blown up by grenade spam or stumbled into 15 guys who kill you instantly or get sucked into a Vortex and turn to paste and yes you have pathetically little inventory space and just ridiculously low carry capacity and guns and armor are just absurdly overexp and every single fight you get in means spending 50% of your money fixing your damn gun but holy [ __ ] stalker 2 is a masterpiece man it is the best Far Cry game ever made the atmosphere is liter abely perfect Gunplay is awesome level and World design perfect the story is fantastic and your choices in the narrative seriously matter the game will let you screw yourself by killing important vendors and NPCs mutants are legit scary because they can kill you instantly radiation is a constant struggle until you fight and scrape to get just enough artifacts in better gear stalker keeps you seriously engaged because the moment you stop being nervous it will kill you totally unfairly it will kill you and the graphics are beautiful art design topnotch music perfect sound design and ambient soundtrack perfect apparently a recent patch fixed some problems with stealth but I'll be honest I kind of liked how punishing the stealth was stalker 2 is a huge game it is ridiculous I know I say I hate open world games and this one has like the biggest [ __ ] map in the world but man it is perfect this is exactly what an open world game should be eventually this thing will have all the bugs patched out but on the day that this launched it was the greatest open world shooter ever made by like a million miles an alltime classic and a game that the developers of Far Cry should be forced to play every night for the next 6 months as a job the only reason it's not number one is because a literal alltime classic releas this year number one Silent Hill 2 remake I struggled with where to put this because at the end of the day it is a remake but every time I place it somewhere I would look at the games above it and I'd be like nah that game is not better than the Silent Hill 2 remake the original Silent Hill 2 is one of the best survival horror games ever made and the Remake is basically Perfection it captures everything that made the original great and brings it into to the modern day now I legit despise team bloopers last game I bought the medium and I played it for like 5 hours it was like this is awful it was lame and cliche and boring just absolutely terrible and you know what layers of fear is also bad it wasn't scary it was lame and cliche and boring full of tropes just dumb but I figured it would be hard to [ __ ] up a remake of Silent Hill 2 but they did more than not [ __ ] it up they've kept the core of the or original but the art design and Graphics make it even more disturbing there are some slight changes here and they make the story even more impactful when this was first announced there was some discussion online that modern Graphics would hurt the atmosphere of the game and oh man that turned out to be extremely not true team blubber has created just like a master class of atmosphere the environments are really special and while I rarely get scared at a game or a movie a couple of levels here had me legitimately on edge the prison maps in particular are just expertly crafted just tension the combat in Silent Hill 2 is amazing ammo is perfectly scarce it's like absolutely perfectly balanced so you're forced to make constant choices the best strategy I found is to use one bullet to soften an enemy up and then finish them with melee and that interplay of like shooting and melee and dodging and shooting and melee and dodging it is so good it's it's like they stumbled onto something perfect it's amazing and best of all the melee animations and sound design do a ton not only to drive home the gamees themes and atmosphere they become a really important part of james' characterization the original game is known for its extremely layered narrative and disturbing themes around sexuality and violence and team blubber knocked it out of the park with that it is all there Silent Hill 2 was one of the best horror games ever made and team blubber has legitimately made it even better better an all-time classic again perfect art perfect Graphics astoundingly Great Sound and Music perfect acting the gaml is great it's perfect exploration is great and I think the story is even better in the remake because modern technology is allowed for such detail in world and environmental storytelling what a masterpiece in a year that has a ton of games but is less topheavy than the all-time great years that were the last couple Silent Hill 2 the Remake stands out as one of the Great greatest video games ever made and an easy game of the year all right I'm going on vacation on Sunday taking the family on a cruise I'll be back the second week in January and then I'll get to work on whatever is next as always you know at the end of the year here I really appreciate everyone who watches these videos like you know I keep making them because some people keep watching them and hey to that dude who found me on Facebook if you're watching what's up thanks for the kind words that actually kind of got me to make another video hope you all have a happy holiday all right thanks for coming I'll see you next time bye