I feel like 2022 was a better year for just about everyone than 2021. The future is still uncertain, but things look brighter at this time than they did a year ago.

That said, this year was a bit of an awkward one for the games industry. Lots of delays of games into 2023. Lots of big anticipated titles that felt disappointing. This happens a lot during the first year of a new generation of consoles, as the industry looks to reset as it adopts new technology. That should have happened last year, as more PS5s and Xbox Series X/S consoles got into people’s hands. Instead, this generation has had a bit of a slow start, with lots of cross-generation stuff still hanging around. 2023 will probably be the year where this finally starts to shift, but until then we have a bit of a lethargic year for game releases that feels a lot more like 2014 did than 2015.

All that said, let’s get into my personal favorite games of the year.

Real quick, before I get into it –

Quick obligatory notes:

• This is a ranked Top 10 list with 3 honorable mentions (unranked).
• Each game features a link to one of my favorite pieces of music from its soundtrack. Feel free to listen as you read.
• I consider the release timing of Early Access games based on when they exit Early Access, or enter V1.0.
• Remakes (which are becoming even more common these days) can be on my lists, but only if they are substantial enough in that the game is something fundamentally different. Examples of games I counted in 2019 were Pathologic 2 or Resident Evil 2. In 2020, I didn’t consider a game like Demon’s Souls (even though I loved it) because it is mostly a visual overhaul to the 2009 original game. Hopefully that distinction makes sense and isn’t just arbitrary to you.
• I’m never able to get to all the games I’d like to by the end of the year. There are always ones that slip through the cracks. I typically like to list up front the games that I had the most interest in that I admittedly didn’t have time to get to. This year, my pile of shame is as follows:

Pile of Shame:

• Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope
• Splatoon 3
• Sonic Frontiers
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
• Neon White
  

Okay, with that out of the way, on to the list…

Honorable Mentions:

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide – Fatshark

It’s difficult to talk about Darktide without drawing direct comparisons to Vermintide 2 – which is probably my favorite co-op game of the last half decade or more. In fact it’s probably inevitable to draw comparisons. So, that being said, let’s start with the good stuff.

Darktide’s combat feels significantly improved. The outrageously devastating and comically oversized weapons of the 40K universe are an absolute joy to wield when compared to Vermintide’s meager ranged options. For my first character, I played as an Ogryn, 40K’s race of towering mutant humans. When playing an Ogryn, the first weapon you’re presented with is the Lorenz Mk V Kickback, which, as the name suggests, is a less a shotgun than it is a type of buckshot cannon that you can carry around with you. Everything from the sound design to the enemy stagger to the gibbing animations make firing a single shot from this thing feel absolutely massive. I knew as soon as I used it that it was positive sign for the weapons to come, and sure enough, the game’s arsenal continued to impress as I played. Every shooter worth its salt needs a good shotgun, right? 

The game’s technical prowess also represents a significant step up from its spiritual predecessor. The environments of Darktide – which is set on the planet Tertium – positively ooze atmosphere and detail from every square inch. The way that game utilizes volumetric light, fog, and material-based rendering creates what is undoubtedly the most complete depiction of the 40K universe out there. How Fatshark manages to get such impressive visuals out of its in-house engine (Bitsquid, now Autodesk Stringray) continues to blow me away. Is it performant? Well, not exactly. The sheer scale of Darktide’s plague-afflicted hordes will reduce all but the absolute latest PCs to a stuttering mess. But regardless, these are visuals that truly feel “next-gen”, coming at a time where game graphics appear to be stuck, rife with cross-gen compromises. It’s exciting to play a game that feels like it’s actually doing something with all that expensive hardware, not just pushing framerates into the stratosphere.

Unfortunately, as is the case for a lot of live-service games still in their infancy, Darktide feels incomplete. The same maps come up in rotation far too frequently, and many of hub’s features – shops, training areas, etc. – feel half-baked or even unfinished. The issue with maps has to do with how Fatshark chose to structure Darktide’s content. Where Vermintide 2 at launch was divided into 3 distinct campaigns that proceeded from one locale to the next in a logical progression, Darktide instead ferries its players to and from each mission on dropships. There’s no real story to speak of, and instead, each of the game’s 14 maps are explicitly categorized as one of 7 possible objective types: Raid, Assassination, Strike, Espionage, Repair, Disruption, or Investigation. It all feels a bit hollow structurally – launch map, play whatever mini-game that the objective type told you that you would be doing ahead of time, reach the extraction point, repeat – but that might just be down to my personal taste.

What really hurts, however, is that there is currently no way to select a given map and difficulty to play at-will. Instead, the mission select is handled in a manner similar to Deep Rock Galactic, where a handful of randomized mission options will appear on a quest board until a real-time timer expires, at which the game will roll a new map and difficulty. That type of approach works fine for a game like Deep Rock, where every mission is procedurally generated to one degree or another, but I found it absolutely baffling for a game like Darktide. You might arrive back at the hub with your friends to find that the only fresh maps available are at the mind-numbingly easy 1 and 2 star difficulty levels, while the harder missions are all retreads of the same area you’ve done 3 times over already. Yes, you can select a specific difficulty for Quickplay, but that selects a random map and might join you to a mission midway through. Not only that, but the weapon shop in the game works much the same way. Since the loot available in the shop is randomly generated, there are times when you’ll scrub through the list only to find that you have nothing worth saving your money for at the moment. The shop resets every real-time hour, so you basically end up checking it between every mission to see if anything the algorithm chose to generate is even worth a shit. It’s a really tedious progression loop, and it undermines what is otherwise a brilliant co-op experience.

So, is Darktide as good a game as Vermintide 2 was? Well, no, obviously it isn’t. At least not yet. Given the long support window that Vermintide benefitted from however, it might still be too early to make that call. It goes without saying though, when shit kicks off on a high intensity zone, with hundreds of enemies pouring out of every nook and cranny of the environment, and your whole team responds in-kind with grenade explosions, psychic cranial explosions, jets of red-hot flame, and massive cleaving swings of a man-sized bowie knives…no game this year quite reaches the levels of insanity that Darktide is capable of in these moments. It’s for this reason that Darktide makes this list, but there’s certainly room for improvement here.

God of War Ragnarök – Santa Monica Studio

It’s almost impossible to deny that God of War: Ragnarok is one of the most well-made games of 2022. It’s ridiculously polished, to the point that custom dialog is written for nearly every point in its story that you decide to take a sidequesting detour. I wondered, when taking an entirely different companion with me to free the second Halfgufa in Alfheim’s desert, whether Kratos and company would have as much character arc-specific conversation about its imprisonment. Indeed they did. When I would struggle a bit too long with a puzzle, the game would swiftly step in, offering increasingly leading hints via companion dialog, afraid that I might put the game down if I got stuck for too many minutes. Every moment has been carefully accounted for, play-tested extremely thoroughly, and every rough edge has been buffed down ensure a smooth experience.

At times this can feel stifling, constantly being shepherded toward progression when you just want to figure things out for yourself. At times all that custom, carefully constructed dialog gets in the way, when all you want is to explore in silence without worry of missing some new character beat. At its best though, this new God of War is a joy to explore, its level design just complex enough to reward your curiosity without derailing into aimless wandering. Its puzzles are rewarding to solve, always ensuring you get some interesting item for your time spent scouring its environments for Nornir chest runes. And this is to say nothing of the game’s combat, which – as expected – is just as deeply satisfying as ever. Recalling the Leviathan Axe to Kratos’ hand and feeling the haptic bump of the controller against your palms still stands as one of the fastest paths to dopamine release in a single gameplay loop. When the game allows you to let loose as Kratos, swapping between the ice attacks of his axe and the flame of his Blades of Chaos, I always had a great time with it. The boss fights are all well-designed and look great in action, especially an early-game one that echoes Kratos’ encounter with Baldur from the last game. There’s a couple of optional boss fights in the end-game that are exceptionally difficult in an unfair way, and really make obvious the limitations of the combat design, but those are exceptions rather than the rule.

And despite all of the hand-holding that I bemoaned earlier, there’s a great section in the final hours of Ragnarok where it opens up substantially. Hidden behind a single optional sidequest in Vanaheim is a gigantic secret area that itself spans at least a dozen more sidequests, all arranged around one of the most visually interesting and freeform maps in the game. It’s absolutely the best part of the game, and as exhilarating as discovering it was, it also does beg an unfortunate question – why wasn’t the rest of the game like this?

If it isn’t obvious yet, as much fun as I had with it, I’m torn on God of War: Ragnarok. While the 2018 God of War remains one of my favorite games of the last half-decade, razor-focused in what it wanted to achieve, this sequel feels totally adrift by comparison. There are plenty of great individual moments throughout Ragnarok, but very little in the way of thematic glue to bind them all together. I appreciate that Santa Monica Studio didn’t feel the need to create an entire trilogy of games, opting instead to resolve Kratos’ time in Norse mythology in just two parts. But given how all over the place the story is here, how big and overwrought the plot is, maybe it would have been better to go the traditional trilogy route. The pacing is really awkward, and attempts to break up the normal gameplay loop with Atreus-led bow and arrow shooting sections feel forced and above all, boring.

And none of this is to mention my biggest issue with the game, which is the Joss Whedon-ization of so much of the dialog. So many characters in Ragnarok all communicate in Marvel-speak – the kind of detached, ironic, trying-so-desperately-hard-to-be-relatable, self-aware jokesterism that has become the de-facto standard for how to write characters for blockbuster entertainment – that they all started to blur together in my head. When practically half of the cast are competing to be the comedic relief, it becomes difficult to take any of them seriously when the actual drama begins to kick off. I found myself getting tonal whiplash constantly, never knowing when I was supposed to be getting invested or really why I should. The 2018 God of War had such a strong, distinct tone – something so many AAA games struggle to achieve – but Ragnarok can’t seem to decide what it wants to be – an operatic familial drama or a Thor Ragnarok impersonator.

It’s a shame that Sony’s first party output, which has been the envy of the entire industry over the last generation of consoles, has seemed to struggle so much with creating worthy follow-ups to its beloved first acts. Recently, we’ve seen them fumble the sequel to The Last of Us – an ultra-violent, ultra-grim but ultimately poorly characterized and patronizingly didactic story – as well as the Guerilla Games epic Horizon Forbidden West – a game from this year with absolute top-tier technical prowess but insufferably long-winded characters and a shockingly stilted combat system. To be completely clear: I think God of War Ragnarok is a better game than either of those other two. I had a lot of fun with it, even to the point that I got a 100% completion rating. But this game should have been in contention for placement a lot higher up my list. So, while this is an extremely polished game with excellent voice acting, gorgeous environments, satisfying combat, clever puzzles, and solid level design, it never rises above the sum of its parts.

When you’re the follow-up to 2018’s God of War, being a really good game doesn’t quite cut it for me. You must be better.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land – HAL Laboratory

I’ve never been much of a Kirby fan. Actually, let me rephrase that: I’ve never played a Kirby game. At least, not until I picked up Kirby and the Forgotten Land this year. Now, having introduced myself to the series with such an impeccably designed game as this one, color me freshly converted. I am a new disciple to the Church of Kirby.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is pure level design. Using scripted camera angles most reminiscent of Super Mario 3D Land, it showcases its 3D world with just the right framing at the right moment. There’s no fighting the camera in this action platformer, so you get to focus all of your attention on controlling Kirby.

There’s such playfulness in every aspect of this game, from the world and enemy design to the quirky challenges it presents the player with. One level might have you rounding up a brood of baby ducklings and returning them to their mother. Another might have you grabbing the Sleep copy ability to take a nap poolside. Then there’s the new Mouthful Mode feature, which is what happens when Kirby tries sucking in inanimate objects multiple times its body size – be them vending machines, giant traffic cones, an entire set of stairs, or a rusted-out car. Each one of these objects enables Kirby to significantly transform the gameplay at a moment’s notice. Kirby can become a hang-glider for a flight sequence, swallow a lightbulb whole to illuminate platforms in the dark, or just completely inflate with water to spray away some unsightly sludge – all that’s missing is some of that sweet Delfino Plaza music. Needless to say, the chaotic energy of Kirby sucking in an entire car and then driving it around, boosting into enemies, is funny every single time you do it.

The Mouthful mechanic, combined with the series staple ability for Kirby to absorb enemies and copy their moveset, makes for a game which changes up its gameplay like Fortnite changes up its corporate partnerships. It reminds me of Cappy in Super Mario Odyssey, and how that game would theme entire sections around a given transformation. In much the same way, Forgotten Land makes excellent use of Kirby’s copy ability, crafting levels around the various powers. You might have ice blocks that need melting with Fire Kirby, faraway platforms that need Tornado Kirby’s ability to float to them, or bullseye targets that require that Ranger Kirby bust out his guns.

Outside of the main levels, the game also features what it calls Treasure Road maps, which are optional time trials centered around a particular transformation. Completing these will grant you Rare Stones that can be spent to upgrade your copy abilities. Completing the Treasure Roads is rarely challenging, but achieving the target times it asks of you can require near perfect movement. In doing so, it feels in keeping with the way modern Nintendo games have been handling difficulty curves for several years now: the game is easy to complete, yet quite challenging to master if you want to 100% it.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land represents Kirby’s first foray into a fully 3D game world (though there are some edge cases that may or may not count to you). It’s not some groundbreaking entry into the 3^rd dimension, the way that the Mario or Zelda or Metroid franchises had, but it is a fantastically well-made game nonetheless. Sometimes a game is just a fun time, and doesn’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel too much. That’s exactly how I would describe Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

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