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To be honest, I’m proud of the delights we’ve put behind the doors of each Advent calendar this year. All my top picks are there, plus a few more that I haven’t played but watched other people play, and spent a lot of time doing. Still, there are a handful who aren’t always decisive, but who still deserve a pile of Christmas praise at the end of the year. So here is my selection box, my bonus games of the year 2024. This time it is an unusual triad.
Packed
When I first played Packed At the beginning of the year, the main point that set it apart from other survival craft games – the monster-spawning shrew that covered the landscape – didn’t quite stick with me. It’s a beautiful game with a world that looks like fun to explore, and when I get my head around it, I replace that wonder with time pressure, good-but-not-great combat, and a whole lot of fog. Still, Kin Games deserves credit for creating the best building system I’ve come across in the genre.
Seriously, it was hard for me to go finish my Early Access review and do other things, because all I wanted to do was keep building. Powerful tools allow you to create beautiful-looking builds faster and with more freedom than in similar games. Valheim. Voxels change their appearance contextually to blend satisfactorily with their neighbors. There’s a wealth of rustic building materials, and being able to quickly swap not only materials, but shapes with the mouse wheel makes building as painless an experience as I’ve seen in these games.
Since I last played, the world of Enshrouded has gotten bigger, and the options for building, finding, and stabbing things in the Shroud have grown along with it. I should find time to go inside soon.
Only hell
One of my biggest regrets this year is our planned notebook series for the Political Hell strategy game. Only hell It didn’t pan out (for various reasons). Even in the pits of Hell’s Sulphur, I can feel things heating up quickly in our game. I was only five or six miles into the battle with Catherine, the implications of each move being so vast that even my brother, who does not play such games, would stay up late with me. Discuss strategies and contingency plans.
Even if we never finish a game, the endless political intrigue and mind games of Soium Infernum will remain the high point of 2024 for me. The original game is long gone, and looking back, I can see why League of Geeks was such a strong focus to streamline certain areas and make the reimagined game easier to approach for new players. After a (very competent) tutorial, I felt confident enough in my water skills to taunt Kathryn in round 1 (which led to the aforementioned battle). I love games like this, the world is small but every decision is punchy and powerful. At the end of this year, I found the same thing in political intrigue Dune: The ImperiumBut that still lacks the Dobos Torte strategies and implications and second-guessing adversaries that I found with Solium Infernum. Readers, I’m going to try very, very hard next year to have my fellow treehouse-dwellers join me for the 2010s proper series. Gameboys from hell Series.
Delta force
Delta force It was a surprise to me, and not only because it came so late in the year, but we had already finished the Advent Calendar before it stole my heart. Anyone who knows me knows I’m crazy about extraction shooters. I still haven’t finished last year’s Cycle: Frontier’s Undeserved Death and have been waiting for a game to fill the void ever since. So far, Delta Force has been doing a swell job – something I really didn’t expect, given the take-out aspect of a larger Battlefield-like game.
I haven’t played the main battle mode yet, I’m having too much fun in Operation. It’s much sleeker and simpler than Tarkov, but it packs a lot of cool stuff, like a jigsaw-inventory, and a helmet that suppresses your vision when you’re shot. The economy is more forgiving than Tarkov, but things are expensive so it still hurts when you lose your favorite sniper rifle. The gun feels great, the game looks great, and the Maps They are amazing. Friends, I like Hunt: Showdown, but there’s no denying that the maps don’t feel particularly natural. Just a flat array of equal-sized points of interest on a square of land. The maps in Delta Force feel like real places. Everything fits together well, movement on the map is great, and you’re never far from tense encounters with dangerous mini-bosses or other players trying to steal your gear. It’s a very, very scary new entry to the genre, and if I’m not going home to visit my family for Christmas, I’ll be spending most of the holiday dying in Delta Force over and over and loving every moment.
