This week, it’s Alan Wake 2, which has released and scored an 89 on Metacritic, a tick below a 90, but a 92 if you’re looking on PC where its visuals can be maxed to their fullest.
You can tell gaming has been mid for so long that we get a couple of ok titles again and they are like “there is no room for all these GOTY titles!!” lol
I’m about 13 hours in AW2 and it’s not a complication. This is one of the few easy choices to put up there. BG3, this and TotK even if it wasn’t my cup of tea. 3 last 3 have a bunch of choices but I would be very confused if AW was snubbed with some of the issues the other contenders have (RE4 is an exception to this, it’s risk is just that it’s a remake and now there is a concrete horror candidate)
Reject the idea of an absolute GOTY, normalize a Mt. Rushmore style "Best of the Year" selection.
Games can be great in so many different ways, many of which are somewhat exclusive with each other, that I've never understood the concept of saying that one was absolutely better than the rest.
As a fan of the Ocreana and Majora, I was super disappointed with the same dungeon just copy pasted 4 times with basically no story or dialogue. It was a fine enough open world game I guess, but it wasn't a Zelda game.
BotW was great, but not if you were wanting a traditional Zelda.
TotK is hot garbage. They just took BotW and leaned way too hard into the whole “build silly contraptions!!1” thing that some fans were doing with BotW’s physics interactions.
I love FromSoft games. I still haven’t gotten around to AC6. It launched at such a bad time with so many other games coming out, especially if you have GamePass. BG3 came out about the same time (not on gamepass, but easy purchase), then Starfield (which was frustrating and bad, but still took time), Payday 3 (which is alright but flawed, and hopefully will be improved like PD2 was), and Cities Skylines 2. Notable mention to Counter Strike 2, while not doing anything that new for CS, it’s still the thing we’ve been waiting for for years. I still haven’t gotten around to it yet either, but patches are improving things so waiting is good.
As someone who almost 100% it with all shrines… Nah. Totk honestly didn’t take enough risks as botw and the new additions were disappointing. The sky islands were copy pasted many times with the same layout, the dungeons were arguably not much better than botw, and the depths all looked the same.
The game is also piss easy once you have enough hearts to tank hits. Still so disappointed I first-tried the final boss.
Still a good game, but 8/10 at best. In a year where much better games came out I wouldn’t even nominate it for Goty
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