John Warren’s 6th-15th Games of 2024

John Warren is the founder and editor of VGBees, one fourth of If You’re Driving Close Your Eyes, the peddler of Glydr the innovative foot controller, and former head of Fanbyte (RIP).

I’m really stoked to be writing a Giant Bomb Games of the Year list! Running Fanbyte meant we always had our own place to do this kind of thing, which we had fun doing for a while until we didn’t. Then I took 18 months off from the whole games media thing and decided to start VGBees, which is a really great website and fun project that has published some great writing and great podcasts (with Giant Bomb’s very own Niki Grayson).

This is my first time writing for Giant Bomb, though, which is so wild to be doing! I’m always happy to be invited onto couches or podcasts at GB, but publishing a year-end list is on a different level! What an honor!

I have to admit something before we continue. My website is going to publish my list of the top five games of the year. I had to save my very favorites for my own website, you know? I can’t be unfaithful to my true love. But honestly, 2024 is a great, great, great year to publish fifteen favorite games. So just consider this my Giant Bomb top 15-6 and swing by VGBees to see my top five!

In alphabetical order:

I am completely bowled over to list a Call of Duty in my games of the year. Shocked. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m turned off by the American military industrial complex and the ways Call of Duty offers a surreal cracked kitchen window into it, but I don’t think I had more fun playing a multiplayer game this year. The maps, the gunplay, the progression…all of it feels tightly tuned and really smart. Where the game shines between the whistles, so to speak, is in the new Omnimovement system. It doesn’t really make sense to be able to dash slide backwards, but the responsiveness of Black Ops 6 feels like several steps up from the last time I consistently played Call of Duty.

My only real gripe is the average time to death seems remarkably fast for a game that probably doesn’t want to remind you, the player, about how expendable combatants can feel.

Where Treyarch and Raven were smart, though, is how similarly fast it feels to get back to the action.

Oh, the campaign? I didn’t play it. What can I say? I know what I want from Call of Duty and I stuck with it.

I played more of this game years ago than its technical release year thanks to the practical magic of Early Access. Firing it back up this year felt like coming home, if home is an inscrutable future where “normal” is a meaningless word. Rolling a new character and finding new ways to explore, kill, die, mutate, communicate, help, etc. remains one of gaming’s greatest thrills.

Caves of Qud is designed to surprise you and has a fundamental confidence that is easy to recommend even to those turned off by the minimal graphics and clunky interface. If you’ve never played Caves of Qud, give it a shot. It has never been easier to hop in, but its friction is the irresistible quality I keep coming back for.

The Vampire Survivors formula saw some interesting iteration in previous years with games like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, which added tantalizing player-guided action that the original bullet heaven style sometimes needed. My favorite riff on the formula is this year’s Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, which eschews manual action for mining mechanics found in the series that inspired the game, Deep Rock Galactic.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is the only other game besides Balatro (which you can read about on my top five roundup at VGBees!!!) that I had to uninstall at various points to save myself from losing literally, literally half a day to blowing through run after run.

It is dangerous catnip for me. It might be for you, too, so beware. Today, I have a healthier relationship with the game. I can fire up a run in between meetings and stick with that. The appeal remains, however. The level-based runs up the ante in ways that feel more predictable than the endlessness of Vampire Survivors, which removes a little mystery from the proceedings but feels more goal-oriented, which I like sometimes. If you’re a bullet heaven fan and haven’t tried Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, I recommend you give it a shot. It runs great on Steam Deck, too!

“Hell yeah, BioWare is back, baby.”

This is a phrase I uttered in real life to myself in my home office after playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard for about an hour. I was thrilled to be back to making my own character (what a creation suite that is, huh?), meeting my companions, and making choices that seemed like they were going to matter.

I kind of wish I could take back my initial excitement and don my garments of skepticism I came into the experience with, because I think my overall impression of the game may ultimately be higher without the unfiltered hope I let creep into my heart.

Just being honest. Still, there’s enough good here to make my list. Though Dragon Age still has a staggering villain problem – something I was sure they were fixing when the subtitle for the game was Dreadwolf and positive they were not going to fix when they changed to the infinitely worse The Veilguard – BioWare still understands deeply the importance of compelling companions and provided us with wonderful options this time around.

The highs of The Veilguard are awfully high and I hope, foolishly, BioWare gives us one more go-around with our Rook and some of these characters in the next few years.

We love a short, weird game, don’t we, folks? I really adored Jozef Pavelka and Vlado Ganaj’s sublime Felvidek, a throwback to mid-90s Japanese role playing games in the form of a bizarre gumbo mixing high fantasy Middle Ages nods and the surreal anachronism of a game like Hylics. You play a knight doing knightly things but you’re also a drunk with big problems both personal and professional.

If you have a few hours and want to see what Vagrant Story is like through a looking glass you found at a haunted garage sale, grab Felvidek this weekend and go nuts.

The highest compliment I can give the new Indiana Jones game is it feels like someone dared MachineGames to do an impression of Dishonored-era Arkane, required them to still make it about killing Nazis (which they were already great at doing), and handed them an absolutely mind-boggling amount of money.

I need to be so clear. The Great Circle is not an immersive sim nor is it even a great stealth game, but they got so much right about the magic that makes Arkane games so riveting to me (adventure, attention to detail, environmental design) that I think it’s a great success.

What a joy it was to discover a marble bust in a hallway and seeing the interaction button, assuming it would prompt a small information dump from Indiana but rather trigger the pick-up animation so you can brain an Italian fascist with it. Imagine that happening about 700 more times in the game and you’ll get a sense of why I, and so many people, are putting The Great Circle on our year-end lists.

My only gripe (and backdoor recommendation for the next inevitable Indy game) is with the pacing, which feels much too slow for the films that inspired it. I’d almost rather have three self-contained adventures with self-contained MacGuffins than one sprawling adventure, which got a little long in the tooth for me. Still, there’s so much good here that I recommend it to anyone who loves globetrotting, puzzle-solving, and Nazi-bashing.

And yes, I have to acknowledge that Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford impression is excellent.

Okami Sequel was such a fun announcement at The Game Awards, right? The original was an amazing game and I’m so ready for more. But it wasn’t a total surprise for those of us lucky enough to have played Capcom’s best game from the past year, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. Not only did the game feature an official Okami crossover, but thematically and visually it paid homage the entire time.

Describing Kunitsu-Gami is a self-contained improv game. Is it an action game? Yes, and…

Is it a strategy game? Yes, and…

Is it a tower defense game? Yes, and…

Is it a base-building game? Yes, and…

I loved Kunitsu-Gami taking such a measured approach with its storytelling. Minimal words, minimal explanation, maximal vibes, maximal stakes. Good stuff. Building up your villager classes and finding the right combos to tackle the increasingly difficult levels (and bosses) made for some great replay value that never felt needlessly grindy.

I have a confession to make. I’m one of those annoying jerks who thinks Final Fantasy has lost its way. Too much experimentation, too much straying from the party dynamics and world-building of its most successful entries, too much time spent on development, etc. I’ll never tell those teams what to make, though! They’re welcome to turn a franchise that cranked out five-star classics for years into whatever they’re doing now!

You gotta chase your bliss!

I feel especially secure in Square-Enix’s insistence on doing something different with Final Fantasy in the wake of Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio, a game that took all of the things I fell in love with in Final Fantasy and squeezed them through their particular filters. Maybe it stays too close to the Atlus formula found in their excellent but massive Persona games, but I found a lot to love that felt refreshing and original.

Metaphor does a lot to check the boxes that Final Fantasy has failed to fill over the past decade or so, but it also serves as a really wonderful standalone meditation on fiction and its place in the story of humanity.

I’m really slow to pick up Metroidvanias these days. I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen it all. Ubisoft took that notion and dunked it straight into the trash can with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Not only did the game offer mechanical innovations in an exhausted equation, but it offered a true challenge not only in combat but in platforming. I never completed the game’s most intense challenge rooms, but had a blast watching friends and colleagues post their attempts and eventual successes.

It isn’t easy to inject new life into something stale, but The Lost Crown’s rejuvenation of an oversaturated genre got my attention and admiration this year. Too bad we’re unlikely to see a follow-up.

I’m happy to report we’re close to getting the return of the true king of 3D fighters, Virtua Fighter, but 2024’s finest offering was the electric Tekken 8. Though I’m frustrated the franchise hasn’t taken a huge creative leap since 1998’s Tekken 3, which featured not only a time jump but the elimination of many classic Tekken characters up to that point, Tekken 8 feels like dipping a toe in that pond.

We are miles beyond the grounded fighting formula of the earlier entries and it feels like Tekken is finally settling into its own groove.

I had conflicted feelings when they reintroduced the presumed-dead (at least for like six months) Heihachi Mishima because Reina, his spiritual replacement, is one of the best characters Bandai Namco has ever designed. In fact, their character designs in Tekken 8 might be their strongest in many years. Strong designs boost gameplay that feels snappy, if a little samey between characters.

It was fun dipping in and out of Tekken 8 all year and I expect to return many times as they continue to add new characters and modes to the game.

Thanks for reading, Giant Bomb community! If you want to read my VGBees Hive Five Games of 2024, head on over to the site!