The 2020 Goaties: The Elevens
Video games! They’re a great distraction from the Horrors of the Real World, and 2020 has had…well, fewer games than you’d expect, honestly. I managed to play a pretty decent variety and number of games this year, largely due to things like Xbox Game Pass for PC letting me dip in and out of a thing without a terrible monetary commitment. Honestly, before we talk about any other video games at all on this website, I should probably just shout out Game Pass.
Hey, Game Pass? You rule. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’.
Okay, with that in mind, the 2020 Goaties have officially begun, with - as always - a handful of games that didn’t quite make my Top 10 list: the Elevens.
“The Elevens”
I’m not really sure anyone has actually played Crusader Kings III so much as they have experienced it. Coming out eight years after its predecessor, it’s a titanic, engrossing, absolutely overwhelming grand strategy game that tasks players with handling a distinct lineage. You can pick one of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals, from all walks of life, and watch their family history rise and fall over the course of a few hundred years, while manipulating things in your favor as much as you can.
Watching an offspring from your arranged marriage weasel his way into a rival’s court, cuckold said rival, only to ultimately be executed for his arrogance…is honestly par for the course in terms of the wild stories I’ve seen come out of CKIII. In a standout multiplayer game, I picked a tiny vassal in southeastern Asia. After slowly building up my alliances with some of my fellow vassals and figuring out where I wanted to take my lineage, I spent the better part of twelve hours in a constant, grueling back-and-forth with a series of rulers that involved me kidnapping them, demanding a ransom for their return, declaring war against them, only to immediately win and usurp their throne. As soon as I took the crown, the next would-be usurper lined up to…dethrone me shortly after. It was entirely pointless, completely circuitous, and derailed several times by other people assassinating me as I prepared for future upheavals.
Crusader Kings III could also be taken seriously, I suppose, but that seems less engaging.
Gears Tactics! That game was alright! It went on for too long, I didn’t really care about much of the story, and by the time it was done, I was ready for it to have been done for about…oh, six hours or so.
Now, having said all that: Gears Tactics is a really sharp tactics game, in the vein of an XCOM but amped up with a handful of smart improvements that I think developers-at-large would be Total Goobers to not attempt to incorporate in whatever tactics thing they cook up next. The way Gears plays with momentum and pacing in a standard turn - primarily by letting you get extra actions for downing or executing enemies - lets you turn what would normally be a pretty average kill or two into a room-clearing slaughter. It feels great. There’s just enough variety in the mission types that, if they hadn’t added an entire third act to the game that felt like treading water, you wouldn’t get bored with any individual style. The handful of boss fights are very good to look at, even if the difficulty feels inconsistent between the three.
It’s got issues apart from the amount of investment required to see it to completion, of course. Getting attached to any individual character is pretty pointless as you routinely have newer, higher-level candidates just waiting to be thrown into the meatgrinder of the Locust War. The story, even for a Gears tale, feels a little shallow and incredibly obvious from top-to-bottom.
Either way, if you’re looking for a Pretty Good One of Those, you could do a lot worse than Gears Tactics. When you feel like you’ve had your fill, you probably have! You don’t need to see it through to the end. You fight a bat nightmare thing on a ringed platform, it’s kind of tedious.
Talk about a game that gets people into confusing, pointless arguments!
The weird thing about The Last of Us: Part II for me is…I liked a lot of that game! I wrote about it back in June, and feel like my thoughts on it haven’t changed too much from the afterglow of that playthrough. The story of Ellie and Abby just…hasn’t stuck with me like I kinda thought it would. There are a handful of moments and encounters, sure - who can forget the Rat King, straight out of a Resident Evil game? As a whole, though, it feels like a game that came out so long ago, and try as I might, it’s just all kind of a blur to recall.
It’s currently raking in Game of the Year accolades across the board, so clearly it did resonate with a lot of folks out there. I dunno. I’ll probably check out the multiplayer stuff, whenever that comes out, and I’d be interested to see how it runs with a PS5 performance patch.
For now, though, I think I’m okay letting this one go, unlike any of the characters in the story of The Last of Us: Part II, who refused at every opportunity to just stop going after each other, good grief, let it die.
As a rule, I am Required by Law to either replay an existing Dark Souls game or try a handful of new Soulslikes every year. As it turns out, I’ve done both: we talked about Mortal Shell shortly after its release in August, and it ended up getting me interested in the idea of playing through the original Dark Souls again. In doing so - I’m in the Painted World right now, with a SL1 character, and can’t recommend it - I’ve remembered both what endears me to this subgenre of games, and why I enjoyed Mortal Shell in particular.
There’s something to be said about the unflinching obtuse nature of a proper FROM-developed Souls game, and the relative ease with which Mortal Shell gets at the heart of it. It’s oppressive, but not in a lingering way. It’s haunting, but relatively short. Its world design has just enough of the shortcuts and labyrinthine twists that we’ve come to expect from a Souls-like, and your requisite handful of jaw-dropping, larger-than-life vistas. Their monster design is the right kind of ooey-gooey Gothic horror, and if I hadn’t completely broken the difficulty curve with the Hammer and Nail, they might have posed a challenge as well.
The handful of little wrinkles they add to this tried-and-true formula - the Familiarity system, your stats being determined by your interchangeable Shell class, and the quick-as-lightning Harden - make Mortal Shell feel like a lot more than an also-ran in a space increasingly crowded each year.
It’s cool! I very well might replay it or work through a NG+ run after this Dark Souls SL1 nightmare concludes.
These four games are all great, in their own ways! I wouldn’t have played through the entirety of three of them (and put another 15-20 hours into the fourth) if they weren’t. It’s entirely likely that I fall down another Crusader Kings III storyline somewhere down the road, but for now, we’ll leave these four Elevens in the past.
If you’re reading this the day of its posting, we’ll have another post in the evening, highlighting a handful of games I loved this year that happened to not come out in 2020. If you’re reading this after the fact, well, here’s the link to that.
Until next time!
