[The following is a transcript of my voiceover for the video of me putting together this tier list, hence its more freewheeling rambly nature. For the full effect do watch the video embedded below.]
[This is also why this was my one attempt at an unscripted video, LOL]
I played more than 24 games in 2024. If you know me, that’s a rarity because I don’t really play new games, and I don’t really consider myself a Casual Gamer–but I’m definitely not hardcore. Back In 2022 I probably played two full games, one of which was Elden Ring, and that was for most of the year. But that was also a good year, and that tier list would have been short but still relevant! And that’s what I’m doing here, a tier list, so why don’t we just get into it?
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
So this kind of spills over from 2023, but I started playing Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty late in December, and through most of January of 2024 so let’s count that as this year. In fact let’s count that as a full game, because while the base Cyberpunk 2077 came out in 2020, and I played the hell out of it on a PlayStation 4 Pro, which you know is actually not that much better than the baseline, especially on launch day if you remember (Yeah, I went back, and it is rough). I didn’t have a PS5 by this point so I played it on an Xbox series S. Phantom Liberty is great! I love it! If you’ve never played Cyberpunk, last year was the time to get into it. They haven’t fixed all the bugs, but even putting that aside Phantom Liberty is a great, great game. Beautiful campaign, beautiful side missions, great new areas to explore. It really does expand on the base game, not just in terms of spaces but in terms of themes, and it sort of reinforces a lot of the themes. What a great way to start the year. What a great way to end 2023 and start 2024. This definitely goes to the top tier.
RANK – S
Dead Cells
I don’t like to keep playing AAA games or big games, so I usually switch it up and try to go for Indies (in-between), and I still had my PS Plus or something at the time, so I went into Dead Cells, which I had heard a lot about. I like Metroidvanias but I don’t always have the the patience for them, or even the manual dexterity, but Dead Cells is really, really good. I did a run through and that didn’t take too long–took a couple of hours–but I’m pretty sure that that’s not how you actually play Dead Cells. It seems like only the beginning and you kind of keep going back into it, unlocking more, finding more ways through it. I really liked it. It’s not amazing; after I was done with one run I just felt, “Enough,” and I just let it go after that. I will come back to it. So yeah maybe it’s an A tier for me.
RANK – A
Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)
Now, I have no history with the Star Wars Battlefront series. I played a lot of the Star Wars games from the PS2 era, but somehow the Battlefront ones just never never made an impact, or I just never tried them. I do remember maybe trying them in a store at some point, a bit too frantic. Battlefront II, which I only played the single player of, and the single player DLC, and that’s sort of what I’m basing it on here, years after the controversy about loot boxes and all of that subsided. You’re looking at a game that is frequently on sale for very cheap, and I would suggest getting the DLC because it’s a fun game. It’s short but the story campaign is pretty good. The game is a bit janky from a single player perspective but the story is really good, I especially the DLC. I liked seeing a Star Wars story that goes all the way from literally from the last moments of Return of the Jedi to setting up the new Trilogy and with characters who were grew on me. I frequently find the Star Wars extended Universe video games better than the the… let’s say linear media stuff that has come, especially since George Lucas left it in the hands of, uh, other people let’s say. Battlefront II gets an A from me and especially because of the DLC, the story campaign. Play that.
RANK – A
Halo: Combat Evolved (Master Chief Collection)
Right. So, about 20 years ago now, when Halo had come to the PC for the first time (I didn’t really have any consoles at that time. I was between PlayStations, and I was not an Xbox person), I played a bit of Halo, did not really get it. I was a Half-Life and No One Lives Forever type of first person shooter guy. I could not quite figure out the systems and the general flow of things (in Halo). So I thought, let me give Halo Master Chief Collection a try, especially now that I had an Xbox Series S. I’m sorry to report that my feelings on Halo haven’t really changed. I played a fair amount of Destiny at Destiny 2 and I can see some of the DNA of that, but Halo is… the gameplay, the combat is still good. That’s the thing about Bungie that has not really changed in 20 years, but it’s still very repetitive in terms of the level design and there’s just a lot of frustration. Also it’s just like getting older and where now everything is checkpointed properly and you know you die and suddenly you’re 15 minutes before. There’s like all sorts of stupid things like that that. It’s fun and it’s nice as a historical thing I guess, but for me it just didn’t really work. So I’m actually giving this a C so… feel free to vent your frustrations in the comments!
RANK- C
Unicorn Overlord
I played a demo, and by demo I mean this is the first five or six hours of the game. Even though it’s timed it’s sort of set up where you can finish the first act of the game. So you’ll get a good idea of the systems, the characters and whatnot, and it’s a beautiful game to look at. There’s not really so much strategy and tactics. You set up your systems and set up your parties and then they kind of just go at each other so it’s like chess: there are basic rules and things. It’s not even as advanced as something that I played back in the day like Shining Force, but it scratches that same itch, and yes it looks gorgeous. The animation is superb. Just on the visuals alone and just the sumptuousness of the music, the presentation, I’m giving this a B even though it’s a demo. Play the demo you’ll get 6 hours out of it and you’ll know whether you like it or not within the first hour or two.
RANK – B
Astro’s Playroom
So after that I finally got a PS5, and of course the first thing I did was play Astro’s Playroom. Now, I didn’t play Astrobot, but Astro’s Playroom is basically like the best demo–and you might be sensing a pattern her–this year I played a lot of demos. Astro’s Playroom is not just a great demo, it’s a great game period. If you have played Game of the Year winner Astrobot by now, you need to go back and play this. It is not just a silly pack-in game to show off the PS5 controller and all its bells and whistles, although it’s really great at that too. I literally show it off whenever I need to show people my PS5, because there aren’t that many people I know who are gamers. I’m like: “Okay, play this game and you’ll understand why this thing is special.” All the little feedback on the way surfaces feel and then all the the little things in the speakers. Astro’s Playroom is Astrobot, it’s great, it’s a small slice of really really good fun, and yeah that’s S tier for sure. It’s short and sweet and it’s brilliant.
RANK – S
Hitman: World of Assassination
Something that isn’t short and sweet, but is brilliant in the way I played it, is Hitman: World of Assassination, as it is now called. So this is confusing because Hitman (or as some people call it Hitman: No Subtitle or Hitman 2016) came out episodically where each level was put out every few weeks or a month, and that was the first game. Then there was a second game with five more levels continuing the story. There was a third game and now if you buy the third game, I think which has been rebranded World of Assassination, you just get the whole story. So that’s what I did: I just played through the whole story. Not the best way to play it because the Hitman levels are kind of these sandboxes that you want to spend your time in to get to know, but I thought: there is a story here, let me see what it’s like. And it’s a good good story. I’m glad that these guys are off to handle James Bond because as of the time of this video the movies are not going anywhere. Very famously they’re not. There’s a tussle between the people making them and Amazon MGM. But the game: if you just play the story missions–the main critical path–you get a great spy story. Obviously you see production value suffer a little, not in the levels but in the cinematics. They clearly didn’t have the budget for it in the second one and they tried to do better in the third one (and they did). It’s nowhere as good as when they had Square Enix’s inhouse teams in Japan working on them, probably at their highest level. That would have been fantastic. Maybe one day we’ll get a remaster of that, if this does well enough. Weird way to play Hitman. I will go back and just play The sandbox version of it, seeing all the various bits and getting the clown suits and whatnot, but this uh this is another S tier for me. I will go back and play these missions.
RANK- S
The Talos Principle
So going with my AAA to Indie kind of thing: The Talos Principle, which I had a almost no idea about. I sort of knew that it was a first person thing in the style of Portal, you know puzzle rooms and whatnot. I was pleasantly surprised by it. There are a lot of great puzzles in here, and in the end I went back and did a lot of the optional things, got the true ending and all of that. You get a bit full of the game–in a good way–about 75% of the way through, and then you can just finish it off, and I didn’t do any of the DLC. So right now I’m putting this one in my A tier. They just recently announced a remaster with Unreal Engine 5 and it’s going to be better looking but the same great game, and there’s the DLC so I’m actually going to wait around for that and go and do that fully whenever that comes out sometime in 2025. The Talos Principle is not a bad game, beautiful again in its own sort of minimalist way. If you like puzzles definitely play it.
RANK – A
The Artful Escape
There haven’t been any clunkers so far, other than my horrible sleighting of Halo, but after that I tried out a game that I’d always been curious about and I had great hopes for. And it is a beautiful looking game, it’s called The Artful Escape. I finished about 50% of it and I gave up. This doesn’t usually happen for me with games. Even if it’s a bad game sometimes I’ll just like see it through and hope there’s something in there, but but there wasn’t enough game to this thing there. It’s presented beautifully, there are the graphics alone and maybe you’ll take to the music a bit more than I did. I just don’t care for that particular type of music, and then the game itself was literally running left to right, occasionally jumping, randomly pressing buttons to kind of do rhythm-gamey things. And then the characters: they were borderline unlikable for me, and in a game that’s about being true to yourself and telling original stories, this kind of felt weirdly like it was trying too hard to be something it couldn’t quite live up to, either as a game or as a story. That’s why I’m kind of putting it in my D tier. There are probably people who will love this game, for whom this will be the best game they ever had played. I’m not one of those people, I’m sorry.
RANK – D
Uncharted 4
I went back to comfort food after that, because I had never played all of the Uncharted games. I played most of them through at least twice except for Uncharted 4, so when the PS5 version was there with its nice 60 FPS and nice graphics I played it through again, and I really love Uncharted 4. I don’t think it’s in my top Uncharteds–that one I would reserve for 2 and 3 (and you’ll see more later). I think the problem with Uncharted 4 is it goes on a little too long. I like the story, I love the characters, the graphics are beautiful, it still looks fantastic. Great setting, good mechanics. I love that they added things like the the grappling hook, and more interesting gun play and cover, and a bit of stealth and even slightly open world parts, but it does go on slightly too long, and I don’t know what they could trim out of it but it’s it’s still an A tier game, but just not as good as…
RANK – A
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
The Lost Legacy is almost seen as a side thing, like an expansion the way Phantom Liberty would be. But Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is superb. Now, I have certain misgivings about the way it portrays the part of South India it’s supposed to be portraying, since I am from that part of South India, but that’s like a different video and a different essay, and I have complicated feelings about that. But as a game, as an Uncharted adventure, it is fantastic. If you ever had any doubts that Uncharted couldn’t go on without Nathan Drake, I think this game more than proves that you can, and they should, actually do adventures with other people in that world. Because all of them are good characters. All the people involved with Uncharted, the writer–famously people like Amy Hennig–they’ve really set the foundation well. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is superb. I will replay it just to be in that world again. S tier for sure.
RANK – S
Grand Theft Auto V
Here’s another one that’s going to be controversial: I tried playing Grand Theft Auto V for the first time. I have never really ever played a Grand Theft Auto game, again I have tried, back in the day, Grand Theft Auto III. I’ve never played IV, I’ve played Red Dead Redemption as you’ll see later, and loved that one, but something about Grand Theft Auto V did not jive for me. I played 45 minutes of it, did not like any character, did not really like any of the missions, or the handling of the anything. I may come back to it but for right now it’s like I don’t even know if it should be on this list, but whatever it’s in here now.
RANK – D
Assassin’s Creed Origins
Instead of going to another indie I went for something big. I love the Assassin’s Creed games. They are the only real AAA mainstream thing that I play. I don’t play Call of Duty, I don’t play sports games, but play every Assassin’s Creed. It’s something I’ve played now since the first game, and I love to take my time with it. I played most of them multiple times, loved all of them for various reasons, including all the way up to Syndicate (there’s a video upcoming about that one and why I think you should play it). I put off playing these because I knew they would change the formula. They made them RPGs, and I like Assassin’s Creed Origins. I love the world. It’s one of the most beautiful open worlds ever made, I would say. It’s wonderful that a studio can spend so much time and effort making a rendition of an ancient world like this. I didn’t really like the story, I didn’t like that, well, throughout there’s things about kids dying, which is, yes, thematically correct to the story they tried to tell in the world they tried to tell it in. But there’s a weird unevenness to the main story versus the world it’s in, which I might get into in a more involved video, but by the end of it I didn’t really like the RPG combat, I thought original Assassin’s Creed style stealth and mission work was fine. I think maybe Black Flag is the top of that style for me, maybe some of the Ezio Trilogy. This one felt like what people have thought Ubisoft-y games are, where you just go to a point in the map kill a few things and tick off something, but you know it’s still a good game so I’m putting it in A, but if I was doing halves it would be somewhere between the two.
RANK – A
Gotham Knights
Clearly I didn’t learn my lesson for large games, so I went into Gotham Knights right after to this. On console it’s ridiculous that it still just runs at 30 FPS, and again it’s a live service game. I didn’t play Suicide Squad but that’s coming up as well, because hey that’s on sale. Gotham Knights also is on sale several times. This one I played on PS+. I love the story, I love the way the characters were handled. I thought it was a great thing to do and, no spoilers, but you know the way they handled the ending: I think it did a disservice to what had come before in some ways for me. I like looking at all the characters in all their cool suits, I didn’t care that I didn’t have to pay live service loot boxy things for it, or to just get something slightly higher. I just looked at it cosmetically. It’s not as good as an Arkham game. The combat is not is tight, it’s just kind of this frenzy of you just hitting buttons, not really having that nice rhythm from the free flow combat of before. I still like it. It’s fine. I’m tempted to put this up here but I think I definitely didn’t like it as much as Origins in the end so I’ll just put it here in B.
RANK – B
Streets of Rage 4
When a game is that long, and two of them are that long, I like finding the perfect palette cleanser, and that is the superb Streets of Rage 4. Oh my God. I played Streets of Rage 2 and 3 back on my Mega Drive days the ’90s, and this was so perfect. It’s literally a couple of hours long (single player). It’s got some of the cruft of the old games where you can’t quite line up a punch unless you’re literally on the same pixel as the other person, but man this is so much fun, I would gladly put this… I think I’ll put this in S because it’s so short and sweet, and if you get it I guess at a price that you like then really there’s nothing nothing wrong with it. I could imagine going back and playing this with friends. I did play that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one the year before and I got bored with it. I played it with my niece and we both kind of got bored with it. It’s a great game but it kind of goes on too long. I never finished it, but Streets of Rage for perfect length. Perfect game.
RANK – S
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Speaking of games that are the perfect length: Miles Morales. You can’t call it Spider-Man 2 anymore, it’s Spider-Man 1.5 I guess. A great side story, or rather an interquel if you want to call it that, between the stories of Spider-Man one and the one that comes after that. I haven’t played it yet but we’ll get to that. I like playing Miles, he’s a much faster, zippier character, and the story was decent. It had the usual tropes of everything happening to three characters, and everyone being connected, but that’s I guess par for the course with superhero things, but considering the first Spider-Man game was a great version of all those characters and stories, I think it this is still an A tier game for me.
RANK – A
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
As is, of course, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Same studio as Spider-Man. The thing they made before, the thing that made me fall in love with them when I got my PS2 way back in the day. It came with Ratchet & Clank 3 as a pack-in. I had no idea what these games were but I fell in love instantly. Insomniac does game feel like nobody else, and now they do polish. This is one of the prettiest looking pieces of graphic art ever. It’s as good looking as a movie. You don’t need a PS5 Pro to see how great it is. It’s also a good, solid Ratchet & Clank game, which in a year where yes Astrobot and things like that are there, it’s nice to have something like that. So that’s top tier for me.
RANK – S
Halo 2
After that, I went back to the Halos. Considering I didn’t really love Halo (the original), I did not mind the switching between the two characters, the two points of view. I like the new CGI they put in for all the cinematics, beautifully done. I think it’s a little better than the original Halo.
RANK – B
Halo 3
And then I went into Halo 3, and it’s a nice way to end that story. You can see why people kind of took to it as this as this big grand epic space thing, and this is all long before things like Mass Effect and all came along and kind of did similar things. So yeah I’m not the biggest Halo person in the world–sorry–just did not grow up with them. I’m a Half-Life guy. And I don’t care about multiplayer, so campaign it is, and it’s a good campaign. It’s just um not a great campaign.
RANK – B
Yakuza Kiwami
Another series I’m very late to is Yakuza. I played Yakuza 0 last year. If there was an SS tier I would put it on that for its year, but anyway, that’s a different story. I played Yakuza Kiwami, which is a remake of Yakuza 1 with newer graphics, using the Yakuza 0 engine. It’s not as good as Yakuza 0. Almost nothing is as good as Yakuza 0 in my opinion. I think the problem maybe is that they had to stick to a lot of the same PS2 tropes, so a lot of the side stories that you come to for a Yakuza game, they’re just not as deep or not as interesting, but it’s still a great game. I will put it into the A tier, and it’s a great game along the way to many other games. There are like 10 of them at this point, so it’s it’s okay for one of them to be not as perfect as the rest.
RANK – A
Assassin’s Creed Origins: The Hidden Ones
I’m counting the Assassin’s Creed DLCs as different things, because they were large enough to be big expansions of their own in some ways. And I wanted to talk about them because especially when they’re on sale you get the expansion pass and the game for fairly low, so you might as well get all of them. I think they are all worth playing. The Hidden Ones is interesting but also kind of more of the same, more slightly weird people, and lots of the same theme of children in peril or nearly dying. It’s alright. I don’t think it’s the greatest ever Assassin’s Creed DLC out there, but you might as well play it on the way to one of the best Assassins Creed DLCs out there…
RANK – C
Assassin’s Creed Origins: The Curse of the Pharaohs
The Curse of the Pharaohs is really good in terms of finishing off a lot of the themes of the whole game. It’s well steeped in Egyptian culture and mythology of that time. Spoiler! You literally get to visit the afterlife, and it is beautiful. You can see that they really put the effort in, and really wanted to show off this part of it. It takes Assassin’s Creed away from the pure real world and modern Animus stuff, and does some of the weirder things they started doing that with Unity. They had done some of it here and there, but this one really lets that shine. It’s totally worth it. It’s definitely not a C, uh it’s an A for me.
RANK – A
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare.
I said I’ve not really played many Rockstar games. I have played the first Red Dead Redemption around 10 years ago now, and I did not expect to like that one. I loved it. I played through it entirely, every last thing, every last side mission. It’s a great game. Now I think it’s finally on PC and it’s on modern consoles. You really should play that. You should also play Undead Nightmare, which I did not play back in the day because I’m not a zombie game person, but hey this thing had cheats and things to make some of it easier. Undead Nightmare is a bit clunky, especially now after you’ve played things that have solved a lot of these problems. I still don’t know how to run properly in these game. It’s either you have to mash buttons or press them at a rhythm, I don’t know. But the reason Red Dead is great for me (this first one. I’ve never played the sequel. It’s on my list.) is the characters and the writing. It is the most skewering tongue-in-cheek thing ever. If you’re not American, maybe some of this is lost on me but it’s great, and that is what you come to this for, because even its take on a zombie apocalypse is ridiculously funny. It’s not a great game, and it doesn’t really end all that well, it just kind of ends. Okay, you do a final mission and that’s kind of done. But it is really fun to just go and find those characters and then see how they react to this bizarre situation. It’s not an absolute must play. I don’t miss that I didn’t play it with the main game, in fact I’m kind of glad I waited a long time, so I didn’t have the impact of that first game in my head when playing this, but yeah it’s a good game you should play it.
RANK – B
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
And now we come to what is likely the only 2025 release (well one of two if you can spot it) and even that is a remaster of a game from 2016. I’m talking about Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, the one that people say, “Why does it exist?! Who cares?!” Well, I care. I think Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the best stories and open worlds ever made. It was always beautiful to look at, it still is, and this version is even better, even though I can’t really tell, you know? Go and watch Digital Foundry for that, but it’s such a beautiful game. I played a new game plus because I imported my old save. I didn’t do anything except the critical path, and I would not recommend it, especially if you’re playing this for the first time through, because so much of this game is in the text and the story and all the little diary entries and the lore of the what happened to the world, what is happening to the current world, how the current world came to be… There are five or six levels or strands of storytelling in this, and the fact that they all kind of dovetail together and talk to each other in terms of theme and resonance. I love this game. You should play any version of it. If you have a PS4 play that. If you have a PC play whatever version is there. If you have the PS5 get this one. Tey aren’t even brand new and I don’t think it’s full price.
RANK – S
The Crew 2
Speaking of things that aren’t full price: like a lot of you I was curious about The Crew 2, mostly because of The Crew 1 being delisted, and then Ubisoft being sued for it going away. So when they announced that The Crew 2 would maybe get an offline mode eventually and one week I think in October they just had it on sale for a deep deep discount of 80 or 90 cents through most of the world, I just snapped it up and I tried it out. It’s not a bad game. I hope there is an offline mode eventually. I know at 90 cents I’m not really going to complain if it goes away. It’s not bad to try, I did not actually play many of the race missions. There’s this other mode: they’re called I guess stories or something where you just you get a point on the map and a general idea of where you have to go, not even a point on the map, just a picture and says okay you go to this part of the US and this town and find this barn or something and you have to drive from some place to that place with a kind of vehicle and these can take up like an hour, hour and a half sometimes, and that’s great podcast listening time. I just kept a podcast on to do these missions. Even for that it was it certainly worth 90 cents. I would not pay more, because I’m not into the race side of it, although that’s pretty fun. I actually like the physics model, there a bit more than in the Forza Horizon 4 demo I tried which is not on this list because it’s like okay, it’s just a demo, it not even an an advanced demo like some of these. I don’t know where to put this one but I guess I mean it’s not a C, I wasn’t disappointed anything but also you have to see the context, you know I paid almost nothing for it. I guess B. It’s a good seven out of 10 type game.
RANK – B
My First Gran Turismo
Which brings me to our final thing, which is a curiosity. My First Gran Turismo is a demo. There’s no getting around it. But this is not my first Gran Turismo: my first Gran Turismo was Gran Turismo 1, back in 1998. I remember buying a copy of it and a dual shock controller, for the first time using analog controls, and going, “Wow!” when the thing vibrated. And you know what? With the DualSense controller I went, “Wow!” again, because like I said with Astrobot, first party Sony games really do take advantage of these things. The the rumble features alone are just sublime in this thing. It’s three tracks, about a dozen cars that you can unlock pretty quickly. You can go through this in about 2 hours. There’s the license tests which teach you how to drive, and then you can time attack, and you can practice, and you can do a few races, and it is a demo only because Gran Turismo games are huge. I remember a time–and I’m dating myself here–that sometimes games did only have three tracks and a dozen cars, and that was an entire full priced game! Well into the PlayStation era, until about 1998 when Gran Turismo showed up, and said, “Okay, here’s a dozen tracks, hundreds of cars!” If you have never tried a Gran Turismo, or you just want a decent enough introduction to that kind of game, this is A tier for me. Not S tier. Maybe if they would have put in five tracks, maybe if they were 20 cars, maybe if they had put in split screen. They don’t do that. I think it has VR support but not split screen. I don’t think it even has any online matchmaking or anything. It’s a demo but it’s a good demo. You should play it if you’ve never played a Gran Turismo especially, try it out.
RANK – A
That is my 2024. Playing these many games is actually kind of why I started working on this channel this year, more than previous years, because like I said one year I just played Elden Ring. I did not even play the DLC this year because I knew I didn’t want to spend the entire year only playing Elden Ring. I may go back to Grand Theft Auto one day and play it. I may go back to the Artful Escape, but probably not. I might just look up the ending on YouTube. That’s kind of what people do these days. I recommend playing pretty much everything on this list, especially the S-tier, and playing them in the way that I talked about. You can play Hitman through its critical path story. Do not play Horizon through its critical path story. Enjoy the two hours of Streets of Rage. Enjoy Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and yeah give things like Battlefront II‘s story a chance. Give the DLC Curse of the Pharaohs a chance. Unicorn Overlord is really fun, it’s almost like a game that plays itself. I think someone described it as almost like a AAA Auto battler, but it’s worth it. Hell even the Halos are fun. I’m kind of out of the context of it, even though I did live through that time and played the contemporaries of it, and I played the things after it. The Halos have their place in history and you should play all of them. And with that I will see what I’m setting up for 2025. There will be more videos including on some of the games in here, some thoughts I have especially on themes and what they could have done right or wrong. Some of them I won’t cover. I’m definitely never talking about The Artful Escape again, sorry. I will see you in 2025 with more videos. This has been wyrdr. I’ve been Vishal.