Top Games of 2022

It has been an incredible year for games. 

Elden Ring feels like a shift in how adventure games will be built for the next 10 years.

Vampire Survivors has imprisoned people world wide in a loop of, "One more run." 

And arcade beat-em-ups return in a big way with Ninja Turtles.

I can't remember the last time I was this excited to play everything I touched. It had to be close to one of those Mass Effect or Skyrim years when it comes to pure fun. 

I played a lot of games this year. I'll rank them all. Remember, these are games I played this year, not necessarily games that came out in 2022. 

The backlot

25. Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny: I still install and play a couple maps of the original Wolfenstein 3D every few years. I never played the expansion, Spear of Destiny, as a kid. I don't know if I would've liked it then, but it feels tedious nowadays. There's no charm to it. No cohesion. It's especially disappointing knowing Doom came out less than a year after Spear of Destiny.  

24. Mech Warrior 5: I love me some mech games. Mech Warrior 5 unfortunately feels very low budget. Voice acting is rough, story is rough, movement is rough. But it did have it's moments of fun. I just don't want to have extended battles in the game mechs.

23. Mirror's Edge: I can see why this is such a beloved game. The first 3-4 hours I was having a blast. Then the gameplay loop overstayed it's welcome. I got about 3/4s of the way through the game and just bounced off. 

22. Return to the Obra Dinn: I know people love this game, but I was finding it more of a chore than a really fun exploration. The transition between seeing the scene in the past and coming back to the present was just too slow. Maybe I'll try to play this for the third time in 2023. There's something there, it just hasn't hooked me in any attempt yet.

21. Call of Juarez Gunslinger: Had a weird craving to play a mid-2000s B-game. This is a blast, just a really fast action cowboy first person shooter. Basic story, lots of shooting.

20. Bounty of One: One of the better Vampire Survivors clones, it just needs more. From what I can find, there's not any other levels on it. 

19. Forza Horizon: I'm not a car game guy, but this found a good medium between arcade and sim for me. I'd much rather be playing Burnout, but this does the job. 

18. Legend of Legaia: This is one of my favorite PS1 RPGs. I'm just stuck on one of the most annoying bosses in the game. So no progress in a bit. I don't have the time to grind it out anymore. 

17. Assassin's Creed Origins: I thought I was ready for another Assassin's Creed after playing Odyssey for like 140 hours. Origins is great... but it's also a ton of fluff. So this tends to be the game I sort of boot up every few weeks, do a couple check boxes on the map, and leave. there's nothing really driving me to finish it quickly. 

16. Save Room: Just a relaxing game about inventory management a la Resident Evil 4. Strangely compelling, I blasted through it in a couple hours. 

15. Warcraft 2: I only played WC2 on the PlayStation and all I remember was the framerate being about 5 per second. I wanted to see how it felt nowadays, and it's still great. I ended up completing the Orcs campaign. And heavily considered starting the human campaign. There's something relaxing about the simplicity of this early RTS. 

14. Resident Evil 2: Remake: I played through Clair B scenario this year and didn't expect so much of the game to change in the second run through. It's still one of the best REs ever made and I look forward to running through Leon's B at some point. 

13. Luigi's Mansion 3: I have a lot of thoughts on Luigi's Mansion 3 that I'll write up at some point, but this was an incredibly clever and fun game. It felt like they were able to thread the needle between a child's game and an adult game. 

12. Back 4 Blood: I came to this a bit later, mostly because of the complaints. After playing it, I think the complaints were mostly that it wasn't Left4Dead 3. Back 4 Blood is a blast and I would suggest it to anyone.

11. Doom 64: What a weird game to exist, but it's a blast. This is the only Doom game to go completely off script of the original. 

10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredders Revenge

I did not expect to find both a Ninja Turtle game and a beat-em-up landing on my top 10 this year, but here we are. 

Shredder's Revenge somehow nails the feel of the NES arcade game with modernizing the controls. 

There wasn't enough content here for it to move up. Maybe they should've combined this and the arcade collection. I think that would've probably bumped it up to 7 on this list. 

9. Hitman 3

I don't know what else to say about Hitman 3 that hasn't already been said. I finally got good enough to where I was able to pull off some of the complicated and fun ways of killing people. 

I kept going back, trying to run the level a little better. And like Dead Rising, I picked up almost every object to see if it could be used as a weapon. I played through every map in the entire trilogy by the end of my obsession. 

My only complaint is I came to it late. So I missed a lot of the fervor and forums around how to complete the best runs. 

8. Evil Within 2

I liked Evil Within 1, but I never finished it. It felt like the natural extension to Resident Evil 4, but the difficulty curve toward the end wasn't fun. 

Evil Within 2 took that formula, but instead of being a completely linear experience through hallways, it had these sort of wide open hubs between the major areas where you could decide how to progress. There are a ton of side builders that are completely optional to explore, but each one tends to have some event or item you would want. 

The biggest downfall is some of the late game bosses have ways to kill you very quickly in ways that don't feel fair. For instance, very late in the game, a boss grabs you with a tentacle and you have like 3 seconds to aim at the tentacle and shoot it several times. The issue is, the camera angle changes, so this shooting you've been doing the entire time all of a sudden changes and you have to quickly figure it out. And in this particular boss, you have to replay the previous section of the fight every time. 

7. Sniper Elite 5

Not much has changed between Sniper Elite 5 and Sniper Elite 4, but I think that's OK. If it's not broke, don't fix it. The co-op is unmatched in Sniper Elite. Letting you play like Metal Gear Solid or Call of Duty with a buddy on these massive maps.  

One thing I will mention is that overall, the maps in this one are weaker than Sniper Elite 4, but the great maps in SE5 can't be touched. Occupied Resistance was one of my favorites. 

6. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

I don't know if I can say anything more about Call of Duty that hasn't been said. It's another Call of Duty game. So you know the controls, the graphics, the map layouts are all going to be great. 

It's just that this one had one of the best campaigns in a long time. Ground War, Battle Royale, and standard multiplayer all are firing on all cylinders this year. 

The one issue I have holding back MW2 is the damn menus. I haven't had so much trouble finding the mode I want to play ever. Apparently it was designed by someone that designed Hulu's menus... which are also terrible. 

5. Disco Elysium

I started Disco Elysium during Covid, but my brain was not in a place for a heady discussion of socio-economic theory and it's affect on the world. 

Ultimately this adventure somehow is part political theory and part Lucas Arts? The characters all have that sort of wacky Lucas Arts adventure game feel to them. Like they could definitely exist in the real world, but they are also sort of cartoon characters. 

I found myself compelled to drive forward to figure out what happened with this murder and ends in one of the most bizarre but fulfilling endings it could have. 

4. Age of Empires 4

Age of Empires continues to be my go-to game. With a fairly large free DLC drop this year, I don't see me moving on anytime soon. 

It's now a Saturday morning tradition to wake up and beat the hell out of some AI with my brothers. 

Every civilization plays completely differently. Usually in these type of games, you get a few different units, but this one has systems for each Civ that are unique. The Mongols are always on the move, so you don't dig in and build defenses with them. The Romans get major bonuses to religious points. The Chinese have economic bonuses to building certain structures around central hubs. 

3. Vampire Survivors

It's become a joke now that the Steam Deck is really just a Vampire Survivors machine, but it's sort of true. The loop on VS is perfect. 30 minute rounds, if you have a bad round it ends soon enough that you want to hop back in while you're warmed up. If you have a great round, you think, "why stop while I'm on fire?" Next thing you know, it's 10 pm, your eyes hurt, but you found some random item in one of the world and you don't really know what it does. 

So the next day, you spend an hour digging through the VS Wiki, seeing all of the places this item touches. Turns out this item enables some things in every level. So yeah, map 1 that you've played 40 times and have mastered it... well you gotta go back in and get the new Arcana. 

Many games have tried to copy the formula, but no one has come close to VS. And with the recent DLC, I don't see this dropping from my list anytime soon. 

2. Tunic

I wouldn't have picked up Tunic if not for Jeff Gertsmann gushing about it. I don't have a particular affinity to the top down 2d Zeldas of the SNES. (I never owned an SNES) Yeah, it looks like a cute little character puzzle game. But at the time nothing else was coming out, and it was on Gamepass, so why not give it an hour and see what happens. 

I was charmed by this game. Just a big goofy smile the entire time. It's so well thought out. It feels like someone drew out this world on graph paper, handed it to a developer, and the dev executed perfectly. 

The combat is fine. It's exactly what you think it'll be. The boss fights really give you that Soulsbourne feel. Every time you die, you don't feel like the game cheated you, you feel like you screwed up. 

The way they play with perspective is an evolution of Fez. You can technically get to the end game areas immediately, but because you haven't had your brain broke by this game yet, you don't notice the various paths. 

And every room... I mean every room has something hidden in it. 

This is one of the few games where turning on god mode did not actually take away from the enjoyment of the game. Yes, I turned it on because I wanted to get back to puzzling. 

1. Elden Ring

I struggled with the top slot. There was a part of my 'scene' teenage brain that wanted to pick something else. Tunic and Vampire Survivors were such great experiences, but I really can't pick anything else. 

Elden Ring's map just kept getting larger. And it didn't feel like a grind like some of the Ubisoft open world games can. I wanted to see what messed up scenario From Soft was going to put me in next.  I actually went out of my way to go into every tomb and dungeon.  

I played this game for 170 hours before credits rolled. And the moment they finished, I stared at the New Game + screen, wanting to immediately jump back in. 

That's an incredible feat. The combat is still From Soft, but they've made it ultimately so fluid that any playstyle is valid. You can look up "S" tier weapon lists and every one of them is different. Every person that has played Elden Ring has had a different experience. Everyone comes out with stories.