Gaming

From Fortnite to Red Dead Redemption 2, the 10 best video games of the year


Not that most of us needed much of a reason to leave the world behind for a couple of hours at a time in 2018, but video games this year did seem, quite apart from the horrors of reality, unusually alluring as a means of temporary escape. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the year’s best games share a virtue of irresistible fantasy wish-fulfillment, allowing all of us to step into the shoes of a world-class assassin or Super Saiyan or major-city transit commissioner — not to mention the boots of a frontier cowboy, so comfortable we’re all finding them hard to take off again.

Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 4)

Team Ico’s yearning, plaintive action-adventure epic Shadow of the Colossus has a strong claim to being the greatest video game ever made, so it seems only natural that a faithful high-definition remake for the PlayStation 4 would impress. But in refurbishing this classic for a new generation, Austin’s Bluepoint Games did more than simply spruce up the source material for an easy payday — indeed, they made serious, demanding creative decisions that actively improve on the original.

Fortnite Battle Royale (PC/PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Switch/iOS)

It isn’t every day that a video game ascends to worldwide ubiquity, but sometime between its debut in late 2017 and its endorsement by Drake in March, Fortnite Battle Royale became about as inescapable as oxygen. Parachute into a single hundred-man melee and you’ll understand the attraction: something to do with the balance it strikes between chaos and calm, between looking for resources and being assassinated for them. You see nobody, then you die. Then you dive in again.

Mini Metro (Switch/PC/iOS)

Twin brothers Peter and Robert Curry, from Wellington, New Zealand, founded their development company Dinosaur Polo Club in 2013, and under its aegis, created an ambitious, deceptively modest transit-planning simulation game called Mind the Gap. Five years later, under the title Mini Metro, the Currys’s dream project is one of the best indie titles on the Nintendo Switch, a minor masterpiece of heady, infectious minimalism and labyrinthine subway-system fun.

Dragon Ball FighterZ (PC/PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Switch)

It isn’t clear who exactly was asking for a state-of-the-art fighting game based on Japanese anime from the early 1990s in 2018, and it is even less clear what powers decided it would be reasonable to dedicate the resources of a triple-A blockbuster release to such a game. In any case, the result is extraordinarily lavish, painstakingly constructed and realized with obsessive zeal — a fighting game made with such care and attention that it’s almost hard to believe.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch)

In the era of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, any game that graced the console bore a small holographic insignia known as the Nintendo Seal of Approval — a sort of official guarantee of merit that was not always to be trusted. But these days, Nintendo’s first-party exclusives really do live up to the standards of the brand, and so it’s hardly surprising that Super Smash Bros Ultimate, the company’s flagship fighting title, should prove as unimpeachable as Mario Odyssey did last year.

Celeste (PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Switch/PC)

No developer apprehends the beauty of handling quite like Matt Thorson. His last game, the elegant and exquisite 2D fighter Towerfall Ascension, derived unfathomable amounts of joy and satisfaction from its hyper-rigorous controls, fine-tuned to appreciable perfection. Vertical platformer Celeste, co-developed with Noel Berry, advances this fanatical exactness even further, transforming the most functions of movement and combat into strokes of cosmic grace. This is game controls as high art.

Marvel’s Spider-Man (PlayStation 4)

Insomniac Games, best-known for inventing early Sony-mascot platformers like Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank, seemed an unusual choice of developer for a new flagship Spider-Man game, the first in generations made independent of a feature film. As it turned out, the youthful energy and manic invention they bring to bear on all of their work made them ideally suited for this charming, good-natured superhero adventure, as delightful as Spider-Man has been in any medium for years.

Hitman 2 (PlayStation 4/Xbox One/PC)

Considering it only ever really gives you one objective — kill someone and escape alive — it is truly remarkable how original, spontaneous, and surprising Hitman 2 can be. Over the course of just five self-contained, episodic assassination missions, IO Interactive has conceived a sandbox of almost inexhaustible possibility, an exercise in problem-solving and lateral thinking with the mind-taxing intensity of a puzzle game and the freewheeling abandon of a round of tag.

God of War (PlayStation 4)

At a time when the “gritty reboot” seems about as cutting-edge as boot-cut jeans, it’s something of a miracle that Santa Monica Studio’s leaner, darker, more self-consciously serious God of War sequel achieves something authentic, unfamiliar and, above all, new. Drawing lessons from The Revenant — including a fondness for long takes that does much to add tension and drama — and building on the foundation set by Bloodborne and Dark Souls, it’s equal parts indebted to the past and interested in the future, taking ideas from the history of literature, cinema and video games, and synthesizing them with great care and skill.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (PlayStation 4/Xbox One)

You can do a lot of things in Rockstar’s colossal wild-west tour de force Red Dead Redemption 2. You can wrangle cattle and play dominos and hunt alligators and track outlaws and catch fish. You can take in some theatre, or you can tend to a stable of mares, or scale the harsh peaks of a mountain in the snow. You can get your hair cut, or your beard trimmed, or shape a mohawk in the mane of your horse. The volume of content in this game, and the level of detail with which that content has been so meticulously crafted, represents an accomplishment that is, among other things, unprecedented in the history of gaming.

But stuff is not what makes Red Dead Redemption 2 great. No, what makes Red Dead Redemption 2 great — what makes it not only the greatest game of the year but moreover one of the great games period — is how it feels to ride toward the horizon as the sun sets and the air cools and the tumbleweeds roll in the distance. It’s the way the light looks on the lake sometimes, or the way a deer might dart at dawn between trees in your periphery. There’s no quantifying glimpses like these of the sublime. No accounting for them. What’s special in Red Dead Redemption 2 simply is, and we are all better off because we have this.



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