Dave Lang is C3P0 at Iron Galaxy Studios. You can find him on Twitter @JosephJBroni.
One of my 2020 silver linings is that after my travel schedule got wiped from the calendar, I had a lot more time to play some digi-tapes.
Below is a list of games (in no order save the last one) that left a lasting impression on me this year. Please enjoy.
Warzone
PUBG was my first foray into the battle royale genre, and I played around 200 hours of it since its launch (which for me is a ton). Despite having dumped so many hours into it, I never really did come to grips with the shooting. I never felt like I could consistently kill people I had the drop on. I appreciate the depth that the ballistics modeling brings to this game, but at the end of the day the community’s skill level left me behind, and at some point, I stopped trying to catch up.
As time rolled forward, I tried most new BRs out, and while I liked a lot of them, none grabbed me the way PUBG did. When Warzone launched, I knew quickly that it was going to be exactly what I was looking for: A BR for casuals that prefer military-style shooters to fantasy ones. Also: The Gulag. I still remember the first time I was thrown into the Gulag, having no idea what was happening, I was smiling ear to ear despite getting domed within the first 5 seconds. Warzone is not the first BR to have a second-chance mechanic, but for my money it’s got the best one.
Cyberpunk 2077
I am playing this on the PC and liking it a lot. I am not sure what I was expecting, but it’s basically Deus Ex in an open world (which in hindsight, is exactly what I should have been expecting). I am playing as a stealth-hacker that avoids conflict at all costs, and as of now (about 25 hours in) I have only run into a handful of situations that required me to get my gun out and start firing, so in that regard it’s giving me exactly the game I want. It’s impossible to be unaware of the drama surrounding this game’s launch, and I’m not here to tell you how to feel about any aspect of that, but I am here to tell you I’m having a blast.
Shadowrun Returns
I was in on the Kickstarter for this game, but never played it until now. Turns out, I should have played this right away as it's right in my wheelhouse. The RPG-systems are reminiscent of the old Black Isle games, I’m a sucker for a good detective story, and the cyberpunk-infused world of Shadowrun is familiar but still cool. The writing is generally solid, which is good because man is there a lot of it. The characters and the missions all slowly unfurl a murder-mystery that got its hooks in me, and I when I sit down to play the game, I end up getting sucked into it for longer than planned.
BattleTech
I stated playing this in 2019, but finally finished its campaign in 2020. It shares a lot of the same structure as the modern XCOM games. You have a base of operations you upgrade to unlock new and better stuff for your lance of Mechs, you fly off to hotspots and engage in demanding turn-based combat, and it’s got an “ironman” mode for those that want to flirt with permadeath. It’s important to understand this isn’t XCOM, though. It’s definitely on a more streamlined budget, and that shows in its production quality, but if you can look past that this game has it where it counts: the combat and mech variety. I played this game for tens of hours just grinding side missions so I could see and try out all the different mechs it has to offer. I eventually settled on dual Marauders being the backbone of my Lance, as the Marauder have a unique piece of gear in them that raises its chance of a headshot to 30%. This is beneficial because if you can destroy the head, you kill the pilot with doing very little damage to the mech itself, thus maximizing your salvage. Once I figured this out, I played the next thirty hours big-game hunting 100-ton mechs to build out my armada as quickly as possible. After around 100 hours I had finished the campaign, and with Career Mode and Multiplayer there’s still so much more to do. I will be playing this game for years to come.