Jeff Gerstmann is a professionally recognized anime expert who loves to "get fresh." You can follow him online via Tiktok at @freddurst2000.
OK, forget whatever I'm going to write about whenever I get to the top video games of the year later on down this page. The video game of 2021 is Outriders. Outriders is the 2021 of video games. Outriders is the game I played while I was waiting to get to the other side of wherever it was that I was then, in hopes of getting to something better on the other side. It wasn't a bad year, and Outriders was not a bad game. But in a lot of ways I was just trying to get through it and get on to whatever is next.
I never did finish Outriders, but then these first weeks of 2022 have felt a lot like 2021, too, so hey, maybe that balances out.
The release cadence and quality of video games felt a little herky-jerky all year. Many of the big games were things that had been delayed into their eventual 2021 release window, and a lot of stuff launched in weird states of not-quite-ready. The video game industry's transition to working from home happened in 2020, and things were probably smoother by 2021, but... not the sort of thing you'd actually call "smooth."
As for myself, I opened the year with a newly-pregnant wife and we immediately started making plans for how all that was going to go. Additional bedrooms would be needed if we were going to continue working from home while also filling the house full of kids. So I started eyeballing what could be done about that in January or so. I also started thinking about what we, as a site and as a team, might look like on the other side of all this. Remember that week or two there where it seemed like there was going to be another side to all this?
Well I won't bore you with the details of all the similarly herky-jerky plans that we went through all year here around staffing, physical locations, trade shows, and all that stuff. Let's just say I spent a lot of 2021 in meetings that ended up going nowhere.
THE GAMES OF 2021
10. Loop Hero
Loop Hero is a series of really cool ideas that work well together. It can be deceiving at first, because on one hand it looks like your typical indie deckbuilder. But then it also looks a bit like an idle game. And, in some ways, it almost looks like a board game. But it isn't quite any of those things. The process of placing your tiles, managing your equipment, and deciding how many loops you want to run before chickening out and cashing in your resources is thrilling. You can gamble and try to squeeze out one more loop, but the monsters you encounter and the bad luck that can swing your way at any given time make everything risky, which in turn makes all your decisions feel like they matter.
9. Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown
Virtua Fighter (VF4, to be precise) marks the first time I ever truly felt like I had to stop messing around and pick a main in a fighting game. Sarah is that main and I will never waver! VF5 is a terrific fighting game, and it was a really cool surprise to see a PlayStation 4 version of it pop up as a PlayStation Plus game last year. It still feels great, plays well, and this one had fairly decent online support, too. Ultimately I just want this to lead to a Virtua Fighter 6. I... I need this.
8. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
You could probably say this across multiple games in multiple eras, but Rift Apart feels like the Ratchet & Clank game that finally conveys what the series was always trying to do all along. It's got this seamlessness to its transitions that just keep the action moving, helping the pace of everything from the writing to the shooting. It also looks fantastic, like the sort of thing that you wouldn't have expected to be rendered in real-time on a console. It's a stupid cliche, I know, but this feels like that game Sony was talking about when they spent all that time in the run-up to the PlayStation 2's release talking about "Pixar-quality graphics" and stuff like that. I can't believe how good games can look now, it's easy to take that for granted, but... think about what your brain would have done if you had seen this thing 10 years ago. Just unfathomable.
7. Babble Royale
The idea here is to turn Scrabble into a multiplayer, battle royale style game. And it works shockingly well. It's easy to laugh about it for how ridiculous it seems on paper, but Babble Royale is an incredible idea that has been executed extremely well. This is the sort of game that just makes me feel like an absolute idiot. I would never come up with anything this smart. Me dumb in head, hit rock.
6. Forza Horizon 5
I don't think there's too much to really say about Forza Horizon 5 other than that it continues the legacy of the previous Horizon games while changing up its progression process in ways that make the game feel more inviting and open, rather than always funneling you into boring, pre-fab events. The game uses its environment really well and, you know what? It's just a pleasant, beautiful video game. It's joyous in the way more games used to be.
5. Hitman 3