But oh man, another year almost down so that means it is time to press the pause button and give thought to the best games of the year. In a way, this is easy for me this year. I've known for most of the year which game was going to take the gong in this prestigious event (that's a joke by the way). This year I'm just going to get straight to the point and blurt out the winner, which is...
Winner Best Game 2019 : Minecraft
Minecraft! Minecraft? Seriously? After all this time? Well, yes. It is perhaps the best value gaming experience ever, and somehow Microsoft have yet to stuff it up, which is a minor miracle. What I have been playing though is not the vanilla game, but instead heavily modified versions of the game. Modded minecraft takes it to the next level, or even several levels, of difficulty compared to vanilla. It also adds a huge amount of variety and challenge, something the game needs when you have played it for the many thousands of hours like I have.If you have played modded minecraft before the immediate question is - which modpack? There is a very healthy community of modders who give, for free, wonderful themed mod packs. I use the Twitch launcher which, once you get the RAM settings sorted, makes the experience of playing mod packs easy. I have played quite a number of them this year, and want to give a micro-review of each in the order I played them.
One thing they all have in common are questing systems. These are a great idea as they generally lead you though the various mods and give you pointers on how to play. You also get rewards and a sense of progress. The questing system gives you a reason to play, which can sometimes be an issue for a seasoned Minecraft player.
Stoneblock
I watched the youtuber GamesForKicks play some of this and the more I watched the more I wanted to play too. The start of the game sets the tone for this one - you are stuck in small spherical cave in and more or less have nothing but a torch. At the time this seemed like a fresh take on the restricted start, when compared to all of the skyblock variants. Some people find this claustrophobic, and it is a little, but it is fine really after not long at all. I also liked the idea of inverse building - normally you are adding blocks but in this it is all about taking them away. I enjoyed my playthoughs on this a lot. I think I did a few because I was not happy with my base layout or progress.
Where things started to fall over a bit was in the unlimited resource generation method chosen by the pack - chickens. You breed them up to being 10/10/10 and that is a bit of a chore, and then you have unlimited supply of resource x, whatever flavour that chicken is. I think it was this pack were I cut my teeth on a number of other mods I have not played before, like refined storage. Again, the questing system, discord and a bit of googling makes all this possible to get a handle on fairly quickly.
Forever Stranded
The Yogscast started playing this and as I watched I wanted to play too. This one is really quite hard in the start but you have a pre-build base in the form of your crashed shuttle-like ship, in the desert. This pack has a heat/cold mechanic along with the food, and getting resources initially is quite a grind. The mobs in this hit pretty hard too, and the sand can build up to allow them to climb over walls. Overall this is pretty hard pack, and just getting to the point of certain safety and enough food is a major milestone. Unfortunately, that is about as far as I played as it seemed to be the point of the pack to me. There is a lot more you can do, of course, but I didn't get drawn to it and about the time my interest was waning there was a new release...
Stoneblock 2
Feed the Beast released an updated Stoneblock 2, and as I had enjoyed Stoneblock so much I was bound to love Stoneblock 2 even more, right? Well, not so much as it turned out. It was OK, but I felt like I have "been there, done that". Again, I seem to enjoy the early game of just surviving an setting up the base, but once I'm comfortable continuing just seems to be a bit of a grind. By now too I was becoming more aware of the individual components of the mod packs, which ones I liked and which ones I didn't so much. For me it turns out I am not so fond of magic based mods, they just seem arbitrary and not always logical. I started looking for something different and found it in ...
Astroblock
Talk about a rough start and a change of scene. You start out suffocating from a lack of oxygen on a small space station. Fortunately you have a single tree that .... errr... grows in the vacuum outside without issue and provides oxygen. Yeah, well, accept that and move on. A space based theme seemed like a welcome stark change from the claustrophobic caves, and I enjoyed this pack a lot. There comes a time when you have to take a leap of faith and jump off the station. You have to watch your oxygen tanks, and the base power. You slowly build up resources and capabilities. Eventually you can build a ship and fly away to another planet, my first time with using any kind space travel, and it was fun to land again on Earth, which is of the destroyed cities variety. This was cool because you had to set up again, another piece of the early game cake I love so much. Then, you go to the moon and guess what, you have to set up there too, this time without oxygen so you have to bring all the gear to make that (that you got given it in the first base). And so it goes, with more an more space travel in the quests - but I more or less stopped there as I felt that I had achieved what I had wanted to. This modpack relies quite heavily on some machines that no other pack really use, compressing things rather than smelting them. I also discovered I really like having a jetpack. The developer was really cool too, and was often on the chat in Discord. Overall I had a lot of fun with this pack but the internet was abuzz about a new version of a kitchen sink pack, and I stopped playing briefly (I thought) to check it out...
Project Ozone 3
This pack is really big, and takes a log time to even start up, about 4 minutes on my PC. There are a number of start options but I took the suggested "Garden of glass" which is more-or-less a skyblocks scenario, which I had not played for a while now. There is something to be said for creating everything from nothing, or almost nothing. This pack has a number of quality of life additions so that often the grind element can be bypassed and you can get to the fun bits, eg vein-mining. There become quite a lot of dimensions to explore - Hunting Dimension, Deep dark (good to go to fairly early for resources), Twilight forest, Erebus (first time for me for this one, think land of the bugs) etc. There were a few mods I didn't like so much in this - Embers, Lordcraft and Pneumaticraft to name a few. But I played through them fairly quickly and moved on to the stuff I did like more. I built a mob farm and storage systems to deal with all the loot. The infinite resources from this comes mainly in the form of Mob farms and Mystical Agriculture crops, and I collected almost every seed there is, which is quite a feat (chore?). In this pack I played a fair way into it, reaching some of the late game content of extended crafting and Draconic Evolution, which starts to get a bit silly after a while. I also did most of the armours, which is also a massive grind. So, I gave this modpack a great go, and got fairly powerful by the end, both in terms of my base and also gear. It's a top tier pack, worth playing for sure, and is fairly beginner friendly. The RAK reward system is a really gamble, and adds some spice. You do want to save up for the swords though.
At one point a "John Cena" creeper blew up a fairly huge hole in my base, and JUST missed destroying my AE2 hard disks. I am diligent with backups (before every play session) but did not ragequit because all my stuff was OK, so I played on and rebuilt. You end up with hundreds of thousands of ingots, diamonds etc. It is a lot of working on base power, layout and storage systems and then a bit of exploring.
Sevtech Ages
At this point I was feeling pretty cocky, and wanted to try something a bit more challenging and could go the distance, and I tried Sevtech. Boy, is this a contrast to PO3. You spend hours and hours playing before you can even get to a crafting table. The low-tech start of the game I actually didn't find all that great. I also dislike having such crap storage systems like open chests that only hold a few things each. I played to the start of the third "age" and gave up. This pack beat me, in the sense I couldn't be bothered carrying on. I had survived, and was in the process of building a large base building, but it just all seemed to hard. I have seen others play through this modpack and it is a fairly serious grind at times. I certainly would NOT recommend this as a first pack to try. If you can make it all the way through the ages in Sevtech, my hat comes off to you.
Omni Factory
I read about this online somewhere and it sounded intriguing. It had some "expert pack" like qualities, which means it was fairly hard, but promised to be like a factorio in minecraft. At this point I was fairly sure I didn't like any magic based packs, and this modpack didn't have any in it. Further, combat was not important and even could be played in peaceful mode. I chose a start in the ruined cities environment and I think that this is the best choice (perhaps the sparse cities is even better). I started in a river bed next to a road, and I followed this a short way to a large building, which was to become my base... once I cleared it out. For a pack that claimed combat was not important, clearing out a building when you hardly have any resources is a lot more challenging than you might think. It is worth it though - the building makes a good base and there is a lot of loot. You want to find the boots which allow you to have no fall damage. Once you get a safe space, and a bit of food going, you can start to work on the quests and the factory. You need power and you need machines to make parts, so that you can make more and better machines. This is a road that goes a LONG way, and I had a great time with it, some of the best minecraft gaming I've ever had, and that is saying something. Every step forward feels like a real achievement, because it is.
One thing I really like are the HUGE vein ore deposits, so mining is not really something you have to worry too much about. If you can find a vein, you are more or less set for life as you can hammer a 3x3 strip into it and get a few stacks of it in no time. Later you get vertical diggers and other things which make ore collection less and less manual. This does not use refined storage but AE2, which is different but you get used to it. Pretty soon you have a huge number of machines linked together via power lines and item and fluid pipes, and it is all working away. When AE2 gets going you can start to order the system to automatically make things for you, creating all of the components from raw materials and assembling them. This is just as well as by this point you are starting to go a bit crazy with some of the micro crafting of crap like screws.
I'm a big fan of this modpack, and I have started over a few times just to play it more. One major problem it has is that eventually the game starts to lag with all the machines working at once. It is somewhat immersion breaking to have to make design decisions of your base to minimise lag. As a new pack, there are also some minor bugs and balancing tweaks needed. As of writing this the version is 1.2.1, and there is rumour of a version 1.3, but the developer may have either fallen ill or lost interest in the project. He seemed to be distracted too by a "Kappa" version of the game, that is, a super hard variant. I don't think it needs it myself, it is plenty hard enough as it is. You can spend hours tinkering in your base and not even step outside, my save files were tiny as I have explored very little. The ultimate goal of this modpack is to make the creative tanks so that you can re-do your base and then make create drawers. At that point you are effectively playing in creative mode, being able to make infinite amounts of anything. I never got to this, the furthest I got to was LuV power.
Dungeons, Dragons and Space Shuttles
This is the pack I'm currently playing. It is a fairly massive pack again and fairly hard in places, and a greater emphasis on exploration. Some things take a fair time to craft, and the Nether is fairly brutal. A fairly good mix of mods, and some I'm getting into that I've never bothered with before, like Pams Harvestcraft for cooking. Mobs hit fairly hard (especially skeletons) and I always seem to be out of gold. There are a fair number of interesting buildings and creatures that are not in any other mods I've played. I'm not sure how far I'll go with it and I'm perhaps half way through all the quests, but it is a lot of fun so far.
One thing I have done to make my life bearable is to claim the chunks around my base so creepers don't grief when they explode. Also, I tend to adjust the Blood Moon mod so that I can sleep through it, because honestly, I don't enjoy it. I'm trying to play this game without making a mob grinder of any sort, but I'm starting to think that I might need one, particularly for gold. There are some magic mods in this and so far they have been bearable.
And more!
You'd think the above list was enough, but I've actually played more still.
- R.A.D Rougue-like adventures and Dungeons. A bit too run and gun for me, but still fun.
- Glacial Awakenings. Start buried in ice. Once you get the surface, it is an snow world
- DigSite. Fixed map with a lot of story and hand crafted locations
Runner up 2019 : Noita
This was the surprise game of the year. This little game has some things about it that I really, really love and wish was in more games. For a start, it launches really fast, like in seconds. The soundtrack is amazing. The game is being honed and balanced with each update, and is still early access and quite beta, but is very playable and takes considerable skill (and some luck) to succeed. What I like about it too is that there is no hand holding. You develop your own techniques for the challenges you face. Initially you are likely to try and kill all the enemies you meet, for example, but this will likely wear down your health and the choice of running is often wiser. This is where a lot of the satisfaction in the game comes from - discovering how to play it well.
The game has an overall vibe which is kind of unlike anything else. Yes, the stand out feature here is the per-pixel particle simulation, and it does have effects you can take advantage of, but it is only a part of the gameplay. Much of the game is spent searching for new wands and traits to enable you to face the deeper levels with some hope of surviving. It does get hard quickly, if you are stuck with your starter wands on the third level you are pretty much toast. I will admit that despite dying about 65 times (it keeps count), so that's how many games I've played, I'm yet to "win" the game. That may seem hopeless and dreadful, and perhaps it is but I don't care at all. I am generally improving each time I play and get a little (or a lot) further. Deaths can be varied and fairly entertaining in themselves, and usually you learn something - even if it is "don't do that again!".
However, the reason this game has not won this year is that I can see that it has limited playability. You restart each game in exactly the same place, and it does get old fairly fast. Each game lasts about 10 minutes, perhaps more and perhaps a lot less. But it has a bad case of ground hog day. If they can add a decent amount of variety to the start, then this game will be elevated to another level. I am not aware of any plans to do so at this point, it is just a thought I have. Please don't get me wrong, even with this gripe/limitation the game is an absolute blast to play and an easy recommend to try out.
