Game of the year is the hardest category to choose and I often think about this throughout the entire year. While there were so many great runner-ups, like there is every year, the one that makes it to the top for me is the most memorable. It’s not a mathematical score of what game received the most awards or had the highest score, but what was the most fun and memorable. A game has to leave something with me and resonate. A game that needs to be discussed and admired and something even revolutionary or groundbreaking.
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil isn’t just a great remake, but pushes a game further in an already genre defining franchise. Resident Evil 2 is sparking a whole new revolution in remakes and setting a brand new standard and you can’t go wrong with that.
Sound design is all about immersing the player into the world. It’s not about quality but about how the sound is implemented and how much care is put into it. Do the developers use the same footstep sounds throughout the whole game or different steps for each type of terrain? That’s the type of detail we’re looking for.
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 2’s sound is both eerie and unbelievabvly engaging. From the sounds of opening doors, the moans of zombies, and footsteps in empty halls. Even the rustling of clothes is present and it’s tall enough to create one big sound design package that helps suck you into the atmosphere of RE2.
Voice acting isn’t just tied to AAA titles, but many indie games have fantastic voice acting as well. It’s also not just about not sounding like you’re reading a high school play in boredom, but the delivery of character, and selling the character to the player and drawing them in.
Jedi: Fallen Order doesn’t just have great voice acting, but the actors sell the characters and it most importantly feels like it could be an actual Star Wars film. There have been bad voice acting in Star Wars games before, but Fallen Order is by far the best yet next to Battlefront II. Every character feels and looks like their voices and it helps sell the entire game as one cohesive top-notch package.
The best graphics in a technical showcase are less about the art and more about pushing shaders and GPUs. Usually the best technical game is a masterclass example of a brand new graphics technology or just a game that can define a generation even.
Metro Exodus is a gorgeous game, but what really pushes it above the others is the use of Nvidia’s new ray tracing technology to bring lighting to life. It’s one of the few games that does it well and is only available on the latest RTX GPUs from Nvidia.
Multiplayer games are in abundance every year, but the best one isn’t the most realistic, or allow the most players, but the most fun and quality content. There are a lot of those every year as well, but only one can be at the top.
Call of Duty, being the laughing stock of the game industry, has made a full circle over 10 years later and has become the best multiplayer game this year. With gameplay that hearkens back to the first few games, revisited maps, and all of the addictive action that made Call of Duty the top is now back and better than ever.
The multi-platform genre is usually one of the easiest categories to pick as it is usually filled with the best AAA games the year had to offer. This year had so many great games that a lot didn’t make it. While we are looking down the tunnel at the end of a console cycle once again, these are the games that this generation will be remembered by.
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 2 isn’t just a simple remake or reissue, but it sets the standards for how remakes should be. We’ve gone through almost 10 years of yearly remasters and HD collections, but RE2 shows actual love and care for a beloved game that has millions of fans. Everything from the most realistic zombies ever made to the fantastic new perspective, visual fidelity, and turning stilted ancient gameplay into something fresh.
Shooters have crawled their way back out of the depths since 2016 and are just getting better and better. With more sophisticated stories, groundbreaking visuals and tech, and fantastic multiplayer, 2019 was another notch in the shooter genre.
Call of Duty is the laughing stock of the shooter genre and the gaming industry as a whole. It’s amazing to see what one of the most criticized franchises crawl its way back up to the top spot. All it took was inward thinking and back to basics mentality. Modern Warfare has never been a better example of K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid.
When you’re desperate to bring a franchise back, what do you do? Well, two things: either reboot the entire series into something new or bring the series back to its roots. Activision chose the latter, and somehow it just brilliantly worked. See, Call of Duty 4 was something groundbreaking and revolutionary in the first-person shooter genre. With a fantastically cinematic campaign, an interesting protagonist (Cpt. Price), and addictive multiplayer that had you grinding for perks and weapon unlocks, it was fast-paced and fluid with well-designed maps. Infinity Ward had created magic that took the world by storm. Of course, what do you do with a franchise that’s this successful? Milk it to death with yearly sequels for over a decade until it kills itself. That’s actually what happened to Call of Duty twice! While the peak of the series was with Black Ops 1, the latest Black Ops 4 was a complete disaster. With every iteration, there was a less than stellar campaign and boring multiplayer. So, all those wonderful memories you had with Call of Duty 4 can now come back as this is a prequel to that game. Keep those memories in mind because we’re going to come back to them later.
Call of Duty has never been well known for its amazing story, but Modern Warfare tries, at least with the game taking place in Russia and the Middle East. You are trying to find out who stole a toxic bioweapon, and you team up with a rebel group in the Middle East to stop the Al-Quatala terrorists from unleashing it on the world. It’s a typical modern terrorist plot, but it’s enough to get the job done. At least the characters are interesting. With you playing Adam, Garrick, and Farah, Adam is part of the US Army, and Garrick is part of the SAS. Farah is the rebel group trying to break her people free from Al-Quatala, and the Russians selling the bioweapons aren’t helping. Each character is actually really good to watch and pay attention to on-screen. Of course, Cpt. Price has this awesome presence that you can’t look away from. His voice acting and motion capture are amazing, and it’s nice that they tried to breathe actual life into these characters. Remember when I said to remember those CoD4 moments of nostalgia? Well, when Cpt. Price comes on screen for the first time or you see the ending, you get goosebumps and can’t help but smile and think, “It’s back!”
The campaign is short but sweet. Running for about 6 hours, each and every level is unique and different, with a ton of scripted cinematic moments. There’s even a level where you play as a child and have to sneak out of your village. Infinity Ward really tried with this game, and the campaign is actually replayable and incredibly fun to go through. The game is familiar to any Call of Duty fan, but you can feel the original’s fingerprint throughout the entire game. From nighttime stealth missions to explosive-bombastic firefights, modern warfare covers every base, the pacing is spot on, and it never gets boring. The shooting itself is very familiar with the first three Modern Warfare games, with various real-world military weapons fine-tuned and balanced just right. There’s a play style here for everybody, from spewing rounds with the PKM to running around corners with an M80 shogun to picking off enemies with a Dragunov sniper rifle. The balance of weapons leads to the feeling of movement and the satisfaction of bringing someone down. The four-way spread of the reticle when you’re hitting an enemy and the sound it makes to let you know you’re on target have changed the way you can now slide around corners and mount walls. It’s a formula that only works in Call of Duty, and it’s never been better than it has been here.
Once you finish the campaign, it’s off to multiplayer, which is where the meat of the game is. This also feels very familiar and brings back old Call of Duty balancing and modes such as Team Deathmatch, Headquarters, and various other modes. This is the first Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 2 that has had me coming back over and over again for more carnage. The gameplay is perfect, and while the weapons are still being balanced through patches, the expensive map packs are now gone in favor of free maps and a battle pass similar to what Battlefield is doing.
Acquiring new unlocks comes much quicker and more steadily than in previous games. Nearly after every match, I was unlocking something, whether it was a paint job, a perk, or an attachment. There are so many playstyles available for players, and the maps allow them all. Hand back and pick off enemies, set up camp in a sniper position, or run around with a shield and shotgun like a lunatic—it’s all up to you. The Killstreaks and Perks are back to basics, with UAVs, Cluster Strikes, and Apache helicopters raining havoc down, including white phosphorus and the new Juggernaut armored suit. It’s a reason to play better and stay alive, as the best Killstreaks are for the elite players who are the best. The game can also seem frustrating at first, as you will die a lot and not get any kills when you first start out. Modern Warfare has a special feel to it that every player needs to get down. Learn the maps, every nook and cranny, the shortcuts, and how the flow of each map is laid out. That is key.
Speaking of maps, the launch maps are rather generic. While they aren’t designed poorly, they just aren’t that interesting, with just an overall generic feeling to them. While more maps are to come, the 10 maps included just don’t feel as memorable as previous games. With a few maps being specific to Ground War, which is an all-out huge battle to take over choke points, the smaller maps just leave too much room for campers with blind corners and are easy to hide in pockets. Overall, they’re still fun, and I don’t have any other complaints about multiplayer than the map quality. I do enjoy the new cross-play feature, which is a first for Call of Duty. PC, Xbox, and PlayStation players can play together with symbols indicating what system and device the players are using in the lobby before a match starts. It’s a great way to keep longevity alive, as PC activity usually dwindles towards the launch of a new game, but with three combined user bases, the game is sure to stay alive for much longer.
The last thing I want to talk about is the visuals in the game. They are out of this world amazing thanks to a new game engine and implementing RTX Ray Tracing on PC for Nvidia GPU users. The lighting is fantastic, and the engine is so well optimized that I’m able to get triple-digit frames with RTX on and the graphics maxed out in certain scenes. The textures and models look fantastic, and the lighting is just incredible. Running through certain scenes and levels just made my jaw drop, and this is easily one of the biggest technical marvels of the year, hands down. However, that is just for PCs. I did play this on the original Xbox One console, and it looks like garbage with tons of blurring, poor frame rate, and stuttering. I’m sure the PS4 looks the same if now worse, and the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro versions are better performance-wise but don’t hold a candle to the PC version.
Overall, Modern Warfare is one of the best shooters in the last decade and the best in the entire series. It took way too long for the series to get back on track, but it’s here and better than ever. With groundbreaking visuals, an addictive multiplayer suite, and tons of maps to come, there’s not much to not like about this game.
When a game as big as Call of Duty 4 gets remastered, it takes you down a serious memory lane. I remember watching the E3 reveal video of the “All Ghillied Up” level and being blown away. The cinematic gameplay and delivery of CoD4 were unheard of back in the day and helped push that generation of consoles forward. It was a groundbreaking game, despite where the series has gone over the years. Each level was carefully laid out with memorable moments and varied gameplay that most first-person shooters didn’t do 10 years ago, and that’s just the campaign. The multiplayer rewrote how first-person shooter online play should be.
That sound you hear when you hit an opponent and the X that appears in your crosshairs when you nail them? That was all Call of Duty. Being able to earn ranks and upgrade your weapons over time? That was Call of Duty. The maps were fantastically designed, and the weapons felt amazing to shoot. The movement was fluid, the pacing was perfect, and the opening scene on the ship is something I will never forget. Take all of that, fast-forward 10 years, and then stick the game in a current-generation engine, and you have a game that holds up and is better than any recent Call of Duty game.
While the campaign only lasts about 4 hours or so, there’s so much variety. From the stealth missions in Pripyat to using the AC-130 and bombing the crap out of Russian ultranationalists and even running away from choppers in vehicles, There’s various terrain, weapons, and pacing to make the campaign feel far from boring. While the story is generic and barely interesting, the gameplay isn’t. You play as two separate military teams from the US Marine Corps and the SAS. “Soap” MacTavish and Jackson are your two guys, and while it doesn’t really matter gameplay-wise, Captain Price is actually quite a memorable character as he has interesting dialog, cracks jokes, and has such a unique appearance. It seems silly, but Call of Duty 4 was the only game in the series that had anything really interesting or memorable going on.
The multiplayer here is not only groundbreaking but also super addictive and fun. There are several different game modes, but my favorite has always been Team Deathmatch. The maps are perfectly designed and make it easy to remember every nook and cranny. Upgrading weapons and ranking up is so fun in this game, and you could literally spend dozens and dozens of hours just in the multiplayer alone. Despite how much time you spend on the online portion, I just wish the campaign was longer. It’s such an overlooked part of the game and trumps any future Call of Duty campaign.
The visuals have been massively upgraded to the point where current hardware will have a hard time rendering them. The textures look beautiful and have been painstakingly redone to make this game look like it was released yesterday. Lighting, physics, sound, and models have all been redone to look current, and it looks amazing. So much so that you need at least 8GB of VRAM just to see all the textures in glorious detail and at least GTX1060 to get the game off the ground at 1080p.
Overall, Modern Warfare Remastered is a snippet of a game that pushed the first-person military shooter in a new direction, but it also shows just how far downhill the series has fallen. Carefully planned-out campaigns and memorable maps are long gone for this tired franchise, but at least we have an upgraded version of one of the best shooters of the last decade.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.