What has been your favorite game of 2024 so far?

I’m having an absolute blast with FF7 Rebirth. I feel like I’m playing a game that shouldn’t exist in 2024. Just about everything in this game has quality to it; the campaign, the open world; the side missions, writing, characters, battle systems, music, the graphics and just the sheer amount of content. I’m about 60 hours in and still feel like I have so much to do. Definitely one of the all time great Final Fantasy games. What about you, SW? What’s been your favorite game of 2024 so far?

This couple. I was expecting kind of a God of War style knock off game but I got way more than that.

The story and main characters are just entertaining to follow and it's just a good tale about ghosts, spectres and the afterlife.

The gameplay like I said, could be seen as a God of War knock off but it's actually more like an RPG where skills, items you carry and weapons you collect start stacking until you can do some insane amounts of damage. This makes fighting the unforgiving enemies a ton of fun.

The UI in this game is sublime: everything is made to make it easier on the player and to be as simple as straightforward as it can be, without ever feeling hand holdy. Systems that seem complex like having towns with quests in between are just plain easy to navigate in this game, everything was made with the player in mind.

Compare it to Suicide Squad where the UI there would make baby Jesus cry.

Probably persona 3 on gamepass of course.

FF7 Rebirth. Currently on chapter 12 playing queens blood.

I have played two games released this year, Persona 3 Reload and Unicorn Overlord; have yet to finish the second one, but unless they made something really bad on the latter part of it, it would be my pick.

Dragon's Dogma 2, a game with a strong execution on gameplay, exploration and story without routinely taking away control from the player to force feed a story.😌

@R4gn4r0k: Banisher is on my to play list.

Balatro

Prince of Persia I enjoyed a lot. Loving Unicorn Overlord also.

FF7 Birth - nothing else comes close

Dragon's Dogma 2 fails for me as fast travel is limited and can involve micro-transactions. Fast travel should be a standard that should never involve cash.

Skull and Bones. It is the only new game of 2024 I have played anyway.

80 hours and things are starting to wind down for me. I still need to grind out a good long cannon and armour. Which should still take me another 15 hours. Then I can just mess around or invest in a better rocket system and so on.

I give Skull and Bones 8.8/10. I was about to be in a gaming slump but S&B dragged me, 80 hours, out of it.

I just played Portal: Revolution. I really miss portal, so it was a great time 😁! Amazing what modders can do! Honestly the best time I had with a game this year.

The game kept surprising me, with its characters, story and even its gameplay. It stayed fresh from start to finish.

In fact I was so enthralled by this whole spectre/ghost thing that right after beating it I went for a playthrough of Murdered: Soul Suspect, a game that had been in my backlog since the early Xbox One days lol.

What platform are you enjoying DD2 on?

Good shout out!

Gotta say a lot of these Valve-style mods are sitting on overwhelming positive scores:

Portal Revolution, Entropy Zero Two, Swelter, ... It's kind of insane what the community has been doing to carry on Valve's legacy.

Does Portal Revolution have its own voiced characters or what?

Rebirth

FF7 Rebirth. GOTY. Do not care about the sales numbers, this game is a masterpiece in modern day Final Fantasy. Could say bang for your buck with the content you're getting lol. 74hrs in on Chapter 12..

Helldivers 2. Just so damn fun.

Dragons Dogma 2. I just beat Persona 3 Reloaded and thought it was over rated. P4 golden is way better.

Definitely Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. You can really tell that SquareEnix put their all into this game. Such a massive game with a ton of variety and passion poured into it. Gameplay, writing, voice acting, and music are absolutely fantastic.

Helldivers 2, but that's only because i haven't played DD2 for more than half an hour. DD2 will most likely win it over HD2.

Thanks for those tips!

It has voiced characters actually. I won't spoil anything, but the game has a little story and some pretty fun banter. And the puzzle-design is great. It's not too difficult, but there ís a lot of variety and flinging yourself through portals never gets old. Well at least when you haven't for a few years 😁.

Tomb Raider II.

As of right now, its Horizon Forbidden West PC and that game has me coming back for more. Great solid port despite the bugs regarding on the high settings but overall, I'm having fun with the game itself.

Banishers: Ghost of New Eden is a welcome AA from a developer who likes to try things new and that game really got me hooked on so far. Glad to see few posters above are also taking a liking on Banishers. The two main characters are really well developed and I like the setting it takes place during the Salem Witch era.

And last is Prince of Persia: Lost Crown. Glad to see Ubisoft is making a comeback for the 2D platform I been hoping for to be a great return for the Prince.

Can't wait to what other games surprises me for the remainder of 2024. The 3 games above I've mentioned are going into my top 10 of 2024. That's 3 down, 7 to go.

Dragon's Dogma 2, FF7 Rebirth and Helldivers 2 have been the three best games of the year so far imo.

It's a game I've been meaning to play but if you like Portal, you might like Quantum Conundrum. Both have Kim Swift as lead designer.

@R4gn4r0k: Pedro only has an Xbox :p

Tekken 8. Already bounced off of it about a month ago, right after hitting Tenryu. All my boys hitting purps and blues now 😭

But yeah, great game, I'll probably get back to it soon.

Helldivers 2 with a bullet.

Honestly the only new game I’ve bought and played yet this year is Helldivers 2. It is okay but I do find it is getting repetitive and grindy trying to upgrade the ship parts and level up.

oh snap, you're back. So is Tekken 8 better than SF6?!

@Mozelleple112: that's die hard. I like that.

@TheEroica: just played some Helldivers. That new Quasar canon shreds robots.

@R4gn4r0k: Series X because it allows for two people to play the game with one purchase.😁

Not really 😅

They're two great games at the top of their respective sub-genres. They're both arguably the best vanilla outings for their series. Can't think of any concrete argument for one being better than the other. And they're both only going to grow and improve in the coming years. If you like fighting games, you're eating good right now. New Fatal Fury already looking amazing too.

I do prefer SF6, that's largely why I bounced off T8, was just missing it. But I've always preferred 2D fighters in general and SF is my favorite take on those.

But yeah as for 2024 games, it'd be pretty insane for anything to top T8 for me.

@Pedro: How often do you use smart resume on your Xbox? Seems like a handy feature though I've never used it. How often do you play multiple games at a time?

Every single player game. Why this feature isn't a thing on PC is beyond me. I play multiple games pretty often. Sometimes because of work other times I have games that compliment each other in the sense of when I have had my fill, I jump to the other.

Yeah it just uses RAM or something, right? It should be a feature on PC as well.

1. Unicorn Overlord - honestly my 2nd place choice isn't even close at this point. It's going to take something absolutely amazing to knock this out of the #1 slot. 113 hours and 6 minutes on expert to get the 100% and platinum trophy and I loved every minute. One of my favorite games in a long time and easily a top 100.

2. Granblue Fantasy Relink - This was in the 1 spot until UO knocked it out of the park. GFR is an awesome game that deserves a lot more praise. I put about 40 to 50 hours into this and plan on going back and finishing the harder raids.

3. Dragons Dogma 2 - I'm about 20 hours into the game and have gotten lost just exploring and doing whatever the hell I want. At this rate the game will take me 200 hours to finish.. lol. I could see this ending in the number 2 slot, but for now it's at 3 since I haven't gotten that far. I am running Thief/Thief on my Arisen and main pawn and ha ent had any issues yet. While exploring last night I stumbled upon a village with master thief techniques which was out of the blue and awesome since both my main characters benefitted from me going off the beaten path.

4. The Outlast Trials

5. Tie between MLB The Show 24 and Rise of the Ronin

Quick Resume (Smart Resume) is a nice feature on Xbox Series but I guess for me is, I've never cared about it on PC. And it's probably because most games (at least in the past) typically let me save anywhere, and restarting games takes no time at all since most of my games are on NVME drives. Suspend system mainly on Steam or better yet hibernate/sleep has honestly been good enough IMO...depends who you ask.

MS stated smart resume is coming to PC at some point, we just don't know when.

@R4gn4r0k: It is a memory dump onto the SSD. It is almost like a save state found in emulators. They dump and compress onto the local storage and reverse when resuming.

I guess I'm fine on PC as long as there is a skip intro option.

I'm pretty sure that is what prompted PCgamingWiki's existence: if there is a skip intro for a game or not.

Oh wow I love that feature in emulation, that is a rather smart move by the engineers over at MS.

@davillain: I remember when this gen started people were making a big whoop out of the quick resume. It didn’t really end up being that big of a deal lol

Tekken 8 and Crusin Blast

I'm still on Vanquisher rank after spending 131 hours on it :(

Yeah orange ranks were the wall for a few of my friends, but they eventually climbed. Just gotta keep at it.

Can be frustrating since people are still just unloading gimmicks at those ranks. Upside to that though, they usually commit to blocked/whiffed strings, so you can kinda just hang back and punish. And since most people are still playing "2d" at those ranks, start stepping and launching, **** their whole world up lol

Thanks, will check it out!

I haven't played a game released in 2024 :P.

But, of the games I have played, I'm leaning towards God of War. Initial impressions were not good (Except the visuals). Going 3 rounds back to back against the same boss. Pressing the same button multiple times to get Atreius to do something (getting a bit david cage there). Some cutscenes could drag.

But as soon as I hit the Lake of the Nine I started to really enjoy it. The game opens up big time. Solid combat once you get a few extra skills, Great visuals (though a lesson in the strength of art direction over technical prowess...but that's a rant for another day), nice soundtrack and a good story well told. I thought Atreius would get really annoying but, in fairness, he was a good sidekick after the opening part of the game and his character was good. Also just a nice length. The game doesn't needlessly drag on.

I do have some issues with the games balance. On higher difficulty I really just found enemies to be a slog. They just absorb crazy damage. On easier it's ok but, then, they have the hitting power of a paper towel in the wind. I wish enemies couldn't take as many hit but could also hit a bit harder.

The end game equipment also seems a bit pointless and I never bothered to get it. You collect rare items to forge power armour for......why? The games over. But these are not game breaking issues.

@osan0: Reminds me of the modern Tomb Raider games where the game itself is great but the game experience is awful when the developer wants to push the story so hard onto the player at the cost of gameplay.

Unicorn Overlord.

I expected a good game, I got a great game.

Yeah there are a couple of points where that can get annoying (1 point in the final boss battle was a bit of a fudge in particular). But I found it to be rare enough in the game that it didn't really bother me (though I did enjoy the modern tomb raider games too overall. So tolerances for such things can vary I suppose).

Cutscenes too were generally short enough that they didn't really annoy. I thought the quality of the cutscenes were also generally good enough that I was entertained for those periods anyway. The dwarves were always a delight in particular imho. Really the only one I can recall as bad was an overly long was the build up scene to the final boss that just wasn't well executed.

...There may have been a few issues with the final boss :P.