Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – one great game amongst many (Square Enix)
GameCentral offers a half-year report for video games, in what has been an exceptional six months, filled with great titles like Animal Well and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
We don’t want to alarm you but we’re now halfway through the year. Time flies when you’re fretting over the future of the video games industry but 2024 is now 50% complete and while the news has been a non-stop parade of misery the best way to cheer yourself up about the current state of gaming is simply to play some of the new releases.
At first, we weren’t even sure there were 20 games worthy of such praise but once the list below started to take shape we realised we were going to have to leave out a lot of notable games, including the still very good Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Rise Of The Rōnin, as well as innumerable indie titles such as Dicefolk, Paper Trail, Hauntii, V Rising, Ultrawings 2, Freedom Planet 2, and Little Kitty, Big City.
We’ve used the same rules as our yearly Top 20, in that we don’t include remasters, remakes, and DLC (although we do count Final Fantasy 7 as a new game) so that leaves out the superb Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, not to mention Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, Braid Anniversary Edition, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, and Persona 3 Reload.
Clearly, it has been an excellent year for quality games and while a few weeks ago the second half of 2024 was looking a little barren it’s now filled with an encouragingly diverse range of promising titles, from Astro Bot and Star Wars Outlaws to Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom and Life Is Strange: Double Exposure.
If the disconnect between the games and news seems hard to credit the answer is simple and related to one of the key problems in the industry at the moment: games take too long to make. All of those listed below would’ve been started long before the layoffs and uncertainty began. What happens after is difficult to tell but for now this is looking like one of the best years for gaming in the modern era. Which is a very welcome surprise.
20. F1 24 (XO/PS4/XSX/PS5/PC)
We never know what to do about yearly sports sequels in these sorts of lists, as even when they’re good they’re usually not very different from the last one. F1 24 literally cannot reinvent the wheel but it is the best Formula One game Codemasters has made so far and a sign that their purchase by EA isn’t having an adverse effect.
19. WWE 2K24 (XO/PS4/XSX/PS5/PC)
Likewise, Visual Concepts has been making WWE games for years now and not only is the best wresting game in at least two generations but they’ve now fully atoned for the disaster that was WWE 2K20, in what is comeback story worthy of the real WWE.
18. …read more
Source:: Metro
