Almost done Halls of Torment and getting kinda burnt out, might drop it and come back later.

Got Darktide with a friend and have been having a good time playing through missions. It is DARK on some of them, to the point that my friend’s favorite special ability to have on a weapon is “has a flashlight”. Overall gameplay is good, one of the grenade options for ogryn is just whipping a large rock at enemies, and it is extremely satisfying. Progression seems a bit weird; weapon stats are capped by a character’s weapon mastery level as opposed to overall character level, which means you’re heavily encouraged to main something. On the plus side, it looks like you can kinda skip that by just buying a bunch of shit weapons and sacrificing them for mastery XP at the forge, but that’s obviously kinda lame. Sadly no solo-only play, which is weird, because VT2 with bots was fine.

Top games I played this year prior to December (most of them did not come out this year lol):

1. Shadow of the Erdtree - No surprises here, the biggest problem I have with the game is that I played it for like 20 hours in 3 days and burned out
2. Victoria 3 - I’d played it before at launch, but picked up a legit copy during a sale and had a lot of fun playing Big Communism Simulator.
3. Vampire Survivors - Played through the Contra and Amogus DLCs earlier this year and had a good time utterly breaking things with the new Darkanas in the last big update
4. Total Warhammer 2 - Was waiting to get all the DLC when it went on sale for years, and had a good run going through a variety of campaigns earlier this year. This has problems (a lot of the campaigns are just not very interesting, the mid-to-end game is almost always a grind), but overall still very good
5. One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 - A dumb fun musou game. Does a terrible job of actually explaining what happens in One Piece. The post-game grind is dumb and I didn’t even attempt it.
6. Halls of Torment - A solid Vampire Survivors clone, this time themed around Diablo 1. Some of the classes are bad (Norseman), and the level variety isn’t particularly interesting, but otherwise good.
7. Risk of Rain 2 - The new DLC broke the game at launch, and a lot of the new content is still bad (glares at Chef), but the recent updates have returned it to actually being a fun game. There are no longer giant swathes of items that I don’t want to pick up.
8. Monster Hunter Rise - Nowhere near as good as World, feels grindy in comparison, perhaps because the story is so much weaker? The base-game endboss sucks lol. Sadly both my friends I was playing with burned out before we could start Sunbreak, and though I played a bit on my own, I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it.
9. Yakuza 7 - The JRPG combat is a fun bit initially, and could probably have worked for something shorter, but this is a 70 hour game that never gets more complex than 3 party members attacking and the last one using healing abilities. It ends up feeling extremely tedious (with a huge difficulty spike partway through the campaign which can fuck you over if you haven’t been grinding out the side content). Main Story is terrible (which seems to be the case for Yakuza games?), Side Stories are charming, minigames range in quality from “actually pretty fun” like Dragon Kart to “I’m not touching this with a 10-foot pole” like mahjong, koi-koi, poker, or blackjack. I do not understand how people are able to play through these as fast as they come out, I feel like I need to take a few years off between games.
10. Hi-Fi Rush - I honestly don’t get the hype. For a musical spectacle fighter, the integration of the music wasn’t that great. Something like this lives or dies in its boss fights, and the only one I consider good is Wolfgang. Not by coincidence, that’s also the only one with really well integrated music. Comparing it to MGRR, it just doesn’t even come close.