Tin’s Top Ten Games of 2021
2020 was a bad year. 2021 wasn’t much better. At least there were still new video games for me to play, and then rank based on how much I liked them.
10. Guilty Gear Strive
I like a good fighting game every now and then, and this is definitely a good fighting game. I enjoyed playing the beta on PS4 early in the year, but I waited to get the full game until the Steam Thanksgiving sale. The fighting mechanics are really solid and fun to master, but I wish there was a story mode that involved actual fights and wasn’t just a visual novel. The only real single player modes are the arcade mode, which gets old quickly, and the mission mode, which didn’t draw me in. I really like this game conceptually, but I struggle to find the motivation to play it more.
9. Picross S Genesis & Master System Edition
The Picross S series is great, but so many releases have come out lately that they’ve gotten quite stale. Making picross puzzles out of sprites from old Sega games makes this version stand out from the rest of the games in the series, and it’s definitely the one I would recommend getting if you’re at all a fan of the Genesis (I’m not sure if any Master System fans exist). That being said, I’ve played a lot of Picross the last few years, and Genesis sprites weren’t quite enough to stop me from being a bit bored after a while.
8. The Jackbox Party Pack 8
This year’s Jackbox is a bit of a mixed bag, but Job Job is a real banger. In Job Job, you’re forced to answer job interview questions using only words from other people’s answers to various prompts. Your answers are then compared with another player’s answers and everyone votes on which one is funnier, Quiplash style. Being so limited with word choice results in pretty much any answer being funny, if only for the fact that it managed to be written given the limitations. The WordArt aesthetic is also amazing. It’s easily the best game in the pack, and one of the best Jackbox games outright (although Tee KO still reigns supreme).
Drawful Animate and Poll Mine are both good games as well. Drawful Animate is arguably too complicated when playing with people who aren’t that into drawing, as you now have to draw two pictures that animate, instead of just one still drawing. Poll Mine is an interesting game; I enjoyed the thoughtfulness required in figuring out the fourth most popular response to a poll. The other two games aren’t that great: Weapons Drawn is too complicated and takes too long to play, and The Wheel of Enormous Proportions is too random, with the gimmick of spinning the wheel not being exciting at all. Overall, it’s a decent collection of party games. It’s not one of the best Party Packs, but it’s not one of the worst ones either.
7. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury
This is effectively two separate games that happen to be on the same cartridge/download, and Bowser’s Fury is the only reason it’s on this list. Bowser’s Fury is one of the best single-player experiences I had this year. You get to navigate a large open world (by Mario standards), incorporating the best elements of both Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey. The movement is great, as one would expect from a 3D Mario game, and it’s one of the main reasons this game is so fun to play.
Super Mario 3D World didn’t hold up as well as I expected it to. I collected every star in the game on the Wii U version and really enjoyed it back when that version was new. When playing the Switch version this year, I found the eight-directional movement to be limiting, and collecting the bonus stars on each level felt more frustrating than fun. Perhaps my play style of playing each level until I get all of the stars, the stamp, and the gold flag pole was too restrictive, but I didn’t have as much fun with the game this time as I did back in 2014 or so. The online multiplayer is a welcome addition, although it can be laggy in the way that most Nintendo games are.
It’s unfortunate that Bowser’s Fury only lasts a few hours, and it’s hard to justify spending a full $60 for Bowser’s Fury alone. If it was on the eShop for $20, it would be an easy recommendation. Even so, if you never played 3D World or want to play it again, the Switch version is a solid deal.
6. Halo Infinite
Yep, that’s definitely a Halo game. Multiplayer is really fun, especially with friends, and I actually felt sort of competent playing a Halo game online for once, at least while using a controller. I didn’t mind the forced inclusion of mission-based modes in the multiplayer playlists at launch as much as other people did, although Slayer is still my favorite mode. Also, One Flag is terrible, almost always ending in a tie as it’s very difficult to score in it. In my opinion, it should probably be cut from the game entirely, even though it rarely appears in the playlists. The battle pass progression is so slow that I couldn’t be bothered to care about it at all, and I wish that there were more cosmetic options available by default, as 99% of people playing online look almost exactly the same.
Apparently there’s also a single-player campaign, which is the main selling point of Halo Infinite (quite literally, as the multiplayer mode is free-to-play (although there are season passes and cosmetics to buy, which will probably make more money than the campaign, therefore actually being the main selling point, therefore ruining this joke)). I haven’t played the campaign mode yet, so I’m basing its position on my list solely on the multiplayer mode, mostly during the beta launch week, as that’s when I played it the most.
5. Mario Party Superstars
Nintendo has had a rough year in my opinion this year, so I expected Mario Party Superstars to be pretty mediocre. However, it’s actually quite good! Superstars returns to the traditional style of early Mario Party games, moving away from the motion-based controls of Super Mario Party (how many people do you think got the wrong Mario Party game for Christmas this year?). There are no stupid gimmicks from 9/10/Super (no stars), and the chosen minigames are mostly solid inclusions. My biggest complaint is that the character selection is paltry, with Birdo being the only remotely oddball inclusion. Where is Toad or Boo or Dry Bones? Toadette hands out the stars in the game, but why can’t I play as her anyway?
Including online multiplayer from the start, and not waiting two-and-a-half years to implement it, is a big deal, and the only reason I got the game in the first place. At least 90 percent of the time I’ve spent playing the game has been with friends online. The online multiplayer is implemented weirdly, where the very first screen of the game asks if you want to play offline or online, and then the whole game loads after that. If you want to spend coins that you’ve earned while in online mode, you have to go back to this screen, select offline mode, watch the intro video again for some reason (it fittingly begins with the line “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?”), and then go to the menu where you can buy stuff. I guess the benefit of this setup is that online play is less laggy than in many other Nintendo games.
4. Hot Wheels Unleashed
This was probably the biggest surprise of the year for me. Developer Milestone is known for making racing games that look really nice, but aren’t very fun to play, so I was expecting much of the same from this game. However, the handling model is actually really fun and arcade-y. The drifting mechanic takes a bit of time to nail down, but it’s really satisfying once you figure it out (the trick is to tap and hold the brake for a little bit when starting the drift, not just tapping it). The track design is very good as well. Any worries I had before release about the tracks using too many Hot Wheels pieces and not enough of the environment were mostly unfounded. There’s also a powerful track editor that lets you make tracks just as impressive as the developer-made ones. The cars themselves are superbly modeled; they’re probably the most graphically impressive facet of a game I’ve seen this year.
One complaint I have is that I wish there were more than just two modes, race and time attack, although it isn’t that big of an issue. The blind-bag nature of unlocking cars is also annoying, as it meant that there were several cars I wanted that I never had the opportunity to get during my playthrough of the game. There is a store that lets you non-blindly buy a random selection of cars, but the store only rotates through the selections in real time, and at launch, it took 4 hours of gameplay for a rotation to occur. Fortunately, that was updated to only 1.5 hours, and it also now includes more cars to choose from.
Hot Wheels Unleashed is definitely worth getting if it looks at all interesting to you, although I’d recommend waiting for a sale, as it’s a bit overpriced at $50. I wouldn’t recommend the season pass either, unless you happen to like most of the licensed franchises that make up most of the cars in the pass.
3. Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania
The mad lads finally did it — they remastered Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, one of my favorite games of all time. Is this game better than Deluxe? Not really, but it isn’t that much worse either. The physics are slightly different in the remaster, but it didn’t impact my ability to play the game too much. The main annoyance I had with the controls is that the dead zone for rolling the ball straight forward no longer exists, meaning that navigating narrow platforms is significantly more difficult. However, using the keyboard for these sections can mitigate the issue to some extent. I swear that Sonic is slightly faster than the other characters, even if the Internet says that every character has the same stats, so I’m not sure if it’s placebo or not.
Removing lives from the game (and therefore game overs) is a big improvement, as failing difficult levels over and over until you succeed is one of the most enticing parts of the game. I also enjoyed the variety of missions in the game, and I spent a good amount of time clearing all of the main game missions. I wish that the story mode included levels from SMB 1 and Deluxe, as the SMB 2 levels are over-represented as a result, and in my opinion, the SMB 1 and Deluxe levels are better.
The minigames are a mixed bag, but they were in Deluxe as well. Lots of people said that Monkey Target was ruined in the remaster, but I didn’t have much of an issue with it. Monkey Race, Golf, and Bowling are still my favorites, although the physics in Monkey Bowling are rather different than they used to be, and it takes some time adjusting to them. Some of the minigame challenges are also very difficult (getting under par in Monkey Golf is a lot harder than it sounds), and it stopped me from completing every challenge in the game.
2. Mini Motorways
Mini Motorways was originally released on Apple Arcade back in 2019, but if a game is released only on Apple Arcade, is it really released at all? Fortunately, Mini Motorways came out on Steam this year, and it quickly became my favorite puzzle game in some time. Effectively a sequel to Mini Metro, Mini Motorways improves on its formula in a number of ways. The meta of Mini Metro, at least in its early days, was to have three or so circuits connected to as many stations as possible, and then use the remaining lines to constantly “bus” people on overloaded stations to their destinations. This isn’t really possible in Mini Motorways, which requires careful planning of roads, intersections, and which houses are connected to which destinations in order to succeed.
There are still tricks that wouldn’t be used in actual city building that are needed to get the highest scores, such as avoiding intersections at all costs and placing roads in empty areas to prevent houses or destinations from spawning there. That being said, I enjoy the gameplay loop of Mini Motorways more than Mini Metro. It still feels somewhat random in terms of how well you do, but not as much as it did in Mini Metro. The end-game maps are much more visually appealing, too. Mini Metro’s maps often ended up looking like a zig-zaggy mess, whereas Mini Motorways’ maps are much more organized, although the highways can get a bit messy as well.
1. Forza Horizon 5
Believe it or not, despite the fact that 90% of the games I play are racing games, this is the first time a racing game has won my GOTY award since I started doing these yearly posts in 2017. Back in 2018, I wrote that Forza Horizon 4 was very similar to Forza Horizon 3, and the same is definitely true of this game. The race modes are the same as in Horizon 4, and the story missions are very similar as well. Most of the cars are also taken from Horizon 4, which isn’t a bad thing, although I wish there were more new cars. The livery editor, while hugely impressive 15 years ago, is archaic by today’s standards, and pales in comparison to the editor in Gran Turismo Sport. I was hoping the game would be a bit more different given the extra year of development time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the dev team lost most of that year of productivity due to the pandemic. However, Horizon 4 was by no means broken, so perhaps there was no reason to fix it.
The changes that have been made are positive: the additions of car collections and accolades kept me coming back long after I had completed all of the standard races and story missions. I was able to collect every car in the game after doing some skill point grinding and getting 15 million credits for a duplicate Shelby Daytona Coupe in a super wheelspin, which helped me buy a Honda Civic for 20 million credits, because that’s the most expensive car in the auction house for some reason. I also spent way too much time trying to complete as many of the accolades as possible. These accolades felt very similar to the ones in Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, with hundreds to thousands of small challenges to accomplish. I wonder if this is going to be a trend in more games in the future. There’s actually so many things to do that it’s overwhelming at times.
I was initially worried that I’d get tired of the game quickly, given its similarities to the last two Forza Horizon games. However, once I started playing, I remembered how fun the Forza Horizon games are, and never doubted that this game would be my GOTY this year. Several of my friends who don’t typically play racing games tried it out and really enjoyed it as well. If you have Xbox Game Pass, it’s absolutely worth checking out.
Now it’s time for the Other Awards:
Tin’s Eleventh Best Game of 2021: Cruis’n Blast
Cruis’n Blast feels like the type of game that will be in some sort of arcade game compilation in 20 years time, which makes sense, since it’s a port of an actual arcade game. It’s extremely arcade-y and has no respect for physics whatsoever (you go as fast in 2nd gear as you do in 6th), but it’s dumb fun. Definitely a game worth getting when it’s on sale if you like arcade racers (the ones on actual arcade machines).
Most Underrated Game: SkateBIRD
While nobody hated SkateBIRD, nobody seemed to like it much either. The pervasive feeling towards the game was disappointment that it wasn’t as good as it could be. However, I really enjoyed the game, and completed the first level in one sitting, something which very few people have done at all, according to achievement statistics. If you look at the game as a Tony Hawk clone, it’s not great, but if you look at it as a more generic platformer, it’s quite a fun game.
Most Overrated Game: WarioWare: Get It Together!
I don’t think that the new WarioWare is a bad game, per se, just that it wasn’t for me. My favorite WarioWare games have been the ones that use the controller in various gimmicky ways, and Get It Together! doesn’t do that, instead opting for a more straight platformer approach with a variety of different characters. While this creates a wide variety of challenges, adjusting to the different characters’ abilities so quickly can be overwhelming, and I just didn’t have that much fun with the game.
The “Why Did I Buy This?” Award: Destruction AllStars
Destruction AllStars was free on PlayStation Plus for months. I didn’t claim it because I didn’t have a PS5 at the time. Then I got a PS5 and needed a game for it, so I paid twenty (20) dollars to buy a physical copy of the game, and played it exactly once because it’s terrible.
Best Pre-2021 Game I First Played in 2021: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2
I didn’t get this game until early in 2021, but it definitely would have made my Top 10 list in 2020 had I played it then. I definitely need to be in the right mood to play a Tony Hawk game, and I just happened to be in that mood early this year. The controls are really solid, and there’s hundreds of little challenges to complete, similar to the ones in Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania and Forza Horizon 5.
Best Racing Games to Play All Day for Weeks On End: Gran Turismo Sport, Forza Motorsport
During the year, I found myself fixated on playing through a bunch of different racing games, but I focused a lot on these two in particular. Gran Turismo Sport has a very long single player campaign with around 300 races and very few rewards for completing them, but I spent weeks grinding through them, even all of the hour-long endurance races, and eventually completed them all. I also found a group of friends that plays the game every Thursday, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing in those weekly sessions and competing for wins.
I also 100% completed the original Forza Motorsport. My memories of this game as a kid were that it was extremely difficult, but I found out fairly quickly that I was just a dumb kid who didn’t know how to properly play the game, and also probably wasn’t skilled enough at the time. This was the game that taught me you sometimes have to brake for turns, after all. Much like GT Sport, I grinded through every event in the game, and really enjoyed the 40-or-so hours it took to do so.
Biggest Mistake in Last Year’s List: Ranking Project Cars 3 above Trackmania
Realistically, Trackmania should have been #1 on my list last year. Cup of the Day, effectively a battle royale mode where the slowest drivers each round get knocked out, is an amazing mode, and revitalized my love for the game, making it one of the games I played the most this year. I also got into watching various Trackmania streamers, particularly Riolu (until it was found out he cheated for a decade and stopped streaming) and Wirtual. I got to #3 in my state in the overall rankings, and interacted some with the other top players in my state.
Project Cars 3, on the other hand, was a game I only booted up whenever new DLC came out, so I could play through it and get the achievements. The multiplayer scene is completely dead, whereas Project Cars 2 lives on in that regard. It’s a shame, because I much prefer PC3’s handling model over PC2’s model on a controller. However, the lack of pit stops and a less simulation-y vibe meant that Project Cars 3 was dead on arrival.
Most Anticipated Game of 2022: Gran Turismo 7 (Again)
This is the second year in a row that Gran Turismo 7 has been my most anticipated game of the coming year, having been delayed in true Gran Turismo fashion. It now has a firm release date of March 4, which means it hopefully won’t be delayed all the way to 2023. I firmly expect GT7 to win my GOTY award next year — let’s see if it does.
Thank you for coming to my Medium talk. I’ll be back this time next year for another Tin’s Top 10 Games list. Will Salamander County Public Television occupy all ten places? Find out next year! (Hint: It won’t.)
