Games

New Game Releases: 2024 Buyer’s Guide – Part 1

With 2024 coming to a close, and Christmas just around the corner, most game companies have taken the next few weeks off.

“OH MY GOD?! IT’S ALMOST CHRISTMAS!!!! What do I do? My kid/wife/husband/Secret Santa wanted some game about…I don’t know, a fantasy baby being reborn, or the animated film Balto, or super may-reo brothers musical party ship, or maybe something that had all three. Do those exist? If they don’t exist what can I get?? HELP ME!”

Okay, okay, stop fretting, I got you covered. I will be giving you a buyer’s guide for each month with my top picks in BOLD. What were the best games to come out; which ones sucked, and which ones flew under the radar and deserve your attention? Get ready to find out!

Since this guide tends to be on the long side, and in the interest of keeping your attention, I will be splitting it into two parts; January to June and July to December. Get your pencils ready, folks, because the games are coming fast and I hope you’re taking notes.

January:

  • Best – Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Last of Us Part II Remastered, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Tekken 8, Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes
  • Avoid – Stargate: Timekeepers
  • Hidden Gem – Another Code: Recollection (Recommended by Mikey Insanity)

January started off like it usually does, slow, but then it almost always hits us with a huge title at the end of the month. 2024’s big January release was the eagerly anticipated sequel Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Continuing the story of new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, players return to Yokohama, briefly, before finding themselves in Hawaii, searching for Ichiban’s mother. Joining Ichiban are his friends from the previous game, as well as another familiar face, The Dragon of Dojima himself, Kazuma Kiryu.

Infinite Wealth is the most complete and polished game in the entire Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise, with a multitude of mini-games to take part in, ranging from fan favorites like karaoke and classic Sega arcade games, to brand new pastimes like the Pokémon-esque battling game Sujimon, and the Animal Crossing inspired Dondoko Island. Infinite Wealth is so huge and massive that you could probably spend an entire year playing it. I don’t know how they top this entry.

The slow days of January only lasted a couple of weeks, as we soon found ourselves with an onslaught of great games. The best of the rest was from Ubisoft, shocking, with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a 2D side scrolling, Metroidvania that is among the best games the company has put out this decade. Unfortunately sales were pretty low and the company disbanded the team that made the game and said they’ll continue to focus on their major franchises like Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed; too bad.

If 2024 felt like it had a lot of remasters and retro collections, well, that’s because it did! Our first big collection came in January with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, which collected Apollos Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice. Speaking of remasters, our first of the year was Last of Us Part II Remastered for the PS5 which, to be frank, looked like shit on the PS4, right. Right? If you like fighting games, January had two big ones, Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes, with it’s emphasis on narrative storytelling, and Tekken 8, which is still getting DLC as of December, with FFXVI’s Clive joining the fray.

Our first stinker of the year was the licensed game Stargate: Timekeepers, a tactical RTS game that failed to inspire. The game was heavily maligned at launch due to it being incomplete, with the developers saying that they would release the second half later in the year. Well, they finally did and, surprise, the game was still bad. What you should be playing instead is the Nintendo published Another Code: Recollection, yet another retro game collection. This game was recommended by reader Mikey Insanity who said, “Nintendo’s first game this year and it didn’t even sell a million copies. The story is engaging, the puzzles are clever without being frustrating (and there’s a hint and guide system if you get stuck on them), it has a nice art direction, and the voice cast did great with their characters“.

February:

  • Best – Balatro, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Helldivers II, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Persona 3: Reload, Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered
  • Avoid – Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and Skull and Bones
  • Hidden Gem – 20 Small Mazes (Recommended by Jarathen and Toothpic Monsoon)

2024 in gaming could have packed it up in February and called it a day, because one of the best games of the year (and my personal favorite) came out, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. The second in a planned trilogy that remakes the PSX classic, FFVII, Rebirth picks up right at the end of Remake, which finds Cloud and his companions escaping Midgar and stopping in the town of Kalm. From there, the group observe several hooded men heading in the same direction. Feeling a sense of urgency to follow them, the team head out on a grand adventure to discover more about the environmental crisis plaguing their planet, as well as what Sephiroth is up to.

No other game in 2024 gripped me as much as FFVII: Rebirth. Even knowing where the story was going, I was constantly thrown curveballs, particularly with the appearance of Zack Fair, from FFVII: Crisis Core, a character that died in the original FFVII. Not only did Rebirth have an engaging story, it played out over a huge, semi-open world with lots of areas to explore and lot’s of side content to get lost in. While it may not have the mini-game depth of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, it was still more than enough content to get me to spend over 120 hours in the game.

February was a bit of a slow month, this year (a trend we saw continue as 2024 rolled on), but we did have the biggest indie game of the year come out, Balatro, and the biggest multiplayer game of the year, Helldivers II. Balatro made a huge splash at this years The Game Awards, winning three awards and being nominated in five, including Game of the Year. Helldivers II seemingly came out of nowhere and delighted co-op fans around the globe. It would win two awards, Best Ongoing Game and Best Multiplayer Game.

The remasters/remakes/collections continued, of course. The biggest deviation from its source was Persona 3: Reload, a complete remake of the original Persona 3. The game now holds the record at Atlus for being the fastest title to reach one million sales, pretty good for a game that, I think, a lot of us kind of forgot about as 2024 rolled along. In other remake news, Nintendo dropped Mario vs. Donkey Kong, a remake of the 2004 GBA title. Last up was Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered, a collection of the first three titles in that series, and featured updated graphics and controls. It received mostly positive reviews, though some critics didn’t enjoy the modern control scheme and others said they felt the enemies looked too goofy.

There are two games to avoid this month, both of which are failed live-service titles, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Skull and Bones. With Suicide Squad, we saw a studio, Rocksteady, long known for making classic single player titles, be saddled with a live-service looter shooter that failed to inspire any kind of positive reaction from critics or players. The game was DOA when it launched, prompting massive discounts at the end of the year (as low as $3.49). Unsurprisingly, Rocksteady announced they would end support for the game after January 2025 and there were, of course, massive layoff’s due to the game’s failure.

Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones had been in development for nearly ten years when it finally released to a world that did not give a shit. With a price tag of $70 (which is on top of paying for the battle pass and any premium currency you might want), the company declared that Skull and Bones was the industry’s first quadruple A game, a technological feat so astounding that you would be thanking Ubisoft for only charging $70 for the honor of playing it. Skull and Bones would later get discounted to as much as $15 bucks and is now regularly priced at $60; womp womp.

Instead of playing these bloated sacks of garbage that will soon just be distant memories on the trash pile of other failed live-service games, check out the amazing little indie title 20 Small Mazes which is, as the title promises, a game where you must solve 20 small mazes. Recommended by two longtime readers, Jarathan and Toothpic Monsoon (both of which seem to have turned on to the game by Merve), saying “It’s free, it’s kind of slight, but it’s a good time, kind of a ‘What the Golf?’ of mazes. My son and I sat down and played our own copies side by side for like an hour one day, it was a good time“.

March:

  • Best – Contra: Operation Galuga, Dragon’s Dogma II, Felix the Cat Collection, MLB The Show 24, The Outlast Trials, Princess Peach Showtime!, Rise of the Ronin, Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, Unicorn Overlord, WWE 2K24
  • Avoid – South Park: Snow Day!
  • Hidden Gem – NOTTOLOT (Recommended by Merve)

March ended the Q23 fiscal year with somewhat of a bang, giving us yet another massive RPG for the year in Dragon’s Dogma II. The sequel to the 2012 original, Dragon’s Dogma II was highly anticipated prior to release, thanks in part to its well designed character creation tool that came out a few weeks prior to launch. Set in a fully connected open world, Dragon’s Dogma II’s development team said that they took a lot of inspiration from Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, particularly in the way that events seemingly happen, out of nowhere, giving the world a “lived in” quality. While it’s luster may have dropped as the year went on, this was still a really special RPG in a year where we were spoiled for choice.

Speaking RPGs, our other big title from March was Unicorn Overlord from developer Vanillaware. This tactical RPG was another visual feast from the studio, and was praised for its engaging characters. Certainly not the biggest hit of 2024 (that name probably didn’t help), but one of its most memorable to anyone that played it. If you like action RPGs, Sony and Team Ninja gave us Rise of the Ronin, a well received title set during the final years of the Edo period. Another open world game, critics were generally impressed with Ronin, but it wasn’t the smash success that both companies probably hoped it would be.

If RPGs aren’t your thing, we’ve got the Nintendo title Princess Peach Showtime!. In this game, players take on the role of the famous damsel in distress as she tries to save the day for once. Our first big sports title of the year was WWE 2K24, followed by another sports game, MLB The Show 24. I opted for baseball this year instead of wrestling, and The Show ended up being my second most played game of the year.

Finally, in the world of remakes and collections, we had Contra: Operation Galuga, a reimagining of the arcade/NES classic, there was the Felix the Cat Collection which, I guess was exciting for some people (it probably lowered the price of the physical NES carts significantly), and we wrapped things up with the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, which bundled the PS2 titles together, giving them a graphical upgrade.

Our title to avoid from March is another licensed game, South Park: Snow Day!, an abysmally boring shooter. Touted as a co-op title, Snow Day allows you to play with up to three friends, online, and only if you all own the same device. No couch co-op, no cross-play, Snow Day is a budget title through and through. Boring, lifeless worlds, stale, outdated graphics & game mechanics, Snow Day just isn’t worth your time, no matter how big a South Park fan you are.

Instead, check out the free to play hacking game NOTTOLOT. Recommended by Merve, he writes, “An action/stealth/puzzle game about a robot that can possess other robots“. Is that it, Merve? Hey, it sounds & looks great, and it’s free! They probably should have made Snow Day free, instead of trying to foist it upon us for thirty bucks.

April:

  • Best – Dead Island 2: SoLA Festival, Demon Slayer – Kimestsu no Yaiba – Sweep the Board!, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide, SaGa Emerald Beyond, Stellar Blade
  • Avoid – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Wrath of the Mutants
  • Hidden Gem – Minishoot’ Adventures and Botany Manor (Recommended by Toothpic Monsoon) and Sand Land (Recommended by Zero)

Things really started to drag in April when it came to new releases. Our top game of the month is kind of the winner by default, I’m talking about the action game Stellar Blade. Developed by the Korean studio Shift Up, Stellar Blade finds players taking on the role of Eve, a sort of freedom fighter who is trying to save humanity from being enslaved by hideous monsters.

The game is perfectly cromulent, to take one of The Avocado’s favorite terms, and is only your best choice from April because, well, nothing really came out that was better than it (subjectively, of course). There are going to be a few games this year that some of us may find hard to play because of their perceived associations with right wing blowhards, and Stellar Blade is one of them. 2024 was a year where your identity was strongly tied to what games you played (more so than other years, it seemed). It was gross, and it stifled any kind of reasonable debate about some of this year’s games.

Enough about that, what else came out in April! Well, if you like gigantic RPGs then you’re in luck, because we had two of them! There was the long awaited Suikoden spiritual successor Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a game that I sunk hours and hours into. It is, personally, my favorite game of April, but it’s kind of a buggy mess, to be honest, and got a little boring. Out other big RPG was SaGa Emerald Beyond, the latest entry in the long running SaGa series, though it was met with lukewarm reviews by critics and an almost complete rejection from players.

Funnily enough, April didn’t feature any remakes or collections, that I can see. We did get a next gen port of Fallout 4 to coincide with the release of the Fallout show on Amazon. There were a couple of big DLC’s in April though; Dead Island 2: SoLA Festival added more content to that game, taking players to a Coachella-esque music festival that was, surprise, overrun by zombies. Final Fantasy XVI also had some DLC with The Rising Tide, which found players venturing to the magical land of Mysidia to deal with the lost Eikon of Water, Leviathan.

While some of you might have avoided Stellar Blade for its aforementioned right wing gooner reputation, what everyone should be avoiding is the terrible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Wrath of the Mutants, the worst of three (yes, THREE) TMNT games to come out in 2024. A port of the 2017 arcade game of the same name, Wrath of the Mutants is dull, boring, and soulless. A cash grab made for people who don’t know any better. Well, now you do, so ignore it! IGNORE IT!

Instead, check out one of the three games recommended by your fellow readers! Toothpic Monsoon has more more great suggestions, first is Minishoot’ Adventures an, “incredible game that no one played. Top down Zelda-like/bullet hell” that I will, promptly, be adding to my Steam library. They also recommended Botany Manor a, “cozy puzzle solving game set in an old countryside manor“; hell yeah. Reader Zero was baffled that Bandai Namco’s Sand Land didn’t get more love, saying, “it’s an open world vehicle building and action game based on Akira Toriyama’s manga series. It’s fun! Imagine if Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts was good. It’s not earth shattering but I don’t see many people talking about it and that should change“.

May:

  • Best – Animal Well, Braid: Anniversary Edition, Endless Ocean Luminous, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle Chomp Champs, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Reus 2, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, Surmount: A Mountain Climbing Adventure
  • Avoid – XDefiant and Homeworld 3
  • Hidden Gem – Crow Country (Recommended by Blip), Cryptmaster and Starstruck Vagabond (Both recommended by CedricTheOwl), Duck Detective: The Secret Salami and Little Kitty, Big City (Both recommended by Toothpic Monsoon)

After a lackluster April, May didn’t really inspire me either, except for one title; the masterful indie game Animal Well, another one of my personal favorites of the year. After an initial frustration with the game and its cryptic, nearly obtuse set of goals & tasks, I found myself utterly consumed by Animal Well after a couple hours in. A brilliant Metroidvania style adventure game, Animal Well is an absolute treat for players that love to experiment and explore.

There’s a main story/path that you can follow, but there are also tons of hidden nook’s and cranny’s to get lost in, literally, you can easily get lost in the game’s giant map and not find your way back to where you here for hours. It might sound dull but, I promise you, it isn’t. Animal Well is a triumph of a game, destined to be one of the most remembered titles of 2024. I’m eagerly awaiting either a sequel, or a new title from the game’s lone developer, Billy Basso. Do not skip Animal Well.

Maybe I liked Animal Well so much because the rest of the games released in May were just kind of…meh. Our big, AAA title of the month was Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, an action/puzzle game that was one of the few Xbox console exclusive of 2024. While it was praised for its graphics and story, some critics felt Hellblade II was more style over substance, with the gameplay falling well short of the actors’ performances and the narrative beats.

Nintendo had two big titles in May, starting things off with Endless Ocean Luminous, a gentle underwater exploration game from developer Arika. On the other side of the coin, Nintendo gave us another one of our many 2024 remasters, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The game was actually more of a remake than remaster, being rebuilt in a new engine, with QoL improvements and some new content added. There was so grumbling about the game only running at 30fps and not 60fps like the GameCube game; if you care about this stuff please, get a life.

The rest of May was filled with smaller titles and one big, long awaited release. Good things were said about the indies Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (which just released on PS4 & PS5) & Surmount: A Mountain Climbing Adventure, and not just because they both have weird, long names; they’re supposed to be really good. Oh, and there was a re-release of Braid called the Anniversary Edition; that’s cool.

Our game to avoid in May is a bit of a sad one for me, personally, because I know someone who was directly involved with the game; XDefiant. Yet another in a long line of failed online-multiplayer shooters, XDefiant started strong but just couldn’t keep up with the competition, seeing record low player counts only a few months later. This led to the cancellation of the game and the closing of Ubisoft San Francisco, with a friend of mine caught up in the layoff’s. I’m not telling you to avoid XDefiant because it was bad, you should avoid it because it won’t exist anymore, sadly. Give it a try if you like, but don’t get too attached.

At the suggestion of reader Crooked Paul, he also thinks we should all avoid Homeworld 3, saying, “New players greeted it with a shrug; to longtime fans of the series, it was a slap in the face. (Still only 38% positive Steam reviews.) The devs just released a massive patch that gets the game to where it should have been at launch, and I feel like I should check it out because I spent $60, but I don’t really want to play it again. Full thoughts on why it let fans down in my Homeworld 3 review.”

Instead, check one of the many games that readers recommended for May, hopefully none of them get erased from existence anytime soon. First up, reader Blip recommends Crow Country, calling it, “a charming PS1-style horror game that oozes atmosphere“. I know multiple people who say this is good, so let’s all give it a try!

Long time Avocadoian CedricTheOwl had two recommendations this month, Cryptmaster, “A first person dungeon crawler…where the gimmick is that the RPG mechanics are rooted in Wordle-style word guessing games. Your party gets stronger by gradually finding letters that describe their abilities, and you can unlock those abilities ahead of time by guessing the word. It’s got unique mechanics, a fun retro look, and a sharp sense of humor“, as well as Starstruck Vagabond, which they called, “a space exploration game (where) you start out on a mission to find a rare ore that can save the human race from an encroaching invading force; your character is frozen in suspended animation, wakes up to find that the ore was worthless and humanity was wiped out, and then has to get a job as a space trucker. You ferry shipments of cargo between planets…all while maintaining your ship by hand. It’s a nice, relaxing game to play (but) I can imagine its unhurried pace would get frustrating if you tried to rush through it“.

Finally, Toothpic Monsoon was back with two MORE recommendations from May. The first is Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, saying that it reminded them a lot of Curse of the Golden Idol, but way more silly and fun. Their other recommendation is Little Kitty, Big City, saying, “Explore a section of a city as a kitty trying to get back to their house after falling out of the window. The writing is silly and made me laugh a lot“.

June:

  • Best – Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition, Destiny 2: The Final Shape, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Fallout 76: Skyline Valley, Luigi’s Mansion Dark Moon HD, Metal Slug Attack: Reloaded, Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble, The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road
  • Avoid – Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game
  • Hidden Gem – Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends (Recommended by Me, Andy)

On paper, June looks really exciting and stacked, but honestly, that whole month was a wash for me. Things in June were so slow that the top game is DLC, of course it’s DLC for one the greatest games ever made, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Introducing a huge new area to explore called the Land of Shadow, players uncover even more of the slightly confusing story of Elden Ring, specifically the origin story of the character Marika.

With brutal new enemies to vanquish, players can acquire new spells, new weapons, and new ways to play the game. It’s so massive that it’s almost a full new game unto itself, something that made the voting bloc at The Game Awards take notice, nominating it for Game of the Year. This caused a bit of a stir among fans and the press, with some calling for The Game Awards to ban it from the category and instead creating a Best DLC category. This didn’t change anything, it was still nominated for GOTY but it would lose to a title we’ll get to in the September write up, Astro Bot.

June was a big month for DLC, not only did we get Shadow of the Erdtree, we also saw an expansions for Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online. For Fallout, we got Skyline Valley which added a huge new area to explore in the game’s southern region. Based on Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, players stumble upon a vault that is home to Ghouls that are literally full of electricity. For ESO we got Gold Road, which adds the new area the West Weald from TSE IV: Oblivion. A Daedric Prince is in Tamriel and players must find out why.

That’s not all the DLC though, as Destiny 2 put out The Final Shape, it’s latest expansion that tried to, once again, justify its soul crushing gameplay loop. If DLC isn’t your thing then we’ve also got remasters/re-releases. Ubisoft remember that they own Beyond Good & Evil and put out a 20th Anniversary Edition, just because. Nintendo ported the 3DS game Luigi’s Mansion Dark Moon to the Switch with an HD version. Konami resurrected the retro series Rocket Knight Adventures with the cleverly titled Re-Sparked, and Atlus put out their usual “complete edition”, or whatever you want to call it, for Shin Megami Tensei V, called Vengeance; phew.

June didn’t really have anything terrible, so when this happens I usually go for the “online only” games because, well, they usually have a short shelf life. This month’s game to avoid is the asymmetrical horror title Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game. Not necessarily a bad game, but there’s just no reason for it to exist. These niche franchises should just, in my opinion, be used as DLC for an already established game, like Dead by Daylight. As much as I love Killer Klowns, I don’t need an entire online multiplayer game dedicated to them; hard pass.

Instead, you should check out one of my favorite little indies from 2024, the delightful Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends. You take on the role of a robot sushi chef, brought to a small village to help put it on the map, literally, as most people have forgotten it existed. To do this, players must become the greatest sushi chef in the region, helping to bring tourists and new residents to the area. Design and decorate your restaurant, learn new recipes, upgrade your entrees, serve demanding customers, and solve a centuries old mystery!

Hey, look at that, six months down and six more to go! I hope I was able to steer you towards a few games that you might have missed out on or given you some good ideas on something to get for that gamer in your life this holiday season. I’ll be back tomorrow morning with a look at the titles released from July to December. Take care out there folks, play some good games, and don’t let anyone…BREAK your holiday spirit!