The DeanBeat: My favorite games of 2019

5) Death Stranding

Developer: Kojima Productions
Publisher: Sony
Platforms: PlayStation 4

Talk about both goofy and creative. Hideo Kojima’s debut on his own, outside the familiar embrace of Konami, was a huge undertaking. Sony decided to bankroll Kojima’s project after he parted ways with Konami in 2015, after he completed Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. At The Game Awards in December 2015, host Geoff Keighley skewered Konami for not allowing Kojima to travel to Los Angeles accept an award for the game, opening the way for some hero worship of Kojima.

I was truly befuddled when I started playing the resulting epic, Death Stranding, which had huge cut scenes that left me even more befuddled. Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus, is a kind of postman in the wake of the apocalypse, which has separated human communities into disconnected, offline places that have to be reunited by these postal workers who brave the disintegrating rain and use babies to warn them about the presence of otherworldy beasts.

You’re tempted to carry huge, comical loads of packages, like an Amazon carrier during the holiday season. But if you run into trouble and can’t flee fast enough, you’ll lose your whole load. Strangely enough, other players can pick up your deliveries and complete them, or trash them and cause you more grief. This beginning only gets weirder as you run into actual plot characters.

But I admire Kojima’s risk taking. He has a message about connecting us and doing so in a largely non-violent way. It is a beautiful game and an amazing journey into the bizarre and the comical. The latter is illustrated when Sam drinks Monster Energy drinks to restore his health.

4) Control

Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: 505 Games
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

In the surreal world of Control, you start out not knowing what is going on, and then things get more confusing. But if you stick with it through the end, it is a wonderful adventure that reflects the imaginative genius of creative director Sam Lake and the crew at Remedy, which has given us games like Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break. Remedy has differentiated itself over the years with its reality-bending stories that address subjects such as time travel to writer’s block.

As Jesse, you find yourself as the director of the Federal Bureau of Control, set in the Oldest House (which keeps changing as you progress through its levels). The game efficiently uses and reuses a relatively small place, in contrast to the crazy open worlds of modern games. Jesse finds she has to unlock various places and discover secrets that apparently drove the previous director to commit suicide.

You pick up a magical gun that is an Object of Power, one of many mundane objects that can protect you from an amorphous enemy, dubbed the Hiss, that possesses the bodies of soldiers and creatures that turn against you. It is a wonderfully imaginative story, with nods to Weird TV, with some very good acting by characters like the insane Dr. Darling. Everybody is banking on Jesse to save the day against the Hiss, but her concern is locating her brother Dylan, who was abducted by the bureau.

The game is so well done on many levels, from the gunplay to the challenge of beating the enemies and the thrill of picking up objects and tossing them with superhuman force at anything that stands in your way. It’s satisfying, with endings that aren’t endings and leave you puzzled.

I was waiting for a bigger pay off to the notion that this game universe was connected to other games that Remedy has made. I’ll leave that there, as I don’t want to spoil the ending. But there were many more opportunities to overtly tie in things that didn’t get tied in.

3) Apex Legends

Developer: Respawn Entertainment
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows

Apex Legends took the battle royale world by storm, growing to more than 50 million players within a month of its launch. Respawn Entertainment was late to the battle royale craze, but it decided to postpone Titanfall 3 and it “chased the fun.” That is, the team began iterating on its own idea of a battle royale game, and it didn’t stop until it shipped Apex Legends as a surprise title in March.

In nine months, the game grew to more than 70 million players and challenged battle royale stalwarts such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. It was so easy to jump into and start playing that it became my favorite battle royale game within a short time.

The success surprised Respawn and Electronic Arts, and they lost some crucial weeks as they caught up with the demand and retooled the development effort to update the game more frequently. By that time, Fortnite recovered. But I loved the feel of guns like the Spitfire in Apex Legends. It had a more logical spread of enemies, with 60 people in a match split into three-player teams. The map got old, but then Respawn updated it with a new one, and it brought a lot of players like me back.

You land on the map unarmed and have to frantically search for weapons. I liked the way that the game forced players to communicate, and how it introduced non-verbal ways of helping your friends. You could click on a rifle to tell your team that there was something that they might want. The different characters, or Legends, had very different and sometimes comical capabilities, like Mirage, who could vanish and then send enemies chasing after an illusion. In Apex Legends, I felt like I had a chance to win. And I did a couple of times, but that was mostly a kind of lie that I learned to live with because it was so fun.

2) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows

Of all the games that came out this year and of all the Call of Duty games I played, none worried me more than the Modern Warfare remake that came from Infinity Ward, a studio that had been known for pushing the edge when it came to shocking and provocative violence in its games. It has truly disturbing violence that depicts chemical warfare, civilian and animal deaths, child combat, multiple torture scenes, and the shooting of unarmed women. You can’t unsee these scenes, which resemble documentaries like Last Men in Aleppo (which is about the White Helmet rescue teams in Syria). This didn’t look so good the first time I saw a preview of this game, and I still strongly advise that kids don’t play this game.

But it is also one of the best games that Call of Duty developers have ever made.

The studio created a unique character in Farah Ahmed Karim that becomes the conscience of the game and the fictional war that resembles the U.S fighting in Syria and Afghanistan. The game depicts the horrors of war, as experienced by the soldiers who must fight it, and the everyday life-or-death decisions they must make.

The circumstances are gritty, raw, and ugly. Soldiers are put in impossible situations, and the game forces you to feel empathy for what soldiers and people who are stuck in communities at war go through. Karim is a good leader because she knows exactly where she draws the line, and if you cross it, you are her enemy. With a new game engine, the graphics look amazing. The PC version makes really good use of shadows and lighting. And ultimately the game preserves its message about empathy for the soldier without allowing the player to perform the most unethical acts in warfare. It holds you back from your worst behavior, even as it shows you what that behavior could be. And that is a good lesson to impart.

I’ve also been obsessively playing the game, reaching level 51 in multiplayer. I’ve leveled up a light machine gun and can actually hold my own in Team Deathmatch battles that I would have completely failed to survive in past years. The game gives you a path to become proficient, and if you stick to it, you can actually see yourself progress in the rankings. My victory-loss ratio is 50-50, and my kill-death ratio is 0.86, after scores of matches played. I’m having the most fun in multiplayer in a long time, and I could hit Prestige, or the top level, earlier than ever at this rate. The game also has a good policy in place with cross-platform play and no fees for DLC and no game-winning microtransactions.

On both fronts, with single-player and multiplayer, Infinity Ward did the right thing and walked the line, producing one of the best Call of Duty games in years.

1) Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Developer: Respawn Entertainment
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows

I was not prepared to like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, because of the mixed bag of Star Wars games over the years. But Respawn learned some great lessons from the past, and it was inspired by the right games, such as Dark Souls and Metroid Prime.

The lightsaber combat is superb, requiring you to master swordplay in a way that you have never had to do in an accessible Star Wars game. You couple that with an epic story of Cal Kestis, one of the last surviving Jedi after the events of the first chronological film trilogy, and a journey across six planets and a huge diversity of environments, and you get a masterpiece.

It has some glitches that held it down on Metacritic, which suggests the game could have had a bit more time for polishing. In fact, there was one bug where I thought I had to train over and over again to succeed, only to learn that I needed to reboot the console. I also didn’t like backtracking, or unwinding a maze that I had just succeeded in threading. But I like the feel of exploration, as the game doesn’t follow any other Star Wars plot and so you don’t know what to expect.

As a Souls-like game, every enemy has the chance to knock you on your ass. If your timing is off slightly, expect to die. It has some fierce enemies in the Inquisitors, who serve as seemingly unbeatable bosses that you fight in lightsaber duels. There were many moments when I felt like I would never be able to win a boss fight. But with enough repetition, I would find an opening and win. The Second Sister is one of the most interesting villains I’ve seen in a Star Wars story.

It’s a glorious moment when you upgrade your lightsaber and become the badass of the game, only to find there is someone stronger than you. Respawn has never been known for its storytelling, but the game has plenty of moments of humor and drama, and the cute droid, BD-1, is a delight as a sidekick for Cal. I felt that each scene and each battle in the game had been crafted, just so I could barely win. That’s what made it so satisfying.

Honorable mentions

• Life is Strange 2
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• Untitled Goose Game
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• The Division 2
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Telling Lies
• Borderlands 3
• Call of Duty: Mobile
• Metro Exodus