The DeanBeat: My favorite games of 2019

Games grew to a $148.8 billion market in 2019, up 9.6% from 2018 and reaching over 2.5 billion people across the globe. Console games, the lion’s share of the industry a decade earlier, were smaller than mobile games in 2019, a continuation of a multi-year trend, according to research firm Newzoo.

We watched the further growth of esports and game watching expand this year, and we saw the introduction of subscription gaming for Apple Arcade, Google Play, and Google Stadia’s cloud gaming service. Hyper-casual mobile games that last 30 seconds emerged, but big mobile titles like Call of Duty: Mobile emerged to hold their own against the nanosecond attention spans.

I didn’t think we could match last year’s brilliant titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man. For me, last year was the triumph of traditional narrative triple-A games that blended open worlds with deep narratives.

But the highest end of the industry didn’t rest on its laurels in 2019. As usual, I didn’t have enough time to play it all. But I enjoyed everything across the board, from Sandbox VR’s Star Trek: Discovery — Away Mission virtual reality experience to episodic games like Life is Strange 2 to mobile titles like Call of Duty: Mobile and Apple Arcade’s Where Cards Fall. I re-engaged with favorite maps from years past in Call of Duty: Mobile and plunged into battle royale maps with squadmates in the multiplayer action of Apex Legends. And I was scared out of my wits playing titles like The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan.

It felt like I had less time to explore indie experiences that my peers played, so I wasn’t the first to stumble on titles like Untitled Goose Game. But I enjoyed delving into my own passions, such as the World War II real-time strategy game Steel Battalion 2 from Eugen Systems, where I could zoom in on a single tank in a battle or pan out to see an entire division marching across the Russian landscapes. Toward the end of the year, I rushed to finish titles such as Remedy’s Control and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

For the sake of comparison, here are my favorites from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011. In each story below, the links go to our full reviews or major stories about the games. And be sure to check out the GamesBeat staff’s own votes for Game of the Year and the best individual favorites of the staff soon.

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Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.

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10) Sayonara Wild Hearts

Developer: Simogo
Publisher: Annapuana Interactive, iam8bit
Platforms: Apple Arcade/iOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Windows, MacOS, tvOS

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this dream-like game, as music games don’t usually get me dancing. But Sayonara Wild Hearts has an artsy combination of dance-fighting, pop music, and high-speed motorcycle chases that clicked for me. I played it on an iPhone with Apple Arcade‘s $5 a month subscription platform, and I used a Rotor Riot wired game controller to play it rather than brave the untrustworthy touchscreen. You can also play it on an iPad or Apple TV.

It’s a high-adrenaline game where you tap, jump, and maneuver to collect little hearts in a beautiful neon-and-black landscape. And it isn’t that long with 23 levels. The neon-on-black art is beautiful. It’s hard to believe a small game studio put it together, because the art is so well-crafted. There isn’t much of a story, but the developers tell you what you need to know.

In Sayonara Wild Hearts, you play as a young woman who suffers a heartbreak. A tarot card pops up and dubs her The Fool, transporting her into an alternate universe. She sets out to restore the harmony of the universe hidden away in the hearts of her enemies. As you take control of The Fool, you speed along on a motorcycle within a tunnel-like view of the horizon.

The fusion of music and gameplay reminds me of music games like Rez from 2001 or that wacky and artistic “Take On Me” music video by A-Ha in 1985. The gameplay in Sayonara Wild Hearts seems impossible, and it takes a lot of skill to avoid crashing. But it’s whimsical and forgiving at the same time, as you can start up right where you crashed to try again. I thought songs like Begin Again were catchy and hard to get out of my head. I’m not going to say that this was far better than many of the triple-A games that debuted this year, but this is my nod in the direction of creativity, fun, and the indie spirit on mobile devices.

9) Rage 2

Developer: Avalanche Studios and id Software
Publisher: Bethesda
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows

When id Software’s Tim Willits visited Avalanche Studios in Stockholm, he told his new compadres to ignore constraints. “When I met with the team in Stockholm on the whiteboard, “More crazy than Rage” That was the first pillar of this game,” Willits said.

And he got what he asked for. Rage 2 didn’t get the best reviews, but I thought it was underrated, as I played it through the end of the single-player campaign and played a lot of silly side missions as well. Rage 2 had a lot of environments, ranging from the Mad Max-style desert to jungles and cities. The script was a bit weak, but the enemies were tough and the weapons were glorious. The “nanotrite” capabilities that you discovered along the way are critical to defeating the biggest bosses. The art style was absolutely wild, with plenty of bright pink and yellow colors splashed across the punk habitats. And I enjoyed reuniting with my old friend, the Wingstick, which is like a boomerang that could slice an enemy’s head off.

If it had flaws, it was that it wasn’t Red Dead Redemption 2. It often littered the landscape with side missions and enemies to kill, to no purpose. You could get damaged on your way to an important mission, and then have to figure out a way to recover. It’s good if you stayed on track, built your capabilities up, and stuck to the good stuff.

The final part of the game lasted a lot longer for me because I had trouble taking down General Cross, the bad guy, and his pet monster. But to me, it was a thrill when I finally succeeded.

8) Days Gone

Developer: Sony Bend Studio
Publisher: Sony
Platforms: PlayStation 4

The amazing success of its first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) hampered this game, as did a couple of years of delays. By the time it came out, many were sick of it, and it suffered from having some of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a triple-A game. Others wrong wrote it off as a copycat of The Walking Dead, World War Z, and The Last of Us.

But I admired Sony’s guts in standing by Bend Studio, and I stuck by it too as my colleagues ragged on it. I played it for perhaps 50 hours over several weeks, and I was quite possibly the last critic to review the game. I rated it only as a 75, because of the bugs. But without them, it would have been more like a 90, based on the quality of its story and the thrill of fighting the hordes of zombies, or Freakers.

I was drawn to the story of Deacon St. John, a bounty hunter in the Oregon woods and a broken man in a fallen world. He had a death wish and could ride a motorcycle through a horde of zombies just to get them to chase him. But Bend Studio delivered on the big scene where a few hundred zombies chased the biker through an abandoned lumber mill. It was a thrill to figure out how to beat that challenge, and I was hooked on the story of how Deacon was haunted by the memory of his lost love Sarah.

The adventure took me across the beautiful Oregon landscape into horrifying creature battles, motorcycle chases, infected crows, memorable horde battles, stealth missions tracking the secretive government agency, and just plain-old surviving in the wilderness. It was kind of an art to orchestrate your escape from several hundred Freakers. And it was good to see Deacon change and become the person that Sarah would have wanted him to be.

7) Steel Division 2

Developer: Eugen Systems
Publisher: Eugen Systems
Platforms: Windows 

There are no Metacritic reviews for Steel Battalion 2. I may have been the only one who played it. But I saw the game being played on YouTube by some dedicated influencers with tiny audiences. And I was fascinated. I’ve been playing the Total War series of real-time strategy games since they first debuted more than 15 years ago, and I played Total War: Attila for hundreds of hours in 2015.

And I was glad to pour scores of hours into it this summer into Eugen Systems’ real-time strategy World War II games, which are a niche within a niche. It dwells on a bit of war history I didn’t know much about, Operation Bagration. It was the Soviet Union’s huge summer offensive in Belarus to take back big chunks of Eastern Europe from the Nazis, as the Allied invasion of Normandy was gathering steam in 1944. It was a massive set of tank, infantry, and air battles that left the German Wehrmacht in full retreat on the Eastern Front.

It has a steep learning curve. The game has more than 600 historically accurate units, 18 divisions, and an astounding level of detail in its graphics. You can focus in on an individual scene, such as above, or zoom out to get a birds’ eye view of an entire battle with thousands of soldiers. Your job as general is to constantly feed the right kind of troops into the fray to make the enemy’s forces melt away from you. This is easier said than done, as you can dislodge well-trained enemy squads from a forest trench, even if you’ve got superior armor. The enemy AI is smart, taking out your anti-tank guns on a hill with artillery or air power.

I lost dozens of skirmish matches against the AI before I figured out how to win. On top of the tactical battles, I also got hooked on the Army General mode, where you moved around divisions like chess pieces on a map. But you can still choose to play those huge campaigns, one tactical battle at a time. That’s what is amazing about the title.

6) Gears of War 5

Developer: The Coalition
Publisher: Microsoft
Platforms: Windows, Xbox One

Coalition head Rod Fergusson humbly said that Gears 5 was the best entry yet in the Gears saga. And he wasn’t making that up. I was gratified to see the developer get the balance right when it came to creating a wild action game with an emotional story with strong characters such as the hero, Kait Diaz.

Gears 4 got pretty goofy at certain points in its narrative about the human race losing its battle for survival against the Swarm in a world gone mad. But this story balanced that goofiness that brought us chainsaw bayonets with the moments where you mourn the death of a lost friend. These are tough moments because the cast of characters has survived some very tough times, and they’re a close-knit group. When you rip a character out of that group, it leaves deep wounds.

The campaign’s longer than usual, and it features cool features such as a skiff that sails across both the desert and ice. shoot out the ice under the feet of the Scions, the heavy tank bosses that carry a heavy weapon and are often shielded from attack by flying drones. This was very different from past Gears games. I remember spending an hour battling a blind boss, slowly figuring out a kind of choreography to stay out of its way, replenish my ammo, grab new weapons, and spray it with the frosty freeze guns. The title also had some cool additions to multiplayer and co-op play.

Gears 5 delivers a sense that you’re losing a big war at the same time it delivers the blow of a personal loss. And it generates a resolve to hit back. I like how this team outgrew its urges to be goofy and shocking and instead opted for something closer to fine art.

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