2024 is on its way out. It wasn’t as big a year for gamers as 2023 was, and it was certainly a much more scarier year for developers, as the industry continued to remain unstable and layoffs continued to happen. Still, 2024 managed to produce some noteworthy games, and a lot of stuff happened that will no doubt affect the next year in gaming.
In this recap video, let us take a look at some notable games, as well as some notable events that shaped the year.
The open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds offered a generous trial of the game’s core systems, allowing players to get a taste of what to expect from the full game. Returning players of the franchise will be able to appreciate several quality of life improvements, while new players will get a very well-designed tutorial that lets them understand the basics of monster hunting.
The beta focused on showcasing three things: character creation, a trial of the main story, and an open-world hunt of a monster called Doshaguma. Let me quickly run through all of them.
My First Gran Turismo is a free-to-play driving simulator that is essentially a demo for Gran Turismo 7. It is targeted specifically at a group of players who have never played racing games before, but have been curious about them. This demo is designed as a friendly introduction to Gran Turismo, which continues to be the best-selling franchise in the history of PlayStation consoles.
This review doesn’t really need to exist, because why watch a review of a demo when you can go download it for free right now?
But…I am making this video for a very niche audience, which includes people who already own the full version of Gran Turismo 7, but are curious to see if My First GT can act as a lightweight alternative to the bulky GT7. And the short answer is, no, not really.
Developer Polyphony have been very careful not to include too much content in this demo so that once you are done, there’s little reason to come back. But, that doesn’t mean existing players of GT7 shouldn’t give this demo a try, because you can still finish it in a couple of hours or less, and walk away with 18 free cars that you can sell in GT7 for a neat amount of credits. Apart from that, it is not the GT7-lite experience that some people were expecting.
Secrets of the Spire is the second DLC for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and it is a lot of fun, as long as you enjoyed the base game. I said the same thing for my recent review of the new Star Wars Outlaws DLC, and it’s not a coincidence. Both DLCs were developed by the same Ubisoft subsidiary – Massive Entertainment. It’s no small feat that two teams within the same studio were able to release two high-quality DLCs in the span of a week.
Sadly, similar to Outlaws, Frontiers of Pandora also has been largely forgotten by the larger gaming community, due to its average launch reviews, so only a small portion of the people who bought the base game will actually discover this second DLC. And once again, Ubisoft’s marketing team is partially to blame. There was no trailer or details on what to expect from this DLC until after the DLC was launched. They did the same with the Star Wars DLC as well, so I’m not sure why they have adopted this strange strategy.
Anyway, Secrets of the Spire is a massive improvement over the first DLC, the Sky Breaker. It finally gives you a new gameplay mechanic in the form of a mounted crossbow, which you can use while flying your Ikran. The new map looks great, and while the story is once again a bit dull, the level design and general gameplay offer a good mix of missions that kept me going. Best of all, at nearly six hours for the main quests alone, this is a much longer DLC than the first one, and is quite memorable as well.
Wild Card is the first DLC, or “story pack” for Star Wars Outlaws, and it has come out a little less than three months after the base game’s launch. As a reminder, the launch of the base game was criticized so much that it is rumored to have been part of the reason for the delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The key points of criticism were the forced stealth sections, and the general feeling of the world not being interesting enough. While the second part is now too late to change, Ubisoft have done their best to make the first part more tolerable.
Along with the release of Wild Card, a huge title update to the base game was also released, which makes all the stealth sections in the game totally optional. You can still use stealth if you want, but if you get caught, or if you ignore it, you can continue the mission with direct action. This applies to missions in the new story pack as well, and it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the level designers, who had to work with this restriction in mind.
Anyway, Wild Card is a brief, standalone Star Wars adventure. Is it going to be nominated for any game of the year lists like the Elden Ring DLC? Probably not. But if you’re among those who liked the positive aspects of Star Wars Outlaws, then Wild Card is a good excuse to get back into the game.
MS Flight Sim 2024 got off to a very rough start, with thousands of eager aviators trying to login on day one, only to be blocked by a login queue and multiple server issues. I logged in around two hours after the global launch and was fortunate enough to get in quite quickly, and it didn’t me long to discover that behind all the online barricades, there was actually a very technically well-built game waiting to be discovered.
Before I proceed, let me mention that this is not a full review of the game. I am not a serious flight sim player, and I am not too much of a casual flyer either, because flying even casually is more stressful than playing a racing simulator seriously. If this title was not on game pass, I would certainly not give it a try. But it is a day one release on game pass, and it seemed like something different from what I usually play.
With that said, let’s look at what this game has to offer to people like me, who just want to play it out of curiosity, and not for actually using it as a flight simulator.
The 16th edition of the India Game Developer Conference was held from November 13 to 15, 2024. I have been attending this conference for quite a few years now, but this was the first time that I took out my phone and pointed the camera everywhere I went.
The resulting “vlog” is linked to this post, but I also wanted to link to the many interesting games I saw at the event, that I could not highlight in the video to avoid it running for more than an hour.
In alphabetical order, here are some of the games showcased at the event. I am only including games that have a steam page or official website available as a bare minimum, to allow for readers to discover more about these games. This is not an exhaustive list. I will add to it as and when I collect more store page/website links.
The video in this post features heavy spoilers for Hades 2, and is targeted at people who have already played the game as it exists in late October 2024. So if you haven’t yet played Hades 2, watch at your own risk.
The Olympic Update is the first major patch for Hades 2, and it was released a few days ago, on October 16, 2024. It introduces the new Olympus region to the surface path of the game, a new main boss, Prometheus, and a new weapon, the black coat, which is said to be the final weapon to be added to the game. Oh, and for those playing on the Mac, this update adds native Mac support.
With these new updates, let’s look at what the game contains now: six weapons, four bosses in the underworld region, three bosses in the surface region, two different game modes that add various modifiers and conditions to keep your runs interesting, and a whole lot of collectables, decorations, and characters with whom you can build relationships. What’s more, there’s more to come, with at least one more boss for the surface region, and maybe some more story surprises before the launch of the final game.
This is exactly the kind of experience I was hoping for with the early access version of the game, and so far, Supergiant games hasn’t disappointed me. There are a group of fans who are intentionally delaying their purchase of the game till the full version is out, because they do not want to experience the game with so many delays. The next major update is not expected until early 2025, and there is no word about the final release of the game. This means you will have to constantly remind yourself about what happened with the story, or how each of the six weapons work, and so on.
I don’t mind consuming the content in small chunks, because so far, it is very much in line with the experience offered by the first Hades game. We know what to expect from the game, and even though there may be a few surprises, the basic structure of the game is expected to remain largely the same.
Occult Chambers is a third person action horror game being developed by BornMonkie, an independent studio from Hyderabad, India. Recently, I was fortunate enough to be given access to a playtest of an early build of the game, and the team kindly allowed sharing of the footage on YouTube.
However, it is very important that I give a disclaimer right away: I primarily play on consoles, and the footage you see in this video has been captured on my really old PC, which is more than eight years old at this point, so it does not represent the best visual quality or performance of this game. I still wanted to use this footage though, because I was surprised to find the game running decently, at maximum settings, and wanted to showcase it as an example of the game running on old hardware. Thanks to some pointers from the dev team, I was able to squeeze out a decent 20-40fps performance out of the demo, while still keeping the visuals impressive, but the footage you see here has very low FPS, because I wanted to record the game at max settings. In any case, the game is still in development, and this level is only a slice of the final game, so don’t let this video give you any assumptions about the game’s visuals or performance.
Last year, I purchased Call of Duty Modern Warfare III at full price, mostly because I had just started this YouTube channel, and wanted to review a big-ticket game to get things started. Sadly, it turned out to be one of the worst video game purchases I had ever made. The campaign was terrible, the multiplayer mode launched with only a collection of remastered maps, and the zombies mode was a reskin of the free game mode DMZ.
This year, I was thankful to Microsoft for including Black Ops 6 in the game pass catalogue on day one, mostly because I thought even if it ended up being terrible, at least I was not spending any extra money. Surprisingly, Black Ops 6 turned out to be one of the best call of duty games I have played in recent times. The campaign was full of twists and turns, the multiplayer mode launched with more than a dozen all-new maps, and the zombie mode…well it did a U-Turn and went back to a round-based format, which is what a lot of fans wanted. So at least at launch, this is a really competent first person shooter that is actually worth paying full price.