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The RPS Selection Box: Ollie’s bonus games of the year 2024Imagine if you combined all three…
Imagine if you combined all three…
Image credit:RPS
Image credit:RPS
I’m quite proud of the delights that we packed behind each door of the Advent Calendar this year, to be honest. All my major choices are in there, plus a few more that I haven’t played but I’d watched other people play, and had a swell time doing so. Still, there are always a handful that don’t quite make the cut, but still deserve a heaped Christmas plateful of praise at year’s end. So here’s my selection box, my bonus games of the year for 2024. It’s an unusually diverse triad this time.
Enshrouded
Image credit:Keen Games
Seriously, I found it hard to go off and do other things to round off my early access review, because all I wanted to do was keep building. Powerful tools allow you to erect gorgeous-looking builds much quicker, and with much more freedom, than comparable games likeValheim. Voxels contextually alter their appearance to blend satisfyingly with their neighbours. There’s a wealth of rustic building materials, and being able to quickly switch not only between materials but shapes with the mouse wheel makes building about as painless an experience as I’ve ever had in these games.
Since I last played, the world of Enshrouded has grown larger, and the options for building, discovering, and stabbing things in the Shroud have grown with it. I must find time to dive back in soon.
Solium Infernum
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/League Of Geeks
It’s one of my great regrets this year that our planned diary series for political hellspawn strategy gameSolium Infernumdidn’t pan out (for various reasons). Even in the sulphurous pits of hell, I could feel things heating up very quickly in our game. Only five or six turns in, I was already engaged in a concerning war with Katharine, one where the implications of each move were so vast that even my brother, who never plays these sorts of games, was staying up til late at night with me discussing tactics and contingency plans.
Delta Force
Image credit:Tencent
Delta Forcewas a real surprise for me, and not just because it arrived so late in the year that we’d already finished up the Advent Calendar before it stole my heart. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m crazy about extraction shooters. I’m still not over the undeserved death of The Cycle: Frontier last year, and since then I’ve been on the lookout for a game to fill the void left behind. So far, Delta Force is doing a swell job - something I really didn’t expect, considering its extraction mode is just one part of the larger Battlefield-like game.
I haven’t even played the main Warfare mode yet, I’m having far too much fun in Operations. It’s a lot more streamlined and simple than Tarkov, but keeps several cool things like the jigsaw-ing inventory, and helmets that visually obscure your view when they get shot up. The economy is more forgiving than Tarkov, but things are expensive enough that it’s still painful when you lose your favourite sniper rifle. The gunplay feels great, the game looks beautiful, and themapsare phenomenal. Friends, I adore Hunt: Showdown, but there’s no denying its maps aren’t particularly natural-feeling. Just a flat array of equidistant, equally sized points of interest on a square of land. The maps in Delta Force feel like real places. Everything fits well together, movement across the map feels great, and you’re never far away from some sort of tense encounter, whether with dangerous minibosses or with other players looking to steal your gear. It’s a very, very formidable new entry to the genre, and if I weren’t heading home to visit my family over Christmas, I’d be spending most of the holiday dying repeatedly in Delta Force, and loving every moment of it.
