As we get into the final hours of the year, it’s time to reveal our overall Game of the Year 2023 winner!
14.12.2023 - 15:44 / gamesindustry.biz / Rush Cyberfunk
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Before I start this feature, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the games industry is now nearly 10,000 people shorter. Writing my feature as this celebratory thing feels weird in light of that fact.
Now, I don't engage with media for escapism mostly because escaping reality is 1) not a privilege for people like myself, and 2) real-life demands that I keep essential matters in front of my mind.
What I find interesting is seeing what creators do with entertainment based on real things. Creative work is not made without its social and political influences. Are these creative works ten toes down on their point, or will their sanitized approach leave a bad taste in my mouth?
This brings me to my game of the year, Team Reptile's skating, graffiti writing, and street culture-inspired Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (BRC). BRC tells you precisely what it's about within the game's first five minutes.
You bust someone out of custody and spray paint art on the walls of New Amsterdam's police headquarters. All the while learning the game's basic controls - this is now my favorite tutorial chapter of a video game to date.
If the title hasn't made its stance against the police clear yet, the last thing you do in the introduction chapter is fight cops to evade arrest.
Then, Red's story with the BRC crew (along with Bel and Tyrce) unfolds across six chapters. You'll find an upfront, highly stylized, vibrant title that never eases on its themes over its eight-hours-or-less runtime.
The team aims to become the best graffiti crew, gaining the title of All City in New Amsterdam. It also serves as the narrative underlying Red's efforts to find out who he is in this weird (weird good) story.
BRC's five boroughs five boroughs you'll run - err... skate through visually just pop. For example, the first area, Versum Hill, will look familiar to those who have lived in a big American city. Apartments, a subway, and a basketball court surround it.
The Millennium Mall area is so big and packed with businesses it probably gives the Mall of Americas a run for its money. Then there’s the Mataan borough; it's scary how much it reminds me of downtown Miami at night. Lights are everywhere, packed with people, billboards, and streets that seemingly don't end.
Team Reptile made color and character design decisions within BRC with stylistic purpose. Each of the crews within the game matches their respective surroundings. The Franks, the Frankenstein-like basketball players’ mish-mash of skin tones, match the earth tones of the Versum Hill. The afro futuristic-inspired all-women crew Eclipse's lime green outfits compliment the primary color and shades of the Brink Terminal.
Regar
As we get into the final hours of the year, it’s time to reveal our overall Game of the Year 2023 winner!
Oh, hey! Been a minute, hasn't it? Well, a year. It's been a year. Tell you what, though, it sure does feel shorter than that. 2023 has been a whirlwind, full of huge games and even bigger news from January right through to, well, just the other day.
For far too long, Xbox gamers have had to say to themselves “Next year. Next year’s going to be the big one” as they hope for platform defining exclusives. It’s no secret that Microsoft’s expanding collection of game studios have struggled to produce over the last few years, but 2023 was a year that changed that in some ways.
2023 was a huge year for PlayStation 5, with Sony finally able to cut loose and produce consoles without any of the constraints of the last few years. There’s now over 50 million PS5 consoles out in the wild, as they’ve taken a firm grasp of this generation, and then there’s the launch of the PlayStation VR 2 to hopefully rekindle their ambitions for virtual reality.
2023 has been another great year for games as a whole with some exceptional experiences that have been a pure joy to play, but as always there’s been some jarring disappointments that hit hard, and we’ve seen the impact of slowing economies around the world on executives making business decisions.
Ho ho hello! Christmas may already seem a distant memory, but we have gathered in our finest festive gear for one final treat — the Eurogamer Newscast News Quiz of the Year 2023.
2023 was an incredible year for Nintendo Switch fans, with Nintendo having easily the strongest line up of first party games and exclusives from the big three console manufacturers. Sure, a large part of that was thanks to the company trawling through their back catalogue of beloved classics and sprucing them up for their current handheld, but there were also long-awaited sequels, rejuvenated mainstays and more.
The PC Master Race has been a meme for a good 15 years now, but it’s truer than ever in 2023. A top tier gaming PC might be horrendously expensive when stacked up against a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S, but these days it gives you the best of all worlds. Almost.
As big as online gaming has become, 2023 has shown that single player games are absolutely thriving. Whether it’s a sequel that takes what its forebears did and refines or expands the experience further, a game that takes a genre and wrings every ounce of creativity and ingenuity out of it with new ideas, this year has been absolutely fantastic for gamers that like to be left alone in front of the screen.
Multiplayer gaming feels pretty much inescapable these days. Sure, we’ve left the days of “tacked on” multiplayer modes behind us, but now we have so many games that are all about online gaming, live service models, and a constant drip feed of things to lure you back in to play.
I think almost every gamer would agree that how a game feels to play is absolutely the most important factor in whether it’s fun or not. Given how many fan-created ‘demakes’ there are of contemporary blockbusters, the proliferation of pixel art (which while it can be pretty is hardly pushing graphical limits), and hilariously shonky nonsense of a game like Vampire Survivors, it’s pretty clear that gameplay is king.
Music is an increasingly important part of modern video games, able to elevate an experience to new heights, adding real emotion to scenes and engaging the player on a more subconscious level. What’s particularly delightful is when it goes beyond merely being an added element alongside the action that takes place on screen, but rather an integral part of the game, right down to its very conception. Of course, just being good music that you can happily listen to outside of a game-playing context helps as well…