#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 MOD#
#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 SERIES#
#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 TV#
#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 FREE#

There’s no denying the impact Fortnite has had on our industry. Super Mario Odyssey is the best sort of game - one where the hours melt away in the face of simple, white-hot fun. If you start to tire, you can hop into your hat-shaped spaceship and blast off to another colourful, exciting world. The magic, however, is that nothing feels like busywork. The biggest change here - to replace linear levels with open-ended sandboxes with hundreds of macguffins to find - is straight out of the N64 era, where each 3D platformer developer would add another tier of rubbish to collect.

#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 SERIES#

That speaks to the quality Nintendo has managed to maintain across the series - but what’s most impressive about Odyssey is how it is a worthy successor to both Galaxy and 64, all while celebrating the joyous energy of Mario’s original outings. It probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a core-series Mario game is good.

#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 TV#

While the story is nothing new, the novelty of playing Pokemon on a 50 inch TV hasn’t worn off yet. The removal of random encounters improves things and it is very cool to see a chonky Onyx sliding around in caves in proper proportion to other Pokemon. Pokemon Let’s Go has the same story as Pokemon Yellow, except for this time you can choose between a Pikachu and an Eevee - oh, and you can play it on your TV! It’s brilliant fun and a great way to introduce Pokemon to family members young and old. The ensuing mystery has more twists than M Night Shyamalan’s pile of rejected screenplays, and while its lengthy run-time was perfectly suited to the pick-up-and-play portability of the Vita, you can now grab the whole series on Steam as well.

#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 FREE#

Caught in the clutches of the maniacal Monokuma, the “Ultimate” students of Hope’s Peak Academy are free to leave whenever they wish - as long as they can murder one of their classmates and get away with it. Part visual novel, part mini-game detective sim, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is the best kind of nonsense. There’s something really satisfying about solving traffic jams, and I wish I could do it in real life - a true power fantasy to rival Doom’s BFG. To get to work, those roads need to keep flowing.

To generate money, people need to get to work. To keep expanding, you need to generate money. Like most city builders, you have to think about where you place what, but it’s in that traffic flow that Cities Skylines comes into its own. Set up your road network, lay down the infrastructure, erect your buildings, then watch the world go by as night falls and headlights twinkle along the motorways. I don’t really see Cities Skylines as a strategy game - it’s more of a chill simulation. And you can play as cat people, which makes it better than most games.

#BEST INDIE GAMES 2010 MOD#

You can mod the absolute hell out of it, too, including a sweet Mass Effect mod. Whether you’re creating a government, mining for resources, or building a Dyson sphere, the granular micromanagement in Stellaris can feel overwhelming at times, but everything fits together wonderfully. While it’s more accessible than other Paradox titles, it’s still a complicated beast that consists of running an empire, exploring the galaxy, and claiming new worlds and systems as your own while tackling RNG random encounters that could indefinitely change the course of your game. Stellaris brings together two of my favourite genres: sci-fi and grand strategy. Any games that didn’t make it into the top 50 were brutally sliced off the bottom and lost to the annals of history. Add them together and you get something approaching a consensus. Each person’s top choice got 25 points and each underneath it got one point less. To achieve this, we used science: everyone on staff picked their top 25 games of the last ten years and placed them in order. Since we don’t get many chances to look at a decade as a whole, we thought it’d be nice to look back on the past ten years in video games and select what we consider the best of the best, ranking them all to boil some piss. The same goes for video games - the gaming landscape has changed in those ten years, with many developers now focusing on building games that will last a decade, rather than be consumed and forgotten, in the form of service games. Maybe you weren’t longing for an asteroid.

Perhaps you had another job, lived in a different house, or you have a different circle of friends. Just think back to where you were in 2010 and there’s a good chance your life was different. You don’t realise how long ten years is until you sit back and take stock of what’s happened in the space of a decade.

Best indie games 2010