Game of the Year 2025

It’s fun to think about which experiences you would rank highest in a given year. I tend to play a decent amount of games, so finding which one is best in a given year is also a great way to cement what I was thinking and doing and working through that year.

In previous years I’ve had two GOTY picks:

• One for best game that came out this year
• One for best game I’ve played this year (no matter when it came out.)

For this year, there’s some context logged in page for some games that I played in like Jan - March this year.

Best Game of 2025

Below are the games I’ve shortlisted from what I’ve played this year.

• Caves of Qud
• Citizen Sleeper 2
• Fantasy Life
• BF6
• EU5

Best Game from any year

Here’s the highlights from this year:

• Ascension
• Bloons TD6
• Rimworld
• BF2042
• Citizen Sleeper
• Death Stranding
• Brotato
• XCOM 2
• OpenFront.io
• KOTOR
• KOTOR 2

Crysis Series Playthrough

Starting in 2022, I decided to focus on some series that have always interested me. I’ll play through most, if not all, of the games I can get easily and rate / score them as I go.

This year I played the Crysis series - 1, 2, and 3.

• Crysis 1 is a great time, and it’s short length is to it’s benefit. It does the gunplay and sandbox-lite elements really well, and I can see it being a Halo 1 clone if it was released before Halo 2 came out. It’s not that insane of a graphical lift these days, and I think it’s a must play for any shooter-head.

• I had played Crysis 2 before, when it came to the X360 in like 2010 or 11. It’s so agressively mid-tier and of it’s time that it can be charming at times, but ultimtely it’s a chore. Like if 1 was inspired by Halo, 2 is inspired by Modern Warfare 2, down to the shlocky and overwrought story and voice clips.

• Crysis 3 is the most forgettable game of the series. It looks good, and was a great posterchild for the early 2010’s “bows are cool” fad, but otherwise it doesn’t really do anything that 2 doesn’t. It’s overwraught, annoying, and forgettable. I can see why Crysis fell off after 3, there was nothing left in the tank.

OpenTTD “Series” Playthroughs

OpenTTD has spawned so many copycats. When I first got into OpenTTD in late 2024, I gave a lot of these other games a new look. This year, I played:

• Transport Fever: I only dabbled with this one, and then moved over to 2.
• Transport Fever 2: really good, but a huge time sink. I don’t really have the time to devote to building up a network right now.
• Simutrans: Free, and not very good :(

KOTOR Series Playthru

I ended up accidentally playing through these games as I wanted to play through them with AMCA’s coverage of them.

• KOTOR 1: This game kinda sucks, compared to where BioWare would go in the future. I have a soft spot for Mass Effect, so seeing this made me just want to dip back in to ME. And, it has too many rough edges and difficulty spikes that can only be fixed by re-rolling your character. That’s cool in a D&D game where I have the docs open, but not in a Star Wars game.
  • UPDATE! Played through this game again in December, and it was really fun! The D20 system makes a ton of sense when you get into it, and party management / use is deeper than Mass Effect. Updating my options here to: KOTOR is good, actually.
• KOTOR2: A much better game! Sure the difficulty isn’t there quite so much, but it really lives up to what Star Wars could be. It’s deep, decently well written, and though a mess in terms of development it really shines. This is really what KOTOR1 should have been. Not to mention, it does replayability really well!

Game of the Year

• 2025:
  • EU5 - mostly because other games just did’t hit this year.
• Any year:
  • Rimworld - has to be. This was such a huge part of this year for me, and though other games have shined since then, this can’t be ignored.

Looking Ahead

Need to rethink this page. Maybe a job for 2026?