2020 has certainly been a year, huh. I’m sure everybody doing any kind of retrospective on this past year will be talking about “these unprecedented times”, so I certainly shan’t dwell on it too much here. However, despite that, this past year has been a pretty fantastic year for gaming, and that’s without even considering the launch of a new console generation. These are my Top 10 Games That Were You Know Actually Pretty Decent.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Most important change: Jessie now horny af

I’m not sure what’s more astonishing: that Square actually remade Final Fantasy VII, or that fact that it’s fucking incredible. Seriously. As a massive FF7 fan, this game is so close to perfectly encapsulating what a remade FF7 would look like in my head. It hits so many of the right nostalgia notes, but never feels like it’s pandering purely to those nostalgic of the original, it’s an accomplishment in its own right. The gameplay is an iteration of FFXV’s, only this time it’s actually good and has enough mechanics to make it feel distinctly FF7, despite being a mostly real-time action affair. Visually, aside from a few dodgy textures here and there, it looks sublime. Characters move and emote in ways you could only dream of 20+ years ago. Midgar now feels like the actual sprawling metropolis that it’s supposed to be. The soundtrack is so good, I spent upwards of £100 importing a fancy limited edition physical boxset of it from Japan. The additions and changes they made to flesh out the story and characters are on the whole, fantastic.

There is that ending though. If you’ve played the game, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t played the game, you might still know what I’m talking about. I don’t like to really spoil things in these end of year roundups I do, so I’m not going to delve into details. I will say though, that my feelings on what Square Enix did with the ending of this game will ultimately depend on what they do going forward. There is the potential for them to completely change everything from here on out, or, not at all. The stopping point of the story in Remake is fundamentally not any different from what it was in the original game, but SE have given themselves an out if they want to go batshit insane in the next parts, and whether they do (and how they do, if so) will be what shapes my view of this game looking back.

A Short Hike

They’re a big deal.

This short and sweet little indie game is something I picked up on Switch after seeing some buzz about it in a few of those “hidden gem” threads you see on Reddit and the like. It turns out, I already had it on PC: it was free on the Epic Store at some point, but I certainly don’t begrudge the few quid I paid for it on Switch.

You play as Claire, an anthropomorphic bird, and your ultimate goal is to get to the top of a mountain that forms part of a national park that you’ve visited with your aunt. It’s essentially a small open-world exploration game with some really simple but satisfying movement mechanics. Being a bird, you can glide as well as earn golden feathers which give you additional jumps. The endgame is to climb the mountain, but you’ll be spending plenty of time finding those feather upgrades, as well as doing minor puzzles, finding chests, or just exploring and talking to the other animals that are going about their various activities in the park. Said characters and the writing is all very charming and funny, and the whole thing has a low-res 3D aesthetic that I was really into.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2

This is definitely how this game originally looked, right?

THPS 1 and 2 weren’t my favourite games in the series. Honestly, I preferred 3, 4, and THUG. But that’s not to say I didn’t like 1 and 2, and certainly not that I don’t have nostalgia for them. In fact, one fond childhood memory I have is sitting down in the bedroom of a friend who I have long since lost touch with, handing the controller to each other as we take turns playing through the PS1 demo of the first THPS game (or, Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding, as it was called over here).

These games were a cultural phenomenon. Ask any kid who was a skater in the early 2000s why they got into skateboarding, and the vast majority of them would tell you it was because of THPS. That includes me, I was a skater kid in my early teens, as were a good deal of my friends and it was all thanks to these games. They were also a big influence on my early music taste. THPS3 in particular would release a few months after my 11th birthday when I received my first CD player. Tony Hawk’s games shaped a not-insignificant part of my identity as a tween.

And so, these remakes of the first two games together in one package is about as perfect as it could be. It controls just like it should. It looks great. The soundtrack is all there. Well, a few songs are apparently missing, but nothing stuck out to me. Superman is there. Police Truck is there. Jerry Was a Race Car Driver is there. I didn’t really need any more, to be honest. Honestly, my only real criticism is that… it’s a remake of 1 and 2 and not the later ones. 3 pretty much perfected the formula these games laid out, but in all honesty, I’m not a massive fan of the timed, score-attack nature of the first few entries. I generally preferred the more open, freeform nature of 4 and THUG. Here’s hoping for an eventual remake of these. Give me that motherfucker, Eric Sparrow, in HD, you cowards!

Granblue Fantasy Versus

Charlotta is basically E.Honda plus Akuma.

If you read last year’s entry, you’ll recall my gushing about Granblue Fantasy, a browser-based gacha JRPG which, at the time of writing, I have over 1500 hours of playtime in. I went on about much I’d fallen in love with its world and characters last year, and this year, to be able to see some of them be playable in 3D, and in one of my favourite genres, made by one of the best developers in that genre, is fantastic.

It’s a shame that covid really fucked this game over. Not being able to develop any kind of local tournament scene coupled with the pretty bad netcode means the game is pretty much only held up by the GBF whales (cough) buying it and the DLC for bonuses for the gacha game. Which is a shame because, as far as fighting games go, this is a really good one in my opinion. Arc System Works is known for making “anime fighters”: that is, fighters with much more crazy stuff like air-dashes, long juggle combos, crazy character-specific mechanics, and whatnot. Granblue Versus, however, is actually much more subdued. If Dragon Ball Fighterz was ArcSys’s take on the madness that is Marvel, then GBVS is their take on Street Fighter. And I really like Street Fighter.

I really hope that once the whole virus situation is behind us (if it ever will be…) that this game can still gain a solid footing as a competitive game in the FGC. It combines two of my big recent loves in gaming and I’d like nothing more than to see it successful.

Rune Factory 4 Special

This game gets me.

Okay. What if Stardew Valley… but hella anime?

That’s it. That’s this game. A fantasy Harvest Moon. That was literally the subtitle for the first couple of games’ English release.

This is an updated rerelease on the Switch for what was originally a 3DS game… and it shows. Not that graphics are everything, of course, otherwise, this game wouldn’t be on this list. I don’t really have any experience with the Harvest Moon series, which is why my initial comparison was Stardew. Like that game, there’s a lot more to do than just farming: there’s a plot, you can go fishing, there’s a fairly deep combat system, a fairly large world to explore, you can get married, etc, etc. If you’re into those kinds of games, this here is a good one of those.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

This game is hella pretty.

Okay. So. I don’t rank these lists, right? But this game is number one. This is my favourite game I played this year.

If Nier: Automata didn’t exist, this would probably be my favourite game of the entire generation.

13 Sentinels has one of the best stories in a video game. Period.

What if Vanillaware, a studio mostly known for side-scrolling action games like Muramasa and Odin Sphere, instead made a 30 hour, story-focused adventure game? And what if that story involved taking almost every conceivable sci-fi trope, cliché, and influence, threw them all into a blender, and then doled it out over a non-linear storyline comprising of thirteen different viewpoints and multiple time periods? And what if that somehow all came together perfectly, and not as an incomprehensible mess? Because that’s what they did. And it’s fucking amazing.

If you like story-focused games, and especially if you like sci-fi, 13 Sentinels is absolutely required viewing.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I think my Switch may have died, so here’s a promo screenshot. :/

I’m sure just about everybody who’s talked about Animal Crossing this year has said something to the effect of how it came out at “the perfect time” and… they’re not wrong. As someone who’s day job is working in food retail, I was working right through the pandemic with only a few weeks of regular holiday time as time off. And as someone who is a diabetic (read: slightly higher risk of complications should I catch the ‘rona), the combination of those two facts made the time around this game’s release a very anxious one.

So it was nice to have this charming, super chill game where you ultimately do fuck all to just unwind a bit when I needed it. Something about the daily routine of just pottering about my island, hitting rocks to find money, shaking trees hoping a pinball table or something falls out, catching bugs to spook the local owl, or the myriad of other forms of simple busywork made for a nice, relaxing experience at a time where I, and many others, really needed one. I’ve long since moved on from the game, but I’ll look back on it fondly, and it’s certainly a large part of what I think of as “2020” in my head.

Demon’s Souls

Photo mode is a nightmare.

I’m going to be honest: of all the Souls games I’ve spent a decent amount of time with (which is most of them), I personally think Demon’s Souls is the weakest. That’s kind of to be expected, it was the first one, after all, they were still making the formula. However, this game’s biggest weakness in my opinion is its level design. I’m about to make a comment that I’m sure a lot of people will take umbrage with and tell me to “git gud”, but I hate the general lack of checkpointing and shortcuts in DeS compared to the later offerings. A general staple of Souls level-design is that you start at a checkpoint, you move and fight your way through an often labyrinthian area, only to eventually unlock a door or pull a lever or something that creates a quick shortcut back to the checkpoint you started at. There’s very little of that in this game. The only hard checkpoints are at the start of an area, and after beating a boss. It makes it so, after meticulously making my way through an area for 20 minutes only to then get killed, or make it to a boss only to then get killed, it feels very frustrating, and the inclination to just give up rather than try again is much higher than in the later games. In games like Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne, etc, the paths you had to take to get back to reattempt a boss or whatever felt much shorter. The combat itself was just as challenging, but they felt like they respected your time better through their level-design.

All that said, this is still a Souls game (originally) designed by FromSoftware, so even the worst of them is still very, very good. This remake of it is very, very good. It looks absolutely stunning, and the fact that it’s a graphical showpiece for the PlayStation 5 without making use of any ray-tracing speaks volumes to the quality of its artistry. I never played Bluepoint’s previous remake of Shadow of the Colossus, but this is certainly their best work yet, and I’m excited to see what they do next, whether it be another reimagining of a beloved game or something of their own.

Hades

You can pet the dog(s?).

Supergiant Games’ latest is one of the best rogue-likes on the market. Not only because the gameplay is superb, but because they’re pretty much the only studio that has managed the inclusion of a fleshed-out story into this genre and have it fit and make sense. And there’s so much story here! Every time you die and are returned to the hub at the beginning, you’re treated to a bunch of great dialogue from a bunch of great characters and, in the roughly 30 hours or so of playtime I have, have not once heard any repeated lines.

The rogue-like gameplay itself is also super satisfying, the studio’s penchant for great-feeling combat is still there, and the best it’s ever been. The healthy selection of weapons you can pick to make a run with, coupled with the plethora of boons (upgrades, effects, modifiers, and the like) you pick up along the way can make for a staggering variety of possible builds. One of my favourite runs had me getting upgrades that gave me more dashes, and those dashes would also damage enemies and knock them back, and enemies being knocked back would also take damage, and well as getting hit by a status effect, and a few other effects. The end result being that I could just enter a chamber and mash X to dash around like a madman, never even swinging whatever weapon I had, and everything would die. You can stumble into some really cool builds.

I haven’t played as much as I would’ve liked of Hades after it released as 1.0 this year, so I hope to get back to it at some point and see what they’ve added. Probably even more dialogue!

Genshin Impact

I wish I had Qiqi so I could take dumb photos like this.

Genshin is… a weird one to put on a best-of list. It’s definitely a good game, but it’s also a gacha game, and gacha games are inherently predatory, even the good ones. I say this as someone deep into a gacha game, one that I’ve spent money on. Even if a gacha doesn’t really try to monopolise your wallet, it may very well try to monopolise your time, though granted, if you’ve played any MMO, or live-service game from the last half-decade or so, you’ll be familiar with that. Genshin Impact’s gacha is bad. Like, among the worst in the industry bad. Like, 0.6% chance of getting a 5-star character, of which you need multiple dupes to fully upgrade bad. (For reference, the draw-rate for SSRs, the equivalent in Granblue Fantasy is 3%, or 6% on bimonthly gala banners, which are the only ones you’d realistically ever pull on, and the game doesn’t have a mechanic for dupe characters: once you get a character, you’re done.)

Thankfully, you can kind of ignore the gacha aspect of Genshin, and what you’re left with it a pretty polished and enjoyable open-world RPG that takes some superficial influence from Breath of the Wild, but is ultimately its own thing. The open-world here was enjoyable to me for largely the same reason that Zelda’s was, because I generally like exploring for the sake of exploring, and said exploration will almost always reward you with something, even if it’s small. The combat is not particularly deep, but enjoyable, focusing on quickly switching on the fly between a party of four characters, primarily to cast elementally-attuned abilities whenever they’re off cooldown in order to create elemental reactions that result in status effects and/or big damage.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste: it gets very grindy once you get into the endgame, and the insidious gacha aspects will always be there, waiting to snare someone without the impulse control to resist. But if you go in and treat it as a single-player open-world RPG, you can get a lot of polished hours of enjoyment out of Genshin, which for the entry price of free is remarkable.

And so there we have it for the hellyear that was 2020. Let’s see what the next year brings: hopefully some more meaty offerings in the next-gen exclusives department. Not that being able to play PS4 games at their absolute best on PS5 isn’t great, but I’d love for some more killers apps that aren’t just remakes of a game from two generations ago. Hopefully Nintendo will actually put some first-party games of note, and I would love at least of a glimpse of where the FF7 Remake is heading.

Welcome, one and all, to the now third annual installant of Those Games What Released This Year That I Think Were Alright. It’s been a slow year here on Jeo.me, with a whopping TWO previous posts in 2014. I had plenty of posts I was planning on putting up this year, but I kind of got lazy and they fell through. Mostly because I was probably too busy playing Street Fighter. Enough of that though, apologising about lack of posts is pretty much a trope round these parts at this point, so on to talking about games from this year that I liked.

You should know the format by now; these games are in no particular order, and being released in 2014 is the only requirement needed to be eligible.

Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster

I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll mention it again: Final Fantasy X is my favourite game of all time. Is it objectively the greatest game ever made? Of course not, but it’s my favourite. It had probably the greatest impact on my taste in video games that I can think of, and I immensely enjoy all the time that I spend with it. So to be able to play a game that is now almost 15 years old at this point on a somewhat modern console, with somewhat modern looking graphics, is an utmost pleasure. Me being me, I’ll probably also end up double-dipping when it comes to PS4 next year.

Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire

I’ve always been a total sucker for the mainline Pokemon games. Ever since the original Blue and Red versions, I’ve always invested a fair amount of time into every major Pokemon release since then. The original Gen III games were probably around the time a lot of people started to write them off, citing “badly designed pokémon” or whatever (even though they often gloss over some of the terrible Gen I designs with their rose glasses). I’ve a particular fondness for each generation of Pokémon, and Ruby and Sapphire were no different. Being able to adventure through Hoenn again, with all that water and all those trumpets, only this time in 3D and with all the gameplay up-grades you’d expect, has been a treat.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call

Do you like Final Fantasy music? Do you like rhythm games? Then there is almost nothing to not like about Theatrhythm. Curtain Call improves on the first game mostly by just having a metric fucktonne of music, as well as a whole bunch more characters available to build your party with. There’s also a whole new quest system, which is enjoyable to play and provides a little more meat than some of the content of the first game. There’s also a new multiplayer mode, which is… eh, not great, but can be a fun distraction. But the main draw has always been the simple, but fun rhythm gameplay and the swaths of Uematsu-san and company’s music spanning two decades.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Considering I paid the extravagant amount of £0 for Isaac (well, minus my PS+ sub fee of course), the money-per-hour ratio of this game is probably the highest on the list. If you played the original Isaac, you’ll know what to expect here. It’s basically the same game built again from scratch, so it’s no longer a flash game, which is good. Very good. Content wise, I believe it contains everything from BoI plus the Wrath of Lamb expansion, as well as some other new content sprinkled throughout. I never got very heavily into the original, but I’ve played enough of Rebirth to cause my PS4’s left thumbstick to start falling apart. Also, Azazel is hella OP.

Ultra Street Fighter IV

For a brief second, I considered making this entire post just “Street Fighter is rad, peeeeace” and leave it at that. Definitely wins the award for most amount of time I’ve spent with a game this year. This latest version of Street Fighter IV, as well as introducing five “new” characters (four from Street Fighter X Tekken and one literal Cammy clone) also introduces a few new system mechanics to help move the game away from the very set-play heavy state the previous version was. It’s still very much Street Fighter IV and I love me some Street Fighter IV.

The Wolf Among Us

While I feel that the story took somewhat of a dive towards the end, and an episodic format is probably not the best for a murder mystery story, I found myself nevertheless enjoying The Wolf Among Us immensely. As someone who wasn’t familiar with Fables going in, I found the premise incredibly interesting, and the game itself is just… stylish. Killer soundtrack and 80s-inspired neon visuals, the game is a treat for the senses.

Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax

Thankfully, the wait here in Europe this time around for the next Persona 4 Arena game wasn’t quite as painful as it was last time. Ultimax is basically the… well, ultimate version of P4A. The story I felt was a lot weaker this time around compared to the last game, but from a pure gameplay side, there’s a lot to like. An expanded roster, now featuring pretty much every conceivable character from Persona 3 and 4 that makes sense, “shadow” versions of every character who play differently and have different tools, and a whole host of incremental improvements, including a very cool and robust lobby system for online play. I’ll never get into it quite the way I did Street Fighter, because fundamental things about the way anime fighting games play don’t jive well with me, but Ultimax is a great fighter worth checking out if you’re into the genre, or simply just a Persona fan.

The Last of Us: Left Behind

I could put The Last of Us Remastered on here, since that game is still as incredible as it was when it first came out, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to put Left Behind, the story DLC that released earlier this year. There was a lot to love about The Last of Us, and Ellie is at, or close to, the top of that list. So to get the chance to learn a lot more about her backstory is something I just couldn’t pass up. The story aspects of Left Behind are top-notch as you’d expect, but so is the gameplay. They use a lot of the game’s combat mechanics in interesting and novel, non-combat scenarios and it also features the only combat encounters in the entirety of The Last of Us that feature both human and infected enemies, something that should’ve been present in the original game. If you enjoyed The Last of Us, you owe it to yourself to play the Left Behind.

Titanfall

Remember Titanfall? Released way back in, what, March? Man, that game didn’t set the world on fire quite like a lot of people expected it to, but it was still a pretty solid first outing from Respawn. It definitely has some key flaws, but it’s the sort of thing that makes you excited for what could be in Titanfall 2. Plus, the core gameplay is a blast. It’s interesting to see games like Halo 5 and this year’s Call of Duty already seemingly taking influence from the way Titanfall does movement and mobility.

Threes!

Threes! is a mobile game, and mobile games are generally not something I give much of a fuck about. It’s a number game, where you have cards on a grid, and have to move them in 4 directions to combine identical cards, similar to, but not as insane as something like 2048. It also has a great style, with fantastic music, silly voiceovers, and a nice clean aesthetic. There’s even a snappable Xbox One version now, which is cool. It deserves a spot here solely based on the amount of time I spent with it this year. Mobile games tend to have a very “flavour of the week” thing going on, where big games come and go really quickly, but Threes! had a constant presence on my phone throughout the majority of the year.

Honourable Mentions and Games That Would’ve Been on this List had I Played (More of) Them

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is probably the best CoD game in years, and the only one since MW3 that I’ve bothered to finish the campaign of. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a collection of 4 games, each great in their own right, but isn’t on the list because… well, that game was, and still is, broken as fuck. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes gets me real excited for The Phantom Pain, but as a standalone product, there just isn’t enough of what I want out of a Metal Gear game. Destiny is the worst game that I spent the most amount of time playing. I could probably write an entire post about everything that game did wrong, yet for some reason, for a good chunk of time, I couldn’t stop playing it. Fantasy Life is an adorable RPG for the 3DS by the Professor Layton people, that seems like it has a bunch of stuff to do in it, but I simply haven’t been able to put that much time into it yet. Lethal League is an awesome take on the fighting game genre that I definitely need to play more of. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Wolfenstein: The New Order are the two big standout non-Wii U games this year, that are the kind of games I enjoy, but I simply haven’t played.

There are also a multitude of indie games this year that either passed me by, or that I simply didn’t manage to play. This year was also probably the best year yet for the Wii U, with games like Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8, and Super Smash Bros. putting up a strong argument that, maybe, I should think about getting a Wii U at some point soon.

Looking back, 2014 has been a somewhat lackluster year. The new consoles are out, and have been for over a year now, but are stuggling to make a strong footing with games convincing you to throw down the money for them. Most of the big games for them have been either remasters and rereleases of old games, or big marquee titles that were mostly broken messes at launch.

But tomorrow is 2015, and if Back to the Future taught us anything, it’s that we’re all going to be flying about on hoverboards and flying cars, and that sounds way cooler than any of this video game shit.

So, I posted a little bit about Diablo III when it first came out, way back when. I enjoyed it for the most part, with my only real issues being in the storytelling department. Unfortunately, at that time I had not played through the game all the way to level 60, I only got to somewhere in the mid-30s. So because of that, I hadn’t experienced any of the endgame, which is often the meat and potatoes of this genre. The endgame content of these types of games is basically just doing runs over and over until you find loot upgrades that allow you to do those runs more efficiently. Repeat until you get bored of it. The issues that people had with Diablo III’s endgame basically boiled down to the itemisation. The loot just wasn’t very interesting, and it took too long to find meaningful upgrades.

This was an almost direct result of the existence of the game’s auction house. Whether it be by using in-game gold or real money, players could buy and sell items that they had found in-game. Because of this, finding decent items was a rare occurrence, otherwise virtually everyone could stick their loot on the auction house and make some money. It also meant that the most efficient way to upgrade your character was not by playing the game, but by simply buying upgrades on the auction house.

Since Diablo III’s release two years ago, there have been a number of updates to help fix this issue, with the two main ones being “loot 2.0” and the now complete removal of the auction houses from the game. Loot 2.0, which overhauls the loot system to a more quality-over-quantity experience means you are now more likely to find more meaningful upgrades more often. Where previously a stat on an item could’ve rolled from anywhere between 1-100, it’s now more like 75-100. Add to that much better legendary item drop rates (you’re now pretty much guaranteed a legendary at least every hour or two, compared to my 3 legendaries in about 100 hours previously) means that the loot progression is much more satisfying and feels like much less of a grind.

This week also brought about the game’s first major content update, in the form of Reaper of Souls. As well as adding a whole new act onto the story, the expansion also brings about a whole host of other cool new features. The biggest of these, Adventure Mode, essentially completely changes the way in which you play the game. Unlocked for all your characters once you’ve played through Act V once, Adventure Mode opens up the entire game and allows you to travel wherever you want, completing bounties. These bounties are usually quick, five minute affairs, where you travel to a specific location and kill a specified enemy, or complete a specific event. Completing these nets you experience and gold awards, as well as bonuses if you finish five bounties in one act.

But that’s not even the coolest part. By completing these bounties, you will occasionally be rewarded with Rift Key Fragments. Spending five of these allows you go back to town and open a Nephalem Rift. These are essentially completely random dungeons (seriously, take every tileset and enemy type in the game, and throw them into an RNG) with a powerful boss at the end for you to kill. The monster density in these rifts also tends to be quite high, so the potential for big XP and loot gains is high.

Crusader is pretty dope.

The expansion also increases the level cap by 10, up to a max of 70. Higher level means better loot. Even some of the basic level 70 gears makes the best level 60 gear look terrible. Each class also has a brand new ability and set of runes to go with it, which first unlocks when you hit 61. The only one I’ve tried, the Wizard’s Black Hole, is cool and seems to work well as a decent crowd control ability. There’s also the brand new class, the Crusader. I haven’t messed too much with it (only level 30 or so) but the class seems to play fairly similar to the Barbarian, with the main difference being a lot of more defensive abilities, which require resource spending to use, rather than being cooldown based. They definitely seem like they have the ability to be super tanky. Oh, and one of their passives allows them to weird a two-handed weapon and a shield at the same time. So that’s pretty rad.

There’s also a third artisan to go alongside the blacksmith and jeweller: the enchantress. She can let you enchant items, essentially completely re-rolling a stat on an item in the hopes for a better one, for a price of course. So if you find an item that is great all-round except for one bum stat, it’s very much possible to fix that. She can also “transmogrify” items, altering their appearance. So if you find a really good upgrade, but think it looks ugly as shit, you can pay her to just make it look like another item of the same type. For someone like me who cares a lot about cosmetic customisation in games, this is a very welcome addition.

Some real nice environments in the new expansion,

As for the actual new act, it’s pretty good. I’ve only played through it once, but it felt to be of decent length. At least, much longer than the mostly disappointing act IV. Most of the new enemy types aren’t particularly interesting, in my opinion, however, the new environment designs are probably among the best in the entire game. Strong art design has always been one of Blizzard’s strengths and it definition shows here.

If you care at all about Diablo III, the expansion is definitely a worthy addition and worth picking up. If you haven’t played the game much since release, you should probably give it another go. Even before the expansion there have been a number of improvements that have made the game vastly more enjoyable and rewarding to play. You don’t need to upgrade to the expansion to experience the benefits of the new loot system. This is the Diablo III that should’ve been there at launch.