Along with our Game of the Year awards, chosen by the team, each of our writers has drawn up their own personal list, covering the top five PlayStation 5 and PS4 titles of 2020. Today it is the turn of retro expert Jamie O’Neill.
My favorite part of Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the beauty of his winter Christmas setting. There is a nostalgia factor for me. In 2018, Insomniac Games had already been successful with a modern version of the PS2 Spider-Man 2 swinging traversal, with an expansion of the free-flowing combat of Arkham games, but Miles adds extra talent and style. I think the succinct game length is ideal, so I hope that the shorter, more stand-alone model, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, remains in the ninth generation. The update to include an RT Performance Mode was welcome, as the combination of the 60 frames per second PS5 with ray tracing was the icing on the snowy skyscraper cake, with shiny reflective windows.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is the most fun game I’ve ever had playing Tony Hawk since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 in 2001. The remake of Vicarious Visions was amazing for its fidelity to the flow and feel of the original Neversoft controls . If you had told me at the beginning of the PS4 generation that Activision would publish two of my favorite remakes – the other being Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, which also featured Beenox’s development skills – I wouldn’t have believed you. So get out of a combo of over 100,000 points, guys, because Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is sick on PS4 and I can’t wait to be heard screaming.
Alongside Hotshot Racing as a modern retro version of 2020, developer Guard Crush Games can be praised by Streets of Rage 4 as a PS4 brawler that looks authentic to the classic 1990s SEGA game design. When it was first announced, I initially wished Streets of Rage 4 to incorporate traditional sprites and pixel art, but in a similar way to Lizardcube’s Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the glorious hand-drawn visuals of Streets of Rage 4 outperformed mine. expectations. I loved the details, secrets and nods to the retro games, as well as the absurdity of the boss’s final battle. I also appreciated the later balance refinements, like the 1.03 patch that improved Axel’s movement speed.
Before reading Christian Kobza’s 10/10 review of Push Square, I was excited by its subtitle praising PS5 Demon’s Souls as the “Best PlayStation Launch Game”. Bluepoint Games is known for working on names like PS4’s Shadow of the Colossus as the masters of remastering, so Demon’s Souls is a true graphic showcase for the PS5. Fast load times and 60 frames per second performance mode are an incredible experience. Also, if you’re not sure about the difficulty, read Sammy Barker’s Soapbox, because anyone lucky enough to own a launch PS5 shouldn’t miss a game that’s in the rare Push Square scoring club “Excellent” .
Not only do I consider The Last of Us: Part II to be the best game of 2020, it is also my favorite PS4 game of the eighth generation. With the opening lyrics of Pearl Jam’s Future Days song stating “If I ever lose you, I would certainly lose myself” still ringing in my ears, that sentiment portrayed a recurring theme throughout the Naughty Dog series. Likewise, the idea of the PS3 expansion to be ‘left behind’ after losing a loved one continues in The Last of Us: the heart-breaking story of Part II, which unfortunately became a reflection of 2020 as a year heartbreaking for me.
So these are Jamie’s five favorite games in 2020. Do you agree with his choices? Have your say in the comments section below.