Game Informer’s (Belated) Top 10 Games Of 2024 Awards
Look – we don’t need to go into what happened. You can read about that [here]. For some strange reason, we were not able to share our 2024 Game of the Year awards the same time we have been for more than a decade. What matters is we’re here now. We may be late to the party, but that doesn’t mean 2024 wasn’t full of fantastic games that we are eager to highlight. You can find our top 10 games of 2024 below, as well as a collection of additional specific category awards. Last year may have been a tough year for Game Informer, but we didn’t want it to mean that we skipped a year celebrating the best the industry had to offer. Thanks for sticking with us!
10
Helldivers 2
Every time we boot up Helldivers 2 with a party of friends, we drop onto various alien planets to do… something. There are objectives – kill bugs and robots, collect data, and extract resources – but we honestly could not tell you what these are in any given mission. Though the Helldivers have goals to accomplish during missions (with a post-completion grade to go with it), the fun Arrowhead Game Studio’s sequel provides is found not in these objectives, but in the shenanigans that happen while attempting to accomplish them. Through fiery blitzes of alien raids, we unload bombing run stratagems, call down mechs and rocket launchers, and unleash near nuclear-sized bombs on the battlefield, laughing maniacally as our fellow Helldivers realize too late they’re in the danger zone. Helldivers 2 succeeds as a well-made extraction shooter that uses great battle pass “warbonds” and community efforts to advance an ongoing war to create one of the most exciting live-service games of the year. But it succeeds even more as the most fun (and funniest) cooperative game of 2024.
9
Marvel Rivals
Marvel Rivals is the first game to wholeheartedly attempt to fuse the hero shooter genre with a major superhero brand, and while the two are a natural match, Marvel Rivals is impressively more than the sum of its parts. Seeing heroes clash is fun in its own right – watching the Hulk leap into the sky to grab Iron Man or seeing Doctor Strange open a portal for Scarlet Witch and Black Panther is still thrilling dozens of hours in – but the game is much deeper than its high-profile aesthetic. Queue times are lightning fast, an impressive feat for a game that launched to millions of players. The bright and striking visual design offers interesting new takes on classic characters and locales. And the playable roster of over three dozen heroes is almost completely competitively viable, keeping matches varied and fresh. Despite releasing just a few weeks before 2024’s conclusion, it made a strong impression, and we expect it to stick around for years to come.
8
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
From the moment you walk up to the first puzzle in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, you are already fully absorbed; and you don’t even know what mystery you’re working toward unravelling. The game just drips with a moody style and rewards thorough investigation of every corner of the strange mansion you find yourself exploring. Every document works its way into the hundreds of rewarding puzzle solutions, and at the end of the experience, everything you’ve learned comes into focus to deliver a fulfilling and surprising narrative conclusion. Lorelei is a game that’s difficult to put down and one you immediately miss after the experience concludes.
7
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Following the success of Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2020, Square Enix expanded the scope of its follow-up entry in the Remake trilogy exponentially. Taking the story far beyond the walls of Midgar, Rebirth moves the series structure into the open-world realm to great effect. Going through a region, completing its avalanche of sidequests, and meeting the game’s colorful cast before moving the iconic story forward establishes a terrific gameplay loop that follows the party to its fateful end. And for longtime fans, seeing the events play out with modern visuals while rearranged versions of the original’s beloved soundtrack orchestrate your journey is a treat from the start of Rebirth. After closing out this second act of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, we’re itching for the third entry to see how this modernized story plays out.
6
1000xResist
Across its 12-hour runtime, 1000xResist explores themes of generational trauma, immigration, authoritarian governments, grief, and about a dozen others with deftness and nuance nearly unheard of in modern gaming. That these themes are conveyed through a story about alien invasion, a world-ending plague, and a society of clones is unexpected, but after completing the game, it’s clear it couldn’t have been done any other way. The era-jumping timeline allows the player to see every side of a given issue, showing how suffering can be cyclical, in both families and systems of government. Boasting heartfelt voice acting, intricately crafted dialogue, and stellar sci-fi character and environment designs, 1000xResist is a narrative experience like no other.
5
Animal Well
Developer Billy Basso’s Animal Well expertly exists among a collection of genres. It functions as a satisfying platformer and Metroid-inspired action game, but it is also a shockingly deep puzzle game. Who or what you are and why you’ve ended up in the titular Animal Well is never made clear, but finding new tools to help you explore and solve its deep puzzles is consistently enthralling. You can finish the game and see its finale without losing yourself in the adventure, but the real joy of the experience, arguably, comes from digging into the game’s community and seeing just how deep the well truly goes.
4
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Prince of Persia has struggled to find its place in the years beyond its heyday. Ubisoft Montpellier didn’t try to revive the series in the way we’d expect, instead returning to its 2D roots to create the best Metroidvania of the year and a true standout in the increasingly overcrowded genre. With smart features like the ability to drop a screenshot on the map to help you return to it later (hopefully something we’ll see adopted in other games) and excellent post-launch quality-of-life updates, the game is as approachable as it is fun. Engaging and dynamic combat with a parry that never gets old, excellent platforming, a vibrant visual style, and a story that uniquely doesn’t put you in the shoes of the titular prince, The Lost Crown is a game worth celebrating today, tomorrow, and onward. It’s a shame the team behind it was callously disbanded after delivering near-perfection, though, robbing them of the chance to build upon this exemplary foundation. But hopefully, the people behind it see the praise this game gets as more players get their hands on it.
3
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Metaphor: ReFantazio’s elevator pitch is “Persona in a fantasy setting,” but that discounts everything the core Persona development team accomplished with this new IP. Using lessons learned from decades working on that iconic RPG series, Metaphor: ReFantazio moves forward various Persona mechanics like the calendar system, turn-based combat, and social simulation while adding an intricate jobs system and a road-trip backdrop to the story. And with a politically charged narrative that shines a light on mental health, tribalism, and social change (not to mention a fantastic cast and menacing antagonist), we were left thinking about our journey through the Kingdom of Euchronia long after we rolled credits.
2
Balatro
To play Balatro is to obsess over Balatro. A single run of this brilliant poker-themed roguelike can quickly turn into several. Minutes melt into an hour or more as your score multiplies into the hundreds of thousands with each carefully constructed hand played. Nothing beats the rush of watching your synergized lineup of Joker cards pop off effects in succession to shatter a round’s score quota, making you feel unstoppable as the meter erupts into flames. That is, until you hit a boss blind sporting a debilitating stipulation that unravels your entire strategy. But even these crushing defeats do little to dampen the enthusiasm to start runs anew.
Arguably, Balatro’s biggest success is that you don’t need to understand or even enjoy Poker to become hooked. The game is ultimately about assembling high-scoring hands and bolstering those cards with power-ups in the form of creatively designed Joker cards, powerful Tarot cards, risky Spectral cards, and more. Using multiple decks sporting unique conditions adds even more replayability while encouraging players to concoct new tactics; Balatro is excellent at rewarding multitudes of strategies, especially in its unlockables. Balatro is an ingenious and exquisitely designed surprise that kept us chasing our highest scores throughout 2024. We still have trouble putting it down for long.
1
Astro Bot
Astro Bot emphatically proves that Nintendo hasn’t cornered every good idea in the oft-neglected 3D platformer genre. This joyous adventure is platforming nirvana, boasting inventive stage design, a gorgeous presentation, and perfectly tuned controls. Developer Team Asobi has crafted the PS5’s best exclusive to date, successfully showcasing the platform’s capabilities while raising the bar for its contemporaries.
The little bot’s previous strong outings, Rescue Mission and Playroom, feel like dress rehearsals building up to this exuberant third act. Leaping through dozens of eye-popping worlds never fails to make us smile, and traversal feels as good as it looks thanks to the effective and playful use of the DualSense’s haptic feedback features. Every stage offers a cool hook or surprise, whether we’re stomping around as a water-soaked kaiju sponge or playing an abridged reimagining of a beloved PlayStation title. Whenever we think Astro Bot could peter out of ideas, it lobs another neat twist on its mechanics, making it feel like a bottomless well of creativity.
Though it achieved this before, it remains impressive how Astro Bot’s interactive tour through PlayStation’s history feels like an endearing celebration rather than a commercial. An impressively deep roster of cameo bots representing a multitude of game franchises, iconic and forgotten, offers the perfect reward for completing a fun platforming gauntlet. Everything about Astro Bot feels expertly tuned to deliver maximum entertainment at the highest quality, and sometimes a superb video game just needs to be unabashedly fun. We can confidently say that no title this year kept a smile plastered to our faces more than Astro Bot.
Additional Category Winners
Best Nintendo Exclusive – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Nintendo’s 2024 was light compared to previous years as it, presumably, ramps up for the Switch 2. Even with the console preparing to sunset, we got a brand new mainline Zelda and it finally, officially, let players play as the legendary franchise’s namesake. Playing as Zelda was long overdue and we were impressed by her suite of unique abilities. It may have struggled to sustain the fun of its primary mechanic through the entirety of the experience, but we loved using Zelda’s new power and we’re eager to play as her again in the future.
Best Xbox Exclusive – Indiana Jones And The Great Circle
From its initial announcement, the prospect of developer MachineGames (Wolfenstein: The New Order) adapting its fantastic writing, excellent gunplay, and Nazi-destroying ideals to one of fiction’s most outspoken Nazi haters was exciting. But there was one big barrier: Harrison Ford was not going to be involved. Despite that hurdle, however, MachineGames delivered an incredibly fun archaeological action game that stands next to the films, and in some cases, even outdoes them.
Best Developer – LocalThunk
You’d be forgiven for incorrectly assuming Balatro was crafted over years of work from dozens of veteran developers. In reality, LocalThunk is a solo developer, and Balatro is the result of a project he started in 2021 while taking time off from his tech job. The game was one of our favorites of the year, and it’s astounding to think that the broad concept, mischievous pixel art, and approachable yet deep gameplay loop were all made by the same person across just a few years of passionate development. In a landscape where more games are made each year, and budgets and teams balloon larger and larger, it is an incredibly impressive feat to create a game like Balatro, and we’d be remiss not to give LocalThunk the flowers he deserves.
Best Publisher – Sega/Atlus
Last year was stacked for the role-playing genre, and many of the best games came out of Sega and its subsidiary Atlus. Metaphor: ReFantazio won Game Informer’s RPG of the Year award, but Sega/Atlus also delivered Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, and Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. In addition, we also received Sonic X Shadow Generations and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble to round out the calendar year for the publisher. Top Sega/Atlus’ 2024 off with an adaptation of Like a Dragon on Prime Video and the theatrical release of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and any way you look at it, Sega/Atlus had an incredible year.
Best VR – Batman: Arkham Shadow
The idea of being able to put on the cowl in VR is an exciting prospect. The Arkham series’ creator, Rocksteady, delivered an interesting, if basic Batman VR game in 2016, but Arkham Shadow pulled out all the stops. Developer Camouflaj managed to create an excellent Batman game in the mold we know and love without any need for VR asterisks. Combat is rhythmic and rewarding without making you feel like you are arbitrarily swinging your arms around, stealth is intense and engaging in the first-person perspective, and the story is full of fun twists on familiar characters.
Best Action – Stellar Blade
Looking at Stellar Blade in action, you might be surprised to learn that developer Shift Up was primarily a free-to-play mobile developer before switching to consoles. To call it a first effort would be inaccurate, but we’re still impressed by how well it delivered on its first stab at a big, expensive action game. Executing Eve’s combos feels great and taking on Stellar Blade’s impressive collection of bosses was always thrilling and rewarding. There may be other action games on our top 10 list above, but to solely focus on how good it feels to swing a sword in a video game in 2024, Stellar Blade was our favorite.
Best Moment – Destiny 2’s Avengers: Endgame Moment
Bungie has been building to The Final Shape for a decade, and though prior expansions (looking at you, Lightfall) had players worried it might not stick the landing, the studio proved doubters wrong. The Final Shape does a lot right, and no part of it exemplifies that success better than the final fight of the expansion. Taking a note out of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, as Guardians reach the climax of their race to stop The Witness (the Thanos of Destiny), they are joined by fan-favorite characters from the series’ 10-year history to finish the fight alongside 11 other player-controlled Guardians. The result is an exciting and celebratory moment that’s a perfect finale to this decade-long journey.
Best Hero – Indika from Indika
Indika is a young nun seeking safety and forgiveness in faith, but there’s one big problem. The literal Devil plagues her mind, constantly whispering corrupting thoughts and compelling contradictions to her beliefs. As terrifying as his presence can be, what scares Indika most is that Satan often makes some pretty good points. We were captivated watching Indika cope with challenging moral dilemmas and her past sins while navigating a harsh world that constantly beats her down. Sadly, her attempts at doing good often backfire, culminating in a powerful climax that cements Indika as the year’s most empathetic and utterly fascinating protagonist.
Best Villain – Emmerich Voss from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
One of the most satisfying actions you can do in the world of video games is partake in the act of absolutely walloping a Nazi in the face. The Nazis represent a cruel and hateful movement that committed genocide against an entire ethnicity, making for an easy group to despise, but that did not make MachineGames phone in its antagonist. Even without his Nazi background, Voss would be an easy villain to hate, but he’s also, sometimes, just dumb in entertaining ways. It makes the final confrontation against him both satisfying and hilarious.
Best Dork – Captain Boomerang from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
It’s not a controversial statement to say Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a disappointment. Its cynical approach to its characters, world, and story wore thin quickly and its gameplay was… okay. One bright spot, however, exists in Captain Boomerang, the loud-mouth Australian with an exaggerated and wholly unearned sense of self-worth. Performer Daniel Lapaine imbued him with a charming and idiotic tone that easily got the most laughs out of us. We don’t think we’d ever want to hang out with Captain Boomerang, but to laugh at him and decisively not with him was arguably the best part of trying to kill the Justice League.
Best DLC/Expansion – Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
FromSoftware took a celebratory victory lap of Elden Ring with last year’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, reminding the Tarnished why its 2022 action-RPG captured the attention of more than 25 million players worldwide. Shadow of the Erdtree isn’t doing anything radically different from Elden Ring, and it slots in nicely to the journey through The Lands Between. It introduces a couple new mechanics that speed up the progression process, a few new classes and weapons, and some of the most challenging boss fights in FromSoftware history. At its core, though, it’s more Elden Ring, so it’s no wonder it’s the best expansion of 2024.
Best Sports – WWE 2K24
WWE’s yearly wrestling sim has steadily climbed the ranks of quality since returning in 2022, and 2K24 sees it finally capture the gold. Boasting a strong Showcase mode celebrating WrestleMania’s finest bouts, improved iterations of the typically entertaining MyRise, MyGM, and Universe modes, and further refinement of its solid grappling gameplay make for an impressive pedigree. Like its popular cover star Cody Rhodes, WWE 2K24 finished its story to capture our Best Sports award.
Best Fighting – Tekken 8
The latest entry in the beloved 3D fighting franchise proved to be a worthwhile continuation of the long-running story. A terrific roster that has only improved with post-launch updates is just the beginning of what solidifies Tekken as the best fighting game of 2024. Fun mechanics centered around offensive aggression, an over-the-top story, and multiple long-term single-player modes complimenting the competitive suite make for an incredible eighth mainline entry in the Bandai Namco fighting franchise.
Best Horror – Mouthwashing
The advantage of telling a horror story in a video game is that the player, more so than a viewer or reader, is often the direct target of the elements that make the game scary; you’re the one getting chased by the killer, trapped in a room, or bitten by a zombie. Mouthwashing flips this idea on its head, instead placing the player in control of the person responsible for dooming their crewmates, forced to watch as people reach their inevitable breaking points. Mouthwashing is devastating, tragic, and compelling, with memorable characters, surrealist art, and brutally poetic lines of dialogue. Its scope is small, but as is proven by the crew of the Tulpar, it’s remarkable how much memorable suffering can come from a ship with a handful of stranded people.
Best Adaptation – Fallout
An intersection of satire, slapstick, sci-fi, and sincerity, nothing makes Fallout stand out more than its signature tone. Amazon Prime’s adaptation does many things well – introducing compelling characters, thoughtfully recreating iconic designs from the games, and scoring the action with classic jazz tunes – but its greatest success is nailing the series’ vibe in its minute-to-minute writing. Bolstered by stellar performances, most notably by leads Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins, Fallout is a hilarious, gripping television season, making it an easy choice for Best Adaptation.