Top Ten 2020

This post is a part of my Top 10 Games I played in 2020 list that I said I was breaking up into smaller parts to avoid having a single huge post all at once. Note that the games in this list weren’t necessarily new releases in 2020. To qualify for this list, it just had to be a game that I played in 2020. This post features games I rank as the #6 and #5 games I enjoyed playing most in 2020.

#6 Renegade Ops

After Steam launched their Remote Play Together in late 2019, I started looking into my library of Steam games for couch co-op games and I rediscovered Renegade Ops, which is a fun little cooperative, vehicle based, twin-stick shooter with up to 4 players locally or online. It originally released in 2011. I’ve owned it and its DLC packs for several years, and other than playing through the first level once many years ago I never really played it.

Over the course of a week or two in early January or February 2020, another player and I played through the main campaign and possibly also the expansion DLC campaign as well. I’m not sure if the game has a dynamic difficulty adjustment based on how many players are present, but we failed some of the missions a few times and had to retry them multiple times. Maybe the game is intended to be played with 4 players so playing with just 2 made it more difficult. Or maybe the game intends you to play and fail a few times so you can level up your character and unlock more skills or buffs to make it easier.

Either way, it’s kind of a mindless, but fun game where you drive around blowing things up. The story is unimportant, over-the-top, macho, G.I. Joe kind of stuff. It’s a fun few hours to spend playing with a friend or two or three. I don’t think I’d enjoy it much playing solo.

#5 MarZ: Tactical Base Defense

I got MarZ as part of a Humble Bundle last September and was only mildly interested in it. But I decided to give it a quick try because I do like tower defense games. After playing through the first couple of levels I got the feeling that it was going to get boring really quickly.

I then binge-played through the entire campaign with all my free time over the next few days, totaling just under 13 hours of gameplay.

I was pleasantly surprised by this indie game and its interesting take on the tower defense genre. And the story was decent, too.

The game also includes a map editor with Steam Workshop support, as well as other gameplay modes. But I never looked into anything other than the main campaign.