Game of the Year 2023: TA Team Picks

This year has been one of the best in recent memory for excellent new games launching on Xbox — it feels like we’ve had at least two must-play games hit the platform each month. With the year almost over, we’ve looked back over the past 12 months to bring you some of our favorite games of 2023.

To make things a bit more interesting, we’ve decided to champion two games each in the hopes of creating a more varied list with a few surprises. Let us know what you think of our favorite games of the year down in the comments!

It’s not a lake; it’s an ocean of creativity. We waited 13 years for a follow-up to Remedy’s excellent survival-horror game Alan Wake, but oh boy, was it worth the wait. Alan Wake 2 is an exceptional game. A stunning story full of twists, turns, meta-narratives, and references to earlier Remedy works and otherworldly horror.

It wears many different hats and manages to pull them all off with style. It’s got investigation and mysteries, bursts of intense action, genuinely terrifying horror sequences. The writing is funny at times, scary when it needs to be, and always wonderfully performed by the stellar cast. I loved every minute of the game, and I can’t wait to dive back into the new game+ mode over the holidays. Play Alan Wake 2!

A puzzle game from the lead designer of Limbo and Inside? Count me in. Cocoon was the indie darling of 2023, and for good reason. It blends genuinely clever and unique puzzle design with haunting and beautiful visuals. It’s so masterfully put together — there is no dialogue, no writing, no on-screen instructions, and yet you still intuitively figure out every mechanic that it throws in front of you, thanks to the excellent game design.

It’s not just Limbo again either – the puzzles are on another level of complexity, and the interspersed boss fights are a great ramping up of challenge while still essentially serving as puzzles in their own right. Everyone should play this one.

I struggled with my Game of the Year picks. Gunfire Games’ excellent Remnant II was going to occupy this spot, but if I’m going with my heart over my head, the game that I absolutely loved this year was RoboCop: Rogue City. Yes, it does lack polish compared to other first-person shooters, and it is a bit repetitive in places, but I had such a blast going for the 1,000G in RoboCop: Rogue City that I really hope Teyon gets to make a sequel.

In RoboCop: Rogue City, you play as the legendary part man, part machine himself, and after a mysterious new crime boss starts causing waves in the underworld, it’s up to you to put down this new threat that is targeting Old Detroit. What Rogue City gets right is not just the atmosphere and look of the films (the levels look gorgeous) but what it’s like to play as RoboCop. With each of RoboCop’s thudding footsteps, you feel more and more like an unstoppable tank, ready to deliver justice with your overpowering strength and that ferocious Auto 9 handgun. While the shooting is great, what I loved the most about the combat was walking through hundreds of bullets to pick up a quivering thug and hurl them against the wall or thirty feet up into the air — I can assure you, that never gets old. Light RPG elements also add a bit of variety to the gameplay, and a few interesting story beats let you really lean into the sillier and sometimes emotional side of RoboCop as a character — of course, these moments usually result in excellent but cheesy one-liners.

If you’re a fan of the movies, RoboCop: Rogue City is simply a must-play, but even if you’re not familiar with the franchise, RoboCop is a thrilling first-person shooter that will entertain you for a good 20 hours. I’d say it’s worth picking up for sure, but it’s your move, creeps!

With less than 800 tracked members on TrueAchievements, El Paso, Elsewhere has seemingly passed many by, which is a shame because it’s so damn good. Absolutely dripping with style, Strange Scaffold’s El Paso, Elsewhere is a shooter where Blade meets Max Payne. Playing as pill-popping vampire hunter James Savage, you descend into the depths of a Texas motel to stop an ex-girlfriend from destroying the world. To do this, you’ll need to blast your way through 46 floors of the undead, utilizing twin pistols, dodge rolls, and some glorious bullet-time mechanics. However, beyond all the slow-motion shooting, you’ll discover an emotionally charged love story about vampires and the end of the world, as well as one of the slickest video game soundtracks of the year. Seriously, the music in this game is excellent, and it only adds to the cool factor as you slowly dive through a window while popping demons in the head.

After an excruciatingly long wait, Dead Island 2 finally launched this year, and it is everything I had hoped it would be: violent, beautiful, and filled with humor. Considering the game was in development hell for a long time before Dambuster Studios picked up the pieces, the studio has brought the franchise back from the dead, faithful to the games that came before it.

Dead Island 2 offers you a playground set in the LA sunshine to live out your zombie-slaying dreams, solo or in co-op. While faithful to the franchise with a returning character, a storyline beginning with the start of the outbreak, and modifiable weapons, Dambuster has also introduced its own twist. In this sequel, the violence is turned up to 11 with the addition of finishers and localized damage that mutilates the walking corpses in awesome detail. The result is a level of carnage akin to a Hollywood film as you carve your way through multiple open-zone areas filled with shambling, fleshy target dummies. Add in the new Fury mode, weapon mods, Skill Cards, and more, and you’ve got a fresh new game to play wrapped in a familiar package. Aside from a few quibbles with the lack of firearm attachments and end-game fun, I loved Dambuster’s latest in my Dead Island 2 review, and I can’t wait to see where the studio takes this franchise next!

Keeping with the theme of twos and maximum violence, my second pick this year is for Trepang Studios’ first-person shooter, Trepang2 — a game so good that the team just moved to the sequel instead of wooing us all with a new IP. That’s most likely not true, but damn, Trepang2 is a ridiculously fun ride.

Trepang2 puts you in the shoes of a supersoldier who has broken out of an experimental facility run by a pharmaceutical company called Horizon — the type of company that creates monsters for “the greater good.” It’s a first-person shooter with some light horror elements and sees you embark on a rampage through multiple levels as you tear down Horizon’s world, one facility at a time, as part of the counter organization, Task Force 27. There are a number of story-based levels and side missions to hop into, but the real fun of Trepang 2 is its fast-paced and visceral combat. No matter what weapon you’re wielding, Trepang2 makes you feel like a machine on the lower difficulties but certainly removes the invincible feeling on the harder modes. Gunfights are brutal as you decimate the environments and blow the enemy soldiers into giblets, amped up even further with the use of a slow-motion ability that allows you to watch the carnage unfold before you at a speed you can enjoy. Bullets crashing through chairs to hit the guy on the other side, grenades blowing limbs off of some poor sucker too close to the impact zone, and shotgun pellets tearing holes in the bodies of anyone unfortunate enough to receive them are all shown in vivid, glorious detail.

Trepang2 should be played by anyone and everyone, and if you’d like to read more about the shooter, check out my Trepang2 review.

Ok, so I know everybody’s meant to be picking one AAA-ish game and one smaller one, but I’ve had so much fun with indie titles this year that I’m just going to squeeze Coral Island on this list instead and pray to the gaming gods that this is acceptable.

And then we need to address the elephant in the room: not everyone has the same experience with this game, with some running into endless bugs while others are having a fairly glitch-free time. That’s what’s happened for me so far — I’ve been lucky enough to avoid most bugs and crashes, and with that difficulty removed, Coral Island has been left as just the most lovely and enjoyable game. After an oil spill wrecked a small town’s community, you’ll help revitalize the place — and heal the surrounding coral reefs — while running your own farm and exploring the island’s mysteries.

Coral Island really does have the potential to be a new titan in the farming genre. There are so many improvements here, as well as so much to do. Aside from farming, you’ve also got crafting, mining, fishing, decorating, and more — plus, the whole game is ridiculously beautiful, with the added interest of a tropical setting. The characters are lovely, and there’s a lot of diversity there. Coral Island still has a lot to flesh out when it comes to some end-game content and romance options, but already there’s so much there to love.

I was looking forward to this one, but assuming I’d have to wait for a sale, then it only went and launched into Game Pass — an immediate win. What struck me most about this one, though, is how I’m enjoying it even more than I thought I would.

It’s a simple premise with a simple gameplay loop. You make your way to a land of famed artisans to prove yourself as a master blacksmith, which you do by exploring the world, taking on orders, completing challenges, and revitalizing the blacksmith village. You’ll be making a lot of orders and often repeating the same items, but while this sounds like a pretty thankless grind, it’s actually very fun. Upgrade options are frequent and accessible, and you’ll soon quicken your pace with upgrades to make multiple items or skip minigames. There’s always something to work towards and always something to try if you’re stumped in one particular area. It’s quite nice for my exhausted attention span to have a lot of little achievable goals and to always be finding new areas, crafting diagrams, and characters. The characters themselves are very endearing and funny — I particularly love the ox you befriend and his willingness to wear whatever accessories you find for him. It’s a lovely game.