This year has been surprisingly stacked with excellent releases, but two recent games have really blown me away.

The first is Onimusha Way of the Sword. I haven't finished it yet, but I can't imagine this game fumbles the final 25% or so based on what I've seen so far, so I'm comfortable shouting about how good it is at this point. And holy shit, is it good. It's one of the best action combat games I've ever played.

The combat is the obvious standout, the aspect that holds the entire game on its shoulders. The boss fights are some of the best I've ever experienced. It's challenging, but not frustratingly so. I beat most bosses in under three tries, and, so far, the most difficult took six, I think. The thing about the fights that really stands out to me is how active it is. When I think about something like the Souls series, or even Stellar Blade, boss fight seem very reactive. You wait for the boss to do a move, then counter it and wait for an obvious opening, then attack in a small window until the fight resets and you do it again.

Onimusha is also very counter based. Like many games now, enemies have a stamina meter that, once depleted, open them up to powerful attacks they cannot defend. You can block, parry, deflect, dodge, or Issen pretty much every move. All of those moves work on every attack (with very few exceptions) and benefit you in different ways. Each of them has its own timing window to correctly execute. Parries have the most generous window and serve to reposition the enemy while doing just a bit of stamina damage to them and also build up a meter that powers up your attacks and deflections. Deflections have a tighter window but do more stamina damage. Dodges build up a separate meter that opens up a powerful counter attack when the meter is full. Issen is the tightest window--you press the attack button at the last possible second during an enemy attack and you perform a powerful counter attack that does the most health damage of any counter. To my knowledge, literally any attack in the game can be countered with an Issen, but it's very risky and difficult. If you pull it off, though, you'll make short work of basically anything.

The thing that makes it feel different, though, is how active the fights are otherwise. While you can play the game in a reactive manner, the boss's stamina bars recharge very quickly, so if you purely react, you're going to have a difficult time getting their stamina all the way down. The way I've had the most fun playing this game is to constantly be attacking, only reacting with correct counter right as I'm about to get hit. Unlike Souls games, this game seems to have pretty generous animation cancelling--even if you're mid-swing, you can successfully perform a counter. It allows you to be hyper aggressive and push the bosses around in fun ways.

What really surprised me, though, was how well presented everything is. The story is pretty basic stuff, but it is highly entertaining and engaging. The characters are all well written and acted and, especially, animated. Musashi's expressions and the way he moves are truly on another level, and it goes a long way towards selling his character.

The game is just very charming in all its presentation. The bosses are all very unique with their own personalities (my favorites are two brothers who just like fighting, as Musashi does, and spend their boss fights just shit talking the entire time-it's great). The music is good, the game looks fantastic.

The biggest complaint I've seen is how repetitive the side quests get. The game has a sort of open world hub in the form of Kyoto, which you can wonder around and complete side quests and find upgrade materials. While I would normally agree that they're not outstanding, they all lead to more fighting, which is just fun to do in this game, so it never bothered me. Also, some of the later side quests combine the various enemies types together is some truly devious ways that were a lot of fun to figure out how to work through.

Onimusha was competing for my game of the year, until . . .

Star Wars Galactic Racer released. This game surprised the hell out of me. I was cautiously optimistic about it, despite not thinking it looked amazing when they were showing it before it launched. For context, Star Wars Episode I Racer on the Nintendo 64 remains one of my favorite racing games ever. It had cool tracks and felt super fast to my little eleven year old brain.

Galactic Racer is truly a spiritual successor to Episode I Racer in all the ways that matter. It nails nearly everything. It looks and sounds great, hits all the Star Wars beats you would expect. The racing machines (Landspeeders, Speeder Bikes, and Skim Speeders) look exactly how they should--cobbled together shitboxes with massive engines strapped to them. Each of the vehicle types feel very different with advantages and disadvantages, but they all remain totally competitive. Podracers also feature in the game, but they appear in a cool way that I'll save for later in case anyone wants to avoid spoilers.

The main campaign of the game is a brilliant roguelike mode. Each run is a new tournament in which you try to take down your rival with a surprisingly neat story playing out as you complete runs with a cool cast of characters, which I won't spoil here. Each completed event earns you credits to purchase upgrades to your vehicle's stats and special parts that modify the way certain systems work. So you complete races to upgrade your speeder, but if you get knocked out and lose your League Token, your run is done. You can earn extra tokens through various means, so it's not always just a single loss ending your run. Like most roguelikes, each run can feel totally different depending on how you choose to build your speeder as you progress.

You can lean into using your Ramjet (my favorite) which is a special boost that overheats. If it overheats all the way, you blow up, but the hotter it gets, the faster it goes, so how far will you push it for that speed boost? Some parts will modify how fast that bonus is, some will increase the Redline zone so you can run hotter for longer, some will give you other bonuses when you exit Redline, etc. Then you can plug in Abilities like Vent, which vents all the heat so you can stay in the Ramjet boost for longer, or more offensive capabilities that allow you to target other racers.

Because the other thing is that this is also Burnout 3, takedowns and all. And they are glorious. All the vehicles are very modular (which you can fully customize, with cosmetics unlocked purely through gameplay--no cash shop here, baby!), and watching them blow apart because you shoved a rival into a wall never gets old.

I have not played a better racing game in maybe decades. Honestly, Burnout 3 is probably the last time I've loved a racing game this much. And that's because it's game that requires your full attention. You must be locked in at all times, because the game is wild and frantic and super fast.

Here's SkillUp talking about it, and I think he completely nailed it with this one.

I started playing online multiplayer in Galactic Racer today, and it's addicting. It plays out as a miniature version of the campaign. You play a small roguelike series across five or six events, building and upgrading your speeder along the way. You can bet on your finishing position for each event, even call out a rival before each race, which gives you bonus XP and Credits for defeating. It's very fun in a way that most online racing games just aren't. I guess mostly because chaos in a Forza lobby fucking sucks, but Galactic Racer thrives on it.

So, Podracing. Podracing is in the game, but podracers are not one of the standard vehicle types you can normally race with. There is an Arcade mode where you can just do some races in them, and likewise, a separate online mode where you can just race online with them, but they don't feature int he roguelike modes as a normal vehicle.

Instead, as you go through the campaign, you meet Sebulba, and he tells you stories about his glory days and you get to play through some scenarios as him. And it's cool, because the game is pretty heavy handed in the beginning telling you "Yeah, podracers are banned, those things are way too fast, they're fucking crazy, it's suicide." And then you get to drive one, and it is way faster than anything else. It's just kinda cool to see them portrayed like real life Group B rally cars, in a way, and then they actually live up to that in the gameplay. I've only completed two runs of the campaign, and something happens that makes me think they might play a bigger part going forward, but I haven't actually seen that for myself.

I'm blown away by basically every aspect of Galactic Racer, enough that I haven't touch Onimusha since I started. It's exactly what the racing genre feels like it has needed for years now (I swear, if we get one more boring ass open world driving game . . . ), and I hope they can make more like this. It's just so good.

* I'm actually liking Galactic Racer a lot too, just click-baiting everyone.

We did it, folks. We got Bandai Namco to give a damn. Drama, dogfights, goddamn two different SP weapons on the same loadout, we got it all. Also, boss fight music is now canon.