Well, somehow we’re here again, at the start of another calendar year (or rather, 1/12th of the way through it already). The games keep coming thick and fast, so once again I’m taking a look back over the year just past at what was on my Xbox (or my increasingly old PC).

Well, it’s that time of year again. The earth has travelled another 584 million miles or so, people are making all kinds of resolutions about how they’ll be different now that a number has changed, and we’re all looking back at the year just ended. Somehow COVID is still kicking around, although at least here in the UK things are a bit more open than they were, people still can’t get hold of the Playstation 5 or high-end graphics cards, and it seems like the world has gone daft for NFTs (including some game developers looking to get in on the action - please don’t).

Here’s my annual rundown of the games I’ve enjoyed playing in 2021 and the ones I’m looking forward to trying soon.

Back at the start of 2019 the world was a simpler place. COVID-19 wasn’t a thing, Bungie and Activision got a divorce, and every major game publisher was looking for their own Destiny-killer. EA’s take on the online persistent world live service looter shooter genre was the eagerly anticipated Anthem, the new game from Mass Effect developers Bioware. Despite plans for multiple years of story and content, Anthem famously bombed and within a few short months there were talks of gutting the game and starting again with a massive update. Bioware recently announced the overhaul was cancelled, so I thought I would jump back in for the first time since those early days so full of promise, before EA pull the plug on the servers.

This weekend I’ve been spending a little time on the Anthem demo/beta. That is, eventually, once the initial networking issues were resolved. It’s part of the reason for these betas, especially for online persistent games like Anthem, The Division, or Destiny, but the scale of the networking issues suggests that either someone completely underestimated the number of players, or made some very poor technical choices.

Regardless, I managed to get into the demo and spend some time flying around in my Iron Man-esque Javelin suit, and here’s what I made of the experience.