The Best Video Game Of 2018 Is Not What You Think

2018 was a truly incredible year for video games. With fresh installments of hit franchises, brand new epics, and an explosion of fantastic indie games (not to mention the continued dominance of past years' hits like Overwatch and Fortnite), there was no shortage of great titles vying for your attention. As tough as it might be on our wallets, that kind of embarrassment of riches makes for a pretty good time for gamers... until it comes time to decide which one is actually the best.

With so many great games released this year, the debate about which one reigns supreme is bound to rage well into 2019. For us, however, everything's finally been settled. We've taken a close look at the many highlights and put careful consideration into how best to compare them. Now, we've got our definitive choice for the single best video game of 2018 — and it might not be the one you'd expect.

From the moment it was announced, Fallout 76 was already in the running to be the game of the year. The newest version of the long-running post-apocalyptic franchise shifted the single-player experience of exploring a vast, post-nuclear wasteland with a rich lore and compelling NPCs into an online multiplayer game that, ironically, crafted an incredible sense of loneliness and isolation.

In a lot of ways, 76 was the product of bits and pieces that had been experimented with throughout the history of the Fallout franchise. Placing players in the role of a vault-dweller tasked with reclaiming Appalachia 25 years after nuclear Armageddon, it incorporated the settlement-building of Fallout 4, the survival mechanics of New Vegas' "Hardcore" mode, and even took plot cues from the original Fallout. That alone makes it refreshing — it takes the series back to a time when survival was still a difficult task, before factions like the NCR, the Brotherhood of Steel, and Caesar's Legion had reformed a version of civilization themselves. Throw in the Scorched, some Appalachian cryptids, and the eerie, depopulated wasteland of West Virginia, and you've got a truly compelling take on a franchise that's been running for decades. If nothing else, it's the game that proved that, as Polygon said, Fallout has become a genre unto itself.

Unfortunately, 76 also has a lot of the problems that can be seen in, well, every other Bethesda game. While the environment is compelling, a lot of the early quests — particularly in the first few hours — feel more like doing chores than exploration. It's not just fetch quests, either; there are a few that are literally built around in-game obstacle courses that reward you with a new hat. The transition of established Fallout game mechanics from single-player epic to online multiplayer is also not perfect. With a few patches and some tweaking, 76 will undoubtedly keep providing a super rewarding experience, but for now, it'll have to settle for just being great.

The other game marking a major franchise's return to consoles in 2018 was, of course, Pokémon: Let's Go, which came to the Nintendo Switch in both Pikachu and Eevee versions. It's less worth mentioning because it's a good game (although it is) and more because it just happens to be the latest major release of a beloved worldwide phenomenon.

What's surprising, though, is how much of a departure it is from previous entries. It's essentially a remake of Pokémon Yellow, and while it definitely benefits from 20 years of further development, it's a step away from the complexities of recent Pokémon games like Sun and Moon. That make sense, since it's meant to be a bridge between the core games and the wildly popular Pokémon Go mobile game (hence the title), but that requires massive changes.

The most notable one, of course, is the removal of battles with wild Pokémon in favor of just lobbing Pokéballs at them until they're caught or run away. That's a massive change to the core mechanic of the games, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's pretty jarring. For players who have been waiting years for a full-on console Pokémon game, there are a lot of areas where it's hard not to see Let's Go as a huge step backwards, even if it does remain incredibly fun and delightful.

It's hard to say why it took Monster Hunter so long to catch on in the West, but we're glad it did. The series seems tailor-made to be a global hit. Its core gameplay loop — you hunt beasts and score better gear, which allows you to to hunt bigger beasts and get even better gear — is the same cycle that's propelled franchises like Destiny and Diablo to international superstardom. It has one of the most satisfying cooperative multiplayer experiences available, and its combat requires Souls-like precision and planning.

Monster Hunter hasn't ever been overly accessible, however — at least, not until now. Monster Hunter: World may not be as complex as previous entries in the series, but its streamlined approach to tracking, hunting, and crafting is explicitly designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and it works beautifully. If you like RPGs and you've always wanted to give this Monster Hunter thing a try, Monster Hunter: World is hands-down the best way to get started.

Monster Hunter: World is undoubtedly the biggest RPG of the year, and if it gets its hooks into you, it's the only game from 2018 you'll need. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, the repetition gets old before too long. Ultimately, the game doesn't have enough endgame content to keep casual fans occupied, and the constant grind is just tedious enough to keep Monster Hunter: World out of 2018's top spot.

Up to now, we've been talking about games that excel in specific areas: well-realized worlds, compelling stories, progressive game design, and, most importantly, fun. Taking all of those elements into account, there's one great game that excels in every area: Insomniac and Sony's PlayStation 4 Spider-Man.

As much as it might not be the expected choice, it also shouldn't come as a surprise. While there were a couple of missteps in the early days of 8- and 16-bit systems, there hasn't really been a bad Spider-Man game since Neversoft dropped the first 3D Spidey adventure back in the Dreamcast era. Even the weird ones, like the one about all the interdimensional Spiders-Men or the one that's basically about Spidey fighting an army of Venomized zombies in a virtually apocalyptic Manhattan, are still pretty fun.

A great deal of that has to do with how Spider-Man works as a character. He's uniquely built for an urban environment that's easy to translate into the kind of 3D setting common to open world games, with super-powers that allow him to add the kind of effortless vertical element that games like the Assassin's Creed franchise have built themselves around. But that said, everything that those games have done well in the past is done immeasurably better in the PS4 Spider-Man — and that's only the beginning of its strengths.

For the best example of how well Spider-Man captures the feel of being Peter Parker, look no further than the mechanic that you'll be spending the most time with: web-swinging through Manhattan. It's the make-or-break element of a Spider-Man game, and a perfect example of a key element in any open-world game.

In a game like Spider-Man (or Red Dead, or Assassin's Creed: Origins, or Breath of the Wild, or any other game where a massive map is a key selling point), traversal is one of the most important elements. The moment that getting from place to place becomes a chore is the moment that the player is taken out of the game, but if that movement is done well, it can make something feel less like a series of distinct missions and more like a cohesive experience.

Spider-Man does that better than almost any other video game — not just this year, but ever. It's such a basic building block that you almost don't notice all of the different tricks and visual cues that have gone into refining it, but the result is that the most basic aspect of the game, the simple act of moving from one place to the next, is itself an incredibly enjoyable experience. It changes the way combat works, it allows for boss fights that exist in three dimensions where you can take on supervillains without ever touching the ground, and it encourages players to explore its Marvel Universe Manhattan from the streets to the skyscrapers without ever feeling like it's giving you another mandatory task. It says a lot that while fast travel exists in the game — and comes complete with great little cutscenes about Spider-Man riding the subway in full costume — it's never something you really want to use. The controls are so tight, so well-realized, that it makes just existing in this world a fun experience.

There are plenty of other aspects of 2018's Spider-Man that are worth noting. There's a huge amount of Marvel Universe Easter eggs, like a statue of Lockjaw on Wall Street. There are forced stealth sections that are done well enough that, for the most part, they actually feel like they're adding variety to the game instead of slowing it down into frustrating diversions. There's the fact that Spider-Man's dialogue sounds more strained when he's web-swinging than when he's standing still, a minor touch that'll blow your mind when you realize it. Even the choice of throwing in lesser-known villains like Screwball and Taskmaster for the side missions is great.

The short version, though, is this: every single thing that Spider-Man does, it does well. There's no fatal flaw in any aspect, which makes it the most consistently, thoroughly enjoyable game of the year. In our estimation, that makes it the best.