Best of 2022: Michael Leri's Top 10 Games of the Year

Best of 2022 is ComingSoon's week-long celebration of the entertainment that made this year so memorable.

Although I didn't quite beat my 2021 number, I still played and finished a ton of games last year. And browsing through so many games demonstrated the staggering breadth of experiences available throughout 2022. For example, Supermassive Games pulled off a disappointing dead-eyed mannequin horror adventure with The Quarry in June, and then the same team did also developed a disappointing horror adventure with dead-eyed dummies in November's The Devil in Me. All kidding aside, 2022 is probably my favorite year for game releases due to how many different titles there are and how hard it is to pick a top 10. Anyway, here are my favorites of 2022.

10. Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

I was late to the party, but I fell very, very hard for Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle earlier this year and walked out the other side thinking it t was Ubisoft's most creative game for quite some time. Not only was it not an open-world collect-a-thon filled with microtransactions, but it was something the Mario series had never really seen before and a fresh take on the strategy genre.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope only lost a little of that shine, but it's still one of my favorites of the year for many of the same reasons. I already enjoyed its tactical combat, and adding more movement and customization options only made it more engaging (though it wasn't generally as difficult as the last game). The talking characters were annoying (shut up, sassy Roomba!) and the game's lack of level scaling deflates my desire to revisit older levels, but Sparks of Hope is a great sequel despite those little stumbles and is still only Ubisoft's second most creative game in a while. Rabbit Mario is also hilarious and should have been the star of the next Mario movie.