The 2025 Gaming Round Up - What We Played This Year...
2025 was quite a year for the coolest among society, aka us gamers. With plenty of new releases it saw me once again playing games released years ago (as is tradition) yet there were some real stars this year and I felt a need to sit and write stuff about each of them.
So here is a little run down of each game I played in 2025 and thoughts about how good or bad they are.
1. Eve online
Entering my 23rd year of playing this game, it still amazes me that I find something to keep coming back to. Eve online is perhaps not in the best shape of it long life however, the reality is that a large number of players have retired or ‘won’ EVE by simply leaving it behind. The average player counts are down from way back but the game itself still turns out a huge amount of money (accorded to CCP Games filings, EVE Online turned over $60M USD in revenue last year, it certainly is a cash cow still) The game suffers from a problem of how to get new players in and keep old players paying.
2. Eve frontier
The CCP Games crypto scam grows by each cycle, but is it really a scam? No its not, its far from a scam, it feels like EVE Online did back in beta, all a bit basic and terrifying. The pros of the game are the huge, expanded galaxy of over 70K stars, a lack of ability to multi-box and the basics of EVE Online around ratting and mining. All of this makes for an amazing game foundation.
Personally, I have massive hope for this game, sure the blockchain stuff is complex and confusing, yes its likely going to be a struggle for CCP to differentiate this game to EVE Online but I can see it has a spark of something and would recommend this to everyone.
3. Eve vanguard
The third CCP Product that I played this year, I do admit that one could level an accusation that we are overly ‘into’ CCP products, but I do admit that this one was perhaps my fave this year. Vanguard felt good to me as it was a shooter in the world of EVE Online – light, airy, breezy even, this shooter was a massive plus to my day and I enjoyed the looter shooter mechanics, get in, own, run away, extract. What more could you want. One to watch in 2026.
4. Barotrauma
This one came out of nowhere, the story to me was the real hook, humanity has made it to Europa around Jupiter, a moon that has more liquid water than the Earth yet its trapped beneath a vast ice crust above a giant volcanic sea at the core of the planet. What isn’t to like there. Well there is more:
Humanity has colonised the upper under ice cap ocean and started to build a new home when all of a sudden all contact was lost with Earth, no more supply ships arrived, and the newly established society was suddenly cast into a mode of self-dependence.
Amid this devastation event, the defacto government that took the reigns turned out to be a bit ‘right wing’ so to keep things nice and simple, an underground movement began to push back and gain momentum.
So, story scene set, the game is an amazing 2d style game where you command a sub in this world, yes its just that good. Go get it.
5. Factorio Space Age
The best game in the world to manage what I would imagine if I ever got myself diagnosed, of low level ADHD or similar. Always one more thing to resolve, always a more efficient design being shown on Reddit, its an amazing game but I do provide a warning that if you don’t play this currently, say good bye to weeks of human activity as you will be drawn in deeper than your mom to the all you can eat buffet.
6. Warp drive machine
Take Factorio Space Age and add a mod that amplifies all the addictive bits and makes them basically like mainlining speed. Warp Drive Machine perhaps is the one game I played this year that really did draw me in. you see, it’s the complexity of mods like this that just drive players mad. Unlocking nuclear power was a major focus for hours upon hours of the game for me as it meant I could expand the entire ship. Just one example of a mod that literally racked up hundreds of hours of play.
7. Battlefield 6
I really liked Battlefield 6 but it remains the one game this year that I really liked yet barely played. What is this? The gun game was perhaps the best I have ever played, the vehicles were amazing fun, all around it was an amazing game. So why didn’t we play it?
Like all games that came out recently, Battlefield 6 was hit hard by hundred of thousands of players, most of which were veteran players of FPS games. A hardcore gamer I may be but I am no expert when it comes to shooters and going from a game like PUBG to this you remind yourself of the ‘spawn die, spawn die, repeat’ style of game wears thin after a short time.
8. Surroundead
Quick mention of this one – it was completely out of left field and turned out to be huge fun but almost as quickly as it grabbed my attention, it let go. Why? Games like this promise themselves to be the new Project Zomboid, often they have all the pieces but lack the real gaming challenge and certainly avoid going hardcore to make sure they don’t upset the casual gamers. Worth a play if you like open world survival games but avoid if you don’t like ‘soft’ games.
9. Star Sector
The Mack Daddy of 2d games, one of the greatest games ever made and frankly this should have been how Factorio Space Age worked, coupling this game with something like Factorio could have birthed the most incredible game ever devised. I hope one day to play a game where they do this. Buy it you wont be disappointed if you like space games with 4x stuff.
10. PUBG Battlegrounds
I hate this game, I love this game, I loathe this game. Never before has a game that is nearly 10 years old captured 500K people daily to play it. How does it do this? I have no idea but it has something about it that keeps me coming back.
The rampant cheating, the level 400+ try hards that wreck entire teams using C4 strapped to the front of a car, on paper it should not work but I will be damned if it just is amazing at times.
SO that’s the list of games we played in 2025, a mix of stuff but heavily focussed on CCP Games products. Moving forward we will push for more balance as we have invested heavily into Star Citizen and many others like Space Engineers 2. Watch this space (great pun) and here is to 2026.
SquadB