Favourite Games

Favourite Games documents the standout titles from Ricardo Neudorfer's gaming history — games that made a lasting impression, saw the most hours, or are considered the best in their category. Games are marked ★ in the Game Library table.

GTA 5 — Legacy and Enhanced

Platform: Steam

Grand Theft Auto V was originally released by Rockstar Games in 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, followed by PC in 2015. The Enhanced edition, released in 2022, was a rebuilt version for PlayStation 5 and current PC hardware with improved graphics, new content, and expanded Career Builder options for GTA Online.

Ricardo's engagement with GTA 5 is primarily through GTA Online — the persistent multiplayer component set in the same Los Santos map as the single-player story. GTA Online has been updated continuously since 2013 and contains an enormous range of activities: heists requiring coordinated teamwork, contact missions, stunt races, adversary modes, casino games, nightclub and business management, and regular free-roam activity.

The scale and variety of GTA Online is the core appeal. No two sessions are the same. The open world is dense enough that organic encounters — not just mission-based activity — happen constantly. It rewards both solo play and playing with others.

Dead by Daylight

Platform: Steam

Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer survival horror game developed by Behaviour Interactive, released in 2016. The format is 4v1: four survivors attempt to repair five generators and escape through exit gates, while one killer hunts them. The asymmetric format gives each side a fundamentally different experience.

As a survivor, the gameplay is tense and reactive — completing generator repairs while listening for the killer's heartbeat, hiding, running, and relying on teammates. Mistakes are costly, and the gap between a well-played match and a poor one is immediately felt.

As a killer, the gameplay is strategic — applying pressure across the map, predicting survivor movement, and denying escapes. Different killers have completely different movement, power sets, and playstyles, making each one effectively a distinct character to master.

Dead by Daylight has a large roster of licensed killers and survivors from horror franchises including Halloween, Scream, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, The Stranger Things, Alien, and many more. The licences mean familiar faces on both sides. The game has been in continuous development since 2016 with regular content updates.

Ricardo plays both roles. The variety keeps it from becoming repetitive.

Saints Row 2

Platform: Steam

Saints Row 2, developed by Volition and released in 2008, is the strongest entry in the Saints Row series. Set in the fictional city of Stilwater, it follows the player character — the Boss — waking from a coma to rebuild the Third Street Saints gang and take back the city from three rival gangs and a corporation.

What distinguishes Saints Row 2 from its contemporaries — principally Grand Theft Auto IV, released the same year — is tone. GTA IV committed to realism and dramatic weight. Saints Row 2 was unapologetically absurd, packed with cheats, over-the-top activities (spraying sewage from a truck, destroying property as a giant ball in a hamster wheel), full character customisation, and a co-operative multiplayer mode that let a second player join the campaign.

The Stilwater map is well-designed — varied districts, good traversal, memorable landmarks. The radio stations are excellent. The story is functional. The side activities add hours of content. By the standards of 2008 and the standards of today, it is a complete and highly playable game.

Saints Row IV

Platform: Steam

Saints Row IV, released in 2013, took the series in a direction so different from its predecessors that it effectively ended the original continuity. Set in a computer simulation of Steelport controlled by an alien warlord, the player character — now President of the United States — gains superpowers and uses them to liberate the city.

The superpowers — sprint at superhuman speed, leap hundreds of metres, glide, use telekinesis, shoot elemental blasts — made conventional gunplay and driving largely optional. The movement system is the best in any open-world game: covering the map by running, bounding, and gliding is genuinely enjoyable as a standalone activity. The game understood this and designed the side quests and collectibles around movement rather than driving.

As a pure sandbox of movement and combat, Saints Row IV is excellent. As a Saints Row game, it is a departure. It is in the library because the movement is exceptional.

Satisfactory

Platform: Steam

Satisfactory, developed by Coffee Stain Studios and released in full in 2024 after several years in Early Access, is a first-person factory-building game set on an alien planet. The objective is to build increasingly complex automated production chains — from mining raw ore to processing it into components to assembling those components into advanced products — to complete project milestones.

The loop is: explore to find resources, build extraction infrastructure, automate transport between machines, optimise the production line, hit a resource limit, expand, and repeat. The factory grows organically from simple beginnings to enormous, highly automated systems spanning large portions of the map.

Satisfactory's first-person perspective and alien environment distinguish it from similar games. You walk through your factory. You see the machines running. You see where the bottlenecks are. The sense of scale when a factory grows from a small smelting operation to a multi-storey complex processing dozens of resource streams simultaneously is something other games in the genre don't deliver in the same way.

It is one of the most replayable games in the library. Each new save starts with the same mechanics but produces a different factory, in a different part of the map, with different design decisions.

Euro Truck Simulator 2

Platform: Steam

Euro Truck Simulator 2, developed by SCS Software and released in 2012, is a long-haul trucking simulation across a stylised recreation of Europe. The player drives a semi-truck delivering cargo between cities, earning money to upgrade the truck, unlock new truck models, and eventually hire drivers and manage a transport company.

The appeal is meditative. Long drives on motorways, navigating city streets and tight loading bays, managing fuel and rest stops, watching the landscape change between regions — these are not conventionally exciting activities. ETS2 makes them compelling through attention to detail, a huge and well-designed map, and a progression system that rewards time invested.

The modding community has expanded the base game's map with detailed recreations of regions not covered in the official DLC. The total modded map covers most of Europe, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and parts of Eastern Europe.

Assassin's Creed Origins

Platform: Ubisoft Connect

Assassin's Creed Origins, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in 2017, was a deliberate reboot of the Assassin's Creed series. Set in ancient Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy XIII and the rise of Cleopatra, it follows Bayek of Siwa — a Medjay, a kind of regional protector — as he investigates a conspiracy that killed his son.

Origins rebuilt the series from the ground up. The combat moved from a counter-based system to a hit-box driven action RPG. The world was an open environment rather than a series of mission zones. The RPG systems — levelling, equipment, skill trees — gave more control over how the character developed.

The setting is the strongest element. The recreation of ancient Egypt — the Nile delta, Memphis, Alexandria, the desert landscapes, the temples and monuments — is the most detailed and visually impressive environment in any Assassin's Creed game. It is also historically grounded to a greater degree than most entries, with optional discovery tour content providing factual context for locations and events.

Origins is the best Assassin's Creed game and one of the best open-world games in the library.

See also

• Game Library — Full game index across all platforms
• Gaming Platforms — Device history
• Saints Row Series — Dedicated page for the four Saints Row titles