My top ten favorite games of the year, presented in ascending order each day leading into the holidays. Look for my full Top Ten list with categories and awards on December 24!

#10 Fire Emblem Heroes
#9 Metroid: Samus Returns

#8 Injustice 2

I’m not at normally a fan of fighting games, but I do like superheroes, and enjoyed the first Injustice: Gods Among Us back in 2013. The sequel does almost everything better with a huge roster, fun leveling and loot progression, and the fantastic Multiverse.

One of my favorite parts of the first Injustice was the campaign, which felt like a fun comic tale of heroes and villains constantly fighting each other in this darkly twisted What If world. I actually felt the campaign in Injustice 2 was a big misstep, shoehorning in an alien invasion by Brainiac that haphazardly brought everyone back together, before they go back to fighting each other in the very last chapter.

Thankfully the campaign is only a small slice of the whole product this time around. The real meat of the game lies in the Multiverse, an awesome new mode that revolves around limited time, rotating events. These events, shown as planets in the multiverse, have multiple chapters to complete, which themselves contain a string of fighters and some additional challenge, like constantly losing health, or lasers that shoot at you.

It’s an effective way to create an RPG-like quest system. Even better is leveling up each hero; everyone levels individually, and there’s level-based loot! So much loot, including torso, arms, legs, etc. They all have stat increases and occasionally offer new abilities or set completion bonuses.

It sounds stupid to include random loot drops in a fighting game but it works amazingly well, and kept me playing far longer than I normally would have. Especially for someone like me, who doesn’t care much about going online and trying to ‘git gud,’ the multiverse, leveling, and loot gathering components were welcome features that made Injustice 2 one of my favorite games of the year.