It's easy to pick your best games of the year, but what about those games you had a lot of fun with, but weren't "top 10" material? They deserve attention, too! Here's a list of games, in no particular order, that I played this year that were fun, but not quite memorable enough to be called "Top 10". This list will include games that came out in the past couple years that I was finally able to play this year.
While this game definitely didn't offer the same "HOLY SHIT" factor that Generations did, Colors is one of many recent Sonic games that prove Sonic Team is getting their shit together. I picked it up for under 20 bucks at Walmart, and ripped it to my PC to play at 1080p via the Dolphin Wii emulator. The graphics are actually really fuckin' good when you do this.
This game is, what, over 5 years old? Well, turns out I had totally forgotten I even bought a Nintendo DS several years ago, and randomly found it shoved into a drawer in my apartment only a couple months ago. Picked this up used from a Gamestop for about 10 bucks, and have had a ton of fun playing it.
Another slightly older title, I picked this up during a Steam sale. It's like playing WoW, but as a single player FPS. Lots of attitude, and really fun shooting. I've put nearly 60 hours into it.
This slick shooter took the amazing Nanosuit mechanics from the first Crysis, and streamlined them into a system that works so much better. While more "linear" than the first one, this game still offered up lots of exploration, and multiple ways to your objective. Definitely a memorable 2011 game.
What an odd game. Yeah, it didn't review very well, but I can safely say that, after putting in literally 150 hours of game time, this was a legitimately fun dungeon crawler. I would fire it up every night after finishing a 25 man raid in WoW, put on the Frozen Synapse soundtrack, and run a chain of levels for some loot.
A labor of love from the two man team at MinMax Games, this is the kind of game that you just don't see much of anymore. Having seen TotalBiscuit do a "WTF Is..." Youtube video of the alpha build of this game, I immediately put this on the "games I want to play this year" list, and picked it up when it went into beta. To me, it calls the old Mac shareware game Escape Velocity to mind, and I highly recommend this game if you smiled as soon as I mentioned Escape Velocity.
Platformers are my favorite genre of games. This game takes that genre, distills it down to it's purest form, and dials the challenge up to 11. This game would easily have made the Top 10 of 2011, if it didn't come out in 2010.
As charming as it is broken, this game blew my mind while it simultaneously kicked me in the balls. The game was absolutely awful at communicating to you what all the RPG mechanics were doing, but what this game really excelled at was atmosphere. I put 8 hours into it simply because of how immersive it was.
It took me a month to finally sit down and give this game a shot. It does a lot of things right, but for whatever reason, I don't have as much fun playing this as everyone else seems to be having. Still a great game, though. The world is impressively realized, the RPG mechanics deep and engaging, and the primal "LOOT ALL THE THINGS" feeling smacks me in the face whenever I stumble across a dungeon or cave.
This charming, budget-priced dungeon crawler Rogue-like is an absolute blast to play. Definitely worth checking out if you like to loot lots and lots of stuff.
Yeah, this game was definitely a disappointment. Yeah, it had massive issues on PC. Still, it did one thing right that Id always gets right: the shooting. The guns felt brutal and effective, the character animations were life-like and convincing, and the graphics when you are outside driving around are absolutely stunning.
Yup, another 2010 game I didn't play until this year. This would have also been on the Top 10 for 2011, had it come out this year. Not much else to say, other than "THIS IS AN AMAZING FUCKING GAME".
Another game that, while disappointing, I still had a ton of fun with. This is the first Bioware game I've ever played, and felt it was good enough that I had to give some of their other games a shot (Mass Effect 2).
For a game I hold in such high regard, it's almost hilarious that I've only been able to play this game for about 2 hours. It's THAT fucking scary.
Amazing graphics, wild guns, and challenging enemies combined into a very fun, if ultimately too short, FPS experience. Worth checking out, if you've got the PC to run it.
Bullet hell shmups aren't exactly my cup of tea, but this game's bat-shit insane plot and aesthetics drew me in. A steal at only 10 bucks.
