Keeping a list of every game I complete in 2013. The game doesn't need to have been released in 2013, just completed. The list isn't in any particular order, just what came to mind first while adding them retroactively, or whatever was most recent ends up at the bottom. I buy the majority of my games on sale, so I've added the prices I payed for context.
Fantastic shmup, at least for people who aren't very experienced with them but want to play one. Really enjoyed this one on normal, provided a good challenge, but I'm still not good enough to play on the arcade mode difficulties for most levels. The maze level is the only low point of this game. Art, sound design, level design, and everything else, all great.
Price paid: $2.50
One of the best games I've ever played. I really just loved everything about the game, between the combat, the setting and atmosphere, the story, Yakuza 4 just managed to get everything right for me. The story may be a little hokey and crazy, but it's done in what I found to be a very amusing way; I never grew tired of Yakuza's tricks, rather I just couldn't wait to see what would happen next. You don't need to have played previous games in the series to understand this one, so if you own a PS3, you have any interest in the series, and you haven't played it, just get it!
Price paid: $20.00
Bought this game on a whim in January. Didn't know really anything about it, other than Studio Ghibli being involved, but really wanted a JRPG to play at the time. Played the game for about an hour a day over the course of a month and enjoyed my time with it. Like JRPGs usually do, it took way too long (~10 hours) to open up, but past that I really enjoyed both the exploration and combat in the game. AI companions were kind of frustrating since they'd continually just waste their MP and run out after three or four fights, unless you set them to not use any spells. Story is good but not great, and the last dungeon and boss were really fun.
Price paid: $60.00
Fans of the site have probably know enough about this game thanks to Vinny, but I had a bunch of fun with it too. I didn't care for it quite as much as I did Saints Row 3 or GTAIV, but it feels like a game with heart and I was glad to see it turned out anywhere near as well as it did considering, well... True Crime: Hong Kong. Pick up the purse?
Price paid: $12.50
I realize this might be a bit of an odd one, but I completed the Sith Marauder story which took me something like 100 hours. Game complete in my books!
Picked this up for $4 during an Xbox Live sale. Enjoyed it a fair bit, but the ending was pretty bad. Difficulty curve was weird, where most of the game was way too easy on normal but on occassion the game would completely flood you with enemies and leave you without much of a chance. Most of my frustration was likely due to my inherent hoarding of flashbangs and flares; I think I used like five or six batteries throughout the entire game.
Price paid: $4.00
Neat little game, has fantastic visuals and a reasonably interesting story. It's less than two hours long though, so I beat it in one sitting. The game's normally $10, which depending on how you look at it may be a bit much for what it is. If you come in with the perspective like you've paid for, and are going to watch a movie, then it might be worth your money. It's a neat idea and I enjoyed my time with it.
The game's consistently on sale and in bundles though, so if you have interest in it but not $10 of interest, you shouldn't have to wait long to pick it up.
Price paid: $1.60
Pre-ordered about five days before launch without ever having gotten into Bioshock or watched almost any early coverage of the game. The interview with Ken Levine that went up on the site though was enough to pique my interest, along with Green Man Gaming having a really good deal on for it at launch, so I went ahead and bought it.
Ended up enjoying both the story and the combat a lot, and was surprised to find that so many people thought playing on hard was a mistake and that they didn't think the combat was any good. Between the perks, the inventive powers, and being able to use the skyrails during combat, I really loved the freedom in the combat. Story was interesting in a bubble, but I don't really care to disect and ruin it for myself like I know many other people have.
Price paid: $45.00
Edit: Burial at Sea DLC completed November 15th
Bought this on sale so I could have it to mess around in the multiplayer once and a while. Generally try to beat the story in these games before going into the multiplayer, so I pretty much did the same here. Played on Hardened, should've played on Veteran, and the actual story itself was not very good.
Price paid: $40.00
Really fun puzzle game, probably works best on mobile devices but had launch price parody for PC. Neat and unique take on match-three games, which I'm kind of surprised to find people can still do so well. The suspend function in this game seemed to work really well even on PC, and I was able to pick up right back at the enemy I left off on. If you're curious about this one I'd say just check out a short gameplay video on Youtube and if it looks fun to you pick it up, it's worth it.
Price paid: $2.99
Was waiting for this to go on sale, as I was worried it wouldn't hook me like the past Hitman games. Enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, and pretty quickly played it to completion. I know a lot of people look at this as being inferior to the older games in the series, and while the game certainly had some flaws, I thought it was streamlined and improved in a lot of positive ways as well.
Even if it was possible to just gun your way through missions, I never ended up doing it because of the scoring mechanic. Seeing your score drop a few thousand points every time you kill a non-target was good enough encouragement for me to want to play it in a stealthy manner. If you can get past that it's not the exact same as the previous games in the series, this makes for a pretty fun stealth game in its own right.
Price paid: $10.00
Got this as part of a bundle and enjoyed my time with it. It's pretty simple and I wasn't nearly as impressed with the story reveal as most people seemed to be. Would have a hard time recommending this for anymore than $3-$4.
Price paid: $15.00 (Humble Bundle 8 purchase)
Strong racing game, had a fair amount of fun with it. It's pretty different from the first game, but it manages to be fun in its own way. The absence of the cockpit view didn't deter me, even though that's normally the only view I'll use in racing games. The only thing I didn't think was very good in GRiD 2 were the drift events. If you're joining drifts together too quickly during a drift event, it won't count towards your score, and it makes the drift mode both way less fun and way more difficult than it should be.
It seems like most of the people complaining about this game when it came out were people who were just mad about the direction Codemasters went with the series. It's a perfectly fun game that feels well polished in most respects, and a racing game worth playing if you're not stuck in the mindset of sim racing only.
Price paid: $33.75
Came into this one figuring it probably wouldn't be my thing, but after a couple of hours with the demo I had to have it. Ultimately doesn't seem to have as much replay value to it as something like Dungeons of Dredmor, but there's still quite a bit to do and fun to be had.
Price paid: $10.00
This is one of the worst games I've ever played? Just finished this, and I disliked pretty much everything about it. The platforming is really bad, the story is awful, the voice acting is terrible, the puzzles were extraordinarily simple, etc, and the list just goes on. Basically the only redeeming thing about this game was that there was a certain depth to the environments which was neat, it looked like someone talented put a lot of time in thought into them, but you don't interact with any of the interesting areas.
Luckily this game is mercifully short at about 3 hours with 80% of the items collected by happenstance. Don't buy at any cost.
Price paid: $3.74
Rockstar managed to do it again. I enjoyed this game even more than I thought I would, and ended up finishing it in about a week. The missions were almost always the perfect length, there was a good variety in locales, the gunplay never got old, and I enjoyed the story the whole way through. I could see why people would be down on the story and Max as a character, it's not exactly the most cheerful and upbeat game, but that's what really made me like it.
I did end up playing it on 360 instead of PC though, as the Games on Demand version is 13GB (near 7GB for the initial download, and then the game makes you download acts 2 & 3 separately, which are another 6GB) and the PC version was close to 30GB. It still looked pretty great on consoles, so I can only imagine how nice it would be on PC. Absolutely recommend this to anyone who's interested in it, definitely worth playing through.
Price paid: $10.00
I did not like this game as much as most other people seemed to. I thought the story was alright and had a couple of high moments, but a lot of the "twists" were so painfully obvious.
The gameplay also was often times frustrating or just felt plain lazy. I actually enjoyed fighting the humans much more than the infected, as any section with clickers was automatically made not-fun. The level of resource scarcity on hard at least made that aspect of the gameplay fun though, and there were some pretty satisfying area completions as well.
I regret buying this game at full price for sure, but at least I didn't have the few interesting story beats spoiled for me. On the Giant Bomb review scale, I'd be at a 3/5.
Price paid: $60.00
This one ended up being a bit of a grower. I didn't really like it very much for the first three or four hours, but once I started getting a lot more of the upgrades and new items/weapons, the gameplay started to become a lot more fun. The intro was a mix of gross and gratuitous camera shots on top of really restricted platforming and gunplay. Once the game opened up a bit more, I actually started to have fun with the gunplay and puzzle/platforming tombs.
The story was alright, but nothing amazing. I felt I kind of knew what was going to happen at the end of the game from about 4 hours in, so I wish it hadn't played so many of its cards to early on in the game.
Gameplay in this game was most frustrating whenever they tried to make me play it like an action game. Any time I could, I was using the bow or the silenced pistol to take out all of the enemies in an area without alerts, and that was when I felt the game was at its best. It quite frequently likes to force you out of those situations though, and I never felt like the game handled well enough as a Gears of Wars style of shooter for those moments. The "defend this point" and "Oh no, all of the enemies know you're here so you're going to have to kill a hundred of them to progress!" moments were far and away the worst parts of the game.
As I said though, I really started to enjoy the game more once it opened up, and would recommend getting it at a decent sale price if you're interested.
Price paid: $12.50
My time with Bully was... interesting. For the most part I enjoyed the story, the characters, and the setting, but the gameplay very much felt rooted in its time of release (2005). No checkpoints in missions, bad minigames all around, poor aiming controls, buggy, and sometimes just confusing. With all of that in mind, I'd still say Bully is worth playing now if you haven't before.
Going into it, I'd kind of forgotten the old Rockstar way of mission design, where if you fail or die at any point during the mission, or the game bugs out and you can't complete your objective, you've got to start all over. Not even from the location that you travel to during the mission, but instead you usually have to go back to the school all the way from town, accept the mission again, go through the dialogue (usually lets you skip the cutscenes), go back to where the mission actually takes place, and do all of that work all over again. There are school bus stops in the towns so you can get back to the school quickly and the game gives you a skateboard so you can get around a little quicker, but it's still a little slow. The skateboard ends up being pretty fun to scoot around on too, so it at least makes up for a bit of the tedium.
For the first six hours or so I hadn't run into any bugs or failed a mission so all of this was fine, but it really started to ramp up at the end of the game. You also don't get your health back at the start of a mission, so you'd best make sure to kiss a girl or beat a bully up for his soda first. I still think Bully is a pretty neat game and I wish I had played it sooner. It holds up in enough ways that if you can see past some of the antiquated design flaws, it's a pretty fun experience overall.
Price paid: $2.50
Kind of unsurprisingly enough, this game was awesome. The super powers work out better than they do in most games where that's the focus, and it still manages to be really funny (though maybe a little too referential at times). If you liked Saints Row: The Third, you'll like Saints Row IV!
Price paid: $33.50
