Game of The Year 2014 Users Choice
First off, this only counts things that I actually finished.
Some honorable mentions that fell short of the list: Titanfall and World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor
Some backlog games I played that I really enjoyed: SteamWorld Dig, Mass Effect 3, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Dishonored, Fez, Beyond: Two Souls, The Walking Dead, Super Meat Boy, Metal Gear, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
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Okay, I kind of cheated with this one. I played the PC release which technically came out in 2013, but this game was too damn good to relegate to my backlog honorable mentions.
Do you like colors? This game's got colors.
Do you like jumping on stuff? You can jump on stuff.
Do you like mariachi bands and luchadors? Of course you do.
Play this game. It is delightful.
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Wolfenstein is all about an alternate reality -- where instead of CoD and Halo becoming popular, the single player explorable-level shooter reigned supreme. Also there are mecha-Nazis and secret Jewish magics.
Leaving out multiplayer on any big budget game these days seems like an impossible task, but leaving it out on of shooter is another level of bold entirely. And Wolfentein's freshness and greatest triumph is in abandoning tropes added mainly for multiplayer experience. The biggest of these is being able to actually hold more than two goddamn guns at a time. You can snipe a dude hundreds of yards away, and then bust out your dual-wielded shotguns that take up the entire bottom third of the screen to lay into a gigantic robot who's about to rip your face off.
Along with great gunplay, visuals, and music, the plot and voice acting of the game are surprisingly well done. It doesn't feel the need to pull out any stupid betrayal or deus ex machina so you can have a giant 'aha!' moment. There are good characters that do things that make sense given their goals. That's all I ever ask for.
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Blizzard was not satisified with crippling the lives of its fans enough with World of Warcraft. I think the designers over there just think 'What genre is relatively niche that we could use our Blizzardy goodness on and make absolutely explode?' Somehow they missed the mark on MOBAs, despite DOTA being a Wacraft 3 mod, but they nailed it with RTS, MMOs, and now card games.
I had played a little bit of the Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers games, which is Hearthstone's closest equivalent in the 'video card game' genre. Magic is generally a lot more complex, so to distill it into video game form, a lot of restrictions had to be placed on deckbuilding, and the game is mostly only fun as a singleplayer experience.
Hearthstone massively simplifies MTG into a package that is very approachable, even by non-gamers. Building a top-tier deck yourself can be kind of intimidating, but there are tons of online resources listing off cheap, servicable decks and expensive, top tier decks.
The biggest problem for me with this game is the unbelievable amount of cash you have to pump into it if you want to get the majority of cards needed to play with pro-quality decks. You're at the mercy of buying card packs and hoping the card you want finally pops up, or that you have bought so many packs full of cards you already have that you can destroy them to create the card you do want. The game is very fun, but the 'ooh, I got a new card!' positive feedback to keep you playing is pretty lacking.
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Trials and Trials Evolution are some of my favorite games on the Xbox 360. They are a perfect blend of puzzles and skill, similar to Super Meat Boy. It's a 2D platformer (not a racing game!) where you have to perfectly apply leaning, throttling, and braking to maneuver around obstacles and make it to the finish line. It is very much a game focused around completing levels below time limits or competing with your friends on the global leaderboards.
The difficulty is pretty much as hard or as easy as you want to make it. Are you just looking to cruise around and finish each level? Completion of the early to mid-range levels is pretty manageable. But completion of hard levels, and gold/platinum medals on levels require really perfecting your input and strategy.
While I normally don't have the time or interest in games that require me to become insanely skilled and not make a mistake for an entire level, if you're playing Trials correctly, these levels are only asking for a minute or two, which is manageable. You play 30 seconds of a level, screw up, press the button which satisfyingly instantly restarts the level, and you've only got 30 seconds of ground to cover again. Or if you just want to work on that section, you can respawn at the checkpoint. In a way this is similar to learning a new song on a musical instrument. At first you can play it slowly and make a lot of mistakes, and you gradually speed up. And if some sections are harder than others, you can just repeat those until you've got it down. This seems to scratch the same itch in my brain as playing guitar.
This year's version also added a trick system, but it's kind of half baked and forgettable. This game delivers more Trials, and more Trials is good.
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Amazing music and 70s-style visuals, a depressing 'make hard choices' Oregon Trail style metagame, and a servicable turn-based strategy game.
While the strategic gameplay was not terrific, it was fine, and the entire world of the game sucked me in. I know an iPad version of this game came out, and I think if they added an option to skip the tactical battles altogether, this would be an amazing 'game for people who don't play games.' Everyone played Oregon Trail and is capable of making a choice from a list of three or four, and it's those choices and stressing out about their consequences that make this game fun. It was a little short, and I'm very excited for the sequel.
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This nomination is less for the Reaper of Souls content, and more for the gigantic Patch 2.0 changes that massively improve every aspect of the game.
Adventure Mode - A terrific way to just let people do the fun part of Diablo and stop pretending that the story is important.
Removal of the Real Money Auction House and Loot 2.0 - Now...you actually find items that are useful to you. In a Diablo game! Imagine!
Enchantress - This makes even more stuff useful to you. Now you only need 3 of the 4 slots of an item to be good, and you can infinitely (and I mean infinitely :'( ) re-roll a slot to get something useful.
Seasons, Greater Rifts, New Act, New Class, New Sets with Unique Bonuses, Leaderboards
Blizzard was in real jeapordy of leaving its fans with a pretty bad taste in their mouths with one of their only three properties. They absolutely saved Diablo this year.
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This is another entry in the Souls series, with some minor upgrades and downgrades from Dark Souls 1. If you don't know much about Souls games, their hallmarks are:
* Slow, measured combat where each different type of weapon actually attacks completely differently
* A dark, depressing world where the only story is very subtle and requires some digging into the world
* High difficulty that requires the player to be patient and in control, rather than rushing around mashing buttons.
On the whole, this game isn't wildly different from Dark Souls. There are some small differences that probably make this game a hair worse than Dark Souls, but a hair worse than Dark Souls is still a phenomenal game. Every time you die, it's your fault. Every time you succeed, you feel like a god.
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Loved the visuals, but I thought the story was unnecessarily cryptic. I think Supergiant's previous game Bastion is one of the best games ever made, so I had trouble managing my expectations here. The gameplay is mostly turn-based, and you have thousands of customizable options for how your choose actives, passives, and active modifiers.
There are some puzzle levels that place restrictions on what abilities you can use, presumably in an attempt to help you learn how best to use all the abilities, and I think these were probably more fun than the actual story content of the game. It's still a fun game and absolutely worth playing, but I'm a little sad I didn't like this more.
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Out of the sea of AAA open-world games, this is the only one that makes my list. It mixes Assassin's Creed-style climbing and Arkham-style melee combat, which already makes it the best Assassin's Creed game. But the real strength of this game is the Nemesis system.
The orcs you're fighting throughout the game have a layered seniority hierarchy that you can view at any time. When you kill some orc named Nuruk the Slasher, some other lowly orc is promoted to fill his position. When you die, the orc that kills you gets a promotion, and taunts you the next time you see him running around the world. Getting revenge on your Nemesis is particularly satisfying if they managed to kill you a few times and won't stop gloating about it. Eat it, Tugog the Man-Breaker.
Also, the short cutscene sequences that play when you see a named orc on the battlefield are hilarious. It feels like some hilarious wrestling crew is trying to hype up the battle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeJi4o1E_mM
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I fell into the same trap of everyone else this year: 'Best 7/10 Game that I played way too much of.'
I originally played about 10 hours of Destiny and put it down, planning never to return. Then I got a wild hair and decided to at least hit the level cap. And then...I just kept playing. I really don't know why. The shooting mechanics were terrific, but everything about the loot progression was glacial. Run the same thirty minute dungeon four times in a row, and *maybe* you'll get the slightest of upgrades. In the end, I decided to keep playing until I got to a high enough level to play the raid. And the raid was a lot of fun. But I spent eighty hours playing the same four missions over and over again to have a fun two hours on a raid. There's way too much other cool stuff going on in the world for that investment to be worth it.
I bought the version of the game that came with the DLC out of the bat, but I haven't picked the game back up since it came out, and I can't image that it will. This game nails the shooting fundamentals, but for a game with this high of a budget and this long in development, it comes up pretty drastically short in the MMO department.
