I've never been the kind of person that can buy more than 10 new games a year and finish them all, so take this list for what it's worth. I cheated and put some old games on here that I also played this year, and I liked them more than most of the new ones. Sorry about the length, I wanted to get it all off my chest and ended up writing a ton about most of them. I've tried to spice it up with images like @marino did, my own where I had them. I might have gone overboard.
Honorable mention to Dark Souls 3, which had DLC this year that I played and basically enjoyed, but that I didn't feel strongly enough about to actually put it on the list. It's a good sendoff for the series, and I think it's way better than Dark Souls 2. But honestly I'm too burned out on the franchise right now, and most of Dark Souls 3 feels like going through the motions of the series rather than trying anything new and exciting. It still lacks atmosphere, and despite the gameplay being a lot more refined at this point, it doesn't feel special anymore. As good as Dark Souls is, and as tall as it stands above most other action RPGs, I think it was past time to put it to rest.
It was nice to relive the nostalgia for a few wonderful levels, the added animations and music making it even better than it used to be. But by the time I drowned in Hydrocity I'd had enough.
This game was a frustrating experience for me. I went in expecting the storytelling chops of Yoko Taro to mix with Platinum Games' outstanding combat design and result in a slick action-RPG that I'd love to play. I thought 2B looked cool. I'd heard Nier 1 was awesome, and I just never got around to it.
So you can imagine my disappointment when I got a game I thought was incredibly boring to play. My problems with the action are well-documented, suffice to say I think it's one of the weaker systems Platinum Games have done, and you're forced to stick with it for longer than in any of their other games. Instead of testing my skill, it tested my patience. It's poorly balanced and mindless, and while it reuses a lot of mechanics from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance and Bayonetta, it's nowhere near as fun to play as either of them are. There are additional top-down/sidescrolling shooter bits, but they're terribly shallow. I've been told this is miles better than the original Nier's combat, but for me, that's not enough. It needs to actually be enjoyable gameplay for more than three hours.
But even the story didn't do that much for me. The actual plot of Nier Automata I thought was pretty bad. The androids fight the robots and shit just happens. If there's any reason, it's that the robots where programmed that way, or somehow removed themselves from the network at this point but were back in the network at this other point, changing behavior whenever it's convenient to the story. Some robots just go crazy, or there's a mind control virus or something similar, rather than anyone having agency. Other times a giant robot will attack at random, and the main characters have no comment to offer other than "Oh alright we better fight it then", and off they go, no insight required.
This all meshes well with the themes of the game, of finding meaning in life and struggling with the meaninglessness of existence, and is represented the strongest through the central conflict between androids and robots. They're locked in an endless war with no resolution in sight, fighting on behalf of creators that have long since abandoned them. There's no meaning to the conflict anymore, but the vicious spiral of revenge won't stop no matter what anyone does. Almost every sidequest and character reflects this theme, with all the machines(both robots and androids) imitating humans in different ways to try and find meaning in life and failing miserably. There's no clear parallel to a real human conflict, it's just hitting at the themes from every angle possible in order to try to find a weak spot where it gets to you.
But as far as a story goes, that just doesn't make for an interesting tale. It's so aimless and pointless and boring. There are a lot of secrets and reveals about the nature of robots, androids and humanity, but barely any of them came as surprises to me, and the ones that did usually happened when it was no longer relevant to the plot. As I mentioned, a lot of shit just happens. It doesn't feel like either the androids nor the robots have a big plan - the robots are just acting on their random obsessions and the androids are sent in to deal with them, and that's basically it for most of the story. When things get personal later on, the way it happens is kinda hard to wrap your head around. You can't ask why or how and get a decent answer out of anybody. There is no way for the involved characters to ask proper questions of each other, act reasonable and work things out, because that'd go against the theme and the tragedy of the whole ordeal. That's part what makes it feel more like emotional manipulation than coherent story to me.
At one point a likeable character gets everything taken away from him, including his morals and ideals, and that's very sad. But it only happens because the author arbitrarily decided that it would be sad if it happened, with no reason or motivation on behalf of the characters in the story. The robots just go mad and attack this person all at once, despite many of them having been established as robots that I thought couldn't go mad because of what the story told me earlier. That's frustrating writing. It's certainly emotional, and I can't say it absolutely doesn't make sense because I don't hold all the cards to the lore or whatever, but it feels like the equivalent of a random car just hitting a nice character at the end of a drama.
This is not helped by the way the whole thing is paced, either. You're forced to play through the same story twice from only a slightly different perspective to get a few new story beats, when those revelations could have easily been spliced into the first time you play through it, which would've helped somewhat with the tedium of the game. (I'm not even sure whether to blame Yoko Taro or Platinum for this. Yoko Taro did this replay business in his older games too, but Platinum also did essentially the same thing in their brawler Anarchy Reigns). And while the third, final act after all that got me invested with all the dramatic shit that happens immediately, it mostly failed to deliver any kind of character interaction and resolution I wanted.
I won't say the story is not effective at points. Yoko Taro is the kind of writer that knows that you don't burn the main character's village at the beginning of a story, it's much more effective if you burn it later when we're all attached to it. I think hardly any area or character makes it out the same as they went in, and a lot just don't make it out at all. In one part of the world they even replace the friendly regular robots with friendly robots pretending to be zombies for no discernable reason other than to keep up a consistent miserable mood.
When bad stuff happens to characters I had spent 30(repetitive, dull) hours with, it did hit me right in the heart. Some of the(dull, fetch quest-y) sidequests do involve funny characters. I especially liked one with a robot inventor. Pascal is wonderful. Emil's shop theme is hilarious. 9S goes on a journey, and is the most interesting main character by far, a fair trade for being both the least attractive playable character and the one with the least fun gameplay(9S literally does topdown, twinstick shooter minigames instead of heavy attacks). Occasionally the game will have interesting asides like a funny one-off scene of the robots acting out their take on Romeo and Juliet.
I'm not trying to sit here and say that there's nothing good in Nier Automata, I'm saying it's full of filler and unnecessary repetition to pad out its length into something neither the system nor the environments could support, and that the story is way more interested in tugging at your heartstrings and making its themes worm into your skull than making sense on a basic plot level. The final experience is one where you run around for a long time just for your commute to the mission, around dreary looking environments, only to arrive somewhere where you can fight similar, dull enemies with mindless combat and get a cutscene that goes nowhere.
Overall, making me feel depressed and doing something subversive with the UI once every 20 hours just isn't enough to make me enjoy Nier Automata. I put the game down for months during the first playthrough with 2B because it was just so exhaustingly uninteresting. When what I liked the most in the game is 2B's butt, something has clearly gone wrong. (Granted, it's a spectacular butt, and if I was ranking games based on booty then Nier Automata is up there for my Game Of All Time award.)
Nier Automata is weird, unusual and has a strong focus on its themes. It's got heart, which is more than you can say for a lot of games, and I think the developers did their best with the sort of budget and development time they must've had. And with the skills and experience they have, for that matter. Nier Automata was supposedly mostly made by the studio's younger talent, and if these are the kids at Platinum responsible for The Legend of Korra and Transformers Devastation, they've improved. While the graphics are often sort of plain and poor compared to phenomenal lookers like Horizon Zero Dawn, the main characters are animated well and effort has gone in to make the game as pretty as possible with interesting lighting and framing. I'm not a fan of most of the music, and I think it's a real bad fit for Bayonetta-style, joyful combat, but it's a unique and unsettling score for a game all the same.
There is totally some additional depth to the combat system that I just never found during my playthroughs, moves I've later seen in combo videos, which could've made me have more fun with the fighting even if the difficulty balancing is out of whack. Maybe I could've made my own fun - restricting myself by keeping the limitless healing items in the stores and practiced more combos despite not being required to do so at any point. Though I'll say Bayo and Metal Gear Rising managed to just be fun while I was just playing through them without mastering the mechanics.
The themes and crucial scenes of the game have a way of sneaking themselves into my head and stay there. I've actually spent a long time thinking about Nier Automata after I finished it, which I can't say about a lot of other games on this list. Part of that's just because it contains a ton of references to older Yoko Taro games that don't explain themselves very well, which I wanted to look up. Part of it is just 2B's butt. But the emotional journey itself has stuck with me, despite its contrivances.
When it comes to the experience of playing it, however, I just had an awful time. More power to you if it spoke to you on a personal level, or if the combat is somehow just your jam, but I appreciate Nier Automata more when I don't have to interact with it. It's a breath of fresh, unusual air that looked like it was gonna be everything I wanted, but came up short in every aspect for me. I respect it more than I like it.
Both Nier Automata and Sonic Mania can be happy that I didn't get to play much Nioh, Yakuza 0, Cuphead or Super Mario Odyssey this year. I doubt they would have stayed on.
Horizon Zero Dawn(Which takes home this year's coveted Worst Title Award) is a fun game held back by some really generic design decisions, lifeless characters and a world that's way too serious. It's the opposite of Nier Automata, which is a title with a lot of heart suffering from budget constraints and some bizarre auteur design decisions. Horizon is more solid gameplay wise and looks absolutely beautiful, but takes the safer option at every route, managing to feel like every other open world game despite featuring robot T-rexes.
An open world game where you hunt giant robot animals that all have specific weak points to hit and parts you can knock off to disable their attacks? That's a cool premise. It takes some heart to make a postapocalyptic robot dinosaur hunting game when every popular mainstream AAA game is the most mundane stuff in the world. They succeeded in a lot of it, with a believable world, beautiful graphics, environments that are easily recognizable at a glance etc. But I don't think their focus was entirely right.
The combat gameplay is largely good, and I don't have much to complain about. It feels pretty good to move around, the slide is cool, the time-slowing is a lifesaver and every weapon, perhaps besides the primitive shrapnel gun, feels useful. The stealth, shooting armor off of enemies, disabling enemies' attacks by shooting their weapons off, ailing them with status effects, that all works pretty well. I should've turned it up a notch, because apparently the higher difficulty changes enemy behavior in a way that makes the combat more fun, for instance by making the whistle ability weaker. On normal difficulties, the simplistic stealth is just way too powerful by making you hard to detect and able to draw any enemy to you instantly. Besides that, my only big complaint about machine combat is a lack of unique encounters. Some enemies will put in the effort to be "boss fights", but since it's an open world with an ecosystem you're naturally gonna run into these guys out in the open pretty often. That makes it hard for any individual enemy to feel like a boss, and even the final boss is just one particularly powerful enemy you've fought at least three times already, only this time it is summoning other robots to help it out.
You also fight a lot of regular old humans besides the robots, which is a bummer, because humans in this game are shit to fight. I suppose you had to have them in here because of the story focus, but it's a shame since the human combat is so dull. They don't even react to shots the way they might a decade ago in RE4, they just tank it like champs until they're dead. On top of that the only difference between them all is that some are melee, some are longer range and some carry a machinegun/rocket launcher. You don't often fight them in areas that have a specific flow or setpiece feel to the encounter either, you just drop into a big room or a bandit fort that feels the same wherever it is placed and have a shootout/stealth-out. You're stuck with only two melee attacks, a light one and a heavy one, so if you wanna try and go that route it gets very old very fast. It's boring, especially compared to how cool the machine fights are.
The same can be said for the systems around you. There is a ton of crafting to do and plants to pick up, and it just feels like busywork. Adding to that is a ton of collectibles and landmarks to find that just makes it feel like a Ubisoft open world game checklist. I can't be inspired to say much about it - this aspect of the game is similar to the tons of other sandboxes we've seen in recent years, and it's a big part of what makes Horizon less exciting than it could have been. Robot dinosaurs? Pretty sweet. Hunting boars for pelts and doing in bandit camps? Super played out. I don't feel like the developers asked themselves whether it was more fun to loot a room of 30 cultists after finishing them off or not have to loot them, or the same for having to craft all your ammo. This isn't helped by your only options for traversal being walking, riding one of the smaller robots or climbing in predetermined paths up the mountainside. It's a far cry from the Just Cause hookshot or the Breath of the Wild climbing and gliding, and it feels dull and restrictive. My exciting robot hunting expedition keeps getting bogged down by having to get off my robot horse to collect healing herbs(And I have to hold down the button to pick them up instead of just pressing it, natch).
The story is honestly a hindrance. The background stuff is solid! They hired the Fallout New Vegas guy to do the heavy lifting on the writing, and it feels like they asked him to write a Fallout world that makes sense. So instead of everywhere being desert and all the local cultures being based on dumb American 50s stuff despite it being hundreds of years after the fact, he wrote about a beautiful green world with vaults and cultures and tribes in a way that actually checks out. And while the setting is Fallout But Sensible(And Also Robot Animals), the actual story is more remniscent of Disney. It starts out like any Disney princess flick, with main character Aloy that has to figure out her place in the world and stops just short of singing her "I want" song over a montage of her training. It's easy to think of Merida because she's the ginge archer, but eventually it turns out that the ginger she's most similar to is Disney's Hercules, only with all the fantasy terms traded out for science fiction terms. Instead of a wave of evil demons and monsters ravaging the land, it's a gray goo scenario with machines. Instead of being a child of the gods, it's cloning. Instead of gods, you get AI and the old humanity. Instead of corruption, you get... well, corruption, but it's a different kind of corruption(though it's totally just fantasy corruption, really). It's nice how the game starts you out thinking all the tribes are superstitous dumbasses, which they are, but then reveals slowly how all their beliefs have a strong root in the sci-fi technology. My favorite story parts of the game are all either about the old world, or about how parts of the old world have become the religion and myths of today.
That stuff is all fun, but the minute to minute-storytelling is a lot of milquetoast characters talking at each other Bioware-style. Uncanny faces with what I can only assume are procedurally generated animations. People standing completely still. Character personalities that are all dry and lifeless. Just in general, I'd describe this game as sexless, and not just because there isn't any boning in it(Aloy is flirted with by a number of NPCs, but she herself has zero apparent interest in any of them. That part of the Bioware games is not present). Every person is serious. Nobody is funny. There is more personality in a single character from Zelda or Yakuza 0 this year. Someone like Kazuma Kiryu would stand out like a sore thumb just because he knows how to have fun, and the cinematography on him would be better. Maybe this type of "cinematic" Bioware storytelling just isn't what I prefer, but I think there has to be a more fitting tone for a game where you hunt robot wolves and dinosaurs than straightfaced seriousness. That's Metal Gear Rising Revengeance levels of camp.
I don't want Borderlands 2, and I definitely do not want Joss Whedon-style quipping, but there's gotta be something better than this, a mixture of tragedy and comedy that's better at gripping one's heart. It's only been six months since I beat it and I can barely remember the names of about four characters. Characters in Yakuza aren't funny all the time, they treat serious situations seriously and funny situations like they're funny, and they're able to balance a variety of moods without making the player lose faith in the world. It makes the characters in Yakuza feel human, and relatable, like they're people like you and me. Instead of having interesting people doing fun things with the setting, a lot of what I remember most about Horizon are common genre tropes(like Detective Vision) that are just explained and written into the story more than normal. I think that's why the staff on this site in particular just aren't passionate about it, there's nothing meaty to latch onto. It's hard to care. Everything fits together, tonally, but it's just one note. It's a generic blockbuster in everything but setting, and it can't make most of the characters feel like either funny caricatures of real life or realistic, believable, interesting people.
People are mean to Aloy and she loses some stuff dear to her early on in the story, but that doesn't make me like her, it makes me feel sorry for her. While being the underdog is a good start, pity alone isn't enough. Nier is clever enough to save burning the village for the dramatic finale, but Horizon does that within the opening act and it just falls flat.
Aloy lacks the charisma and characterization that could make her likeable outside of just having a sad backstory and a clear goal. An example: Throughout the entire game, does Aloy make a single friend? She certainly gets a lot of allies, that all turn up for the final battle, which is pretty great - but does she ever drink with one of them, fool around with one of them, have a sleepover or something, go out eating with one of them, ever act like she cares about them as anything more than allies, like they're friends? No, not in any quest or mission I encountered. Are there worse video game protagonists? Totally, she's not the worst by a mile. Watching her as a baby and playing her as a kid goes a long way to making me feel for her shitty situation, immerse myself in the setting, and appreciate her caretakers. Her goals and dreams align enough with my own desires as a player to explore the setting, hunt interesting robots and figure out the truth about the world that she was never in the way of me having fun with the game, and she's nice enough of a person that it fits my basic RPG do-gooder persona.
But she's got a lot of story screentime for only being alright, and she lacks both the swagger, style and sex appeal of 2B and the lovable goofy personality and relatable humanity of Yakuza 0's Kiryu. There's no relatable inner struggle and friendships like with Night in the Woods' Mae Borowski, no strong character arc like 9S in Nier Automata. She only comes alive in sections where you get an option to pick her dialogue from nice, clever and angry responses. The clever ones are well written and made me appreciate her, snappy stuff that hits right where it aims. But there are only like 5 of them in the entire game. Similar to the rest of the game, Aloy is just too flavourless for me. She's perfectly adequate, and it's nice to see a Ubisoft style open world adventure game with a revenge plot where you play as a redheaded young woman rather than a grizzled brownhaired white dude for once, but nothing about her made me care the way other characters made me care this year.
Horizon tries to balance RPG elements like dialogue wheels with action-adventure elements, and I think their balance is a bit out of whack, and doesn't make the most of it. You can have a great gamey open world game about hunting monsters, you can have a great RPG with hundreds of NPCs and minor stories, character-defining opportunities and interesting builds, or a tight, strong, narrative-focused action-adventure full of hand-animated cutscenes and scripted events. But is Horizon the best possible mix of all of those? I can't think of anyone else off the top of my head that's tried to be all three, but there is probably a reason there haven't been many attempts. Horizon is a bit shallow in every aspect besides the beautiful graphics, the lore and the combat system. It might be worthwhile to either narrow down that focus or just getting another iteration out to make the individual bits more interesting or mesh better.
The story focus gets in the way of the open world exploration. Going out of my way to explore before doing story missions was a bad idea, because I'd find dozens of large areas with nothing much in them, only to be sent there hours later for a story mission. At one point I went to the final boss arena just by looking for the most suspicious landmark, making it a bit awkward when the bad guy only showed up there twenty hours later.
I don't think the characters and tribal politics of the present day warrant this level of dialogue trees and cutscenes. It's all justified within the lore, but it just boils down to evil cultists that used to own the empire and are a bit pissed about having been chased out. It's not interesting. How the world of yesterday turned into the robot apocalypse of today is quite interesting, but honestly they spend too much time on that, too. I'm able to infer a lot from how all the old buildings are destroyed and the world is now covered in robot monsters, you know. You don't have to walk me through every step of doomsday with audio logs and holograms, in like 6 separate vaults during story missions. That's not the most exciting way this story could've been told.
It really feels like Mass Effect 1, all interesting worldbuilding with dead boring characters. I can imagine a Horizon One Noon where a new writer is handed the reins and instantly shits over the worldbuilding but manages to deliver a lot more exciting character moments, like in Mass Effect 2. Maybe some of the evil cultists could be convinced to cyborg it up with parts taken from the robot animals, giving them both weakpoints and interesting movesets. Perhaps some of the robots could be given AI's that are humanlike instead of AIs, meaning you can now tell the story without focusing so much on human cultists and add some unique personality to the beasts, as well as have some unique bosses in there. And given a bigger focus, the characters might show more of their humanity and make me care more about them. Maybe the melee combat could be expanded upon. Maybe the human bad guy could be Sylens this time instead of a jobber like Helis - he actually has a little more going on, as far as personality goes, and his understanding of the history of the world is on Aloy's level. However, in this game he just helps her explore tombs and pisses off for the post-credits teaser. There's so much room for improvement. That game could be the Horizon I love.
Horizon is an amazing game for being Guerrilla's first try at this sort of thing. If they're just gonna keep focusing on justifying every trope instead of going for the things that might make it a more fun experience, it's not gonna be for me. But they've already managed to make a solid game that's fun to play for many hours, I just got tired of what it had to offer long before it was over(both the framework and content of the open world are too generic at this point to impress)and I thought that parts of it were too weak to be effective. I feel bad for picking on a what's totally a fine game so much, but something about Horizon as a full package just doesn't manage to pull me all the way in, and I keep trying to figure out where exactly it falls apart for me. It's a game I feel like I should like a lot more than I actually do.
Personal pet peeve: Aloy's face. The actress they modeled Aloy's face on, Hannah Hoekstra, is about 10 years older than the character is supposed to be, and it shows. It seems they didn't think she looked appropriately rugged and changed her face after the fact, but to me it just looks like they enlarged her cheeks and jaw, giving the impression of, uhm, a woman someone enlarged the cheeks and jaw of. …[truncated]
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