by jjrage
My list for the Official Giant Bomb Community Game of the Year! This might be the hardest GOTY list I've ever put together. I'm still playing many of the games below, so this list will likely see some changes up until the 12/31 deadline. (Mild spoilers may appear below)
Showing 1-10 of 20 items
The conclusion to my favorite series of the generation, I loved every second of Mass Effect 3. Well... almost. Yeah okay, the ending could have been better. But it wasn't terrible, and it certainly didn't change the fact that every single moment of the series leading up to it was fantastic.
Episode 1 of The Walking Dead was interesting, but I hardly expected it to take me the places that it did. The game takes off like a rocket with Episode 2, and doesn't slow down until the final cut to black.
I don't think anyone expected this game to be as good as it is. The combat, the story, the characters. The game was barely on my radar, and it was only after some positive buzz that I bothered to rent the game out from my nearest Redbox. Turned out to be a pretty good decision.
It's been said before, but Dishonored is the stealth-action game that Deus Ex: Human Revolution was not. The game allows traversal of it's open-ended levels without requiring you to crawl through a series of vents, and doesn't punish you for choosing that play style with poorly designed boss encounters. I played through it once being as quiet and passive as possible, and I look forward to starting it all over again and killing everything in my path.
The simplest way to describe my time with Journey is this: I am not a spiritual man by any means, and after playing Journey start to finish in one sitting, I can say with great confidence that playing this game was the closest I may ever come to a religious experience. Transcendent, indeed.
As a Halo fanboy, it's tough for me to put this game so far down on my list. But the campaign had some real pacing issues, and I found myself disappointed in the overall narrative of the game. That said, I love how the game ended and I'm excited to see the continuing adventures of the Master Chief in this new trilogy. And while many of my friends would disagree, I am a fan of the tweaks made to the the multiplayer structure of the series. 343 kept the multiplier fresh, and kept me interested as a result.
Far Cry 3 is really, really good. And maybe if I'd played this on PC instead of the technically inferior Xbox 360 version, or maybe if it's narrative didn't shit itself after showing so much promise in this first half of the game, it would be higher on this list. Still, even as I talk about the story's shortcomings, I want to dive back into the game and clear out a few more bandit camps.
I've never been a big fan of strategy games, but Firaxis has this way of crafting ones I really enjoy. After all of the positive buzz, I decided to give XCOM a try and at first, I couldn't really get into it. But I kept playing, and once I started to wrap my head around the game's depth and began developing more successful strategies for approaching each mission, I couldn't put the game down.
Rarely does music make a game, but Hotline Miami likely wouldn't have even gotten my attention this year if it wasn't for the amazing soundtrack. But underneath that, the puzzle combat of Hotline Miami is additing as hell, and although I'm still not entirely sure what the hell was going on with that story, I'm pretty sure I liked that too.
As a huge fan of the Hitman series, Absolution's rather linear mission structure was pretty disappointing. Far too much "hide from the bad guys and get from A to B" and not enough of the living world, open-ended stuff that made me fall in love with the original games, and the new detection system made acquiring disguises nearly irrelevant. However, there are still The Contracts mode is interesting if not all that well implemented, and gives me nostalgia for the days when I'd congregate on the GameFAQs forums for Hitman 2 and Hitman: Contracts, sharing our own user-created contract long before it was an official mode.