by cybexx
I thought 2014 was a weird year for my gaming time but it doesn't even come close to 2015. Between changing jobs, moving homes and a big ongoing family emergency I basically lost those 4 months in the middle of the year I rely on to catch up on games. So as a result a lot of the games I wanted to put a lot more time into like The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 were barely touched so it doesn't feel right to put them on my list.
So this is the weird list of games I managed to put enough time into to feel like I could justify placing them in some order.
Showing 1-10 of 12 items
What a weird game paired with a weird development history. For everything this game does right there is another bizarre decision that could have been interference from Konami or just a weird quirky choice from Kojima. As a big fan of the series I wanted this to be the game to close the Big Boss / Solid Snake loop that seemed to be promised, this is not that game but it is one hell of a ride. The tight controls, open world setting, loose mission design and a very polished version of the troop management / research systems introduced in Portable Ops come together to form one of the most compelling gameplay loops in years. The 80+ hours I spent in this game may have prevented me from finishing a lot of other games but it was time well spent.
2015 in many ways felt like the year of the episodic adventure game as many other developers joined Telltale in fleshing out this previously underserved subgenre. The best of these attempts for my money is Life is Strange. Developed by french developer DontNod, they basically took the best feature of their previous game, Remember Me, and built a much better game with it. Max's time travelling powers provide a unique tool to manipulate dialog trees and solve environmental puzzles. This isn't a game about finding items and combining them with other items (most of the time). This is mostly a game about relationships and manipulating those relationships into the best outcome. Unlike Telltale games you can often reverse your choices but all major choices have a delayed payoff and deciding which morally ambiguous choice to locked into is tough. I have to commend the developer for really going the extra mile in exploring the possibility space of the story. This game goes to some really dark and mature places I was not expecting from a video game. But really I think it is the numerous little quiet character moments that really put this game over the top for me.
Speaking of episodic adventure games. With the advent of series like Life is Strange and King's Quest it kinda felt like a lot of games were delivering the Telltale experience but in a more polished way than Telltale tends to manage. It often feels like Telltale's engine technology, budget and schedule can't quite keep up with their storytelling ambitions, we gave them a pass when they were the only game in town but in a year with 3 Telltale series it felt like they were maybe not quite living up to the competition. However of those 3 series Tales from the Borderlands is the clear standout, they took their sweet time delivering each episode but this is the strongest series Telltale has delivered since The Walking Dead Season 1 and the most polished series they ever managed to put out. Usually I tend to find the quality of a Telltale series dips during the middle episodes but every episode of this series was very strong. It's nice to see Telltale returning to writing humour and there are some amazing hilarious moments like the catwalk stealth sequence, the "Bro" conversation or the ridiculous finger-guns action set piece. They deliver some genuine laughs but they've also learned a lot about how to tell a compelling narrative that manages to make me care about those characters even when one of those characters has a holographic ghost hand sticking through his crotch. Also the unique title sequences for each episode deserve some kind of presentation award because my god they are glorious.
I received a copy of this free with my new graphics card and it thankfully ran mostly fine for me apart from some occasional hitching and texture loading issues. I proceeded to nearly 100% this game bit-by-bit in the evenings during one of the craziest times in my life. I unfortunately ran into a nasty gameplay bug with one of the riddler trophies that stopped me from completing my playthrough. I then went and bought the PS4 version (at thankfully a bit of a discount), which I intend to do a 100% playthrough on one of these days. So sure this game doesn't stray too far from the Rocksteady formula and yes it's still missing the tightly designed environments of Arkham Asylum and yes the Arkham Knight storyline is a letdown and yeah the Bat-Tank combat is leaned on too much but it got me through a tough time in my life and it comes together better than Arkham City did for me (stupid horseshoe shaped world...).
I was listening to the first day of Giant Bomb's Game of the Year Podcast and Undertale came up multiple times. I had bought Undertale before going on my break but I suddenly realized I wanted to play through the game before I got any other moments of the game spoiled for me. So I took a day of my break and played through it. Undertale does a lot with what it has. There is a lot of personality in the sprite work, the musical score perfectly conveys the personality of the characters and the game is constantly tweaking its relatively simple mechanics in interesting ways. It feels like every element of this game is used to tell its story in interesting ways. Sure the opening area is a little bland but overall I feel the game comes together rather well.
Full disclosure, as of this writing I have yet to finish AC Syndicate, I haven't even seen the cool secret thing that is supposed to happen late in the game. But I played a lot of this game over my break and I feel this is easily one of the best AC games. I feel like they've finally found a good balance between the automated freerunning and responsive controls. The combat is a bit simple but the animation is so good, especially for the finishers that it's still fun to beat up thugs. This game strikes an interesting balance between its story missions and its meta-game that compels me to do all the objectives in each area. The story doesn't take itself too seriously and controlling Twin Assassins is a great idea, I prefer playing Evie most of the time due to her focus on stealth abilities and her personality but it's also fun taking her into the Fight Club activities and just let her wreck shop.
A good 3 months early in the year were dedicated to hunting a lot of monsters with my co-workers, unfortunately I fell off when I changed jobs and didn't have that constant prodding to play at lunch. This series can be somewhat impenetrable but a lot of people I know who had never tried the series before managed to get into with just a bit of hand-holding so this feels like the more accessible entry in the series. The climbing and jumping also make this the more energetic entry in the series.
Yeah so Ty Taylor hasn't technically released this game yet unless you bought a key at PAX but I spent a bunch of time with it this year. I don't think I've seen people get so mad at each other so quickly in any other competitive multiplayer game. Its a match-3 puzzle game that is really easy to learn how to play and the game has a smart dynamic handicap system that scales the size of the puzzles depending on how close you are to winning. There are also some really crazy modifiers including a mode that activates a random modifier each round like the recent Mortal Kombat games. These keep seasoned veterans on their toes as you suddenly have to deal with walls or your "puzzle-gun" firing twice every time you tap. The campaign is also pretty cool, comprised of hundreds of devious puzzles with no time pressure (just mind pressure) and some boss battles thrown in for good measure. This has been the standout game at the parties I've been to recently.
Remember Excitebike 64 and the ridiculous number of zany modes that game had. No? Well you probably should have played that game. Rocket League's predecessor basically takes the Soccer mode from Excitebike 64 and made that into its own game, Rocket League polishes the hell out of that game. It's fun and easy to just jump in and start chasing the ball but there is a lot of depth to the strategies you can deploy and a really high skill ceiling for trying to get good at aerial interceptions.
My experience leading up to the release of Galak-Z was punctuated by running into lead engineer Zach Aikman at various events and talking to him about Garbage Collector optimization in the Unity engine because when you create procedural environments you end up with a lot of bits of memory you need to dump somewhere. But that is beside the point. Galak-Z is a terrific playing Roguelike game where you control a little nimble ship and try to survive long enough to collect enough upgrades and defeat the Season's boss (the game is broken into seasons). It is also gorgeous with a great mix of 2D and 3D art assets. It has a wonderful style that evokes a bootlegged 80s mecha anime.
