by cybexx
Weird busy year for me. So much so that a lot of my favorite games of this year I didn't manage to finish and thus I am only now getting around to finishing a lot of them.
Expect this list to change over the next month. I just roughly placing the list together now to ensure its included in the site's users choice tally.
Showing 1-10 of 19 items
This is pretty much the Assassin's Creed game that Ubisoft should have been making. Working stealth mechanics. Fun but challenging combat. Lots of side content presented well and worth doing. The procedural enemy system is the crown on an amazing achievement by one of my favorite developers. Thanks Monolith, welcome back to Triple-A.
Shovel Knight is mostly faithful to its NES inspirations. Great games of old like Duck Tales, Mega Man 2, Super Mario Bros 3 and Castlevania inform Shovel Knight's design but its hindsight helps it avoid falling into nostalgic pitfalls. Shovel Knight is like someone managed to wipe your memory of a favorite classic while still designing a game that feels modern in 2014, not an achievement to be overlooked. Also the soundtrack is bloody amazing.
While only half-done Broken Age is pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be. Tim Schafer is back in full force, no longer resorting to sneaking adventure game mechanics into other more marketable genres. Sure the puzzles are on the easy site, on the flip side you could call the progression butter smooth. Lets be realistic here, if you are playing this game you are playing it for Schafer's writing, which is inventive and hilarious. You also get a game that looks like concept art in motion, some great voice acting and a fantastic soundtrack. The mid-story finale is also basically perfect.
I wish I worked on games that were a quarter as interesting as Jazzpunk. A constantly hilarious game, that is pretty much 90% easter eggs. Juzzpunk encourages you to poke at it and almost always rewards you with some fantastic tangential discovery.
I have every trophy you can achieve on a single playthrough and plan to get the platinum in 2015. In a year where Playstation exclusives were lacking Second Son still made me very happy that I owned a PS4. One of the few games that shows off the power of the system. Fun abilities, great looking version of Seattle and stunningly rendered mocap performances. Sure the relationship between Deslin and his brother Reggie seems a bit rushed, as if its missing a scene or two but Fetch is a fun character and Augustine makes a great villain.
This game easily wins best atmosphere. The first four hours are a slow build-up of tension. Slowly exploring The Torrens, a courier starship modelled after the film's Nostromo, and The Sevastopol really gives you an appreciation for the loving care that Creative Assembly has put into re-creating this universe. All the while expecting the Xenomorph to jump you. When you finally get to go head-to-head with the creature its a harrowing experience. There is no binary stealth in this game. Hiding under a desk only works if the creature doesn't have line of sight with you, which makes you think a lot about your chosen hiding spot. A too eager attempt to pull out your motion tracker or peer through the slits in a locker may be just the noise that bastard was hunting for. Occasional moments of funky AI or scripting don't take away from the fact that you almost never feels safe. Just when you think you're in an Xenomorph-free zone, you run headlong into him at an intersection. Great, just great.
If Gamergate did anything but make you question the sanity of the internet it hopefully made you question the portrayal of women in video games. Bayonetta is an enigma. On the surface it can seem like the character is being exploited for pure titillation. Its hard not think about this as the camera gracefully glides along her abdomen. But on the other hand, Bayonetta and her pal Jeanne are always in control. The men are all idiots and Bayonetta does what she does because she wants to do it. She is totally empowered in a way that far too few females in video games are. I'm a man, so I probably don't get to make the call on if Platinum's exploitation of the female form is sexist but I can say that the experience of playing this game is phenomenal. Its super tight controls, fantastic combat design and over-the-top set pieces are absolutely worth experiencing.
Supergiant Games' sophomore interactive experience is not as tight as Bastion. This is a more ambitious attempt at world-building and mechanics, it fumbles a bit but still creates an enthralling world to fall into. The art is phenomenal, the music is better. I was very impressed with how you can customize your skills and wanted to try out every combination not just because it unlocked some cool lore but because Supergiant went out of their way to allow for amazing program combinations that went way beyond "now it does lightning damage".
As someone who works mostly in the mobile space and has some experience attempting to adapt console game ideas to touch screen devices, Hitman Go is a miracle. Distilling Hitman into its core elements and then reforging them into a touch-friendly puzzle game is a hell of an achievement. The board game aesthetic is also beautiful and brilliant.
In a year where everyone was shouting about how poorly Ubisoft was executing on many of its big games, they also released one of the best executed stories about war our medium has ever seen. This isn't a story about historical headshots, this is a game about people on both sides of a conflict trying to save each other. The sometimes slapstick humour and cartoony villains alleviate the tension when the game gets dark. The gameplay is okay, its an adventure game you control like a platformer. You solve some puzzles and there are probably a few too many fetch quests but the little write-ups on the various trinkets you unearth give you some interesting insight into a war that we don't talk about much anymore. The stories that the main characters go through are mostly great and during the end sequence I was in tears when I realized what was happening, made all the more poignant by the fact I was still controlling it.
