by winsol
Hey, so here it is, my personal top ten games of 2017. I didn't honestly get to play enough games this year. The start of the year i was pretty much broke and didn't have the cash to buy anything so ended up playing a lot of stuff from last year. The second half i had the cash but didn't have the time. Being an adult is fun...
But anyway, here's the rest of the stuff i played before, Just remember the top of the list will show up first, so skip to the bottom of the page if you want to see them in ascending order.
So i played the beta of this and honestly i really enjoyed my time with it. I can't speak of the single player but the multiplayer was legitimately fun to play. However the business model surrounding it was just disgusting. Loot boxes have also stopped my urge to play Shadow of War as well as this. If this is where certain publishers want to take gaming then I'll go elsewhere. Enough good Indie games come out now that i can play great experiences without being treated like a cash pinata by the big guns of the industry.
A bad version of Payday 2. Hampered with numerous bugs. Honestly the worst game i played this year, by far.
More Fifa, it's fine.
Only played a little of my Snes Classic but this is a fun experience. I'm glad this is finally seeing the light of day.
More 2k, it's fine.
So this is an interesting one. I can see the appeal of it in all honesty, but i just find the mechanics to not really gel. The shooting does not feel as visceral or as tactile as i would like it to. The shooting feels kinda clunky, like i would have to learn the intricacies of the weapon feel just to get average with them. Other games on this list just made the weapons feel meatier. It also has the problem that resources are a far bigger advantage in this than in other battle royal games. Being able to just spam metal walls from in coming fire and then spam rockets back at your assailant is such a huge advantage. Still fun to play but I'd rather play other stuff if given the choice.
My biggest problems with Nioh is the fact that it feels very uneven when compared to the souls series, which it is obviously playing homage too. I might be being unfair to it, comparing it to another series but i can't really help it. after a few attempts the enemies feel really simple to get around and don't feel dangerous. The boss's on the other hand are a massive spike in difficulty and take far too many hits to kill. The first boss in Dark Souls 3 i feel like took me about 10 solid hits to kill. The first boss in this took about 40. It just requires a trail and error style of gameplay that isn't satisfying for me. You need to run the boss until you get the feel of them down to perfection and then execute a perfect. The problem also being that once you have that down, the boss's are normally not difficult either. It's a shame though, because there's a lot to like about it. The story is at least interesting, if formulaic. I've always like feudal Japan as a setting so seeing it in this was cool, and William seems like a interesting main character. I'd still be up for playing a squeal to this, if they can even out the peaks and troughs of it.
Personally i was not the biggest quake fan back in the day. This game obviously wears it's influence on it's sleeve. It's enjoyable, a cool idea on a rogue lite, but didn't grab me.
So this was originally my no.10. I also had a lot to say about it. Then i tired to come back to it to find that it had, for no reason i can find, decided to delete my save data; and it had not saved it on the cloud either. So yeah, fuck this game. I know that's petty but fuck it, and fuck Ubisoft at the same time.
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8. The magic number you are looking for is 8. That is the amount of Chicken dinners I've had up until this point. There really is not a game that can illicit the feeling that this game can. Most games are the same, you land, you (hopefully) get a gun and within a few minutes you're dead. Shot down my someone that little bit luckier or skilled or whatever. You get back in the queue and go again. Then you get a game and you get into the top 30. and all the messing about you've been doing stops. Before this it didn't matter if you got shot. That will happen, you will get killed and you'll get killed a lot early on. but once you're in that range, then it starts to matter. You start putting your game face on. No more rushing houses blindly. no more charging in to the street like Rambo because who cause if you get shot? It's at this point you start really listening to the environment for noise. looking for clues as to where you might get assaulted from next. Planning when and where you are moving to. More than anything in this game your position is key. Getting the drop on someone is what will be the difference between a sweet, sweet chicken dinner, and a trip back onto the plane. It has it's faults yes. It is still very rough around the edges. in the end though, that feeling of your heart pounding in your chest as you peek around a tree, having only 1 other person left alive with you, one more kill away from victory or another agonising defeat is what makes this game so exhilarating. It's why it's been able to be as popular as it has been, and it's why it's my own personal Game of the Year.
When i look back on this game in the years to come i think what might be lost to me is just how stunning it looks. I'll remember the narrative. How it slowly unfolds as you play the game, learning more and more about the world of the past and how we came to be in a post apocalyptic world with metal dinosaurs. I'll remember the themes. How Those with power will at times act with only profit or their own legacy in mind and not the greater good. How we as a people will still ostracise people for no reason other than what society tells us is the right thing to do. How hypocritical we can be even with that. How devotion to an ideal or god will blind us to what is staring us in the face. I'll even remember how much i liked some of the characters. How funny Aloy can be at times and how the voice acting really carried the game through enjoyable, but shaky combat. But i think I'll maybe forget just how good it all looked at the time. As graphics get better i'll forgot just how stunning it all seemed.
What i wouldn't have given to have had more time with this game. There was never enough time to play this, and yet i still sunk about 70 hours into it. If i had had the time and finished it like i wanted to then there's a good chance this would have been no.1. as it is i can't give it higher than this, but that should still tell you how wonderful this game is. Every little piece of it is expertly crafted in a style that is unique to the series. It's no wonder these games take as long as they do to come out given how much goes into them. The different systems of where you are as the player must be a nightmare to design. the writing is really top notch in this. The voice acting is great as well and the combat system has a very deliberate flow to it. It maybe relies a little too much on exploiting the enemies weakness but it's a design choice and i can respect them sticking to that choice as much as they did. The characters are all relatable to in some way. There interactions with an unjust world is definitely a theme we have all explored, especially in our youths and even now given the odds stacked against the common man in this day and age. The music in this game is so god damn good. The music in the persona series has always been good but i think they knocked it out of the park with this one. There is of course an element of wish fulfilment to the narrative, in that a supernatural force is making the world a better place rather than the slow process of social change that actually effects our society. but fuck it, 2017 was a nightmare of a year and if this game let you escape that for a while and imagine an easy answer to difficult questions then all the more power to it. It perfectly captured a time and feeling both in society as a whole and also a time in everyone's life.
I've been a fan of Resident evil since the very first game. Resident Evil 4 is in my top ten games of all time, easily. But i have to say that the series was getting long in the tooth for me and the last few weren't that great. Even ignoring Resident Evil 6 (which is what i did because i never even played it) the series as a whole has not been great for a long time. i honestly thought a reboot was the best way to go with it. Resident Evil 7 is almost like a reboot. It Definitely reboots the style of the games, taking them into the first person. and it works. It works really well. They also managed to add not only the horror (kinda) back to the series, but the mystery. After the first boss fight i was genuinely surprised and wanted to know what the hell was going on with the game. The Baker family are a great series of antagonists to the player. They help give you a sense of dread while exploring the house and the surrounding grounds. For the first time in a long time, i'm interested in what they do next.
I still have a weird relationship to Destiny. I'm still not sure i really like it, but i do enjoy playing it, if that makes sense? It makes so many decisions that i don't like or would like done differently or just have more to do...but i still like playing it. It has that mmo feeling of just being able to drift off and play for hours while not really doing anything. The stuff surrounding the game have not made it easiest to play in all honesty. It's really fucking disgusting to see the eververse pushed as it has been. What is also annoying is seeing how many people just give this a pass because...reasons? However underneath all of that, there is a really fun loot shooter that has always been Destiny's strong point. Hell this one even has a story! It's not great but it's there, it's something. I even laughed a few times at it. I might be being a little hard on this but i want it to be better. I want this to be the best game it can be. Oh well, maybe Destiny 3, or Anthem...
I really liked the original game of this and so it was no surprise that i really liked the sequal. I do have to admit though, Because of work i was never able to beat this (along with another game higher up on my list). This series continues to have one of the best combat systems in any RPG. You have to make a lot of clever choices here or you'll pretty much get wiped out. The games story as well is interesting and really well told, you get to make a lot of dialogue options that affect what happens in the story. Playing the someone else makes the game so much better and you can get into some really fun situations where you're team mate sets everything on fire by mistake and screws up an encounter... Not that i ever did that.
I loved FTL. It was one of my favourite games the year it came out and i have went back to it often, pretty much failing every time. This has some of the spirit of that game but makes some cool changes that i liked. You slowly upgrade both your plane and crew to get better and better as you go along. It's really nicely done and i'm glad i took the plunge and bought it right away.
This is a nice little puzzle game that is put in a very stylised package. The premise is really interesting and slowly uncovering what you need to do reminds me of old adventure games. I really enjoyed it and it might not be for everyone i think. However it'll definitely be right up some peoples alleys.
So i said last year i'd include this in my list for this year so here it is. Up until Chapter 9 this would have been a lot higher on the list. I liked the characters a lot, the world was interesting and it slowly was drawing me in. Then Chapter 9 happened, and it all went to shit. Chapter 13 is one of the single worst missions i have ever played in a game, period. And some of the characters just become straight up unlikable. And (spoilers for the game) as crazy as it might seem, the bad guy fucking won in my eyes. How is the end of the game a victory for us? He got everything he wanted. The world is pretty much destroyed, there is 1 city left, all the major empires and settlements are dead and overrun with demons. He also gets his last wish and he dies at the end. em... hurrah? *Cue final fantasy victory flair*
Ugh. I hate that i'm writing this here. In all honesty i know that if i had played some of the other stuff i wanted to this year this wouldn't have made the top ten. I really wanted to like this game more than i did. I ignored all the warning signs. I hoped that with a new setting they'd be able to get it right. Mass Effect 2 is my game of the last generation, and while i hated the ending of 3 i still had it in me to love the series again. And you know what, i like this setting. I like the characters. I like the premise. But the execution is just so poor. This game really didn't need to be an open world game. All of the open world parts of the game are just, bad. And there's still some great stuff in here, you can see the mass effect trying to get out. All the character's loyalty missions are really cool. Liam's in particular is a highlight for me because it was what turned me around on his character. But it's just put in this unnecessary wrapping that makes it feel like they took Dragon Age 3 Inquisition and slapped a mass effect total conversion on it and it doesn't work. And the bugs, god damn the bugs. I never even got the crazy ones that everyone else got but i still had 5, yes FIVE game ending bugs that made me have to restart the game to fix. I really did want to like this more, but i think this might be the end of the series. Until the reboot with micro-transactions comes in 10 years.