Welcome back to my GOTY countdown for 2015. Today I’ll continue my list with the 10th-6th best games of the year. I will warn you that this will be long so buckle in for some decent(maybe?) longform writing about video games. These games are in order from 10 to 1. If you missed the Honorable Mentions part of my GOTY celebrations, you can find that here.
GOTY 2015 Top 10
10. Audiosurf 2: About 7 years ago, I went from having a laptop to a Mac. When that happened, I was not able to play a lot of my games that I had bought over the years, from Sid Meier’s Pirates, to Star Wars Galactic Battleground(basically Age of Empires with a Star Wars skin so I played it all the time and created strategies for each story level because I was a supernerd during that time of my life).
The one I missed the most though was Audiosurf. I had heard about it on the Bombcast and it was so much fun to play and compete against people who played all of the weird and obscure songs I played. When I heard that Audiosurf 2 had finally gotten support for Mac I bought it right away. The game has also improved a lot on the first one by having much better visuals, sounds and different looks for how you play it.
The core gameplay is basically the same with a few tweaks. I only play the mono mode and they actually added a new wrinkle to it. As you go through the level, instead of earning points for each block you hit as well as the combo for getting sets of blocks together you just get the combos this time. The other addition is that there are now spikes that take away pieces. You can now use this to keep your combo going because it resets the timer between combos. It adds a nice bit of strategy to where you figure out the optimal path through the song by adding through subtraction. I have been playing it about 30 minutes a day since I got it a week ago and it has earned a spot at the bottom of my list for that reason.
9. Titanfall: This is definitely a game that I played throughout the year up until the summer when I finally set it aside. I won’t say much about this game since it’s been out for a long time but it is still super fun to see your Titan fall out of the sky and then get into it and wreck shop for a little bit. The movement style is also still amazing and I can’t wait to see what Respawn does in Titanfall 2. Play this game if you haven’t done so already.
8. Halo 5: Guardians: This was a weird game for me this year. I enjoyed my time with it but I couldn’t help but feel it could have been better for some reason. The campaign was well done but the mini boss fights every so often were some of the worst I’ve ever done in my time playing games and I just eventually had to kite the boss around and use my AI allies as bait so that I could finish him off. The multiplayer felt the same way. I enjoyed it but once I felt I was done playing it, I decided that I was finished with it. This is all faint praise from me but I will say that the gameplay itself is still excellent and it was nice to see characters from the previous Halo games come back. This is a Halo game and it is even more so the second Halo game in the new trilogy. If you felt that Halo 2 was problematic in the way the story was handled, you will not like how they handle it here either. Either way, it was still an enjoyable experience, even if it has been tempered by reflection.
7. Just Cause 3: This was one hell of an experience this year. I have always been a big fan of the Just Cause series, even the first one. I love how the series has grown and done things bigger and better as things went along. Rico is still an enjoyable character to play as and the supporting cast this time around is probably the best it’s been. The way it controls is still a lot of fun and the new challenge courses they set up in this game also work really well as tutorials for how to truly get the most out of everything you have at your disposal.
The reason it’s not higher are the performance issues on consoles. I’m someone who really dislikes people who get all snooty about performance issues and I don’t normally get upset about them. However, this is one game where I really wish I had a great PC to play this game with no drops in framerate. Instead of looking at all the explosions I was causing, I always had my back to them so I could hopefully have my FR be in the teens instead of single digits. I did find near the end of my time with the game that if you were in a helicopter and flew really far above the ground, then you would be able to keep a steady frame rate. This is no good for a game that brags about how awesome the explosions are though.
Overall, I love this game and this series but I can’t help being disappointed by how it didn’t reach its potential.
6. Batman: Arkham Knight: This was a game that I knew what it was and it delivered on everything it said it would. I actually loved getting back into this world and getting back to my old ways of beating up all manners of crooks and figuring out what was going to happen. The story was excellent and while the Arkham Knight’s identity grew to be easy to figure out, it was still nice to see another way they adapted that comic story for another format.
The combat system is still amazing, even after all sorts of games tried to copy it and make it their own. The Batmobile stuff was actually pretty cool to engage with and the Riddler challenges with the Batmobile may have been the most fun I’ve had with a driving sequence this year. Overall, this was not the best of the Arkham games (that would be Arkham City) but it was very much an enjoyable one.
Come back tomorrow for the best Christmas gift of all: My top 5 games of the year. Thanks for reading and have a safe and terrific holiday.
Log in to comment