Huh, what a peculiar list in spots.

WHERE IS TAP TYCOON??? HUH????!

hard agree on T2 as GOTY

Nice list, nothing surprising given that Jeff has been very open about games he doesn't like all year. And since he seems to dislike a lot of modern games, the ones he does like is easy to remember.

Also, I blew some inebriated disc golf player's mind by matching him chop for chop in a VR D-Generation X crotch chop battle...

Why has video of this not surfaced?

I'm glad Jeff likes Titanfall 2 as much as he does. I bought it at launch and someday, someday, I'll play that campaign.

nailed it, titanfall 2, superhot and witness are for sure top 5. i'm playing through doom right now.

I'm actually quite surprised to see Hitman that high up, or even on the list at all. It's real cool to see that the franchise is back in force and pleases tons of different people.

LET IT DIE IS AMAZING!

Just made it to floor 29 and can't wait to fight the main 3rd boss and watch the intro video for that boss!

Love the way they handle multiplayer and the game is a great grind to get to the higher floors without getting boring -IMO

Just a tip: After floor 20 make sure you have some guns leveled up. I leveled up my assault rifle, nail gun and sniper rifle to make it through the floors in the 20's.

GOTY!!!!!

No order..

• Overwatch
• Mad Max (played this year)
• Hitman
• Doom
• Witcher Blood and Wine
• Titan Fall 2
• Uncharted 4
• King's Quest
• Xcom 2
• Dues Ex MD

Gotta say, this list surprises the hell out of me. Cool to see Let It Die on here. Thought Doom would have been number 1 for sure.

Great list. Can't wait to get to Titanfall 2.

You call this a quick look?!

Thanks for the Rhythm Heaven love, Jeff. I really like that game.

Looking at this list has made me realize that VR has actually got a pretty good line up, better than I thought it would get in its first year, this has me hopeful :D

Awesome.

picross?! dan's influence is moving out just in time, i see. kidding, the nonogram apps on ios have all but consumed my soul.

probably wouldn't have tried superhot or darkest dungeon without gb's coverage.

good list.

Wow, I wouldn't have expected Titanfall 2 to be that high on Jeff's list. Listening to the podcasts though, I'm not at all surprised Superhot is runner up or that Let It Die charted with him and nobody else on staff.

Whoa, you go, big guy!

"Let it Die is almost definitely not one of the 10 best games of 2016, but it's definitely one of my 10 favorite games of 2016."

I love this line. I feel like sometimes the squad feels like they know a game is good and have this obligation to recognize it, but I always like when they go with what they loved, and say screw other people's opinions. Agree or disagree with some of their choices, I dig their ability to put together a unique, and Giant Bomb feeling list.Great list!

I believe The Witcher 3 would be a good example of this. I think this is what people are getting at who want objective reviews, which is an admittedly impossible task.

One review that comes to mind would be IGN's review of a soccer (football) management game. For those who enjoy that sort of thing, it was a highly acclaimed game. The IGN writer reviewed it as if it were supposed to be FIFA or something, and gave it a very low score. I think eventually IGN gave it another review from someone who was actually familiar with the genre.

But yeah, I think Jeff has a pretty solid list this year.

Didn't need to scroll to the end of the list to know it was going to be Titanfall. I'm basically buying this game on Jeff's recommendation as I don't normally play shooters.

If you want to pickup the PS4 version, I'm pretty sure it's still $30 for week four of the PSN Holiday sale. I think it goes through Monday. I've heard of more than a few "I don't normally play multiplayer" people who ended up becoming addicted to this game. Perhaps it will click with you as well.

In several ways, Titanfall can be pretty encouraging to casual players. What is probably the most popular mode, Attrition, doesn't even show your deaths on the scoreboard. It's all just about contributing to your team's score.

Great read...Thanks Jeff

SuperHOT

SuperHOT

@spaceinsomniac: Isn't Bounty Hunt the most popular mode?

Titanfall 2 is super dope!

@spaceinsomniac: yeah, you know what has always been weird to me, when somebody who likes specific types of games, say RPGs, or the infamous series, reviews a new entry and you see comments like "of course, he's a fanboy!" One of the biggest things to me is getting to know reviewers, so I can really feel the weight of their review. Vinny's opinions on games is shockingly similar to mine, so I always trust his opinion when it comes to games I'm interested in. Jeff I feel is super in touch with the Call of Duty games, which I also dig, so his reviews mean 10x more to me than any site.

And I'll always be with Jeff, Saint Row the Third was the true Game of the Year.

I have over 20 hours in Let It Die as of this writing, and I'm still waiting for the moment when that game actually tries to get me to spend money. I'm constantly reminded of microtransactions by games that I paid (sometimes full price) money for and this free to play game doesn't even do that.

The only thing that comes close is when you die you can spend Death Metal to be instantly revived, which is of course a resource you buy outside of getting a minor amount every once in a while. Thing is, you can pay Kill Coins (ingame currency) that you earn through playing the game normally to just get your character back that way. 9 times out of 10, I have more than enough Kill Coins to immediately rescue my Fighter. It has happened where I didn't, but playing with a different character for 10 minutes made that a non-issue.

Beyond that, Let It Die is incredibly interesting and unless that game reveals cruel and disgusting ways and reasons to spend money, it most surely is one of the best games of 2016. For what it's worth, some people say it gets worse the further you get in, but I know people on a personal level that have 'finished' that game without spending a dime and say that it is fine.

Also, RAGE is underrated you bad man (it's better than DOOM).

Just bought Titanfall 2 based on this. Downloading to my PS4 now. Hope it's fun!

Not sure. I'll have to look into that. Now I'm wondering.

I suggest this to everyone, but please at least try playing with the evolved control scheme, and set your FOV to somewhere around 90. Only changing from the default controls will allow you to fully appreciate the movement in this game. I recently borrowed a copy of Infinite Warfare, and it feels like I'm wearing lead boots and a broken jetpack.

@spaceinsomniac Yeah, when I realized this was more Doom than Call of Duty, jump on L1 made a bit more sense. I do like having melee nice and close though, so right now I'm on Bumper Jumper. Still gotta mess around with the FOV though. Thanks!

Also for anyone interested, yeah, the movement in this thing is fantastic. The campaign isn't as great as I'd heard though. Story-wise I mean. BT is a pretty cool robot buddy, but there's no good villain or interesting stakes or anything like that. What there is however is some really interesting level mechanics that keep it all feeling fresh throughout.

Played a bit of the MP earlier tonight and it's great. Got your standard progression stuff, but the Titan rodeo stuff and wallrunning around like a maniac feels awesome. Diggin it!

Yes! I beat RAGE twice and thought it was pretty goo...

it's better than DOOM

what.

WHAT!?

I know exactly what you mean by wanting to keep melee close at hand. I want to scream every time I get killed by a melee attack, and I have no chance of reaching my circle button first, but I just can't give up instant slide access. I just can't do it. It's crazy how far players can take the movement in Titanfall 2, and while I may not be ANYWHERE this good, even being able to do basic slide-hops takes this game to another level.

If the commentary bothers you--I know a lot of people on this forum can't seem to stand you tubers--just watch it on mute. Either way, guy is highly skilled.

Glad to hear you're enjoying multiplayer, though. I've been playing on a semi-regular basis with a number of Giant Bomb community members lately. If you'd like to join us sometime, feel free to join the PS4 community and / or send me a friend request.

Wait... if you thought RAGE was bad what exactly are you saying 'Yes!' to?

There's two things at play here. DOOM is overhyped first and foremost. It is a good DOOM game. Even if it was a perfect DOOM game, that will never be the end all be all for me. But it isn't. Game takes way too long to get going (if it ever does, I haven't finished it yet), has lighting issues and suffers from old-school level design where I sometimes just can't find my way to where I am supposed to go. Game should be much higher pace and should have offered up combat encounters that allowed you to flow for longer, a lot sooner (again, if at all). Not saying it is bad at all, if anything I'm admitting it's not really my thing, but on top of that the ridiculous hype should also have been toned down a notch. Jeff putting it at number 5 feels like a spot where that game belongs if it is your thing.

Secondly, RAGE is underrated. Most underrated shooter ever, as far as I can tell. To this day it's hard to find a shooter that feels better and has better 'reactive AI' to being shot. I would argue it definitely feels better than DOOM. In fact, I might say that is the best feel a shooter has ever felt. What else is there? Destiny, The New Order in some sense too... that's mostly it? Yeah, I actually don't feel bad at all saying RAGE is the best a shooter has ever felt. Then the criticism: it's not as big as Fallout. There isn't enough weapon variety compared to Borderlands. This did not revolutionize the FPS genre. The criticism that game was subjected to was entirely unfair. People's expectations were way out of whack.

What if I criticized DOOM for not even having ADS? Or not having big set piece scripted events like Call of Duty? That is the type of criticism RAGE was subjected to. People didn't take it for what it was.

I'm not saying you should think RAGE is better than DOOM, I'm just explaining what I think.

@zevvion: RAGE has problems though aside from technical ones at launch (PC version). The racing is not bad, but nothing spectacular and feels like the weaker part of the game compared to the shooting. The shooting parts feel good with some cool weapons and gadgets (Sentry Bot <3), but there's some repetition because they make you visit each location twice if you want a full playthrough. The game is also on the easy side, even on the DLC Ultra Nightmare mode. The game has a crappy ending with no real boss fight (the Scorchers DLC sort of fixes it, but it's still side content in the story). It had a really lackluster multiplayer (to the point it was unplayable since noone played it and it used playerhosting with really bad netcode).

DOOM singleplayer kinda doesn't have any of the downsides (for me it has no downsides, but I grew up with far, far worse maze like leveldeisgn so I never had any problem with the one arguably legit downside some might have*), while being just as good, if not better than the positive sides of RAGE.

*And in all honesty, there's only one part in the game where you need to do some exploration with multiple objectives at once. The rest is actually quite linear with some side exploration for secrets.

@gundogan: If you're going to raid on RAGE for being easy (which I generally agree with, though 'too easy' is overdoing it and Nightmare and Ultra Nightmare provide a fair challenge) you can't do it in a comparison to DOOM. That game is too easy too, which is it's biggest downside for me. They create this combat system for you to engage with and at the point I am now: I didn't have to at all. Where RAGE is mostly easy, it still requires your full attention to be so and I'm actually having fun. In DOOM I constantly feel like that combat system is underutilized because encounters are over way, way too quick.

As for its level design, it completely sucks for me. That game needs a setting in the options to show me an objective marker onscreen, because I honestly turned that thing off several times because I wanted to shoot something and it took way too long before I could, and when I could it was over in 30-60 seconds.

Beyond its combat, which in my opinion takes waaaaay too long to get interesting, DOOM really doesn't have anything for me. Where you see a game with no downsides, I'm hard pressed finding any strong sides.

Different games for different people.

@zevvion: No RAGE is easy and much easier than DOOM on their highest difficulties (please note that if you haven't finished DOOM yet, you are most likely not playing on nightmare and the jump from ultra violence to nightmare is pretty big). Both have their short cuts to make things easier (BFG ammo rune in DOOM for example), but in RAGE they shower you in mats from the get go to make gadgets and ammo that trivialize the combat much more than DOOM and not to forget the one time cheat death mechanic called the defibrillator.

I personally had no problem at all with pacing and leveldesign in DOOM, but that's different games for different people I guess yea.

@gundogan: I have not, no. But I can safely say my time on Nightmare and especially Ultra Nightmare in RAGE felt right. It didn't need to be harder for me. That said, I also don't excel at shooters necessarily. The only possible exception is Destiny. But since my argument was in regards to reception, we can assume the vast majority of people also did not play DOOM on Nightmare and most likely not even Ultra Violence which is what I'm playing it on. DOOM was received in an almost singular sense of extreme praise in that scenario still. So when comparing the two receptions I don't think you can say DOOM was a real challenge compared to RAGE in that sense.

I could read encouraging posts like this in Uncle Death's voice all day!

<3

@zevvion: To clear things up as much as possible, I think both Rage and Destiny are pretty good games that people bash way too much for lacking story and praise way too little for movement and mechanics and combat being better than 95% of shooters out there. Doom still beats the hell out of both in every department. Also, this is all just opinion but as someone who feels pretty strongly about Doom - I've gotta speak up.

You're a huge fan of Destiny, from what I understand, and I think Rage suffered from a lot of the same problems that Destiny did. It has a surface personality but no real depth to match. It has just barely enough content - it might take you fifteen hours to do everything in Rage, which is supposed to be an open-world RPG-lite game. It feels good to play, but it doesn't necessarily feel compelling for anyone looking for something more interesting than "it's got an interesting, smooth look and feels pretty good to play".

(spoiler block'd the rest because it's kinda long)

That's a bit of a silly thing to say since they are not anywhere close to the same game. How exactly does DOOM beat Destiny in multiplayer, co-op, endgame and content? From what I gather I'm nearly through DOOM's campaign at this point which means it is roughly 8 hours long. That's like a first run of a raid in Destiny. Claiming that game has no depth reveals how little you know about it more than anything else. It's a-okay you love DOOM better or dislike Destiny, but don't run that home saying it beats every other game that features a gun in it on every front imaginable

And no, it's not nonsense. I get you like DOOM, so for you things must have felt right, right from the get go. I'm still waiting until that game throws a decent amount of enemies my way so I can try to get in a zone. I don't mind short firefights, but DOOM feels like it would be extra-awesome if you're being tested by hordes of dudes. The game isn't doing that for me. That doesn't disqualify your enjoyment of the game, again, just saying what I wanted out of it. It's just a different thing than what you wanted.

The lighting issues I'm referring to are the 'adjust until barely visible'-drama that game starts up with. DOOM is hardly the only game to do it (heck Destiny does it, Titanfall 2 does it) which causes the game to be way too dark. I couldn't see enemies, I couldn't even see my weapon. You know that part where you get the shotgun at the start of the game? I knew it was a shotgun because I saw the Quick Look. It could've been a stick for all I knew, I couldn't even see the thing as I picked it up. The only thing I could see were candles and shades flickering in between them. It admittedly looked moody and cool, but it's just unplayable. The part where I was having issues was, after conceding and just boosting the brightness back up, it looked washed out in comparison. I felt like that game wanted me to play in pitch black darkness so I was adjusting the lighting for the first 4 hours of the game back and forth and could never get a good setting between the dark the game apparently wanted and it still being playable. I just gave up eventually and the game just looks washed out to me now. I probably wouldn't have noticed that if they didn't ask me to adjust my brightness on the offset.

To be perfectly clear: I'm not saying it's a bad game. I enjoy it a fair amount. I just don't line up with the praise that game has gotten. It's so unreserved too. People are throwing around 'best shooter campaign ever made' so nonchalantly. I can think of a handful of campaigns I enjoyed way more without even having to think. One of them even came out this year. It's perfectly cool that you feel like it is. I just don't share your opinion.

@zevvion: Some people would rather play an 8 hr campaign of Doom (and I'm pretty sure it's longer than that) rather than spend 8 hours in a Destiny raid. I've done several raids in Destiny and they are mostly a slog in my opinion. Thats of course a very subjective opinion, but it's no stretch to say that raids are a very specific and extremely time intensive type of entertainment that not everyone will be into. I did it a few times and while there were some in my group who were really into it, but I always thought it was more trouble than it was worth and it honestly wasn't all that much about skill rather than perseverance. We did these 4 waves, ok ok oh oops someone teleported wrong or got bumped off a map by accident annnnd it's a wipe. Fun for some, not so much for others - especially when the drop in the end turns out to be a dupe of something you already have.

Also I'm not sure what the problem with enemy numbers is as Doom throws a fair amount of enemies at you in each encounter. It's not like 4 or 5 guys, it's usually about 10-ish with different classes mixed and matched causing you to run from Pinkies while avoiding Imp fireballs and oh boy here comes a Baron... Your brightness thing is entirely on your end because I've had some issues with brightness in games in the past as my monitor runs a bit dark, but Doom was absolutely fine. Nothing was washed out, the colors had deep blacks and vibrant lights without black-sinks where nothing was visible.

But hey in the end it is what it is right? I remember the guys on the Bombcast always say how the gunplay is amazing in Destiny, and it's something I never understood. I mean it's ok? All the guns (at the time) were basically hitscan rifles, nothing especially fun or exotic. I aimed, I shot, numbers flew off and you could do headshots. It's very similar to how Doom just isn't impressing you in any way, I was never impressed by Destiny, or by the "combat puzzle" mechanics of Halo. It's a feel situation and I guess you either feel it or you don't. Doom is excellent, and it's a shame that it's just average for you, but then again you are able to gleam entertainment from doing the same raids and strikes in Destiny so hey, you got that!

@humanity: Of course, but that was my point. It is opinion and they are completely different experiences. So to say DOOM 'beats the hell out of it in every department' (which is what I was replying to) is just silly. You can't even get the Destiny experience in DOOM so how could it possibly beat it?

As for the lighting, not really accurate. They put that slider there specifically because everybody's monitor is different. You adjust it so the game is lighted correctly for your monitor. I can completely imagine it didn't look washed out to you, because you didn't put that game on the recommended settings so you never saw what it was 'supposed' to look like. To keep a long story short, my first experience with that game looked not even anywhere close to the Quick Look for example.

I didn't say there was nothing about DOOM that impressed me though. The shooting does feel exceptionally good, similar to how it felt in RAGE, though RAGE's enemies reacted more satisfactory. I also don't think it's average at all. If I had to name shooters that nail how the shooting feels it's RAGE, Destiny, DOOM and sort-of-more-or-less The New Order. And pretty much those alone. Id has that stuff down. But I'm judging it based on its praise: it does have some problems and besides that I wish it threw more enemies my way.

That's not taking legitimacy away from anyone, if anything I want something different out of it than what it is going for.

Great list of games, love the insight into Jeffs mind!!!

Thank you so much for informing me about the release of Frog Fractions 2!

I'm liking it quite a bit.

Jeff.zone!!