2018 was an interesting year for games as always. There weren’t as many big releases this year, but the ones that did come out were probably some of the most highly anticipated games of recent years. Red Dead Redemption 2, maybe the most anticipated game since Red Dead Redemption 1 was released all the way back in 2010 (the fact that RDR 1 is 8 years old is baffling to me), finally made its way out from under the crunch of Rockstar. Everyone got the big console Monster Hunter game they have always wanted with Monster Hunter World. Marvel’s Spiderman was set to be the successor to the legendary Spiderman 2. And God of War had a sequel that reinvented the series entirely.

Of course, there were smaller games that made a big impact as well. The smaller surprises are sometimes the most fun, as games I had never heard of before are released seemingly from nowhere and are incredible to play. Most importantly, the overall quality of games has definitely risen across the board. Of the 22 games I played this year, I enjoyed all of them, some more than others of course. But each game I played had its own unique and fun qualities, to where I didn’t regret any of my purchases, perhaps a first for me in a time where I generally buy more games than I have time to play. While I still found myself taking issue with things like repetitive quests, bloated open worlds, and some lackluster game mechanics, for the most part this year’s batch of games felt like they were all attempting to do their own thing or truly improved upon mechanics of old.

Games That Didn't Make the Top 10

Artifact – Artifact is surprising to me in multiple ways. It’s related to Dota, it’s created by the guy who created Magic the Gathering, and it’s the first game Valve has released since Dota 2. All of these things made me think Artifact was going to instantly be a huge success, perhaps even becoming a true competitor to Hearthstone in the virtual CCG space. However, the player base plummeted and sales were apparently extremely low. I guess not being free to play, not having progression, and not explaining the games economy well enough hurt the game badly. The other surprise is that while I like the idea of Artifact and while I am someone who loves deck building and competitive card games, I just don’t enjoy playing Artifact. It’s weird and I honestly can’t pinpoint one exact reason why, it just doesn’t feel fun I suppose. I see the strategy, I see how smart the draft mode is, and yet I don’t want to touch it at all. Perhaps I’m just too deep into Gwent to want to get invested in any other card game.

State of Decay 2 – I put a few hours into this game and, like with all survival games, this is another one where I love the idea of the game but don’t enjoy playing it very much. The idea of managing a Sims like community during a zombie apocalypse is cool, I just couldn’t get myself to enjoy playing the game enough to keep going with it.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 – This game was fun for a time, its very well made and has enough replayability and progression to be satisfying. I just finished all the missions and played a few runs on the harder difficulties and then had my fill. I certainly liked it more than similar games like Left 4 Dead.

Far Cry 5 – Far Cry 5 is a good game for making your own stupid fun in the open world. Playing co-op with my friend and doing dumb things like seeing how many dead bodies we could load into the back of a truck and drive around with, or seeing how terrible of a crash we could cause with the various vehicles were really the high points in an otherwise repetitive, standard open world game. Nothing about Far Cry 5 is really bad, just mediocre, and eventually I had played enough and stopped before I had finished it.

Dragonball FighterZ – Probably the most I’ve ever learned about how to be good at a fighting game came from this game. It does an amazing job of letting you have success and look cool while button mashing, while also having an incredibly deep and difficult learning curve. I played it enough that I was able to win at least a few matches online, which was good enough for me.

CrossCode – This game would be at the top of my “game that probably would have made my top 10 had I played more of it” list if such a list did exist. The entire concept of the game feels unique and the world feels open in a way that a lot of other smaller games such as this don’t. It has challenging combat and smart puzzles and as someone who spent far too much time playing World of Warcraft, I love the whole MMO setting. I hope I play more of it, but as we roll on into 2019 I feel like this will be one of those games I enjoy but just never really get back to playing.

Vampyr – My favorite part about Vampyr is how it attempts to mix story decision making with actual gameplay. A lot of games don’t have actual consequences for most decisions, particularly if you choose the good guy route. Vampyr tries to solve this by making ever decision you choose have an impact. If you bite and kill people you grow more powerful, making the actual combat easier and allowing you to buy and max more of the powers. However, by doing this you will miss out on the characters stories, and perhaps ruin districts of the city. If you choose not to bite people you will be able to see all their stories and learn all about them, however you will be weaker and make the enemies tougher to kill. Cool idea in theory, in practice however it doesn’t really amount to much. In my time spent with the game I did not bite anyone and yet the game remained relatively simple. Enemies all have similar attacks and the game doesn’t do much in the way of changing their behavior to make things tougher for you. Even if it were more difficult, dying doesn’t really matter, you just reload and continue on your journey. Perhaps some sort of vampire nemesis-like system would have been the perfect solution to this problem. I appreciate what Vampyr attempted to do, and although it isn’t a great game, I enjoyed the time I did spend with it. Hopefully I get around to finishing it one day.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – Black Ops 4 is the most mindless fun I had playing a game all year. The competitive multiplayer has some neat new twists, the hero class system works better than I thought it would, and the new blackout mode is an enjoyable, faster paced version of PUBG. I like Black Ops 4 quite a bit, but make no mistake, it is still a Call of Duty game through and through. It’s definitely an achievement that over a decade later these games still play the same and are still lots of fun, but its also not enough anymore to get me to consider it as one of the best games of the year. Also, the season pass and cosmetic system is absolutely terrible. Blops 4 has some, of if not the worst customization menus ever.

Assassins Creed Odyssey – AC Odyssey is a great game buried under a mound of mediocrity. The world is huge and fun to explore, the loot is varied and surprisingly allows you to create completely different character builds, the skill trees actually change the way you play and the skills themselves are surprisingly fun to use, some of the side quests are incredible and when the humor is good its really good. The boat gameplay I loved so much in AC 4 Black Flag also returns and is still just as fun, the mercenary system is a neat idea, and finding and assassinating the cult members is a cool side adventure. The game is just packed full of stuff to see and do and while people say you can never have too much of a good thing, Odyssey tries its hardest to prove those people wrong. Twenty bandit camps to take over would be fun. One hundred is not. The list of side quests and collectibles is never ending. That’s something that it seems Odyssey doesn’t want to happen. It doesn’t want the game to end. Unfortunately, the content in the game is not good enough to justify a 150-hour adventure. 50 hours though? Definitely. It’s a shame the game is so bogged down with such repetition and over abundance of stuff because the core systems are solid and running around as Kassandra is the most fun I’ve had in an Assassin’s Creed game since Black Flag.

Octopath Traveler – Octopath Traveler was easily going to be in my top 10, but eventually slogging through the stories, of which most are quite boring, lead me to stop playing the game. In a huge sprawling RPG with multiple party members, I think character interaction between said members is probably the most important thing to enjoying a JRPG and its story. While the combat in Octopath is extremely fun, combining the party members classes together to create different builds is rewarding, and the boss fights are some of my favorite in recent memory, I just couldn’t get over the way the game handles its various stories. The eight characters hardly interact with each other, to the point where each story is completely written as if none of the other seven characters are even there. It’s weird and makes the story telling even worse when you are slogging through a character story that is the most basic JRPG story ever written. The game looks great and plays great, it just didn’t have the narrative pull to keep me going past the 40 hour mark.

Celeste – Although part of the official splatformer genre, Celeste feels more like a splatformer – lite. The main campaign is challenging, but not extremely difficult like a Super Meatboy or even an Ori and the Blind Forest felt. It controls great, it stays fresh by changing its mechanics with each new zone, and it has a good story. None of it really wowed me, but it was a nice enjoyable game that doesn’t over stay its welcome. Also I have heard the B side levels are extremely difficult, I just have no interest in even attempting them.

Dead Cells – Dead Cells feels incredible. The controls feel exactly how you want them to and the character moves and reacts exactly how you think they should. Its surprising to say that that’s a big plus for a game in this day, but when so many games just don’t get the feel right, it feels so good when a game like Dead Cells comes along and nails it. The combat is snappy and quick, the sound effects and enemy explosions are satisfying, and the plethora of weapons allows you to have a new tactic every attempt you make to beat the game. It’s a lot of fun, but after a while the game wore me down. The levels aren’t random enough for me to run through them time and time again and while the game does incentivize speed running, I was never good enough to properly get to the locked doors in the later levels. I reached the last boss, who is insanely hard, and after dying to him multiple times, I felt like I had played enough of the game. The runs just began to feel more like repetitive work than fun, and my progress began to slow to a crawl when all that was left was unlocking the rest of the weapons. Even still, I really enjoyed Dead Cells and it was very close to be being on my list.

The Top 10

10. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

The most overlooked game of the year (Giantbomb didn’t even do a quick look for it!) Thronebreaker seemed to have released and then disappeared within the same minute. Even if you don’t care about Gwent, I highly recommend this game. You play as Queen Maeve, Queen of Rivia. When she is betrayed and has her kingdom stolen from her, she journeys across the lands of the Witcher universe to fight for her people and to see justice be done. It’s a basic premise, and while I haven’t actually gotten around to finishing the game yet, the writing is as good as you would expect, with tons of difficult moral decisions that not only effect the story but the gameplay as well. You collect different party members during your journey and each one becomes a unique card you can add to your deck. You could spend half the game building a strategy around one of these cards, but then you might make a story decision that upsets the character and they leave your party for good, taking their card with them. It’s a really cool mechanic that intertwines story, decision making, and gameplay. The deckbuilding and progression is fun, and even if you don’t like Gwent the game has enough interesting challenges such as various puzzles and variations on Gwent’s rules, that each “combat” encounter never really feels the same. Most of the time, you aren’t ever really playing a traditional game of Gwent. Each round might have a different rule or completely different mechanics, and all of the cards are entirely unique to the campaign itself so none of the competitive multiplayer side of Gwent has any effect on Thronebreaker. Plus, you get to explore beautiful drawn maps, search for hidden collectibles and resources and make story decisions worthy of a Witcher game. It’s a fun experience that I continue to make my way through and I look forward to finishing later in 2019.

9. Hitman 2

Hitman 2 was literally just more Hitman, and that’s ok. IO perfected the formula with 2016’s surprise reboot and its just as fun in this sequel. Some of the maps are absolutely outstanding and the sheer stupidity of the humans that inhabit the world of Hitman never gets old. The best part about Hitman 2 is that all the maps, disguises, and weapons from the first game get integrated into the game seamlessly. While having all the new maps upfront did shorten the time I spent with the game it was still a hell of a lot of dumb fun.

8. Return of the Obra Dinn

The best part about Obra Dinn is it feels unlike any other game I’ve played before. While the game does have a unique look, the frozen diorama-like scenes told backwards Memento style adds an interesting level of story telling and characterization. You never see anyone move or speak, so you create profiles of each character based on facial expressions and their actions as they playout from start to finish. Not only was I trying to figure out who everyone was and how they died, I also found myself giving the characters personality traits, motivations, and emotions. The story goes places I wasn’t expecting and I found myself absorbed with the atmosphere of the ship. The sound effects you do get to here are often brutal, menacing, and emotional. The music is stunning and wraps the presentation of every scene into a nice package of carnage and mayhem. The gameplay makes you feel smart and the difficulty never gets too frustrating. I haven’t felt this good about solving puzzles since The Witness. While moving back and forth between scenes is cumbersome, Return of the Obra Dinn does more with less better than any other game.

7. Forza Horizon 4

Horizon 4 is the first racing game I’ve spent any significant amount of time with since I played Burnout Paradise 7 years ago. Before that I played a lot of Need for Speed Underground 1 and 2 on the PS2. My history with the genre isn’t much, so it’s easy to say Horizon 4 is my favorite racing game ever. While the races are fun, particular the cross country and off-road sprints, the open world is where the game is at its best. The driving feels incredible and was something I did just for fun. Normally open world games keep me engaged through markers on the map, collectibles, and other checklist boxes to fill, but Forza Horizon 4 is one of those rare game where I just enjoyed playing the game regardless of whether I was making any sort of progress or ticking off boxes in a menu. I would just speed around the map, hitting the occasional sign, getting 2 stars as I accidentally ran through a speed trap, or crashing my car wildly over a wall and into a river. The moment to moment action of speeding through the beautiful terrain and small country towns and the feeling of getting noticeably better at the driving was what compelled me to keep playing. Sure, the races are fun, the collectibles are challenging and often got me addicted to trying them over and over, the online modes are interesting, the weather is awesome, but it’s the core gameplay that makes Forza Horizon 4 an amazing game. The only real problem I had with the game is the economy, which pretty much forces you to play an absolute ton if you care about owning all the property, building a massive car collection, and tuning all your favorite cars (I am a big fan of the Nissan GTR). Even still, it didn’t matter enough to ruin my enjoyment of driving around the world at 200 mph. I know all this is old news for people who have played the previous three games, but as my first experience in the series, this game was outstanding.

6. Marvel’s Spider-Man

As one of apparently millions of fans of the legendary Spider-Man 2 game from 2004, Marvel’s Spider-Man was exactly what I wanted from a modern-day Spider-Man game. Swinging around New York is easy to do and feels intuitive, fluid, and fun. The combat feels like the “Batman combat” which I’m still fine with. Honestly, most of the game feels like Insomniac looked at the Arkham series and used it as template for their game, which I’m also fine with. Those games were great, and this game follows in their footsteps of being an actually great licensed superhero game. While the overall gameplay is continuously entertaining, the story and the character of Peter Parker and what he does as Spider-Man is what really makes this game stand out. While Batman will always be my favorite superhero, his dark, brooding nature and pessimistic outlook on the world can be depressing. Not to mention he’s unfathomably rich, and has no care in the world other than stopping super villains (usually). Spider-Man on the other hand is completely broke, yet spends his time volunteering at a homeless shelter, working practically for free to try to better mankind through science and technology, and still taking the time to do things like stop pollution and find missing pigeons. While the side content isn’t the greatest, I did love the research labs because they were a great representation of who Spider-Man is as a hero. He’s in the middle of saving the city from maniacs with super powers, yet he takes the time to stop natural disasters and failing technology. He loves the city and he always has a positive outlook on people and life, even though he’s barely making ends meet and nothing in his personal life really seems to go his way. This makes the story engaging, particularly with the smart choices Insomniac made by making this Spider-Man their own entirely new version of the character. While some of the gameplay in the story missions was mediocre, the stealth sections were bad, and the open world gameplay felt a bit old by today’s standards, I’m hoping Insomniac builds on this framework and comes back with a bigger and better sequel to an already awesome game. Also, I believe Spider-Man has the best character movement/animation in any game ever. The way he twists and twirls through the air while web slinging and the way he flips and springs off walls before backflip kicking an enemy in the head all look outstanding.

5. Into the Breach

When I first started playing Into the Breach I struggled. The game plays like a tactics game similar to XCOM or Fire Emblem, so I played it like one of those games. Once I realized that Into the Breach is absolutely not a tactics game is when I really started to love the game and understand its brilliance. Into the Breach is a puzzle game, where from the first move on you can play perfectly or at least near perfectly to win. If you make too many mistakes turn after turn your chance at being able to win dwindles. Once I understood this, I began taking my time with each turn and tried my best to determine the most successful move. Even with knowing this, the game is still incredibly challenging as there are so many important decisions to make constantly throughout a run. Do you let your best pilot die, taking a hit to save an attack on your energy? Do you try to line up a high damage play on the next turn, risking the enemy moving out of your reach? Do you focus on the side objectives, or risk skipping them in the hope that all your mechs surviving and maintaining high energy will be all you need to win? It’s just smart addicting gameplay, with a small easy set of rules that you can pick up and learn quickly. With tons of different mechs to unlock, different difficulty levels, and multiple islands to save, the game has a staggering amount of depth and replay value. I’ve honestly only scratched the surface of the greatness of Into the Breach, and it may have been even higher on my list had I spent more time with it.

4. Monster Hunter World

Being my second Monster Hunter game, I knew what I was getting into with World. Thankfully they removed or changed a lot of the annoying parts of Monster Hunter making an easier, more accessible version with World. Unfortunately, they somehow made getting a multiplayer game going with friends more difficult than it was on a 3DS. The decisions they made with the multiplayer are confusingly bad and really hurt an otherwise remarkable game. The appeal of Monster Hunter is mastering all the different weapons and mastering all the fights with countless monsters. It is a very difficult game, filled with grinding and RNG loot, but it is a game where you improve as a player because of your skill, not just because of your stat screen. I appreciate the difficult challenges Monster Hunter offers, and I appreciate them even more now that I can face the challenges with a controller in my hand on a big TV instead of on a tiny 3DS screen. The Kulve Taroth raid was one of the coolest things I took part in this year in gaming, and all of the events and new weapons and outfits added over time were fun and kept the game going for months after it came out. I obsessively grinded monsters over and over just to complete armor sets (I think I ran the Kulve Taroth event about 20 times) and I even pushed into the post end game content, trying out different builds and fighting the toughest versions of some of the monsters. Monster Hunter is this incredibly unique series that feels like an RPG, action game, and MMO raids fights all rolled into one. Even when it feels clunky or nonsensical at times, the feeling of defeating an Elder dragon after a forty-minute fight is like nothing else in any other game. I’m excited to see what the expansion has to offer, and hopefully in the sequel they use modern day multiplayer mechanics instead of the nonsense they implemented with World. Also, the cats are dope.

3. Slay the Spire

I love card games, I love deck-building, and I enjoy run based games. It’s easy to see why Slay the Spire is my favorite run-based game ever. Although I’ve beat the game with all three classes multiple times, I still pop back into the game to see new updates and just go for a run or two. With hundreds of cards and relics to be able to find on any given run, there are dozens upon dozens of different builds to try to achieve victory with, each with their own unique playstyle. You can build a combo deck that focuses on you playing low cost cards and continuously drawing through your deck, you can build a defensive deck that allows you to hurt the enemy based on your armor, you can build a deck where you hurt yourself to deal damage, you can create a deck where you store up your energy for one massive kill shot…I could go no and on. On top of an excellent base game, there are ascension runs that add modifiers increasing the games difficult, custom games where you can combine your own rules such as preset decks or card drafts or combined modifiers, and a daily challenge. When you combine all the different cards, relics, random events, modifiers, and different enemies, no run ever feels the same. At the same time the game really feels like there are hundreds of decks that could lead you to victory and experimenting is half of the fun. I am not the type of person that goes back to a game after they beat it, but I kept returning to Slay the Spire throughout the year. It doesn’t even leave early access until later this month and it is a perfect example of early access done right. They just recently added another level to the Spire in a patch so I still have new content to see. For anyone who likes card games and run based games this is an absolute must play.

2. Red Dead Redemption II

Red Dead Redemption II is one of my favorite games of all time and also one of the most frustrating, annoying games I’ve ever played. The more time I spent with the game the more I came to the conclusion that the writing, story, voice acting, facial animation, world exploration, and discovery were some of the best, if not the best in any game I’ve ever played. I also came to the conclusion that the gameplay, controls, and mission design are absolutely terrible. There are so many amazing things this game does that it’s completely baffling that Rockstar still uses gameplay and mission design that feels the same as it did in GTA Vice City. The open world feels real and alive like no other game, with tons of secrets to find, random events and encounters, beautiful land to see and explore, and tons of options for the player to be able to interact with that world. The number of things to do and find is staggering and they all feel incredible, especially when the rewards are just the discoveries themselves or perhaps some cosmetic items. When you find something you feel excited because you found it yourself and so many of the secrets are very well hidden. The vastness and freedom provided by the open world is unrivaled, which is why it is so horrible when you play story missions that allow you no freedom whatsoever at any point to do anything. The game literally tells you where you have to stand, who to shoot, when you can shoot, what path you have to follow, and if you do anything other than what the game explicitly tells you to do you fail the mission. Coupled with the fact that most missions involve ten minutes of riding followed by 10 minutes of bad, swimmy shooting where its easier to repeatedly tap L2 to keep auto locking onto enemies then actually freely aim, most of the gameplay in these story missions is boring and forgettable. There were numerous instances of the controls pulling me out of the immersive world as well, like horse riding. Most times my horse would leap a fence with no problem. Other times? A 1-foot high rock would send my horse crashing. It took me the better part of 10 hours to stop accidentally pointing my gun at people and it took me nearly the entire game to remember to reset my loadout at the horse because for some reason the game likes to remove all your weapons at seemingly random times so you run off into battle without a rifle. I hated parts of this game and I shut it off multiple times out of frustration. It plays like its over a decade old and it doesn’t respect your time, at all. I’m still in the epilogue after doing nearly one hundred missions. It’s slow and dragged out beyond belief. How did it get so high on my list then? Arthur Morgan.

Arthur is my favorite character in any game ever and potentially my favorite character in any story ever. His redemption arc is incredible and some of the moments in the game are truly inspiring, but also incredibly sad. I’ve felt sad over game stories before, such as To the Moon and The Last of Us, but Arthur’s story hit me on an entirely different level to the point where I’m constantly thinking about his character and the story. I’ve watched a certain scene multiple times (where Arthur talks to the Nun about how he’s dying and how he’s afraid. It is the most heartbreaking, inspiring, powerful moment in any game ever) and I keep replaying it in my mind. I’ve even considered going back and restarting the game, when I don’t really enjoy playing the game. Yet I want to experience Arthur’s journey again, and find all the secrets I missed and partake in the tons of conversations and camp activities I missed out on. Seriously, I think something is wrong with me. If it weren’t for the numerous things I strongly disliked about this game, it would have won my game of the year and it wouldn’t have been close. Having it be my #2 game this year despite it starring my favorite playable character of all time is really unfathomable, but here we are. And I can’t stop talking about the damn thing.

1. God of War

God of War was the one game this year that felt like the total package. It has everything I want in a single player game. Great story, awesome characters, challenging fights, interesting side content, meaningful exploration, and fun gameplay. The story kept me excited from start to finish and I think it is astounding that the developers were able to take Kratos, a character known for not having any personality or story other than being angry, and turn him into an actual person with emotions, feelings, and reasons for his behavior. I think most of the interactions between him and Atreus are powerful and the story arc between the two is well earned. The writing is sad, funny, surprising, and is able to combine big budget popcorn action with mystery, emotion, and life lessons. While I don’t think all parts of the story are told perfectly, I think it is the second-best story told this year and the one story that constantly had me eager to play just so I could see what twist would happen next. On top of an excellent main tale, the world is filled with interesting side stories about dragons, dwarves, and gods. The backstory you get to hear while traveling around the lake is always entertaining, and the game is able to be funny and smart when it needs to be. Although the world is mostly dead, it is quiet in ways that make it feel like an old, lived in place, filled with history and stories to tell. The atmosphere has a mystery to it and also a sadness that kept me eager to explore. This game is probably the best example of being able to mix bombastic, thunderous action sequences, with extremely quiet moments of exploration and character building. Most importantly, the game’s combat is fun, unique, and challenging in ways the original trilogy wasn’t. The Valkyrie battles were some of the most satisfying moments for me in gaming in 2018 and I spent hours running through the Niflheim mists until I completed everything. Any critiques I have about the game are minor things that can be easily retooled or balanced in a sequel, such as making more of the loot matter and fixing the early pacing issues. I was never annoyed or bored when I was playing the game, which for a game I spent around 50 hours with is pretty incredible. The ending leaves tons of unanswered questions that I am excited to see where it goes with the sequel.

For as good a year as 2017 was for video games, I also found it to be a year in which games are starting to overstay their welcome. Yes, we all want bigger games and being able to say a game is 30 hours rather than 8 is often a really good selling point. Unfortunately, I felt like too many of this year’s games tried to stretch their gameplay too far in order to add length to the game. There were many games this year that I liked but wished were shorter. Repetition of fun but basic gameplay mechanics can turn something from enjoyable to a slog in a matter of hours. At times it felt like too many games were taking too long to come to their conclusion. Long games are welcome when there is great character progression, and consistently new mechanics and challenges that add difficulty and interesting twists to the gameplay. If you can back all that up with an intriguing and narratively solid story, then the increased playtime deserves its length. Too many games this year felt like I was doing the same thing in hour 20 that I was doing in hour 2. Not to say that these games were bad, because I still enjoyed most of them. This was just the first year that I noticed a trend in games being much longer than they really needed to be. Sometimes a shorter, tighter experience is worth more than adding hours to the game.

Now for the good of 2017. Nintendo made a great console, with some great games on it. The Switch is the first Nintendo console I’ve owned since the 64 and, despite owning only 4 games for it I would already be willing to call it one of my favorite game consoles of all time. Being able to play Zelda and Mario as handheld games is so convenient and seamless. I really love the idea of the console and I can’t wait to see how Nintendo expands its catalog.

The top 3 games on my list also could be some of my three favorite games of not only 2017 but of all time.

Old Games

Starcraft II

The Cooperative mode is still incredibly fun and dipping back into the multiplayer from time to time is always a stressful high. Blizzard’s continued support of the game through warchests and announcers is awesome.

Overwatch

I played Overwatch off and on this year and while I really enjoy the game I don’t enjoy it as much as I want to. Playing competitive is often just a series of frustrations and the game still has serious problems with character and map balance.

Skyrim

Skyrim is still a pretty damn good game and it’s crazy to think its now 6 years old. I’m excited to see the DLC I never played.

Titanfall 2

My favorite game from 2016 that I played even more of in 2017, Titanfall 2 did everything right in terms of DLC content throughout the year. They added multiple game modes, including an entire horde mode with its own separate level progression and abilities, as well new weapons, maps, and a titan all for free. I was more than happy to pay money for new gun and titan skins because I wanted to support the great work Respawn did in keeping this game fun and exciting for over a year. I was pretty sad to hear EA bought Respawn, and hopefully Titanfall 3 isn’t ruined by their terrible business practices.

Games I didn’t get to play

Hollow Knight

I’ve heard the praise, but I restrained myself from purchasing it based on the fact that I always fall off playing Metroidvania type games.

Tacoma

I liked Gone Home, but never got around to playing this one.

Uncharted Lost Legacy

I decided to skip this because of how recently Uncharted 4 came out. I also thought that they couldn’t top Uncharted 4, but hearing all the praise for Lost Legacy makes me feel like I need to play this at some point.

Finding Paradise

I love To The Moon and this sequel came out of nowhere in mid-December. I will definitely be playing this in 2018

Elex

I’ve put 2 hours into Elex and it seems like a wacky bunch of fun. I’m hoping it will be what I was hoping Fallout 4 would be and that the bugs don’t ruin too much of the experience.

Games that were Disappointing

Mass Effect Andromeda

Decent premise, rich universe and lore, and surprisingly fun combat were not enough to stop the horror that is ME Andromeda. Absolutely horrible facial expressions, animations, and lip sync. The human characters look like they were molded in a lab by a scientist who only ever saw humans in fun-house mirrors. A weak plot that drags on. Embarrassing dialogue with annoying or just boring characters. Loads of meaningless side quests and collectibles. Overly complicated crafting mechanics. As buggy as an open world Bethesda game. The only thing that made this purchase not a total waste of money was the cooperative horde mode. It was nothing really new to the series, but I still enjoyed it. Even still, the character progression in that is mind numbingly slow, once again making you feel like EA was dangling loot boxes in your face as you suffered.

Pyre

I absolutely love Bastion and Transistor and was eagerly awaiting Pyre. Unfortunately, Pyre didn’t hit the mark for me. The art is gorgeous and the unique “sport” gameplay is really cool in theory. I have to say in theory because while I could see the depth in the game, the ways in which a player could be amazing at Pyre, how it could be a truly competitive game to play against friends, it never clicked for me. I often just controlled one of my characters, juking around and cheesing the AI or just baiting them into a bad position, then passing the ball off and scoring with my wide-open teammate. I wanted to be good at Pyre, but I felt like it took too much effort. Everything boiled down to using fast characters to just go fast and jump far. Also, while I loved the idea that each time you win the rites you would have to choose one of your characters to be gone from the game forever, I never cared too much about any of the characters to miss them, especially from a gameplay perspective. Sir Gilman is the only one who stands out to me as an entertaining character. The rest of the story just didn’t have the same impact as Bastion or Transistor. It felt slow and predictable, especially with all the dialogue you have to read. After slogging through the rites one too many times I was relieved to see the credits roll. Even though this was a disappointing experience for me, I still applaud Supergiant Games for never making the same game twice. This mish mash of very different genres is still quite creative even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as their previous games.

Destiny 2

I think Destiny 2 is a good game. I had a lot of fun times playing it and it still had that same addictive quality as The Taken King. It also still had all the same issues as The Taken King. If the Taken King was Destiny 1.5 then Destiny 2 was Destiny 1.6. The patrol content is fun for about a week, then becomes lackluster. The loot is thrown at you so fast none of it matters. The story is terrible and the story missions are boring and uninspired. The multiplayer is slow, although when played with friends can be a fun time. But Destiny 2 just sealed the fact that Destiny is never going to be what most people want it to be. It’s never going to be as expansive, diverse, or filled with unique content as an mmo. People who are really into Destiny can see all the game has to offer within two weeks. I still enjoyed my time with the game, but I honestly thought that with the “2” in the title the game would be bigger and better than The Taken King. Instead it’s more of the same. And I actually think I liked The Taken King better.

Games I enjoyed that didn’t make the list

Everything

Everything is a really neat, relaxing experience. You can make a planet dance.

XCOM 2 War of the Chosen

War of the Chosen is a great expansion to XCOM 2. It changes the core XCOM game in a lot of interesting ways with the Chosen enemies and the new heroic classes. Overall, it is the best XCOM package ever. Stupidly I tried to play it on iron man and had too many unsuccessful runs that held me back from seeing more of the game.

Grim Dawn Ashes of Malmouth

Grim Dawn is still a really good ARPG for people who want to play an experience closer to Diablo 2 than Diablo 3. While I personally still don’t like it as much as Diablo 3, I am enjoying playing the new classes and seeing what the expansion has to offer.

Fortnite Battle Royale

Fortnite Battle Royale is a really cool take on the battle royale genre. While the tiered loot and the base building aren’t my favorite, the destructive environment is awesome and adds interesting gameplay situations that aren’t provided in games like Battlegrounds.

Divinity Original Sin II

Divinity is one of those rare games that actually makes good on its promise to allow the player to do anything. The character customization feels like it allows me to truly build my own unique character that plays in the specific way I wanted to play, rather than following a pre-set skill tree or a determined class type. You can handle every quest in a variety of ways and the way the environment can be interacted with is incredible. If you light a table on fire, everything on top of the table burns too. If one of those was a spell scroll or a book then it’s gone forever. You can kill any npc, even to the point of it changing how quests work or where and when you can get skills. As part of one quest I got into a fight with a guy and his allies, eventually killing them all. Turns out some of his allies were npcs that you could talk to or buy stuff from, including one that was my skill vendor. With her dead, I could no longer buy skills in that town. The game has so many mechanics that it can be hard to wrap your head around everything you can do and how it could change or affect the world. It is also backed up by good writing and world building. It would have been in my top 10 if I had played more of it, but after 20 hours I’m still in Act 1. The game moves slowly, but so far, the payoff is always worth it.

Star Wars Battlefront II

The Battlefront II campaign is bad. The multiplayer progression is even worse. Still, I really enjoyed this game. It looks amazing, feels amazing, and most importantly sounds amazing. The space battles felt exactly like how I would want a Star Wars space battle game to feel. While not really a good game divorced from the Star Wars license, if you want to play a very faithful looking and sounding Star Wars game, this is it.

Nioh

Nioh is a game that I greatly enjoyed, but also fell away from because of its repetitiveness. I think Nioh is one of the perfect examples of my issue this year with games over staying their welcome. The setting in the game is awesome, the armor looks cool, the combat is fast and snappy and satisfying, and the loot is fun to collect. Early on the game is very challenging and feels like it took Dark Souls and did something new with that gameplay formula. I really enjoyed the first 30 hours or so with the game, but then I grew tired of it. Eventually the loot just becomes overwhelming and unnecessary as tons of weapons and armor just repeatedly drop for no reason other then to sell. The interesting level design starts to run out of ideas and becomes extremely limited, either feeling too similar to previous levels or too restrictive. The worst part is you fight the same enemies with the same attack patterns throughout the majority of the game. Eventually you can just out level the content too, and the game slowly starts to become easier and easier as you repeatedly level way more than the challenges the game offers. I think Nioh is a good game that needed to be scaled down to a shorter experience.

Persona 5

Persona 5 is a game that I half enjoyed, half disliked. For everything good it does, it takes away from it by doing something annoying or just plain bad. The art design and music are fantastic and some of the characters have really great story arcs, but the actual design of some of the dungeons are awful. The story has some really great moments, but I didn’t feel like the end justified playing the game for 100 hours. The worst part of the game though, is its treatment of women. While a lot of games have issues with over sexualizing women and not giving them good characterization, Persona 5 feels like it was made for teenage boys to indulge in some weird fantasies. The game spends 10 hours having you fight against a teacher who is sexually abusing his students, and then spends the rest of the game using women as sex jokes. Ann’s entire character arc is the classic “I’m pretty but it’s so hard to be me” trope and they constantly use her to poke fun. The main characters even have her pretend she will allow another character to paint her naked so they can sneak into his home without him knowing. Even stuff like your teaching being your “maid” and having her call you “master” felt very creepy. The game felt even creepier when you remember that a lot of the girls in this game are 16 and 17 years old. The entire point of the main plot of the game is to treat people equally and care about everyone, and then the game actively pushes back against its own ideals. Also, the combat gets incredibly boring after 100 hours.

Splatoon 2

I thought that Splatoon 2 would be on my top 10 for the first 15 hours or so that I played it, but once the new game high wore off I saw all the mistakes Nintendo made with this game. The gameplay itself is fun and feels fresh compared to the majority of other shooters on the market and the horde mode “Salmon Run” is a blast, but a lot of things around the gameplay ruin the experience. The Salmon Run mode being on a timer is awful. There were multiple times I turned the game on to play that mode and I could not play it because it wasn’t open. Also, the map rotation doesn’t make any sense and made me get sick of the maps much faster than I would have otherwise. I also don’t like the motion controls, but if you don’t use them the aiming feels clunky. I like a lot of things about Splatoon 2, but so much of the design around the game made me stop playing it a lot sooner than I thought I would.

What Remains of Edith Finch

Edith Finch was an interesting short story that had some really neat vignettes about members of the Finch family. It was really heartfelt and well made, but nothing about it stood out to me and the ending did nothing for me.

Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods is a very well written story about returning home, the struggles of becoming an adult, dealing with responsibilities, and small-town life. It has some great jokes, and some really fun characters. While I didn’t enjoy walking around Possum Springs as much as I liked talking to its inhabitants, I still think the game looks good and evokes a great sense of place and time. I also really enjoyed hanging out with Gregg and Bea and seeing Mae rebuild her friendships with them. My favorite part of the game was the journal Mae keeps that logs all her activities and then the reveal for why she keeps that journal was really interesting. The repeated “Gregg rules OK” line always made me laugh, and the drawings are really fun to look at. Unfortunately, the game started to fall apart for me around the last 90 minutes or so. Once the secret gets unveiled the game goes off the rails in ways that I didn’t appreciate. I enjoyed the game because of its grounded, realistic feeling and to have the story go where it goes was way too ridiculous for me. The whole thing made the game last far too long and it leaves too many unanswered questions. I understand a lot of the ending is metaphorical and intentional, but I thought the whole thing shifted too far away from the characters and their real life problems into the supernatural and the game didn’t need a fantasy hook tacked on to make me enjoy it.

Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice

Hellblade gives the player an incredibly powerful and emotional story, with an absolutely stunning performance by Melina Juergens as Senua. The sound design and performance capture really felt like the next level for video games in a lot of ways, and as an art piece this game is stunning. As a game however, it drags. The combat is extremely one-note and the puzzles feel like annoying busy work. If the game had been shorter I could have felt better about the simplistic gameplay, but the fact that Ninja Theory felt the need to throw enemy after enemy in your face for hours really detracted from the experience.

Middle Earth Shadow of War

I really enjoyed Shadow of War because it still provides an experience no other game can match through the nemesis system. The ways they expand upon that system in this sequel bring so many more interactions and options that I enjoyed just trying to find as many different orcs as I could to build and strengthen my forts. Everything about the combat and the traversal feels smooth and the game moves quickly so you spend less time traveling and more time hearing orcs shout ridiculous things at you. Unfortunately, the main story missions are awful and unexplainably so. When you have a system as unique and creative as the nemesis system, how do you decide to barely incorporate it in any of your story missions? The missions are all generic busy work and the grind at the end of the game is pretty ridiculous. I still really loved the ways they enhanced the nemesis system for this sequel, but even more now than ever before do I hope another developer takes the ideas from the Middle-Earth games and puts them into a new game.

Resident Evil 7

My experience with the Resident Evil series is a bit all over the place. I’ve played 1 and Code Veronica and enjoyed them but never finished them. 4 is one of my all-time favorite games, but I really disliked what I played of 5. With 7 I think Capcom struck a great balance between the old pacing, combat, and puzzle solving of the first few games, while adding new modern-day mechanics to it that make the series feel fun and exciting again. This game is scary and tense unlike any other single player game this year and they use that tension in a variety of ways. Whether being chased through a house, creeping around corners waiting for monsters to jump out and attack, or fighting off a disgusting spider lady, the game keeps you on the edge of your seat like any good horror game should. The story dangles its multiple mysteries in front of you well enough to make you interested in the characters and the world. If I had time to finish the game it probably would have made my top 10.

Now onto the top 10

10. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

I struggled to find my number 10 game this year because so many of the games I played felt too long, too repetitive, or I was unable to finish them. For as many good games as there were this year, I struggled to find games that I didn’t have huge issues with near the bottom of my list. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe wins out for two reasons; it’s still an enjoyable easy and quick to play Mario Kart, and it is one of the very few games my girlfriend enjoys playing. Some of my favorite moments in gaming this year were hearing my girlfriend yell at Peach and Mario to get out of her way as she crashed into them trying to take over first place. The game does a great job at easing in new players and is still simple enough that it would be hard to find someone that wouldn’t have a good time racing against their friends. This game also marked the first time my girlfriend ever played a game online before and I had a blast seeing her react to beating real people. While I didn’t absolutely love Mario Kart 8 myself, the fun I had playing it with my girlfriend puts it above so many other experiences I had this year.

9. Life is Strange Before the Storm

I absolutely loved the original Life is Strange. That game tackled so many issues that other games seem to be afraid to, and had some really memorable characters. When they announced this prequel I was disappointed, and then when they said the original voice actors would not be involved because of the strike I thought this game would be a disaster. Thankfully, it is a really good game. While I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the original and the ending has some really horrible problems, I was happy to be back in the world of Life is Strange. The music is once again perfect, the voice actors do a great job of capturing the original feel for the characters laid out by the previous actors, and the story allows us to see the beginnings of the bond between Chole and Rachel Amber.

I think the main way Before the Storm succeeds is in how happy it is. The original game is sad, then gets sadder, and then somehow gets even more sad and while I loved it for what it did, it felt really good to play a new Life is Strange game that embraced happiness, love, and friendship so much. The game does an excellent job of portraying what it is like to have someone in your life that actively makes your life better, especially when you are going through tough times. The gameplay and story telling also work out better than expected even without time travel powers, as it still retains tough decision making and fun interactive mechanics through Chole’s “backtalk” ability.

I really enjoyed the first two episodes and the first half of episode 3, but then the end of the game goes off the rails in ways that make the original games ending seem like the best ending ever written. Even with all of the missteps in the last hour of the game, the final montage the players get to witness of Chole and Rachel’s relationship as it grows over the years feels great to see. You as the player already know all the horrible things that will happen in the future, but for that moment you only get to see the characters be happy and it was exciting. Unfortunately Deck Nine decided to “tie” the end of Before the Storm to the original game in a very dark depressing way that just absolutely crushed the happiness of the end of Before the Storm. It was really disturbing and off putting in a way that I was not expecting, and actually made me disappointed. While I don’t think Deck Nine had bad intentions by doing this, I just wish they had thought through a lot of the decisions they made to close out this prequel. Even still it was the most surprising game for me this year because I expected it to be a cheap money grab off of the first games success, but instead it was a heartfelt story of friendship.

8. Wolfenstein II The New Colossus

The act of playing Wolfenstein II is not very fun. Dual wielding shotguns while blasting Nazi’s in the face should be amazing, but somehow this game just feels bland to play. There’s weird difficulty spikes, poor player feedback, and some awful level design. I constantly ran the wrong way and I died from things I didn’t even know were shooting me more times than I can count. After DOOM had such great success allowing players to be constantly running around in the action, I was hoping Wolfenstein would do more than have you run and hide behind cover. It’s incredibly stale gameplay, and completely at odds with how wacky and exciting the rest of the game is. While I enjoyed the characters and story in the first game, this one out does itself. There are at least five huge, crazy moments in the game where I could not believe what was happening. It’s also funny, smart, and the actors all give tremendous performances. There’s also a lot of quiet moments and some really heartfelt stories wrapped around the craziness. The backstory of BJ’s childhood, and what results from it are so well done that I was shocked at how good it was. This is a game about killing Nazi’s by the hundreds, in a world where they apparently invented a silly giant one wheeled motorcycle, and yet its just as good at being emotional and serious as most other games that came out this year. I can’t say enough about how incredible so many of the moments are in this game, I just wish more of those moments involved me actually playing the game.

7. Super Mario Odyssey

Multiple times while I was playing Super Mario Odyssey I kept thinking to myself, “this is joyful”. The word joy just stuck in my head the entire time I played the game. If anyone is looking for a game that is just pure fun and happiness, this is it. The game as a lot of really excellent moments and continues to find new ways to surprise the player again and again. In a lot of ways this game felt like an Uncharted game to me because it had so many amazing set pieces that looked stunning and felt incredible to watch, even though the gameplay wasn’t very deep or challenging. Every world has its own twist on the formula and the game is paced so that you are always on the move and finding new things to do around every turn. It had some of the tightest, best controls in any video game ever. The platforming feels phenomenal and the ways in which you go about platforming through the use of the capture mechanic is incredibly creative and keeps the gameplay fresh and unique even when compared to previous Mario games.

This is the type of game you play as a kid and it becomes one of your all time greatest most memorable games, similar to how I feel about Super Mario 64. And while I will definitely remember a lot of the incredible moments Odyssey provides (particularly the ending) I kept feeling like the game was missing the challenge I was looking for. A lot of the moons I found I purchased, or butt stomped the ground, or broke something open. At times the game felt like it was hanging moons in front of my face and then rushing me off to the next environment. Even when it was giving me some good platforming to do, none of that platforming ever felt challenging in anyway. I have heard that some of the later game stuff increases the difficulty, but I hate the fact that you have to play the game for hours and collect a bunch of very simple to get moons in order to see the best gameplay in the game. At times this game felt less like a platformer and more like a puzzle/exploration game as many of the moons require you to search the environment and use the capture mechanic to solve problems rather than just have traditional platforming levels to take part in. Also, I really thought the boss fights were lackluster. Even so, I still love Odyssey and I will continue to play it in 2018 as I am still eager to see more of what that game has to offer. And I want to collect all the outfits.

6. Cuphead

When I first saw Cuphead years ago it looked so cool that I just assumed the game would be bad. How could something that looked that incredible be anything other than a gimmick? Fortunately, Cuphead is an absolute blast to play. Not only is the presentation outstanding in every aspect, but the gameplay itself provides some of the most challenging, rewarding moments in any game this year. Some of the bosses are intensely hard and are so much more than trial and error tests. Each one has its own mechanics and have so many layers to them that you could fight a boss ten times and not see every attack pattern. I know it’s a meme to compare everything to Dark Souls, but man did a lot of these fights feel like Dark Souls boss fights. Hoping that the one attack you absolutely hate doesn’t happen before you get that last hit in. The nervousness and the anxiety of even trying to land that last hit. Seeing a boss for the first time and getting absolutely destroyed as you try to figure out the mechanics. That satisfying sense of relief and accomplishment when you finally defeat the boss that’s been beating you down over and over again. It all feels incredible. Yes, the art is amazing, the animation is incredible, the soundtrack is wonderful, but I think the highest compliment I could give Cuphead is that even if it didn’t have its unique style, it would still be a really fun game.

5. Nier Automata

There is too much to say about Nier Automata. At times I thought it was my game of the year. Other times I wasn’t even sure if I liked the game that much. Everything about it feels crazy in a way that no other game I’ve played before has felt. As someone who has no experience with Drakengard or the original Nier I had never witnessed the multiple endings/playthroughs that this series provides. The entire idea of replaying the game again but as another character is so interesting and also so insane. But this game constantly does things that seem absolutely ridiculous and yet somehow still work. So many games try to make a big statement about life or the human condition, or even just try to make characters that feel like real people. Nier does all these things with a cast of androids and robots. Robots that look like trashcans no less. The struggle of these androids and robots as they evolve over the course of the story is something that everyone has seen before, but somehow manages to be its own unique thing in the world of Nier. It feels like taking the humans out of a story about humanity was the best thing Nier does from a story telling perspective. Pascal and his village of peaceful, nonviolent robots is perhaps the greatest storyline in the game, but each area of the world has its own tragic twist. There are so many different character arcs that even some of the smaller side quest characters get some really impactful stories. Then as the game goes on and you play it multiple times you get to witness these events and characters from a different point of view and learn even more about the world. Even removed from all the absolute madness that encompasses a lot of the story, this stuff is done really well.

The part where you play Nier however is incredibly hit or miss. While the combat is certainly stylish and flashy, its very simple and becomes mind numbing after fighting the same enemies repeatedly. There are a lot of weapons that give some new animation and combos, but even switching weapons in and out doesn’t do enough to alleviate the boredom that starts to overtake the action. I really do like the way the game transitions into a bullet hell game from the top down and third person perspectives, and the hacking mini games are also a cool touch. Once I was deep into the second playthrough however, I was absolutely sick of all of it and was coasting through any gameplay portion just so I could see the story. It also doesn’t help that the world is so small, ugly, and a pain to get around. A lot of this made the game feel like a drag and at times I struggled with playing it even when I was deep into uncovering the mysteries of the world and discovering what would happen to all these really cool characters. The soundtrack certainly helped me push through, as it is easily one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time, especially with the way it is used in the game. Also, without a doubt it has the best end credits in any video game ever. I think the best part about Nier is that in a time where people find it a lot easier to be mean to each other for no reason, it reminds people that being nice and caring about others feels a lot better. It's hard being a human.

4. Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon doesn’t do anything really new when it comes to open world games. It has a lot of icons on a big map, a lot of side quests, and a lot of things to collect and upgrade. Where Horizon out does most of those other open world games is in its story, its enemy design, and its combat. A lot of times I feel like I am enjoying open world games because something in my brain loves the idea of running around and turning a messy filled map into a completed, checked off one. With Horizon I loved engaging in its combat. The different weapons and damage types combine with the different enemy types in a way that encourages experimentation and weapon swapping. Sure, you could stick with one or two weapons for the majority of the game and you could succeed, but Horizon gives you the tools to find ways to exploit the enemy weaknesses and defeat enemies in the most efficient way possible. Most importantly, breaking off pieces of the robots changes the fight in drastic ways. If you knock off certain parts a robot can’t perform the same attacks that it was using. You can even use its own parts against it, like knocking off a giant gun from a robot T-Rex and picking it up to shoot it. A lot of games this year left me bored with their combat. I constantly felt like I was button mashing and repeating the same fights over and over. With Horizon I felt like every fight was interesting and unique depending on the type of ammunition I had, the combination of enemies I was facing, and how I decided to handle it. Also, I loved the enemy design and it helped the combat that there were so many different types of robots. It’s also why it’s a shame that the human enemies are the exact opposite of everything I just said and feel like a poor attempt at a Far Cry game. Snipe from far away, sit and a bush and whistle, bad guys dead. That is definitely the low point of this game.

The world is fantastic and the story pushes you forward at a good pace, giving you hints and pieces about what happened to the world and about what is going on with the robots. I thought the reveals were a great payoff and their answers for everything felt like a fun, new take on a classic story. I just wish the world itself had more life in it, but also it makes a lot of sense as to why it doesn’t. I just wanted there to be even more to see and do than there was. I feel like a lot of games have trouble combining great story and great gameplay. Sometimes it feels like one has to be had at the expense of the other, but Horizon nails both and is one of my all time favorite open world games.

3. Gwent the Witcher Card Game

Even though the game is still in Beta, Gwent is my all time favorite card game. The deck building and strategy feel like they take more skill than other card games and even the best deck in the hands of a bad player won’t be an easy win. It feels so rewarding to rank up and learn strategy when playing this game. The one card per turn as well as the best two out of three round mechanics give this game such a different feel than the plethora of Magic The Gathering clones that are out there. Sure, the game is about building a deck that has a win condition and then playing to pull off that win condition, but the real strategy comes into adapting when your opponent nullifies your win condition. When you play your cards and why you play them feels like it carries more weight than in other card games. It also helps that I absolutely love the world of the Witcher, and being able to see all those characters and concepts from that trilogy of games put into a card game format feels really cool, especially when the card abilities match the lore, such as wild hunt hounds being able to play frost to damage enemies. Also, CDPR is incredibly generous with their free to play model, easily allowing players to earn at least one pack (keg) of cards a day and with a ton of really awesome season ending rewards.

The only downside to it is that CDPR is new to multiplayer games and it has often felt like they are unsure where the game is headed. Their latest big patch was not received very well by the community and the game can still be quite buggy even though it has been in beta for over a year. Sometimes it seems like they aren’t learning from there mistakes and that the game is headed down the wrong path in terms of balance and card design. Hopefully that is not the case because I absolutely love Gwent and I think it has limitless potential in terms of being a more strategic card game than many of its competitors. The game is scheduled to come out of open beta this year with a story based campaign and a draft mode which I am looking forward to. I hope Gwent succeeds because I want to keep playing it (and I do keep playing it even when I have a bunch of other games I want to play).

2. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

I hope Breath of the Wild sparks huge change in the way other developers create their open world games. Something I never thought about when playing open world games until I played Breath of the Wild is that, in so many games you are going to a place on the map because you know what is going to be there. You have a goal to either check something off your list or to obtain something because the game has already marked it on the map and will even plot your course there for you. In Breath of the Wild, you are so often going to a place because you don’t know what’s going to be there and you certainly don’t know what you will run into along the way or how you will even get there. The adventure is the discovery of the world and its secrets.

The world starts to feel like its own character because of the design. When you start to see how important the shape of a particular mountain is, how the height of the hills affects where you can glide to, the way you can only see certain areas if you are standing in certain spots, you start to understand how much effort and detail went into creating Hyrule. The land is not just there to run from point A to point B, its there to hide secrets, to be its own puzzle. Rather than just being the place the game is set in, traversing the world and solving its mysteries is the game. The environmental puzzle solving in this game changed my entire view on how open worlds should be built. For as much as I adored Horizon Zero Dawn this year a lot of the design of the world, beyond the aesthetics, felt meaningless. There was space they created to look nice, but there was no real reason to interact with it or even any option to interact with it. Zelda makes the landscape matter in ways that no other open world game has.

It is also incredibly important to the design that it gives you all of your tools up front. There’s no seeing a door or a mountain or a tunnel and thinking “I’ll have to come back here later because I don’t have the item I need to get there yet.” Everything is immediately at your disposal and the tools they give you to manipulate and play with the world are fascinating. And sure, after a while all the searching and discovery just repeatedly leads you to a new shrine or a new korok seed, but that searching and discovery is some of the best in any game ever. Even after 70+ hours of playing the game I don’t even have 90 korok seeds yet and there are 900 in the game. Where did they hide them all and how the hell did they do it? Imagine 900 of a collectible in any other open world game. You would be picking them up in the middle of fields and on the side of the road. Somehow Zelda keeps them hidden.

The shrines are also really fun and have a wide range of difficulty and creativity, although some are certainly better than others. Anything with motion control is terrible, and the combat shrines are very one-note. I have enjoyed the three dungeons I’ve completed so far and I’m even enjoying the flashback cutscenes. I think Zelda’s character is really well written and as someone who hasn’t played much Zelda or known about the lore in the previous games, it’s cool to see Zelda interact with Link in some quiet story focused scenes. I also love trying to collect all the armor sets (the DLC sets are really cool). Yes, the rain is awful. Yes, the inventory limit is annoying, even when you expand it. Yes, weapons breaking can be a pain, especially when they are really good ones. Yes, cooking is slow and tedious. Even with all the small missteps I still think Breath of the Wild can move game design in a new direction. Get rid of the icons on the map and encourage the player to mark areas. Build on the feeling of exploration and adventure rather than a checklist of items. Create a solid set of systems and mechanics that have fun ways of interacting with each other. Let the player use these systems to discover things for themselves. Breath of the Wild trusts its players and through that trust gives tons of amazing gameplay and surprising moments.

1. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds

Battlegrounds is unlike any other multiplayer shooter I have ever played. Even after nearly 300 hundred hours with the game I still find myself getting nervous when it comes down to the final 10 players alive. The game is one-part survival, one-part tactical shooter, and one-part horror game. I remember my first time making it to the top 10. I ran into a house terrified and hid in a corner, thinking I was safe and hoping the circle would favor me. It didn’t. I drank some energy drinks and went to move when all of a sudden, the door across the hall from me opened with a player crouched there blasting me with a shotgun. I freaked out and flung my mouse around the screen, eventually aiming at the ceiling and then dying because of this horrific jump scare another player pulled on me. One of the best parts about this is thinking on it after the fact, that person must have been scared too. They had heard me come in and possibly waited, hoping I hadn’t heard them, hoping I would leave. I didn’t and they made a move to kill me.

Every match in Battlegrounds has a story attached to it. You want to talk about every kill, you want to say how you survived sprinting across the street to get into the circle, you want to tell people that you won and exactly how you won. How you sniped someone from two hundred meters or crawled in the grass as people ran past you. And the game can be played in so many different ways. You can land in highly populated areas and go for lots of kills, you can try to find a car and drive away from the plane path and look for top loot before you engage enemies, you can set loot traps and wait for someone to try to come pick them up while you hide in the corner just waiting to blast them, you can run around and hide with no weapons at all trying to outlast the other players in a battle of “blue” damage. Even though you go to the same cities, see the same sites, use the same weapons, drive the same vehicles, none of it ever feels old or boring. Every match something new happens to make it different from the other matches you’ve played. The game also makes sound design much more important than any other shooter. The fact that when you kill a player you are not eliminating them from the round or sending them back to respawn, you are removing them from the match entirely adds such a layer of intensity and tenseness to all your actions. The game is brutal, but that makes the feeling of winning even more satisfying. The first time you and/or your teammates outlast 95 or more other players in the match feels incredible. Not only is the game a great competitive game, but its also a fun game to just mess around in with your friends and to witness the ridiculous things that can and will happen. This is bad to say, but even with all the bugs and the cheaters and the server issues, this game still was my game of the year and when it comes down to it is one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time.

2016 was a really great year for video games which meant it was another year for me to blow my money on a bunch of games I didn’t necessarily need to play, or on hardware I didn’t necessarily need to have. Yeah, I bought a Vive. Yeah, I didn’t use it very much. I still think the technology is amazing and I will spend more time with it (hopefully) in the coming weeks now that I’ve finished up most of the games I wanted to finish this year, but MAN, it was really hard to take the time to set up the Vive and use it in my much too small of a room, when I could just turn on the PS4 or click on a game on Steam and instantly have fun. It’s silly, and me being lazy, but taking the 5-10 minutes to set the Vive up and get a game running felt like too much work. Besides the VR craze (or lack thereof?) there were two other major themes to gaming this year. First Person Shooters are “back” and are damn good fun again, and all the games everyone thought were going to be absolute garbage turned out to be some of the best games of the year. Four of the games on my top 10 this year were games I thought were going to be terrible and/or I had little to no interest in. They certainly proved me wrong. I think I write this every year, but this year was the toughest for me to pick my favorite game. Usually the choice is obvious, or comes down to 2 games battling for the top spot. 2015 was The Witcher 3 by a landslide, Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls was an amazingly fun time in a surprisingly poor year for games in 2014, The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite were clear front runners in 2013…and so on. I was incredibly surprised at the overall quality in games this year. I could make a game of the year argument for pretty much every single game on my top 10. So, while it’s nice to have that one big obvious game of the year winner, 2016 showed me it’s even better to have a plethora of really amazing games to choose from. But before we get into that, I have a lot of other games I’d like to talk about.

A few “Old” Games I played this Year

Helldivers

I played this in four player co-op with three of my friends just a few nights ago on a complete whim (damn you steam sales!). While I don’t think the game itself is very fun, my friends and I had a blast murdering each other, whether it be by accident or not. It was especially hilarious when we would decide to not kill each other in order to get 3 stars on a mission, and then within one minute kill each other on accident. Sometimes you just fall off the back of a bike and get run over. Or you accidentally get caught in someone’s cross-hairs. Or you get a Mech dropped on your head. It’s dangerous spreading democracy!

Dark Souls 1 and 2

I played each of these for a little bit as part of my “Souls game crisis" I had this year. I love Dark Souls 2, so I’m interested to see the improvements from Scholars of the First Sin update. So far, it looks very nice. I’ve actually never finished Dark Souls 1, which is something I’m working my way towards, but let me tell you, Dark Souls 1 is HARD. I think it’s the hardest game in the series, just based on me replaying the first 3 hours or so. No teleporting bonfires, the animations feel slower, drinking estus takes an eternity, and the capra demon is still an asshole.

Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void

While my love of playing Starcraft 2 competitively has officially died, I truly enjoyed the Nova side ops campaign and the CO-OP mode this year. The vast improvements they have made to co-op since the expansions release in 2015 is incredible. It’s a really awesome game mode I’ve put a ton of time into. I also appreciate Blizzard beginning to add DLC like announcers, portrait packs to support tournaments, and unit skins. Of course, a lot of it feels like it’s far too late, but for those of us still playing Starcraft all of the additions to the game have been awesome.

Invisible Inc.

I hadn’t heard a thing about Invisible Inc. until Austin Walker made his passionate argument for it on Giantbomb’s 2015 game of the year deliberation. I absolutely love turn based tactical games, so I bought it on a Steam sale thanks to Austin’s recommendation. I instantly liked all the ideas and gameplay elements, especially that the game forces you to make tough choices in just about everything you do. Unfortunately, it seems that I was always making the wrong choices. I love difficult games, but Invisible Inc. seemed to be unbeatable for me. I don’t think I ever got past the 4^th level. It seemed no matter what choices I made or how I approached the map, I would get caught, one of my agents would get downed, and then I would have to book it to the exit or be forced to fight. Eventually, I would lose all my characters and have to restart. I spent a few hours trying to understand the game and figure out what I was doing wrong but nothing seemed to work. So, while I can see why someone would love this game, it was far too difficult for me.

My VR Experience

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter VR

I always wanted to play this game and when I saw it was being released on VR I figured that would be the best platform to give it a shot. Nope. The resolution on the headset made the game seem fuzzy and unclear. The environments looked muddy, the distant landscape was blurry, and playing without the teleport feature made me feel nauseous. While there seems to be an interesting story in this game, the current VR version is not the place to experience it.

The Lab

The Lab is really cool and a perfect opener to showcase the ability of VR to new users. It has a good variety of quick, unique experiences that I enjoyed messing around with. My brother and I got addicted to taking turns shooting arrows, repeatedly smacking the controllers off the wall because I decided to buy a Vive with no real room to put it. I would have spent more time with this if I had the true amount of space needed for room scale VR.

theBlu

theBlu was probably my favorite VR thing this year, even though it’s incredibly overpriced and only lasts for about 20 minutes. Even still, I think it’s a great introduction to VR, especially for people who don’t play games. Graphically it looks amazing, and the interaction you have with the various marine life is fun. I also found it to be quite relaxing, just sitting on the floor of my room and staring at the bottom of the ocean.

Job Simulator

I like throwing things in VR. Job Simulator has a lot of fun things to throw. It’s also funny and works well in a smaller space.

Tilt Brush

Tilt Brush is probably one of the best things the Vive has to offer in terms of what would feel like a full product. Even just using it in my small room space, it was pretty entertaining to draw various lines and make horrible creations with my very poor art skills. I can imagine using this thing at room scale, especially if you are an artist, can be quite thrilling. If anything, Tilt Brush feels like a product that proves VR works for things other than games.

Games that Disappointed Me

Dishonored 2

The E3 gameplay demo of Dishonored 2 had me convinced that it would be my game of the year. I loved the original Dishonored, and everything I saw of the sequel had me convinced it would be a bigger, better version of the original game. Yet as I played it, it just felt like more of the same, despite the new playable character and the new powers. A lot of the missions felt uninspired. Free roaming around an open area of a city felt interesting and exciting in the original game, but with the sequel I was expecting there to be more. Yet, many missions are very derivative of the first game. Of course, every level had its good moments, but I feel like I’ve already forgotten the ins and outs of the majority of them. Even the time shifting level ended up feeling underwhelming. Still fun, but forgettable. Also, the story was even worse than the first game. I didn’t care at all about what was going on with the characters, and everything fell into a predictable place by the end. I like what they did with new game plus (you get to reset your powers and Emily gets Corvo’s powers and vice versa) but I would have really appreciated that feature when I beat the game two months ago. There is nothing else in games like the world of Dishonored, but everything about this sequel fell flat for me in a way I did not expect.

Stardew Valley

I probably shouldn’t call this section “Games that Disappointed Me” because really Dishonored 2 was the only game that let me down this year. With Stardew Valley, and other games on this list, its more that I just didn’t like the game, and had no expectations going in that I would like it/them. Stardew Valley received a ton of hype when it launched, gathering astronomically high user reviews on Steam and getting nothing but the utmost praise from Dan Ryckert. While I enjoyed sim/farming type games as a kid, as I’ve gotten older my patience for them has run inexplicably thin. Yet, the fast paced “one more day” nature of Stardew Valley made me think it could be the type of game that would keep me up late into the night, waiting for that next crop to grow. Instead, I felt overwhelmed, then completely bored. I would spend my time chopping down trees, watering crops, and then barely have time to go into town. I would spend some time fighting monsters in the cave and then not have time to work on my farm. Hearing more about the game, I understand that “not having time” is not a big deal and that the game goes infinitely if you want it too, but while playing it I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being rushed through everything I wanted to do. Instead of being able to take my time I had to pay attention to a clock. It didn’t help that I found the gameplay itself uninteresting. Maybe I didn’t give the game enough of a chance, but I went from overwhelmed to annoyed to bored over the span of a few hours.

Madden 17

Madden 2002 was the last great Madden. From 2003-2005 2K delivered some of the very best football games in history. As far as I’m concerned, NFL 2K5 is the best sports game in history. So once EA bought up the NFL license and I was forced to play Madden I realized I liked nothing the "new" Madden was trying to do. I hadn’t played a Madden game for any serious length of time since 2007. So this year, since I love to waste money on games, I decided to buy Madden. I still don’t like Madden. The game feels slow and plodding, running the football means you want the final score to be 10-7 because you won’t move the football but will eat minutes off the clock, and the AI seems to swap between stupidly easy to Pro Madden player hard in-between every play. The Madden cards, which used to be outrageously fun to collect, are now monetized and split into so many different variations and packs and rarities that I feel like I’m in a card store looking at Upperdeck boxes. I know people love drafting teams and competing online, but I just want to play a solid, fun season of franchise against the AI. Madden just doesn’t do it for me. But I’ll probably buy it again in a few years, just to remember I don’t like Madden.

Pokemon Go

The Pokemon Go hype was insane. People at work spent hours talking about it, going down into the lobby to take breaks and catch Pokemon at the food court. My girlfriend, who has no interest in games, downloaded it and was catching Pokemon in her house. All this hype got me into playing and tricked me for about a week that the game was really cool. Then I realized there was no trading, no battling with friends, the servers hardly worked, it absolutely demolishes your phone’s battery, and that if I didn’t stop staring at my phone while walking down the street I was going to be robbed. I know many people at my work who still play the game, who aren’t really interested in actual video games. I guess that’s how most of the mobile games make their money. It’s certainly a fun idea, but Pokemon Go is not a good game.

Games I Didn’t Get to Play Yet

Oxenfree

This game was this year’s Invisible Inc for me. I had either paid no attention to it, or somehow hadn’t heard a word about it until this game of the year season. It sounds super interesting, so I grabbed a copy from the Steam Sale and look forward to playing it in 2017.

Bound

Bound looks like a game that could have broken my top 10 this year. Everything about it looks entirely original and the core concept seems very cool. I’m always up to try new types of games with unique stories, so I can’t wait to play Bound. It’s the one game this year I regret not playing before the year ended.

Salt & Sanctuary

I got really obsessed with Dark Souls the last few months so I decided I should play this. If there isn’t going to be anymore Souls games, I’m glad another developer is going to pick up where From left off. Also, 2D side scrolling Dark Souls seems like a neat idea.

Telltale’s Batman

I haven’t fully played a Telltale series since The Walking Dead season 1, but I love Batman and I have heard good things about this. I’m still unsure if I will give it a go though.

Watch Dogs 2

To be fair, I have played about 3 hours of Watch Dogs 2, but not nearly enough to fairly judge it. So far, I like the world and the goofy nature of the game, but wasn’t too impressed with any of the gameplay I’ve experienced so far. Unfortunately, this game may fall into the pile of “paid full price for it and then hardly played it”.

Games that didn’t make the top 10

Grim Dawn

A fun, old school ARPG from the makers of Titan Quest. For anyone who is tired of Diablo 3, I recommend this game. While I don’t think the core loop or the loot is as good as Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 it was a fun game nonetheless.

The Division

The story/mission aspect of this game is just meh. What I really enjoyed was the multiplayer. A very novel idea that felt rewarding and intense. I especially loved how you can hear other player’s mics when you get close to them. To hear someone about to betray you is hilarious, and always being forced to wonder if that friendly player who joined up with you is about to kill you always made for exciting gameplay. It felt like something new that the genre desperately needed. While it wasn’t enough to make my list, it was certainly worth the time I spent betraying people for mostly useless loot.

Gears of War 4

I had a ton of fun returning to Gears of War. For me, it was a real “return” because I hadn’t fully played a Gears game since the original. I did the entire campaign in co-op and had a blast, I shot some people in multiplayer, and had a ton of fun beating Horde mode on Hard when people would finally choose to stay in the game rather than grab their XP and leave. Gears of War is still really fun to play. The only negative thing I could say about it is that it’s pretty much still same old Gears, which was fine for me.

No Man’s Sky

I really, really like No Man’s Sky. Somehow, despite all the outposts, aliens, and animals looking similar, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of anticipation and eagerness when I landed on a new planet. It was always fun to find a planet I really liked too, and just spend a few hours running around to see how crazy it could get. I took more screenshots playing this game than I ever have with any game, and I enjoyed the generic loop of upgrading my suit, gun and ship even though it was incredibly disappointing to find out you can get everything to max level by staying on one planet. Normally I’m not into survival games, so I think how light and easy going No Man’s Sky is with its crafting and survival mechanics really helped me focus on exploration and giving things I found really dumb names. I think the best compliment I can give the game is it feels like nothing I’ve ever played before. Flying between planets and landing on them without any loading screens brought about feelings of adventure that I haven’t felt in any other game. With all that being said, the receptiveness eventually got to me and once the fall game season got into full swing my frustrations turned into boredom and I quit playing. I still want to try the Foundation update to see how good the base building is and if I can get a freighter ship. I was certainly disappointed in No Man’s Sky, but I still think there is a great time to be had with the game. Hopefully one day Hello Games or some other developer can bring everyone’s dreams of what No Man’s Sky could have been to life.

Clash Royale

It’s possible to get to Arena 8 without spending any money. It only took me 4 months of playing almost every day to do so. I would not recommend it. Clash Royale is the best and worst mobile game I’ve ever played. It has a horrible addicting quality to it and a frustrating amount of pay-to-win players. However, I can’t deny how genius the simple but highly strategic gameplay is and how satisfying it always was to beat those players you know dumped a ton of money into the game. After roughly 6 months of playing at least one match almost every day, I was finally able to break its horrible spell on me. Shout out to people in the Giantbomb.com clan, thanks for all the card donations!

The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine

The Witcher 3 is one of my all-time favorite games. It won my game of the year last year. From world building, to dialogue, to storytelling, to enemy design, the Witcher 3 is best in class in everything that makes an RPG great. If you have not played the Hearts of Stone expansion, do yourself a favor and play it now. It’s easily the best RPG questline I’ve ever played and some of the best single player content I’ve ever experienced in a video game. With that being said, yes, I am also really enjoying Blood and Wine. Unfortunately, new games sidetracked me away from my Witching and I haven’t finished it yet. I like the new zone, the quests are unique, and the story seems like it’s going places, although it doesn’t quite have its hooks in me yet. I’ve spent roughly twenty hours in the expansion and still have a ton to see. I’m actually happy I still have more to play because the Witcher 3 is so great.

The Witness

The Witness is a work of genius. To be able to create so many intricate and creative puzzles out of such a simple concept is an amazing achievement. If anyone told me this was their game of the year, or the greatest puzzle game they had ever played, I wouldn’t even think to question it. This game had me addicted for hours, just baffled by how difficult it was and by how smart it made me feel when I solved puzzles that seemed near impossible. But for some reason, around the 20 hour mark with five of the areas completed, I just stopped playing the game. I’m not sure if it was because of pure frustration with some of the tougher puzzles, the lack of story or of any narrative hooks that I thought were interesting, or just me being bad at the game. Whatever it was, The Witness ended up fading into the background as the year went on, and despite me staring at it in my Steam library and thinking about starting it up, I just never did. But even though I was frustrated with the game and some areas proved to be too challenging I still see the game as a masterpiece, just not a masterpiece I can appreciate as well as others.

Inside

I never really understood why Limbo was loved by so many people. The puzzles were pretty standard for the most part, the environments got worse as the game went on, and the story didn’t do anything special. I enjoyed Inside much more than I enjoyed Limbo, but I still had similar feelings as I did playing Limbo. The puzzles feel like boring busy work. Some of them are certainly better than others, but most of them are obvious how to solve and just require you to do physics puzzles and push boxes around. While some of the added mechanics were cool and much appreciated, I still didn’t feel like the game got as challenging as it should have. With that being said, I think the story, the environment, and some of the sequences leading up to the end of the game are amazing, and in some cases shocking. Not as shocking as the last 10 minutes of the game however. Damn, what an incredible moment. I could list at least 10 amazing moments in games this year, and the end of this game would be right there at the top. I liked it so much it almost made my top 10 despite my dislike of the actual gameplay.

Darkest Dungeon

I absolutely love Darkest Dungeon. I actually purchased it in 2015, played it in early access, and then still came back to it this year and played it even more, which is something I never do. I generally avoid early access games because I feel like if I play a game in early development too much, by the time the final release comes I will be burnt out and not care. Not in Darkest Dungeon’s case. I love turn based tactics games, and a 2D version of one of those would already be enough to get me interested. This game feels like a side scrolling XCOM. The mechanics are deep and satisfying, and skill and smart decision making are absolutely necessary to keep your party members alive. I loved following each of my character’s narratives as they grew more powerful, I loved dealing with the various mental status effects, and really enjoyed the overall insane difficulty of the game. It always felt challenging, your characters always felt unsafe, and defeating a mission always felt rewarding. The bosses were a joy because each of them had unique mechanics that would often force me to change up my party and typical strategy. I also loved the narration and the entire Lovecraftian aesthetic (thanks to Bloodborne). Everything about the game screamed “one more mission!” at me.

Then I got to the Darkest Dungeon, the final Dungeon of the game. Now, I previously had no problem with the grindy aspect of this game. Sure, you had to level up lots of characters, and yes you often replayed very similar mission in order to get items and become more powerful, yet I enjoyed the game so much I didn’t care. However, after hours of grinding and being intimately familiar with the game, I expected the final dungeon to go fairly well. Sure, I would lose some warriors, but their sacrifice would result in my victory. I was absolutely shocked when my entire party of best heroes, two of which had survived since the very first mission, had gone completely insane or died half way through the dungeon. By the time I made it to the boss my party was in shambles. I tried a few other heroes and different party combinations and continued to get slaughtered, losing the majority of my best items and fighters. Was it game over? No, I could have grinded up more heroes and continued the onslaught, but I was just so upset at the sheer amount of difficulty the last dungeon presented, combined with the hours upon hours of forced grinding that I just turned the game off and never finished it. If you want to make your game insanely hard, I’m all for it. But if you want to also force the player to grind for hours and hours to even maybe have a chance at winning, then I think the game only suffers. Could I have just played poorly in the that final dungeon? Absolutely. But since I had conquered everything else in the game, seeing such a difficulty spike in a game that was already incredibly difficulty was not appreciated, and soured me enough to drop the game from my list.

World of Warcraft Legion

World of Warcraft is my favorite game of all time. The few years I spent playing vanilla and The Burning Crusade are some of the best times I’ve ever had playing a video game. The game felt challenging, rewarding, and became a great social space for me, my real-life friends and our guildmates. Running the Karazhan raid was my absolute favorite thing to do in the game. Yet after The Burning Crusade ended I canceled my account and hadn’t played since. When I saw this year’s expansion was going to bring back Illidan and the Burning Legion I thought, why not give it a shot? And then, as if Blizzard new exactly what I wanted, they introduced a new version of Karazhan! LANing with my friends and figuring out how to take down Karazhan bosses felt like old times. I also really enjoy the Mythic + system as it provides challenging end game content for someone like me who doesn’t want to get involved in a raiding guild. I certainly had some really fun times playing WoW with my friends this year.

But I don’t think the game is very good, especially compared to the Burning Crusade. Comparing the two is an entire blog post on its own, so I’ll try to keep it short. The free to play-like send your “followers” out on missions is a terrible mechanic and is only made worse by the fact that they time gate your very important class quests through this system. The entire attunement process for the Arcway and Court of Stars dungeons is also time gated by reputation and long, boring quest lines. The artifact weapon system is cool in theory, but if you want to switch specs or classes you get way behind everyone else because to be able to level your weapon at an efficient rate you once again get time gated by research that increases your artifact power gains. It also ruins the uniqueness of weapons, as everyone has the same weapon, with the same skills. The skill tree in the weapons don’t require any real choices as you unlock every skill eventually. The legendaries are random and are completely imbalanced between being necessary and being absolute garbage. And worst of all, the Destiny-like item level just makes people care about a number on your stat sheet rather than the actual gear you have or how good you are at the game. I’ll stop now.

Now for the top 10:

10. Firewatch

I think the most important part of Firewatch is that it’s a game about real people in the real world. For the most part, everything that happens in Firewatch could really happen. There’s no magical powers, no monsters or aliens. It’s about characters with real human emotions fighting through real life problems. What really impressed me the most about the game was how interested I stayed in the story despite not liking the main character, Henry. I think Henry isn’t a very good guy. A lot of the way he acts, the choices he makes, especially in his background story, made me think he’s not a very dependable person. He comes across as selfish, and as Alex put it, in some ways cowardly. I appreciated that the game doesn’t force these feelings on you, either. You get presented with the facts about Henry and you get to witness what he does and says throughout the game. You can make up your mind about him from there. Still, I found it cool that I was playing as a character that I didn’t like, someone who doesn’t feel like a hero or like a person someone would want to grow up to be. There’s no fantasy power trip, Henry is just an average adult. And as the game moves on and you learn more about Henry, you can in some ways start to empathize with him, maybe even understand him, which I think speaks volumes about the quality of the writing in Firewatch. Henry and Delilah feel like real people. The dialogue feels natural.

I also love the setting of the game. Its original, and that originality pays off. I never even thought about how fire watching used to be a much-needed job in the summers before technology has become what it is today. The game showed me a piece of the world that doesn’t exist anymore (at least not in the same way) and it was cool to see it. The game is also gorgeous and really brings to life that hot summer 1980’s vibe I’ve only seen in movies. It felt bright and inviting, and for a moment made me imagine what it would be like to get away from technology and just live out in the woods for a few days.

It’s a shame that the story goes a bit off the rails, even it did have its intense moments. I just felt like they added a little too much drama for drama’s sake, though there are some good story beats behind all the craziness. I also liked the ending because it summed up one of my favorite themes in the game; the mystery of something is often better than the truth. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but I appreciated the originality of the experience and will eagerly await Campo Santo’s next game.

9. Hitman

If this list was my favorite game to watch being played this year, then Hitman would win hands down. I think this game is one of the rare cases where I actually enjoyed watching a game more than playing it. Watching Brad and Dan fumble through the various levels was some of the most entertaining videos on the site this year. The game itself is hilarious and I can see how having a friend or two around to enjoy its stupidity can make the game ten times better. Playing by myself however was less of an exciting experience. Hitman feels like two games to me. One where you follow the opportunities and watch as the most ludicrous of assassinations gets pulled off, and one where you fumble around without any guidance and usually just kill your target by throwing a knife in their head. Both are satisfying in their own way, and some of the kills the opportunity leads you too are absolutely incredibly. Yet, I never felt like I became a master Hitman player. On my own I would stumble around to an eventual boring kill, and following the opportunities sometimes felt like I wasn’t even playing a game. Still, the amount of content in this game is staggering and if you want to test your Hitman skills, there are plenty of challenges to do so. And while some of the maps are better than others, each one of them brought their own unique take on the formula that I think switched up the gameplay in some interesting ways. Getting complete mastery on each level is very satisfying, and I think the elusive target system is one of the best designed gameplay ideas in any game this year. They are difficult, but when I would pull them off I felt like I actually knew how to play Hitman.

Most importantly, the game is stupid and silly and the developers know it. They feed into it and create ridiculous scenarios around the wackiness of the world. In some ways, I enjoyed Hitman more for its comedy than its actual gameplay. There is really no other game like Hitman, which is all the more reason to play it.

8. XCOM 2

It seems like a lot of people were upset or disappointed by XCOM 2 this year, which felt like a surprise to me. It was more XCOM, which is awesome! New enemies, new utility items, new map layouts, new weapons, new character customization. Overall, it felt like a solid package worthy of the “2” in the title. The biggest change to the game that I saw most people complaining about is that many of the missions are timed. You only have a certain amount of turns to complete a mission which completely changes the strategy from the first game. Rather than creeping forward and using overwatch on every soldier, XCOM 2 forces you to run forward and make more aggressive decisions. Does the game fuck you over sometimes because of it? Of course it does. But this is also the same game where you can miss a 95% shotgun shot with the target standing right in front of you. I think having timed missions forced me to become a better XCOM player. I had to choose skills for my squad that I normally wouldn’t and play less with snipers and more with shotgunners. I absolutely loved using the sword. If it weren’t for the bugs that forced me to restart some missions, this game could have been higher on my list. Even still, it's the sequel to my 2012 game of the year and I think it lives up to everything I wanted it to be. I had a blast playing through the campaign and got stuck in that “one more mission” loop for hours on end. More XCOM is always welcome.

7. Overwatch

I’m still astounded with the unanimous praise Overwatch has received from all types of gamers. This game seems to have transcended to the Battlefield and Call of Duty levels of popularity in a matter of months. Yes, it’s a Blizzard game, so why am I so surprised? Well, the game is quite difficult, for starters. The good players are really damn good. The bad players can be pretty damn bad. While all the characters are incredibly designed, playing most of them well is no easy task. When one team is far better than the other the matches often aren’t close. This is why I’m so shocked to hear that so many people who don’t like competitive games or who don’t get into the FPS genre love this game. “It’s so player friendly!” everyone seems to say. Unfortunately, Overwatch often frustrates me as much as I have fun with it. It has a MOBA level quality to it, where toxic teammates ruin games, players refuse to play roles the team needs, people play heroes they suck as in competitive…really the player base makes this game worse for me. I love the core concept, I love the teamwork aspect (when people actually work as a team) I love the characters, the emotes, the sprays, repeatedly spamming the dumb voice lines (Can’t Stop Won’t Stop!) and I love the way the game feels to play. Each hero controls differently and has their own qualities that can make playing each match a completely different experience. And I certainly had a blast playing with my friends. I just think I take the game too seriously and since I’m not very good at the game myself, it just bothers me more when people don’t work as team, get abusive in chat, and just make it their every goal to ruin the game for everyone else. Still, of all the games on this list it’s the one I played the most this year. I just need to learn to let go of my stupid competitive nature and just focus on having fun. Also, Zenyatta is the best.

6. Dark Souls III

I almost never finished Dark Souls III. I put it down roughly halfway through the game and didn’t pick it back up until roughly 6 months later. Why did I stop playing it? I have no damn idea. Dark Souls III is another Souls game, so that instantly makes it amazing. For some reason, this one hooked me the most out of any past “SoulsBorne” game. I liked it so much that I beat it twice, which is something I very rarely ever do with any game. I did my first playthrough as Dexterity which was really hard, and my second playthrough as Pyromancy which was much easier and super fun! I always play these games as melee, so it was a great experience to try out a completely different playstyle. Dark Souls III also caused me to have what I am calling a “Souls game crisis.” Once I finished the game I realized it may very well be the last SoulsBorne game we ever get, and thus I went spiraling down a dark but wonderful souls hole. I started watching hours of lore videos. I began listening to a podcast entirely about the SoulsBorne games. I watched various speedruns. I read strategy guides. I tried some PvP. I bought Scholar of the First Sin on PC and am replaying Dark Souls I. No other game this year got me as obsessed with its world and its lore. Also, Dark Souls still just plays better than most single player games. It’s smarter, better designed, and has a style unlike anything else. Do I think Dark Souls III is the best of the bunch? I honestly can’t say. It has some of my favorite bosses ever in the series (some of them talk!) and the way they mishmash pieces of all the games together (even Bloodborne, at least to me) was really cool. I honestly can’t really pinpoint why I got so hooked to this game evern more so than the others. Perhaps it was the first Dark Souls game in the new generation, and the graphics, framerate, and controls all feel great. Also, a lot of the quality of life improvements make the entire game a much smoother experience. Sure, it’s just more Dark Souls. But I would play a Dark Souls IV right now if I could.

5. DOOM

DOOM is the best first person shooter campaign I have ever played, without question. There are so many things it does right. No reloading, vertical level design, smartly hidden secrets, powerful feeling weapons, great movement speed, and a hilarious story all wrapped up into a gore-filled demon slaying package of excellence. And while playing the game is amazing, the story beats and “lore” surrounding the DOOM Slayer are absolutely hilarious and fantastic. As I listened to this deep generic demon voice boom out of the prophecy of the mighty DOOM Slayer sent to massacre the demons I burst out laughing at the audacity of the game. Were they actually doing this!? And is it actually working!? The way everything works in DOOM can't really be explained. The way the DOOM slayer is the most stereotypical meathead silent protagonist, but is actually incredibly awesome because he punches and breaks everything he’s not supposed to for seemingly no reason…I just don’t understand how they got any of it to work and work so damn well. My only complaint is doing a second playthrough requires you to find the keys to all the doors and find all the secrets again, and I’m just not up for that. Which is a shame, because the score attack mode they added in a few months ago is rad. Shooting guns in that game is just the best. I was so enamored with the game once I had finished it, I wrote this lengthy blog post about why DOOM is a better shooter campaign than every other shooter campaign. You can read that here if you would like. DOOM is great!

4. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

I love the Jak and Daxter series, and The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time. The Uncharted series on the other hand has always felt like I was missing something. I enjoyed the games, but I never felt like they were game of the year material (Arkham Asylum is a much better game than Uncharted 2). So, when Naughty Dog announced Uncharted 4 I was extremely disappointed. Wasn’t Nathan Drake’s story finished? Also, was it really that great of a story to begin with? I didn’t care about this game at all, only to laugh at the fact that Troy Baker would be playing Nathan Drake’s (Nolan North) older brother Sam. I didn’t think this game would be anything more than the previous games. I am happy to say I was wrong. Not only is Uncharted 4 hands down the best Uncharted game, it’s a really damn good game all on its own. What makes it so much better than the previous games? The story is incredible. Rather than focusing on the fantastic, the treasure, and the ridiculousness of every situation Drake puts himself in, they chose to focus on him as a character. They focus on his relationship with his wife, Elena. They dig into his past, his relationship with his brother. They focus on his flaws as a person, his issues. They show that Nathan Drake isn’t some perfect hero, he’s kind of an asshole. They really build the relationship with his brother Sam from the ground up, making you feel like you have known their story since the first game. They make you care about the characters and what happens to them. They even finally manage to bring in a crew of really great villains. For once none of it was about the adventure or the treasure, it was about the characters, and about how far Nathan Drake would go to just get another treasure seeking high.

To top it all off, the game looks better than most PC games, has some absolutely outstanding action sequences, and finally adds some creativity to the gameplay through the use of better stealth mechanics and traversal through the environments. While I still wasn’t in love with the gameplay side of things, it’s easily the best Uncharted has ever been in that aspect as well. Naughty Dog just does everything right. The voice acting, the facial capture, the explosions, and the soundtrack were all best in class. What a phenomenal game. Now I’m even more excited about The Last of Us 2. If Naughty Dog can make the 4^th game in a series the best game, what can they do with the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time?

3. The Last Guardian

Of the 4 games I loved this year that I thought would be terrible (Hitman, DOOM, Uncharted 4) The Last Guardian was the one I thought would be the biggest pile of shit. I had no hope for this game whatsoever. How could anyone, after its eternity in development? Yet, I feel like I would now be comfortable saying The Last Guardian is one of the greatest achievements in game development. Is it a game everyone will love? Absolutely not. Is it a flawless game? Not even close. Is it a game that exceeded all of my impossibly low expectations, and then continued to surprise me as it got better and better? Yes. The Last Guardian is a great game. How is it so good? Well, the design of the creature Trico is incredible. The way Trico behaves makes it feel like a real animal. It moves so realistically and behaves with such life that I grew very attached to the creature. It also looks incredible and the movement of such a large creature in such large and astounding environments is really something to behold. Trico feels integral to the game, a complete and necessary part of it. It’s not a gimmick, or a tacked-on addition that gets in the way. Every puzzle feels like the boy and Trico need each other, that they couldn’t survive the journey without the other. The game also does an excellent job of balancing the puzzle solving with relationship building between the boy and Trico. Petting Trico is an integral part of the game and is used very well. Taking care of Trico feels like something you want to do, rather than a boring chore. This game is not kind at all. Trico gets hurt in some very vicious ways and the game makes you want to protect it, despite the boy’s small size. And when you heal its wounds, or help it in battle you feel tremendous, as if you the player are building a relationship with this virtual creature. It’s truly unlike anything I’ve seen or felt in a game before.

What may be even more impressive about the game however, is that it out does Uncharted in many of its big action sequences. I went into this game expecting a quirky, quiet puzzle game. But as you get further along, the game is filled with harrowing action sequences, giant leaps of faith, collapsing towers, and anxiety driven battle scenes. There are more breath taking moments in this game than I can remember. There is just a shear beauty to the way the animation of the boy and Trico work together during these scenes that absolutely shocked me. And the story is crazy! It actually goes places that I would have never expected! And the last thirty minutes is really something else, just a pure rush of panic and emotions.

This game easily could have been my game of the year if it weren’t for the framerate and the controls. The framerate really hurts the game, especially when Trico runs into a big open area and decides to roar Jurassic park style and the wind is blowing his feathers and the sun is shining on the grass…and the frames drop to about 10 and the gorgeous scene is ruined. Even more unfortunate is my struggle with the controls throughout the entire game. While commanding Trico was fine, getting the boy to do what I wanted was a pain too many times. Getting him to leap to the ground off Trico was always a struggle. Climbing things could often result in disaster, either because having the jump button on triangle and the drop button on X is a terrible idea, or because the boy just wouldn’t let go of things. Or climb when I wanted him to. It grew frustrating over the 12 or so hours I spent with the game. Even still it was some of the best 12 hours of entertainment for me this year. The Last Guardian is unlike any other game out there and is an incredible achievement for such a joked about game. Trico is the best.

2. Abzu

After the amazing game that is Journey, I had high hopes for Abzu. I’m happy to say it delivered on all my expectations and may be even better than Journey. The first noticeable thing Abzu does well is it finds a balance between the big, flashy, breath-taking moments and the quiet zen-like areas. Being able to just meditate on a statue and watch the various sea life swim around and interact was calming and also an enjoyable way to break up the game. I always made sure to fully explore every area and take my time just looking at everything the game had to show me. And what a look this game has. The colors of Abzu jump between bright and happy and dark and mysterious. Everything blends together naturally and manages to keep a fairly realistic look when it comes to the marine life. The entire look of the game is just an impressive display of animation, motion, lighting, and color. And once again, Austin Wintory composes a perfect soundtrack to fit every moment in the game. And there are so many amazing moments.

An easy “moment of the year” candidate for me is the first time I grabbed onto a fish and realized you could ride it to the surface and then have it jump out of the water with you. The controls feel so elegant in all aspects of the game, but the diving in and out of the water is truly special. And so much of the control and the “action” of this game is perfect. I’m not sure any of the moments are as shocking as the infamous sand-slide in Journey, but I think as a whole Abzu brings a much greater and much better looking experience overall.

Another reason I’m so in love with Abzu is my fascination with sharks. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve always thought sharks are the coolest animal. I know they are dangerous, I know they can’t be your friend, but there is something about them that I just think is rad. Abzu has the best use of sharks in any game ever and it somehow manages to build a very open ended but interesting story with a shark. The last twenty minutes of Abzu is one of the best things I’ve ever played. I got emotional over some of the moments at the end of the game. The entire thing is so bright and colorful and filled with heart and joy. The entire sequence gave me an unparalleled sense of freedom, which I think is exactly what it was trying to do. The final minutes were an absolute joy to partake in and certainly felt like nothing I had experienced in a game before. And despite all the excitement and sensory overload the game brings, it still manages to be a calm, soothing experience. I urge anyone who is a fan of Journey, or anyone who likes short, focused experiences to play Abzu. It’s literally the only game this year I have no complaints or issues with. It did everything it tried to do perfectly.

1. Titanfall 2

My favorite line from this year’s Giant Bomb Game of the Year deliberations was when Jeff said “You are all making a huge mistake” when Titanfall 2 did not win best multiplayer. Titanfall 2 is the best competitive/multiplayer shooter I have ever played. It’s better than any Battlefield, Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Overwatch, or anything else. It’s absolutely incredible. But first, the campaign. I wasn’t expecting much more than a serviceable Call of Duty-like set of missions when I booted the game up. And at first it seemed fairly standard. The movement and control was quick, sharp, and snappy. The guns felt good to shoot. The robot seemed nice enough. But then the creativity starts to shine, with some really intricate and wide open levels full of twisting platforms, and enemies scattered above and below. The platforming is even better than DOOM’s because the movement just feels so perfect and they create some very manageable but challenging platforming sequences. I loved running through the planet building factory and was having a fun time. I was starting to love BT, as he felt like my own Iron Giant.

Then something weird started to happen where it seemed like flashes of the past were appearing in the present. The game makes some mention of what could be wrong, but I pressed forward thinking it was just a quick story bit. Eventually, you get a button prompt that says press “L1 to time travel.” I remember thinking, “what the fuck is this game? Did they do the Dishonored 2 thing!?” I hit the button. “Holy shit they did the Dishonored thing!” And yes Dishonored 2 wasn’t even out yet, but I was so excited for that game my brain instantly connected the two. And after Dishonored 2 did come out, all I could think was “Titanfall 2 did this mechanic 100 times better”. That entire mission is right up there with DOOM for me in terms of best first person shooter campaign moments ever. What else is great about the campaign? The boss fights are really cool how they introduce them like cartoon super villains, and how each one of them uses a different Titan. Also, BT was one of my favorite characters of the year and his greatness culminated in the amazing “Sere Kit” moment of this game. The entire cut scene before this is a really solid and emotional story bit. They get you to feel like you lost your friend and like you are in a lot of trouble. Then BT hands you the kit and I thought “Shit, that’s the smart pistol!” And then I proceeded to wall run and headshot every single person standing between me and the mission. It felt like sweet revenge for BT and it was awesome. And to have you run through hordes of enemies while parkouring around to finally get outside and hear “Prepare for Titanfall!” as a new Titan plummets from the sky is simply fantastic. Plug in BT and get ready to fuck shit up. What an amazing moment.

Now, about the multiplayer. There’s so much it does that other shooters don’t. First, is the movement. It’s unmatched in any other shooter, period. The way you have complete control over wall-running, double jumping and sliding your way around the environments at ludicrous speed gives the game a frantic and yet incredibly skillful feeling. All of the guns are fun to shoot and each of the classes allows you to have a different strategy. I never use shotguns or snipers in these sorts of shooters, but Titanfall 2 gets me to try every weapon. For the record, I think Stim is the best class because of the importance of getting in and out of battle quickly, but each one of them is viable depending on your playstyle. Then there is the Titans. The Titan gameplay is leagues better than it was in Titanfall 1, and that’s saying something. There is such great balance between the Titans, with each one of them having strengths and weaknesses that make them better or worse in certain situations (at least Tone is manageable now). The Titan battles feel skillful and fast. And they are all fun to use. At first I was a Tone player, but then I had a blast sword chopping as Ronin, and now I’ve been laser-beaming as Ion and lighting fools on fire as Scorch. Scorch is great! The skins are great! The prime titans are great! Dropping your Titan out of the goddamn sky onto an enemy Titan who thought he was about to kill you is great! And maybe the best part of the entire game is that there is no competitive mode. There is no “mmr” or ranking system. Stats don’t matter and I don’t particularly care about them. I seriously just play the game to have fun. What a novel idea. Of course, I think my love for the game does come from the fact that I’m very good at the game. I had a 32 pilot kill-6 titan kill game of attrition the other day and it felt pretty damn good. Certainly, the game is not without fault, but any issues it has pale in comparison to the amount of fun I’ve had playing it. I’m currenty G5 and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. Game of the Year!

I never played the original DOOM games. I was a bit young for them at the time and had little to no understanding of what DOOM actually was. I heard snippets of stories from kids in my class who had older siblings or parents who had the game, from which I gathered that you shot monsters and that was pretty much it. I saw DOOM 64 at the rental stores multiple times, but I was much more too into Goldeneye to be bothered with it. When DOOM 3 was released I was more into the PS2 than anything on the PC and when I did get my first PC for gaming it was for World of Warcraft. Playing any of the DOOM games never really crossed my mind.

I actually had a very limited experience with first person shooters when I was a kid. My first real experience with the fast paced, "DOOM-like" fps was Unreal Tournament 2003. When I eventually settled into fps and other shooter games, I played Timesplitters 2, Black, and Half-Life, which eventually lead to Call of Duty and the plethora of third person cover based shooters to follow. I never played Quake, Duke Nukem, or Wolfenstein. At some point in my life, I saw those games as "old" and therefore no longer good games. The actual idea of NOT having a cover system and frantically moving around the environment seemed like a silly way to play a shooter game. Don't ask me how or why I came up with this belief. My only guess is I never actually played those games and being a dumb teenager I assumed what I knew was better than what I didn't know. I had no frame of reference for why those old shooters were so special and loved by so many and as the years went on and the plethora of cover mechanics, "follow the arrow" guides, and corridor tight shooters slowly became stale to me, I actually had reached a point where I thought of shooter campaigns as a sort of side mode to a games multiplayer, especially for the fps genre. Third person shooter campaigns still received my attention, but mostly the handful that were amazing technical showpieces or have good stories (Uncharted and Spec OPS The Line come to mind). But beyond that, I hardly thought about buying an fps for its campaign. They were all the same, boringly linear, non-challenging slogs. Then DOOM came.

Honestly, I was skeptical. Listening to the Bombcast, I was partially convinced it was just their nostalgia playing into their insane love for the game. Years of not thinking about buying an fps for its campaign had trained my brain to think this game couldn't be THAT good. I had even played Wolfenstein The New Order once it went on sale, and even that wasn't able to hold my attention for long. How could DOOM be any different? Even watching the Quick Look I still didn't see it. Brad walked into a room, the door locked behind him, and he had to kill all the enemies to get out with a fairly standard pistol and shotgun. Nothing special about it. But the praise for the game was overwhelming by fans, user reviews, and critics alike and since I have a wonderful habit of buying most popular games and not finishing half of them, I figured why can't I give DOOM a shot?

My feelings on the first two hours of the game were mixed. The story was goofy and well written for what was there. The pistol and shotgun felt good to shoot, but were fairly standard fps weapons. The enemies were fairly simple to dodge and were not overwhelming. The level design was cool, and the early secrets were fun to find. The game looked nice. But I was not enthralled yet. Thankfully I kept playing and as I did my feelings changed dramatically.

The goofy story turned into a hilarious, well written, surprisingly lore heavy endeavor that never dragged on too long or took itself seriously. The pistol turned into a fast moving charged headshot machine. The shotgun turned into a grenade launcher. From there the weapons only get better. The demons grow numerous, with tons of different behaviors and abilities. The level design is unfathomably good in both exploration and combat. In short the game exceeded all of my expectations and I beat it in five days, which is an extremely quick time for me. It made me wish I had known about these old fps games, that I had been old enough when they were released to play them and appreciate them for what they were. Or what they are, apparently. For being filled to the brim with old game design, DOOM feels new and fresh in a way shooter games haven't in years. Here are the multitude of ways DOOM became one of the best shooter campaigns I have ever played and what it does other shooters today don't.

1. There's No Time to Reload, So Don't

It’s surprising how this seems like a novel concept, but I can't recall any other game I've played where you don't reload any of your guns. It's also the first thing that stood out to me that DOOM was going to play differently. Reloading is so ingrained in my brain that I can't count the number of times I hit R on my keyboard to reload my weapon only to change my weapon mod instead. Normally games use reloading as their "tactical" element. Hey you have to decide the best time to shoot and the best time to reload! Which is fine, and a concept that certainly has worked well over the years, but when all you need to do in most games is sit behind cover to reload the entire concept becomes more of a nuisance than I even realized. I'm not saying every game should remove reloading, in many games it wouldn't make sense, but the way it lets you just unload your weapons on the demons in DOOM is incredibly satisfying. Most importantly, it allows you to constantly stay on the move, dodging and climbing all the while launching rockets into demon faces. And the ability to just never stop shooting is smartly balanced by the need for ammunition management.

2. Ammunition Scarcity Done Right

So, while you never have to reload you can and will run out of ammo for your guns frequently. Rather than replacing the annoyance of having to reload with the annoyance of having no ammo in a game that’s all about shooting guns, DOOM expertly forces the player to balance their ammunition through weapon strategy and decision making. By allowing your guns to run out

of ammo, you frequently need to change your weapon. You can have your favorite gun in DOOM all you want, but you better make sure you save it for the right enemies. Rotating weapons depending on the enemy composition is incredibly important and the lack of ammo forces you to learn to use all the weapons. Some weapons work much better against certain enemies than others, so there becomes an excellent back and forth of "do I save this gun for later or do I use it now?" They further complicate this decision making with the chainsaw. If you have enough fuel, you can instantly kill any enemy and get an amazingly satisfying explosion of all the ammo you need like a loot chest in Diablo. So do you decide to use the chainsaw on multiple smaller enemies to get as much ammo as possible? Or do you save it to one shot kill a Baron of Hell, but then risk being low on ammo later? Its all very smartly designed and encourages tactical weapon switching and good play without hindering the player in anyway. Of course, having to switch from your favorite weapon wouldn't be any fun if the other guns weren't fun to shoot.

3. All the Guns Are Fun

The guns are just plain fun to shoot. They feel heavy and powerful. When you rapidly fire missiles into a demon you can feel the thud of each one. Despite some of the weapons being big and bulky they never slow you down or really hinder your movement (with one exception).

On top of that most of the weapons have mods that you can find that completely change the way the weapon works in some incredibly satisfying ways. Turn your standard machine gun into a rapid firing missile launcher. Turn your plasma rifle into an area of effect stun bomb. Turn your shotgun into an explode on impact grenade launcher. Not only are you switching weapons constantly but you are switching weapon mods too, making almost every gun in the game three guns in one. It only increases your options and your strategy to take down the demons in the most efficient and satisfying ways possible.

4. Meaningful Challenges

In case you weren't already on board with trying different weapons, each mod has a challenge that unlocks its best modded feature. None of the challenges feel incredibly impossible, instead hitting the right spot of challenging to complete but entirely reasonable. Furthermore, each mission has three challenges attached to it, that often serve as make shift tutorials to the different ways your weapons work, or the many different glory kills you can perform, or encouraging you to hunt for secrets. These challenges unlock points to upgrade your weapon mods, so it’s a constant feed of completing challenges while using new guns which in turn unlocks you points to improve your guns. The whole system feels like a smart design choice rather than just slapping an experience bar on the screen and giving you a level.

5. Don't Hide For Health, Go Fight for It

Nearly every shooter these days has the same returning health system. Hide behind cover, don't get shot, your health comes back. Similar to reloading, it encourages, passive campy play. In DOOM you have to kill enemies to get your health back. About to die? well you better run out into the fray, frantically dodging shots while stunning enemies to get a glory kill and then get close enough to collect the health pickups. It adds an intensity to the combat that other games lack. I can't count the number of times I was low on health with five demons chasing after me only to land the perfect rocket, run forward and get a glory kill just in time to get some health back. Just enough health to survive a shot or two I might add. One glory kill will never give you your full health back, forcing you to stay on your toes until the last enemy falls.

6. Mobility That Works

Climbing and platforming in first person games has been very complicated over the years. At its best it feels janky, at its worst it’s a terrible mechanic. With all the movement required to run from enemies, and the expansiveness of the levels, DOOM needed a good mobility system to work. Thankfully climbing in DOOM feels enjoyable. Every time the DOOM Marine pulls himself up a ledge it felt good, which is the only real way I can describe it. The traversal feels natural, along with a double jump and a small air dash, you feel like you are in perfect control of where you are going at all times, even in the middle of the most intense fire fights. And all this mobility only serves the game even better for hiding collectibles, forcing the player to climb into places you normally wouldn't even think about reaching in other first person shooters.

7. Well Hidden Secrets

I largely ignore collectibles and secrets in most games because they are often much harder to find than the reward you get for finding them. Most of the time they don't even feel good to find, often hidden in seemingly random places with no context or clues to look there. Even worse,

unlocking concept art is generally the highlight of secret rewards. DOOM does two major things to alleviate this. First, you can upgrade your suit to show you where the collectibles are on the map. Any area of explorable terrain is also visible on the map. This makes finding the secrets easier because you know where to look, but they are so masterfully hidden that sometimes they still take minutes to find. Also, the game will often show you the secrets in the environment, such as on the other side of a wall you can't pass through) letting you know where the secret is but that you can't get it until later. It is an excellent tool to getting the player to want to find the secrets. Second, while the game will hand you a lot of upgrade points and weapon mods along the main path, about half of them are hidden in secret rooms. Rather than rewarding concept art for your secret hunting, DOOM rewards you with meaningful upgrades. In my experience, about 75% of the secrets were smartly hidden but not too difficult to find, while the other 25% were incredibly elaborate or expertly hidden, to the point where I'd say it’s worth looking them all up just to see how well designed the game is.

8. Aggressive AI

Since you are able to run around, jump and climb, and never reload, the demons can too. There is no hiding behind cover for the enemies, they come at you nonstop. But they don't feel like mindless, dumb creatures. The ranged enemies stay at range. They will often leap away from you, climb to high ground, or find a spot behind you to continue shooting you. The melee characters chase you aggressively. Many of them charge right at you and never stop pursuing, even if you climb up ledges. Yes, all the demons have mobility of some sort, and will run and leap after you across platforms, forcing you to engage or eventually get shot to pieces by the ranged attackers surrounding your perimeter. Each enemy has its own set of attacks and behaviors you learn that leads you to prioritizing killing them. You should probably take out the demon that summons more demons, before dealing with the laser beam shooters, but maybe you have more trouble with the charging Pinky Demons and would rather eliminate them before they come up behind you and spear you to death. Also, there never feels like a point where the demons leave you alone to catch your breath. Late in the game you will frequently encounter fights of 10-20 demons at once, all of which are aggressively attacking you. It keeps the action intense, and really brings together all of the other excellent systems the combat offers.

9. Expansive Levels

Probably the second most important piece to DOOM, along with the weapons, is the level design. Many shooters today are flat, straight paths. DOOM levels are all tremendously vertical. The games excellent mobility, fast pace, well-hidden secrets, and aggressive AI are all a product of the expansiveness and vertically each level has. You never feel trapped even though you are overwhelmed. You never feel enclosed or cornered. And you quickly learn to assume that you CAN go anywhere rather than you can't. Multiple paths and backtracking further show off how open and creative the levels are, allowing the player to have strategic battles, or explore and discover secrets. And the map is expertly designed to avoid you getting lost. When shooters are so linear, this type of open level design feels incredible in an fps and its really what makes all the other systems work together so well.

10. A “So Dumb its Good” Storyline I Can Get Behind

Despite the outrageous gore, heavy metal soundtrack, and demonic symbols DOOM actually doesn’t take itself seriously. Somehow they made future Mars colony harvesting energy from Hell with you playing as a demon prophesied DOOM slayer incredibly funny and interesting. I generally get tired of the "so dumb its great" theme a lot of games try to go for, but DOOM's story nails it. It is incredibly dumb but also awesome. When the deep dark demon voice is reading prophesized scripture of the DOOM marines destruction of the demons I was simultaneously thinking this is hilariously stupid that they did this and also I'm actually going to stand here and listen to all of it because I want to hear what it has to say. Not to mention the DOOM Marine constantly breaking and punching everything for seemingly no reason, the hologram spokesman spouting propaganda about how they are all doing great work, and the pages upon pages of codex on demon invasions and hell energy really got me wrapped up in such a ridiculous world. It’s the sort of dry humor I love. Not a single part of the game is in your face about any of it either, which is what I love the most.

So a game that uses many mechanics from 90s shooters is amazing. Well what happened to them in the first place? How did this boring, follow the leader corridor cover shooter style eclipse the fast paced, bullet dodging, power up wielding gameplay DOOM pioneered? Perhaps it’s just a case of things getting stale after so many years. Maybe with DOOM’s surprise success, other shooters will start following its “old is new” style. Then after ten years’ worth of DOOM clones spawn on us, we will grow tired of them and once again call on the cover shooters. As someone who has no experience with the old DOOM games, I know it’s more than just nostalgia. This style of game works and reminds me that shooters can do more as games. And it’s not just that DOOM was able to rebuild itself, it was able to recreate itself with a mixture of modern day gameplay systems. So perhaps what we are looking for isn’t just new, big ideas or old nostalgia grabs. It’s a combination of the old and the new, 20 + years of video game experience to build the DOOM we have today.

Well this year was awesome, especially compared to last year. I think story telling in games reached a new high this year, as did choice systems in games. The top 7 games on my list were by far the hardest to order this year and because they were all such great games. Unfortunately there were a few disappointments, so let's get those out of the way first.

I was disappointed in:

Fallout 4- I was very excited for this game. It was in my top 5 games of the year for the first 30 hours. Then I hit a wall of boredom. Where were the interesting quests? Why do the factions hardly have any quests? Why is there tons of buildings filled with bugs and bandits, but no meaningful loot or story? Fallout 4 is a good game, but it feels like Bethesda got lazy. Nothing about it innovates or builds on their classic formula in any substantial way. I stopped playing it and I don't know if I will ever finish it.

Just Cause 3- Maybe this one was more of my fault than Just Cause. I thought there was going to be a lot more to this game. At least a wider variety in destructible objects? This game is fun but it really is the biggest copy and paste job ever. Same base after same base after same base. What a shame.

Disney Infinity 3.0 - Moments about this game are awesome. A lot of the Star Wars content is super cool. But then a lot of it is super lazy, especially the new Force Awakens playset.

I need to say I'm sorry to:

Ori and the Blind Forest- Platforming as difficult as Super Meatboy. A beautiful world and soundtrack. Why did I quit playing it after 4 hours, most likely to never return?

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture- A beautiful game graphically, especially on the PS4. Very interesting story too, with game design right up my alley. I hope I finish it soon.

Undertale- I played it for 20 minutes and I almost died of boredom. I promise I will finish it, I just need to muster up the inner strength to power through the beginning of the game.

Invisible Inc. - I didn't know about it until I read Austin's top 10. I absolutely love tactics games. I wish I could have played this game sooner to consider it for my list.

Pillars of Eternity- Seems like a very awesome game. Will I ever finish it? Probably not, sadly.

Mad Max- I didn't give it a fair shot. Not that it would have been my game of the year but maybe there is an enjoyable game in it. probably better than Just Cause 3.

Downwell- The true #10 game on my list.

Now onto the list...

10. Destiny: The Taken King

It actually pains me that Destiny was able to creep its way onto my list this year. This #10 spot should belong to Downwell! I avoided Destiny last year and absolutely began to detest the game thanks to the never ending conversations about it on the bombcast. I picked up The Taken King this year since getting the base game and all the dlc (plus my lack of self control when it comes to buying games) seemed like a good enough deal to give the game a try. The shooting does feel really good. The art design is fantastic. The multiplayer is fun, though a bit boring compared to other competitive shooters. But the story is awful, even with The Taken King. The quest design is awful too. Half of the Strike's are boring and lifeless. Honestly, I don't think the Taken King really changed anything about the game other than the update to loot drops. You do get new weapons and armor at a very steady rate, just steady enough that the game grabs ahold of you and says “you want more right? Even though you played this content 12 times already, you want more! I mean the next gun you get could bring you from 291 light to 292!” And so I played, thankfully with a friend, but I played and grinded strikes over and over and thought to myself why the hell am I playing this game?

But then I did the raid. Twice. It has interesting mechanics, it requires voice chat and teamwork with complete strangers. It has exciting bosses and somewhat exciting loot. It was the closest thing I've played to World of Warcraft ever and since Old school vanilla and Burning Crusade WoW is probably my favorite game of all time, the fact that Destiny could give me feelings similar to those old raids is enough to let me look past all the boring, repetitive game design. That, along with Bungie putting out crazy timed special quest chains for legendary weapons, that had me and my friend running around like fools for hours on end to get a gun I would hardly ever use makes me think I have to give Destiny its due. I put the game down for good after I finished the raid a second time, but I had a memorable enough experience that I will be very interested in whatever Destiny 2 has to offer. Hopefully Bungie finds a way to incorporate more of the raid design and mechanics into the game, because it sucks that you have to play around 50 hours of a mediocre game to get to the really amazing part.

9. Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

I have always been a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed series. Somehow they manage to keep these games entertaining (for the most part) even though this is like the 9^th major release it has had. I think AC II and Brotherhood are amazing games and I think Black Flag is pretty great too. Yet, Syndicate might be the best Assassin's Creed game ever made. I would never call it my favorite, but in terms of combat, traversal, open world design, art design, and graphics, I'd say this is the best Assassin's Creed has ever been. The quests are pretty entertaining, but the actual major assassin missions are awesome and show actual mission design improvement. Those missions feel like a Hitman game with Assassin's Creed gameplay. The grappling hook is an amazing addition as it makes traversal even easier and more fun than it ever has been. Also, the increased focus on actual stealth is a welcome change. I mainly play as Evie because she has the cooler outfits, the cooler personality, and she has the three major stealth skills. The throwing knives are a blast to use and I think this is the first Assassin's Creed game where I try to kill everyone without being caught instead of just running in, alerting the guards and easily murdering all of them with simple button presses. It certainly helps that the AI is more aggressive and that they have levels, making certain areas of the game much too tough early on.

Most importantly the world looks fantastic and is designed extremely well. I have always loved the collectibles in Assassin's Creed games, for reasons which I don't even know myself, but they have never been more fun to collect than in Syndicate. The world is filled to the brim with life and personality, and actuially feels like a real city. So many open world games to this day feel too barren. Major cities will only have thirty or forty npcs. Small villages and towns have five or six people. For such huge worlds they feel too lightly populated. Assassin's Creed fills London to the brim with people and they all go about their business, looking, doing, and acting fairly differently. Sure, they are all on timers and scripted paths, and it still is weird that for the most part citizens ignore your crazy assassin behavior, but the world in AC Syndicate feels big and alive like other open world games don't. I haven't even finished the game yet because I'm so caught up in collecting everything and liberating the map. The story is certainly forgettable, but it is amazing to me that this series is still so much fun when they get it right, all these years later.

8. Batman: Arkham Knight

Arkham Knight makes my list even though I was disappointed by this game. The Arkham series has been one of my favorites of all time. Arkham Asylum is a game changer in design and combat. City allowed me to fly around as Batman and it had one of my all time favorite endings. Needless to say I was pumped for Knight, but rather than being a grand finale for the series a lot of the design of the game felt uninspired. While the Scarecrow is a cool villain and he certainly pushes Batman to his limits, the rest of the villains in the game fell flat for me. Poison Ivy teaming up with Batman? A man who sequels like a pig and listens to opera music (forgive me for not knowing his name)? Two Face and Penguin left as lame side missions? That cool Hush storyline is also a very short side mission? I understand they drained the well pretty hard with the previous two/three games, but a lot of the villains, particularly Two Face, could have been used better. The side missions felt a lot more like check boxes than compelling mystery's to solve, especially when a lot of them were beating up random thugs and shutting down their surveillance systems. And lastly, the batmobile was cool but also forced. Seriously how many waves of drones that behaved exactly the same did I have to blow up? Hundreds? A lot of the game felt like Rocksteady actually didn't want to make another Batman game but they had to, so they hit all the check boxes of “improvements” that could have been made to City. Certainly the look and design of the open world is better than City and Origins, and the combat is the best it has ever been, but it just felt half-assed in too many places.

That being said the story in the game hits a lot of high points. Sure, the twist was obvious if you know anything about Batman lore but Mark Hamill's surprise return as the Joker was outstanding. In some ways it is the most brutal Joker of all the games which is quite an achievement seeing as how he is in Batman's head. The entire last thirty minutes of the game was completely crazy in a good way and really focused on what I love the most in the Batman universe, the relationship between Batman and the Joker. Rocksteady did right by both of them and the ending of this game goes to a place I'd never thought it would go. And even with all my complaints it was still a solid Batman game. It looked incredible, controlled well, the combat was as challenging and as satisfying as ever, and launching Batman from the batmobile into the sky was maybe the coolest thing in the entire series. It may not be my favorite in the series, but it is still a damn good Batman game.

7. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

MGS V is the best stealth game ever. It's so good at what it does, it's not even a close competition. For years games have talked up their immersive and “anything goes” gameplay, but I think that MGS V is the first game to make right on that promise. Most games are actually quite limited when you get deep into their mechanics. You can often find the flaws in the design and easily see what the limits are to where you can go and how you can approach your mission. MGS V is a constant learning experience that has so many variables, whether it be the hundreds of weapons, outpost designs, tools, or guards, that you can constantly find and learn new things about the game and how it behaves. You literally can sneak your way everywhere or shoot and kill everyone. When things go bad and you get caught you can improvise rather than reset to the last checkpoint. The stealth works and it works well. The random nature of the way the enemies behave along with things like the time of day and changing weather constantly created unexpected moments.

In my opinion, the main reason the stealth in MGS V works so well is because of the fulton mechanic. Often in stealth games the unconscious body is a nuisance. You either leave it in the open and a patrolling guard sees it and gets alerted, or you spend minutes dragging it around to hide it, potentially getting caught in the process. The fulton mechanic gets rid of this stealth game issue. Slowly picking apart camps by fultoning the soldiers one by one was as satisfying as cleaning up a new settlement in Fallout 4. The fact that you can just take any enemy, vehicle, weapon, or storage container and just launch it into the sky was maybe the best gameplay mechanic all year. It allows you to be a more aggressive stealth player and encourages you to take more risks with even greater rewards. Rewards like fultoning a truck with two soldiers in it as its also on fire and about to explode. Or fultoning a soldier and while the nearby guard stares up at his friend be carried into the sky by a giant parachute, you surprise him by fultoning him too. Or the great moment when you first get in the helicopter, leaving poor D-Horse on the ground all alone until out of nowhere he gets fultoned into the sky. Hilarious stuff.

There was one point, about thirty hours in, where I thought that MGS V was going to be my game of the year. The story, while spread thin, was intriguing and mysterious and the gameplay had me hooked. It was one of the best sandbox worlds I had ever played in. But as the game grew longer, the story disappointed. And then got worse. A lot of the big moments are pretty lame. I felt no attachment to any of the characters because they were all annoying and over exaggerated, or disgustingly designed (Quiet). The side ops start to get tedious. Unlocking upgrades and new weapons is like a free to play phone game. Why do I have to wait 2 hours for my base to upgrade? Also, why is there this many weapons? Most of them were the same. And the worst of it, Chapter 2 has to be the most horribly paced, horrible designed ending to a game ever. It's confusing to sift through which missions matter and which don't. The numbering is nonsensical. The majority of the missions don't even have anything to do with the story and then what is there for story is poorly written. I thought the big twist was cool, but also completely dumb. I ended up walking away from the game with a bad taste in my mouth, like I had just played one of the best and most disappointing games at the same time. It's unfortunate that in the end, all the things I loved about the game got overshadowed by everything I hated about it. But for my first Metal Gear game I have to say, the series is pretty cool.

6. Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void

I love Starcraft II. It is by far the best competitive multiplayer game ever made. When I stuff a cheese build in a game of 1v1 I think to myself “why do I ever play any other game?” Then the very next game I get absolutely crushed and say “why the hell do I play this game?” Starcraft is the hardest game to get good at and with that difficulty comes frustration and anger. But losing games of Starcraft is often a great life lesson. It reminds me to stop blaming others for my mistakes and that I need to focus on what I can do to improve rather than why I think I'm better than my opponent. There really is no one to blame for losing but yourself.

That is why I am so happy Legacy of the Void has gotten me back into Starcraft. I fell off a few months into Heart of the Swarm because I absolutely hated playing against Zerg (I'm a Protoss player). The improvements they have made to the multiplayer for this expansion are awesome. The new units, while I still have some complaints, are much more powerful and useful than the last expansions additions. The increased worker count to start the game makes the game move so much faster. You have to macro better, micro better, and expand quicker. It encourages aggressive play. Skill stands out more than ever before. It is certainly shaping up to be the best competitive Starcraft II ever.

But even my insane love of Starcraft can't shake the lazily designed campaign and co-op modes. The campaign's story is horrible. It feels like they literally stopped caring about any of the characters or the interesting drama within the Starcraft universe and instead made a bunch of stock characters with boring personalities and wrapped them up in the lamest ancient-evil-prophecy-end-of-the-world-chosen one story of all time. Then, when you have possibly the best CG cutscenes in the industry, the final story moments are just text on static screens. Playing the campaign is certainly fun, especially on harder difficulties but a lot of the mission design boils down to build an army and capture/destroy certain points, or defend a point. Even as fun as it is, when some of the missions have really unique mechanics, like having to move your base around the map on a moving platform, then I can't help but feel Blizzard really got lazy with mission design. The co-op missions are fun as well and are a great idea for friends to enjoy starcraft together without getting serious about the multiplayer, but they too feel uninspired. They recently updated the missions to make them feel more “immersive” but they still come across as a hastily thrown together side mode. It's a shame too, because the different ways each commander plays are smartly designed and fun to use.

In the end, Starcraft II will be the one game on the list I will continue to spend a significant amount of time with in 2016 (and hopefully beyond). I love being excited about Starcraft again, I just wish it felt like Blizzard put more effort into everything outside the multiplayer (and parts of the multiplayer even) instead of letting such an iconic series end on a flat note. Hopefully the professional Starcraft scene thrives in 2016.

5. Until Dawn

I have watched my fair share of horror movies and while I can find them enjoyable, I've never had a real affinity for them. I certainly don't make it a point to watch them. Even still, I thoroughly enjoyed Until Dawn, so much so that I'd probably say it is the best horror “movie” I've seen. The setting is great, the characters all fit their rolls perfectly and each have their own memorable moments, and the story does a 180 on you halfway through. The jump scares are all unexpected, and the game tricked me in some really clever ways.

What stood out the most however, was how well the game hides it's moving parts. It has the butterfly effect system, letting you know when choices you make will have an impact later in the game, but it is nearly impossible to tell when they will have an impact and how. I played through it in two sittings while two of my friends watched and helped me make decisions and we were constantly analyzing the story and making hypotheticals about the plot and how our decisions effected it. The game does an excellent job of mixing up the dialogue and the character interactions based on your decisions, and masterfully hides the real meaningful choices that lead to the various character deaths. My friends and I had so many theories about what our choices would or could effect that I literally got lost in the game. I just wanted to beat it. It pulled me with it's mostly solid facial animation, great voice acting, and crazy story. Even more so, I'd have to award Until Dawn with the best use of quick time events of any game ever. These quick time events were intense. I never knew which of my missed button presses would result in a gruesome death of a character. My hands got sweaty during the most intense scenes, particularly during the “hold still” moments. Those moments were so tough for me because they were so sensitive to movement that I had to close my eyes and hold my breath to try to stay still. Scary, heart-racing stuff! Until Dawn isn't really a revolutionary game, its story certainly isn't the greatest thing ever, and the characters are only as deep as any you would find in a teen horror movie, but there is just something about it that I love. It's just a really fun interactive movie that's even better with friends watching it with you, trying to help you make all the correct decisions (in our playthrough we kept everyone alive until the final scene, where we ended up getting two characters killed). I can't say enough good things about this game. If you like interactive/adventure/choice based games, and especially if you like horror films, this game is a must play.

4. Bloodborne

As a huge fan of the Souls series Bloodborne is an awesome spinoff to the franchise. I played all of the Souls game as a sword and shield walking tank so Bloodborne really forced me out of my comfort zone and demanded that I rely less on blocking and a huge health bar and more on timing, quick reactions, and solid decision making. It is tough to say where Bloodborne ranks among each of the Souls games as they each have their own quirks and differences that make them fun, challenging, and unique in their own way. What I liked most about Bloodborne is it combined what was great about Dark Souls along with its own faster combat. The game is filled with hidden surprises, whether it be weapons, items, enemies, bosses, or shortcuts. The game has tons of crazy moments and mechanics that I would never have figured out if it weren't for the internet, but there is something surprisingly fun about combining your own self discovery while following along with the internet as it pokes and prods at every nook and cranny of such a complex game.

I can still see how this series could be impenetrable for some people. Dark Souls II was a lot more forgiving and much less confusing, whereas Bloodborne gets back to the ridiculousness of the first two Souls games. A murderous npc that can kill other npcs if left unchecked. A giant invisible eyeball spider brain creature that can teleport you to a nightmare world. An entire hidden area, only reachable upon receiving an invitation and arriving in the correct spot. A collectible currency called insight that reveals things about the world that had people scratching their heads for weeks. Numerous hidden optional bosses. A story that ties everything together in an incredibly intriguing but entirely confusing way. It's a world I got lost in, not only because of the amazing combat and countless secrets, but because the world is just coated in atmosphere. From the victorian dark brooding castles and werewolves, to the insanely grotesque cosmic horrors, Bloodborne has the most cohesive and stylistic theme of any of the Souls games. I wanted to understand the world, the nature of the hunters and the curse, and how everything was related. Where did these cosmic beings come from? What were they trying to discover within the college? What is with the eyeballs? Bloodborne features some of, if not the most creepy, disgusting enemy designs in any game ever. Some of the enemies creeped me out, and I'm not squimish.

Oh yeah, and the game is incredibly tough, but just as satisfying. The reliance on dodging, countering, and being aggressive made it feel like a new game. Patience gave way to aggressive and daring gameplay. The fear of what could be around the next corner constantly stayed with me. The story is deep, and in most cases more lore heavy than most RPGs. I started reading Lovecraft because of Bloodborne, which just tells you how deep into that cosmic horror world Bloodborne had pulled me because Lovecraft's work is not great (although I understand why he is revered). The moment to moment encounters were as thrilling and anxiety driven just as much as any of the other Souls games. The best part is no one else has made a game like this yet and I'm happy that we are staring to get a yearly iteration of the Souls series (or spinoffs). These games bring curiosity, mystery, difficulty, and intrigue that no other single player games even come close to. While not without it's faults, Bloodborne is a harrowing yet amazing experience. I would certainly not be opposed to a Bloodborne II.

3. SOMA

I have felt joy, excitement, sadness, shock, and heartbreak from playing video games. But never before has a game giving me actual anxiety, nearly to the point of panic. Slightly dramatic on my part? Yes. But something about imagining being in the main characters shoes, trapped in the world SOMA creates, completely terrified me. Maybe it was being at the bottom of the ocean, trapped in darkness with monsters. Maybe it was the nature of consciousness that gets examined. Maybe it was the state of the world itself. Hopelessness, despair, dread. Those were my feelings as I pushed through SOMA, hoping to find hope. There isn't much in this game.

Instead of hope, this game uses the fear of the unknown to push you forward. The environments are claustrophobic, dark, and uninviting. If there was ever a game to play with a good pair of headphones on, this is it. The rush of the ocean, the scream of a monster, the creak of the research lab as the ocean pushes against it. The sound is masterfully done. The style of the world is also magnificent, as it looks like the developers combined the world of Bioshock with the technology of Dead Space. I didn't think any game could top Bloodborne's atmosphere this year but SOMA wins by a landslide. The world pulls you in to its horrors as you can't help but wonder what the hell is going on and how the hell you will get out of this mess.

For me, the story is amazing. It ends in a way I wasn't really expecting. Instead of relying on plot twists, it just constantly surprised me with its reveals as well as numerous shocking moments. It puts you in uncomfortable situations over and over again. It is nearly perfect execution. I say nearly because the actual “game” part of SOMA really puts a kink in the story and pacing of the game. Hiding from the monsters is not fun, scary, or challenging. Along with the light puzzle solving, it all just feels tedious. And even when the game parts weren't terrible I found myself rushing through them to get to more story because the story and exploration was just so much better than anything the gameplay was offering. It is a shame the developer couldn't have found a better way to add gameplay rather than just shoving Amnesia into an entirely different game.

Even with the less than stellar gameplay, I'll be thinking about SOMA for a long time. It puts the player through some really interesting and tough philosophical decisions. It asks tough questions and doesn't force any answers on you. Sometimes something about a game just puts me in the mood to write and SOMA was one of those games. I wrote a review for SOMA, within it saying “I have never had more anxiety playing a game than I had while playing SOMA. It makes you think about scary things, rather than force you to be scared.” I think that is the first time I've ever described a game that way.

.

2. Life is Strange

Whereas SOMA gave me anxiety, Life is Strange gave me all the other feelings I listed. Excitement, joy, hope, sadness, heartbreak. Lots of sadness and heartbreak and “Are you fucking kidding me?” over and over. I loved a lot of games this year. Making this top 10 might have been the most difficult of any year since I've started doing it. #2-7 on this list were all so incredibly close to each other it took me hours upon hours of thinking to finally decide an order for them. What put Life is Strange ahead of #3-7? It could possibly be that I just finished the game on Sunday, making it extremely fresh in my mind compared to these other games. The wounds this game inflicted on my psyche haven't even come close to healing yet. But I think what really pushed it ahead was, similar to SOMA, it's story telling stood strong without crazy plot twists. And most importantly, it was a story that I had never played in a game before.

How many games star a teenage girl? How many of them focus on that girl's relationship with her best friend? How many games deal with bullying and suicide in such a serious and actually relevant way, especially without coming across as preachy and unrealistic? How many games deal with death and loss in such a real life way? How many games focus so intently on decision making and selfishness? How many coming of age stories actual tackle such difficult topics with class and sensitivity? This is a game about time travel, but it still feels like it is about real life. The horrible situations this game deals with are actual things people have to deal with everyday in the real world. Feelings of abandonment, drug abuse, being put on medication, owning up to your mistakes and becoming a better person. This game tackles all of these topics and more and it does so in a way that no other game does. So many games focus on the fantastical elements, the nature of being on a grand adventure, the power trips and godlike abilities, and for good reasons. People often play games to see things, to be a part of things that they can't be in real life. The powers play a more important role than the characters. In Life is Strange the time travel is secondary to who the main character, Max Caufield is and who everyone else is in the story. What they say and do, and how you have Max handle such difficult situations is the core of the game. The time travel is just a way for Max to help deal with these tough life situations, most likely a way we all wish we could have dealt with things in our lives.

But then the game constantly questions it's own fantastical power. Does the time travel really help Max and Chole? What are they risking by using it? Is it actually making things worse? The game questions your decisions throughout. Are your intentions good or are you using people to help yourself and what is only important to you? Are you helping people or manipulating them? Lastly it focuses on the idea of fate. Can we change our lives? And if we could go back in time, should we? I've always lived my life as a believer of coincidence, but in some ways Life is Strange argues that life may be more than one big coincidence.

The gameplay certainly isn't the strongest and thanks to Telltale this is well worn territory by now, but I would argue this is better gameplay than anything Telltale has put together. The time travel puzzles are simple but often have very cool results. Most importantly, the time travel allows you to preview the various choices you make throughout the game so you can see the beginnings of your decisions. Every choice in the game is difficult and stressful. The game warns you constantly that bad things may happen because of your choices, and bad things certainly do happen. A lot. But the choices all feel new to games because of the real life nature of a lot of them. Certainly the game is more dramatized than people's lives, but many people have had to face these decisions to varying degrees in their life. I have heard complaints about the ending and I understand them. To me the ending epitomized the entire concept of the game. It also helped that I picked the more fleshed out of the two endings, but either ending is a solid conclusion in my opinion. Life is Strange is great. It was almost my game of the year. It has the best characters and best main story of the year. It's also the most real and most heartbreaking game I've ever played. Most importantly it felt like something different in a sea of a lot of the same games. Lastly, it has the most fitting title of any game possibly ever, because after I finished it, all I could think of was “Life really is Strange.”

1. The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

The Witcher III is my game of the year. I'm slightly bias toward the series, having played the two previous games and loving them to death. The world is the most interesting fantasy world in gaming because it really reaches the pinnacle of “humans are the true” monsters, in a world filled to the brim with actual dangerous monsters. The combat is fun and tactical, but really only shines on the higher difficulties where even then you get fairly over powered. But it had enough variety in the builds that I enjoyed experimenting with different play styles. Unfortunately the skill tree is a mess. I see what they were going for, forcing you to mix and match skills depending on the situation and pushing you toward making tougher choices with your skills, rather than letting you have everything. The system ended up being too limiting and none of the skills were that exciting in the first place, which is a shame.

But what really makes the game great is the story, the world exploration, and the characters. There are heaps of sidequests in the Witcher III that are better than entire main stories of other games. I know the bloody baron stuff has been talked about to death, but I have to reiterate that that story arch is some of the best writing in games ever. It can also end in a number of extremely different ways. But there is tons of other content that is equally awesome. Warning minor spoilers incoming: You help the witch Keira Metz on various quests, leading up to the discovery that she needs a certain dangerous potion to save her life. She is an acquittance of yours, so do you let her go freely or do you stop her? You run into an island in the middle of the sea with tons of crashed boats, only to find out that the lighthouse keeper has been purposely leading the boats to crash into the rocks. You fight off wraiths during a massive seaside ritual with the pellar. You run across a man pretending to be a witcher and besmirching their already tarnished name. You help a man break free of a very evil spirit posessing him. You go on a Sherlock Holmes detective quest to find out what happened when a bunch of massive bears break into a celebratory feast and start slaughtering the guests. You drink a bunch of drugs and then go into a cave to face your fears only to witness flying blue whales, fish, and fight a bunch of crazy hallucinations. You travel to an island to rescue a group of men who went off to kill a legendary giant. I could keep going. This game is filled to the brim with interesting storylines, chalk full of moral ambiguity, tough choices, betrayal, lies, deceit, and powerful characters.

The main story has other great moments too. You get to learn a ton of information about the history of the Witchers and the awful torture they have to go through to become one. You get interesting characters like Lambert, who is still angry at being forced to become a Witcher. You get drunk with your witcher friends and perhaps one of the funniest moments in all of video games ensues. You gather a party of your allies to defend the famous Witcher castle from a giant onslaught.

Some other things I've always liked about the series standout even more in this game. Geralt is a Witcher and rather than being treated like a hero, he is often hated, spit on, and looked down upon. And although hes the most badass Witcher ever, he's not a super hero. He relies on his friends quite often, some of who are more powerful than him and he gets caught up in politics far more than he likes. Sure the main story does turn into a “chosen one save the world” plot, but at least Geralt isn't the chosen one. He is often just a protector or a helper for people who can and will do greater things than him. Lastly I love how all the witcher contracts turn into detective-like investigations. I love reading about the monsters to learn their weaknesses. I love exploring the world and finding treasures. I love hunting for new Witcher gear upgrades. I haven't even begun to talk about how the game has a collectible card game built in, with hundreds of cards to find and an entire quest line revolving around a card tournament. While the game itself isn't very deep it is still tons of fun to play, especially if you love strategic card games like I do.

I was incredibly satisfied with the Witcher III upon completing it. I had spent over one hundred hours exploring the world, completing every quest I came across. Then the DLC, Hearts of Stone came out. And it is incredible. Geralt gets tasked with completing three wishes of a powerful and heartless criminal for a mysterious man who children sing a wonderfully creepy song about. The main questline involves Geralt going to a wedding when he isn't quite like himself and it is hilarious. You take part in a heist and an auction. You travel into a painting and unravel the mystery of past events. And in the end you have a huge decision to make. It doesn't disappoint.

I could go on for pages about all the meaningful content in the Witcher III. The game is jam packed full of interesting characters, a beautiful but haunting world, tough moral choices, interesting combat, and amazing story. I think this year may have been the best year for story in video games and the Witcher III is the pinnacle of it. If you ever play any 100+ hour epic rpg, please play The Witcher III. It is story telling, world building, and exploration in games at it's finest.

I began writing this blog as a post to Austin's most recent Off the Clock. In his article, Austin wrote "But in Fallout 4, spending a resource often means a decrease in efficiency. I lose screws and steel and copper so that I can have a row of lights welcome me home when I return from the wastelands. The lights don’t do anything except trigger a small bolt of electricity in my brain that makes me recognize them as familiar, as something that I placed there. The “most efficient” way to play Fallout 4 would be to ignore these mechanics entirely. In the same way, the “most efficient” way to live in a real house is to spend money only on the most necessary of material improvements. Bare walls and empty shelves. What separates a house from a home is a collection of inefficient, emotional investments, and Fallout 4’s settlement system allows you to make these by the dozen". I love this point about playing games "efficiently". I feel like games often get criticized or our enjoyment of them is based on, like Jeff says, "seeing the numbers go up". I feel like a lot of people, myself included, have put way too much stock in these sorts of things. We complain about all the loot systems being similar, the numerous open world games with completion percentage bars and a list of collectibles in the hundreds, climbing towers to unlock things on a map that let us unlock more things, but sometimes it feels like we also deem a game as "not good" or "pointless" if it doesn't have these arbitrary progression systems.

As an example from what Austin wrote about, the Fallout 4 settlement and building system isn't great. The controls are janky and feel half baked. The idea that you can bring any item in the world you find back to your settlement, allowing you to design your home in anyway you want is cool, but then you realize you cant place the items easily in the way you want them. I can't get my toy rocketship to sit on a shelf facing me. I can't get jangles the moon monkey to sit on a counter. It's annoying and disappointing. Lastly, the entire gameplay system is largely "useless". You build up your settlement(s) to recruit more people, have food to gather, a place to store items, and a place for your companions to hang out. I don't really need any of these things. Food is easy to come by, as well as stimpacks. I'm playing on PC so I have 5,000 carry weight because fuck carry weight stats in games, so I don't need storage space. You can have settlers run your stores, but it is an expensive investment, especially for the higher ranking stores, and there are plenty of stores in other places to trade items. Jeff stated (and I'm paraphrasing) how it seemed that the building was a bit boring because he couldn't figure out the point to it, that it wasn't unlocking him things and getting him new stuff, so it's not efficient to play the game doing it. It's a waste of time. I feel like Jeff, and a lot of other people, myself included, take this approach to gameplay too often. If mode or scenario X isn't unlocking/filing a meter or making numbers get bigger, then it's pointless. But why?

What happened to games just being fun? I think the building/town creation in Fallout 4 is fun. I don't spend hours upon hours doing it, I certainly don't get crazy creative with it, but I take part in it and I enjoy that they put it in the game. I built a house and I dump shit in it I find in the world that I think is cool. I built rooms with furniture, I have lights and turret defenses. I have a collection of power armor models. As I get more settlers I add more water, more food, and in turn more defense. I put goofy pictures of dogs and cats on the walls. I try to place items I find, like pillows and cups, where they would fit in a real house. I put a typewriter on a desk. I have a bobblehead collection stand and magazine racks to hold my comic collection. Doing a lot of this has given me experience points, so I've probably gotten about two levels from building stuff, but beyond that there is no point to it. It didn't unlock me special perks, it didn't give me new weapons or armor. It doesn't give new missions, at least none that I have seen. It's just fun, even though it doesn't have a point. It's certainly added an extra 5 hours onto my Fallout play time that did nothing to progress my character or the story, but it was fun.

Not everything needs to have a "point." Not everything needs to be "efficient." Why play single player games for efficiency? I find myself in Fallout saying "well this gun is boring but it has waaaaay more damage than the gun that shoots an ice beam. It's certainly more fun to shoot people with an ice beam, but this generic pipe rifle kills people faster, getting me experience faster, getting me perks faster, helping me beat the game faster so I can...so I can what? Be done with the game? Why don't I just use the damn Cryolater!? It's WAY more fun! I had a similar feeling reading the Star Wars Battlefront review and watching the quick look. Dan kept talking about the progression, how lacking it all was and how that seriously impacted the review score. He kept saying "this is all there is, that's it." How about just tell us if the game is fun! If you actually enjoy playing a game, then why do you NEED any progression? Why do we need such efficiency to the things we do in games? And yes I know he did say it was mediocre, which is fine, I did not purchase the game because the gameplay did look tiresome. But I mean, would someone give Counter-Strike a lower score because you never unlock new guns or level up? Would someone say Mario is a bad game because you don't have a skill tree and earn experience points every time you jump on a goomba? No they wouldn't, because those games are just fun to play, period.

If something is fun it is fun, even if it doesn't fill some arbitrary progression meter, or is an inefficient way to play the game. Hell if you are worried about playing games efficiently, especially single player games, then I would wonder why you are playing games in the first place. They make life pretty inefficient! And sure you can just say, well the Fallout 4 building mechanics just suck and the Battlefront gameplay is basic and has no lasting value and I wouldn't disagree. The building mechanics in Fallout 4 are really lacking. Battlefront's gameplay does seem very lacking in variety. But I think it is fair, and certainly makes more sense, to judge things based on if they are fun or not, not if they have X amount of "progression." Games used to have zero progression and people loved them! Now everything needs rpg mechanics or it has "slim replay value", or 10 levels of prestige or the review score gets lowered. And yes, I didn't give the best examples with Fallout 4 and Battlefront because I agree both those games could be fairly qualified as "not fun" based on playing them alone, but they are two recent big budget games that I think highlight some issues many people have when playing games today. I even noticed on the Giantbomb forums that some people were having a blast playing Battlefront because they love Star Wars and the gameplay is so simple. Who am I to say it is inherently bad then, because the progression is thin? Efficiency and value are a weird thing. We want to feel like the progression in games, the side missions, the unlockables are all overflowing so we get our money's worth out of every game. I understand, games are expensive. But sometimes it seems like we lose sight of the most important thing in games; is it fun to play even if you don't unlock a single thing? At a certain point the progression will end. You will reach max level. You will unlock every gun. Do you stop playing then? Or do you keep playing because, level 100 character or not, the game is just damn fun to play.

2014 was, sadly, a year of disappointments. Many games that were supposed to be big, game-changing releases lacked content or were just rehashes of older games, and other games got delayed until who knows when. I also saw a big change in my gaming habits. I had more trouble this year finishing the big release games I purchased even when I liked them a lot. There are two games I quite enjoy on my list that I haven't finished yet, and certainly not because of lack of time. I did develop a Dota 2 addiction, so I guess that doesn't help. But I'm finding it tougher to play single player games to completion. Maybe that says more about the quality and excitement of this years games than it does about me? I don't know but here are the games I thought were the best this year.

10. Crypt of the Necrodancer

Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of the best examples of why Steam's Early Access is awesome. The game is filled with content, clearly tells you what is unfinished, and provides constant updates. It also shows the amazing creativity that can come from these smaller early access titles. Rogue-Like games have been done to death over the past few years, but Crypt of the Necrodancer manages to stand out among them in an extraordinary way. Instead of walking around the dungeon, you move from tile to tile with the beat of the music. Fighting enemies requires you to hit them in time with the beat, or avoid being hit by them. The music is amazing, particularly when the shop keeper sings along with it. There are tons of different enemies and items, and each run is so quick that it is easy to just hit the retry button over and over. It's a fantastic idea for a game and I will continue to play it as new content is released in 2015.

9. Heroes of the Storm

I got into the Heroes of the Storm alpha fairly early on and so far I have really enjoyed the game. Blizzard has continued to make a lot of major changes throughout the alpha and surprisingly they have listened to player feedback more than they ever have before by actually removing entire stat and gameplay systems ( the rune system was horrible). While the moba scene is already dominated by League of Legends and Dota 2, Blizzard has come up with some very fun and creative game mechanics to give Heroes a Storm a seat alongside those two. The game features a team level rather than an individual character level, you change how your abilities work rather than buying items, and it has multiple different maps each with their own objectives. The leveling system is interesting because it allows players who otherwise would get behind to remain equal level, it removes the importance of "who gets the kill/kill stealing" during fights and encourages team work. Overall, the differences in the game compared to Dota and LoL mean that one hero can't get so far ahead that they can win by themselves. The game requires the team to have a strategy and to work together throughout the game, which in some ways makes it even more frustrating to match make solo than in another moba. They keep the game skillful on an individual basis by having lots of skill shots that require good timing and good hero combos. Overall it is a really cool game and if I didn't get addicted to Dota I would certainly be playing it more.

8. South Park: The Stick of Truth

Unfortunately, South Park is one of those game I have yet to complete this year even though I love it. The fact that it looks and moves just like the show is amazing, but the way Obsidian integrated the RPG mechanics into the world is outstanding. I am a big fan of the show and I enjoyed all of the references and characters I have seen so far. The side missions have been some of the best I can remember from an RPG like this in years and the game has so many incredibly funny moments, even when it is entirely stupid. Some of my favorite parts are how one of the games collectibles is your Facebook clone friend count, where your friends then post hilarious status updates for you to read throughout the game. The combat can get a bit boring, but using every party members special moves for the first time is a great experience. I'm about halfway through the game and hopefully I can find it in me to finish it in 2015.

7. Titanfall

I did not buy Destiny this year and after listening to countless hours of Brad and Jeff talk about the lack of content in that game and what it could have been, I feel like Titanfall is my Destiny. It is a really good game that could have been great, but they put hardly any content in the game. The core shooting is solid, the game modes are familiar but fun, the traversal is excellent, and the pilot versus titan battles provide for interesting gameplay. But then you pretty much see all there is to see after 8-10 hours with the game. Sure, multiplayer is meant to be replayed and the game does have a good amount of maps, but the amount of unlockables, weapons and perks, are at a bare minimum level. There is no campaign and for most of this year there was no cooperative mode. I'm not sure if a campaign is what Titanfall needs to make it a better, more fulfilling game, but it just lacked so much content. I love the core gameplay and I still played it for over twenty hours, but by the time I prestiged once I felt like I was done with the game. That and the fact that they removed game modes from the pc version due to lack of players made me really wish there was more to this game. I still love it, but I hope Titanfall 2 expands on the formula in some huge ways.

6. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

I hate Hearthstone. At the higher levels I feel like some decks and cards are just broken. You have to play way too much to get the necessary good cards to be competitive without spending money. The amount of luck involved in winning can be absurd. But I still got addicted to the game. The art design, the presentation, and the Warcraft theme are all outstanding. There is a high amount of strategy and deck building varients, and the game's draft mode "Arena" is a very cool, fun game mode that takes a lot of skill and smart deck building. They have already updated the game with a new mode and tons of cards that seem to have added tons of new decks and strategy to the game. In truth I don't hate Hearthstone. No matter how frustrating it can be, it is too easy to play and too much quick, addicting fun to not enjoy.

5. Dragon Age: Inquisition

Another game on my unfortunate unfinished list, Dragon Age Inquisition could have been my game of the year if I had finished it. It also could have been my game of the year if there weren't an excruciatingly long list of things I dislike about the game. I feel like Inquisition is one of the best games I have ever played wrapped in one of the most disappointing games I have ever played. How can that be? Well I love the core combat. Ever since Kotor I have loved pausing the game and strategizing my attack plan. I like setting the AI's behaviors and combining skills to make combos and use tactics to defeat enemies on higher difficulties. The combat in Inquisition is very satisfying and some of the enemy encounters remind me of old WoW raids, keeping aggro on the tank, healing at the right moments, and moving into the correct position to dodge attacks. Doing all this with four characters in real time can be tough, so pausing the game allows you to queue up commands for each character in order for them to do a set number of things you want them to in order. But as it turns out you can't queue up commands! When you pause the game you can tell each hero to either use an ability, a potion, or move to a position. You cannot pause the game and tell your archer to turn on poison weapons, use long shot, drink a health position, and then move to cover. If you want to do that you have to pause the game four times! Plus you have three other characters to manage! It is insane to have to pause the game so much and the level of control with the mouse and keyboard is pretty horrible, especially during tough boss fights like dragons. The AI never dodges attacks and hardly does anything that makes sense. I can never let the AI control my main character because he is a daggers rogue. The AI is so horrible it never backstabs, it uses invisibility randomly and stands in front of enemies and doesn't move. It is incredibly frustrating and disappointing because I love the skills in the game. I have spent multiple hours staring at skill trees and respeccing my characters multiple times trying out different skills and combinations. It is too bad it all can't come together in the way it should.

As far as the world goes, I love it. The game is gorgeous, the environments are varied and large and there is a ton to see and explore. Unfortunately a lot of the side missions are extremely boring, sometimes making exploration and clearing the map a disappointment. The party members are good, but not great. Some of them are very boiler plate and average while some stand out. I think Cassandra has the most personality and fits the world perfectly. Varric provides good comic relief and his relationship with Cassandra provides good drama and dialogue. Sera can be annoying but she is unique so I appreciate her. Cole is the same way and he is probably the most interesting idea for a character in the game. Unfortunately he never has said anything really interesting and his personality is lifeless (though he is a spirit I suppose).

I love the war room table, and pretty much everything you can do at your base. Making judgments on criminals, talking to party members, and building up Skyhold are all addicting. Crafting is also fun because there is a lot of it and it is actually useful. The story is okay, but I have found most of the cutscenes so far, particularly the ones where they are going for a big heroic/emotional scene as extremely corny. The game is just filled with a million "I love this part but don't like this part" moments that it is so frustrating to think of what this game could have been. I am 40 hours in and I will continue my love/hate relationship with it in 2015.

4. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor was the best surprise this year. It reminds me of when Arkham Asylum got announced and the game looked amazing, but since it was a Batman game I figured it would be total garbage. It turned out Arkham Asylum was a game of the year contender and Shadow of Mordor felt the same way for me. Being a huge Lord of the Rings fan I was convinced this game would suck and there was no way the nemesis system would be anything more than a gimmick. And just like Arkham Asylum the game turned out to be amazing (except for the Lord of the Rings part). The nemesis system truly felt like a next gen gaming experience. The first thing it did that amazed me was populate the world with these orc captains, rather than having them be in instanced areas or only in certain zones. I never knew I was going to run into one and if I hadn't already gotten intel on one, it's appearance could have been a total surprise. Early in the game I would go to attack an orc only to have him counter my blow and have the camera zoom in as he threatened to rip my guts out. It was always unexpected and always awesome. The second part that amazed me was the amount of variation in the orcs. The cynical side of me assumed I would see repeats of orcs 3 or 4 times each throughout the game with only a handful of dialogue differences. As I got deeper in, I was surprised to see the amount of different facial features, gruesome threats, and different names each orc had. I don't think I saw any name repeats and I heard tons of different dialogue. Being able to see the captain's current thoughts or status in the menu was also pretty cool and often times hilarious. Everything thing about the system works well and made the world feel alive.

The gameplay was also very strong but a bit too recognizable sometimes. The world itself also wasn't very creative or colorful, although that's less about the game design and more about the source material. The story was ridiculous and forgettable, but I didn't find any of it too offensive even though I'm a huge Tolkien fan. The part about the game that disappointed me the most was the difficulty level. Early in the game the captain's are extremely tough to kill. If there are two or three attacking you at once, good luck surviving! And dying to a particularly captain just makes him even tougher further increasing the difficulty and making every kill of a captain satisfying. The first half of the game felt like a real challenge that often isn't presented in these type of power fantasy games and I loved it for it. Unfortunately once you are able to brand the orcs and mind control them, killing any captain became almost trivial. It was amazing how you could set up ambushes and use the war chiefs guards against him, but at the same time it made killing a war chief incredibly easy. The branding gave the gameplay so many more options for creativity and interesting ways to kill the captains, but it also took away the difficulty from the beginning that I enjoyed so much. Overall though, Shadow of Mordor finally put something new into a big budget game and I hope the nemesis system is the next gameplay system we see used in many games in the future.

3. Dark Souls II

Dark Souls II is not as good as Dark Souls I and in many ways, not as good as Demon's Souls, but it is still a great Souls game. I was disappointed that the world was just one long hallway rather than a big connected area filled with surprising short cuts and backdoors and most of the boss fights required you to rotate toward the bosses shield until they swung and missed and then beat on them. Some of the bosses were quite easy and weren't designed with too much creativity, although there were some standouts (such as the chariot boss). Even still, Dark Souls II is a great adventure. The first ten or so hours of the game is brutally tough and the world is still filled with tons of hilarious "what the fuck!?" traps. It still never holds your hand, and it still has some insanely fun and intense pvp. Also, it had maybe some of my favorite set pieces in all the Souls games, particularly the Dr. Frankenstein-like mansion with all the weird experiments, the giant pillars in the sky with dragons flying all around, and best of all, the moment you first step out into the hub world with the sun shining over the ocean. Technically it still had the same old framerate and janky Dark Souls issues, but it still looked damn good. I even got into the story, which I didn't care much about in previous Souls games and I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. The ending sequences were really neat and while I didn't understand everything that happened myself, I consulted with the internet to learn more about the world and its characters. Even though it may not have been the best Souls game, it was still a great game and one of the best this year.

2. Transistor

As my ability to finish games gets worse and worse every year I really start to appreciate the shorter, simpler games. Transistor really hit all the right spots for me. The music was amazing (I instantly bought the soundtrack) it looks incredible, and the story was awesome. Also, I felt like the gameplay mixed a lot of genres in a way that hasn't been done before and I really enjoyed it. The skill trees were unique and the way you could combine skills to make new ones resulted in such a huge variety of gameplay styles and strategy. While Supergiant's previous game Bastion was more about timing and reflexes, Transistor required more strategy and experimentation which is something I love in games. But really the combination of the visuals, the music, and the story is what pushed this game near the top of my list. I understand the complaints about the story and my only response is that not every game has to be told right up front in your face and make sure you understand. I really enjoyed the mystery surrounding of what had happened to the world and its characters and I came away from the game with tons of my own theories. Of course I consulted the internet to discover what everyone else thought, but I liked the fact that everything was left for the player to discover and determine themselves. The ending especially is pretty open ended but I just though it all fit together so well. It was an original world with a lot of original ideas and I think the gameplay, music, story, and visual style all came together so perfectly. After this and Bastion, Supergiant is easily one of my favorite developers and I will be very excited for whatever they make next.

1. Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

Reaper of Souls is what I wanted original Diablo III to be. I loved Diablo III but overall it was a huge disappointment. The real money auction house, the low drop rates, the crazy nerfing of every skill, and the lack of cool useful legendaries was just baffling to me. It destroyed a game that was supposed to be crazy mindless fun and turned it into a torturous grindy pay to win mess. Thankfully Reaper of Souls rights all of the wrongs of the original game, besides the incredibly stupid story. The real money auction house has been removed, legendaries and set pieces are the best gear, skills receive buffs instead of nerfs, skills got reworked to be more flexible and to allow for a wider range of builds, and the end game has more variety to it. Adventure mode is tons of fun, and the rift system really makes the game a joy to play. The new seasons system really got me back into the game as well, to the point where I started playing hardcore with my friends. I lost about five demon hunters in the season, including one right after I got one of the rarest one-handed crossbows in the game, then I had roughly 80 hours on a demon hunter with a full turret set, and died on the tier 30 rift boss. 80 hours of work gone forever, but I wasn't even mad. I knew the risks and I had tons of fun playing it. hardcore changes the way you think about the game a lot and turns it into less of a relaxing podcast game into a furious micro battle, particularly when getting hit once can instantly kill you. There is just so much about the game that is fun now, like how the treasure goblins can spawn a portal to the goblin world where you get tons of gold and gear, legendary gems that can be upgraded, and season specific leader boards and achievements that I just enjoy playing the game to have fun. Every second feels like the next drop could be that piece of gear you need to move up to the next rift difficulty, or the next goblin will open a portal, and it continues to be addicting even though I've put hundreds of hours into the game. While I have trouble finishing epic single player story driven games, my brain apparently has no problem clicking on demons until they explode over and over. Playing Reaper of Souls the ngiht of its launch was the most excited I was to play a game this entire year and I'm happy to say my excitement actually turned out to be worth it this time. I've taken a break from playing until season two starts, but I still think about starting up a new character all the time, even though I have already gotten every class to the level cap. Either that's the sign of a game of the year, or I just have a serious problem.

This was a really great year for games. I liked it a lot more than last year, mostly because the top 5 games of my list could each be a game of the year winner and two of the games were some of my favorite this generation. Anyway, onto the list.

10. The Swapper

I don't play too many puzzle games, as I often find them to be tedious or that the puzzles aren't good enough for me to want to press forward when the story is lacking (or non-existent). The Swapper however, had such striking visuals and interesting gameplay mechanics that I had to give it a try. Thankfully, The Swapper is a tremendously engaging game at all levels, with easy to learn but difficult to master gameplay and a very interesting story laired over it. While all of the puzzles were quite creative, I found myself most impressed by how well the game teaches you everything you need to know about the mechanics in order to solve the puzzles without beating you over the head with instructions and without leaving you in the dark about what to do or how to do it. I also really appreciated the ability to do the puzzles in the order that I wanted, because I often got stuck and wanted to take a break from the puzzle that was giving me trouble without entirely quitting the game.

Beyond the puzzle solving, the game is absolutely gorgeous to look at. A lot of the visuals and the colored lighting reminded me a lot of Dead Space 2 (which is a really good thing) and the isolation I felt while running around the space station was brought on by the wonderful sound and somewhat creepy story. The story itself is often told through text logs, but what character interaction you do get in the game is excellent. The story leaves plenty of room for interpretation, and the ending was very well executed. Although it was frustrating at times, I felt a great sense of accomplishment with every puzzle I completed, something no other game gave me this year.

9. Fire Emblem: Awakening

Fire Emblem Awakening was my first foray into the Fire Emblem series and I found it to be highly addictive. Just like last year's XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Awakening forces you to be patient and to pay attention to the positioning of all your characters. The enemies are ruthless and quickly taught me to not rush forward into combat. I had a few incidents early on of sending my flying units or my weak healers to close to the enemy and they would immediately target them down. Just like in XCOM, I didn't restart the game unless my entire party wiped and being so cautious really allowed for some rewarding gameplay. Unlike XCOM however, Fire Emblem gives each character in the game a personality and a storyline, especially if you are building relationships with them. Instead of being nameless characters they were all part of the story and if they get downed in combat you miss out on future conversations with that character. I lost somewhere between 10-15 of the characters when I played including the one Dancer class the very second I got her. It was frustrating to lose people, but I always knew it was my fault.

The leveling system in the game was much different from other tactics games I have played and required a lot of thinking as to which characters I wanted to pair up and get married and what classes I wanted to evolve my characters into. It was a really interesting system that required a bit more thought and decision making than a lot of similar games do. The story was fun, but fairly generic JRPG stuff. Where it shined was in the characters and the writing which was always at least interesting and often times extremely funny. While it wasn't my favorite tactics game ever, I really enjoyed my time with Fire Emblem.

8. DmC Devil May Cry

As a huge fan of the first Devil May Cry game I was fairly interested in the new reboot of the franchise. While character action games have never been my favorite, I've enjoyed my fair share of God of War games and after hearing Brad talk so highly of the game I decided to grab it on a sale earlier in the year. The first thing I loved about it was how smooth it ran on my pc, as it always kept itself around 60 fps. Furthermore the environments were all really awesome and creative. The Raptor news boss fight and the dance club level really stand out as fun level design from a gameplay and visual perspective. While the story would often get out of hand or just be completely stupid, I still appreciated that the game didn't take itself too seriously. I also didn't mind the new Dante, as I thought his cocky attitude fit the role very well.

Of course the combat is obviously where this game shined the most. The system Ninja Theory created really fits the idea of simple to learn, difficult to master. Most of the combos were the basic combos you see throughout character action games and nothing was incredible difficult to time right or to memorize. Where the game really brought everything together was in its smooth transition between weapons that allows the player to create their own combos. The ability to switch between different weapon types right in the middle of combos really gave the combat a lot of depth and the enemy design often encouraged players to be creative in order to defeat them efficiently. I also really appreciated the fact that Ninja Theory made the game have tons of replay value by using new weapons and abilities to unlock secrets Metroidvania style, the arena mode, and gameplay remixes of all the enemies on new game plus playthroughs. This was one of those games I never expected to play this year and was happily surprised by how much I liked it.

7. Gone Home

Gone Home was one of the more interesting game experiences I've ever had and one of the few games I feel is worth having a lengthy conversation about in terms of game design and story expectations. I think the thing Gone Home does best, especially early on, is atmosphere. The game gets you to feel alone and to also feel a little worried about where your family is and what happened to everyone. As you get deeper into the sister's story you really feel like something horrible must have happened, yet since you don't have a car and the phone is out, you are just trapped in this spooky house trying to piece together whatever you can about where your sister could be. The way the game built up all these emotions, along with the fact that I am so used to games having big plot twists or huge emotional moments, I got to the end of the game and was extremely disappointed. All I could think was, this is it? After all that this is how it ends? What was the point?

I had my girlfriend play the game to see how she felt about it and since she never plays games I wanted to hear her opinion on the ending. While she was playing, we discovered a bunch of things I didn't on my first playthrough and I put things together that I did not understand my first time through. When we got to the end, I liked the game much more and my girlfriend was disappointed. Interestingly enough though, we talked about the game for a few days after she had finished it and the more we talked about it, the more we liked it. We decided that our feelings of disappointment were not the fault of Gone Home's, it was more that we just constantly expect big plot twists and dramatic endings from other forms of media. Gone Home stripped away a lot of the craziness that comes with most stories and gave us a story that for once could have actually been a part of real life. The game is about a lot of serious issues and handles them all well and if you pay enough attention, you can piece together some very interesting stories about the family. I really have to give credit to a game that can make me like it more days after I've finished playing it, and Gone Home really was a fine example of how games can portray real life issues.

6. Rayman Legends

Rayman Legends is just pure fun. I hadn't played a pure platformer in a very long time, and Legends is one of the best I've come across. The game looks amazing and the level design is phenomenal. I really enjoyed how they kept adding in new gameplay, rather than just having you jump from platform to platform level after level. I got addicted to trying to grab all the teensies, and since I hadn't played Origins, it was amazing to have all that game's content right in Legends. I even took part in the daily and weekly challenges for a fairly long while.

Of course, my favorite part of the game was the music levels. They were just awesome to play, and each time put a smile on my face. The game just has so much charm and so many great ideas that even when they didn't come together perfectly (touch screen bits weren't that elegant with a controller) I still loved the challenge everything presented. It was also really nice to play a game that reminded me of old school gaming. It was fun and relaxing, and is a must play for anyone who loves great platforming.

5. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

I could only come up with four games that were better than Brothers this year. This game surprised me many times, gave me lots of emotions and had some really interesting game play mechanics. Going into the game I was not expecting such brutal violence. I found myself being somewhat shocked multiple times by some of the things the brothers encounter during their quest. It led to a lot of unexpected moments for me and I was always eager for and a bit fearful of what was going to come next. The art design really captured the essence of what I imagine a fairy tale world to be, and the way the environments seamlessly transitioned was really impressive.

In terms of controls, I found them to be somewhat frustrating but also very interesting. I have used video game controllers for years, but controlling two characters independently at once was quite the challenge and was a good exercise for my brain. In the end though, Brothers is this high on my list because of its story. While the overall plot is pretty predictable, it didn't stop me from feeling emotional multiple times throughout the game. It did an excellent job of demonstrating the importance of family relationships and the lengths people will go to save and protect the ones they love. It also is a great example of how games can tell stories in ways other mediums can't, by making the controls fully intertwined with what happens with the brothers. This is a game well worth anyone's time.

4. Grand Theft Auto V

GTA V brought me back to the good old days of Grand Theft Auto. Doing things like driving around and memorizing the city, spending multiple hours diving in the ocean to collect items that are completely unrelated to the rest of the game, and doing rampage missions reminded me why I loved the old PS2 games. Honestly, it is absurd that this game lets you dive under the ocean and explore. Rockstar put so much work into the fine details of the world that it's very hard not to be impressed. Even when so many aspects of the game seem entirely pointless, I can't help but partake in the various activities and craziness because it's just amazing to me that Rockstar went to such lengths to bring the world to life. From being able to take people to a cult for money, to having a pretend facebook where various characters from the game regularly update their status, to an entire economy system based around a stock market, the game is just filled with so much stuff it was overwhelming trying to see it all.

While the gameplay is still classic GTA for the most part, the characters really create a story that is hilarious and entertaining. The writing is top notch, and I really enjoy having three protagonists, each with extremely different personalities and motives to keep everything feeling fresh. Franklin, Michael, and Trevor each have their own feelings and opinions on everything that happens and that made the game even more interesting. While a lot of the game seems a bit old at this point, Rockstar still proves they are one of the best in the industry at world building. I mean, I role-play the characters by what vehicles I have them drive, the clothes I have them wear, and the music they listen to. I know it's a bit crazy, but it is also impressive that GTA V gets me to play it in that way.

3. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

What an amazing surprise. I've always been a huge fan of the AC series but after how much of a slog 3 was (although I did enjoy some of it) I was sure Black Flag was going to suck. Fortunately, Ubisoft actually took this series in the right direction. The new protagonist, Edward Kenway, is such a fun character and really gives lets the series move away from all the serious Assassins vs Templars nonsense. What really made the story great is that it was actually about Edward as a character and how he changes over the course of the game. I'm all up for the usual craziness of AC plots, but I really appreciated the direction the story took with Black Flag. Outside of the animus was also really awesome. The fact that you are creating the game you are playing and are able to rate the missions you play is a really cool and hilarious idea. The game also doesn't force too much of that stuff on you, so the moments when you have to be out of the animus are completely worth it.

As far as gameplay goes, no other series gets me to play a game like Vinny more than Assassin's Creed. Black Flag has tons of collectibles on various islands and in underwater shipwrecks and caverns. I explored and found almost everything, leaving my synchronization at close to eighty percent. The world was just so well made that I found it fun to just run around collecting items. The boat combat is was also tons of fun and the sea shanties are one of my favorite things in any game ever. When it comes down to it, Black Flag is just a really fun game to play and it succeeded all my expectations. Once again, I am excited about Assassin's Creed.

2. Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is a masterpiece of storytelling. There are very few games ever that have gotten me to scramble throughout forums, desperately searching for answers to things. I was excited to learn the truth about the story and to understand it especially while I was playing it. Playing Infinite was like reading one of the best books ever, as I kept pushing forward to beat it just so I could know what was going to happen. The most masterful part about the game is that the answers were right there with you the whole time the game just hid them so well and had such good foreshadowing that I never saw any of it coming.

Such an amazing story wouldn't be anything special if the world and the characters weren't amazing as well and Bioshock has some of the best of both. Infinite is the reason why I didn't say Rockstar is the best at world building with GTA V, because Irrational games created such an original world with Columbia. I found myself exploring (at least what I thought to be) every nook and cranny just to see everything the world had to offer. The music bits were also incredible and I had to stop and look up songs multiple times wondering if they were actually old songs.

Even though the actual gameplay itself was lackluster at times, and the audio logs were disappointing because they held such important story moments that I missed, Bioshock Infinite is one of those games that I will remember for a very long time. I wish people would stop trying to pick apart the story now that it is months later, and just remember how exciting the game was at the time and how fun it was to discover what the world of Columbia had in store. While I wouldn't be sad if this was the last Bioshock game because it ends so well, I would really enjoy to see where the series went next.

1. The Last of Us

The argument that movies and books can always tell stories better than games can be proven wrong with The Last of Us. This game could have been a book or a movie and it would have been amazing, but as a game it does so much more than those other mediums can. Similar to The Walking Dead, The Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse story that isn't about the zombies, but about the people. The world is filled with realistic characters who have realistic personalities and emotions, brought brilliantly to life by an amazing cast of voice actors and incredible character animation. The story itself is very generic, but the way it tells that generic apocalypse story and the way the characters interact and make the decisions they make just makes it unlike any other zombie game or movie I have ever seen. The main protagonists, Joel and Ellie, have such an interesting relationship that changes over and over again throughout the story, and they each have their own personal qualities that make them stand out much more than any other survival story characters.

Joel at first seems to be a classic antihero, yet as the game progresses and you see more of the type of person he is and why he does what he does, you begin to wonder if his somewhat villainous ways aren't completely justified and necessary. Ellie is there to counter him in a lot of ways and together they really create the best character duo I've ever experienced in a game. The game is filled with such moral ambiguity that I always found myself wondering what I would do if I was in Joel and Ellie's position. It also made me question a lot of things about survival and if at a certain point, if enough things went wrong and you lost everyone you loved, if it's just not worth living anymore. The game is quite depressing in that way and in a lot of other ways too. This game doesn't have too many happy moments, but when it does they are incredible.

In terms of gameplay, I loved it. I can completely understand why someone wouldn't like it as it is slow and requires a decent amount of trial and error, but the game keeps its promise in letting you decide to handle each situation how you want to. You can sneak by without killing people, or stealthily kill, or run in guns blazing (which is often times a big mistake). Rather than playing it like I play most stealth games and restarting as soon as I got caught, I played out every sequence no matter what happened. I felt playing it that way fit the story better and allowed me to enjoy all the different ways combat can play out. I enjoyed the crafting and feeling low on resources, and I felt like the game did an excellent job of making you feel like a scavenger hunting for supplies rather than just placing them right in front of you.

The multiplayer was also amazingly fun. It's difficult and the metagame of keeping your group of survivors alive made every single match more difficult and more intense. If you want to unlock stuff in the multiplayer you have to play well which is something I really appreciated. The game also requires a great amount of patience and good team work, which is something I feel is lacking from most multiplayer shooters these days. Every kill is rewarding as in a game like counter strike because the stakes are high and winning or losing is meaningful. I really want to get back into playing it, but I'm afraid I will be so terrible that I will cause my whole survivor group to die.

The Last of Us is a great achievement for video games. It proves that games can tell stories that are equal to or better than great books and movies and it creates a world that is filled with real characters and real emotions. The beginning and ending scenes are the most powerful parts of any game I have ever experienced and should not be missed.

Honarable Mentions: Saints Row IV, Tomb Raider, Batman Arkham Origins

This is an early extra entry into my BlackBlog posts because I did not originally list 999 as one of my backlog games but I have been meaning to play it ever since my friend played it 2 years ago and talked about how amazing it was.

I am happy to say that he was right, 999 is a wonderfully amazing game. There are only a handful of times when a game has gotten me to truly care about its characters, story, and fiction to the point where after the game is complete I just want there to be more. I wanted to see what happens to the characters after the game said The End, I wanted to know more about the world, I just wanted more of anything. 999 was like reading a great book. When I finished it I was completely amazed at how genius the plot was and how great all the characters were that I just wanted it to keep going. I wanted their to be more revelations, more puzzles, more conversations, and more fiction. Even though the game is played on a fairly small DS screen I was completely absorbed within the world of 999 like I was watching a movie. And while some of the puzzles weren't that clever and the way the game forces you to replay them is a bit annoying, the story is so good that it was totally worth it to me. I felt so compelled to see how everything was going to turn out that I didn't even really mind any of the game's faults.

And the game's faults are totally worth putting up with if you want to experience one of the most well written stories of all time (in my opinion). I love plot twists, especially the Assassin's Creed II ending, but Patrick has often made criticisms about it the twist not being "fair" because the game doesn't earn it's twist. There was no opportunity for the player to see the twist coming because it wasn't relevant to the game until it happened. Now I understand what Patrick was saying and I agree. 999 earns its plot twists. At the end of the game when everything is revealed there are multiple "holy shit!" moments because the twists were sitting right there the entire time and were so well written and so clever that even though some of them are right in front of you there is no way you could have guessed them. There were even twists within the twists and there is so much that happens that it is just overwhelming in the best possible way. After reading through the Q & A with the game's writer found here I could not believe how perfectly the plot fits together. All of the parts where I thought there were plot holes that didn't make sense make perfect sense. In such a complex story, that is truly the work of a genius. I want to just keep writing about it and describing how amazing each one of the plot twists and story connections were, but there is no way I would ever spoil anything about this game for anyone because it must be experienced! I can not say enough good things about this game. If you love great stories, characters, and plot twists then this game is a must play. Even if you don't like touch screens or adventure puzzles, it is still worth it. The experience of 999 is something that is truly a masterpiece and I am very excited to play VLR.

Side note: If you have played the game and are confused at all I highly recommend reading the Q & A I linked with the writer Kotaro Uchikoshi. He cleared up any confusion I had and also explained things that made me feel even more amazed by how well written the game is.

I finished the first game of my back log, Limbo. Here is my original post about challenging myself to finish my back logged games.

Limbo was an amazing game that turned into a disappointment. The game opens up with no text, no tutorial, no music, no voice acting and it continues this way through the entire game. The developers use good game design to allow you to figure out the puzzles on your own and how the game works so you don't have to take 15 minutes to be explained every single mechanic. The lack of voice acting or any text at all to explain the story was also done really well because I started piecing everything together myself from what was actually happening in the game. This all works perfectly in the opening of the game. You are alone in this quiet seemingly empty forest that is definitely not empty. Being afraid of spiders, this game may have had the creepiest spider I have ever seen in a game. Not to mention, the game is horrifyingly brutal. You are playing as a young boy and to see some of the stuff that happens to him when you die is shocking and also adds to the creepiness of the game. The environment and the puzzles work perfectly with what is happening around you and everything fits together so well I could not wait to see the conclusion to the game.

Then the second half of the game disappoints big time. The environment completely changes from a forest to a factory and all the brutal images and enemies of the forest go away and you are left with a puzzle game in a factory that is much less creepy. It felt like the game went from this really interesting, creepy story experience that had puzzles just to add to that experience, into a game where the puzzles were the only thing that mattered and the atmosphere and story were no longer important. The game did throw a lot of interesting mechanics together in a really good way and the puzzles do start to get difficult near the end but I was still left totally underwhelmed. The final puzzle isn't even some big special reveal or some puzzle that ties all the mechanics together, it just seems like it's another part of the game and then the game just ends. I was happy with the ending and the way I interpreted it from what I saw made sense to me, but I can't help but feel really disappointed by the second half of the game. The forest and what you encounter there was so perfect that I didn't understand why they felt the need to get rid of all those enemies and level design for something that was much less interesting. Overall though, I am happy I played it.

Now onto my next game, finishing Sleeping Dogs!