The title says it all. Every year that I make one of these lists I look it over and realize that I must have a really dark and twisted mind. Some therapy might be in order. There were plenty of things I wish I could have played before the end of the year but overall I'd say this seemed like a good year for video games.
"Words that kill when you speak them to me." A message that doesn't fully sink in until the main plot is revealed. For dozens of hours my attention was captivated by the insane level of detail in the raw mechanics of this video game and the story was weird enough that it made me want to progress and see it to the end. Didn't care for the FOB stuff at all, especially when Konami started tampering with it to make some extra bucks. However the shoddy inner workings of video game publishing couldn't keep this from being my favorite game this year. I don't necessarily want more Metal Gear Solid but I'm certainly down to see just how weird Kojima can get when not tied to a singular fictional universe.
No other game this year featured character dialogue as entertaining as The Witcher III. Geralt is like the Detective Frank Drebin of dark fantasy. I found the story to be both enthralling and riveting. Some of the action in the cut scenes is shockingly well directed especially in the later parts of the story. The RPG mechanics were perfectly okay but I love this game when it is more adventure game and less RPG. On that end of things it is a gigantic accomplishment. I can never take Legend of Zelda games seriously ever again after a game this good. I didn't know that I wanted this out of my fantasy games until these Witcher games started releasing.
I feel like I wouldn't love this game nearly as much if I hadn't been playing video games over a very long period of time. This game made me laugh multiple times both with it's ridiculous cast of characters and the super weird game play cycles. Definitely reminded me of a time when I loved these simpler game designs. The ways in which this game gets weirder as the plot unfolds are truly something to behold. That said it also had more heart than any other game to come out this year.
There's nothing more satisfying than scoring exploding goals using these speedy, flippy RC cars. It took two video game genres that I had the least interest in these days (sports and racing) and combined them into something awesome and addictive.
I really enjoyed this game's dark sense of styyyyyyle. I'm a sucker for these insane Gothic fantasy settings. My favorite part though was how wicked awesome all the weapons looked. Hands down some of the coolest weapon designs in all of video games. The character building didn't feel as deep and varied as the previous Souls games but overall I greatly enjoyed my time with this game, even when it was kicking my ass.
This game felt like they took a darker version of Dexter's Laboratory and made it into a Metroidvania style game. I'm into everything about that concept. Looks great, sounds great, a decent progression for power-ups, this game pretty much nails everything about that style of game but still manages to feel unique in the story it's telling.
As you'd expect these Batman games are always really fun. You know what's not fun? The Batmobile. Despite that I think this is a strong finish to this series of games if they are in fact done making them. They've done a great service for making Batman into an incredibly memorable video game character. They also tap just enough of the source material to make the story worth seeing to it's conclusion. My heart goes out to PC only folk who couldn't play this because it's pretty good.
NetherRealm did it again in that they made another great fighting game at a time where those are fewer and far between. It's not quite the breakout hit as MK9 but still quite good. For once they made new characters for these games that aren't total garbage. I'll always accept more of these games if they continue making them this good.
The story in this game is one of the most boring and lifeless (pun intended) ones I've played through this year. Playing the game however was a surprising amount of fun. From parkour-ing around the environment to smashing zombies' heads in with electric flaming baseball bats there is a lot of entertainment to be had in this otherwise bland piece of zombie fiction.
The whole time I played this game I kept picturing Tucker and Dale from that movie screaming "College kiiiiiids!" This game so masterfully captures the campy horror tone that I couldn't help but love every cheesy second of it.
