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MikeLemmer

Recovering from GotY

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My Top 10 Games of 2014

If you'll notice, quite a few of my games on this list actually weren't released this year. Some are still in early access, others have been around a while but I've just discovered them this year, and quite a few were released years ago but had so many updates and tweaks this year that breathed new life into them. Can we really ignore Early Access games when some of them are more entertaining and stable than the broken release-day crap? How many major updates, patches, and tweaks does a game like DotA2 or League of Legends need before it reaches the same level of difference as an official expansion like Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls? Or, in the case of Kentucky Route Zero, what is the cutoff between being different episodes of the same game and being different releases in the same series?

We are reaching a point in gaming where a new release not only has to fight other new releases coming out around the same time, but also games-to-come and long-running games from the past. As such differences grow murkier (and in light of such a lackluster year for new releases), I am simply listing the games I had the most fun with this year, instead of my favorite games that were released this year.

List items

  • The Chilean developers of Xenoclash make a side-scrolling platform-brawler that borrows heavily from Chilean mythology. The platform-brawling feels a bit clunky but is still decent, but I'm mainly pointing out the weird & surreal mythology surrounding it. You play a living dream fighting through a labyrinth spawned by a warlock's nightmares. A demon violinist gives you gifts before hunting you down to kill you. You help 1800s Chilean infantry fight demonic flying fish. I wish more studios would dig into weird local mythology for game concepts.

  • KiteCo's dirty little secret is they occasionally get bored with Eve and try out other weird MMOs. After their weeklong obsession with a Korean fishing MMO, they dragged me into trying this... supremely weird French MMO. It is a multiplayer FFT/Disgaea clone where you take turns moving your character across a grid-based battlefield to destroy your enemies with weird classes, ecosystem mechanics, and potty humor tossed in to boot. The different classes are complex enough that it takes a while to figure out how to work together (and avoid killing your teammates) for tough fights. A lot of the game's aspects (like the ecosystem and crafting mechanics) feel half-baked or downright broken, but they pull off the concept of an MMO FFT/Disgaea decently and get my support for that alone.

  • After the advertising blitz for Smite during PAX East, I decided to check it out. It subsequently distracted me from LoL for several months. It plays like DotA/LoL meets Quake/Unreal Tournament: your perspective is over-the-shoulder instead of overhead, and you have to manually aim to hit a target rather than just clicking it. Several heroes feel overpowered, and some of the skills have finicky aim, but it differentiates itself enough from the other MOBA games I could see it easily become the 3rd-most popular MOBA behind the LoL/DotA juggernaut while everything else crashes & burns.

  • Early on in this game, my pair of characters came across 2 beligerent, drunk guards who demanded I come with them to see the town wizard for... glaring at them suspiciously or something. My male protagonist agreed to comply, but then the game asked me for the woman's response. I was at a bit of a loss; I wasn't expecting the game to ask me to respond for both of my characters. I decided the woman would be more stubborn against being brought in and she stated so. What followed was a back-and-forth argument I was playing both sides of, followed by an automated Rock-Paper-Scissors game to determine who won, which led to the pair refusing to go with the drunken, beligerent guards and killing them instead. It took a moment to pick my jaw up off the floor and comprehend just how different this game would be. Between the crazy interactions of the environment, the different spells, and the characters themselves, I feel I've just scratched the surface of a strange & entertaining RPG.

  • Still in beta, still more entertaining than many finished games. The rhythm game forces you to keep moving, changing a methodical turn-based game into a frenzied dancefight against enemies from all sides. Defeating enemies is a matter of learning their simple patterns, which gets much less simple when 10 of them are barreling down on you from all directions. The music is also catchy, as befits a rhythm game.

  • Alright, I'll try to explain this. It starts off as a dungeon exploration game, where you move your heroes through different rooms of a labyrinth, killing monsters and trying to find the exit. Once you explore enough, it also becomes a tower defense game, where enemies occasionally spawn in dark rooms and you have to build defenses to kill them before they destroy your Power Crystal at the entrance. As you start learning the nuances of that, it also becomes a resource management game where you not only have to protect your Crystal but various machines you create to produce food, industry, and research. And when you finally discover the exit, it becomes a mad dash to freedom as you grab the Power Crystal and run while all hell breaks loose around you. It's off-kilter and surreal and doesn't quite fit neatly into any genre I can think of, which is just what I look for in an indie game.

  • Plenty of the staff members have already elaborated on why they (and I) liked this game. I will add my love for its story to that, which not only gets you to feel how much Shovel Knight misses his companion Shield Knight with a few minimal cutscenes, but also establishes her as an equal partner & companion to Shovel Knight in a single boss fight. As Patrick put it, "Better story than Watch_Dogs."

  • I bought this game instead of Beyond Earth, and I don't regret it. It feels like a stolen copy of the next Civilization combined with pre-Tolkien fantasy to create something innovative and weird. Animated suits of armor that live off currency! Nomad traders whose cities ride on giant beetles! Descendents of a crashed spaceship's crew fighting with dragonmen over ancient relics! The mechanical tweaks are similarly different, such as an emphasis on regions instead of cities and a random Summer/Winter cycle that can quickly put a halt to attack and expansion plans. If you like 4X turn-based strategy games, this is well worth your money and time.

  • One reason I prefer League of Legends over DotA2 is that Riot Games loves to shake things up every season. This year, they rebuilt the whole map, changed how jungling works, tweaked the turret mechanics, and increased the number of viable choices you can make to win. After getting burnt out on LoL earlier this year, those changes brought me back into the fold, and now I'm playing daily again. There's only one game I played more of this year...

  • I decided I was hooked on EVE when I switched my phone's clock over to Icelandic time to track our defensive timers better, and for the past 6 months it has stayed the 300-lb gorilla of my gaming library. It is the first MMO I've played that felt Massively Multiplayer. Back when I played WoW, I was only vaguely familiar with two dozen other people in my guild, and everyone else was just a name in the passing crowds I never really interacted with. However, Eve's combination of a single server, a complex economy, and PvP where you can lose ships and systems makes allies all the more necessary and enemies all the more nefarious.

    My in-game Rolodex has over 50 friends I regularly talk to about organizing fleets, ordering materials/parts, or discussing alliance politics. There's a few dozen more enemies I regularly track with it as well, whether they're Titan pilots who only log on when something big's about to go down or gankers who love to camp our relic sites. Tales of betrayal, bitter losses, and several dozen frigates taking down a battleship are our daily news. It is a game where you can discuss whether a PvP war on the opposite side of the galaxy might distract our current enemies one minute, then help pull off an elaborate ruse to lead an enemy Titan to its doom the next.

    There's nothing seemingly revolutionary about the gameplay, yet the community that's sprung up around it is unlike anything else I've seen in a game. And CCP's monthly "mini-expansions" are simultaneously improving the weak aspects of the game while encouraging destalization and skirmishes in NullSec.

    Eve's grabbed me like no other game this year, and it's been steadily getting better to boot; that's why it's my Game of the Year for 2014.
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