As every year, here are the games I belligerently refused to put in my list, despite being in many others. Because I'm the kind of a dick that wants you to know.
Closest to making GOTY are up top, more vicious, "you're not on the list" entries are down bottom.
Look, if I put Rayman in there I have to put Mario in there, and I really don't want to put Mario in there, alright? Rayman Origins is charming, well designed, satisfying to play and much better balanced and designed than Legends, especially on Wii U, but its bag of tricks is a bit shallower than some of the competition (*cough*Mario*cough*) and the stages with mandatory touch controls range from too frequent on the Wii U to obnoxiously retrofitted to button controls elsewhere. You should play this... right after you play those other ten games in the other list.
Look, Assassin's Creed III wasn't that bad, this isn't that good.
You can tell because nobody seems to agree on why this one's good and the other one wasn't. Is it the fun character? Is it that Haytham isn't in this? Is it that Connor isn't in this? Is it that there's more sailing? That there's less sailing? The cities are better?
Whatever, ACIV is a good game, as most of the series has been, but it's still very much iterating on the same gameplay structure that has gotten really stale through annualization. Ubisoft notoriously asked in a survey if you'd play a sequel to Black Flag with no Assassins in it, just as a pirate game. The answer to that is that I would have, if they hadn't made this one yet. Ubi needs to start taking some risks with its open world games.
OK, so I didn't leave GTA out of my list as a statement, but I did have to acknowledge that, much like ACIV, its technical achievements aren't paired with good gameplay design and, like ACIV, the parts where it's a sequel to a franchise interfere with the much more interesting bits where it's a game about capers and heists.
GTA V is a really good game, but it's not a brave game in the way Red Dead was.
Look, if I list Nintendo sequels that were good but not particularly original or great we'll be here a while. Then again, there are 10 games on this list, and this wasn't a year of unabashed, undeserved critical praise, so it's going to happen a few times.
A Link Between Worlds is a good game that would have been better had it not been stuck trying to be a follow-up to a SNES game for no discernible reason. Its structural innovations are not as much of a game changer as the press has suggested, either, despite being mostly convenient.
Again, a game worth playing, but probably not a GOTY entry.
Somebody at Nintendo has decided that co-op is now a thing you expect in Mario games. Maybe it's that the NSMB spin-offs sold so well but Galaxy 2 didn't. I don't know.
The thing is, Mario already has some conceptual issues justifying another platformer and, despite what most critics are saying, you've seen most of what it has to offer either on the 3DS or on the Wii before. The co-op focus also stretches stages weirdly, making for extraneous expanses in the middle of otherwise tight levels and the cat suit reeks of Nintendo wanting to redefine how Mario moves but not having the courage to do so from the start, instead wrapping the upgrades in an ubiquitous power-up, because last time they did that (in Mario Sunshine) it didn't go down well.
Tomb Raider's reception was measured, but it seems to me like sometimes people can't cope with a game being successful without it being extraordinary, and Tomb Raider is very much the picture of successful competency with no extraordinary features. The writing is not offensive, but it's not engaging, either. The gameplay is perfectly functional, but it's stuck on autopilot, cruising at "gritty Uncharted" levels throughout. It can't even decide if it's open world or not.
It does enough to be enjoyable and to justify a sequel. That's... neither here nor there. So OK, I guess.
Antichamber is really cool, guys. It really is. Its concept of applying non-euclidean geometry to puzzles is fascinating. Its execution... is just OK. It falls short of Portal in finding either a compelling framing device for the abstract gameplay or in controlling player progression, and it ends up with a lot of roaming around, wondering if a passage is blocked because you lack the right fish-gun or because you didn't figure out a puzzle. For a game that relies entirely on lateral thinking, that's a pretty big deal.
I... don't really get this game.
I mean, it's good. It's harmless and charming. Sure. I just couldn't get over the "rubbing your belly while patting your head" wire-crossing whenever the characters onscreen are not laid out just like the sticks, which the game doesn't do any effort to account for. I was also a bit baffled by why it's meant to be so emotionally affecting. I don't have any problems with people liking this game or by it receiving widespread praise, but my attempts to like it fell flat.
Monaco launched to some praise earlier this year, and I could never figure out why. Its concept is ambitious and promising, but this is a game ruined by its visuals. Play Monaco as it is intended, with four people trying to cooperate and it'd be confusing under the best circumstances. Muddy visual design and confusing, unreadable prompts are not the best circumstances.
So EUIV won't be on many GOTY lists, but that's because only a few people care about it in the first place. I'm one of those. Unfortunately, if I had to describe EUIV with one word, that'd be "stubborn".
Paradox continue to pander to the PC crowd by being obscure where they should be clear and mistaking depth for complexity. Worse, that doesn't stop them from aping Civ5 in several ways and mangling the interface in the process because that's what makes it "hardcore" right?
Well, no. In the wake of Firaxis proving multiple times in a row that an easy flow and interface doesn't have to come at the expense of depth and accuracy, the way EUIV is designed makes it a frustrating game to try to like.
