Best of 2017
God damn this was a hell of a year.
For video games. And my son being born.
And literally nothing else.
Fuck 2017.
List items
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I love everything about this game. It has the most satisfying third-person combat in a game since....Bayonetta 2? And that's a very different type of combat. It's an incredibly detail and gorgeous world that I love just running around and looking at, it has a great sci-fi story, and Aloy is a great protagonist.
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I tried this game a couple years ago on PC but couldn't really get into it. It felt kind of clumsy playing with a mouse, and I always felt like I could be playing bigger games in my extremely limited couch time. So thank god for Switch! Thanks to my Switch, and an hour long train commute twice a day, I was able to put more time into this - and by more time, I mean 60 hours. This game completely consumed me for about 4 weeks.
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It had been nearly ten years since Metroid Prime 3, and I'd long since held out any hope for another Metroid game. So I was very surprised when Nintendo announced Prime 4 during their E3 Direct. And then I was even more surprised, and happy, when they announced another Metroid game for 3DS and that it was going to be out in just a few months. Some of that hype deflated when they announced the developer was Mercury Steam, but this game shockingly turned out really great. It plays extremely smoothly, full 360-degree aiming is great, the melee counter is fun and feels good every time you pull it off, and even the 3D was great - I actually left it on for the entire game. I wish there was a bit more atmosphere to the game, but overall this was a fantastic new entry in my favorite game series.
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Playing this game is simply a joy. Each Kingdom is wildly different from each other, but they all feel great to run and jump around in. My main criticism is that I wish there had been more platforming in it. Personally, I come to Mario games for the platforming challenges, not to find 500 bafmodads by butt-stomping the ground. That said, however, I simply could not stop playing this game. It looks great, it plays great, it sounds great. Using Cappy and figuring out complicated jumps to make getting around faster was one of the highlights
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This was a wild reinvention of the Zelda, and most of it worked. The world felt expansive and huge, and running and climbing everything was great. It took Skyrim's "See that mountain? You can go there" to its extreme, with it's go-anywhere-climb-anything design. I wasn't a huge fan of the combat, and the dungeons were easily the worst in the Zelda series. I hope the next game returns to Zelda's more traditional dungeons, but keeps the giant open world. It was just so much fun to run around and explore everything.
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I thought Uncharted 4 was a great capstone to this series, but Lost Legacy is even better than that game was. The action is better, the set pieces are better designed. 4's shootouts all felt like they lasted a little too long and were a little too frequent, to the point where I kind of just wanted the game to end already. This game's fights are shorter and much better paced out throughout the game. I never once felt like I wanted to game to end. It also ends with what is probably the best climax in the series (even if it does basically steal wholesale the train sequence from 2...but that wasn't a climax). Chloe and Nadine were a great pairing, and the story was told as well as anything we expect from Naughty Dog.
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This was definitely the biggest surprise of the year. I played this game, and finished it, and I still literally can't believe it A) exists, and B) is in my Top 10 Games of the Year. An Xcom-style game starring Mario and pals and the annoying Rabbids from Ubisoft's Wii games? This should not work at all. And half of it doesn't, to be fair. Anything outside of the battles is boring and rote. I can only push so many blocks before I need SOMETHING ELSE TO DO. Luckily, the battles themselves were fun as hell. These battles were tough. They needed real strategy to complete, and being able to respec and change your party out at any time was a brilliant design that made you play around with the systems - and it was absolutely required for some fights. And no random chance! Everything either hit, or it didn't *side eye to Xcom....95% chance to hit, my ass*
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I was never as down on this series as I know a lot of people were. I hated Unity, but I loved Syndicate. However, I was glad to hear Ubisoft were taking a year off to make this game. The series desperately needed some time to breathe. And the game they came back with is fantastic. The environment is beautiful and huge. It's great to just run around see the sights. It also makes some good changes to the open-world formula, that every subsequent open-world game needs to follow. Much like Zelda, you can climb pretty much anything in this game. However, it also has things like Boat Guy, where the game will detect you're in a large body of water without a boat and immediately send the nearest guy in a boat out to you. Or Camel GPS, where you can hold X and your camel (or horse) will automatically follow the road to your objective or waypoint.
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I already loved the first one, but this game makes some smart traversal improvements to that game, and does a better job with its story-telling. In that it actually tells a story, albeit a very simple one. It's still just plain fun to mine through the earth gaining gems and upgrading your equipment, and I wished it kept going longer than it did.
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I haven't even come close to finishing this yet (it's really long, you guys!) but everything I've played of it so far has been incredible. The writing is a bit wonky at times - courtesy of a somewhat awkward localization - but the art direction is fantastic, and the UI is the most stylish UI I've probably ever seen in a video game. I look forward to continuing with this game over the next....let's be honest, probably 5 years.
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