List items
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#9
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#x - One of a few games I think might have been on my list if I had played, or put more time into.
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#x - One of a few games I think might have been on my list if I had played, or put more time into.
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#x - One of a few games I think might have been on my list if I had played, or put more time into.
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#x - One of a few games I think might have been on my list if I had played, or put more time into.
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#x - One of a few games I think might have been on my list if I had played, or put more time into.
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#x - One of a few games I think might have been on my list if I had played, or put more time into.
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Honorable Mention
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#10
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#0 - Prepare to Die Edition on PC - My most played and most enjoyed game of the year. The true winner, though not released this year so not technically part of my Top 10 for 2013.
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#8
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#7 - A game overlooked by many, it seems.
It does free-to-play in the very best of ways. Purchases are almost entirely for cosmetic purposes, with a few for more bank space which are not required but definitely nice if you are a hoarder like myself. I put most of my time into the game in the open beta and enjoyed it immensely. It felt like the game I was hoping Diablo 3 would be. By the time I'd put in 60+ hours and felt like I wanted more space in my bank, I was more than happy to throw the developers some money for that. And then some more for some dumb cosmetic stuff.
It can be daunting at first, and it definitely took a while for everything to click for me. The skill tree is scary when you first look at it. You get your head around it, and you start to realise just how many options are really available to you, even if not all of those options end up being truly viable.
The economy feels like a thing of beauty to me, once you know what's going on. White items are no longer something to be ignored. If you find a white item with the sockets you want, you can turn it into the powerful rare that you need (hopefully). Or you can change those sockets colours, or links, or the number of those sockets. When I started playing, it felt strange to not have a currency like gold, but they really nailed it and made something special.
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#6
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#5 - Bioshock Infinite is primarily a triumph in world design to me. By the time the game was coming to a close I had had my fill of the combat, but the world of Columbia was still beautiful to take in.
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#4 - Somewhere amongst arguments about sexism in games, I feel this game was overlooked by many. It essentially boiled down to Uncharted by another name, but it did it better than many that have tried while making Lara into a more realistic character.
Yes, she ends up killing a legion of dudes by the end of it and that doesn't quite gel with her character in the rest of the game. That argument can (and does) get thrown about against other games all the time with people caring little about it most of the time. It seems unfortunate to me that this was one of the games that argument got leveled at as though it were a mortal sin.
The death scenes being quite graphic was also another problem many had with Tomb Raider. They may say it's not because Lara is a woman, but you know what? I winced as much at Joel getting his face ripped off by a Bloater in The Last of Us as I did at any death scene in Tomb Raider, and I haven't heard anyone complaining about the graphic nature of deaths in that.
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#3 - The Saints Row franchise has always been fun to me, way back to when it was little more than a GTA clone. It's never taken itself too seriously, and I enjoyed it going really wild in SR3.
SR4 took a game I loved in SR3 and threw in the parts I loved of other games like Infamous, Prototype and Crackdown to create the super powered game I always wanted.
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#2 - I rarely end up feeling all that much for video game characters. Some part of my mind always holds on to the fact that nothing is real. I might get attached to them and like them as characters (Ezio from the AC2 trilogy comes to mind) but I don't feel for their pain and heartache. Not so with The Last of Us. Once the game got it's hooks into me, I finished it in short order and legitimately cared for what would happen to Joel and Ellie. That's a powerful thing.
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#1 - I had no real attachment to the old Devil May Cry games. I'd played a couple and enjoyed them, that was it.
Honestly, even I was surprised when this ended up top of my list, but when I looked back on things DmC was just some of the most fun I had with a game this year. The combat flowed very well, looked cool and wasn't super complex without feeling dumbed down or mashy, and the level design and aesthetic was excellent.
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