Something went wrong. Try again later

isomeri

I should probably say something smart here.

3528 300 22 21
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

Game of the Year 2015

I put off writing my GOTY list for 2015, because I got way into Kerbal Space Program and Life Is Strange at the beginning of January 2016. Both those games proved that they belonged on my list, so I wanted to spend a proper amount of time with both of them before making my decisions.

Twenty fifteen was another fantastic year for games, and I feel like this year having to cut games from my top 10 was harder than usual. Many great games that I played this year missed the list only just, like Hotline Miami 2, Massive Chalice and Star Wars: Battlefront for example. That being said, here are the games I had the strongest positive feelings towards in 2015, with honorable mentions going to the following categories and games.

Best Looking Game: Star Wars: Battlefront

Runners-up: Ori and the Blind Forest, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Best Music: Hotline Miami 2

Runners-up: Undertale, Ori and the Blind Forest, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Best Sounding Game: Star Wars: Battlefront

Runners-up: Halo 5: Guardians, Battlefield Hardline, Life Is Strange

Best Multiplayer: Rocket League

Runners-up: Halo 5: Guardians, Star Wars: Battlefront, #IDARB

Most Jank: Fallout 4

Runners-up: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, #IDARB

Best Value: EA Access

Runners-up: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Rocket League, Halo 5: Guardians

Best Dumb Fun: Battlefield Hardline

Runners-up: Need for Speed, Time Clickers

Best Puyo Puyo or Tetris: Puyo Puyo Tetris

List items

  • Out of all the games I played in 2015, Ori and the Blind Forest struck me as the only one I couldn't really criticize in any way. Every part of the game, from the gorgeous hand-drawn art style, to the beautiful melodic music, gripping gameplay, interesting story and haunting mood left me in total awe. As someone who's never gotten that into any "metroidvania" platforming game, I was very surprised to see how well the game grabbed a hold of my attention for days on end. It's usually easy to forget about great games which came out at the beginning of the year, despite their quality. But with Ori, I found myself thinking of the game on a monthly if not weekly basis.

    Having to choose between the two top games was extremely hard this year, due largely to the fact of how different the two experiences were. However, there was no game this year as complete and singularly memorable as Ori and the Blind Forest, and I think it'll stay in my mind as one of the defining moments of the Xbox One in the same way as the likes of Journey or Limbo did for their respective consoles.

  • I don't think I've ever finished a fantasy role-playing game before the Witcher 3, not even Oblivion or Skyrim even though I enjoyed them quite a bit. I don't even consider myself to be a fan of fantasy settings in general, and I'm certainly not an enthusiast of "deep role playing games". So what was it about the Witcher 3 that dug its nails into me for months on end?

    First of all the game looks and sounds astonishing. If it wasn't for the technical hiccups, like framerate drops on the Xbox One version, I'd probably have praised is as the best looking game of 2015. It isn't just pure technical prowess, but a deep level of art design which varies from character to character and area to area. Every item, character, and town in the world fit together as seamlessly as the flow of the music and audio ques from whichever bog or wood you happen to be rushing through. Some truly impressive weather effects put a bright cherry on the audio-visual pie.

    The real draw of the Witcher 3 is in its world and character-building. Even menial seeming quests out in the wild have well crafted stories and characters surrounding them. In some ways the random quests offer up better stories than the main quest itself, because they are so different from one-another. Every character in the game has their gray-area and interactions with them can have snowballing effects on other characters or stories in some very interesting ways. The Witcher 3 simply excels at storytelling and developers like Bethesda especially should follow what CD Project Red are doing very closely.

    The combat and general gameplay aspects may not be the most shining part of the game, but I still enjoyed myself with the swordplay essentials. The inventory system is a drag though, even after all the updates.

    It's hard to jot down all the things I loved about the Witcher 3. I've rarely been as immersed in a videogame world, and even though I went away from the game for a month during my summer Interrail, I eagerly jumped right back in the first day I flew back from Istanbul. Even so, there are things about the game which made me drop it down from the top spot. Some poorly crafted inventory and menu systems broke up the pacing way too regularly. The technical aspects of the Xbox One version just weren't there. While the game looked great at a glance, regular framerate drops to single digits, geometry popping in and a variety of random bugs are defects I can’t just ignore. Maybe the game would be on my top spot if I'd played it on a beefy PC, but I can only judge my personal experience with the game.

  • Metal Gear Solid is one of my favorite entertainment things ever, right up there with the likes of Halo, Star Wars and Hospital Records. That's why MGS V was the first game I attended a midnight launch for since GTA V, and playing the game at midnight gave me a fizzy feeling I haven't had with any game in years. After a very strong start, the game opens up into an insanely varied open world battleground, which did keep me thoroughly entertained right through the end; or the first ending at least. Everything in MGS V is of the utmost level of quality, but in the end I was left with the feeling that there just wasn't enough of it. The game felt abruptly incomplete, and the somewhat forgettable story didn't really help the matter.

  • Forza Motorsport 6 is the best Forza Motorsport game ever released. That's a pretty boring way of putting it, but Forza 6's success is how well it ticks all the boxes of how to design a sequel. The number of cars and tracks has been doubled, as has the amount of cars on screen. The graphics have improved, and the introduction of night and rain races doesn’t just add to the visual aspects of the game; they totally change the way you tackle each track. The way water moves on the track, creating deadly puddles and small streams, is especially impressive and completely alters the way you think about racing in the game.

    Again, for someone who's not into games like these, Forza 6 won't provide anything new. But for fans of the franchise, like myself, Forza Motorsport 6 has been the biggest jump forward since the introduction of Forza Motorsport 3.

  • Halo 5 is a fantastic Halo game. It plays better, looks better and sounds better than any previous game in the franchise. Add to that a varied and well functioning multiplayer mode, the controversial Warzone (which I've enjoyed a lot) included, and you've got one of the best value game packages to come out this year. However, the game is brought down by a somewhat uninteresting campaign and dull, if not well animated, characters.

    The removal of split-screen multiplayer is a huge sin, which is hard to forgive. In the past I've spent the vast amount of my time with Halo games in split-screen. Because of that, Halo 5 will probably become my least played Halo game, even if it's arguably the best playing one in the franchise.

  • Kerbal was a bit of a latecomer to my list. I’d spent a lot of time with the game in early access during the last few years, but hadn’t played it in a long time. However the Project B.E.A.S.T. videos encouraged me to try out the final release of the game, and I ended up spending hours upon hours tuning my rockets for a comfortable ride to the Mun and back.

    I've been fascinated with everything space-related since I was a kid, and as I've grown older my interest towards astrophysics and the history of spaceflight has just intensified. So being presented a game, where for the first time I'm able to put everything I've learned about spaceflight into practice, has been extremely exhilarating. I can safely say that there hasn't been a game in a very long time which has felt as rewarding to me as Kerbal. The game is a constant learning progress, with failure always leading to the player learning new things about how spaceflight works. Getting safely into Mun orbit for the first time, after dozens of attempts, only to not stick the landing because of too much mass, can be frustrating, but experiences like this only make it that more exciting when you finally do achieve the goals you've set for yourself.

    I’ve always dreamed of a Sim City style space agency simulator, and while Kerbal doesn’t quite accomplish building a satisfying campaign mode, the rocketry sandbox is varied and detailed enough to keep me entertained for many lunar cycles to come.

  • So I only started playing Life Is Strange in 2016. I'd already bought the game during December sales, but it was the cold and snowy January evenings that finally made me start the game up. After only a couple of hours it became clear that the game would punch pretty high in my GOTY list, so I delayed writing the list until I'd seen the adventure of Max and Chloe to the end.

    I've been quite keen on these sorts of narrative driven games in the past, the Walking Dead and Gone Home being pretty good examples. However I feel like the genre had stagnated a bit during the last couple of years. Life Is Strange doesn't really bring anything new to the table, apart from the time-bending mechanics, but it is just very successful at all the parts that make games like these click for me. Every character is well developed, the world is detailed with tidbits of information that I actually want to engage with and the pacing is spot-on in most episodes. Even more importantly, when playing the game I felt very at one with the main character. Perhaps that's the most impressive thing about this game; that I can feel at one with an 18-year old girl going through her formative years in high-school.

    You probably already know whether or not Life Is Strange is the kind of game you'd be into. Some people might not really regard it as a game at all. However I'd argue that some of the things that Life Is Strange does, regarding choices you have to make and moments you "live through", can't be done in any other medium except videogames, at least not as effectively and intimately. Intimacy may be a weird emotion to relate to any videogame but Life Is Strange provided that to me, which is something really special.

  • Sim City 4 was a great game. Sure, for most people their fascination with computer-based city building started with the previous installments of the franchise, but for some reason the series didn't really strike me before the fourth installment. Cities: Skylines feels like the great sequel that Sim City never got. The gameplay was easy to understand, but hard to master. The price point was right. The game looked and sounded stellar; and in the end it was way too easy to spend hours upon hours in a dark room lit only by my PC screen, fiddling around with optimal public transport routes or waste management solutions.

    The endgame however was slightly dry in content, but I guess that only leaves more room for an upgraded sequel from the Tampere-based Colossal Order.

  • Apart from Puyo Puyo Tetris, Rocker League was the multiplayer game in my household this year. Anyone who came by to hang out at my place, regardless of their age, gender, or level of interest towards videogames was able to pick up a DualShock 4 and get into the groove with Rocket League after a game or two. The simplicity of the graphics and gameplay in Rocket League will surely make it a staple of drunken nights for years to come, and the game is the main reason why I've held on to my PlayStation Plus subscription as long as I have.

  • The level of detail, variety, sense of exploration and story weaving that Bethesda is able to achieve in their games has always left me in awe. In this regard Fallout 4 was much the same as previous games carrying the name, but that’s also the stem of the problems I had with the game. The only major addition to Fallout 4 is the base building system, which is almost entirely optional and doesn’t really reward the player in any concrete way. In every other part the game feels too familiar to its predecessors and the technical difficulties on the Xbox One version of the game really hampered my experience with it. Having to do a 25 second load every time I want to drop a few weapons back at base, or having the frame rate drop down to single digits in crucial battles often left me frustrated.

    Then again, when everything in the game is flowing well, when I’m finding lost bases out in the wilderness filled with interesting characters or solving murders in the alley of some sleezy bar, I’m totally hooked and can’t put the game down for hours on end. Even with all its problems, Fallout 4 is a great showpiece of what the medium of videogames is able to achieve; something beyond movies or literature. But that also means that the player must endure all of the most primordial bugs and irritations that oftentimes come with playing games.

  • Why do I have 11 games on this list? Well The Rise of the Tomb Raider was originally number ten on this list, until I spent a considerable time with Kerbal Space Program and Life Is Strange in the beginning of 2016. Usually I would've just booted this game off the list completely, but I just couldn't bare seeing a game this great get no respect.

    I really enjoyed the first modern outing of Tomb Raider two years ago, but I can’t say that I was fiendishly craving for more. However after buying this game due to the positive reviews, I was left in awe of what Crystal Dynamics was able to achieve on the somewhat aging Xbox One hardware. The set piece moments of the game rise, in my mind at least, above anything Naughty Dog was able to put together with the last few Uncharted games. And it’s not just the visuals. In Rise of the Tomb Raider I felt much more in control of all the scripted events happening around me, and the way the game directs you through puzzles and platforming parts feels more subtle than in other games of similar ilk.

    On top of that, the gameplay is actually very enjoyable and the various side quests bring a lot of much needed variety to the game. However the story of the game does drag on a bit in parts and the dialogue used to carry the story is dull and unforgettable at best. In latter parts of the game I saw my focus steering more and more towards the side content than the main story itself. Regardless, in my mind the game is a definite must buy for Xbox One and Xbox 360 owners, and I hope that as many people as possible will take the time to do a bit of tomb raiding with Lara next year on the PC and PS4.
Load Comments