Hello, gamers in Giant Bomb forums!
About 6 months ago, I've made a thread about favorite games from 2001, now this time I'm going to bring up my personal favorite games from the year 2011 are:
Even Halo had car driving in it! Wow!
Haha, anyway, 2011 is an interesting year for me because, just like most of the PS3 era, I was so heavily hooked on NBA 2K online competitive play and running a franchise game by game in MyGM - oh, to be a basketball fan in the time before MyCareer and MyTeam ruined everything - that I didn't find time for much other gaming at the time and came to most things after the zeitgeist had wound down. That being said, through PS+ and game sales I did eventually get to play some pretty great games from 2011, and these are those!
NBA 2K12: There's a reason Polygon included this in their Top 100 Games of the Decade; I think it was actually in the Top 50 even? It wasn't just an incredible basketball sim with some super-fun roster diversity (OK, most people were picking the Lakers or the Heat, but still, the lesser teams were formidable in capable hands), its nods to the history of basketball with mostly complete rosters from dozens of the best teams of all-time, period-accurate rules and presentation for each decade and some truly stellar recreations of historic athletes in their primes made for the ur-game of simulation basketball. If the joke about sports games is that they're glorified yearly roster updates, 2K12 was the exception that proved the rule: for once, a publisher truly could've just released the same game again next year with roster and attribute tweaks and it would've been a better decision than the path 2K Sports actually followed.
Mortal Kombat: I don't know if my interpretation of this franchise was ever true, but for me personally MK had gone from a marque title to an afterthought in the years following MK4 (an accidental camp masterpiece and you can't tell me otherwise!) by wading way too deep into the fighting game waters and getting way too desperate in search of new characters and official lore. While I still miss the zaniness that accompanied '90s fighting games and their character-specific endings, MK9 did yeoman's work in collecting the original trilogy into a canonized text and recontextualized what a fighting game's story mode is capable of in a way that's so shockingly competent and cool it's kind of insane that Netherrealms are still the only studio on the block doing something like this. While MK has also experienced a revival in the competitive fighting scene, I love that they found a way for non-competitive players like me to scratch that adolescent itch of mashing out combos and compel me to do so against AI opponents for reasons other than "I fucking hate how cheap Shao Khan is and I once again must muscle my way through 9 pretty easily defeated AI opponents in order to show him how much he sucks!"
LA Noire: I love that this game has had such an up-and-down reputation in the history of games, but I feel like it's settled in pretty nicely over the past few years as a somewhat disrespected, certainly misguided little gem of technological hubris and bygone Q&A storytelling. The ability to skip driving around town by riding as a passenger was a masterstroke, the Mad Men of it all was lost on me then but has only grown more charming with time (and repeated rewatches of Mad Men...) and while it will never not be frustrating how loud and wrong Cole can be at times (especially given the weight of player expectations in certain scenes), I can appreciate that that aspect is eventually revealed to be somewhat of a character trait and more feature than bug. Perhaps the game could've been a little less restrictive (and also a lot less open, paradoxically) but it's a real shame nobody with the time and money to give this sort of game another shot has any interest in doing so. Also: you can have your Marios, your Zeldas, your Halos, your Mass Effects, your Final Fantasies, your Grammy-winning Civilization IVs...best video game theme of all time. Not best score overall, but goddamn what a theme!
Batman: Arkham City: A lot of people argue that this game took the franchise in the wrong direction, turning it from a Metroid-esque puzzle box into a schadenfreudian toybox for Batman fanboys. Fortunately for me, this was a PS+ game and Arkham Asylum was not, so this was my first foray into the Rocksteady Batman Combat™ ecosystem and good lord was it a treat and a half! Flying around as The Bat felt cool, getting to hear all the old Batman: TAS cast reunited was a hoot, the punching and kicking was revolutionary (again, by my measure) and the story was pretty fun. Not to mention it had a lot of numbers that could go up and a then-novel skill tree that still seems to be the foundation for, like, every third person action game at their core anymore. What more could you want, other than less, which you already had and apparently preferred? Lunacy, I say!
Bastion: Without this game, there are no Supergiant Games games, which would be a sadder world than the sad world we currently live in. I don't have a lot to say about it other than I enjoyed my time with it and found it quite good, even if I didn't feel the tug to NG+ it even once the same as I did with Transistor or Pyre, both of which I played first.
Portal 2: Man, this was a game, huh? As someone who sucks at puzzles, I definitely had to look up solutions several times, but almost entirely in the back half when things got a little too physics-puzzley technical gibberish for me to comprehend at all. That I wasn't scrambling to the internet for a solution to every puzzle was a testament to all the clever ways this game first presented you with a seemingly impossible series of tasks and slowly taught you how to complete them simply by always following its own rules. It helped that it was funny, too. This is the only Valve game I've ever played, and even off just the strength of this one game I understand the reverence people have (had?) for that tiny little indie developer.
Uncharted 3: Look, I get why some people think this was a sour note to end the original trilogy on. It's got some weird magical realism (ie. suspiciously convenient) elements to its storytelling that hold up less and less on repeated play and, all told, its set pieces are a little less magical than Uncharted 2's (that boat though). That being said, the new characters in this game are a real smash, especially Marlow, who I'd still argue is the series' one great villain and should totally be played by Helen Mirren before she retires. That café scene is a real chiller for a series that's all swashbuckling and antics, I tell ya! But more important than anything else, Uncharted 3 did something so tailored to my desires it almost felt like a rug could be pulled out from me at any moment: they introduce a ludicrously magical endgame element, tease that this is going to influence the gameplay in some way...and then they just end the game! No nigh-invincible kinda-zombies or interpretations of whatever you called Kimari's race in Final Fantasy X, just some more regular schemgular tricked out mercenaries and roll credits! Thank the heavens! What genius!
Lastly, I just want to say that it sucks I can't write about inFamous 2 in this post, which oddly enough most people seem to like more than its predecessor in the way I prefer City to Asylum, but for me it just didn't feel right to be playing an electrified super hero in a city half-sunken under water. It didn't feel as free as the first, and the story felt hackneyed in a way that the first also did, but more, and I didn't want that franchise to double down on the dumb bits of it. inFamous and Second Son are both super great, but I really don't have anything to say about inFamous 2 other than there's a great game in there, buried under a bunch of bad ideas and good intentions gone wrong.
...I guess Mass Effect 2 also came out this year? Didn't appear on the scroll at the top of the Google search results page. Weird, considering Captain America and Thor games do. Well, guess what? That game's better than every other one I mentioned here! And you already knew that! End post!
@nodima: Mass Effect 2 was 2010 on 360, 2011 on PS3.
For me, 2011 was a fantastic year. I have sunk hundreds, maybe over a thousand hours in Skyrim, between all of its iterations over the past decade, and I'm pretty sure I have sunk thousands into Minecraft. I love both games and can so easily lose myself in either of them.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 came out that year and it was the last CoD I played a bunch of until MW 2019 (I stopped playing 2019 almost altogether when everyone I was playing it with went to Warzone, which... ugh). I had fun with it, but by the time I finished I was finished with that series. While on this topic, Battlefield 3 came out that year, another multiplayer shooter I played a lot of.
Can't forget Dark Souls! Much like Skyrim and Minecraft, Dark Souls has become a game that I can easily lose myself in for hours at a time.
Portal 2 came out that year as well. Not a game that I replay all that often, but I did replay it earlier this year and I thought it was great. Weirdly, I think Portal 1 is a significantly more difficult game - Portal 2's puzzles introduce clever and interesting mechanics but never uses them in particularly mind-bendy ways. They're good puzzles, I just thought some of them would be more difficult.
I played through all of the Gears of War games with my brother earlier this year. Of all the mainline games, 3 was by far my favorite and it was a 2011 game.
Dead Space 2 came out that year, a game I really ought to replay at some point in the future but that I played through a few times back then.
Deus Ex Human Revolution was 2011, a game I've replayed a few times over the past decade.
Mario 3D Land came out that year as well, also a wonderful game I sunk a lot of time into.
...Yeah, I don't think any other year last decade had as many great games as 2011 did for me.
2011 was an absolute top year, but I just wanna shout out Nitronic Rush, which is just excellent. Best student project I've ever played and it launched on the exact same day as Skyrim, which is hilarious.
When I first think of 2011, it doesn't immediately strike me as a year for some of my most cherished games, but looking back over what was released that year, there were some games that hold really particular sentimental value to me at the time. (Wall of text incoming - I apologize in advance but this is quite cathartic to write, so thank you for humoring me).
Off the top Portal 2, Uncharted 3, and Mass Effect 2 are no brainers. I never was quite as head-over-heels for the Portal games as most of my peers, but I really enjoyed the way Valve expanded the game with that sequel, really fleshed out everything that was missing from the first one. Uncharted 3 in my mind ended up being less memorable than 2 and 4, but at the time I was still enthralled with it's ambition, presentation, and story-telling. The latter half of the game with the ship, desert, and ruin sections were kind of a slog.
Mass Effect 2 though - easily and unquestionably my Game of the Year. For the time it was marvelous and yet continues to age gracefully. The first entry is still my favorite and even though 2 sacrificed some of the RPG elements, it was overall a more polished and tight package.
Battlefield 3 was a massive one for me - Battlefield has always been my favorite multiplayer franchise (in recent years not so much) and at the time we had just come off of Bad Company 2 which was a resounding success, but the smaller scope and single player focus left alot of us in the hardcore Battlefield community clamoring for another numbered entry. I had been in multiple rounds of closed alphas and betas in the previous year and with each round my anticipation for the game grew and grew. Mechanically there were signs that this was going to be the point where the series was going to start a gradual move away from the tenants that we originally came to Battlefield for, but this was still a hell of a game that I sunk most of this year (and the following year) into.
Crysis 2 was a special one for me. I was in college, and had finally saved enough to build my first monster gaming PC from scratch with (relatively) high-end parts. I was a PC gamer from a very young age but had grown up gaming on the "Family PC" or my brother's PC when he wasn't home. In my high school years I had a capable PC with hand-me-down parts that was great in older games but struggled with modern titles. But in 2011, with a water cooled i7, 16GB of RAM and dual gtx 560TIs in-hand, the first game I bought to flex the horsepower was Crysis 2.
Critically, Crysis 2 got a fair bit of criticism for trading the open sandbox island stealth gameplay of the first game for a more trimmed-down urban combat setting. I can understand the complaints having played Crysis and Crysis: Warhead also, but something about this game was just the right thing at the right time for me and I really look back fondly on it. It wasn't a perfect execution, but I feel like it did make good on the promise of an "urban jungle", even if it was superficial, relative to the first game.
I was never into MMOs - but KOTOR and KOTOR 2 were masterpiece games that were incredibly dear to me, so the long awaited successor in the form of The Old Republic had me dying with anticipation. The trailers were Blizzard-quality cinematics just drenched in everything I could have wanted. I waited in line for the midnight release, went straight home and fired it right up. It was released either right on or very close to the holiday break in university, and I probably sank 150 hours into the game over those 2 weeks. The game didn't hold me much longer than that once my classes picked up after that, I was mostly there for the story content.
Total War Shogun 2 was a gorgeous game that I got so I could play a co-op campaign with my buddies at a LAN at one of their houses. While not my #1 favorite Total War entry, that was probably the most lean and true implementation of the series' formula. It was firing on all cylinders and I hold that game in high esteem.
Deus Ex Human Revolution and Bastion are phenomenal games but it took me years after the fact to finally play them so I don't look back on them the same way with the same context of other games of that year. I'll avoid discussing them for that reason.
Now - when I think of 2011...there is one paramount defining title that gives me such anguish that it's probably the reason the other titles didn't immediately come to mind. Brink was supposed to be the game. Like, seriously...Brink was going to be The Shit™ - The TF2 killer, The Battlefield Evolver, The class-based, parkour, objective FPS game of your dreams. Brink was going to have style. It was going to have pazazz, it was going to have that sleek aesthetic and end-all gameplay to dominate the online FPS space. When Brink finally came out...I didn't just lose $60 that day, a piece of me died as well.
Fin.
2011 was an absolute top year, but I just wanna shout out Nitronic Rush, which is just excellent. Best student project I've ever played and it launched on the exact same day as Skyrim, which is hilarious.
I almost forgot about Nitronic Rush, this game is totally awesome!
2011 was a pretty meh year for me looking back, with Skyrim and Portal 2 being my only All Time Greats. Saint’s Row The Third was also perfectly fun but not quite a GOAT. Apparently everything else I thought came out 2011 was from 2010 or 2012. 2010, now there’s a truly fantastic year.
I remember people absolutely hated Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. It was a bad Ace Combat game, but still a great arcade air combat title. The multiplayer modes had several years of staying power for me. There also was the very good 3DS launch title, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - Shadow Wars, which was an XCOM game made by one of the original X-COM and Laser Squad developers.
Trackmania 2: Canyon was also released in that year, and it's probably my second favorite TM2 entry next to Valley (never liked Stadium much, but you kinda have to play it since that's where all the servers are).
Aside from those three, it was almost entirely an FPS year for me, Battlefield 3 still holds up really well, its absurd browser based game launcher aside, and I still have fond memories of Crysis 2 and Hard Reset, even though I haven't revisited them in years.
So, yeah, my list would probably be:
Honorable Mention: Achron (Incredibly cool concept - time travelling RTS, not quite there in the execution)
Most disappointing: Darkspore
I remember people absolutely hated Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. It was a bad Ace Combat game, but still a great arcade air combat title. The multiplayer modes had several years of staying power for me. There also was the very good 3DS launch title, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - Shadow Wars, which was an XCOM game made by one of the original X-COM and Laser Squad developers.
Trackmania 2: Canyon was also released in that year, and it's probably my second favorite TM2 entry next to Valley (never liked Stadium much, but you kinda have to play it since that's where all the servers are).
Aside from those three, it was almost entirely an FPS year for me, Battlefield 3 still holds up really well, its absurd browser based game launcher aside, and I still have fond memories of Crysis 2 and Hard Reset, even though I haven't revisited them in years.
So, yeah, my list would probably be:
Honorable Mention: Achron (Incredibly cool concept - time travelling RTS, not quite there in the execution)
Most disappointing: Darkspore
Battlefield 3 is awesome! and I almost forgot about Trackmania 2: Canyon.
Not a very original list...
Also, some of my favorite HD re-releases ever
In no order
This was a year where many of the games I wanted to like just sucked. So the list above what at least interesting, for a year that was a real gut punch.
Motorstorm Apocalypse is fantastic.
2011 was a pretty great year.
Skyrim, Dark Souls, Arkham City, Portal 2, LBP 2, Rayman Origins, Bastion, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Super Mario 3D Land, Dead Space 2, Modern Warfare 2, Sonic Generations, Saints Row 3, LA Noire, Pokemon Black/White, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 (had the Masters! and I played it a lot)
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