This is a list of the best games I played in 2012. Some games, like Persona 4: Golden didn't make this list because I haven't played enough of them. It should be noted that my aim was to create a Top 10 list but as games were pushed off the list I didn't delete them. So just because a game isn't on this list doesn't mean I didn't like it, it just means it was never a Top 10 contender.
Right from the reveal it looked like exactly the game this needed to be and every time the marketing plan pealed back another layer it looked better and better. Turns out it is absolutely as awesome as I wanted it to be. Always tense, with great balanced decision making, Firaxis absolutely nailed it.
Usually with a Telltale series I find myself falling behind when the 3rd or 4th episodes roll around, usually rushing to finish them when the final episode is released. But with Walking Dead I was playing each episode as soon as I could find an uninterrupted 3 hours of time. Amazing Characters, cringe-worthy decision making that often had me regretting my choice seconds after I made it (but I never reloaded). After Jurassic Park I was worried about the Studio but they couldn't have had a better comeback.
I love stealth games. I love deciphering moving, evolving, environmental puzzles. I love the feel of going through a room as cleanly as possibly. Mark of the Ninja's great UI and gameplay-focused art-direction gives you all the information you need to know at a glance. It makes you vulnerable enough to give you reason not to just run about mashing the attack button but a powerful feeling when your the predator which is an amazing balancing act.
This weird 80s acid trip is one hell of a game. A very aggressive stealth game. The feeling of satisfaction after clearing a room is amazing. Pair that with an astounding soundtrack and intriguing snippets of narrative and you have yourself an ever so bloody good time. The only way to proceed is to kill...
I did not expect to like this nearly as much as I did. I knew from the announcement that I was going to buy this game but I forgot how much I enjoy the Halo series and 343 managed to capture those feelings quite well. Sure it could have used more Promethean enemy types and it somewhat squanders its villain but it was a very enjoyable Campaign. The changes to competitive multiplayer are great and Spartan Ops is quite fun with some friends even if it does re-use levels a bit too much.
While not quite as tight a stealth game as Mark of the Ninja, Dishonored's blink mechanic is a very novel way of navigating an environmental to avoid enemy detection. The art direction makes that environment amazing to look at and the Deus Ex style multiple paths gives it some decent replay value.
While I don't buy Journey as an "Indie" game (Sony funded it and a lot of the tech seems to have come from Santa Monica) it is a great game. With amazing looking rendering, fluid movement and an interesting adventure it is a game absolutely worth experiencing. But I think the seamless co-op is the aspect of this game to watch in our industry moving forward.
Star Trek meets rougelike in this fantastic little space sim game. I'm not very good at it, I haven't defeated the last boss or unlocked much yet but it is a blast to play. All the little systems that interlock with each other form a very interesting experience even when I keep running into bad luck.
Overblown internet reactions aside, Mass Effect 3 is still a pretty awesome game. The combat is tighter than ever, there is more variety to encounters than ME2 and the multiplayer doesn't suck. A lot of closure is given to many long-standing relationships, the way one of them ended for me will continue to haunt me. It feels like Bioware maybe spent a bit too much time building bits and pieces of content to reflect all your choices from the previous games and not enough focusing on the new stuff. The endings in of themselves are okay, they map very similarly to the endings Deus Ex presented back in 2000 but the fact the choice is presented as just a bunch of switches is quite lame.
With Rockstar not willing to set any of its open-world games outside of the USA (GTA London being the one exception) it falls to other developers to fill this gap. United Front borrows a lot of elements from other games like Arkham Asylum's combat, Just Cause/Pursuit Force's Stunt Position Mechanic, Wheelman's slam-n-ram and many other bits and pieces from other open world games. This could of resulted in a mess but instead the game controls tightly and the way that side mission rewards feed back into each other makes it feel like a cohesive world with a lot of activities worth doing.
Far Cry 3 makes a great first impression. It looks beautiful and the game is constantly populating the world with crazy combinations of pirates, wildlife and vehicles that are guaranteed to create an explosive experience every time. While travelling between mission markers you can spend a lot of time hunting, gathering, crafting and climbing towers. The improved marking mechanic combined with some decent first person stealth makes taking over outposts a thrill each time. The performance captured characters are fun to watch especially the villain Vaas as has been mentioned by many reviews. I'm far too early to either agree with the critiques of the story or see if my ravenous pursuit of the side activities early in the game will result in a dull late game.
Blizzard is one of the few developers who can spend huge amounts of time in the polish stage and are willing to throw a project out if they are not happy with it. Diablo III could have been a lot of games during its lengthy development, the one it ended up being is a solid follow-up to Diablo II that makes it really easy to group with friends and play with different character specs. The narrative falls short of its production values and the loot drop rates are maybe a bit too built around the new auction house but its a fun game regardless.
Rockstar's more gritty, serious and ruthless take on the Max Payne franchise made me yearn a bit for the Remedy Stylings of previous entries. Max starts the game at the end of his rope and it just gets worse for him and the people around him as it goes. I miss the cool bullet-time combo system from MP2 but I can see why they cut it. The production values are sky-high, the soundtrack is awesome and many of the procedural animations make me giddy (popping pills in mid-air is kind of amazing). Due to the sales we might never see another one of these, I would like to see Remedy take a crack at MP4 but ultimately MP3 is an interesting game.
With a more compelling narrative Borderlands 2 is a game I actually finished, unlike the original. The weapons feel better and are more varied from each other. The game can feel like a grind some times but it is generally well put together.
Starbreeze continues its exploration of the FPS genre with a well done re-imagining of Syndicate. Yes its not the top-down small-scale RTS-ish thing that the original game was but instead its a solid single player campaign and a four-player co-op game that borrows the R&D and mission design from the original game. The shooting feels solid, the hacking mechanic is light but works well and the co-op is fun. Just because publishers are turning beloved old-school franchises in shooters doesn't mean they have to be bad shooters.
Who would of thought that a bargin bin franchise for PC and PS1 would come back to tell one of the most interesting stories this generation. The gameplay is a solid but standard 3rd person shooter, but the choices that the game has you make and the journey it puts the main character through are definitely worth seeing. The ways that the narrative bleeds back into the gameplay holds other narrative-driven games to a new standard.
Quick Time Events have become a bane of gaming as of late. This is mostly due to the fact that many games present them horribly. Its not about throwing random buttons up on the screen that the player needs to input to continue the cutscene, its about tying those button presses directly to the action. The player needs to feel like they were contributing otherwise it should have just been a cutscene. Asura's Wrath is mostly Quick Time Events with a little bit of standard arena combat in-between. The button prompts during the cutscenes work well and the presentation of them is varied throughout the game. Everything just gets so big and so crazy that it is a fun ride to see it through.
