Welcome to my Game of the Year Blog. This will take place in two parts that will be done over the course of two days. The first day will be my honorable mentions, which are games that I played this year but didn’t think warranted being put into my actual Top 10. Tomorrow will be about my Top 10 games of the year. So, let’s get to the honorable mentions. These are in alphabetical order.

GOTY Honorable Mentions

1. 

   Forza Horizon 2: This was a game that I continually went back to because I was working my way through completing all of the championship series found in the game. I would only finish two championships at a time but that would take me about an hour or so since each championship involved 4 races. This game is so well made and perfectly balances the idea of a simulator and an arcade racer. The ability to drift is easy to perform but is not like a Burnout or Need For Speed where you just hit the drift button and you go. It requires a small amount of finesse and I grew to really enjoy pulling off great drifts as I was racing. This was on my Top 10 last year but there were actually great games that I played this year that allowed me to move it down.

2. 

   Mortal Kombat X: I was super excited for this game to come out but I stopped playing it fairly soon after release and I haven’t really felt any reason to return to it. I once again enjoyed the story and felt it was a great continuation from MK9. The fighting systems are still amazingly well done and the action is just as visceral as always, if not moreso.

3. 

   Rayman Legends: This was one of the Games with Gold a while back and I had heard that it was really well done and an excellent platformer. I am not someone who played platformers much growing up and since it was free I decided to check it out. I really enjoyed the mechanics and the feel of the game. However, it was almost too much of it. It feels weird to say that but it seemed like it was trying to do everything at once. I enjoyed my time with it but it was not something that I wanted to finish.

4. 

   Smite: As someone who watches but doesn’t play MOBAs, I wanted to check this out to see exactly what a more action oriented MOBA was like. In my time playing the beta, I felt like I would need to put a lot of time into the game in order to be great at it. I got to be okay playing the game but decided I didn’t want to stop playing a bunch of games I knew I wanted to play in order to play one I maybe didn’t actually want to play.

5. 

   Ziggurat: I had never really played any rogue-lites since most of them were on PC and I don’t have a gaming PC. I decided to try this one out because it seemed like a cool concept and the QL the guys did of it convinced me to check it out. I did beat the game once but I didn’t feel like trying to finish it again after that. I know that how I played is not the specific way people go about attacking these kinds of games but I had gotten everything I wanted out of it.

These are my honorable mentions for GOTY and now it’s time to get my Top 10 ready to go. Thanks for reading and enjoy everyone’s GOTY content.