I’ve never written a blog or a GOTY list before, but that’s a thing people do so I thought I’d give it a shot. Smartly I chose to do it after all of the GOTY content on GB when everyone will be over saturated with lists and most likely not care. Either way here it is!

This year was a fantastic year for games I didn't get around to playing every game, I missed Titanfall 2 and only just started Shadow Warrior 2 (probably won’t finish by the end of the year) (scratch that, I really didn’t like it compared to the first and uninstalled it) and I do want to get around to The Last Guardian and SUPERHOT at some point.

So to start with some quick ancillary awards in no order:

BEST OLD GAMES I REVISITED OR PLAYED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2016:

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Not much needs to be said here, this is one if not the best RPG I’ve played. It has its flaws yes but it does so much of what it’s trying to do so exceedingly well. I will never forget the characters and the world of this game.

Ultra Street Fighter IV

This game is significantly more feature rich, functional and to me mechanically more enjoyable than Street Fighter V. I hope one day SFV manages to get to this games level, only time will tell.

The Evil Within + DLCs

The Evil Within was something I was looking forward to quite a bit, sadly the PC port was hot trash and barely ran at 30fps on very low settings. Now that my PC can just horsepower its way through it, I was able to experience this psychological thriller as it was intended. Needless to say I thought it was a really cool game that had some really interesting ideas. It sadly didn’t reach its full potential but it gave it a real good crack.

Max Payne 3

OBJECTIVELY THE BEST THIRD PERSON SHOOTER FIGHT ME! But really, making your shooting near flawless (minus the down but not out system) goes a long way for me to liking your game. No one has learned from Max Payne 3’s innovative aiming system except for Infamous: Second Son (both games play fantastic coincidence?) and that’s criminal.

GAMES THAT FAILED TO KEEP ME ENGAGED:

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

I put about 5 hours into this game before I completely fell off of it. It didn’t help that Nioh was in Beta when it released but Mankind Divided failed to create an interesting narrative setup that I could cling to and care about. On top of that when I got to the meat of it the gameplay had hardly been improved and they totally squandered the potential of interesting Augments. Human Revolution was a much better game from the outset and held my attention throughout the whole campaign. This failed to get me interested in anything that the game had going on.

Dishonored 2

I’ll be honest, I’ve not given this game much of a chance because of its awful port. Arkane did manage to go back and fix a few of the issues that plagued it on release but the optimisation still remains sub par which hampers my enjoyment.

That being said, the game much like Human Revolution has a bad start. It seems to follow a very similar setup to the first game and I didn’t much care for any of the voice acting (for any of the characters especially Corvos) which in turn made me not care what was happening in the story.

I stopped playing after the third or fourth mission? due to framerate issues. This is the one game that I can see myself going back to in the future in this list.

Uncharted 4

I liked Uncharted 2 a lot despite its issues, I really didn’t like Uncharted 3 and Uncharted 4 left me with an apathetic sigh. There’s amazing tech in this game, there’s amazing performances and amazing ideas yet Naughty Dog has failed to address the one major flaw that has plagued this franchise from the beginning. The core combat dynamics.

Instead of say, making the AI more reactive and providing them with a more interesting set of behaviours they fall into the same stale blueprint of third person shooter enemy and encounter design. Light, medium and heavy enemies that get progressively more helmeted and bullet spongey over time, throw grenades at higher frequency and only provide challenge through numbers is uninteresting design. Unlike Max Payne 3 that does fall into these design conventions at times Uncharted has never sought to improve the core shooting mechanics either. Thankfully they added the choice of stealth for a lot of segments, but I found their stealth mechanics to be too basic and they eventually wore thin on me.

I got up to Chapter 12 (driving the boat with Sam on the ocean islands) before I found myself tiring of it.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (PC)

I just didn’t like this game, Lara is now portrayed as some vapid girl who miraculously gets through crazy ordeals yet still after the fact comes across as totally unsure of herself and willing to do incredibly dumb things despite her reluctance. I let this slide in the reboot because she was supposed to be like that, but at this point I’m wanting the confident and cocky Lara from the previous games. On top of that, I found the structure of this game to be rote. I’ve played varying degrees of Farcry 3 too many times since its release and now you’re giving me Uncharted + Farcry 3? No thanks.

I made it to The Geothermal Valley (second HUB-like zone) before I fell off entirely.

MY TOP 10 2016 GAMES:

10. Overwatch

Overwatch is a fantastic shooter, but it’s not my fantastic shooter. I really enjoyed the time I spent with friends playing this game but as someone who’s put significant hours into basically every game that Overwatch rips its ideas from it as I expected didn’t have much longevity for me. The characters are diverse but I also found their dialogue to be god awful and a lot of the voice acting just as bad. I've also grown very tired of linear chokepoint map design which is what Overwatch thrives on and I disagree with a lot of the design philosphy that the game holds close. None the less I can see that there's a quality to this game that others appreciate whilst not getting too much in the way of the enjoyment I had with it personally.

This is a brilliant entry level shooter that will probably stick around for others a lot more than it did for me.

But for real, that character dialogue is fucking awful. The comparison to TF2 is there for gameplay but lets compare the character dialogue as well. The fuck is up with Blizzards writers?

9. Street Fighter V

I’ve probably spent more hours in this game than I have any other game on this list. Despite that this game was so broken that I feel dirty putting it on my list even in the bottom 2. They installed a fucking rootkit on my PC, can’t even put region filters in the battle lounge search settings and can’t release a single update without one massive fuckup accompanying it. I could write a huge list of all the things still wrong with this game but I’ll spare you.

But this game is more than just the game to me, it’s the people I’ve gotten to know through it, it’s the events that we gather and watch together over the internet and it’s the drama and stupidity of the FGC that we follow. The other thing? When this game works it’s pretty damn good.

8. Dark Souls 3

By all accounts Dark Souls 3 should be the best game in the franchise right? It has the largest amount of content without sacrificing its visuals. Its back end of the game doesn’t obviously appear as if the game was rushed out the door and the highly praised Miyazaki was back on board in a directing role. Funnily enough even with all these things in its favour Dark Souls 3 is the worst Souls game for me personally. It ignored all the drastic improvements that Dark Souls 2 made mechanically, reverted bold new ideas like how NG+ worked back to stagnate pre-existing ideas and rested almost all its laurels on fan service for the original Dark Souls.

The game was still really good, it has some of the best bosses in the franchise, but overall it’s hardly one that stands out when I look back on the 3 games (DS2>DS1>BB>DeS>DS3.)

7. Total War: Warhammer (Total Warhammer)

I’m not much of a strategy guy, I’ve historically been shit at RTS’s and never had the patience for GS games and I’m not even a Warhammer fan. I bought this game as apart of my effort to try new genres or get back into old ones that I never saw myself as too big on previously. I’m probably writing blasphemy for core fans of these things but I thoroughly enjoyed the blend of these ideas present in Total War: Warhammer. The factions were diverse, the combat scenarios were a lot of fun and the over world strategy was a real good chill experience. Shame about some of the DLC practices though.

6. Inside

A very late entry into my list I only bought and finished Inside on the 27^th just gone, and needless to say it did a solid job to get onto my list. The ability to convey what a game is about and how to play it purely through animation, lighting and sound effects is a design feat that not many developers manage to achieve. Inside takes a really good stab at this and it for the most part succeeds but the parts where it stumbles managed to almost entirely destroy any chance of evoking a serious emotion from me.

I’m not sure whether the developers expected this and it might say more about me than it does about the games presentation, but I found certain elements of this game to be absolutely hilarious. The way your player character ragdolls from forceful impact or how humanoid enemies slink their way over to you and nonchalantly choke you out were very reminiscent of a string puppet play which for some reason made me laugh. Then when you get to the last 10 minutes and you witness “that thing” I just burst out laughing at the constant moaning it created, the fantastic but comical animations involved and just the sheer fact that I had inhabited a juggernaut-like ball of human flesh.

This game probably has some deeper meaning to it, I’d guess something to do with human manufacturing and slavery but I honestly barely paid attention. I spent most of my time laughing, going out of my way to die on purpose to see what happens and occasionally solving puzzles on the fly.

5. Battlefield 1

The Battlefield franchise has always been my go-to for dumb mindless shooting. Racking up KDR’s in excess of 50:1 isn’t easily achieved in most other shooters but Battlefield has always been the best outlet for that for me. So being a long-time fan that found Battlfield 3 to be disappointing, Battlefield 4 being borderline unplayable and Hardline just being uninteresting I can’t say I was ever expecting to be keen for another Battlefield game.

DICE then announced BF1, it looked visually stunning and they said the words I wanted to hear but I still wasn’t convinced. I then tried the games beta and my denial shield broke down, I was sold. DICE went back to the drawing board and reworked most of my major mechanical gripes with their more modern games and put the changes I’ve been wanting since BC2 into BF1 with a nice new lick of paint and some cool new modes to boot. The single player seems inoffensive I guess if you’re into that, I enjoyed the 1 vignette that I played but wasn’t compelled to play the rest.

The game has been a blast to continually play since its release.

4. Nioh Alpha and Beta

Yea you read that right an Alpha and Beta in my Top 10. No I’m not crazy these builds were incredibly fun for me to play and were a highlight of playable games released in 2016. After Dark Souls 3 felt too familiar, these tests came along and proved to me that the base level structure of the Souls games isn’t what fatigued me with Dark Souls 3 but rather the lack of mechanical improvements to shift how the moment to moment gamplay loop worked. It also helped that the tests were chock full of content, there was significantly more content available in these tests than most alpha and betas and I got more hours out of them than I do some entire games several times over.

Team Ninja also really took into consideration the feedback given from the alpha and implemented it in smart non-knee jerk reactionary ways. Durability was a low point from the alpha so instead of simply removing it they replaced it with a far more interesting familiarity system. Low stance was basically broken in the alpha, the AI couldn’t deal with people who utilized it correctly so they shifted its rules to High stance re-emphasising the importance of each stance making them more unique and equally viable. What I played was incredibly promising placing Nioh at the top of my most anticipated games of 2017.

3. The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine

DLC? For a game from 2015? Why is that in a 2016 Top 10 list? Because it’s a damn brilliant DLC that came out this year that’s why. I’ve seen a lot of people state Blood and Wine as one of their best games of this year and I’ve seen a lot of other people comment on that along the lines of “DLC’s don’t count that’s for a game from last year!” My stance is that I don’t let marketing titles and distribution methods dictate whether something is eligible for consideration in any given year. If The Witcher 3 wasn’t so damn big this would be big enough to be its sequel. This is as much of a sequel as Mass Effect 3 was to Mass Effect 2. In fact it’s a larger game than Mass Effect 3 It’s also larger, more content rich and has more mechanical changes than certain other sequels from this year (see most games in my ‘Games that just didn't grab me’ list.)

This DLC had me hooked from the minute I arrived in Toussaint. The world was lively and the characters reflected their surroundings. Although the overall narrative and characters didn’t live up to Hearts of Stone (near impossible task as far as I’m concerned) CD Projekt still did a fantastic job and one that is still the bar for all other game writers out there to reach for. From the fairy tale setting to the fairy tale ending I’ve not seen a big budget franchise ended so elegantly to the point where I don’t want to replay such a brilliant game (aside from the fact its 150 hours long) because it felt so perfectly final. Geralt has done his dues it’s time for him to retire.

2. Hitman

Hitman had a lot of scepticism surrounding it prior to its release. Their initial business model was a shitty glorified Early Access game. They then reworked that model to be episodic which I could stomach slightly more but still thought to myself “man fuck this.” This was also the game following up the not-so-Hitman Hitman game Absolution which was nothing more than disappointment in its purest form. So needless to say I wasn’t so psyched about the direction they were heading with this iteration.

What saved them was the debut gameplay actually looked quite promising. The level was large and open ended, the gameplay loop had returned to AI interaction and disguise hierarchies and they were designing it around Hitman’s strengths of learning through success and repeating for mastery. The end result turned out to be the complete opposite of my expectations both simultaneously being a really damn good Hitman game and actually proving to me that episodic content can be done well. Deciding between Hitman and DOOM for the #1 spot was really tough but what ended up knocking Hitman down was it is still missing a large swath of mechanics from the previous games, some of which I feel are core to the Hitman experience.

Aside from the game itself as a fan from the beginning with C47 it’s been a real joy seeing Hitman finally getting a lot of recognition and praise both from here on GB and the wider internet.

1. DOOM

At this point there's not much to be said about DOOM that hasn't already been said but what Top 10 doesn't have accompanying thoughts for #1? I was, much like everyone else sceptical about DOOM much like I was with Hitman. The pre-release footage looked slow, the glory kills seemed pace disrupting and the multiplayer during the beta was just ‘eh’. Then 2 days before the games worldwide release an Nvidia event demoed DOOM on the PC showing it running on the Vulkan API. This video immediately 100% sold me, it looked like they ramped up the speed by a factor of 10 and most importantly the person who was playing knew what they were doing and they knew how to demo a DOOM game. I made an impulse buy purely on that video (something that I can’t recall ever doing before) and I was not disappointed. This is easily to me the best single player first person shooter I’ve played period I have serious trouble trying to find fault.

So that's that, it's not an overly unique list but I've never felt so compelled to write about games released in a year before. 2016s releases defied a lot my expectations for better and worse that it made me feel compelled to say why and how. The fact that a lot of my old favourites came back in top form was more than enough to make 2016 one of the best years in games for me. Also damn, I can't wait for Hitman Season 2 and DOOMs sequel.