My Game of the Year lists for 2017! - Disclaimer! Includes 2016 releases
By nuttyjawa 0 Comments
This year has been a crazy year! Not only have we seen a ton of releases this year (both good and bad) my year personally has been amazing. An unfortunate side effect of that is, I haven't played half as much as I should have this year.
This year has seen me get an amazing new job after 9 years working in the same organization, it's seen me purchase my first house and it's seen me marry my lovely wife! I think it's acceptable to myself that games have taken a back seat! (let alone all the time I take recovering and strengthening my back).
(disclaimer this list will totally have games from 2016 on)
This year I played through Heart of Stone and Blood and Wine for The Witcher 3, because of my schedule it literally took me 6 months to get through it all, and what a ride! The two expansions are huge 30+ hour adventures each full of great story, presentation and action! I believe fully that Heart of Stone’s main quest line is as strong as, if not stronger than the main questline of the base game!
I’ve come very late to this game, I picked it up on release, but I haven’t really got around to playing it until recently. Typically, I find open world games bit of a chore, bit of a rinse and repeat affair as I roam the map screen methodically checking off each of the hundreds of icons presented to me. This year thanks to another game yet to be mentioned this idea was challenged, and this made Hozion accessible to me.
The support that Ubisoft put into this game is phenomenal, after a development hindered by redesign and redesign to a rocky launch that saw the game deemed as overpriced “As it only contains multiplayer”. Ubisoft have proven that investing in a game and its community really pays off. The game is multiple bounds stronger than it was at lunch and its player base has blown, a really enjoyable multiplayer gem for me.
After I got married I played this game for 3 days straight on my Switch. The hardware combined with this game seems like a perfect match to me, a game that you can really play non-stop and yet also a game I can spend 5 minutes in the morning to harvest my crop really matches with hardware that can do both jobs well. A great peaceful game.
A rocky year for IO Interactive, Hitman’s creators, Square Enix their publisher sold them this year, they managed to buy themselves out and at the same time secured their IP Hitman, the recent incarnation was released in 2016 and I really got to grips with it this year, a great game that always entertains.
My second Switch game on this list, this game introduced a love of Open world games to me. I’ve always struggled to stick with open world games, typically as FarCry is my usual go to open world game and the rinse repeat nature of going to towers and then clearing the map always bummed me out. Zelda ignites the thrill of exploration and the reward of seeing something strange and then taking 5 minutes trekking to it. A gem of a game, restrained in style, but rewarding by nature.
This game builds off of its predecessor in a very strong way, it really focuses on the weaknesses of the first and fixes them, resulting in less downtime and more war time! A free patch later in the year opened up the grand campaign allowing you to combine the worlds of the second and first game into a gigantic world campaign. 100’s of hours of high fantasy fun here.
I had the luck to enjoy the Alpha of this game this year, and boy is it fun. A truly social game which isn’t always something I would look to enjoy but Sea of Thieves is just full of joy. I started the game by shouting pirate phrases down my microphone and drinking as much mead as I could, before I knew it my character was throwing up all over the ship and my ship mates were also shouting pirate phrases down their mics too! Before I knew it I had been on hours of adventures with my new found pirate ship mates searching for booty and raiding others.
I had to have at least one VR game in this list having spent quite a lot of time in my goggles and Onward is the one. It’s still in Early access but as someone who physically can no longer enjoy outside sports (airsoft and paintball) Onward allows me to continue that from within Virtual Reality. Featuring realistic multiplayer shooting all created by one guy (Who now has a team thanks to the help of Valve) this game is quickly turning into the Rainbow Six of VR.
I’ve been playing this game in duo and squads in First Person only and I have been thoroughly giddy with enjoyment! Not to mention adrenaline! I’ve played both the arma 3 mod and H1Z1 and I could never enjoy them (no matter how hard I tried) finding them clumsy and the crafting boring I never got the hook I really wanted. PUBG has fixed all of that, big risk and big reward with great gameplay really have me loving multiplayer games like it’s 2005 all again. Playing with others really mixes things up as you have to always been tactically and strategically aware of your situation at all times. A big success story and a big surprise, what a year for games!