Slaughts' Game of the Year 2016
My personal Game of the Year list, starting from #5 to #1.
List items
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I’ve told people over the years that if there’s a franchise I go fanboy crazy for, it’s Civilization. I’ve spent too many hours on the games over the years and I still enjoy them. However, that doesn’t mean I was fully expecting this new installment to wow me. Civilization: Beyond Earth was not as good as the older Civ games and the initial release of Civ games were notorious for leaving out major content from the prior title. Fortunately, Civilization VI is a great game from the ground up and is my 2016 Game of the Year.
In some places there are just minor touch-ups between Civ V and Civ VI, but the district system is a major improvement to the base gameplay. You can specialize cities to a further degree with the district system and most importantly, it makes you think harder of where you want to place your cities. If you have a city close to mountains your Holy District and Campus districts get better. It also forces you to make hard choices because your cities are capped from having all the districts depending on population. It adds a major layer to the mid-game that I’ve been wanting in my Civ game.
This district concept also applies to wonders. Before when you built a wonder, it’d somehow fit in your city and may show up on the map, but it was easy to wonder spam (very irritating if AI or other players did it). Now, each wonder takes a tile. You can see it on the board in full detail, but it also takes up a space you could use for an improvement or district. Again, it makes you think more about how you want to expand and what direction you want to take your empire.
Basically these two systems make you care about your cities. Cities are a fundamental element with the game, a poorly planned city will screw over your progress while a well-planned city makes you stronger and gets you closer to a victory. The consequence of poor city planning was not felt as much in prior Civ games as it did in Civilization VI and that really satisfied me. I felt smart when I outsmarted my rivals on this front and got the critical resources at their expense.
It wasn’t just the new mechanics that impressed me. I feel that those that missed the aesthetic presentation from Civilization IV will find it reborn in this game. The visual style is cartoony and the map itself evokes old maps from the European Age of Exploration. The character animations threw me off at first, but they grew on me. Even the music is very reminiscent of Civilization IV, even brining back composer Christopher Tin to compose the main theme.
There are flaws in this game, but they’re very minor compared to the issues I had with vanilla Civ V or Beyond Earth. The diplomatic AI is erratic and it’s very hard to understand the mechanics behind it. There’s 2 of the victory conditions that seem broken, one is very easy to get with no effort and the other super hard. There’s also some lack of explanations of units and abilities that you can’t find in the Civilopedia. However, these issues can easily be fixed in a patch and not something that drags the game down for me.
Overall, Civilization VI is what I wanted in a new Civ game. The new mechanics were a welcoming update to the standard Civilization formula and the design, both visual and audio, were amazing. To give you an idea how happy I was with this game, I went back to Civilization V to check if I’d rather play it than Civilization VI. This feeling was somewhat there from Civ IV to vanilla Civ V and definitely from Civ V to Civ: Beyond Earth. This time, I didn’t get that feeling. I want to keep playing Civ VI and I don’t want to stop for a long time.
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I’ve been playing space 4X games ever since I was a kid. Masters of Orion, Galactic Civilization, Endless Space, Alpha Centauri, etc., they’re all beloved in my gaming heart. When I heard Paradox Interactive was creating a space strategy game that mixed their grand strategy formula with the space 4X genre, I was onboard the hype train. Unlike some other games this year that I was hyped for (looking at you No Man’s Sky), this game justified it.
Stellaris does something that older 4X games don’t do: they make you invested in your creations. Even though I could customize races before, I didn’t have the degree of empire customization as I did in this game. You have a myriad of race appearances, flags, titles, government types, ideologies, and names to create your own unique empire.
These types of customizations play a significant part into the early game where you expand your territory, research new technologies, and meet other species. Random events will pop up and you may encounter some of the same ones throughout, but you have different options based on your ideology. It makes each playthrough unique and it made me want to experiment with different ideologies.
The end game is also fun to play with. There will be existential threats that will affect the whole galaxy whether it be life-killing invaders (like the Reapers from Mass Effect) or a robot army that overruns other space empires. By this point I’ve got a lot of weird technologies that I can play with and use to combat these threats as well as the larger empires.
With all of this, Stellaris should’ve been #1 and it was close several times. However, there is a major issue with it that sinks it down to #2. While the beginning and end are great, the mid game is tedious. More often than not I was stuck with little to do but wait for stuff to be researched, built, and finished. The events that were very prominent in the early game don’t happen as much in the mid-game and the mechanics of diplomacy and battles are not that nuanced to hold my interest as other Paradox Interactive titles do. If I have the timer set to max and waiting, that’s a big negative in my book.
There’s also no unique victory conditions outside of pure conquest or owning 40% of the habitable planets in the galaxy. It’s usual to not have different victory conditions in Paradox grand strategy games, but their presence was missed in Stellaris. I wish there was a science victory or even a diplomatic victory if you’re playing a pacifist power.
Still, I would be lying if I said I didn’t absolutely enjoy this game. I sank so many gameplay hours into it and I want to keep going back to it creating different species. Stellaris is a delicious mix of Paradox grand strategy with the space 4X legacy of Master of Orion and it has gone beyond that. I am amazed that I got invested in it the way I did. It was definitely worth full price and I cannot wait for the content Paradox will add to it.
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I’ll be honest, I had negative expectations of what this game was going to be before it released. When I saw how they were planning out the content and that it relied on online servers, there was a growing sense of dread bubbling within me. However, after seeing some gameplay videos of it, I decided to buy it on a whim and see it for myself.
What I bought was one of the most entertaining stealth-action experiences I’ve played in years. The amount of ways you can take out your targets are just amazing. You can follow opportunities the game lays out for you and they can be very ridiculous (like dropping a metal moose over someone’s head during a TV interview), but you can formulate your own plan. For example I took out one of my targets by exposing a wire in a water puddle and lured my target to this puddle using coins.
The way they parceled out the content monthly and sometimes bi-weekly with the elusive targets made me want to come back to the game constantly. They put in a lot of care to craft these levels that they make you want to play them again. When they put out a new elusive target (a target you only get one chance to take out and cannot play again), I get excited about what new challenge the developers are throwing at us.
The praise is well deserved, but there are a few problems I have with Hitman. First, I feel that the sparse narrative they have threaded through the episodes is not as fleshed out as I’d like for it to be. More often than not I was confused by the cut scenes and only at the ending did it peak my interest. Second, the contract system is a mixed bag, some of the player built contracts are interesting but most of them are not engaging enough for me to not just put a bullet into the target and run off.
However, there is one problem that still irks me. Because I bought the episodic content at a time instead of buying the full version, there’s extra missions I’m not allowed to play unless I buy that full version. While that’s not a problem for new players, it’s a problem to me because I essentially have all the episodes and I paid the equivalent of the full price game, but I’d have to pay $60 again just to get those missions. This is the one chink in the format IO Interactive is releasing their content.
Despite those problems I still love the hell out of Hitman. It’s an enjoyable experience for both long-time Hitman players and new comers alike.
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Every time I think about this game, I ask myself, “How the hell did id Software pull this off?” They had a lot going against them with this game. It was attempting to capture the feeling of the original two DOOM games, the original developers behind DOOM (except one) were gone from id Software, and it had a long troubled development cycle. Odds were that this would turn into another Duke Nukem Forever and be forgotten.
Instead, the game ripped and teared through these obstacles and became one of my most favorite FPS campaigns in years. DOOM is a weird synthesis of the old and new in one complete package There’s still a lot of demon-killing action with different weapons and power-ups with a kick-ass soundtrack playing over it all. However I’m doing it through a well-designed environment and playing through a campaign that has the pacing of a modern shooter.
The campaign’s story may seem simple and it is in part, but I think there’s clever stuff going on within it. The writers knew you just want to kill demons and cause as much mayhem as you can. One of the first computer screens you see in the game is “Demonic Invasion In Progress”, a subtle way to tell you that they’re not going to tease out what you're doing. You're there to kill demons and tear them apart.
DOOM even has fun with its version of a “serious” story. For example, at one point you’re asked to shut down and remove three energy canisters. The facility director asks you to be careful with them. Instead of that, the Doom Marine decides to stomp on them deliberately over the annoyed protests of the director. There’s numerous moments like this that illustrate that even if the story is simple and stupid, the developers are doing it with a tongue in cheek attitude.
While the single-player campaign is great, I would be negligent to ignore the other components of this game. The Snap-Map mode is an interesting way to design levels and the tool-set is fun to play with, but it doesn’t interest me enough to keep going back to this mode and play the maps other players have created.
The multiplayer is sub-par at best and is the weakest part of DOOM. It offers standard PVP modes and allows armor customization like in Halo. However, it feels like an old Quake game in the worst tedious ways without interesting weapons. The levels are relatively small and the flow of the match isn’t as fast and furious like Quake. I only got 2-3 hours of enjoyment out of it before I was bored with it.
The strength of the single-player campaign is enough for me to put it on my GOTY list. The guys at id Software managed to hit a home run with this campaign and made me want to keep going back to it. Unfortunately, other modules of that game keep it from being the top game for me.
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This was one of my anticipated games of 2016. I’ve had a long history with the Deus Ex franchise, the original being my most favorite game ever. However, I came out of this game both satisfied and concerned, a paradoxical feeling that left me pondering for days. Mankind Divided is a flawed game in numerous ways, but there were enough good things in this game that kept a Deus Ex fan like me engaged.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided still has the mechanical foundation of Human Revolution with its augmentation system, the hacking mechanics, the stealth-action gameplay, and the choice of responses to various scenarios. However, the addition of experimental augs determined by a heat sink system made me think more about my character build. It also helps these were fun to play with. Combined with the weapon modifications, it made the action and stealth more fun to play. Outside of a couple wonky issues, I loved the mechanics of this game.
However, the story of Mankind Divided is where the crux of my paradoxical feelings come from. I both like it and don’t like it. I do like the conspiratorial stuff around Task Force 29 (the place Adam Jensen works at) and it has a lot of call backs to the original Deus Ex. Unfortunately, the main plot about the augmented terrorists didn’t feel that consequential in the end and there were numerous open questions left around. In some ways the plot felt incomplete and that the rest would be covered in a sequel.
I still like this game and will play it again sometime soon. It has major flaws, enough of them that that leave me some doubts about the next Deus Ex title, but they were not enough to keep me from investing long hours into it.
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