Best of 2013
Some notable games that I played this year but didn't make the list, for one reason or another:
- Agarest: Generations of War
- ArmA 3
- The Last of Us
- Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
List items
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Sort of like Dragon's Dogma last year, I bought this on a whim without knowing anything about it, right at launch. I really liked just about everything about this game: the art is unique and pretty, the animated cut-scenes live up to the Studio Ghibli standard, the score was great, the world was vast, the story as a whole was maybe a bit simple but the characters were captivating so the journey was very fun, and the combat mostly pulled off being a more active version of Pokémon. If I had one complaint, it would be that the friendly AI is way too quick to waste their MP in combat, so unless it was a boss fight, I always set them to not use any.
Ni No Kuni completely surprised me and was a lot of fun from start to end, and as such I feel it was handily the best game I played this year.
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Gran Turismo 6 was sort of a known quantity to me before I even got my hands on it, but I've been having a ton of fun with it so far. It is fairly similar to GT5 in many ways, but they fixed most of my minor qualms in addition to greatly improving the suspension modeling, adding some new cars and tracks, tidying up some of the visuals, and greatly improving the menus.
For as much as is possible, I think GT6 does microtransactions "right". The progression feels very similar to that of GT5, and to me at least, that's a good thing. The Gran Turismo games have always been a slower burn, and while my garage remains relatively small for the time being, it makes me greater appreciate each of the vehicles I have. I think GT6 has fallen much more on the side of microtransactions that are easy to ignore, compared to how Forza 5 greatly impeded its old progress system in order to make them more enticing.
I'm very happy with what's in GT6 now, and Polyphony Digital is promising much more content to come (for free!). Normally I wouldn't instill much faith in a company coming through on their word for those promises, they certainly managed to do it in GT5, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now. Even if they never delivered on it, Gran Turismo 6 would still take the #2 spot on my list for 2013.
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The only new game this year that actively had me laughing aloud throughout. Not only is this game crazy in all the right ways, but it also managed to pull off making a really fun superhero game of sorts, the first one I've enjoyed since the original Crackdown. Even though they kept Steelport as the locale, it hardly felt the same, and I think that's really impressive.
My real problem with Saints Row IV is the same as it's been with past iterations in the series. I dislike about 75% of the minigames, and they make up a large part of the game. Blazin, the Mayhem variants and Prof. Genki's Mind Over Murder I thought were fine (read: mediocre), but I really hated Fight Club and the Telekinesis Rifts. I realize the game would be really short without these, but I really wish there were more fantastic story missions in place of the diversions.
Even the diversions weren't able to stop me from flying through this game though, and I'm sure it's a game I'll replay in 2014.
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Another game that really surprised me this year. I never played Bioshock 1 or 2 to completion, but at launch I was able to get it for nearly half off as well as with a bunch of other 2K games, so I bought in.
I know I'm sort of an outlier on this, but I really enjoyed the combat in Infinite. A lot of people complained about it, saying they died a bunch and that it was very standard/boring, but that wasn't my experience at all. There was a lot of variety available to the player, they just needed to actually make use of the different mechanics. I felt the combat was very fluid and engaging, making use of the full arsenal, opening tears, flying around on the skyhooks, and combining vigors all made it feel like no FPS I'd played before, and by making use of everything I had I never died (I actually found the game too easy without playing on 1999 mode).
My real issues with Infinite all stem from the story. While the setting and themes were all fantastic and interesting, the plot had more holes than Swiss cheese and having to hunt for every last, stupid, voxophone (I ended up with 83 of 85) was entirely antithetical to fun or good story telling. Even though I could sit here and poke a bunch of holes in the plot in reflection, I still really enjoyed it in the moment and do think it's affective at what it tried to do.
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I really enjoyed the single player of GTAV. The shooting was better than ever, I didn't necessarily like, but enjoyed all of the characters, and it felt like there was a lot of depth to to world (I never even tried most of the minigames). I don't have much to say as it just felt like a natural progression from IV in most ways. Even this long after launch, I still haven't touched the multiplayer. It was broken when everyone was still playing, and all the fun I had in the online mode of IV was in the free roam mode with friends.
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What a neat thing this is. It's not particularly “game-y” in most ways, sure, but I've had a lot of fun with it. It took me a little bit to get the tone cable working properly on my PC, but after using a fan-made patch it's been working fine (though it does effectively disable my audio device outside of the game when I'm playing). It's gotten me to practice a lot more than I used to, which was my main hope when buying the game. Having interactive tabs that can tell me when I'm doing something wrong and other features that make self-teaching easier means Rocksmith is capable of exactly what I needed it to do. I haven't spent much time in the jamming mode or the arcade games, but they all seem fine too. As a bonus, the game's ability to emulate playing a bass with a regular guitar plugged in is both impressive and fun to do.
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I came into GRiD 2 with different expectations than most people seemed to (that being that I didn't expect it to play exactly like the original game), and enjoyed it. Codemasters managed to carve out their own unique and fun physics (I didn't miss cockpit view here because it wouldn't have been very well suited for the handling model). It's nowhere near a semi-sim like Gran Tursimo or Forza, nor is it as arcade-y as Need for Speed, but I still really enjoyed it's drifty style of handling. The career mode wasn't anything too crazy, but I did enjoy the variety in event types, from the liveroute events where you don't really know what corner's coming up next to the checkpoint races.
The online mode was ambitious, but the community wasn't really there on PC to keep it alive for very long, so I never did more than nine or ten races total. My biggest gripe with GRiD 2 actually didn't have to do with the game itself, but Codemasters trying to shove DLC down players throats. At launch there were like three packs of launch DLC you got for pre-ordering, and following that they were very quick to put in more cars and tracks; I felt like I was being egged on to buy more before I even got to enjoy the game. I ended up buying none of the DLC as a result, and have less fun returning to the game now as they put all of the stuff you don't own inline with what you do.
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I enjoyed a Final Fantasy game! The first time I've really enjoyed a Final Fantasy game, and the first time I've enjoyed playing an MMO on a controller. Most of the mechanics present in XIV weren't terribly unique, but it felt super polished and had an interesting world. My interest waned once I reached around level 17 and the game suddenly had a very heavy focus on group play, but I really enjoyed my time up to then.
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This is a weird one. I went into The Bureau with appropriately tempered expectations, and enjoyed it. The mechanics used for the strategic combat in the game layer quite well and work as a really neat concept, but like most things in this game, they feel like a concept that didn't get the chance to be fully fleshed out. The game pretty much felt like it should have been three times as long as it was, but it was fun while it lasted. It felt like they got the first third of the game down pretty solid, and just as I was starting to get more invested there were suddenly like four different major twists followed by the game ending incredibly shortly afterward. If there hadn't been so many issues with the development of this game as there were, I think it could have been something really cool. Knowing that would likely be the case going in however, I still enjoyed playing through it, and it was fun just for curiosity’s sake of seeing what that game had become after so many revisions.
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Never would I have expected something related to Naruto to ever make it onto my top 10 list for the year, but here we are. The combat in the game is really fun, it's very pretty, and they actually managed to get me somewhat invested in the story. As an outsider, it definitely felt like it lacked basically any resolution (which made sense after I learned that what's missing it content the manga has yet to cover), but it set the stage pretty well and I'd be interested in picking up the next game if they put it out on PC again. They should really drop any and all of the “open world” mechanics of this game though, as they feel even more pointless and restrictive of that found in Mafia II.
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