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winsord

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Game of The Year 2014 Users Choice

This just showed up under my lists. I suppose I should have my "Best of 2014" list here, instead of in my own separate list, so this simply contains the original contents of that list. Yeah.

The list of my favourite games from 2014. I've played a lot of titles this year, and though my favourite ones tended to be from years passed (Persona 3, Stella Deus, Tales of Xillia 1, etc), I still had a hard time picking between my top three games for the year.

The following is a list of 2014 games I played in 2014, so long as I own them they should be included:

  • The Banner Saga
  • D4
  • Dark Souls II
  • Destiny
  • Diablo III: Reaper of Souls
  • Divinity: Original Sin
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition
  • The Elder Scrolls Online
  • Forza Horizon 2
  • The Golf Club
  • GRiD Autosport
  • Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F
  • OlliOlli
  • Peggle 2
  • South Park: The Stick of Truth
  • Star Wars the Old Republic: Shadow of Revan (this doesn't have a wiki page, and as such can't be included on my Giant Bomb list)
  • Sunset Overdrive
  • Tales of Xillia 2
  • Titanfall
  • Trials Fusion
  • The Walking Dead Season 2
  • The Wolf Among Us

List items

  • I'm one of the seemingly few who enjoyed Dark Souls II more than I. I think people tend to have a lot of reverence for the first Dark Souls because it's where they got into the series, but I believe it's lesser to its sequel in a number of ways. While Dark Souls II is not without issue, I had so much fun playing through it when it came out that I almost immediately played through it a second time with a different 'class', something I rarely do in games.

  • I've spent a ridiculous amount of time playing Diablo III this year, both co-op and solo. I didn't pick up the base game until right before patch 2.0 this year, so I wasn't sullied by the sour launch experience (mostly because I avoided it at the time specifically as a result of the bad launch). The Reaper of Souls expansion takes what's already a fun loot-grind game, and is able to give the player so much more to do.

    At the end of vanilla Diablo III you were basically just left to re-run the story over and over, but between the Adventure mode and the Rifts/Greater Rifts, Blizzard was able to pull off vastly extending the shelf life of the limited number of areas. It's great for playing intently, it's great for listening to podcasts/music, and it's great for playing with friends.

  • I'm one of the weird people who liked Dragon Age 2, even more than Origins in fact, and I think Inquisition does a great job of delivering on bridging a lot of the positives from both of the first two titles. I started out on Normal, which proved to be too easy and didn't really require any strategy, but after bumping it up to Hard I felt like the gameplay really came unto its own. You are somewhat limited in what you can do, being that you can only have 8 skills mapped at a time, but I hadn't tired of the combat by the time the game ended thanks to the advanced classes.

    Inquisition really felt like it delivered on the expansiveness of Origins, while having some of the better character design and writing from 2. Honestly, my only complaint with Inquisition was that I wished the story missions just scaled to whatever level the player was. The final mission is recommended for player levels 16-19, or something similar, and with less than half of the game's content completed I ended up doing the final mission at 21 for fear of being overleveled. It is nice enough to just allow you to continue on as normal after the story is complete, but I'd have preferred to have pushed further into the side content before tying up the story.

  • Not many people seem to be talking about Season 2 of The Walking Dead, and certainly with nowhere near the same fervor that the first season brought in 2012, but I still really enjoyed my time with it. It does tend to suffer from the TellTale "here are your non-choice choices", but most of the time I at least didn't feel like that while playing it. Unlike season 1, I didn't have any real 'stinker' chapters that I didn't enjoy, and enjoyed both the story and characters on the whole. My main complaint with Season 2 would be that Clementine is often relied on too heavily by the adults. Even though she's clearly capable and an asset to the survivors, it feels a bit silly every time Clementine is solving the issues of like 9 adults.

  • I only played Tales of Xillia 1 in January of this year, but I really enjoyed it and was very excited for 2. Xillia 2 does some neat things and made some improvements to the first game, but it also stumbled many times in its execution. I didn't like having a nearly-silent protagonist, I didn't like having to do as much backtracking/replaying the same areas as I did (and of course they usually seemed to be the worst areas), and I wasn't a big fan of Elise.

    With that said, Xillia 2 still pulled off a reasonably entertaining story, and the 3 weapon styles to switch between in combat was entertaining. After I let go some of the systems that I enjoyed in 1, like how the shops were upgraded vs. how they were in 2, I started to enjoy my time with it more. Xillia 2 is flawed in many ways, and it's certainly not as good as the original Xillia, but it's still a pretty fun title with its own quirks.

  • As someone who doesn't watch the show, I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting to. I kind of knew what I was getting into, but I ended up beating the game in two sittings, and had a lot of fun doing it. It came along at the perfect time for me, when I really just needed something to sink time into for a couple of days. Although I didn't find myself laughing aloud very often, it was amusing most of the way through, and they really did nail making it look exactly like the show.

  • I really wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy The Wolf Among Us, considering the 'gritty' fairy tale concept didn't sound terribly appealing, but I enjoyed my time with it. The adventure game elements of it are very light, even more so than The Walking Dead, and your choices extra don't matter here, but the story that was told, alongside most of the characters, was actually quite well done. It wasn't as predictable as I'd feared it'd be, and I thought there were quite a few clever twists.

    I will say though, that I was fortunate enough to have had the foresight to wait until all 5 episodes were out. Based on where they left off on episodes, and knowing that it was taking a long time between episodes for a while, I don't think I would have been nearly as impressed if I'd had to have waited so long between episodes. The episodic format did feel like it worked well for the game, but it really needed to be an episode every 2-3 weeks at the most, not 2-3 months.

  • Great, and also terrible. Non-existent story and a terrible loot system, but paired with great movement and gunplay mechanics. I enjoyed playing through the story missions the first time, and I've played each of the strike missions a bunch of times, but once I had to start collecting spinmetal to upgrade my gear I was done.

    There's such a good foundation to Destiny that what could be with it is very promising, but Bungie seems to be more interested in making things as crappy as possible for players instead. The decisions they've made with the DLC downright made me consider taking the game off my list completely because of how awful they are, but instead I'll extend the Bungie the favour of only recanting my time played, which was all before the expansion came out. This could be a really promising series if they overhaul the loot system and actually deliver on the amount of content this style of game needs, but at this point I've lost all faith in Bungie pulling the sequel in the right direction.

    For what Destiny was however, I did enjoy -most- of my time with it, and running strike missions co-op with friends was great too (aside from the part where about 60% of my strikes were the Flayers mission). If I focus on the time I had up to the end game, and just pretend that that portion doesn't exist, I actually had a pretty good time with Destiny. It flounders on its promises of being a true open-world game, and the end game grind is miserable, but if I'd just stopped playing earlier it wouldn't have been an issue.

  • A really fun, fairly straight forward tactical RPG with a great art style. The unique camp mechanics were pretty fun, the setting and characters were really well done, and the art goes a long way to tying it all together. The Banner Saga's biggest fault was not remotely being able to stick the landing.

    The end of the game and the last couple of missions are just bad, there's no way around it. The last boss fight is a significant ramp up in difficulty from anything that's been done before, and not in any sort of fun way. Then, to top it off, once you finally do beat the last mission, the end of the game is totally lackluster and tries to set up intrigue for the sequel. For a game I had really enjoyed up to that point, the way they decided to end it really squandered a lot of the positive feelings I had about the game. If they could've pulled off a good ending, it would've been much higher on my list.

  • Kind of an odd one for me, but I've really enjoyed playing The Golf Club. There's not that much to say, it's a relatively straightforward golf game with a really impressive level editor that I'll never use, but it just feels intelligently designed, whereas the Tiger games always tended to over-complicate themselves (likely as a result of the yearly cycle). It's something I feel like I can go back to at any time, and have a relaxing/fun time playing a couple of courses.
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