With 2014 coming to an end, it's that time again..
Best of the Year:
The Wolf Among Us: Following the amazing (and well deserved) success of The Walking Dead, many wondered if TellTale would be able to keep up their momentum coming off such a strong entry. They silenced all their critics with The Wolf Among Us, another well told story with great voice acting and more tense decision making. It seems like after all these years, TT has finally hit their stride with these games. I’m also looking forward to 2015 where we will see the Game of Thrones as well as Tales from the Borderlands series’ (and their subsequent 50%+ discounts.)
South Park: The Stick of Truth: Licensed games traditionally have about as good of a track record as the Chicago Cubs do in the playoffs, but South Park: TSOT, regardless of if you are a fan of the source material, marked an apex of licensed game development, where the creators of the product and the game developers actually worked together to make the best game possible, and it truly showed here. It almost seems like a “thank you” note to all the South Park fans out there such as myself who have been with the show over its nearly 20 year run. I only hope that other developers and content creators will take a cue from this game and start embracing collaboration more, as opposed the old school method of just making a game and slapping an IP on it. Given the fact that Trey Parker (one of the show's creators)
is a self-professed gamer may have had much to do with the games' success, as opposed to ones in the past that were done with little to no collaboration.
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor: Well, this certainly came out of nowhere for me. My interest in Middle Earth ended right about the time the end credits for Return of the King came on screen and I’ve completely ignored all the games based on it. After reading a deluge of good reviews for this I decided to give it a shot and I’m glad I did. A simple formula of Arkham City style gameplay and combat tuned up to include a disturbingly satisfying amount of the old ultra-violence along with the Nemesis System have made this extremely enjoyable. I haven’t actually beaten the game yet, but I’ve played enough to know greatness when I see it and this fits the bill.
Honorable mention: The Walking Dead: Season 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Valiant Hearts: The Great War
Worst of the Year
Rambo: The Video Game: Holy craparoni. Rambo is that unique type of bad, similar to
Ride to Hell: Retribution and
Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, wherein the player is just awestruck at how bad the game is. A rail shooter with a cursor, for a game with PS2 level graphics, and voice work ripped straight from the movies (a VHS manually recorded version of the movies apparently) all come together to make when of the saddest excuses for a game in recent memory. Hell, it’s bad even by licensed games standards, which should tell you something. If you’re at all interested in what this train wreck entails, watching either
Angry Joe’s or
Total Biscuit’s critique of it should do you nicely.
Disappointment of the Year
WWE 2K15: The WWE game series has been on a bit of a roll lately, even with the series’ transition from THQ to 2K games. WWE ’13’s tribute to the Attitude Era made for a fun experience, and while I did not get to play 2K14 (yet) from what I heard it tweaked and improved the gameplay and then added the 30 Years of Wrestlemania mode. Everyone was hoping (and expecting) 2K to continue the momentum into the current gen releases with 2K15. Sadly what we got was a shell of a game with reduced gameplay modes, reduced superstar roster (not even counting the obscene number of characters that needed to be unlocked) and reduced fun. The last gen releases seemed to suffer a similar fate as well. Hopefully they’ll fix things up for the next version, OR maybe they can come to the conclusion that we don’t NEED a new WWE game every year and instead go back, look at what has really worked over the past couple of years and combine them into 1 solid package, as opposed to being under the gun to produce something new and as a result constantly make changes just for the sake of making changes.
Infamous: Second Son: Again, while I declared that this game was not bad, there's no denying the fact that (other than graphics) this game is worse in every aspect when compared to the previous inFamous games. Worse story, worse environment, worse characters, worse gameplay, worse controls, the list goes on. I saw stuff in this game that I'd expect to see in the first inFamous game, not the third. And while I do understand that at the end of the day this is essentially a launch title that was rushed because it was meant to be the PS4's first "killer exclusive," that doesn't change the fact that stuff got sacrificed that really shouldn't have. It also didn't help that what it was trying to do had been done better by other games, such as Saints Row 4, Prototype, and sadly, the previous 2 inFamous games.
Dishonorable Mention: Watch Dogs, Destiny, CoD:AW, Titanfall, AC:Unity, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
