The Top 5 Games I Played that Came Out This Year

Overall, I would call 2014 a disappointing year. Most of what I was looking forward to ended up being pushed back to 2015 and what did release mostly left me feeling underwhelmed or ambivalent. However, there were still quite a few surprises to be had and while my back catalog from 2014 isn’t quite complete, here is a rough look at my Top 5 in no particular order.

1. NaissanceE

Released early this year to little fanfare, as are most things relegated to Greenlight that aren’t building/survival sims, NaissanceE was both a visual and sensory treat, giving me bright, distinct visuals and absolutely breathtaking atmosphere. I spent all of my time with the game either in awe of it or terrified of it, it’s great big cityscapes coupled with an excellent use of licensed music led it to be at the forefront of my memory, even through the rush of holiday releases late this year. A beautiful game that makes me look forward to whatever the devs bring next.

2. Divinity: Original Sin

I haven’t reviewed Divinity yet for the sole reason that I haven’t finished it yet. That being said, I don’t imagine there is much I could do that could cause it to drop in my mind. With hassle-free and tactical — if not exploitable — combat that gels seamlessly with the exploratory elements and a full co-op campaign that feels designed for such, Divinity was just a treat to play at almost every turn. Minor quibbles about delay inputs in the UI aside and sometimes juvenile writing aren’t enough to turn me away from my most pleasant surprise of 2014. Here is a Kickstarter I wish I had backed.

3. Drakengard 3

No other game on this list will be as technically incompetent or frustrating to play. Framerate and screen-tearing issues abound in the title which only hampered by the fact that the game looks like an early-era PS3 game with the budget to match. Gameplay is straight forward and repetitive to a fault and is only playable in the sense that it plays better than previous titles in the series. It’s a crude, ugly game all the way through.

And I think I’m in love with it.

While NaissanceE continues to be in the forefront of my mind, Drakengard 3 never quite left all this year either. While it fails to live up to the batshit zaniness of it’s predecessors, a great performance by Tara Platt as Zero and one of the most dysfunctional RPG casts in recent memory lend itself well to just being unforgettable. Add in the best damn score of the year and some truly wonderful directorial touches by Taro Yoko and you have a game that’s all the right levels of crazy to sometimes pull it off just right to make something so ugly become beautiful.

4. Bayonetta 2

No, I don’t think I can add anymore that needs to be said Bayonetta 2. It isn’t the masterpiece others make it out to be, but no other game will play better or gives a better bang for your buck action wise. Add to that often humorous characters and truly dazzling set pieces and you have a game that never forgets to have fun.

5. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Awful title aside, I have to love Nintendo for being one of the last few bastions of playing with friends on a couch. And no game better serves that point than Super Smash Bros. I may gripe and whine while playing — I am one of the saltiest people you’ll ever meet while playing fighting games — but I still always come back.

I find it funny that we praise Smash Bros. for having loads of content when almost all of it is terrible. Smash Tour sucks, the single player content still hasn’t evolved past what it was in Melee, this time without a goofy mode like Subspace Emissary to give me wonderful cutscenes (Shut up, I liked Subspace Emissary for the cutscenes and felt the mode would have been fine if it cut back on the repetitive gameplay elements). But the core gameplay is just so simple to grasp and fun to play around with that we kind of forgive how throwaway the rest of the game is. And I will admit that while 8-player smash is awful, I appreciate the mode because it allows for 5 people to play with little to no repercussions. No more having to rotate loser.

Honorable mentions this year include: Endless Legend (an easy choice for number 6, one of the best 4x I’ve played in a long time), Grand Theft Auto V (belongs on a 2013 list), Mario Kart 8, InFamous: Second Son, Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax.

That’s not quite it for 2014 for me (Like I said, I got backlog I’m working on right now) but this is the list in time for year end. Tomorrow I’ll highlight the games I’m looking forward to most next year.

Happy New Years, I guess.

 

The Worst Games I Played of 2014

Needless to say, I haven’t played the worst games this year. My free time is limited and valuable so I usually only play games that I like or am looking forward to. One glance at Steam Greenlight is all I need to know that there is worse out there than one I played. So this list is going to account for what I have played this year and may not even include bad games. Disappointing ones will be on this list as well.

So, without further ado, an arbitrary list of the worst games I played this year that were also released this year.

1. Bravely Default: Flying Fairy

I was looking forward to this game a ton. An RPG that harkens back to the golden age of console RPGs with an intricate job system? They even went through the trouble of giving it it’s own look rather than make it a Final Fantasy spinoff like they had initially anticipated. And after all was said and done, they may as well have. Bravely Default is an absolutely derivative title, essentially being nothing more than a modern take on Final Fantasy V. Every modern convenience thrown in (controllable random battles, exp, and difficulty sliders) is overshadowed by how dated the rest of the game feels.

Stocking attacks has never been entertaining in an RPG and this game is no different. Other wise it plays exactly as a 2D Final Fantasy made two decades ago. The story is bad, the beautiful concept art is traded in for nightmarish chibi figures, the characters are rather annoying, and apparently the game becomes a repetitive mess in later levels. I wouldn’t know, I barely breached Act III before boredom finally won out. My heart goes out to those who lasted longer than I.

The one upside is the job system is put together well and the ability to mix and match them is fun, but the grind to get the most out of them is another carry over from an age where we were far more tolerable of it.

2. Destiny

No other game disappointed me more this year than Destiny, the concept I am still in love with that likely won’t exist until Destiny 2 or 3. What Bungie built is an excellent foundation for a game that will be sold to us piecemeal over the next year or two while trying to make us once again salivate over the idea that the sequel will be the game they promised us in the first place. Thanks, but no thanks.

I already talked about Destiny at greater detail here, so I’ll keep this one short. Much like the first Assassin’s Creed game, I doubt I’ll ever hop on this series’ bandwagon again.

3. Super Smash Bros. for 3DS

Now, I don’t like the idea of portable fighting games in general and Smash Bros. is no exception. I love this series, for better or for worse, but I was always going to skip out on the 3DS iteration. That changed when Nintendo announced that players who registered both the Wii U and 3DS copy would receive the soundtrack for free (Mewtwo DLC hadn’t been annoucned yet, which was another nice addition). So for me I was essentially paying $40 for a limited print soundtrack of the game, which was fine by me.

I think I played the actual game on 3DS a grand total of 3 hours before I gave up. The 3DS slide pad is terrible, especially for how crucial it is in the game, and the screen is far too small to accommodate just how hectic the fights get. Super Smash Bros. on 3DS is exactly what critics of the series have always claimed it to be, a mess. I do not feel hyperbolic in saying that PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a better portable version of it’s parent game.

4. The Letter

At some point over the summer after picking up my Wii U I was heading to the eShop to purchase Earthbound when I noticed a game being sold for fifty cents. That game was the letter and it claimed to be a horror game. I knew at fifty cents it couldn’t be anything good, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt my wallet either.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt my wallet, but it certainly hurt my brain. The Letter is an unfinished game that somehow made its way to Nintendo’s store. Stock art assets appear everywhere, the game has no direction outside of blank white sheets of paper with the what can laughably be called the plot typed on them in Microsoft Word. From what I played of it — I made it to level 2 — the level design is not only nonexistent but bafflingly amateurish, consisting of a closed of valley containing a construction site, a barn, a playground, a what I guess was an oil pipe.

I don’t miss my fifty cents, I feel I got a chuckle or two out of playing for an hour or so, wandering aimlessly looking for the next piece of paper that might clue me in as to what was going on. But it is without I doubt the worst game I played this year.

Neverwinter Nights 2

The kind of gamer I tend to be is a distracted one. I have trouble focusing on one game at a time, partially because I find many of them I give a chance to to be uninteresting and partially because of I always like to try new games but “new games” only stay new for so long. I rarely replay games anymore, preferring instead to move on to the next one to try and experience as many of them as I can, for better or for worse.

A lot of the time this leads to longer games being left in the dust. The Witcher was left unfinished on my PC until I upgraded enough to play the sequel, at which point I finished the game out of a misplaced sense of duty. Metroid Prime II: Echoes was left lingering on the last boss until a month before Corruption came out. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne was beaten over a 2-year period where I only played it in between new releases. But no game ranks on my procrastination meter higher than Neverwinter Nights 2.

Neverwinter Nights 2 I got for free with the purchase of a graphics card way back in 2008. Subsequent expansions were purchased at a local used book store and eventually I repurchased the entire collection at gog.com. My first attempt at playing it occured sometime late in 2008 and I finished it only a week or two ago. I had restarted numerous times, got stuck just as often, and left it alone for such large periods of time I had forgotten what exactly I had been doing. In a sense, Neverwinter Nights 2 may likely be one of my own personal epics, a journey through a game that took me years to complete. Which is good that I got experience like that out of it, because the game didn’t really offer me one.

In fairness to the people over at Obsidian, that really isn’t their fault. But for those unfamiliar, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a computer role-playing game based off of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 ruleset. Infamous for being quite exploitable, 3.5 is far from a balanced system and goes off the deep end from the mid game onward. As opposed to other games which use D&D rules like Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment, which were designed as campaigns first that just happened to borrow the rule set, NWN2 is mainly designed for multiplayer in mind and is in that way meant to be a lot more focused on the mechanics than the actual campaign that was included with it. Hopefully that is enough context for me to say that 3.5 does not translate well into video game form.

In trying to cram all that they could from the source material into the game, Obsidian forced a clunky interface concerned with every little bit of minutia that could be wrung. Stealth, tracking, defensive casting, preparing spells, crafting, multi-classing, etc. Character menus, spellbooks, skill, feats, inventory are all multi-layered and dense menus, stacking on top of each other in a cluster of words, rules, numbers, and invisible dice rolls.

Of course, a lot of this is positive if what you are looking for is a 3.5 game. As far as NWN2 is concerned, in terms of adaptation it is the best D&D game made. While I may think the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate II and Planescape: Torment are better games, their use of D&D rule sets feels more like a foundation to build a game around rather than the focus, particularly in Torment. But this does not translate well for those looking for a good game. The detail, which will be quite familiar for vets of the pen and paper game, will leave others at a loss for what to do. The game makes no effort to teach you how the game works and what any of it means, assuming beforehand that you know. And those are just the applications of the rules within the game.

Just playing tends to be a hassle. You are given 2 options for camera control, one being the strategy camera, which locks how far you can scroll the screen to the immediate area around the selected character. I tended to use this more than the other options, even outside of battle where it shines. The other is an over-the-shoulder exploration camera, which is just useless. The several times I tried to use it resulted in me switching back every time, as the game is not good looking when up close and the exploration is all but unnecessary. The dungeon design is standard as all hell and very rarely does the environment come into play. By holding “Z” you can highlight everything you are able to interact with anyways, so the exploration doesn’t grant you anything except an up close and personal look at the game’s low res textures and flat game world.

Story wise, the game is as generic as possible. The game includes all the major classes and playable races available as companions but they all serve to fill slots in the least creative Mad Libs ever. There is a dwarf who likes to fight and drink. There is a rogue tiefling that’s out for herself. There is a brash, overconfident sorceress. There is a goofy bard. There is an elf wizard who thinks he’s smarter than everyone. There is an elf druid. The bland story and characters do little to highlight Obsidian’s strengths as writers. Their need to fill quotas comes at the cost of style and substance. Also, for anyone expecting to be fulfilled by the base game alone are in for a lazy surprise.

I have not yet had a chance to make my way through the game’s first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer (See you in 6 years for that one) but from what little I’ve started a lot of my complaints have not only already been addressed but the story is doing more for me than the base game ever did. Given that you can really only purchase this game as a complete edition, it will likely come with both expansions anyway. Those looking for a D&D experience streamlined in video game form, look no further. Those who are just looking for an RPG to get lost in can do better, but you could still do a lot worse.

For me, I can just be glad that I finally finished it.