Following in the steps of SideQuesting’s 2014 Game of the Year coverage, we’re again not hosting a definitive Game of the Year for the site, instead focusing on the individual writers and their favorites. Hopefully, you’ll be able to connect a little better with the writers that make up this little corner of the web, as many of us will be posting our Top 5 lists throughout the next week. Enjoy, and bring on 2016!
2015 was not a great year for Ryan playing games. In a year with heavy-hitters like The Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5 and indie darlings like Life Is Strange or Her Story, I spent the year mostly playing games I’ve beaten a hundred times before like an idiot. So, this list isn’t really meant as a “best of” 2015 and more of a “I played these and thought things about them of 2015.” So enjoy this summation of 2015’s most 2015 games, or whatever.
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
I loved Hotline Miami. I cannot recall another game that has ever gotten me so “in the zone.” Bursting into rooms trying to kill everyone in sight without taking a hit yourself, figuring out the perfect way to flow through the level like a deadly river, all with a thumping soundtrack of licensed vaporwave music that ties so well with every gunshot and every crack of a baseball bat you can’t believe it wasn’t custom made, nothing has ever put me in such a pure trance of video game bliss.
And then Hotline Miami 2 seems to have unlearned everything that made the first so great. There’s some things in the plot to suggest perhaps this was intentional. That maybe the developer’s had tried to make a game with a message about violence last time and instead everyone ate it up, so here’s some more you sickos. Ultimately though, that’s all speculation and I don’t think I’d even care if it were true. The biggest problem change is in level design, this time they last much longer and are far more wide open. Getting killed by enemies off screen become frustratingly frequent, and the length of levels changed the almost one-hit death of your character from a tense way to keep you on your toes to a tiresome chore.
I found myself enjoying it anyway. The music would match, I’d get a long combo going, everything just flowed and I was in that trance-like state again. A disappointment that largely failed to improve on the original but with enough glimpses of the original shining through to keep me into it.
Westerado: Double Barreled
Westerado came out of nowhere for me and ended up being maybe the most fun I had with a game this year. A gussied-up version of an Adult Swim browser game, Westerado, in that classic cowboy movie way, is all about extracting vengeance from your family’s killer. Thing is, he’s randomized. Every new game the killer is random combination of hat, bandanna, pants, jacket, you name it, and he’s just walking out there in the world. The crux is to narrow it down by doing all by getting people to tell you a little more about what he looks like or where he might be. You can do favors around frontier towns to get people to tell you, help the sheriff put down some cattle rustlers and he’ll tell you what kind of belt your target wears. Or you can be more of a desperado, selling people’s homesteads out from under them to get a wily oil baron to tell you what you need. Hell, you could literally gun down every single non-player character in the game in the hopes that eventually you kill the right guy.
Westerado is just a delight to play. It’s got a great sense of humor that fits in classic western references without using them as a crutch. It’s got a great hook in the randomized bad guy that made me play it over and over immediately after beating it the first time. Westerado ruled.
Fallout 4
Remember how I said I spent most of 2015 playing games I’d beaten plenty of times? Well, a lot of that was spent with Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I was prepping for Fallout 4. I was hyped. I kept telling myself all I needed was more. All Fallout 4 needed to do was give me more of the last two games and I’d be thrilled.
But then it came out, and that’s mostly what it was. There was plenty of wandering, finding kooky characters and one-in-a-million random occurrences, to be had, but I was wrong. That wasn’t enough for me. Maybe it would have been if it didn’t also seem like they’d gutted some of what made the others so special, most of which literally happens in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system. In 3 and New Vegas there were a multitude of ways to create your character. You could load up on charisma and intelligence, combined with high medicine and science skill and talk your way through most of the game. Or you could be a bulky idiot with high endurance and strength using melee weapons and big guns. There’s still stat customization, but it feels much more like it’s about progressing to a single point of completion rather than making a unique play style. It’s made all the worse by the dialogue system. Swapping out dialogue boxes where you saw everything you would say for the Mass Effect-stlyle nice, mean, snarky, or question choices resulted in a lot of not saying what you intended. Even worse, compared to New Vegas, there was almost no skill-based special dialogue options, something that really killed it for me.
There’s also been a lot said by smarter people about how the potential of the story of the last pre-apocalypse survivor waking up in the wasteland was squandered. So I’ll just repeat that sentiment by saying what a poor job they do with it. Waking up in a world full of grotesque mutants and completely new ways of living is apparently not a shock at all to our voiced player-character. It also doesn’t help that the main quest is ostensibly supposed to compel you with a sense of urgency to find your son, but does nothing to convince you not to frolic around and do nothing of the sort.
Maybe it’s because I had such high hopes for it, but even though I’ve spent dozens of hours in Fallout 4, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of it, it still feels like a failure.
Halo 5: Guardians
I said just about everything I wanted to say about Halo 5 in my review. I did, however, want to touch on how my feelings have developed since then. In particular, the inclusion of purchasable card packs that give access to weapons has come to feel more and more insidious since release. Sure, you can earn them for free, but more often than not it feels like everyone else has spent hundreds of dollars on the system and are awash in tanks and rocket launchers while you’re lucky to get an ATV. It’s not just that I don’t like getting rolled over by players with power weapons, it’s that the scarcity of those weapons, even if I bought a dozen packs there’s only a random chance I might get a particular weapon, makes me engage in an uncomfortable decision metagame. I might be in the middle of a match with cards for a Scorpion tank and a shotgun, but my team is really far behind, is it sensible to use those cards if it’s unlikely to result in a win? It feels like the cards forces that kind of thinking, and that’s just not fun.
Massive Chalice
Massive Chalice was another game I didn’t see myself enjoying as much as I did. I hadn’t paid attention to its Kickstarter campaign much, so I was caught off guard. I’m not any good at strategy games usually, so this should have been a hard sell, but instead I got wrapped in by all the dressing and garnishes that’s put around that core turn-based gameplay. The lineage system of marrying and breeding royal houses was exactly the kind of thing I’d wanted after playing 2012’s XCOM. That extra story and personal connection with the units I used in battle made me that much more engaged with trying to play as best I could. I couldn’t afford to make sloppy tactical decisions if it might mean losing my most promising heir and losing much more in the strategical sense. At one point, I even spent more than half an hour writing in a notebook to catalog two house’s lineage to make sure I hadn’t accidentally interbred them. That’s a level of dedication very few games have ever inspired in me. Also, I did accidentally inbred them. Whoops.
No Comments