Gran Turismo Sport: This game is so amazingly awesome! Who would of thought something as simple as a Sportsmanship Rating would induce such terrifically clean racing? I guess Polyphony Digital. Easily the best online racing sim I’ve played. I love that you can get a good race in a public room instead of having to always coordinate private lobbies. That and all the terrific physics and visuals we have grown to know and love from GT.
Marvel vs Capcom Infinite: I really like this game. It’s complex and hard to learn, but it’s also super fun. All the air juggle combos are just a hoot. I know some folks dislike the visuals, but I kinda like the look of the game, eye of the beholder and all I suppose. I still think I prefer SF5, but that didn’t really have a release this year.
Injustice 2: Cool game that I want to like more to be honest. The presentation is slick, even if some of the art and design is kinda meh for the characters. Really though, actually creating a meaningful story and the endless single player content of the multiverse is the real win here. Cool idea, and I’d love to see it in a game I like the “feel” of more.
Destiny 2: Kinda a meh entry in Destiny for me. I’m not sure if it’s objectively worse or if the Destiny formula has just grown old for me, but this thing really didn’t grab me much. If I actually played more games this year I doubt it would make the list.
Guilty Gear Rev 2: Kinda a reach here since it’s really just a “super” version of Guilty Gear XRD, but damn is this a good fighting game. Single player is fun and the online lobby system is so cool. Lack of players and an incredibly intricate combat system definitely prevented me from playing this more, but I still love it.
Kinda weird list for me since I don’t think I’ve actually played any other games that released this year. It feels a bit hollow ranking your “top 5 games” when you only actually played 5 new games in the year. Truthfully SF5 has monopolized a lot of my time in 2017 and I suspect it will continue to do so in 2018 as well (Sakura!).
Nier Automata This game was surprising. During the first playthrough it kept surprising me. Then during the second when I thought it was the same game, but it really really wasn’t. Then during the third… I think what I found the most surprising was how much confused affection I felt towards all of the characters, never sure if it was safe to like any of them.
I found 2017 pretty uninspiring. Like @tomchick said in his front page article, that probably says more about me and what’s happening in my life than anything else. I played a couple games I appreciated this year, but only one game I liked enough to want to put on a best-of list. Maybe I just need to take a short break from video games to get that excitement back.
My two runner ups that I really liked but not quite enough to vote for were Nioh and Persona 5, both fantastic games that felt a bit too obvious for me to find them inspiring.
I haven’t been playing and enjoying Japanese games that much in the past 5 years (despite them being my foundation as a gamer). But I pretty much only enjoyed Japanese games this year! I think the kind of inventiveness and excitement I like most is happening in that scene more than with most other developers. But maybe I’m just not following the right developers anymore.
I haven’t yet played, but expect to love Rim World and What Remains of Edith Finch. Maybe those will be the ones to ignite that excitement again! Can’t wait to find out.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins. GOTY for me. This is a landmark achievement of a game fully realising a time and place. I can’t wait for the ‘tourist’ version of the game that lets you travel around with no combat whatsoever.
Total War: Warhammer II. Continues the winning formula from TW1 of monster mashup battles. The only thing keeping it from the top spot has been the poor implementation of the Mortal Empires campaign, and Tomb Kings being pushed to 2018.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Tom wrote a great review of this game - unfortunately he wrote it for A Hat In Time, not Wildlands. GR: W isn’t concerned about making things difficult for you - like making you backtrack to a base just to get a different gun, or limiting your ammo. The game just wants you to move on to the next set piece battle in a gorgeous open world and give you plenty of gun porn along the way.
The Operational Art of War IV. Feels a bit cheaty to put this in since the best thing about the game are the hundreds of scenarios made for TOAW3, but being able to play a battle set in every 20th century conflict, no matter how niche or obtuse, is amazing.
Pokemon Ultra Sun. I’ve never played a Pokemon game before and this honestly has just got me so hooked.
Cryptark: it’s the smartest, most thrilling strategy game of the year for me. And the nukes are really satisfying.
Through the Ages: I am too old to experience any “quarter-to-three” gaming anymore, but this game does it if I make the mistake of launching it from my phone in bed. Yes, it plays amazingly on a phone! What an amazing inteface design, for a really great game.
Low Magic Age: Early access be damned, those AD&D style battles fueling the single munchkin game mode now available are so smooth and addicting. But the truth is that the game is really about the character development: it is spreading the Icewind Dale or Neverwinter Nights character creation process over the whole game, properly paced with little battles to get a taste of your overpowering fantasies in between.
Race for the Galaxy: Jumped back into it for the past couple of weeks, and while it is an acquired taste, it is one that is starting to fill my mouth.
SHENZHEN SOLITAIRE: it is the mini-game extracted from Zachtronics’ SHENZHEN/IO, and is a wonderful twist on solitaire. With very simple rules, it requires a lot of gauging and thinking before even the first move, thanks to the awesome and punishing decision to suppress any undo function.
I would have loved to pull an @arrendek and put Rimworld in there, but truth be told, I spent more time watching Jason playing it than playing it myself.
#5 was so tough to pick, so many candidates here! Unexplored, Cold Waters, Dominions 5, Monster Slayers, Opus Magnum…
Same picks and text as the other thread. I almost swapped out NieR for Yakuza 0 or PUBG, which I’m finally starting to like a little more, but I’ll stick with my first impression.
Nioh - I really liked this on PS4, and I love it on PC. It has better resolution and it’s easier for me to jump into. I breezed through the content a second time and I made it to the loot endgame, which I never really explored on PS4 because I was burned out after 100 hours. The broad movesets match my preference for Soulslike games: I get to play an entire campaign with the familiarity of a single weapon, but there’s enough variety in the attacks that I don’t get bored. The grind and the relative lack of enemies do get on my nerves after a while, and the multiplayer is a little weak. I’d still call this a flawed all-time favorite, kind of like Bloodborne.
Bayonetta - It’s a classic, but I think I like this game the least out of the “big three” character action games (with Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden). I have no strong pull to come back to it, though I plan to give it another chance to build up hype for Bayonetta 3.
The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile - This is a fast 2D brawler with satisfying, immediate attacks. Some of the combos are seared into my brain’s pleasure centers. It’s kind of a 2D Ninja Gaiden, which helped drive my current enthusiasm for that series.
Aztez - I was a beta tester for about 18 months. I enjoyed watching the game improve over time. It’s a casual-friendly experience since it’s so easy to start up and smack some enemies. I’m pretty burned out now though, and the disastrous launch means there’s been no post-release support to suck me back in. That’s a shame.
NieR: Automata - This is a tough game to place. I was really impressed with the experience while I played it, but now I hardly remember anything about it. The flashy combat was too shallow, and the side quests felt like empty completionism. In the end I treated it a lot like The Witcher 3: I kept the difficulty low just to get through the story.
If nothing else, my list demonstrates the continued dominance of Japanese designers in catering to my specific tastes. :)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Without a doubt the best game of the year for me. A design tour-de-force of elegantly interlocking systems waiting to be manipulated. A constant stream of micro puzzles and a fresh-feeling take on a stagnant genre.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
I’ve played this more than I did Zelda and absolutely loved it the whole time, so I considered this for the top spot. But Zelda has this beautiful design elegance, whereas this is more ‘kitchen sink’. I loved discovering the game systems and slowly unlocking more and more complexity. And I actually started to care about how the plot resolves (rare for me).
Nioh
As a big fan of From Software and Diablo 3, this game mashed the two brilliantly. Superb combat systems, brutally satisfying fights, and showers of loot.
Elex
Janky, clunky, glorious! Piranha Bytes make the most underrated modern RPGs, likely due to B-grade production values. But I loved this; the inviting exploration had a sense of place, reward, and real danger. Most quests had twists and consequences. Great stuff.
Persona 5
Probably the most stylish UI ever made, with a pretty decent game strapped under it! I dig the mix of the life-sim style progression choices, and the Pokemon/SMT demon collection and fusion.
I played a lot of good games this year and picking the top five was tough. Especially the choice to leave Mario out. I don’t much get into platformers, but Odyssey sunk the hooks in like no other platformer has before. If there were ten allowed, here’s the other five I would have picked:
I’ve played hardly any new release this year. First because of the price problem: next year it will be 30-60% cheaper, so why buy now? Second is because my backlog is yuuuuuge, and I’ve played mostly from that. I just recently got through Fallout 4 and Witcher 3, that would be 2015. I would put Witcher 3 as best I’ve played this year, but it is an old release so…
Strictly 2017 releases:
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen - at this point I consider this comfort food. There are enough wrinkles to make this different from XCOM 1, but not enough to make me go all gaga. For XCOM 1 I must have clocked 700+ hours, graduating to an impossible run (but not ironman run because a CTD once ate my 50+ hours ironman save, and I can’t stand a second time.) The problem with XCOM 2 is that it isn’t all too different to XCOM 1.
WoTC added a strategic layer that I can’t imagine I can live without in vanilla XCOM 2, but it suffers the same problem as XCOM 1 with Enemies Within: the first few months are extremely tough. Once you ride it out and get to the next tier of weapon, it is smooth sailing. (Or you start a new game and reroll).
Mass Effect: Andromeda - what kind of lesson did they learn from DA:I or Witcher 3? I don’t know, because based on ME:A, they learned not much. Instead they give us a better version of ME1. And the allegorical potential is never realised, which is even more disappointing, because given all the LGBTI (and alien) romance options, asylum and migration issues stare the game right in the face and the game just sort of didn’t understand how to say anything meaningful connecting to the zeitgeist. It is like talking to someone attractive in a party and then realise all that person has to say is platitude. And the face is tired.
And that is literally the list of all 2017 releases I’ve played. A grand total of two.
Heh. All the games in my top 5 are Japanese games. I only got to play Japanese games recently though (5-6 years ago) because precious few made their way to the PC, but that changed a lot lately - and I got my first Nintendo console in 2014, which opened even more fantastic options for me. There’s so much to appreciate and discover in that universe - and so much that touches me on a deeper level, not only in games, but in movies and other works - that I feel like I should make up for all the lost time before. :)
Anyone, I love them Japanese games and I want more! That’s all. :)
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: A video game hasn’t made my heart pump and hand shake out of tension and exictement in quite a long time.
Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire: A ripping expansion pack that made me addicted to an mmo for a few weeks, which hasn’t happened since the good old early days of LOTRO.
RealPolitiks: It’s a modern day grand strategy game, and pretty much the only existent game that fits that description. it’s really not the best game but I think it’s quite the accomplishment that a game with this ambition isn’t terrible!
theHunter Call of the Wild: Still not sure how I feel about hunting games after playing this, but it’s the most beautiful depiction of nature in a videogame that I have ever seen. Git ur visual stunz here.
Age of Rivals. I enjoyed playing this, it’s an interesting concept for a card game that is well implemented.
I haven’t played much else released in 2017 that I enjoyed. I look forward to playing all of these other 2017 titles in a year or two when they go on a good sale!
Wolfenstein II: The New Colosuss - Goddamn. I mean, really. Goddamn! Machine Games has taken the Wolf franchise to places I never thought it would go. From a facile corridor shooter to the most politically relevant game of the year. Not only is the run and gun terrific, but the story gives you all the motivation to mow down countless Nazis (as if you needed more) and then adds a healthy dose of pathos. B.J., the goofy face at the bottom of the HUD for so long? That guy can be a fully-rounded and convincing character? Yup.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 So many open-ended choices and goofball dialogue choices that the mind boggles. The game falls off quite a bit towards the end, but the journey there is sublime.
Opus Magnum - This is the kind of puzzle game I like. The basic solutions to every puzzle are freeform and can be done with little trouble. It’s perfecting them by chasing your friends’ scores and trying to make the most aesthetically pleasing solutions possible that’s the real meat of the game.
Assassin’s Creed Origins - I know it’s another open world filled with Ubistuff, but now matched to an obtuse loot chase that makes very little sense in the context of the story, but I’m a sucker for these.
Injustice 2 - Here’s the opposite of the above. Somehow adding a pointless loot chase and a level grind to a wacky superhero fighter has pushed the game into something I actually want to play. Weird.
Super Mario Odyssey
This is the game where gaming really, finally, truly, clicked with my kids. I’ve had a blast watching them play and having them teach me the various tricks they’ve picked up. What’s most fun, perhaps, is that their child minds tend to find moons that I don’t and my grumpy old man mind tends to find ones that they don’t, meaning we’re always surprising each other when we play.
Stardew Valley
Made me realize that I would prefer to play most games on the Switch. I had dabbled with it before, but now I can kick back, relax, and play a bit without having to be at the computer.
Oxenfree
A fun surprise that I picked up after Tom’s positive review. I explored a lot of narrative-driven games this year and this was one of the best.
Lego City Undercover
While not a challenge, it was just a lot of fun to play. Great on the Switch, too.
Everything
Something about this weird philosophical roll through the extended universe was just a blast for my family and me. My daughters and I had many an hour of fun just turning into different animals, buildings, etc… and rolling around.
Horizon: Zero Dawn - One of those games that was open enough that it allowed me to imbue the world with some of my own stories. I had been “gaming” it, using the fast travel system to get around. Then a mission that took that ability away for a dramatic race across the map left me wanting to punch the robot dinosaurs in the nose. I became a kind of Terminator, marching back across the world killing every single robot I saw. It really pushed the gameplay for me, and got me pretty invested in the world.
Super Mario Odyssey - Supremely polished game, and the first Mario title I’ve ever beaten. My difficult college time swallowed up most of the NES and SNES years, so I missed the foundation a lot of Nintendo fans got. Later games kept pushing me away for one reason or another, mostly due to poor control choices (such as Wiimotes). This is the first Mario game I’ve really been able to see why they’re brilliant. All it wants to do is teach you how to play it, and there is always another skill or trick to master around the corner.
Destiny 2 - Decidedly superior to the original, which doesn’t explain why I played less of it. Probably because I didn’t get hooked up with a regular crew to run the more difficult missions this time around.
Picross S - Does it make me sound nutty to say that this was a system seller for me for the Switch? I love love love Picross games, although I sure don’t love the “Mega Picross” mode.
Typeshift - An iOS game that grabbed me good early in the year. Usually I couldn’t be bothered with iOS games, but this one caught me. Something like a cross between a jumble and a crossword. Clever and rewarding in tight chunks.
