| Title | The most surprising games of 2015 |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | December 18, 2015 |
So if the most disappointing category is a list of games that should have been better, the most surprising category is the opposite. These are games that were better than they should have been..
Read the full articleExcellent list, both MGSV and Heroes of the Storm were great surprises to me in terms of how absorbing they were. I normally hate MOBAs, but Blizzard's managed to make them accessible and easily allow me to ignore jerks. MGSV was a revelation, because finally there was a MGS game that didn't bore me to tears after 2 hours. Plus, I appreciated the fact that it didn't really seem to want you to be a completionist like other games of its ilk - so much that I might actually replay it at some point, which I never do with open world games.
But the single most surprising games to me this year were a pair of Warhammer titles - Vermintide and Mordheim.
Both are a bit rough around the edges, but damn if I haven't been thrilled with Vermintide's fast, fun level design and upgrade mechanics and Mordheim's careful, deep-management personnel and tactics gameplay. Out of nowhere, Games Workshop licenses have become fun to play again.
You GUESS that SOME people liked Medieval? SOME people?!
I'm nerd offended by that statement.
And as you probably know, Creative Assembly's next Total War is a Warhammer Total War!
Heroes of the Storm is easily my most pleasant surprise of this year. There's been a lot of great games that sounded great on the way in this year, but I certainly wouldn't have expected to be this into HOTS. I typically hate competitive games and have found LoL and DOTA 2 both impenetrable and far too drawn out to be appealing even in bot matches. Something about the combination of Blizzard's mining a bunch of games I already love for characters, the drastically shorter matches, the variety of maps and objectives, and the trading of arcane item shopping builds for hero-specific talent trees has made something genuinely thrilling and yet not too crushing in defeat. I've spent most of my time facing off against bots that seem to put up just enough of a fight to be satisfying to defeat without actually making me lose very often, but my handful of forays into Quick Match haven't seemed too bad, at least with friends.
I haven't gotten into MGS V proper yet, but it's also moderately surprising me as an MGS game I want to play, not just watch over someone's shoulder. I haven't gotten into it because I've been playing and sometimes replaying most of the surprisingly varied scenarios contained in the Ground Zeroes prologue so as to get a few bonuses going in, but Ground Zeroes has been a very convincing argument that they've developed robust systems that are nonetheless reasonably accessible and sport controls that aren't nearly as bizarre and uncomfortable as the earlier entries. But then, this is the first one that I've been able to play with mouse and keyboard.
I've struggled to get into Total War to date, but man does that thing look droolworthy.
Of all the Tom Chick year-end lists for gaming, this one and the overlooked list are always my favorite. Prediction for tomorrow: rending of garments and gnashing of teeth....;)
Surprised Chaos Reborn isn't there.
As for Attila - is this the one where you actually have some flavour making you believe you're there and willingly go into long boring battles? Or is it like every previous Total War games? Judging by the screens they at least try to provide some atmosphere, Rome 2 schematic icons for everything made me feel I'm playing low-budget Paradox game till I got into battles. Then it felt I'm playing movie.
Tom, if you thought MOBAs sucked, why did you make us play so much Demigod back in the day?
Also, wish I saw what you saw in Starships. I knew Pirates!, Pirates! was a friend of mine, etc.
Ah, Demigod! It was a very different time back then...
As for Starships, I agree it would be better if it had dancing!
Chaos Reborn is great, isn't it? But given what Gollup has made in the past, and the game's long beta process, and how the original game played, I have to admit I was pretty much expecting something as great as we got. But, yeah, it deserves recognition. Easily among the best games this year.
If all the other Total Wars haven't worked for you, you probably won't get into Attila. But if you're a sometime fan of the series, you don't want to miss this one.
You know, Rome 1 has worked great for me. I loved it. But then I've noticed I don't play battles. Cause most of them are already decided. And when the time came for the really important ones where it made sense to intervine I barely knew what my units do. So it turned into a simple strategy game with great atmosphere and quick autoresolve.
Then I've played Paradox games and understood I really played those games all this time even if the game said it's from Total War series. And it's not like I hate tactical battles. Some of my best friends are tactical battles. It's just in TW they're immersion breaking (no way greatest battle of antiquity had just 4000 people) and incredibly sluggish and predictable. Is there anything I have to know apart from flanking people with my horsemen? At least thank you for fast forward and autoresolve functions, Total War. Nice to see you understand how boring you can be.
Oh, man, Demigod! I loved the announcer!
"ARMAGEDDON!"
Tom, could you elaborate a little more on what you liked about Starships? Or maybe direct me to a post you've already made about it. I did a quick search and couldn't find anything.
I mainly like that it's a simple tactical combat game in which a variety of systems on the strategic map feed into the tactical combat (cf. Bedlam's Skyshine, Invisible Inc, Massive Chalice, etc); it feels very tightly woven together and pared down. It forces difficult choices and you see those realized when you fight the little battles, with different kinds of weapons and clear above-board stats. The battles also do an interesting thing with space by contriving a cat-and-mouse among asteroids and planets. I also like that you can play a full game in an hour or so. It's great on the iPad. The scaling difficulty makes it challenging, despite the usual AI issues.
It feels like a Sid Meier project that came up through the prototyping process, unlike Civ V and Beyond Earth, which feel like the result of a bunch of stuff thrown at a wall to see what sticks. I get a sense of an actual design process behind Starships.
Have you tried it? If so, did it work for you? If not, you might want to look at some other reviews or browse the forum thread before you take my word for it. A lot of folks describe it as hollow, but I suspect that might be a matter of expectation management. Starships isn't a 4X, despite looking an awful lot like one on the main strategic screen.
Thanks for the reply. I have not played it, and most of the comments I read about it came down to people being upset that it was simple enough to play on a tablet, or that it wasn't enough like Civ,
