icemann on 24/12/2017 at 03:16

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Dark Cloud 1 & 2. Though that's returning a destroyed town back its former glory.

Malleus on 31/12/2017 at 16:56

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The games I played that were released this year were For Honor, which I consider a flawed masterpiece, and have been playing it since June almost every day. I also played The Surge and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, both of which were great. Speaking of DLCs, I played DXMD: A Criminal Past too, which was really good, and the Dark Souls 3 DLC, which was, well, pretty much like the main game, except with more annoying bosses and sillier weapons. :)

Of the older games, I finished the Tomb Raider franchise by wrapping up the last two games, which were well made, and I had fun with them, but I feel they don't have the mojo the classic ones had. I also played Salt&Sanctuary, Antichamber, DmC Devil May Cry and Oxenfree, all of which were great fun.

As for the games I missed, I actually plan to play Nioh and Prey some time in the future. We'll see about the rest :)

icemann on 1/1/2018 at 05:41

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Revised list, now that I've played another two of 2017's releases:

1. Zelda BOTW
2. Prey
3. Dead Cells - This game is fantastic. A little too hardcore, but it's still great.
4. Dishonored 2 - Death of The Outsider
5. Battle Chasers: Nightwar
6. Watch Dogs 2 DLCs
7. Inner Chains - This game is ok. It looks absolutely beautiful, but it's just average. Play once then never again.

Best Non 2017 game played this year:

Tex Murphy: Tesla Effect

2017 games on the todo list:

* Assassin's Creed - Origins
* Cuphead
* Friday The 13th: The Game
* Halcyon 6 - Backed this on Kickstarter but have yet to play it.
* Steamworld Dig 2 - I LOVED the first game. This should be great when I get around to playing it.

icemann on 1/1/2018 at 14:15

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No, I haven't played that yet.

Sulphur on 4/1/2018 at 05:38

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I haven't played too many 2017 games long enough to make a decent judgement on their quality, so I'll just skip to the best game of the year for me along with a few highlights. That game is:

Okam Nioh: Complete Edition - Right. Let's not fool ourselves, the real GotY is Okami every single year until we're all eaten by sentient alien fungi courtesy of Oumuamua, but for the purposes of being fair, I'll squint past it and point at another game heavily steeped in Japanese culture/mythology. There's no escaping it: Nioh's pretty darned good.

It's the Dark Souls of Ninja... Gaiden? Nah. Here's the thing, it might borrow stuff from DS, namely the Souls system of picking up your XP from the spot where you died, shrines/bonfires, the Ki (i.e., stamina) bar, and unlocking a few shortcuts in a level that show you how the architecture winds back on itself, but it's definitely not Dark Souls.

The biggest difference is the combat, which is fast and insanely slick. Besides specialising in weapons and their attendant unlockable combos (of which there are a metric shit ton), you have a choice of three stances from Low to High that can be switched on the fly during combat, and you'll need to do it to manage your damage output + stamina/ki. Speaking of ki, one of the most inspired touches is the Ki Pulse mechanic. Remember Gears of War's active reload? It's the same thing, but applied to your ki. Every time you swing a weapon, you can press RB to regain a bit of ki. But if you time it just right, pressing RB regains a whole wodge of ki, meaning you can keep battering an enemy down if you're able to manage your stances, your positioning, and your ki pulses together. It sounds complex, but it's almost intuitive in practice, and when it all comes together, Nioh sports some of the most compelling and addictive combat I have ever experienced in a game.

I haven't even mentioned the utility of ranged combat or the Ninjutsu/Oumyo magic, but you get the idea. The game gives you a swathe of things to explore in enemy encounter management alone -- and you'll need to explore them, because some of these enemies are dicks. There aren't a lot of enemy types, but the bigger demons can bust out moves that can insta-KO you if you're unprepared, and some of the bosses are just savage bastards. Rinse and repeat's part of the general gameplay cycle, but if you're a Souls alumnus, you're used to that already.

There's a bunch of other things that round it out, like the sheer quantity of loot drops that turns it into Diablo, the weapon/armor crafting and upgrading systems, Kodama/guardian spirits and so on, but all of that's icing on a delicious cake. A cake made of swords and shurikens and pink and purple Shiba Inus.

Not all of it is grand, though. The levels are nowhere near as intricate as DS1's, the optimisation is a bit neh, enemy variety peters out by the third/fourth area, and the story manages to be incredibly silly whenever it shows up. But honestly, those are minor roadblocks when you've got one of the finest combat systems ever put to a game.

The Best of the Rest:

Hob: Runic's swan-song is about a woodland boy-creature who loses his arm and is then sent by his robot father to save the land from a purple tree blight by solving puzzles and whapping enemies around forests and underground vistas. A bit Zelda, a bit its own thing, mysterious and solitary but presented with a colourful palette and gorgeously tactile animation. I sort of love it, even though it's a bit spare and light of touch compared to games like Hyper Light Drifter.

West of Loathing: Yup, the turn-based combat's too simple for its own good. Doesn't matter, though: I found a book that, upon reading, unlocked an option for Stupid Walking in the menu. I proceeded to laugh at the screen for the next minute when I saw what it did. Humour is subjective, so probably check out a gameplay video if you want to know whether it's going to just annoy instead of entertain you, but this game is so full of lovable daftness in everything from the item descriptions to the NPC dialogue, I've been playing it just because it feels so damn nice. And again, yes, the battling's not great, but you can be a snake oil merchant who uses a snake as a whip. That's a game that has its priorities straight.

Ruiner: essentially what you'd get if Hotline Miami and Akira had a baby in Chiba city circa the future of Neuromancer. It's not for everybody, and it's fairly repetitive, but the gameplay loop of murdering people to unlock abilities to murder more people is nicely judged, as is the mechanic of reallocating your points to any skill tree any time you want. The art is crimson and neon cyberpunk goodness, and the soundtrack is brilliant, so worth your time if you like slickly presented murderfests. It is quite a bit difficult, though, so only go in if you're prepared to die early and die often if you like dialling your difficulty level up to Hard.

What Remains of Edith Finch: an anthology of family stories presented with lovely art and narration. Its best trick is turning what could have been morbid into something tender and warm; instead of banishing the darkness from its tales, it uses the shadows to make its light shine brighter.

Bayonetta/Vanquish: yeah, you already know why these are great. Just play 'em if you like great games in the respective genres they fit into. Finally, a locked 60 FPS for both (I played Bayo's demo on the PS3 where it was just... ugh), which means these now play as smooth as butter. Hurray!

Honourable mentions: The Evil Within 2, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, Resident Evil 7, Prey, Night in the Woods, Pyre, Cuphead. I've played some of all of these, and even a lot of Wolf: TNC, but not enough to appraise all their merits properly. I can say that Wolf: TNC is pretty good, but it's got a bit of that sophomore slump syndrome even though it's technically Machine Games' third album. So far it's been gorgeous and exciting and boring and a bit down in the mouth and daft and ludicrous and violent, but as you can tell by that it's also fairly messy; also, I'm in the last act, so I feel justified in saying this: more open/complex levels, please!

And that's it. It's been a good year for gaming, and 2018's the year I'm looking forward to polishing off some of those landmark titles from my backlog. Hello, Breath of the Wild!