Let's take a look back at some of my gaming highlights of 2011. They are in no particular order, save for the last one, which is my favourite.
DEAD SPACE 2
This was a fun game to play, a survival horror filled with blood, gore and bad guys lurking in every dark corner. Five years ago I was comparing third person shooters to Resident Evil 4, now I compare them to Dead Space 2. The controls are polished to perfection, resulting in a great third person shooter that allows for speed and mobility but doesn't stop you feeling threatened every time the enemies close in. While there are a few crappy platformer moments and the script, while not as weak as the original game, isn't all it could have been, there's no denying that this is the best third person shooter of recent years and it's going to take a great game to top it.
BULLETSTORM
It was never going to be a game to everyone's taste, and if you're a Fox News watching moron who loves to scream things like, “Won't someone think of the children!” you'll hate this. But looking past the crass language, immature humour and bloody cartoon violence, I see a game that is more clever than it first seems. While the game play is solid and makes the combination of shooting and melee attacks feel effortless, where I really enjoyed this was it's story. The friendship between Grey and Ishi is what holds the game together and even allows for some more tender – I hate to use the word, but – bromance moments, that legitimize all of your actions in this game. Of all the games I played this year, this is the one I want to see more of.
FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS
(Okay, I'm cheating, this game came out at the tail end of 2010, but I didn't play it until this year. My blog, my rules.)
I avoided this one when it first came out, mainly because I'd hear of all the issues with bugs, and I had already gone through all that with Fallout 3. Imagine my surprise them to find that this game was far more stable than I had been led to believe. Maybe giving the game a bit of time to let a few patches come out helped. But the reason I enjoyed this game so much was not just because it was more stable, but because I honestly think it's a far superior game to Fallout 3. It's shooting mechanics still feel old fashioned compared to first person shooters coming out at the same time, but being able to actually aim down the barrel is a welcomed inclusion. The stories are a lot more fun, with characters feeling more unique, stories being more interesting, and bad guys feeling more dangerous. The first time you meet Caesar's Legion, they have crucified a whole town load of people. Exploration is also a tremendous amount of fun. Fallout 3's landscape was quite dull to look at, and often I simply relied on a map marker to guide me to where I was going. In New Vegas, there are a lot of oddities in the landscape, so it's more a case of, “Is that a dinosaur in the distance?” and off I would go to check out said dinosaur. In a game with such a heavy emphasis on exploration, engaging your curiosity makes all the difference.
THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM
This was the game I wanted to play since before it was announced. I am a mere fifty hours into it, and there is still so much to see and do. This game feels epic from the moment you start playing, putting your head on a block to be executed then having said execution interrupted by a dragon attack. From there onwards it's exploration all the way. The reason it takes me so long to work my way through an Elder Scrolls game is because I always want to see what is over the next hill or up the next mountain.
The RPG elements of the game have had a major overhaul and instead of locking yourself into a specific way to play from the beginning, it allows you to experience the different types of combat and more naturally find your own balance. I've always been a sword wielding warrior in these types of games, but the magic is more user friendly and the ability to duel wield meant I was mostly running around with a sword in one hand and a fire spell in the other. Skyrim does suffer from some of the typical Bethesda problems found in previous Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, but (unless you're on a PS3) they rarely get in the way of enjoying everything this game has to offer.
This is my favourite game of 2011. It may not be the longest or the biggest, but it's the only game in recent memory that I played four times in a row. It's the only game that made me laugh and cry and made every moment fun, even when I was stuck on a puzzle. GLaDOS and Wheatley are two of the best written characters in any game I've played, and the voice actors bring the human element to them. The game is also effortlessly funny, a rarity in games. The story has many twists and turns in it and also manages to make the player feel a part of it all. The third character, Chell, is really just a blank slate to allow the player to insert themselves into the game, and it really works. When GlaDOS says “Oh, it's you,” she's not speaking to Chell, she's speaking to you, the player. It's smart, it's entertaining, and I loved every moment of it. It's always such a delight to experience a game that isn't another Call of Duty style FPS or another sandbox game. While I wouldn't want a Portal 3, because this one came to a very natural end, I would like to see Valve do another puzzle game, they clearly have a flare for it.
HONORARY MENTION:
RESIDENT EVIL 4 HD
The Idea of HD remakes of games has never sat well with me and you can thank George Lucas and his attempts to utterly ruin Star Wars for that. My attitude was: there are already several versions of this game available (GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Wii) why not just go play one of them? But I'll admit that this is a great deal. They've cleaned up the visuals and taken away that layer of fuzziness that is now painfully obvious on an HD screen. They've also added a new controller layout that is more like modern third person controls (L1 to aim, R1 to fire) which lets slipping back into the game easier, but haven't completely reworked them. It does feel a little clunky now compared to the brilliant controls on Dead Space 2, but it still plays really well, and holds up as a great gaming experience. I came away from this game thinking that this is what George Lucas should have done with Star Wars: clean it up, smooth out the wrinkles, but don't dick around with a classic.
And of course it wouldn’t be a list like this without mentioning some of the disappointments of the last year. Three of the four games, Homefront, Battlefield 3 and Infamous 2, I’ve already covered in greater detail, but I’ll summarise again quickly:
HOMEFRONT
AND
BATTLEFIELD 3
I'm grouping these two together because I have the same complaint for both of them. They are trying to be Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare without understanding what made that game so good. They have characters that are horribly two dimensional that I don't give a damn when they start dying. Compare that to the death of Jackson, a character who never speaks, and yet being with him in his final moments is heart breaking. The combat is boring and only ever hints at the potential for something better and more emotionally engaging. And worse than that, many of Battlefield 3's sequences are lifted straight out of Modern Warfare. Both of these games had the audacity to say they were going after Modern Warfare, and were going to overtake it in terms of innovation, popularity and gamers love. What a joke.
INFAMOUS 2
God forbid they should fix the problems of the first game. That seemed to be asking too much from these people. If they had, this would have been an outstanding game. But they didn't. What they gave us was a game that had enemies that attacked by the dozen with rocket launchers or super powers far superior to Cole. The story happens mostly behind the scenes, with Cole simply being brought in to do the fighting and the moral choices are so black and white they had no impact on me whatsoever.
BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY
I loved Arkham Asylum and really was hoping for a sequel but this is such a let down. It doesn't feel like they have really made any kind of changes, it feels like the same game in a different setting. They've expanded the sandbox structure to make the game feel bigger, but it's still the same fights with the same people standing around waiting for Batman to turn up and kick the crap out of them. It never really does anything with the sandbox element. There are various factions supporting the various super villains, but you never get any real sense of this outside of cut scenes. There are times when you come to the aid of political prisoners, but I swear to god, you are saving the same, identical person each time. How PlayStation 2. When I came to a boss battle with Mr Freeze, the first time the game demanded I put some effort into playing it, I realised I didn't care. I didn't care about the boss fight, I didn't care about the game. It felt like nothing but a boring, missed opportunity, words I hate being associated with Batman.
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