{"id":791,"date":"2015-01-10T12:50:01","date_gmt":"2015-01-10T17:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/?p=791"},"modified":"2015-01-10T12:50:01","modified_gmt":"2015-01-10T17:50:01","slug":"games-of-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/games-of-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Games of 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year I gave every game a rating on a 10 point scale, similarly to how many gaming sites do.\u00a0 But I tried an experiment: while most sites refuse to give games a rating lower than 7, resulting in most games bunching up between 7.0 and 8.5, I took 5\/10 as the rating for an average game and meted out higher scores sparingly.\u00a0 Here’s a more detailed description:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve started by treating an average game \u2013 that is, one that I enjoyed but didn\u2019t stand out in any way \u2013 as a 5 out of 10.\u00a0 Good games would be 6s.\u00a0 Very good would be 7s.\u00a0 9s would be rare and 10s would be reserved for only the greatest of experiences.\u00a0 Conversely, 4s would be games that were OK, 3s would be games I disliked, 2s would have major flaws, and 1s or zeroes would be virtually unplayable.\u00a0 Using this system, I came up with 6 games that seemed to fit in a list of \u201cbest of the year\u201d, and I describe those games below.\u00a0 After discussing those 6 games I\u2019ll post a list of all of the games I played in 2013 and how I would rate them.\u00a0 Assuming that I\u2019ve been honest, the average should come out pretty close to 5 (possibly a bit higher since I tend to play games I know I\u2019m more likely to enjoy).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The resulting average was 5.25, pretty close to my goal.\u00a0 I’ve rated all the games I played this year on a similar scale, though I’ve come out with a slightly higher 5.8 average.\u00a0 There were actually fewer good games this year, but I did a better job of steering clear of games I really disliked.\u00a0 This year there’s only one game below 5; last year I gave out two 1s.<\/p>\n

Last year I wrote more detailed reviews for every game I gave a 7 or higher.\u00a0 This year that’s only four games, so I’m expanding my criteria a bit this year and giving brief reviews to everything that got a 6 or higher.\u00a0 In general it was kind of a disappointing year for games, with nothing beyond the top two or three really standing out.\u00a0 But first, I’m going to start with a brief talk about a game that missed the cut.<\/p>\n

Dragon Age: Inquisition<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"dragon<\/p>\n

There are things about DA: I<\/em> that I really enjoyed.\u00a0 The characters are up to Bioware’s usual quality, the dialogue is generally very good, and some of the central story missions are great.\u00a0 But I think my primary feeling about the game was summed up by Patrick Klepek – I Wish Dragon Age Respected My Time<\/a>.\u00a0 Inquisition <\/em>is a massive, but largely empty game filled with diversions held only thinly together.\u00a0 It suffers from the trend that afflicts most big-budget games these days, which is that it’s trying too hard to please too many different people, and it feels aimless as a result.\u00a0 Also, from a technical standpoint the PS3 version is a bug-riddled mess.<\/p>\n

\n

7. Elegy for a Dead World<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"elegy\"<\/p>\n

Elegy For A Dead World <\/em>is probably what many people would call “not a game.”\u00a0 There isn’t really a set objective or ruleset.\u00a0 Instead, Elegy<\/em> provides a sort of communal story-telling experience.\u00a0 Here’s how it works: there are three worlds, each based on a poem by one British poet.\u00a0 You play as a solitary astronaut whose crew has died and who has crash-landed on one of these planets.\u00a0 You walk across the landscape, and at specific points prompts come up that ask you to write some text about the scene in front of you.\u00a0 At the end of your journey, you’ve got a complete story, which is uploaded to a central server.\u00a0 Then you can read the stories that other people who’ve taken the same journey have written.\u00a0 A really unique experience with some achingly gorgeous water-colour backgrounds.<\/p>\n

6. The Wolf Among Us<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"wolf\"<\/p>\n

The first episode of this five episode series was so promising that it’s pretty disappointing this isn’t higher up my list.\u00a0 What starts out as an intriguing murder mystery quickly spirals out into a much larger conspiracy-driven drama that seems to lack focus.\u00a0 The biggest issue I had with TWAU<\/em> was its shifting logic.\u00a0 For example, characters seem immortal most of the time, but in a very small number of specific instances they can die.\u00a0 It’s difficult to get emotionally involved in a story when you can’t know what the stakes are.\u00a0 Still, it is well put-together, and like Telltale’s other recent series, The Walking Dead<\/em>, it provides a platform on which players can make more nuanced and mature decisions than most games offer.<\/p>\n

5. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"mordor\"<\/p>\n

The image I chose to represent this game is a screenshot I took using Shadow of Mordor’s<\/em> incredible in-game screen-capping tool.\u00a0 I also took this one:<\/p>\n

\"mordor2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And this one:<\/p>\n

\"mordor3\"<\/a>And a whole lot more.\u00a0 Sometimes I even took a break from framing screenshots to kill orcs, which I guess is also something the game lets you do.<\/p>\n

4. The Walking Dead: Season 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"walking<\/p>\n

On the one hand, Season 2<\/em> felt like a big step back from Season 1<\/em>, which was perhaps inevitible after some of the key creative people who worked on the first season left to go start their own studio.\u00a0 The plot points in the second season of TWD<\/em> often felt more forced and predictable, and the retconning of the death of a character from the first season was awful.\u00a0 But, on the other hand, this is still a series that, as I said for The Wolf Among Us<\/em>, offers more complex and nuanced decisions than almost any other game on the market, and Clementine (an 11 year old girl and one of the few survivors of the first game) is one of the more intriguing lead characters in gaming at the moment.<\/p>\n

3. Bravely Default<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"bravely\"<\/p>\n

Oh Bravely Default<\/em>, how I wanted to love you.\u00a0 A game that’s a throwback to SNES-era RPGs, especially Final Fantasy 5<\/em>, this game could have been a new classic, and it wasn’t far off.\u00a0 The job system is a lot of fun, especially the way you learn new jobs by defeating bosses.\u00a0 That means that once you get past a boss fight, you get to use that characters abilities for yourself, which is very rewarding.\u00a0 The world design is great.\u00a0 There are also a lot of smart little touches, like the ability to turn off random battles.\u00a0 But there are things holding the game back, too.\u00a0 The story is not especially interesting, and story is usually one of the selling points of RPGs.\u00a0 And the fact that the game makes you replay huge sections multiple times<\/em> after a false ending really is unforgivable.<\/p>\n

2. Shadowrun: Dragonfall<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"shadowrun\"<\/p>\n

This may technically be considered an expansion to last year’s excellent Shadowrun Returns<\/em> rather than a new game as such, but it’s sold as a stand-alone title and it’s a longer game than SR<\/em>, so I’m counting it as a new title here. \u00a0Dragonfall<\/em> is a cyberpunk game about a crew of mercenaries who run espionage missions for corporate clients in order to earn enough money to uncover what happened to a former team-member who died under mysterious circumstances.\u00a0 The game uses a grid-based, turn-based RPG combat system, which endears me to it quite a bit.\u00a0 There are times where the combat drags on a bit too long, but on the whole this is a great game.<\/p>\n

1. The Banner Saga<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"banner\"<\/p>\n

The Banner Saga<\/em> was the first game I ever Kickstarted, as its gorgeous, Disney-style hand-drawn art drew me in, as did the promise of a mature story and tactical turn-based combat (are you sensing a theme?).\u00a0 The final result didn’t disappoint.\u00a0 The combat is great, challenging fun, and the story provides a lot of interesting decisions.\u00a0 The way the player is constantly asked to balance the needs of their military with the needs of their civilian followers is really emotionally engaging, and the decisions often felt heart-wrenching.<\/p>\n

Unlike games like Dragon Age<\/em> where the player is allowed to essentially control the destiny of a world, in The Banner Saga <\/em>you’re face with far more complex decisions.\u00a0 For example, do I take the longer route, cutting down on the amount of combat to keep my fighters fresh, but potentially running out of supplies to keep the civilians from starving?\u00a0 One thing The Banner Saga<\/em> does that most other RPGs refuse to do is allow you to make bad decisions; if the game hints that the people asking to join your caravan are bandits, they might really be bandits, and they might steal your food and run off with it.\u00a0 These much more nuanced and meaningful decisions make The Banner Saga<\/em> stand out for me, and help propel it to #1 on this list.<\/p>\n

\n

Full list of game ratings (within-score numbering is random):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/colgroup>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The Banner Saga<\/td>\n9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Shadowrun: Dragonfall<\/td>\n8<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The Walking Dead: Season 2<\/td>\n7<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Bravely Default<\/td>\n7<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Elegy For A Dead World<\/td>\n6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The Wolf Among us<\/td>\n6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Shadow of Mordor<\/td>\n6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Thief 4<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Dragon Age: Inquisition<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Little Big Planet 3<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Divinity: Original Sin<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Endless Legend<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Civilization: Beyond Earth<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hearthstone<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hack N Slash<\/td>\n3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n5.8<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year I gave every game a rating on a 10 point scale, similarly to how many gaming sites do.\u00a0 But I tried an experiment: while most sites refuse to give games a rating lower than 7, resulting in most games bunching up between 7.0 and 8.5, I took 5\/10 as the rating for an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}