Gosh, so difficult to choose which ones are the best...
Well, except for the AAA titles. Looking at the list of games I've finished this year, there's really only two contestants worthy of the top spot. BioShock Infinite and XCOM: Enemy Within. But, since EW is "just" an expansion, I guess my choice for the best AAA of the year is
BioShock Infinite.
But the choice for the best indie is a lot harder. There are just so many to choose from. Though these five titles are probably the best ones in my opinion: DuckTales Remastered, Shadowrun Returns, Rogue Legacy, Sword of the Stars: The Pit and Papers, Please. I think I'm gonna have to break 'em down...
The whole time I played DuckTales, I played it teary-eyed. It has an incredible nostalgia factor. However, it's only three hours long and doesn't have that much replay value, especially since the game is laid down like an episode for the TV show, with an tremendous amount of cutscenes.
Shadowrun Returns has an incredibly enticing setting. I really liked the detective story too. Complaints are that the game was pretty linear for an RPG, and there weren't many side quests.
Rogue Legacy is top notch action platforming. Always getting a little bit further with each offspring feels very rewarding. Although, I'm not sure how many New Game+'s I'd have the energy to complete before I'd get the feeling I've seen it all, so I happily left the game behind after finishing it twice, and while it still felt fun.
Sword of the Stars: The Pit was incredibly tense. The last 10 or so rooms, and especially the final two, really made my palms sweat. I loved the scavenging and item crafting. Also, it wouldn't have felt as rewarding if it wasn't as hard as it was. Although this also works against the game: sometimes your luck is so rotten, you won't even have a theoretical chance of success.
Papers, Please: never did I thought roleplaying a border patrol guy would be this much fun. You'd think examining the documents would get boring in less than 0.005 seconds, but it doesn't. The plot and subplots going on behind the scenes really make each day interesting. Never going to know what's going to happen. And some of the people trying to cross the border are really something else. The negative: not much replay value since the major events are always going to be the same.
Hmm...still very hard to choose. But I guess I can now narrow it down to two: Shadowrun Returns and SoTS: The Pit. And...since I've put so many more hours in to SoTS: The Pit, I guess I'm gonna have to go with that. Especially considering, that I've been trying to decide whether or not to get the DLC for five months...on the other hand, I really want them, but then again I'm not sure if my nerves can handle the stress of the latter stages. So, best indie:
SoTS: The Pit.
Then the worst. AAA...kinda hard to choose actually, because again, I didn't really play through that many AAA games this year. But I guess the worst I did play, were Dead Space 3 and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Dead Space 3 was just more of the same I had already seen on DS1 and DS2. I couldn't take the antagonist seriously because of his looks (it's an Elton John lookalike), and the QTEs were atrocious. I haven't yet finished The Bureau, but I can already tell it's really nothing special. I mean, it's not really
as bad as people say, but it's all-around flawed. It feels like it doesn't have soul, and there are small glitches and bugs everywhere. Therefor, the worst AAA of the year to me is probably
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
The worst indie: now there's a lot of competition. I'm not kidding. I'm not gonna toss all these names out and explain the reasons in detail, 'cause that would probably take an hour, so I'm just gonna go ahead and pick one I absolutely despised the most. That would probably be......
oh, Waking Mars was from 2012? I would've probably said that. But in that case, I'm gonna pick Anna: Extended Edition. The plain "Anna" is from 2012 as well, but the EE is made this year, so I'd say it counts. Everything was just horrible. Movement is clunky. Game is not scary. Game is confusing as hell. Puzzles don't make a lick of sense. Everything looks like shit. Objects can be easily missed, rendering the best, hell even the slightly better than shit endings unobtainable. And when I looked up what the best ending is: even that is shit. The only thing good about this game was the music. Which was nice, but didn't fit a horror game at all. So, the worst indie of
2013: Anna: Extended Edition.
Final words: Not sure if this topic was about naming only the games released in this year, or from the pool of games finished this year. There were many good (and rancid) games I didn't mention since I wasn't sure, but I think the best (and worst) games were named nevertheless. If you're interested, you can take a look of the games I've finished
here.
