Yeah, this is a weird pick, given my usual gaming preferences. Thing is, multiple people whose opinions I generally respect listed this as their best game of 2014. Plus I haven’t played a straight shooter for a while now, so here we are. This one plays it so straight that it’s downright anachronistic, without even a multiplayer component. That’s unheard of in this day and age!
I was a big fan of both of the previous Shadowrun games so it’s no surprise that I backed their Kickstarter campaign for this. It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been two years since the first one. As its title makes clear, this one takes you to Hong Kong under the premise that you’re a native of Seattle who travels to the city-state in search of your adopted father.
Even my wife, non-gamer that she is, knows enough to remark, “Hey, this looks a lot like Portal!” It’s a puzzle game that takes obvious design cues from Portal and even overtly references it in a number of ways. There’s no portal gun in here and Elohim is no GLaDOS but this turned out to very worthy successor to what is one of the most famous puzzle games ever made, a state of affair that I still have some trouble wrapping my head around given that this was made by the same studio responsible for the thoroughly silly Serious Sam series.
Shadow of Mordor is now considered to be one of the best games of 2014 but it was dismissed by many at first because it looked like a generic action game crapping all over the Lord of the Rings IP. I ignored it myself because it looked like a poor clone of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. But after reading reports that it’s closer to WB’s own Batman games, which I’m a big fan of, plus it adds a significant new innovation to the genre, I bought the GOTY edition.
I pretty much only bought this game because I saw screenshots of it on a forum and was totally entranced. Later, I regretted this a bit when its Polish developers came out as being pro-GamerGate. This is a bit weird since it actually most resembles games like Gone Home and Dear Esther which gators love to deride as being not real games. But they don’t seem to have similar problems with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Note that I played the original version and not the Redux version because I didn’t realize that it was available as a separate download for free.
I’m actually a Kickstarter backer for this so the reason why I’m slow to play newly released games isn’t always because I’m a cheapskate who buys games only when they’re on sale. Of course, the good thing about this is that I only play them after they’d been more or less fully patched and Pillars of Eternity is a game that had more than its fair share of bugs when it first launched. It’s worth noting however that even now it still has more bugs than I’d expect though they are minor ones that don’t really affect gameplay such as error messages in the textbox and getting exploration XP over and over again at a specific location. The most annoying bug I had is how the dialog buttons disappear from the save game menu after you’ve been playing for a while.
This War of Mine earned some pretty impressive kudos when it came out. That’s no surprise given its premise of playing a group of civilians looking to survive a siege of their home city. Heck, the developers even partnered with a charity for children who are victims of war for authenticity. Looking at the screenshots, I also found the two-dimensional cutaways of buildings with lots of elements that you can interact with to be very appealing.