Congratulations! If you are reading this, then you have (just about) survived 2016, which was a monumentally shitty year in almost every respect except for videogames. I remarked at the end of last year that I thought 2015 contained some games of exceptional quality, and yet 2016 makes it look like it wasn’t even trying; I’ve played so many good games this year that it’s actually difficult to think of any actual bad ones, and while that’s partially a result of the industry saturating the market with new titles (to the point where I suspect we may be headed for a mini-crash sometime in the near future as there’s only so much money to go around and the sheer volume of commercial failures could become unsustainable) it’s also a pleasing indicator that many previously-moribund development houses have rediscovered the internal spark that made their games fun in the first place. And there’s no better way to examine this phenomenon than through the usual medium of the Scientific Gamer Completely Made-Up Awards Ceremony 2016!

The Hentzau Self-Injury Award: Devil Daggers

It’s been a while since there was a decent contender in this category; the most recent I can remember was SpaceChem, which caused me to think so hard I gave myself a migraine. Devil Daggers at least causes a more traditionally known injury — where tennis players get Tennis Elbow, FPS players get FPS Left Index Finger RSI — but it does it over a hugely accelerated timeframe, since your panicked flight from a horde of demonic skulls and other beasties chasing you around the arena is so tense and unnerving that your hand will inevitably be clutching the mouse in a rictus claw grip the whole time you’re playing it. A typical game of Devil Daggers lasts maybe 2-3 minutes, but it’s an incredibly intense 2-3 minutes and you’ll find yourself playing game after game as you chase after your friends’ times on the high score table. In a way, Devil Daggers is the perfect indie game. It only has the one idea, but it’s a really good one and it doesn’t get sidetracked with any extraneous bullshit; 100% of the development effort has gone on exploring its one good idea, resulting in a more polished and focused experience than every single one of the AAA titles I’ve played this year.

Best Game That Caused Me To Do A 180 On The Franchise: Dishonored 2

Runner up: The Banner Saga 2

The Banner Saga 2 is possibly the best RPG I played this year and a huge improvement over the original in almost every single area, and yet it still finds itself outdone by a game which only really improved in one — level design — but which poured so much creativity and intelligence into it that I went through much of Dishonored 2 with my mouth gaping slightly open at what Arkane had managed to accomplish.  Each of its levels is a densely-packed warren of secrets, and unlike the first game an awful lot of care and attention has gone into contextualising them as actual conceivable places in a world rather than levels in a game. Thanks to this, and to its choice of two playable characters, Dishonored 2 passes the replayability test unusually well; I’ve been through some of its levels three or four times and I was still finding new things on each subsequent run, and one of them absolutely blew me away with how reactive it was to certain things that only a tiny fraction of players will ever do. With Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2 and DOOM, 2016 was unusually well-served in terms of excellent first-person games; all of them were different, all of them excelled in their respective niches, and all of them are well worth your time. If you had to pick just one, though, I would highly recommend making it Dishonored 2.

The Section 8: Prejudice Multiplayer Award: Titanfall 2

Another near-perfect sequel, Titanfall 2 took everything the original game did, cut in places, streamlined in others and added a single-player campaign that really had no right to be as good as it did. I don’t like waxing lyrical about it too much as I think it was merely Very Good rather than having the all-time classic quality that certain parts of the internet seem to think it does, but that’s still far better than I was expecting; the contrast between Titanfall 2’s campaign and the creatively-monotonous campaign in Infinite Warfare was proof that the talented parts of Infinity Ward really did all jump ship to Respawn, and that they’ve still got what it takes to make a really good shooter.

It’s the multiplayer I’m here to talk about, though, and Titanfall 2 is the most fun I have had in a multiplayer game in years. Maybe even the last half decade. Everything about it is so well thought-out, so finely-tuned, that you can’t help but have fun whether you’re sliding round a corner firing your SMG one-handed into the back of an enemy or goosing ejecting Pilots with your Titan’s laser weapon. It’s even fun when you’re losing, for crying out loud; this is multiplayer so a certain amount of toxicity is expected, but I’ve found myself resenting surprisingly few losses in Titanfall. Partly this is because individual matches are not long enough for you to get overly invested in winning or losing; mostly, though, it’s because it’s extremely difficult to have a truly negative experience when you’re thundering along in a Titan wasting enemy players and AI mooks alike. That’s why I’ve sunk thirty hours into the multiplayer so far, and it’s where something like Overwatch really fell down: I’m practically guaranteed to have fun when I play a round of Titanfall 2, and there’s not very many multiplayer games I can say that about these days.

Most Incomplete Game: Stellaris

Runners up: Civilization VI, No Man’s Sky

It’s a little sad that I can make up an award for this, but that’s the unfortunate state of videogaming these days: it’s viewed as entirely acceptable to skip the polishing phase these days and push out a product that’s only 80-90% complete, and while the missing 10% might not sound like all that much it’s usually the effort that would have been spent on the most important player-facing bits of the game like the UI. No Man’s Sky was obviously released way too early, but it has far deeper problems than a lack of polish or balancing and even if Hello Games had had theoretically infinite time and resources to finish it I believe No Man’s Sky would still be a bad game thanks to its almost intentional ignorance of the collected history of PCG in games up until this point. Civilization VI similarly was missing a good 3-6 months of additional development with pivotal aspects of the game such as the UI and the AI being barely functional on release, but it was still possible to have fun with Civ VI in spite of this; it at least delivered the core of a working game.

Stellaris, though, is a game that was over-ambitious, over-hyped, released about six months earlier than I thought it would given typical development cycles, and which failed to include something rather more fundamental to a 4X: a mid- and endgame that was actually worth a damn. Once you had explored the galaxy there was almost nothing to do besides make war with your neighbours, and since the warfighting system was absolutely atrocious that was an absolutely huge problem for Stellaris. In the event it appears that my six month estimate may have been generous, as they’ve had seven months of additional development  and I’ve not heard any encouraging  evidence that Stellaris is worth playing yet. I plan to revisit it sometime in the new year to see if Paradox have succeeded in bolting a viable endgame onto it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Best Worst Game: No Man’s Sky

Runners up: Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Ah, now this where No Man’s Sky excels. It’s not like there isn’t a huge amount of talent that’s gone into it, but quite aside from its significant issues on release I believe that No Man’s Sky is the most misguided game I’ve played this year. The developers simply didn’t grasp the strengths and weaknesses of what they were trying to make, and consequently fell into almost every single one of the blindingly obvious traps awaiting PCG-driven games. It’s built around a PCG algorithm that produces planets that are seemingly identical, with their similarities disguised only by their surface textures; there is no point exploring in this game that’s supposedly about exploration, because once you’ve landed on one planet you’ve effectively landed on them all. It has crafting, because open world games are supposed to have crafting, but it’s a painfully shallow affair; ditto for the combat. But this would all make it merely bad; the reason No Man’s Sky attains “Worst Game” status this year is because it does have a hint of promise lurking within it if you play it as an interstellar version of Pokemon Snap, jetting about the universe to get pretty screenshots of places and lifeforms. Unfortunately Hello Games were so hell-bent on aping other open world games that they spent almost no time exploring the potential of exploring. I don’t think it warrants the shocking amount of vitriol that’s been directed towards the developers in the months since, but the disproportionate backlash from Angry Internet Men doesn’t change the fact that No Man’s Sky is a game that didn’t understand how to be a game, and is consequently the most abject failure of 2016 by some considerable way.

Best Film Of The Year: None

I’ve maintained my cinema-going habits this year, but the results were substantially more disappointing than 2015. There was no Mad Max or The Martian released in 2016 just a series of increasingly identikit blockbusters that, while I couldn’t call them bad (except for the new Independence Day), weren’t exactly good either and which were almost instantly forgotten the moment I walked out of the cinema. Rogue One was good, but I almost feel it wins by default rather than because it is a particularly good film in and of itself, and I’m not sure it’ll stand up to repeat viewing in the way that Mad Max and The Martian did — and which The Force Awakens did not. So no dice this year, Hollywood. You’ll have to step up your game in 2017.

(And no, I haven’t gotten around to seeing The Arrival yet, which is a shame because it sounds like the one film that could legitimately go here.)

Best Soundtrack: Nuclear Throne

Runner up: Brigador

Considering the unusually high quality of many of the games that were released this year it’s curious that nearly all of them were paired with rather unmemorable soundtracks. Some of them had great individual tracks, as with XCOM 2’s Squad Loadout theme, but when considered as a complete body of work there were only two games that serenaded me with great music the whole way through. One was Brigador, whose retro synth stylings were a perfect accompaniment to its neon-drenched arcade shoot ‘em up gameplay. However I’d not heard anything quite like the strummy guitar/harmonica soundtrack to Nuclear Throne before; it lays its cards out on the table the moment you hear that incredible main menu music and continues exploring the idea from there. I’ve been fond of acoustic guitar tracks in  videogames ever since the Tristram theme from Diablo, and Nuclear Throne is basically an entire game of that, so it takes the prize this year.

Best Game Of The Year: Total War: Warhammer

Runners up: Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2, DOOM, The Banner Saga 2

(In any other year XCOM 2 would have been on that list, and the only reason Hitman isn’t on it is because I haven’t yet gotten around to playing episodes 3 through 6 and so can’t comment on it as a complete game.

I must admit I’m a little bit shocked to be writing this. I love bashing the Creative Assembly on here; up until this point they’ve always looked to me like a talented developer that nevertheless keeps falling down in terms of their general approach to development, resulting in games of unpredictable quality. For every Shogun 2 there is a Rome 2; for every Empire a Napoleon; and even their successes bear the unfortunate hallmarks of a development process that seems to value wide, sweeping, and unrealistic scopes over the tight focus required to make a really good game. It’s no coincidence that their best Total War games have been the ones whose scope has been limited by either the time period or by geography, and it’s also not a coincidence that their worst ones have been brought down by too much bloat diluting their development efforts.

Total War: Warhammer changes all of that. Total War: Warhammer appears to be the end result of the Creative Assembly finally putting somebody in charge who knew how to correctly scope out a development plan that was achievable with the resources on hand, and then successfully executing on that plan. That, or they’ve been reading this blog, since Warhammer does what I’ve been saying they should do for years: trade breadth for depth. What’s the point in having thirteen different playable factions if three of them are just the the same barbarian horsemen in differently-coloured trousers, after all? Warhammer cut the number of playable factions down to just four (that were available on launch), but it compensated the player for this apparent reduction in scope by making each faction genuinely different to play. Obviously it was helped in this regard by Warhammer being the first non-historical Total War game and the Creative Assembly’s collective imagination suddenly being let off the leash; it must be so refreshing to work on something like this after a decade of doing the line infantry of Napoleon or the legionaries of Rome, and that enthusiasm really shows through in the design, the art and the animation. So the cavalry in Warhammer aren’t the umpteenth identical set of medieval knights or barbarian horsemen; no, the cavalry in Warhammer are giant green orcs riding boars, or undead knights riding skeleton steeds, or… well, okay, there are some medieval knights in here, but they’re fantasy medieval knights and the two factions that field them are still very different. This cavalry rubs shoulders with hordes of trolls, chaos spawn, giants, dragons and other monstrous creatures, and even the basic foot troops are just as likely to be a shamble of zombies or a disciplined, unbreakable line of dwarves as they are a group of Empire swordsmen.

Add to this the rich lore of the Warhammer world and a map that has landmarks from that world prominently displayed on its surface — resulting in somewhere like Karaz-a-Karak properly feeling like the dwarf capital city when you can see the giant dwarf statues that are carved into the face of the mountain above it — and you’ve got a game bursting at the seams with character and factions that are so different the replayability of Warhammer is dramatically enhanced. I’ve spent a significant chunk of time as each of the four original factions now, totalling over seventy hours. I actually went back to play Total Warhammer twice this year instead of playing other, newer games, simply because it was that much fun to try new races and new strategies. Also because the Creative Assembly are supporting it with a meaty program of DLC that’s adding in whole new playable races to the game — Beastmen and Wood Elves have been added so far, with the Bretonnians scheduled to be released in February — as well as new sub-factions with more interesting goals and starting locations than their parent races. That’s one of the most interesting things about this Total War: instead of trying to do all of the races of the Warhammer world at once and spreading themselves too thing, they’ve instead focused on just doing the original four properly while leaving themselves enough hooks to add in other races later via DLC or even full-on expandalones¹. The extra time they’ve spent on the core factions has ensured they’re good enough to provide a suitably full-fat experience, which in turn means I don’t feel short-changed that additional factions are going to be added via DLC: if each of them has the same effort put into their individuality as the Dwarves or the Orcs then I know that DLC will be well worth the money, and it lets the Creative Assembly slowly build their game up in a way that does it justice.

With so many other excellent games having been released this year I genuinely was very surprised to find a Total War game topping the list when putting together this post, as I hadn’t quite been immediately blown away by it in the same way that I was with DOOM or Dishonored 2. Total Warhammer is much more of a thoughtful, slow burning game whose true potential has only become clear after many months of playing it. It’s earned its place, and not just because it’s the result of the CA finally pulling their act together: in terms of playtime, replayability, character, imagination and sheer fun, Total War: Warhammer is my Game Of The Year.

The post End Of Year Retrospective 2016 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Only one review in the last month? I feel like I’m slipping from my usual regular ouput, but with my Christmas break fast approaching I should accept the writing is on the wall and I’m not going to invest enough hours into any game to sneak a final review in under the wire. This is a shame since I was hoping to at least get some time in on Elite Dangerous before wrapping up for the year, but as I’ll shortly be spending a week in a place where only integrated graphics chips can follow me it seems like a better idea to attack that in the new year when I can get properly invested in it.

It’s not all bad news, though — the end of the year brings with it the annual Scientific Gamer Completely Made Up Awards Ceremony! Secretly this is actually a fairly worthwhile exercise since my opinions tend to mellow somewhat over time and it’s useful to take a second look at some games with the benefit of six months’ reflection, but mostly it’s a convenient excuse for me to look back on the year just gone so that I can regurgitate some of said opinions at you. So without further ado, let’s get stuck into the Best (and not-so-Best) games of 2014.

Best Slowly-Sapping-My-Life-Away Game: Hearthstone

Hearthstone is a game that’s had a lot of criticism levelled at it. It’s too simple. It’s too opaque. It’s too random. There’s no skill involved. There’s so much skill involved that it creates a high barrier to entry. That it draws such contradictory statements from across the gaming spectrum is, I think, a sign that Blizzard have pitched their Warcraft-derived deck-builder just right. My involvement with most other games have been temporary dalliances at best. Even Spelunky, superb as it was, flamed out around May, while I finally quit Dota back in August. Hearthstone, though, remains firmly embedded into my playing habits, and it’s a rare day when I don’t play at least one match. It’s cheerful, it’s genuinely free, and it dispenses a finely-tuned adversarial multiplayer experience in ten to fifteen minute chunks. Every time it seems like it might get stale Blizzard release new expansions to revitalise the metagame, which is why I’ve been able to play nearly two thousand games of Hearthstone without getting bored. It’s the epitome of free-to-play done right.

Best Kickstarter Game: Planetary Annihilation & Divinity: Original Sin

It’s been two years since the great Kickstarter rush of 2012, and since this is the average gestation time of a PC game this category has slightly more competition than it did last year. To my substantial surprise, very few of the Kickstarted games I played this year were out-and-out terrible. They were all flawed in some way or another, but with the possible exception of Shadowgate I enjoyed each of them for what they were, and nearly all of them delivered on their initial pitch. There are two that stand out above the rest, though: Planetary Annihilation was a great RTS marred by a bizarre online-only requirement, while Divinity Original Sin was one of the most engrossing RPGs I’ve played in years even if its cliff-like difficulty curve did eventually cause me to quit the game in rage. Both of these issues look like they’ve since been fixed; Planetary Annihilation can now be played offline, while Larian have spent time overhauling the latter half of Divinity to bring it up to the high standard of the game’s opening area. I had great fun with them both, and since this is a bunch of made-up awards I feel perfectly comfortable declaring them joint winners. I’m looking forward to revisiting each of them when I have time.

(An honorable mention goes to Xenonauts here — it was solid rather than spectacular, but I’m frankly amazed that they finally finished it after an arduous five-year development process that was almost totally transparent. It was fascinating to watch, even if the final product wasn’t everything I’d hoped.)

Best Wargame: Wargame Red Dragon

Wargame reviews are becoming something of a yearly fixture on this blog. Eugen had my buy-in from the very first iteration of the series; this most recent version isn’t the step-change in graphics and gameplay represented by Airland Battle, but it’s still one of the most devastatingly complete strategy experiences you’ll have this year. Red Dragon introduced some great single-player campaigns complete with persistent unit attrition that meant you had to carefully husband your forces from battle to battle, and some downright apocalyptic co-op skirmishes against the AI prove that it’s still got that multiplayer juice. I was a little down on it in my review thanks to the ships not having the global impact that fighter aircraft did, but with the constant improvements Eugen is making to the series, and given how spectacularly Rome II failed when it was released in September last year, I’m ready to say Wargame has supplanted Total War as my PC strategy game of choice. Certainly I’m baffled as to why it doesn’t get more attention from the PC gaming press¹, because it’s absolutely superb.

Best Unexpectedly Not-Terrible Game: Wolfenstein

(Runner-Up: Dragon Age Inquisition)

If you asked me at the start of last year which game would be least likely to show up on this list, it would be this one. Wolfenstein not being an awful formulaic cash-in on its famous name was surprising enough; I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be the best FPS I played in 2014. Sure, Titanfall aside that’s partly a function of the competition being the usual dull military claptrap, but that sounds too much like damning Wolfenstein with faint praise. It’s a good game that stands on its own merits, and a surprisingly thoughtful throwback to an era when FPS protagonists could carry around ten weapons at once and find uses for all of them. Shadow Warrior tried the same thing and mostly succeeded, but at the cost of also bringing back some older FPS elements that should have remained firmly rooted in the past. (Like that sodding poison gas level.) This makes Wolfenstein all the more impressive; it wasn’t a sure bet that they’d pull it off as well as they did, and so while it wasn’t exactly an all-time classic it still beat the odds to become an extremely competent game that’s also making it onto a lot of other people’s Best Of lists this year.

Best New Mechanic: Shadow of Mordor

Titanfall drew my attention early on with its flawless free-running and crowded battlefields full of AI bots for you to crush beneath your metal feet, but Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System has the potential to be downright revolutionary if other developers have the courage to pick it up and run with it. Imagine an Assassin’s Creed where your targets are dynamically assigned based on your actions, or a superhero game where your arch-nemesis starts out as a simple street thug and slowly increases in power over the course of many battles; Shadow of Mordor proved that this idea can work, and work well. It worked so well, in fact, that –excellent combat system aside — SoM didn’t even suffer that much from being rather sickly in terms of other content.

Best Soundtrack: Warlords of Draenor

I know. I was surprised too. Blizzard have some very talented composers on staff who ensured World of Warcraft had some classic themes used to good effect, but it peaked (quite literally) with Wrath of the Lich King; the music in Cataclysm was a disjointed mess, while Pandaria’s was like somebody had tried to create the most low-effort, generic oriental themes possible² and stuff them into an expansion pack that was just terrible all round, really. They’ve come to their collective senses with Warlords, however, which is probably the most coherent soundtrack of any Blizzard game since the Burning Crusade³.  It sums up the brutality of the Iron Horde’s war machine perfectly, as well as finding time for some amazing zone music. And if you liked the Stormwind theme from vanilla WoW, oh boy does Warlords have you covered with its Alliance garrison music. It also has the best main theme since vanilla WoW. Warlords of Draenor has temporarily revitalised WoW, and it’s at least partly down to the soundtrack making Draenor  itself an outright pleasure to explore.

Best Game Where You Run Down A Church Steeple And Use Missiles Being Fired At You As Stepping Stones So That You Can Totally Cut That Giant Robot In Half With Your Nano-Katana: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

And let me just emphasise that this is how the game opens. The ending is far sillier and one of the most perfectly pitched pieces of comedy I’ve seen in gaming for a long time. Metal Gear Rising is a fantastic parody that knows exactly what it’s doing, and even if you take it at face value it’s still a great action game. Everything about it fits together well, from the soundtrack to the gore to the lengthy philosophical debates with your arch-enemy while beating the crap out of each other on top of yet another giant robot. This is a Metal Gear game I can really get behind.

Best Games That Were Exactly As Good As I Thought They’d Be: Legend of Grimrock 2 & Age of Wonders 3

Best Worst Game of 2014:

A difficult one this time. Thanks to life getting in the way I’ve played less games than I usually would have this year so I have a smaller sample size to choose from, but even from those thirty it’s hard to think of one that out-and-out enraged me like Swords and Sworcery or SimCity did. Legendary Heroes was incredibly dull, but I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be exciting. Ditto for Thief; it was hard to be annoyed at how bad that game was when I could see the warning signs from several thousand miles away. Space Hulk is probably the game that irritated me the most in terms of totally and utterly missing the point of both the boardgame and the previous Space Hulk video game adaptations, but it wasn’t anywhere near bad enough to get this award, which is reserved for games that are outright technical or mechanical failures (or preferably both). Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age, but this year the Best Worst Game award goes unclaimed. Well done, gaming industry. You didn’t piss me off too much.

Most Disappointing Game of 2014: Civilization: Beyond Earth

Now this is an award that has a lot of competition, since this year there were plenty of games that simply weren’t as good as they should have been. The Banner Saga didn’t live up to the promise of its fantastic art, while Transistor ended up being a less-sophisticated and less-interesting retread of Bastion rather than forging out into new territory as it should have. No game disappointed me more than Beyond Earth, however; Firaxis are one of my top three favourite developers, but my opinion of them took a big dent after they released this paper-thin, poorly-balanced mess of a game. It’s particularly galling because Beyond Earth has a lot of good ideas that simply weren’t given the time or polish they needed to truly shine. The tech web, the affinities, the aliens – all of these were potentially great mechanics that deserved a much better game, only to be wasted on this one. Beyond Earth pulled the usual 4X thing of surfacing practically none of its fiction, instead preferring to bury it all behind the scenes in the Civilopedia, but what it failed to understand was that despite having the Civilization name this wasn’t Civilization. We intuitively understand irrigation and chemistry and tanks and can accept those at face value, but we don’t understand biowells and floatstones and the Promethean and we need these explained to us. Strong fiction goes a long way towards papering over the gaps in a game — god knows Alpha Centauri isn’t perfect, and is fondly remembered because it did exactly this. Beyond Earth has forgotten this lesson, however, and in presenting its vision of the future to the player bereft of any context it reduced everything to a pure numbers game. And that’s something it really isn’t very good at. Beyond Earth could have been something special, but instead it came across as something Firaxis made just because they didn’t have any real Civilization games to release this year. If it was a real Civilization title we’d at least have the consolation that it would eventually be patched into something worthwhile, but I suspect this bastard offspring of the series will be swiftly disowned by its creators. That one of my favourite developers has slipped up so badly on a game that had no real reason to be as bad as it was makes this something of a double whammy in the “crushing disappointment” stakes, ensuring Beyond Earth easily takes the prize.

The post 2014 End Of Year Retrospective appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Time for the Scientific Gamer Totally Made Up Awards Ceremony 2013! If this were a real awards ceremony it’d be an entirely self-serving affair where a captive games journalism machine showers pointless awards on whichever publisher had the largest marketing budget to pay for them this year, but happily I’m entirely free of corporate sponsorship (seriously, I’m disappointed in you guys) and so I can do whatever the hell I like. As a result these awards may be a little unusual and totally biased in favour of my opinion, and if you don’t like them you can go start your own blog. Or argue in the comments. Either’s good.

Best Expansion Pack: Brave New World.

That I like the concept of the expansion pack is a matter of public record, and 2013 saw a brief resurgence of the format with the release of Heart of the Swarm, Brave New World and Enemy Within. That being said this is possibly an odd choice considering that I didn’t actually like Brave New World all that much, but I can’t deny that it was very well-designed and added much that was worthwhile to Civilization V. Anyway, the other two fell some way short of what I hoped they would accomplish, with Enemy Within being just kind of good and Heart of the Swarm actually being… not bad, as such, but so boring that it made the previously-dull background extra Matt Horner seem like an interesting and well-written character. With that in mind Brave New World wins by default, but I’m not going to fault the other two for trying.

Best Soundtrack: Sang-Froid.

I let Sunday Soundtracks slide since getting the job, but this doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to the audio side of things and this year had a lot of games with outstanding soundtracks. Payday 2 backed up the excellent acoustics of its gun battles with a thumping techno soundtrack, while Desktop Dungeons supplied a surprisingly meaty aural accompaniment to its fiendish puzzling. For my money, though, nothing quite approached the thematic period music that came with Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves. This was somewhat unexpected considering the dirt-cheap production values of the rest of the game, but I can’t deny that it’s absolutely bloody brilliant: unusual, catchy, and appropriately boisterous for slaying creatures of the night. I’d like more games to do slightly off-kilter soundtracks like this one, please.

Best Implementation Of Aircraft In An RTS: AirLand Battle.

Aeroplanes are something that the RTS genre has traditionally had a bit of trouble with: how do you balance a unit that can go anywhere and attack anything? Most RTSes dodge the problem by ignoring air units completely, and when they’re included their implementation has varied from sensible (Red Alert) to baffling (Dawn of War: Soulstorm), but I haven’t seen a game that’s nailed air warfare anywhere near as well as the jet fighters in AirLand Battle.  They move well, look good and sound stunning, especially if you zoom down to ground level where an incoming airstrike is like being hit by the fist of God.  Given that this is historically something that’s been very difficult to get right – and continues to be; something that caused me actual physical pain earlier this year was the flight animation of the aircraft in this Shipbreakers trailer – I thought it was worth mentioning, especially since AirLand Battle itself is rather excellent despite being the niche-iest of niche games.

Best Kickstarter Game That I Backed That Was Actually Released: Shadowrun Returns.

Otherwise known as the only Kickstarter game I backed in 2012 that was actually released this year. (Broken Sword 5 doesn’t count because they’ve split it into two parts.) Fair play to Harebrained Studios: they made their pitch, brought in far more money than they thought they would, issued a revised release date, and then proceeded to miss this release date by only a couple of months. They at least know how to do the process of game development right, and the resulting game – while not without some significant flaws – was for the most part a very respectable RPG that scratched a certain cyberpunk itch, and should be the poster child for Kickstarter success stories.  Unfortunately it’s the exception to the rule, with several of the other projects appearing to languish in development hell after achieving their short-term goal of a Steam Early Access release. Maybe I’ll have a bit more to include in this category next year, but I’m not holding my breath.

Best Swamp Level: Metro Last Light.

Swamp levels are one of my pet hates in videogames. I’ve never understood them: these are virtual worlds and developers can build practically any sort of level they can imagine, and yet they persist in making me endure dreary, dank, and depressing swamp levels, which invariably bear all the hallmarks of being filler content that the player has to slog through before they can get to the good stuff. They are visually uninteresting and mechanically dull — or at least they were, until Last Light surprised me by actually doing some fairly imaginative things with the setting, obscuring the player’s view and surrounding them with murky, treacherous water and the unsettling sound of something out there stalking them. It’s all the more damning for the rest, I suppose, since Last Light proved it is possible to have a good swamp level. It’s just that the vast majority of games just can’t be bothered, and I still stand by my opinion that if your game has a swamp level in it then you automatically lose any respect I might have had for it because it proves you just ran out of ideas.

Best Attempt By Blizzard To Take All Of My Money, Again: Hearthstone.

Ah, but we should talk more about this one in the new year when it will (hopefully) be in open beta and everyone can try it. Suffice to say that I’ve already spent money on it despite being not all that sure that I actually like it – and I’m usually quite resistant to the siren call of the microtransaction. As a method for extracting cash from people with a big pair of pliers Blizzard have hit upon another surefire winner here. As a game, though, I’m not quite so sure.

Most Broken Game: Rome 2.

I really wish things hadn’t turned out like this, but as it stands this is the award with the fiercest competition. Three high-profile games came out this year that, on release, turned out to be so completely and utterly broken and buggy that they were all but unplayable.

SimCity suffered server overload after the baffling decision to make it online-only; it was only several months later that things had calmed down enough for basic game features like Cheetah speed to be turned back on. Meanwhile players had to contend with awful agent pathfinding that always took the shortest possible route to a destination, resulting in absurdities like 21 buses jammed in gridlock as they all tried to pick up a single sim from the same bus stop. However, even if SimCity had been released in perfect working condition I’m not convinced that it would have been any good as a game; the bugs and server issues merely compounded the core problem of it being terrible. This is why SimCity, broken as it is, misses out on this particular award.

Over a month post-release and Battlefield 4 still isn’t working properly. The stress of releasing for five different platforms simultaneously seems to be getting to DICE, as they recently proclaimed that they’d stopped all other work to focus on Battlefield’s constant connection errors and crashes. If this is what they’ve actually done then it’ll probably make things worse, as there’s a point in game development where you hit Too Many Cooks and you can’t fix software issues like this by throwing more people at them. I think that at this point, however, it really doesn’t matter; the damage has been done and – anecdotally – very few people I know are even playing it any more. It’s just not worth the hassle. Perhaps next time EA and DICE have the gall to charge a yearly subscription for a Premium service they’ll actually make sure that service works out of the box. I’ll believe that when somebody lowers a thermometer into the underworld and tells me that hell has in fact frozen over, though.

Despite the stiff competition, however, no game I played this year was quite as disappointingly broken as Rome 2. There were two particularly infuriating things about it. First, a large proportion of the bugs and design issues to be found in the game were mistakes that had been repeated from previous Total War games, with the imbecilic battlefield AI in particular being rather reminiscent of my experience with Empire. Game development is usually an iterative process, but you can’t iterate when you apparently have the institutional memory span of a goldfish. Second, though – and far more annoying– is that underneath all the AI bugs and UI issues and incomplete features, somewhere underneath all of that is a good game. Rome 2 is hardly bereft of good ideas. There was a lot of stuff in it that I quite liked in principle, such as the tech trees and the new province system. It had potential, far more so than either SimCity or Battlefield 4; those games were bad (or mediocre) games that happened to be broken, whereas Rome 2 could have been an excellent Total War title had it been executed properly. That it was not was almost entirely down to the rushed release date and subsequent crippling bugs and design issues; with another six months of development it probably would have been a solid entry in the series, but as it is it is merely frustratingly awful and if we’re judging this in terms of nixed potential then Rome 2 easily takes the prize.

Most Perfect Game: Spelunky.

I want to emphasise something here: “Perfect” doesn’t necessarily mean “Best”. Whether you like Spelunky or not is going to be very much down to personal preference; however, several months of attempting to complete the Daily Challenge has led me to appreciate just how well-made Spelunky is. It is a game that knows what it wants to be, accepts its limitations, and excels at literally every single thing it attempts within those narrow boundaries. The art is gorgeous, the mechanics are so polished they’re practically mirror-like and even the music grew on me after the hundredth dungeon crawling session. I usually don’t like to sing the praises of indie games that already get plenty of attention from mainstream gaming sites, but sod it: Spelunky is superb and it deserves every accolade that gets thrown its way.

Best Game That Was So Utterly Horrifying I Still Haven’t Finished It: Papers Please.

I can’t even write about that damn game. I’m pleased it exists, and I’m pleased that I played it, but oh my god is it an uncomfortable experience.

Best Worst Game Of 2013: SimCity.

You know, I’m actually kind of glad I played SimCity, since without it there would be nothing I’ve played this year that really merited this award.  Last year there were plenty of games that made me so angry I couldn’t even talk about them in polite company without turning the air blue, from the ineptly-made Carrier Command to the disgustingly not-a-game Swords and Sworcery, but this year… well, maybe old age is mellowing me a bit. So it’s a good thing I played SimCity; it’s utter badness kept the rage smouldering for a good couple of months and even now thinking about it makes my palms itch. Almost every aspect of its design and execution was a car crash from start to finish, from the computing limitations of the agent AI that meant it couldn’t simulate a city larger than a postage stamp to the AI itself being so incredibly stupid that the most efficient city layout was a single incredibly long road. The resulting simulation was utterly unlike a real city, or even a simplified approximation of one, and so SimCity rather failed at both of the core features implied in its title. I’m actually a little amazed that Maxis have the gall to be releasing an expansion pack for it next year, since I still think the core idea of the GlassBox engine is so fundamentally flawed that anything else built on top of it is going to collapse in utter ruin. But then I guess if you’re Maxis and/or EA that’s the last thing you’re going to admit. I suppose it’ll just have to wait for the inevitable hand-wringing in a post-mortem article a couple of years down the line. Right now, though, SimCity is bad, will always be bad and is all the more bad for being a rather undistinguished coda to what had been one of the PC-est of PC gaming series.

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