Every year I’m always super late with making my game of the year list because I want to finish up the last few games before committing to a list. This year however, I finished my list over a month ago, wrote it two weeks ago, and sort of forgot I never posted it until now. That’s called progress my friends.
This year was full of some really amazing games, and for the first time ever a bunch of awful pieces of trash. I’ve played bad games in my life before, but not with the frequency I did in 2015. I played so many awful games this year that I decided to turn my usual yearly list of only my top games of the year into a best and worst list. Here’s hoping I don’t have to do this again in 2016.
WORST
Neverending Nightmares
Neverending Nightmares might not have released this year but it was such a sour experience that I couldn’t help but include it. The concept for this game is really neat and I was 100% down for playing through someone’s actual depression fueled nightmares, however I was hoping for an actual game to be part of that experience. This is a game where you walk down a hallway filled with empty, copy-pasted rooms that have no reason for being there, and you occasionally have to run past an enemy or two only to wind up at an uninspired ending that I’ve seen done better. The worst part is the tortuously slow pace at which you walk and how the character can only sprint two feet before needing to stop as he loudly wheezes for air. Neverending Nightmares proves that an interesting concept doesn’t make up for garbage game design and should be an eternal example of how to not design a game.
Worst Moment: Spending more time waiting for the asthmatic protagonist to catch his breath than actually playing the game.
Will Fight for Food: Super Actual Sellout: Game of the Hour
You know a game is bad when it has a joke title like that. Will Fight for Food is a joke of a game that has really interesting ideas that are never fully realized which leads to the game coming off as a shitty prototype you’d pitch to someone instead of a fully released game. I really like the idea of being able to immediately end a conversation to start a fight with that person but when the end result is to either mindlessly mash the punch button in a fight or mindlessly mash the mouse button to continue dialog, then what’s the point in choosing? It doesn’t help that this is the unfunniest game I’ve ever had to endure, with each line of dialog being the most pathetic attempts at humor imaginable.
Worst Moment: That moment of realization when I realized I made a grave error in doing this review.
Broken Age
Broken Age was supposed to be the glorious return to adventure games from Tim Schafer but all it ended up being was a delayed mountain of disappointments. This game was a complete joke of an adventure game with no puzzles to solve, bored voice-acting, short length, weird pacing issues, and a plot that quickly becomes as uninteresting as its characters. The two or three puzzles this game has are just shoved in at the end of the second half, almost as if the developers realized they totally forgot to include them in the game and quickly came up with the most tedious puzzles ever. Being a Double Fine game, I was also shocked at how unfunny it was with the game only managing to wrest a slight grin from me at a somewhat clever gag. The best praise I could give this game is that it exists and is competently made.
Worst Moment: Realizing if this is Schafer’s idea of a return-to-form for adventure games then I have absolutely zero interest in any of his future titles.
Armikrog
After Broken Age’s massive disappointment, I looked to Armikrog as the game to finally bring back that classic adventure game format with modern sensibilities I was craving, so you can imagine my surprise when this turned out to be an even bigger mess. Here was an adventure game whose only bit of plot is relegated to the opening and closing cutscenes and two characters that don’t speak for the entire duration of the game. To make matters worse, Armikrog features some of the most insultingly simplistic and frustratingly vague puzzles I’ve ever encountered in a game with most of the puzzles repeated numerous times as well. Armikrog’s only saving grace is its excellent claymation design but that doesn’t excuse a game that reveals a new, terrible design choice around every corner.
Worst Moment: Having to do that garbage cradle puzzle three times.
Afro Samurai 2
I had the unfortunate burden of reviewing this game and did so because of my love for the anime series and I still regret doing it. I’ve played bad games in my lifetime, but this is a game that I genuinely wish I had never experienced because it was so bad it put me off playing video-games for a week or two. It’s almost kind of amazing watching developer interviews in the lead-up to its release and seeing such expert liars working flawlessly at selling their game knowing how broken of a mess it was. These people actually went out and claimed they had a fully functioning, proper video-game for everyone to buy when in reality they had one of the most unplayable games I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Everyone keeps making jokes about how bad the game looked, but unless you actually played it you seriously have no idea. People seemed to be pretty shocked when Afro Samurai 2 was removed from all stores, and the libraries of anyone who owned the game; I was more shocked that they actually had the gall to release that dogshit excuse of a game.
Worst Best Moment: Having the game permanently removed from my PSN library.
BEST
Chroma Squad/Hard West
I couldn’t decide which of these to knock off so I decided to put them both up because more people need to hear about these two games. I’m a huge fan of turn-based tactics games so getting one based off Power Rangers™ and another off supernatural cowboys makes 2015 a pretty good year for me. Chroma Squad is a game where you manage a team of stunt actors who decided to start up their own sentai TV show. It’s silly, super meta, and a complete blast to play and having to manage your studio adds a decent amount of depth to the game. Hard West is less sentai-simulator and more X-COM which is both the best way to describe it and also the worst. Calling it X-COM with cowboys would be a disservice to the neat things it does differently but if you like the idea of X-COM with cowboys then I doubt you’ll be disappointed with Hard West. The game takes the cowboy setting and turns it on its head with demons and supernatural powers that you can give your characters. You can equip poker cards that will allow your bandits to burst into flames to become a snarling demon, ricochet shots off metal objects, or even unleash a Black Canary style shriek. The story itself is interesting in a kind of silly pulpy way and the only real issue I had with the game was the somewhat weird combat system and its length being on the short side.
Best Moment: [Chroma Squad] Spending an hour customizing my stupid sentai team and giggling to myself like a crazy person at my dumb joke characters. [Hard West] Rolling into an ancient demon cowboy’s hideout and stomping his crew silly with my band of horribly cursed characters.
Life is Strange
As someone who has been slowly losing interest in Telltale’s almost “samey” approach to their games, it was a refreshing experience to play something in the genre that actually tried to do something different; mainly, having a proper plot with actual consequences that weren’t black or white with an interesting gameplay mechanic. DONTNOD took TellTale’s already tired formula and shook it up just enough to get me totally hooked in this high school world through smart writing and pacing. What really impressed me was how every choice stood hard in the gray line, whereas in Telltale games your choices are very clearly either “be nice” or “be an asshole”. Even though the game didn’t end exactly how I had hoped, the overall experience was one I’ll never forget.
Best Moment: The segment after Max touches that photograph for the first time and seeing the repercussions afterward.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Metal Gear Solid V is a weird game. It delivered on my prayers of the gameplay being vastly improved from MGS4 but at the cost of a much weaker story; monkey’s paws are some real bastards. As a huge fan of the series that has been eagerly waiting to see how Kojima links Peace Walker to the beginning of the series I was pretty disappointed at having to spend half the game killing no-name generals but man did the gameplay make up for it. Everything about how this game plays is amazing and I got that same euphoric glee from sneaking a mission as I did laying waste to everyone with liberal uses of airstrikes. Being able to customize your loadout, along with your companions, and drop into an area to just wreck whatever outpost you wanted was a blast. I would spend hours just going from base to base doing whatever the hell I wanted with my awesome eyepatch wearing wolf dog who is decked out in riot gear and can stab people in the face.
Best Moment: Fultoning everything and everyone.
Bloodborne
I can understand why people came out of Bloodborne a little disappointed due to its dramatic changes from the series but I really enjoyed its different, more aggressive focus. Bloodborne took the Souls formula and flipped it on its head by having you play on the offensive instead of previous games. It’s a subtle change that feels significant once you play it. Of course, the absolute best part of Bloodborne came from its trick weapons that had some of the most visually and mechanically unique weapons in years. It also has some of the most interesting lore in the series, expertly mixing lovecraftian tropes with the sort of crazy nonsense the series is known for. This is also the first in the series where I actually felt a genuine horror vibe with some enemies being incredibly unsettling to look at. I love Dark Souls and am patiently waiting for the third game, but I’m really glad that Bloodborne exists.
Best Moment: Laughing at anyone who seriously tried to convince me that the Hunter’s Axe wasn’t the best weapon in the game.
The Witcher 3
I’ve been a huge fan of this series since the first game came out mainly because its world is so well built. You enter anywhere in any of the games and it reeks of being lived in with that classic fantasy style few games manage to nail. CD Projekt RED has improved upon each iteration of the series to such a shocking degree that it really speaks volumes to their talent. With The Witcher 3, they tackled an open world for the first time and absolutely killed it with what’s easily one of my favorite RPG’s of all time. Every part of that world feels dense from various quests to do, areas to explore for loot, or just monsters to hunt and it does a great job of immersing you into this deep world. The absolute best part though is the absence of fetch quests; each quest in this game has its own mini-plot that never feels half-assed and fits into the overarching story. They even updated the game with some significant gameplay improvements that you just don’t see happening very often nowadays. This game really raised the bar for open world RPG’s for me and I really can’t wait to see what they do with Cyberpunk 2077.
Best Moment: The Taxman.
