Oh let us never forget 2014, or as it is written on the Chinese calendar: ‘year of the broken game’. There’s no nice way to say it, a lot of big names put out a lot of big garbage this year and hopefully will serve as a time where we can all quietly contemplate what went wrong. That’s not to say that there haven’t been high points, I’ve done my best to lay out six of them here:
6) Cannon Brawl
I remarked upon starting Cannon Brawl that I probably wasn’t going to like it, and now here I am still remembering it fondly months later. The game’s brief campaign does a great job of teaching you its mechanics and preparing you for some of the most frantic online battles I’ve played this year. Gameplay feels like Starcraft made a baby with Worms back before the series’ current slump. The game’s not perfect, I wish it was a little longer and maybe a little better at online matchmaking but even so Cannon Brawl took a genre I hated and made it feel appealing to me and that’s almost certainly the hallmark of a great game.
5) Super Smash Bros. For Wii U
Super Smash Bros For Wii U is the best entry in the series to date. Faster paced than Brawl, a little slower than Melee, the game nails the perfect fighting tempo while looking and running like a dream. Can we also all take a moment to reflect for a moment that we now have a game that features Pac Man, Mega Man, Sonic The Hedgehog, and Super Mario beating the shit out of each other? Go back in time and tell your 12 year old self that someday that will happen, your child self will likely die of laughter, disappear, and create a time paradox.
The game is great on the 3DS, but the Wii U takes things to a whole new level both in aesthetics and new features. I never would have thought I would want 8 players in Smash Bros but now it’s almost exclusively what I play. This is Smash Bros as it should be played and it’s the most compelling reason to purchase a Wii U to date.
If I told you back in March that one of the best games this year would be a retro styled indie platformer, funded on Kickstarter, and launching on the Wii U and 3DS you would have been right to not trust me.
Until I played it I wouldn’t have believed that the world needed Shovel Knight. If you closed your eyes and threw a rock in the Indie megabooth at PAX you would hit a 2D pixel sidescroller seven times out of ten. You really couldn’t blame somebody for assuming that the genre was tapped out. But here we are, and Shovel Knight’s retro design truly stands out in a market that is flooded with unremarkable platformers. The game is not an homage to NES Classics, it IS an NES classic. The graphics, the music, and the finely balanced difficulty all combine to form a game whose existence can only be explained with a time machine. Shovel Knight isn’t just one of the best games this year it also may be the greatest retro-themed sidescroller of all time.
3) Dark Souls 2
I remember when I first arrived in Dark Souls 2’s hub city of Majula. After finding all the NPCs in the area I turned my attention to the enormous pit sitting in the middle of the town. Peering down inside it I could see a collection of platforms loaded with glowing treasures and of course I immediately started to gauge whether or not I’d be able to survive the fall to go get those goodies. A friendly player message scribbled near the pit’s lip read “try jumping” so of course I jumped to my immediate death. Boy if that isn’t Dark Souls in a nutshell…
I know I’ll probably draw some flack for this but I think Dark Souls 2 might be my favorite game in the Souls series to date. Some might complain about the logical inconsistencies in the world map, the re-used bosses, and the missing lighting effects, but at the end of the day Dark Souls 2 managed to take the best parts of the original Dark Souls and its spiritual predecessor Demon’s Souls and merge them together into one great game. The world of Drangleic is loaded with more variety than ever before and it’s just a joy to explore. If you love the Souls series I don’t see any reason not to love this.
Shadow of Mordor is the best narrative experience you will find this year, but not for the reason’s one would normally expect. People make the game’s plot out to be abhorrent when really it’s just somewhat unremarkable. What’s not unremarkable is the god damned Nemesis system. I feel like we’ve beat this horse to death so if you still don’t have a grasp on what makes the system so special then read the review above. Having your own unique arch-enemy feels really cool, and chopping their heads off feels even cooler. Shadow of Mordor only takes about fifteen hours to beat, but if you ask most people, they’ll admit to spending way longer than that creating and dispatching their own unique opponents. Were it not for one other game, Mordor would find itself at the top of my list by a very wide margin. While it might not be my personal favorite game this year, it’s almost certainly the most important. The Nemesis system is nothing short of remarkable and I can’t wait to watch everyone try to copy its magic in the coming years.
1) Hearthstone
I play Hearthstone daily. There’s literally not another game that came out this year for which I can say the same. If you’re just getting here, Hearthstone is basically a streamlined version of Magic The Gathering Online with about 1000 times the polish. The game is free to play but of course like any good collectible card game you’re going to want cards, lots of cards. Blizzard has done a great job balancing things so that players still have regular access to new card packs without feeling like they have to plop down boatloads of cash. On top of that the game’s first two expansions, Curse of Naxxramas, and Goblins Vs. Gnomes have done a great job introducing new cards into the mix without breaking the original game. While the model Blizzard has laid forth may not be for everyone, if you have ever been hooked on a trading card game then there will definitely be something for you to like in Hearthstone.
