Graphics are great in games, but some just strive to be artistically beautiful rather than push your hardware to the limits. There were quite a few beautiful games in the indie department this year, but still a smaller amount than last year. These games look like moving paintings or drawings. These are the most beautiful of them all.
Journey’s art style just breathes artistic flow and imagination. Despite the brown color palette the overall design choices, effects, and visual representation of everything you see are just fantastic. Combined with a beautiful score, Journey is a one of a kind game that AAA titles can’t seem to provide.
Storytelling in games is probably the most important thing. Even if your game has good graphics if there’s nothing to follow why bother? There a few great games with good stories, but most of them were the endings to long-running series. These were the best of the bunch.
A great story isn’t just about plot twists or mystery. Being in suspense and actually giving you the option to make those twists and turns is revolutionary. The Walking Dead has a story that will tug at your heartstrings and even make you shed a tear or two. Being in total control also gives you multiple possibilities throughout the whole series. This is by far the best story this year, and I can’t wait for Season 2.
The best sound design consists of effects, music, voice acting, variety, and overall immersion accomplished through sounds. Ambiance has a huge factor as well. A lot of games these days sound really good, but the best will give you total immersion with background noises and little effects that don’t have to be there, but they are because the developers care that much.
The sound design in AC3 is just fantastic. The various accents, different languages used, the sound effects used in the Frontier such as the wind during snowstorms, the sounds of wildlife, then the bustling city sounds in the cities. The naval battles just pack a punch in your ears. The cannon fire, the various ship crew yelling things at each other, the sounds of the ocean. There is so much variety there and it is so crisp and clear. This is the best sounding game this year.
The atmosphere in a game is the overall immersion you get. You have to believe you are in the game and that the whole world is real, but also feel a part of it. There were a lot of games that pulled off some great atmosphere this year, so this category was tough. Most of the atmosphere this year was focused on realistic or futuristic settings. These were the best of them all.
Assassin’s Creed III really showed off the American Revolution and colonial times. The game really made you feel like you were there. The Frontier, Boston, and New York were both well designed as well as the costumes, accents, objects, and even the hunting! You just felt like you took a trip to the past. This was a tough choice over The Walking Dead, hell, all the games in this category were hard to choose from. This won due to the attention to detail and mainly because it is a setting and time period rarely explored in games.
The Best Music award goes to a game that delivers emotion, atmosphere, and tension through the game’s soundtrack. Whether it be orchestral, licensed, or anything else it must feel just right. There weren’t many games with great soundtracks this year, but there were a few. These were the best, but only one comes out on top.
Journey comes out on top because of how rich and powerful the score is. It reminds me a lot of Skyrim, and hey, it was up for a Grammy! Journey is not only a very unique game, but the soundtrack pulls you in and provides feelings and emotions on top of the visual experience. Mass Effect 3 was very close, but the epic space battle music doesn’t compare to this masterpiece.
Liberation is probably one of the most anticipated games for Vita, right next to Uncharted and Mortal Kombat. Like both of those games, it doesn’t live up to their console counterparts or everyone’s expectations. Liberation is probably the most disappointing of the three, but it is still a solid game. The problem with Liberation is that it is sloppy and felt slightly rushed to meet the Assassin’s Creed III console release. Aveline is an excellent protagonist and a very interesting character, but the narrative is very confusing and just feels slapped together. It only makes sense, or gets interesting, towards the last two sequences of the game.
Like all the other portable AC games, Desmond Miles doesn’t make an appearance in this game. You just started out as Aveline in New Orleans before the American Revolution started. New Orleans is occupied by the French, and the Spanish are busy selling slaves from Africa and trying to take control of New Orleans. Aveline, being a slave herself, is now freed by her stepmother but joins the Assassin Brotherhood by a leader who lives in the Bayou to free these slaves. This sounds very interesting, and it is, but it lacks the expansiveness of AC3. The story is very short, and it doesn’t allow enough time to tell a rich story. The side characters are forgettable, and Aveline barely gets enough time to really show her personality. I was highly disappointed with this, but the disappointments don’t end there.
The game is mostly like AC3, in terms of combat, animations, the control scheme, and whatnot. There are some Vita-specific features, but they fall flat. You pickpocket by zooming in on the character and running your finger down the rear touchpad; this makes it very cumbersome. You can open letters by pinching the top of the screen and sliding it, but it doesn’t work as it should. There’s even a weird puzzle thing that uses the Vita’s camera by holding it up to the light at a certain angle and turning a dial on the touchscreen. This also doesn’t work like it should and is confusing.
Combat is the same as AC3 and thankfully that hasn’t been broken. The combat system is very fluid and just feels so good. However, your assassin recruiting abilities are now gone. You have to use them in the world by interacting with an NPC and starting that ability. I really didn’t like this. Aveline has a couple new weapons, like the sugar cane machete and whip she can use to swing around some ledges. She has a pistol, as well as a blowpipe and parasol gun! The weapons are really neat and work well within the setting. Aveline can also use three different personas, which are an assassin, a lady, and a slave. The lady can’t climb around anywhere, but it is good for bribing certain soldiers to get into areas you need and blending in with certain crowds. The slave persona can blend in with slave workers, but the assassin has all weapons available but always has a minimum notoriety of level 1. The problem is that these personas are only useful during the main missions, but each one has a certain collectible that only that persona can get. Other than that, these personas feel useless. great idea, but not fully fleshed out.
Another issue is the world you’re exploring. The Bayou isn’t a fun place to be because you wind up swimming 70% of the area or being forced to climb around trees up top. Hunting was completely removed from the game, and the only animals that attack you are alligators. The game just feels very small in comparison to AC3. Let’s talk multiplayer. Don’t expect the addictive and excellent multiplayer from AC3. Instead, we get a cop-out of a strategy board game that is extremely boring. It requires 5% user input, and the game does the rest. You choose a faction (Abstergo or Assassin), pick your closest location on the map, then tap the icons of the opposite factions. You send off NPCs to fight a roll of the dice. Very boring and will keep you interested for all of 5 minutes. This is just like the assassin recruit missions in AC3, but used for multiplayer. There is nearly zero interaction with other players.
As it stands, Liberation is disappointing with its sloppy design. The story is confusing and not very interesting until the very end. The story is very short, the side missions aren’t very interesting, and the multiplayer is an absolute bore. The game is a fun weekend rental, but nothing more. I hope to see Aveline again, but the developers need to take more time. At least the game looks fantastic and is a huge technical feat for all portable games. It looks very close to the console games in terms of quality, but I know the Vita can do better still.
Doom may be the father of first-person shooters, but like the eldest man, you can’t teach it new tricks (or were those old dogs?). I was really excited about this compilation because I expect a nice HD upgrade to Doom 3 and a lot of cool extras, but nothing like that exists. Instead, we get all three Dooms just thrown together, with 3D capabilities for Doom 3. What a waste of money and time. This is pretty much for people who have never touched Doom before, but if you have played them all, just skip this. I will talk about each Doom game separately, so here we go!
Doom 3
I didn’t have a high-end PC when this was released, so I got stuck with the Xbox version. It wasn’t all that great then, and it still isn’t. The game is very straightforward, linear, and lacks the fast pace of older Dooms. There’s barely a story holding all this together, and one of the biggest issues with the last two games plagues this one: confusing levels. I can’t tell you how many times I got lost in this game because every hallway looks the same. The guns are boring to shoot, and the graphics today look terrible with really low-resolution textures, bad lighting effects, and cheap scares. The game doesn’t even capture the sick and twisted satanic cult stuff from previous games. There’s a lot of keycard finding and door opening like in the last game, so is it even worth playing? Sure, the first time through is a bit fun, but if you played this once, don’t bother again. BFG includes the Resurrection of Evil expansion, which is just more of the same, but at least the environments are a bit different. There’s also no one playing online, so you can pretty much forget that feature.
Doom
I had more fun with the older Dooms than I did with the younger ones, mainly because I had never played them before. The pace is really fast, and it just looks more interesting and is more fun to play. New gamers may be put off by the 2D graphics or the fact that you don’t aim up and down; just point at the character and shoot. The biggest issue with this series is the stupid keycard finding and switch finding. The levels are laid out so poorly that you always get lost for longer than you should. The best levels were the ones that didn’t have switches or keycards. There is also a very small enemy variety, which makes shooting boring after a while, and Doom has three expansions to play through. Each expansion looks different but is utterly the same, with nothing new added. This is a classic game, though, and should be played by every FPS fan out there.
Doom II
Not much has changed from the original except for a couple new enemies and different levels. Doom II was shorter-lived than the first game, with only one expansion, but contained 21 levels. Doom II is still worth a playthrough because it is mindless shooting that is fast-paced and just entertaining. These games are meant to be played in short bursts, not hours at a time, or you will get bored.
As it stands, BFG Edition is really disappointing, with no upgrades or extras. I at least expected Doom 3 to be upgraded to HD with a cleanup job, but none of that exists. Why id was so lazy with this is beyond me, but they have been pretty lazy lately (the terrible Quake 4 and Rage are examples). I do not recommend buying this if you have played any Doom before. This is for people who have never touched a Doom game and are interested. For the low price point, it is a good bargain, but fans will be sorely disappointed.
Scribblenauts is one of those games that is just fun, no matter what age you are. Solving puzzles by using your imagination just spells fun for anyone. Unlimited tries to throw in an open-world feel, which doesn’t feel so open and has almost every item you can imagine in there. The problem with Unlimited is that it is literally unchanged with no new features, and that is a huge letdown. Still worth a playthrough, though.
There is a bit of a story about Maxwell and his sister, who have parents who have a magic journal and pen. You can create anything with this, but one day Max uses it for bad on an old man. He puts a curse on his sister to turn her to stone unless he does good for people and collects Starites to free her. It’s a bit touching at the end and pretty cute, but nothing will wow you. The story is fine and works for the game. Once you are set free, you use your special vision to find people at each level who need help. They will appear gold, and the main puzzles will have blue stars above them.
The people outside the main puzzles just require items to solve their dilemmas. You will read your clue at the bottom of the screen and try to solve it. Most logical things work like a ghost that doesn’t feel scary enough. Click on him and write in the adjective box “scary,” and you solve the puzzles. It seems pretty simple, but there’s such a variety (over 100 in all) that it is just plain fun. I spent 2-3 hours in one sitting just flying through the puzzles, but then you get the snafus, which kind of ruins it all. Some puzzles won’t accept logical solutions, or you get a bad hint. The secondary puzzles don’t get additional hints like the main puzzles. The best thing is to get other people to help you who have a fresh thought process on it.
Overthinking puzzles will probably make you the most frustrated in the game, so it is a good idea to come back. Most main puzzles are pretty wacky and fairly simple and easy. For example, one area has you making dishes for certain people. A gamer comes in and wants pizza, so you add three ingredients. Easy. Another comes in and wants to eat a phoenix. Pretty weird, but ok. Add feathers, a beak, and wings, and you’re done. The last one wanted to eat a motorcycle, so I added a tire, gas tank, and engine. It was very strange, but very simple, and it was fun coming up with all this stuff. There are a few that are challenging and require some minor platforming and timing, but there aren’t many. You can finish the story in just a few hours, but getting 100% is fun.
Scribblenauts still has colorful graphics with paper cutout-style visuals, and it looks nice. The physics have been improved, but overall, the game is just pure fun. Sure, it may be really easy, but there are those puzzles where you just won’t get it or won’t take logical solutions. The biggest issue is that there is literally nothing unchanged from past games. The UI may have changed for PCs, but that’s about it. I wanted to see some mini-games or an actual adventure where you have to think about objects to get you from one end of the level to the next using objects. What’s here is fun, but maybe not for $30.
This is such a strange game, and to this day, I never got it. I tried out the original game for PS1, and it wasn’t very good. The whole game is about sprinting around really fast, shooting things, and jumping. The problem is that the gameplay feels so old and outdated that it isn’t worth playing even today. The HD graphics look nice, but there are areas that look like the developers just stretched the textures out.
I won’t even begin to explain the story other than Kurt is sent off to Canada to find a remaining mine crawler and is captured by an evil guy named Schwing Schwing. Yeah, I know; I won’t even bother. The game does have some good dialog and humor wrapped in it, but you have to get through the dated gameplay first. Kurt can run at about 50 MPH, and he is shooting everything on the site. He has his trusty parachute to glide and his sniper mask/face, which has different types of bullets. These range from grenades, bullets, and lock balls, which control doors as well as others. That isn’t the issue. The problem is that the entire game feels the same. Running around with floaty physics, lobbing grenades into small holes that are a pain to hit, and killing tons of enemies while scooting around. It gets boring after the first level.
You can play Max and Dr. Hawkins this time, but Max is even more mundane than Kurt. He has four arms, so you get to use four guns, but it isn’t much different. Dr. Hawkins has a complicated weapon-making system you can use for him, so maybe his levels are the most interesting. I honestly couldn’t stand more than a few levels of this game. I was really hoping MDK 2 was much different from the past game, but it is nearly the same.
The HD graphics look better, as do the new character models. Most of the textures look like they are just stretched out and weren’t redone like the character models. This isn’t the remake I was hoping for because the physics are still really floaty, and you feel like you’re skating on ice. The game just really feels 12 years old, and it shows in the gameplay. It doesn’t help that there is no native gamepad recognition like most PC games these days have. You have to map the controls yourself, which is a serious pain and takes a lot of tweaking. The resolution also stinks because it isn’t on widescreen. This was a lazy port, or it looks like they only went halfway and released it.
Is there any reason to play this game? If you like old-school shooters and platformers, then go ahead, but this game is pretty dull. I really tried to like it, but the only thing going for it is the humor and wacky story. The floaty platforming, poor HD upgrade, and gamepad mapping just made me give up on the game. I hope there is an MDK 3 and everything gets updated, but until then, don’t bother unless you love old school.
The Mark of Kri is a curse passed down from generation to generation, and each firstborn child bears the mark on their skin. There are six at all times, but some crazy guy wants to kill off the curse or something like that. The story isn’t explained very well and is not very interesting. The Mark of Kri’s strong points are its stealth, but it has sluggish combat and camera issues galore. It may have been pretty good ten years ago, but not today.
The game is very linear, with usually only one pathway to follow. You have a bird that is your companion that you can send off to certain points to scout ahead for you. This is mandatory; otherwise, you will be fighting off tons of guys all the time and dying. Once you use Kuzu to scout ahead, you can plan an attack. Use stealth by sneaking up, buckling against walls, or dropping down on enemies. You use the right analog stick to sweep a beam around that assigns a face button to an enemy; that’s their attack button. You can stealth kill two enemies by starting the attack on one and then pressing the buttons shown above the second enemy. Sometimes you need to distract guards by shooting bells with your arrow, scaring animals, and other things. This is pretty fun, and finding the right path through enemies can be fun. It is the actual combat that is sluggish and troublesome.
The right analog stick should have been used for camera control in this game because it gets lost all the time. It never focuses on enemies like it should, and it takes forever to sweep around. The combat is okay when there are just a few enemies, but later on, in the game, 15+ enemies will surround you. You get better weapons like the axe that can lock on up to nine enemies, but this whole lock-on business just doesn’t work. I would rather control the camera and have a more fluid combat system that way. The reason why I died so much was that Rau would stop and rub his head, trip constantly, bang his weapon off of stone walls, and get it stuck in wood, and this was frustrating. In the meantime, you are being hit and dying while all the unnecessary animations are playing out. Once you get surrounded or trapped, you’re dead. Backing out is impossible because once you unblock, you get bombarded by attacks.
If that isn’t enough, the save system is annoying. There are no save points, just save scrolls. You have to find these, and they don’t carry over to the next level. The same goes for max health upgrades. You will end up using your save scrolls or squandering them because you want to save a hard part. Another issue was using the bow. Aiming at enemies takes forever because you have to wander around the enemy until you get a lock on, and if the enemy is too high up, you have to fiddle with it until you hit the enemy. Not fun.
The graphics are just average, even for back then. The game is only 6 levels long and can be beaten in about 4–5 hours. The story is underdeveloped due to its short length, and you won’t care about any of the characters. The combat has sluggish controls, and the whole sweeping lock-on system is a terrible idea and doesn’t work right. The camera has a lot of issues, and the list goes on. For just a couple of dollars, this is a decent stealth game, but be wary of all the problems.
thebinarymessiah.com 
ORC is probably the worst game in the entire series. It's objectively awful. Being bad isn't different. Different is Outbreak…