What is an action game? Any game with action can be considered, but in my opinion, these are action/adventure games or games that are cinematic and full of flash and adrenaline-packed adventure.
God of War almost got overtaken by RDR2 on this one, but the combat system in God of War revolutionizes its own genre and just feels astoundingly perfect and insanely intuitive yet also very deep. The scripted scenes are also out of the world and the best ever seen in a game, you can’t beat the action here.
This was a great year for multi-platform games. Exclusives were a bit dry, so many heavy hitters came out of the woodworks, so you were happy with any system you owned.
Red Dead Redemption II
Red Dead was the biggest contender against God of War this year and is a no-brainer for the best Multi-Platform game. The level of detail in this game hasn’t been seen since GTAV and has an unprecedented amount of love put into it. There’s no other game like this out there.
What is an action game? Any game with action can be considered, but in my opinion, these are action/adventure games or games that are cinematic and full of flash and adrenaline-packed adventure.
Nier: Automata
NieR was the best action game this year because it was something new and fresh. While it wasn’t the most technically impressive game out there, the action was phenomenal with fast-moving characters and fluid combat against interesting enemies. It’s a weird one-of-a-kind game that we rarely get to see.
This was a great year for multi-platform games. Exclusives were a bit dry, so many heavy hitters came out of the woodworks, so you were happy with any system you owned.
Nier: Automata
NieR: Automata may not have looked the best, but it sure played the best. With fantastic combat, an interesting story, great characters, unique visual style, and gorgeous locales to explore, NieR was something fresh and different than all the sequels we got this year
The most disappointing game isn’t exactly an award but more of an award of shame. 2014 saw some real stinkers, but it’s usually the big AAA titles that shock us on how terrible they are.
The Elder Scrolls Online
While Assassin’s Creed Unity may be the winner for everyone else as it shipped completely unplayable and ruined the reputation that AC had, The Elder Scrolls Online made me even more upset. How can you take such a fantastic franchise as The Elder Scrolls, create 43,000 miles of land and make it boring and mediocre? That’s all due in part to Bethesda handing the game off to an untrusted game developer. It really felt like it had great potential as everyone saw this one coming. Here’s to hoping the console versions can wring something out of this dry mess.
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. This is a saying heard throughout Assassin’s Creed, and it really sticks with you. So does the thick plot that has come to take the game industry by storm, as well as one of the greatest game characters of all time: Altair. The plot is actually weird at first because it’s a sci-fi story. You are actually Desmond Miles, captured by modern-world Templars. They stick you in an animus and use your DNA to access your ancestor’s memories to find the Piece of Eden, which can be used to control people’s minds. That one ancestor is Altair, set during the crusades. The second story is of Altair, who ends up losing his rank and status among the Assassin Brotherhood by failing a mission due to his eagerness and stupidity. Your master, Al Mualim, sends on special missions to assassinate key leaders throughout the holy land (Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus) to keep them from taking the Piece of Eden and using it to win the war.
As you can see, the plot is very interesting, with a lot of twists. How is the game, though? You have a huge open world that is full of side missions and hundreds of buildings to climb. Assassin’s Creed has a parkour climbing system as well as a puppeteering system. You control each of Altair’s limbs in two different states. The “socially acceptable” state allows you to use eagle vision, which can show enemies and key targets. You can gently push people away from you, and this is key because if you’re running around the city knocking people over, the guards will come after you, and towards the end of the game, everyone is highly suspicious of you, and just a few people knocked over will have the entire guard on your tail. The third thing is obviously combated, but if you hold down the run button, you start climbing buildings, grabbing people to toss them, and jumping around.
Assassin’s Creedreally tried to introduce crowd psychology into the game, and it works here but does feel limited. If you climb buildings, people will react by stopping, staring, and saying things accordingly. If you use ladders, people don’t mind so much. While using rooftops is faster and keeps you away from most guards, you must watch out for guards on rooftops who will shoot you with arrows if you don’t get down, kill them, or move away quickly. The climbing works well enough, but there are some control issues, clipping issues, and other issues with the camera. When Altair is facing a different way than the camera, he will jump in his direction instead of the way you’re telling him to. Also, if you run around a pole or near a crate, he’ll start climbing it instead of just jumping over or going around. This can get downright frustrating when you are running away from a dozen guards and trying to find a hiding spot.
The game also introduces anonymity via a symbol near your health bar, which stays white when no one suspects you but will turn yellow when you are watched and flash red when guards are on you. When it does this, get away quickly or kill whoever is watching you. Don’t just kill out in the open, or people will run around screaming and calling guards. Get away from dead bodies quickly because guards will come by and try to find out who killed them, or citizens will give you away. If you are caught, you need to kill all guards after you or hide. To do this, you must break their line of sight, and the symbol will flash yellow. When it does find a hiding spot quickly, it turns red again. You can hide on benches between people, on stacks of hay, in groups of monks praying, or on draped boxes on rooftops. Stay there for a few seconds, and you will be anonymous again. You can avoid all this chaos by just jogging, staying calm, not flailing around and jumping around like a monkey in crowded areas, etc.
This whole crowd system is really something else and works well, but it feels repetitive and predictable because of the recycled sayings and animations, and it always happens the same way. The combat is the same way because, while you can gain new abilities, it feels like a counter-festival. You can attack with a sword or short sword and throw daggers, but most guards always block, so you just stand there with the block button held down and wait for someone to attack and then counter, which is usually an instant kill. This gets repetitive, and the combat isn’t as deep as it could be since combos are limited and animations are repeated often. It does control well and feels smooth, so I guess that’s better than broken.
The most repetitive thing and the game’s biggest flaw are the constantly repeated missions that repeat dozens and dozens of times. You can save citizens, do some time-trial flag gathering missions, escort missions, assassination missions (probably the most fun), interrogation, eavesdropping, pickpocketing, and climbing tall buildings to find viewpoints to put more missions on your map in that area. Sure, they are fun at first, but after you have saved the 30th citizen or climbed the 50th building, it gets old, and you just want it to end. Some more mission diversity would have been nice.
While it’s cool to be an assassin, sneaking up behind a guard and shoving a punch dagger in his gut and then running away while he falls to the ground without anyone suspecting otherwise is satisfying, and you must look good doing it too. Assassin’s Creed looks amazing, even today, and the PC version sports DirectX 10 graphics with some slightly higher resolution textures. The game looks a lot better than console versions and is well worth another play-through just for that alone. While the graphics are amazing technically and artistically, the game feels very Middle Eastern, with a great soundtrack to support that and voice acting, and the whole game feels true to its time. The architecture is great, as are the clothing, lifestyles, and jobs people do in the game, but it all kind of looks the same with a lot of grays, browns, and whites.
Overall, Assassin’s Creed is an amazing experience with a story you will talk about long after you finish the game, great crowd simulation, and the true feeling of being an assassin. If there was some more mission diversity, visual diversity, and smoother controls, the game would be perfect. This is a game you cannot miss, and every gaming fan should play it.
Some video game comics are a bit iffy. The Fall is a whole new storyline set in Russia, and there’s no Desmond Miles this time around. Daniel Cross ends up losing his memory, but he can also see visions of his ancestors from the late 1800s. Nikolai Orelov is tasked with killing the Tsar of Russia and getting the Golden Staff. In the present, Daniel gets taken away to a secret Assassin camp and finds out his true identity.
Daniel himself is a raging drug addict and alcoholic. He has a court order to take psych meds but won’t do it. I loved how they introduced him, but he’s not a very memorable character. The comic series wasn’t long enough to allow this. During the first issue, you are just introduced to everyone and what their common goal is. During the second issue, Daniel finds out who he truly is and why he has these visions. It all comes to an end during the third issue when you find out the major plot twist and how shocking it is.
There is a special edition 4th issue that shows several years later where Daniel has cleaned up and finally meets the mentor that he has searched for for 2 years. There’s another shocking twist at the end, and without this final issue, the other three don’t seem so great. The art is really nice, and the series is pretty gory and bloody. There’s a decent amount of fight scenes, and the art holds true to the game. I just wish it were longer so we could get to know these characters more; there’s a lot that could have been done.
One thing that video game comics tend to have is a lack of intelligent dialogue. The Fall has great writing, and there’s actually reading to be done rather than a sentence or two on each page. Fans will enjoy The Fall, and the separate storyline is a welcome change. I just wish it were longer.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze. When most gamers hear this name, they think of one of the best video game characters ever made. Ezio went down in game history the way he did for a reason. Assassin’s Creed revolutionized the action/adventure genre with assassination skills, a whole new take on stealth gameplay, and awesome parkour gameplay. Revelations are the conclusion to Altair and Ezio’s story, but just another chapter for Desmond Miles. Desmond is stuck in the blackness of the Animus and is in a kind of coma. His brain can’t tell his personality apart from Ezio and Altair’s, so Subject 16 (yes, you finally meet him) helps you a little bit here. There isn’t much of Desmond here because this is the two assassins’s story; in fact, there are only three cut-aways for Desmond through the whole game.
Ezio’s story starts with him trying to find the five keys that Altair hid, but the Templars are also after them. Altair has some secretly hidden library under Masyaf, so it’s a race. This is the shortest AC game to date, but that doesn’t mean it’s worse. There is a new layer added to Ezio’s personality because he’s 50 through 62 in this game. Playing as an old man is pretty awesome, though. Ezio is now wiser, smarter, and a master assassin. You even play as Altair through his old age up to 92, and he still kicks ass! This should be more like Geriatrics’s Creed. Let’s go ahead and start with side missions. The same ones from Brotherhood are kept, but others from past games are cut. Templar Dens replace Borgia Towers; you can recruit assassins, buy stores, buy monuments, find viewpoints, and that’s about it. Side missions took a back seat here to some epic main story missions. Overall, the game can be beaten in less than 15 hours, even if you try to do the side missions that are here.
Collectibles this time around involve only Animus Fragments, which are used to unlock crappy Desmond side stories, which will be explained later. Two new combat abilities are brought to the table here: bomb-making and the hook blade. This adds a layer of depth to combat and climbing. Remember when you would jump off a building from too high and just couldn’t reach the one in front of you? Now you can, with a quick press of the action button, catch yourself. It can be used in combat as well as running away from guards. Remember when guards would block your path and you had no choice but to get knocked over? Now you can hook them and roll right over their backs. This also adds another item to climbing, which is zip lines. Zip along and assassinate enemies at high speed, which is a blast.
Bombs have three different levels: diversions, weapons, and defense. Boxes are scattered everywhere that contain parts of bombs that contain the container, gunpowder type, and item inside. You can use a lamb’s blood bomb to make enemies think they’re wounded and become stunned. A splinter bomb stuns enemies or uses a cherry bomb to drive guards away from areas. These really come in handy when you don’t want to get into a huge fight. The problem here is that it’s wasted on the short length of the story. I didn’t even get to use all the bomb types because there weren’t enough missions in the game that called for them.
There is also a strange strategy-type section at the beginning that is never used anywhere in the game, and I thought it was fun. You can use points to call down different types of assassins on roofs or use defenses on the ground. You can use your gun when the wave of guards comes. This was kind of like a tower defense thing and was really strange just to have it on one mission.
All the other items are here, like parachutes, poison darts, and all that stuff from past games. However, combat is finally perfect with combo chains after you kill an enemy. Keep the chain up, and you can kill each one near you with just one hit. The combat really flows this time, and the new kill moves are just gruesome. You can do everything else in past games, so nothing here has really changed. You do use your Eagle Sense more because you need to use it to find these clues to the keys. This leads to awesome and varied main missions that involve epic chases, picking your way around guards, and even giant climbing puzzles. I found these to be the most entertaining, but the gameplay really ends there. It is short and sweet, as well as entertaining.
The area is completely new because it is set in Constantinople and Istanbul. There is one sequence dedicated to a whole underground Templar city, but I felt all this was wasted on such a short little sequence. The area in Revelations is tiny compared to past games, but this is understandable for how short the game is. The new art style and the setting are a great welcome because Rome and Italy were getting tiring to see. The graphics are still superb, even with the slight updates to the engine. The voice acting is superb, and so is the storytelling.
Desmond’s Journey is a strange telling of Desmond’s past through a first-person platforming puzzle thing. I have no idea what this is, but it should go away. There are five short little areas that involve platforming and pushing buttons. Then you get to place floating blocks in front of you to make paths. Yeah, what the hell? It’s nice to know Desmond’s story, but collecting 100 fragments for this isn’t even worth it.
Multiplayer has been amped up and is just as fun. There are more modes, but instead of being really original, they are hidden under the AC theme. These are the models you see in first-person shooters that are disguised here. Capturing the flag is just taking a key from the enemy base and returning it to yours. There is a deathmatch mode and a few others, but more modes are good and they are fun. There are more maps, characters, and abilities that will keep you coming back for hours.
Overall, Revelations is just as amazing as past games in the series, but just on a smaller and shorter scale. It perfects the series to a T, and I don’t think anything else can be done with these two heroes. If you made it this far in the series, go ahead and finish it. Long-asked questions are answered, but there are also some new ones now. The game has a touching ending, and we even finally get to see what happened after the first AC. Revelations is an excellent game, with just enough new stuff to keep fans happy.
Game of the year is the hardest of them all. What makes the game of the year? Everything must be almost perfect, well balanced, epic, have a great story, characters, mechanics, graphics, and everything that makes up a game must be amazing and better than the competition. I wish I could have picked more than one because there were so many amazing games this year.
Skyrim actually wasn’t my first choice. It won because of how grand in scale the game was and the attention to detail that only a few games this year did. Over 100 hours of gameplay, unique characters, a grand story, beautiful graphics, lots of customization, and a gorgeous soundtrack made Skyrim come out on top of the entire pile. Skyrim is a special game in the sense that no other RPG or game can do it.
Action-adventure games are all about open worlds with great combat/fighting, lots of missions to do, variety in activities, and even customization is great. These tend to be the heavy hitters and one of the most revolutionary genres in gaming history. There were a lot of AAA action-adventure titles this year, and a few didn’t even make it on the list. Only one can win, though.
Arkham City may be a sequel, but it’s a sequel that does everything that a sequel should do: Make everything 100x better and introduce so much new content it’s a completely different game. Arkham City has a huge open world and allows you to really feel like Batman with investigation missions, smooth and fun combat, plus all of Batty’s gadgets. This is truly a beautiful and unique game, something that all comic books games need to model from.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.