Artistic graphics don’t necessarily mean the most impressive technically. They probably won’t push your system to its limits, but instead, provide a fantastic visual experience that you won’t forget.
Cuphead
Cuphead is one of the most visually pleasing games I have ever seen, using early 1900 Disney style visuals with inspiration from cartoons like Steam Boat Willy, Cuphead just looks and sounds like a piece of moving art. This isn’t just the most artistically impressive game this year but in gaming history. No other game out there looks and sounds like Cuphead.
Best technical graphics is all about games that push their system to the limits. Shaders, ambient occlusion, shadow maps, tesselation, anti-aliasing, deferred lighting, and every other piece of tech that makes games look as good as real life.
Forza Motorsport 7
Forza 7 isn’t just passionate about how its cars drive, but how they look. From rain, effects wiping off the windshield, to hydroplaning in puddles, and every button on the dash, Forza 7 looks eye-watering amazing, especially on PC. My own car is in this game and it looks piece by piece identical, I love it.
Hitman is a long-running series that is over 10 years old. The series is highly underrated and overlooked, mainly because of the time between each release. The last game (Blood Money) was released back in 2005. Some people actually thought the series was done until the announcement of Absolution about 18 months ago. You play as a slightly older Agent 47 while he hunts down men involved in kidnapping a very important girl for the agency. The story isn’t all that interesting and is slow-going, but the characters are great, and the voice acting is superb. Of course, the best thing about this game is the signature kills and stealth.
The levels are pretty linear, but 47 now has an instinct ability that will highlight important objects in yellow when they are nearby and will be flashing beacons at a distance. These range from weapons to distractions. Some levels will have hits that you have to complete, but the challenge isn’t just running around shooting everybody. Sure, you can, but what is the fun in that? Absolution has a very punishing scoring system; even if you kill one target that isn’t your hit, you will get a score drop—not much, but enough to keep you from getting the ultimate Silent Assassin score. You can knock out enemies and hide them to regain the negative score as well. The levels are cleverly designed, and each one is completely different. It is really fun to sneak around trying to find ingenious ways to kill your hit, which is usually to make it look like an accident.
If you just can’t find one, you can use your signature fiber wire to get the same score, but it isn’t as fun. This is the biggest issue with Absolution, though; you get punished for not being stealthy, but the game has a large arsenal of weapons of all kinds. Sure, you can run and gun for fun, but I honestly felt they should have just stuck with stealth and left the other weapons out. There are very few times where you need to use a gun, but those are usually silenced. The other huge problem is trial and error. Some levels had to be restarted over a dozen times because I just couldn’t find a path through a bunch of enemies or find a signature kill. I eventually found one, and there are checkpoints spread throughout the levels, but it is really tough. You can use disguises for enemies you subdue or find. The instinct indicators will tell you if someone is about to see through your disguise, so you use instinct to kind of blend in. This uses a special instinct meter but can be upgraded over time.
Some levels require multiple hits, which can be really tough. The whole point is to distract guards or find quicker ways to your target via vents, ledges, ladders, and other hallways. Most levels are pretty easy to figure out, but there is one you will restart over a dozen times. This really made the game feel frustrating at times because you would have no idea what to do on the first level. I was completely lost and didn’t know how to kill the targets. You can poison food, make things drop on enemies, or there are level-specific things that can happen. Sometimes you can blend in with the crowd; other times, disguises may not be available. Thanks to the large variety of levels and hits, you will never get bored. There is also a Contracts mode that expands the single-player campaign as well as the ability to outscore other players.
Multiplayer lets you create your own contracts, but most people won’t spend too much time here. The PC visuals are astounding, with beautiful DirectX 11 visuals, but you will need a rig with the latest hardware to run it in this mode. The textures look nearly realistic, and there is some gorgeous lighting and shadowing in this game. They are a huge step up over the consoles, which really show their age. Overall, Absolution is an amazing stealth game with a lot of variety and satisfying signature kills. I just wish the trial and error wasn’t so high.
The technical category skirts art and pushes you to console to the max. Games that use DirectX 11 on PC, or really push consoles to their ultimate processing get this award. They also have to do it right and use a lot of advanced techniques, or brand new techniques. Since the consoles are 7 years old they usually don’t win this category anymore, but it doesn’t mean they don’t look fantastic.
Yes, all these games have their PC versions nominated, and yes they all use DirectX 11. Far Cry 3 uses it the best this year with fantastic lighting effects, amazing textures, and an astounding draw distance. The lighting looks so real you almost start looking for sunglasses! This game will also push your PC to its max and suck out the power of the latest PC gaming technology. It was hard to choose between these 5, but that draw distance and amazing light effects really put this on top, but just barely.
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.
Creative Assembly has made a lot of time-period hack and slash games that are decent but have many flaws (Spartan: Total Warrior for PS2 was one). Viking is a decent game but is plagued with repetition. I played this 5 years ago on the Xbox 360, and it was just OK back then. This game has aged like rotten milk, only having a decent graphics upgrade. Is it worth even a $15 purchase?
The answer is maybe. It depends on how you look at low-budget ports of older games. Viking has a paper-thin story that is middling on nonsense. All I know is that two busty goddesses are fighting each other and using Skarin (what a dumb name) to round up Vikings to stop Hel’s Legion. It feels more like a Lord of the Rings rip-off when you play it. Aside from the lame story, everything in this game is repetitive and grows boring. I finished this game back in 2007, but I couldn’t even finish the third section of this game this time around; I just wanted to tear my hair out. The combat is sluggish, with repetitive animations and combat moves. Sure, there are some upgrades, but mashing light and heavy attacks against hundreds and hundreds of enemies is boring. There are a few instant kill animations, but they repeat so often that you will just finish off the enemies normally because of how tiresome it gets. It doesn’t help that the slow motion goes on for way too long.
Using flame pots, throwing axes, and health potions don’t help either. This game can be really tough, and you respawn at Leystone locations spread throughout each of the three islands. Your only goal is to run around liberating camps with Viking cages in them. It gets boring because that is all you do. There are no other objectives. Some camps require you to “prove” yourself before they join your army. This leads to mundane tasks like liberating another camp to prove yourself. At the end of each island are large fortresses that you liberate, which are probably the only interesting thing in the game for the first time. You can summon a dragon to wipe out shamans, but you need to acquire stones to do this, which completely breaks this. Once all the shamans are dead, you liberate that area and move on. No matter how fast your computer is, you will experience a massive slowdown during these battles because of all the people on screen. This drove me nuts.
Before you can liberate the final town on each island, you have to use stealth to sneak in and complete an objective. This was both broken and boring because you had no idea where to go. Enemies spot you too easily, and then they call all their friends over, and you die. Why you have to sneak into these camps is beyond me. Why can’t you just liberate it and then take the item as a reward? After one hour, this game is just not fun. The world is empty, there’s no reward for exploration, and the map system is nearly useless. The only redeeming qualities are the gore and the updated graphics. At least the game is really short and can be beaten in about 8 hours.
Overall, if you missed this five years ago, you’re not missing anything now. If you really need a budget hack and slash, then go ahead, but be warned of the boring, repetitive gameplay.
Serious Sam is one of the original old-school shooters where you just shot everything on sight. Forget about the story, gameplay, cinematic events, or anything else. Serious Sam is one of the less popular FPS series that is shadowed by Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem. BFE doesn’t really do anything new or add anything new except a spiffy new engine, which is seriously wasted. The game is repetitive, lacks any awesome guns (except a couple), and has the same handful of enemies thousands of times over. BFE is mainly for newcomers because only the super-hardcore fans will truly enjoy this (if that).
The story is paper-thin, with Sam trying to stop an alien invasion. That’s it. This is the prequel to First Encounter, but who really cares? The game tries to be a bit different by starting off slow with a sledgehammer and introducing awesome melee attacks to show off the new engine. You acquire a pistol, then a shotgun, and then more guns as the game goes on. There are dozens of secret areas everywhere (I couldn’t find a single one for some reason). You shoot thousands of enemies throughout the game, but in extremely difficult waves that can be in the hundreds.
I honestly felt that my arsenal was underwhelmed by the vast amounts of enemies the game throws at you. The most effective weapons were the cannon, C4, and Devastator, but the ammo for those is pretty rare (except C4). All the rest were pretty useless except the minigun, which was good at reducing crowds in a wide area but ate up ammo quick. I can’t tell you how boring the game got by the end, and it will really test your endurance. I played on the easy setting and still got my ass kicked sometimes. For the hell of it, I tried it on the hardest difficulty, and it was impossible. I couldn’t get past the third level; it was that hard. By the last level, you are thrown probably a few thousand enemies with wave after wave that takes you about 45 minutes to chew through. The waves get so big that I backpedaled half the level to get some breathing room in some areas.
When it comes to looks, BFE is impressive for a DirectX 9 game. This is the most customizable PC game ever made when it comes to graphics options. There are options here I have never even heard of! There are about 45 options, but when you max the game out, it looks amazing, but it is sadly wasted on a bland and boring art style. Everything is brown and dead, with nothing interesting to look at. Halfway through the game, I couldn’t take it anymore but finished it anyway. I do have to say that I am disappointed that Sam’s macho quips aren’t as funny this time around as in previous games. They just seem stale and are pretty mellow. Oh well.
Multiplayer is where BFE shines, but no one is playing online. During my entire week of playing the campaign, I logged in at different times of the day and night and maybe got 1 or 2 people playing if I was lucky. The server list is almost always empty, which is sad. This is a game that you will have to get buddies to go LAN on. When I did get a tiny game going, it was addictive and felt very old-school with fast movement, lots of jumping, and twitch reaction shooting. There are some neat modes, but I never got to play most of them because this game is nearly abandoned despite Croteam releasing a patch about 2 weeks ago.
I can only recommend this to hardcore FPS fans and hardcore fans of past Sam games. The campaign is nothing special and gets incredibly boring and monotonous halfway through, not to mention freaking tough as nails. The weapon arsenal is disappointing, and there are only a handful of different enemies. There isn’t enough new here to make it a true sequel, but the game looks damn good. For the low price, it is worth a fun play-through, but don’t expect tons of people to be playing online.
Graphics are great when it comes to textures, resolutions, and lighting but what about the art itself? Some games are living breathing pieces of art and are one of a kind. Sometimes a game may be inferior technically but surpass in style and better art. This year was more geared toward technical showcases, but there were a few artsy games that popped up.
Alice won over everything else because it is just oozing with art and substance from American McGee’s crazy mind. It brings out the darkness in Alice in Wonderland and every single speck on the screen has something unique about it. It has been a long time since something like this has come out where you want to hang every screenshot on your wall. Alice truly deserves this award hands down, but all I can say is you have to play it to understand why.
While graphics may not be essential, the artistic side can set them apart and make them individual and unique. The artistry of graphics is very important in defining a series or making it instantly recognizable.
Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Yarn. Who would have thunk? Using yarn to create the world is probably one of the most original art designs I have ever seen. Why does such a cutesy art design beat out other games that have tons of research behind them? Because it’s original. That’s the keyword. The game makes you feel just as fuzzy inside as the characters look.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.