This is always the hardest category for me to pick and I always spend weeks thinking about it. What makes a game better than all the others? Does it have to be revolutionary? One of a kind? Bigger than any other game? Not necessarily. GotY is usually for a game that exceeds expectations and feels solid, structured, fun, and memorable, and just stands out as a whole over any other game. This was a hard year to pick from as there were so many fantastic games that fell under these criteria.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I’m just as shocked as you are about this. I was on the bandwagon that BotW was overrated, hyped-up nonsense, but after getting a Switch during the holidays and really playing it I started to see just how wrong I was, and how blind all the naysayers are. Nintendo always gets a bad rap for their hardware and using the same franchises for 3 decades, and I get that. However, BotW is something different, something unique and revolutionary for Nintendo themselves. They stepped out of their comfort zone and looked at other popular games that helped influence BotW. BotW has so much going for it, gorgeous visuals, unique puzzle-solving, a vast open world, and so many secrets and things to discover and explore. 30 years of Zelda has all accumulated and is playable in one game. I can’t think of another game that was this ambitious and this well done this year.
The atmosphere in a game can be just as memorable as the story or be a character itself. Fallout 3 proved this as the Capital Wasteland was a character all on its own. A great atmosphere is something that can draw you in and make you feel a part of the world.
Just like Soma, Observer delivered an unrelenting atmosphere that is chilling to the bone, disturbing, and outright immersive. Not a single game this year touched Observer in terms of atmosphere. It was a let down storywise towards the end, but the entire play area of Observer tells its own interesting story.
Sound design isn’t something we normally think of every day, but without great sound design we wouldn’t be as immersed in games, it’s something that’s on the back burner and never gets enough credit.
Call of Duty may get a lot of backlashes, but WWII impressed on sound design. I felt like I was actually in the war thanks to the fantastic explosions, realistic gun sounds, tinging of shells off the ground, people screaming, doors creaking, and snow crunching. WWII went above and beyond…the Call of Duty in sound design.
The best voice acting in games aren’t just the best delivery, but how it fits into the game. Is the character tortured, insane, or psychotic? Delivering the characters the way we would see them in person is how a game delivers the best voice acting.
Wolfenstein doesn’t just have good actors, but each voice type fits the actor, and you feel the personality of the characters bleed off the screen. From BJ to various resistance members, I felt sucked in and became attached to the characters more thanks to the amazing voice acting.
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.
A great multiplayer game makes you want to come back and engages all players. Communication, fun factor, and great modes are what make a multiplayer game great. We didn’t get too many multiplayer exclusive games like we did last year, that really stood out, but some had great multiplayer modes.
Destiny 2
Destiny 2 isn’t just a fun shooter, but it’s fun with others. Seamlessly mixing the single-player campaign and letting other players pop in and out and play the same missions is just awesome. The raids, crucible missions, and many other modes are challenging fun that requires every teammate to perform their best.
Wolfenstein II was up against some big names, but it featured a unique and solid single-player campaign that the other shooters did not provide. The game felt good, was challenging, had a great story, and varied locales that were gorgeous to look at. Single-player shooters like Wolfenstein are hard to come by these days.
Am I 13 again? That’s the question I asked myself when I first loaded up WWII. World War II shooters dominated the gaming industry back in the late 90s and early 2000s, with Medal of Honor and Call of Duty at the forefront. With so many WWII games (check out my articles on nearly every WWII game ever made), everyone was done with them into the late 00s. With Modern Warfare, Battlefield, and other games jumping into modern combat, we quickly got sick of those in about the same amount of time.
Here we are in full circle. It’s rather funny that a WWII shooter feels fresh when, just 10 years ago, we were begging for it to end. Call of Duty was always my favorite of the bunch, as its slower, more cinematic take on the war was memorable and the gunplay was more realistic. There was always an interesting connection between teammates, rather than the war as a whole. In Call of Duty, you always followed one squad, or a small few (Finest Hour), but it never created anything groundbreaking.
WWII follows this old trend again as you play Private Daniels, who follows his squadmates through theaters of war and discovers losses along the way. It’s enough to keep you moving forward, but it never really amounts to anything. These are just generic soldiers that we have seen time and time again in these historical war shooters. What I was in for was the cinematic set pieces, weapons, and realism of WWII coming back with our current technology. Remember, these WWII shooters died in the middle of the last generation cycle.
I was very impressed with the storming of Normandy Beach as the game opened up. It showed the visual prowess of the game, with bullet shells flying everywhere, realistic and detailed characters and animations, and great water physics. What amazed me the most was when a soldier’s head was blown clean off, and I said to myself, “Wow, so they finally took the hint from Brothers in Arms that there was gore in these wars.” It’s just a no-brainer. I don’t know if it was technical limitations or just trying to get the teen rating, but why was there no gore for all those years these shooters were out? Only Brothers in Arms did that, I can remember.
As I played through the campaign, I had a sense that I was the small man in the war, never really a true hero. There are “heroic moments” that allow you to pull someone to safety to save someone from a Nazi trying to kill them, but these felt like they were wasted and just got in the way. Same as trying to find hidden moments everywhere. When you’re stuck in the middle of tank fire or being raided by bombs, you aren’t going to go around hunting for stuff; it’s just plain silly.
That wasn’t the only silly thing in the campaign; some of the cinematic scripted events are too crazy, and they feel like some sort of Indiana Jones thing, like when Daniels is falling down a bell tower and the bell is chasing him. Don’t drag it out so long and make so many near misses that you start rolling your eyes. These things took me out of the experience. However, the game did change up the pace quite a bit by throwing in stealth missions, escort missions, one mission where you are flying a plane (which is horrible), and even some tank and driving sections. It’s all here, and it feels like the culmination of Call of Duty from yesteryear, but in the end, it’s still missing something.
You can feel a bit of the Modern Warfare series in this game, such as the hit counter, quick scoping, and grenade lobbing. I wanted this game to stand apart from those and have nothing familiar in it, but it gets even worse in multiplayer, where it feels like Modern Warfare with a WWII skin attached.
After I finished the 8-hour campaign, I was left wanting more, which is always a good thing. I’m sure Activision will milk this again, as will other developers, but let’s use this opportunity to create something unique and give us parts of the war we haven’t seen. How about through the eyes of the Jews, or something a little more personable? It can happen, but WWII did what it was supposed to, for now.
I won’t get into multiplayer or Nazi Zombies much, but zombies are completely evolved. The new story carries out, and the map is much larger, with little puzzles here and there. There are a lot of upgrades, and Zombies is at its best yet, but you should probably already expect that. I never played Zombies much on CoD and probably won’t here either. Multiplayer is a little different and isn’t sure if it wants to be WWII, a Modern Warfare skin, or a Battlefield 1 clone. Multiplayer needs the most work in the next series, but I would love a larger campaign.
As it stands, WWII is a much-needed game in the series. Another Infinite Warfare, and the series would have been done for good. A few more hours in the oven, and Call of Duty could possibly cook up the best WWII shooter ever created next time around. With fantastic cinematic moments, a variety of gameplay, a long campaign, amazing visuals, added gore, and wholesome weapons, WWII is one of my favorite shooters to have come out in recent years.
World War II shooters were everywhere, but Ubisoft and Gearbox took a dangerous risk and released one so late in the game. 2005 was a year when WWII shooters were at their peak and when gamers hated them the most. Brothers in Arms proved to be a more authentic and smarter shooter and won fans of the genre over.
Gearbox painstakingly recreated Carentan and many parts of France, where the 101st Airborne Division landed on D-Day. The game also uses squad tactics and realism, unlike any other WWII shooter out there. You will notice when you play how well the guns feel when you shoot them and how you can’t nail an enemy from 100 feet away with a Thompson. You have to flank the enemy, or you die. It’s that simple and that difficult. Red circles will appear above enemy squads. You can issue commands to your squads to suppress them. Their circle will turn gray, and then it is safe to move up and find cover around the area to flank them. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Your squadmates can die, and so can you if you aren’t careful. You have to watch out for MG fire, which will kill you in an instant, and sometimes even tanks.
This realism and authenticity can’t be done without good AI, and BiA delivers and is even more impressive today. The only issue I had with AI was with tanks. Sometimes they wouldn’t go around each other or go the other way to follow a command. The game also requires a lot of patience. Sometimes even trial and error. You can’t just rush every enemy, like in Call of Duty, and save the day. You can order squads to rush and attack while your other squad suppresses, and then you can charge in with them to kill them all. You can also order squads and set positions that you want, so you have total control. It feels good and is a key part of the game. Without mastering this, you won’t get very far.
You also can’t just use an M1 Garand and snipe an enemy’s head while he’s in cover. It just doesn’t work that way; you also can’t kill an MG unless you flank them. This isn’t a Medal of Honor. This gave a great feeling of realism, but it was also very difficult. I died quite often because I chose the wrong tactic or flanked the wrong way. Sometimes my impatience got in the way as well. I even found different weapons to help in certain situations. When I finally got the Springfield sniper rifle, it was a weapon from God. After all the inaccurate weapons that couldn’t hit crap, this thing made life easier, but only for a few levels at the end.
When it comes to looks, BiA looks great, even to this day. The lighting looks real, the grass flows, and the models and textures are pretty high-res (for back then). You will be impressed. The game holds up and is still better than a lot of shooters today. My main concern is that the game feels the same throughout. I just went around killing everything and maybe planting a few charges. I could mount an MG sometimes and ride the back of a tank, but overall there wasn’t much variety in the game, which I find the biggest issue.
What’s here is one of the most authentic shooters around, and fans of the genre won’t be disappointed at all. The game looks great, has smart AI, and tells the sad story of Baker Company and the 101st Airborne.
Pearl Harbor was one of the worst terrorist attacks on the US and was what got us involved in World War II. EA decided to leave the frontlines of Europe and head to Hawaii at Pearl Harbor and into the Japanese and Philippine frontlines. It’s a nice change of scenery, especially back in the day when WWII shooters were coming out nearly every day. The problem is that Rising Sun is a reskin of Frontline with a lack of polish and detail and just doesn’t feel complete. Rising Sun needed about 6 months more of development before being anything remotely decent. What we have here is a sluggish, boring, and mediocre shooter, probably one of the worst shooters of 2003.
The game actually starts out pretty nicely. The bombing of Pearl Harbor feels epic in this game, you are just a nobody sailor who gets woken up by the bombings. After you see the poorly pre-rendered cutscene you start controlling your guy and it feels very similar to Frontline—too similar. Right off the bat, you realize the control issues haven’t changed. The aiming is really sensitive and finicky; there are no iron sights aiming, and the controls just stink. Once you run around the boat trying to escape your notice, you can save at checkpoints. This is actually one of the only two major issues that were fixed by Frontline. The missions are very long, and you no longer have to start at the beginning of every level when you die.
Once you get out, you notice the framerate is worse than Frontline. The FPS drops to single digits often, and it actually affects gameplay. Trying to shoot someone when the game is chugging along at 5 frames per second is nearly impossible. It doesn’t help that the aim is already wonky. The change of pace in the beginning, using the turret on the boat, and shooting down planes is fun. I also have to mention that the only great part of Rising Sun is the music. Medal of Honor has a fantastic score across all the WWII games, but Rising Sun needs more than that to save it.
Once you start the next level, you realize the game is just so bad. The level design is abysmal with confusing mazes; it was cute for EA to try to make you feel like you have multiple paths, but you really don’t. It just makes things more confusing. There are also secondary hidden objectives this time around, but they are nearly impossible to figure out; hell, even the regular objectives are hard to figure out. Items don’t flash, so you can’t tell if they’re part of the scenery or something you need to interact with. Most of the time, you just get lucky when a prompt comes up on the screen when you pass something.
I like the new selection of weapons: the shotgun, Type 99, Sten MKII, and a few other Pacific Theatre weapons. That’s probably the only other great change from Frontline, but the guns control themselves so horribly that you won’t care. The most annoying part of Rising Sun is the forced and failed implementation of stealth. During one of the last few levels, you get recruited into the OSS and have to infiltrate a Japanese summit at a hotel. The game gives you the Welrod, which is a one-shot silenced pistol. Sure, that’s fine, but Rising Sun wasn’t built for stealth. I shot the first few people silently, then all of a sudden I was being attacked. I had to run around the whole level with just a pistol and the Welrod. Not very fun. The hints say to stick to the shadows and stay in the column areas. Yeah, sure, what shadows? The stealth is just completely broken, but at least healing items give you more health, so the game is a bit easier in that regard.
Let’s finally talk about graphics. The game is butt ugly, even uglier than Frontline. During the jungle levels, the developers just put the flat texture of a forest on the walls. Yeah, good job, you lazy jerks. The game is just ugly and unpolished. The events in the game are so unbelievable that it’s hard to think that these things actually happened. Did I mention there’s still no blood? The last thing to go is the terrible AI. The friendly AI just stands there while they’re being shot and completely ignores enemies. The multiplayer is also as boring as ever.
Rising Sun sold millions of copies, but it couldn’t live up to the quality of the previous game. With ugly graphics, horrible framerate, terrible AI, bad level design, and various other issues, Rising Sun stands as one of the worst games in the series.
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Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.