Best Looking Game
This isn’t best or most graphics, or even best art design, it’s simply the game that looked the best to me, all things considered. Super subjective, I know, but so are all of these awards.
NOMINEES:
The Wolf Among Us
Wolf Among Us had its visual hiccups (like all Telltale games, unfortunately), but it deserves special mention here for being the best looking Telltale game yet, including the new Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones.
Bungie knows how to do skyboxes, and that’s the biggest reason that Destiny made this list. Credit where credit is due, I did like a lot of the enemy and weapon designs, but you saw them so often that the uniqueness wore off quickly.
Valiant Hearts
A perfect example of “less is more” art design. Valiant Hearts used the same UbiArt engine as Child of Light, but altered it to give a more simple, hand-drawn style. And boy was that dog adorable.
Infamous: Second Son
This was the first game that showed the power of the PS4 graphical hardware. Seattle was so insanely detailed, and few games were as pretty this year as Second Son at night in the rain.
Far Cry 4
Like Second Son, this was more of a graphical powerhouse than anything else, but the locations were incredibly varied, the animals looked full of life, and every fire and explosion seemed real.
Child of Light
I really loved the painted look of this game, and the character models were adorable. Would have benefited from more visual variety in enemy design, though.
Neverending Nightmares
This was the most unique looking game I played all year, hands down. The black and white really made the blood red pop in a brutal way, and I loved the oppressiveness of the blurry black lines all over the screen.
The Banner Saga
This game had a very distinct 2D, hand-drawn style that hearkened back to old 50’s cartoons. Banner saga might have won this category if it weren’t for the static “cutscenes.”
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Some might say the game just looked like an episode of the show, but I think that’s incredibly impressive and deserves recognition. The game looks super clean, I loved how the weapons and armor were re-purposed items that the kids would actually have, the magic looked awesome, and the sequence in Canada broke up the visual style in a perfect way at the perfect time. Kudos to Obsidian and South Park Studios.
4 thoughts on “Game of the Year 2014”