Game of the Year 2014

NOMINEES:

Valiant Hearts

Before you freak out about the fact that I’ve commended Valiant Hearts in other categories, remember that I’m not saying that this was a bad game, just a disappointing one. Despite the fact that I loved the story and visuals, it just wasn’t fun to play. The puzzles were too easy and most sequences were boring, with very few stand-out moments.

Never Alone

As with Valiant Hearts, this game was just better to look at than to play. However, where Valiant Hearts only suffered from some simple puzzles, Never Alone took it a step further with just overall bland gameplay and some frustrating trial and error platforming sequences. The game had a great message, but that doesn’t make it a great game.

I’m a huge Borderlands fan. I played through both other games multiple times, including the DLC, and I was one of the few people that was excited for the Pre-Sequel. And it sucked. It took forever to get anywhere in the bland environments, the jokes felt even more forced than they occasionally did in the first two games, the O2 mechanic was completely pointless and discouraged you from ever exploring, and, worst of all, the low gravity made enemies too hard to hit and made the shooting feel like it was in slow motion. This game really killed a lot of my excitement for the series.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s like Bungie took great shooting mechanics and a cool universe, and worked their asses off day and night for five years to completely overshadow them with extraneous and poorly implemented bullshit. The boring, non-existent story, the lack of any interesting characters, the monotonous, endless grinding, the fact that they hid the most interesting gameplay elements in the raid (something only a fraction of players even saw), constantly having to return to the Tower just to turn in a quest or bounty, having a million different currencies and reputations to manage, trying to level gear that’s randomly dropped, not having enough different locations, the multiplayer that didn’t do anything new or interesting, hiding all of the interesting lore aspects on a damn website not even accessible in the actual game, making exotic weapons not exotic at all, ditching all of the interesting social features of a typical MMO, not having matchmaking for the raid or weekly challenges, the terrible random number generator for engrams, having to pointlessly grind material to upgrade weapons and armor, and let’s not forget Dinklebot. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed with Destiny.