Isometrics Game of the Year: The Top Eight Games this Year

2014 was a rather interesting year of near misses and near brilliance, ruined by inexperience with new hardware or incompetence with porting. However despite this there were some truly brilliant games, and so I had to trim my shortlist a lot to get to my top eight best games this year.

Again, as with the worst games list, the games had to be released between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014, cannot be freemium games, and remakes are allowed if they change enough stuff to almost be considered a game distinct from the original. The first release of a game in English also applies here. No beta or early access games here, which basically wiped off a good chunk of my shortlist.

In the end though, this is my shortlist, and I'll do my best to explain where the rankings come from.

Here goes!

8: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (Konami: PC/PS3/PS4/X360/XONE)

This was a game I really hoped they wouldn't screw up, but in a few ways it did so let me get the bad parts of the game out of the way first. The game is ridiculously short for its original price tag (£30!), clocking up at about an hour and a half for the main mission, though of course it contained a few side missions. There is only one map, and of course the story can't really get going, although we do get a lot of disgusting imagery which I won't get into which is a bit unsettling since none of the previous six or seven MGS games got anywhere near as visceral. It very nearly ended up on the end of the worst games list because of its length, and I'm not even kidding.

All that out of the way, the game was utterly magnificient. The control system, vastly improved from MGS4 onwards was absolutely joyeous to use. Graphically the game was spellbinding, using light and shade in a way I'd never seen in a next gen game, with some great details and amazing character designs. The AI is vastly improved and a legitimate part of the challenge, since they will call for help and go into alert if something logically untowards is discovered, reminding me a lot of the Hitman games in that regard. The story, such as there was, is evocative, expertly directed and brilliantly performed, particularly with regards to mental trauma and harm, obviously this will become a far greater part of The Phantom Pain. There are a lot of ways to handle each mission and a ton of weapons to collect to, so it is a case that if you enjoy the game there are plenty of reasons to replay.

Added to this is the phenomenal PC port, one of the best from a Japanese developer (and one of the most optimised Next-Gen games released on PC this year) and you have a brilliant game that only slightly disappointed.

7: Toybox Turbos (Codemasters: PC)

I agonised whether I was going to put this or BlazeRush on my list, and eventually it boiled down to a straight choice. While Blazerush was an amazingly fun game which really surprised me from a developer who hadn't made a game that good before, Toybox Turbos is simply a better game. It is a modern day Micro Machines, which is probably the greatest compliment you can give a party racing game.

The graphics are superb, there are plenty of cars and tracks to play and an excellent online mode. However the main star is the gameplay, which is as perfect as you can make a party racing game. Overall it is a little short in single player (3 hours, but the game was £11 new and of course there is the multiplayer) but get a few friends playing and you have a great party game.

6: Cloudbuilt (Coilworks: PC)

On the one hand, it's incredibly tough. On the other it's an absolutely gorgeous, fantastically designed joy to play. Coilworks' debut is amazing to play, basically getting to the core of what 3D platforming should be. Armed with a hover, a dash and the ability to run up walls, Demi can go basically anywhere, but the limits to all three of those abilities mean the game ends up becoming one of careful strategy and risk, particularly since there are so many routes you can take through levels, some unforgiving tough but very quick. Add to that an interesting story about journeying through trauma and a lot of interesting levels and you have one of the sleeper hits of the year.

5: Murdered: Soul Suspect (Square-Enix: PC/XONE/PS4/X360/PS3)

A game which scores a lot of its points with an interesting premise and an excellent adventuring mechanic. The best way to describe the game is Ghost Trick meets LA Noire, where you play a cop who has to solve his own murder in order to get into heaven. At times the game is complete nonsense but the game really does a good job of painting the ghost world as different from the real world. Add to that the interesting clue gathering and piecing together mechanics from LA Noire and you have a very good adventure game. The stealth sections, combat and the sheer amount of combat there is later in the game probably could have done with some balencing though.

4: South Park the Stick of Truth (Ubisoft: PC/X360/PS3)

Don't say I never give Ubisoft credit when it's due. For all the AAA problems they've had this year, they also released the touching Valient Hearts, the stylish Child of Light and The Stick of Truth, the single best licensed game released this year, and up on the list for being the best licensed game of all time.

Where it works is in the details. It looks like the show, and few games ever manage that. The writing is by the show's writers, the voice acting is by Matt Stone and Trey Parker and it is as hilarious, demented and absolutely brilliant as the show has become. The gameplay is akin to Paper Mario, right down to having patches, badges and extra abilities and may well be the most refined game Obsedian have made as well.

3: One Way Heroics (AGM Playism: PC)

There were a lot of RPGs in my shortlist, and again I was torn between the sublime Legends of Heroes, Trails in the Sky and this, and really both deserve to be on this list. One Way Heroics succeeds in having an excellent array of mechanics, a great pace to the game, lots of choices and customisation and really managing to do something new with the roguelike. The balance between getting experience and looking for items, as well as the potential for strategy is done excellently, along with one of the best soundtracks this year (in fact the only two soundtracks better than it are at #2 and #1 on this list). A sleeper hit in every regard.

2: The Binding of Isaac Rebirth (Nicalis and Edmund McMillan: PC/PS4)

I love the Binding of Isaac, but there were a lot of slight technical problems with the original game which meant I never really got the fullest out of it. If it didn't do quite as many improvements, modifications, engine changes and the like to the game it might have been disqualified for being a rerelease, but because all those changes improve and change the gameplay experience so thoroughly, it has to be here. Since I bought it a month and a bit ago I have sunk 75 hours into it, and it has become the go-to game I play when I'm doing other things. The amount of content in the game is staggering, almost as much as how much that affects the game, with good and bad loadouts really meaning the difference between a tricky game and an incredibly hard one. Despite this you never feel the game has made it impossible for you, and it manages that great rogue-lite sense of risk and reward perfectly. Add to that a great mix between adorable and abject imagery and an incredible soundtrack and you have one of the best games this year.

1: Transistor (Supergiant Games: PC/PS4)

The game world this year has been characterised by games that promise a lot and simply do not deliver. Many games I thought would be spectacular at the start of this year have by its end either been forgotten or are not quite as great. Transistor however is not one of them.

I went into 2014 thinking this would be my game of the year, perhaps having to battle MGSV and Watchdogs for the top sport. But it simply did not disappoint. If anything, the game was better than I had anticipated, with all its functions and form coming together wonderfully with an amazing aesthetic. I love cyberpunk, and this mix of cyberpunk and art deco made for an arresting hauntingly beautiful atmosphere, particularly as the work of the Process serves to swallow it up.

The soundtrack is one of the best of all time, a mix of genres along with some sensational vocals creates that tragic out of time sense for the game, which just works perfectly for every scenario. The game is short but with a New Game Plus option and a heartbreaking story.

There were many good games this year. A few great ones, but it turns out only one of them managed to do everything right this year and that was indeed Transistor.

An Isometric 2014: On Transition, Change and Challenge

The year 2014 has been a year of flux as a whole, and the gaming world has been shaped in part by that flux. Compared to the amazing artistic swansong that was 2013, it may be easy to see 2014 as somewhat of a disappointment, critically, creatively and culturally, however peel away the dank cynicism and there is a lot more hope for the future than one might imagine.

The biggest thing of the year is of course the release of the next generation of consoles, with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One being part of a somewhat acrimonious console war. Many of the news stories, trade events and interviews featured more than a few potshots and particularly tactical marketing decisions intended as much to put the enemy down rather than big up the system itself. Things like the rather bitter tit-for-tat exclusivity deals (“You got Titanfall and Rise of the Tomb Raider? Well we'll get Street Fighter V!”) and the increasingly secretive marketing deals and relationships between giant companies and the larger web-based gaming media was something that would have massive echoing effects throughout the year.

Despite the plaintive cries of the PC faithful who claim they had all the power of the new systems years ago (Full Disclosure: I built a gaming rig this year), the systems were genuinely more powerful and brought the potential for newer and bigger gaming experiences. Sadly, those experiences weren't entirely realised within the bigger budget games, and my top ten lists will reflect the fact that there wasn't a AAA title around that didn't come without the sting of disappointment. The ambition and attempts at new ideas and new intellectual properties shouldn't be understated however, even if the chequered reception to Titanfall and the rather poor release of Watch Dogs didn't seem to foster much in the way of confidence. Generally the biggest two bugbears of the past, overhyped and undercooked releases, ended up having a greater effect than ever, with Assassin's Creed Unity being the inevitably bad result.

This was the first year to see some major broken promises in the case of crowd-funding platforms as well, with Double Fine's fall from grace being a particularly dark indicator of the importance of really planning for every possible eventuality when asking people for money to fund your project. That said, despite some major issues, the majority of successful Kickstarters are still trucking, which if all goes to plan will lead to a 2015 stocked to the brim with amazing unique ideas.

Culturally the video game community saw its biggest shifts to date. Youtube as a gaming media platform really hit the spotlight this year, first being treated as a threat through the ContentID shenanigans at the start of the year that received no limit of coverage, to the giftedly bad games seemingly designed to be let's played, to the increasingly questionable issues of payola, reaching a zenith with Yogsdiscovery, a scheme that at least was a pretty blunt statement of intentions. Youtubers making careers on the platform is a relatively new thing and so certain basic things like disclosure and the trust between content provider and the audience was broken on more than one occasion over the year, and the less said about the insane tribalistic mess that was the entire Gamergate story the better, as prominent people both for and against seemingly different interpretations of the core ideologies climbed over themselves to yell obscenities at each other in a way that served to leave people caught in the middle feeling more than a little isolated. This coupled with the market censorship of a few controversial titles adds further questions to where gaming stands on the cultural front between toy and transcendental art.

In the end though, there is the sense that deep within all this pain, harassment and epithets is a discussion that needs to be had, about the relationship between developers, the gaming press in its nebulous state and gamers themselves, as well as the identity of a gaming culture faced with its own adolescence. What is gaming and what are gamers going into 2015? That answer is something every gamer will have to face themselves but having written Isometrics on and off this year on top of news and reviews for two sites now, the answer for me personally is a web of fear and doubt over where gaming will move to over the next few years, but like all good adventures a sense of wonder comes directly from this. 2015 looks promising, and looking forward rather than back, 2014 looks pretty good too.

With the amazing promise of last year it was going to fall below our expectations, but it is possible that the progress of last year might be discolouring the achievements and great games of 2014. Even with me playing catch up on 2013's releases I still had more good games than bad in my shortlists, and there were some fantastic games that lived up to their promise. With the recent release of new consoles a sense of conservatism was inevitable, with the market dominated with updated re-releases and HD ports. However, a year sandwiched between the artistic accomplishments of the past and the great expectations of the future to not be branded a total write-off is a good achievement indeed.

Happy Christmas, hope 2014 wasn't too brutal, and I hope you stick around for the Isometrics Awards

Isometrics: On New Beginnings and the Isometrics Awards

Welcome to Isometrics, the Belated Bellevue of the literary world of computer and video games. It has been an amazingly long time since the last Isometrics, for various reasons I won't go into here, but suffice to say many of those concerns are no longer a factor in my life and thus Isometrics lives again. I figure the best time to come back would be December because it means I can discuss the gaming year and will have more than one post a week.

There's a little bit of caretaking and cobweb dusting to do first before we leap back into the fray, so I apologise in advance for a bit of a cluttered article. Currently all my old Isometrics posts are on Geek Pride (Link to a little library of them here), but as far as I know in the immediate future they will be on The Clinkening, which is my old blog of sorts (there's plenty of my old stuff here but don't look, it's terrible!). That will be the home of Isometrics until I either create a new site or someone decides that they'd like to see these articles on their website and I somehow pitch it successfully.

In any case, the time has come for the Isometrics Awards, which is a set of five articles that will be released over the Christmas period. This didn't happen last year because they would have been my first Isometrics articles and it didn't seem right to discuss a year I'd not written about in some way.

The first will be a review of the year “On Gaming in the Year 2014”, where I discuss how gaming changed, progressed and changed in the year 2014, and my oh my is there a lot to talk about. That will be up either this week or next, depending on how everything falls into place in terms of my life. That should be up on Friday all going well

Next week there is the crowning of the Worst and Best games of 2014. I've wanted to do a list like this for so long, where I chronicle the crowning achievements and the deepest lows of video games in 2014, from the most evocative epics to the most repulsive ideas. There are ground rules I hold, which I'm not sure are the same for every games media person doing a list like this, but mine are as follows:

To qualify, the game must have received a full release in one of the three major territories (Japan, USA and Europe) between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014. A release in this definition is a retail release of a full game, or in the case of freeware games that may make the list, the release of a 1.0 and a sourced report that the game is no longer a beta. The reason for the date overlap is that while this list is based on a full year, it will by definition be released before the start of the next, so to ensure that games that may have been ignored in the lull after cyber monday are not ignored, they are eligible for next year's list as well.

Games released in a paid beta programme or Steam's Early Access are not eligible until they receive a full release, to encourage the speedy development and release of said games. Episodic games are eligible, providing their first episode was released within the window of release, so long as the game's intention was to be episodic, as opposed to an attempt to buy more development time (This is known as the Broken Age Rule).

Freemium games (aka “Free to Play”, “Free to Start” and “Confidence Tricks”) are not eligible due to the inherent issues with the format. Exceptions will be made for particularly egregiously terrible examples that defy the standard issues that plague Free to Play games. Note that I have not mentioned any ways Freemium games could enter the Best Games list. A particularly excellent example may well qualify, but it is difficult to explain the conditions that would lead to it, and will likely be decided on a case by case basis.

There is a thorny issue of remakes, ports and expanded rereleases. Generally as a rule straight ports of a game are not allowed as a means to get around the release date limit. This would for example, disqualify Valkyria Chronicles from the 2014 lists (For the record, it would have been very high up the Best of list, had it been allowed.). HD Rereleases, expanded ports and remakes are disallowed unless they have enough content and gameplay alterations to differentiate themselves from the original game, which may well be up to me to justify. An example of this in action is that Resident Evil would qualify for 1996 for being an original game. Resident Evil for Gamecube (the REmake) would also qualify for 2002 for being significantly different from the original game (new enemies, new enemy types, story differentiation, new modes), while the 2015 HD rerelease of that would not qualify because it is not different enough. It is a rule that makes more sense in practise.

Regarding games with inferior ports, generally I will go with whatever version I've played (Almost entirely the PC this year), as opposed to treating different ports as different games. It just gets confusing that way especially with games like GTA V, which would in theory be eligible for three years in a row.

Finally, while all my reasons and justifications will be explained in my review, they are in the end subjective, at least based on what I have and have not played. I will only be including games I have played myself this year, which may discount a lot of AAA games. My judging criteria is based on active joy and active malice, so the game that gave me the most amount of joy and did the most amount of amazing things with the medium will win Game of the Year, and the opposite is true for the Worst Game of the Year. In the end these are all basically opinions I explain and elaborate, so don't take it to heart if a game you really like is not in my list.

I've been looking forward to this all year, and my list has changed in so many ways since my predictions at the start of the year.

Then there is the Isometrics Awards, the big list of miscellaneous awards based around the world of literary gaming, from the ridiculously serious to the seriously ridiculous. Basically as much of the craziness, joy, splendour and stupidity of video games and game culture will be brought to the fore.

After all that, there is the Isometric New Year's Resolutions, which will be five predictions/hopes/pleas to the gaming zeitgeist for things to change in 2015. I had a blast writing the resolutions last year and so I'll definitely have a ton to say this year.

With everything else I want to say to everyone who read Isometrics (or pretty much anything else I posted), thank you ever so much. It meant a lot that people read my works. I had some great discussions with friends about the things I had written and the feedback I received was nice. I'm also really sorry that other articles and work commitments got in the way of new articles, but with a new beginning for 2015, there will be a greater endeavour to continue writing what I love rather than what I need to.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and all the rest!