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| My top 3 games of 2016 by Mischief Maker 01/02/2017, 8:09pm PST | ||||
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| 3. Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal
This is the best tower defense game ever made but I hesitate to call it that because it plays almost nothing like the tower defense genre turned out. Rather this is what tower defense should have been. It synthesizes ideas from several failed experimental indie games over the years from Perimeter to Harvest: Massive Encounter and finally makes them all work. The premise is humanity is under siege by a malevolent alient race whose unconventional tactic is putting replicators on planets that create an endless flood of semi-intelligent purple slime called "creeper" that selectively destroys any humans or technology immersed in it. You control up to three command posts that must build an energy infrastructure to build and fuel a sufficient amount of various turrets to beat back the ever-encroaching creeper until you can secure ground close enough to build a bomb in range of the replicator and stop the onslaught for good. Like I said, this is what tower defense SHOULD have been. The game takes place on a 3D map with the creeper spreading with proper liquid physics and you have the ability to build walls and construct the perfect fortress, but also have the constant need to defend greater and greater territory because occupied land surface is the primary source of power in this game. I know it sounds weird battling against the blob, but there's a real Lord of the Rings battle sense of satisfaction against this liquid opponent, with a well-placed mortar shell blasting an area of creeper feeling as satisfying as watching a sea of orks squished by trebuchet stones. It also has random map generation, something shockingly missing from almost every other TD game in existence. The main downside is programmer graphics. It looks about as ugly as DROD, be warned! 2. Shadow Warrior 2 Like I said before, this game is a mix of good, questionable, and bad ideas, but alltogether the good wins out. This is the best FPS in the Painkiller-mold I've yet played. I love the Ninja agility the game gives you to fly around the levels and love the giant levels it provides you to ninja around in. I appreciate they held onto the previous game's philosophy that the best FPS level is one covered in explosive barrels, and also appreciate that they removed all the boring construction site art assets from the previous game. The plot not only stinks, it kinda contradicts the surprisingly good story of the previous game in many ways. Seems some of the developers agree because every cutscene is skippable and many of the conversations with your disapproving mary sue sidekick are an opt-in affair. However, several of Lo Wang's one-liners evoked laughs from me by sheer statistical inevitability if nothing else. The RPG mechanics are a little annoying thanks to the terrible inventory interface, but you can beat the game on normal without touching the weapon upgrades and there are some pickups that are really cool, like one that turns a gun into a stationary turret ala. Rogue Trooper. Protip: on normal mode spread your skill points out, any skill maxed out on normal becomes borderline game-breaking (like stealth). 1. Thea: The Awakening I bought this game on sale on a whim and it's kept me up past midnight more times than any other game I've played this year. Like Creeper World, it synthesizes several ideas from many other experimental games from Armageddon Empires to Renowned Explorers into something unique and great. The premise is a fantasy apocalypse has thrown your world into 100 years of demon-infested darkness, but sunlight has finally returned to the world and you're a weakened god who has to guide a tiny village of humans first to survive in this hostile world, then to restore your power and save the world, then to survive the ridiculous onslaught of the aftergame DLC war against the giants, and finally to thrive by reaching huge economic milestones. The world is represented in a civilization-style hex grid, but your starting village is the only settlement you get the entire game (located on the last patch of holy land). Your villagers are each individuals with their own name and portrait. They get a class, a paper-doll inventory, and a semi-random collection of skills. In the village they can be put to use gathering resources within reach or building things. But you constantly need to be provisioning and sending out expeditions to explore ruins, scavenge supplies, and destroy monster lairs. As your expeditions explore the world you constantly run into random side missions that play out in fully-voiced choose your own adventure form. Now whenever you get into a fight or a skill challenge, the game switches to a battle card game. Your dudes are converted into cards and randomly shuffled into two hands. The offensive hand is the front line that participates directly in combat, the tactical hand has special powers based on the characters' skills that let you do everything from changing the initiative order, boosting the stats of a friendly card in play, or even forcing your opponent to discard. Your dudes' stats and abilities in the card game are directly influenced by their skills and equipment Different skills apply to different types of challenges, so the scholar on your team who's an absolute weakling in combat might be the baddest motherfucker in your hand during a persuasion challenge. The glue between the exploration and the card battles is the expansive crafting system that lets you construct hundreds of different items based on various item combination recipies. The best part of crafting is, once you know how to make a type of item you can use any materials to make one of those of any quality. It's a real thrill in the early game when the RNG spits out some dragon bones and ancient wood after an encounter because you can immediately construct the best spear in the game using those. They even managed to make cooking a compelling activity because the larger variety of types of food an expedition carries, the more stat bonuses they get. I would definitely be enjoying Conquest of Elysium 4 better if I'd never played Thea. Not only do I love the sense of exploration and RPG escalating power, I really like how the layout of the map can require significant alterations of your strategy while COE4's random maps either enhance or impede the one winning strategy of each race. There are two downsides to Thea. The first is easily avoided, the game defaults to below-developer-intended difficulty and can be an absolute pushover on normal. The other is unavoidable and that's some heavy duty unlockable cancer to give your village all 5 of your god's blessings, blessings that prove essential to survive higher difficulties. Also the final God to be unlocked is completely unbalanced and flat out superior to the entire pantheon unlocked earlier. |
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My top 3 games of 2016 by 01/02/2017, 8:09pm PST  Is Thea early access at the moment or is it officially released? NT by 01/05/2017, 6:28pm PST Yeah, it's been out for months. In fact it's had two free DLCs already. NT by 01/05/2017, 7:26pm PST Only one of which was released in 2016. NICE LIST, LISTY. NT by 01/06/2017, 6:11am PST Halcyon 6 is basically Thea IN SPAAACE! but gets it all wrong gameplay-wise BTW. NT by 01/07/2017, 5:09pm PST Dissapointment of the year: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided by 01/08/2017, 6:31pm PST Arrgh, it's true, it's true by 01/08/2017, 6:48pm PST You forgot Neil Druckmann NT by 01/08/2017, 7:09pm PST After 2 weeks, I finally tried picking it up again after the prologue by 01/24/2017, 3:49am PST I can't believe I forgot to include Brigador! by 01/12/2017, 10:46pm PST |
