5. Batman: Arkham Knight
I’m one of the few people on the planet that didn’t absolutely adore Arkham City and found Asylum to be a much tighter, more satisfying experience. City made next to no use of its open world, which usually got in the way rather than adding to the gameplay experience in any meaningful way.
Thankfully, Arkham Knight fixes that, offering a more organic world that feels more open to exploration rather than just serving as a bunch of big buildings to fly around. Knight‘s Gotham is a vibrant, neon-lit visual wonder that offers plenty of things to discover, from militia checkpoints to Gotham’s Most Wanted missions, with lots of mysteries to unravel and, yes, Riddler puzzles to solve. Never before has a game made you feel like Batman, whether you’re swooping from rooftop to rooftop or zooming around in the Batmobile.
Yes, the Batmobile: the most polarizing thing about Arkham Knight. I personally enjoyed it and thought it added quite a bit to the gameplay, and the tank combat sequences – while sometimes a bit overdone – were a fun new element that fit perfectly in the universe. It handles really well, with an amazing weight to its controls that make it truly feel like the powerful vehicle that it is.
Not only that, but the cast of characters is the best yet for the series, with so many Batman heroes and villains coming together during Scarecrow’s night of terror in Gotham. An old favorite even returns and, despite my fears, their presence in the game is handled creatively and appropriately. The titular Arkham Knight is a sinister, truly threatening character that seems to know everything about Batman and constantly comes up with new ways to undermine and work around the Caped Crusader. Throughout the game, with his guidance, enemies adapt to Batman’s combat style and force you to come up with new tricks and ways to clear rooms. I did guess his identity, however, quite a bit before he was unmasked – and I know next to nothing about the Batman universe outside these games.
Overall, Arkham Knight is the closest I’ve ever felt to actually being Batman, and it’s probably my favorite game in the series; a truly fine way for Rocksteady to close the trilogy.
4. Tales from the Borderlands
Confession time: I’ve never played a Telltale game. And I’m not the biggest Borderlands fan in the world.
However, Tales from the Borderlands sucked me into its world like few other games have in recent memory, and I played through the game over the course of just a few days – often completing whole episodes in one sitting. For someone who normally has the attention span of a gerbil when it comes to my gaming sessions, that’s an impressive feat indeed.
When I think about Borderlands, I think of toilet humor, one-note caricatures of characters, and repetitive missions with lots of superfluous loot hunting. Not the best background for a point-and-click choose-your-own-adventure style game, but Telltale somehow crafted an amazingly satisfying adventure, with characters I fell in love with from the start, emotional highs and lows, intelligent writing, and some of the funniest laugh-out-loud moments of the entire year. Loader Bot and Gortys especially steal the show in just about every scene they’re in, but the human characters are fantastic as well, with their own unique backstory, flaws, and character development throughout the ten or so hours of the story. Even Handsome Jack is no longer the one-note villain that he was in Borderlands 2 – even offering some rare moments where you almost sympathize with him…or maybe he’s just manipulating you like always.
Tales from the Borderlands might just make me try some of Telltale’s other adventures, not to mention that I’d jump at the chance to spend time with the cast again and pick up where Tales left off – whether it be in a sequel or even Borderlands 3.
3. Splatoon
When Splatoon was first revealed, I didn’t really get the hype. Sure, it was a unique Nintendo-style take on traditional shooter mechanics, but the gameplay looked really shallow and one-note, and it seemed like it would get old fast. And the closer we got to release, the worse it sounded – with the announcement that it would only have five maps at release, the fact it would only rotate two maps in at a time, no voice chat, and the lack of any ranked modes available at launch. It seemed like the most barebones of releases, and Nintendo’s strategy of drip-feeding content just seemed like an excuse to release a half-finished game and artificially extend its longevity.
Thankfully, I convinced myself to pick it up at release anyway, and once I turned off the typically horrendous motion controls, I found one of my favorite shooters in years. I know it’s become trite and cliche when describing this game, but the best word to describe Splatoon is “fresh.” The idea of shooting your opponents being secondary to simply painting the landscape and covering more ground than the opposing team is typical Nintendo creativity at work, and it really makes you rethink how you play a shooter. Not to mention turning into a squid and jetting around the arena beneath the ink adds a whole different level of mobility to the game. Plus, the matches are just long enough for them to feel like a chaotic tug-of-war, but short enough so that you want to play “just one more”…and then before you know it you’ve spent three hours playing the game.
And everything about the aesthetic, from the bright colors to the design of the Inklings and a soundtrack that can only be described as “squid punk,” makes a ’90s kid like myself instantly get transported back to the days of Saturday morning cartoons of that era.
As the year has gone on, Nintendo has increased the number of maps to 16 and added several ranked modes (of varying quality) to the game, so anyone buying the game now has no shortage of content to dive into (literally). Add in the game’s short but oh-so-sweet single player campaign, and Splatoon is truly a fantastic package.
Now if they’d just get rid of the damn map/mode rotation…seriously, there are 16 maps now, there’s no need to limit them to two every four hours.
2. Rocket League
Talk about coming out of nowhere. Rocket League is the long-awaited sequel to the seminal classic Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars and…wait, you mean you’ve never heard of it? Yeah, me neither.
It’s a simple concept: soccer, but with remote control cars and a giant ball. That will sound like either the dumbest or the most awesome thing ever, but it works. It’s an amazingly simple hook that makes the perfect pick-up-and-play game – whether it be a quick match or two when you have a spare few minutes before going to work, or an hours-long marathon session at night. Like Splatoon, the matches are short enough to foster that “just one more” feeling that will cause you to blow two or three hours on the game before you know it. It’s simple, but highly addictive.
Rocket League is a perfect example of a game with a low barrier to entry and a high skill ceiling. Anyone can play it and have a blast by just racing around the field and hitting the ball when they get to it (and hoping it happens to go into the goal), but mastering the more advanced tactics like saves and aerials (using your boost power to rocket into the sky and hit the ball mid-air) will take considerable time and practice. Even now, I can’t pull off an aerial to save my life, and even the closest-thing-to-a-veteran-we-have Rocket League player in my friends group hasn’t totally mastered them yet.
It’s also helped by the fact that there are no stats, no loadouts, and no extra fluff. The myriad car customizations are entirely aesthetic, and besides having a larger or smaller hitbox, there is no difference in speed or capability between different cars, wheels, etc. Your success or failure is entirely dependent on your own skill rather than what parts you equip to your car, and there are some truly fun and wacky ways you can customize your vehicle – including items from other classic games. Right now I’m personally rocking the Portal cake on top of a monster truck with the propulsion gel from Portal 2 serving as my boost.
Rocket League is the very definition of a game that just seeks to be fun above everything else, and it succeeds on every single level.
1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
If you’d told me at the beginning of the year that The Witcher 3 would be my Game of the Year, I would have recommended you undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Coming into the year, I had zero interest in the game – I’d never played a Witcher title before, and everything about the game screamed “generic open-world fantasy RPG” like the Elder Scrolls games I love to hate and have always found dull and boring. And, to be honest, the only reason I even got the game is because it came for free when I upgraded my GPU back in April. So, I figured that I might as well give it a try when it came out a month later…and over the course of the year, I’ve put dozens of hours into the game.
I’ve spent more time with The Witcher 3 than I have any other game this year, and yet I’ve still barely scratched the surface. Part of the reason for that is because I actually want to explore the world – and it’s a huge game, with a massive world to explore and things to do around every corner. Normally, in an RPG like this, I’ll plow through the main questline and call it a day, maybe doing some side quests here and there, but mostly just sticking to the storyline. But in The Witcher 3, I want to explore, interact with the world and its inhabitants, and take my time picking up tons of side missions along the way, rather than rushing through the game and missing something.
Probably the biggest reason for that is because CD Projekt Red has mastered the art of creating meaningful side missions. They’re not just “go here and kill five wolves” or “bring me back twenty leather straps.” Very rarely does anything feel like filler or busywork. I won’t go into specifics in order to avoid spoilers, but most of the side quests in The Witcher 3 have their own story progression and character arcs, and you truly feel as if you’ve accomplished something by completing them, rather than just grinding through repetitive chores to gain EXP and loot. The main quest is no slouch in that department either, with memorable characters and an involving plot – the Bloody Baron storyline in particular has been a standout of my experience thus far.
This is the first time I’ve been confident in crowning a Game of the Year that I haven’t actually finished – and I know that it will be a long time before I ever finish it. But I’ve been playing the game since May and I know I’m just beginning to scratch the surface, and yet my hours with The Witcher 3 have been the most memorable time I’ve spent with any game this year. It’s a game that I’ll be playing well into 2016 and probably beyond, and it’s opened my eyes to the fact that maybe I can, in fact, enjoy a massive open-world RPG if it’s done well.
I thought it was impossible for an open-world fantasy RPG to actually have a soul and feel like it was lovingly crafted by a passionate dev team rather than churned out by some paint-by-numbers algorithm, but CDPR proved me wrong with The Witcher 3, and it’s obvious a lot of love and care went into its development. I absolutely adore what I’ve played so far, and I can’t wait to see what awaits me as I keep exploring this massive world in the new year.
Despite its ups and downs and disappointments (coughcoughMGSVcoughcough), 2015 turned out to be an absolutely stellar year for games. Even as we move on to 2016, I’ll still be returning to games like Rocket League and Splatoon in the new year, and I know The Witcher 3 will be just as much a 2016 experience as a 2015 one for me. The fact that I want to return to these games even after I’ve “moved on” from 2015 speaks volumes as to their quality and addictiveness, and I don’t think any other year has had so many games with that type of staying power.
So here’s to 2015, and if 2016 is even better, we’re in for a great year!
Game of the Year 2015: Klippy’s Top Ten
