2011 needs a name; I propose The Year Of The Humble Bundle. Almost certainly, thousands of PC gamers will be going into the new year with their rigs heaving under small mountains of pay-what-you-want indie games they’ve owned for months but not yet managed the chance to play. I’m one of them; in fact, 2011 could be said to be the year I finally ‘got into’ indies, rather than just playing what Craig told me to whilst hitting me with his Review Whip. It was a fine, if sequel-packed, twelve months for the big guns too. With that in mind, developers and publishers, cold you maybe try to release in months which aren’t November? It’s like eating a trifle that’s been stored at an angle; the contents are still good but you kind of wish it wasn’t all congealed at one side.
I should probably take this opportunity to explain some of my lower-ranked choices. Skyrim was good enough to ensnare a man who hates the fantasy genre for 80 hours and counting, but even with patches some nasty bugs remain. I haven’t experienced many myself, but I’m penalising out out of some ineffectual sense of solidarity with those who have. Modern Warfare 3 has the best CoD multiplayer in four years, but even this clause is longer and bettur ritten thn the singleplayer mode.
Anyway, enough of that. Let’s talk about some goddamn fantastic games that came out this year. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, reader.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Show me an action FPS, released this year, that offers the same wealth of freedom and experimentation as this does. Show me an RPG, released this year, with stealth and combat mechanics that are even a modicum as fluid, brutal and satisfying as this. Show me a game that can do both, at the same time, while wrapping everything up in a clever story of intrigue and posthumanist philosophy that takes place in a beautifully realised near-future world, and I’ll have no choice but to reply “Dude, that’s just the box for Deus Ex: Human Revolution”.
No game can have it all, but Eidos Montreal’s successor to a PC gaming classic comes damned close. The boss battles are, of course, incongruent and irritating (they can be practically skipped with a certain upgrade, but even I find that defence unconvincing). But the worst crime these fights commit is distracting attention from the game’s real bosses: bartenders and police station secretaries. With the cheap Social Enhancer mod – one of a huge number of bleeding-edge mechanical augmentations you can install within the less-than-enthusiastic body of Adam Jensen, security guard turned half-cyborg hero – conversations become tense battles of wit. You can analyse each subject’s personality and attempt to play their egos, but when they’ve become involved in a global conspiracy, they’re not exactly willing to give up what they know. Each verbal tango takes genuine consideration, making them immensely fun to win; no other game this year has let me save the world with the help of a well-aimed Mary Shelley reference.
Conversation, surprisingly involving as it is, remains but one option. Adam Jensen is no JC Denton, and can swap between silently sleeperholding guards and mowing them down with a hacked machinegun turret with ease. Rather than dumbing down, the removal of thumb-handed incompetence at more than a couple of skills opens up the game to even more possibilities. I’d specced my Jensen out for stealth, with cloaking and vision-enhancing augs, but slipping a few points into arm strength let me breeze through a defence section (the slowest elevators are always the noisiest, aren’t they?) simply by blocking off all the entrances with reshuffled vending machines. This doesn’t mean choice is meaningless, either. In fact, the consequences of certain decisions often manifest in very unexpected ways. Sparing a particular grunt’s life fairly early on – as in, punching him out rather than shooting or stabbing him to death with Jensen’s sword-arms – causes him to show up, hours later, looking to avenge his defeat in a rather sadistic fashion. In anything else, he’d just be cloned cannon fodder.
I could go on – about the sidequests, which are vastly more substantial than anything the original Deus Ex bothered with, about the level design, wherein multiple entrances and hidden nooks make buildings look and feel like real places, about the immeasurable little details that make the world a little more interesting to explore. I will say that if you only hack one person’s email, make it Pritchard’s, the guy giving you technical help over the comms, for a brilliant insight into why he hates your ex-cop character so much. Judging from the sales figures, though, very few people need extra convincing. And if it can be proven that games like this – stunning, witty, story-driven yet open and expansive – can be successful in a market full of military shooters and yearly sports titles…well, that’s something worth celebrating just as much as Human Revolution’s many and varied triumphs.
Portal 2
Portal 2 is the kind of game my friends, who have repeatedly complained that I talk about games too much, will happily play for hours, in a darkened room on a beautiful July day. It’s hard to blame them – Valve took a genius puzzle mechanic and managed, with some slick new additions, to build a hefty new game out of it without over-complicating the core portal-chucking. Mainly though, it’s the writing. GlaDOS is still a laugh, but it’s the charmingly useless Wheatley – voiced masterfully and hilariously by Stephen Merchant – that makes this a true comedy game. His friendly unassertiveness also serves to make his mid-game corruption into a spectacularly unqualified villain all the more surprising – for an eight hour campaign, that fact that this is only one of dozens of standout moments is telling.
Minecraft
This is kind of cheating. Minecraft’s “release” was never an end, or even a new beginning, of anything, but a fairly arbitrary notch (hurr hurr) on a seemingly neverending development timeline. Still, it’s eaten up more hours of my life than I care to count/admit, every update bringing a new reason to venture out into a landscape that’s utterly unique and, importantly, all my own. It’s still desperately in need of some kind of reference guide to the mountains of more obscure content – I still don’t know how to make potions, or journey to the mysterious parallel dimension that houses the (air quotes) final boss, but you have to admire a game where the rewards are just as much the player’s design as they are the programmer’s.
Also: Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, Crysis 2, There’s No Time To Explain, The Stanley Parable
