GAME OFFLINE HAY NHẤT 2014
2014 ended up being a classic year for PC gaming. Nostalgia-funded dreams became new favourites thanks khổng lồ Kickstarters, friendships were broken over repeated games of Warcraft cards, & we found everlasting love in the eyes of a pigeon.
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Not one for looking backwards? In that case you might want to head over khổng lồ our carefully curated danh mục of thebest PC gamesto play right now.
If you found yourself momentarily distracted for twelve months and have no idea what games you should have played in 2014, take a look at this handy danh sách to find out what you missed.
Alien: Isolation
Horror games fall apart at the seams as soon as you notice how those seams have been stitched together. The moment you figure out how an enemy works – how close to it you can get without it noticing you, how large its cone of vision is, how long it will search for you for before giving up and returning to a pre-scripted patrol route – the mystery of that enemy evaporates and along with it goes the thing’s ability khổng lồ frighten you. So it’s legitimately terrifying to lớn discover that Alien: Isolation’s big alien fellow is designed lớn react differently every time you play; granted animal-like behaviours that plug straight into the fear centres of your brain.
The badly-lit corridors of Creative Assembly’s first-person survival story belong khổng lồ the xenomorph. Its movement, the noises it makes, its impossible predatory skill – it’s all immediately evocative of the original Ridley Scott film. Isolation is almost so good that you’ll forget Colonial Marines ever existed. Almost.
Elite: Dangerous
David Braben’s crowdfunded sequel to the seminal space classic, Elite: Dangerous defeated all odds khổng lồ come good on its promise of a galaxy of interstellar adventuring for its backers khổng lồ explore.
Moving through systems leaves you slightly in awe of the scope & scale of the worlds you’re travelling between, a feat that’s helped along by a creaking, groaning soundscape of rocketing frameshift drives và churning space engines. Your ears will believe you’re in a battered old boat that’s breaking several laws of physics just khổng lồ deliver a load of vegetables to lớn the next star. Visually too, the fidelity & slickness of the most basic actions in Elite: Dangerous totally sell the idea of space travel. Its void can feel lonely and desolate, even now Frontier have expanded on their original vision, but the very simple joy of flying through it can’t be denied, và should probably be experienced by everybody.
Broken Age
Broken Age tells the story of two children living separate lives: Vella, who must be eaten by a monster for ceremonial reasons, & Shay, a boy who saves aliens with the help of a wolf. The player flits freely back & forth between their two worlds – both of which are more compelling than any Double Fine have built before. Most of the puzzles are fun và not too finicky, such that you can rattle through them at a decent pace, và more easily take in its story of two young adults so desperate khổng lồ throw away childish things & break out of iffy norms that they don’t care who they hurt in the process.
After years of seeing Tim Schafer take a backseat as studio head, there’s a refreshing jolt every time you recognise his voice jump snarkily from the mouths of either of his protagonists. The fact that Part 2’s puzzles accidentally revived the frustration inherent in LucasArts’ classics couldn’t diminish this quirky, heartfelt, outstanding point-and-click adventure game.
Hearthstone
Blizzard’s incredibly popular card battler left beta in 2014 with a buzzing community và a metagame already in constant evolution. It’s since become the liveliest trò chơi on PC, convincingly taking turn-based gaming into arenas & onto streams for the first time. It’s a bona fide brain sport.
Hearthstone isn’t interested in your capacity for trash talking opponents, or flipping tables, or building card pyramids. It’s only interested in your mind, & what it does when presented with part of a deck at the start of a new turn. You know when you sit down khổng lồ play 15 minutes of Hearthstone that you’ll get a proper game in – because it only does proper games. And that when you win, it’ll be a real, cerebral victory. Your brain will have championed over somebody else’s, simple as – & you’ll get lớn feel quietly smug for at least an hour. Hearthstone is the best of you.
The Banner Saga
The Banner Saga is a story-driven tactical RPG played from multiple perspectives. Burly vikings và horned giants clash with monstrous stone demons in turn-based combat và travel across a Norse-inspired fantasy world while attempting khổng lồ manage supplies and lives. You’re journeying against a backdrop of huge snow-capped mountains and monolithic statues dedicated to lớn unknowable gods. Though the hulking varl loom over their human comrades, they seem positively tiny in that lonely, frozen & exquisitely beautiful land.
The fighting mirrors the desperation of the caravan manangement – your warriors becoming weaker as the Dredge stick them with pointy objects. When a warrior dies, the loss is significant; when members of the caravan starve, it’s a personal failure. Và it’s through the individuals along for the ride that we slowly learn about this world; not through wordy over-exposition, but through short, meaningful conversations. The Banner Saga is a masterpiece of sad, subtle storytelling.
Banished
A year before Cities: Skylines repopulated the genre, we had this cruel medieval đô thị builder – where the lives of the citizens under your protection are at the mercy of freezing cold winters, plague-bringing nomads và the looming threat of starvation. Lumber, iron, stone, food – these resources can turn a tiny colony of exiles into a burgeoning city, but they aren’t the most important resources in Banished. That honour goes khổng lồ people. They are born, get jobs, educations, start families và eventually die. Management is a juggling act, demanding that players attempt to lớn balance growth with stability, because starvation & death are only ever one disaster or unexpected population boom away.
Everybody dies over và over again in this city-builder, lớn hunger, to lớn pestilence, lớn cold, lớn fever. They’d be throwing themselves against the sharp edges of the UI if they could, such is their powerfully absent instinct for self-preservation. Banished asks for caution and patience – and as such remains unlike most everything else in contemporary gaming.
Titanfall
Titanfall’s magic is in its leaping. Leaping out of dropships, leaping through windows, leaping off billboards, leaping along walls, leaping onto robots, leaping off of robots as they detonate in a weirdly-not-that-deadly nuclear explosion. The stompier option isn’t the trudge it could be, either. Titans can run full pelt – và there’s true happiness khổng lồ be found in chasing a man into the confines of a highrise where they think they’ll be safe, only to fire a cluster missile inside và turn the floor into an endless explosion party.
This is a superb multiplayer shooter: built lớn please the hordes that savour hotline of Duty, but accessible khổng lồ everyone. It’s funny and knowing: chú ý the little robot face that smiles as you exit lớn war, the vaguely Portal-like tutorial, và the endless waves of grunts that die for your pleasure. Mega-budget triple-A first-person shooters can inspire cynicism. Yet somehow, Titanfall inspires joy.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Possessing a copy of The Stick of Truth is like owning something utterly illicit. Breaking into the homes of South Park’s residents & stealing their sex toys, defecating in their loos, leaving the shower running or catching them in compromising positions is not entirely unlike sneaking into a pub when you’re 15. You know you probably shouldn’t be doing it, và if anyone catches you they’ll frown & probably shake their heads. Awful stuff.
But it’s entirely worth the risk of someone walking in & finding you carrying gargantuan dildos while listening khổng lồ a racist child singing about a waterpark. Underneath the gags & grotesqueness is incredible design. This was Obsidian’s best role-playing trò chơi until Pillars of Eternity, seamlessly blending FInal Fantasy combat with Metroidvania style exploration. Somehow it crams in the best qualities of countless games, making it loot-driven one moment & narrative-driven the next. The Stick of Truth will set you không tính tiền from identikit RPGs.
The Wolf Among Us
In many ways the opposite of Tales From The Borderlands, so cheery và bright you could play it on your phone at the beach, The Wolf Among Us is Telltale noir. But it’s more than a supernatural detective yarn it appears to be; philosophical và moral quandaries spring out of Bigby ‘Big Bad’ Wolf’s murder investigation as you explore of the various plights of the Fables – fairytale creatures living the not-so-good life in new york city. If, at moments, it feels as if the consequences aren’t clear or significant, it’s because it’s building khổng lồ a brutal conclusion. You’ll regret almost every choice you make, but probably wouldn’t make them any differently given the opportunity lớn rectify your mistakes.
The very real issues of invisible, disenfranchised people & the inability or simple lack of interest that administrations have in protecting them is central khổng lồ the game. The Wolf Among Us left us feeling uncomfortable, but desperately wishing for a second season.
Towerfall: Ascension
Ever had a friend round và found yourself scrolling wistfully through your Steam library, at a loss for what to lớn suggest? Towerfall is your solution: a local multiplayer arena battler in which everyone grabs a controller và directs a tiny sprite khổng lồ fire arrows at their fellows. Every death is fair: there’s only one screen, so no sneaking a glance at somebody else’s perspective. If you bởi vì end up stuck with a pointy stick, there’s nothing to do but quietly admit that your mate was the better player.
There’s plenty of scope lớn become a great yourself, of course. Towerfall is crafted và honed to really bring out not only the foulest, most sea-worthy language in you, but also the best skills. With a few matches under your belt you’ll soon have dash-parkour down to lớn a tee, & grabbing an arrow mid-flight becomes muscle memory. Go easy with the trash-talking though, though: your opponents are sat near enough lớn give you an all-too-real thump after a particularly humiliating kill.
Luftrausers
Luftrausers is about flying – with the emphasis on ‘fly’. At the centre of its thiết kế ethos is a desire to lớn make the player feel cool, as they swoop high above battleships & duck down below zeppelins in a tiny plane. Và it’s successful, thanks lớn the sepia filter that colours everything và the dependable momentum that governs movement. Tight controls allow you khổng lồ cut the engines at any time – then boot them up again the instant before you hit water level.
The variation comes from Luftrausers’ unlock system: interchangeable plane parts. Builds can be as extreme và peculiar as ‘The Pig’ – a squat machine with a bulky abdomen suitable for flying right through those battleships và out the other side, leaving only explosions behind. Where their indie peers are criticised for making the trò chơi equivalent of meandering, self-indulgent guitar music, Dutch studio Vlambeer write perfect pop songs. This is another of those.
The Walking Dead: Season 2
The continuation of Telltale’s gut-wrenching adventure game series based on Robert Kirkman’s comics – in which child-protagonist Clementine tangos with zombies, shifty survivors and an unhealthy helping of guilt. It’s a tricky bastard, building you up with reunions, safety, even light-hearted joking, and then BANG. Tragedy. But it doesn’t just vày this once, it does it again và again. There’s a mythology at work here: resurrections, heroes, tremendous evil past & present.
Soon enough, the new group is no longer the ‘new’ group – having gone from completely strangers khổng lồ fully realised characters within two episodes. Và dammit, yet again Telltale force you to care too much. Season two draws on everything that came before it. Choices made as a different protagonist, even when they don’t directly affect what’s happening to Clem & her new friends, will still inform how you act & who you are willing to lớn trust or sacrifice. There isn’t another series that manages to bởi vì this so subtly and effectively.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
MachineGames, some of the folks who brought us Riddick & The Darkness, delivered a straightforward & unpretentious shooter in their id reboot. It revels in ultra-violence & alternate-history horror while never deviating from a remarkably strong & immensely satisfying vi xử lý core mechanic: shooting Nazis so that their blood comes out.
The New Order knows where its roots lie, paying just enough homage to lớn the original Wolfenstein 3d while never being overly reverential. So there are hidden rooms và bowls of dog food, but no cheeky winks khổng lồ the camera when such things appear. It sets a surprisingly well written and keenly self-aware pulp script, brooding Max Payne style monologues and all, against such ridiculous abilities as dual wielding sniper rifles. Expect an FPS fan’s FPS, dumbly entertaining in its kinetic, punchy gunplay but at the same time hiding an endless capacity to repeatedly surprise with an endearing plot & cast. For our money, the best Wolfenstein trò chơi ever made.
Sir, You Are Being Hunted
A good portion of Steam’s vị trí cao nhất sellers list is now regularly composed of open-world survival experiences – but there’s not one aspect of Sir, You Are Being Hunted you’re likely to lớn find replicated exactly in another game. The premise finds you dropped on an archipelago of procedurally generated British countryside, inhabited by a small population of aristocratic automatons armed with hunting rifles & robo-dogs, và tasked with retrieve all the parts of your shattered invention needed to lớn return home.
With no levelling or inherent skills, you are the contents of your backpack. So choosing what lớn take with you & what lớn leave behind is a continuous, nail-gnawing toss-up between pragmatism và aspiration. An empty blunderbuss is lovely – but oughtn’t you really take a couple of extra bandages và a bot-distracting glass bottle instead? Between its uniquely provincial setting và dedication lớn undergrowth stealth, there’s more than enough novel in Sir that you’ll gladly be the rabbit in its lights at least one time through.
Dark Souls II
If you’ve played a Souls game, you know what this one is: a punishingly difficult third-person RPG that actively loathes you, presents you with apparently insurmountable challenges, and delights in killing you unfairly with cruelly designed traps – all while funnelling you into taking risks & gambling progress at every turn. Exhaustion, oppression và mercilessness are not usually the tenets of good game design, but in Dark Souls II they come together khổng lồ create a trò chơi that pushes you as much as it punishes you. Every death is a lesson, teaching you how to khuyễn mãi giảm giá with the mounting challenges by showing you just how poorly prepared you are. Và the option of co-op assistance means it’s not just for masochists.
This sequel doesn’t better the original but is far better tuned to lớn PC gaming. The stale breadcrumb trail of rewards and granular successes is just as gratifying a second time around – & the fallen kingdom of Drangleic is filled with more malformed, unexplained creatures to dodge & dance with.
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Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part Two
The second half of Bioshock Infinite’s story-based DLC, Burial at Sea Part Two saw you take control of dimension-hopping Elizabeth in the doomed thành phố of Rapture, primed as it was for its spectacular downfall. With shrewd stealth and a clear-thinking plot, this finale stands out as some of Irrational’s finest work on the series.
For fans this marks a sort of spiritual full stop: a full circle brought lớn a neat close. After the disappointing first DLC, which was a mess of combat ideas dragged out of Infinite & dropped into a Rapture that didn’t want lớn co-operate, this second half was a refreshing return khổng lồ what made Rapture a captivating place to lớn be. You were solo. You were outnumbered. You were tactical & slow. It was the magical reimagining of the underwater dystopia we’d wanted first time around. Burial at Sea’s conclusion looped Irrational’s timeline back around to lớn meet System Shock, và proved a fitting swansong.
Child of Light
An idiosyncratic surprise from Ubisoft’s trusted Montreal citadel, Child of Light was a side-scrolling RPG that matched gentle world-exploration và puzzle solving with deceptively strategic turn based combat. You’re a girl trapped inside her own dreams: a world of monsters và fantasy creatures và weirdness và poetry and delight.
The 2d UbiArt engine, loaned out by Michel Ancel’s Rayman studio in Montpellier, gives Child of Light a beautiful hand-drawn style. As a result, the game is lent a gently tweeness that touches every square inch of the screen. From the dialogue, which is written entirely in rhyming couplets (and then brilliantly subverted at one point) khổng lồ your means of moving and flying around the unpredictable landscapes of a young imagination, Child of Light is an uplifting experience. The combat, meanwhile, is surprisingly deep: semi-turn-based & with elemental strengths và weaknesses that combine to create a complex & at times super-challenging RPG. You might have to turn the difficulty down. Dreams are hard.
Distant Worlds: Universe
A 4X wargame, Distant Worlds: Universe is the culmination of Matrix Games’ work in space strategy, gathering together in one place the base game & all of its expansions while expanding the galactic narrative và chucking in vastly greater modding capabilities. But it’s better not to lớn think of it as a trò chơi at all – rather a tool that allows you to lớn experience leading a galactic superpower on your own terms. You can automate everything (the AI actually coping pretty well) và just fly around space in a single exploration vessel, pretending you’re Picard. Or you can steer everything, from your empire’s complex economy khổng lồ ship production và war.
All of those numbers & systems that hold the simulation together create dramatic stories, about gallant captains pushing back the frontier, và races under the thumb of pirates rising up lớn take back their independence. Distant Worlds is a 4X, a space sim, an RTS & a galaxy builder all in one. That’s quite the cocktail.
Tropico 5
While Tropico 5 introduces eras, taking dictators from the colonial era to the modern age, this is still very much the thành phố building simulator you remember, just with a few extra toys and novelties lớn play with. That means you take control of a fledgling banana republic, ruling the tiny nation by whatever means necessary, all while expanding, researching & trading to lớn maintain your power.
It’s mix in the series-standard paradise, and as ever, life for your people is rarely so sunny. The biggest difference between this sequel và its predecessors is how your state no longer feels like it’s in a vacuum. Foreign powers interfere more, & relationships can deteriorate khổng lồ the point where war breaks out, the trò chơi turning into a slightly iffy RTS for a spell. It’s another diversion, but being able to properly defend your island is a welcome addition. Tropico 5 is like SimCity but cleverer, with political satire out the jungly wazoo.
Divinity: Original Sin
Larian are known for their decades-spanning Divine series, a staunchly traditional top-down roleplay universe laced with curious characters & maddening detail. The Kickstarted Original Sin is no exception, allowing you to be the tricksiest arsehole in an unpredictable world of swords, magic & physics-enabled crates. It also eschews the kích hoạt combat elements that held back previous entries, embracing an interactive elemental twist that enables you to lớn burn oil barrels, electrify pools of water and steam the faces off of unsuspecting orcs. Taking turns is not only the most polite way to fight anybody, but it’s also the most tactically challenging.
Playing as two main characters, you’ll pick and choose the dialogue on both sides of a conversation, making actual playing-of-roles unavoidable. & you’ll want khổng lồ submerge yourself in Larian’s world: it’s thick with inspired incidental encounters and silly asides, và laced with comedy as broad as its maps. Divinity: Original Sin doesn’t feel lượt thích some tortured piece of nostalgia, but rather a contemporary và fresh new round in a genre that had all but totally evaporated.
The Sims 4
You’ll already know one version or another of the real-life simulator in which you take control of a dollhouse of virtual people, managing every aspect of their existence, from marriage & career progression to showering và pooping. While the larger simulation of surrounding neighbourhoods has been dialled down this time around, The Sims 4 is the most realistic modelling of tiny digital brains yet, introducing a palette of moods that affect how the sims behave và what they’re capable of.
The decision to lớn focus development on what happens inside a sim’s head rather than on how the wider communities of sims congregate and interact was the correct one, and set a strong foundation for a relatively restrained onslaught of expansions. This trò chơi remains fascinating, funny và still (weirdly enough) the only trò chơi of its kind worth playing. As with every Sims game that came before it, we were totally & inexplicably engrossed.
Hatoful Boyfriend
Hatoful Boyfriend is brilliantly weird. A visual novel and pigeon dating simulator in which you, a human girl, take up residence in a school for birds, it’s an interactive text adventure with a branching plot và surprisingly complex storyline. Myriad twists và turns can lead to lớn JRPG battles with, or even death at the hands of, pigeon punks; slowly you’ll get to lớn grips with the uncomfortable class hierarchy that puts fantails on the top.
But it’s the sensitive side that’ll win you over: you’ll find yourself growing to care for your strange avian chums, who between bombarding you with bad puns start to open up, revealing painful tragedies and touching stories. Seemingly inconsequential choices mở cửa up new paths and new lãng mạn or platonic encounters. The days blend together in a whirlwind of fast-forwarded text, until eventually you’re living in their surrealist world without irony.
Watch Dogs
Watch Dogs’ Chicago is a great big simulated city, and you’ve got all the switches. In this xuất hiện world third-person hacking adventure, you can manipulate your environment using a magic phone. Steal from ATMs, look through security cameras, raise bollards, lower bollards, explode steam pipes, see the secret lives of the pedestrians around you – you’re basically không lấy phí to become a local authority’s worst nightmare in Ubisoft Montreal’s cybercriminal world.
It’s true the studio’s weaknesses are unusually apparent here. A cacophony of side missions và distractions feel arbitrary & mindless. The main character is a hateful caricature of a vigilante nerd with awful fashion sense, và there’s just something altogether charmless about the world. That said, when the main story missions really hit their stride and the mechanics of hacking different objects finally come together, Watch Dogs becomes ludicrously good fun. Similarly brilliant is the multiplayer mode in which you’re tasked with hacking another player while remaining inconspicuous. If you’re willing to persevere there’s excellence wrapped up inside Watch Dogs’ dull, battered brown trenchcoat.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Ethan Carter is a scenic first-person walkabout phối in an impossibly beautiful game world in which you use supernatural powers lớn inspect crime scenes & solve environmental puzzles. Its Red Creek Valley is a lonely paradise that you could be forgiven for mistaking as real footage of a real location, so rich in detail are its worn armchairs và ringed tree stumps. In fact that’s pretty much spot on: The Astronauts used photogrammetry to build exact 3d replicas of objects & buildings from photographs. The effects are spectacular.
This verdant slice of American wilderness doesn’t simply impress with its realism, though. A streak of horror & isolation flows through it, slowly building, leaving this adventure trò chơi simmering with tension. Punctuating the trek through the woods are weird tales, pulpy horror, sci-fi and fantasy yarns that defy reality & transform the gamespace, revealing more of a memorable place that is not what it seems.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
The only place & time Assassin’s Creed hasn’t been is inside Tolkien’s head, so Monolith obliged. As a sword-swooshing ranger with wraith abilities, you’ll mill about an open world murdering up & being murdered up by orcs. Icons popping up all over the map, villains to lớn kill swiftly and silently, a pretty crap story – it’s familiar. The twist is that you’ll earn nemeses as you adventure: orcs rightly miffed at you after being defeated, who’ll appear later in your game to exact their very personalised khung of revenge.
Before you know it, you’ve become Sauron’s number one recruiter – inadvertently turning green(skin) recruits into new captains with names like Ghura the Endless và Thakrak the Fool. You might even feel proud of your worst enemy: he started off as a nobody, after all, and worked his way up the ladder to lớn become a legendary bodyguard khổng lồ one of the infamous war chiefs. The Magneto to your Xavier.
Wasteland 2
Sequel to lớn the quarter-century old RPG that inspired the Fallout games, Wasteland 2 is an RPG that wears its traditional roots all down its tattered old sleeves. You command a small group of rangers who are routinely forced into making difficult moral decisions in a ruined and post-apocalyptic California. Combat is turn-based with kích hoạt points, lượt thích a big trò chơi or irradiated chess with shotguns.
And it’s huge. Not just by merit of the massive map, but also the number of stories & many ways they can play out. Though individual moments in this humongous adventure left us disappointed, we always left the trò chơi eager to return. Inventive solutions to tricky standoffs, a failure to save a life, a silly line of text spotted in the peripheral – these are the things that stuck with us every time we pressed ‘quit’. Though the name Fallout has meant something different since its Bethesda reboot, Brian Fargo & his team have ensured that little from the Interplay era’s been left behind.
Valkyria Chronicles
Valkyria Chronicles was locked away in console land for half a decade, but its natural audience was always here on PC. A turn-based strategy game set in a Japanese anime-styled reimagining of the Second World War, it’s got some of the most involved squad management of any game since Jagged Alliance 2. Each soldier has special quirks, abilities, & synergies with the others on your team. And for all but the crucial characters, permadeath is on.
Sega took a more personal approach to war than is typical of the turn-based tactics genre. A close-up perspective puts you right in the middle of battles, & your troops are not just numbers, but people. This makes the costs and risks seem even higher than they are in XCOM, và when you see a gigantic engine of war aiming its gargantuan guns at your favourite scout, you’ll worry lượt thích a parent who’s just dropped a baby.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
A hard-as-nails action-roguelike with some nightmare-inducing imagery. The original Binding of Isaac mercilessly consumed time, with a structure that enticed you lớn play ‘just once more’ until the hours blurred together. Rebirth takes all of that addictive content, adds the Wrath of the Lamb expansion, new skins, a new soundtrack, and a drizzle of extra quái vật designs – before strapping everything into a faster, more stable engine. If you’re new to the game then this is the best version to lớn begin with, & if you’re already a tín đồ then perhaps the presence of new poo physics will tip you over into another purchase.
Even playing through the very first level over và over again can kick up some unexpected treasures, be they miscellaneous pills that affect you in unexpected ways, power-ups that transform you into strange beasts and shifty looking demons, or special enemies that drop equally special loot when killed. Secret rooms and surprises can be found right from the get-go, and you’ll only find more as climb down the levels.
Endless Legend
Set in the same universe as the supple Amplitude Studios’ Endless Space, this is a sci-fi fantasy 4X trò chơi in which bizarre factions fight for dominance over a single world. Expect turn-based empire & city building and curious tactical combat.
Become a warmonger, a being of pure energy trapped inside a suit of armour, watching your armies sweep across the face of the world like a merciless machine. Or be a peacemaker, a measured dragon, bringing the races together to lớn create something better. Or maybe an insectoid monster, feasting on the corpses of your foes and inspiring fear & hatred. Endless Legend combines fantastic fiction with compelling strategy. & underpinning it all is a strong design philosophy that connects the tenets of the 4X genre together seamlessly, providing a plethora of options without overwhelming. Even during a time when we’re seeing a lot from the genre, Amplitude’s effort sets itself apart.
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
Icewind Dale was black Isle’s attempt lớn bash out an action-RPG in Baldur’s Gate’s Infinity Engine. Because they were the studio who’d built Fallout, they failed miserably: accidentally making a coherent world of Faerun’s northern wastes, & filling its dungeons with tangled networks of tactical battles. Whoops.
There’s never been a better time to relive the wintery wonder that inspired the underground adventures of Pillars of Eternity. The new version pulls in all the class and race options from Beamdog’s other Enhanced Editions, turns once-broken multiplayer into convincing co-op, và blows up the game’s maps to lớn the highest resolutions – where the tangible cold of the Dales can be properly appreciated. The starting town alone, Easthaven, manages khổng lồ pack subsistence, stoicism, religion & the stench of drying fish into an isometric drawing. What’s more, this remains khổng lồ our knowledge the only RPG in which you can have an argument with a skeleton about the problem of proactive foreign policy. Bone-rattling stuff.
Legend of Grimrock II
In the Before Time, we had graph paper. Stacks và stacks of it. These magical sheets were our lifeline – a way to lớn escape whatever prison we found ourselves in. & it was up to us to fill them in, to lớn facilitate our escape. Dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock II might be a modern game, but it’s got one foot in that era. The world is a fantastical island prison – one giant maze, filled with monsters, beasts & the undead, all wanting to lớn kill you. So it’s fortunate that you’re actually four people, a tiệc ngọt of adventurers that might include a minotaur, or a giant rat with a penchant for guns & explosives.
And it’s not just for the old-school lot. Grimrock II is pretty, ripe for exploration, boasts deep character customisation và a groovy magic system. What’s more, the puzzle kiến thiết recalls Portal. Don’t play it for nostalgia’s sake, play it because it’s great.
Classic or cack, great or guff? What did you make of 2014, & our choices for that matter? Let us know in the comments below.
