I'd feel bad taking like 2-3 weeks off updating this and then rushing through to 2011... but I'm excited to post a couple! Well a lot actually. It's stunning to me how many of these games I've played at least a little. I think we're starting to reach the golden age of steam sales where you just own everything for pc now cus it came in a $1 humble bundle or was $2 on steam.
GOTY worthy: Bastion, Dead Space 2, Magicka, Skyrim, LA Noire.
Others I liked: Dragon Age 2, Darkspore, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Warhammer 40k space marine, the Binding of Issac, Dark Souls, Orcs Must Die
plus a bunch I haven't played like a few assassin's creed titles, zelda skyward sword, Trine 2, Star Wars the Old Republic, oh and Might and Magic Heroes VI and Stronghold 3! Haha jk, those two should probably be on a worst games of the year list. And yes, I know most people will hate on dragon age 2 and darkspore as well.
Dragon Age 2: Most of the major complaints about this game are it's nothing like DAO, which it's not. But on its own it's actually pretty fun. The massively simplified the game and changed combat a lot. Another major complaint is the game world is tiny, which it is. But, the plot and dialogue was interesting enough within that world to me I didn't really care. It's much more mass effect style dialogue with voiced answers you pick from.
The combat is much more action style, auto attack an enemy and then press some special hotkeys. Instead of a more tactical approach with organizing your team, it's more straightforward, although I do like the combo effects. In DAO there were a couple magic combos you could do like nightmaring a sleeping enemy or something, I don't remember. In 2 though there's more explicit combos, they have effects like a smash attack always does double dmg to a frozen target for example, and you can check out the different spells the setup combos between your mages and rogues or whatever you want. I found it fun and I liked the talent trees more. The combat animations are over the top, but the DAO ones were pretty awful in their own way.
In general it's just a solid action rpg, almost like fantasy style mass effect, with a much worse story. But it's a solid c+/b- game like a 7/10 in my view, I don't get the massive hate for it.
Darkspore: oh man, where to begin. This is a really hard one to talk about objectively because there were so many technical issues with the game and servers and it's the first game I've ever played that's literally dead. The took the servers offline a few months ago and now the game is done. Even in single player you had to be connected to a server, which was a big issue.
The game was diablo meets spore's creature creator. It really had nothing to do with spore at all except you could model your heroes just like you'd create creature in spore. The plot was extremely thin, some mumbo jumbo about how this dark dna was corruption spore into darkspore and there was some super boss masterminding it all. Didn't make sense.
What did make sense was the gameplay and oh man it was awesome in my opinion. You just hold down right click to attack stuff, but every hero also had three abilities. One was unique to your hero, one was unique to your elemental class type (fire, cyber etc), and one was unique to you but shared by your squad, plus every hero had a passive effect. And then you unlocked variants of the heroes with different stuff. The cool part was you assembled squads of 3 heroes and then could swap between them in game. They shared squad abilities so if you had this one guy krel that had an ability that shot two firey missile things out that increased energy dmg taken, you could pair him up with a big nuker in your squad and then the nuker could use that awesome ability. It led to tons of possibilities, plus there were even more intricacies cus hero types like cyber, fire, earth etc took double dmg from enemies the same type, so you had to mix them up, and they did energy vs physical dmg and would run into enemies resistant to that dmg so you had to plan for that. And the gear was just cool.
I loved the gameplay, but there was never a good multiplayer community so it suffered, plus all the getting online issues just killed it. And the levels were repetitive and quickly turned into a gear grind. I'd love if someone could take the gameplay and make it offline available with properly designed levels, it could be really good.
Other games, Bastion is a unique little gem, sort of plays like older zelda games. It's hard to describe. It's very lite on rpg, a little heavier on action and HUGE on atmosphere.
Dead space 2 continues the franchise improving on gameplay but it just isn't as scary as the first. Probably cus the protagonist Issac talks and the environments are more open. Still a great game though.
Magicka is really unique too. You play a little wizard and create powerful spells by combining elements. For example pressing F I believe (I might be way off on the actual keys) queues up a fire element. Then if you right click it releases a stream of fire, kinda cool. But if you then pressed D or whatever the earth button was it combined earth and fire to make a fireball. Plus there were super unique spells you could do with the right ones like summon elementals or teleport. Your fingers had to be pretty quick and the possibilities were pretty endless. Very fun game with great atmosphere as well. Funny writing.
Skyrim, well everyone here knows skyrim. I don't really even like it that much, I never bothered to mod it so probably my fault, yet somehow I have ~100 hours on it... I recognized it's a great game.
And the LA Noire, a bit more of a point and click adventure than an action title but the story is just great imo and I really enjoyed playing through it.
Unfortunately all of these are solid like 80-90 pt titles, nothing stands out enough. I think I'm going to vote magicka...
