10-THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!!!. Team Fortress 2-My first ever multiplayer shooter, and I think I picked the perfect place to start. All of the classes have unique but balanced play styles, the art style was fantastic until recent times (but the maps still look nice), the sense of humor is great, and overall it's much more fun than the Call of Honorfield 7 nonsense these days where the graphics are washed out and ugly, and the gameplay is a frustrating experience in getting instantly killed after spawning by some wannabee 1337 sniper making a dubstep montage. It's by far my most played game on Steam, probably of all time.
9-Amazing. Saints Row IV-I thought that this game was going to be a disappointment like SR3. It looked like a repackaged SR3 and to be honest that's kind of what the finished product is. I thought SR3 was too over the top for its own good, and hearing that you get superpowers now made me think that I was gonna hate it. But holy shit was I surprised at how good it was. The Super Powers turned the combat from a clunky inferior GTA wannabe to something actually fast, fluid, and fun. Using telekinesis to throw one Alien jet fighter into another, and then performing a Death from Above on a squad of enemies who just emerged from a car, only to activate my fire buff and run through a crowd of civilians to regain health? Yes please. It is by far the most fun I've had with an open world game. It blows GTA 5 out of the water in terms of free roam gameplay. Yes, GTA 5 has great missions and an immersive world, but SR4 just has something about it that makes it so much more fun. Maybe it's just the superpowers. Top it off with a funny story parodying sci-fi and RPG games, a great main villain, easy modability on PC (I like to replace all of the regular enemies with Wardens for a big challenge), and you have one of my favorite games of all time.
8-Great. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory-One of my first PS2 games and my personal favorite stealth game. The graphics are great, level design is nice, gameplay is tense and satisfying, soundtrack is amazing, and overall there's not much I can say that's wrong with it, aside from the wonky A.I at times and frustrating controls on PC, plus the fact that you can't play multiplayer on PC anymore. I really liked Spies vs Mercs with my friends, and now it's all gone
. Blacklist's Spies vs Mercs pales in comparison to the original. It's far too fast paced and favors reckless strategies, like charging directly at a merc for a knife kill.
7-Good. DOTA 2-I have a love-hate relationship with this game. Sometimes I'm on Cloud 9, playing with skilled and good-hearted people and helping out in the big plays of the game. Other times I'm stuck with 4 Russians/South Americans who spend most the game pinging furiously whenever they dive at a stupid time and expect me to help them. Overall I usually have a good time playing though. I like how all the heroes are unlocked from the start but there's still cosmetic items, some of which are really cool. I went to the International this year and was even willing to spend hours in line at the Secret Shop for some swag.
6-Average. GTA 4-Probably my least favorite of the GTA series, but it's still a good game. I like the cover system, improved A.I, improved graphics, and funny characters. However the missions and city are by far the least memorable for me. Maybe I just don't like big cities, but everything about Liberty City just felt samely to me, in contrast with GTA 5, where there's cool stuff everywhere you look. And the city has the same washed out look that most modern shooters have. Look, I get that the tone is supposed to evoke depression, but it's so unpleasant to look at. On a clear and sunny day in GTA 4 the sky looks like something out of a horror movie. Contrast with GTA 5 which has one of the most beautiful lighting systems of all time. A good game, definitely, but the lowlight of a great series.
5-Mediocre. Watch Dogs-Where did we go so wrong? The shooting and on foot controls are light years better than GTA, but, pardon me if I sound cheesy, the love is missing. The driving controls are sloppy. The multiplayer is a train wreck, with nonsensical design choices, such as the inability to perform "blending" actions while hacking somebody like sitting on a bench or otherwise acting like a civilian. The story is a haphazard pile of cliches. It focused to much on Nichole and should have been solely about serving up cold vigilante justice to those who deserve it. Stop acting like you need to throw in a damsel in distress to make a story interesting, we've seen it all before. The draw distance is also a big problem. Cars quite clearly pop into existence just a few hundred feet away. I like the controls and the world is fairly immersive and detailed despite the draw distance issues, so it's not a bad game, just a misguided one.
4-Bad. Call of Duty Ghosts-Like GTA 4, it's the worst game in the series. At least Modern Warfare 3 had some cool co-op modes and an awesome final level where you go on a heavy-armor rampage. The problem with Ghosts isn't that it's exceedingly terrible, it's just... not good at anything it does. We've seen all the gunfights before. We've played through the helicopter sections before. We've heard this story before. We've even been able to lean before. There's nothing remotely original about Ghosts, and no reason to pay money for it. Oh yeah, and there's that tie in with Snoop Dogg. Are they fucking high? This game is kind of similar to Arkham Origins-both shouldn't have existed. They don't exist to tell an interesting story, bring in awesome new game mechanics that change up everything we thought about the series, or even just be good games. They just exist without justifying themselves, and that's what offends me.
3-Poor. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs-This game also shouldn't exist, but for different reasons. The story is nice, but the gameplay... oh my fucking god did they drop the ball on this one. No inventory system and regenerating health take away the tension of encounters. The monsters aren't that scary. There's no sanity meter. The story is good, but everything about the gameplay takes several steps back. The trailers looked so good too, making the game look scarier than it actually is. Amnesia the Dark Descent was dripping with tension and suspense. This one is more like a teenager with a bucket of water hiding behind some bushes. It'll get you for a second, but that's about it.
2-Trash. Defiance-A poor, sad excuse for an MMO. The mechanics are eerily similar to Borderlands, but it has none of the charm or humor. Borderlands, Diablo, and all other similar games are best played with 4 players. That way you can have a shoot and loot (or slash and loot) experience with your friends without a bunch of other assholes getting in the way. Unfortunately Defiance gets this wrong by being an MMO. There's too many of them already, and many are well established. Defiance sounds like a novelty with its third person shooter gameplay, but it's basically an action game disguised as an MMO. There's not much crafting or any MMO-like features to speak of. It's basically a Third Person Borderlands with an MMO skin taped on. There's not much to do besides shoot things, which gets old eventually with the laggy shooting, terrible enemy A.I, and complete lack of challenge. Oh yeah, and I'm from where the game takes place (Marin). This game looks absolutely nothing like the real place. Yeah I get it's post-apocalyptic, but Fallout 3 looked a lot like a nuked Washington D.C. There's San Quentin, but most of it is conveniently underwater to disguise the fact that the developers couldn't recreate any part of it somewhat realistically. Mount Tam? What mountain? There's no distinction in terrain from the rest of the game world. Did it level out over time? Why's it still called Mount Tam then? Stay away from this garbage.
1-WTF is this bullshit? Mindjack-The absolute worst thing ever, no exceptions. I don't even want to talk about this game. Just watch Angry Joe's review and you pretty much know all that you need to about this abso-fucking-lutely fundamentally broken monstrosity.
