Batman Arkham City is Rocksteady’s fantastic sequel to Arkham “best superhero game ever made” Asylum. Taking the framework that made that game so good and expanding it into an open-world playground filled with the most vile scumbags imaginable, not to mention the trademark villains and sidekicks that makes the Batman world so appealing, Arkham City is easily one of the best games of 2011.
We all breathed a sigh of relief when Deus Ex Human Revolution finally hit the market: it was actually as good as it looked. Since Invisible War struggled to improve upon its predecessors achievements and success, we found it hard to believe there could be a worthy successor to Deus Ex with a third installment, but with this intelligent and satisfying prequel, we were rendered immobile for days until completing it. The dystopian future Adam Jensen comes from is rich in detail, and the man himself was a hugely versatile protagonist, allowing us to make the ultimate choice: sneak past, or elbow sword to the neck?
It’s a testament to just how good Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are when they can appear on a list of games many years after they were originally released. Sure, this HD collection for the PS3 is a remake of two beloved Playstation 2 games, but going back to them was one of the best gaming experiences we had all year.
Undoubtedly the most original shooter of 2011 that we played, Bulletstorm introduced us to the hilarious skillshot system. Its easy to shoot a guy in the face with a shotgun. But its harder to whip a guy towards you, boot him in the balls so his body flies towards a huge wall of spikes, and then shotgun him in the face seconds before he’s impaled. This is the only game I know of that rewards such imaginative thinking, and we had endless fun figuring out the hundreds of skillshots in the game. Bulletstorm deserves its place on this list.
Crytek are notorious for creating some of the best-looking games out there, and Crysis (released in 2007) is still used as a benchmark for PCs today. It’s always assumed you needed a behemoth of a machine just to get their games to run, but that all changed with the release of Crysis 2. It was their first game to be fully optimised to run on this generation of consoles, and the result was one of the most beautiful console games ever made.
EA’s mega-sequel Dead Space 2 arrived early in 2011 to scare the crap out of everyone in January. It was bigger, louder and more violent than its predecessor, which is saying something. With a new focus on Isaac’s mind, the game tapped into some psychological issues aimed directly at the player this time, and the result was one terrifying experience. We were worried about the possibility of Isaac having an actual voice this time ruining some of the atmosphere, but those fears were unnecessary as Dead Space 2 turned out to be one of the best games of the year.
Magicka was one of the first games of the year, and is first on our list. Released in January by small indie team Paradox Interactive, the game was originally broken as hell. Anyone who bought it in its first few weeks of life would have played a bug-filled mess of a game. Luckily for us, we didn’t buy it until a few months later when everything had been ironed out. Featuring 4-player co-op, its an isometric action game, injected with humour and the best spell-casting system we’ve ever seen in a game.
2011 is over, then. It was an interesting year for gaming, with a relatively slow start and only a handful of big game sequels appearing early on with the likes of Little Big Planet 2, a new Total War game and Dragon Age 2. This was followed up by a great summer featuring The Witcher 2, LA Noire, a new Valve game and the unbelievable release of the mammothly disappointing Duke Nukem Forever. Then Winter came, good grief. In what proved to be one of the best gaming winters of all time, we could hardly keep up with the amount of games that came out week after week for the final few months of the year. Uncharted 3, Saints Row The Third and Modern Warfare 3 all hit us within a couple of weeks, we had a new Assassin’s Creed game, old-school arcade fun from Renegade Ops, a return to form from Sega in Sonic Generations and charming puzzler Trine 2 just managed to squeeze in before the year was out.
But none of these games were good enough to make our list. No, the top 10 games of 2011 are better than all of these. Care to find out what they are? Check back here every day as we count them down…
The Video Game Awards were this weekend and some games won some prizes. More importantly were the new game trailers that were released, and I’ve embedded 3 of my favourites below for your viewing pleasure. Check out the new Alan Wake game, awesome footage of Mass Effect 3, and the first footage of Naughty Dog’s new game The Last of Us.
… and we’re going to be able to fly harrier jump jets again! This excites me. This excites me a lot. See, I like flying helicopters, and I like flying jets, and in my mind a harrier is the best of both, and that means it should be helluva fun. If at least only because of the nostalgia I’m going to have when shooting the shit out of that big crane while a little guy tries running along it to avoid the hail of bullets from my minigun. Suffice to say, I can’t wait!
Gunpoint is an indie game being developed by PC games journalist Tom Francis. If you read PC Gamer like me, you’ll probably know him for his writing more so than his game development skills. Nonetheless, he seems to be doing a pretty good job of creating his first game. In it, you play a spy who has to break into office blocks, hack computers and take out guards before making a daring escape, quite often by leaping out of a third story window. But that’s not even the best bit. You get a gadget called the Crosslink, which basically lets you rewire any electrical device to almost any other in the building, allowing for some very creative puzzle solving…
The London Philharmonic Orchestra has recorded an entire album’s worth of video game music. It features music from the likes of Battlefield, Final Fantasy, even the Mario Brothers theme – all in fully orchestrated glory. If you have a Spotify account you can give it a listen here.