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…
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
There’s not a lot I can say about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that hasn’t already been said, but here’s my take anyway. The game deservedly garnered a heap of attention when it came out for being a fantastic example of a JRPG, that happened to be made in France. Technically, ignoring the fact that the team includes a bunch of ex-Ubisoft veterans, it’s the debut title from developers Sandfall. And what a debut game it is.
Portal is one of those games that sprang out of nowhere, taking everyone by surprise and causing a storm all across the internet. With almost no hype, and zero expectations, it came bundled as a throwaway extra in The Orange Box, arguably the best game bundle ever made.
The Trials franchise is surely the most successful game to ever start out life as a Flash browser game. I remember playing the original game on Miniclip back in the day, and I have played every single iteration since. The game’s core concept is simple – you control a trials bike, and must navigate it across a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses on a 2D pane. It’s the perfect pick-up-and-play game, because it’s easy to get the basics, but insanely difficult to master.
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