Racing games rarely feel like a real adventure, mostly because of their singular focus: driving. It's hard to imagine that a turn-based strategy game would be so thrilling, but XCOM 2 is a white-knuckle game of schemes and tactics where your back is always up against the wall and not everyone's going to make it home, and you'll love every second of it.įorza Horizon 3. XCOM 2 makes that even better by making desperation the name of the game: It's a turn-based game that gives you a limited amount of turns to do what you need to do and limited resources for expanding your base of operations, forcing you to stop hedging your bets and just commit to the decisions you've made, good or bad. The sequel to 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown asks the same question as the first: "What if chess was badass?" It's a game where making tactical decisions for a squad of soldiers felt legitimately thrilling in an observable way, as you ordered soldiers to crash through windows, breach buildings, take cover, and try and outsmart the superior aliens that invaded earth. Maybe strategy games aren't sexy or an easy sell, but most strategy games aren't XCOM 2. Hitman does with a sentence what most games take pages to get across. It encourages you to cook up elaborate schemes and see if you can pull them off, and it does so in a manner so compact and efficient you can't help but admire it. Hitman delivers a satisfying and complete experience that's involved but not taxing, a game that initially overwhelms you with its possibility before training you to see options in all the chaos. Each episode is a wonderfully digestible and complete experience-it's tremendously satisfying to wander through the clockwork of a level, observe a dozen little stories unfolding within it, and discern which opportunities are best for the game's protagonist, Agent 47, to insert himself into and find his target.
Released across six episodes between March and October of this year, each installment of Hitman's "first season" gave players a distinct mission in a different location, taking players from Bangkok to Colorado.
Good games of 2016 series#
A soft reboot of the series that acknowledges the weirdly elaborate backstory while also nudging it to the side, Hitman is a brilliant revival of a series that seemed long past its prime. It's also, as 2016's Hitman proves, completely unnecessary. You wouldn't know this unless you've played every Hitman game since 2000, but there's a surprisingly elaborate and complex mythology behind the Hitman series. The Witness is the Arrival of video games, about learning to communicate in a language completely foreign to you, mastering that language, and maybe, hopefully, understanding why in the end. It's also strangely immersive-solving its puzzles is one of the most satisfying feats you can do in a game this year, and wrapping your head around them is easier than you think. The Witness is hard, a game that needs pen and paper to get through. The rules for solving these puzzles are never outright explained, but each area of the island offers a new variation on these grid-puzzles, and the faintest whispers of a story you can try and sort out as you unlock doors and caves and bunkers hidden away in places both obvious and not. It's a game where you're stranded on an island, surrounded by puzzles, all of which involve drawing a line on a grid. It's hard to see the appeal in The Witness from reading about it or even watching a video-its simplicity is almost deviously dull. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. While it may occasionally frustrate or seem needlessly obtuse, Final Fantasy XV is always interesting and often hilarious, and easily one of the most enjoyable games of the year. But that would also make it less interesting or fun- Final Fantasy XV is good because it's a mess. In a world where time and resources are unlimited, perhaps Final Fantasy XV is a sharper, smoother, and altogether more coherent game. It's a role-playing game that is like others but also not, a friend with many flaws with whom you nonetheless enjoy being around.
And yet Final Fantasy XV is distinct, memorable, and warm. It is one of the messiest games of the year, a weird casserole of ideas that never cohere as well as it should-and plays against itself in ways that are sometimes perplexing. By this metric, Final Fantasy XV would fail pretty easily: It's a massive game that tries many things, and doesn't always stick the landing. The closer a game is to perfectly articulating and executing its vision, the better it is. Too often, "best" is equated with perfection, particularly in games.