Best of 2009: Top 5 Games

2009 was the year I rediscovered my passion for gaming. It was the year I finally left World of Warcraft behind and got to grips with the backlog of games that had slipped by me in the last couple of years. It was the year I added a Playstation 3 to my existing stable of consoles, a purchase that was worth every penny. 2009 was also the year that a slew of games appeared from nowhere and redefined what I expect from my interactive entertainment. I give you my Top 5 Games of 2009

5. Batman: Arkham Asylum (360)

I really wanted to dislike Arkham Asylum. My view was coloured partly by conspiracy theories circulating before release that suggested that Eidos were trying to buy high review scores from magazines and partly by the fact that the last non-Lego Batman release, Batman Begins, was utterly, utterly dreadful. I even held off playing the game for four months because I was so convinced I would hate it. I was wrong. Very wrong, in fact. Pass the ketchup, I have a hat to eat.

Drawing its inspiration mainly from the 1990s Animated Series and the gritty Christopher Nolan films of recent years, Arkham Asylum is a much darker and adult game than previous attempts at making a compelling Batman title. It drips atmosphere and the Unreal Engine adds a real sense of weight and presence to the game world, not least the lead character. Developers Rocksteady have taken a first principles approach to the combat mechanics, stripping back the control system and allowing the player to worry more about timing and spectacle than mastering multi-button move sets. It’s an elegant solution that lets the action flow unhindered and makes brawling a pleasure rather than a chore.  Stealth sections are handled with the same amount of care, turning rooms of heavily armed guards into satisfying puzzles as Batman attempts to silently take down enemies without being seen.

Unfortunately, boss battles are something of a disappointment. The 2D Scarecrow sections quickly lose their novelty and occur just a little too frequently. The Poison Ivy encounter is a wretched piece of game design, a poorly-checkpointed exercise in pure frustration. Killer Croc is a damp squib, after a lengthy build-up, and like Poison Ivy, relies too much on trial and error and learning attack patterns and directions by rote. The problem here is that the boss encounters rely on gimmicks rather than the Arkham Asylum’s bread-and-butter combat and climbing abilities and are, in some cases, disproportionately difficult compared to the rest of the game. There’s nothing that will really hold anyone up for any great length of time but there’s an overwhelming feeling that boss fights are to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Thankfully, there’s more than enough here to make up for these deplorable sections. Arkham Asylum’s detective mode borrows heavily from Metroid Prime but without the tedious backtracking and re-spawning enemies that made that game drag severely in places. Again, it’s a minimalist approach to exploration and the environment that allows the player to get on with enjoying the game world without becoming bogged down in mundane and unnecessary tasks. A special mention must go to the game’s superb voice acting, particularly Mark Hamill, reprising his role as Joker from the animated series. Batman: Arkham Asylum is perhaps 2009′s most unlikely success story, with an unknown developer taking a high-profile movie license and producing a game which has redefined what we expect from future licensed titles.

4. Assassin’s Creed 2 (360)

Let’s set the record straight here. The first Assassin’s Creed was by no means a bad game. There’s no disputing that it failed to fully live up to the levels of expectation generated by the industry hype machine but it still managed to pull off slick, polished and entertaining with aplomb. Had Assassin’s Creed 2 been released in its place in 2007, it would likely have been declared one of the greatest games of all time. But as it is, things have moved on in the last couple of years and ideas that once seemed fresh and exciting have long since been absorbed into gaming convention. Instead Assassin’s Creed 2 is merely one of 2009′s finest games.

Ubisoft have atoned for the sins of the father by removing the fat that made Assassin’s Creed 1 corpulent and unfocused in places. In the first game there was always plenty to do but thanks to repetition of missions types and no overarching goals to work towards, there was little incentive to actually do it. Assassin’s Creed 2 brims over with content and constantly dangles tantalising carrots in front of the player in the form of achievements, new weapons and armour, extra health perks and hidden videos. The new currency system helps of course, with the game able to hand out monetary rewards for completing optional goals to go towards buying new shinies. Elsewhere, combat has been overhauled and is fun and stylish, a ballet of parries, counters and disarms with lead character Ezio facing anything up to a dozen opponents at once. And of course, Renaissance Italy is as gorgeous a place as any to set a game and one that makes the very best of the AC2′s wonderful graphics engine.

Not that Assassin’s Creed 2 is without its faults, of course. The Animus story conceit is as unnecessary as it was in the original game and only succeeds in shattering the player’s sense of immersion at regular intervals. Climbing controls are occasionally ropey and take quite some time to get to grips with (geddit?). For the first few hours, accidentally leaping into thin air while scaling a hundred metre tall church spire occurs with irritating regularity. Then there’s those opening hours themselves, where the game really takes its time getting up to speed and giving the player something approaching a full set of moves and the freedom to explore the beautiful surroundings. It feels restrictive and patronising and is a stark contrast to the free-roaming delights of mid-game and onwards.

Still, these shortcomings are relatively minor and with the exception of all the rubbish Animus stuff, mostly disappear after a few hours. They certainly don’t stop Assassin’s Creed 2 being deep, stylish and, most importantly, a great deal of fun. The original game has been scrubbed and polished to within an inch of its life and Ubisoft’s care and attention to detail has produced a sequel that stands head and shoulders above most other games released in 2009.

3. Dragon Age: Origins (PC)

Reports of PC gaming’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Dragon Age: Origins shows that the platform can still hold its own against and even surpass upstart console titles. Indeed, the PC version of Dragon Age is very much the definitive version of the game and harks back to the golden age of Infinity Engine-powered top-down games while preserving the closer third-person perspective of the 360 and PS3 conversions. It’s a huge game with an inordinate amount of replay value and one of the finest RPGs released in the last decade.

For a while though, it all looked as if Bioware might have dropped the ball. The marketing campaign leading up to Dragon Age’s release was crass and sold the game as a “mature” title, featuring blood, boobs and a silly Marilyn Manson soundtrack, shoehorned in without any trace of irony. Thankfully the final game proved to be an altogether more refined affair, even if gratuitous violence and cringe-inducing sex scenes did rear their ugly heads from time to time. In many ways, Dragon Age is the true successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, with a depth and complexity many modern RPGs lack. Combat is tactical and challenging and the game’s morality system thankfully abandons the binary good/evil approach in favour of building relationships with individual characters based on a combination of deeds and conversations. Decision-making becomes a genuine dilemma as the player attempts to weigh multiple potential outcomes, aware that their choices may alienate at least one of the supporting characters.

Blood and boobs aside, Dragon Age is let down somewhat by the fact that is, above all, a Bioware game. It follows a basic structure that has remained virtually unchanged since Neverwinter Nights and Knights of Old Republic and relies on similar narrative conceits. There’s a real sense that we have seen many of the NPCs before and despite the fact that it has been seven years since the company released a true fantasy RPG, the game just doesn’t feel new or fresh. There’s also the question of difficulty level, with Easy a pushover for most players and Normal an often gruelling and punishing affair with relatively straightforward encounters proving disproportionately frustrating.

Regardless, Dragon Age: Origins marks one of the first major shifts in PC RPGs for several years and is a real breath of fresh air after a long succession of MMORPGs and rough and ready German and Eastern European efforts. It’s a high budget, Western title with a developer determined to return to the roots of the modern genre it helped codify. More importantly, it demonstrates that there remains a niche for PC gaming – those playing Dragon Age: Origins on a console really are missing out on the full experience.

2. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)

You’ll probably already know Uncharted 2 as The Official Game of the Year, as voted for by Eurogamer and any number of other sites. I have no qualms with that but I can’t quite claim that it’s my personal Game of the Year. What I can say is that it’s about as good a game as you could possibly hope to play in any given year. It’s perhaps the most polished game yet released, both in terms of its jaw-dropping good looks and gripping gameplay.

Like Assassin’s Creed 2, the sequel to Uncharted has advanced leaps and bounds over the original game. While the first Uncharted was poorly paced, endless waves of enemies occasionally interspersed with some platforming, Among Thieves nails the mix of combat and exploration and makes the former much more engaging and entertaining. Drake’s Fortune was no slouch in the looks department but the sequel is genuinely gorgeous, with particularly impressive urban environments. The is also full of memorable set-pieces, from the game’s opening in a train carragie overhanging an icy abyss to the encounter with a helicopter on the rooftops of a Nepalese city and a head-on fight with a tank in a Himalayan village.

Great though Uncharted 2 is, it’s not perfect. Its early chapters are schizophrenic and suffer from inconsistent pacing and the player is forced to suffer through the ignominy of a forced stealth section in the second level. As the game reaches its climax, firefights become increasingly predictable and usually degenerate into weeding snipers and grenadiers before mopping up the rest of the human detritus. Technically though, it’s virtually flawless, with only a few minor bugs and glitches popping up in a playthrough. whether the multiplayer mode really adds much is debatable but it seems to have attracted a reasonably devout following on PSN either way.

Those are very small potatoes, however. In all ways that matter, Uncharted 2 is the new peak of the action-adventure genre, the Resident Evil 4 of its generation. It would take a very special game to beat it to my Game of the Year and, as it happens…

1. Demon’s Souls (PS3)

They’re not supposed to make games like this any more. Stoic, uncompromising, difficult. Compelling, rewarding, unique. If there’s one thing you can say about Demon’s Souls it’s that it is quite unlike any other game released in 2009. But it’s so much more than that. Demon’s Souls mixes old school values with genuine innovation, grafting an ingenious online infrastructure onto its action RPG framework. It strips the sub-genre to its core elements, ditching everything from strictly defined character classes to conventional currency. And it must be emphasised that it’s tough. Really tough. But behind its unforgiving façade is a game that rewards every second you invest in it tenfold. It’s definitely not for everyone but those who persist in spite of the difficulty will be hard-pressed not to fall under Demon’s Souls captivating spell.

On paper at least, Demon’s Souls does everything that modern games design seems to expressly forbid. With players losing all collected souls – the game’s single currency exchanged for everything from levelling up to repairing armour and upgrading weapons – on death, it punishes failure. Players are expected to learn from mistakes and are never held by the hand. The game’s tutorial is minimal and new characters face the task of clearing the lengthy first level and killing the final boss before being allowed to level up. But though it’s harsh, Demon’s Souls is never unfair. Players die because they have screwed up – misjudging an enemy’s swing, running out of stamina because they have been flailing their sword wildly rather than hiding behind their shields and making calculating swipes at the right moment – rather than at the hands of some arbitrary machination by the game. And with the stakes so high, every enemy defeated feels like a true triumph, every downed boss a cause for genuine celebration.

If there are any criticisms to be levelled at Demon’s Souls it’s the game’s menu and inventory systems. This aspect of the interface is gaudy and poorly designed and selecting a particular item often involves navigating several screens of ugly menus. There are also slight framerate issues when things get a bit busy on screen but it’s never enough to seriously affect the business of killing. There are, of course, those who will find the game too difficult and the only answer to this is that it’s a very niche title and those who are adverse to a stern challenge should stay firmly away.

What’s most amazing about Demon’s Souls is that for a resolutely old school game, it’s actually the most refreshing thing I’ve played all year. It’s certainly stern and forbidding but underneath the surface is a game that rewards the player like no other recent title. In many ways, playing Demon’s Souls is like being involved in a torrid love affair. It’s difficult and often frustrating but the highs are so ecstatic that it doesn’t matter. It abuses you and yet you keep coming back for more, convinced that you’ve deserved your punishment. Demon’s Souls: it only hits you because it loves you. And that’s why it’s my Game of the Year for 2009.

Honourable Mentions

Torchlight (PC): RPG that’s like Diablo with a sugar rush.

Left 4 Dead 2 (PC): More zombies. Can’t really be a bad thing, can it?

Flower (PS3): Immensely pretty and relaxing PSN title.

Braid (PS3): Technically a 2008 release but a recent release on PSN secures the time-based platform puzzler a place in this year’s Honourable Mentions.

Street Fighter IV (360/PS3): The epitome of the modern beat ‘em up.