My five best games of 2014

Some might know I’m an avid gamer. MY best five games (ok ok I smuggled in more) I played in 2014 are:

South Park: The Stick of Truth
This an excellent, basically, adventure-meets-RPG game. The originators of South Park had a hand in this and it shows. The game basically is an interactive, whole series worth of South Park material.

Watch dogs
This was presented as a blockbuster A* game and after some tweaking I got it working well enough on my PC. The open world game clearly adopted elements from Grand Theft Auto but I particularly liked the ‘hacking’ twist: several times I raised the bridges while racing across them. There was a lot to do about the ‘dumbed down’ graphics after demos at the E3 conference, but as I have a PC: no problem.

Alien: Isolation (I think the gamespot 6 is unfair)
After the disappointment of AlienS: Colonial Marines this title does one of the best SciFi movies ever justice. The game is not so much a First Person Shooter but more an atmospheric ‘stealth’ game. Especially the sections where you have to evade the xenomorph are gripping and tense. I recorded the end (spoiler!):

Far Cry 4 (still finishing this one)
This basically is Far Cry 3 all over again but in a new (and gorgeous) environment, new animals (rhinos, elephants) and the same, excellent gameplay.

Everything from Telltale: The Wolf Among Us, Season 2 of the Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands, Game of Thrones
This is just a whole category of games, with very limited and simple gameplay. But that’s ok because the games are ‘story-driven’. The stories are captivating. Choices made in the game influence the subsequent events in the game.

Note that I couldn’t include Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Dragon Age: Inquisition because they simply didn’t work well (enough) on my system. Other notable games are Shadow of Mordor and -for the kids but also enjoyable- LEGO Lord of the Rings and Minecraft 😉