Community Review: Game Of The Year So Far?


The last week or so has seen a dearth of new releases, so I put it out there on Twitter — what would you like to see in the Community Review this week? I had some good responses: DayZ, the most recent Humble Indie Bundle, Mario Tennis. But then I thought — why not just let you guys review the game you’ve enjoyed the most this year?

The timing seems pretty good. We’re almost halfway through the year, and E3 is just about to kick off properly, so this might be a decent time to reflect and talk about all the games we’ve loved in the first half of 2012.

Alrighty then… I’ll start.

My two favourite games of the year are polar opposites. One is a Zen like experience that calms the nerves and eases the pain in your soul. The other shreds your nerves and transforms your soul into a quivering wreck.

Those games are, respectively, Journey and Trials Evolution.

Journey probably ekes it between the two, mostly because it’s a new IP and it felt like a legitimate push forward, even if I’m not sure what direction it’s headed necessarily! Trials Evolution, on the other hand, was an already polished mechanic stretched to its limits.

In a lot of ways, both games really reinvigorated my faith in gaming and their ability to provide new experiences. Journey was an ‘experience’, as crap as that word is, and Trials Evolution showed what games can achieve when they provide the player with a simple, yet infinitely complex central mechanic. I love both types of games, and it’s difficult to seperate the two.

It’s going to take one mammoth video game to dislodge either of these from my best of 2012 list, that’s for sure.


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