You’ve told us what games let you down the most. Which Aussie games left you on a high. Now it’s time for the big one: Kotaku Australia’s reader game of 2017.
All of the polls we ran were a pretty tight affair – except for the winner of this poll. It was a comprehensive blowout for first place, and a veritable gulf between second and third place as well.
Beyond that, however, only two or three votes separated pretty much every game after that. So without further ado, let’s start with number 5.
5. Super Mario Odyssey
If more people owned Switches – and it’s not been an unsuccessful console so far by any means – this would be higher. Odyssey took out three percent of the vote, and was only four votes behind #4.
4. NieR: Automata
The stories about NieR were fascinating alone, so it’s not a surprise that everyone who played it absolutely loved it. Just edged out Odyssey, and a worthy winner in the #4 spot. But not as worthy as the gargantuan game that’s about to follow…
3. Persona 5
Yup, it’s the mammoth JRPG Persona 5. Needing 100 hours or more didn’t put you off, with Persona enjoying a comfortable gap in the GOTY voting over Odyssey and NieR. For the record, Persona also had more than double the votes of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Wolfenstein 2, Prey, Cuphead and Resident Evil 7.
But it didn’t come even close to our number #2, which should come as absolutely no surprise because it’s …
2. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Of course it’s Zelda. In fact, the only surprise to some might be that Zelda isn’t higher, although that can probably be explained by the fact that a) not everyone owns a Switch and b) running Breath of the Wild on PC takes a beast of a machine and is far from the simplest process.
Because of that, I can see that plenty of people skipped BOTW entirely. But those that didn’t absolutely loved it. Mark played and played and replayed the game all year. Every time I went to a friend’s house his five year old was sitting there, toying with Ganon, flinging the Master Sword around with abandon. BOTW is a beautiful, incredible piece of work, and if you didn’t play it in 2017 you should endeavour to spend some time in Hyrule over the next 12 months.
But Zelda only got 14% of the vote. A nice result, but nowhere close to your favourite game of 2017.
Which was one vote shy of having exactly half of all the votes tallied.
Your favourite game of 2017 was …
1. Horizon: Zero Dawn
Nothing burned as bright for Sony in 2017 as Horizon. For me, it was the first game that gave the PS4 Pro a real sense of purpose, the first game that truly showcased the value of HDR in gaming, and hopefully a sign of a very vibrant and creative future for Guerrilla Games.
There’s a lot to love about Horizon: Aloy’s journey away from the tribe, the tightness of the open world, the overall visual design, optimisation on the PS4 Pro and stock consoles, the cleverness of the UI, solid voice acting throughout and the strong supporting cast, including Rost, matriarch Lansra, Erend, Esra, and more.
In many ways, Aloy has become a beacon of light for Sony. We’ll see more of her in future Horizon games and probably as a special character in other PlayStation games to come. And when she appears, it’s likely that a lot of you will be very, very happy.
So Horizon took out top honours, but there were plenty of games that just missed the cut. In no particular order:
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – PUBG was the highlight for a lot of people around the world, and still is. But it fell a handful of votes behind Super Mario Odyssey in the voting. The poll did go live before PUBG 1.0 launched on Xbox and PC, although I’m not hugely sure the extra optimisations at launch would have swayed many votes either way.
Mass Effect: Andromeda – Yes, people voted for Andromeda nonetheless. It actually beat out Cuphead and South Park: Fractured But Whole, amazingly, and tied with Prey for equal 9th.
Divinity Original Sin 2 – Larian’s RPG wasn’t short of praise this year, and it wasn’t far behind PUBG and Odyssey in the voting. There was a comfortable gap between DOS2 at #6 and the next placed game, which was Assassin’s Creed: Origins.
So that’s your take on the best games of 2017. It’s probably been the best year since the launch of the PS4 and the Xbox One, to be fair, and Nintendo had themselves a solid year as well (even without a new Smash or Pokemon).
And as always, thanks to everyone who voted. Everything we do wouldn’t be possible without you, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support.
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