Historically this time of the year is one of my most productive. Coming off the new year blogging is a bit stronger in general as everyone is taking a look at what’s gone down the year before. 2013 gave me very few games to laser focus on, even in spite of trying out several MMOs. Just one more post after this to finish out my half-assed reviews. I think last time I did this, I went on to start making a few youtube reviews, but gave up on that after a month or so. Probably not picking that up again any time soon. I might be stalling, let’s get it on already.

1. Warframe – This is my game of the year, by far. The only real downside is being a bit grindy, but otherwise it does what it does quite well, and there’s not a lot else like it out there. Can you show me any other multiplayer psuedo-MMO space ninja pve-focused parkour shooters? Probably not, but if you can, please do. The grind involves gathering money, materials, and farming bosses for blueprints that you craft into new warframes and weapons. More grinding comes from using said crafted weapons to not only level them up, but to rank up your mastery level which then unlocks access to more powerful weapons, rinse/repeat. More grinding in unlock the much hard orokin missions with prime versions of the regular warframes and better weapons unique to the void. Warframe, it’s good. (and free)
2. Defiance – Oh Defiance, you should have been so much better polished at launch, but you weren’t and you paid for it. I think the weak start of this game, coinciding with the launch of the TV series on Syfy, kind of doomed the franchise, not to mention tarnish the squeaky clean polish Trion Worlds had going for them. Defiance tried to be an open-world shooter MMO, but there were so many UI issues and general confusion as to the flow of the game, for me it sputtered before it had a chance. I haven’t touched it since, and I haven’t heard much about it shortly after release. It rears its head on Steam occasionally, but I can’t imagine going back to it.
3. Deadlight – This is one of those indie games that just has such low playtime on Raptr that I managed to hit Experienced with a mere hour of gameplay. It’s a zombie survival platformer with a couple puzzle elements. Wasn’t terribly difficult but I stopped playing after one too many cheap shots from things that weren’t remotely obvious. Not a huge fan of being kicked in the dick repeatedly.
4. Far Cry 3 – Should I be crucified for this being my first Far Cry experience? Perhaps. I feel that FC3, with mods, could quite possibly be one of the best examples of PC gaming this year. If you’ve got the beef in your machine to run this at max quality with certain mods, you’ll be hard pressed to find something that looks better. The only downside really is that you as the protagonist are a white guy turbo-bro. My how original.
5. Trials Evolution – I was actually playing this on XBLA with RL gamer friends of mine before it came out to Steam. Mike B was doing a great series on Youtube called TETS, he also covers a handful of other games that I’ve played this year. Trials is a dirtbike platforming racing game with a ridiculously high skill cap. Even built into the vanilla game are tracks that I couldn’t comprehend how you could possibly complete, but sure enough  people on youtube managed to get it done.

Honorable Mention

• Jet Set Radiooooooo! – I actually did a rather poor review video of this on my Youtube channel, and I’m not sure if I’ve touched it since. However, at the time it was 2$, so I probably got my money worth. Still fun after several years of obscurity, and Sega seems to be revisiting their old games to re-release them more frequently. I’m totally okay with reliving some childhood nostalgia on occasion, but gaming has actually advanced pretty far in the past 12 years, which makes games like this lacking in comparison. I could totally go for an HD reboot of it as there aren’t a lot of street graffiti rollerblading games being released these days.