Finally wrapping up this mini series of reviews. Maybe by now Raptr will have their 2013 gaming summaries finished, or maybe they’re just not doing them at all. I rather liked what they did last year even though it wasn’t particular packed with data. Seems like it would be right up their alley to continue doing them. Alas, I’ll just have to do all the heavy lifting myself until they get it together.

1. Don’t Starve – It’s been a long year of games in beta status slowly being developed over time. I’ve come back to Don’t Starve several months later to find it much harder with many of my tactics not working anymore. You pretty much can’t sustain yourself indefinitely by building a farm, and these some new creatures that really punish you being away from your camp. Still a great game, and making it hard reinforces the concept of the roguelike genre. You’re not supposed to survive, you just play as hard as you can until the inevitable end finds you.
2. Eden Eternal – I uh… I’m not sure what I was doing here. Okay look, there was this frog character… and he had a robot suit. It was a weak moment for me. Well, it was ~15 hours of weak moments for me. This is a chibi MMO, very cutesy, totally outside of my norm. Reminded me a bit of Ragnarok Online… not that I played a lot of that.. dammit. Just, let’s try to forget this happened. Thanks.
3. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare – This is much more my thing, granted when I started playing this in-progress beta the multiplayer barely worked and it was really difficult to play with your friends. We made it work, and this brings medival weaponry to the first-person shooter genre in a way that I haven’t seen done before. I preferred my polearms to the swords, a good clean thrust into someones helmet was usually enough to pop them like a grape. However there was something to be said for the heavy armored guys flailing around a claymore and racking up kills by the handful. Chivalry can get quite frustrating if you get into a bad streak, but you really only have human elements to blame as everything is equally balanced. Recommended.
4. FTL – This is a semi-turn based spaceship strategy game in which you’re running for your life after stealing intel from an empire of ships in your wake. There’s several different races that you can get to join you in the process, several ships to unlock, and a few secret areas that you stumble onto once in a great while. The first couple of playthroughs has a bit of a learning curve, then there’s another learning curve as you fight the boss ship at the end. The game is constantly pushing you to do better with each playthrough and it’s very rewarding figuring out effective strategies and ways to maximize your effectiveness throughout. Totally worth whatever the full price it’s currently going for.
5. Torchlight 2 – I played the shit out of this 2.5d isometric RPG, beat the storymode and enjoyed grinding through the randomly generated levels afterwards looking for sets of armor. I think eventually it wore on me that there was really so few sets of armor for specific intervals, and you really couldn’t find them fast enough to keep up with the level scaling. There are so many mods to counter this issue in the Steam Workshop however which freshens things up. It still sells for a mere 20$ and is on my shortlist of games that I really enjoyed this year./

Honorable Mention

• Intrusion 2 – This platforming shooter had a lot going for it at release. The mechanics were solid and the gameplay was rather fun. However it got me stuck on the first real boss and I was unable to continue past that point. For some reason that boss was waaaay harder than the rest of the gameplay leading up to that point. I thought I was missing some key game element, but it turns out the bosses are just like that. Reminds me of fighting the first boss in any particular Mega Man game with only your standard blaster and now powers. Slowly grinding down their health bar while playing as carefully as possible… except I couldn’t actually kill the boss. I have no idea if the rest of the game is worth playing, unfortunately.