It's part Indiana Jones, part James Bond, part Lara Croft, and all utterly awesome. Uncharted 2 is the very definition of an adventure game. Presenting a setting and story like no other, and filling them with action as thoughtful as it is exhilarating, BioShock is as unique and completely realized a vision as you'll find in gaming. And don't forget the powerful soundtrack in this equation, which blends stirring strings with perfectly chosen vintage recordings, to create a soundscape in which coherent, moving tone is king. The complete, cohesive creation of a world like Rapture is a vast achievement in itself, but to ensure that the compulsive, ever-escalating RPG-shooter action only ever feeds further into the believability and immersion of that world? That's just showing off. From its still unsurpassed opening sequence, it's clear that BioShock is different from anything that came before it.
The first truly defining, AAA game of the last generation, it set standards of gameplay depth, world-building, atmosphere, and narrative ambition that many other developers spent the following seven years desperately trying to match.
It took a while for PS3 to get BioShock, but good Lord, was it worth the wait. It takes days - weeks, maybe - of immersion to truly realize its nuances, but for now, just know that in terms of form, feel, and function, it's the closest games have yet come to recreating the real world. never has an open video game setting been so expansive, so richly varied, so cohesive, and so utterly, vibrantly reactive. Between naive nice-guy Franklin, aggressive family-man Michael and benevolent psychopath Trevor, suddenly all play-styles are catered for without breaking the integrity of the game's stunningly realized world.Īs for that world. Even better, it's now finally possible to play GTA any way you want to and have it make sense.
The three-protagonist set-up does far, far more than simply mix up the characterization, building sophisticated dramatic irony as three separate storylines twist and conflict, all under the control of the player.
Probably the biggest evolution Grand Theft Auto has enjoyed since it went 3D, GTA 5 takes the essence of what has always made the series great, dismantles it, and rebuilds it with a new, fresh, altogether more thoughtful, and entirely reinvigorated structure. That Arkham City also plays host to a Batman story dark, dramatic, and entirely epic enough to stand up in any medium is just the icing on the utility cake. The same mix of intelligent, creative sandbox stealth and taxing, thrilling, almost musical combat still underpins everything and is even better than it ever was before. Letting the empowering yet perfectly balanced mechanics of the first game really fly, literally and figuratively, Arkham Citys structure is an equally grand victory in both gameplay and aesthetic terms.īut just as importantly, it never dominates or detracts from what made Arkham Asylum great. Smartly choosing fidelity, personality, and meaningful design over sheer scale for scale's sake, Rocksteady's quarantined chunk of Gotham is one of the most striking, affecting, and most entirely purposeful environments seen in an entire generation. How do you make the best superhero game of all time better? You add a whole lot more of it and drop all of that into one of the best-realized open-world cities ever seen in a game.