All The Bests in Video Games of 2016

We ran through our list of our favorite games early this week.  That list made us want to take time to appreciate not just the games but the sequences, characters, and levels in games that we particularly enjoyed this year.  Games did some amazing things this year and those elements deserve some special recognition.  Here’s our list of The Bests in video games in 2016.

The Best Action Sequence: Nate’s Caravan Chase

We liked Uncharted 4 just fine, but we weren’t as taken with it as we have been with previous sequels in the series.  However, if there was one portion of the game that really amazed us, it was the caravan chase sequence in which Nate and Sully rescue Nate’s brother from a group of pursuing vehicles.  Nate and Sully first have to escape a particularly persistent tank as it chases them downhill and then Nate leaps from cranes to cars to disable his brother’s pursuers.  It’s fast, intuitive, and perfectly designed to instill a sense of desperation and confidence.  You have no idea what to do, but you still manage to figure it out almost without thinking.  It’s a perfect action sequence that is easily the high point of the game and reminds us how much we’ll miss these adventures with Nate.

We will need to go faster.

The Best Power: Domino

Games this year gave us alot of great abilities to experiment with this year, but the game that gave us the greatest variety of fun abilities was Dishonored 2.  You could grab guys and yank them towards you.  You can teleport around like Nightcrawler.  You can even turn into animals to sneak through grates and past guards.  The best ability in the game, though, is one of the simplist: Emily’s Domino ability.  Domino allows you to link the fates of several targets, so whatever you do to one person happens to all of them.  This simple ability makes for some hilarious sequence, as  single dart will take out a trio of attacking guards.  I personally loved linking the guards, snagging one with my force pull ability, yanking him towards me (which pulled all three through the air towards me), grabbing him and choking him out (which knocked out everyone else).  There was no ability that gave us more fun as consistently this year.

If he’s that impressed by the robots, he will really be amazed this magical ability to link his fate to his buddy.

The Best Villain: Lady Arkham

As we have mentioned before, this was not a great year for supervillains.  A year in which we get a manic pixie Lex Luthor, a somnambulating Apocalypse, and a preposterous preening Negan, the bar for badguys is set pretty low.  However, Telltale’s Lady Arkham would have been a terrific villain in any year.  She’s vicious, she’s smart, and her motivations are well-defined and understandable.  She’s strong enough to face Batman head-on and her connection to Bruce’s history and life make her a formidable presence in his life as well.  She’s not just a criminal; she represents the consequences of past actions that Bruce has benefited from.  Facing her is almost a metaphor for coming to terms with his own past.  Telltale’s Batman adventure did a lot of amazing things this year, and Lady Arkham was their most impressive accomplishment.

Lady Arkham’s apparently been training with Donatello.

The Best Non-Player Character: Trico

Complain if you must about The Last Guardian’s control and camera; we’re the first to admit that these issues make the game unnecessarily frustrating.  But don’t complain to us about how hard it is to control Trico: he’s his own guy.  Getting to know Trico is as much a part of the game as getting from place to place.  However much he frustrates you  by not doing exactly what you want, the moments of spontaneous affection or the times when he saves the day will win you back.  The entire game isn’t about whether you can get to the end (of course you can), it’s about whether you develop a sense of affection for Trico by the end.  We did.  Don’t let the haters scare you away from this game; it’s flawed but its strengths outweigh the weaknesses.  Our experience with Trico was one of the most fascinating experiences we had this year and he was our favorite NPC to get to know.

Despite wonky controls and a truly evil camera, this big guy won us over.

The Best Non-Player Cooperative Partner: BT-7274

Titanfall 2 was one of the best surprises this year.  We complained a great deal about Titanfall 1’s lack of a campaign, and the developers got their revenge by delivering one of the best campaigns we played all year.  Seriously, you should play through this campaign.  And as cool as the levels were (and they were SO cool) and as great as the story was, the best part of the campaign was the cooperative partner BT-7274.  As your armor, he enables you to blast through wave after wave of soldiers.  When you separate though, he comes to life and provides cover and distracts enemies away from you.  He’s funny and dark, easily matching your clever remarks with better jokes and funnier lines.  He was our favorite NPC to work with this year and only wish we had more time to get to know him.

This wingman has got your back. He’s also your ride.

The Best Level: TIE: Effect and Cause and The Clockwork Mansion

This was actually a pretty good year for levels.  We enjoyed much of what we played in Doom, The Last Guardian.  We loved the fantasy world in The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, the final level of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and the caravan sequence in Uncharted 4.  But when it comes to levels that told a complete story that engaged us from beginning to end, the best we played came from Titanfall 2’s Effect and Cause and Dishonored 2’s Clockwork Mansion.  Titanfall’s level introduces a great in-game mechanic in which you spring forward and backward in time to learn more about your mission while battling enemies in both periods.  The Clockwork Mansion traps you in the mansion of an evil designer whose elaborate mansion is designed specifically as a high-tech panic room.  Both levels are smart, fun and amazing.

The Best Final Level: Inside’s Final Twist

Nobody blew our minds in the final moments quite like Inside.  The entire game is so subtle and quiet as you lead your defenseless boy through increasingly sinister environments.  You travel through creepy forests, dark factories, and deep into an undersea base.  Your motivations are completely opaque as you move through each part of the game and you never understand what you’re looking for and why.  Then, in the end, you find what you’ve been looking for and the entire game changes.  Our understanding of who our hero was and what he was doing becomes completely different.  The motivations of the ruthless killers trying to stop us became more understandable.

You both do and don’t want to know what they are looking at.

The Best Ending: Geralt’s Retirement

One thing we didn’t see a lot of this year was great endings.  Most games like Dishonored 2, Gears of War, and The Division just wrapped up the stories with a pat ending.  Some games did their best to break our hearts (Titanfall 2) and some mercifully didn’t (The Last Guardian).  Other games gave us a decent goodbye to a beloved hero (Uncharted 4).  But the best goodbye to a hero we’d grown to love the most was Blood and Wine’s goodbye to Geralt.  Having worked for kings and monarchs and saved the world multiple times, perpetually penniless Geralt finds himself suddenly provided with a nice retirement with his own vineyard and estate for assisting with one final mission.  Geralt finally has a home of his own and can spend his retirement treasure hunting, fighting the odd monster, and enjoying whichever of his friends and love interests come to stay.  It’s a worthwhile ending for a terrific character and gave us the best ending we saw this year.

This place is all yours, if you’ll kill the evil vampire in the basement.