The Best Games of 2013 as Reviewed by AGS

So 2013 is over allegedly and all the developers have been far too busy eating and drinking to release much in the way of games over this silly season. So here is my top favourite games of 2013 plus one dishonourable mention.

Number 4: Sid Meier's Ace Patrol
Sid Meier's Ace Patrol was a bit of a surprise entry into the mobile world for Sid and now there is the sequel Pacific Skies. Sid Meier has done very little wrong in his career and this game shows why he is the king of turn based strategy. You can't go wrong in picking up this title or the sequel.

Number 3: Natural Selection 2

Can we use the term asymmetric gameplay whilst not talking about the Wii U. If we can then that would be the best way to describe Natural Selection 2. One team plays the aliens, the other the marines in a first person shooter view, whilst one commander on each team plays an RTS. You can't get much more asymmetrical than that, yet the game is still quite balanced and a hell of a lot of fun to play. It's 90% off right now on Steam which makes it ridiculous cheap but only for another 13 hours.

Number 2: Company of Heroes 2

A lot of titles have come and gone this year and often they have received rave reviews from the early press only to be much maligned come launch day. Company of Heroes 2 is the opposite of this, it got solid reviews but it wasn't overly hyped and it has just been getting better and better. A bunch of free content has been released and there has ben plenty of balancing patches to keep the game fair. Well worth the play if you like RTS or WWII games.

Number 1: Desktop Dungeons

It's a tough decision for me between Desktop Dungeons and Company of Heroes 2 for the number one spot but I chose Desktop Dungeons because it is so different to the bulk of titles out there. A tactical rogue-like, with kingdom building aspects is quite unique. If you are looking for something unique it is a pretty cheap game (also available on the Steam sale for another 13hrs) but beware, it is immensely challenging.

Dishonourable Mention

Mechwarrior Online was another title that got a high score from me this year and it was only officially launched in September. What I have realised after a lot of play is that this game was better in beta, in fact it was great. You would get a share of money to spend and then the whole game would be reset and you'd receive your money again. You could have so much fun with different builds and try out the new mechs and guns but now that it is fully released, it's a grind. You have to grind to get a gun and grind to get a chance to try the new mech, or spend a tonne of money. I already put $60 into it right from the start and I don't think I got a full games worth of value out of it.

The Tube Adventure

Sometimes you need something silly to play, whether you are unwinding at work, ignoring a loved one, or just plain bored out of your mind and the The Tube Adventure is the silliest of them all. I'm not going to write a review for this one as it's quite short but it is well worth many a play through. It's best not to try and make sense of it, just sit back and enjoy the madness. It's available for free anywhere Flash is.

My best score yet

Desktop Dungeons

Desktop Dungeons began it's life as a Game Maker game that is still available for download as a sort of demo of the game. It has changed a lot since then, including changing to a Unity based engine. As I too am making a game based in Game Maker, I was interested to play the original to see how much can be done with Game Maker and I was pretty impressed but for the purposes of this review let's look at the full version.

The original isn't as pretty as the full release.

There is a story of forging a new kingdom to ward off the monsters of the world or something but it is all rather silly. The main crux of the game is defeating dungeons and then using that gold to upgrade your kingdom. This will unlock new classes, races, items, etc for you to use in the dungeons. But don't think these upgrades will make the game any easier, quite often an upgrade will also let loose a new dangerous type of monster that will require new tactics to defeat. You really need to be focused when playing Desktop Dungeons as it is quite a challenging game. Dungeons will often take multiple tries to complete and the game explains that dying is learning. Often you just need to learn the pattern of the dungeon but as they quite often randomise key features you can't always rely on your memory. The random nature of the dungeons also means sometimes you get off to a horrible start and other times you find the items and enemies you need straight away. This can be immensely frustrating at times.

Look at those graphix

It's an odd style of gameplay where you just bash into your generally unmoving foes until they die. Then as you explore through the fog of war you regain health and mana. However, there are various additions that mix this all up. Magic plays a big role in this and can give you an edge in combat. So to do shrines. Worshipping at a shrine will grant you powerful benefits but the gods get angered by certain actions like drinking potions, or using magic, so you have to be careful. To switch up from just straight dungeon crawling all the time the game also offers puzzles. Puzzles have a specific way they are to be completed and are meant to teach you about the game. The thing that really tricked me with them is that you don't have to "win" them like you would a dungeon. In a dungeon to win you typically have to beat the strongest monster there but in a puzzle you just need to perform the actions in the correct order. I was trying so hard to be able to beat this one monster and when I figured out all I needed to do is hit it once, well, I was a bit shocked. I really think this could have been explained as it would have made it a lot easier. Oh well you die you learn.

 

I don't normally go for immensely challenging games as some others do but I got a lot of enjoyment out of Desktop Dungeons. There are some annoying issues and the game isn't going to win an award for it's graphical achievements but it has a lot of charm and character. It has a good balance of patient, tactical play and loot grabbing silliness to keep you coming back for more. Plus it's pretty cheap and on Steam, which means it will go on sale eventually, I say at the very least put it in your wishlist 8/10.

Band Stars [iOS]

Band Stars is a free to play, band simulation game. I was pretty excited to pick this up as the combination of being a rockstar plus Kairosoft style gameplay really appeals to me. If only it was as easy as playing this game to start a successful music career.

The game is divided into five different sections, firstly you have recording. Recording is the bread and butter of your group and is what you'll be doing most of the time. First you'll pick the label, the style and the lyrics of a song as well as one of your band members to write it. Then you select who should play what instrument on the track and if anyone will do a solo. Finally you choose someone to mix it. All of these different sections correlate to one of the five different skills, lyrics, creativity, melody, rhythm and polish. I am always confused by polish as they write it with a capital first letter. Who has the best Polish? It asks, umm... Next we have training. Training will improve your band members in one or multiple of the five skills as mentioned before. The higher their stats in these levels the better your song will do on the charts.

Hiring band members is the third section. You'll start the game with just four musos but you can have up to six working on a song at once, plus you can store others away in the VIP section. This allows you to collect the whole lot and complete all of their challenges which I'll get to shortly. Next comes upgrading. You can upgrade the look as well as the performance of all the instruments in your studio. You can also upgrade your furniture which allows your musicians to rest faster. Plus you can upgrade the strengths of your solos and because this is a free to play game you can also buy your various currencies here. Lastly we come to challenges which act as the quests of the game. You have various tasks to complete some of which come from the specific band members you have and some are just bonus challenges. Each musician has three challenges to complete which will provide you with various goodies for completing.

At first I was really sucked into this game. It slowly introduced new concepts and it felt like there was depth to this and it was slowly being fleshed out. But after a few hours I felt a little lost. There was still plenty to do but why am I doing it? Because it's free to play you'll have to play the waiting game with this one and you only seem to get rewarded with more waiting. The solo mini-game is boring you just occasionally tap to spend inspirado and there aren't really any other mini-games to play. Sure there are more challenges to complete but they are all essentially the same. Train someone in rhythm, train someone in polish etc., this game needs a little something more. I think this is what I don't understand about the way the free to play model is being implemented at the moment. You can pay to not wait but waiting is what the game is about.

The music is enjoyable if a bit generic at times but they do have to cover a lot of styles so that is understandable. Plus the presentation is great, it's colourful and cheerful. I still think it's worth a play because you will get some enjoyment out of it at first and perhaps some of you will feel hooked but in the longterm, you aren't going to even think about this game again 7/10.

Snail Dentist

So snails do have teeth, in fact they can have thousands of them. Luckily in this game you only have to deal with eight individual teeth. As far as I can tell this game is made by just one guy and it is based off a game that was released in October called Pumpkin Dentist. In fact I believe it is the same game just with a snail instead.

So right in front of you is a snail's head and it will open and shut it's mouth allowing you to clean its teeth. To clean its teeth you just need to touch on them until they turn white but if you try to clean its teeth whilst it's mouth is shut you will hurt it. Hurt it too many times and you fail the level. Also there is a timer and a little gremlin that want to ruin your day too. You do have some power-ups to combat all this. A toothbrush which cleans some teeth a bit, freeze will let you keep the damn snails mouth open for a while, and the finger? Well the finger just undoes all the times you hurt the poor snail.

There are just a bunch of odd things about the game. You are constantly bombarded by a message asking you to review or report a problem with the game. Eventually I thought why not leave a review so I hit the button and the whole thing crashed. The in app purchases aren't explained at all and it seems immensely dodgy to me, it just says 100. Is it going to charge you one hundred dollars? I am too scared to find out.

The only problem with this game is that it's boring, which is a fairly big problem for a video game. All you do is tap on the snails teeth every level. It isn't like Plants Vs. Zombies which throws in some new mini-games from time-to-time to keep you going. Still it is better than Ashes Cricket 2013 2.5/10.

Ashes Cricket 2013 [Windows]

Ashes Cricket 2013 is in contention for one of the worst games of all time. The game was released on Steam on the 22nd of November and then pulled on the 26th, for being too buggy and straight up terrible. Now it has been reported that the game has been cancelled by publisher 505 Games, though it seems to me that it is still unclear if the whole project is cancelled, or if they will send the developer Trickstar, back to the drawing board. Trickstar are an Australian developer based in Melbourne, so it is particularly sad to see them drop the ball on this one. Anyway, what is this game actually it like?

The graphics are just atrocious, the models look like something from years ago. The crowd just stand around with their hands in their pockets. The animations are shocking, sometimes a player will throw the ball backwards which looks pretty hilarious but I'm sure was not what was intended. At least they managed to get all the sponsorship signs on the stands, I guess. The music is alright but the commentary makes no sense most of the time. They will tell me how the batsmen was terrible to miss that ball, even though it's called a wide, plus it gets quite repetitive.

Where the hell are his eyes?

The controls are terrible and there is no explanation of them nor is there any customization. If you are going to play with a keyboard you need to go here to learn the keys. Yes in order to learn the keys to play the game you have to go to a third party website. I can't even imagine what they are thinking. If you play with a controller be prepared to use the keyboard and then the controller in no specific order and for no logical reason. Like all cricket games you need to learn the right timing and placement of your shots and bowls but honestly I have no inspiration to want to learn it in this game. Without a tutorial to get you started you are left alone to figure it out and with an option to see the controls in the game you have to alt-tab out to your browser. What a frustrating mess.

Even if the game does re-release without a single bug it's still going to be just a simple cricket game. You get to play 20-twenty matches, ODIs or tests, which is fine but there is no career mode or anything off the beaten track. Don Bradman Cricket 14, which had a little preview in Melbourne on the 7th of November, is going to have a full career mode where you can work your way up through the ranks and it looks like they are actually going to take the time to put out a finished game. I give this abortion of a game 2/10.

Crusader No Remorse

Crusader No Remorse was originally released back in 1995 and it's now available on GOG for $5.99 USD. I never played it in it's heyday though I really wanted to get it. Your character looks like Boba Fett and therefore oozes cool, also you've got no remorse so obviously you're killing and blowing things up indiscriminately. The story goes that you are a super soldier who originally is part of the immensely corrupt World Economic Consortium but after botching a mission where you were meant to kill civilians, you decide to join the resistance. I think it is a cool story even if it is played out in cheesy 90's, I can see each pixel, CD video. The GOG version runs DOSBox to make it compatible with your modern PC so very little has changed.

The first thing I noticed about this game was how clunky the controls are. Aiming with the mouse is terrible, aiming with the keys is too slow. Searching for loot and hitting switches takes far too long. The controls will see you going all over the keyboard for the buttons that you need and to figure this out you're gonna need to read the manual. The problem is every time I alt-tabbed out the game would permanently get stuck in tiny window mode, which is frustrating and makes me miss the printed manuals of old. Eventually I got the hang of it and I must say it is great to have a lot of control but it doesn't compare with modern games. I think it is a shame that there is no added controller support as this would have made it easier to play. The worst part was when shooting if you got too close to an enemy you wouldn't hit it, same with being too far. Also, the enemies seem capable of hitting you from the strangest angles that you yourself cannot achieve.

One of the coolest features at the time was how interactive the world was and it still stands out in this regard. You can basically blow up everything, hell, you can even blow up metal guard rails which makes no sense. There are a lot of traps and secrets to interact with that help to keep the world interesting. Some traps are as simple to get past as switching off a valve but there are more devious ones such as, hidden sensors traps that blanket the room in grenades and annoying walls that zap you with electricity. The game is also about finding loot, you must loot everything to survive! Like every other game like this, RPGs, Farcry, etc., picking up every bit of ammo and money gets tedious after a while but due to the clunky controls in Crusader No Remorse you'll feel it even quicker.

I honestly did have fun with Crusader No Remorse but I also had a lot of frustrations. I encountered a lot of bugs from in game traps not triggering right, to plain ol' disappearing off the screen at times. I didn't realise how long each mission was at first and that it is crucial to save at all times. Slowly but surely I made progress and got the hang of things. Still, I think this game is best left to those who played it back in the day and loved it, or those that really wanted to play it back then and are willing to give it a lot of time now 6/10.

Clumsy Ninja [iOS]

Clumsy Ninja is a pay-to-not-wait style game which puts you in charge of training a ninja and yes, he is clumsy. The ninja's sister has disappeared after fighting a mysterious villain and it is up to you to train him hard enough to get her back. It plays more like a virtual pet simulator than anything else.

The bulk of the game is spent training your ninja in one of four mini games. The first is a trampoline and in terms of gameplay this one is pretty boring. You have to slide the trampoline back and forth to keep him from falling off and slowly he will learn how to do new moves. Next up is punching bag training. I feel this one is fairly satisfying to watch but you don't really do anything but hold up the bag for him. Then you have my favourite mini game where you throw various things at your ninja like watermelons or basketballs and he has to learn to defend them. Lastly is the practice dummy. You don't do anything with the practice dummy except put it back in the ring if the ninja knocks out it. I wish the game was a bit more interactive.

Then you have the "Fun Stuff" section which includes some other training options and some general silliness. You get things like balloons and boxes, potions that make your ninja do a variety of silly things like get really dizzy or spin uncontrollably. You can combine some of these items with the training tools for some interesting results. For example, I set up a ninja tower from the fun stuff section, put the ninja on top and had him jump down onto the trampoline. Watching the ninja go flying after bouncing off the trampoline was pretty funny to me and this game really aims to be humourous. However it mostly falls short from my perspective but kids are bound to love it's simple slapstick comedy. One of the oddest attempts at humour is the basketball hoops you get. These will provide experience to your ninja every time you shoot him through a hoop.

In app purchases are handle by ways of buying coins or gems, plus there is also a "Holiday Box" purchase too. $2.99 AUD is the cheapest option you can buy which I think is a little silly. A dollar is about all I would want to spend on a game like this personally and there isn't that option. Coins and gems allow you to buy new equipment or recharge the equipment you already have. Once you have used a piece of equipment with the ninja a timer will start showing you how long you have before you can use it. You can get a lot of this game for free though because instead of paying to wait for some items to recharge you can watch a video, tweet or post to Facebook about the game. The Holiday Box adds a snow filled world with various activities set to coincide with winter in the Northern Hemisphere. 

The graphics, sounds and music of this game are all top notch. The way the clumsy ninja is animated is quite outstanding. Though at times he seems like a simple rag doll, as he learns new moves he gets a lot more interesting. At first when you throw him up into the air he will just collapse in a heap but eventually he learns to land like a ninja pro, which looks really cool. Whilst you can't flaw this game for its aesthetics, it's such a shame that more time wasn't spent on the gameplay. All the mini games are too simple and whilst there is some connectivity between training apparatuses it is very limited. To sum it all up, if you are looking for a ninja pet to keep and sometimes play with this is a good option. Just don't expect it to keep your interest for long 6.9/10.

Legend of Grimrock [Mac, Windows, iOS]

Legend of Grimrock has been out for sometime but I've only just gotten around to playing it lately. It's essentially an old school dungeon RPG with new world graphics and sound. Legend of Grimrock is made by another Finnish development team, who go by the name Almost Human, my second Finnish developer this week.

You're thrown into a dungeon with a team of four and you have to survive. The way you lay out your team is crucial as only the two in front can strike with melee weapons. The back is reserved for missile weapons and magic. I do recommend reading the short tutorial to get a handle on the game but very little is explained. It's all part of the old school charm, you have to figure out what is going on for yourself. This makes the game quite difficult at first and on my first try I died pretty quickly, after being overwhelmed by monsters. Once I figured out how magic worked and that you need to keep backing away from monsters, recharging your attacks and coming back in for the kill, I started to make some progress.

I love the lighting in this game it's so beautiful and really adds to the feel of being trapped in a poorly lit dungeon. I think the animations of the monsters are the most stand out aspect of the graphics. The character models themselves aren't amazing but they way the creatures move in the world really helps you understand how they fight and how you should fight them.

Like it's old school predecessors Legend of Grimrock is fairly frustrating. It rewards precise play throughs that can only be learnt with practice. It's all about the fine details, looking for that switch, figuring out that puzzle. This is what most people want out of this game but it does lead to some problems. The inventory suffers from this old school design and it feels like you are always poking through it to pull out a key, or a rock just to solve a minor puzzle. Combat is clunky too though the clunkiness does add to the sense of panic that makes each battle so intense.

I really see this as a niche game and I am very surprised with it's sales figures. Earlier this year they announced it had sold over 600,000 copies which is amazing for a small developer. That being said there are plenty of players out there looking for just this game, though I think most of them have already found it 7.7/10.

Humble Mobile Bundle 3

The Humble Mobile Bundle The Humble Mobile Bundle number 3 is looking pretty sweet if you are an Android owner. I reviewed Epoch earlier when it was out only for iOS and gave it an 8 so it is a solid game. Plus it's made by a team of Australian developers so bonus points for that. I also reviewed Kingdom Rush as a Flash game in a one sentence review giving it 9. It is a tower defence game but it actually added a lot of cool ideas to tower defence that many have copied now. Things like having little soldiers that block your enemies whilst your towers blast away and just the overall art style and theme of the game make this title really stand out. I haven't played the others but Ridiculous Fishing is just like Radical Fishin', which is a pretty sweet game that involves shooting fish.

The bundle is currently sitting at just over $5 USD for all six games which is pretty damn cheap. I say go and get it if you are an Android but not paranoid…