10 Best PC & Console Video Games Of 2015
2015 has been an amazing year for video games across all major platforms. With the New Year only a couple days away, we decided to compile our very own list of top ten video games from the passing year, and had quite a bit of trouble finalizing our picks, which range across PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox and Wii U platforms, and are based on our own personal experiences with these games as well as their general reception around the web. If you’ve been out of touch with gaming this year, our list should prove to be a good place to start catching up.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Easily one of the best action role-playing games ever created, the third installment in CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher franchise has been winning awards and hearts alike left, right and center throughout the past few months, and deservedly so. The game not only delivers in quality, with a riveting story-line, mesmerizing visuals and tense combat sequences, but is clearly among the most accomplished in the quantity department as well, with approximately 100 hours of gameplay evenly distributed between the main story and side-quests, and that’s without its periodical DLC releases and the Heats of Stone expansion.
Perhaps the best element of the game is its side-quests, almost all of which are as profound as any chapter of the core story-line, and many of the decisions a player makes during these optional quests have significant effects on how the story plays out.
Fallout 4
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Bethesda’s massive open-world RPGs never disappoint, and this year’s Fallout 4 release was no exception. Owing in part to high expectations fueled by the success of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the game was able to break records on Steam for highest sales (1.2 million copies) and most number of concurrent players (445,000) on first day of release.
Fallout 4’s post-apocalyptic sandbox is said to offer over 400 hours of fun, new, surprisingly flexible character creation and base-building elements, weapons and armor crafting, tons of secrets, and genuinely difficult decisions that shape the player’s story. It’s not surprising that despite its several glitches and imperfections, the game has raked an active modding community.
You may also like to check out: 25 Fallout 4 Tips & Tricks You Should Know.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360
Hideo Kojima’s last Meta Gear Solid title may very well be the best one yet. The Phantom Pain takes the franchise where it has never gone before, with an open-world setting and base-building elements that could give even the most popular sandbox games a run for their money. The stealth game offers a new level of detail as well as countless ways to complete each mission, customizable companions and several decisions that can effect the story-line.
Bloodborne
Platform: PlayStation 4
Like Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls games, this action RPG poses a challenge that might be a bit too much for the casual player. It is this seemingly unfair level of difficulty along with tense battles, a gritty environment and genuinely scary beasts that makes Bloodborne a must-play title for seasoned gamers, and with a new expansion released only a month ago, there’s quite a bit of additional content to play through after the original 40+ hours of gameplay.
Rocket League
Platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
This creative take on physics-based sports games came out of nowhere and took the casual gaming world by storm, rising in popularity to the point where it had to be included in almost every best-of-2015 list out there. Psyonix’s Rocket League is a soccer game played with rocket-fueled battle cars instead of people, and if that in itself doesn’t sound like endless hours of multiplayer fun to you, there are a bunch of additional game modes to be played and more to be added with upcoming DLC. A fun fact unknown to many is that Rocket League isn’t the first of its kind, or even in its series; it is actually a sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, which was released back in 2008.
Kerbal Space Program
Platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U
Another dark horse among this year’s popular games, developer Squad’s Kerbal Space Program looks like a casual game at first glance, hiding a surprisingly challenging open-world space flight simulator under the surface, which puts the player in control of everything from building spacecraft to flying them and aiding the Kerbal race in their quest to take over the universe.
Dying Light
Platforms: Windows, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Developed by the team behind Dead Island, Dying Light is an open-world, first-person survival horror title that offers a surprisingly enjoyable combination of zombies and parkour along with a commendable story-line, weapons crafting system, RPG elements, co-op and asymmetrical multiplayer to sweeten the deal. The game is one of our personal favorites here at Geek Cosmos.
Super Mario Maker
Platform: Wii U
The target audience for Nintendo’s 2D platform game builder might have mainly been 90s’ kids with their nostalgia for the world’s favorite fictional Italian plumber, but the Wii U title, which lets players design their own Super Mario levels and upload them for other players to play, has been able to garner considerable popularity among all those with creative minds, a love for platformers or both.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows (Coming soon)
The second reboot to the Tomb Raider franchise saw its female protagonist evolve into something more than mere eye-candy for teenage gamers. The sequel to Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 release, this year’s Rise of the Tomb Raider takes Lara Croft through a new, equally engaging story that gels nicely with the gameplay, offering tense combat sequences that force the player to constantly rethink strategies, an impressive crafting system, vast, gorgeous environments and even more tombs to raid and puzzles to complete than before.
Life is Strange
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360
Life is Strange is a beautifully directed, emotional rollercoaster of a story molded into an episodic, decision-based game, much like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Tales from Borderlands series. The game is divided into five brief episodes that make you grow attached to the female protagonist – a high school student who mysteriously develops the ability to reverse time – and her friends. Excellent character development and the time reversal element helped the game garner acclaim from the critics along with several well-deserved awards.
Honorable Mentions
Our honorable mentions start with games that would have made our top-ten list if they weren’t expansions or delayed platform releases. First up is Destiny: The Taken King, the third expansion to Bungie’s wildly popular MMORPG/FPS hybrid, which revitalized the game with new missions, gear and more.
StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void brought the StarCraft II trilogy’s story to a memorable close and the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V finally made its way onto Windows, breaking records for most concurrent players on Steam (later broken by Fallout 4) and quickly garnering an active modding community.
With an opening sequence that leaves a lasting impact, unique jump mechanics and dazzling environments, 2015’s Ori and the Blind Forest brings an additional layer of depth to 2D platformers. Halo 5: Guardians might have failed to impress everyone with its single-player campaign, but fans seem to agree it packs the multiplayer gameplay the series has seen in quite a while.
The reception of the much-anticipated Batman: Arkham Knight, too, was tainted following a problem-riddled debut on PC, but there is no denying that the game is still one of the best superhero titles ever released, even if it does borrow a majority of its most enjoyable elements from its predecessors. Of course, PC gamers will disagree, and considering the Windows variant of the game still experiences frame rate hiccups that make it more or less unplayable, they can’t be blamed.
Just Cause 3 took its open-world, action-adventure franchise to the next level with destructible environments and creative ways to kill and wreak mayhem, which make the game one of the more enjoyable titles of the year despite its repetitive missions.
Blizzard submitted what is essentially its entry to the MOBA genre with Heroes of the Storm in June, though the studio identifies the game as a “hero brawler”. Blizzard’s offering might be a DOTA 2 and League of Legends competitor, but its gameplay is slightly more team-focused and wildly simpler. The game follows LoL’s freemium model for access to heroes, and offers characters from the Blizzard franchises of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, The Lost Vikings and Overwatch.
Mortal Kombat X took the versus fighter genre by storm with memorable new characters, fatalities and a new game mechanic that allows players to choose one of three unique fighting styles for each character, and the decision-based horror game Until Dawn pleasantly surprised console gamers with a concept that seems to have been inspired from the premise of Cabin in the Woods.
The Indie tier too was full of surprises this year with the likes of Undertale, a decision-based RPG developed by Toby Fox that has been surrounded by quite a bit of hype and critical acclaim as of late owing to its innovative gameplay, dark humor and references to other popular RPG titles.
Did we miss any in our honorable mentions section? What’s your list of best 2015 games? Let us know in the comments section below!
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