Escape Artist's Best Games of 2010

I've just spent a couple of hours playing Dead Space 2 on my own, in my flat, at night. This might mean nothing to you, but trust me, this pretty much makes me a goddamn superhero. Horror games are the perfect example of the power of the interactive medium. I get scared watching [REC] or Night of the Living Dead, but the difference with horror games is you're expected to actually do something about the awful things happening on screen. The whole appeal of horror is putting yourself in the shoes of someone experiencing a terrifying ordeal, and there's no better way to do that than to pick up a controller and take part.

Anyway, to distract myself from thoughts of horrific mockeries of nature ambushing me from air vents, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of some of the best games of the past year. 2010 was a pretty strong year for gaming, with a great mix of reliable sequels that built on the work of their predecessors and new titles to expand our horizons.

There were disappointments - Fable III and Vanquish spring to mind - but for the most part last year's games delivered. 2010 also marked a bit of a turning point for the games industry, as publishers began to release more top-drawer titles outside of the traditional pre-Christmas period. This is a great thing for gamers and for the industry itself as it begins to realise that quality speaks for itself, no matter what time of year. With the success of early-year titles like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2, and now Dead Space 2 in 2011, this promising trend looks set to continue.

Bayonetta (Platinum Games)

The third-person action genre is a pretty crowded one, with the likes of Ninja Gaiden, God of War and Devil May Cry filling our screens with musclebound anti-heroes grunting and shouting for our entertainment. Bayonetta trumps all of these games on most counts, and adds a healthy dose of batshit insanity for good measure.

At the game's core is a rock-solid combat system. Titular (not to mention tit-tacular) heroine Bayonetta feels lithe and responsive to control as she pirouettes between enemies unleashing a wide array of crunchy, satisfying combos. But the game really separates itself from the crowd with its sheer eye-humping visual splendour. The design of levels and enemies is consistently surprising, throwing an astonishing variety of extra-dimensional environments and enemies at the player. The story is pretty inscrutable (something about witches and motorbikes and angels with glowing vaginas?), but when a game offers you the chance to throw a reborn god-queen into the fires of the sun, the wheres and whys are pretty irrelevant.

Mass Effect 2 (BioWare)

Hands-down the best videogame story of 2010, as Commander Shepard recruits a new crew on his space-faring mission to defend the galaxy against the planet-harvesting Reavers. Yeah, it might sound like an episode of Stargate SG-1, but the appeal of Mass Effect lies in making the story your own. With the best conversation mechanics of any game so far, the ability to make meaningful choices that alter your game world in sometimes unexpected ways, and some of the best characters this side of the Omega-4 Relay, there's a real feeling of consequence behind the superb firefights. I got my entire team through the game unscathed because I am the King and Queen of Cheese, but the very real chance of losing treasured teammates before the game's end adds consistent tension and even (whisper it) a hint of emotional resonance.

Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego)

How did it take this long for an unreservedly great cowboy game to come out? All the elements are right there - quickdraw duels, roaming the open plains, fisticuffs in smoky saloons... you know, cowboy stuff. Whatever the case, it wasn't until 2010 that a game brought all these elements together, bundled them into the back of a rickety ol' wagon and rammed them into our eye-holes. Rockstar San Diego has made expert use of Grand Theft Auto's game engine to create a gorgeous natural game world, spanning pine forests and great plains in the north to the ochre-tinged sandstone monoliths of Mexico in the south. The diversity of gameplay options is more than a match for Red Dead's setting. The long journey of blackmailed ex-outlaw John Marsden makes for a great story, filled with imaginative diversions and the colourful characters that have made Rockstar releases so special over the years.

Limbo (Playdead Studios)

A brilliant X-box Live Arcade puzzle-platformer with a unique atmosphere. Players control a little boy searching for his sister in a spectral purgatory realm. That's all the story there is, and this game needs no more. Everything else in Limbo is conveyed through its shadowy, silhouetted world. Threatening little details emanate from every crevice, from the world's mysterious and hostile inhabitants to the shockingly gory death animations when the player slips up. The game's puzzles, which revolve around using physics to move through areas, constantly introduce new mechanics to keep things fresh for the duration. Limbo is an excellent puzzle game, but it's the melancholy ambience that makes it great. Oh, and the giant spider chase sequence. Can't go wrong with a giant spider chase sequence.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft Montreal)

After two games that struggled to match their immaculate sense of style with equally engaging gameplay mechanics, Brotherhood is the first game in the AC franchise that's an unmarred pleasure to play. The action may see players jump back into the bejewelled pantaloons of AC2's Ezio Auditore as he murders his way up Rome's corrupt Borgia hierarchy, but Brotherhood comprehensively refines the series' ideas that work and overhauls those that don't.

Combat is smoother and more interesting; assassination missions are better structured and reward good planning; stealth sections are now a joy rather than a chore. The most impressive thing about Brotherhood is the sheer amount of content there is to distract the player in Rome's vast play area, from the simple pleasure of chasing thieves and couriers across the city's terracotta rooftops to piloting a frankly absurd 16th century stealth bomber. The story continues to be sub-Dan Brown secret society wankery, but if the franchise's gameplay continues to improve at this rate, all that nonsense can be forgiven. Now let's have Assassin's Creed III set in Victorian London, please.

Halo: Reach (Bungie)

The only straight-up shooter on this list, Bungie's swansong to the legendary series just radiates the experience and dedication of its development team. The Call of Duty franchise might have overtaken Halo as the number one blockbuster FPS, but for my money Reach outstrips Black Ops both as a single-player story and a multiplayer playground. The game's premise of fighting a losing battle against overwhelming Covenant forces on a doomed colony world packs more emotional punch than most other shooters (including a brilliant ending), and the enemy AI is superb, creating combat moments with a real sense of space rather than the shooting galleries that have become so popular of late.

Online, Reach is the best of the best. I may have spent more hours compulsively logging into Modern Warfare, but Reach makes every new game a unique encounter. The game types are varied, the maps are stupendously well-designed and playing Firefight mode with friends is like a whole extra game. And for hardcore fanatics, there are the well-featured Forge level creation tools. With this treasure chest of riches, Bungie has ensured that Reach will continue to thrive long after the studio has moved on to new projects.

Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment)

Not a smash hit by any means, but if Alan Wake doesn't get a sequel it would be a great shame. This isn't necessarily because of the scares and solid combat (based on giving your corrupted enemies the willies by lighting them up with your torch), both of which are excellent, but because Alan Wake is quietly revolutionary in its approach to interactive storytelling. We guide our titular confused writer through the town of Bright Falls and the surrounding forests in search of his missing wife who has been abducted by a dark presence that's infecting the whole area.

The fascinating layer buried beneath the narrative is that Wake has lost time, during which he seems to have written about the events he's currently living through. Pages found on the forest floor or strewn about rusty old sawmills serve to deepen the narrative as well as warn players about dangerous encounters ahead. It's an amazing way for the developer to communicate with the player, not to mention push some pretty far-out ideas about authorship and the constraints of moving through a world that has been designed for you. As the game progresses the rabbit hole only gets deeper, with Wake beginning to question why he wrote the things he did and realising that his words might be the key to breaking free of the town's strange curse.

Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment)

After 60 hours or so of exploring Fallout 3's post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, the thought of diving back in to a sequel that uses the same creaky engine and transports the story from Washington D.C. to the ostensibly less memorable Mojave Desert didn't seem all that appetising. New Vegas didn't immediately prove me wrong - the first couple of hours is filled with the critter hunting, stat-levelling and V.A.T.S. combat strategies that had become all-too familiar from the previous game. The story's opening is also a little contrived. The player wakes up after being shot in the head and having his courier package stolen, and decides, with a slightly incredible level of job dedication, to hunt down his ambushers and get it back.

It was only when I arrived at the New Vegas Strip, filled with decay and corruption but a bustling vibrancy that was missing from Fallout 3's communities, that it all started to come together. Obsidian, a team that contains some of the original Black Isle developers who worked on the first Fallout PC games, has pushed the modern franchise forward by thrusting players into a more rich and morally confusing world. None of the Strip's factions are unblemished, which makes choosing who to support (if any) all the more thrilling because there are no convenient signposts. You begin to realise that you are, much more so than in Fallout 3, a catalyst for massive change across this seedy desert, and by leaving you to make your own mind up, New Vegas burdens you with the full weight of your actions. It's a scary prospect, and one that provokes real thought. After another 60 hours of wandering the wasteland, I really would like to see the back of the game's charming but tired and buggy engine. Then again, I've been proved wrong before...

Red Dead Redemption: Impressions, leading to a conclusion

Apologies for the resigned tone of the title above. It's just that I so desperately wanted to use the subtitle "Me So Ornery" for this post, but the dull side of my brain told me that it was a step too far and more than a little racist. So to spite my killjoy brain I went with a snarky title and decided to put the quote in the very first paragraph. In your face, common decency!

So now that I've given you that privileged glimpse into the creative process of a deranged troglodyte, we can take a collective peek at the creative process of a bunch of intelligent, presumably non-troglodyte game developers who are hard at work on Red Dead Redemption, pseudo-sequel to 2004's patchily-received PS2 spaghetti shooter Red Dead Revolver.

While Revolver was a vivid romp through Sergio Leone cliche, taking in a range of evocative (if occasionally jarring) locales and a well-rounded (if occasionally playable) supporting cast, its shonky mechanics and second-rate graphics showed that the developers' imaginations were pistol-whipped by their limitations. The lack of production values was a result of the game's chaotic development. Original publisher Capcom canned the game mid-way through its development, paving the way for Rockstar Games (the powerhouse behind GTA) to purchase the rights in 2002. Rockstar San Diego expanded on the game's existing assets, leading to a product that felt like a standard shooter with extra features and style poured on before release. Needless to say, it was the last-minute Rockstar additions that provided Red Dead Revolver's best moments.

Red Dead Redemption has suffered no such setbacks. It's a Rockstar San Diego joint from top to bottom, and looks set to become the rootin', tootin', shootin'est game ever to set foot in the Old West.

STORY

Players take on the role of John Marston, a former gunslinger who has since hung up his metal to settle with his family. But familial bliss does not an awesome game make, so our man is coerced by the law into taking up arms again to track down and bring in his old gang. It's a journey that will take him across the arid borders of America's southern states and on into the revolutionary breeding ground of Mexico (there are three huge primary areas where the game takes place). So far, so Ford. But Rockstar San Diego have made the interesting decision to set the game in 1908, with the West definitively conquered and the frontier smashed into the sea. And with encroaching modernity comes the technology to grind the old breed of outlaw desperado into the desert dust. It's a fascinating period of upheaval that paved the way for modern America, and it seems that the game will take more from revisionist anti-Westerns like The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven than the classic interpretations that preceded them.

GAMEPLAY

Well, it's Rockstar, so yes it's an open-world sandbox game. If you're anything like me, those terms will elicit a curious mix of excitement and dread. The best open-world games offer players freedom and choice but with enough context to imbue those choices with meaning. Infamous and Prototype were so unappealing to me because they simply presented cities to piss about in, as if that were enough. It's not. But based on Rockstar's spotless track record in this genre (GTA IV is a platinum example of a game that effortlessly integrates player freedom with an overarching story), we have every reason to hope that Red Dead Redemption will follow suit.

At the front end of the experience is the shooting mechanic, buoyed by the Euphoria engine that powered GTA IV's character animation and physics. Any player who experienced that jaw-dropping first moment in GTA IV where Nico is sent flying through his car's windshield after a particularly nasty crash will testify to the engine's power, and based on the promo videos shown so far, Redemption is using it to similar effect. So expect enemies to react uniquely and convincingly when you fill them with buckshot, rather than pre-canned animations (a la Call of Duty) or over-the-top ragdoll physics. Dead-eye targeting returns from the original game, an inspired take on bullet-time which allows advanced players to slow down time to mark separate targets and then watch the carnage unfold as Marston pours lead into the skulls and bollocks of his foes (the only two areas worth aiming at). Expect to see the Quick Draw pistol duel mechanic return too, although this hasn't been confirmed.

As Marston gallops (on some of the most convincing horses yet seen in a game) through dusty towns and border outposts, his actions will be monitored by an Honour system that will see the reactions of common folk (and the long arm of the law) change based on the violence of his disposition. Capturing bandits and stopping off to rescue stranded wagons will see Marston revered as the Batman of the Old West, whilst horse theft, shooting old ladies in the face and single-handedly wiping out small villages will, unsurprisingly, cause hapless townspeople to prolapse in fear at the sight of his horse on the horizon. Don't expect a swift GTA-style police reaction, but consistent lawlessness may result in righteous posses being rounded up and a sizeable bounty being placed on your own head.

As this is Rockstar's first open world game set in a predominantly rural environment, we can't expect the vibrant, frenzied hustle and bustle of Liberty City. But the development team has worked hard to ensure that, outside of the main story, there's plenty for players to aim their peacemakers at. From lively saloons complete with bar games (one of the videos shows a game of skill involving a sharp knife and five tender fingers, like you used to play at school only not with a compass) to treasure hunts complete with hand-drawn maps to side quests aplenty, there ought to be enough to do. I'm particularly looking forward to simply saddling up and heading into the wilderness for a few hours of living off the land (there's a dynamic wildlife system for you to admire and/or slaughter) and enjoying the vistas presented by the weather system and ambient day/night cycle. After the straight lines of Liberty City, Rockstar's proprietary RAGE engine has shown itself equally capable of creating organic-looking natural spaces, from sunlight filtering through weatherworn branches to the warped wood of the ramshackle towns and villages.

THE CONCLUSION

So all the pins seem to be in place for a satisfying gameplay experience. But the real potential of Red Dead Redemption is in its setting. By choosing to set the game in a period when savage wilderness was eroding under the steam pressure of oncoming modernity, Rockstar has given itself a golden opportunity. Just as GTA IV plays on ruthless entrepreneurialism and the cruelties of modern American economics, Red Dead Redemption could make a powerful companion piece, exploring the violence and misanthropy that lies at the dark heart of the American dream. I drink your milkshake, indeed.

Red Dead Redemption is released on Xbox 360 and PS3 on May 21, 2010.