Top Five PC Games of 2008

Whew, another year done and another 365 days of gaming content faithfully represented, critiqued and ripped apart for your reading pleasure. Now, we’re all tuckered out.

5 – Dead Space

In our review we complained that Dead Space felt a little bit clunky on the PC and was undoubtedly designed for consoles first, but while that may have held the game back just a little there’s still no denying that it’s one of the best and scariest third person shooters of this year. Arguably, it’s the game that Doom 3 should have been.

Set on a space station near the end of nowhere, Dead Space is about a rescue and repair team that responds to an emergency broadcast but quickly finds themselves in over their heads. What the team had expected to be a series of purely mechanical failures turns out to be something a lot more sinister.

So, yeah, creepy aliens and lots of dark corridors but nothing that hasn’t been done before, right? Wrong.

Dead Space was one of the major launches in EA’s attempt to reinvent itself as an innovator this year and the title shows off some rather funky in-game effects and mechanics. This isn’t just another over-the-shoulder bullet fest with monsters in closets, this is a lot more clever and subtle. The aliens you’re going up against are surprisingly tough to kill, but can be crippled by blowing off their arms and legs – so a lot of the action is up close and personal. It’s a good thing you have such a big suit of armour on.

The armour is for more than just protection though, giving players a holographic inventory system and the option to move in zero gravity. By giving players cool abilities such as physics guns and slow-motion it would have been easy for Dead Space to become just another mindless shooter, but somehow EA has produced something worth more than the sum of its parts and the game becomes a truly rewarding experience.

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4 – Crysis: Warhead

When the original Crysis was released it was a subject of much debate because, while the game definitely looked good and played OK, the steep hardware requirements meant that the definitive Crysis experience was off-limits for many.

Thankfully though a year later Crytek released Warhead – an optimised expansion pack that came out at a time when the market was just starting to catch up to Crysis’ demands. Crysis: Warhead was perfectly timed and fit into the market perfectly.

Borrowing an idea from other Electronic Arts partner Valve, Crysis: Warhead tells a parallel story to the original game, following the original plot and timeline but from a different viewpoint. Instead of playing through the eyes of Nomad, players take the role of Psycho.

Trapped on the other side of the island to Nomad, Psycho is pursuing objectives of his own as he evades aliens, kills Koreans and tries not to freeze to death in the flash-iced tropical island.

Arguably better than the original game because it focuses on giving player more specifically memorable and explosive sections, Warhead is all about playing dirty with your nanosuit abilities and making big explosions. The original Crysis had its share of cool bits too, but the emphasis was always on trying to play your way. With Warhead though, Crytek showed that it understood how a linear, scripted experience can often be more powerful than an open sandbox one.

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3 – Fallout 3

Set in the future, Fallout 3 tells the story of a young person who grows up in a Vault – a vast underground complex that exists to shield a clutch of people from the nuclear war that has raged above and devastated the world. Safely imprisoned underneath the ruins of Washington DC, all is good for you in your microcosm – until your father goes missing and Vault plunges into chaos. You flee to the surface in pursuit of your dad.

As soon as you get outside though, the entire game changes and the training wheels are taken off. You can go anywhere in the Capital Wasteland, revelling in this 50s view of a post apocalyptic future. There are funny-voiced and impossibly technical cyborgs at the corner of every ruined street, looming super mutants and giant scorpions warring against bandits and settlers.

Comparing Fallout 3 to Oblivion is a natural path to take as the two games seem fairly similar at the start. Both are free-roaming FPS/RPG hybrids, both are developed by Bethesda and both put a heavy focus on raiding dungeons and collecting increasingly powerful weapons.

In reality though Fallout 3 far surpasses Oblivion in exploratory depth, easily eclipsing the former king of the FPS/RPG genre and proving that Bethesda has listened to fans well enough and worked hard to improve the faults of Oblivion. Gone are the annoying persuasion mini-games and the bandits who scale in level as you play.

The game-world has been scaled down and refocused too, with Fallout 3 showcasing a lot more unique dungeons and destroyed office buildings than a lot less of the samey cave systems in Oblivion.

One of the best innovations that’s been bought forward into Fallout 3 though is Random Encounters – that old stalwart from the previous Fallout games which ensures that the game is always going to be slightly different no matter how often or similarly you replay the game. You can never be sure when you might stumble across Uncle Lou or a flock of deathclaws.

The slightly stale and safe world of Oblivion has been traded in for a more gory and splatter-riffic presentation too, with more mushroom clouds than Michael Bay after a strong Vindaloo. Heads explode, limbs fly and gore drips from every surface. It may be sick, but we love it.

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2 – Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 may have got some of you down with some fairly repetitive missions, but it’s hard to deny how much innovation and beauty there is in the game. Ubisoft’s follow-up to the original Far Cry may have no connection to the first game in terms of story or location, but it captures that sense of strategic freedom perfectly.

It casts players as a simple mercenary, one of many operating in the African savannah, all of whom are trying to take down a local gun runner called The Jackal – a man deeply entrenched in the politics of a civil war.

Finding where The Jackal is won’t be easy though – and nor will killing him. At the start of the game you’re already indebted to local factions, pretty much defenceless and coming down with malaria. You need friends, supplies and medicine. You’ll need to wade deep into the local war and earn all these things.

Earning all this is done through a mixture of assaults, assassinations and betrayals as you take on missions from different factions, often with the help of other mercenaries who will give you advice and support as you wade into the sandbox with a gun in hand and murder on your mind.

Far Cry 2 isn’t a perfect game. The missions do get quite samey after a while and the AI will get occasionally flakey, but it doesn’t matter too much. By and large this is one of the most visually stunning and impressive games of the year, offering players options that constantly change and a world that is always evolving. With a smattering of original ideas, such as the cool healing system, and the best flamethrower in the history of gaming, Far Cry 2 definitely deserves to be on this list.

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Game Of The Year – Left4Dead

Damn you, Valve. You’ve done it again – stolen our time, hearts and Game of The Year award for the second year running. Last year you did it with The Orange Box, this year you do it with Left 4 Dead. You talented buggers.

And really, there is a huge amount of talent that’s been poured into Left 4 Dead. We’ve played games with friends, family and people who normally abhor computer games, but the cocktail of violence and teamwork has always gone down smooth and impressed our initially unwilling team mates.

The premise for the game is simple, with the story told more through subtle visual clues than the amazing four minute cutscene that preludes the adventure. An infection has mutated nearly all of the human race, creating a race of savagely fast zombies that are hungry for the flesh of anyone who is left immune. That includes you and your three pals.

Using the same techniques as learned in Team Fortress 2, Valve has created a series of recognisable characters amid the mob of frothing infected. There’s Bill, the war-weary Vietnam veteran, Hell’s Angel Francis, college-girl Zoey and office worker Louis in his red tie and designer shoes. Each of them is armed to the teeth and desperate to get away from the infection.

Opposing them are a series of brilliantly balanced opponents; the huge Tank, the shy Witch, the vicious Hunter and Smoker. Oh, and vile bile-spilling Boomer too.

None of these characters stand out nearly as much as the faceless games master behind it all though, the AI Director that sits on the sidelines of each match and moves around key resources and enemies to match the pace of the game. The AI Director is the main source of frustration, elation and fun in the game and hating or loving it is something that the whole team can get involved in – and will do when it throws two tanks in a row at you!

The game isn’t wholly co-operative though and for those who fancy more of a competitive experience there’s the rather awesome Versus mode, which sees two teams of four take it turns to try and run through a map from Co-op mode. The problem of course is that the special infected are now played by the opposing team, who get full reign to terrorise and grief the humans.

As has been proven typical of Valve’s games, it’s rather easy for us to rattle off superlatives and exclamations, telling you how fantastic the story and pacing and balancing is and so on. With Left 4 Dead though it’s become more obvious than ever that that isn’t fair or true.

The reality is instead that no specific part of Left 4 Dead stands out because the whole game is fantastic. Everything is superbly polished, balanced, designed and made. There’s literally nothing in the game that feels more unfair than it should be. It’s within an inch of gaming perfection.

With a fantastic multiplayer, co-operative and singleplayer experience and so much replayability that you probably won’t need another game for a very long time, Left 4 Dead is undoubtedly our game of the year.