I'm gonna go ahead and say DARK, the game from last year that made alot of 'worst of' lists but was overshadowed by Ride to Hell. Yahtzee absolutely thrashed it on Zero Punctuation, and rightly so, but honestly, I had a decent amount of fun with it, and if the devs learn from most of their mistakes from that game, I would seriously look forward to a sequel. If we're doing the pro/con thingie...
Pros:
Sort of like Deus Ex: Human Revolution with vampires, minus the open world. Similar to how VTM: Bloodlines was Deus Ex with vampires.
The core stealthing about and doing one-hit-kills is reasonably solid, and some of the powers are really fun to use. Plus feeding to replenish health and mana is fun.
This might just be me, but I thought it was awesome that the main character shared the VA of Geralt from The Witcher games.
Cons:
Alot, with most of them boiling down to "The devs had no clue how stealth-action games work". That studio only ever did strategy and adventure games, and they just sort of pulled together mechanics from other games with no understanding of how they're supposed to work, like The Chinese Room (The thought experiment, not the Dear Esther devs). Also the devs are German, and the one non-gameplay complaint comes down to some dodgy translation being unhelpful when picking powerups (it can be really confusing to discern what ability does what thing, and I avoided alot of useful upgrades because they sounded useless, like the ability to detect whether your abilities will alert enemies).
Basically, they blended together Deus Ex:HR, Metal Gear Solid, and Dishonored; you may have noticed that those games have different design philosophies. Like HR, you can stealth about through cover and run up to guards to do a one-hit KO, and then hide the bodies before anybody sees them. You also have a suite of powers, including a very Dishonored-esque teleporty thing. But, there's no actual combat system. You have only your one-hit KOs, and so if you get spotted (and you WILL get spotted, because there's a really brief window of time between being seen and the alarm sounding), it turns into Metal Gear Solid, with a timer and guards looking for you while you try to hide. Except the timer is just some kind of bar with no actual indication of time remaining, all the guards will convene to your last known position not only making hiding from them impossible (you can't hide in a box or closet or something, only behind cover), but they will constantly trip over bodies and reset the hidey meter. It tries to mix slower, old school stealth mechanics with newer, streamlined ones, but only because those mechanics were in other, popular stealth games.
This isn't even mentioning some of the really obnoxious sections, like the part with the teleporting sniper (no really) who's almost impossible to hide from and will alert all the guards if he manages to spot you, or the 'heavy trooper' dudes that require TWO of your attacks to take down (and yes, the first one does aggro them and their friends). It would also be remiss of me not to mention that most of the animations are hideous, but that didn't really bother me so much. Oh, and I would easily have ragequit if I hadn't dropped down to easy so I could quicksave every 2 minutes. (you get limited saves otherwise. Really limited. Like 2 or 3 per level.)
AND YET, despite all it's flaws, I see some serious potential. I hope they get their act together and make a good sequel. Hell, the first Hitman game was an unplayable atrocity, and that game spawned a franchise that people generally like.
