What Game Surprised You This Year?

[Girl With One Eye]

Dead Island, but not in a good way. Great trailer, terrible game. After playing it for 2 hours I turned it off and never played it again.

 

[Papatuanuku]

Crysis, I've never been a fan of FPS but I wanted to play something that I wouldn't normally play. Surprisingly I quite enjoy it, I was terrible at it but still enjoyed it.

 

[everfreeDragon]

After a quick ctrl+f of the thread I have found no one else felt this way about Aquaria. I bought it with the humble bundle only knowing it's a Metroidvania set underwater, sounded interesting but I didn't have high expectations, now I'm already downloading mods for when I complete it.

 

[WorriedSandwich]

Bastion and especially Frozen Synapse surprised me in a positive way. So yeah, go indie's go! Also, Portal 2 managed to surprise by being better than my unreasonably high expectations.

 

[Terminate421]

Skyrim for sure. I thought it would be good. I liked it at first but I thought it would just be a really good game, wasn't looking heavily forward to it. No, I was dead wrong. It is AMAZING.

Dead Space 2 is definitly something I knew would be good but it was HOW it was good, that it surprised me.

 

[MetalDooley]

Bastion for me, was my Summer-of-Arcade purchase in lieu of Double Fine's Trenched (which technically wasn't an SoA title but close enough) because Trenched got a "delayed" European release, which still hasn't come.

It was released a couple of days ago with the new title of "Iron Brigade"

OTeadly Premonition.Didn't know an awful lot about the game and only picked it up because it was pretty cheap new.Despite being poor on a technical level I had a surprising amount of fun with it

 

[Mallefunction]

Ah sure thanks for that. I had thought initially that trying to drag the series out to end in 2012 might cause some problems; I might still get it at some stage though, I'm very much a sucker for all things Assassins Creed.

Yeah I know. I am a big time fan too and I loved the other games to pieces. Unfortunately this one had so many flaws that it lost its spark and fun.

 

[nononoiefiewpfoiejofijp]

Amnesia: The dark descent, never knew such a simple game would become my favourite game of all time.

 

[Therumancer]

Just a discussion about games that you decided to try and either blew your expectations away, or left a bad taste in your mouth. So what game(s) surprised you this year?

For me I will say Bastion. I wasnt really all inclined to buying a small game because of a few cool art directions. But when i picked it up on a steam sale it became one of my top games of the year. Partly from the solid story element. Partly from the easy to use gameplay. But mostly im sure because of that suave narrator that makes you want to keep coming back to the game.

The single biggest was "Dragon Age 2" which was a huge turd compared to the first game, despite it's defenders. That was a disappointing surprised.

This closely followed by a lot of other RPG material. "Darkspore", "Dungeon Siege III", on the action-RPG front for example wound up being very underwhelming compared to what they could (and should) have been to name only two. Indeed this year seemed like a sort of major sweep for EA with tons of high quality titles all on the way... but almost every one of them kind of fell flat come their actual release.

This year the only game that wasn't kind of a disappointment was "Skyrim" and that's mostly "as expected", it's good, but didn't exceed my expectations in any way. They cut the corners that were expected, and really didn't deliver anything new and paticularly impressive that I didn't see coming.

Really, I think this year was kind of flat for games even if it shouldn't have been, unless of course your a shooter fanatic, and that means "Battlefield" and "Modern Warfare" pretty much carried the year for you. I am however not a shooter fan.

The closest thing to a surprise, break-out hit for me this year was probabkly "E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy", despite me not being a shooter fan.

 

[Thespian]

It was released a couple of days ago with the new title of "Iron Brigade"

Really? I knew about the Iron Brigade thing but last time I checked it didn't seem any closer to a release than this summer. Hadn't checked in a few days so thanks for bringing my attention to this Much gratitude.

 

[pyrosaw]

Brink surprised me. It was so bad. I wasn't expecting Payday: The Heist to be as bad as it was either.

 

[geK0]

Honestly, the announcement of the Mists of Pandaria expansion for WOW was an extremely unpleasant surprise. I haven't played WOW since the beginning of Cataclysm (not that I didn't like the expansion, I thought it was great. I just couldn't really get into raiding as much as I used to), but Pandaria pretty much guaranteed that I'll never play WOW again... everything about it just looks terrible, not just the theme, but the dumbed-down mechanics.
I played wc3, and I am aware that pandas have been in the warcraft universe for a while; but the pandaren brewmaster was a JOKE HERO, which doesn't warrant an entire expansion.

 

[comadorcrack]

Terarria surprised me. I bought it in a steam deal for £2 odd. And I fucking loved it! I would of happily bought it full price!

 

[VladG]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Biggest disappointment for me this year. Not because it's bad, but because it could have been SO much better. It could have finally been a worthy sequel to the amazing game Deus Ex was. But then it ended with me fighting a rotating turret on a rail and 4 buttons....

 

[Mondai Randy]

Dark Souls really surprised me , never playing Demon's Soul, I thought I was going to dislike it , but I ended up LOVING it