Tag: hero shooter

My Top Ten Games of 2016: #5

 My top ten favorite games of the year, presented in ascending order each day leading into the holidays. Look for my full Top Ten list with categories and awards on December 24!

#10 Pokémon GO
#9 Skylanders Imaginators
#8 Stellaris
#7 Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
#6 Fire Emblem Fates

#5 Overwatch

top five 2016

I don’t really consider myself a big fan of any specific franchises or game developers. But if I had to pick a game developer to receive my feverish devotion, it would be Blizzard Entertainment.

I’ve been loving Blizzard’s games since before they were Blizzard, with 16-bit titles like The Lost Vikings and Rock ‘N Roll Racing. I fell in love with real-time strategy games in the 90s with Warcraft and Starcraft and Action-RPGs with Diablo and the rest is history.

So it means a lot when I say that we are at peak Blizzard awesomeness right now. A Blizzard game (or expansion) has appeared on my annual Game of the Year list for three of the last four years (and twice last year). Now with Overwatch, make that four out of five.

Overwatch is easily the most popular game on my list. The “hero shooter” blending of MOBA and FPS exploded this year. But leave it to Blizzard to once again take a genre and perfect it into an easily accessible, yet highly competitive format. Continue reading “My Top Ten Games of 2016: #5”

Battleborn Review [Pixelkin]

When everything in Battleborn clicks together it’s a beautiful mess, but too many frustrations drag the experience down.

Read the full review at Pixelkin

Battleborn is a tale of two games. Borderlands developer Gearbox took the main elements of the MOBA genre – waves of NPCs, multiple hero classes with unique abilities, leveling, towers, etc, and injected them into a first person shooter.

The other half is a series of cooperative missions involving the unique story and characters of their insane universe. Both feel like they should’ve been expanded into their own games. When everything clicks together it’s a beautiful mess, but too many frustrations drag the experience down.

Gearbox has leveraged their funny comic art style into some truly awesome character designs. The 25 heroes are a motley crew divided into five different backgrounds, from the fantasy-inspired Eldrid to the space pirate Rogues.

There’s Oscar Mike, your typical Call of Duty/Halo soldier. But then there’s Miko the sentient mushroom healer and Toby the penguin in a giant mech suit. The Shayne and Aurox duo have a teenage girl possessed by a giant guardian demon thing. Battleborn has some of the most unique hero designs I’ve seen in a hero brawler.

Read the full review at Pixelkin