Introduction
The time has come once again, as the staff at EGM sat down and fought it out over which of this year’s released we’d put into our list of the top 25 games of 2014. There were a lot of choices, a lot of mixed emotions, and a lot of arguments. However, a list we created—and here are our choices for slots 20 through 16.
And yes, we know—some of you will hate us for where we’ve ranked your favorite games. It’s nothing personal, we swear.
EGM’s Top Twenty-Five Games for 2014: Part Two
#20: Shovel Knight
Publisher: YachtClub Games
Developer: YachtClub Games
Platforms: Wii U, 3DS, PC, Mac, Linux
EGM’s Take
Nostalgia is a huge force right now in games, since players who grew up on the NES and SNES are now adults (in terms of age, anyway). Many are looking to relive some of those glory days gone by, and no game this year channeled that era better than Shovel Knight. Incorporating elements of Castlevania II, DuckTales, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Mega Man, Shovel Knight took the best elements from those titles and added its own twists, like its unique risk/reward checkpoint system, to create a side-scrolling action-platformer that anyone who played it won’t soon forget.
#19: Super Time Force
Publisher: Capybara Games
Developer: Capybara Games
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC
EGM’s Take
Capy’s irreverent, trippy take on side-scrolling bullet hells is simply nuts. Instead of bestowing players 30 lives to navigate ammunition-strewn screens in the traditional sense, Super Time Force’s “lives” are time-rewinding alternate takes that team up with the player’s previous run. The end result is a 60-second level that takes a tad longer to set up Rube Goldberg–style, but once completed becomes a synchronized orchestra of destruction delivered by skateboard-riding dinosaurs, Mad Max wannabes, Merlin, and a whole host of other wackadoo characters. And you know what? It’s hard not to fall in love with anything that lets us unleash an army of Hawaiian shirt–clad dinosaurs named Zackasaurus. Kookabunga!
#18: Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Publisher: Blizzard Games
Developer: Blizzard Games
Platforms: PC, iOS, Android
EGM’s Take
If we can be brutally honest for a moment, the words “Free-to-Play Digital Collectable Card Game” conjure up images of an especially sadistic level of videogame hell that we’d prefer never to visit. And yet, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft was the opposite of everything we expect from that category of game offerings. The time, care, and effort the team at Blizzard put into making a quality experience is evident all throughout Hearthstone, and even after hours and hours of time spent building decks and challenging opponents, the amount of enjoyment we were able to get without ever spending a dime was far beyond most of its competition. Hearthstone doesn’t feel like a free game whose main goal is to nickle-and-dime you whenever possible; it feels like a fully featured, properly released game that just so happens to have an unbelievable price tag on its box.
#17: Bravely Default
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Silicon Studio
Platforms: 3DS
EGM’s Take
For years, many longtime fans of Square Enix’s classic RPGs have bristled at the publisher’s bloated modern takes on the genre. They don’t want absurdly zippered protagonists and convoluted battle systems anymore—they want something simple that captures the magic of 8 and 16 bits. Square Enix seemed baffled by this request, confused that we didn’t abide by their messaging to “please be excited” for Lightning’s Continuing Adventures No One Asked For, and they offloaded development of Bravely Default to Silicon Studio. That turned out to be a blessing, however, as the little-known developer truly captured the simple appeal of games like Final Fantasy V while also infusing the experience with sensible modern-day upgrades. Now, if we could just get the sequel confirmed for the West…
#16: Towerfall Ascension
Publisher: Matt Makes Games
Developer: Matt Makes Games
Platforms: Ps4, PC, Mac, Linux
EGM’s Take
We went back and forth on whether or not TowerFall Ascension should be eligible for this year’s awards (it did, after all, come out first on Ouya back in 2013), but we eventually decided that the EGM Crew had too much of a blast with this expanded re-release of Matt Thorson’s four-player brawler to not give it some props. The beautiful simplicity of the game’s archery and platforming mechanics make for a couch co-op experience that’s easy to pick up, while the wealth of rule tweaks and game-changing items make it every bit as hard to put down. If this list were ranked solely on the amount of productivity lost at the EGM offices, then Ascension would be the year’s hands-down victor.