CCIV: Game of the Year 2007 - Round Three

[Neon Ignition]

Like Parappa the Rappa, You Gotta Believe! that round three can bring up more top contenders!






Which of the above games are among the best of 2007 and why?

[Asura]

I loved Crisis Core. I still remember playing it in sessions going to-and-from Tokyo via train.

[Neon Ignition]

For me, here, it's Crackdown which had its limitations but was incredibly compulsive

I enjoyed The Darkness too but it was more like quality AA stuff. I expect it will do well but when I played Crysis it was something of a let down.

[MartyG]

Crackdown was superb, such as shame they didn't manage to properly build on that premise in the two sequels.

[Neon Ignition]

I still don't understand the thinking behind the sequels. The second should have had new skills and a new city, slapping zombies in after three years remains... I just don't don't get that project and it did much to smother the brand. The third game was just dull. They could have either expanded the sense of starting weak and growing strong in some sort of Spider-Man-esque open world campaign or leant into the GTA aspects and how the exaggerated mechanics would work in a large scale. Instead we got increasingly worse versions of a 2007 proof of concept title.

[wakka]

Crackdown for me too. It was one of those games, like Dead Rising and Oblivion, that felt like a proper leap (over a skyscraper) forward and a great use of the new technology of the 360. Man, the first couple of years of that console were just absolutely brilliant. The golden era of Xbox.

Collecting the agility orbs was, as everyone knows, easily the best part of the game. It was one of those clever bits of game design where you got to feel like you were kind of breaking the game, which is always so much fun.

The Darkness was pretty good too, and Fare Wars was OK for the time as a portable version of Crazy Taxi. Rendered irrelevant by technological advancement of course. And the music was wrong.

[Asura]

Honestly Crackdown is among my favourite games ever, and one of the only open world games I liked - because the mission structure was loose. You just had to kill gang leaders, and could do it however you wanted. The game presented a way to do it, but you didn't have to do that.

Too many "open world" games fall into that trap. Hell, GTAV starts with an unskippable linear mission where you "fail" if you go off-piste.

[wakka]

Agreed. It's a very cleverly structured game. Once GTA progressed out of the PS2 era, it became increasingly rigid like you say. I started replaying GTA 5 when they reissued it for £8 on PS5, but I quickly lost interest. While I loved it at the time, it had that excessively scripted feel that just drives me nuts now - it's like acting in a play where you don't know your lines, and you're constantly stumbling into fail states because you're not doing everything in the single, precise, yet ultimately arbitrary way the developers selected for you.

[Hirst]

Crackdown is great, I love how it’s technically possible (but almost impossible in reality) to kill all the crime bosses from the moment you’ve started playing. Also it works as a backwards compatible title and looks brilliant.

[Mr Ono]

C&C and Crysis.

My PC gaming period was well and truly up to speed.

[egparadigm]

Crackdown here, too. Wasn’t that Conan game thought to be alright (or am I thinking of a different Conan game)?

Also, 2 votes for Cheggers game so far, what’s with that!? I reckon Keith Chegwin must be one of few, male Children’s TV presenters (in that era) that has yet to face allegations of abuse.

[Hirst]

Also, 2 votes for Cheggers game so far, what’s with that!?

If I've ever got a vote spare and there's a particularly stupid game, I put one on it for the laugh.

[fuse]

Dracula X / SotN port and Crisis Core, prime PSP action! I never got to Crackdown so the 360 game I went with instead was The Darkness, which I remember being pleasantly surprised with.

[Cepp]

I've got fond memories of playing Crysis at 15-20 FPS if I was lucky. It's an excellent game even today.

[hudson]

Crackdown. Agility orb hopping was just so fun.