Obviously, we can built a list of items, and attributing points to each, until 60$ is reached:
1 - budget
2 - time to complete main quest
3 - time to complete side quests
4 - multi-player option
5 - single player campaign
6 - how many multi player maps
7 - number of different ennemies
8 - number of weapons
9 - voice acting (I guess that could go into the budget thing)
10 - replayability (some people seem to use multi-player as a short hand for re-playability, but a truly interesting game will be replayed no matter what... obviously this is an individual thing)
Obviously all this listing makes no sense, I liked Far Cry 4, spend about 65 hours on it, doing quite a few of the fetch quests, playing coop a few times... I sold it and will never go back to it... I played through The Last of Us many times over now, bought it on PS3 and PS4 and I will re-play it again, probably because the game has nothing that feels like a shore, it's simple, yet it plays slightly different each time, not because a random number generator throuw an eagle or a tiger at me when I'm about to do a stealth attack on an ennemy, but because most encouters are designed in a way that allows for imagination on how I approach it, and the story is meaningful enough to keep me interested.
I used The Last of Us, but this could have been said of most God of War games, Uncharted 2 or 3, Castlevania Symphony of the night and many many good games over the years.
