6. Arms
Nintendo
Paul Watson: Prior to the launch of Arms, I regarded most news from Nintendo regarding their new fighter with a sort of lingering dispassion. It felt as if the publisher was using the game as an excuse to push the Switch's motion controls à la Wii Sports, and I had no interest in revisiting that particular gimmick again. Happily, I was proven wrong.
Beneath Arms' candy-coloured visuals lies a stunningly deep fighter with some of the best character design I've seen since Overwatch. Third-person fighting games are notoriously difficult to make work because of depth perception, so of course it makes perfect sense that Nintendo would choose to tackle that approach, and excel in doing so.
Martin Robinson: Nintendo's best game this year, by quite some margin. If you think otherwise, you're plain wrong, and I'll fight you in Arms to prove my point. No grab-spamming Ninjaras though, please.
Tom Phillips: It's alright, but it was no Zelda.
Christian Donlan: Zelda is no Master Mummy.
5. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle
Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Milan
Christian Donlan: If this was Mario with guns it would be a bit of a downer. Much better to think of it as XCOM with a new focus on bouncing on people's heads to get across the map at double speed, then. Mario + Rabbids is a brilliant mash-up that knows exactly how unlikely it is that its pieces will fit together neatly. Lovely!
Oli Welsh: Definitely the year's nicest surprise. I still remember the astonished reaction to the E3 reveal among the team, when we were all, to a man, expecting a car crash. "It's XCOM!" "But why? Why is it XCOM?" I still don't know why, but I do know that it's a beautifully designed tactical game that balances accessibility, challenge and depth with a very fine touch. It's such a pleasure to puzzle out. The licensing is a bit off, but the Rabbids' slapdash cosplay parodies of the Mario characters make a virtue of that. In fact, that might be the most surprising thing about it: it made the Rabbids genuinely funny.
Martin Robinson: I'm absolutely awful - I've tried a couple of times to play this, and every time I do I think it's all just swell, but then I go back to the homescreen of my Switch and see that nasty Poundland Mario design in the game's icon I have to delete the whole thing straight away. Sorry.
3. Super Mario Odyssey
Nintendo
Martin Robinson: I don't think there's any game this year in which it's so much fun just running around in circles. Nintendo nails movement, and Odyssey's bolder than most other Mario games in giving you freedom to do what you want with it. Having that more open-ended sandbox style return to Mario for the first time since Sunshine was always going to be a delight, but for all that I do wish there was a bit more coherence in Odyssey. I'm all for anarchy, but when you look at the grotesques that are the Broodals - whose design surely marks the lowest point for mainline Mario games since Yoshi's Fruit Adventure - I can't help but wish that the beauty of playing Odyssey was met by its artwork.
Matt Reynolds: I agree with Martin that this is the best 'playing' game of the year - the mere act of running and jumping is joyfully reminiscent of previous Mario games, but thanks to your new platforming assistant Cappy, the rules are rewritten and feel fresh all over again.
Odyssey is the most inventive Mario has ever been - and as a series that prides itself on throwing out ideas as fast as it can come up with them, this is high acclaim - but suffers because it's perhaps too dense with its collectables, sights and sounds at times. But as a playground to just explore and enjoy yourself, it's unparalleled.
Also, not enough is said about the rumble, going from subtle nudges as you twist and turn on foot to being surprisingly violent (give the New Donk City scooter a spin to see what I mean), single-handedly justifying the 'HD' label Nintendo slapped on its Switch rumble tech.
Oli Welsh: It really is all over the shop, isn't it? There's stuff in this game that might actually be a bit shoddy, if you had more than 30 seconds to think about it, and then there are brilliant ideas tossed away for a quick gag that someone else would make an entire game, nay, franchise about. It's Mario in extremis, and it's almost too much. But it's also an engine for pure, untrammelled joy. If that's not what video games are about, I don't know what is.
Oh and dressing Mario up in the little outfits is just too cute.
1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Nintendo
Chris Tapsell: Choose a single part of Breath of the Wild - like the way weapons break, or the way climbing works - and run it through Google. Each mechanism and element of design is so brilliantly crafted that I'd wager any one of them has given rise to a dozen think-pieces and deep-dives on how it works, why it works like it does, why it is great. To really butcher a metaphor, Breath of the Wild is our medium's Helen of Troy - the game that launched a thousand video essays.
In the age of hyper-specialists, reverse-engineers and mechanics who are capable of reducing games, films and other creations to their barest intricacies with such incredible precision, it's very easy, and natural, to think of Breath of the Wild as a game about those specifics - about experimenting with the brilliant physics, or the endless puzzles made of basic traversal, or the planning required of you by its degrading weapons and sandbox combat.
But in this game, each of those specifics is barely a single stroke of the brush. Breath of the Wild is transcendental: it isn't about the science of design - as much as it is built upon the incredible, deliberate decisions of its designers - it's about how that design is experienced by you, about learning the principles of a world from scratch, thinking and existing and interacting with a world as a human being would. It's a game that, in order to really have its desired effect, relies on you to recall your own early experience of the world, how you learned about your own consciousness and your own ability to affect things around you. As much of the world, and our small corner of it in video games, shifts towards the mechanical and the technical, Breath of the Wild is fundamentally about what it is to be human.
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell: I'm going to risk all of next year's Eurogamer commissions by saying that I'm cool on Breath of the Wild. I'm not entirely sure why. It's a game in which every last functional detail manages to stick in the memory - the way Link twangs his bowstring comically when you try to shoot with an empty quiver, for instance, or those jewel-like encounters with fellow travellers on the road. While it's an open world with towers, sidequests and whatnot, the Ubidrudgery is kept to a minimum, and Nintendo is happy to let you find things rather than covering the map with waypoints. And yet somehow I'm not compelled. Mostly, I miss the extended themed dungeons of the older Zeldas - the Shrines are too piecemeal and visually repetitive, and while you could argue that the combat sandbox makes up for it, I'll take another Shadow Temple over Fun Times With Bomb Physics any day of the week. In a great piece earlier this year, Chris Thursten called it the immersive simulation's Paul McCartney, a straight-edge artist for the broader audience. I couldn't listen to Paul McCartney for 100 hours straight. Can the next one be the immersive sim's Buckethead, please?
Martin Robinson: It was alright, but it was no Arms. Also Edwin, have you never heard Wings' Arrow Through Me? I'd listen to that for 100 hours straight any day.
Oli Welsh: Funny, I remember Martin playing this avidly for many weeks, raving about it and even buying one of those awful knock-off amiibo cards for a rare figure so he could unlock the Ocarina Link outfit, then furtively passing it around the office. Anyway.
I miss the dungeons too, but they are the most notable cost of an astonishingly brave decision at Nintendo. Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma told the team of designers making Breath of the Wild to rip up everything about Zelda and start again from scratch. Can you imagine any other company doing that with such a treasured series? Especially one as intricately bound up in notions of tradition and repetition as Zelda? And can you imagine it going so triumphantly right? We'd be lucky indeed if just a few more of gaming's big names were prepared to take these kinds of risks with their properties in the name of moving things forward.
Breath of the Wild is magnificent in scope and detail. It's remorseless in the way interrogates, breaks down and rebuilds afresh all the building blocks of several genres of game, including open-word adventures, role-playing games, survival games and sims. It's unprecedented in the solidity and craftsmanship with which it fits all these moving parts back together into a whole that offers tremendous freedom, but never breaks down or breaks its own rules. Yes, it owes a lot to Bethesda and Rockstar and Valve and Bungie and the rest, but it also schools them on their own turf.
But like Chris said, you can spend too long academically revering Breath of the Wild for its achievements in game design, when they all work so well and smoothly to a single purpose: stripping this kind of gaming of all its drudgery, of all the rote behaviours that had been ingrained in both developers and players, and bringing one of these so-called open worlds to teeming, gorgeous, mysterious life. What is the most magical and meaningful action you can undertake in a video game? For me, it's exploration. And this is nothing less than the best exploration game ever made. Go be in it.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-12-30-eurogamers-top-50-games-of-2017-10-1
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