2. Need for Speed: Most Wanted
Winner of gamescom 2012 Silver Bolt.
2012 hasn’t been too kind on the racer, especially when the stand-out titles are widely regarded as being mere spin-offs of the core franchise, it’s time we went canon and got the big guns out. With Gran Turismo and Forza holding strong in recent times, Need for Speed has had a somewhat bumpier ride. Hot Pursuit in 2010 was the best received NFS title of all time, but the follow-up The Run left a damp, soggy aftertaste that just couldn’t be rid of.
Step up Most Wanted, the first title since Criterion took full responsibility for the series, and it’s chuffing marvellous. To call it Burnout Paradise 2 is grossly unfair, especially when Most Wanted is so much better and so much more than that. It’s sleek, sexy and features fully-licensed cars; the sheer unbridled joy of police evasion has never been better showcased than now.
Not only is Need for Speed Most Wanted liable to be one of the best racing games in recent years, it’s also a close-contender for one of the better games you’ll play this year. That is, except for Dishonored.
Read our full Need for Speed: Most Wanted gamescom 2012 preview here.
1. Dishonored 
Winner of gamescom 2012 Golden Bolt.
If you like being chased down corridors by your own begrudging sense of necessity then Dishonored is not the game for you. In fact, bugger off, you shouldn’t even be playing games.
Dishonored is remarkable as it’s both linear and open at the same time. In recently times, games have had a propensity to go for either extreme: the Uncharted approach of dropping a boulder down an alley and watching you scramble up a pipe away from it, or Skyrim’s sense of helplessness and isolation in a world far bigger than yourself. Dishonored rejects this notion outright, instead opting for a linear story with individually very open level design and gameplay.
If you so choose, Dishonored is a marvellous stealth game where Corvo is but a spectre, never seen and never heard, but ever present. Equally, Dishonored is also a game about possessing foes and attacking their friends, or putting them in the path of their own bullets. There’s so much variety and possibility than you could have 6 or 7 play-throughs and never even come close to repetition. Any game that lets you strap a mine to a rat and go kamikaze is a sure-fire winner in our eyes.
Read our first Dishonored gamescom 2012 preview of Kaldwin’s Bridge here.
