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Our picks for the best on each console in 2012.

Halo 4 - Winner

With Halo 4 heading our way, we were pumped to finally get behind John 117’s helmet in the campaign and to refresh our obsession with online multiplayer. The only worry was if things might go pear-shaped as the reins of the Halo franchise were handed from Bungie to Microsoft’s 343 Studios.  Thankfully, Master Chief’s new handlers did a spectacular job of maintaining everything we love about Halo while freshening things up just enough to put their own stamp on it.

Halo 4 still has the skirmish-travel-skirmish pacing cemented in the series’ very first game, but also adds a new slate of enemies that inject an entirely new set of variables to the mixture of scenarios.  Even though you could argue that some of the new enemies are variations on the classics, each had a few dramatic differences to completely freak us out from time to time.  The new Promethean Knights were tough to manage (especially when their Watcher pals resurrected them after your ammo was nearly spent) and the Crawlers were easy to pick off, but could quickly overwhelm you with sheer numbers.  These new baddies in addition to the classic Covenant Elites, Grunts, Jackals, and Hunters made each battle in the campaign a unique encounter.

The multiplayer sessions managed to hit that same level of quality, with a great blend of addictive XP earning and high-speed Halo gunplay.  Charging around a fresh slate of maps on foot and on Warthogs in the team-heavy matches helped us forget the loss of many of the solo offerings of yesteryear.  Even if you can’t bear to live without all of your solo game-types, many of the classics cycle through from time to time as limited time offerings and you’re free to create any custom game types for you and your friends too.

With this first entry in a new trilogy of Halo games that is likely to stretch onto the next Xbox, it was comforting to witness everything turn out just about perfectly.  Even though the system itself doesn’t rely completely on Master Chief like it did in the beginning, he certainly gives us enough of a reason to love our Xboxes and get ready to buy the next console too. 

Write-up by Travis Hawks

Mass Effect 3 - Runner Up

Mass Effect 3 is everywhere, including the Wii U, but since the series began as an Xbox 360 exclusive it just felt right to have it on our best games of the 360 nominations. At this point in the year, it seems like ME 3 will go down in history as the game with so much fan backlash over its ending that BioWare had to go back and change it. That’s a shame, because this game deserves far more praise than that, which is why it grabbed two awards from us in our Game of the Year considerations.

We gave you many of those reasons in our RPG Runner Up section, but let’s talk about that multiplayer, shall we? When it was announced, most people expected to never touch it, but BioWare deserves some propers for making the multiplayer aspect of Mass Effect 3 not only entertaining, but meaningful to the single player campaign. The only way you’re going to get your galactic readiness at 100% is by fighting the good fight with some online buddies, and the multiplayer in ME 3 rewards teamwork better than almost any other horde based mode we’ve seen before. The addition of real money items is shady for a full retail game, but fortunately the money earned from matches is enough that the only reason to buy any gear with real cash is sheer convenience. The fact that people are still investing tons of time into the Mass Effect multiplayer this long after the game was released is a testament to the quality of this initially dismissed mode.

Write-up by Julian Titus