(5) Need for Speed: Unbound
It really wasn’t very good, Criterion’s grand Need for Speed comeback. Sad car physics/driving feel, ridiculously lousy story and pathetic characters (as well as hopeless online mode) made us at Gamereactor tired after just a few hours, but it was nice. Incredibly beautiful. The mainly Swedish-developed Frostbite game engine with all the world’s Battlefield glamor did wonders for the game city of Lakeshore and its surroundings and when we couldn’t play anymore, we could at least (luckily) just sit at a red light and watch the traffic whiz by. It ran super smooth at a locked 60fps to both consoles and featured lighting to die for.
(4) Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
How to create art within art is the question everyone who has worked with Warhammer asks themselves. Everything in this future interpretation of humanity is over-detailed. Every weapon, armor, building is a work of art. Every detail in a building consists of small works of art. Darktide captured this during the year in a brilliant way by painfully recreating this dark future whose only watchwords are war and misery. It was a visual spectacle with amazing effects, cutscenes and visual design. It’s dark, disgusting and manages to show Warhammer in an exciting way. Due to the focus that was on Nurgle one of the gods of the universe, premonition, flesh, boils and plague are emphasized. This was contrasted with the high-tech, decadent and dilapidated megacity we were fighting. Fatshark’s graphics did a fantastic job creating one of the best looking gaming experiences of the year.
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(3) Horizon: Forbidden West
Already when the first trailer appeared the year before the release, we knew that this would be something out of the ordinary, purely graphically. And we weren’t wrong. Guerrilla Games gave us an endlessly beautiful adventure game that took us through sparkling snow-capped mountains, red sandy deserts, enchanted deep forests and warm beaches where the turquoise waves licked our bare feet. The graphics brought life and movement to the game, and we saw evidence of that over and over again in the fine details. How the wind caught a few stray strands of hair around Aloy’s face, how the shadows moved with the movements of the sun, and how the vegetation we moved through folded with her body. The game felt so alive and the graphics also made the characters feel real and human with grimaces and facial expressions that mimicked a real live face. Horizon Forbidden West was a perfect utopia of a post-apocalyptic world so beautiful that you wouldn’t actually hesitate to travel there if a ticket had landed in your lap.
(2) A Plague Tale: Requiem
We are used to seeing the best-looking and most technical graphics come from first-party studios where you as a developer only need to focus on one format to optimize your adventure to. This year, however, one of the best-looking games would come from a smaller French studio that had previously been responsible for bringing out titles like Microsoft’s Flight Simulator and The Crew 2. With A Plague Tale: Requiem, Asobo Studio proved that you don’t just possess a great knowledge when it comes to weaving together a compelling story, but they also offered enchanting eye candy that few other titles could match. Because the European Middle Ages has never looked better, and although many of the environments were filled with death and misery, they managed to make the misery feel alive and beautiful thanks to brilliant models, polished textures and eminent lighting. The fact that the adventure was also launched together with a well-built photo mode meant that we at the editorial office probably spent more time trying to capture the fabulous scenery and vibrant facial models than trying to save our little brother Hugo and the rest of the world from perishing in a sea of angry rats.
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BEST GRAPHICS OF THE YEAR 2022
(1) God of War: Ragnarok
Aside from Art Director Raf Grassetti’s absolutely magical design, Eric Williams & Cory Barlog’s epic script, and Bear McCreary’s masterful music, Sony Santa Monica’s acclaimed sequel was offered the most delicious graphics of the year, from a technical perspective. The home-made game engine really excelled in Ragnarok, where the game world has been expanded and the graphics multiplied in terms of detail. Animations, lighting, particles, fog, smoke, fire, and the way the characters moved their mouths and eyes during the dialogue-driven sequences make this the game that we at Gamereactor believe featured the best graphics of 2022.
