Alas, another year has passed. 12 months of shooting blasters, scaling cliff-sides, and fighting off zombies (or avoiding them altogether). Feast your eyes on our top 3 games of 2012:
Honorable Mention: Mass Effect 3
The promise came true! A game that lets you play the same character you started in the first game, through to the end of his/her story. Despite criticism of the game’s controversial ending, Mass Effect 3 was compelling, tightly designed, fluid, and powerfully moving. Truly a standout in 2012.
Runner Up: Diablo 3 
What should we say about Diablo 3 that hasn’t been said already? It was a long wait for this sequel, and well worth it. Blizzard mastered multiplayer with it’s new, seamless system. Friends can easily jump in and out of games. When criticism came their way, they swiftly countered with the Paragon leveling system for max characters. What more can be asked of a company trying to appeal to new gamers while pleasing the existing fan base of a 10 year old game (Diablo 2)? Also, the sales figures can’t be ignored. Diablo 3 is the best selling PC game of all time. It was the game everyone loved to hate on, and play at the same time. Lastly, from a value perspective, Diablo 3 provides more entertainment and hours of gameplay for your money than any other game in 2012.
Game of the Year: The Walking Dead 
Don’t assume we didn’t spend hours debating this, because we did. Walking Dead: The Game, while the perfect choice for GOTY, brought intense discussion to surface. It wasn’t without bugs and technical issues. The game also wasn’t the most beautiful. So why is it our GOTY? Because we can’t stop talking about it! Like Heavy Rain of 2010, The Walking Dead challenged us to make critical, human decisions quickly. We not only regretted taking certain actions after learning the consequences (sometimes an episode or two after the fact), we also began to criticize each other for taking different actions. We even learned things about each other! What’s more, TellTale’s video game is arguably the best implementation of The Walking Dead. By putting the player in the driver’s seat, Robert Kirkman’s vision of a world with consequences is fully realized and experienced.
If you haven’t played The Walking Dead: The Game, GWW recommends it as 2012’s best game of the year.