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The Top 5 Videogame Settings
Our rundown of gaming's most impressive, believable or memorable environments.
Written by Jon Denton, 14 February 2010
Mechanics, visuals and storytelling may be the most obvious focal points when judging a game's quality, but you can't overlook the power of a believable or conceivable environment in which it all plays out. Here we take a look at the 5 gaming environments that shocked, overawed, daunted and beguiled more than any other.
5. Ancient Greece - God Of War
The wealth of incredible myths and monsters at Sony Santa Monica's disposal lends God Of War its astonishing aesthetics. It's all about size, scale and meat-rending violence, so whether it's huge, crumbling temples or screen-filling Colossi, you never know what's around the next Aegean corner. Of course, it helps that Kratos is the angriest man/god to have ever lived and that Sony Santa Monica houses some of the world's most talented visual artists and gameplay designers, but it's the voluminous universe of Olympus and its myriad followers that gave birth to the phenomenon that is God Of War.
4. The Castle - Ico
Partly because of its muted colours and haunting beauty, and party because it's one of the most cogent and coherent game spaces ever crafted, Ico's castle is a sprawling structure loaded with mystery; of a story yet-to-be-told. Traversing such a space alone would be impressive enough, but when shared with the delicate Yorda, it makes the scale of the task in hand even more daunting, and the triumph even more rewarding.
360Zine Issue 39
For our latest Bioshock 2 coverage, click here to download 360Zine Issue 39 for free.3. San Andreas - GTA San Andreas
At first, it's just the size. Three cities and all the surrounding countryside and desert made San Andreas the most ambitious game ever made and Rockstar North's credentials as the world's premier studio cemented. From the deliciously reverent beginnings in Los Santos with its searing coronas and light-hearted gang banging, all the way through to losing yourself - physically and metaphorically - in the midnight expanse of the Nevada desert, San Andreas is a place with more variety and more possibility than anything that had come before it.
2.Rapture - BioShock
Fiercely original, defiantly intelligent and outstandingly atmospheric, Rapture is the type of city that lingers long in the memory. As a depiction of a society in decay, it's second to none, but that Rapture represents a snapshot in time creates a fantastic juxtaposition of style and sadness. As you roam its halls, it reveals the true horror of the urban mistake in which you are in, and yet it's almost impossible not to be impressed by the glorious art-deco architecture and its cast of bizarre, broken academics. If every game was this smart, no one would ever question videogames' position as a conduit for artistry.
1. The Capital Wasteland - Fallout 3
Fear. It's almost tangible. Stepping out into the vast, decaying expanse of Fallout 3's overworld is a terrifying experience. It's simultaneously constructed from the fantastical - two headed cows, super mutants - and the worryingly real. The first time you find a burnt skeleton in the bath, the slaver camp at Paradise Falls, the shattered politics of downtown DC - it's a depiction of post-nuclear society as believable as it is upsetting. As disturbing and unsettling as Fallout 3 is, though, it's also a place full of hope and even humour, where you shape your own destiny through the people you meet and the actions you take. If New Vegas can capture even 50% of Bethesda's inspired space, then we'll be in for another treat. If that's what you can call such an ordeal.
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