Thanks to a heatwave zapping parts of the United States, some of this weekend's Fourth of July celebrations may have fewer fireworks due to issues like burn bans. That's as good an opportunity as any to enjoy the kind of virtual pyrotechnics that video games can afford—all in air-conditioned rooms with no annoying mosquitos or in-laws buzzing around, at that.

As such, we're taking this mid-year opportunity to pick out our favorite video games of 2015's first half, but in Ars tradition, our list comes with an asterisk. We've asked our staffers, most of whom aren't dedicated games writers, to list any favorite game they played this year, and we've broken the answers down into two lists: games published in 2015 and games published at any point in time.

This isn't necessarily a "best of" list, but rather a list of the games we've made time to play while reporting on the wider world of tech. In many cases, the results include a serious helping of comfort food and old franchises, and they're all games that have survived repeat playthroughs as opposed to being propped up by nostalgia alone.

Our 2015 favorites

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt













I could never get into the first Witcher game, and while I loved the world and story of The Witcher 2, I found large swaths of the gameplay to be tedious and aggravating. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the Witcher I’ve been waiting for. The game’s open world is ludicrously huge, and it’s filled to the brim with stuff to do. It has the most detailed and non-filler-y side quests I’ve ever seen in an RPG. Its scope can get overwhelming at times, but fans of hackin’ up fantasy monsters and yakkin’ up NPCs owe it to themselves to put in the time with this one. —Aaron Zimmerman, Copyeditor

While 2015 has been no stranger to sequels and remakes, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt stands apart as one of the most ambitious. Developer CD Projekt Red took its flagship series—itself based on a successful series of Polish fantasy novels—and adapted it to the open world. Unlike most such games, however, Wild Hunt's enormous environment feels vibrant and alive. The game's brand of sci-fi/fantasy can seem dire at times, but it stays grounded with a central (and ridiculously long) story of monster hunter and his adopted daughter. The story between these two adds much-needed color to the otherwise desperate and often horrifying struggles of normal people living in a world of creatures beyond their understanding. Of course, stopping to investigate, track, and kill said beasties on the heroes' road to resolution is pretty rewarding all by itself. —Steven Strom, Contributor

Her Story











It's quite possible that Her Story is at the front of my mind because it's the last game I completed in the first half of 2015. But I don't think that's the only reason. This complex tale of murder, mistaken identity, and psychological intrigue—told entirely through well-acted video clips of a multi-day police interrogation—is likely to stick with me until at least 2016. So what if it doesn't have a well-defined goal or ending? It's a fine piece of storytelling that takes the medium in a new direction and revives a genre that most wrote off as a joke decades ago. —Kyle Orland, Senior Gaming Editor

Bloodborne



















Bloodborne's aesthetics, narrative, and sound come together in a presentation that feels effortless (though clearly wasn't), and the package is anchored by nearly flawless mechanical design. It makes few concessions to those without the patience to master its combat, and while that may put off a daunted few, victory wouldn't be as sweet any other way. The triumph that comes from the defeat of a seemingly impassible foe, knowing that it was your own well-earned skills that got you there, is a classic video game trait, one that is slowly being lost in today's standard triple-A games. So yes, I'm enjoying Bloodborne immensely, in spite of seeming like I'm not. There may be times when I hurl my controller across the room in frustration or simply get up and leave in a huff, but Bloodborne always draws me back again, ready and willing to take on the next snarling foe. Forget 2015: Bloodborne is easily one of the best games of all time. —Mark Walton, Gaming and Hardware Editor, Ars UK

You Must Build A Boat









You Must Build A Boat is a mobile game that's sort of about building a boat, but more importantly, it's a sequel to 10000000, the poorly named but incredibly fun match-three-meets-RPG from 2012.

Like its apparent prequel, you're presented with a Bejeweled-esque board whose columns and rows you can shift vertically and horizontally to match three or more tiles at a time. Above this game board, a man in a hat runs through an endless dungeon filled with monsters and chests, and that's what drives the gameplay. Matching different tiles has different effects on the scene above; swords and wands damage monsters, keys open chests, shields charge your shield, and so on. Get hit by enough monsters (or stand still for long enough) and your run ends.

Where YMBAB differentiates itself from its prequel is character building, where you use each session's acquired gold and resources to boost your character. As before, you can power up your sword, wand, and shield, but you can also buy special items, power up the spells you can cast in the dungeons, and get other miscellaneous bonuses by "capturing" and "recruiting" monsters (maybe the only part of the game that's less fun than it sounds on paper, since monsters only bestow seemingly unrelated stat boosts and then jump around on your boat for the rest of the game).

Spoiler alert: Eventually, you build a boat, but that's mostly incidental. This one is $3 and you're probably reading this write-up on a device that can play it. —Andrew Cunningham, Senior Products Editor

Rocket League / Job Simulator

In 2013, Kyle caught hell for listing Hearthstone, which had only existed in closed beta form, as one of his end-of-year best-of picks. I'm going to do him one better (er, actually, two worse) by listing favorite 2015 games that have not seen formal release—and one of which has only been played by a few hundred people.

My first, Rocket League, launches next week on PC and PlayStation 4, and I'm more comfortable picking it as a mid-year favorite because of the extensive time I've spent with its closed beta through the first half of 2015. I'm a sucker for action-sports games that support couch multiplayer and put a gaming spin on "get the ball into the net" archetypes. We've seen a lot of these in recent years, but none has gotten me as pumped as this game's soccer-meets-cars frenzy.

I've always struggled to understand why people love car-combat games like Vigilante 8 and Twisted Metal—and even Mario Kart's battle modes, to some extent. Since high-speed steering and weapon aiming don't naturally go hand-in-hand, these games tend to compensate with heat-seeking weapons, so there's not much actual technical challenge in getting a kill shot. Rocket League, conversely, strips its "hit a soccer ball with your car" system down to a very simple control scheme, along with an easy camera-swap button so that players can either drive directly at the ball or veer off course to boost toward a defensive position. Plus, the mid-air spin mechanic lets players quickly boost in another direction—or propel cars into the coolest bicycle kick ever. Point being, the game is a true contest of car-driving skills, along with teamwork and field-management strategy.

I won't belabor my second "favorite" pick for long, because I wrote fifty gazillion words about SteamVR in June, but suffice it to say, Job Simulator's silly take on virtual-reality Jenga will change your entire gaming worldview. Will the final product, coming this fall, hold up compared to how its first eight minutes felt? Doubt it. Were those first eight minutes the coolest I've spent in a video game in nearly a decade, though? Absolutely. —Sam Machkovech

Twenty

I love gaming. Unfortunately, my console gaming days are over, as playing anything on a large display gives me motion sickness, so no more Burnout or Super Mario for me. (I played Mario Kart 8 with my kids on Christmas and regretted it for a couple of hours afterwards.) As a result, my gaming is done on small screens in short bursts. As I appear to have exhausted all of the good tower defense games in the App Store, most of my free-time gaming has been devoted to an addictive little number-mashing game called Twenty.

If you’ve played Threes or 2048, you know the drill—use your finger to flick numbered tiles at one another to form larger combinations. Unlike Threes, where your numbers double (i.e., 6 + 6 = 12), in Twenty you smack identical number tiles into one another to increment them by one. Two 2s makes a 3, two 7s an 8, and so on. The game starts off easy enough, but once you make your first 10, things start to get crazy. New rows of numbers pop up quicker and the tiles might be joined together by a bar, making it more difficult to clear the numbers. Once you hit 15, it gets crazier.

It’s a great diversion for when you find yourself with a few minutes to kill. In fact, I’ve found it so engrossing that my leg has fallen asleep in the bathroom. That may be the highest (and grossest -Ed.) compliment I can pay a smartphone- or tablet-centric game. —Eric Bangeman, Managing Editor

Elite: Dangerous

Video: A few minutes of flying, fighting, and exploring in Elite: Dangerous.

Elite: Dangerous for the Xbox One is my favorite video game of 2015 so far (and we're counting this console version as a 2015 game). I'm not very good at it. I've not tried out any of the Xbox-focused bits like CQC—in fact, I've not set foot outside of Solo mode, nor do I intend to. You see, I was a huge Elite fan as a kid, playing the original BBC Micro version with friends and at school, then the C64 port (which wasn't quite as good). Elite: Dangerous takes me back to that time, 30 years ago: just me, my spaceship and a cruel, cruel galaxy, something my colleague Lee Hutchinson conveys well in his ongoing Web comic, Fangs. What better way to unwind after a long day's writing (or driving) with some light exploration of the galaxy? —Jonathan Gitlin, Automotive Editor

Dota 2

Valve

Valve

My favorite game of the first half of 2015 is the same as my favorite game of all of 2014, and my favorite game of 2013: Dota 2. "But Peter!" I hear you cry, "You can't pick the same game every time. That is so very boring!" Child, I can, and I will, and let me tell you why. Dota 2 is back in beta. Although the game was released in 2013 after a lengthy beta test, that was then. This, as they say, is now.

The reason for the new beta is simple: Source 2 is a-comin'. Dota 2, like other Valve games such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Half Life 2 Episode 2, is built on Valve's Source 3D engine. Over the past few years, the company has been developing a major new version of that engine. It's meant to scale better on fast hardware (and it will include DirectX 12 and OpenGL Vulkan support when those become available) and run faster on slow hardware. Should the mythical Half Life 3 ever ship (it won't, mind you—it's been canceled), it will use Source 2. So will Left 4 Dead 3. And any other 3-numbered games that Valve clearly won't make.

Dota 2 is the first major test of Source 2. While the mainstream version of Dota 2 is the old-and-busted Source version (and this is the version that will be used for the company's record-breaking $15 million prize pool summer tournament, The International 5), the company is running an open beta of the Source 2-powered Dota 2 Reborn in parallel. The Reborn gameplay is the same as regular Dota 2 gameplay, but the client itself is undergoing great improvement. This has two main aspects. First is a much better DotaTV experience for watching tournaments. We'll be able to see player stats, track tournament brackets, watch videos and interviews, all from within the game client, when formerly this required us to use Twitch.

The second aspect is the more revolutionary one: support for custom game modes. Already dozens of mods are available, and this is only going to grow. Mods and custom modes have a particularly important role in the Dota 2 community because Dota 2 itself was born from a mod. The original Defense of the Ancients game was a custom map for WarCraft 3. Valve hired its maintainer, the mysterious IceFrog, and together they have created the standalone, purpose-built Dota 2 game that we know and love, but there's a sense in the community that with custom game modes now a part of Dota 2, the next great mod-derived game is sure to follow.

I don't know if it will, but what I do know is that Dota 2 is getting even better. And since it's already the greatest game ever made, that's a tough act for everyone else to follow. —Peter Bright, Technology Editor

Listing image by Aurich Lawson