The art of the boss battle is often synonymous with gaming in general. You would be hard-pressed to find even non-gamers that would look on in confusion if you uttered the term. If a superhero is often perceived as only capably being as good as his arch-nemesis, than its entirely reasonable to believe that maybe a video game is only as good as its boss battles. After all, the objective usually is to take down some nefarious up-to-no-gooder. I do not agree with that assessment after 2013 though. While looking back on the year in gaming which includes well over 75 games played - I noticed that there werent many boss battles period, let alone a bottomless pit of treasures to choose from. In an article like this, a writers first instinct is to immediately glance at the best games 2013 had to offer or our own Scott Talifords brilliant countdown feature- and pick out the best boss battles from those games. Theres only one problem; some of the biggest games literally had none! The Last of Us purposely bucked this cliché of introducing some godlike monstrosity that is unlike anything youve ever faced in the game, and instead chose to focus on its character piece driven narrative. Also, some of these games just had flat-out awful boss fights that didnt properly flow within the game mechanics. Im looking at you Bioshock: Infinite! Despite that if you look hard and ironically in a few cases towards some terrible to average games- there are some diamonds in the rough. The volume may have been slightly lower this year, but there were still some unforgettable battles. Before we move on though
Dishonourable Mention
Queen Aliens: Colonial Marines
It's unlikely that you'd find many defenders of this one in any area of game design: its essentially Duke Nukem Forever, but truly terrible and featuring a story loosely connected to the franchise legacy. Its a piece of garbage and its final boss battle is no exception. Fighting a Queen sounds an incredibly prospect on the surface, but the execution here is dumbfounding and completely amateurish. It essentially consists of you sneaking around the cargo area of a plane to pull 3 levels, that when activated release a metal crate that knocks the Queen out of the plane. It seriously feels like boss design taken out of a 1996 Capcom trash bin.