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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Since I last posted here, I have 100%'ed both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
I have no words to describe how much I loved this trilogy, it just encapsulates everything I could possibly want from a single-player game.
Rise was so incredibly tight and polished, no complaints. While Shadow has some warts, it just is so much larger and comprehensive than Rise that I love it just the same. Hoping Legacy of Atlantis will improve on the existing systems, I honestly do not want much of the mechanics to change and would be entirely fine with the original reimagined with the systems already in place.
Now a short break until Thursday, when Control Resonant drops, I am so ready.
The modern Tomb Raider trilogy is great! I have played them in succession 5 years ago anf it was a blast! I loved all three of them and I'm lanning to replay them once more and again all three at once.
This is how reboot of the series should look like.
I never really got into the original TR games, but I absolutely loved this trilogy. Rise was definitely my favorite.
Yeah, they're quite different from the original games and I'm hoping Legacy of Atlantis will still keep the current formula instead of trying to go back to the original gameplay ideas.
The original games (primarily thinking of the first three) are best understood to be 3D elaborations on the old Prince of Persia formula. The platforming is tile-based and deterministic, which is why the controls function as they do. The choice to offer a "modern" control scheme in the remasters is baffling to me because it completely breaks things, unless the idea was to highlight why the game had tank controls to begin with.
I haven't played either of the Death Stranding games; what do you think of them so far? I've always considered playing DS1 but I never pulled the trigger on it. With Resonant coming in 2 days I probably won't pick it up now, but I could do so after I finish Resonant.
I have finally fi ished the Outer Worlds and its DLCs. Really solid gane, if you ask me. It is very Fallout-y in a way of various skills and how you can implement them in your gameplay. For example, I didn't put nearly any points into any fighting skills, be it melee or any guns. I went the speech/technical way. Mild spoiler - I even talked down final boss of the game, which was kinda anticlimactic, but fitting to the story.
There are not that many weaponsandnthey repeat in three tiers. There are many unique and also one if a kind ones though.
I love how there are many people you can talk to and quest givers amd relatives have rich dialogues, both in length and also in options to choose from, many of which being one-time only - this means you have four to choose and once you pick, you can't ever go back to the dialogue tree again and try other ones (besides lading the game). Sometines this makes for different outcome but even when it doesn't, it still behaves this way.
The world is kinda alien-ish, developers went haywire on that. Visuals are very good, even though I played at medium on Steam Deck, it gets you properly into the alien world the game takes place in. Planets/places vary a lot, making every stop on your journey a unique one.
The story isn't exactly bad, but nothing to write home about. The good thing is you can approach it in two ways, kinda good/bad scenario. I always (twice) picked the good one (in my eyes).
This game is kinde shuned upon by many players, but I don't see why. It is solid game. And DLCs are very good, very fitting unto the game world.
I played and finished this game on launch and it was just extremely mid. I did put skill points into guns, and by mid game my sniper one-shot most everything and it just became a slog. I also remember there being a bunch of unique "science" weapons that were completely useless, and that's about all.
The fact that the game came out 7 years and god knows how many patches ago and you have all the DLC means we probably had very different experiences.
I played it on Switch Lite before (yes, that "bad" port of the game) without DLCs and it seemed the same to me. DLCs add some weapons but mainly locations, they don't really have anything to add to the base game world. Apart from Spectrum Gatling, which is also science weapon but one I actually used - being able to rip enemies with sniper level damage but actually minigun firing rate and having all damage types on top of that, you can't beat it. Well, it was going throu my ammo stack like it was butter on hot sunny day...
I can confirm, that I also used sniper rifles the most and also one-hit killed many, but not actually everything. One of the DLCs had real boss - with life-bar and huge life points. This was missing in the base game.
But I overall liked the world, locations, characters, the story was meh, but the setting of the game was great (dystopian society). It's not a great game, but solid.
I posted last week about finding a replacement for Slay The Spire, and after buying some games, losing money and refunding some, I found one that wasn't proposed in the thread, but on "/r/deckbuildingroguelikes".
There was a thread there about how is StS still king and one dude commented that the only game that made him spend as much hours was Spellrogue.
It's been a little over a week and I spent 20 hours on it. There's a free demo and the full game is like 30$.
The game is simple, there are fights like in StS, ennemies attack you or do something else. You have 3-7 spells available at all times. Every turn, you roll 3+ dice and you assign every die to the spell you want. Now the twist is every spell has a combo potential, there is so much to explain here that the text wouldn't do it justice.
What makes me want to play it are the 5 criteria I had in my thread. There is definitely a challenge here. All runs are winnable but understanding the micro of where to put your finite dice and the macro of which spells to take with you every fight is such a fun puzzle.
It's very similar to StS with the macro, you choose your path, there are shops, events, elites and bosses at the end. 3 acts. You have relics, gold and card rewards, potions. The fun difference is the upgrade system. You get shards when you beat an elite or through special events, and shards allow you to upgrade a card or add a spell slot. But just like in StS, you can't upgrade everything and choosing what card to upgrade is another fun puzzle.
I would definitely highly recommend it. I unlocked ascensions (descents) and apparently there are 13, and I still lose at D2. I can't imagine how I'll win at the harder difficulties. But I'm happy! I finally found another fun challenging game! It's funny because there are daily challenges and there's like 10 people that do it, so we're like 100 people playing this game lol
Wolverine. I’m somewhat disappointed. It’s buggy, the pacing is bad, the big enemies have too much health, the writing is decent, the VO is good, and the combat is fun. I think overall I’d say a 6/10. It definitely doesn’t feel worth $70.
I am not surprised by the reception it has received and while I think it’s fair, it at times feels overblown. Yes it’s a flawed game that feels rushed and Insomniac should’ve done better, but there’s still some fun to be had if you liked the Arkham Batman games.
People complaining that you don’t feel strong as Wolverine is my biggest gripe because I think it really comes down to them not play the game long enough in most cases. Yes you’re a little weak at the start which feels goofy narratively since you have adamantium claws, but as you upgrade your skills and learn the combat more you really can shred through most enemies other than the bigger baddies. The boss fights are really hit or miss with the sentinel fights being atrocious so far. I’m about 9 hours in or so and I’ll definitely complete the game.
I finished Wolverine yesterday. It was very meh. Far too linear with collectibles mostly in the path. Too many slow walking segments. I felt the story got a little incoherent where they were adding new plot points late in the game, like
Spoilers
Phoenix and Apocalypse, and stealing the X-genes where not much earlier Essex just wanted to use the helix engine to awaken latent mutants.
I was very much looking forward to the game being over by the end.
I've been playing Shadow Generations this week. A friend gave me a code for Sonic x Shadow Generations on Steam that he didn't want (not the same friend who gifted me High on Life - people have been really generous this year!)
It's a competent platformer with polished 3D visuals. It's very similar to Sonic Generations, if you've played that - the same engine, I imagine - but instead of playing as Sonic the hedgehog you're playing as Shadow the edgelord, so you have Shadow's abilities, levels and story.
The platforming is designed around the Sonic franchise's classic "gotta go fast" tenet. Split-second decision making (or prior knowledge) can be used for optimizing your path through a level and routing around entire slower sections, with Shadow's performance (time) being graded at the end. Each level also contains three optional collectible keys that can be used for opening chests that can be found in the hub area (there are nearly 100 of these, sometimes behind little platforming puzzles) that contain concept art, music or background information from the franchise. Main game levels are padded with short "challenge" levels which typically require killing or collecting a certain amount of a certain thing or using a specific skill. Honestly, they're alright. The feeling of going through either kind of level and doing the platforming "correctly," chaining multiple moves and blasting through a whole bunch of enemies, is great. Levels are designed well enough; it "feels" like Sonic (I'm not a 3D Sonic fan, so I've mainly enjoyed the original 2D ones back in the day, plus Sonic Mania).
One thing I dislike about the gameplay is how often it relies on unpredictable, abrupt camera swerves and perspective changes. Sometimes Shadow is running to the side, others he's running away from the screen, then there are bits that are automated, and it may be hard to tell what's going to happen unless you've already attempted and failed a level. If you're going for the collectibles you may have to kill yourself/restart from checkpoint because the unpredictability makes you miss a split-second cue. I remember being irritated by this in Sonic Generations as well (which I played back when it was released). Also, boss levels are by far the weakest in terms of gameplay; they're riddled with cutscenes and require different unpreditable mechanics at different times (Shadow has many abilities) so the game resorts to just telling you exactly which buttons to press at all times, which makes them far too easy and pointless.
I don't want to offend any Sonic or Shadow fans but at least without the benefit of rose-colored glasses, I find the entire plot to be inane garbage I wouldn't have enjoyed even as a teenager, additionally contrived (I imagine) due to how they're trying to cram in references to other games and drop cameos for several characters I don't know who are literally pointless besides hanging out and feeding you random NPC lines. I don't care for any of it and I wish I could have skipped every cutscene (I think they're all unskippable). Just give me the levels!
Even if you are not very good at it you should be able to complete this game in less than 9 hours.
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Playing through some Breath of the Wild again (new save) and once again there’s parts that I absolutely love and then parts that I absolutely hate.
Such a fun game when it wants to be, and then a very grindy, tedious game at other points.
Since I finished Outer Wprlds, I might as well go for BotW once again, this time on Steam Deck. I love the game and I miss it so much! But it's quite a huge time investment into this one, probably half a year.
I finally got good BOTW emulation set up for my ultrawide a few months ago, which involved dumping the save from my switch and converting it to a Wii-U format. I'm trying to finish the only thing I haven't beat in the game - master mode trial of the hero, (started via the master sword pedestal).
I tried it like 15 times when I set up the emulator then took a break, maybe I need to go back soon. Or maybe I should finally kill Miquella in Elden Ring, or the dlc bosses in Hollow Knight, or finish Silksong. Maybe there is some sort of pattern here, namely my lack of extreme skill and mild masochism...
Star Wars: Zero Company
I finished the game. To start with the bad, the technical performance on PC is pretty bad. There's literally no resolution options. You have to override the high DPI settings to set it to the native screen resolution. There were points where the enemy slid across the screen like a chess piece. My rig is alright. AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 5070TI, 32GB DDR4 ram. Even with DLSS x4, the frame rate was inconsistent at best.
The actual gameplay, story, and performances are all really good though. Hard is appropriately tough. I was fortunate that I didn't lose anyone and I only reloaded a mission twice lol. Didn't save scum either. Money management ended up being very important. My budgeting skills helped there, but there were times I took missions/OPs because of the pay day. Which is in line with the crew and the stroy lol.
The story of this MC, his crew, and the time period all work really well together. It did a good job of bringing in characters from the movies/shows for a mission or two. In a way that made sense for them to be there and then leave. Also didn't conflict with the movies or shows they're in.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
I just started this. I love this series and have been playing the games for the last 15 years or so. I'm only in chapter 4 or 5 of one of the character's routes. I didn't look up anything about this game beforehand, so there's several surprising things.
First off I appreciate some of the small improvements to the tactical turn based gameplay. Specifically the ability to toggle an enemy or enemies' range as well as toggle all of their ranges is super useful. Before you'd just have to remember the range after looking at the character. You can also modify what information about a character is previewed.
There's a lot of other modes as well. One story battle had a goal that wasn't about killing, but taking candles on a grid. It basically functioned like the dots and boxes game we played as kids. That was fun. I didn't realize there was a bit of dungeon exploration, resource gathering, and the FF style turn based combat. It's not very deep, but a fun mechanic to have inbetween battles.
The production is noticeably higher. Not just fidelity, but the VA. There's a lot for a game natively on a Nintendo Platform. More dialog and story than I had expected, but not unwelcome.
From what little I previewed before, it seems like you can go to the final battle with one or all of the allies? In Three Houses, I only explored one route. I feel like I'm going to do all the routes, so I can see the true ending. So I may only be playing this and Marvel Snap for the next couple months 😆
I picked up In Falsus - it's a rhythm game that just hit its full release and I hadn't seen the demo of. It has a really nutty control scheme where your left hand plays a bemani-style key pattern (on Shift-A-S-D-F-Space) while your right hand plays a Sound Voltex/osu-style tracing pattern (with your mouse moving left and right). Then it's also an entire visual novel and also has an extensive crafting system. Crazy game, and I hope I stick with it long enough to actually get good.
Then more and more work on my "endgame" Satisfactory world. This is a save file that I've fully completed (all Space Elevator deliveries plus Golden Nut statue) and I'm now making builds that are bigger and more aesthetically-decorated. I've finally finished up my Rocket Fuel power plant (3600 fuel/min, generating 216 GW of power) and am pondering what gets built next.
I tried that game's demo a few months ago and it was too much for me to keep track of.
I may revisit it at some point, it's in my wishlist but not a priority.
I think I'm just starting to get the hang of the dual-focus chart-reading as the charts I'm playing are now very willing to overlap both hands, but it's definitely a mind-bender.
I finished Xenosaga Episode 1. In the last thread, I said that I would probably take a break before going to the next one. I lied. I'm now on Disc 2 of Xenosaga Episode 2. Boy, am I not enjoying the gameplay of this second one. I'm only having a bearable time because I grinded the shit out of that Shion-only dungeon.
I really enjoyed episode 1, more than I thought I would. I do eventually hope to understand more of the story and characters by the time 3 rolls around, but I'm happy to be patient in the mean time. But the ending sequence, and the music, for episode 1 was great! Final boss one shorted me.though, which would've been frustrating if not for the fact that I save state before a boss fight begins.
This might be a weird comparison, but the feel of the game (and the graphics) remind me a lot of Star Ocean 3. Down to the voice actors, with the voices of Albel and Albedo, and Margulis and Vox, being the same, and being kinda the same archetypes too. The sci fi is very similar as well.
Oh wow, you finished the first game! Congrats!
Disliking the gameplay shift in the second game compared to the first seems to be a near-universal phenomenon. I do wonder how I'd feel about it now instead of as a frustrated middle schooler; I opened a random Reddit thread and the jargon is ... fascinating because I genuinely do not remember interacting with these aspects of the combat; I just remember stocking, break points, and doing a ridiculous amount of damage with MOMO.
...Wait, wait, wait. I am getting distracted now. Whilst looking up more information on Xenosaga 2's combat, I learned that they added MOMO as a cameo in Xenoblade 2... in the Switch 2 version. Huh!?!?
Anyways. Hey, Star Ocean 3 is another blast from the past! I played the PSP remakes of Star Ocean 2 and 1 and while I haven't replayed all these games since 2010, I remember being way more impressed with SO3 as a whole (despite a lot of online opinion roasting 3's story and lauding 2 as the best of the franchise at the time). I have a really soft spot in my heart for the video game and anime English voice acting names of that era.
There's obviously something good about it, because I don't always (or usually!) finish old RPGs that I don't already have nostalgia for. Like, I've sat on Sakura Wars for the Sega Saturn for a year now,.on disc 2. And I do eventually want to finish it and move on to the next game, but I do have to push myself into doing so. With XS1, I just played every day.
I'll be frank, I don't think I fully understand every aspect of the combat in XS2. I think in theory you're meant to stock up and then down or air after breaking the enemy, and then wail on them. But it turns every single random encounter into a fully engaged fight, and I hate it. Dungeons are already stressful with puzzles and enemies and bosses and how long they are, it doesn't help to turn every encounter into a high stakes fight. The only thing saving this game for me if the fact that you can break the level curve with the Shion dungeon, and the fact that I have save states so I can stop playing whenever. I also really dislike the class and skill system. In XS1, every character had their niche and upgrade path. Here, it feels a lot of characters are pretty aame-y.
The story feels less coherent than the first game, but the highs are still pretty high. I like the URTV storyline, and every scene with Albedo is still amazing. I've reached the Labyrinthos (is that the name?) core now.
Stat Ocean Till the End of Time is probably my favourite JRPG of all time, so when I compare the games, it's a high compliment for me! I beat SO1, and never finished SO2 (it's also on my list of games I mean to finish). Beat 4, fell out of the series after that game.
Oh man, I love hokey early 00s English anime voice acting. Hearing that kind of voice direction sends Cupid arrows straight into my heart.
Started Graveyard Keeper 2 today. Been excited for it since I found out about it and so far I'm very happy. I love how much they keep to the root, it feels very much like a "2" with the same core gameplay, familiar assets, and overall feel. But it's clear there's a bunch more meat added to it just by scrolling through the skill trees. They've addressed some of the pain points and the tutorials feel a little more clear (though they've kept the whole 'you have to remember what this symbol means' annoyance). But my absolute favorite thing so far is that you finally aren't stuck in just the village, the worst part of graveyard keeper was how claustrophobic the map felt (even though the DLC expanded it a bit). The voice acting is a bit odd though, I might switch over to mumbling mode.
I started playing the first one recently, it's quite a grindy game. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's challenging to have what feels like a lot of bottlenecks in progress. Right now I need to do something to get my faith generation up, and it's frustrating I can only generate it once a week (unless I'm lucky enough to get someone in a confessional box).
Does the second feel different at all in this respect?
I'm not far enough to really say as I haven't unlocked faith yet. The main bottleneck so far has just been stamina, feels like I'm constantly walking back inside to sleep. My experience in the first one is that faith is hard until you unlock the right prayers and then you can quickly end up with more than you need. I'm hopeful they've mediated this one a bit more where it's not so feat or famine, but I can see faith is used in even more places than the first one so I'm sure it's still going to be a bottleneck.
In the past two weeks I've put a ton of time into Valheim; I'd been wanting to play with the new 1.0 update and that Friday I saw my friends had jumped on, so I joined them and we played for a good long time.
But I got antsy; I wanted to play more and my old worlds I'd left behind weren't doing it for me, so I spun up a server at home and gave my friends the information and then set to work getting things up and running there. Queue the weekend and we spent a good amount of time on Friday and then Saturday night playing and progressed into the Swamp and acquired some iron. We then went on a quest to find the Merchant, which resulted in us accidentally finding Plains and getting killed over and over again, which ended-up taking us about an hour and a half or more at the end of the night to recover our corpses.
I think that's the moment my friends burned out on it and I was feeling pretty similarly at that point. I logged back on Sunday, but my friends were nowhere to be found and I got the sense that this server was going to be abandoned. Feeling like there's no point in playing by myself now--which is weird, given I played over 100-hours of the game solo--I started looking for other stuff.
Which got me back to Teardown. I haven't played in maybe two years and to be honest, when I booted it up, I really wasn't feeling it. I kind of was just exploring and wasn't sure where to start on the mission I'd left it at, so I just started making some holes near the items I needed to extricate and before I knew it an hour had passed and I was hooked again.
I took about 62 minutes of planning and tweaking, but I finally was able to grab all the items in the level, 4 required, 2 optional and make an escape; damn it felt good. I took a quick break, because that game gets my heart pounding and I need a minute to calm down afterwards, but I then jumped back in and finally completed a mission no problem that I'd been struggling with two years prior when I eventually stopped playing the game. Now I've just spent another 65 minutes or so on the next mission and managed to complete that one with all the optional objectives.
My kids will be excited because they've been playing it more again--sandbox mode--and were wanting new levels and tools, which I've just unlocked. And honestly, now having played a couple of hours of it again, I have zero desire to go back to Valheim at all.
Valheim is one of my favorite games though it does seem like most people burn out after the swamp. The difficulty ramps up fast and if you aren't prepared with good gear/food/portals it feels impossible.
Working with friends to explore and recover gear can be fun too with the right co-ordination, but it takes some patience and planning that not everyone has the will to do.
Our group is just entering the Mistlands now and I predict many more deaths!
Yeah, I think it's just that we've all played a lot at this point and repeatedly made it to stuff like Plains, but not further.
I turned up the resources to 2x on my server and it is faster, but things are still very much a grind, especially trying to get stuff for 3 people.
We'll see if we get back to it. I've still got my server up, as it doesn't cost me anything to run it, so I periodically take a peak at it to see if anyone is on, but I think they're hooked on WoW Forever now, so I doubt if they'll log back in.
I've been playing a lot of Elden Ring Nightreign lately. I've only been playing solo so far, but have beaten all the bosses (including the ED variants that have been available since I tarted playing) and have started working on the remembrance quests for the characters.
I've been having a blast, it scratches both the souls-like and rogue-lite itch for me in the moment to moment gameplay. The meta-progression via relics is a bit too random for my tastes, but I've managed to get some reasonably good loadouts for the characters I've played so far so it's fine.
I will probably try out some multiplayer at some point, though with Valheim 1.0 dropping recently some friends and I have started a new save (sadly said friends aren't interested in Nightreign, so I'd be at the mercy of random matchmaking to play multiplayer)
So I started playing Stellar Blade.
I didn't think I'd enjoy a game like that, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
I did trick the girl I'm dating into thinking it was called "Bootylicious Blade Fighter".
I made a redisgned logo that said "Bootylicious Blade Fighter" and sent her a bunch of screenshots with the logo in the corner.
We joke about stuff like that, I'd told her about the smut novel I read out of curiosity and so now me reading or playing weird gratuitus stuff is a topic of jest.
Underneath the outfits and eye candy presentation there's a fairly decent game to be played. While it isn't a 10/10, it controls well, feels smooth, and has a somewhat satisfying progression going on.
Mods can go a little bit too much into the "adult" theme for my liking, though I did wind up getting a couple of them as some of them greatly expand the customisation options (SFW in my case) like jewellery, hair, and clothing styles. I recommend at least checking it out.
Or, if you want to dip into the gratuity for the sake of jest, you can go hog wild with fully modelled genitalia. If mod makers put half the effort they put into accurately modelling virtual anuses into something good, we'd live in an utopia right now.
I agree on the gameplay which is very solid. Not entirely perfect for me but far enough from souls likes to enjoy it on easy.
The fanservice probably drew lot of people in and the game is good enough to honestly say that it is more than the presentation. Sex sells and enough teasing does too, though if they added it in anyway they could have integrated it better into the game world as currently it sticks out a lot in contrast.
I can't comment on the mods as I have it on PS5 and have no interest to neither pay twice for the exact same thing nor put Denuvo on my computer.
Been on a Castlevania kick and I decided to revisit Lamet of Innocence for the PS2, after bouncing off of it multiple times.In short, I definitely see why that happened.
The idea of Castlevania doing a Devil May Cry has a ton of potential, and some of it is kinda delivered by the game. There are some fun combos to pull off, with a good amount of damage potential if you really maximize their use, it's cool to see classic Castlevania monsters interpreted in 3D, and the game has an incredible soundtrack. That being said, the drawbacks are pretty foundational, and it's left to be maybe a template at best, but hardly a finished game.
Structurally, the game has little in common with Symphony of the Night (or even Devil May Cry) or even classic Castlevania. There is a small central hub with portals to five worlds which can be completed in any order. The levels themselves are not connected, and are mostly made up of empty rooms with a few enemies to fight. The paths within don't really diverge much, and upgrades are sparse, mostly unhelpful, and hard to find due to the terrible camera. There's a boss fight at the end, and another level and boss after all five are completed.
It's possible to complete levels without finding important items, because most upgrades on the critical path are just health/mp increases. I've completed every level and have only found one relic (special ability) and maybe 6 accessories. Either they're unreasonably well hidden or there just aren't very many, but it seems really strange for equipment and powerups to be so few and far between in, since leveling up is not really a thing in this game. It's opaque in a way that doesn't feel considered, and it asks the player to retread identical rooms too frequently to feel well made. Mostly a lot of wandering around, avoiding enemy encounters unless forced otherwise, jumping everywhere so the camera will point high enough to see if there's anything in the empty room.
Lament of Innocence kind of feels like a quick and cheap knockoff unfortunately. It can be pretty fun at times, and it's carried pretty hard by its soundtrack (which doesn't get old in spite of some truly boring levels), but the missed potential makes it more frustrating than it would be otherwise. I'll finish it up and see if there are any last mintue twists before moving onto the sequel with this all in mind.
I played the WoW Forever beta on the weekend and quite enjoyed it.
I have been on and off playing on my own CMangos server with bots for a while now when I want to scratch the itch, but it's a pale experience at best. This is: different enough from classic to be fun, there are only so many large "fresh" experiences for WoW available, and I'm hopeful they can do a horizontal game going forward. Time will tell but in the meantime I will play if I'm having fun. I think I am going to play a dwarf shaman but not really sure which ruleset at the moment.
Assasins Creed Valhalla I am pretty engrossed in right now.
Eivor the male protagonist, portrayed by Magnus Bruun, feels a lot closer to Geralt of Rivia than I expected. He's smart and eloquent and courageous. There is a much different vibe to this game than previous ones.
The HUD was reduced from Oddysey and no longer feels like I'm looking at a cockpit.
The villages and monasteries look and feel different from each other, less like copy/pasted Greek communes.
The design of the game tries to keep you in one region but it is not at all required. I felt in oddysey there was like "go, explore all of Greece!" But this game learned that is painfully daunting, and you can enter into "pledges" at your base camp to complete a set of story quests in one region first before moving onto the next.
The old English spoken by anglo Saxons is fun.
Vikings are just so much more interesting than ancient greece, and despite the cool sequences in oddysey with Medusa and fire trolls and minotaurs it just felt stiff compared to how breathable Valhalla is.
A few tweaks make this game a little more engaging:
I can't craft or auto craft arrows, you have to reclaim from bodies or pick up from stumps or ammo cases. Which also means you aren't scowering the open world for iron or wood all the time either like in oddysey. If I run out of arrows, well I'll have to adapt. And that's cool.
Forts contain wealth and gear and ability books but clearing the fort of every loot and enemy is not some pop up objective tied to the big XP payout. It was kind of automatic to me in Oddysey to go for any fort and 100% it for the XP it would give. But then I'm spending so much time on one fort and the game becomes a fort simulator. Valhalla let's you spot the wealth/spots of interest, sneak or massacre your way there and then leave without a threat of XP FOMO.
Side missions: these are a lot more like stranger missions in GTA, honestly. They're written so affable and native to the world. And maybe it's the navigation settings I have saved, but the side missions keep their waypoints very minimal, which means if I look away and the npc I was supposed to follow walks off, then I genuinely won't know where to go and it's like the world continues on. Granted, they'll return to start over if you leave without completing the "world event" but there is a lack of handholding that feels so tight, so refreshing.
Also it has a bureau featuring actual assassins and I'm looking forward to how these factions intertwine. Edit: how the Assasins story and the volatile story happening under the Vikings intertwines, that is.
Normal Golf Game is a perfectly normal game of golf. With exceedingly normal controls.
One which earned it the nickname "QWOlf".
The game's mostly about struggling against the controls (it easy to set up, but it won't stay set up) to complete a variety of challenges to find all across the course (mostly single-shot ones, although you do have a set of multi-hit ones, including the usual par/birdie for each hole), ultimately coming up against Luke Muscat's Ultimate Golf Challenge: get par across the whole course. That's as far as I got so far.
It's short, good, fun golf. With a bit of meta-commentary apparently (only saw a building with scraps on how to make the UI, and stacks upon stacks of Luke trying his challenge).
Driving Rogue's recently got a bit of a rep as "carlatro", which isn't really wrong?
I already spoke about it before, even back then I was very positive, and now my main problem (the drift) has been corrected.
Again, it's an Outrun-esque racer where you need to complete the track in time with enough points.
You get points from hitting your top speed, slipstreaming, near misses, and drifting (so it not feeling good was an issue). Between stages you'll enter a shop to buy mods (Jokers, you can have 10 of them unlike Balatro's 5 but they also impact your driving stats so you do need more room), consumables, an ability (nitro's an example, but my favorite's ghost which just lets you phase through other cars for an instant), and trick stat boost.
You get a sprint, a marathon, and lastly a boss per stage, with the 3rd stage being the last one of a run (ignoring endless mode).
Game's good, a bit on the short side and with not even enough to qualify as an excuse of a story, but again, this is carlatro, you're here to see how big the combo and your score gets, not for a story to rival Hades.
Been working through Red Dead Redemption 2. I've finally gotten over what I can only describe as my interest hump. Lately a lot of big games take a long time to grab my interest. I'm finally att he point where I'm enjoying the game.
Except the horrendous bugs. I've had a number of the bugs the last few days that are just frustrating. Game crashed a couple times which is always annoying though thankfully didn't lose any progress either time. I skinned a baby alligator and had the skin on my horse but it didn't exist in inventory and I couldn't sell it to craft the saddle. It visually was on my horse for hours before it finally disappeared but I lost that and had to kill a big one to be able to craft the saddle.
Was also hunting elk to craft satchel upgrades. Needed 1 more pelt and spent probably 2 hours wandering the mountains where they are and only found 1 or 2 star elk. I finally found one and shot it near a short cliff, it slid partially down but it looked walkable. Apparently not as I slipped getting to it, no big I was able to skin it. But then while trying to get off the cliff I slipped again dropped the pelt and it went whoop through the terrain and disappeared. Such bullshit.
Also had some issues when riding, I'm clearly to the side of a rock at full gallop but the game decides that no you ran straight into it and throws me off. Super annoying when that happens. I've started having to give wider berths to stuff than I should need to.
Lot of minor issues like that that add and make it annoying but otherwise am enjoying the game a lot
Finished Kowloon's Gate a while ago.
That game... Is neither good nor fun.
It's an interesting game, though.
The game itself relies on being weird, including having weird enemies and sometimes sexual imagery(A late game boss is literally a massive dick and balls with arms attached to it), the plot is kinda nonsensical at times, and is definititely a game you should consider using a guide with. iirc I previously talked about it, but a summary is that you play as a Feng Shui master and your job is to expel malice and return "Yin" to its correct/stable state, so you go to Kowloon and deal with "JPEG Dungeons" that are more like a movie/FMV where you navigate it like Google Earth/Map live view sort of navigation. Talk to NPCs, pickup items, do things, etc. Then you enter Hutongs, which is a kind of convoluted dungeon, and the game has no random encounters, certain tiles contain Guilu(Malice possessed objects) that you detect by having the screen distort and change colors, you fight them either by absorbing their element, or shooting a superior element at them that you previously absorbed, if you absorb all 5 elements, you game over, I really like how the combat ends up being trying to weigh whether to absorb, shoot or scan to see element of the enemy, as the Guilu attacks you after every action.
The music choice is interesting.
The game as I previously mentioned is NOT fun/good, and if it wasn't weird, I might've not been compelled to finish it, but it's a game that has nothing similar to it that I know.
I've also went back to my replay of EO1 via EO1HD after finishing Kowloon's Gate.
CONTROL Resonant is out right now (with a 93GB launch hotfix lmao); so hyped!
Anyone else planning on playing it this weekend? Would love to share opinions and theories on it.
I am taking a break from Warframe at the current time. So here is the games that I have been playing in the meantime.
Dwarf Fortress - currently learning the ropes with this one, and so far I had managed to get my first long term, after picking the game on and off, since I got it, fortress into a capital. I had set this set of dwarfs where I had originally set down another group after ahem failing to plan properly (everyone starved), and since I liked that location I just set another group to that location and after learning that ghosts do in fact exist, I buried all of bodies to lay them to rest. But for whatever reason I cannot raise my population above 200, because one or two of them die of dehydration, despite them having access to water and alcohol. And I am currently building a large hospital on my living quarters level and trying to expand my dwarfed-made underground lake, by making it go down two levels instead of one level.
Fields of Mistria - This one is like Stardew Valley, in the sense that you start out as an outsider to a sleepy village, with a bunch of bachelors and bachelorettes (Reina is best girl). And it falls on you to help improve the standing of the village and to fix the village (mostly through material gathering and selling crops) after the area was hit by a earthquake. I mean if you like Stardew, you might like this one because it is more of that type of game.