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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.
I've spent the last week playing Final Fantasy XIII. This is a game I played for 10 hours before putting it down 2 years ago. I've now played enough to get to "the real game", and I think all this time I've put into it to get here has made me hate playing it. As far as games go, there's just not a lot here outside of the battle system, and I don't find the battle system particularly enjoyable. So now I'm 26 hours into it and putting it down again. I shouldn't be terribly surprised. I don't really like Final Fantasy games, and the only one I've finished was FFXV. Still, I picked up FFXII because of the recent sale, as it's the only FF game I haven't played so I'm going to give that one a go.
I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the FFXV offering on Xbox Game Pass includes the DLC, which I didn't buy when I played that game, so I'm also starting the DLC episodes. The first one is Gladiolus and I've entirely forgotten how to play this game.
I'm with you, except that I am generally a Final Fantasy fan. I laboured my way to "the real game" part of FFXIII only to find myself asking "That's it?" And then I accidentally beat the game relatively immediately so "That's it?" turned into "What the hell?" It seems like FFXIII after it "opens up" basically becomes a rather small portion of FFX, and then ends.
The sequels are better games overall, but I'm not even sure I'd say they're worth playing because FFXIII set such a low bar that stumbling over right out the gate may still result in a better game.
I appreciate you saving me some guilt over dropping it. I was half tempted to just mainline to the end of XIII so I could get into the sequel, but I think I'll just let it go. Life's too short for crappy games, right?
I played through Q.U.B.E. Director's Cut (thanks @kfwyre for the idea). It was a great game, quite reminiscent of Portal . I'm looking forward to trying Q.U.B.E. 2. All together, it took about 4 hours, which was not rushing, and trying to find secrets when I could. Solid game, good puzzles; if you were thinking "I'd like Portal, but instead of portals, it's a different mechanic" then this is the game that you want. 7/10.
Glad you enjoyed it! You, along with finishing Q.U.B.E. 2, have actually inspired me to go back and replay the first one! I played it before the Director's Cut came out, so I'm thinking that's a good way of revisiting it for a familiar yet fresh experience.
I've been playing a lot of One Step from Eden lately. It's an extremely fast paced game that I struggle to find a genre for. It's sort of like Megaman Battle Network with roguelike elements. Anyway, it's super fast paced and challenging, but not in a way that feels unfair and it's got a lot of replayability because you can always keep pushing yourself. Like my first goal was to be able to beat a boss. Then I started to be able to beat several boss, but some were still run killers if I found them at the wrong time. Then I tried to beat the game. Then I tried to beat the game with multiple endings and different characters and so on and so forth. It's tons of fun and there are a lot of viable builds, though there's a solid luck component in terms of whether you get the right cards and artifacts for what you're looking for.
We're not quite half-way through the year yet, but I'm already saying One Step from Eden is a strong contender for indie game of the year.
I've also been playing XCOM: Chimera Squad recently. It's a really solid entry into the XCOM franchise, but it's also kinda experimental. The new mission structure in terms of how you breach and then fight a contained encounter is nice, one of the things I really hated about the previous (new) XCOM was when you would move one step to far on your last move and trigger a new pod of enemies, who get to move as a reaction to being trigger and then take their turn. It really felt like bullshit. And with the new format that's no longer a thing.
All the characters feel unique and useful and you can combine them in interesting ways. And some of the dialogue is genuinely funny.
The move to an intitiative tracker instead of XCOM TURN, ALIEN TURN means there are a lot of opportunities to mess with enemy initiative and added depth to your target prioritization. So I would say it's tactically deeper than previous entries in the series.
And seeing the alien civilians on the battlefield is really a nice touch. You'll be fighting terrorists and there'll just be a viper in a polo shirt cowering in a corner trying not to die.
Though I will say that it's buggy AF. Lots of hard locks. I ran into a soft lock yesterday that I need to see if I can recover from. So it's in dire need of some patches. But my girlfriend has been playing it too and hers been much more stable, so YMMV.
I picked up the Halo Master Chief Collection on steamrecently, and I have now played the Halo Reach campaign for the first time, and I'm making my way through Halo CE this week.
Reach was a pretty solid game in terms of gameplay, especially since prior to playing reach, I had only played the original Halo back on the xbox. The story wasn't the most engaging for me, and it felt like they were referring to a bunch people and things I didn't know about with little to no explanation. Hopefully the other games in the series will fill in the gaps in my knowledge and may make me like the story more in hindsight.
The original Halo has been fun and somewhat nostalgic for me, but as I play through the later missions for the first time in over15 years, I'm finding the game much more repetitive and uninteresting than I remember. It feels like every room and hallway is the same as the previous one, and the only way to tell I'm still moving forward is if new enemies are spawning when I enter the same room full of the same few enemies for the 15th time this level. I've honestly forgotten how the game ends, so I don't know how much longer the backtracking and repetitiveness will continue, but hopefully the end game will at least take me to somewhere new.
All things considered, I'm glad I am able to play reach and the original game again on a PC with updated graphics, and I look forward to seeing what happens in the future entries in the series as they are released.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare -- the attention to detail is simply stunning in this game! I'm not very good at FPS games but the graphics in this game are simply astounding, and it's very well-optimized too. I can run the game on a laptop 2070max-q with CPU capped at 3.0GHz and I get roughly 60fps on 2K ultrawide which is very impressive :) But I still can't overlook the fact that this game is a huge 172GB on PC...
A few friends and I started playing Avorion. We played for a little bit on an existing server and enjoyed it a bit. So we started our own hosted server, and it's been pretty fun so far. It's a voxel-based space game where you can build custom ships, space stations, and other things. You can administrate a trading empire, hire pilots to fly your ships for you and have a fleet and go raiding, there's a good variety of stuff. I really enjoy the building/crafting type games, and also very much enjoy space games. This has the feel of Eve Online, but with simple 8-50 person multiplayer instead of thousands. And you can also control the server, add mods, etc.