KillEm_Dafoe

I played it at launch on my PS5 and while I had fun with it, I shelved it after about 15 hours or so to wait for the prospective "next gen update." Now that's it's FINALLY here, I actually really do want to do a full playthrough but it's just come out at such a bad time. I'm still making my way through Dying Light 2, and Elden Ring is out next week. It will probably be some months before I get to Cyberpunk, which kinda sucks since I've been waiting so long to play it. It's at the top of my backlog though. Sounds like they've made a ton of improvements over the last year.

@therealturk: @merxworx01:I really don't think the timer during the night/dark parts is nearly as bad as it seems at first. It's supposed to create tension by making you manage your resources to ensure you have what you need to survive. If you overestimate your ability to survive, you're gonna get your ass kicked.

A few hours in and you have access to better items to increase your survivability. You use the shrooms to create immunity boosters rather than just taking the shrooms themselves. The boosters are used much quicker and provide a bigger increase in time, and continue to get better as long as you upgrade your blueprint for them. Like the first game, certain aspects become much easier the farther you get and the more you invest resources into the right things. But also like the first game, the increase in your abilities is very slow and gradual. I'm 15 hours in and have upgraded my timer a good bit but don't think I'm anywhere near close to trivializing the entire mechanic.

Right now I have only 6 minutes or so of base immunity time, but have a ton of boosters, UV sticks, and a bunch of purple weapons that have high durability. I can get a bunch of stuff done during the night and come away feeling decently rewarded without losing too much. Not saying it's a perfect mechanic by any means but I think it's very manageable once you get your bearings. Honestly though, I think the first game had the better nighttime mechanic. It was more punishing but also felt more dangerous and scary in a fun way.

Also, I'm assuming you're talking about Hakon when referring to Aiden Gillen? I can see the resemblance, but Hakon is played by and modeled after David Bell. He is an actor but is more importantly credited as the creator of parkour. He was involved in the first Dying Light too, as far as I know, doing motion capture stuff. If you've never seen the District B13 movies, you definitely should.

Well, after what seems like a very troubled development and several significant delays, Dying Light 2 is finally out. What are everyone's thoughts?

I adored the first game, although I only played it once, only coming back to it to play The Following expansion. It had the best feeling first person traversal and melee combat mechanics I had seen at the time...at least by the end of the game. The main reason I never really had the urge to play through it again was because the ramp up to the game feeling amazing is pretty slow. Not that its unplayable at the start by any stretch, but after knowing what it feels like later, it makes starting over unappealing.

So far, DL2 seems like it's going for the exact same gradual increase in power and abilities. I think it feels even slower than the first game, going by memory, actually. That said, you also seem a little more capable at the outset than you were in the first, especially when it comes to the parkour abilities. Still, this game has a very slow beginning, as it's a good 3 hours before the open world is even available. The game continues tutorializing a lot of things beyond that, though.

I'm about 10 hours in at this point and my overall impression is positive, but not without caveats. The parkour and combat still feel really good. It's perhaps just less impressive than DL1 was simply by being more of same 7 years later. I'm enjoying that the game has leaned a bit more into its RPG elements, and I'm just getting to the point where loot feels meaningful. There seems to be a good variety of things to do, but the map full of icons is giving me serious Ubisoft vibes.

Maybe I'm not far enough in the story yet, but I don't think it's terrible so far. There are a few fun characters, and the voice acting ranges between good, to "good," to just plain flat. I've done several side quests that have implications in the main story, a few of which have had various choices and outcomes that already make me curious to see how else things would play out if I did the other option or had not even tackled it at all. A few quests and their placement in the story make no fucking sense though. There have been two instances so far where I've been to areas and met characters I've already interacted with only for them to act like this is the first time meeting me. Either the writing has failed to account for this or certain quests are being given in the wrong order. It's hard to get absorbed into the story at all with something as immersion-breaking as that.

As far as visuals, it looks nice running on performance mode on the PS5, though there is little about it I would consider impressive. I tried the other two visual mode options just to compare and I still like that the performance mode, purely technically, somehow still looks better than the higher fidelity modes. I will say that I haven't seen many repeated character models yet. Every character you can actually talk to has a very distinct look and animates pretty well during conversations. This is something Techland has never really excelled at until now so maybe it stands out a little more because of that.

I totally understand everything Jeff seemed put off by in the QL. Your enjoyment of this game will heavily depend on your tolerance of modern open world mechanics and your commitment to building your abilities up. There is still a lot to like and the game can be fairly rewarding. If you're a fan of the first game, I think this should be pretty easy to get into.

I definitely still prefer having a physical collection over a digital library. As of recent, however, my purchases have all been digital for a variety of reasons. It started last year when I was pre-ordering games through Amazon and they kept getting delayed to the point where I wouldn't have them after a week after launch. So I just started buying digital versions of games I otherwise wouldn't have. The other major reason is that the sales on PSN have been pretty good and usually beat what physical copies are going for. After a year of owning a PS5, my physical library is only 6 games, and the last one I bought was Ratchet and Clank.

The Resident Evil remake is still one of my favorite games of all time, so I'd probably say that. I also loved

TimeSplitters 2

Red Faction 2

Medal of Honor: Frontline

Mafia

Ratchet and Clank

Die Hard Vendetta

I suspect not many of those hold up all that well, but at the time I loved them. TimeSplitters is probably the only one I can still go back to and have honest fun. I still load of RF2 on the PS4 from time to time for nostalgia's sake, but it plays pretty rough. The original Ratchet and Clank was quickly made obsolete a year later, but at release it was a novel and fun game.

Mafia was likely the first game thought I thought had a legitimately good story. I'd be interested in playing the remake. I don't think any MoH game plays even remotely well by today's standards. And while I haven't played it since I was probably like 6 or so, I will recognize that Die Hard Vendetta is probably a wretched pile of shit, but MAN did I play that thing a lot.

I recently picked up Kena: Bridge of Spirits and Tales of Arise on the PSN sale. I've been playing through Kena all week and I'll probably finish it tonight. I fucking love everything about this game. It's incredibly gorgeous, plays beautifully with a good amount of mechanics that are fun to engage with, and has a pleasant vibe and atmosphere, even during the combat and darker parts of the story. People weren't kidding about the bosses either. The game is deceptively difficult and the bosses are tough but for the most part, very tightly designed and fair. Overall it's just a great mashup of old school action-platformers and classic Zelda design.

Looking for to starting Arise after this. I've been itching to dig deep into a big RPG.

I definitely had to go back and look in my personal site lists to remember most of this shit, and then look up what games came out in a given year after I stopped doing those lists. Kinda weird to think about how long ago these were.

2011: Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Not a perfect game, but still one of the most memorable visual styles and game worlds I can remember playing in.

2012: Max Payne 3 - I would kill for a remaster of this. One of the best third person shooters of all time. It also got me through a very tough time in my life.

2013: The Last of Us - Probably in my top 10 of all time, as well

2014: Wolfenstein: The New Order

2015: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

2016: Titanfall 2

2017: Resident Evil 7

2018: God of War - Looking through the biggest games that came out that year, I just realized I didn't play that many of them. Funnily enough, although I really loved GoW overall, I was still disappointed with parts of it. So I guess it would have to be that by default. Either that or BLOPS 4 for Blackout.

2019: Borderlands 3...or the RE2 Remake.

2020: Last of Us Part 2 - Possibly could've been Half-Life Alyx if I had played more.

2021: Tormented Souls - I think I could only just barely scrape together a top 10 if I wanted to. There just wasn't a whole lot this year that interested me. Even a lot of the games I did play and enjoy didn't exactly set my world on fire. Back 4 Blood, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, RE: Village, Returnal, Outriders, and It Takes Two are among my favorites. My actual GOTY is the indie survival horror throwback, Tormented Souls. If you like old school survival horror games with tank controls, camera angles, and puzzles galore, you owe it to yourself to pick this up.

@stealydan: I'm fairly certain I still own my PS2 copies of both of those games actually. I don't really have a good way to hook up a PS2 though. I'm thinking about trying out some emulators soon.

That's hilarious. I associate Quarashi's Mr. Jinx album with Turok: Evolution. I played that game to death but I think there was only one occasion where I listened to that record while playing it, and for whatever reason, that one time is forever engrained on my brain. Any time I listen to a song from that record I instantly think back to Turok: Evolution and kinda want to play it. Pretty sure I thought about it last week actually...I may actually have to do it soon. Unfortunately I have no music memories linked to Mace Griffin, but I am glad someone else mentioned that awesome game, lol.

I have a lot of others though. "Survival of the Sickest" by Saliva and Jak 2. Slipknot's "Iowa" and the first Red Faction. My buddy and I would often have sleepovers as kids and there was a period where we played a fuckton of THPS3. Obviously that game has an amazing soundtrack of its own, but you get bored of it after awhile. That game is mostly linked to "Group Therapy" by Dope and the first two Ill Nino records for me. When the 1+2 remake came out last year, I made a Spotify playlist exclusively on all the shit we listened to back then to listen to while playing.

@lobster_johnson: I fucking LOVE that game. I actually wanted to write about it when I was still writing blogs on here years ago. Definitely one of the best PS2-era console shooters that no one's ever heard of. Shockingly good story with very punchy action and Soldier of Fortune levels of gore. I need to play that again soon. I don't explicitly remember what the head popping looks like .

Anyway, I recently bought Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 because it was $4 and I thought it would give it a shot. Honestly, for the price, you kinda can't go wrong. It's very janky but a surprising amount of fun with good action. It also features one of the best exploding heads I've seen in a game. If you use either .50 cal rounds or armor piercing rounds, any headshot that triggers a bullet cam will cause heads to pop like over-ripe melons. It's quite graphic, and although the heads come apart in the exact same way every time, it's never not satisfying.

You don't have to play very far into the game either to gain access to AP rounds. I discovered the head popping by accident hours and hours into the game. Didn't realize I had AP rounds loaded in my gun, got a headshot that triggered a bullet cam...definitely a "holy shit" moment for me.