Big list so far this year; after the relatively small number of games finished in 2016 I decided I would work on my backlog and particularly see how many games I could finish in January.
Bit of a mixed bag with some genuinely awful stuff I managed to suffer through and some absolute classics.
Showing 1-10 of 53 items
January - 4/5 A good, solid, varied campaign, going from rail shooting to tank control to contesting points through to stealth. I think it takes you through pretty much everything you'd need to be able to handle the major points of multiplayer. Shooting in a Battlefield game remains as fun as ever and the weaponry isn't as much of a restricting factor as you'd think for the era - the only exception being the fact that with one exception there is no real way to kill someone remotely without making a loud noise. My only issue would be the usual with BF - sometimes checkpoints are a bit far apart.
January - 4/5 Very good campaign. Gears was always at its worst when it was taking itself too seriously so having the main characters a bit more aware that people with no necks chainsawing monsters in half is not terribly realistic works a lot better. PC port works well, too - being able to aim with a mouse makes the enemy feel a lot less bullet-spongy to me than the 360 games, massively speeding up what felt a bit stodgy before.
January - 3/5 Not bad. I like the little quick missions that you do to unlock stuff. Lots of little niggles and weird decisions that bring it down though.
January - 3/5 Was a lot of fun til about 2/3 the way through and then the AI just couldn't keep up. The game structure feels a bit too randomised and free to play for a game which is supposed to be something you buy, too. At the price of "part of Origin Access" it's fine.
January - 1/5 [PS4 version] Barely works a significant part of the time. Some really fun and cool ideas ruined by the tracking. Even in a pitch black room! I'd love to try it on Vive but I don't have the space or money.
January - 3/5 Loved the racing. Huge, beautiful world with loads to do. The F40 with 4WD upgrade is probably still my favourite car in a driving game. My issues are these: - The PC port is terrible. Still stutter city. - The game's goals feel too much like they came from an algorithm rather than being something that someone planned out. - The sense of progression that was in Horizon 2 that game from touring around the hubs is gone. - The final showcase was fucking shit. There's a slang word in Japanese, 誰得 - daretoku - which is a shortened version of the sentence "who the hell would get anything from this". What is it with me, 2016 and disappointing sequels that end badly?
January - 4/5 Really solid action RPG. Shows its age both technically and in terms of design but I played through it pretty much in one sitting. Hub level design was impressive. Recommended!
January - 1/5 It's frustrating that this should be so much worse than Guardian Heroes with the main planner being the same guy responsible for it. I'm not convinced there's any sense of balance, the levels are insanely short (so you end up talking more than fighting, even in a 3 hour game) and there's only 1 campaign - turns out that you get the achievement for clearing the game with each character just by playing the very last level, which has no fighting in it anyway! Extra marks for the completely insane interface where they literally have you hitting F5 to cycle through display modes to show the (minimal) stuff on the 3DS version's second screen.
January - 3/5 Good shooting with some super fun weapons. Looks fantastic with hundreds of bolts and shots flying around during hectic fights. Those Clank sections, though... I'm hoping they make another as I think with a development schedule not based around a film they could really nail it. Though Sunset Overdrive was one more iteration away from being really good, and I'd prefer another of them, I think.
January - 2/5 It's still based on the SM4 engine which is fun enough but there are too many faults to recommend. Firstly, there are far too many instant loss conditions around the middle of the game which results in something often infuriating to play (I literally got spotted by an enemy that warped in from somewhere else at one point, instantly failing the mission I was on). Secondly, there's too much bumph in there - bits where you walk 15 seconds to another cutscene, short bits of text to bridge cutscenes, having to go back to town to increase your level cap, stuff like that, and that's not even including the fact that about 50% of the battles feel like filler. Most of all, though, the story and characters just didn't do it for me. I think it's clear it's not written for me as a non-Japanese man; the story of Yukimura Sanada is one which I realise is important to anyone who wishes to understand the Japanese character, it's still not one I enjoy. It isn't helped here by the fact that Yukimura as a character is still incredibly boring and passive in everything he does - which I assume is part of his appeal to the sizeable female audience of the Musou games (the same applies to Zhou Yu in the Three Kingdoms games). Where this game goes even further off-course for me is the way the relationship between Yukimura and Chacha (culminating in the story's end), as well as the way Sasuke is included. One other thing - if this and the latest Atelier are indications of how Kocmo are going to use PS4 Pro hardware then I think I'll be starting to mess around with my display settings for their games in future. It uses an extremely ugly reprojection method to make it look kind of like 4K, except there are miscoloured pixels, dot crawling and the like all over the place. It's extremely ugly and seriously harms the framerate. You might ask why I'm looking at individual dots; to that I say "why the fuck else would I have bought a TV that can display them?"