by mnemoidian
Showing 1-10 of 47 items
Very disappointed. I guess at it's core, it's a decent game. But it feels like price of "going 3D" has been a very steep on - and like the game has been released (abandoned?) in a very buggy state. Playing through the game co-operatively, online, we ran into a plethora of bugs - everything from broken cutscenes to box physics just not working. Not to mention basic user interface problems - joining a multiplayer game, the game selecting keyboard+mouse controls despite you controlling the menus with a gamepad? Doesn't help that the game ends on what is effectively a "to be continued" sign. Maybe Trine 4 will be a return to form.
Vermintide has it's good and it's bad. It's very Payday 2/Left 4 Dead inspired in design - basically running the same systems straight off, but a lot more focused on melee combat - as there is a cost of using ranged in the game (ammo is limited, magic hurts the user). This works fine, and the game has clear potential. Where the game suffers is in 2 areas: 1) Level design is uninspired. All levels feel alike. This is in stark contrast to Payday 2 and Left 4 Dead. Especially Payday 2's levels are very distinct and while you do similar things in them - the way you go about them is wildly different. Here... you are basically crawling through dark passages and cemeteries, carrying barrels and smashing crystals in all of them. 2) Loot. I like Loot. I've played a lot of Diablo. I've played a lot of Payday. Loot is fun. What isn't fun is Payday 2's "random loot" system - and it's only made WORSE by locking all weapons (which are the major part of what's fun with the combat) behind random drops. Very frustrating. But... it has a lot of potential. And I do like Warhammer games - even Fantasy Battle ones.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I like a lot about Helldivers. It invokes Starship Troopers. It feels good to play. But Playing 1 player, 2 player and 3 players (but not 4) made me feel like 1 player required me to play a specific way. 2 Players had a good balance, while 3 players left me feeling superfluous. So... I don't know. I might come back to it. Or just play it when I can get a second player.
Pretty cool. Small game, and it did catch me at that one point. Though... that illusion quickly fell apart... but it was nicely done. I did find that it did overstay it's welcome - but that might just be me being a miserly bastard.
I want to like this game a lot more than I do. I want it to inhabit that same fever-dream-esque status that Fez has for me... but it never quite got there. Part of the reason why it never quite gets there is probably the 'technical' reasons - few games make me motion sick, but The Witness made me very sick until I adjusted the FOV (using a config file... :/ ), which helped the issue, but did not solve it. The other part is... that it's too long. And it appears(?) to have a narrative, but that narrative is only damaged by the amount of Puzzles (many of which you just blow through with little thought). Did I like it? Yes. Do I have papers of insane scribbles lying around me? Yes. Have I recommended it to multiple friends? Yes. ... but I still feel ambivalent stepping away from it, and not at all interested in digging into the "post endgame" puzzles (which I started messing around with a bit), which I was in Fez (The Monolith still excited me!). But maybe my problem is that I'm somehow putting this in a similar place to where I have Fez, and that is an unrealistic comparison? I don't know.
I remember quite enjoying 'Tomb Raider', even though I felt there was a dissonance in Lara's personality - she changes too suddenly, there's not a lot of Lara from the beginning of the game a short time after the action starts popping off, despite her being very emotional about what's going on at first. So I'm very glad to say that while Lara is still a mass-murderer of historical proportions, her character is written a lot more evenly in the sequel. There's some growth (not a lot), but there character at the end of the game is recognizable from the character at the start of the game. More, she's clearly human and sympathetic. I like the character. And I think it's to the character's credit that I keep bringing up her body count - it's the one thing that is causing dissonance in me now. Beyond that, the game But it's not all smooth sailing. I kept struggling with the climbing mechanics through the game - they felt clunky and the fact that they are not 'magnetic' pissed me off. But I also found that the mechanics for climbing is also not consistent - there are times when climbing seems magnetic - but most of the time it isn't. Every time it seemed to shift, I kept struggling - especially in 2 areas: 1) Timing puzzle where you had to "drop" onto a platform below you. The game kept correcting the position in a way that I had to do the sequence about 5 times before I managet to pull it off. 2) Lara seems to have inertia when climbing? Sometimes, when quickly going from "climbing to the side" to "jumping up," the game would jump me to the side anyway - killing and resetting me to the closest checkpoint. (Worth noting: Checkpoints are good, but loadtimes (rare normally) are pretty bad.) Another complaint I have is the story. The main characters are written in a way that they pretty much telegraph their entire character arcs the moment they appear, and the story is entirely macguffin based to the point where it's just window dressing, entirely without substance. Combat and Sneaking is pretty good, but the amount of people they throw at Lara is just ludicrous. Skills are largely interesting - though some make Lara possibly a bit too powerful... Stealth isn't as good as Phantom Pain - but Lara's not supposed to be as... potent as Snake is. Seems likely there will be a third game, and that the story will be equally insubstantial. I'll probably check it out, based on this games' performance.
Firewatch is pretty cool, cute and stuff. It's a great, focused experience. I did not expect the gut-punch that is the intro - it hit very close to home. I'm still torn on what to think about parts of the game. I was hoping the camera would be something more than it was... but it's fine. It's a touching story, but I also kind of feel that it started pulling it's punches after the intro - going for the KO in the first minute, then lulling you into security with the cute banter. ... I don't really know where I stand on Firewatch.
XCOM 2 is really unfortunate. On a technical level, the game is a mess. Regular crashes to desktop, terrible performance, long load times, fake load-screens, lots of small timers running all of the place just wasting time. It's just frustrating. I can't count the number of times the game just decided to close on me. It's an unmitigated disaster. Come on, It should not have been released in this state! Then there's the game. Having played these games for decades - being an evangelist for the earliest games in the series, this game infuriates me. It's just so frustrating. More than ever, it feels like the percentages the game presents to me are straight up lying to me. The turn-limit on most missions is another point of frustration. I understand what the developers are trying to do here - they are trying to push you out of your comfort zone, create more desperate moments and in general stop being so safe with our "crawling overwatch" strategy... but I feel like they went the wrong way with it - especially considering that I feel like they did a much better job of it in Enemy Within - where it was an optional objective with a lot of incentive. Instead, XCOM 2 gives you 8 turns to get to an objective, usually covered by 4 pods of enemies. This typically means that you will be sprinting blindly for 4+ turns just to get to the objective in time, at which time you are expected to make a heroic sacrifice to get the objective done. Here it just feels like the game is stacked against me to the point where I eventually broke down and started save-scumming heavily to get through the game. And I hate save scumming, I feel it ruins the game for myself. And then there's the final mission, which breaks it's own rules and just seems to throw enemies at you without any real thought on how you are supposed to deal with that without save scumming. On the other hand, XCOM 2's been the first time in a long time where I suddenly went "Hmm." and spent 10 minutes just planning through my consequent actions. When that works, the game is beautiful. Overall, I feel like XCOM 2 is trying to bludgeon you into submission: "Do things the way I tell you to, or I'll punch you again!", rather than encourage and teach you how to use it's systems. (And let's not even talk about the game teaching you things... XCOM 2 must be one of the greatest failures of Interaction Design in a while - considering the number of hidden features that the game never seems to be able to figure out how to tell you about...) ... sigh. (And yeah, I'll be back in ~4 years for XCOM 3, but I hope they sort this shit out.)
SUPER. HOT. SUPER. HOT. SUPER. HOT. ... err. Honestly, I didn't think that this would live up to it's prototype, but I do think that they managed to at least meet my expectations, if not slightly exceed them. Very cool game.
Disgustingly charming. Surprisingly one of the funniest games I've played in a while. Also dastardly difficult at times.