by mnemoidian
2012 - End of Times? Best play some awesome games then!
Rules; Games listed are either:
Doesn't mean I won't play more of them, though!
Showing 1-10 of 62 items
Pretty much exactly what I expected - fun game with pretty gross characters that grow some degree of decency by the end. Fun ideas for game-play, even if for me it pretty much ended up being the game of "how can I kick dudes into something lethal"-the game.
Beautiful! Very fun in coop, even if it is largely "more of the same" (as Trine (1)). Playing as the Wizard, I think it's hillarious how you can't levitate what YOU are standing on, but you can levitate things below things you are standing on. MAGICAL PHYSICS! ... and a last cop-out way to manage puzzles where the Knight and Thief leave you behind :|
War in the North is and does a lot of things - a decent Co-op distraction, taps into that desire for better loot... it's unfortunately also a buggy mess - especially if you have an AMD graphics card. Throughout the game, to the last chapter, the game was sporadically barely giving me 1 fps then suddenly giving me super-smooth framerate for a bit. Regardless of graphical settings and resolution. In the final chapter, the performance issues became so bad that I was no longer able to stay connected to the multiplayer game, and I had to finish the game in single-player. But, yeah, it's a pretty decent game - even if it is very similar to an MMO in strucutre. The combat is fairly interesting, though.
Battlefield 3 is a strange beast. In multi-player, it is an experience that is closely related to the Call of Duty games, but has it's unique flavor that makes it it's own thing - indeed, the greatest criticism I can give Battlefield 3 is that it's been done before - to me, Battlefield 3 is pretty much the same game as Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Vietnam, Battlefield 2, Battlefield: Bad Company, Battlefield: 2142, Battlefield: Bad Company 2; It's just prettier, and a bit modern. It can be fun, but... it's been done before. The Single-player campaign though, is something else entirely. Here Battlefield 3 is aping it's greatest competitor, yet failing in many ways. It's clearly intended to be a series of "OH SHI-" moments rapidly following one another. And it largely is - which means it suffers from the same "All highs, no lows" problem that I think Call of Duty has: Because there are no low moments (or they are so brief as to be insignificant) the constant high becomes a middling average. Similarly, the game tries to evoke some sort of feeling for the multitude of characters they present and kill off during the game. But so little time is spent building up personalities and relationships that they are meaningless. However... those problems are hardly nique to Battlefield 3. No, Battlefield 3's single-player campaign's greatest issue, in my opinion, is how tightly scripted it is. In many parts of the campaign (on "normal"), I felt more like I was playing a game of "stay within the box the game wants you to", forcing me to not stay too far behind, and not run too far ahead. Doesn't help that load times are fairly long when there are several situations where you can take an RPG to the face (killing you instantly) or a scripted event can cause you to die instantly if you are in the wrong place. That said, Battlefield 3's campaign is not nearly as bad as some people are making it out to be - it's decent, if extremely frustrating at points.
I've struggled to really get into/through dual-joystick shooters recently, but I feel that Renegade Ops has found a perfect balance between Story, Gameplay and Length. The loose controls were a bit off-putting at first, but I think that if it wasn't so loose, it wouldn't have been as interesting either (or so stylish). Game looks great, plays great, and I hope to come back for more DLC at some point in the future - clearly, we must get some sort of explanation where Inferno and Coldstrike come from, yeah!?
One of the best titles of the year. And yeah, I mean the title of the game. The game itself has great value and an amazing chiptune soundtrack. At 4 hours long it feels a bit short - but it's a great experience.
My main complaint towards the Darkness is probably it's brevity with a 6 hour single player campaign. However, with a(n optionally) co-op campaign to explore as well - that feels like weak criticism. The other complains would be that I feel like Starbreeze's interpretation of The Darkness moved a lot faster - because a lot of actions in this game, performed by the Darkness, will stop you from moving - such as the "execution" moves you can perform on grabbed enemies - I appreciate that it puts a lot more focus on those executions (and makes you think more about what you are doing), but I found it disrupting gameplay - to the point where I would avoid doing grabs because I rather wanted to keep moving. That said, it's a fairly pretty game (art-style similar to Borderlands stylized quasi-cell-shaded look) with a story that will tug at your heartstrings. I feel like Digital Extremes keeping the "slow parts" of the game from the first game was very well done - too many games these days spend so much time on the highs that everything just feels middling.
Wow. I'm really torn about this - on the one hand, I really like the character development, and I don't think Lightning and co. being supporting cast was ok - it gave Serah and Noel room to grow as characters. I did not have any particular issues with Mog - though, to be fair, I've always found moggles to be annoying, and Mog is pretty much exactly what I imagined Moggles to be. But yeah, most of the primary parts of Final Fantasy XIII-2 is pretty good. Unfortunately, they stink it up with some pretty stupid mechanics around the middle of the game - almost as if they are trying to make the game seem longer. The Fetch-quest at the middle of the game almost broke me, and the final boss' special ability was not telegraphed nearly well enough - forcing me to brute force it (and still struggle). Not cool. But still, pretty cool. Kind of.
Having now finished Mass Effect 2 three times, putting more than 130 hours into it, I do feel like I have to place the game apart from other games I've liked - it's very rare that I feel the need to replay a game, and it's very rare that I find parts of games I replay exhilarating. The final sections of ME2 are just breathtaking and the final decision is an extremely difficult one - there are so many reasons to go either route. That said, I feel like I'm done with ME2 now - and hope I don't feel the need to come back for another round in a few months.
After 20 hours, I still don't see what all the buzz about this is about - while it's a fairly competent 3rd person action RPG, with focus oddly on the middling story, rather than the pretty decent combat system. Unfortunately, as for story-content, Reckoning is clearly a game of quantity over quality. I found my enjoyment of the game improved significantly after I started skipping all but the most central story bits. And even then... pretty obvious story. Other than that - it's not a far leap to see that 38 Studios wants to make an MMORPG out of this - it has all the markings of an MMORPG - the weak story, story written so generally that anyone could be the protagonist, and an open world with a quest progression that leads you through the zones of the game. While I'm not going to make the art comparison to World of Warcraft, I am going to compare Reckoning to it on most other points. Less interesting story, more interesting combat. Finally, I don't think Crafting Systems work very well in most of these games - and yeah... it works pretty terribly in this game. Every time I attempted to craft an item, I realized that the items available were significantly worse than the items I found during my travels. Bonus complaint: Managing inventories is not fun. Conclusion: Middling. May come back for more if I get bored, but doubt it.