Finally finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider. What a ride! Very good game, and sad to see it end. It didn’t last too long, and I finished it wanting more. But alas, time to move on to the next great adventure. Here’s hoping we’ll keep getting new TR games. 🤞🏼
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Assassin's Creed Odyssey and really enjoyed it. My favorite AC to date. I had to start ignoring side quests which I hate doing but I was never going to finish it before RDR2 if I didn't. After 75 hours I still have a ton left to do. The amount of content is insane.
I recently fully finished Nier: Automata with the best [E]nding. What a fantastic game with a beautiful music score to boot. I must admit to buying a few trophies for the plat but only because I chose to sacrifice my save data. I've been humming Emil's theme tune ever since. Also, I might be in the minority here but 2A was my fave character.
Slime-san (Switch):
Skill-focused platformer ala Super Meat Boy or Celeste. There's not really much to this game outside of the challenge of the gameplay itself, though. There's a lot of characters, but they're not terribly memorable and only get a few lines of dialogue each. The music is unremarkable. The visual design is... weird, with hollow-looking characters and clashing colors all over the place. There are shops to buy new slimes, themes, and accessories, though. The new slimes actually change how your slime feels, although I found myself preferring the default character.
The saving grace of this release is decent level design and a LOT of free DLC content. In addition to the 100 levels in the base game (all with collectibles and time trials), there are four or five additional worlds to play through. Combined with the low cost of admission, it's a good value. I collected the majority of collectible apples throughout the levels and also completed a handful of time trials before hitting the end credits. While I'll probably dip back in here and there, I think I'm mostly done with it. Not an amazing game, but I'm happy enough with it.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC):
Finally got around to playing this. I knew I would have to try this eventually after playing through the excellent Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. It's alright. The core mechanics of the game are pretty solid, of course, and it's fun gradually building up your troops, although I feel like the pool of available skills and abilities for each type of soldier was a bit limited. The presentation is good in battle, although, for whatever reason, the cutscenes seem to top out at 30fps, which is a bit of jarring transition from the smooth 60fps gameplay.
Two things kind of held this game back for me. The first is the sheer repetitiveness of the gameplay. Once I cycled through the four different types of events in this game (UFO sightings, terror missions, panic management quests, and main story quests) a few times, the lack of a feeling of forward progression began to wear on me. This is very much a game where you do the same things over and over again, with little in the way of surprises. The first five or six hours are very strong, but afterward, it just feels like the same thing continuously.
The second thing holding this back for me is the lack of a compelling story. There's a narrative here, for sure, but it's razor thin and primarily communicated through boring and very short cutscenes. I continuously interacted with a handful of characters, but I barely even remember them after finishing. The campaign just kind of felt like it was going through the motions.
I also didn't like the limited control I had over managing panic in various nations. Other than completing missions, requests, and launching satellites, there's often not a lot to do when countries are on the verge of leaving XCOM. Thankfully, you can lose at least a few countries and still be fine, but the whole process was less than ideal.
I did like gradually building up my base over the course of the game. You kind of want to plan out how you lay out buildings, as adjacent ones of the same type grant bonuses, which can definitely add up over the course of the 25-hour-ish campaign.
I also enjoyed the variety of weapons and armors that you unlocked throughout the game. The ghost suit, my favorite piece of armor, actually allowed my characters to become very temporarily invisible, allowing me to sneak up on otherwise annoying enemies.
The best aspect of this game besides the actual strategy gameplay is the lore, surprisingly. As you dissect and study alien remains at your base after recovering them from battles, you learn a lot about the sorts of lengths the aliens were willing to go to to be as fearsome as they were. It made for some very interesting reading.
All-in-all, a solid enough game, but it also has a number of glaring weaknesses that kept it from being a top-of-the-line experience.
@Ralizah If you're playing on PC, there is a mod called Long War which is known for improving the game massively in loads of different ways. I only ever played on console so can't attest for how it is though.
XCOM2 is fantastic though. It makes so many improvements on the original game and the War of the Chosen update makes it close to XCOM2.5 with a whole heap of improvements including soldier fatigue (so you can't use your same squad of super soldiers), XP which you can use to buy skills from outside of their class skill tree, team mate bonds etc. The Chosen are also excellent with nemesis-style strengths and weaknesses. The base game itself introduced more mission types and the terror missions are nowhere near as annoying (civilians even fight back!).
@RogerRoger The battle system in Mario + Rabbids is extremely similar to XCOM. Although the big difference there is that M + R is much more focused on giant bursts of movement, whereas, generally, your squad will inch across an XCOM map, as too much movement can easily mean an early death for your character.
I didn't mention the permadeath in my mini-review, I noticed. Your troops are kind of expendable, as you can generally buy as many as you want, and they can easily die on the field. I imagine the only big loss is the skills they've accumulated over the course of many battles. Although I'm unsure what happens to their equipment if they die, as I pulled a FE and reloaded my last save anytime someone kicked the bucket.
@Thrillho Interesting. I probably should have picked up XCOM 2 when it was in humble monthly a while back (unlike PSN, you actually get to keep those games when you drop the service), but it seemed pointless when I still had the original to play (and a pretty extensively large backlog as is). Another big thing making me nervous about it is I've heard missions are timed. Is that true?
Oh, and have you played Xenonauts? I've heard really good things about that from classic XCOM fans, but the level of complexity there sounds a bit intimidating.
XCOM2 does have some "timed" missions where you normally have a set number of turns to get things done. War of the Chosen reined them in a bit and they are a pain in the arse but mainly because they put you under so much pressure. Most of the time, those missions are about making planned escapes more than anything! Often the main goal is capturing a target but they are certainly the mission type I've failed most.
I think the Long War type mod for that allows you to remove those missions but I think they do have their place.
Mighty Switch Force! 2
I nabbed this when it first released, but I never fully finished it before now. It's a lot like the original in that the gameplay revolves around solving environmental puzzles and platforming, both of which are reliant on the block-switching mechanic. Like the original, the 3D is extremely effective and helps with the gameplay. Other than using your fire hose to douse flames, the gameplay is extremely similar to the first game. It can probably be completed within an hour if you just rush through it, but I got a good 8 or so hours out of it by speedrunning levels and trying to find all the hidden babies (which you humorously kick to safety).
Nothing incredible, but the pixel art is attractive, the gameplay is tight, and it's a good time overall. Also, the music is surprisingly decent. Especially the awesome ending credits theme.
Finished my playthrough of Detroit Become Human last night. My experience is mildly tainted by having a cold presently and just overall feeling rough because of that. Having to pause the game frequently to blow one’s nose tends to be immersion breaking. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the experience a great deal. My ending was only chosen by 2% of the world, which speaks to the significant differences that your choices make as you progress. The game is very well crafted, beautiful, and runs great. Only once can I remember a hiccup in the performance. There are a ton of trophies in this game and I had them popping with regularity. I got a total of 29 by the end yet was still only 54% of the trophy completion. I want to go for the platinum, but I don’t think I will right now. Too many other games are vying for my attention.
But in short, Detroit is highly recommended if you have even the slightest interest in narrative driven choice based games.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@JohnnyShoulder Lol, yes sir. I think Sneezing Simulator 19 is an Xbox exclusive. Or wait, no - that was Yawning Simulator 😜
As for Detroit, I would say if you liked Beyond TS, then you’d like Detroit. I didn’t play BTS but Detroit is pretty similar in play style to Heavy Rain, but just much better.
It’s had a permanent price drop to $40 (well worth it at that price) and will probably be $30 or $20 at Black Friday. One of 2018’s best.
@Th3solution I've never played a David Cage game before. Does the game require constant interaction as it goes along, or are the cutscenes largely automated, besides making choices on where to take the narrative?
@Ralizah The game requires fairly constant interaction. Some of the scenes are cut-scenes for brief viewing, but it isn’t very long before you need to make some kind of input. Whether it be deciding what to say, picking something up, defending yourself with quick-time event inputs, etc. It’s a very interesting combination of heavy storytelling and casual game input — it’s not as sedentary or passive a game as you might expect like Telltale or Life is Strange where you make a choice then watch stuff happen, then make another choice, and on and on. In this game, you pretty much have to pay attention the whole time and mostly have your hands on the controller or you might miss an input. There is a lot of walking around to trigger the next story point as well. I’m trying to remember Heavy Rain but I think it was more or less the same, but not near the amount of branching paths or complexity of outcomes. And not near as much choice and interaction with the environment, as I recall. As for Beyond Two Souls (which I didn’t play), I got the feeling it was less interactive and more like - play and then watch a scene.
@RogerRoger Thanks man. I do feel better now. Stupid cold just makes you feel like death for 2 days until it finally let’s up. Yeah, I honestly do think you should check out Detroit. Then if you like it, you can go back to Heavy Rain and maybe Beyond TS.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@JohnnyShoulder The only good thing about being sick is that I have gotten quite a bit of gaming done. I also finished Oxenfree finally. I was sitting there 30 minutes from the end for like 2 weeks because I was enthralled with Detroit and then Red Dead and SoulCalibur. But I mixed in Oxenfree tonight and finished my first playthrough. It was a really cool little game, with unique presentation, a strong story, and fantastic voice acting. I was glad to have played it and it’s too bad it’s often overlooked. It’s another game I’d like to replay to see how the other endings and dialog options turn out, but I probably won’t be able to right now with all the other games I have going.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@KratosMD I played that on PC at the beginning of the year because it was being distributed for free on GOG, I believe. Not really my sort of game, but I mostly enjoyed my time with it. Great voice acting. I also liked the dialogue system: it's not one of those games where there's obvious "nice" and "tough" things to say, and that helped make a lot of the conversations feel more naturalistic to me.
Thinking about the game, I forgot that it is quite chilling in places and proper freaked me out. Not too many forms of entertainment manage that these days.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@Kidfried Eh, I disagree. The level design sucks (the game practically mandates more cautious gameplay and increased use of guns to avoid getting nailed by an enemy off-screen with a long sight line), the different character abilities are often gimmicky, the plot is all over the place, and it's lacking in the atmosphere that made the original game so memorable.
I platinumed the original on Vita after playing it exhaustively on PC, but could barely motivate myself to finish the second game once.
Glad you enjoyed it, though. I'd love to see another game more in the style of the original.
I just beat Never Alone. It was a fantastic. It was a little frustrating with the platforming at times, but the story was amazing. It's based off an Inuit tale. A girl sets off from her village with a fox friend she found to find a the source of a blizzard that could threaten to cause her village to starve. Throughout the fox and spirits helping gave the game a very spiritual vibe, and it really made me think. The way she's helped (and saved) by spirits throughout the game as well as other things which felt like they were divinely guided even though not directly shown made me felt it was largely about divine help we get knowingly and unknowingly - as well as the importance of the help we receive from others as well as using our own gifts (that we sometimes gain from others) to get through problems. A lot of balance overall. It also has short videos about the Inuit culture that help explain that and the game reflects their culture a lot. It was definitely story that felt like it was meant to be played too.
It only took me a few hours to finish as well, which was the perfect length for it. The puzzles did get a little tiresome towards the end, but if I ever had someone to play this in Co-op with I would give it another go. I feel like I get something different from the story too.
Shout out to @JohnnyShoulder and @KratosMD for convincing me to look at indie games. I had this from Plus so I decided to try it. This is the kind of game I want ton Plus. Something that I probably (and shamefully) wouldn't buy on my own . Getting stuff like this is one of the best things about the service.
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