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Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Posts 1,481 to 1,500 of 3,212

Octane

@Ralizah Good thing is that it's relatively cheap at this point. Which was the reason why I bought it in the first place. Squadrons is a bit of a dud in comparison, based on what I've played so far, but I really enjoyed my time with JFO.

Octane

Rudy_Manchego

@Th3solution Oh yes, no real grinding really. For example, I got my backside kicked by a boss, found a different door, found a different area and several hours later remebered how I got there and went back to the boss. It is fairly intuitive as well in terms of level design. Only a few items are hidden behind bosses. Some are just waiting to be found.

@Ralizah I can see your reasoning. I think you can see all the game has to offer within 30 hours (which is no short time). I explored every inch really and did the DLC (and I am a bit rubbish). As for Silksong, I will be getting that day one. Hollow Knight was so competetively priced at launch, I really want to support Team Cherry.

Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot

PSN: Rudy_Manchego | Twitter:

Rudy_Manchego

@RogerRoger Nice review. This completely skipped me by but I remember quite vividly playing Frontline and was it Rising Sun on Gamecube and being wowed by how much of a step up they were from previous era shooters. They had some wow factor - at least for my jaded brain.

Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot

PSN: Rudy_Manchego | Twitter:

Thrillho

Right, one of my gaming resolutions was to try and keep up with this thread better so I've jumped back a few pages to catch up (apologies to the ones I've missed as I know it takes effort to write them !)

@RR529 on Dead or Alive 5: Last Round

I can't say I've ever played any of the DOA games and only know them for that reason and it's kind of good to hear it hasn't abandoned it's roots! The amount of costumes (and the cost!) seems kind of silly but I guess it fits with the vibe of the game. It sounds like you enjoyed it though and that final boss does sound like a bit of a beast being able to change character at will.

@RogerRoger on Star Wars Squadrons

Squadrons isn't a game I would have considered buying but I do enjoy the odd dogfighting simulator. Your thoughts make it sound like the short story is still worth playing and the few screenshots you threw in do look rather pretty. The idea of playing both sides sounds like it's well done too. Did you end up playing multiplayer much more in the end?

@Ralizah on Wizorb

What an odd little game. I thought it was going to be a retro style RPG so it was a bit strange to see you talk about Arkanoid/Breakout and weirder to find out why. The idea of spells as powerups is a neat one and secret exits in levels also sounds quite clever. It's a shame it felt like it outstayed its welcome in only a short game though.

@Ralizah on CTR: Nitro Fuelled

It's interesting to hear your thoughts on the game as it was one I loved back in the day but I haven't played the remake. I quite liked the drift style as it was quite tactical to try and get the third big boost. In the original game (where you didn't have UFO-esque vehicles) the smoke out the back of the cart would go black as well when you could boost. I do agree that relic races were well done but CTR ones a bit of a pain. I never minded the boss races but the Nitrous Oxide race is brutal (although I note Foxy seems to say they made him easier)!

@crimsontadpoles on Yuppie Psycho

The pixel art style is a bit overdone these days but the game looks great. The premise is suitably odd/different as well and you make the cast sound like good fun too. I'm not sure I'll ever play it but it sounds like something I'd enjoy.

@Octane on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Some brief thoughts there (particularly as I ignored the spoilers) but it goes with your thoughts from the thread for the game which finally convinced me to buy the game in the latest sale so I know who to blame if I don't like it (although I'm sure I will). The "short" game time actually sounds like quite a good thing too.

@Rudy_Manchego on Hollow Knight

I'm glad you did write your thoughts as it's one of those games I love to hear other people talk about but one I feel isn't that widely known. Congrats on getting through so much of the game though! How did you find Nightmare King Grimm? I've said it many times on here but beating him was a real accomplishment for me (I've posted the video before and even on my successful run I almost ballsed it up).

I'm completely with you on the art, music, and overall feel of the game. It just struck a chord with me and I utterly fell in love with it. I can't say I found too many boss fights complete roadblocks but maybe I just have a higher tolerance for frustration. That said, it was the Hornet fights I found most difficult so it's funny you didn't find those ones too bad. I'm massively looking forward to the next game but with how much post release work they did on this, I'm not sure that picking it up early is a good move!

@RogerRoger on Medal of Honour: Allied Assault

My MacBook autocorrected Honour there and I'm going to let it stand. That era of games really don't look great do they? It's funny that pixel art can look great and retro but the jagged polygons just look jarring. Anyhoo, what an odd mix of levels jumping around the entire world with fictional and factual battles. That Ardennes bit sounded really well done but I can imagine it didn't really work as a game.

Thrillho

Rudy_Manchego

@Thrillho Thanks for reading. I actually never fought Nightmare King Grimm - I think I messed that up. I banished the troupe after talking to the accordion guy as it seemed like the best thing to do. Then I googled it and found I had missed that boss fight. Part of me is relieved though as I know that is considered one, if not the, hardest boss fight.

I think I'll still get Silksong day one - I sort of trust that the base quality will be enough, however, I'd agree that PS4 owners who got the Voidheart edition meant they got the full package. It's like any GOTY edition - they always end up the best.

Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot

PSN: Rudy_Manchego | Twitter:

Thrillho

@Rudy_Manchego You probably did save yourself a whole world of pain not facing that boss It's one of those that is immensely tricky but fair as, a bit like you said in your thoughts, it's all about learning the move sets but at quite a speed! Plus, he's the only boss where each hit takes two notches off your health bar.

Here's my vid yet again if you're interested (the music is great but I turned it right down to help me focus!)

The one thing with Silksong is the amount of silence on the project. They're not a big team admittedly but even their twitter account is pretty minimal through 2020, although Edge seemingly had a piece on the game from the end of the year so there's still hope!

Thrillho

Thrillho

God, I still get palpitations watching that back and how close I came to messing it up once again..

Thrillho

RogerRoger

@Rudy_Manchego Thanks for reading. Rising Sun is the only major game in the franchise I haven't played or owned before (there are others I need to catch up on, but I've got them downloaded ready). I have a feeling, if Allied Assault is anything to go by, that the PC sequel Pacific Assault will cover a lot of the same history. Once I've mixed things up a little, I'm quite looking forward to its promised focus on a theatre of war oft overlooked in favour of the European battles.

Apologies, by the way, as I totally missed your Hollow Knight review yesterday, but I really enjoyed reading it earlier. It's great when a game clicks like that, especially after a long absence; that being said, I'm sorry to hear that some of its demands sapped your enjoyment later on. A very interesting case study in the whole difficulty debate, for sure.

***

@Thrillho Thanks for going back and reading two of my reviews! Very kind of you. From your brief comments, I'd suggest waiting until you see Squadrons for a tenner or less; that way, at least the shiny production values and story will be value for money, even if the gameplay doesn't grab you. I did play some more multiplayer, and it's kinda cool, but quite repetitive and suffers from a lot of sitting around, waiting between matches. There was a big patch for it yesterday, though, with no new content that I can see, so maybe they've tightened up some of the load times.

Yeah, I kept having to force myself to write "honor" instead of "honour" because the Medal of Honor is an actual thing, so it should have its native spelling upheld (but boy, did my browser disagree; I think it was the most red underlining I've ever had in a review!). And I actually quite like early PSone / PS2 graphics as a style, moreso than 2D pixel art. There's a uniformity to retro pixels which I find a little predictable, but I enjoy seeing all the ways developers tried to overcome the shortcomings of early 3D. There are some really inventive, quite beautiful touches sometimes... but hey, each to their own, I guess!

"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."

PSN: GDS_2421
Making It So Since 1987

Rudy_Manchego

@Thrillho Oh wow - you are a far better player than me. I struggled on the non Nightmare version. I can tell you had his move sets pegged. When you got down to one soul I wouldl have panicked but you managed that dodge and Abyss Shriek!

Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot

PSN: Rudy_Manchego | Twitter:

Ralizah

@RogerRoger Wow! That really was a fantastic review of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Rog. You have a way of discussing games that reads more like literature. There's an internal structure to it, but the fantastic writing hides the bones and makes the sentences flow smoothly from one point to the next. Really, really well done. Especially the discussion of your emotional reactions to the game, and how it generated sympathy for your character, and, by extension, real people who were likely trapped in the nightmare of war, crushed between the nexus of duty, honor, and pure terror.

To be honest, I know very little about this franchise, but it's interesting to think about military shooters having started as sober educational lessons about the sacrifices of war when the broad consensus has shifted so much via the recent Call of Duty games to regarding the genre as jingoistic.

That music was pretty good. Very theatrical and grand. I particularly liked Panzer Blockade: lots of variation in that piece, but, generally, it does a good job of conveying danger and thrilling action.

Also, I don't know if it was intentional, but making post #1,488 about a nazi killing game was some god-tier timing.

Edited on by Ralizah

Currently Playing: Advance Wars 1 + 2: Re- Boot Camp (NS)

PSN: Ralizah

RogerRoger

@Ralizah Very kind of you; almost too kind, as I'm genuinely blushing. Especially since I've apparently lucked out into conveying a structure behind my runaway train of thought (perhaps it's the same luck which made my review land on #1,488 because, I can assure you, I didn't plan that in the slightest; I hadn't even noticed until you just pointed it out). You've just made my day!

Perhaps I overegged the education angle, because Medal of Honor games are still games, with all the shooting and sillyness that you'd come to expect (some of the cheats included in the PSone entries are hilarious). They just included enough realism and historical background to feel respectful. I suppose it's there if you wanna see it, and people who just wanna shoot Nazis will invariably skip the mini-documentary cutscenes to get to the scoreboards quicker. Perhaps that's why I was pleasantly surprised by how Allied Assault folded authenticity into certain sections of gameplay so effectively.

You're right, though. I haven't played any Call of Duty games myself, but a friend recently played CoD: WW2 and told me that there was nothing thoughtful or contemplative about its gameplay. At least there's a chance for such moments in a Medal of Honor game.

And yeah, I feel like Michael Giacchino is one of the few remaining advocates for using identifiable melodies and themes in soundtracks. It's infinitely preferable to just using different walls of generic noise to inform different moods; when you hum along with a tune, you connect with it. I frequently listen to many of the Medal of Honor soundtracks, despite not playing the actual games themselves half as often as I should. They make for beautiful, evocative albums.

"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."

PSN: GDS_2421
Making It So Since 1987

nessisonett

@Ralizah I DIDN’T NOTICE @RogerRoger’s REVIEW WAS POST 1488 THAT’S BRILLIANT 😂😂

Plumbing’s just Lego innit. Water Lego.

Trans rights are human rights.

RogerRoger

@nessisonett Like the leader of the Space Nazis said...

Untitled

"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."

PSN: GDS_2421
Making It So Since 1987

mookysam

@Rudy_Manchego Nice Hollow Knight review. You deserve kudos for getting through the White Palace! I eventually gave up on that because I couldn't get through the area where you have to "bounce" off spikes., and didn't think it was worth sacrificing what remains of my sanity. The game is superb. Although it took a little while to click, once it did I was hooked. The world feels organic, and progression flows quite nicely. My only real criticism is the relative lack of fast-travel, which does mean a little backtracking here and there when completing the map. The music is wonderful, and I love the sound effects, especially with headphones on. The crawling sounds in the Deepnest really add to the atmosphere!

@RogerRoger Another great review. It's interesting that you note the game blends history with the gameplay. One criticism I have of some modern WW1/2 shooters is that they treat these absolutely horrific conflicts purely as sources of entertainment. Obviously games should entertain to some degree, but they sometimes skew things to the point of being distasteful. Those tracks you posted are quite dramatic, not what I would've expected from the game at all!

@Ralizah You really must play Fallen Order!

Black Lives Matter
Trans rights are human rights

Thrillho

@Rudy_Manchego Practice makes perfect and there was a whole load of practice for that fight! The shriek was a clever way of getting extra hits in and gives you a brief window of invincibility too. I absolutely thought I was going to do the classic Souls thing of freak out at the last second but somehow didn’t!

@RogerRoger Call of Duty: World at War is worth a go if you want a little realism from the series. Having it set on the Pacific front but also on the Russian front was an interesting twist on the WW2 focus and I really enjoyed it at the time.

Thrillho

Rudy_Manchego

@mookysam Thanks and I get the White Palace point. It was the least enjoyable part of the game. I mean, who really would build a palace like that? The bugs in Deepnest... with headphones were... let's just say, unpleasant. Backtracking does take a lot of time. If it is natural exploration it is fine, but for example, with the Grimm Troupe when you have to go to set places on the map, it added time to the whole thing. On the plus side, I now know Hollownest and its map more than I know my own city.

@Thrillho I know that with a fully upgraded Abyss Shriek you can cheese the normal Grimm fight by slapping Joni's charm, having spell builds and triggering the fireballs by attacking him before he bows and just spamming him. Never worked for me because I never got the Abyss Shriek so I had to do it properly!

Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot

PSN: Rudy_Manchego | Twitter:

Ralizah

@mookysam I have so many AAA last gen games to get to over the next few years, lol. The good news is that, thanks to the way AAA games are priced in this industry, they should all be incredibly cheap going forward.

@nessisonett Years of dealing with literally insane right-wing people in this country dog-whistling to one-another with glasses of milk and cartoon frogs must be messing with my brain a bit. I'll be seeing nazis in my breakfast cereal soon if things don't chill out a bit.

@RogerRoger It really was a fantastic post. You definitely need to get back to writing fiction (I recall that being one of your resolutions for the year?).

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I thought the Medal of Honor games were docudramas or anything. But compared to CoD's nazi zombies and glorification of American imperial terrorism overseas, it sounds a bit more respectful and educational, which I appreciate. And yeah, I definitely like the idea of a war game actually putting the player, in some small way, into the shoes of a soldier, and letting them experience even one-millionth of the terror ground troops must have felt being bombarded with enemy fire.

I'm not really knowledgeable about the series as a whole, but I don't think CoD has always been uniformly brainless. i played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare way back in the day, and it does have this famous and genuinely interesting sequence where you play as a character who gets caught in the blast zone of a nuclear warhead. After it goes off, your character, who is clearly dying, crawls out of the downed helicopter he's in and sees his comrades dying around him before succumbing to the damage done to his body. It was a surprising, sobering sequence in the middle of an otherwise kind of mindless experience.

Yeah, the music is heavily cinematic, and reminiscent of the scores one would hear in somewhat older movies. It's nice.

It's a pity the series apparently lost its identity over time trying to compete with CoD. If anything, its developers should have doubled-down on the unique design sensibilities of their series, although I imagine corporate suits would have objected when the games continued to pull in a fraction of CoD's utterly gargantuan sales.

Currently Playing: Advance Wars 1 + 2: Re- Boot Camp (NS)

PSN: Ralizah

RogerRoger

@mookysam Thank you! Both elements you mention, the respect and the music, often come together to complement one another. There's a haunting level in MOH: Frontline where you parachute into occupied farmland and encounter some terrified farmer NPCs, and it also begins with the inescapable death of a comrade. Here's its accompanying soundtrack.

It's all about tone, and early Medal of Honor games nail it. Later ones... well, I'll report back!

***

@Thrillho Cheers for the recommendation, I appreciate it. Was generalising the Call of Duty series, and with third-hand information as well, so I should probably try some of the games for myself before speaking with any authority. I'd guess that, as with Medal of Honor, the older ones kept a better balance.

***

@Ralizah It was, yeah. I keep wanting to kick myself in the pants, and have dozens of ideas swimming around in my head, so it's only a matter of time. Anyway, thanks again!

You've identified why I've never really enjoyed strategy games, like Command & Conquer (even the genre's Star Wars variants leave me cold). It's less immediate, feels too distant and, as is apparently evident from my emotional review style, I need to connect with something a little more in order to enjoy it. Maybe I'm just overthinking Medal of Honor and maybe it isn't half as powerful as I'm making it out to be, but I like that the capacity is there, at least.

Further thanks for the insight into Call of Duty. You've described what sounds like a pretty effective sequence. I have the PS4 remaster of Modern Warfare, back from when they gave it away with PS Plus, and I keep meaning to get around to it. Might bump it up the schedule.

Competition was only part of it, I'd guesstimate. I was thinking about this the other day (funnily enough, when watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a character sarcastically accepted a certain outlandish situation by saying "Of course; it's the only thing we haven't done yet!") and reckon the pressure for annual shooters might've played a part in Medal of Honor's downfall. There is only so much of the Second World War to go around and, what with Call of Duty adapting the same history as well, even I've noticed a little bit of repetition from game to game. As soon as the first Medal of Honor became a hit, you could almost start the clock on when they'd run out of material and, therefore, ideas. That's why they eventually copied CoD and modernised, with disastrous results. I'll never touch those games.

Good thing I've recently discovered PC gaming, because I can kinda live my nostalgia and revel in all these games I skipped (for a fraction of the price, and on hardware which barely breaks a sweat). I really should get a proper mouse and keyboard at some stage!

"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."

PSN: GDS_2421
Making It So Since 1987

Th3solution

@RogerRoger I’ll add my appreciation for your recent review. I’ll likely never play the Medal of Honor games due to my reluctance to go backward technologically, but as you know I really love my WW2 history. I went so far as to download COD: WW2 onto my PS4 after it was given to us a few months ago via PS+, but I have never clicked on the icon to open it and I don’t know if I ever will. Getting into any military shooter for me feels like walking into a party late after the introductions and get-to-know-you games are over, the food is half eaten, and all party participants are having a great time socializing with one another but you can’t find a person you know or will even talk to you. As everyone ignores you, the party goes on without you and clearly everyone loves the setting, but you sit by yourself in a corner with a broken cookie and stare at the ceiling trying to look like you belong. You feel so awkward and out of place and just want to go home, but also sense the embarrassment of walking out after you’d just got there. (Wow, that metaphor seems suspiciously too detailed doesn’t it? 😅)

Anyways... [ahem, let me wipe the sweat from my brow] I enjoyed the write up regardless. I happened upon Saving Private Ryan the other day as I was channel surfing and paused on it for a while. I forgot how good that movie was. The portrayal of the horror of that war is quite well done.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

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