Hitman: Codename 47 (PC). The very first Hitman game, released in 2000. It's very much a product of its time, and hasn't aged well. As someone who is only familiar with the recent trilogy, it was tough to get into this game. I was determined to see it through to the end though, so I ended up speeding through it by dropping the difficulty down to Easy and making extensive use of a walkthrough.
As it's the first Hitman game, IO Interactive hadn't yet found the ideal Hitman formula. Due to this, many of the missions will feel very different to later Hitman games. The concept of being a silent assassin isn't a thing yet, and there's no non-lethal take downs. Sometimes stealth is expected, but other times a shoot-out is the only way to go. It's lacking the sandbox style of having multiple ways to complete a level, and instead often requires figuring out the one good way to proceed.
The game can also be very unforgiving, even on Easy difficulty. Enemies are very quick to shoot if Agent 47 does anything they don't like. There's generally no real feedback to explain what went wrong, leading to confusion. But the biggest frustration is that there's no way to save in the middle of a mission. There's a limited number of respawns available when Agent 47 dies, but since enemies will still be attacking you, it's not very helpful.
It's usually fairly unclear what you should be doing next. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if experimentation was easy to do. However, the lack of saves means that you basically have to go back to the beginning of a level again whenever you mess up.
The general clunkiness also adds to the issues. It came out before WASD controls were fully standardised for PC games, so its default controls are somewhat awkward. There's a bunch of other things as well, such as needing to get right up and close to something before interacting with it, almost as if Agent 47 has tiny arms.
The low point of the game has to be the Columbia levels. The first part takes place in a huge, foggy jungle, with a lot of running back and forth. Despite the fog, enemies will still shoot you from a mile off if you do anything suspicious. The third part starts North of a compound. The only entrance is on the South side, so there's a solid minute of running around it before you can do anything interesting. And with the lack of mid-level saves, there's a lot of repetition whenever you need to restart.
There are a couple of good levels in this game, that actually feel like a Hitman prototype. One takes place in a Hong Kong restaurant, and the other in a Budapest hotel. These focus more on stealth, costume changes, and interacting with other NPCs, with ways to avoid the shoot-outs. Though even in these levels, there's a sequence of steps that's the best way to proceed, with different options being fairly limited.
I'm not sure that I can say it's a bad game. However, anyone coming into it with the same mindset as me (i.e. someone that has only played the recent trilogy and wanted to see how the series began) is going to have a bad time. It was interesting to see the game that started the Hitman series, but the gameplay sure doesn't hold up today. Unless you've played similar games in the past and really want to see Hitman's beginnings, I wouldn't recommend this game.
Despite my scathing impressions, I am interested in trying out Hitman 2: Silent Assassin one day. That supposedly has aged much better, and its focus on stealth instead of action makes it feel much more like a Hitman game. Plus it has mid-mission saves, the lack of which made Hitman: Codename 47 way more frustrating than it needed to be.
@velio84 Thanks for the review and very informative. I’ve read others who have mentioned the poor balancing of the encounters (either too easy or too hard). I had not read much about people being unhappy with the open world, or with the recycled enemies and locations. I’ll keep my expectations in check. It is probably difficult for both HFW and ER to have come out so close to one another and each will forever be compared to the other. I’ve played neither so I can only go from screenshots and videos, but HFW’s environments appear to be peerless in their beautiful design, so I can see how ER’s open world would feel bland by comparison. And yeah the performance is probably the most common downside I see mentioned. I suspect it will get better with a few more patches hopefully by the time I play it.
All in all it sounds like it’s still a great game, just not without flaw. I gave Demon’s Souls an 8.5 so if it’s near that quality then it is still fantastic and worth experiencing.
@crimsontadpoles Oof! I've never played the very first game, having jumped into the series with Hitman 2 on PS2 (and Blood Money!). I can attest that the sequel is a much more fully realized version of the Hitman formula than the original apparently is, although it might still feel clunky or limited in certain respects compared to the modern trilogy. But certainly nothing like this!
Some series seem to take a game or two before they really find their footing. Especially older 3D games made back when people were still experimenting with new concepts and gameplay styles.
Fantastic read! I've always wondered if I should dig into the original on PC, but this sounds... painful. I think I'll leave this one in the past.
@velio84 Nice! Another good critical review. And pretty much all of the gripes are very fair.
I agree that the game feels like it was designed to be played with two players, with spirit ashes fulfilling that role in sp. Also, yeah, the game doesn't make it easy to experiment with new builds thanks to the stat-heavy nature of damage scaling, which indeed did mean most weapons just ended up cluttering my inventory, because it wasn't worth respeccing to experiment with them.
I found the open world design was variable throughout, with Limgrave and The Weeping Peninsula representing some of the densest areas in the game.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@velio84 Interesting writeup and I can say I have definitely felt some of the frustration you experienced myself even though I’m nowhere near the end.
I'm not a souls vet and have only played Demon's Souls remake so far but thought that was an amazing game and still remember all the bosses and most of the levels. The size of this game definitely takes away that shine and uniqueness about each of those battles. Like you alluded to on the other thread if you had less higher quality bosses then that might have checked that box, but instead I'm finding that a lot of those that I've been taking on lately have been very similar and I’m beating most things in a similar way. My strategy has basically been attempt boss by myself first and then if I’ve not done it within say 5 attempts I’m just unleashing the spirit ashes and using that as a distraction to batter the hell out of it. I've struggled with a few still but using the ashes makes it so much easier in most cases.
I'm also getting tunnel / cave overload. There's so many of them which look so similar and there's a few I've had to check again because I couldn't remember if I'd completed them or not. It's probably tough to create enough totally unique places to fill a world this size but now I see a cave I'm like "uh not another one!".
My biggest issue though, which I’ve alluded to in other posts, is that I find it really hard to follow the thread of what’s going on and talking to people and finding out how to further those quests to completely unlock the thread isn’t obvious enough in a lot of cases. I talk to someone and then instantly forget them and crack on exploring, as you do with open world games, and then I'll meet that person later on and have no idea where I've met them before. Perhaps it's because I'm finding that all the characters are quite bland or that in a lot of cases they only really drop hints as to what you are supposed to be doing etc. either way it just feels like a backwards step to me and takes away from the story telling. I then just generally care less about the characters and what's going on. I can perhaps put this down to the amount of time I’ve got to play the game and my bad memory, but I don’t struggle with other games this way as they at least have a quest log that I can use to recap what I've been doing.
Regardless it’s a great game and I’m still enjoying it and feel that I will for a while longer, at least until I meet something really frustrating which you’ve suggested is coming 😬
The World Ends With You Platform: Nintendo DS Developer: Square-Enix Publisher: Square-Enix (2007 in Jpn; 2008 in the West) Playtime: 12 hours
I like to think my gaming habits are healthy, and have long decried the functional irrationality of people who will persist in playing games long after they should have stopped in order to feed some neurotic impulse to "complete" everything that would probably be better solved by scheduling a few visits with a local therapist. But, in truth, I'm often no better, and time and again will return to spend my precious, limited hours on this Earth on software I don't really enjoy out of some irrational belief that I am doing something unfair by not giving them a 'proper chance' to improve. Well, I'm done with that, and that actually leads me into a discussion about this game.
I wanted to like The World Ends With You. If nothing else, it can't be faulted for a lack of originality. It's a cult classic Nintendo DS game that imprinted itself on the minds of a generation of young Nintendo fans with its stylish presentation, hip modern setting, and unique themes. You can arguably see how it might have influenced the design of games from other developers, like Atlus' Devil Survivor and Persona 5.
But... look. A while back, I had a discussion on here about quality vs quantity of content in games. I argued that some games liked to toss in stuff to distract the player from the shallow design of the core gameplay.
Truth be told, when I wrote that, I was thinking of this game.
TWEWY is set in modern-day Shibuya. Or, at least, it ostensibly is. Protagonist Neku Sakuraba, the world's most generic teenager who spends half the game whining about the world around him like an anime version of Holden Caulfield, awakens in an amnesiac state and finds himself drawn into a bizarre death game known as The Reapers' Game alongside another teenager named Shiki Misaki. The two are pushed to join forces and complete tasks each day in the Underground, an alternate-dimensional version of Shibuya that is invisible to but exists parallel alongside the Realground, where ordinary people reside. Together, they learn of the existence of other Players trapped in this game, as well as the Reapers who will erase them from existence if they fail their tasks.
So, interesting, right? There's a lot more to it, actually, but that devolves into spoiler territory that's unnecessary to talk about. The tragic thing about TWEWY is that the plot is actually super interesting... in concept. In execution, the game never feels like it actually properly fleshes out the concepts it introduces. This is a problem conceptually and mechanically. TWEWY is almost the ideal illustration of the concept of something being a mile wide, but an inch deep. Plot-wise, it continues to layer in new concepts, characters, etc. But in the absence of properly developing these, the player is never given the opportunity to latch onto anything, and major plot twists wind up having no impact whatsoever. So none of the underlying existentialistic and psychological themes end up mattering at all, because they're in service of nothing meaningful.
What really holds TWEWY back is the gameplay. Both the flow of it, as well as the mechanics themselves. The game is well-known for its thoroughly bizarre approach to combat, so let's start there. Throughout the game, Neku will pair up with different characters, and always enters into battle with them. You control these characters simultaneously. On two different screens. Neku will fight enemies on the bottom touch screen, and his partner will battle on top. Neku is controlled by using different touch controls on the bottom screen (some enemies might need to be poked, while other abilities require a swiping motion, or for the player to draw specific shapes, etc.), while the partner is controlled entirely by inputting combo attacks with the D-Pad on the top screen. The D-Pad combo paths are randomized each time, but you have to push them in the correct order to collect points that can be used to trigger a screen-clearing special attack, which is pretty much a necessity against most bosses. It has to be the most poorly-conceived and chaotic battle system I've ever encountered. Presumably the player is somehow meant to divert attention between the two screens, but enemies are often so aggressive that it doesn't work out this way. This game wasn't designed to be played by human beings. Our brains don't work this way. So, what ends up happening is that you HAVE to focus on the top-screen, most of the time, because otherwise you'll do sub-optimal damage and won't be able to collect enough points to consistently trigger your special attacks, which will also be your primary method of restoring HP in battles most of the time. So, while you're focusing on the top screen, you're reduced to scratching, stroking, and poking with maddening randomness at the touch screen, because you can't look at it, because, again, the top-screen demands all of your attention. The game rewards you with a score for how well you performed in battle, and, I've found, the only consistent way to score well is to exactly this: press the D-Pad in randomized ways over and over to collect points, and abuse your DS/3DS' touchscreen like a madman with random inputs that still end up triggering attacks most of the time.
So, yeah, combat sucks. I did like the build variety in this game, though. The player will gain different pins in battle throughout the game. These pins are both your primary means of making money (money pins can be disposed of to gain the value in them) as well as the weapons you'll be using throughout the game. Pins have a variety of effects that can be used in battle, and you'll have to equip them in a specific order on your character, as pins in lower slots activate before pins in higher slots, which means you'll need to consider how the effects of these pins harmonize in battle.
Even this element quickly becomes overcomplicated, though. TWEWY' hip modern Japanese setting is one that's also inordinately obsessed with fashion, so the designers thought it wise to introduce a mechanic where different pins would work better or worse in certain areas of Shibuya based on who their designer is. You can actually work around this, though, in the most tedious way possible: if a certain designer is less popular in a certain area, you can actually increase their popularity by grinding enemies with those pins. Sounds fun, right? Grinding battles using one of the worst RPG battle systems I've ever encountered to get around a mechanic that should never have been included in the first place? This is actually REQUIRED in certain parts of the game to advance the story. Enjoy!
More interesting, and here's another tiny little bone I'll toss this game, is the way it handles difficulty and rewards. Being an RPG, the main character will level up throughout the game as they gain experience points from battle, but a system was implemented whereby the player can actually gain greater rewards from battles (including rarer dropped pins) by temporarily reducing the the character's level, which obviously makes battles harder. This gave an interesting risk/reward element to combat that I wanted to enjoy, but when combat reduces to 'scratch the touchscreen and follow tedious on-screen prompts with the D-Pad,' this made it difficult to properly appreciate.
The game also features thoroughly bizarre systems related to powering up your characters and buying stuff from stores. When you go to a store, there'll be these "quest" items that you're unable to purchase without trading in the right pins. Of course, as far as I could tell, to even gain access to these in the first place, you'd first need to raise your friendship levels with various shopkeepers by spending money on crap you don't need, all in service of gaming access to crap that you do need. It wouldn't be a problem if the game wasn't so controlling about gating the ability to equip new clothing behind stat thresholds.
One way to increase your stats enough to equip these items (assuming you can; each character only has four equipment slots, and they're also gender-locked, in a game where you have no control over which partner you're with at any one time) is to eat food. You... equip food to a food slot on your character, and then, for the item to have its effect, they have to digest it. How do you trigger the digestion process? You fight battles. So you'll also be grinding battles needlessly in order to digest food so your character's stats can increase and you can hopefully equip a piece of equipment. I couldn't make this stuff up even if I wanted to.
TWEWY's issues extend to the way the game flows as well. It's hard to describe, but the pacing of it is so controlled, environments are so small and lacking in interactivity, and the game is so intent and constantly introducing new mechanics that it winds up feeling like a never-ending tutorial. Maybe in the last few hours of the game I didn't play, it lets go, but, more than 2/3rds of the way through, it has never once truly let me off the hook. It feels like the game never actually begins. And, given how ill-advised much of the game design is, it's hard to blame them. If they did allow the player to just play the game without introducing new mechanics or railroading players into new text interactions ever three minutes, what would be left? As mentioned, environments are tiny. There's a mechanic where you can tap on people and read their thoughts, but outside of a few story moments, nothing ever comes of this. It's just meaningless flavor text that rarely relates to anything involving the actual gameplay.
So, the saving grace of this title are the aesthetics, right? It's famously stylish.
Well... no.
The character designs are awful. I'm sorry, I know some people really like the over-the-top designs in games like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and so on, but TWEWY takes this to the next level. These people look parodies, frankly. Why does the main character wear giant headphones, a sleeveless purple shirt with a gigantic collar, and look like there's no place for his internal organs to go? Why does his hair jut out at every possible angle? These people all look like they were vomited out of a particularly ill-fated fashion accessories store. Which is possibly fitting, given the game's fixation on stupid teenagers who think they're fashionable.
But, OK, I don't like the way these characters are designed, but it's fine. I can live with that. What I can't deal with the horrible, droning pop music that drowns out everything in this game. The audio design is awful, because dialogue will be happening, but all you can hear in this music playing at full blast, no matter the situation. Characters are having a meaningful personal discussion? Droning pop music. Someone is mourning the death of a friend? Droning pop music. It never lets up, no matter what's happening on-screen. It's like the developers decided that, by god, this track will play when dialogue is happening, context be damned! The game apparently has a large number of tracks, but it feels like 90% of the time I was listening to the same few crappy tunes.
I'll link a few. Imagine the first couple of tracks blasting when anyone is talking in this game, and you'll hopefully understand why I often felt the need to mute the audio:
Those are my feelings about the game, I suppose. Usually I compose these reviews over the course of several sessions, but this was all composed in one fevered session as soon as I woke up. Truth be told, it has been weeks since I've played this, as I've been dreading returning to it. So I decided to drop it. Before doing so, though, I wanted to properly express my frustration with it, and to exorcize the negative feelings it has caused to well up inside of me, so you'll please forgive me if this piece ends up sounding like little more than angry rant.
It's hard to rate this game. Objectively, though, it attempts a lot of interesting things, and, truth be told, has a rather fascinating (if poorly told) story, so there is some redeeming value to it. I genuinely don't understand its status as a cult classic, though. This has been one of the most thoroughly unenjoyable games I've ever played. It fails as a game on almost every level, frankly. Despite that, I'm still interested in trying the sequel, which I copped for a pretty low price after launch, but I'm going in with very low expectations now.
3/10
NOTE: Screenshots in this review are drawn from the Nintendo Switch remaster, and not the original Nintendo DS release. Just imagine the same scenes, but much lower-res.
After finishing Elden Ring and getting the Platinum trophy, I’d like to share some thoughts about the game. I can’t structure a proper review, neither I can write one probably so please excuse the randomness of this rant. I won’t include any spoilers and will try to be vague where necessary. Some background before I start it off - I love the games From software makes and could even be considered a fanboy. I haven’t played DS1 and DS2, played all the rest with Bloodborne being my all time favourite. With that out of the way, let’s get to Elden Ring.
First off - the open world bit. The first time From is attempting one and sadly you can tell that. The map is HUGE. And not in a good way. When you set off for your adventure - it’s all great. You have no idea where you’re going or what you’re doing, you find crafting materials along the way, it looks beautiful initially and you enjoy yourself. But this all gets tiresome very fast. There are essentially around 10 different things you can encounter on the map, with some of them being very rare so at some point you know exactly what you’ll find on a certain location of the map. And around halfway through the game you might as well actually stop caring at all as you’re already settled on a build and whatever you find will most likely become more clutter in the inventory.
The biggest issue with the world though is that not only it’s huge, it’s also very barren and half the map looks the same. You start at Limgrave, which you’ve all seen how it looks in the video clips around the net. And many of the regions around it are pretty much the same - some a bit more hilly, some a bit more windy and barren, some with a bit more woods and one with a huge swamp in the middle. But they’re all the same. And that’s almost half the map. Then on the East you have Caelid which feels like they put it in the game last minute as it looks terrible. Further in the North you have 2 snowy regions which are again a big chunk of the map and look really bland and uninspiring. The only 2 regions in the open world that I really enjoyed were the Volcano Manor and the Altus Plateau. With the latter being probably one of my favourite places to explore in any game. You also have the underground world which is again huge and after the first wow when you enter those areas, they are all the same after.
The map is only revealed when you find map fragments. Which sounds cool. But it isn’t. Because as soon as you enter an unknown area, all you need to do is follow the road for up to a minute and you’ll find the fragment on the side of the road. That’s it, map revealed. So what’s different than the tradition open worlds then? Well - you don’t have places of interest marked on the map. They are only marked once you’ve got to them. Not quite the innovation we were hoping for.
What is good on the map though are the castles, forts and other buildings where you get off your horse and explore on foot - which is more like a “traditional” souls game. From know how to make that work and it’s apparent in this game as well. Although again, apart from 2 locations in particular, the rest is not their finest work and some places in previous games felt much more interesting and better done. Now, if we compare to Horizon FW which came out at around the same time - a game that is also very good, the world there is absolutely mesmerising and a joy to explore. You have such a vast array of different biomes that it’s never a chore to go out and explore even if you don’t find anything in the end.
Crafting is pretty much a useless mechanic in this game. I did try it initially by crafting some throwable items but seeing how little use they were, I simply didn’t bother further. I found and bought countless “cookbooks” with new recipes and didn’t craft any of it as I saw no point or use.
Regarding the combat… I think here is where my biggest issue with the game lies. First up it’s the weapons you find. There’s a vast variety of weapons but the issue is that in order for them to be usable, you’ll need to upgrade them. And the regular weapons go up to +25. That means you need to upgrade them 25 times to max them out. And there simply aren’t that many materials to do so. Towards the end of the game you are able to buy the smithing stones needed, but to fully upgrade a weapon will be quite expensive. And you may not be able to purchase the stones if you didn’t find some items before hand.
The legendary weapons are upgradable to +10 but those require some special stones and are again hard to upgrade. So even though you can fairly easy re-spec your character’s stat to be more inline with a certain weapon and play style, you can’t really experiment much as you won’t have the necessary materials to upgrade a new weapon you’ve found.
In my play-through I played a melee build with magic. The magic here is split roughly into 2 categories - spells and incantations. Spells scale with Intelligence, the others can be either Arcane, Faith, Intelligence or any combination of the 3. I only played with the spells as I couldn’t afford splitting too many points on all attributes so focused on Int. And the spells were underwhelming to say the least. There are many of them, but the most useful ones are found early in the game and you use them pretty much the whole game as they scale with Int with the odd new one that’s actually good. They were either not doing enough damage, had to be cast from too close, were cast too slow or all 3 combined… Not sure how the incantations are, hopefully better, but I won’t be playing with such build anytime soon, if ever.
In terms of bosses - in my opinion this is the weakest From game in terms of memorable bosses. There are MANY bosses and you’ll encounter many of them many times as they are scattered around the map. And I think that because of the quantity, From sacrificed the quality. There are only a handful of bosses I really enjoyed the fight with but even then none compares to some of the greatest From has done in the past.
Another thing I hated regarding the bosses was how they were implemented to fight. In 90% of them, their attacks are “delayed”. What I mean by that is that they start the attack, but instead of hitting, they hang around with the weapon in the air and just walk around. Of course your muscle memory from previous games has kicked in and you’ve dodged away as soon as you saw the start of the attack. Only for the boss to hit you right after you stand up from the roll. The only thing I can think of why they did this is simply to throw off players from previous games and make it “harder”. Of course, you can adjust to this and get used to it, but it feels cheap from them to do it this way.
And don’t get me started on a certain boss that heals when it hits you and has a move that can 1 shot you depending on the build you’ve got. And this move has 3 phases. And if you don’t have enough vigor, at least 1 of these 3 moves will send you to oblivion. And the last boss - you just have to “experience” it yourself to believe how ridiculous it is.
If we bring Ghost of Tsushima on the table as well, one of the most annoying things was that as you wander around, you’ll encounter a bunch of mongols on the way that you’ll either have to fight them or seek a way on the side if you’re tired of that. Well the mongols here are a bunch of bosses you fought over and over so at some point you just run past them as you’ll gain nothing from fighting them.
The dungeons you’ll find around the map are plenty and all the same with 3 or 4 type of enemies inside and a boss at the end. Thankfully they’re not big but even then I stopped exploring them at some point, because why bother.
One final thing I want to touch on is the game being the most accessible From game to date. I agree with that. And the “easy” mode comes from 2 things - the open world where you can go explore and inevitably you’ll over-level yourself for the main bosses and the second and more important thing is the Spirit Ashes. While they are great, I think the game falls victim into them as well. In my opinion this game has 2 modes - “easy” (a very broad term for From games) and “ridiculous hard”. What I mean by that is when you go to a main boss, you can either summon a spirit ash to keep the boss busy while you slam him from the side. OR - you don’t summon a spirit ash and get wrecked to pieces. That’s it - nothing in between.
I’ll be honest and say that if it weren’t for the spirit ashes and the game was as is - I wouldn’t be able to see the credits roll. I’m simply not good enough to beat the later bosses on my own. Sure, there will be people that can do that without any help and without getting hit. But I’m no such person.
But on the other hand - the spirit ashes made the game a bit too easy for me. At one point in the game, you have a weapon and play style you’re comfortable with, so all you need to do is enter the boss room, summon the ash and smack the boss to pieces. Bar few of the later bosses…
To top it all up, the game is very poorly optimised and doesn’t run well even on a PS5. Up until some areas it was fine and manageable, but at certain locations it drops frames very noticeably. While it was fine when From were a niche game developer, they are no longer that and poor performance can no longer be an excuse. If studios like Guerrilla are slammed for dropping a frame or 2 at certain places, so should be the measurement against From.
So that’s it about my view on Elden Ring. A very good game that got a bit overhyped by the media. In my view there’s no way this game can get a 10/10. It adds little to the souls genre and nothing to the open world games.
Best I could give it is an 8/10 - same as my personal score for Horizon FW. Both really good, albeit very different games, each with it’s own flaws.
Nice write-up buddy . I see the same complaints from other to many users on metacritic & especially steam which you pointed out thoroughly.
@Ralizah That's a shame you didn't enjoy TWEWY. As it's a cult classic, I had always assumed it was a hidden gem, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The controls and gameplay do sound frustrating, and it's disappointing how they didn't make the most out of what could have been a great story.
@RogerRoger I don't think I'd go lower than a 3/10 for this. After all, there were no obvious bugs, performance issues, and, ill-advised though they may have been, every system in this game seems to have functioned as intended. I also found it interesting enough to suffer through for 10+ hours. That's more than you cay say for a lot of AAA Western blockbusters out there.
I actually liked the premise of TWEWY. Especially considering it predates most other stuff that's conceptually similar to it. But... at the end of the day, execution is what's important, and the game really missed the mark in that respect. I've long maintained I prefer interesting failure to functional mediocrity, and that's still true, but there are limits. If the game's experimentation makes it no fun to play, that's the point where I lose my patience with it.
You won't be surprised to learn the battle system in this version has a lot of defenders, then. I actually opted for this older version of the game primarily because people talked up how much better the controls were, but now I have to wonder. Kinda wish I'd tried the Switch version when it was free for a week on NSO now, if only so I could compare the controls. Then again, the rest of the game would still be the same, so maybe not!
Yeah, TWEWY does a lot of weird, insane stuff mechanically. Which I kind of admire, but it didn't work well here. I agree that a lot of games in the DS era went way too far with the hardware gimmicks. The phrase "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" comes to mind. At least this game didn't make me play it with the system held sideways, though, which is more than I can say for some DS games!
Haha, I'm not surprised you feel that way about the tracks I posted, considering you already have an established preference for music without vocals, but, if I'm being brutally honest, I still prefer the caterwauling in this game to whatever the heck Sonic Chronicles was going for.
Of course, at some point, this becomes the rhetorical equivalent of "which arm would you prefer I break?" Well, one would be worse than the other, but it's still an awful choice to have to make either way!
Thanks for reading what amounted to an angry blog post! I do recall a while back hoping I'd find a game bad enough that I could unreservedly rant about it, and I guess I found it, but... I dunno. I kinda wish it was just a better game. y'know?
I'm just glad to be done with it. I actually borrowed it from a friend, so, thankfully, no money was wasted on it. Only time, which is inarguably a far more valuable resource, unfortunately.
It's kinda funny. Both the best and worst games I've played so far this year were developed by Square-Enix. Hoping to talk in depth about the other one soon, actually. I never replay games, and I'm already in the middle of my second playthrough of it. Out of a planned three.
@crimsontadpoles It still has a lot of fans, so maybe I'm just an outlier opinion that regard, but... yeah, I dunno, I expected a lot more than I got. I really wanted to like it as well!
It's the weirdest combat system I've ever encountered in a game. Not necessarily the worst, but it definitely helped to spoil the experience.
I might check out the anime to see if it's any better. It's an interesting setup and world. There are some (theoretically) cool twists. But they really fumbled the ball when the time came to actually deliver the goods.
Finished Far Cry 4. That's one of the worst open worlds I have played. It's a chore, monotonous and uninteresting. Gave FC3 an 8.5 but this one is a 7 for me. Not buying anymore FC. Also very very minor improvements to the combat and the story is worse (characters too).
Should I expect the same for AC franchise? I'm starting that franchise this year.
@Ralizah I honestly adore TWEWY but then I played it on release. I probably put up with more of the admittedly tedious stuff out of a general love of the things the game gets right.
@RogerRoger 380 playable characters? That's nuts! I can definitely see how this might serve as fanservice/content overload for a super fan like you. The degree of optional content here sort of reminds me of Koei-Tecmo's musou games, where you can blast through the story in 20 - 30 hours, but the bulk of the content will take you hundreds to fully complete. It's an approach I like, actually, when done well, since it allows different sort of players to experience the game to the degree that they like while still having a sense of completion attached to their time with it.
It's good to hear they've somewhat overhauled the combat and camera controls in this release, as those were aspects of these lego games that massively held them back for me. Particularly the combat, which was, yes, sloppy and very basic. Probably why I've only ever completed one of these games in the past, despite having played a number of them.
The scale of the environments sound impressive, and it's nice that they've better integrated the game's levels so that they have a sense of consistency and flow from one to the next.
Putting aside the inclusion of the new trilogy, this all sounds like a pretty massively improved version of The Complete Saga back in the PS360 era. Which was actually probably my favorite Lego game back in the day (aside from the ill-fated Dimensions).
It's hard to imagine a no-voice acting mode would be pitched as a positive, but I guess some people have never adjusted to these things talking.
Pity about the performance issues, although I suppose that's one of the risks of playing games when they release. Hopefully it's patched up sooner than later, though.
Will you be focusing on this game exclusively until you get the plat, or will it be the sort of thing you dip in and out of while playing other games?
Entertaining review, as usual. Your enthusiasm as a Star Wars superfan definitely shines through, and I'm happy that the developers have managed to translate the entire nine-film saga to lego game form as fully as they have.
I get your 'certain perspective' comment. It'll probably never be the quote-unquote "best" Star Wars-themed game, but it might end up being the ultimate fan-pleasing game tied to this particular IP.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@RogerRoger I enjoyed your TSS review. As a Star Wars fan but not a LEGO fan (yes, there are a few of us out there) I’m intrigued about the game, even if it’s outside of my wheelhouse. I suspected the game would be very good based on early impressions and previews. It might just be worth a dive for me someday!
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@RogerRoger Once it goes low enough, I might grab this in order to play through episodes 4 - 6 in Lego form again. Love the movies, but you can only rewatch them so much before the thrill is lost.
Good to hear the developers didn't cheap out on this product, considering it probably would have been a simple thing to cut corners with assets, jokes, and whatnot drawn from their previous take on the first two trilogies.
The silent lego humor can be cute, but I'm not sure if I'm up for anymore mime-like cutscenes from my lego games. It works well in a certain context, but not when I want to re-experience set-pieces from [insert favorite IP].
To be honest, I'm surprised there haven't been any Lego James Bond games to date.
It's an amazing problem, isn't it, to not have enough time for all of the amazing games you want to play?
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a decent time investment. Probably 70+ hours of storytelling unless you're an especially fast reader. Definitely worth it, though: the series is taken to new narrative heights (particularly in the second game), and it has replaced the og trilogy as my favorite 'set' of games in the series.
The Stanley Parable was only a couple of hours long when I played it back in 2014 or so, although you'll probably squeeze more time out of it if you're going after all the trophies in this version. Especially if it's an expanded version of the game. Nevertheless, it probably won't be a huge time investment.
@RogerRoger
He'll of a write up and pleasure to read (so much so that I feel slightly inadequate praising it in a mere sentence of two!). I remember enjoying the first Lego Star Wars game a long time ago in a... As an occasional Lego game player and longstanding SW can (though not of your level, obvs!) I do have some interest in this. However as an occasional completionist with a never ending backlog I worry about the time commitment that it would entail. I agree that the Lego formula did need a bit of a shake up and its good to read that most of it landed.
Off topic: I always remembered KOTOR as my favourite Star Wars game ever, did you ever play it and are you looking forward to the remake?
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
@RogerRoger fantastic review for TSS, your love of the star wars IP oozes from it 😀. I will confess to having never played a lego game! Ive always enjoyed the star wars and I'm hopeful that this game might be the thing that tempts my daughter into the star wars universe, as she loves lego but gets freaked by the star wars movies. Experiencing that story for the first time via the medium of lego probably isn't ideal but hey ho! Did you get the chance to checkout any coop? Thanks again for the amazing review and detail.
@HallowMoonshadow Honestly, my expectations are so low now that any substantial improvement will be welcome. Yeah, I could understand the thought-hearing thing if it was actually integrated into the audio design as a way to immerse you in the setting or something, but, as it stands, the mechanic seems to not serve much of a purpose.
I'll say this: when I first read your impression on the demo, I thought it might have been a little needlessly harsh, but with experience of the original game under my belt now, I'm inclined to say it was probably appropriately harsh.
Nevertheless, owing to an amazing $15 deal a few months ago, I'm now the proud owner of a copy of a physical copy of the Nintendo Switch, so I'll be getting to it eventually.
@HallowMoonshadow If you still have tab up (or know the page number), let me know. I think I'm going to add an incomplete impressions/demo impressions section to the directory. I also want to add my partial write-up on Monster Hunter Stories 2 to it.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@RogerRoger it's probably the switch version I'll go for so we can play away from the tv and joy cons tend to be easier on smaller hands. Your right, seems to be completely fine even in handheld mode. I'm trying to tell myself I've got tons of games and can wait for a couple of patches and a sale but the call of the dark side (otherwise known as simply games.com) is strong!
Just finished Assassin's Creed: Origins on PS4 after 53 hours of playtime and it was an absolutely phenomenal game. I did pretty much everything in the game, such as doing all the question marks on the map, uncovering all areas, doing most of the side quests and so on. It's actually a much shorter game than I thought considering I did almost everything and yet it only took a little over 50 hours, while it took me over 80 hours to do most things in Odyssey and even then there were so many things I could've also done. In fact, if you just go through the story then it's a fairly short experience. You still have to do things like completing side quests, outposts and so on in order to level up accordingly with the story missions but I guess you could finish the game in 20-30 hours, which is very short for the open world type of AC game.
The story is honestly not that long and I was surprised to see that I had only uncovered half of the map when I was done with it. It's kinda misleading actually, most of the areas in the game are just desert areas with nothing to do in them. Anyway, I thought the game was more like a typical Assassin's Creed experience than Odyssey. I mean, it is called "Origins" so naturally they would explain how the Creed came to be. Odyssey takes place before Origins which is why it doesn't feel as much as an AC experience. But at least Origins had all the things that characterises an AC game, such as hidden blade, a group of assassins, the assassin hood, templars and of course a strong emphasis on stealth and assassinating targets. Not to mention the supernatural element which is present in all AC titles. So in one way, Origins is very much an unmitigated AC experience.
That said, the gameplay can feel a bit repetitive with too much familiar content and not enough variety. Sadly, the story missions don't feel any different than the side quests and while these things didn't bother me personally since I love Ubisoft games, a lot of people would probably get sick of them very fast. One difference I noticed between Origins and Odyssey is that enemies don't actually scale with you as you level up in Origins. So for instance, you could go to an area where enemies are around your level, and in another they are much stronger than you. This was never the case in Odyssey and I understand now why people didn't like Origins as much because you are basically "forced" to do side content in order to level up and keep up with the story. However, I do feel like this is something that's common with all RPGs so I don't really see it as an issue other than it restricts the open world aspect. It's not like you can play through the game again and have a different experience by taking other paths, because you have to follow a certain path so that you can level up properly. Odyssey on the other hand lets you go wherever you want right from the start because enemy levels scale with you so it promoted more freedom. Anyway, point is that I was not bothered by the structure of Origins as I still enjoyed the game a lot.
It's definitely nice to have finished this game now as it was one of those that I played for around 20 hours and lost my save file for years ago. Absolutely phenomenal experience and I highly recommend it to people who know what they're getting into based on my aforementioned impressions. I still have the two fairly meaty expansions left to do but I might do them later on as I take a break from the game for now.
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