Last of Us 2.
Well I think it's basically a better game then the first game in all ways. Maybe more importantly I think its basically everything I wanted the first game to be, which is not to say little (so interesting to experience it). That said its also quite violent so if you are a sensitive person I guess you should not play it. The animations in this game are so very beautiful and I felt challenged during my time with the game. Also the sounds effect are very cool and impressive (which I think contribute to make such an interesting experience). Its kind of I think its important to note that the game contains many stealth elements so its kind of beneficial that you enjoy those things in order to enjoy the game.
@RogerRoger Glad you reconsidered your decision to take this down. I'm not going to confront people if they don't feel comfortable posting on here, but I do think it's important for well-articulated minority positions to be maintained online, when possible.
Anyway, it sounds like this is a really good release, but maybe not the one you were looking for. A better traditional video game, but it sounds like a worse role-playing experience.
The game itself looks nice, but wow, it's yet another super unpolished AAA release. The PC version really hot hammered, but even the next-gen consoles were producing unfortunate results. Sometimes I wonder if games aren't getting too visually complex for their own good!
Damning Uncharted reference there. You did remind me that I really need to play The Lost Legacy, though.
@RogerRoger fantastically written review as always mate… and I’m really happy that I got a chance to read it. I’ll be real interested to see how I find the change in Cal’s portrayal having read through your perspective. As I’ve mentioned before… I’m a bit of a cut-scene button-masher, so narrative in games has never been high up on my totem pole but it will be something that I look for as a result of your review.
What I’m most shocked by is how little Respawn appears to have developed the framework they laid down in Fallen Order. I’ve long been under the impression that this would end up being an Uncharted 2-like leap in quality… but the more I read the less this seems to be the case. I wasn’t overly into the first game, so I’m thinking my take will end up being much the same here. Wait for a sale seems to be my take unfortunately.
@RogerRoger Thanks for the contextual information and I completely agree with you — I’ve come to appreciate that a persons opinions and viewpoints do not define them, as you effectively state. And it’s amazing how often I might disagree with someone about one thing and then vehemently agree with them on another. Anyways, cheers and here’s to many happy days ahead. 🍻
Now, about this review… Awesome review, my friend, and slightly surprising! Really glad you shared it. I appreciate your balance and honesty, because I know how much Star Wars means to you and how much the first game resonated for you. Also, after reading 9/10 praises dropped from Push Square and other outlets I was excited for you and the rest of us Star Wars enthusiasts. So it’s a bit of a shock that it fell short. Although, it does seem like there was plenty of enjoyment to be had and a decent Star Wars game is better than a bad one, like you mention in your review.
Out of curiosity I looked back at my Fallen Order review as a level-set to refresh my own expectations. I remember quite enjoying it and having the joy of running around in that ‘power fantasy with a lightsaber’ overshadowed some of the more annoying aspects of the game design. I’m happy to see that the map is improved and fast travel is enabled. Those were two large gripes on my end, and from many other gamers. I never considered that in the process of improving and refining that Respawn might drop the ball on the story and character development though. Sometimes when writers try too hard they lose that ‘special sauce’ that comes with following their own passions, rather than making a character by committee.
I’ve bought the game already, on launch day. In fact I’ve loaded it on my console (all one million GB of it!) and booted it briefly, only to shut it back down so I can finish off my other licensed game time-sink I’m playing. I also figured I’d give Respawn a couple weeks to make good on their promise of patching the game up to snuff. Regardless, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll definitely drop some impressions for comparison sake when I get around to it. (Maybe in a week or two. Life continues to be hectic)
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Thank you for reposting @RogerRoger, you and I can be contrary fairies together if need be!
Again love the screenshots, but this time I will remember to say I love the writing too. You tackled it from a personal angle, a Star Wars fan angle, a gamer and even took the time to break down some more technical/mechanical stuff. Really rad to cover so much in a cohesive writing style and certainly has helped me calibrate expectations. Certainly puts me to shame when the last review I shared in here was just me crying about Rachel Amber 😂 I haven't actually ever finished Fallen Order, feel like maybe I now need to, and hopefully in that time Survivor will be fixed so I can see how I land with it, as someone who has kinda always had Star Wars in his life but wouldn't say he is a massive fan of the franchise as a whole.
@RogerRoger I could have assumed you were reviewing Dead Space 2 after Dead Space 1 from your opening section. Lots of people preferred Isaac in the original, although he was intentionally a blank slate where as it sounds like it was quite accidental in Fallen Order! I suppose where it differs is that Dead Space 2 had a very cool story with even better pacing! Your mileage will vary, I suppose, when you’re left to imprint a bit of yourself onto the character you’re playing.
I would have stuck my 2 cents in but @Hallowmoonshadow said all that needed to be said. I try and give the benefit of the doubt, I dunno, perhaps it was an attempt at being playful. Just don’t understand the need to dig in when you’re obviously in the wrong, how hard is it to apologise these days 🙂
I would have stuck my 2 cents in but @Hallowmoonshadow said all that needed to be said. I try and give the benefit of the doubt, I dunno, perhaps it was an attempt at being playful. Just don’t understand the need to dig in when you’re obviously in the wrong, how hard is it to apologise these days 🙂
This man speaks The Truth.
This is probably sacrilege in review circles @RogerRoger, but I've only read your closing comments. 😬
I've not played Fallen Order yet, but will be soon. I will make sure to play the PS4 version on my PS5. But so glad you put the review up for everyone to see!
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.
@RogerRoger Haha, don't worry about me. More than happy to take a ban for a few days when it's for a good cause. I'm glad to see you ended up reposting your review! Sometimes peer pressure is the perfect medicine. 😛 I was unusually interested in this game considering I'm not really a Star Wars fan (some might even say hater as far as The Mandalorian is concerned), so it was nice reading about the game from a completely different perspective. Considering my relationship with the franchise I probably wouldn't share the same irks you've experienced with it, but I'll definitely make sure to tread lightly!
@RogerRoger Awh, thank you! Always glad to see you're still hanging around as well. I may not and probably will never be consistent in posting anywhere, but I'm glad to report I'm doing good at least! I think what it is with me and Jedi: Survivor is that I'm generally just very into spacefaring adventure-type stories. What turned me off of the previous entry was that I heard it was a bit Souls-like and had extensive backtracking, which are two elements I don't appreciate much in games. The visuals there also looked pretty bland to me compared to what I've been seeing from this sequel. I suppose I'm kind of hoping it'll have a similar feel to the Guardians of the Galaxy game from a few years ago since I very much enjoyed that game. I assume this story will be a tad more serious, but hope the spacelike charm mostly stays intact. I've heard this new game improves on the elements I mentioned before and the positive reception also definitely did a lot to pique my interest, so yeah. Those are the expectations! Feel free to correct me on them in case you think I might be disappointed. Probably won't buy it anyway until there's a sizeable discount since I'm not really in the business of paying seventy bucks for a game, haha.
Haven't had a chance to read your review yet properly but I will soon! Very glad to see it back up though!
That impressions piece I was telling you about is already 900 words long... I wasn't trying to be so long winded with it but... I just can't help myself it seems with anything
Previously known as Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy
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"You don't have to save the world to find meaning in life. Sometimes all you need is something simple, like someone to take care of"
@RogerRoger Oh wow, had no idea Telltale was up to their old schtick again under a new name!
Telltale Games tended to fail as choose-your-own-adventure narratives (illusion of choice, etc.), but I can't deny that you're right about them fundamentally understanding the power of effective storytelling in the first place. My choices might not have meant anything, but I can't say, in the case of their breakout hit The Walking Dead Season One, for example, that the emergent and tragic father/daughter dynamic between protagonist Lee Everett and Clementine was anything less than utterly compelling. It's good to hear that, despite being subpar game developers, the writers still have that magic touch that allows them to tell a brand new story in a way that aligns well with the general ethos of the licensed property it belongs to.
BTW, I'm not sure how far off you are with the PS3 graphics thought. I mean, it's probably obviously running at a higher resolution than 720p, but those screenshots do NOT look like they belong to a game releasing on a modern power console. Not even when you consider their lower-budget nature.
I've actually, since last December, been watching through the Star Trek series with my family, starting with TNG (also finished Strange New World and Picard, and am about halfway into the first season of TOS, which is... interesting...), and not even Star Trek fully understands what makes a good Star Trek story sometimes, frankly. And I don't mean in terms of quality. While I'm generally pretty tolerant of "pew pew" sci-fi in TV/film form, I was a little horrified when I watched First Contact (supposedly the best of the TNG films) and found little more than a violent action vehicle. It felt very wrong in the context of such a thoughtful franchise. So if these developers can capture that Trekian essence at all, it's to their credit. It's much easier to do generic space drama than actually flesh out interesting character drama, which I'd argue is at the root of the IP.
The game might be VERY imperfect, but it sounds like they generally got it right where it counts when it comes to Star Trek.
As always, an excellently constructed review! Although is that final score actually supposed to be a 7/10, I wonder?
@RogerRoger Great review, and another hidden gem in the haystack of the PSN! As a fan of the old Telltale games I must admit that the game arouses some interest. I’ve almost done a clean sweep of the old Telltale games but thanks to @johncalmc ‘s grave 3/10 review of the latest New Tales from the Borderlands , I’ve wondered if the magic could ever be recaptured. I’m not a Trekkie or a Trekster or anyone who identifies with the clan, but I have a shallow working knowledge of the Star Trek Universe and enjoy it from an arm’s length. I’ll keep it in mind if I ever get around to finishing the last Season of TWD, and get an unquenchable thirst for more Telltale. It sound vastly superior to the new Borderlands one.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Thank you for the review as always @RogerRoger. I've just picked this up myself, so I'll be interested in going back through your review again when I am done.
I think most Mass Effect fans will tell you they've spent over a decade chasing a high that series gave them that has just never really been replicated by anything else. I am not one to replay games generally, but I tend to play Mass Effect through again every couple of years because there really is basically no other. I picked up Resurgence in the hope that it scratches even a little bit of my itch, followed by the Expanse game later in the summer.
That said, I booted up Resurgence for an hour or so to give it a quick go and it makes an... interesting first impression. I am playing on PC, and it is in a pretty rough shape there. PC really has taken a battering this year with a string of woeful ports. There are basically no settings at all and it is locked at 30 fps. I guess that is fine for this style of game, but more annoyingly is that if I set it above 1080p resolution it warps the image, squashing it down and stretching it out. 1080p on my 4K TV, when I know it is capable of much higher resolution, just looks really bad to me.
I also can't tell whether it is the lower resolution, but it visually has a real seventh gen game given a HD remaster vibe to it to me. Like facial animations are somehow vibrant, yet there is a stiffness to them as well, same with the walking animations, hair etc yet the skin on some of the models is crazy detailed, I dunno, it is weird. It sorta looks great and kinda off at the same time. Although I thought the art direction captured the world of Trek quite strongly and started lighting that Mass Effect fire for me for sure. Again, it is weird we often don't get games like this where we can move through these sorts of spaces from this perspective and level of fidelity.
I can't work out whether Rydek is a Bajoran or a Kobliad which is probably bad form of me, but it is cool to play one of these games as a non-human. The human perspective was central to Mass Effect and couldn't really exist without you playing as a human, but we've played countless games where we experience the perspective of fantasy races like orcs, dwarfs, elves etc not enough science fiction games where we navigate a world through the perspective of a non human.
@RogerRoger Indeed it is quite a lot of Telltale games I’ve played. The furthest I went back was to play Back to the Future (ed. — unintentional pun 😄). I never played the older stable of games like the Sam & Max games or the CSI and Law & Order games, etc. I also skipped the apparently abysmal Jurassic Park game. And the only recent-ish games I’ve not played are the Minecraft ones.
Taking a look at their Wikipedia page, I’m reminded of the collaborative effort with Deck Nine to develop The Expanse: A Telltale Series and it shows a release date of July 27th. That’s not too far away and so I’m really curious if that will actually come out as planned. Deck Nine did a bang-up job with Life is Strange: Before the Storm (and by all reports True Colors also, which I can’t yet confirm) and so this might be another really good Telltale entry to keep in mind, especially for lovers of Sci-Fi. I really need to go back to watching the Expanse TV show but when I was watching it I did enjoy what I saw.
@RogerRoger That reminds me of the Back to the Future Telltale game which I remember really enjoying about 10 years ago. Definitely more of a classic point and click game than the ones that followed.
I just finished my New Game+ playthrough of Midnight Suns and realised I have never written any real detailed thoughts about this game, but now at almost 120 hours (spread across the main game, the DLC, and NG+) played, I feel like I am in as good of a position I will ever be to get some thoughts down.
Right away, I must make it clear that I am not a New Game+ enjoyer, so the fact this enticed me to play through it all over again - and just a few months after I finished it the first time, no less - tells you more about how much I like this than maybe it would for those who somehow play a 20 hour single player game for hundreds of hours.
It obviously helped that Midnight Suns had post launch heroes, and actually delivered them all, which meant that my New Game+ had new characters to interact and play with, with new missions to go through, meaning it wasn’t just an identical playthrough like it might be in other games. By its nature too, playing a second time allowed me to make different choices than I did the first time around. Although admittedly this is more in the True Colors style of choice, rather than Life is Strange. I also played as a male Hunter the second time, to experience a slightly different central performance as well. This does I guess make it somewhat of a cheat, as it is almost like a 1.5, rather than just playing through the identical thing again, but even without all of those things, I just think Midnight Suns has such an addictive, incredibly playable, loop.
What is Midnight Suns? Effectively it is like what you would get if you took say a Fire Emblem or a BioWare RPG, filled the cast with Marvel characters, added deck building elements and took out any direct reference to sex and romance. If you thought that sounded like it might be a bit of a mess, you would be correct, but it is the hot kind of mess, at least in my books. This game clearly polarised people, but I feel like if you vibe with this niche, you are gonna vibe hard. There is no middle ground here.
Plus like… I’d like to think I wasn’t a prude, but I feel like sex is rarely handled well in games..? Am I allowed to say that? Almost all of the relationship stuff in say a Fire Emblem is usually kinda creepy that I've experienced, anyway. But then even in say BioWare games, which are often considered more on the mature side, I often just find a lot of the romance stuff really cringe. And those sex scenes in Cyberpunk 2077? Christ, they live rent free in my nightmares.
I dunno, I am sure some people would have loved to have been able to bone down with Spider-Man or whatever, I just don’t think it would have ever worked. Especially as the quality of the writing isn’t that great, I am not sure they could have pulled it off in a way that just wouldn’t have felt really uncomfortable.
Instead, Midnight Suns social sim elements are about taking your player created character and embedding yourself in a family of super powered weirdos, who all are just chomping at the bit to call you their best friend and play video games with you. Is it all rather stupid and wish fullfilly? Yeah, sure, I guess, but what is wrong with that? Just a lovely cosy, comfy, good time.
Like I say though, what I am not saying here is that the writing itself is perfect or… even that good, a lot of the time. There are some really jarring uses of tone, and characterisation throughout, which I think really was the source of much of the negativity around this one.
Midnight Suns very much makes the characters their own and this comes with the best and worst of what that approach offers. There will be some diehard fans of X character who will absolutely hate the representation of their character here, but if you take Midnight Suns as its own universe with its own internal rules and logic, I feel like they found a cohesive tone within the four walls of the game. Plus, like, I vibe with way more of these versions of the characters than I don’t. Would this have worked better if it was set in like Xaviar’s school or something? Probably. But I dunno, I liked it overall.
Outside of the social sim elements, the game also delivers really excellent turn based, deck building, combat. For all the wobbly characterisation outside of combat, in combat, almost every hero has been distilled perfectly into a deck of cards. A difficult feat on its own, but an even greater one given you can focus down specific roles for heroes based on the cards you pick, meaning they needed to create not just one authentic feel per hero, but multiple, as they serve different functions decided by the player. Every hero is so much fun to use, experiment with and see how they combo with other heroes.
Part of what makes this such a great NG+er is that deck building sandbox, I am sure you could spend dozens of hours just experimenting with decks, and combos of heroes, if you really wanted. Building individual heroes in different ways as you swap in and out types of cards, apply cards with different modifiers, and then experiment further how those roles for those heroes can complement other heroes with different roles that you have also built. Combat won’t ever feel truly unique one encounter from another, but it will certainly feel varied enough - especially with the inclusion of the 5 bonus heroes (one for clearing the game, four through the season pass) - to give the smoke and mirrors feeling of having an almost limitless chain of combinations to mess around with. Like I say, it is just buckets of fun.
I do, however, have a lot to say on the things that I don’t like about combat (negatives are always easier to go into detail for me) so this is going to seem like a more negative section of this review than I actually feel about the combat in practice, just a warning. Here we go:
Probably my biggest issue with combat is how random it can be at times. For all the control you have over building your heroes your way through your card choices, once you take that deck into the field, it becomes almost entirely hands off at times. Especially at higher difficulties, the deck based system is less of a fun sandbox tool and instead feels like an infuriatingly restrictive prison cell.
Some missions are like watching the car go off the road at 10 MPH, and it would be so simple to just turn the wheel to the left and get back onto the road safely, but there is either no steering wheel provided or the steering wheel is locked behind an unnecessarily convoluted layer of interacting systems, meaning it's right there but you just aren’t allowed to use it. Forcing you then to just helplessly plummet over the side of the cliff into a chasm of frustration. It is one thing to lose a battle due to poor planning on your part, another to basically lose to RNG.
Part of the problem is combat is sorta overly complicated despite its seeming simplicity on the surface. The core fundamentals is you get three card plays and one move once per turn, and this is shared across your party of three. However, most attack and more powerful cards also have a Heroism cost associated with them as well, which is a resource you have to build on a turn by turn basis using specific types of cards. You can redraw cards if your hand stinks, but you only get two of these per turn. Although, there are also systems to generate more card plays or moves or whatever as well.
The cadence I guess is to play weaker, or more support focused cards, to then generate enough Heroism to get off your big damage moves. However, there will be turns where you generate massive piles of Heroism, use up your redraws and still have absolutely nothing to use it on. And trust me, especially later on, a single dead turn can often be at times as good as game over. Sure, you can use your Heroism to turn your environment into a weapon too, but once these environmental interactions are used they can’t be used again. It just feels so frustrating at times because you are absolutely at the mercy of RNG and as a player there really is little you can do to circumvent, brute force or overcome a bad hand.
For the first third of the game though, this feels less apparent, because enemies are generally well tuned and designed so that a dead hand every now and then doesn’t necessarily have to be a game over. This all changes about a third of the way through when new enemies are introduced, all of which do not feel properly balanced in mind with the limitations the combat system can at times layer onto the play.
They suddenly throw a lot of ***** into the mix at once, and almost all of it ***** sucks. They introduce enemies who can replicate, bind you in place or apply status effects, none of these systems feel like there were given a shred of testing or balance, status effects can be stacked onto your heroes, and the combined ticks will kill you faster than anything else can in the game and this is seemingly unavoidable.
Likewise the replicating enemies can only be stopped if you kill them in one hit, but they are introduced at a point in the game where one shotting enemies is not a reliable or even particularly realistic prospect, so they can quickly overwhelm your board and the game basically just gives you nothing to answer back with, other than to just turn the difficulty down until you can one shot things, which feels bad that it is at times necessary.
Talking of difficulty specifically, there is also a difficulty ladder to climb. Combat actions are weighted, and they provide you an overall score of up to three stars depending on how well you perform. Getting a teammate downed might ding you some points, but clearing the battle in x amount of turns might give you a boost, whatever. If you get enough three star clears a new difficulty unlocks and the main benefit of this is it adds a higher modifier to the cosmetic currency rewards you would earn for that mission. So let's say you get 10 currency for completing the mission in five turns, at base difficulty this might multiply by 0, but at difficulty five its times by like 0.75 or something. However, personally, after I climbed to maybe the sixth difficulty I think..? this system just did not seem to be tuned or balanced properly.
My team was basically getting one shot by everything, and every time someone is downed it would minus some currency from your overall rewards. And having a person downed also puts you behind tempo, so it takes more turns to clear the mission as well, which also reduces the currency you can earn if you take too many turns to clear a mission. So by the end when it totalled up how much I earned, minused off the amounts I lost, and then applied the modifier, I was coming out with less than I was on the lower difficulties, where I wasn’t getting downed, or taking multiple extra turns to clear the mission, as the currencies deducted at higher difficulties were always far greater than the modifier applied at the end.
And that isn’t even talking about how all of the frustrations and poor balancing in combat are magnified to excruciating degrees at the higher difficulties, too. I eventually made my peace with basically always running the game at least two difficulty notches below the highest one I had unlocked at that time. These are superheroes, they are meant to feel powerful, they aren’t meant to be getting one shot by goons or using ultimates on goons just to do a bit of chip damage.
And I get it, this is what makes a game strategic or tactical, rather than just a straight turn based RPG. Combat is a puzzle to be solved, but the puzzle has to be more than artificial shackles you have chosen to layer onto me and then force me to overcome with no mechanics to support it. At least in my books. Obviously this’ll be unique to you, but the higher tier difficulties are in my opinion total garbage and not worth the trouble.
Now for the hardest part, wrapping these thoughts up so we don't end on a negative note. I guess my tl;dr really was already said higher in the review. If any of the stuff in here sounds like it'll appeal to you, it'll appeal to you tenfold. If anything in here sounds like you'd really dislike it, times it by ten again. It is just the weird affect Midnight Suns seems to have on all of these who play it. Personally, for all its warts, I vibe with its unique wavelengths and I may have to come back for some more again sooner rather than later.
Not to over complicate things @Kidfried but game length is fairly subjective. What I mean, is that the game has a collection of main missions set over three acts, sometimes these missions will require you to do a randomly generated side mission first or complete a research project or something, but really these are the only mandatory activities in the entire game.
While it will make up a bulk of what you are doing, basically everything else is effectively optional. Especially if you are running it on the lowest difficulty, where minmaxing your bonds and stuff may not be quite as important.
An example is that your base of operations, The Abbey, has this Metroidvania style extended quest branch that threads through it, unlocking additional areas which provides lore or character details that feed back into the main questline. It is an ungodly mountain of tedious busywork though, so while I finished this the first time around, I didn't touch any of this the second time (outside of the mandatory introductory missions/cutscenes for this questline) and was never required to, either. I can't imagine how much time that shaved off of my playthrough.
Likewise, there are groups that run social clubs in the Abbey too, they also come with a bunch of busywork side activities which I also skipped the second time around, which again probably saved me so much time.
I think of my 120 hours, probably about 60 to 70 of that was my first playthrough with me being super thorough to try and do everything in the core game (no DLC touched). There is probably another 10 to 20 hours on top where I dabbled in endgame and DLC content. Then the last forty or so hours was my new game plus run with all the DLC included.
I know people love Persona 5 for letting you pick a partner, but I thought it was done in such a weird hentai dating sim way, that it creeps me out
No idea what you could possibly mean!
It always struck me as a little weird that you can date your teacher or little sister, but all the guys are off-limits lol.
@Pizzamorg The card game aspect of Midnight Suns baffles me. How does the developer of XCOM develop a card game instead of the polished SRPG gameplay everyone thought we would get? I'll never understand the choice.
It definitely sounds like you tended to enjoy your time with it, though. Will have to give it a try at some point. I also love social simulation gameplay. I just wish it was literally anything other than Marvel superheroes!
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