Sacked That Off Mate

[Snaggletooth]

I really quit enjoyed it, the lack of soundtrack was nice and enjoyed learning the trails once I got the controls sussed.

Had a bit of an addictive one more try kinda feel to it.

Apart from the later challenges which wasnt even going to attempt.

[AndyKurosaki]

Daymare. Hoo boy, this is awful. A really janky, bargain basement Resident Evil. An utter chore to play, janky combat, and puzzles that are just ridiculous without a walkthrough.

Nope.

[one-armed dwarf]

Hades, I suppose. I tried it again today but found that the enforced repitiousness of doing the first world before I could even progress the second left me so unengaged that I was dying to the first fury again (a fight which I had beat about 5 times at this stage). I don't mind that it's difficult necessarily, just that doing all the same stuff over and over didn't ever get more interesting and the little drips of story in between deaths weren't worth it.

 

I don't uninstall games usually cause I might turn around on them sometimes, but I uninstalled this cause the more I played it the more I just disliked it and felt miserable. So I cleared the space for something else.

 

I'm glad I tried it though, even just to see what people are talking about and confirm for myself that I was right to give rogue like a wide berth all this time cause it just isn't for me at all. The challenge of its combat and enemy design gave me Ninja Gaiden vibes, just wish it was structed in the style of a genre I enjoy.

[bellow]

Gravity rush 2. Gave me a bit of a headache, to be honest. Not so much that I couldn't cope, but the game started to get on my nerves a bit - fetch quests etc...  This game really knows how to stretch a quest to the limit, like you've always got to do the bullshit quest activity 5 times to close it out, or if it's a combat quest it's gotta be 10 waves of uninteresting enemies. And let's not even discuss the game's attitude to stealth.

 

I can fully see how a certain type of gamer could love this or even hold it as a favourite game. It's huge, extremely well made and beautiful to look at, with an engaging protagonist. Just not for me.

[shinymcshine]

Started God of War (2018) and think I'm already done with it, after about 90 mins.

 

Perhaps it's because I've recently played Shadow of the Colossus, but I took way too many attempts to kill the big troll - initially as I clearly thought you were somehow suppose to use the kid to shoot off the glowing armour, but the hint screen only appeared first time around, not after subsequent deaths, so I thought I'd clearly missed something. After I realised the kid was just a distraction, I did okay. 

 

Then the battle/cut scene with the stranger at the house, which just felt like a huge futile waste of time.

 

TBH it didn't start off well, the whole paddle down the river was fine, but when they stuck cinema style credits over it, it was hugely immersion breaking - I'm supposed to be playing a game FFS, not watching a movie - but then that blurring between combat & cut scenes in the above fight broke that too.

 

I'm sure I might be missing something good, and it all looks pretty enough but I really have no incentive to continue.

 

I've been enjoying a few older games over the last few months, Watch Dogs (PS4), SotC (PS4), Fable 2 (360) and Oblivion (360) - the first two being for the first time, the latter two repeat plays, but at the minute GoW will be binned.

 

[Sly Reflex]

I am done with Basingstoke, which was my first streamed game as voted for by my community. It's not very fun, the item stuff is a bit finicky as well. I'm unsure if it's just shit design or if it's buggy.

 

Doesn't matter though, it's not fun. Shame, but then again not everything can be fantastic.

[DANGERMAN]

@shinymcshine I'm not sure it ever gets easy as such, but I do think God of War starts harder than the middle and end of the game. Spiderman did the same, odd little trend that

[one-armed dwarf]

Not to get too defense squad cause this aint the thread for it but Atreus is actually a very good boy, he tells you where enemies are and stuff. Thought that was a really clever design.

[shinymcshine]

I so want to like GoW as I enjoy reading Norse mythology, but I just wasn't enthused by my gaming experience - maybe a revisit another time then.

[bellow]

On 04/01/2021 at 20:58, shinymcshine said:

so want to like GoW as I enjoy reading Norse mythology

 

What about Hellblade? In that game one of the characters just spiel's stories from Norse mythology throughout the game. I actually started an second playthru to concentrate on the stories.

[Manicm]

I haven’t beaten that troll in GOW yet...I started the game he beat me, I haven’t been back to pick it up after the OH sat there laughing at the fact I couldn’t beat an early boss...need to go back

to this.

[Maryokutai]

ICEY rather recently. Someone recommended this to me because supposedly it has some really cool narrative tricks up its sleeve. That might be true, even if it doesn't go further than a narrator complaining about when you don't do what he says in the first hour, but the combat is so abysmally bad that I just couldn't bother anymore. I think the decisive moment was when I faced a mid-level boss that was charging up an attack so I dashed/dodged through him to the other side only for his sprite to just flip 180° and hit me anyway. No idea where those great scores come from, the last few years have seen dozens upon dozens of 2D action games that are worlds ahead in terms of playability.

 

Thankfully only around 5€ wasted.

[Maryokutai]

And the next one, Invisible, Inc.

It's a really complex game and the tutorial fails to make you understand most of its systems. It's like putting someone in a car for the first time, telling them how to flip over the sun visor and asking them to drive around the Nürburgring 30 minutes later.

Right after the "tutorial" the game displays some info about the difficulty settings and recommends Beginner, which allows for a couple of rewinds during missions and is supposedly more forgiving. This was probably the first warning sign.

 

The second mission after the tutorial already put me up against armed drones and special enemy agents. I regularly fail to see what I'm supposed to hack or what I'm supposed to use as cover on the map as the isometric view makes this a complete pain in the ass to navigate and interpret. I somehow managed to almost get back to the extraction point, but I ran into a drone, which I couldn't hack since my AI's cooldown was down for reasons I fail to understand (see tutorial) and while I was waiting for it to pass a special enemy agent snuck up from behind and killed my two agents. Since rewind only goes back one turn, all I could do here it either run at the drone and die or run back at the agent and die. Or retry the entire mission for another chance at not having a clue and finding terminals that are obscured by walls.

 

Deleted it. This is probably a cool game if you're the developer and know how it works. Otherwise, not so much.

[Craymen Edge]

Call Of The Sea

Specifically the Game Pass for PC version. It's a nice looking adventure game with an intriguing story (the little I saw), but technically it's a load of shit.

 

First of all it has an awful head bob camera motion that's totally unnatural looking, and cannot be turned off. Combined with an awful FOV setting of 75, (which you're supposed to be able to change in the options but this doesn't work), it's nausea inducing. 

There's a mouse acceleration/smoothing thing going on which also can't be turned off, leading to any camera movement lagging behind your mouse movement before catching up, and it feels sluggish and awful. 

Then there's your character's movement. It's so slow as to feel like you're wading through treacle, and makes moving back and forth between different parts of an area feel like a chore. There is a run button which you have to hold down all the time to make movement bearable, but it just makes the head-bob and camera lag feel worse. 

[mfnick]

Cyber Shadow

 

Thank God I didn’t pay for that and it was on Game Pass. Looks right up my street, old school 2D platform hack and slasher which has reviewed really well? Yes please.

 

I made it to chapter 6 and I can’t do anymore. I just think it feels a bit shit. It’s really stiff reminiscent of NES games but in a way which has irked me more than normal.
 

One of the main abilities is just completely unreliable too. There’s a air down attack - down+attack in the air as expected. Simple enough but what the game doesn’t make clear is you can only do it after the apex of your jump and even when you realise that, in practice it only works 6/10 times. Hugely frustrating. When a stationary enemy which can’t attack causes more fear than any other enemy just because it requires that simple ability, something is wrong. I like hard games, but ones where it feels like the controls are the thing that’s fucking you over - no thanks. 

 

[bellow]

I knew cyberpunk was low grade after a few hours. Even though it was running well on my XSS it felt like a knock off GTA. Luckily, with all the hullabaloo, I was able to get a full refund off Microsoft.

 

Immortals got the same treatment, although I only managed to trade that it. A dodgy Zelda.

[one-armed dwarf]

I would like to peek into the alt universe where next gen consoles got the next gen Cyberpunk and if it would still be considered such a letdown.

 

I generally don't connect with most open world stuff (unless it's something that's great like Dragons Dogma or BOTW) so I dunno how much of me not liking that game is due to that or if it's actually kinda bad.

 

Never been more confused by review scores for a game honestly. 

 

Valheim is the one I've binned. It just has such a horrible aesthetic and mostly just seems to be about work. It might be trying for a sort of Minecraft and BOTW hybrid but I can't see it and I'm willing to wait and let other people explore it so maybe they can explain to me what the big deal is supposed to be here.

[Maryokutai]

Took me 15 minutes to decide I'd delete Apex Legends again. Going in I knew there was a high chance of me not quite liking it but there's one aspect that immediately turned me off which is the loot. I really don't see the point of running around a massive map and trying to collect the best loot when it's all just gone the next game. There's also so much of it in certain places that it's borderline annoying to pick it up, since you need to take your thumb away from the analogue stick to press a button. So you're either constantly moving your thumb around or just running through the building with your head angled downwards like Quasimodo. Just really not the kind of gameplay loop I find enjoyable.

 

I also don't really like the art style, though I could have gotten over this if I had enjoyed the gameplay. Some characters look cool though, I admit.

[mfnick]

Wasteland 3

 

Damn shame this one! Put about 5-6 hours in. Really liked the world building and characters, loved the brutality of it, the combat system is a great riff on X Com. All good. Then I died. It doesn’t auto save. Progress completely gone. Deleted.  

[Maryokutai]

Resident Evil Revelations 2

 

I don't know what I expected, it's a coop Resident Evil game, of course it's going to be a miserable experience when played solo. And they really went out of their way to make this as annoying as possible if you don't have a coop partner. For example, there's only one character per duo who can use a flashlight. For the Claire/Moira pairing it's Moira, who doesn't use guns, so you can kind of find a rhythm between using her during exploration and switching to Claire for combat. With Barry/Natalia though it's the other way around and Natalia, the "non-combat" character, can't use the flashlight, but only she can spot certain items and spot enemies through walls. So you either have to hope AI Barry lights your way (he doesn't) or just go in blind all the time (you do).

 

Then there's the usual garbage AI coop stuff like your partner jumping on boxes and containers randomly when you try to approach an enemy stealthily, or them not healing you for minutes but then finally deciding to do so the exact second you use a healing herb yourself, so you waste one. And so on.

 

Too little time for stuff like this. I almost made it through Episode 2 but enough is enough.