Hollow Knight

It took me an embarrassingly long time, but I finished. 93% completion and the worst ending.

About halfway through the game, I messed up any chance i might have had at getting all of the charms, and at that point, I didn't really care if I achieved 100% or not.

At first I installed the Indiebox version, and later on I decided to try the Steam version to access all of the new content.
I should have deleted the Indiebox shortcut, because I clicked on it a few weeks later by mistake. When I went back to my Steam game, I was missing the Dreamshield in my inventory and when I went back to where I had acquired it, it wasn't there.

Having said that, I can't praise this game enough. The visuals and the music are just beautiful.

I'm glad I didn't quite comprehend how difficult this game was, even though I read the reviews, because I probably wouldn't have bought it, and I would have missed out on a great experience.

I gave up about 70% through and it wasn't because of the combat.

The jumping got to be a pain, which isn't normally a problem, but the saves are checkpoint and later on the gaps get longer and longer and you find yourself having to keep trying to make the same series of jumps over and over only to just barely miss the last one and die. Drove me nuts.

You didn't check the control bindings to notice the Quicksave and Quickload keys? Unless these were patched in later. They're definitely there in the Steam version, I wouldn't have gotten to the third level without them due to the combat.

maybe I did. maybe it was something else about the game that drove me to quit,

this was several years ago

Batman - The Enemy Within - The Telltale series

The recent problems of Telltale studios reminded me about that second game in the Batman universe, so i went ahead, bought it and played it, just in case Telltale's servers go dark and the games don't play anymore.

I liked the first installment of Batman series. This second one didn't disappoint me. It was nice to see Telltale's take on the origins of the Joker and the internal dilemnas Bruce Wayne/Batman must face at every corner.

I also like the "episodical" kind of thing, I find it particularly clever for sups' tales like Batman, it gives them a more "comics/TV series" flavor which is, to me, perfect.

So, yes, again a very good game from telltale studios, hoping they will find a solution to keep the boat afloat, finish TWD series and get back on their feets so I can continue to enjoy their games.

Sor far in 2018: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2018/post12

Hector: Badge of Carnage (GOG) - 4.5/5. Funny, great music, art, writing and puzzles. This is what LSL: Reloaded should have been similar to. Must play for point and click adventure fans. Only took off .5 because some puzzles were not obvious to me.

Previous games finished in 2018

I really enjoyed these two as well, but I don't often see people agreeing with me on that or people who've even tried and played them, for that matter. Quite underrated, IMO. Glad to see you liked them! :)

D&D: Tower of Doom. I've played this so many times going back to the arcades but never beat it for some reason. So now I have. It's an especially well-made Capcom beat-em-up based that does a pretty good job of incorporating the pen-and-paper rules despite the odd pairing. You have the different classes, picking up treasure to buy stuff, getting XP, branching paths, and the unique monsters like the beholder. I would liked more weapon and armor upgrades, but that's just picking nits. If you like this style of game, it's a must-play.

I would love a 2nd season of Hector, but with Straandlooper defunct and Telltale possibly joining them, it's not going to happen unless THQ Nordic sweeps in

Uncharted 4 A Thief's End (PS4Pro)

It's another one, just like the other ones. It still does what Naughty Dog does well, good characters, exotic locations and areas. Far fetched story that all plays out in that action movie style. To do that, I accept things in these games that I don't like in other genres like extreme linearity and heavy restrictive scripting. I accept that in this type of game the devs need to keep a tight reign on the player to be able to get those movie style action sequences to work. Also, this time they did reduce the amount of combat in relation to exploration compared to earlier games. That's a good thing.

BUT

The bad stuff is still exactly the same. Combat is still terrible, the worst in any other games with similar combat. Worse than Quantum Break, Gears of War, Tomb Raider...even worse than 1886: The Order. The enemies are still brain dead. They still spam unlimited grenades with pin point accuracy 100m to my hidden position. The enemy ALWAYS targets me and knows where I am, even though you always have a partner. My partner (either Sam or Elena) will be right beside the enemy shooting them, yet the enemies still go all the way across the map to get to me even though I'm hiding and not even shooting at them. Your partner shoots at the enemy, yet only shoots plasticine bullets because they don't do any damage. Which is okay because the enemy never does any damage to your partner either. At one point I got the shits with how ludicrous it was and left my partner in a hail of enemy fire with me safely in a spot they couldn't get to. I went out and walked my dog. When I got back 20 minutes later they were still shooting it out! It's bullshit, and hasn't changed since Uncharted One or The Last of Us, but why would Naughty Dog change? They get near perfect review scores.

Then there is this: I just spent over an hour torturously climbing cliffs, swinging on ropes and swimming under water obstacles to reach some remote place using (supposedly) the only route there. Only I get there and there's 100 (approx.) heavily armoured mercenaries with three huge armoured trucks already there before me. How the fuck did they get there? Fantasy is okay, but keep it consistent and believable within itself.

But yeah, I still had fun and I'll still play the stand alone DLC at some point, especially since it stars Chloe Frazer - the best character in the series. But the series still has serious issues that could be better and I'd like to see the professional gaming media hold Sony studios accountable with their reviews the same as they do other studios. The same reviewer on a big site gave this game 95% and Quantum Break 70%, saying QB is too linear and has repetitive combat! Different standards.

Helicopters. I'm sure they had huge military grade choppers to get that stuff there, and you probably just didn't have the money to charter one for yourself ("unchartered" *hehehe*) so you had to go on foot. :)

(to be clear, I never played the game, so I don't have any Idea if that makes sense, but it was the first thing that came to my mind when reading you review. and we all know we should always write the first thing that came to our mind...

Great review btw. makes me wanna play quantum break at last)

Wolfenstein. In this one, BJ has to infiltrate a small (fictitious) city in Germany and work with the local resistance to stop the Nazis from developing a super-weapon that uses ancient technology that draws energy from the "black sun dimension".

The immediate differences from the previous titles is that it's firstly somewhat open to exploration. You can take certain missions in whatever order you'd like from two factions, and to start a mission you have to travel to the faction HQ, talk to the people there, and then fight your way across the city to wherever the departure point is. Along the way you can find treasures that you can use to buy weapon upgrades, or tomes of power that let you upgrade your medallion.

Which brings up the second major difference, which is that after the introductory section, you get a special medallion that allows you to access the black sun and use a selection of magical powers such shields, slow-time, or increasing your weapon damage. Oh, and the game keeps with many modern FPSs by giving you regenerating health. If you start getting hit, just duck down for a brief time and you'll feel good as new. The game in general feels like they took the Wolfenstein themes and tried to mix them with a bit of Call of Duty and maybe a bit more of Bioshock. It's entertaining enough but it didn't give me the same thrill that the preceding titles did. It's got nice production values (although a lot of bad accents), and I did like the weird selection of enemies, but it feels like a bit of a derivative "me, too" game in the genre, just something to keep the franchise going. The open-world angle is interesting at first, but it gets old having to fight your way through the intersections over and over just to get to the next mission.

Crysis

Well, not quite. I beat the final boss but the end sequence was not triggered due to a glitch and I didn't feel like repeating the fight all over again with hopes for a better outcome, so I just watched the cutscene on YouTube. Meh.

I had some fun with the game before, but I took a long break at some point, not realizing that I was already very close to the ending. Jumping back into it now after all this time was more of a pain than an enjoyable experience. The ending was much too flashy and noisy for my taste, and seeing that the game has set a clear path for you that you have to follow anyway, especially towards the ending, I now felt like it could have done with an objective marker or much clearer instructions. Not that I'm a big fan of objective markers in general, but there's chaos and noise and shooting and flashes and everything and at the same time you have to listen closely to what people say and read your (not that helpful) log and then guess what the developers actually want you to do (just one example for the confusion the game causes: there is a weapon with autolock function that will only lock on to targets when the story demands it, not when *you the player* think it might be of use - it doesn't really make sense). Add to that the glitches and crashes, and I'm really glad I'm done with it now.

It's not a bad game, the story and nanosuit mechanics are interesting enough to a certain degree, but it's not THAT great either; though to be fair, it's mostly that this last playing session today has left me with a sour taste and I hate the average scripted boss battles with a passion, so a lot of games that try to end on a super epic note to make the players all hyped up just become tedious and frustrating to me instead.

KARAKARA2

A nice, short kinetic novel (no choice), following on the story of KARAKARA. If you liked the first one, like I did, I'll like this one too, like I did. If not, or if you're not interested in kinetic VN, there's nothing much in here for you.

So far in 2018: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2018/post12