The boss fight was much easier than in the first game though. At least in my opinion. I think it took me around 10 tries to beat the dragon while the owl went down the very first time I tried.

Spirit of the Ancient Forest

A HOG pretty much through and through. No plot. No puzzles. Except for a small selection of super easy jigsaw puzzles...for some reason.

Cons:
-repetitve
-The plot barely exists and is easily ignored
-same stuff over and over
-Worse, the plot has really nothing to do with with anything you're doing in the game
-did I mention it's repetitive?
-Bugs and really poor balancing

Pros:
-There is actually the seed of a decent game here, it's just not realized with the way the game is designed
-Challenging

First off, even on "Casual" this game is tremendously difficult. Mostly. Of the 91 screens, roughly 81 are object matching games, while the other 10 are ridonculously easy 24 piece puzzles. Of the object matching, even on casual setting, most of them will require you to match 50-70 pairs or triplets, and typically in about 5 minutes.

Worse, it's not like the objects you're matching are the only items on the board on the majority. And there are a few boards where you're matching EITHER doubles or triples - while that might sound easier, you're having to work at a steady pace of a match every 5-7 seconds to beat a board, and if you waste time clicking a visible double only to find it's a triple with the 3rd piece still buried in the mess, you just wasted a few precious seconds. Mis-click, or even have the game register a click on a different item in the multi-layer pile than you're sure you clicked on, and more time you don't have is gone.

"Hard" reduces your already insufficient casual time by 20%, so roughly 4-5.6 seconds per match. The game also wants you to be collecting gems which you can save towards hints, but unless you need a few to polish off a map against the clock, spending hints is mostly bad strategy.

This game would work really well if they stripped out pretense of it being a contiguous game with a plot, and more of a mobile-style game that invited you to play 2-3 boards a day while waiting for the train, etc. Though the hitch with that is that the busy-ness of the screen meant the game really sucked trying to play on my laptop and was really only viable on a large screen.

But I will say, having cranked through 81 boards of matching in 2 days, even on "very casual" with the timer turned off (though due to a bug you do have to turn it back on for some boards) it required a good deal of [wasted] time and focus. Playing with the timer on, it was pretty nuts. Even giving it my full attention it was typically taking 3-5 attempts to beat any board. At that pace, the game would have stretched out to probably 25-30 hours, and it's just much too repetitive to play through that as a "game."

As a 5-minute a day habit, sure. It would actually work pretty well for that, perhaps.

Yes, you are correct. The boss fight is a lot easier than in the first game. Played it on normal (because for me the boss fight in Twisted Dreams was frustrating and way too difficult) and beat the owl on my third try.

full list of games finished in 2018:

2/2: Dragon Age: Origins
3/2: Far Cry 3
4/2: Dragon Age Awakenings
6/2: Driftmoon
10/2: Combat Wings: Battle of Britain
10/2: Crysis 2
11/2: Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron
25/2: Dragon Age: Origins
2/3: Dragon Age Awakenings
?/?: Samorost 2
27/3: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
16/4: Call of Duty Advanced Warfare
25/4: The Journey Down Chapter Two
5/6: Jack Keane
16/6: Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition
17/6: Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition
28/6: The Journey Down Chapter Three
20/7: Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition
14/9: Call of Duty Infinite Warfare
30/10: Homefront
31/10: Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition

been in a finishing spree in the first week of February, some campaigns going back a long time ago: the Dragon Age character I finished on 2/2/2018 had her campaign started on 21/11/2013, over 4 years ago.

games finished in 2017

Halo 2600. I'd played this a few times but never had actually beaten it, which seems kind of silly because it's really not a very long or especially difficult game. The game might sound like a gag but it's really quite a clever demaking of Halo, reimagining it as an Adventure-like game instead of an FPS. You wander around a map screen by screen, looking for keys or power-ups while shooting and dodging Covenant enemies, until you get to a final boss, then after you beat it you can do it again on a higher difficulty level.

The graphics are pretty good by 2600 standards, with large and colorful figures. If this had come out on the 2600 in 1982 or so, it probably would have been well-regarded, although it could maybe use some more game varieties to prolong interest.

SteamWorld: Heist

At the beginning I thought I would love this game but in the end I can barely tolerate is. A premise is nice: turn-based tactical battles, something like X-COM games just in 2D with a bit chaotic aiming mechanism (a bit like in worms). So what’s the problem? The game feels terribly empty. You do the same thing over and over again. Despite random generator every mission is almost identical to another. You cover behind barrels conveniently placed all around every ship, shoot your opponents, heal your allies. You get some better gear, new skills while you progress but they don’t really change the gameplay. There so many stupid in annoying things in the game that I can’t possibly mention them all, so here is just a few:
- Your ship is really huge but you can store only a very limited amount of items and must buy cargo slots to get more. What the hell? There is a huge amount of space everywhere so what’s your problem robots?!
- There several sections in every ship. As long as you don’t open a door every bot which is in another section won’t come to fight you. There are explosions behind the door, gun fires and what not but nooo, as long as the door is closed your enemies will stay patiently and wait for you to come.
- It’s a space game but you can travel on discrete paths only and sometimes you even get an information that this particular ship is blocking your way. How? Can’t we just fly, I don’t know fly around it?
- The fact that you can repeat every mission and grind XP and water doesn’t make any sense. It’s not Angry Bards, is it? This ruins the plot significantly because what’s the point taking about how important this mission is and how many things rely on our success if you can just repeat it over and over again?!
Some missions, especially on harder difficulty can be enjoyable because you really need to manage your skills/equipment efficiently to beat it. But in the end there is little entertainment and a lot of frustration. I’m glad I’m done with the game. For ever.


Full list

Now that's a game I'd like to play. xD


EDIT: of course, it had to exist. iOS exclusive, though.

Overcooked

Good co-operative fun. Up to 4 players can play it but we did all in 2. It is game where you have to "manage" restaurant kitchen and cook foods but it is certainly not trying to be realistic. Only thing I imagine is very true to an actual kitchen is how hectic it is most of the time. One has to pick up resources, chop them, combine them, cook them, put products on plates, serve it and wash dishes. This all in variously shaped kitchens often full of obstacles and with many environmental hazards. Those range from moving platforms and moving furniture to rats stealing foods, pits or fireballs, all that with time limit.
Kitchen layouts and various obstacles make co-operation necessary as one wouldn't be able to do make everything alone in time.
At least not if you want to get 3-stars. Level is considered beaten even if only 1 star is earned but there is amount of stars total required to proceed to new levels so if one only barely gets through levels, it can be then necessary to go back and ace some levels to be able to continue.

Although it is ideal to play in four people we found it very manageable in 2 and goals of the missions are scaled down to accomodate for different amount of players. Quite a few missions I actually find easier in lesser amount of players as more would get in the way. Only mission where it is very apparent they are made for 4 players are in the paid DLC, The Lost Morsel. There it shows in some of the missions a lot that it is meant to be played with full complement of players and it is not that fun to play it other way.
The Lost Morsel was overall the weakest part of the game. As I said its missions are not well made, there is only 6 of them and they offer no new recipes. Only seemingly random mishmash of base game recipes.
It wouldn't be all so damning if it wasn't for the other DLC. That one is free, has more levels (8) and comes with 2 new recipes, one of them made with flamethrower. It is then hard to swallow objectively worse paid-for DLC.

Main con I can name is that the game can be clunky sometimes, especially with picking things up. If you are running out of time and your characters refuses to pick up the right thing for the third time in the row, it can be quite infuriating.
Also I found some missions to be barely manageable while next one was walk in the park but maybe it was because some suit more to our playing style.

We certainly enjoyed the game quite a lot and recommend it as entertaining co-op experience but I think there are better ones out there (ie. Lovers in Dangerous Timespace).
We managed to get 3 stars on every single level (including both DLC) and I would say it took us some 14 hours (need to re-check at home).
Most levels last 4 minutes 15 seconds I think or just something between 4-5 minutes so it is possible to consume the game in small doses and one doesn't waste that much time with unsuccessful attempts.
Only last mission of main campaign last almost 13 minutes and because we failed it by few seconds several times, it took us quite a long time and was quite exhausting to get through.

I wouldn't recommand the game at all for singleplayer experience. 1 Player controls 2 characters there and can switch between them as much as they like but it makes the game harder IMO, as one has to co-ordinate two characters and mainly it loses all that craziness of having to co-operate and not kill each other and I can't imagine the game to be much fun without it for long.

Link to list of completed games in 2018.

Heh, nice catch ;)

Yeah, I had started playing that one last year but it's been months since I played it. I hate to abandon games but I might just let this one go because I wasn't having a lot of fun and it didn't seem like it was going to radically improve.

The game is usually mentioned in this thread...

Two Worlds 2 - Not a bad game at all. I had quite a lot of fun with this one. Quests ranged from your bog-standard fetch or kill, to some rather amusing and some more intricate ones as well. I specced out as a glass canon mage and did quite well. The magic system is fairly interesting with the possibility of creating some pretty impressive spells. My only real big complaint with the game was the final boss battle. I've read complaints in some reviews about this and I feel they're entirely justified. It really doesn't matter how you built or played your character throughout the game, the end is just a point-the-ballista-at-the-boss during 3 different phases and spam healing pots. And hope to the gods you don't miss the quick key for healing or you have to start all over (no saving once the cutscene plays just before the final battle). Had to try four times before I finally got through it. Not that this is a big deal: final boss battles should be tough and you should expect to reload at least a couple times. But when your entire play time of building your character makes no difference in the final battle... that's abit hard to swallow.

Anyway, other than that, the game's well worth playing if you're an RPG fan.

This Year's List

Now I think I'll try the expansion.

Subnautica

I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I didn't think it would be anything but a pretty underwater simulator and did not realize that it takes place on an alien planet and also has a bit of a story and lots of unusual flora, fauna and other things to discover. I do think it's one of those games that you'd better go in without knowing too much about, a lot more fun that way (read on at your own risk). In any case, I thought graphics and atmosphere were awesome, exploration was exciting for the most part, the story was nice to discover, with some cool animations and scenes (not really cutscenes, control of your character is rarely taken from you while stuff happens around you), professional voice-acting in audiologs, and the crafting and survival mechanics, while being a big time waster and a bit tedious, also gave me a great sense of achievement, when I found or figured out something new.

My rig more or less met the minimum requirements only (GPU fine, but CPU probably a bit lower), and when I first started Subnautica, I thought it was going to be unplayable. Loading time on a new game was over 8 minutes (!), and then the game kept freezing for seconds in between movement. All of that changed though after a restart when I put the game on the lowest settings. And to my surprise, it still looked beautiful. The only drawback I experienced was far away objects (like grass, rocks etc.) being added while in viewing distance already, so at the edge of my view graphics weren't always smooth, but everything in range was still looking good, and the occasional blurry texture didn't change anything about that (contrary to e.g. Quantum Break, where setting the options to low didn't improve performance much but made the game look really shitty). So that was a positive surprise, too - going from thinking I'd never be able to play it to fully enjoying a mostly smooth and beautiful gameplay experience.

(Loading times for savegames were still rather long though, maybe 2-3 minutes for me, but I seldom had to load in the midst of a session, just at the beginnning. As a sidenote, there is only one save slot and you need to save manually to it; otherwise, if you die, I think you get set back to the last time you were in one of your bases and you lose a few of the last gathered items. It's not a big deal most of the times, but I still recommend saving manually when making progress.)

While I think the game was pretty great overall, there were also few things that I didn't like that much. I appreciate what the game has to offer in terms of content, but I still think I spent too much time with it in comparison to that (I'm not going to disclose how much, but it was a lot). I guess it comes with the genre - I haven't played many games like this yet - but unless you know what you're doing and you're thinking ahead, you can waste a lot of time on menial tasks. Especially later in the game, water, food and energy management is no real challenge anymore but constantly interfering anyway. And there is a lot of going to and fro, at comparatively low speed, so especially later in the game when you've discovered enough to not care that much anymore, the journeys from point A to point B are often more than a minute of just pressing forward and doing nothing else. This is made worse SPOILER by your submarine only being able to carry one of the two smaller vehicles at a time, even though they have different uses and you'd ideally want to have access to both of them whenever you need them, instead of having to swim or drive back all the way to get the one you left behind./SPOILER

And I really wish the game would have offered some kind of map. As it is, you not just have to go without automapping, but there is no map whatsoever in the game, not even one you can fill out manually. You'll have to draw it on paper, and it's not a small task considering this is not about a linear dungeon or something but a whole open world of freely passable terrain in all directions, with nothing to guide you but a compass. And within the more or less homogenous zones it's not always easy to orient yourself, there may be the occasional landmarks, but a lot just looks kind of the same. Even if you try to map the terrain on your own, it's no guarantee that you won't overlook things, that you won't revisit the same locations over and over again or that you'll miss parts of the map without really noticing.

Also, while finding out things on your own is fun as long as there's a lot of stuff to do, there were stages in the middle and near the end of my playthrough when I didn't really know what else to do, where to find the rarer materials, or when the game wanted me to do very specific things without telling me what or how, and since I had already spent so much time with exploration, traveling and crafting, I often didn't feel like guessing what the game wanted or searching the whole unmapped terrain for a needle in a haystack. Instead I lost patience and looked up what I needed in guides and forum threads, and having to resort to something like that always dampens the fun a bit. Free exploration is cool, but the story is kind of linear and a bit like an adventure game at times, and because of that, in these instances I'd have preferred a little more guidance and also less item hunting (I liked finding fragments and discovering plants through exploration, but I hated having to search the whole map for specific fragments and very rare and hard to spot plants).

There were still occasional clipping issues, sea creatures swimming in air, ladders out of the water sometimes being bugged, and surfacing from the water with momentum once lead to me glitching through a ceiling and getting stuck outside the walls etc. But none of these were really bad enough to detract from the fun.

Despite all the criticism above, what a fantastic and unique exploration game, on the whole!

I think MM1 is the best port in WW. These were the other differences I noticed:
+invincibility time works against spikes so you don't die immediately
+low gravity in the water
+somewhat harder bomb man fight
+faster screen transitions compared to MM1 NES (no delay before and after the transition)
+easier to jump onto a lower platform from above while pushing against a wall
+faster bomb weapon detonation
+new boss mug shots in the stage select
+improved backgrounds overall

+/-
-easier to dodge the smiling helicopter enemies
-easier to climb frozen fire pillars in fire man's stage (they can be at full length which makes some parts easier)

-
-boss energy fills up a bit slower before you fight them
-somewhat slower magnet beam

If you play the game emulated, you can remove all slowdown using overclocking and make the controls more accurate to the NES games using GG codes.