Unreal - 2/5

The more I played of it, the less I enjoyed it. There's definitely some good stuff in there, I won't deny that. But for the most part, the game felt lackluster.

The game has a real rushed-development vibe to it - a bunch of graphical glitches and oddities (such as frequent hall-of-mirror effects) make it seem like they only did the bare minimum of testing. Maybe it's an issue with running the game in 2018 on 1920 x 1080, I don't know. But one thing for sure is that the level design is pretty inconsistent (particularly towards the end) - there's so many boring/bland/insubstantial levels that are devoid of anything at all interesting.

Ultimately, It's a game that makes you wish you were playing something else better (notably: Unreal Tournament or Quake).

Mafia

I cheated like crazy and still it was one of the hardest most frustrating games I ever finished. Without the cheating (cheatcodes + cheatengine + faqs) I wouldn't have stood a chance in (or rather wouldn't have put up with) that game. It's constantly failing you in every mission again and again and again and again (I could go on) and each time you have to start from the beginning. There's only around 20 missions in game and each has around 1-4 savepoints and that's it. No manual saving no rewind time or anything each simple mistake, the game punishes by making you start from the beginning. And it's not only mistakes you yourself make. nope your "buddies" are often recklessly running around trying hard to get killed (mission failed) or other mafiosi chase your car shooting at you and you try and get away what happens is the police starts chasing you for speeding(!) and shooting at you aswell (mission failed) or your car is simply too slow to keep up (mission failed start way back choose a better car) it's so frustrating also there's no god mode cheats so even a cheater like me constantly dies and dies :(

But on the pro side, it has a pretty cool and immersive story with characters that grow on you and quite varied and fun missions and a beautiful world and a great soundtrack (be sure to restore it (see mafia sub forum) since you'll spend most of your time driving around in this game (quite slowly at that else the police will get you. I swear it's easier to speed a bit in real live than in mafia) and some music makes it easier to bear))
Would recommend but do bring some frustration tolerance ;)

Heh, well, it admittedly is a very hard game but frankly I don't think it was THAT hard. I did finish it when I was twelve or thirteen or something and another time many years later (I think I even finished it three times, even). I see how one won't have the patience for the game these days, though. Anyway, from what I recall the key to almost every encounter was to use the Tommy Gun and always fire precise single shots which would basically keep enemies stunned until they are dead. I don't recall having much trouble during my last playthrough sticking with this method.

Anyway...

Finished Battlefield: Bad Company on PS3. I had finished Bad Company 2 many years ago on PC and had been utterly disappointed by that once since it really just felt like a worse Modern Warfare. It was (almost?) as linear as a CoD campaign, used almost no vehicles and it also didn't distinguish itself much with the sense of humour. It was basically Modern Warfare with sillier protagonists.

Well, the good news is that none of that applies to Bad Company 1's campaign. The very premise, that several GIs go AWOL to steal gold is awesome (even if it's a shameless Three Kings rip-off), although the characters are a lot blander than they could have been. The dialogue is pretty great, though, as are many details like Haggard and Sweetwater usually doing stupid stuff in the background while Sarge is briefing the team. It's not perfect but it's certainly refreshing to have a war shooter that doesn't take itself seriously.

Anyway, the most interesting thing is that Bad Company actually tried to provide a single player experience that's both, story-driven and actually Battlefield with huge maps and tons of freedom. Honestly, it actually feels almost closer to ARMA than Call of Duty, with the open terrain and the ability to approach things from any direction, deciding yourself if and what vehicles you will use. Ironically it has a pretty intense warshooter feel with limited use of music and a pretty realistic approach to sound design which almost contradicts the humorous premise.

It's far from perfect, though. The format gives the game some serious pacing issues, missions are unnecessarily long and in the end it's a pretty monotonous game with almost no memorable moments. The guns feel great, they really pack a punch and the destructible terrain, even if the tech was still pretty primitive here, contributes a lot to the experience BUT the aiming is kinda sluggish and enemies and their behaviour are very uninspired. And there's a shitload of guns but most of them are kinda samey. As great and original as many things about the game may be, it soon began to unnecessarily drag on.

It's a bit of a failed experiment, I guess, and I can see why they went for a more "CoDish" approach in the later BF campaigns but it's sad that they gave up on it like this. I'm sure they could have created some amazing games somewhere between ARMA and CoD if they had stuck with this format but refined it.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (PS4)

For some reason it's £1 cheaper on PlayStation compared with PC, this is the default price, not sale price either. Anyway Bloodstained is basically the same as one of the early Castlevania's. It's an action/platformer, there's no levelling up but each level has a power-up that increases one of your stats. The game see's you star as a man cursed with the 'Curse of the Moon', its never really explained what this curse does, besides allowing you to travel back in time to previous stages, which doesn't seem too much like a curse. Throughout the game you comes across 3 allies, you can either recruit them, allowing you to take control of them and make use of their abilities, you can kill them and absorb their soul, improving your own abilities, or you can ignore them. The music is great, boss battles are great, gameplay is great and not too difficult. Achievements aren't locked for playing on easier difficulties, though I beat it on the hardest just in case it did, even on the hardest difficulty it's not too difficult. Bosses do suffer from the flaw other bosses from these types of games have, being that if your health is high enough you can just spam attacks, ignoring damage (I used this method for the final boss). The biggest annoyance with this game is the lack of any sort of manual, there is no real way of knowing you can kill your allies, let alone ignore them.

Now I was originally going to make this review after getting all endings, there are 6 endings that give achievements, the 2 bad ones each unlock a new gameplay mode with harder bosses and a secret final level, and if you play this you will probably get one of these endings first time round, losing lives or health doesn't affect your ending. However for some reason, to get one of the 2 (technically 6, but only 2 give achievements) 'Normal' endings, requires you to kill one ally, and rescue or ignore the other 2. Finding this out caused me to ragequit, you get a better ending having 2 allies instead of 3 SOMEHOW. The best ending requires you to ignore all allies, making 10 endings total. I would recommend it, it's a great game, but I'm not going through it ANOTHER 3 TIMES just to get all the achievements.

Gemini Rue, May 26 (GOG)-I think the best word to describe my impression of this game is unpolished. I spent a lot of the game fighting the interface. As far as I can tell you can only open the inventory when clicking on an interactable object in the game world which was a pain. The story was good but felt really disjointed. The game world with the various factions and relationships were never really explained to the player but spoken of and alluded to frequently by the characters. And the whole first section required quite a bit of suspension of disbelief: joining and being welcomed by the gangsters you just tried to kill? Overall, it wasn't terrible but I wasn't overly impressed.

Full List

Tyranny (Free weekend)


The rare RPG that can be beaten in under 20 hours, so I took advantage of it being free to play on Steam this weekend combined with the U.S. holiday to play it through.

I will say, down the stretch I had to rush a bit to finish before the deadline, so I skipped some side quests.

Pros:
Interesting story
Branching options at least in setting your overall course
Lots of difficult choices
You will have to make those difficult choices often with incomplete information at hand


Cons:
You will have to make those difficult choices often with incomplete information at hand

This is a very ambitious game, and much of it works very well. I think that's why, plot/logic wise, it pinches a bit more when it does not. While the story overall leaves you a pretty impressive array of choices, once you've picked a path in certain quests you get locked into choices that run counter to how your character reached that decision.

A minor flaw in the scheme of things, perhaps, but it was weird to be faced with the "choice" of dooming an entire region to famine or...well, really I had no choice. Yes, you can and probably will opt to travel back to see the boss thinking that will open up any other option at all to resolve the matter, but it does not - you wasted time to travel back and you are still bound to a course of action contrary probably to any other choice you've made thus far.

I will say I was also not super impressed with the inventory system, and while the concept of the combat system was good, I found the execution pretty frustrating.

The end is...a bit of a letdown but it had to end somehow.

The game has replayability in terms of its branching storylines and alliances, but I'm not 100% sure I would replay it, just for myself. I am curious about those stories I didn't get to try, but not sure I'm inclined to deal with the aspects of the game that were frustrating or underwhelming just to see them. The amount of "fun" I had playing this started pretty high, but I think the combat in particular is a barrier for me.

But in sum, this is a very good RPG that takes on a lot, and at least mostly delivers on that potential.

That's my concern with all RPGs and almost always leads me to dismiss any thought of replaying them. Seeing as you've only played this once, you probably won't be able to answer this question, but I wonder, does Tyranny have actual replayability in the sense that a new playthrough doesn't just mean a different character class and a few different dialogue option, but a completely different turn of events, new areas/missons/quests and not a huge amount of repetition in narrative and objectives, mostly?

Spaceplan

It's an incredibly weird idle game which I kept open in the background while working. It's essentially an extended version of the free prototype : http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/ with an added soundtrack.
Given how cheap it was I definitely think it was worth it. Definitely far more interesting compared to something like cookie clicker, and more satisfying since you can actually complete the game in a couple of hours.

Thanks for the opinion!

I always wondered if there are people with this kind of approach to free Steam weekends - and now I know they exist and it's possible to finish even quite complicated crpg :D

I've tried the game also - but I was rather interested in hardware requirements. The beginning was quite interesting and I was really intrigued with the game. None of the big crpgs titles released recently looked as interesting as this one. And it's distopian world - which I always liked in books.

To some extent, yes, though it's not really open world either. The game is in 3 acts (and there's a "Conquest" section before the actual game that's a short selection of binary choices, but that will impact the game world and the resolution). In the pre-campaign, there are choices you can make that will make areas within certain zones accessible or not. So to a point, yes, parts of the game world will be different based on your choices.

The main quest of Act 1 appears to be more or less on rails, though there are zones for side quests you can visit/skip. But you can handle it very very differently. For example, you're part of the Empire, essentially, which has two dominant factions that are feuding with each other while in theory trying to conquer neutral territory.

So you can ally with one or the other, or try to ally with the neutrals, or go nuts and just kill everything. But it does not appear that the quest line changes. Still, I thought I was playing it in such a way as to straddle both factions, and then ____ happened and I had to choose. But all that work wasn't entirely wasted based on how it impacted my relationship to my companions.

Act 2 has 4 main quest lines (multi zones in each), and if you ally with either faction you do 3 of the 4, so there's a line I didn't even do, though I did pop into two of the zones just to capture the tower. Apparently if you go full chaos mode you do all 4 quest lines. There are a total of 10 or so factions, and depending on who you aligned with or didn't of the 2 Empire factions, other factions will respond to you very differently. For example, one faction who should have been sympathetic to my character and playstyle, made me slaughter them only because of who I was allied with, versus being able to negotiate a truce and safe passage.

Still, you have a core objective for each mission, but there are a number of ways to resolve it. In one case I could have resolved a key main quest by murdering a baby (hooray?), but there was another path to resolve it because of my lore skill (or alternately if you play the library quest line and find a scroll first, that can also save you from baby murdering while still achieving the objective). I did not test what happens if you don't have that alternative and don't wish to murder the baby.

So yes, it's dystopian, and you have to make some really awful decisions at times.

Act 3 is the reckoning of everything you've done to that point, so you could play it very differently - again, only to a point. If you handle the assassin one way, you'll fight him in one zone; handle him any other way and you'll fight him in the citadel, but it seems as if you can't get around fighting him somewhere. But of the three other primary archon opponents I killed one and subjugated the other two, and there are a number of permutations available to you there.

Beyond that, I'd probably have to refer to someone who has replayed it to tell you how different it actually is, but I'd say it appears to be at least moderately robust in that regard...maybe.

Heh, funny. I wasn't a big fan of Mafia 2. I don't remember my problems with the game exactly but from what I recall the characters weren't nowhere as interesting or charismatic as the ones in the first game, I didn't like the cover based shooting with replenishing health and it had rage quit moments of its own. I vividly remember one mission where you have to get to some guy's house and warn him of an impending home invasion - I always arrived like one or two seconds late. Now imagine my frustration when I finally did it and discovered that, in the cutscene that follows this sequence, it turns out that nobody's there yet. And that weird "almost sandbox but not really" format, that I could just barely accept in Mafia 1, was utterly outdated at that point.

But well, it had its moments. Anyway, glad you liked it.

Finished Dying Light and its expansions after about 4 months. That game is worth more than they charged and being able to play it on GOG no strings attached has made this one of the best games I`ve played in about a decade...


That`s 10 years to you younger ones.

Thanks for the detailed description and assessment! Sounds like it has a little more replayability than the average RPG. Whether that's actually enough for me to replay it, remains to be seen though. Probably depends on how much I'll enjoy the first playthrough and the game mechanics (or not). Hopefully it's also a little less verbose than Pillars of Eternity.

This is one of the reasons I like this thread. Hearing about new games I might like.