OT Thank you, all clear now. Funny thing is that they are against DRM free because they say it's piracy inducing, out of curiosity I looked for their DLCs for download and found them in a minute.

Valkyria Chronicles. This is an action-strategy game based on a fantasy version of WWII. You control members of small country's militia fending off an invasion by a massive empire. There are guns and tanks but no airplanes, and the energy is based on the use of a fictitious resource that everyone is fighting to control. Also, the reason it's called Valkyria Chronicles is because there was a race in ancient times called the Valkyrur who possessed immense powers but mysteriously vanished, but (without spoiling too much - she's right there on the game cover) it turns out one of them is working for the empire. It's a fairly story-heavy game, broken into chapters which have multiple cinematic scenes setting one or two battles.

The combat is an odd mixture of turn-based but with action. Each side gets a certain number of command points per turn, and when you use a point on one of your units, the view zooms in on that person and you have an action bar that determines how far you can run, and you get to attack once. If you enter an enemy's attack range, they'll start shooting at you, and once you attack the enemy will get to counterattack, assuming you don't kill them outright. While attacking, you can move your crosshair around to determine whether you want to aim for the body (more accurate but less damage) or aim at the head. In real life, aiming at the body makes much more sense, but in this game you should ALWAYS aim at the head because your soldiers are accurate enough that you'll most likely make contact on at least a couple of shots and head shots are devastating.

When the system works well, it feels like a great compromise of turn-based strategy but with exciting real-time action. I found, however, that in many cases it was frustrating because even after playing a good while, I couldn't always confidently predict how far I could move someone, or if a part of the environment would interfere somehow with a plan I was developing. The map view doesn't tell you very much beyond generally pointing out where everyone is and it's not very informative as to things like elevation. I think it would have been much better if they could have allowed you to zoom down to ground level and just see how things looked before you spent your points. The game has a trial-and-error, save-reload-save routine that diminishes what they were going for.

The story is okay. There's a dramatic development midway through that it supposed to yank your heart-strings but which I found completely idiotic, but otherwise it's sufficiently entertaining that I can see why they turned it into an anime later. The graphics are clean and have a memorable watercolor aspect that sets the game apart. I think I had one time it crashed but it mostly ran very well. I have to give Sega credit because I've found that their recent PC ports have all been very solidly optimized.

Bear with Me: The Complete Collection

A point and click Noir adventure where you play a girl and her hard boiled detective teddy bear friend as they aim to find out what happened to the girl's brother. It does a good job with the noir aesthetic, however the black and white art style actually has a drawback in that it is a lot harder to find things you can interact with because nothing ever really stands out from the background. The story towards the end gets a bit... different and it makes more questions than answers. It's a good game but suffers from the same thing most recent point and click games suffer from, the game can be completed very quickly. They attempt to solve this by having 'choices' so you can do multiple playthroughs and giving an achievement for each choice taken. The key takeaway from this is the dialogue, which is the best thing about the game, although the jokes can get fairly corny.

I felt like playing something really short and light and decided to go with Battlefield 1 which I bought dirt cheap last year or so and which has been resting on my shelf ever since. About five hours later I'm done. Well, this was kinda shit.

The first impressions were actually pretty amazing - the game's production value is mind-blowing. The graphics and audio are some of the best stuff I've seen on the last console generation. The game opens with a massive battle where you're inevitably going to die. There's only dirt, fire and blood everywhere. Cool.

And then the game turns into the kind of war game that I hate the most and is in my opinion the antithesis to what the series started out as. It's widely known that DICE decided to radically fictionalise the World Wars in their last two games and honestly, I didn't even mind the idea. What I mind is that they pretend that their game that is fundamentally about the joy of slaughtering people and raising entire villages has a message of peace. I mind that there's cheesy music and narration all the time that can't decide on whether they should romanticize military service or condemn war altogether. I mind that the narrator says "we thought war was gonna be an adventure but we were wrong" and that's followed by one fun adventure after another. And it frustrates me how all the over-the-top elements made the game worthless as a history lesson, especially considering that the missions do in fact reference historical campaigns and battles in a theatre that has been barely explored by video games. Honestly, the game almost made me barf. I thought that the cheesiness in some Call of Duty games is unbearable but Battlefield 1 really takes the cake.

As for the gameplay and the missions - the game was off to a decent start. The first chapter was about a tank crew so I got singleplayer vehicular combat with super high production value - that happens like once in a blue moon. I also felt okay about the second chapter, which was about a pilot, for the same reasons - although here the game began getting ridiculous. After these two chapters the game just goes to shit. The infantry missions are just boring and lazily designed. They are honestly much worse than anything I've seen in any Call of Duty game. There are hints of these missions utilising the series' large maps and open-ended combat but the way the missions are designed, these levels just play out like a particularly badly designed tunnel shooter - it's nothing like, say, the campaign from the first Bad Company which used the series' tech to deliver something that feels a bit like a super accessible ARMA and offers a lot of tactical freedom. To mix things up there's the same stealth mechanics as in Hardline, which I actually enjoyed there, but here they just feel out of place to me.

And sadly like in the Call of Duty games you can sense that the mission designers have no sense whatsoever concerning the dynamics of combat or military tactics - the level sequences are just absurd from a tactical standpoint. It always blows my mind given that any decent player of such games' multiplayer mode must have a better understanding of these things. And the pinnacle of absurdity must have been the final battle where dozens of soldiers assault an armoured train but those literally can't do anything - the entire battle depends on the woman controlled by the player running from field gun to field gun while there's dozens of able-bodied men who could have easily manned all of them at the same time and destroyed the train in a matter of seconds. Such stupid scenarios also appear in every single Call of Duty game all the time but there I feel that it's a sacrifice that the level designers make in the (usually successful!) pursuit of making the games more fun - Battlefield 1's missions are stupid and unfun at the same time. And dear Lord, the cheesiness!

Finally: something I really don't like is the game's format. In the WWII-themed Call of Duty games, even when you had different protagonists on different fronts, the campaigns were designed in such a manner that you felt like you're working your way towards winning the war and you got some sense of how the efforts on all these different fronts shaped the progression of the war. Heck, even in Battlefield 1942, where the campaign was just a series of skirmish matches played in chronological order, I felt like I'm participating in something big and genuinely learned a few things about how the war developed. Battlefield 1 has "war stories", these completely unrelated "fire and forget" scenarios that don't even play out in chronological order. This format neither gives me a sense of how the war progressed nor do I feel that any of may achievements as a player here matter in the slightest. It sucks.

I'm sure many people enjoyed Battefield 1's campaign and I'm being a snob again but honestly, for me the game's singleplayer mode is a solid contender for one of the worst and stupidest war shooters I've ever played. Boy, am I glad I paid only seven bucks for these five hours of crap... well, three hours of crap. As I said, the first two chapters were *okay*.

Hand of Fate

Warning, wall of text incoming! ;P

This is another game where I'm going to pretend now that I finished it, even though I still have a few cards to unlock and I didn't beat the final boss yet. But my ambitions to achieve the latter are pretty low at the moment after I learnt how this last battle works. I'll explain later below, in the spoiler section.

Still, I really, really like this game. I already fell in love with it the first time I played it, several years ago. But then I thought I was stuck halfway through (see below), took a break, got distracted by other games and told myself I should get back to it one day, but never did until last week. Instead of using my savegame, I started from the beginning again and I did not regret it. It was just as much fun as the first time, and I got to where I was before pretty quickly.

The reason for my favorable opinion is that in my book this is one of the rare cases of rogue-lite done perfectly. I usually lose interest in rogue-likes and -lites after a few runs when they start to get repetitive and I begin to feel bored and like I'm wasting my time. That never happened to me with Hand of Fate, because for one, the runs are comparatively short, maybe half an hour or so at best, but also because each one of them offers several chances to unlock new content that you can look forward to in your next run. There is a constant feeling of progression - permanent progression - even if you die, and it also has more story-telling than your average rogue-li(k/t)e, in the form of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure quests with several stages and actual, reoccuring characters. In addition to that, I found the action combat in the style of the Arkham/Batman games quite enjoyable (using a gamepad), and I was also impressed with the great atmosphere - the many different, rarely repeating voice-over comments by the card dealer make the game feel pretty alive and prevent one run from feeling like any other as well. All in all, it's a pretty interesting genre mix that works almost flawlessly and is a lot of fun, at least in my opinion.

There are a few potential points of criticism, depending on your preferences. While the tone of the game is not too serious and it doesn't touch on any shocking subjects that are hard to digest, it's still kind of dark, not at all heroic fantasy. There are unholy deals with demons, devils and vampires, cults and curses, famine among farmers, and a reoccuring theme in the quests is that your meddling often makes matters worse, at least temporarily. Personally I didn't mind, but I know someone who did; it might not be everyone's cup of tea. This is also reflected in the gameplay: Despite the elements of chance in the game, there hardly ever happens anything exclusively nice and beneficial to you (with the exception of maybe two to three cards among a collection of several dozens). There are much, much more cards that pose a threat for you to overcome, or sometimes inevitably harm you. Almost everything comes at a cost, the game makes you work for any rewards, and failure can be punishing. Not to say that the game is hard, the balance is actually quite good, and I didn't feel it was as unfair as other rogue-li(k/t)es can be, just pointing out that it can feel a bit intimidating or depressing in that regard, if you're not prepared for a comparatively dark tone and setting, despite the humour. Of course, you can also get quite a lot of good things, but the further you get in the game, the bigger handicaps you'll have to deal with, in the form of curses and bad events that make your life harder. Your player skills will improve, but you won't necessarily feel that more powerful and on top of things in the end.

The animations of card dealing and such are neat, but get repetitive after a while and you'll want to speed the game up. And you actually can, when you enter combat or shops, but unfortunately you can't with the rather long sequence of card dealing at the beginning of each run - I'd have liked a skip button for that, too.

The DLC has a choice of several new classes that come with minor class specific quests, advantages and disadvantages. But most of them just seem to increase the difficulty, in my eyes. At least in Story Mode, where all the dungeons after the tutorial row already come with their own set of curses, the class advantages weren't attractive enough for me to offset all their additional disadvantages. Except for one or two of them, especially the Explorer who I thought was seriously overpowered, like an Easy mode without any serious disadvantages: He can't wear heavy armor, but you seldom find heavy armor anyway and it's not that important because you'll want to avoid getting hit in the first place. And in return for this minor restriction, entering a map always reveals the exit to the next dungeon level and all shops, as well as all other encounters once you reach the exit, and you can still go back to the ones that interest you. And in addition to that, backtracking doesn't cost the Explorer any food, but you still profit from the automatic healing that usually comes from food consumption while traveling, so you can fully heal yourself by going back and forth over already explored cards - possibly an exploit? Given how much misfortune the game stacks against you, especially in the later dungeons, I hardly saw a reason not to use that Explorer class instead of the default, classless character, just to even out the playing field a bit.

A few quest setups are rather frustrating and annoying, e.g. there is one that is locked into your deck until you complete it, and completion requires you to beat three cards in the same run, but there is no guarantee that all three cards will even appear in your run, so even if you invest time, energy and possibly resources into beating two of the cards, you might not even find the third card (either because it's not among the dealt cards or because you find the dungeon's end boss first, because then there is no going back). And there is another quest, that has you chasing a series of chance events with increasing difficulty before you can fight the quest's opponent, all in the same run, and if you fail at any stage of it, you have to repeat it all from scratch in the next run, and that's tedious and frustrating, because chance events aren't the most exciting mechanics in the game.

Though what I might not have realized the first time I played the game, when I thought I was kind of stuck due to the more annoying quests mentioned above, is that you can just repeat runs in the easier dungeons you already beat, in order to concentrate on tackling these side quests, before you get back and try to beat the next available dungeon with all its additional punishments, and the challenging side quest out of the way.


*SPOILER SECTION* The end boss apparently makes you fight all 12 bosses from before another time, in four stages with pairs of three, and in between the stages you need to do QTEs to counter the end boss' attacks which can instakill you if fail. And that's just too much for me to be enjoyable. I wouldn't necessarily say it's difficult, it just requires more patience than I can muster and actually does the very same thing that I was glad the game had mostly avoided before, wearing you out by longer stretches of repetition. I wouldn't even be averse to fighting all the bosses again, but not at the end of a complete run (in which you can already get worn down by other hazards and curses, but most importantly which costs time), with freaking QTEs in between and the risk of having to repeat the whole thing again and again with no gain, if you make a misstep in the fourth round or so - I mean, that's like a full run on top of a full run, first the multi-leveled dungeon which very likely also has several combat encounters, then the four boss battles within a fifth QTE based battle ... that's just insane. It would take away too much of my time and become increasingly tedious and frustrating instead of entertaining. /SPOILER


I do congratulate the game for holding my interest until (almost) the end though. I'm not very fond of boss battles in general, but I thought these here were mostly fine, apart from the last one, and I beat all 12 of them on the first or second try. I might still play a little longer in order to finish all open quests and unlock the remianing cards, because that could still be fun. The final boss probably not. But regardless, I consider this a hit, I'll add it to my list of favourite videogames.

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order (XSX Game Pass)

I fully expected to play this on EA Play all along, what I didn;t expect was for EA Play to come to Game Pass the very same day. I heard good things about this game and it sounded like something I'd enjoy, but I did not expect it to be this good. This is the best Star Wars game ever in my opinion, KOTOR being a very distant second place. Fallen order takes some parts from a lot of games- some of the combat from Dark Souls (but without the character building depth), a bit of Metroid Prime for the world progression and the feel of an action adventure like Uncharted or modern Tomb Raiders. It achieves a cinematic presentation and feel without going down the Sony path of cinematics and QTE's interrupting your game play at crucial moments to force story. The cutscenes can be lengthy yes, but come after game play in most cases. It's a good balance in feeling like you're in a movie whilst still playing a game most of the time.

It's also a better Star Wars experience than most of the movies...except maybe the original two (episodes 4 and 5). It feels Star Wars, it looks Star Wars...maybe doesn't quite sound Star Wars though- it's missing most of the iconic music themes. The boss fights were okay, except for that annoying Owl thing...Gorgora or something it's name was- a gimmick type of boss where you have to perform a specific move at just the right time. The final boss was good, just a straight fair fight where you learn to time the attacks and opportunities. Then the ending sequence that comes out of no where and luckily I'd never seen any spoilers- so it really was a surprise that I didn't see coming.

Great game. Trying to think of negative points apart from that one gimmicky boss fight...and all I can come up with are the load times after death. The initial game load is fine, made even faster by using quick resume on the Xbox (10 seconds from hitting start to playing in game). But if you die, for some reason it takes an ungodly amount of time to reload at the spawn point- like a full minute. So dying is bad in this game, don't do it! Even that is offset by the game not punishing you for world deaths (falling of cliffs etc)- in such cases it instantly puts you back where you were with a loss of health.

Funnily, the best two games published by EA in the past 8 years were Titanfall 2 and this one. They should just get Respawn to make all their games.

The Last Tree. Run through amazing landscapes as a fox, while listening to a father and son story. I enjoyed it.

I had to take several attempts to beat the kraken and King of Scales, until I had the right equipment. I remember now I was surprised by the QTE too and I had to replay against the dealer, and it was a WTF moment. I took it as the devs trolling the player. I got the game on Steam from the give away but I would only buy the Wildcards DLC here on GOG when I decide to replay it. So I can wait a little.

Just finished Silent Hill 4: The Room as my first entry into the series. Generaly game is for new comers relatively difficult, find out game mechanics was worse for me. When I pickuped basic game abilities it became really great game due to its atmosphere and fantastic sound system which is able provide surround sound with stereo speakers (only a few games can do that). I expect, that future second playthrough will be even better.

Pokemon Ultra Sun

I think this is my first game finished this year, I stopped gaming for the most part as I found more productive things to do, however I decided to give this game a go as I wanted to play something and I can say I enjoyed it very much. I started this game earlier this year and finished about 1/3 of it and left it and came back and binge played it for a few days.
Lots of things to do and lots of Pokemon to catch.

I recommend it.

Battlefield V (XSX Game Pass)

Game devs may be intelligent people, but they sure as shit can't count. Battlefield V follows on from Battlefield 1 which came after Battlefield 4 and there's approximately 10 main entries in the series. Anyway, taking the opportunity to play the single player campaigns with the benefit of Game Pass. The only other in the series I've played is Battlefield 1. V is a similar concept, consisting of 4 war stories that vary in appeal. The Last Tiger was good fun, as was the Norwegian chapter. The other two not so great to me.
Regardless, they all require quite a bit of suspension of disbelief to enjoy. Accuracy is not the aim, I'd even say these go beyond Hollywood. I especially love the bullet proof German flame thrower troops that are everywhere, even in Norway. But as video game fun they were okay short fun.
Stunning visuals, but the game still has a few bugs here and there that are funny. Like when I sniped one German soldier that wouldn't go down...he just stood there and wouldn't move. Eventually I ignored him and moved on only to have him come back to life and shoot me.

Signs of the Sojourner, Nov 24 (Itch)-A melancholy, introspective little game. Playing it was very relaxing but strangely a little sad. I don't think it would benefit from multiple playthrus to fully complete it. I think it needs to keep some of its secrets or it would lose its charm. The central mechanic was pretty good and the idea of experiences changing you grow was very interesting. Right when I felt like I was getting a handle on the card matching the game introduced a new symbol to contend with but I guess that's kinda how it goes sometimes. I don't think I could recommend it though, it left me too sad.

Full List

Battlefield Hardline (XSX Game Pass)

Ever wanted to play an over the top version of True Detectives, but as a shooter? Well that's what this is. The story campaign is ten episodes told like a TV series in the sort of way that Remedy would do it. I was pretty surprised by how much I enjoyed it really. The gun play was fun, stealth was quite crappy just like in regular Battlefield games.
The dirty cop story was just okay and got maybe a bit silly in the end, but what saved it all was that the characters are quite good.
It sells on sale for only a few dollars and the story took me just over 10 hours, and was time I don't regret spending.