Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear (Steam)

It was okay, but also not excellent. It was a lot longer than I was expecting. I managed to get most of my party back together that I used in the main game- with the exception of Branwen (who isn't in the game) and Imoen of course. Imoen is no loss, as I've always found her annoying and only had her in my party because she is sort of cannon for the story. I relaced Branwen with the Goblin Shaman to back up Viconia with healing. Apart from the Goblin, I wasn't really into the other new characters. The famous Trans side character met with an accident...something fell on her head.

The game started off quite good for the early areas. But the closer to the ending things got, the more crappy it got. I'll give them some credit for at least trying something different for the end game areas- but the system just doesn't really allow for a good representation of a large-scale battle...I just let all of the support troops go in and get massacred and then went in after them and mopped up. The final fight was very easy for this series. Overall, it was okay, I'm glad I finally played it, but no one should consider it essential for playing the series by any means.

Trails of Cold Steel 2
Trails of Cold Steel 3
Trails of Cold Steel 4
Trails into Reverie
Final Fantasy 16
Trails through Daybreak
Clair Obscur Expedition 33
Ghost of Tsushima
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
God of War (2018)
God of War Ragnarok
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade
Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect 3
Indiana Jones
Yakuza 0
Yakuza 1 Kiwami
Yakuza 2 Kiwami
Judgement
The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Plague Tale – Innocence
Yakuza Like a Dragon Ishin
Lost Judgement

Warcraft 3 Reforged, Nov 10 (Xbox Game Pass)-I've wanted to play this for over 20 years and when I finally got to I was a little disappointed. I really did not like the first two campaigns focusing on Arthas who I found to be very annoying. Follow on campaigns were better and The Frozen Throne expansion was quite good with a lot of variety in missions. The bonus campaign was terrible and should have been cut. And this game has possibly the worst unit pathfinding I've ever seen.

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X-Men Legends II. I mostly just wanted to dip my toes in the modding scene for this, although I ended up just installing the "all X-Men" mod that brings over characters that were exclusive to other versions. What this meant was that Dark Phoenix, who was exclusive to the PSP version of the game, was playable, and she's appropriately overpowered compared to everyone else, basically a "push button to win" type, so I practically soloed the game with her. Other X-Men were there, but she was the one doing most of the damage by hitting enemies with constant life-stealing powers. Walk into a room, point at everyone, wait for them to drop dead while your friends hurry them a long a little bit..

I was fine playing it like this because I already completed it when the game was new and although it's basically just more of the same as the first game, I was never as fond of it because if the first game is essentially a classic X-Men experience, this one makes you, uhhh, taste a lot of the later crap that had infested the line from the late 80s through the 90s. The story is pretty lousy, but I can't deny that there's some catharsis in viewing it as an exercise in literally destroying all the bad ideas of the Bob Harras/Scott Lobdell/Fabian Nicieza era. Especially when it comes at the hands of Dark Phoenix.

I might check out the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games again but I think I need a break from this style for a bit because they do get monotonous in their gameplay.

On that note, just pointing out that Kirill's music remains freely available: https://music.kirillpokrovsky.de

Otherwise, yeah, DD sure showed how to do an ARPG right. And a dev with the right mindset, hiring someone who was complaining of early builds being boring on the forums to add all those little events and places to make it interesting.

Behind the Frame The Finest Scenery

I hardly play any games at all this couple of months. But I redeemed an old steam key of mine for this game and thinking why not instantly playing it? Better than abandoned it and just add to the backlog. This is more of an interactive story book with a slight puzzle element. A short one as well, around 2 hours to get all the achievements. It also reminds me that I am terrible at drawing stuff.

crysis 1 and crysis 2 :)

Heretic

Because I finished the first three episodes and I guess that's the original game? Played in the remaster though, on medium difficulty, just for fun, to blow off steam, not to git gud. Not sure whether to still try and play through Shadows of the Serpent Rider now, because the first level (E4M1) already seems terrible. Beating the toughest opponents to death with a wooden staff is not my idea of an enjoyable shooter. Episodes 1-3 were enjoyable though, for the most part. I think, unless I overlooked something, E3M8 was the first and only level among them where you were required to make use of an item you collected, which is why I got stuck at first, always forgetting about the items.

Farlanders

Pretty good mix of colony sim and puzzle. You establish a colony on Mars and slowly build up housing, solar panels and wind turbines for electricity, pumps for water, and factories to mine metals and glass that are used in construction. Periodically you gain terraform technology to demolish mountains, fill up canyons and clear sand from the ground to make a region more habitable. Eventually you are able to start exploring underground and expand your colony there. It's all turn-based and you can undo turns if you did something wrong. There's a campaign mode with 7 levels, three scenarios and a sandbox mode to play the way you want.

I haven't played many colony sims before but this one was super enjoyable. Recommended!

I finished the second Kane & Lynch game, too. 11 chapters. This time you control Lynch, except for the last chapter. More intense and difficult battles than the first game. Unfortunately, it ends too plainly. I want to hope there'll be a third part, to learn what happened to these two characters.

The Alters, Nov 14 (Xbox Game Pass)-I didn't think I liked base building, resource gathering, survival type games but I did like this one a lot. The story was pretty unique and the mechanics of the game suited it well enough and never got in the way. I think the big decision point in the mid game had a clear right answer in terms of in game consequences which I think was a big oversight by the developers. This decision, its impact, and the reasoning behind it should have been better presented to the player and the characters and the consequences should not have been so one sided. The ending sequence and epilogue were a bit of a let down as well. But overall it was a unique experience and I had a lot of fun with it.

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Felt like playing something rather casual and relaxing and figured that this is a good moment to finally continue my run through the Far Cry series and so I just beat Far Cry 4 on PS5. And as luck would have it, they released a patch that unlocks 60 FPS on current gen consoles earlier this year. That apparently causes some synchronization errors during cutscenes but oh well.

So, eleven years after the game's release I have confirmed that it is exactly what I've always thought it would be. And yet it managed to disappoint me a bit. I knew that it was just a rehash of the formula established in Far Cry 3 but I suppose that I expected a few more refinements and additions.

What I've found to be shockingly bad is the entire progression. There's a whole ton of systems here like experience, karma, cash, crafting, collectables (various types, of course) and quite frankly all of this sucks. The economy is all over the place, fails to make use of the sandbox format like at all and almost all rewards in this game are offensively underwhelming. I mean, you can craft like 3/4 of all inventory upgrades within 2-3 hours in the tutorial area. Money is never an issue and you can very quickly unlock over-powered "signature" weapons that render the main weapon economy completely pointless and leave you with not a single meaningful reward for basically the rest of the game. Almost all unlocks available in the skill tree suck. Oh yeah, you later also get an upgradeable cottage and guess what: that one sucks too.

I don't understand this at all.

Otherwise it's same old, but I think that I've actually enjoyed this one a lot more than Far Cry 3, probably thanks to the far more interesting setting. A mountainous region is just a much better fit for this kind of sandbox than Caribbean islands, I suppose. The game does have a habit of creating all sorts of ridiculous situations thanks to (un)fortunate spawns of characters, animal attacks and all sorts of chain reactions caused by fire and explosions and I think that that's what keeps it kind of enjoyable even though the open world lacks any substance. And especially taking enemy outposts is still pretty great. It has aged, because so many other games have done this since, many of them better, but there's still a ton of fun to be had, especially when you screw up and everything escalates into an explosive massacre.

And there's also a fair amount of story missions and side activities, of course, and I think I've actually enjoyed almost all of this stuff as well. Even the repetitive activities like freeing hostages and hunting animals are usually accompanied by solid narrative content and may make you laugh - or disturb you because the game doesn't shy away from anything. One moment you're avenging a guy whose wife was eaten by a pack of honey badgers, the next you're freeing hostages who are being held as sex slaves. One moment you're experiencing a surreal drug trip to rock and roll music, the next you have to decide whether you're going to stop or facilitate a child marriage that may save the country. I actually did find the narrative interesting and was eager to find out how all of this is going to end. And I have a very serious issue with that...

Throughout the game you have to make a number of moral choices as there's a power struggle within the resistance movement, with two characters representing two completely different philosophies, both of them making a good point but both of them also being kind of assholes. You also get to make some moral choices regarding the fate of the bad guys: the eccentric big bad Pagan and his lieutenants. I honestly couldn't wait to see what all of my choices would ultimately amount to. Well, they don't. They don't amount to anything. After the final choice the credits just roll and you're never shown the consequences of any of it. Then you're thrown back into the sandbox and literally nothing has changed at all, which really undermines everything that the game's narrative has been doing.

Oh, and somehow they've managed to make the protagonist make even less sense than in Far Cry 3. There's only the flimsiest explanation for why he would even take part in that civil war and there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why he would turn out to be the ultimate killing machine that is going to decide the fate of everything. I can imagine that the game's writers had some super secret convoluted explanation for this stuff... but I can also imagine that they just didn't really give a shit about this. Who knows.

Anyway: it's a solid 7/10 game as far as I'm concerned. It does have a few moments of greatness but ultimately it's seriously held back by the standard Ubisoft sandbox formula that is so radical about avoiding a bad experience, that it is basically destined to deliver an utterly unexciting experience most of the time.

Star Trek Elite Force II. Picking up a bit after the first one, with you controlling the leader of what's basically a SWAT team in the Star Trek universe. Since Voyager made it home after the first game, in this one you're stationed on the post-Nemesis Enterprise, so you only have Picard and Tuvok present as big name supporting characters. There's some stuff in the story to do with genetically-engineered bioweapons that get out of control and threaten the good guys, so the only solution is for you to go in and blast everything, because that's how you do Star Trek.

Although I've always felt that a Star Trek FPS is a fundamentally absurd concept, these games are perfectly decent examples of their genre, and if nothing else they at least look and sound like TNG-era Star Trek should. You can tell the developers tried to include some sort of puzzle-solving aspects. In this one, you often need to break out the tricorder and use it to hack stuff, find traps, or identify structural weaknesses. There are also some downtime segments where you walk around the Enterprise, listen to crew members having funny conversations, and there's a "choose your waifu" subplot so you know your decisions mattered (I chose the exotic, scantily-clad alien princess because she was hot and made me feel like John Carter of Mars).

I think the first game was maybe slightly better overall, but this was still pretty good. It's mostly not very challenging, although the final level kicked my teeth a little bit, especially because I forgot about the game giving you an orbital laser strike ability that could have saved me a ton of ammo I spent re-fighting the various boss enemies. Oops. I have to say that I really like how these old Quake engine games look. It's just a very clean-looking graphics engine that's up to capturing the feel of the universe and looking just realistic enough without getting lost in rendering skin pores and stuff.

I found it a decent game DESPITE looking and playing too much like Quake (a game and genre I don't care for much).