All Activity

I played Horizon VR with 2kg wrist weights on, and let me tell you, it is hard firing a heavy bow constantly.

Even though I've been anticipating this one since it was announced, it was a bit of an impulse purchase. I've only just gotten started with Ys X but last night I said fuck it, bought this and played for a couple hours before heading to bed. Dragon Quest isn't a series that I have a ton of nostalgia for since I never played them as a kid but there's still something super comfy about the series that always makes it a treat to return to. Especially with the HD-2D visuals in this one. I'm really looking forward to putting some more time into it.

It's been a good year for VR. Wasn't planning to get this because the initial trailer didn't impress me but people who have played the game have said it's actually pretty fun in a squad.

It is kind of nice being able to just pick up your units and drop them down where you want them to go.

I bet VR will really work well with the diorama effect, it did in Humanity.

The VR version specifically.

This is VR specific but usually in a VR shooter that doesn't use a weapon wheel you'll have sidearms at your hips and one gun on your shoulder, maybe two shoulders if you're lucky. Metro Awakening gets around this by having all the two-handed holsters you need on your backpack, and you can access them depending on which shoulder you grab the backpack from. Grabbing your left shoulder gives you access to your filters and lighter and portable generator on the front of the pack. Grabbing your right shoulder turns it around so you can access all your guns hanging from the back side. It's a pretty nice compromise and you still have to reach for the weapon you want in real time so it's not like you can just break your immersion by rapidly hot swapping between them. I hope more VR shooters do something like this. I never really liked the Halo style restriction of only two guns at a time.

Metro Awakening At the risk of sounding weird I'd call this more of a horror game than a first person shooter. A very effective one, too. Oh sure, you use guns and you shoot people and they'll shoot back at you and that's all fine, but the parts of this game that really stood out to me are the segments where you're not fighting against other humans. The mutated animals of the Metro have tunnels all over the place that they use to flank and ambush you, and I'd say at least 50% of the time you'll discover a monster when you hear it skittering in your blind spot and then turn around to find it suddenly jumping at your face. It's extremely tense and it's not a bunch of cheap shots either. The monsters can't just teleport behind you. They have to physically run through their tunnels to set up their ambushes so if you listen closely and have good situational awareness you can make a reasonable guess as to which hole they're going to emerge from. These bastards are quick though, so even if you see them coming you have only a split second to shoot them before they leap at you. Backing yourself into a corner to minimize your blind spots is ironically a good survival tactic when it's available. This is a Metro game so you'll be doing things like using a portable generator to power devices and keep your flashlight lit along with looking for air filters for your gas mask when moving through radioactive zones. There's not a whole lot of VR interactivity outside of your weapons and inventory, but considering this is a world that's been blown to shit by nukes it's not like there's a whole lot to interact with besides rubble and cabinets in your search for ammo. Ammo is scarce too so you best get in the habit of emptying out the guns of everyone you kill. Don't throw away your empty magazines, either. You'll need them to hold whatever spare bullets you find. There's a decent plot here and several segments where you're not shooting anything at all but merely walking through haunted areas and absorbing the story, so if you want constant action this is not the game for you. Traveling through pitch black tunnels while hearing the wails of the dead all around you is pretty damn creepy though. I do have a few small criticisms. If you want a Russian dub, you're not getting it here. I don't know if the Ukraine situation has anything to do with this decision but it is what it is. Several maps also get recycled. They're different on return visits, owing to the supernatural nature of the metro, but the fact remains that you'll be seeing certain locations multiple times. Lastly, there's one too many turret sections for my liking. Still, this is a very solid VR title and if you've been looking for an excuse to bust out your headset again you could do a lot worse. By the way, I don't have arachnophobia but if you do this game is going to be your personal hell. Giant spiders not only creep all around the walls and jump directly onto your face but they'll also crawl all over your body, forcing you to grab around your shoulders to catch them and yank them off. Sometimes you'll even go to grab ammo or your backpack only to discover that a spider the size of a small dog has clamped itself onto your hand. There's no arachnophobia setting either so you best be mentally prepared for that.

There's also this really important scene you can get if you backtrack all the way to the beginning.

The Evil Within 2 Brief but accurate summary: This one definitively felt better to play, it is overall the better game, but the first one is the better survival horror. Not to say this one isn't scary, it does have some really creepy parts, but the general atmosphere and feel of this one doesn't quite reach the same heights. The story was pretty cool Overall, this is a game I would totally recommend to anyone interested in the series, there's plenty of QoL and gameplay improvements, although at the cost of some of the horror, still pretty creepy though. Grade: A

Was going to wait to get one of these until either Ghost of Tsushima 2 or Death Stranding 2 came out, but then Trump won and his tariffs are expected to make electronics increase in price by like 40%, so I figured I'd snag one now while I can get one for MSRP.

Metaphor: ReFantazio I suppose there's some irony in finishing the game this week in particular. Having the selection of a leader end well is a nice escape from reality right now... Overall, this is a pretty solid offering from Atlus. While it is basically Fantasy Persona (to a shocking degree, honestly), I found that its main differences from Persona were its biggest strengths. The story doesn't quite reaches the same heights as P5R but the press-turn combat system and the Archetypes job system both felt like a huge improvement over the more repetitive and limited One More combat from Persona. Press-turn felt way more strategic to me. If you play your cards right, you can dispatch enemies without taking any damage and get a boost to your combat rewards. If you don't, an encounter that could've been trivial can end up kicking your ass. The way archetypes work together also adds another neat strategic layer. It clicked for me early on in the first real dungeon. I unlocked a new archetype and equipped it on a character immediately. Then I proceeded to get my ass kicked the very next fight. I thought about it for a bit and considered how my current archetypes could work together and came up with a strategy that carried me through the rest of the dungeon. That was way more satisfying than I ever found the combat in Persona to be. Being able to use every archetype with any character is also great. Need a second healer? Just level up the Healer tree on any character you like. Want that character to still keep its original role? No problem, switch back and use skill inheritance to re-equip the healing spells you want. It's a level of freedom and customization that just isn't present in Persona/Demon fusion. I know I always end up feeling like I have to compromise and lose useful abilities. Here, though, you can build your party members pretty much exactly how you want them. It's great! So yeah, while the game feels very similar to Persona in terms of structure, the combat is the one thing I felt was an upgrade. The story, not so much. it's fine, really, and there's a few cool twists along the way but ultimately it felt pretty basic. It's the one aspect of the game that made me feel like it could benefit from a Royal-style rerelease with added content. Oh and the game is way less strict than Persona as far as time management goes. I didn't quite manage to do everything because I'm dumb and suck at time management but the last month gives you enough free time that I still managed to complete all the requests and max out all the followers' ranks. And that's despite me wasting a bunch of days traveling to places I wasn't ready to tackle on more than one occasion... If you plan things out a little better, there's a ton of breathing room here. So yeah, overall this was pretty damn good. The fantasy setting was a nice change from the usual Atlus fare although I wouldn't necessarily say i preferred it. It was just a nice change of pace. But now that this and P3R are out of the way, I really need you to reveal Persona 6 already, Atlus! And don't you fucking dare go back to launching as a timed PlayStation exclusive, I swear to God...

Forgive Me Father 2 I am honestly not sure what to make of this sequel. It's not bad but at the same time it changes so much it almost feels like a different game and I can't decide if it's better or worse for it. The graphics are objectively better, no questions there. The leveling system is gone now and it's 100% an action shooter. There's only one character now, the priest, but rather than getting four unique spells you can use together you now have a spellbook and can choose up to three different effects for it to have whenever you press the magic button. In theory this offers more build variety but I found it hard not to always keep the lifesteal ability in one of the slots because these enemies hit hard and the maps can be stingy with healing items. The leveling system is gone. Instead you now find token in the levels that you can exchange for new weapons in the shop between stages. There are 24 weapons now with six categories of four weapons each, which is more than last time, but you have to choose six of them to bring with you into each mission. It does give you a chance to try out more guns since you don't have to commit to a specific path this time, but since I didn't find every token in my playthrough there are some guns I never got to use. New game+ is a thing, but it was still kind of a bummer. The gunplay feels better than the first game, although the first game already felt pretty good so that's not a knock against it. Some of the weapons got rebalanced too. The abyss shotgun no longer bounces projectiles all over the walls and now it's just a rapid fire shotgun. Yeah, it was overpowered before but...damn it, I miss my overpowered shotgun! I'm on the fence about which game I prefer. I know I had a lot of complaints just now but this one still does feel better to play while you're actually moving and shooting things. The last game forced you to choose between holding a gun or holding a lantern to light up dark areas while this one gives you a crank flashlight you have to occasionally rewind, which is easier to manage. You jump slightly higher in this one too, which makes platforming sections much easier to deal with. You can also quicksave now instead of being limited to specific checkpoints. I dunno. I guess I'd say both games are good for different reasons.

Forgive Me Father This is a retro FPS based on the Cthulhu mythos. I'm no expert in it so I couldn't tell you how faithful it is, but what I do know is that this is a pretty underrated game. While it has the usual retro FPS formula you would expect, complete with colored keys to find in every level, they still added in some other things to give this game more of its own identity. For starters, there are two different characters to play as, each of them getting access to different eldritch spells over the course of the game. I played as the priest, who is more about healing and buffs. The other character is a journalist who gets access to offensive spells, though I haven't tried her yet. In addition to that, there is also an upgrade tree for your spells and weapons. Upgrade trees are nothing new, but what I found interesting is that you can choose whether you want your weapon to be upgraded with human technology or eldritch powers. Both paths are valid, although in my personal opinion some variants are just straight up better (the eldritch dagger is an enemy garbage disposal and way more useful than the throwing knives). If you decide you don't like the path you chose and want to try something else, you get one reset point for every boss you kill. Gunplay is pretty good and every weapon feels useful. Even the basic pistol also functions as your medium-range sniper weapon and will never become obsolete. Enemies burst apart into satisfying showers of gore and there's a decent variety of monsters to kill, although it can take a while for that variety to really start showing itself in the early stages. Racking up kill combos builds up madness, which is actually a good thing in this game because it not only fuels your spells but also makes you deal more damage while taking less until the meter drains. It's pretty easy at first, with basic zombies shuffling en masse right into your knife swings, but later enemy types can become so dangerous that they almost feel like mini-bosses. You will absolutely need to use your spells to survive. There's no in-game map, but the levels are fairly well-designed and easy to navigate so I found myself not really needing one. I only got lost maybe twice during the whole game, and those levels were intentionally designed as mazes. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack is full of absolute bangers. I would listen to it on Spotify if it was on there. I've never heard of the composer, Tim Fialka before, but in my opinion he deserves to sit at the cool kids table with Mick Gordon and Andrew Hulshult. Just listen to this:

cool if it goes the other way too so on easy mode they stand around taking anti-emetics.

Preordered all of these a few weeks ago.

ROCK AND STONE