Games You've Beaten in 2018

[toxicitizen]

Warframe.

 

I mean, I guess? It's not exactly the kind of game you really "beat" since you can potentially keep playing it forever. But I finally completed all the quests, which are the closest thing the game has to single-player/story content. There's a new cinematic quest coming out soonish, though, so I have that to look forward to. But man, this game is a hell of a time sink. Just passed the 300 hours mark today and I don't think I'll be stopping anytime soon. At the very least, I plan to keep logging in daily for the tributes and sorties for the foreseeable future.

 

You're mostly just constantly grinding but the core gameplay is so much fun that it doesn't get old. I've also not even touched everything in the game. I've barely done anything on the Plains of Eidolon, I haven't tried the recently added Sanctuary Onslaught mode and I've only recently started getting into relic farming and prime weapons. To say this game is dense with content is a hell of an understatement. I'm still constantly looking things up on the wiki and learning new things about it. I don't think I've ever gotten into a game this much, to be honest. It shot up to the top of my most played list on Steam a while back and by now it has almost double the playtime of the previous #1 (XCOM: EU).

 

So yeah, not bad at all for a free to play game. Although, at this point I've basically spent the equivalent of a full priced game on it. You can mostly manage to get anything you want without paying but if you wanna keep all your warframes you do need to buy extra inventory slots with platinum. I've also gotten the occasional cosmetic items and boosters because why the hell not. I've gotten more out of this game than pretty much any other game before, so I really don't mind throwing Digital Extremes some money.

[CorgiShinobi]

Detroit: Become Human

 

Yep, I bought it because I'm still craving single player experiences rather than joining multiplayer matches to grind for loot boxes.

 

Without getting knee deep into spoilers, I do genuinely think this is a great game. Not a masterpiece or anything, more along the lines of Until Dawn. I admit I never got around to Heavy Rain, and I doubt I'll ever play Beyond: Two Souls. This game however was a memorable experience that truthfully does have many different branching paths. Seriously, after my "story completion" I saw different scenarios on YouTube of what could happen to the characters.

 

It has its rough patches, and I'm not happy with where one of my characters ended up. That's the thing about this game; it feels like there's never a break for your characters from just being screwed over. I get that that's the point when androids end up becoming a dangerous entity, but depending on how you play that can be chalked up to mankind's fear. But seriously, there are moments that just screw you over. Like the game can lie to you about how well long something might take, or how well you're doing when ultimately the choice is a bad one.

 

I'm going to play the last bit over because while I'm happy (or content) with where Connor and Markus ended up, Kara's story got screwed up because of said wrenches in a relentless pursuit to...

 

CANADA!

[TheFlyingGerbil]

speaking of sentient androids, I bought and completed a game on the same day, a first for me I think. It was Subsurface Circular. I will probably have another playthrough to see how different it can turn out - I'm guessing not very. Probably play it with the commentary on as I enjoyed that on Thomas Was Alone.

[TCP]

God of War

It was great! I wasn't crazy about the twist but whatever. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good game, but anyone who says this wasn't directly influenced by The Last of Us is LYING. Anyways...... 9.2/10.

[toxicitizen]

Dying Light.

 

It's not perfect but it's a pretty damn fun game all things considered. None of its parts are particularly unique or exceptional but they somehow combine into something greater than their sum. Basically a shallower Mirror's Edge combined with an immersive sim(-ish) open-world. That's a pretty damn good combo, as far as I'm concerned. I almost feel bad for waiting until it dropped below 20 bucks to buy it because Techland have done an amazing job with their long-term support and the game is actually fucking packed with content. I played almost 30h and that was with only doing about half the side-quests and none of the DLC. I also still have The Following to do, which is a separate campaign. So yeah, unless the previews look like complete shit I'll be there day one for Dying Light 2.

 

I'm tempted to keep playing and go into completionist mode but some of the achievements are related to the online and co-op and that kinda makes me not wanna bother. No point going to that much effort if I'm not gonna be able to get everything. It's a shame because I could see myself easily dropping another 10-20 hours into this sandbox. It's just that much fun.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

I'm going to go through all my Xbox One games so I can sell it. With that in mind I played all the way through Unrarvel today. Some of it was very pretty but unfortunately I didn't like the main character design/rendering - it didn't look very woolly and didn't sit in the landscapes very well.  I liked the gameplay a medium amount. Luckily it wasn't too long to outstay its welcome. I don;t think it was as emotional as I think I was meant to find it. Glad I played it but I wouldn't go back to it and won't be rushing out to get the sequel, but would potentially get it in a sale.

[Thursday Next]

Uncharted: Lost Legacy. Really enjoyed it. Was good spending a decent amount of time with Chloe and Nadine. Helped flesh out their characters more. Combat is the same as ever (if you happen to be a hater), traversal and puzzling was on par with UC:4.

 

Rayman Legends Played it through with the gf. We are going back and tidying up missing Lums and Teensies but we've "done" all the levels and seen the end credits now. Might try and get her to play Unravel 2 next.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

I just finished D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die. Shame there's never going to be a season 2, because although it was not a stellar game, I would like to know how the story panned out.

 

Sleeping Dogs is next on my hit list, though I'm finding it slightly frustrating going through my list of games as I've no idea which I've bought and which are Games With Gold, which I can no longer play.

[Mister Jack]

Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage

 

Yeah, I know it's an old game, but this is a special case.  I used to play this game all the time back as a kid, and I even went back to it now and then in my adult years for one simple reason.  THIS GAME IS HARD AS BALLS.  In fact, it's so hard that I might actually say the game's quality suffers for it.  It was made to be played by kids in the 90s, after all, but I never talked to anybody who was ever actually able to beat it.  I know speedruns and such exist on youtube, but if you handed this game to a first-timer and told them to try it out, I guarantee they would never get past the fourth or fifth level at best.  Many people never even get far enough to unlock Venom. 

 

I watched a Cinemassacre upload today where James Rolfe tried to play the game and I thought to myself "I've got this on my SNES Classic.  I should really try to finally beat this bastard."  While I didn't abuse cheats or savestates, I will confess that I used a guide of where the secret rooms and items are hidden.  The thing about this game is that by default it gives you three lives and ONE continue, which is not even close to enough to beat it.  Unless you're an utter god, the extra lives and continues are mandatory for you to have a fighting chance, and even then it took me multiple runs to beat it.  More lives isn't even enough on its own.  You really have to learn to carefully aim your attacks and not flail around like every other beat-em-up allows you to do.  Getting a streak of hits with no misses is the only way to get power hits, which can instantly kill multiple enemies in one blow if you use it strategically.  This isn't Turtles in Time and mashing the attack button thoughtlessly will not serve you well.  You not only have to aim your punches, but you also need to constantly keep positioning in mind and use your web to zone the field so you never allow yourself to get surrounded.  Unlike other beat-em-ups, getting surrounded here can result in losing half your life bar in a matter of seconds.  A real problem with the game is that when you get close enough to an enemy, you automatically grab them and can either punch or throw them from there.  This sounds fine except that you can't move or jump while you're holding an enemy, so if other enemies are around this just gives them free hits while you desperately try to drop the guy you just picked up.  This got me killed more than anything else.

 

Finally, some of the bosses are utter bullshit.  They're cheap, they're overpowered, and they often attack you in groups.  Trying to fight them fairly is almost impossible when they all gang up on you.  However, before I started playing I learned that the hero summons you can pick up work kind of like Mega Man weapons.  They can clear out a room of normal enemies, but certain bosses are also extremely weak to certain heroes.  The right summon at the right time can either reduce a boss' life to a sliver or kill them outright.  This let me hang on to most of my extra lives.  Unfortunately, you can't use summons on the final Carnage fight, and Carnage is one of the most ridiculously overpowered bosses ever conceived.  Even with the ability to switch between Spider-Man and Venom with 6+ lives, he still wiped the floor with me three times and forced multiple do-overs before I finally came up with a strategy to exploit his strongest attack by standing right in front of where the attack ends and forcing him to eat a combo. Trying to combo him any other time will result in eating a big chunk of damage with an unblockable counterattack, but combos are the only way to do any real damage to him.  I tried just getting in one or two quick punches every now and then during one run and it took half an hour just to get his life bar to start visibly going down.  Like I said, total bullshit.

 

That's a lot of trouble to beat a simple beat-em-up game, so you can see why I'm proud of this one.

Edited July 3, 2018 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

God of War

 

I've never played any of the others, but I really liked this one a lot. The ending was a little anticlimactic I felt like, but overall it was an excellent game. I will be all over a sequel.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

Mister Jack, I can't tell if you actually enjoyed that or not. It sounds more like the relief you feel when you get out of an exam does not mean you enjoyed the exam.

 

TME are you not tempted to play the older games? Are they that different?

[TheMightyEthan]

I hadn't been tempted before, but I am now. For some inexplicable reason though they remastered God of War 3 for PS4, but not 1 & 2, so that makes it less convenient than it should be.

[Mister Jack]

4 hours ago, TheFlyingGerbil said:

Mister Jack, I can't tell if you actually enjoyed that or not. It sounds more like the relief you feel when you get out of an exam does not mean you enjoyed the exam

 

It felt like an exam the first time through.  Although after I figured out my winning strategy I went through it again and got a lot of satisfaction out of breezing through the game that once gave me no end of headaches.

Edited July 4, 2018 by Mister Jack

[Mr. GOH!]

The earlier GOW are super different and I think it would feel gross to play through parts of them after playing the new GOW. I mean, I replayed GOW3 before I played GOW4, and a lot of it felt gross. Gratuitous but ugly violence and quicktime sex scenes did not age well. it was worth replaying prior to GOW4 to remember what GOW4 is reacting against and growing from. 

[Thursday Next]

Agree with GOH, GoW was a product of its time. I'm happy to let it stay in its nostalgia form, without reminding myself what it was actually like...

[toxicitizen]

Yeah, I can see the old GoW being hard to go back to. Even ignoring the aspects that just wouldn't fly today, it always felt like a poor man's Devil May Cry to me. Similar enough on the surface but none of the depth. I liked it at the time but I really wouldn't be excited for a new GoW in that style like I am for Devil May Cry 5.

[MetalCaveman]

DOOM, MOST METAL GAME EVER HELL YEAH \m/ \m/

 

Even the credits are badass and METAL as hell.  Loved the combat and how every rune, upgrade and powerup encouraged you to use every weapon in the arsenal without holding back, even the BFG is like "here's a rune that makes it so that enemies drop ammo for this thing!".  \m/ \m/

[Mister Jack]

DOOM is easily my favorite FPS of this whole current console generation.  Can't wait for Doom Eternal.

[Mister Jack]

GHOSTS N GOBLINS

 

I did it.  I've officially beaten them all, not counting spinoffs and mobile games which I have no interest in playing.  This one was by far the most difficult of the trilogy to beat for a number of reasons, least of which being because my NES Classic cord extension doesn't come in for a week so I had to play it three feet away from a widescreen HDTV and that is not very comfortable, let me tell you.  Even without factoring that in, the controls on this one are a lot more rigid than the other games.  If you want to duck, you better be pushing straight down on the D-pad.  Even a slight diagonal input will result in Arthur not ducking, which got me killed so many times.  You better not push any diagonals by accident while you're running left or right either, because this will make him stop right in his tracks.  I had to be much more careful and deliberate with where my thumb was on the D-pad compared to other games.  Usually I can just push a direction and not think too hard about it but that just isn't allowed here.

 

Honestly, most of the platforming and enemies in this game are actually not that hard compared to the sequels.  They can still kill you if you're sloppy, sure, but despite a more limited weapon selection and fewer abilities to work with overall, there aren't nearly as many projectiles flying at you in the original game.  Even the majority of the bosses are fairly simple once you get their patterns down.  The only reason this ended up being the hardest game of the three was because of THESE mother fuckers.

 

 

God damn it, I hate Red Arremers.  They are so unpredictable and so much more agile than you, and while they do have an AI pattern, exploiting it is still a bitch and even then there's no guarantee they won't randomly change their pattern for seemingly no reason.  The sequels scattered these guys here and there, but in the original game they're everywhere.  Level 3 has no less than five of these bastards in a row that you're forced to deal with, and level six probably has twenty of them.  I do not exaggerate when I say it probably took me about fifty tries just to get past level 3.  Thank god for unlimited continues.

 

While I did have a "no savestates" rule for this game like with the others (except at programmed checkpoints), I did end up utilizing a few speedrunner tricks to make things easier on myself.  On top of knowing where all the extra suits of armor are hidden, there are also ways you can turn this game's own rules against it.  Arthur flies backwards when he gets hit.  There are certain areas where if you willingly take a hit at the right time and place, you can get an extra bit of jump height that will skip you ahead of certain sections.  Not only that, but you can also exploit the memory limitations of the NES to prevent certain enemies from spawning.  If you use one of those jump shortcuts in level five, it will result in the whole second half of the level being free of enemies (except the boss) because the game already used all its memory to spawn the enemies in the first half.  Yeah, I used this trick and I'm not ashamed of it because a lot of this game is total bullshit.  For example, it tries to bait you into picking up weapons that the boss of the level just so happens to be immune to, and once you pick up a weapon you keep it even if you use a continue, forcing you to pick up any other weapon, even a shitty one, just so you can progress in the game.  I got stuck with the torch for most of level 3 because of this.  Dirty pool, mister.  As far as I'm concerned, I didn't use any cheat codes or any exploits that weren't already part of the original game, so I consider this a legit run.

[TheMightyEthan]

Destiny 2: Warmind

 

I liked it, not a lot to say beyond that. I'm probably done with Destiny 2 though, at least until Forsaken comes out. I might pop on once a week to do the easy weeklies (Flashpoint and Heroic Strikes), but probably won't play more than that.

 

[toxicitizen]

Assassin's Creed Origins

 

I still have the post-game DLC to play but I wrapped up the main campaign. This game is very good but also very bloated and almost a little too big. It's not as much of a reinvention as I had hoped but it does improve certain areas that seriously needed it, combat being the main one. After not touching the series for like 3 years at this point, it felt really good to be back. At first. The problem is that this game is so big and so long that it almost overstayed its welcome. Just looking at the map feels exhausting, although to be fair, that might be due to my completionist nature. As much as I enjoy the core gameplay loop,  the idea of clearing all the camps, doing all the side-quests and so on sounds like it would be way too long and tedious.

 

The story was alright but it did feel like it ended a little abruptly. There's a point that feels like the climax but then you finish that section and the game is like "Nah, check out this other part of the map over here" and it's back to business as usual for a few more hours. At that point I had no idea where the game was going or for how much longer. Also, I've always been in the minority in that I actually enjoyed the sci-fi/present day stuff, so it was a little disappointing to see it toned down so much. Other than a couple of areas with neat visuals, there really wasn't anything like ACII's ending, which I think might still be my favorite moment of the entire series.

 

Ideally, playing this should've convinced me to buy the next one at launch but I think I'm gonna wait for a price drop again. Probably a bit lower than I paid for this one.

Edited July 14, 2018 by FLD

[TheMightyEthan]

3 hours ago, FLD said:

Assassin's Creed Origins

 

-snip-

 

Are you secretly me? There is not a single word of that post that I disagree with.

 

I had a lot more fun with it once I stopped trying to be completionist. Though I still felt like the leveling system really detracted from the game, because it forced me to do side quests when I wanted to do story quests because I wasn't a high enough level for the next story quest.

 

I bought this game at $35 because of how great everyone said it was, and how much it revitalized the series, but I'll wait until the next one is cheaper.

[toxicitizen]

3 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

Are you secretly me? There is not a single word of that post that I disagree with.

 

Urge to edit rising...

 

3 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

I had a lot more fun with it once I stopped trying to be completionist. Though I still felt like the leveling system really detracted from the game, because it forced me to do side quests when I wanted to do story quests because I wasn't a high enough level for the next story quest.

 

I've seen that complaint online a lot but for some reason it wasn't an issue for me. Maybe it's because for most of the game I was doing every side-quest I could find before moving on with the story, so I was almost always either the right level or over-leveled. I was a couple levels under the recommended one for the final main quest but that's the only time it happened and it only took like 3-4 side-quests to catch up.

 

 

Also, one thing I forgot to mention is how freaking gorgeous the game is. I couldn't hit a solid 60fps, so I locked it to 30 and cranked everything all the way up and that was definitely the right call. I almost never fast-traveled because jumping into a boat and just taking in the scenery while sailing was just so relaxing and fun. I've never been a history nerd and the previous settings of the series have never really done much for me in the past, but there was something about this one that just sucked me in completely.

[TheMightyEthan]

The way I've always played AC games in the past is I do side stuff until I get bored and want to advance the story, then do story stuff until I feel like doing side stuff again. The level requirements just messed with that rhythm.

[deanb]

So I guess I've beaten Pokemon Quest. turns out it has an actual end n shit (though with the usual caveat of "you can still go back n do stuff". In this case get all 150/151 pokemon)