Games You've Beat 2020

[Mister Jack]

Nioh 2

 

This game solidifies the Nioh series as the best Souls type game not made by From. In fact, I actually enjoyed this more than some of the From games because the combat is just so much more complex and rewarding. About the only other game that can deliver samurai battles as frantic as this is Sekiro. Ghost of Tsushima will certainly have its work cut out for it when it comes out. They didn't change too much from the first game, though. There's a new counter mechanic that comes in three different styles and you can also now absorb enemy souls to use their moves in battle, which is a mechanic I always love to see. Other than that it isn't too different. They took what already worked and added more. More weapons, more enemies, more levels, more everything. You now create your own character instead of having to play as William, which is nice, and the story, while nothing amazing, is also better than the story in the first game.

 

I don't know if it's just because I've had a lot of practice but this game felt easier than the first one, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's no bullshit 2-on-1 samurai duels in this game, and thank god because those were way more frustrating than fun in the last game. Yokai abilities are also much more versatile than the living weapon from before, and the new counter moves give you lots of options to create openings. That's not to say it's a cakewalk. I still dropped many an F-bomb while going through this game. The enemies didn't really get weaker or dumber, it's just that you now have more tools to deal with them. You absolutely have to learn how to use these tools too because you will not get by just blocking and dodging. That's what makes the combat in Nioh so great, though. There's so many different ways to approach a fight and there are probably dozens of viable strategies out there for every single boss. I platinumed the last game and I think I'm going to try to do the same here, although this requires mastering every single type of weapon and I went through the whole game using just the katana and the odachi so I'm probably in for a long grind.

[MetalCaveman]

F.E.A.R

 

This was fun, a nice mix of action and horror, though I did run into some performance issues it was not too big of a deal.

 

Overall it holds up pretty well, and it looks pretty good IMO, for a 15 year old game.  

 

I jumped into Extraction Point immediately, I know that one and Perseus Mandate are no longer canon, but I still want to see what's up with those.  

[TheMightyEthan]

I really liked that game, never beat it though. The slow mo stuff was super cool at the time. I also liked how the enemy barks were very accurate to context, and gave you actual useful information about what they were doing.

 

I just beat Death Stranding. That game was super weird, and super boring, and completely amazing, and I can't even articulate why. The cutscenes at the end did kind of drag on too long, but that's basically my only complaint with the whole game. It was exactly what it was, and it excelled at it.

 

5/5

[Mister Jack]

Code Vein

 

Wow, I hated this game, which sucks because I really didn't want to. I went into it with reasonable expectations, figuring it wouldn't be as good as Nioh or Bloodborne but that it would still be solidly enjoyable. Holy shit was I wrong. I usually try not to rely on summons in these games too much but I basically speedran this game with summons almost the entire time because I wanted to get it over with.

 

Okay, so before I take a giant dump on it I'll mention the few things I did like. The story is interesting. Not a masterpiece by any means, but it was neat enough for me to be willing to suffer through the gameplay to see where it was going. There are multiple endings, which is nice, but fuck playing this game twice. The music can also be pretty good sometimes, and there are some ideas in the gameplay that I liked. I liked having an AI companion with me at all times who was actually quite helpful, although you can choose to leave them behind if you really want to go it alone (you don't). I also liked what they were going for with the class system, although the execution is a little hard to understand at first. Lastly, I liked that you could summon pretty much whenever you want and you don't need to farm any consumable items to play co-op. In fact, a co-op partner doesn't even replace your AI partner so you can have a party of 3. I would like to see more games of this genre that are built around actual parties like most JRPGs rather than just you going it alone all the time. However, it must be said that while you're summoning you can't rest at checkpoints or use items, which is really stupid and arbitrary.

 

Alright, that's where my praise ends. This game sucked. Frame drops, bad load times, combat that just has no weight, a severe lack of enemy types, cheap and frustrating bosses, only a handful of weapons, and level design that is shockingly, embarrassingly bad. Don't even get me started. Cathedral of the Sacred Blood might be the worst level design I have ever seen in a modern game. The others aren't that much better. Not only are they boring to look at, full of narrow corridors, easy to get lost in, and chock full of WAY too many bottomless pits, but most of them have some kind of annoying gimmick. Imagine if every level in Dark Souls was Blighttown. Hell, these levels make Blighttown look like Anor Londo. Hey, you want an ice level where the ground always breaks beneath you and plunges you to your death? No? How about a fire level where you are forced to constantly take damage by walking over burning hot pathways because there's no other route available? Still no? How about a swamp where your movement speed is constantly halved? Pick your poison! Thank god I bought this used. I'm getting my money back on this piece of shit tomorrow. Fuck this game! Watch it go!

[MetalCaveman]

So far (just completed the fire level) I have found Code Vein to be the easiest of the Souls-like games I've played, Fortified Zweihander + Queenslayer blood code + a couple of elemental buffs have made most fights, even bosses, ridiculously easy. Even traversing the fire area wasn't much trouble thanks to the fire defence gift.

 

I do agree about the combat lacking the weight that makes other games so satisfying, and the Cathedral can go burn in hell, but other than that I've been enjoying my time with it a lot. Even the Depths are 1000X better than the Chalice Dungeons from Bloodborne IMO.

 

Happy to see you're at least getting your money back.  

[Mister Jack]

Hollow Knight

 

I bought this a while back but got bored with it after the first couple hours. I decided to give it another chance and I'm glad I did because it is pretty good after you get past the slow start. Would I call it the best Metroidvania ever made like some people are calling it? Not by a long shot. I might put it on the low end of a top 10 list, but that's it. It's got tight controls and fun abilities to unlock, but there were a bunch of niggling little things that got under my skin. I couldn't make heads or tails of the story, checkpoints sometimes feel too far apart, some fights go on for waaay too long, the environments put shit in the foreground that block your view of enemies and hazards, the screen shakes every time you hit or get hit...it goes on, honestly. They're all minor issues on their own but put together they did bring my enjoyment down a little. Oh, and I really, really hate the map system. I don't like having to hunt down an NPC to get a new map in every area, I don't like having to buy a bunch of shit just to make the map useful, I don't like how it only updates at save points and not as you go, and I despise having to use up one of my precious charm slots just so I can see where on the map I'm currently located. I still liked the game and I would still recommend it, I just don't think I adore it the way everyone else seems to. I'd give it an 8, maybe.

[Mister Jack]

Return of the Obra Dinn

 

This is a great little puzzle/detective game brought to us by the guy who did Papers, Please. The premise is that you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Company in the year 1807 who is sent to check out a ghost ship that has mysteriously returned after a five year absence to figure out what happened to everyone onboard. You are given a logbook to chronicle the people and events that you uncover and a pocket watch that can show you the immediate events preceding a person's death as long as you have a trace of their corpse. Being able to directly witness the moment of someone's death makes it sound like this game is going to be easy but it really isn't. There are only a handful of corpses on the ship out of a crew of 60 and very few of the death scenes directly reveal the victim's name. You have to infer the specifics for yourself based on extreme attention to detail within the death scenes you examine. You need to pay attention to things like clothing, occupations, languages, accents, and even social circles to figure out who everybody is, how they died, and sometimes who killed them. Sometimes it comes down to sheer process of elimination. It can be very tricky, and I was almost tempted to consult a guide a couple of times. If you went into this knowing ahead of time who everybody is and how they died you could blow through this game in maybe 90 minutes but as a first-timer it took me roughly 10 hours to figure everything out. It's well worth solving too because the fate of the ship's crew is quite interesting. I don't want to spoil anything but take my word for it that this crew has seen some shit. If figuring out the identities of 60 strangers sounds daunting, rest assured that the game helps you out a little by permanently locking in every 3 correct answers you submit so that you'll be working with a progressively smaller list, although those last few entries can be the hardest of the bunch to figure out. Great game, though. Anyone who likes solving mysteries should pick it up.

[TheMightyEthan]

That sounds like something I would either absolutely love or absolutely hate, and I can't decide which is more likely.

[MetalCaveman]

FEAR Extraction Point

 

The new weapons are really fun, I got the AI to freak out by combining turret grenades with the minigun. "Where am I supposed to go!". That was fun.  

 

FEAR Perseus Mandate

 

Once more, the new weapons were pretty cool, the lightning gun was my favourite. I liked this one more, the way the mercenaries play into the story and how you'll sometimes find them fighting the replica army is pretty cool, adds a cool layer to everything going on. The horror bits were better done too IMO even if the floor dudes were kind of annoying (until I figured out how to easily avoid them). The last section felt a bit repetitive though, it was like the Library in Halo, just with less flood.

 

It's a shame these are not canon anymore, I would have liked to see where the senator storyline went. I also wonder if the merc dude was taking credit for the kill or if there's something else going on:

 

"We got Morrison"

 

Except that you get to watch as Morrison gets crushed by a truck after Alma shows up.  

 

This one also broke the curse of the Black Hawk, every time someone mentioned, got close to, or boarded one of those that was an instant death flag, in the end though, you finally get to leave without issues, kinda, not sure if Chen's ghost is a good ghost that disappears after hearing you'll get promoted, or an ominous ghost that hints at everyone being dead already.

 

Edit: OK so AFAIK these games aren't canon anymore, but FEAR 2 just referenced the Perseus compound, so... I don't know anymore.  

Edited July 5, 2020 by MetalCaveman

[Mister Jack]

OneShot

 

I got this in that bundle for racial justice that itch.io was doing a while back. In fact, this was the main game I wanted when I got it. This is a puzzle/adventure game where you guide a little catboy (or girl?) named Niko on a quest to save a dying world by reviving the sun. I really can't say any more than that without ruining what makes it so unique. You can probably beat it in two or three sittings and it's worth experiencing at least once.

[toxicitizen]

Supraland

 

Finished it last night. This is a first-person puzzle game/metroidvania hybrid and it's one of those things where I didn't realize how badly I wanted this until I actually started playing it. When I was about halfway through the game, they announced the release date for the new DLC for it (it's out by now) and I thought by the time I finished the game I'd need a break but I'm actually seriously considering getting it now. At the very least I intend to keep playing and try going for 100% completion in the base game.

 

It also has this really charming aesthetic where you're playing as this little red toy guy and the entire world is a kid's elaborate sandbox world. SIde note: sometimes this giant kid will be standing there looking down at you and it's honestly kinda creepy lol.

 

It's not the most polished thing ever like Portal or Talos Principle but if you enjoy the genre I can't recommend it enough.

 

 

[danielpholt]

Journey to the Savage Planet - XBOX ONE Gamepass

 

Wasn't really expecting much of this, but given it was essentially free to try on Gamepass I thought I'd give it a look. I ended up really enjoying it. It's got a little Metroid Prime, with a dash of that RAGE colour-pallet and a teeny-tiny bit of No Mans Sky.

 

It's also funny. You know, Ha-ha funny. 

 

Managed to get through it in around 6-7 hours. It's definitely worth a play if you've got some time to kill. 

 

[TheMightyEthan]

The Last of Us Part II

 

Boy do I have thoughts.

 

Okay, first off, as an overall package I'd say the game isn't that great. I'd give it a 2/5. The actual gameplay/level structure is fine, but it's got two major problems:

 

First, the pacing of the whole story is jacked up so so bad. The non-spoiler version is that if you divide the story into Prologue, Act I, Act II, and Act III, you could remove all of Act II and the game would actually be better for it. Act II just disrupts the flow of the narrative so bad. Just so bad. It's got to go. Admittedly it's slightly more complicated than this, but I'll go into that in spoiler tags.

 

Second, they made a major character completely unsympathetic, and the way they do it is completely unnecessary and easily avoided.

 

Okay, now for the long version in the spoiler tags:

 

Spoiler

Major Problem 1: Pacing

 

Okay, in case it wasn't clear, I'm calling the part at Jackson the Prologue, Act I is Ellie & crew in Seattle, Act II is Abby & crew in Seattle, and Act III is everything with Santa Barbara. The part where you're playing as Abby in Seattle just goes on and on and on. It's tedious, I don't care about Abby, I'm here for Ellie, so forcing me to go through this is just getting in the way of why I'm playing the game. I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to establish that the Abby and the Wolves are people too, they're not monsters, they're motivated by the same factors as Ellie & crew, etc etc, but the thing is it didn't need to be this long and drawn out to accomplish it (they also fail to even accomplish it, but I'll go into that below). Basically, it's like I get to the climax of the game I'm playing, and then they're like "No wait! No climax for you! Now you have to go play this whole other game first, before you can find out what happened!" It's terrible, I hate it, it ruins the game. And I mean that quite literally, this is the main reason this game is a 2/5 instead of a 4/5. It's like the Star Wars Machete Order except instead of putting the prequels after Empire Strikes Back you stop ESB after Vader says "I am your father", while Luke is still holding onto the scaffolding/whatever, go watch the prequels, and then come back and resume with Luke and Vader's fight still going. It's objectively bad and I honestly have no idea why so many people approved it, nor why so many people are praising this game for its ruined mess of a fucking story.

 

But I'm not just a whiner, complaining about things while offering no solutions, I actually have three proposed ways they could have fixed this so it didn't completely disrupt the pacing:

 

First option, they could have done like the prologue and alternated back and forth between Ellie and Abby segments. I think this is the worst of my three solutions, because it still interrupts the pacing by making you jump back and forth, but at least each story stays more or less at the same "part" along the way. Since it would be going on from the beginning you would get used to the alternation so you would come to expect it, it wouldn't just be a massive slap in the face right as Ellie's story is coming to a head. Both stories would build together, and they would reach climax together (when I started this I didn't mean to make this stuff sound so sexual, but now that it's in here I'm rolling with it). It would be a semi-cohesive narrative, and wouldn't hit reset right as things are getting their tensest.

 

Second option, they alternate like in option 1 (for the same reasons) BUT ADDITIONALLY you keep Abby's bits short and sweet, like the flashbacks are. We don't need to see every detail of how Abby and the kids snuck past the clickers for the 50th time, or how she found Owen, or whatever. Make them like 1/4 the length they are now, alternate them with Ellie's bits so you don't ruin the pacing, and voila, the game flows 1000% better. Abby's sections are here to show us that the Wolves are people too, but we don't need to spend 1000 hours navigating Seattle as her to see that, we just need to see the character interactions. So cut out all the damn filler. This game is twice as long as TLoU1, it could stand to be shortened a bit.

 

Third and best option, you remove Abby's sections from the campaign altogether, and put them in their own separate campaign that unlocks after you finish Ellie's campaign. I think this is the best option because both Ellie and Abby's stories have their own rise and fall to them, and trying to combine them without completely rewriting them is always going to be disruptive. Letting them each be their own separate campaign would give them each room to breathe. The more I think about this option the more I like it, and I honestly think if they had gone this way I would have legit loved this game instead of thinking it's a hot stinking mess. You would have gotten to play Ellie's story, which is what you're there for in the first place, but then instead of it getting interrupted right as it gets good you would have finished it, felt resolution, and then gotten a "BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!" afterward, which I think would have been actually exciting. I think if it had been presented that way I would not only have slogged through Abby's campaign, but I would have been actually excited to get to do it, to see the events from the other side. I think this one change would change this game from a 2/5 for me to a 4/5, possibly 5/5. I even think it would have gone a long way to making me care less about Abby being an unsympathetic monster.

 

Major Problem 2: Abby's an Unsympathetic Monster

 

Okay, so that's overstating it a little bit, but she is unsympathetic. The game is trying to show the player that it's just this revenge cycle that Ellie and Abby are both caught in, with no beginning or end, but that view is completely destroyed by the fact that Abby is in the wrong, she started it. It is not fun to play as someone who is so completely unsympathetic. Like, I don't give a shit what happens to Abby, because she is absolutely in the wrong, and she is a terrible person. Which is not to say that it's impossible to have a compelling POV character who's also a bad person, but they at least need to be sympathetic. You need to be able to look at them and say "I see why you are the way you are, and it's because the world made you this way, it's not totally your fault." Like Joel. Joel was definitely a bad person, but he was still sympathetic because you could understand why he was the way he was.

 

Like sure, Joel killed Abby's dad and friends, and that would understandably be upsetting, but her dad and the other Fireflies were going to murder a 14 year old girl and Joel saved a 14 year old girl from the people who were going to murder her. That's not exactly a nuanced situation. Even given the assumption Ellie could have been the source for a vaccine to save tons of people, greater good, we-promise-we're-not-Nazis, etc, nobody even asked her if she'd be cool with it before they decided to murder her. So the Fireflies were very definitely in the wrong. Now, Abby could still be sympathetic if she didn't know that the Fireflies were going to murder a 14 year old girl. In that case she would be justified in thinking that Joel is a psychopath who deserves to pay for what he's done, but the thing is the game goes out of its way to establish that she does know. The scene where her dad is talking to the Firefly who found Ellie, obviously conflicted about what he's about to do (probably to show that he, too, Is Not A Monster (TM)), it shows Abby overhearing that conversation, and thus learning that they're about to kill Ellie without her knowledge or consent. Thus, she knew her father was going to murder a 14 year old girl, and that Joel was entirely justified in rescuing Ellie from that situation, completely undermining any sympathy the player might feel for her motivations. She can't reasonably believe Joel deserves to pay for what he did because Joel was in the right in that situation and she has all the information she needs to see that. And we can't blame it on her growing up in a fucked up world and having a fucked up sense of right and wrong either, because what little we see of her in flashbacks from before that happens seems to indicate she is a relatively well-adjusted girl, having been raised by a caring father in pretty good circumstances all things considered.

 

However, this problem is easily fixed by just not having Abby overhear that conversation, so she's in the dark about the fact that the Fireflies were going to murder a 14 year old girl, and suddenly her lust for vengeance is entirely understandable. She becomes sympathetic. Then the point the games trying to make about the endless cycle of revenge works, because both sides are locked in this hatred for each other with neither one of them being in the wrong, they're both just victims of this horrible fucked up world. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Naughty Dog decided to make her so unsympathetic, and therefore completely off-putting as a POV character. The game would have been so much better if just that one scene had been cut.

 

Conclusion

 

This is a bad game, but it was so close to being a great game, even an amazing game, but for a couple of really baffling decisions that really aren't that hard* to fix. I really, truly, do not understand why this mess of a game is being heralded as a masterpiece of storytelling in games. I really really don't.

 

2/5 *Edit - 4/5, for reasons posted here.

 

*I know "hard" is a loaded term here, so I want to explain what I mean: fixing this game's problems don't require any rewrites, or any new levels, or animations, or voicing, or really anything at all to the substance of the game itself. They don't require any new assets of any kind, all the data is there on the discs that shipped. They just require rearranging some levels and removing one scene. If this were a movie I would be able to make the changes to fix its problems.

[Mister Jack]

@TheMightyEthan I agree with pretty much all of that. Honestly if I had been in charge I would have tossed out that storyline entirely because the theme it is addressing just feels really sophomoric for a universe with so much heart and thought put into it. I've seen that story done a million times before and done better too. Wikipedia says Druckmann wrote both games but I swear there had to be someone else doing some major input for the first one because I don't know how else you have such a staggering drop in quality in a single sequel.

[TheMightyEthan]

The Last of Us Part II: A Series of Unforced Errors

 

*Edit - It's kinda funny, the ending was actually pretty strong, so my feelings immediately after I finished it were more positive. I even found myself wondering if I had been too hard on it when I was in the middle. Even when I was writing that essay up there last night, I wondered if it was fair to call it a bad game. But the more I think about it, the more the feelings from the very end date, and I realize that no, it's actually a mess, and a bad game. It's sad, because it's so close to being great, and it's such a missed opportunity.

[MetalCaveman]

Senran Kagura: Reflexions (Switch version)

 

BEST. GAME. EVER.  

 

It's a fun little spin-off that's not canon in any way shape or form and shouldn't be taken too seriously under any circumstances.  

 

It's also super short, you can complete one playthrough in 20-30 mins, to complete a character's story you have play through the story mode 5 times. So if you only have the base game you can clear it in a couple of hours, a bit more if you're trying to get everything, even less if you skip some of the base story stuff that's the same across every playthrough.

 

I do recommend playing on Switch though, HD Rumble and motion controls are fun.  

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm upgrading my score of TLoU2 from a 2/5 to a 4/5, for reasons posted in the TLoU2 thread.

[TheMightyEthan]

Abzu

 

This was a nice, short, calming experience. Gave me heavy Flower vibes. There's collectibles and things that you can go back and get, but I played it on the Epic store so there are no achievements to motivate me to actually do that, but I did really enjoy the story mode.

 

4/5

[MetalCaveman]

FEAR 2: Project Origin & FEAR 2: Reborn

 

Way better than the original in pretty much every way except for a couple of things, first being that the AI doesn't feel as smart, this may be due to differences in level design and layout, but it feels like they don't try to flank or move around you as much, most of the time they'll just hide behind cover and remain there for a while. This did result in some funny instances of enemies trying to throw a grenade, only for it to bounce back.  

 

Weapon selection was also lacking, I miss the minigun and the lightning gun from FEAR. The hammerhead is fun, but the laser and prototype energy weapon don't feel as satisfying as their FEAR counterparts. The laser takes a bit to start firing and the way it aims is a bit awkward while the energy weapon doesn't vaporise enemies as often as it should IMO.  

 

Other than that though, it's awesome, huge improvement in graphics, the horror stuff is better and I enjoyed learning more about the fucked up stuff Armacham was up to. 

 

Dealing with abominations was a whole thing for me, one of them shows up and I jump a bit, which ends up with my character doing a 10000° turn and aiming at the ceiling, thankfully reflexes/slow-mo helps with this.

 

Then there's the ending, man was that a thing... I wonder how different it would have been had Beckett just "accepted" Alma.

 

Reborn is a super short campaign, and I mean SUPER SHORT, you can get through it in less than an hour, took me a bit longer because I got lost a couple of times, only to find the path forward was pretty obvious.  Still, it's pretty cool, getting to play as a Replica soldier was fun, the different UI is a nice detail, and having no intel to collect because you don't have an intel network as part of the replica forces is a nice touch. Some of the objectives are pretty cool, gone is the "find an elevator to place X" now you have thing like "You Must Advance, You Have No Allies" and "You Are Unstoppable". \m/ \m/

 

Oh yeah, I mentioned this before, but there's A MECH, and you get to pilot it for a while, and it's great, who cares about demonic apparitions, psychic commanders plotting the end of the world and all the monsters around you, none of that matters when you get to pilot a mech!  It's also great that it repairs itself if you hide for a bit, means you don't have to worry that  much about taking damage as long as you don't take too much at once. HELL YEAH \m/ \m/ Every horror game should have a mech.

 

[Mister Jack]

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

 

It was okay, but I agree with the general sentiment that it's the weakest of the trilogy. The first half of this game is actually pretty bad and not very fun. I was tempted to drop it, but I decided to push through it and it did get better in the second half. Not great, but better. There's a fair bit of artificial difficulty going on here such as ambushes by enemies you couldn't have possibly known about, mobs of 6+ enemies in a game that really isn't designed for fighting against crowds, and tying your i-frames to a stat—which might be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard for an RPG. The early stages are downright painful, but once you level up a bit and actually build yourself a character that isn't useless it becomes more fun. I'll probably try out the DLC, but I kinda doubt I'll ever want to revisit this one like I could see myself doing with the other two.

[TheMightyEthan]

I keep wanting to play Souls games, but I bounce off them every time I try. Idk why they keep calling to me.

 

Why I came here: Close to the Sun

 

It's a Bioshock-lite game, where you're exploring a giant ship where all the worlds scientists have gathered to work for the benefit of mankind without the constraints of national governments. Shockingly, something terrible has happened, your sister is involved, and you're trying to find out what it was.

 

It wasn't very good, and was pretty boring. There's no combat, but there are a few scenes throughout where you have to run away from various things, but they're not very well executed and end up being tedious rather than engaging. The rest of the game mostly just has you moving through environments, doing what people on the other end of a radio tell you to do (sound familiar?). There's basically no "investigation" as far as gameplay goes, and barely any puzzle solving. It's basically a walking simulator where they tried to add a little bit more in terms of mechanics, but didn't really commit to any of it.

 

2/5

[Mister Jack]

If you want to get into Souls games I would actually recommend starting with Bloodborne like I did. Well, I actually started with Demon's Souls but I hated that game and I hated it even when I tried going back to replay it years later. If I were to make a tier list of all the Soulslike games I've played (wish I could use Tiermaker but to hell with Twitter) it would go something like this.

 

S tier

Bloodborne - Still the best From game if you ask me. Best combat, most interesting world, coolest weapons, coolest bosses. If you can't get into this one I can't imagine you'll be able to get into the others.

 

Sekiro - More of an action game than an RPG so it's easier to get into and delivers some fun ninja stealth along with some of the best boss battles ever made, but it's also by far the hardest game on the list. Fantastic game but not for the easily frustrated.

 

Nioh 2 - Basically takes everything good about Nioh 1 and then fixes the stuff that was bad. This one is up there with Bloodborne for me personally. Can't wait for the DLC.

 

A tier

Dark Souls III - This one is my favorite because it feels the closest to Bloodborne, ironically enough. Combat rewards staying nimble with your dodges more than relying on a shield. It doesn't hit the highest highs of the first Dark Souls but I feel it maintains a more consistent quality throughout.

 

Nioh - This game and its sequel have some of the best combat out of any game I've played, period. Mixing up your light and heavy attacks in high, mid, and low stances with several different weapon types gives you an incredible amount of playstyles to experiment with. Admittedly the story here is a little lackluster, there's not quite enough enemy variety, and the living weapon system isn't balanced very well, but all of these were addressed in the sequel. The DLC may have already addressed it but I haven't gotten around to playing that.

 

B tier

Dark Souls - I'm sure a lot of people would put the original game up at the very top, and it does have a very strong first half, but the second half is pretty weak. It did introduce a lot of the stuff people love about modern soulslike games, though, so you could do worse. It does have a couple of really shitty bosses, though.

 

Star Wars: Fallen Order - If you want to dabble in the genre but are wary of the difficulty this is a good one to start with too. I hate to say it's a "normie" game but it kind of is. It's a kinder, gentler Soulslike that has actual difficulty settings and a surprisingly decent Star Wars story. It really rips off its inspiration but it's still fun to play. My only real criticism is that the unlockable rewards for exploration are lame as hell and that the game is kind of short. It's a good entry point nonetheless.

 

C tier

Dark Souls II - This game was designed by someone who thinks people liked the first game because they died over and over again. Nobody likes dying in these games. What they like is overcoming a tough but fair challenge but quite a bit of the challenge here is completely unfair. "Here's a boss that causes your weapon to degrade every time you hit it. Here's a room that aggros six enemies as soon as you set foot inside and also a mini-boss will spawn behind you." Absolutely ridiculous.

 

D tier

Demon's Souls - I swear I will never understand why anyone would say this is the best in the series. This is the first game they ever made with this formula and it shows because it's full of all kinds of tedious, unfun jank that they eventually ironed out when they made Dark Souls. Fuck moon grasses, fuck world tendency, fuck item burden, and fuck the Valley of Defilement.

 

Code Vein - Trash game. Already explained why in this thread.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I've tried Dark Souls 1 & 2 and bounced off both. I've got the Star Wars one on my list so that'll probably be the one I try at some point.

[MetalCaveman]

FEAR 3

 

Well, this completes the trilogy, certainly leaning more towards the modern FPS stuff, regenerating health, only 2 weapons at a time, co-op, etc.

 

That being said the horror stuff is still there, and it still works, for the most part. Intervals 5, 6 and 7 got to that point where things were frustrating enough that whenever scary stuff happened my reaction was just "Yeah yeah, whatever, who cares, let's just get this over with." Those levels have some incredibly frustrating encounters, particularly 5, where the last boss basically seemed unkillable until I found a glitch that causes it to get stuck in the melee animation, before that it had been several failures, since that thing can destroy your cover and grenades don't stun it for long enough, plus, if you didn't deal with the normal guards before it they'll make your life hell.

 

Interval 8 though, that turned things around, it's super creepy and there's not much in the way of combat (until the end), plus you get to learn a lot about the past of the two main characters and why they each ended up the way they did. The main combat encounter there is just the last boss that's easy enough to kill, provided you do a good job at managing the reflex meter.

 

Playing in co-op allows you to play either as Point Man or Fettel, Point Man being the main protagonist of FEAR and Fettel being one of the main antagonists alongside Alma. There's a competitive element there, depending on how many points either gets through the different levels you get a different ending. Points are obtained from challenges and for completing missions, challenges have a couple of different categories, like killing enemies using explosives, using reflex to slow down time, etc. The ending you get is based off who had the most points in the different categories, Aggression, Tactical, Aptitude and Psychic.

 

I completed the game in single player mode, getting the Point Man ending.  

 

The story was cool, a nice way to end the series, and the brothers stuff is fun, watching Point Man and Fettel interact with each other was interesting, Point Man never utters a word, but his expressions and mannerisms say everything that needs to be said. Fettel also adds a layer of comedy, his twisted view of the world leading him to make some funny comments here and there:

 

After falling from a bridge and into the demon-infested ocean:

 

"Is this part of your plan? Things seem to be going.... Swimmingly"

 

It also handles Alma as less of an antagonist and more of a victim of her circumstances, previous games have already covered some of the stuff she went through, and why she and Fettel did what they did, but this time around not only does she never get in your way or try to harm you, she actually never harms or kills anyone, it's all The Creep now. The Creep being the psychic spectre of the man that started everything, using Alma for messed up experiments, using her while she was in a coma to give birth to the two brothers, raising them as both lab rats and killers, etc, everything fucked up in the series, everything bad that happens, even the Replica army, can be traced back to him.

 

All in all, it's fun, I thought this would be way more actiony based on what I remember from comments and reviews back when it came out for the first time, so it was a nice surprise to see it keeping the same balance of horror and action that the previous games have. \m/ \m/

 

TLDR: It's FEAR, it's action and horror, and it's pretty cool. \m/ \m/  

 

Side note: I don't think I've ever finished this many games in such a short amount of time.  

[Baconrath]

 

I never had any more crashes during the last third of the game or so I'm not sure if its cause the temp fix to make it large address aware helped or they silently patched it or its because that last stretch is made of really short days or something else. Still wondering why it was 32-bit but I guess that's the price to pay for freeing something from its Vita shackles. A very monkey's paw port indeed haha

 

I think i got just about everything I could on the first playthrough thanks to a guide except I only had like 85% of the compendium because I ran out of money  

 

Also, I think I used up all my luck when got a fusion accident trying to create Odin and got Metatron instead