Games You've Beat 2021 - PXoD's Excellent Adventure

[TheMightyEthan]

The Pedestrian

 

This was a really cool little indie puzzle platformer. The conceit is that you're a little stick man walking around on street signs, but they use it to create really clever puzzles where you have to rearrange the parts to connect them in different orders at different points in the puzzles. It was also extremely well paced, the puzzles got pretty complicated, but they introduced the ideas well enough, and built them up slowly enough, that there was actually only one puzzle I got so stuck on that I looked up the answer, which is amazing for me with puzzle games. My only complaint is that it was pretty short, I finished it in 3 hours.

 

4/5

[deanb]

Dragon Quest XI

 

I have some epilogue stuff to do but I have finished this. And I think it's my first Switch game I've completed.

It's quite cutesy and I'm happy to pass it on to my younger brother to beat at some point. The story is fairly simple - you're the destined hero and there's a big bad. 

 

My main nitpicks are - the item management is godawful. You have to assign recovery items to each character in addition to their equipment slots. Not a shared pool like most other games have done for decades. And to top it off when organising their equipment it also removes all the healing items n stuff too (except for the reviving items, so there's no rhyme or reason). And it adds them as individual items too, so it's cluttered as hell in their equipment space.

 

There's also a bit in the middle where your party end up scattered to the four winds so you end up with different temp parties and such, and it's kinda cute and the only major plot effort, but it lasted so damn long where you're basically without your full party. 

Spoiler

and then you find you'll never be with one of your party members, cos she died, and there's not much made of it. It's sad but because you've been left so long without this party member you kinda forget about her so it's not as impactful if instead it'd been revealed right away that she was killed in saving everyone from the big bad.

 

Oh you also as part of this learn a "secret technique" learnt by the heroes of old to defeat the big bad. It just becomes a fairly standard attack and does no particular special damage to the big bad.

 

There's also all these doors around with varying levels of locks, and some you eventually get a key mid-way through, there's nothing really given during the start of the game that implies you'll get a key later on so for a while I was thinking i'd missed out on something/missed a sidequest/etc and so had to google a walkthrough for it. More recently found at least one of the types of locks I won't be able to open until post-epilogue either. Which to me is stupid to have things set behind lock doors you can't even access til post games. But given it can clearly set up additional areas post game I don't get why they didn't just put the post-game items there instead of doting around the map and you can't touch them for tens of hours.

Oh the ability tree limits you a ton too - I've barely gotten enough by the end of the game to unlock all of one weapon type so it doesn't really promote mixing it up with weapons given abilities are weapon-locked. It's super stingy with points.

 

But otherwise was fun, a nice simple game to play through. I liked the rideable enemies to go to new areas/hidden areas too, that was kinda neat. Will see what my bro thinks of it.

[TheMightyEthan]

I really enjoyed that game for about the first 10 hours and then just completely lost interest for some reason that I can't explain.

[MetalCaveman]

Resident Evil 4

 

 

HELL YEAH!

 

Still holds up as my favourite in the series, the best mix of action and horror, with just the right amount of cheese , though I've yet to play the remakes, we'll see how those go.

 

My favourite line:

 

Salazar: "I've sent my right hand for you!"

 

Leon: "Your right hand comes off?!"

 

 

Separate Ways and Assignment Ada are also pretty fun, Assignment Ada being all about how fast you can collect the samples and get out of there, while Separate Ways is a short campaign on its own, showing what Ada was up to during Leon's campaign.

 

Most importantly for me though, after finishing this game several times on PS2, I learned that you can actually kill regenerators and iron maidens with the knife! Not only that, it's actually rather easy and saves you a fair amount of ammo, though it does take a while.

 

It also has the best unlockable weapon: The Chicago Typewriter, does a ton of damage, looks really cool and it has infinite ammo! \m/ \m/

 

 

[Thursday Next]

Oh it has the *best* worst dialogue.

 

"Where's everyone going? Bingo?"

"Ah! I have an idea. While you're here, why don't I introduce you to "It"? "It" will keep you busy."

[TheMightyEthan]

Idk, I don't think anything can top "You were almost a Jill sandwich!" or "Here's a lockpick, it might come in handy if you, the master of unlocking, take it with you."

[Thursday Next]

Or "Get. That. Scum. Make. Him. Pay." from... 2 I think.

[toxicitizen]

Titanfall 2

 

I had heard that the campaign in this was good but damn. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed an FPS campaign this much. It's just so much goddamned fun! Some levels are straight up genius, too. One second you're parkouring your way through an automated assembly line building houses and the next you're shifting between the past and present, having to keep track of two combat encounters at the same time and being strategic about where you position yourself when shifting back and forth.

 

For a game all about piloting big robots that punch other big robots, you'd think that every second spent outside the big robot would make you go "When am I getting back inside the big robot?!" But running around as a pilot is just so much fun that it honestly stole the show for me. My favorite parts were when the game made me wallrun my way through hazardous areas and up giant radar dishes. And just when you think you've seen it all you get the smart pistol, and suddenly you feel like even more of a ninja god as you wallrun all over the place effortlessly headshotting every motherfucker along the way.

 

And since this was very short and I still want to wallrun some more, I think Mirror's Edge Catalyst is going to be next.

Edited April 7, 2021 by toxicitizen

[Mister Jack]

Judgment

 

What a ride. This is a spin-off of the Yakuza series and while I wouldn't really call it a Yakuza game because it has none of the familiar characters, not even as cameos, it does share a very similar style of gameplay and it does take place in Kamurocho. I suppose I'd call this a Kamurocho side story. However, don't let that trick you into thinking this is a game where the story is an afterthought. The plot had me riveted. You play as Takayuki Yagami, an attorney-cum-detective who gave up law when one of his former clients went on to murder his girlfriend. Yagami has begun investigating a rash of murders being perpetrated by a serial killer called The Mole, who targets yakuza and gouges out their eyes as his calling card. What starts off as a simple murder investigation ends up being full of twists and turns and it becomes so much more. I also gotta say that the killer is one of the coolest villains in the whole franchise. I'd say this one is worth experiencing for the story alone. Yagami himself isn't as memorable as Kiryu or Ichiban but he's not poorly-written or anything. His archetype just doesn't really stand out that much in comparison. We've all seen detectives with a chip on their shoulder who will do anything to get to the truth, but he's still fine for what he is.

 

The gameplay is mostly similar to Yakuza. Yagami has two fighting styles, one for groups and one for strong solo enemies. It's not as complex as 0 or Kiwami but it's not totally mindless either. In addition to the normal fighting you can also solve cases for clients, which is the easiest way to make money. Cases usually involve interviewing people, examining crime scenes for evidence, and...ugh...tailing suspects. I swear, President Biden should sign a bill outlawing tailing missions because they're always the least fun part of any game they're in and this one is no exception. There's also a cool system in place where you can befriend certain NPCs all over Kamurocho by doing missions for them and if you do they'll help you out in their own way. Some might give you special store items or teach you new skills and some might even help you out during street fights. It's pretty neat.

 

Not EVERY new mechanic is a winner though. If you take too long during random encounters the police will show up and you're forced to run away, lest you get caught and penalized with a 10,000 yen fine, which is a lot of money for this game. Worse than that are mortal wounds. When you're damaged with a gun or a sword it inflicts a mortal wound, which decreases the maximum size of your life bar. The only way to get rid of mortal wounds is either to visit a back alley doctor, which costs 20,000 yen, or use a medical kit, which cost 40,000 yen each. You really don't want to get shot in this game because it will seriously hurt your wallet. This is the first game in the series where I got in the habit of using human shields to block bullets.

 

Those are fairly small complaints though. If you like the Yakuza series and you like crime dramas, this one is a winner. The tone of this game is more serious and not as over-the-top as Yakuza so you won't see Yagami singing Baka Mitai or hiring a chicken to manage his business, but you still get plenty of kickass action and compelling characters to enjoy. 

Edited April 7, 2021 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

17 hours ago, toxicitizen said:

And since this was very short and I still want to wallrun some more, I think Mirror's Edge Catalyst is going to be next.

 

I really like Mirror's Edge Catalyst, but I would also highly recommend Ghostrunner. You're literally a robot ninja slicing dudes up with a katana while you wall run your way up a cyberpunk arcology.

[toxicitizen]

2 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

 

I really like Mirror's Edge Catalyst, but I would also highly recommend Ghostrunner. You're literally a robot ninja slicing dudes up with a katana while you wall run your way up a cyberpunk arcology.

 

Yeah, I really wanna play that. Just waiting for the price to drop a bit.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I'm gonna double-dip as soon as the price comes down on PS4, since they're releasing a PS5 upgrade this fall.

 

*Edit - Also, 505 just bought the rights to the Ghostrunner IP, so I'm fairly confident that means we'll get more of it.

 

[MetalCaveman]

Resident Evil 5

 

Just like I remember, a fun game to play on your own, a really fun game to play in coop, not exactly a good Resident Evil game. Much more actiony than 4, and lacking most of its charm too, still, not a bad game to go through, just not exactly what you're looking for in an RE game.

 

Sheva as an AI partner can be godlike or terrible, give her a sniper rifle and enough ammo and she can clear an entire area by herself, give her anything automatic and she'll run into a room and get killed instantly. Even so, she did save my bacon a couple of times, still recommend playing with another human though, much better that way.

 

The merchant is sorely missed.

[Mister Jack]

Battlefield 1

 

Downloaded it alongside Black Ops III and was playing it off and on. The campaign is pretty much a glorified tutorial for the multi but it still confirms to me that I just plain prefer Battlefield's gameplay style over CoD's. There's not really much worth mentioning either way, although there was one mechanic I found pretty interesting. There are a bunch of guns in the game where if you try to reload them before you're empty, you don't just throw away the clip that still has some bullets in it but instead manually load new bullets in one at a time. Obviously this takes a lot longer to do, but I thought it added an interesting strategic element to ammo management. Do you reload early and risk getting caught with your pants down or do you wait until you're empty so you can reload faster but risk not having enough bullets in a bind? It's something I wouldn't mind seeing in more FPS games. Ammo capacity in this game is also much lower than in CoD so I was switching guns way more often.

[TheMightyEthan]

@MetalCaveman Jeez, you blazed through that game.

[toxicitizen]

On 4/7/2021 at 12:33 PM, TheMightyEthan said:

*Edit - Also, 505 just bought the rights to the Ghostrunner IP, so I'm fairly confident that means we'll get more of it.

 

 

Immediately acquiring the IP seems weird to me, though. Especially since, as far as I can tell, the game didn't set the world on fire or anything. I wonder if it's just a matter of them coming in too late to take ownership as part of the initial publishing agreement or if they plan to keep it going without the devs for some reason. Maybe they already had their next project lined up and weren't available to work on a sequel or something?

[Mister Jack]

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time

 

Finally wrapped up this one after playing it on and off for a few months. This is, hands down, the hardest Crash game in the entire series, and it was already not an easy game to begin with. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with this one, honestly. I like the cartoony animation and designs. The controls are tight, the levels are cool and the new mechanics and playable characters give you some variety and keep it interesting, which is nice, but if you're a completionist this game is going to ruin your life. If you want to 100% a level in this game you need to do ALL of the following. 

 

- Get every crate, many of which are often hidden offscreen and you just have to know they're there.

- Get 80% of all wumpa fruits

- Find the hidden gem 

- Don't die. At all. Keep in mind you usually die in one hit and these levels much, much longer than ever before.

- Beat the platinum time in the time trial, which also requires not dying even once to accomplish

- Now do it all again in the inverted stage variant

 

Have fucking mercy. This is a kid's game! To be fair, they did bring it up to modern standards in some respects. You can turn on a brightly colored ring under your feet when you jump so you'll always know exactly where you're going to land. You can play in modern mode which gives you infinite lives and just counts how many deaths you have. You can play in a limited lives retro mode if you're a purist but I do NOT recommend doing that at all because these levels were clearly designed with the expectation that you will die over a dozen times. Even if you're up for that kind of punishment, one thing I just can't forgive is that whenever you die you have to recollect every box you've broken since your last checkpoint. I know it was like this in the old Crash games but come on. It's a 2020 game. There's no excuse for that anymore. When you are likely to die many, many times in most levels, going back and getting the boxes again every single time you do isn't fun or challenging. It's just tedious. Yes, some of the boxes are used as platforms so you need them to be there every time, but you could at least mark them somehow to indicate that the game counts it as being collected already.

 

I can recommend this game if you're the type who can ignore collectibles and completion percentage and you just want to play a platformer without worrying about any of that stuff. If you can do that, it's a pretty fun, challenging game. If, however, you are compelled to get all the things like I usually am, just know that you are in for one of the most frustrating, infuriating, unfun grinds of your entire gaming life.

[TheMightyEthan]

@toxicitizen Yeah, I knew they had a roadmap for DLC and stuff, I was really talking about sequels.

 

Maybe like you said they came in too late to buy the IP as part of the publishing agreement, but then the dev wanted to make a sequel and they acquired the IP as part of that publishing agreement or something. Or even the agreement for Luna/next-gen.

[Mister Jack]

Finally got around to finishing the Nioh 2 DLC. I think I've nearly mastered Nioh at this point because there was only one boss who gave me a lot of trouble and when I eventually fought her a second time in a side mission as part of a dual boss I steamrolled her pretty easily. Not that the DLC is easier than the main game or anything. If anything it's harder but I feel like I've got the combat down to a science. I suppose that's what happens when you play a game for 300+ hours. I'm doing a co-op campaign with a friend but after that I guess there's NG++,+++, and ++++ to go through as well as the boss rush dungeon. I doubt I'm putting it down completely any time soon.

Edited April 12, 2021 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

Prey

 

Normally I don't count games I've played before, but this is on a new platform for me (PS4) so I figured I'll go ahead and count it.

 

This game is just as great as I remember, though I was honestly surprised to learn it's less than 4 years old, it seemed like it came out longer ago than that. I'm a sucker for immersive sims, especially the ones made by Arkane. I love getting to approach each area how you want to, and all the different, naturalistic ways the powers and abilities and environment interact. Talos I reminds me of Rapture in all the best ways, except the station feels like more of a real place than Rapture ever did. Bioshock always had a tension between the story/lore making it out that there was still a semi-functional society occupying the city and the gameplay segments where there's nothing but psychos and big daddies. In Prey everything that happens on the station makes sense with what's happening in the story, and it's great. I loved it enough that I actually went and platinumed it, although you can do that in just 2 playthroughs and a bit of cleanup if you're clever with saves.

 

5/5

[MetalCaveman]

Resident Evil 6

 

Getting through 5 was a breeze, much shorter than I remember and still holds up reasonably well, this one though, it's a completely different beast.

 

For starters, it's like playing four games in one.

 

• Leon's campaign: Kind of a modern take on the RE style, a more natural progression from 5.
• Chris' campaign: Screw it! We CoD now! Explosions, war, mutant soldiers, car chases, jets!
• Jake's campaign: Run from bosses, fight some bosses, hide from bosses, some combat in-between.
• Ada's campaign: Some light puzzles, some mystery and intrigue, not as much combat as the others.

Each of them is fairly long, I'd say between 7-10 hours depending on how you play and how much time you spend looking for collectibles and stuff. Probably less if you're playing in coop with someone that more upgrades.

 

There's some fun stuff here, but there's also a bunch of issues, both as a Resident Evil game and as a TPS in general.

 

Unlike RE5, which is way better in co-op, but can still be enjoyed solo, this one is made with a co-op focus, there's a ton of moments where, even if playing alone, you'll have to wait until the AI completes it's QTE stuff, a lot of just waiting for your partner to do something, a lot of covering or trying to work together with an AI partner to deal with bosses, etc.

 

There's also too much of this "cinematic" stuff, by that I mean there's way too many times where you'll be running towards a door/button/lever/exit/goal only for something to explode or a monster shows up causing an earthquake, or whatever else the game does, and then your character falls dramatically to the ground, tumbles around for a bit and looks at the ground before dramatically standing up, ready to go again, only for that same thing to happen again... and again, after four campaigns of that stuff, it gets a bit tiresome. 

 

QTEs can be quite annoying, and once again, there's a ton of them, most of my deaths were from a couple of QTE fights.

 

Weapons were a huge let down, specially after 4 and 5, there's only a handful of them, and most of the cool ones are exclusive to some characters, even within the same campaign, so if you want to use the lightning hawk magnum you have to play as Helena, but if you want the dual-wielded guns, you have to play as Leon, Helena also gets a hilariously nerfed version of the Hydra. Chris has his assault rifle, Piers uses a special sniper rifle, and so on, you also can't upgrade them in any way shape or form, all upgrades come from skills.

 

Skills can be unlocked with skill points, sometimes dropped from enemies, sometimes found in boxes, some of them have different tiers, most of them feel pointless, as you really only need extra damage vs specific enemy types, and extra gun damage. Infinite ammo btw, is a skill, and there's one for different categories of weapons, so you'll have to sacrifice one or more of your current skills if you want to use infinite ammo.

 

Story wise, well, it makes sense that 7 scaled down things considerably, there's not much left to do/places to go after this.

Spoiler

Another US town gets zombified and then nuked, a whole Chinese city gets zombified, the entire world learns of this. Aircraft carriers going boom, planes going boom, underwater laboratories going BOOM, the only place left was space, moon zombies, alien B.O.W.s!

 

I did like one of the bosses though.

 

Spoiler

HAOS is, in some ways, the scariest boss of the series, given how fast the entire world would be toast if it were to escape. Also looks cool and scary.

 

Best of all though, you don't have to fight it 500000 times, like that Simmons dude, or the Ustanak.

 

Overall, while I did enjoy some things, there's enough here that leaves RE6 firmly at the bottom of my RE series list, ignoring stuff like the Survivor games, don't remember much about those.

 

Moving on to Revelations, which has already started strong, being way creepier, and with way less combat than 6.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Goddamn, I don't know if my adrenal system could handle that many survival horror games in a row.

[toxicitizen]

Mirror's Edge Catalyst

 

I'm of two minds about this one. It's more Mirror's Edge and, at least on the surface, it seems to be an improvement over the original in every conceivable way. Bigger, longer, open-world. What's not to love?

 

Well, the story is pretty damn terrible, for a start. When it's not utterly predictable, it's just pulling things out of its ass for convenience. And early on they start teasing you with this blueprint of Faith's tattoo in a way that made me wonder if it maybe was a special sci-fi tattoo of some kind that would provide some kind of upgrade. Turns out it's not and she literally only gets in in the ending cutscene but even way before that the story was so bad that I just assumed I would get it and it would be nothing. There's a decent skeleton of a story that could've been fleshed out into something decent. But for some reason they just didn't.

 

Open-world Mirror's Edge sounds fantastic on paper and, to be fair, what is here is definitely an improvement over the original. But the game doesn't exist in a vacuum and by the standards of typical open-world games it just falls flat on its face. It simply doesn't feel like an open-world. It's more like a bunch of semi-open levels that just happened to be linked together into some kind of hub. Ideally, in a game like this you'd never want to use fast-travel and would run everywhere. But the way the world is set up, some sections are just tedious to travel to and from.

 

It's also fairly weak content-wise. The main missions and side-missions are pretty fun but the only open-world content that I actually found worthwhile was the one where you enter a server tower to hack it and once inside runner vision is turned off and you have a solve a climbing puzzle. Everything else is some variation of "here's thing, get it there". Which, yeah, Faith is a runner. And the fragile deliveries where you can't eat shit otherwise your package will break are fine. Diversions are also fine but I found them a little tedious due to how finicky they were about adding bonus time. Sometimes I'd think I reached the next goal just in time but I wouldn't get the bonus time and would just fail the mission instead. Time trials are fine but idk, that doesn't feel like "content" so much as an extra challenge for those that want it.

 

But what the fuck is up with the covert deliveries? I could never figure out what the hell the game wants you to do. Cameras spot you but only sometimes cause the mission to fail. You can't be expected to avoid guards because they spawn randomly (sometimes burst through a door right in your path) and just running past them usually doesn't (but sometimes does) fail the mission. So yeah, not sure what's up with those.

 

The entire time I couldn't help but think back to older Assassin's Creed games from before they turned into the bloated corpse of a monster. Like the Ezio trilogy. The worlds weren't tediously large yet and there was decent mission variety and very little of it felt like, and I hate using this term here, "lazy" content. I saw something online about how people think the covert deliveries might be unfinished and I can kinda see it. The open-world just screams of unrealized potential in general. Maybe it was a budget thing?

 

And I know the whole pristine white city is the series' aesthetic but man, some visual variety would've gone a long way here because for most of the game I never had any idea where the hell I was. Everything looks the same to the point where I can't imagine ever turning off runner vision in the open-world. It's just too important to navigate the environment because otherwise all you have is a far-off marker and no real way of quickly parsing which paths are viable routes to it without looking at your map constantly. And it's kinda hard to buy into the runner fantasy if you're doing that...

 

The gameplay is as fantastic as ever, though. It carries the entire game on its shoulders. At first, it was kinda weird coming right from Titanfall 2 because movement in Mirror's Edge is way more grounded. So at first it felt slow and heavy because I couldn't wallrun, double jump into another wallrun and survive a 50 feet drop without a scratch. But that's not the game's fault and once I got over it the skill-based parkour in Mirror's Edge was so insanely more satisfying. Despite its flaws, I could still just run around the map for hours because it's so much fun. And I will, since I still have a bunch of collectibles and achievements to get.

 

So yeah, that probably sounded super negative but I actually enjoyed the game a lot. I want more and I hope the series isn't dead again (although it sounds like Catalyst didn't do super well so I'm not holding my breath this time.) I just found it to be simultaneously an improvement over the original but still a very flawed experience. And it's not like I went in with any kind of expectations, either. I met the game on its own terms, liked what it had to offer but also found it lacking. Now I'm kinda curious to replay the original to see if it holds up to how good I remember it being. I was engaging with games more passively back then and didn't look at them as critically, so I wonder how I'd feel about it these days. If my Alan Wake replay from last summer is any indication, maybe I'm better of leaving it as a short game I remember really liking lol.

 

Oof, this ended up being more of a wall of text than I intended...

 

6 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

Goddamn, I don't know if my adrenal system could handle that many survival horror games in a row.

 

They stop being survival-horror about halfway through RE4. You could argue RE5 is trying at times but RE6 is pretty much just a bonkers action movie that just happens to have monsters in it.

 

And speaking of, I think RE3 is next for me. I really want to get it done before Village comes out.

[MetalCaveman]

10 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

Goddamn, I don't know if my adrenal system could handle that many survival horror games in a row.

 

Pretty much this:

 

2 hours ago, toxicitizen said:

They stop being survival-horror about halfway through RE4. You could argue RE5 is trying at times but RE6 is pretty much just a bonkers action movie that just happens to have monsters in it.

 

And speaking of, I think RE3 is next for me. I really want to get it done before Village comes out.

 

RE4 is way more creepy atmosphere with some action stuff than full horror, 5 is more action stuff with some light creepiness here and there, 6 is just "everything explodes!" with a paper bag mask that says "horror" in poor handwriting.

 

Revelations on the other hand, is really creepy, more so than 4 IMO, there's something about being stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean, with no help, and with monsters all over the place that's way worse than a Spanish village full of cultists. Although there are some chapters that really ramp up the cheese.

[Mister Jack]

Beat the Nioh 1 DLC. Going back to the original right after spending so much time with the sequel made me realize just how different they are. On the surface it seems like 2 is just 1 with some extra features and a couple of new mechanics but those new mechanics completely change the way you approach combat. With Nioh 2 you are given multiple ways to heal during battle that require you to play aggressively, kind of like Bloodborne. With Nioh 1, however, you're mostly limited to your finite elixirs and maybe healing talismans if you've invested enough points into magic. You also don't have the burst counter move from 2 so you can't interrupt the enemies' strongest attacks, which means you pretty much have to play more defensively. If Nioh 2 is Bloodborne, Nioh 1 is closer to Dark Souls.

 

Speaking of differences, this DLC has an absurd spike in difficulty compared to where you are probably at after beating the game for the first time. I was dying in one or two hits for a while because I was 50 levels below even basic enemies. They gave pretty good exp so I was leveling up pretty quickly, but each mission jumps the level up even higher so by the time I finished all three episodes I was more like 90 levels under the recommended. I got by because I invested in a living weapon build, which is a mode that makes you temporarily superpowered and invincible for around 10-20 seconds. Usually it takes a while to charge that up but I figured out a specific setup that let me refill the meter every two or three minutes. Even then it was pretty brutal. On the plus side I got the PS5 platinum trophy in the process.