Games You Beat in 2023: PXoD Face the Music

[TheMightyEthan]

2 hours ago, toxicitizen said:

I'm so curious about this but I don't want to get spoiled... I kinda feel like rushing the main story is the wrong way to play a Bethesda game, so I'm really torn on this lol. Then again, if I take my sweet-ass time and spend 100h on my first playthrough, I'm probably not gonna want to do NG+...

 

Yeah, that was my thought, I'm gonna do a real playthrough where I do all the side stuff, but I knew if I did that first I wouldn't want to do NG+, so I'm just doing it in NG+.

 

2 hours ago, Mister Jack said:

First time I've ever heard someone complain that open world games aren't empty enough.

 

I know I'm in the minority, but it really takes me out of a game when something is supposed to be really far and it's actually like 200 feet. I want it to feel like a real place, not a theme park.

 

To be clear, I'm not advocating for fewer things to do overall (though I do think certain games, coughAssassin'sCreedcough, are too jam-packed), just I want to feel the scale that the world purports to have.

[Mister Jack]

Got the true ending for Armored Core VI, which requires beating NG++. This game handles NG+ cycles in a way I haven't seen before. As far as I can tell, the enemies do not get buffed at all like in other From games. Rather, during mission replays you will sometimes have new branching paths come up when you least expect it that completely change the story, and taking these new paths opens up new, much tougher missions and boss fights that would be nearly impossible on a NG run. Despite this, I still found the NG++ cycle to be the easiest one simply because by the time I got to it I had unlocked so many powerful parts that there was very little the game could throw at me that I wasn't able to handle. It was pretty satisfying to see the game desperately throw everything it had at me only to get steamrolled anyway because I had put together a monstrously lethal death machine after many hours of work.

 

 

Also I painted it like a Nerf gun.

[TheMightyEthan]

Beat Saber

 

I'm listing this as beat now because I've finished the campaign, but obviously with a rhythm game you can keep playing as much as you want. I've been playing this for exercise, and it's great. Normally whenever I start an exercise routine I have a hard time maintaining it because I never want to actually do it, but this game is intrinsically fun, so I haven't had that problem yet. It may not be what I want to do at any given time, but I'm at least not averse to doing it like I normally get with exercise. And once I'm in it's easy to keep going because it's fun.

 

The campaign was pretty good too, and while there were a few songs with special objectives that I didn't like (such as get at least 10 but no more than 15 misses), overall it was a lot of fun. It's very satisfying to try a new song, and go from "This doesn't seem physically possible!" to being able to do it fairly easily over the course of a couple days.

 

Grade: A+

[toxicitizen]

Mortal Kombat 1

 

I completed the story mode, which is what I count as "beating" the game even though I'm nowhere near done with it. I put a few hours into Invasion and it's pretty fun but I don't really count that as a main mode. It's basically just a replacement for the Krypt and the Towers of Time from MK11. You unlock a bunch of stuff in there and there's seasonal content you can go through. Unclear if it'll go away entirely once the season ends. I don't know how long I'll keep playing or if I'll keep coming back for future seasons but I'm enjoying it for now. The matches are only 1 round, which makes it feel much faster than Towers of Time. Just doing towers repeatedly felt like kind of a slog in MK11, so to me Invasion is definitely an improvement.

 

Anyway, the story mode. For something called Mortal Kombat 1 and marketed as a fresh start in a completely new, rebooted timeline, this sure as shit felt like a direct sequel to MK11 lol. I mean, it starts out like a reboot and actually tells a pretty fun story. But by the last few chapters all the new stuff gets benched when it starts to tie in directly with the ending of MK11's DLC. The last chapter was insane in the best way, though. I can't help but wonder if they felt pressured to top the climax of MK11 because it goes off the rails pretty abruptly and, while it wasn't necessarily the most satisfying ending narratively speaking, I loved every second of it.

 

They said they intend to support this game for a long time but they said the same thing about MK11 and that only got about two years of support. I really hope they mean it this time because the last chapter of the story mode opens the door for some really insane stuff as far as costumes and customization goes. I don't think there's a ton of that in the game in its current state, which is a step down from MK11, but hopefully that's going to change over time.

 

Other than that, the gameplay is pretty damn good. It's way faster than MK11, so there was a bit of a difficulty curve for me. I'm also still not super good at using kameos effectively but I'm slowly learning. I don't think it's going to replace Street Fighter 6's ranked mode for me as far as the competitive side goes but it's definitely a fun time online.

[Mister Jack]

Lies of P

 

I have a lot to say about this one. Soulslike games are getting pretty common and a lot of them are either trash or unoriginal. This one is pretty much Bloodborne with the serial numbers filed off BUT imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it copies the vibe of Bloodborne pretty well while still having some tricks of its own AND running at a steady 60 fps! There's so much going on here that I think it would be easier for me to make another bullet point list.

 

The Good

- Usually the whole "grimdark fairy tale" thing makes me roll my eyes, but I actually like the world this game has set up. It has a pretty interesting interpretation of the original Pinocchio story, and whether or not Pinocchio becomes a real boy depends on the choices you make during your playthrough. You even see it reflected in small things like how he starts to grunt during battle as he becomes more human and how the cat in the hub area regards you depending on how human you are. It's very clever. There's a teaser after the credits that also got me excited for DLC or a sequel.

- There's some great weapon variety in here. Not only are there lots of different kinds of weapons, but you can mix and match the blades and the handles to change their movesets and speed. Is that huge, heavy axe too slow? Stick it on a fire axe handle. Dagger doesn't have enough reach for you? Put it on a spear handle. You can't disassemble the unique boss weapons, but they usually have pretty solid fable arts (weapon skills) to make up for it.

- Parries and dodges are equally viable in this game, so most of the time you don't really have to choose between one or the other. Play how you want...with some exceptions.

- Quite decent enemy variety. Enemies come in the form of puppets, humans, infected, or....other. Despite there being just those four subtypes, there's still a lot of different kinds of enemies within those four. 

- The different puppet arms you can equip on Pinocchio offer some great utility in combat and they all have their use. I definitely got the most use out of the flamethrower arm, though.

- The environments are fairly linear without a ton of room for exploration, but they are really nice to look at and feel like actual places compared to something like, say, Code Vein.

- Very solid performance. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had frame drops in my playthrough of 43 hours.

- If you use up all of your refillable healing items, you can still recharge one by landing enough hits, which is a great way to encourage being aggressive even when you're at a disadvantage. There is no limit to how many times you can do this. There were several bosses I probably wouldn't have been able to beat if not for this.

 

The Bad

- Once again, STR builds get the shaft. P has almost no poise, which means it's all too easy to get hit out of those heavy charge attacks and fable arts that are supposed to be the trade-off for being so slow. I would be very surprised if they don't patch this.

- Not everything it copies from Bloodborne is good. For some reason you have to go to the hub area and talk to the blue fairy every time you want to level up rather than just doing it at a stargazer, which is this game's version of a campfire. The frustrating part is that you CAN level up at stargazers during the beginning and the end of the game, so it feels like they only make you do this because Bloodborne did. 

- In addition to leveling up, there is a separate upgrade system where you use quartz you find from elite enemies and chests to unlock upgrades like extra healing items or better mobility. This is fine, but the problem is some of the stuff you unlock are things that really should have been there from the get go, such as the ability to dodge while on the ground. No, really, I just love getting whacked to death on the floor by a shovel and not being able to do anything about it.

- I don't say this often, but this game is just too damn hard. It is the hardest Soulslike I have ever played by a wide margin. In fact I'd call it inaccessible to anyone who isn't already a veteran of these games and no, Elden Ring alone is not enough. The parry window is a good bit tighter than Sekiro's, but there are bosses in this game where parrying is practically mandatory. Not just one or two hits either. Some of these bosses will flail at you in combos of 10 hits or more and you'd better get that rhythm down or they will jack you up. Unlike Sekiro, where staggering bosses two or three times will instantly kill them, staggering here just opens them up for a backstab/riposte and you still have to get that HP bar down to zero. Even then they only get stunned if you manage to land a charged heavy attack during the very small window where they are open to being staggered, which is easier said than done. Also, pretty much every boss in the second half has two phases, and by that I mean two full health bars. It's fucking sadistic. There is no posture bar either. Attacking, blocking, parrying, and dodge all share the same stamina bar so sometimes even if you parry every hit it won't leave you with much breathing room at the end. Sometimes this game just feels stacked against you in ways that are unfair, so I'm hoping the devs rebalance it a bit. 

 

As you can see, it's a little rough around the edges, but some of these issues can definitely be fixed with a patch and I still see enough potential here to be excited for the future of this franchise. For a first outing from this studio, it's pretty damn impressive.

[TheMightyEthan]

I really want to try that game but there's just too much to play right now.

[TheMightyEthan]

Starfield

 

Goddamn, this game is good. It's not perfect, but it's really good. I know there's a lot of complaints out there about the procedural generations, and that making exploration less rewarding, etc, but honestly I like it. I'm tired of games that tell you you're in this massive world but you can see how tiny it is. Skyrim, Fallout, The Witcher, The Outer Worlds, hell even Red Dead Redemption 2, they all have a problem with scale, where everything just feels small. Not so Starfield. You actually feel that you're out in the middle of goddamn nowhere, lightyears from proper civilization, and it's great. Sure most of the planets are just lifeless, desolate wastelands, but let me tell you something, that's how real life is too. If the game tells me I'm out on the frontier I want to feel like it, and this is the first game that really accomplishes that imo.

 

Now, I said it's not perfect, and it's not. My biggest gripe is that you don't have a lot of room to define your character's personality. It's the most egregious when it comes to the main quest, where your options range from extremely enthusiastic to mildly enthusiastic, when I really wanted a "who are you to say I have to join you people?" option. I understand why they don't really want to let you actually turn down the main quest, but there's no reason they couldn't have let you say you don't want to do it, and then just be forced to anyway for some reason. "Oh, you don't want to, well too bad, you have to because X." I had decided on a backstory and personality to roleplay, and right off the bat the game wasn't letting me act the way my character would, which was annoying. It's better in the sidequests, because the game actually can let you turn those down, but even there you usually only have "yes", "yes (but snarky)", and "no". There's just really not much nuance to the way they let you act, and I wish there was.

 

Aside from that, even the scale that I praised so much has some limitations. Most major cities are the only thing of note on their entire planet, and there's a hard line where the city stops and wilderness begins. It kind of makes sense in Akila, which has murderous beasties outside the city walls, but not so much in New Atlantis, which I feel like should have a little bit of urban sprawl. It doesn't make sense to have a collection of skyscrapers surrounded by absolutely nothing else.

 

Those are fairly minor complaints in the grand scheme of things though. The major sidequests are mostly great, I really liked the main story (even though I know others aren't so hot on it), the NG+ conceit is pretty freakin awesome (enough that I was on NG+10 and 149 hours played when I finally considered myself done with the game). Sure, it's "just" a Bethesda RPG, but it's one that really takes that style to the next level.

 

Grade: A

 

Telltale's The Expanse

 

This game is also great! I had been playing the episodes as they came out and really enjoying them, but I fell behind because of Starfield. I just caught up on the last two last night and tonight, and they definitely stuck the landing. It has excellent writing, and a compelling though smaller-scale story (compared to the books/show). I don't know how much your actions actually affect the way events play out, but it feels like things are reacting to your choices and to me that's the important part. Sure, you could probably start to see the matrix pretty quick if you went back and made different decisions, but if you approach it as roleplaying as Drummer and just go through once it's very convincing. It also benefits I think from the main character being an established character from the universe, with an established personality, because unlike Starfield it makes sense that your choices of approach would be more limited, you can only do things that Drummer might do.

 

It does suffer a little from the prequel problem of making the world feel smaller (in terms of characters) by bringing characters into things when previously there hadn't been a connection (think "Anakin Skywalker made C-3PO" type stuff), but all of that is pretty tangential to the main stuff happening so it doesn't stand out too bad.

 

I'd definitely recommend this to any fan of The Expanse, or any fan of Telltale games. It's also really really pretty (at least on PC).

 

Grade: A

[toxicitizen]

Starfield

 

I had mostly stopped playing it when MK1 came out but I knew I was close to the end so I made an effort to at least finish the main quest monday night. I just didn't have time to do a write-up about it until now. I'm nowhere near done with the game, I haven't done any of the main faction quest lines and I'm excited to dig into NG+ and everything that entails. But right now I just wanna get started on a new Cyberpunk playthrough along with Phantom Liberty, so Starfield gets put on pause again.

 

That being said, I ended up enjoying the game way more than I expected to. It's probably my favorite Bethesda game ever. The main quest is probably around 20 hours long or so but I still logged over twice that amount of time. I genuinely enjoyed exploring the galaxy, going into the occasional detour because I randomly encountered some shit that had a quest for me and even just messing around with the ship builder because goddamn it I need more cargo space!

 

I could see myself easily sinking over a hundred hours into this game. It just came out at the worst time imaginable. The early access coincidentally started at the same time I had planned time off from work but I spent half of my vacations finishing Trails to Azure and then, the week after that, MK1 took my attention away from Starfield. And now it's Cyberpunk 2.0 and Phantom Liberty that I just can't wait to get to.... just as soon as I finish Legend of Nayuta...

 

I'll definitely come back to Starfield at some point and really lose myself into its universe. I just have no idea when I'll take the time to do so. Hopefully by then they'll have added all those QoL updates they just promised to patch in.

[Mister Jack]

Baldur's Gate 3

 

Man, this one came out of left field and totally surprised me. I honestly can't say enough good things about it. It's one of the best, if not THE best western RPG I've ever played with such care and attention to detail that it honestly puts other games to shame. EVERY character is fully voiced, conversations have vibrant body language instead of emotionless puppets, the voice acting is top-notch, the characters are memorable and likable, the environments are HUGE and full of surprises, and it offers tons of player choice. The turn-based combat is extremely strategic and when you get good at it you'll find plenty of opportunities to pat yourself on the back for being so clever. On more than one occasion I managed to end a boss fight by just shoving them off a cliff after they made the mistake of following me to it. You'll figure out how to effectively use choke points, objects in the environment, and even the terrain to your advantage. When you can be fighting up to 12 or more enemies, simply hitting them with your strongest attacks will not be enough. A personal favorite tactic of mine was backing up into a corner and then setting the space in front of me on fire, forcing enemies to walk through it to get to me, and once they got through I'd just have my physically strongest party member shove them right back into the flames. Worked wonders, I tell you.

 

Criticisms? I suppose I have a few, but they in no way diminish my recommendation of this game. This is GOTY material right here, but I suppose I wish the level cap wasn't set at 12. Even for D&D that's pretty low, and I hit the cap well before I finished the game. I can only hope they chose that cap because future DLC is coming that will raise it. Each act of the game is also separated into its own region and once you move on you can never go back so you'd better make sure you complete everything you want to do on the map before you continue the story. There are also a handful of battles where there are SO many enemies that you could probably make a sandwich while waiting for your turn to come up. The final act also loses a little bit of steam at the end. Not a whole lot, but some of the quests and storylines just end kind of abruptly and feel unfinished. It makes me wonder if there's cut content that needs to be added back in. 

 

If you liked Dragon Age or Witcher than you owe it to yourself to try out this game. A friend talked me into buying it and we were constantly comparing notes and surprising each other with just how differently we approached certain situations. That's the mark of a great game right there.

 

Oh, and if you play it make sure you have at least one party member who can talk to animals. Trust me, it's worth it.

Edited September 30, 2023 by Mister Jack

[MetalCaveman]

Wolfenstein The Old Blood

 

I think I got this at launch, played for a bit and then stopped. With spooky season starting it seemed like a good time to play it and remove it from my backlog lol.

 

Now I remember why I stopped playing, that first chapter is such a pain.

 

The rest of it though, is pretty fun, if you've played New Order, it's mostly more of the same, with the addition of zombies. Mowing down hordes of nazis and nazi zombies with dual shotguns never gets old.

 

It's also pretty short, took me about 5 hours to beat, but that was without exploring or looking for secrets and mostly ignoring the perk system.

 

Grade: A-

[Mister Jack]

Digimon Survive

 

This was on my backlog. Half visual novel, half tactics RPG, this has got to be the darkest game in the franchise yet. I haven't played them all, but I would be very surprised to learn otherwise. As the name implies, the story is about a bunch of middle school kids who end up in a survival situation when they are accidentally pulled into the Digimon world, and although they have their Digimon partners to protect them the fact remains that these kids can and will die horribly depending on your decisions.  While the game does imply after you finish it that it's possible to save everyone, I still ended up with two fatalities by the time it was over. The story really hammers in just how much of a mental toll the situation takes on these kids and the first half of the game can be downright stressful with how much the cast is lashing out at each other due to fear. Things eventually lightened up a bit, at least in my route, but it got grim for a while. Admittedly the story gets off to a slow start and at one time I wondered if I was going to keep going with this game, but after the first death the tone shifts dramatically and I was invested until the end, even with some occasional pacing issues. 

 

The tactics gameplay? Well...it's fine. Just fine. It's not exactly Final Fantasy Tactics or even Disgaea. Maps are pretty simple and the mechanics aren't super deep, although I do appreciate that how high you can evolve the main partner Digimon and how often you get free party buffs and heals are affected by how you treat said Digimon's partners outside of battle. There's not a whole lot else to say about the combat, though. You can recruit wild Digimon by talking to them, but with success rates hovering around 20% this can be a slog at times. You'd better do it though, because there will be times when your protagonist is separated from the rest of the kids and thus cannot depend on their Digimon in battle. To be honest, I eventually turned down the combat difficulty because I was more interested in the story than the battles. I suppose that doesn't speak too well about that side of the game, but at least you have the option. You can also turn it up if the battles are what interest you.

 

There are four endings to this game, five if you count a bad ending game over, so there's reasonable replay value here. I don't know if I'll go back to it right away, but I do want to see those other endings eventually so I probably won't delete it off my hard drive like I originally planned to do after I finished it.

[MetalCaveman]

Prey (PC)

 

Still fun.

 

Originally I had intended to do a different run, maybe even try some typhon powers and stuff, but I ended up doing mostly the same build lol, while I did put some points into repair and hacking, I was still running around Talos I at superhuman speed blasting typhon into bits with an upgraded shotgun.

 

Went by superfast too, mostly because I remember enough from my first run, I did end up doing some new stuff though

Spoiler

like saving the couple that's stuck in a escape pod, don't remember ever seeing them in my first run lol.

 

 

Also tried Mooncrash, but that one will be left for later, it is fun, but between corruption levels and the graboid bastard it's also a bit too much.

 

Grade:  A+

 

Lone Survivor

 

Short little psychological horror, the concept and story aren't bad, but there's a bunch of technical stuff that holds it back a fair bit.

 

Controls are a bit awkward, with escape quitting the game, not pausing, the font they use is super blurry and it actually made my eyes hurt trying to read certain things. The aspect ratio change did nothing and, having no options menu, there's no way to set it to windowed or making some changes to maybe help with some issues with the resolution of the game when playing on 1440p.

 

The survival stuff was also a bit annoying for me, specially the sleep stuff, felt like that interrupted progress way too often. You do get an item to help with this, but it affects the ending you get.

 

Grade: C-

[MetalCaveman]

God Eater 3

 

First GE game made exclusively for consoles, and it shows, at least in the graphics department lol. Everything looks way better than GE and GE2, performance is also better, specially when fighting a bunch of monsters.

 

That said, I still had some issues with it.

 

Gameplay overall was an improvement, controls feel better, the new weapons are fun, but there's still some issues with menus, opening a menu to use an item or to give orders to your teammates is still a fairly clunky thing, would be better, if there was some quick heal button, along with using one side of the touchpad for items and the other for team orders, though this may be hard to implement given that this is a multiplatform title.

 

The new monsters look cool and they're fun to fight, to a certain point, they now have their own devour attacks, which for the most part are easy to dodge or parry, except that this only applies to you, AI teammates tend to do everything in their power to get devoured, thus making the monsters that much stronger, even if you're playing perfectly, your team might still decide it's a good time to get chomped lol.

 

Bullets have been nerfed to uselessness, yes, they were hilariously OP in previous games, but this was too much IMO. Custom bullets are now limited, before, they used the same oracle as your normal bullets so as long as you had enough you could fire them, and this allowed for some really powerful recipes that used more oracle. Now, you have a max amount of oracle allowed for custom recipes, and no way to increase this, max is 1200, so if you have a bullet that uses 400, you can only bring 3 of those. Overall, their effectiveness was extremely reduced. Normal bullets are as useless as before lol.

 

This nerf has the side effect that now certain monsters are much more annoying to fight, things like the Sariel, which were made somewhat tolerable with range DPS now take longer to kill since you either bring one really powerful bullet, or just waste time with weak ones waiting for it to get within melee range.

 

Outfits are much more limited this time around too. Before you had all kinds of different outfits and moving to higher ranks unlocked new cool ones, now it's just.

• Military jacket
• Military jacket but with more pockets
• Military jacket with rolled sleeves
• Military jacket with less pockets
• Military jacket with scarf

And smaller variations of the same theme, there's a couple of cool ones and eventually I did find a combination I liked, but the vast majority of the outfits are boring as hell.

 

Character episodes are now part of a DLC unlocked by completing the main campaign and the first DLC, they're also now structured like missions as opposed to previous games were they felt more natural. The stories are cool, and learning more about the characters is always nice, but the main issue is that bond level starts counting once you unlock these missions, which means that even if you've been playing with the same team all game, you still have to farm bond levels to unlock their character episodes.

 

Finally, although this is more of a personal nitpick, I wish monsters had different states, and that destroying certain parts had an effect. There's a monster that has a drill hand that it uses to burrow underground and launch surprise attacks, it'd be cool if destroying its drill prevented it from doing that stuff. Also, during cutscenes, they're shown eating other monsters, meanwhile, during gameplay, all creatures just laser focus on you and your team, would be cool to see some of them fighting each other, or just doing damage to each other while fighting, even monsters that do AoE attacks only affect you and your team, other monsters are immune.

 

All that said, I still had fun with it, it still is God Eater, the story was cool, and the new weapons look awesome and were fun to use.

 

TL;DR: If you like GE, no reason not to play this one, otherwise, there are much better monster hunting games out there.

 

Grade: B+

[MetalCaveman]

Lords of the Fallen (2014 )

 

This was a thing, a whole thing...

 

The first hour or so was OK, kinda fun even, thought it'd be a somewhat janky but still acceptable Soulslike, and then they introduce shield enemies, and it all goes downhill from there.

 

For starters, everything Harkyn(?), does is SLOW, I'm talking Slow Mo Guys style "swimming through molasses at 2 million FPS" kind of slow. Even the fast weapons are ridiculously slow. Enemies of course, aren't bound to the same laws of physics so they move and attack way faster than you could ever hope to. Shield enemies are the worst when it comes to this since not only can they just turtle and poke, there aren't many effective ways to deal with them. Trying to get close when two handing a weapon to kick them results in poke, or shield bash depending on the enemy, anything less than great weapons just bounce of their shields, great weapons take a ton of stamina to break their guard, the most efficient way I found was to use the gauntlet's projectile mode, which take a while since you have to wait for the skill to recharge and for mana to regenerate. Then there's the ghost dudes that are immune to physical damage...

 

There's also this ridiculous camera shake, the moment you start moving the camera shakes like it was on a platform made of jell-o during an earthquake. It actually came close to making me sick with how strong the effect is, and there's no way to turn it off or down, it just is.

 

Physics are also wonky, specially when going down stairs, trying to run down stairs can cause the fall animation to trigger, and in some cases you can die from this, got stuck in the falling animation while going down stairs a couple of times, leading to some really frustrating deaths. It is funny when an enemies dies only to bounce into the sky though.

 

Environments are very samey too, not in a thematically cohesive way, but more in a "I don't know if I've been here before or not because every single room, hallway and arena in this place looks the same!" kind of way. This also means that you can easily miss the right way to go in certain areas where everything just sorta blends together.

 

Magic, like melee, takes way too long to cast, though I did enjoy the cleric's shelter spell, that one pretty much makes you unkillable, reduces incoming damage, heals you and reflects damage back, great all around, assuming you find the time to cast it while in combat lol.

 

The story is pretty meh too, you can see the twist coming from a mile away and though the last bit was cool, it's not enough to make up for everything else.

 

On the technical side, there was this bug that kicked in a few hours in, every time I died, it was impossible to continue, game would be stuck in a black screen, the only way to continue was to pause, and go back to the main menu. It never went away and I had to finish the game while dealing with this stuff.

 

There are however, some neat things here, the XP bonus is cool. As you kill enemies, you build an XP bonus, which goes away when you use a checkpoint, or when you turn it into attribute or spell points. So you can choose whether to risk it and try to get a bigger bonus, or play it safe and level up before going into a new area.

 

While I had issues with the environment, the art style is cool, closer to Darksiders or Torchlight than most other Soulslikes.

 

It also does that thing at the end where it takes some choices you made and weaves them into the story, sorta like Prey but more janky lol.

 

TL;DR: One of the worst Soulslikes I've played, frustrating and annoying for all the wrong reasons, avoid like the plague.

 

Grade: F

 

 

[Mister Jack]

Marvel's Spider-Man 2

 

I already thought the first game was the best Spider-Man game ever made, but somehow they managed to make it even better. I expected just a small update with better graphics and story, but the combat and traversal has been fine-tuned so much that it almost feels like a whole new game. The biggest improvement for traversal is easily the web wings that allow you to mix gliding in with your swinging. It doesn't sound like it would change that much on paper but it really does. There are also a few new swing abilities in there as well which are all pretty useful.

 

The best combat change is, ironically, removing the gadget wheel and instead putting them on the face buttons, usable by holding down R1 while pushing one of the buttons. While this does mean you have fewer gadgets to use, the four gadgets you do get are all useful and you don't have to pause the fight to switch between them. You also get four spider abilities assigned to L1 plus a face button, so all-in-all you have eight abilities you can use with both Peter and Miles and you never have to break up the flow of the fight to use them. It works really well.

 

The story might be somewhat predictable, but it's delivered well and it still had a few surprising twists and cameos. I got invested enough to binge the whole campaign in a little under three days. Miles and Peter both have their own arcs and their narratives weave together quite nicely. Switching between them is nice and seamless and can be done automatically if you're approaching a mission exclusive to one character. One touch I especially liked is that sometimes when doing a side activity you'll run into the other Spider-Man who is already doing it and then the two of you can work together to finish it, complete with banter and team attacks against enemies. Even if it's a gimmick, it's a nice way to make it feel like they both have their own lives and aren't just sitting around waiting for you to switch back to them.

 

This game is also a lot harder than the first one. They do have a super easy game journalist difficulty where you can't die if you're a wimp, but if you play on Amazing or higher you can expect to get your ass kicked a good bit even if you mastered the first game. They've introduced a new parry mechanic and some enemies have attacks that cannot be dodged and can only be parried, which means you've got one more thing to keep up with. Some enemies also have attacks that cannot be parried and can only be dodged. Chances are you're gonna screw up many times in the heat of battle while you're getting the hang of it, but once you do it feels better than any Arkham game I've played, and that's saying something.

 

Honestly, if you own a PS5 then why haven't you already bought this game? The console is starved for exclusives. Go get it.

[TheMightyEthan]

8 hours ago, Mister Jack said:

Honestly, if you own a PS5 then why haven't you already bought this game? The console is starved for exclusives. Go get it.

 

Cause I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and then I have Alan Wake 2 on Friday.

 

Incidentally...

 

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

 

I'm slightly torn on this DLC. I definitely don't agree with Rock Paper Shotgun's headline that it's possibly the greatest expansion of all time. Don't get me wrong, Cyberpunk is great, and I did really like the expansion, but it has some flaws that are hard to overlook. The main one being that it doesn't give you much freedom in how to approach missions. In the base game, you can almost always stealth a mission, and there are multiple ways to enter an area, almost like an immersive sim. In Phantom Liberty, though, most encounters are either a scripted "social stealth" encounter, or they funnel you down one narrow corridor, without any alternate routes, that almost forces you into combat. This is true of both the story missions and the side quests. As someone who played primarily stealth, this was pretty frustrating and disappointing.

 

Once you get past that though, it's pretty good in all other respects. The story is bombastic and fun, the characters and performances are great, it completely lives up to the quality of the base game, which is one of my favorite RPGs of all time. So limited approaches aside, I would still recommend it to anyone who liked CP2077.

 

Grade: A-

[TheMightyEthan]

Cocoon

 

This is a little indie puzzler from the main guy behind Inside and Limbo. Everyone's been raving about it. I'd say overall it was pretty good, definitely pretty and with an interesting visual design, but it drags too much. The puzzles never really get all that complicated, and it takes way too long to get even as complicated as they do, so there's a lot of the game where you feel like you're just running along a more or less linear path pushing buttons with no real thought involved. The mechanics were promising, but I don't think the game lived up to their potential.

 

Grade: B-

[toxicitizen]

The Quarry

 

I've been kinda sleeping on spooky games for October (I even forgot to play the Ada DLC for RE4 Remake!) so I decided to play this at the last minute. Finished it last night and overall I really enjoyed it. I was sold from the first trailer I saw but I hadn't really followed anything about it post-launch nor had I played any of the other similar games made by Supermassive (Until Dawn and Dark Pictures Anthology), so I knew roughly what kind of game it was but very little beyond what the trailer suggested.

 

So, it was pretty cool to find out halfway through that it was actually a

Spoiler

werewolf

story. The trailer sold it as a "teenagers stuck at summer camp get hunted down by creepy redneck family" and I was down for that but it was a nice surprise that there was more to it. And, while there were clues about it, it was executed in a way that was unique enough that I didn't actually put it together until the game explicitly stated as much and made me go "Oh shit, right!" It was also really fun how the cast was filled with so many horror icons like Ted Raimi, David Arquette, Lance Henriksen and Laura Palmer's mom.

 

I wonder how different a subsequent playthrough could be with different choices, though. I went with common sense and managed to keep everyone alive fairly easily. The only time a character died, it was because I spaced out and reacted too late to a shooting QTE and the game offered me a do-over, saying I had 3 lives left lol. I can tell from the achievements list that there's a few possible outcomes I didn't get, so I know some characters can end up in different situations than they have in my playthrough but I wonder how much variety there actually is. I'm curious to give it another run and find out.

 

I'll also have to give those Dark Pictures Anthology games a shot. I've been curious about them since the first one came out but something always kept me from pulling the trigger. If they're anything like The Quarry, I'll probably love them just as much.

 

 

Metal Gear Solid

 

I mean, what is there to say? It's Metal Gear Solid. I would've loved a brand new port that runs at a decent framerate and lets you choose the internal rendering resolution but what we got is an emulated version that runs only kind of OK. But at this point I'm just glad to finally have the game on Steam in any capacity. I've been wanting to replay the series for like almost a decade at this point. I'm especially excited to replay MGS2 and MGS3 in the near future.

 

My playthrough of MGS1 was rough. It's been so long that I was super rusty and kept screwing up. I had to fight every fiber of my being to keep myself from starting over every time I triggered an alert lol. Gonna need some practice before I tackle harder difficulties and go for that Fox/Big Boss emblem achievement.

 

I played the Tanker chapter of MGS2 and that one was much easier to get back into. By comparison, MGS1 felt downright archaic in how limited you are in what you can do. I think the emulation might be a bit buggy, though. I would trigger an alert every time I grabbed an enemy from behind and I'm pretty sure that's not normal. Anyway, after a few false start (and a save corruption bug), I managed to clear the Tanker chapter stealthily enough that I feel satisfied enough to move on to Big Shell soon.

Edited November 2, 2023 by toxicitizen

[TheMightyEthan]

It's spelled "REm4ke", smh.

[toxicitizen]

1 hour ago, TheMightyEthan said:

It's spelled "REm4ke", smh.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Alan Wake 2

 

This game might be my GOTY, which is insane given the games that have come out this year. It is exactly what I wanted when they announced a sequel to Alan Wake. It captures the ideas of the original, and updates them flawlessly. Gameplay is actually good now, the shift to full-on survival horror works perfectly, the story is incredibly well-done, everything just comes together in a marvelous whole.

 

The game isn't perfect, obviously, but any complaints I have are minor nitpicks, overall they completely nailed it.

 

Grade: A+

[Mister Jack]

Alan Wake II

 

Worth the wait. Like Ethan said, they changed it from an action horror to a more full-on survival horror kind of game. You rarely fight more than two enemies at a time, but they're now much more dangerous individually than they ever were before and I can't remember a single moment where I ever maxed out the ammo for any of my guns. The game looks great, the story answers many questions that have been hanging for over a decade, and of course it is also a technical marvel. If I have any complaints I suppose it's that sometimes it's easy to get lost and not know where to go due to the world operating on dark presence logic, which is a far cry from earthly logic. Key items will sometimes magically appear where they didn't exist before, bathrooms will take you to an entirely different floor in a building, walls will be blocked off until you change the lighting in a room, and so on. You get used to it, but there can still be moments of frustration. Even then, this is still my favorite Remedy game ever made. Can't wait to see where the DLC takes it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Spider-Man 2

 

Surprising no one, this game is great. If you've played the other two it's more of that, just further refined. The story was compelling and well-told. There's not really much more than that to say, it was exactly what I expected.

 

Grade: A+

[TheMightyEthan]

Jusant

 

This is a cool little game from Dontnod, way different from their other stuff. It's like Ico crossed with Journey. You're a person climbing a giant tower. At its core that's all there is to it, but the climbing mechanics are surprisingly deep, and many of the sections you have to climb function as puzzles. It's surprisingly fun and rewarding, and pretty as all get out. There's also some lore to discover among the ruins of a vanished civilization on the tower, that tell the story of what happened.

 

All in all it's a very charming little game.

 

Grade: A

[toxicitizen]

Alan Wake II

 

I took my time with it but I finally rolled credits on it last night and I have some thoughts. First off, I loved the game and I'm really happy that we finally got it. A sequel to Alan Wake has been up there as one of my most-wanted games for like a decade, so it was about time. I loved the pivot to full-on horror and the more serious tone but I feel like the survival-horror mechanics were kinda lacking.

 

Inventory management felt tacked on and unnecessary. It felt like they added it because "that's what survival-horror games have" without really considering if their game actually needed it. Like halfway through the game, both characters' shoeboxes were filling up with healing items and various junk because my inventory was constantly so full that I couldn't pick up anything else. I love me some inventory tetris as much as anyone else but that wasn't exactly the fun kind of resource management.

 

It also made it way more cumbersome to switch to an item in the middle of combat if I forgot to setup a quickslot for it whereas something like a weapon wheel would've worked just fine. Also, sometimes my quickslots just didn't work. Now that I think about it, it was mostly when trying to throw one of those propane tanks. I'd switch over to it but the character just wouldn't take it out, so I couldn't throw it. That was fun...

 

I think the switch to a more serious tone resulted in a better game overall but it made for a less compelling narrative. The original Alan Wake is just a fun time and a story that I still genuinely love whereas, other than one particular chapter that's one of my favorite things in any game ever, the story in Alan Wake II never quite reached the same heights as the first game due to not being the same genre.

 

Also, I can't help but feel a little frustrated with the ending.

 

Spoiler

I mean, really? After getting blue-balled for 13 years, you pull the same shit again with that cliffhanger? There's also quite a few unresolved plot threads. I mean, the game just ends suddenly without really wrapping anything up. I mean, come on... It's probably premature to speak about this until we know exactly what the DLC will be but unless they either have clear plans to wrap up the whole story with those two DLCs or already have a deal in place to develop Alan Wake III, then they're fucking idiots for not wrapping up the story when they had the chance.

 

I used to feel bad for Remedy because of how they kept getting the rug pulled out from under them first with Alan Wake and then with Quantum Break both not getting sequels but at this point they're just asking for it... At least now they have the whole connected universe thing where they can use other games to wrap things up, I guess, but that's also kind of the reason why I'm worried about the DLC. They could just use it to tease the next thing like they did with Control's AWE.

 

Anyway, this is already long enough so I'll just leave it at that. I loved the game overall but it's not without issues. Oh and  I loved all the tie-ins with Control. Especially seeing Ahti pop up all over the place. That was fun. I'm really curious to see how they'll handle the Max Payne remakes now.

 

Also, man I want this game on Steam. I pirated it because I'm not giving money to the EGS but I'd love nothing more than to give Remedy money for this. I'd gladly pay a hundred bucks tomorrow for a copy in my Steam library. I really hope it's gonna come over eventually. Hopefully there's some contractual lookhole that allows Remedy to release a "Complete Edition" or whatever down the line.