Seventh Arrow posted:

Aragami 2







I have not played the co-op, this review is from a single-player perspective

In Aragami 2, you play a shadowy ninja who skulks about in the shadows using shadowy magic to incapacitate enemies using shadowy techniques. Shadow. After the opening tutorial, you are brought to a town of fellow aragami and this serves as a hub area where you presumably chill out and have shadowy beers with your ninja friends. The story revolves around the aragami curse, which leaves humans without their souls, and the following attempt to alleviate it. Once you're given your directives, you head to a mission board in town and embark on your quest(s). The missions themselves are pretty straightforward and only sometimes involve multiple objectives. What I really want to talk about is the gameplay, because honestly the rest is just fluff.

Although the conceits of shadow ninja magic are still present, this is a fairly different game than its predecessor. The watercolor-esque visuals are gone in favor of a more grounded unreal engine-type of esthetic. The "shadow teleport" has been likewise updated - instead of having to find a dark area and moving your cursor to teleport to it, you now simply have predefined ledges and overhangs that you teleport to when the cursor lights up. In the first game this could be cheesed such that you could whistle to enemies and then teleport behind them when they drew near. In 2, you have to put a bit more thought into your distractions. You have a number of shadow powers at your disposal to help you dispatch your enemies. One of them will summon a great shadow beast from the ground, which will eliminate your foe (and their corpse) and anyone nearby is stunned. Another one will teleport the enemy to you for an instant knockout and yet another will summon a concealing fog around you while you skewer your opponent. Some of them (like the shadow beast) are very OP but usually have a very generous cooldown to make up for it. Despite the teleport being rather finicky, mobility in 2 is greatly improved. You not only have the teleport at your disposal but you can also double-jump and dash in midair. There's one really great map where you go to the enemy's capital city and you can leap and swoosh amongst the rooftops like Batman. It was very cool!

What's far less cool, however, is the lack of saves. I get that this was designed with co-op in mind, but even so, having some checkpoints throughout would have made a big difference. The lack of saves within the missions has the adverse affect of punishing risk - if you're at the tail end of a mission, you're probably just going to clear with the safest methods possible, since failing means you have to start over again. Granted, you get two chances at a mission before you have to abandon it and start again. And if you're not a stealth purist, Aragami 2 has made combat a much more viable alternative if you get caught. However, there's a few missions that have to be ghosted and getting caught or killing anyone results in an insta-fail. The maps are really great, but they will repeat quite a bit. They shake this up a bit by gradually opening up more of the map the more you come back to it, so it's still possible to see new sights. If you're very meticulous and insist on killing or knocking out everyone on the map, however, you might be there for a while. A typical map will have anywhere from 20 - 70 dudes in it so you'll definitely get a lot of gameplay for your money.

In some ways, the enemy AI is good - good in the sense that if an enemy spots you, they will call their nearest allies and converge on your last seen location. They will also search high and low for you, even in the bushes where you might've hidden several bodies. On the other hand, the AI is bad in the same way as many stealth games - you know, the whole "when I last turned my back, my buddy was standing next to that statue but now there's nothing there but a giant pool of blood. Oh well" kind of thing. Overall I liked it and would recommend it, but the lack of a manual (or even checkpoint) save makes that one tricky. If you enjoy that kind of challenge, then you will likely enjoy Aragami 2. If not, you might want to wait for a sale. If you have a friend to co-op with, I imagine that the experience is much more rewarding.

Seventh Arrow posted:

Winter Ember








So I recently played a stealth game where you play as a cloaked, hooded figure with a fake eye and an emotionless, dispassionate voice. He has to sneak around the outposts of a fanatical, zealous cult in a quasi-Victorian setting while avoiding the occasional zombie and using fire, water, and rope arrows to get around various obstacles. "Zounds!" you say, your monocle popping off your face, "you're playing a Thief game!" Although that could certainly be true from the description, I was actually playing Winter Ember. WE distinguishes itself from Thief mostly by being top-down instead of first-person. Although this is a neat twist, it does hamper visibility somewhat. This is the first game from Sky Machine Studios and I want to be a bit lenient because of it, but the game is a bit of a mixed bag. Your Garret-a-like, Arthur, has a lot of tools to get around - lockpicks, daggers, and various utility arrows - fire, water, rope, poison, explosive. These could be handy, but I felt like I was often hampered by developer-enforced circumstances. There are sometimes more than one way around an obstacle, but this often seems to be at the developer's discretion. If there's a shiny goody behind a weak wall, then often you'll only be able to get to it with a blunt-headed arrow. Don't have one? Maybe next time! There's a crafting system that lets you make your own arrows, but getting the materials can be hit and miss.

Another thing to note is that there are situations where combat is either inevitable or highly likely. Arthur is more combat-capable than Garrett (there's an entire talent tree devoted to combat), so that might be a dealbreaker for some. On the other hand, some people might like that getting caught means you can fight it out instead of hitting the quickload key. Speaking of saving/loading, the developer does seem to listen well to requests/complaints - although one of his responses was to add a save button. In other words, this is something that wasn't in at launch and only added after the fact. Sure there are checkpoints sprinkled throughout but I've always found the lack of manual saves a strange omission from stealth games when it occurs. In my mind, it discourages experimentation, but I could be wrong. One last negative thing - the voice acting is pretty dire, in the "Hey Dave, stop coding for a minute and get in the recording booth!" sense.

Having said all that, the game looks great. Seeing Arthur roam around picturesque environments in his cloak and hood really gets you in the 'sneaky rogue' frame of mind. The moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable, despite the aforementioned issues. Every level has many thought out stealth puzzles and there is a lot of depth to sneaking around. As expected, some of your environments include a bank, a cultist outpost, a burlesque bar, and an underground dungeon - but these tropes exist for a reason and they're fun in their own way. One curious choice is that you have three approaches to patrolling guards - you can leave them unharmed, knock them out, or kill them. If you knock them out, they will awaken some time later. If you kill them and try to move the body, it will leave a trail of blood for guards to find. I guess this was done to make it a bit more challenging, but to me it seems to invalidate the whole point of moving bodies in the first place. I haven't seen that water arrows wash away the blood (like in Thief) either. All that said, I did have fun with it but but not $40 worth. The early game is very representative of what the later game is like, so I would say pick up on sale from Steam and refund it if the first few hours aren't to your liking.

Seventh Arrow posted:

didst thou ring?

trying to jack off posted:

im waiting for the seventh arrow review before i even consider it

Seventh Arrow posted:

Undetected







It should come as no surprise that your experience with Undetected is going to be heavily influenced by your prior interactions (if any) with the classic Metal Gear games (mind you, the dev did what he could to make it unique). Speaking for myself, I was not a console guy at that time so I was pretty much entirely new to this kind of stealth experience when I fired up Digerati's latest. So what did I think about it? Well, I wasn't crazy about it at first but it kind of grew on me. The story is insane in the *gestures towards all the 70s B-movies* kind of way. In Undetected, you are *checks notes*...a member of the revolutionary group 'Los Desplazados' in the year 2063, when the US and Mexico formed one megacountry, the Mexican-American Federation, or MAF, due to oppressive amounts of climate change and fracking galore. Your name is Tenoch Kaan, and it's up to you and your nifty cyber-eye to rescue the leader of Los Desplazados from the clutches of the ultra-capitalist corporation Cimacorp from the Chicxulub Perpetual Energy Station. Look at all those words!

Unfortunately, your handler doesn't yell "KAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!" when you die.

Unsurprisingly, your perspective as you sneak around is top-down which (like Winter Ember) takes a bit of getting used to - at least for me. When you lean against a wall, you get a third-person perspective and you can also hit shift to get a first-person view. You can't do anything in these views, though - it's just for scouting and seeing what's around the corner. Something that usually annoys me (and I make no secret of) is a lack of manual saves, but in Undetected, the checkpoints are so frequent that I can live with it. Mind you, sometimes this is because the corridors are tiny and it seems to save every time you transition. You start off stealthing around in the jungle environment, but eventually go deeper into the bowels of the Chicxulub reactor. This gives it an increasing atmosphere of suffocating oppression and claustrophobia, which is very immersive. If you get spotted, the guards are pretty relentless. They will keep chasing after you until either you're dead or you enter a new area - that last part is a bit silly, but I'll pretend it's part of the MGS charm. Although all of your methods of dealing with guards are nonlethal, they're all effective in their own way. Your gun can fire a blinding goo, incapacitating sponge bullets, and a flash which can blind enemies in a cone. You also get an assortment of grenades - decoys, shocks, noise distractors, and the like. The grenades can be a bit fiddly, since they will only fire in the direction you're facing and can be a bit unpredictable, but they nevertheless fit in well with your arsenal and can even the odds in a number of situations.

The boss fights were really neat - they're just brief enough to not overstay their welcome, and provide an interesting change to the gameplay loop. Usually they will involve an environmental challenge, the solution to which will be provided with subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) hints around the arena. For example, one boss will hide in the tall grass, but the game gives you access to shock grenades that you can use to flush him out in the open. The only exception was the last boss fight, which I feel doesn't give you a lot of feedback and you're left with a lot of trial and error (especially since he can one-shot you). For the rest of the gameplay, there's a temptation to rush through the levels in the hopes of not getting spotted, but this seems like a mistake. Undetected seems to reward a meticulous approach, one where you use all the resources at your disposal. Overall, I would say that if you have fond memories of the early MGS games, then this is a must-buy. For the rest, I think if you're not squeamish about top-down stealth and retro graphics, you should definitely give it a try, sale or no sale.

trying to jack off posted:

lmfao

Seventh Arrow posted:

Funny you should ask...

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3828221&perpage=40&pagenumber=753#post483648715

trying to jack off posted:

hopefully its been fixed as a gog release or whatever, but iw would basically reload the entire game for each map load. modern machines wouldnt close the window from the previous map so youd end up with 100s of windows that had to be closed when you went to quit

EpicCareMadBitch posted:

are the splinter cells worth playing?

Nutmeg posted:

loved that poo poo fr

trying to jack off posted:

im going to preorder it so i can refund that rear end on launch

Michael Transactions posted:

Major Isoor posted:

Heh yeah, you're quite right there! The Irish really put in a lot of work refining those skills during the '70s, eh!

Food Boner posted:

Is war or Mordor the first one

Food Boner posted:

Ok I played the first one, just checking

Seventh Arrow posted:

No, I'm not reviewing the Gollum game

Vadun posted:

Major Isoor posted:

Yeah I actually didn't mind the gold filter either, tbh. Have you played Mankind Divided yet? It's been a while since I played HR but MD (which I played much more recently) basically seemed to be an 'extra missions pack' for HR, which is precisely what I was after. Tough to say which is better... I'd say HR for 99% of it, but the whole ending sequence is very 'meh', which evens it out a little, IMO

Good soup! posted:

How well or poorly have the Tenchu games aged? I found the two ps1 games in my basement and I have no idea how they got there and have no memory of buying them but I guess I'll add them to the backlog lol

Seventh Arrow posted:

I see from your cheevos