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Finished Hardspace: Shipbreaker and got the good ending where you finish repairing your personal ship. Great game, methodically breaking down a massive ship piece by piece is very satisfying and there are enough hazards to keep things interesting for the duration of the campaign. Disconnecting reactors was the best part despite maybe being a bit too easy, they always have cooling systems and thruster connections to worry about but you can generally just ignore those as long as you have a clear path to pull it out and throw it in the barge quickly. Same goes for playing the fuse minigame for those triangular power generators when you can yank the thing off instead with seemingly no downside. Never made it to rank 10 ships, either I got through it too fast or those are intended for people who keep playing after completing the game. The larger rank 9 cargo ships were already the size of the entire ship dock so the rank 10 ones can't be too much bigger. Might come back to the game from time to time to keep ranking up, seems like a good thing to leave installed if I want something more relaxing.
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Dec 3, 2023 09:34
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 11:33 |
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Verviticus posted:i tried that game 2-3 times during early access and i kinda lost interest about 4-5 ships in. is the pacing any better now that there's a story? The story is mostly forgettable and has some questionable voice acting throughout which makes it hard to get invested in anything. Typical evil corporation stuff with a few moments of characters going full cartoon villain, none of it meaningfully impacts the underlying game loop until the final mission. If the core gameplay seemed boring during early access I don't think it would add much motivation to get through it.
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Dec 4, 2023 01:44
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Just finished Jusant in an afternoon. Only three hours long but it's a cinematic experience akin to something like Journey or Abzu, if you enjoyed those you would probably like this as well. I think it's possible to play with mouse + keyboard but I used a controller as recommended, the climbing mechanics feel intuitive and the game throws enough gimmicks at you to vary things up between chapters. Not bad to pick up at the current $20 sale, definitely worth wishlisting for when it goes on sale cheaper down the line.
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Jan 21, 2024 05:40
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Jerusalem posted:I just beat The Outer Wilds. It is an absolutely incredible experience, the kind of game I want to grab people by the shoulders and beg them to go play, but also one I don't want to tell them ANYTHING about because I wouldn't want to get in the way of them getting to experience everything for the first time. I played it in VR which was an absolutely fantastic experience, but the "standard" way of playing it would also be incredible because the writing, visuals and score are all top notch. Kind of jealous you got to experience it in VR. Been tempted to give it a try but I don't think there're really much point, you can play Outer Wilds once and after that you're just sort of going back and looking at things for the sake of nostalgia or whatever without any real engagement. Didn't specify in your post but be sure to play the DLC if you haven't already. More divisive than the base game but I think it managed to reach the same standard of quality and even exceed it in a few areas.
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Feb 2, 2024 23:30
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STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN: Defeated the final boss while wearing a fedora because it happened to be the strongest headgear I had at the time. Battle system is the highlight of the game but always felt a bit clunky to me, largely because you can't animation cancel out of your R1 swings to counter incoming attacks. Party members all feel the same irrespective of which class you assign them, you hit left and right on the d-pad on cooldown to make them use abilities and output some more damage but otherwise they just thow out basic attacks and serve as distractions. Magic seemed a bit overpowered, the Sage class specifically since casting Ultima once would drain about 3/4 of a boss's stamina bar. Most of the harder fights were just a matter of playing keepaway until I could do that and then finish them off right after. Sophia was the only party member who felt like she had a real impact on battles because she can gain the Sage class from an optional mission and will use healing/Ultima occasionally. Level design and environments were forgettable, mostly corridors that feel like they were pieced together with stock assets. Story never maintains a sense of continuity because of how the underlying structure works, you're very much doing a series of isolated dungeons rather than moving through a larger world. Never felt any need to engage with the gear system, the game floods you with equipment dropped from every enemy you kill and you have to spend time dismantling or discarding things once you quickly hit your inventory max of 600 items. There's so much junk that they even added an extensive auto-dismantle system to break things down at the end of missions, resulting in tons of crafting mats which I never used. Maybe you need to pay attention to gear for the unlockable Chaos difficulty and whatever optional bosses I missed but it was easy to ignore all the stats completely. I just used auto-equip the whole game so everyone always looked ridiculous. That all sounds kind of negative but I mostly enjoyed the playthrough. Don't think I'd recommend it at full price but I picked it up on heavy sale, probably worth it if you catch it at a 50% discount or over. 7/10 
NoEyedSquareGuy fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Feb 12, 2024 |
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Feb 12, 2024 00:14
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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - Got this as a free download code included with the new CPU I purchased a few months ago, doubt I would have bought it at its $70 launch price otherwise. You can easily look at this as Far Cry: Avatar, but it's probably the best Far Cry game in that case. Closest to Far Cry Primal, you'll be using various bows and arrows almost exclusively for the entire game. There are assault rifles and shotguns with similar scaling but they're not really well suited to the kind of stealthing around and hitting weakspots you're doing the majority of the time, I used them once or twice and otherwise ignored them entirely through to the final mission. Shooting some rear end in a top hat mouthing off about how "the only good blue is a dead blue" with an arrow the size of a small tree never really got old and had a more visceral satisfaction than the more pincushion feeling hits from a Far Cry game. They succeeded in making humans feel small in weak in comparison to you, needing various classes of exosuit to have any chance in combat. Far Cry maps are already sizeable but this feels much larger, enough so that flying around on your Ikran is always an integral part of the experience and necessary to travel larger distances in reasonable amounts of time. As a Ubisoft game the huge map is of course littered with collectibles, mostly plants that increase max health or give skill points. They went a bit overboard dotting research stations every 500 meters which mostly serve as fast travel points, I'd guess there are about 100 of them total and they're all unlocked with the same brainless hacking minigame that shows up in various other places. The Na'vi villages are similarly numerous and have their own associated quests of bringing specific resources but it seemed like more effort to complete them all than it was worth. There are also totems you have to view from specific angles (unlocks crafting recipes, worth doing), plants which only open up after touching four satellite plants (their contents are garbage), and sites where you meditate and play a minigame to memorize the landscape (long and boring enough that they included an autocomplete setting in the options, was slightly stunned when I finished them all and got literally nothing), plus a few other categories which I played the whole game and somehow managed to never find. Mainline Far Cry games tend to have an obnoxious sense of humor at their core, that's thankfully absent here outside of maybe one slightly quirky character in the resistance. Nothing like those two idiots in the drug tent in Far Cry 4, the primary story and sidequests are mostly played straight and I never found them grating. You're fighting Captain Planet villains in a stunning open world, there's always an inherent satisfaction in wiping out one of their pollution factories and watching all the dead vegetation spring back to life as the planet reclaims the site. I'm not really a graphics snob these days but if you have a computer powerful enough to run it this might be worth grabbing just for the spectacle.      Ray tracing doesn't always do much for a game if the art style isn't designed around showcasing it, here it made for a consistently stunning experience. The forests are full of bioluminescent plants of various colors with light that bleeds out and provides a dull glow to the surrounding fog and landscape. The upper plains in particular have bioluminescent grass which isn't noticeable during the day, but at night you can see it light up with different patches being brighter or dimmer as the wind sweeps across and agitates it. I played Cyberpunk right before this and while that has its own style of visual splendor I think this ultimately looks better overall. I'm running a 7950x and RTX 3070 and was able to max out every single setting (including a graciously added option to extend the object draw distance which you don't see too often), once I also added the dlssg-to-fsr3 mod to give myself frame generation capability when I'm not supposed to have it I was getting something like 70+ FPS consistently. There's kind of a ceiling for how good Ubisoft games can be but this was towards the top. It certainly falls prey to the same formulaic game design tendencies but those are still relatively solid as long as you don't drag them out too much. The scale is large enough that it's more of a daunting replay consideration than a Far Cry but I can see going back to it after considerable time has passed. I'm guessing my playtime was something like 40-50 hours, I don't know if Ubisoft Connect keeps track of it somewhere but I can't find it. I ended up doing nearly everything, getting all the research stations and health ups wasn't really necessary but the world is beautiful enough that I liked having an excuse to spend more time in it. Full price is still a hard sell just because the $70 price point does me psychic damage, if you see it a few months down the line at a heavy discount I'd recommend this over any Far Cry. 8/10 NoEyedSquareGuy fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Feb 25, 2024 |
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Feb 25, 2024 10:15
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 11:33 |
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Just finished a blind 100% run of The Talos Principle 2 I never managed to 100% the first game though I got pretty close. Completed all the mainline puzzles and got the standard ending, but the final set of puzzles were locked behind the secret stars which I never managed to fully track down. Apparently one of them requires you to scan a QR code for the solution, that one alone would have blocked me even if I'd found the other ones. The rest were just really well hidden and tended to require sneaking an object outside one of the main puzzles in some obscure way, I think I was missing 4 or 5 when I eventually gave it up. There was nothing that obtuse in this one and I was able to complete everything without ever resorting to using the autocomplete consoles or looking anything up online. Some of the stars are well hidden and require close observation of the environment but they don't need anything external to the game. Puzzle design is on par with the original, lots of elegant and satisfying solutions with a difficulty curve that starts easy in each biome and ramps up from 1-8 as the new mechanics are explored. Talos 1 had a few annoying elements like the patrolling mines and the recorder, I didn't really feel that way with any of the items introduced this time. They're more about the core logic of redirecting lasers than avoiding hazards, the only way you're going to die this time around is if you're not looking where you're going and fall in deep water. Makes for a more relaxed experience when you never have to worry about running into a mine or being gunned down by a sentry turret. Each zone contains two "lost" puzzles which tend to be some of the harder ones and a golden door puzzle which you unlock at the end of the game, those were a step above the rest and some of the game's standouts. Still never took longer than 20 minutes to solve one if that says anything about the difficulty cap, I was never stonewalled like I am in a game like Baba is You where I have access to 20 different puzzles and can't solve any of them. Finding some of the stars took over an hour but that was more a matter of running past something important over and over while scouring the relatively large hub areas. The story of Talos 1 was about creation of human consciousness through interaction with the simulation, Talos 2 deals with what sort of civilization can be created once they leave the simulation and have to live in the physical world. Characterization is done well, for a bunch of robots who look identical outside of which color they use to accent their frames your companions all have distinct personalities and ideas about how you should interpret what's happening on the island. It ultimately comes down to a 1-2-3 choice of (Megastructure is good/neutral/bad) in the end but none of the arguments made are inherently wrong and there's no obvious bad ending. Won't spoil anything here but the dialogue branches do a good job of allowing for meaningful decisions and everything is wrapped up nicely, especially with the bonus cutscenes if you get 100%. Visuals are a major step up, just about anything made in Unreal 5 is going to look amazing. Lots of sweeping, impossible architecture and varied climates expressed in each of the 12 zones, with each containing their own unique monolithic laser tower as an ultimate goal. Only took a few screenshots myself but there's a full photo mode included, I'm sure those inclined could spend a lot of time taking glamor shots in the downtime between solves.     Not many downsides to speak of really. Was kind of bummed when I reached the final zone and found out it's the only one without a new mechanic, but it ended up containing some of the best puzzles in the game so I left feeling like it was a good way to close the game out and incorporate everything that came before. The "follow the spark" stars are kind of pointless and feel out of place, they probably could have just cut most of them or put more effort into making the paths interesting. One or two will venture into the main puzzles and require you to find an inventive way to reach them but most are just a matter of finding it floating in the wild and then following it from A to B with nothing of interest happening between. Not enough of a downside for me to really care, this was an incredible game and something I would recommend to any puzzle game enthusiast as long as they have the hardware to run it. 10/10
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Mar 11, 2024 04:49
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