Got a few games on the go at the moment:
(well in reality there are about 15-20 games that I have started and am not prepared to say I have abandoned yet! )Final Fantasy XII (Switch)Despite being a huge FF fan (although not the No.1 of course!) I never got very far in this back in the PS2 days, I didn't like the Gambit system and the story never hooked me either. I remember being disappointed as it didn't feel like a Final Fantasy game to me, and coming from the director of Vagrant Story which I absolutely loved as well I think I was hoping it would be a "best of both worlds" collision between VS and FF but that never really worked out!
However I am absolutely loving it on Switch! I think having time away to appreciate that other battle systems can be good has helped - having been a huge fan of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 recently I have grown to see that a system where the player is not 100% hands on and directing every action all the time can be a good thing! The addition of the 2x/4x speed options is a huge win as well - it can be a very grindy game and being able to whizz through battles is a big plus.
It still has its flaws - the area design is incredibly dull and repetitive forcing the player to spend way more time looking at the map than actually in the game world or face getting lost very quickly. And all of the areas being broken up into tiny chunks is very annoying, it would have been nice if they could have stitched things together for this re-release but there you go.
RAGE 2 (PC)Picked this up cheap (although I expect it will be dropping even lower in the not too distant future...) as something to have as a mindless blaster and it has impressed me quite a lot so far! The shooting is great with a real heft to things, but its the "nanotrite" powers that really stand out. These mix the combat up really nicely - double jumping to clamber up high and get the drop on enemies, dashing around to avoid attacks or close ground quickly, throwing out energy balls that will suck enemies in and can be used to propel the player even higher, pushing out an energy blast to kill enemies or knock them back into others... it all really adds to the experience and just makes taking on a group of enemies feel so damn great!
No idea what the story is - the intro was overlong and tried to make the player care about too many things that seemed dull to me, but I have played about 5 hours or so without advancing this forward so far so I'm sure I will get back to it eventually!
Biggest annoyance so far is that the game constantly wants to throw updates about stuff on the screen that pull you out of the action: clear out a bandit camp - bing! here's a popup about how your status with some faction has changed, open a box - bing! here's another telling you about the item you've found and how to use it (even if you've already found it about then times before!), destroy a sentinel - bing! same again! Stop pulling me out of the game with this gooseberry fool! Just put a little popup in the corner or something. The UI in general feels a bit rough around the edges, like the game was still in beta or something - it can be quite sluggish to move around and often things are hard to read because they are supposed to appear on top of the "window" behind but they are too transparent and you can see both at the same time.
Super Mario Odyssey (Switch)Jumped back into this recently for the first time since late 2017 as I still had some moons to mop up and just felt like a bit of Mario action. Such a sublime game, the controls and move-set are absolute gold. I've been going back to the Koopa races on each kingdom to try and improve my times so I'm gunning for a few people on my friends list leaderboard!