Last Game You Finished and Your Rating

Stray (PS4) - 7/10
Charming little game with a cute cat protagonist and a pretty neat dystopian story. It's all fairly linear and the puzzles aren't particularly taxing, but it doesn't outstay its welcome.

The Order 1886

Started this back in 2018, thought I’d come back to it & finish it off.

Short game, good story. Shame there won’t be a follow up.

Firewatch

Still incredible and still perfectly paced. One of the most intelligently told stories in gaming with not even a whiff of pretension.

The audio commentary made for a good listen also, and was integrated in to the world in a fun way.

9

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Firewatch

Still incredible and still perfectly paced. One of the most intelligently told stories in gaming with not even a whiff of pretension.

The audio commentary made for a good listen also, and was integrated in to the world in a fun way.

9

Wonderful game that :wub:

Absolutely sucks that Valve bought the dev then killed their next game In the Valley of Gods

Tomous wrote:
kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Firewatch

Still incredible and still perfectly paced. One of the most intelligently told stories in gaming with not even a whiff of pretension.

The audio commentary made for a good listen also, and was integrated in to the world in a fun way.

9

Wonderful game that

Absolutely sucks that Valve bought the dev then killed their next game In the Valley of Gods

I was wondering what had happened to that game. That's a real shame.

Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island DLC (PS4) - 8/10
Was glad to spot this on PS Plus as it has never had a decent price drop. Originally overdosed on the main game earlier in the year, so the enforced break definitely helped reinvigorate. Anyway, this is a top quality piece of DLC, that's nice and compact and expands the background of Jin. Couldn't really give it a higher marking than the main game, but I really enjoyed my time back in its world.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - 6/10

+ Looks quite nice.
+ Huge world.
+ Lots of items, weapons, armour, and options to customise them.

- Combat is basic and incredibly tedious.
- So. Many. Enemies. Just let me walk a few metres without having to fight something. Please.
- Plot's a load of nonsense.
- Horribly cliche and boring NPCs - usual tired tropes of elves, dwarves, humans, etc.
- Drags on for way, way too long.

This started out with some promise, but strawberry float me, it gets old quickly. Too much combat, which is very basic, too many pointless side quests, a nonsense plot, and everything soon feels like a chore. As soon as I stopped caring about the plot, the side quests, and wanting to explore and find everything the game became a lot better, but still, it was a real slog. I'd love to know who played this, thought "hmm yes, this relentless combat every few seconds while exploring a ridiculously huge world is a recipe for fun" and signed it off. I'm so tired of this kind of fantasy setting as well, with all the predictable races and character types, all with some minor tweaks so the game has its own version of those tired, worn out tropes.

...dang, I picked this up on Switch a few months back. I'd thought it looked pretty good :slol:

.

Just checking... was it the original or the remaster ("Re-Reckoning") that you played, Lotus?

It was the original I played. It's probably worth pointing out that my opinion seems to be a bit of an outlier - on the whole it was pretty well-received, but I feel like I've played this game so many times before, and the flaws grated even more so given the length of the game. Try not to let my experience colour yours!

Yeah, I really enjoyed KOA:Reckoning!

Combat was fun, the crafting system is excellent and I just liked how unassuming it was. Although it's a 10 year old game now, so it's not going to be quite as refined as some newer games perhaps.

I'm sure I heard the game world was originally designed with an MMO in mind, but they switched it to a single player game, so I imagine it would have been a slightly different game had it been designed from the ground up as SP.

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative

Brilliant sequel. Mind blowing stuff as always. The last bonus unlock was just an incredible surprise and gave me goose bumps. Really enjoyed it. Put the Somnium difficulty to easy as they are still the weakest part of the game, but in general they were more logical than the first games.

8

The Council

Not a bad yarn. Unintentionally hilarious in places, and the rpg elements did not really hold true to the end as you end up just using the best option each time, rather than the one you would like to use to shape the story. Still, I think it did some interesting stuff, and the whole “set inside a castle” atmosphere worked for me.
Some of the puzzles were boring, but all in all it was fun.

6

80s Overdrive - 7/10

+ Pretty nice to look at
+ Brilliant soundtrack
+ Plenty of races
+ Enough to do without dragging on

- Can be a bit easy
- Traffic is annoying
- Other modes don't offer much

I wasn't sure what to expect from this, as reviews seemed mixed. I think I paid 89p though, and it's actually been great - I would've happily paid £4.99 or even £7.99 for something like this. Old-school, OutRun-style racing, with cars to upgrade or buy, plenty of races, and a few different modes. The main career is the standout, with a nice variety of tracks and locations, differing levels of opponent AI with variables like traffic levels and police presence, all set to an excellent soundtrack.

It's pretty light on challenge, unfortunately, until a difficulty spike right at the end, and the other modes - time trial and create a track - are pretty weak. A lot more could've been made of time trial, which is a more traditional OutRun mode of choosing your route, but it's not great. The create a track is poor...I tried to set the parameters to the most extreme possible, and got the most boring track imaginable. Didn't waste any more time on that.

Can't complain at all for the money though - need to find the soundtrack to listen to outside the game :datass:

Last edited by Barnsy! on Thu Aug 18, 2022 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Stray - 10 / 10 Obviously

Ice Age Scats Adventure - 9 /10

Shadow of the Colossus 7 /10

Great twist, with the real monster being...the rubbish camera angles and controls. I reeee-ally liked Shadow, it was exactly what I wanted to be Zelda BotW lite, in a more realistic setting, where you can run off and explore a large open beautiful scenic world and is only like 6 hours long. I want to try games like Skyrim / Xenoblade but can't face spending 90+ hours in an adventure that isn't Zelda. Its great the story is super effecting, but I really struggled with the controls and got super frustrated with the camera angle, the frame rate seemed to be a little bitty too.

Barnsy! wrote:Stray - 10 / 10 Obviously

Ice Age Scats Adventure - 9 /10

Shadow of the Colossus 7 /10

Great twist, with the real enemy being...the rubbish camera angles and controls. I reeee-ally liked Shadow, it was exactly what I wanted to be Zelda BotW lite, in a more realistic setting, where you can run off and explore a large open beautiful scenic world and is only like 6 hours long. I want to try games like Skyrim / Xenoblade but can't face spending 90+ hours in an adventure that isn't Zelda. Its great the story is super effecting, but I really struggled with the controls and got super frustrated with the camera angle, the frame rate seemed to be a little bitty too.

Scats adventure? That can't be right?!?

I suppose I should really check out Ice Age if it's getting a higher rating than Shadow of the Colossus :lol:

Far Cry 5

I enjoyed the game but once you can fly a helicopter liberating bases becomes super easy.

The ending was bloody stupid as it seems to legitamise crazy psychotic end of the world cult leaders who use torture, drugs and brainwashing who I spent the entire game fighting against.

You spend the entire game fighting against his end of the world predictions only for the end of the world to happen in a seemingly global nuclear conflict he's been prophecising sand you end up in a bunker just you and him with you in chains and him lording over the rightness of his prophecy. It's all sorts of strawberry floating insulting as everyone you've spent hours rescuing is now dead anyway.

The main game 8/10
The ending 1/10.

I have zero desire to replay this again.

sawyerpip wrote:I suppose I should really check out Ice Age if it's getting a higher rating than Shadow of the Colossus

Come for the ice, stay for the scat.

Detroit: Become Human - 8/10

Finished it with the good ending. Really enjoyed it, proper engaging story

Barnsy! wrote:Really enjoying my first playthrough of this

I've always wanted to play a game, where your choices actually matter - Tell-tale Batman games and LA Noire just missed the mark for me as it felt like you was basically heading to a pretty much pre-determined outcome regardless of your choices. Like the Telltale games, button timed response doesn't do too much for me though!

It look gorgeous, like literally the most visually impressive video game I've ever seen. The texture and lighting and the way the characters interact with the environment is both realistic and beautiful. The character motion capture animation and acting is spot on and fully realise this narrative driven game.

The real game for me is building a relationship with Hank and sod human and android-kind fate. I quite like the Alice little girl story, the revolution stuff with Marcus isn't quite doing it for me yet!

If I had a tiny criticism, this game is all allegories to racial segregation, slavery and the holocaust etc, focussing on real world social rights and civil inequality; human suffering of pasted and present - which is fine. But I was expecting a game more about the moral and philosophical implications of sentient beings living and working alongside humans, the nature of conscience, technical singularity event, Turing test and humans place with intellectually superior androids, which it didn't get into.

I enjoyed it a lot also when I played it a few years back.

In Other Waters (Switch).

From the same developer as Citizen Sleeper (one of my favourite games from this year so far), this is in a similar style, but paired back even further.

It runs really poorly on the Switch, with lots of freezing and stutters, and it even crashed once. Text is also very small (I was ok, but i'm sure some will not be).

Sound and atmosphere is good. Story decent enough if not particularly new.

Paid about £5 for it, think it's worth that much. The jump in quality between this and Citizen Sleeper is pretty substantial though - I look forward to seeing what they make next!

6

Last Game You Finished and Your Rating

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