Last Game You Finished and Your Rating

Halo Infinite

Not good, unfortunately. As I suspected, the switch to an 'open world' style game has been massively detrimental to the Halo experience. There is shockingly little variety on display here, levels consisting of green open areas and blue corridors. That's it. Oh and the story has disappeared so far up it's arse I have no idea what's going on half the time.

It's frustrating because mechanically it's excellent, the combat is satisfying throughout and I'm sure the multiplayer is great. But I want a campaign like 1, 3 or Reach, with incredible set pieces and memorable levels. I finished this five minutes ago and I'm hard pushed to remember any of it.

5/10

Firewatch

I mostly enjoyed it. I think. There were some interesting moments (namely the girls going missing, the lying to authorities, the fire being started and generally wandering about expecting to meet something that's gonna ruin your day) but I felt the bit with the fenced off area was a bit of a cheap way to heighten tension and the worst sort of red herring. Also, I'm puzzled as to why they didn't use the fire to better effect. But overall I'm glad I finally got around to giving it a go so many years after it was first recommended to me.

Halo Infinite.

After an impressive start, what mhtl said.

Far Cry 4 - 6/10

The more I played of this, the more I realised how unbalanced it is in terms of player health and enemy damage output. It really starts to show at the end of the game. It just felt like playing it in a gung ho fashion was not really a thing you could do anymore, the stealth gameplay isn't really great either.

The Shangri La bits were also not that fun.

Onto Primal.

Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart

Good clean fun. Genuinely incredible graphics and brilliant use of the Dual Sense controller.

It's a fair criticism that it is more of the same though, and the new twists in the gameplay don't really change things that much. It looks like it has a really nice New Game+. I probably wont ever get around to playing it again, but it would lovely to play through again one Xmas.

Oh and its far too easy, even on the hardest difficulty level.

7.5

Saint of Killers wrote:Firewatch

I mostly enjoyed it. I think. There were some interesting moments (namely the girls going missing, the lying to authorities, the fire being started and generally wandering about expecting to meet something that's gonna ruin your day) but I felt the bit with the fenced off area was a bit of a cheap way to heighten tension and the worst sort of red herring. Also, I'm puzzled as to why they didn't use the fire to better effect. But overall I'm glad I finally got around to giving it a go so many years after it was first recommended to me.

Played this when it came out a few years ago. I think I agreed with you straight after finishing it, but letting it sit for a couple of years I appreciate it for being an experiencing really highlighting that often times your own imagination is far scarier than the reality.

Really enjoyed the ride either way!

I should really replay Firewatch. It's a wonderful short game.

Preezy wrote:Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS5) - 8.5/10

Really enjoyed this as my introduction to PS5 gaming. Lovely graphics, good controls, decent-enough story (although "The Tinkerer" was a bit of a weak villain). It was quite short but I guess that's to be expected as it's kinda like an expansion pack to the main Spider-Man game, which I shall be purchasing off the back of this

Completed this again on NG+ and absolutely blitzed through it, must have been finished in half the time. No change to my original score, it's a great game I really enjoyed playing it. I do still think The Tinkerer was rubbish and I kept asking myself how does her helmet and gauntlets protect her organs when she's getting smashed into the side of buildings or punched/kicked/walloped by Miles?, just not very well thought out.

What remains of Edith Finch on Series S via Gamepass. I started this simply to complete one of those weekly Gamepass quests but liked the opening 20 mins or so then read that it was only a few hours long and decided to finish it.

I don’t play many of these so called ‘walking simulators’ but I really enjoyed this. The way you explore the house and uncover the stories of the Finch family was very engaging and the stories themselves while humorous in places often had grim twists… like an episode of Tales From the Crypt which is interesting when you consider how one story in particular is presented.

I give this a solid 07/10 I’d have preferred it to have been a little longer perhaps and to have provided a little more of a challenge.

Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart (PS5) [8]

Was pretty good. Just about an [8] for me. It's certainly an impressive visual display, the rift mechanic is neat and there's often loads going on at once. As a showcase of what the PS5 can do, it's a good advert. And I got a strong sense of it being like a PS5-era Jak and Daxter to being with, which was cool. However, not sure I was that fussed about the game play itself towards the end - felt it outstayed its welcome a little.

Alan Wake:Remastered(plus dlcs)-PS5. I still love how strawberry floating cheesy this is. It’s a little janky still and the combat loses its allure towards the end of the main game but I love it. I'm looking forward to the sequel. I hope they don’t strawberry float it up... Anyone played the Control Alan Wake dlc? Is it worth it?

Sable. 9/10

That’s 9/10 for me. I don’t think I’d generally recommend it, but if you love exploring for its own sake, you might like it as much as I did. It gives you a short, story-related training section at the start, then some very cursory pointers on where to go next. The rest is up to you. It’s a fairly huge, mostly empty world, but there is also a hell of a lot out there to discover, if you’re patient and so inclined.

If you follow a guide, I expect it would be a hollow, meaningless experience. Get out there and find stuff yourself, and it’s massively rewarding. Especially when certain elements start to click, the game world makes more sense, and you’re able to create your own strategy of how to go about exploring. Things that you’d dismissed before suddenly becoming hugely relevant, and you’re off on a new quest. The hulks of crashed ships are a highlight.

But really, I can’t stress enough how much patience you’ll need. If you play it for half an hour, it probably won’t grab you.

I adored it.

DiRT 4 - 8/10

+ Visuals can be very nice
+ Variety of disciplines
+ Most events are enjoyable
+ Good selection of cars

- Far too many events and races
- Very limited track and location count

After nearly 66 hours I've finally completed this (completing every event, not getting gold on everything or unlocking everything). It's been great for the most part, but it's taken me months of on and off playing to get through it. The driving is fun, as are the events generally, but there are far too many races and events and nowhere near enough variety in tracks or locations. It's so tedious just driving the same places over and over again, unlocking a new event, then finding it's barely any different to what you've just completed. There could have easily been 20-30 hours' worth of content here and the game wouldn't have been any worse off for it. Good fun, but too much of a good thing in this case.

Dead Island: Riptide - 6.5/10

+ Combat is satisfying and enjoyable.
+ Repairing, upgrading, item creation, resource gathering still works well.
+ Able to import your character from Dead Island and continue upgrading your stats.
+ Some interesting new enemies, missions, and challenges.

- Clunky and slow (why does my character walk like he's injured?) which makes navigating levels and trying to escape from enemies really frustrating.
- You can't do a damn thing without being attacked. All the time. Everywhere.
- Combat gets incredibly repetitive (because of the above).
- Plot is rubbish.
- Incredibly easy to die, and you sometimes re-spawn miles from where you were.
- Levels seem to be designed to maximise frustration.
- Side quests are dull and repetitive.
- Menus are awful.

There's a lot that I want to like about both this and the original, but there's so much room for improvement as well. I think there's a full sequel in the works - not just a copy and paste of the original like this is - and it could be quite good if they address the issues. I ended up skipping all of the side quests except for a handful, and focusing mainly on the plot missions, so it took about 14-15 hours to complete. That time went very quickly, which is a good sign, but there were many, many frustrating incidents along the way.

The Procession To Calvary - 7/10
(included in Game Pass)

An uncomplicated point & click that doesn't drag on for too long. Terry Giliam style animation, without aping Monty Python too much, crossed with thoroughly infantile humour (in a good way). Daft fun, and a nice little diversion between other games.

Inscryption

It was good and it entertained me for its duration. It had some moments of brilliance with really clever ideas but I felt like it never quite reached a truly satisfying pay off. I don't feel compelled to go back and discover the extra story hints that I missed. Glad I played it but wish I hadn't been drawn into the hype beforehand.

7/10

EDIT - Just discovered that it's made by the same guy who did Pony Island. Which I'd rate very similarly. Interesting and worth the time but not as incredible as the buzz would have you believe. He's clearly a clever guy though and I'm sure one day he'll make a game that genuinely blows my socks off.

Picked up crysis remastered collection at Christmas. Crysis 2 is decent, crysis 3 is pretty boring and bland. It looks phenomenal, but the story is waay off
And lacks some of the best sections and battles of 1 or 2.

6/10

Disc Room - 6/10

Mustered up the botheredness to try the last boss and actually it was pretty easy. Finished with 94 percent so I clearly enjoyed it.

The game has some great presentation, music and general design touches. I love the French-cartoon-strip style hand-drawn aesthetic. But some of the (admittedly very few) puzzles were a little obtuse to be satisfying which kind of frays your trust in the game's logic. And most of the power-ups I found less useful than the base dash and so didn't use them unless I really had to. And many of the score-variations in different rooms didn't feel that meaningfully different (you're still dodging and surviving). And no matter how many different types of disc (which genuinely have impressively different 'personalities') are thrown at you, the act of disc-dodging feels roughly similar throughout, doesn't feel as if there's a high skill ceiling - like things get more varied but the core control remains fairly similar. I'm not sure I actually Got Better so much a Got Through the game with roughly the same amount of gaming bullet-hell skills I started with.

But still: fun game I'm glad to have played.

Donut County - 8/10

Enjoyed this way more than I thought I would. I was worried about the reports of the game being too easy and largely unvaried in gameplay throughout. But I found the low-stakes a nice chill out, the vibe was good, the writing was funny.

And though it never gets cray-cray, there is a genuine escalation in mechanics throughout, just enough to keep you engaged, and then the last couple of levels are fantastic.

Everything gets better I think when it introduces more ballistics-y stuff, but even aside from that all the dioramas are fun and different and working out the kind of Rube-Goldberg necessary sequences becomes fun in a Final Destination way of cause and effect creativity. And munching massive things by the end of each level is always great.

And the game is pleasingly short, if it was longer or more game-y I would have liked it less. It said everything it needed to then finished.

Uncharted Legacy Collection - UC4 (PS5)

A good action packed game that I think i enjoyed at least as much as I did when I first played it (near launch) or possibly more. The haptics are good if not game changing, but the 60fps (or more) options really are. The combat always felt pretty bad in the origional game, with aiming being tricky and feeling a bit disconnected. That is largely resolved in this version if you play in performance mode. Its still not perfect, and not as good as TLoU2, but it's far more enjoyable (than OG UC4).

Graphics are still incredible. Some of the interior sets are the best I have ever seen in a game.

8.

Far Cry Primal - 7/10

Weirdly liked this a lot. It simplifies the Far Cry style gameplay, there's less random stupidness with the physics engine. Performance and graphics were great.

Resident Evil 2 Remake - Dunno yet!

I finished Leon A and I'm now on Claire A. Didn't like the way they used Mr X in the police station area, it's annoying and unfortunate but the rest of the game was very enjoyable despite that.

Claire A seems good so far. So I'll reserve judgment on the entire product until I get through more of it.

Last Game You Finished and Your Rating

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