Rate the Last Game That You Played

[Cfrock]

Shadwen

Well, that was an aggravating hour. Four levels in and all I have to show for it is a sour mood.

This game looks so nice and seems like it'd be a fun stealth game if it wasn't for the fact that I'm not being challenged on getting myself through areas undetected but rather on getting a defenceless child through them undetected. An escort game, hooray! I have no direct control over the child and have to trust her AI to get her from hiding place to hiding place, or ping locations for her to run to and guide her manually. Except, the child is very stupid and seems to really love hesitating and running back to where she was, or even just barging through piles of boxes, making lots of noise and attracting the very guards I just distracted. GG. Time freezes when you aren't moving, too. I gather this is so you can aim your grappling hook more easily and assess your circumstances, but it means that the entire game has a grating stop/start rhythm to it. It's honestly just annoying, like watching a video that hasn't fully buffered.

I feel bad calling this a bad game since I've played it for such a short amount of time, but that entire time was spent getting annoyed and angry because of the specific things the game is built around that make the game unique. Leaves me thinking that the issues I'm getting wound up by now are never going to go away and carrying on would be an act of insanity.

 

[Hero of Pizza Time]

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

hmmm...

8.5/10

Pros: Satisfying exploration, great use of real world physics, good story.

Cons: Too short, ****ty dungeons, Mipha's chest is flat.

 

[Spirit]

Fast RMX

What a game, yeah it's an F-Zero clone but in a world without F-Zero this is the next bst thing.

Screw Wipeout. Fast RMX is way faster and smoother. The music is really cool too and wow do those graphics look great.

There are a lot of tracks here too and fifteen different cars to try out. The F-Zero announcer loves life in this game and has a lot to say, he can be mean but at least he isn't calling me a ****** anymore.

The sense of speed is awesome and even though some hazards can one shot kill you, boosting through most of them lets you dodge damage. You can also catch some impressive air time if you boost on a jump. The Ikaruga style colour switching to activate boosts enhances rather than annoys too which initially worried me. This is all stellar stuff and way worth the asking price.

I also love the camera which shifts just enough as to not invert controls but not enough to be always plabted behind you when you drive up a wall and shows you that you are actually sideways which adds to the dynamic look of the races, which is somethong MK8 and F-Zero doesn't do.

There's a lot of content with three difficulty modes, a time trial mode, a challenging 'hero mode' where your life is your boost (F-Zero style) and eery multiplayer option you can think of.

It also clocks in at 1080/60fps docked and 720/60fps undocked and no slowdown that i noticed.

If you want a Switch racer or the next best thing to F-Zero in an F-Zero-less world then this is the game you should buy.

It is pretty damn hard though... and I think it could have done with an F-Zero style attack because your car will spin out of hit by a boosting rival and if you get stuck inside the pack on a narrow there's no real way to escape unless you have boost juice.

8/10

 

[Castle]

Yakuza 0 - First Impressions

Okaaaay? This is the lauded Yakuza series? Weeeell...

Let's see: I'm 30 minutes in and all I've done so far is watched about 20 successive cutscenes that take way too long to play out, suck at establishing characters or even basic premise, are dumping loads of exposition so massive I can't tell what's essential and what's not... oh, and I've point A to point B walky talkied with a guy by holding down the R button to follow him more times than is necessary - which is at all, but so far we've done this three times.

And I've thrown a few punches.

Okay so this is Yakuza's combat???

This is a mess. Enemies swarm and get cheap sucker punches in from behind. Dude attacks in fits and starts. There is no flow to combat here. I swear I pressed that button to switch fighting stances and it completely ignored me... again. I keep repeating the same punch combo over and over. Does he even kick??? There's just no f-king way you can get this guy to attack whatever you want him to. Best you can do is point him in the general direction of something and let him awkwardly flail his arms at it. How are you supposed to dodge again? Why is it so needlessly complicated? Have a button. Make it dodge. How do you @#$% this up? Don't even bother trying to get him to pick up an environmental object when there is any enemy anywhere nearby. He won't grab it. He'll grab the enemy. And instead of picking up the incredibly useful sofa that does aoe knockdown damage to everybody in the room he'll grab a mook by the throat, lock himself in place and maybe get a couple of love taps in before any one of the other mooks slap him from behind before he can let go.

This is supposed to be better than Sleeping Dogs????

Okay, now we're in the open world part. I'm only two and a half hours in. Most of which have been cutscenes I've freaking skipped through. What? This isn't open world! This is two square blocks of twisty Tokyo alleyways, all alike. There isn't even any traffic! All there is are a bunch of Japanese 7-11s selling useless crap, the same Sega arcade featuring the same six Actraiser games and a claw machine, and the same easy fight with the same random goons on every street corner. I played one "sidequest" that was just a bunch of dialog. I got a shirt. woo-hoo.

WTAH am I playing??? I thought these games were supposed to be good? This is garbage!

 

[Spirit]

Yakuza 0 - First Impressions

Okaaaay? This is the lauded Yakuza series? Weeeell...

Let's see: I'm 30 minutes in and all I've done so far is watched about 20 successive cutscenes that take way too long to play out, suck at establishing characters or even basic premise, are dumping loads of exposition so massive I can't tell what's essential and what's not... oh, and I've point A to point B walky talkied with a guy by holding down the R button to follow him more times than is necessary - which is at all, but so far we've done this three times.

And I've thrown a few punches.

Okay so this is Yakuza's combat???

This is a mess. Enemies swarm and get cheap sucker punches in from behind. Dude attacks in fits and starts. There is no flow to combat here. I swear I pressed that button to switch fighting stances and it completely ignored me... again. I keep repeating the same punch combo over and over. Does he even kick??? There's just no f-king way you can get this guy to attack whatever you want him to. Best you can do is point him in the general direction of something and let him awkwardly flail his arms at it. How are you supposed to dodge again? Why is it so needlessly complicated? Have a button. Make it dodge. How do you @#$% this up? Don't even bother trying to get him to pick up an environmental object when there is any enemy anywhere nearby. He won't grab it. He'll grab the enemy. And instead of picking up the incredibly useful sofa that does aoe knockdown damage to everybody in the room he'll grab a mook by the throat, lock himself in place and maybe get a couple of love taps in before any one of the other mooks slap him from behind before he can let go.

This is supposed to be better than Sleeping Dogs????

Okay, now we're in the open world part. I'm only two and a half hours in. Most of which have been cutscenes I've freaking skipped through. What? This isn't open world! This is two square blocks of twisty Tokyo alleyways, all alike. There isn't even any traffic! All there is are a bunch of Japanese 7-11s selling useless crap, the same Sega arcade featuring the same six Actraiser games and a claw machine, and the same easy fight with the same random goons on every street corner. I played one "sidequest" that was just a bunch of dialog. I got a shirt. woo-hoo.

WTAH am I playing??? I thought these games were supposed to be good? This is garbage!

I've only played the remakes but...

I wonder if 0 uses the engine from 6. Remake 2 does and compared to the first game everything is really floppy and the fighting is less satisfying.

 

[Cfrock]

The Witcher
Decided to see what the hubbub was about, and I've been after a new fantasy series to take a bite out of, so when GOG had all three Witcher games (plus DLC) on sale for £17.30 I was like "Yoink! Gimme gimme."

I had a great time with the first game, for the most part. It would have been nice if I'd found the cure for drunkenness earlier as there are a fair number of quests that require you to get drunk, and that makes walking around a complete pain in my seat. Drowners (and Drowned Dead) spawn way too much, to the point when I couldn't enter certain doorways or caves because there was a fishdope somewhere that I couldn't see so I was technically in combat. I also don't really like how a very large number of quests come to a dead end with the journal saying something like "I'm sure some information will come along eventually," or "I'll wait and see what happens". It makes Geralt seem really passive and willing to just trust in fate which, considering I always chose dialogue options rejecting the very concept of fate, felt hypocritical and contradictory.

Also, Geralt loves to ****. I was generally aware that the Witcher was more open about sex than most other fantasy series are, but Jesus of Nazareth, Geralt loves to ****. I lost count of how many women I slept with by accident. At one point I gave bread to a starving elf woman who never stopped telling me she despises me and my kind and that I can shove my charity, only to have the conversation end with Geralt ****ing her. It's a wonder he gets any monster slaying done at all.

Generally speaking, though, it's a good game, if dated. It felt like the kind of thing I'd see on MandaloreGaming, an old game that's fairly rough around the edges but executes its core concept well enough to carry itself, but that will no doubt put a lot of potential players off due to that roughness. I said to a friend that it was clearly a game made by a relatively small team with far more ambition than experience. They did a good job, but there's a lot of room for improvement. If the reception of the next two games is anything to go by, I feel confident they filled that room.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215
I've not finished this, but I'm going to post about it because I'm not sure if I'm going to or not. I really can't decide.

Like Ghost Trick, I'd heard literally nothing bad about this game, so decided to finally pick it up and give it a go. I started it about a month ago and I'm only three chapters into it (in game-time, I've been in the hotel all of about ninety minutes). There's nothing wrong with it, I'm just not hooked into the story or the gameplay. I keep feeling like it'll grip me if I just go a little further, but I don't want to get to the end of the game that way. That would just leave me somewhat resentful.

It feels so slow and almost every conversation feels like it drags. I honestly (and this might sound stupid) feel like part of the problem is that you have to tap a specific tiny arrow in the corner of the screen to advance dialogue. If you could just tap the screen anywhere, like in most other DS games, I genuinely think I'd fall into a more natural rhythm with the game and be more inclined to play it. Outside of dialogue, you walk around a hotel rendered in that particular kind of crappy 3D the DS was capable off. It doesn't look or feel good. The sketchbook style of the characters is novel, but that's all, and the novelty wears off after a while. And the music, well, the music reminds me a lot of browser based porn games (hey, we were all teenagers once).

But like I said, I feel like the story is going to become interesting if I just stick around a little longer. But then I do and it doesn't. But that feeling is still there. So I don't know. I might carry on in the hope it gets better, or I might just say I gave it a chance and it didn't hook me, fair enough.

 

[Spirit]

Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna The Golden Country

This is a physical DLC release which is included in the XC2 season pass which you get with this game for free (to save downloading it and destroying your memory I guess).

I hated Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The battle system sucked, the characters sucked, there were one hit kill triple level monsters roaming around the opening areas and the time it took to kill everything took too long... and the first 20 hours of the story was boring as hell. I couldn't take it, I had to give up.

However, those who share my opinion on XC2 also played Torna and said it was everything the base game should have been.

XC2 is about 100 hours long. Torna is only 12 hours of story content.

The battle system is way better. The characters are far more interesting. The story is a prequel and rather intriguing.

It looks great and the music is rather wonderful too. All of my criticisms of XC2 have been rectified in Torna, but...

Torna is 12 hours of story. But there are a couple of points where you have to 'upgrade your community'. You community is made up of NPCs who dole out sidequests. Once these sodequests are completed they join your inner circle.

This means... sidequests ARE MANDATORY!

This game was doing so well. A concise and well-paced story with cool characters and some rather nice dialogue in places (outside of the usualy generic anime angst), but then everything falls apart when the game asks you to get damn near 100% completion to pad out the run time to make it feel like a longer game.

I am fine with 12 hours of enjoyable story. I am not okay when i have to put more than that into sidequests.

It isn't worth it.

So close MonolithSoft... So. Close.

 

[Morbid Minish]

Sonic Mania. Don't really have a rating for it because I'm not good at rating things. But I really like it. It's definitely the best Sonic game since the original 3. Really captured the feelings of those games which made me pretty nostalgic. The controls did feel a little sluggish at first but I eventually got used to them. I'd say the only things I didn't care for were that the levels felt too big for Sonic stages. I felt like I was missing a lot of stuff and you can't really explore in these games. I also didn't really care for the "catch the ufo" bonus stages. Seemed unnecessarily hard and I didn't get the concept the first go around. There were also a couple of bosses that weren't super intuitive which sucks when you have limited lives and can go through them quickly, which makes you do the entire zone over.

However, some of the bosses were really fun and unique. I thought the boss where you basically played Dr Mario against Robotnik was cool. And the stages felt fresh even though they took inspiration from the original games.

Overall I really enjoyed the game and love that it truly felt like the old games.

 

[Schneider]

Haven't been up with the latest releases of games and consoles alike for a few years but the last game I have played was Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition and I must say, it's beautiful.

9.5/10

 

[Ronin]

Pretty much encapsulates my own thoughts on the matter. The Heist itself definitely should've been in the main game since it's way too short for the price point and doesn't break any new ground. I'm going to wait on the other two to drop before making any further judgement calls...but Black Cat all the way. <3

 

[Caramel H]

Playing at the moment - Red Dead Redemption 2, I give that a 10/10

Completed - Doom 2016, and I also give that a whopping 10/10! I've been overwhelmingly pleased and satisfied by games I've played this year.

 

[Castle]

Red Dead is an unmitigated dumpster fire. A heaping wreck of strewn flaming garbage.

I haven't had a second's worth of fun playing this chunk o' sh-t. The parts that aren't achingly dull are chock full of so much asinine trial and error stupidity it's infuriating.

Every mechanic in this game is utterly broken. The controls were programed by a spastic twit.

You think you've done something right but the game just screws you over and does whatever it wants.

Thought you shot that deer in the neck? Naw, it got up and ran off.
Think your horse can jump over that rock? It's the same size as the last rock six feet away you just jumped over! Naw, you sprawled flat on your face and now your horse is dead.
Hold someone up? Uh-oh. The command to rob them that was just on screen disappeared just as you pressed it. Now your would be victim is shooting at you and you have to kill em.
And, oh look! A random NPC just spawned out of nowhere and reported the crime you committed through no fault of your own. Now your bounty just went up.
Did you think you were sneaking? No, whole camp's alerted.
Were you wearing your mask? Well the game doesn't think so. Crime reported. Bounty's gone up again.

Hundreds, maybe even thousands of little things like this. Whatever your intention was just now the game had some other idea, or pulls something out of nowhere and screws it up.

You don't play RDR2. RD2 plays you. You have no control. You are at its whims. And it will not permit you to have a solitary second of a good time.

I've played rockstar's trash before. I should've expected this.

 

[Rubik]

Tabletop Simulator

 

[Mido]

Kirby: Squeak Squad - B

You know a game can be a truly jolly time when the pursuit of a simple dessert treat can keep players invested. Kirby as a series tends to have such a likeable atmosphere that the games I find are generally difficult to dislike. The case is the same for this entry of the series, one I haven't played in several years properly, but decided to pick up again for a quick third playthrough. The story, while simple, is fun. The characters, while simple, are also fun (heck, it seems that the Squeaks are somewhat popular figures within the series in general as far as I can gather). The gameplay does not differ too far away from what one would expect and is a more traditional Kirby experience in comparison to the likes of its predecessor in Canvas Curse, but is still the fun experience one would expect from the franchise. Overall, this a safe game. Nothing is spectacular, yet everything is good in the sense that I cannot pick out anything that truly bothers me about the game. Simple and fun, an experience difficult to refuse.

 

[Spirit]

Steamworld Dig - 7/10

Pokemon Let's Go Eevee - 9/10