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Post by Wizzard_Ook on Sept 27, 2022 14:47:18 GMT
Journey To the Savage Planet (PS5)
Enjoyable exploration/Metroidvania with a good sense of humour and a good fun toolbox to play with. Just about the right length, (9/10 hours). Platforming and shooting can be a bit wonky, but its not really the main focus of the game so it doesn't irritate too much, but exploring and breaking down the game world is pretty fun.
4/5
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Sept 28, 2022 14:07:04 GMT
Disco is taking a bit long and as Halo 2 didn't work out, I did a quick replay of Half Life: Opposing Force (6 hours) on Hard.
Don't think I'd recommend it on that difficulty. It's perfectly playable, but it's basically a quickload fest. Half Life on Hard was tough in some parts of the second half, but overall it felt well balanced. Not so much with this one. Hitscan enemies having more health, hitting harder and the player getting less health from the health sources... everything combined is a bit much.
I think the health pool of the Black Ops soldiers is a bit on the high side and their Ninja buddies are extremely deadly when you can barely see their half invisible forms in the dark. They also move fast and are extremely accurate. And they show up in relatively high numbers in a few spots, whereas in HL there was basically just one big room with them where you had room to maneuver.
I also felt that the platforming was a bit more annoying in the first half, but that's maybe just me. I didn't remember how stupid the Marine buddies are though. They constantly get stuck and for whatever reason the Medics all were completely opposed (no pun intended) to healing me. They have no problem with taking care of their colleagues, but the only one that ever helped me out with Health was some scientist early on.
Edit: In terms of environments it could feel a bit disjointed. Transitions happen a lot and it can be disorienting. The first half especially is also a bit too eager to include nods to Half Life, but some of those sections and moments were still fun and sometimes well integrated.
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malek86
Junior Member
Pomegranate Deseeder
Posts: 3,176
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Post by malek86 on Sept 28, 2022 21:25:17 GMT
Ghostrunner (PC)
Basically a twitch platforming shooter in 3D. The speed and abilities make for some blood-pumping action, but the perspective feels unfair at times (enemies will shoot you in the back more often than not), and the gameplay loop never really changes. Even if new enemies are sometimes thrown in for good measure, each is almost always more annoying than the last.
The story and characters are also extremely predictable. Probably doesn't matter much, given the kind of game, but still.
At least the visual style is quite impressive, and the cyber-era tunes are pleasant to the ears.
7/10
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MolarAm🔵
Full Member
Bad at games
Posts: 6,665
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Oct 1, 2022 15:20:53 GMT
I finished Triangle Strategy.
Well, finished one of the endings. There's a pretty comprehensive New Game+ that lets you go and try for more of them.
It's worth playing! The story is good, you get to make interesting decisions that actually make a huge difference, and the tactical battling is a lot of fun too. It gets a bit grindy at points, but you could easily get it done in 40 hours or so.
Do recommend.
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mrharvest
New Member
Registered 18 years ago Posts 5,718
Posts: 373
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Post by mrharvest on Oct 1, 2022 17:53:12 GMT
I finished 2 full playthroughs and one side jobs / gigs only of Cyberpunk 2077.
Now I have no mojo to play anything else. I'm installing Guild Wars 2 and I'll give it a go.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2022 18:45:04 GMT
Yeah, I finished my "all" gigs and jobs playthrough last night. Well, couple things. I say all, but I only mean clearing out the map. I'm not including whatever emergent quests you find just by exploring, or some that take a few days after completing other quests to trigger. Also I finally did most of the endings, besides the secret one which I was apparently supposed to have said very specific lines of dialogue to trigger earlier on.
I am so done with this game, but really only because I went and ran through the final mission four times and I am over it. It's still a good game, but I've played it too much these past few weeks.
I might either go back to the Final Fantasy X HD playthrough I started a little while ago, or give Valkyrie Elysium a go next. Thing is, I just don't want to get into another open world game any time soon, especially since I have the meaty Star Ocean The Divine Force waiting for me later this month.
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Post by roastinglbs on Oct 1, 2022 19:19:02 GMT
Bayonetta 2, 3rd time finished and still as wonderful as ever. Now ready for the third installment!
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mrharvest
New Member
Registered 18 years ago Posts 5,718
Posts: 373
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Post by mrharvest on Oct 1, 2022 19:35:28 GMT
I might either go back to the Final Fantasy X HD playthrough I started a little while ago, or give Valkyrie Elysium a go next. Thing is, I just don't want to get into another open world game any time soon, especially since I have the meaty Star Ocean The Divine Force waiting for me later this month. Mmmhm. I think I do want another open world first person RPG. But I'm also thinking maybe Final Fantasy X-2. I remember I loved it back in the day. I just don't know if I have the patience for JRPGs and their plodding pace though.
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Post by pierrepressure on Oct 2, 2022 11:26:57 GMT
Rayman Legends - 7.5/10
Very good but due to the size of the game it started to out stay it's welcome.
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Post by dfunked on Oct 2, 2022 11:58:32 GMT
Bayonetta 2, 3rd time finished and still as wonderful as ever. Now ready for the third installment! I haven't managed to finish it once for some reason. Tried playing it twice but just drifted away. Weird considering how much I loved the original.
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Duffman5
Junior Member
big cook, little cook welcome to our cafe
Posts: 1,332
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Post by Duffman5 on Oct 2, 2022 13:03:20 GMT
Chernobylite Time: 25 hours approx Cheveo 980/1000 (1 cheve glitched, not bothered) Skill: Easy (do not play on this skill, default at least)
Excellent game, do not usually play Resource management games (didn't realise this was actually one!) and I probably did myself a disservice by not playing on a harder difficulty, in as much as I never felt I was in that much peril, nor that my comrades were. If I had played on higher settings I would have been forced into making decisions that may have effected the camp and mission structure. Even with that I really enjoyed the story and gameplay loop. Speaking of story you can change it up a fair bit by revisiting and changing past decisions that change the story in real time. You can add up to five team mates (ai of course) that you can send on missions either to scout and thin out hostile areas or complete certain tasks to gain the base food etc. They will even go on a main quest but purely for reconnaissance. The final mission is great fun and is played out as a "heist" with multiple choices of who does what and what may become of them ? The base building is very FO4 so not too tricky, you also have food and first aid management for the crew.
10/10
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Oct 2, 2022 17:56:48 GMT
Disco Elysium (43 hours):
It dragged quite a bit on Days 1 and 2 and at the end of Day 4 I was kind of stuck again. There is a particular [Shivers] check, that I couldn't get past before doing a particular quest, but doing the Cryptozoologist quest made the check much, much easier. Got into a certain kerfuffle at the end of Day 5, lost about two days and then eventually finished it in the first hours of Day 8, right after midnight. Managed to finish it off with what seemed like acceptable results.
I'm probably just repeating what way too many people have already said, but the dialogue is really well written and frequently funny and quite self-aware. Lots of dialogue checks and other checks in the environment and the checks often communicate with each other. Not sure about how much the Thoughts I internalized did do though. I mean, outside of providing certain stats and so on. At the least it was never explicitly communicated.
Voiceacting was mostly well done too and I eventually warmed up to the music. It's really quite fitting. It just took me a bit to get used to it.
The art style and the animations are surprisingly well done and there is a lot of detail.
You see, all this praise feels a bit redundant
The only real criticism I can think of is that it seems easy to get stuck and the game doesn't always provide enough avenues to keep things going (even though the game is often straightforward about what the player should do next). There are usually quests that can allow you to retry the so-called "White Checks" and make them easier or you can invest a skill point in whatever is being checked. And that's definitely good design, but at times all available checks could be too hard and investing one skill point would often not help at all. On the other hand, asking the right questions or doing some other side task could make some checks so much easier that it could feel like it trivializes the player's attribute build. Save scumming to pass checks was also a thing. Failing was often fun and supported by even more good writing, but at least for me it didn't always feel like I could afford it. There are only so many skill points to retry checks and oftentimes it just didn't feel good to fail something just because a dice roll had only middling chances. It was also hard to know what the game actually lets the player get away with. What I mean is the question, how much you can afford to fail and just roll with it. Investing points into the attributes you currently need and so on. The attribute bonuses from clothes were at times pretty helpful though.
Edit: I relied on Psyche and Intelligence for the most part, but clothes raised some Motorics- and Physique-skills quite a bit as well. I played a boring/sad cop that tried to be friendly to everyone and as normal as possible. Even got an achivement to show for it
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MolarAm🔵
Full Member
Bad at games
Posts: 6,665
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Oct 2, 2022 20:56:56 GMT
My cop was a hot, self-contradictory mess. I even got dialogue to the effect of "he seems to be both a hardcore communist and a dedicated fascist at the same time, I'm not sure how that works". I think Kim was disappointed in me.
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Vortex
Full Member
Harvey Weinstein's Tattered Penis
is apparently a mangina.
Posts: 5,252
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Post by Vortex on Oct 2, 2022 22:01:03 GMT
Deathloop.
Amazeballs/10
Loved it. Didn't think i would manage it for a while, but it leads you nicely through it.
Now, do i try again and not kill that last visionary or two and see what happens then?
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Post by simple on Oct 3, 2022 0:02:22 GMT
Little Nightmares
This was a nice quickie. The creepy imagery is surprisingly atmospheric considering how cliche a lot of it is. I suppose that the game goes for dread rather than jump-scares helps in that regard.
The gameplay a bit sparse but I’m a fan of something smaller hitting its targets and doing its own thing as opposed to massive games trying to do everything. The puzzles mostly made me think of Limbo, simple ideas that require some lateral thinking and precision. The stealth sections mostly made me think how much I hate insta-fail stealth as a mechanic. The check point system is extremely generous so its not too bad but it did feel like it was designed for you to fail a lot of moments at the first attempt then work out why next try. Unless I just sucked at it.
7/10
Cursed To Golf
This is a lot of fun. Big bright 16-bit style artwork and music really fit in well with its spooky sports theme which I love (Basketball Nightmare got a lot of time from me and my brother as kids). Its essentially a roguelike dungeon crawler but with golf inspired physics puzzles instead of combat.
Lots of bonus powers and crazy environmental hazards help keep it fresh and the gameplay loop is very enjoyable.
Only real downsides for me are how much time it spends holding you back from playing the game. The tutorials are long and mostly unskippable and they keep coming back you in the first zone. And even after that each hole starts with a too long preview of the course content.
Still when it lets you play its marvellous.
8.5/10
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Oct 3, 2022 5:58:19 GMT
My cop was a hot, self-contradictory mess. I even got dialogue to the effect of "he seems to be both a hardcore communist and a dedicated fascist at the same time, I'm not sure how that works". I think Kim was disappointed in me. I mostly went with the "none of the above"-approach, which of course the game repeatedly and rather gleefully commented on. Though it seemed to have some difficulty deciding if my character was just really, really boring or some variation of neo/liberal/bourgeois.
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MolarAm🔵
Full Member
Bad at games
Posts: 6,665
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Oct 3, 2022 6:05:16 GMT
My cop was a hot, self-contradictory mess. I even got dialogue to the effect of "he seems to be both a hardcore communist and a dedicated fascist at the same time, I'm not sure how that works". I think Kim was disappointed in me. I mostly went with the "none of the above"-approach, which of course the game repeatedly and rather gleefully commented on. Though it seemed to have some difficulty deciding if my character was just really, really boring or some variation of neo/liberal/bourgeois. Yeah, the game characterises that as you being a filthy status-quo centrist. The quest associated with it is to form a committee to decide whose responsibilty it is to fix things. Which feels pretty on point. They poke shit at other political affiliations too. But the developers are pretty outspoken socialists, so the communists are treated a bit more lovingly.
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Oct 3, 2022 6:23:51 GMT
I think Kim was disappointed in me. I think he was disappointed in me too. The shootout didn't go too well for me. Boring cop was too concerned about everybody getting along that he didn't take his shot until it was too late. Add in low Motorics and Kim surely was quite, uh... hurt by it.
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MolarAm🔵
Full Member
Bad at games
Posts: 6,665
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Oct 3, 2022 6:29:38 GMT
But then you get a weirdly aggressive ginger kid as your partner, so that's all good.
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Oct 3, 2022 6:34:05 GMT
So this always happens? I was under the impression that you need to actually do the Cuno/Cunoesse-quest. Or at least the Cryptozoologist/Locust-quest. I was wondering if he would show up if you don't bother with all of that.
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MolarAm🔵
Full Member
Bad at games
Posts: 6,665
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Oct 3, 2022 6:41:23 GMT
He shows up if Kim gets shot. The last bit of the game requires you to have a partner, and if Kim is unavailable the next logical choice is the weird ginger kid that yells at you all the time because he's on drugs.
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Oct 3, 2022 7:57:50 GMT
He's not so bad, but I'll try to avoid that outcome next time. My skillset wasn't really suited to these kind of situations this time around.
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Post by Phattso on Oct 3, 2022 9:18:25 GMT
Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart 8/10
I'm not a huge fan of the series, so was mainly pootling about in this to see the shinies. It is quite shiny, but replete with so many rough edges that I wasn't expecting. Amazingly rapid loading aside - and that really is still the next-gen MVP for me - the environments are quite simplistic, the interactivity limited, camera glitches out the wazoo, weapon selection bugs, and there's some fairly dodgy traversal.
And yet I played the absolute shit out of it. After a few hours I started to "get" the game a bit more, branched out with the weapons, and really got a kick out of combat encounters that would have been sickeningly repetitive in almost any other game. I was enjoying smacking the shite out of things right up to the very very end.
So yeah - does what it sets out to do really, really well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not sure I can be arsed hunting for Teddy Bears for the Platinum, but more than happy with the mileage I've gotten from the game. I even completed the Arena missions, FFS.
I've given it an 8, but really it's a Saturday Morning Cartoon With Matching Difficulty / 10.
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Post by Gearoid on Oct 3, 2022 9:41:18 GMT
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Completed the main story at 150 hours as I ran around doing lots of side quests and finding additional heroes. Fun combat, wonderful map to explore and great world building, surprisingly dark story at times. Highly recommended!
10/10
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MolarAm🔵
Full Member
Bad at games
Posts: 6,665
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Oct 3, 2022 11:19:21 GMT
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Completed the main story at 150 hours as I ran around doing lots of side quests and finding additional heroes. Fun combat, wonderful map to explore and great world building, surprisingly dark story at times. Highly recommended! 10/10 What did you think about the photo at the end? (only relevant if you've played XC2)
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askew
Full Member
Posts: 6,603
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Post by askew on Oct 3, 2022 14:37:24 GMT
August 2018: I purchased Prey to go alongside my newly purchased Xbox One S September 2022: I finished Prey on my Xbox Series S.
I think that does it a disservice: it's a fantastic game, though not without the odd difficulty spike - particularly if you have been stingy with the Neuromods thinking they are a finite resource…
I recall getting stuck against the first couple of Phantoms, as I'd missed the shotgun. Then RDR2 came out and that took over. I had another session when I got the Series S last summer, and then another blip getting stuck trying to save the characters who had been Mindjacked in the Arboretum.
I almost lost patience on the final run, as the Military Operators became pretty tedious: a fully-upgraded Stun Gun became my go-to solution.
40 hours on the clock as the credits ran, though nearer 45 with replaying sections after deaths. I do fancy a New Game+ in the future, _if_ I can turn on some of the survival options which were patched in. Otherwise, I'll finish my Deathloop replay and delve into Mooncrash.
I think it's my favourite game of the last few years.
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Vortex
Full Member
Harvey Weinstein's Tattered Penis
is apparently a mangina.
Posts: 5,252
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Post by Vortex on Oct 3, 2022 15:29:40 GMT
Prey is lovely. Glad you finally got there and finished it.
Disclaimer: I didn't play it for ages, since it wasn't like the original or even really related to it. I regretted that decision to delay playing it right away when I realised it was brilliant!
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Post by Gearoid on Oct 3, 2022 17:57:59 GMT
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Completed the main story at 150 hours as I ran around doing lots of side quests and finding additional heroes. Fun combat, wonderful map to explore and great world building, surprisingly dark story at times. Highly recommended! 10/10 What did you think about the photo at the end? (only relevant if you've played XC2) I thought, I hope that's part of the expansion pass.
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askew
Full Member
Posts: 6,603
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Post by askew on Oct 3, 2022 21:26:48 GMT
Prey is lovely. Glad you finally got there and finished it. Disclaimer: I didn't play it for ages, since it wasn't like the original or even really related to it. I regretted that decision to delay playing it right away when I realised it was brilliant! Thanks! I'm a big fan of the Dishonored series, so I'm not totally sure why I overlooked it during its 2017 release. I think I'd been distracted by life at that point and found myself playing fewer video games until the autumn. I didn't realise it was going to be such a lengthy game. I mean, I'd seen the Xbox app pulls in HowLongToBeat data, and reckons 7 hours for the main story?! 10 hours completionist?! It must be the wrong Prey: I don't think I even reached the lobby for several hours
Facepalm moment: it was only in the last few hours I recalled the spacesuit had a booster. Remember there's a satellite and a space shuttle? I was flying to them at 1.49m/s. I was glad to have discovered the ability in time to scan the Coral because I had to make some hasty getaways from some Technopaths
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Post by bichii on Oct 3, 2022 21:51:28 GMT
Prey is on the "I really must complete that again" list. The mooncrash dlc is worth every penny. It's like deathloop but way better.
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