The last few games you beat and rate them 5

Section337

Registered User
Jul 7, 2007
5,374
758
Edmonton, AB
No Man's Sky - 8/10

Likely a game I liked better than it's actual caliber. Found it to be the ultimate explore, often half heartedly, low engagement game. Which sounds bad but I sunk hours into it.

Plus it is nice how it continues to get new content. Find myself still popping in to do a few things.

Assassin's Creed: Mirage - 6/10

I agree that Assassin's Creed games should be dialed back and become more focused. But at least make it interesting. A bland protagonist with enemies with simplistic motivations did not do it for me. Definitely my least favourite of the AC games I have played.

Actually would place it below many of the DLCs from the last 3 too-big and broad AC games.

Hogwart's Legacy - 7/10

A competent game that did a lot of things well but nothing was particularly spectacular. Not a Harry Potter fan but enjoyed my time playing. Would likely play another (after it was discounted as much as this one).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jovavic

Frankie Spankie

Registered User
Feb 22, 2009
12,432
442
Dorchester, MA
Slash Quest - 6/10
This is a cute little game where you basically spin around with your sword and use it to point in the direction you want to run in. The mechanics are interesting but until the last world, it starts to get a little repetitive. It's fun enough to give it a shot and the low price tag is right where it should be in my opinion.
 

Soedy

All Hail Cale
Nov 27, 2012
2,681
2,150
Hamburg, Germany
The Legend of Zelda - Wind Waker HD - 9/10
Liked the game overall. I would have appreciated much more in 2002 than today. The traveling is a bit annoying if you really want to go somewhere fast, but relaxing if you just want to explore. Just a step below OoT, BotW and TotK for me.
 

Ceremony

How I choose to feel is how I am
Jun 8, 2012
114,291
17,360
1730826651315.png

The Crew 2 (PS4, 2018)

The Crew 2 is an open world racing game set in a condensed map of the United States. Lots of major cities are recreated. As well as St. Louis. You can unlock vehicles across a range of racing and driving disciplines and compete in races and various events, earning money to unlock new ones and adding "followers" for doing... other stuff.

It's a bit odd for me to jump into a Ubisoft open world in 2024, but there is a reason for this. The new Test Drive Unlimited game was released recently and Ubisoft responded by putting The Crew 2 on sale at 79p. I'm not one to jump to the defence of anything Ubisoft do but this is top, top trolling and I was in the mood for a completely mindless timesink, so I jumped right in.

There are several different racing and driving disciplines to choose from. Boats, planes, bikes, monster trucks, demolition derbies and various kinds of racing all feature. There is a seemingly endless amount of events for you to compete in, with user-created content an option as well as online racing. I think I finished around 75% of the base events and I played the game for 45 hours. If you're a genuine completionist you can go up through two additional difficulty levels on each event, though this doesn't earn you anything except marginally more money.

Each type of vehicle you drive brings its own challenges. Powerboats are different to jetboats. Supercars are different to hypercars and touring cars are different to open wheel cars. The open wheelers are a bit disorientating though, if you spend a bit of time driving one of those then switch to anything else you'll go straight off the road or into the nearest wall because suddenly the brakes and steering don't work the way you're used to. Skill issue, I think the kids call it.

That said, some vehicles are just unpleasant and make the game feel like it's spread too thinly. Hovercrafts bring to mind a Jeremy Clarkson quote - "if you see anything in front of you, you will hit it." And you do. The AI doesn't have any difficulty in handling these though which is quite exasperating. The demolition derbies in particular are hilarious as the AI difficulty seems to be set to about 500%, bashing you around at will. That's the joy of the modern open world game though, if you don't like it you don't have to do it, so you just go somewhere else.

This is terrible though, obviously. And it actually sums up the biggest problem with The Crew 2, that being the sense that everything possible is being thrown at the wall to see what sticks. I said there's a lot to do and, well, there's too much. There's so much in fact the game can barely present it to you. You start off with a few events available on the map depending on what vehicle(s) you have. You gradually unlock some as your "follower" count goes up and as you buy new ones. Every time you do the game brings up the map and shows you all of the new icons that pop up until the map is covered in them.

This isn't so much overwhelming as incomprehensible, and a classic modern open world problem. You can't for one second limit the sense of freedom for the player, so instead of any sort of guidance or direction, let them do whatever they want before they've figured out how to do it. The game gets around this by listing every event by discipline and sorting them by difficulty in the pause menu, but if like me you use this you miss out on actually driving around the open world. Isn't that the point?

If that's the biggest problem, the second biggest is the upgrade system. I'm going to focus on the cars here because I know more about that and because the differences are starker than in boats and planes. All in all there are several hundred cars in the game. All very different, all very unique.

When you finish an event in the target position (either top 3 or 1st depending on difficulty) you'll unlock upgrade parts. There are seven different types (tyres, exhaust, gearbox etc.) and applying them makes your car perform better. There are colour-coded rarities for each part, and as you earn new ones the level on them goes up towards a maximum for each discipline, until eventually you get maxed out at whatever the limit is.

This means two things. One, the car you drive makes absolutely no difference. The parts you have applied are the only thing that matters and the actual difference between two fully upgraded cars in the same class is so miniscule it can only come down to personal preference. Two, there's no need to actually focus on driving or (the very limited) setup, just look at the parts when you're done and pick the one with the highest number.

I realised about halfway through my time with this game what it reminded me of. It's Borderlands with cars. Bounce around a big, largely superficial map while the occasional voice talks in your ear, look for colour coded objects after finishing missions and equip whichever one has the highest number. Great. At least you'll be stuck with whichever car you pick in each class anyway because they're all quite expensive and the rewards for winning races are not rewarding at all.

On that note about voices, the game is loosely centred around the premise of you being some upstart racing driver out to upset the resident leaders of their respective fields. It's all meaningless. Partly because you'll win every race with no problems if you keep upgrading, partly because none of them have a personality, partly because the bland character you pick doesn't have a personality (you're silent and nameless) and partly because if you switch between classes rather than just focus on one type of event you'll have different people talking to you all the time and you won't know who any of them are. I was never able to figure out the significance of 'The Crew' either. There are some people who purport to help you in game but absolutely nothing would be lost if they weren't there. You can join with people online, but you don't even get increased rewards for completing events with other people.

That reminds me of another problem. The game is always online. Why? It doesn't have to be. It's unnecessary and the backlash to the first The Crew game going offline and becoming unplayable shamed Ubisoft - shamed Ubisoft! - into creating a provision for when they eventually turn off the servers for this. The notion of always online gameplay and people losing access to things they've paid for and online spaces they spend time in is a debate which can be had at great length and it's not one I'm going to shoehorn in here, but I really don't understand what this game gains from having to be online. The servers aren't even very good either, I got disconnected quite a few times and this is several years after the game came out.

By the end of my time with The Crew 2 I couldn't quite decide if I liked the aesthetic or not. Oddly, the game's overwhelming and confusing menus offered a slight positive. It was many hours in before I realised there were several radio stations on offer to listen to. The game makes no mention of this at all (another victory for digital releases and no instruction manuals), so I spent most of the game listening to about six different songs on the ambient station. By the time I realised this and got to hear the others, I realised I was better off. The "rock" station is a particular lowlight, with everything sounding like that overproduced, inauthentic American garbage that was everywhere to start the 2010s. The Black Keys only have one song featured, but everything else might as well be by them. Stick with the default tunes.

There are lots of locations featured on the map and this is probably the game's most impressive feature. You can fast travel anywhere on the map instantly, with virtually no loading time. I don't think I heard my PS4 make a noise at any time either which these days is a genuine achievement. The miniature versions of various American cities all feature enough detail to be recognisable, although I found the range of off road courses in between more rewarding purely because of the greater sense of variety. When you're racing round one city, you might as well be racing round any of them. That said if you treat the game as an adventure, something to explore, it is presented engagingly.

The other problem with this concept is when you do recognise landmarks and layouts your mind starts to wander. I've driven around New York and Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto and it was better than this. I've driven around Miami and San Francisco in Driver and it was better than this. I've watched Frasier a million times and Pearl Jam is my favourite band, I know Seattle better than this. Maybe it's a symptom of me playing too many video games over the years but the cities I was familiar with just made me think of other games that did them better.

Ironically the game contains its own example of the problem in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a city built on simulacra. It gathers the world's landmarks and reproduces them in tacky miniature form. So does this game's Las Vegas. This Las Vegas features things already otherwise in the game. Ultimately while the idea of recreating the landmarks of a country as vast and diverse as the US is an interesting one, I don't think it's possible to do it deeply enough to feel worthwhile. The game doesn't feel empty - there's traffic and pedestrians and wild animals, though you'll just phase through the latter two which never stops being jarring - but it all feels like it's barely beyond surface level.

I will give the game credit for one thing in this regard, since I usually criticise it when it doesn't happen. The game has a photo mode. In fact it features several photo challenges to take pictures of certain things in certain places. When you enter photo mode you can change the weather and time of day, everything, but most importantly there's a rewind option. You don't have to pause the game exactly when you want to take a photo. Well done, points for that.

At 79p I can't really complain, but I'm not going to be in a rush to play The Crew Motorfest, which solves the location problem at least. I don't regret my time with The Crew 2, but I don't really think anything of it either which is probably a more damning conclusion.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Osprey

Soldier13Fox

jävlar anamma (f'ing embrace, get with it)
Sponsor
Oct 8, 2013
7,326
3,476
Coon Rapids
Nice buddy. Glad you’re liking it so far. Did you get anything on your hunting trip?
Did ok with the pheasants. Didn't limit out, but this trip was all about my new Vizsla with her first season hunting and she, while not perfect (wasn't expecting that) was awesome. So it's a win!
 
  • Love
Reactions: Rodgerwilco

Jovavic

Concept of a Plan
Oct 13, 2002
15,765
3,465
New Born Citizen Erased
Cloudpunk 7/10

Fun little story driven game, about eight hours long, solid voice acting and characters (especially Camus and Huxley), worth the 4 dollars I paid for it
 

Osprey

Registered User
Feb 18, 2005
27,920
10,802
I just finished Killing Time: Resurrected. It's the new remaster by Nightdive Studios of Killing Time, a 2.5D first-person shooter originally released for the 3DO in 1995 and then largely remade for Windows in 1996. It was completely unknown to me until a few days ago, but I trust Nightdive to remaster games worth playing, so I gave it a shot. I was impressed. Though the gameplay is very similar to other 90s shooters (Blood, especially, comes to mind) and unoriginal (i.e. run around, shoot enemies and pick up ammo, health and key cards), it is quite original in other ways.

First, it's set in the 1930s, but has ancient Egyptian enemies, as well as some goofy enemies like killer clowns and maids. It has a bit of quirky sense of humor. Second, the game world isn't a bunch of levels but one gigantic map that's almost seamless. When you move from one area of the map to another, there are no loading screens, just brief stuttering as the game loads the new area. It's pretty impressive for 1996. Third, the story is told through full motion video of costumed actors, not in cutscenes, but superimposed over the level in front of you as ghostly memories when triggered. It reminded me a lot of how later games like System Shock 2, BioShock and even recent games like Horizon: Zero Dawn also used a very similar device to tell their stories, just with 3D instead of FMV. It was neat to see an earlier example of it that I never knew about, as well as just a novel use of FMV.

Anyways, I enjoyed it. It was better than I expected for such an old game that I'd never played or even heard of. That's likely because the engine was already outdated when the game came out. As the graphics snob that I was at the time, I didn't pay any attention to 2.5D shooters like this after the fully-3D Quake was released earlier that year. I missed out, but I'm glad that I got to finally give it a chance and appreciate it, thanks to Nightdive (once again).
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Frankie Spankie

Frankie Spankie

Registered User
Feb 22, 2009
12,432
442
Dorchester, MA
Station to Station - 8/10
This is a really cozy/relaxing puzzle game. It's not much of a train sim or management game. It's about finding the optimal path and order to create rails in to hit your goals. Bringing more goods to one location from one track will give you stack bonuses so you really want to organize your map accordingly. My only complaint about it is that you'll unlock new buildings to put stations in as you get more money per map. You will often times end up blocking yourself because you don't know what the next buildings will be. They always appear in the same spots so I feel like you end up playing it once to beat the level and then your hopes of hitting the goals relies on remembering the buildings.

You can see the early signs of a construction site where the buildings will appear and hovering your mouse over them will give you a name but then it's up to you to remember what goods it needs and produces. It would be nicer if it would show you everything so you can plan better on your first go around.

However, that's more of an issue if you really want to hit all the goals. Simply beating the levels outright is fun on its own. I really enjoyed the game all the way through. It took me about 16 hours to 100% and I loved every minute of it!
 
  • Like
Reactions: Osprey

SimGrindcore

Registered User
Mar 16, 2021
495
331
www.facebook.com
Every year around Remembrance Day/Veterans Day, I play or replay a WWI or WWII themed game. This years I played 2:

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway (Xbox 360, 2008): 6/10

This game is a product of it's gaming era. The game was made by GearBox and feels like a clunky 1st person Gears Of War set during WWII. It's supposed to be a tactical shooter since you command up to 3 different squads. The problem is, except the bazooka squad, they can't kill anything. So you have to go from cover to cover to gun everything in sight. I enjoyed the slow motion when you get a headshot tho. Also, checkpoint are sparse so if you die, you have to replay great chunks of the game.

The good part is the writing. The story is interesting and it makes you care about your squadmates. But there are looooooong cutscenes. The game ends on a cliffhanger but the sequel was never made.

Call Of Duty: Vanguard (Xbox One, 2021): 8/10

This game had bad reviews right from the start but I always give COD a chance. I mostly play campaigns, but I can enjoy multiplayer and zombie mode.

Right from the bat, the campaign reminded me those from Battlefield 1 and 5 as you play different protagonists in different locations and times. It's a good thing because I really enjoyed those games. The gameplay feels snappy. It's so satisfying hitting a target.

Every protagonist have a special hability. For example, Polina's special is the hability to crawl into tight space and climb on wall and it reminded me of the constrictor harness in Wolfenstein 2 and the Far cry series, both games/series I'm a fan. There are fun stealth sections and fun action set pieces where you gun everything in sight with a HMG. There is a new "boss" enemy type who is a bullet sponge which is kinda weird for a COD game.

The story is fun but not really history accurate. Be open minded here. The are movie-like cutscenes in between missions and they are so well acted. It's a treat!

I got a question though: why there is always a plane mission in those WW games? I hate controlling a plane so much! Definately the downside of the campaign for me.

Multiplayer is fun and there was no snipers/campers in my games. Zombie mode is cool too
 

Frankie Spankie

Registered User
Feb 22, 2009
12,432
442
Dorchester, MA
I really loved the story in Hell's Highway and I'm still mad it ended on a cliffhanger with no sequel.

I haven't played it in probably over a decade now but I do specifically remember the gameplay was significantly better in Hell's Highway than the first two. If you didn't really care for Hell's Highway, do no waste your time on the other two.
 

Ad

Upcoming events

Ad

Ad