The last few games you beat and rate them 5

[The Mars Volchenkov]

Last Case of Benedict Fox - 7.5/10

Really enjoyed the art style and the game itself. A fair bit of stuttering and had some issues with powers just disappearing and having to reload from saves. It’s like a poor mans Deaths Door or Tunic.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

Just fully beat “Grand Theft Auto 2” for the PS1 again like an hour ago for the first time in years, again all thanks to emulation.

And by “fully” I mean I beat all 67 playable missions across all 3 districts. Not just beaten as in the usual “ooooh I have enough cash to progress to the next district!!” kinda way

8/10

 

[The Mars Volchenkov]

Ravenlock - 8/10

Super short game, I think I beat it in under four hours. Not exactly challenging, either. But it’s a super chill game with a fun story.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Resident Evil 4 - 9/10

I tried playing the original like 8 years ago and thought it aged poorly and gave up before I even reached the castle. I'm glad they remade it because it gave me a chance to finally play the game on a modernized engine. It's an absolute classic that I finally get to experience. I loved it all the way through. The world was great, the characters were great, the story was great. I still liked Resident Evil 7 the most but this is a close second. I thought the bosses were more interesting in 7 vs 4 but still a great game.

 

[pistolpete11]

Kena : Bridge of Spirits - 8.5/10

Really enjoyed it. I've seen some people call the combat basic, but I don't really agree. It might look basic because there's not a bunch of different weapon types with different move sets, but you've got a light attack, a heavy attack, a charged heavy, a bow that can be charged and/or put into bullet time, throwable bombs, a shield, a parry, dodge, a jump and a double jump that will both go into bullet time if you cock your bow, a dash, and your little helper guys called 'rot' that you've got to make a decision with. The rot builds up with successful hits and if you break some crystals on some of the enemies. Then you can use it to either heal with flowers in the arena (usually only 1 or 2 are available), attack/distract the enemies, or to do a special attack with your staff, bow, or bombs. It's simple, but it adds a level of strategy to the fights. On top of that, the arenas can get quite hectic with a bunch of different enemies running around. Point being, there's a lot going on as is. You can string stuff together however you see fit. Having more complex combat would be overwhelming......The animation is great. The story is short and sweet, but the music and animation add a lot of depth to it. A lot of little stuff like a raised eyebrow goes a long way in telling the story......The Pixar-like art style was also nice change from the Soulsborne darkness, blood, and gore. There's still corruption that you work to clear, but it's all very "cute" and positive. Deceivingly cute given how difficult the combat is.....I've also seen people complain that the skill tree is too simple. It is simple, but I like that. You only have a choice between a few things at a time, so just pick one and get back to the game. You don't spend 10min staring at a menu screen while you figure out what stat to increase by 1 or what you need to upgrade your weapon or which outfit gives you the best stats......It's a semi open world. You're kind of limited to certain paths until you unlock some abilities. I enjoy that though because then it doesn't fall victim to the usual pitfalls of an open world......It doesn't overstay its welcome. There are optional trials if you want more game play, but it never felt like it was dragging......

Combat and art style are 2 of the biggest things for me and I think Kena mostly nails both, but I have a lot of kind of nit-picky complaints.....The bosses were tough, which is fine, but it was the kind of hard that almost demands you be perfect because of how hard they can hit and how limited healing is. Not my favorite style of bosses......The exploration was too often for gems that could only be used for cosmetic stuff, but you kind of have to explore to find enough of the little rot guys to level them up. There was also occasionally something to give you a different currency that could be spent in the skill tree. There are also meditation spots that raise your max health. You definitely don't want to miss out on those. It was really frustrating to figure out a puzzle just to be rewarded with more gems, though, and it happened too often.....The lock on was wonky. Sometimes you'd lose it whenever a boss moves too fast, but that's when you need lock on. It would also kind of get stuck sometimes if the boss is one of the one's that teleports. After a while, I just stopped using it altogether......The platforming seemed a little off too. Not that bad, but something just didn't seem quite right......I liked the story overall, but there's very little about Kena herself. Would have been nice to flesh her character out a little more.

Overall, a great game. It doesn't reinvent the wheel by any means, but it executes everything well. Hard to believe it was the studio's first game.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Dead Space remake - 8.5/10

Excellent remake , game looked and sounded great, and it had been so long since I played the original, I had forgotten many details so it felt fresh

 

[JaegerDice]

Redfall - 7/10

This game is kind of a charming mess. It’s basically a ton of great ideas and fun mechanics tossed in a stew that just didn't quite come together.

In terms of presentation (visuals, music, dialogue, etc), it evokes a pastiche of Vampire touchstones, from Salem’s Lot to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Playing as Devinder, the gadgety Vampire ‘truther’ kook, there’s a lot of ‘Real Ghostbusters’ vibes too. The ambient music shines, going from playful to creppt and dire seamlessly and on perfect cue with the scenario.

Its not particularly impressive on the technical level. That 60fps patch cant come soon enough. The art-style is somewhat akin to Dishonored 1, almost impressionist in a way. Its not shooting for photorealism so such as broad strokes and caricature in the faces and silhouettes. The open-world environments are large, varied, and have a good amount of environmental detail to build up the setting, but there arw times while runninh between objectives that it feels empty.

The major problem with the game is the AI. It’s just garbage. You can see the DNA of Arkane’s previous games in them, but the developer clearly had trouble making their AI work in a malleable open world as compared to the much more constrained puzzle scenarios of a Dishonored.

For all its lack of polish though, playing through the game with 3 friends, combining our character skills, and tackling missions in different ways was a blast. This is still an Arkane game, which means every objective has multiple routes, multiple options, very few ‘wrong’ answers. Surveying the area from the perimeter, strategizing a bit, and then going loud was a fun social gameplay loop. When our plans came together as intended, we felt like geniuses. When we botched it and had to fight our way through with our hair on fire, that was fun too.

I cant recommend Redfall for $70. But if you have Gamepass, it’s worth a shot. Im going through solo on a second character just to get him leveled.

I hope we see long-term support for this like we did Sea of Thieves. There’s something worth building on here, despite a rough launch.

 

[Ceremony]

​

Need for Speed (PS4, 2015)

Need for Speed is the fourth Need for Speed game I've ever played. I don't think I've sampled the high points of the series (Shift, Payback and Heat prior to this) but even with this in mind I feel as if I've always been in a state of rapidly diminishing returns. I'll grant some leniency for this being the first game of the 8th console generation, but that doesn't absolve all of its flaws.

You are... a person. You arrive in... a city. I think it's named but I don't remember. You turn up, you go to a garage and get to pick a car - a Honda Civic, a Subaru BRZ and something else I don't remember because obviously I picked the Civic. You then drive in a series of events progressing five different "storylines". You have races, time trials, drifts, Togue runs - which is drifting with other people to get in the way, and a Gymkhana mode which offers no points for air time, effectively making it drifting but against the clock. You can buy an assortment of cars to use in these events, with a range of impossible upgrades to their performance. The range of cars on offer is actually very good. I'll always give points to a street racing game which lets you make a Volvo 240 drift or go near 200 miles per hour.

As I worked my way through the events I actually found myself enjoying the driving. I think the game is old enough that there's a simplicity to the physics. Regardless of the upgrades you install or the "tuning" you do, brute force seems to be the best way to get a car round a corner. Drifting is similarly easy and can be cheesed with no problems, but it's still satisfying to get a long slide just right. Of the Need for Speeds I've played, Payback had the best balance in terms of tuning and handling, allowing you to change your car's stats as you were driving. Here, if you want to do a race and then a drift you have to go back to the garage to change car or tune what you're already in. The whole feeling is just a bit clunky, and I'm glad it was refined in later games. You'll enjoy the driving you do, you're just stuck with it unless you go through the game's awkward menus to get back to the garage.

Nothing defines a street racing game quite like the streets you race on. I think in a previous Need for Speed writeup I lamented that the pinnacle of genre, the original Midnight Club, remained both unmatched. Pretty much any kind of open world game is defined by its world, but when all you can do is drive it takes on extra importance. Need for Speed takes place... somewhere. There are buildings. There's a twisty bit in some mountains. I think it has a name but I honestly don't remember, and I don't think it came up often. There are some other cars on the roads but the whole place just feels lifeless. I don't know how the maps for these kinds of games are designed. I don't know if the map comes first and then the events are plotted around the streets, or if it's the other way round. This honestly feels like both, yet neither at the same time.

The lack of anything engaging in the map isn't helped by the game's graphics. There are many problems here. The game permanently takes place at night. While this is presumably intended for the whole street racing thing as well as making everything look cool and sleek and reflective, the actual result is like a big action film from the mid-90s where everything happens at night in the rain to compensate for the unconvincing CGI. A lot of the time it was genuinely difficult to focus on what was happening. I was reminded of a time last year when my TV broke and bought a 720p one without realising and spent the weekend thinking I was going blind. In a game series which is as much about image as anything else, I'm surprised the imagery here is so muddled. You can't see the city, you can't see the cars. Not a great combination.

There is, technically, a story in this game. Technically there are five stories. There are five sequences of events you can progress through, with a different character from your group of friends taking the lead for each storyline. I urge you to look up a video compilation of them online. I think I've only ever seen bits of the Fast and Furious films, but I've seen enough. I'm not as interested in cars and car culture as I was in my teens, and I'm not as interested in motorsport or sim-racing as I was a few years ago, but I know enough. I've also never been to America, or California, which I think is supposed to be inspiration for the game's location. With all of these caveats in mind, the cutscenes and characterisation in Need for Speed are not only cringe-worthy, embarrassing, hilarious or outright hollow, they simply do not reflect any sort of reality which has ever occurred on this planet.

Your own character is never named. I think I realised once I was finished that the "GHOST" on your default license plate refers to the game's developer rather than you, but at least it could be considered ambiguous. The other freaks you get to see though, oh no. The cutscenes are actual proper video with real actors (I've even seen one of them in something) and none of it feels real. They don't talk like humans. They don't behave like humans. None of their surroundings look like things that have ever happened to humans. None of the interactions seem connected to anything that happens. There's a point where the big Hispanic guy whose hair is a bunch of... I don't know the name, tiny braids like you'd let a child do to you on a rainy day, there's some suggestion he's been inappropriate. You hear this in some phone conversations which happen in between events to progress the plot, but none of it makes sense. Nothing actually happens. You meet up with all of them and everything is fine. I don't know who this stuff is supposed to appeal to, but I now understand where the awful characterisation in Payback in Heat came from. Unbound doesn't look much better.

I could forgive this since it's so funny, but for one thing. You know how in films and TV people drinking or eating will very obviously not actually eat or drink anything, ostensibly because they'll be doing multiple takes with the same props? If not you do now. Television is now ruined for you. Every cutscene with these alien imposters features several cans of obviously unrefrigerated Monster. All of them have one all the time, and there's obviously nothing in them. It's all very bizarre, but the one positive here is that it remains entertaining all the way through.

Coming to the game sometime after its release I'm not sure how the various additions to the game were added, but each of the game's five storylines is centred around an "Icon", who the characters all... well, idolise. I actually like this. With the forgettable map and ridiculous characters, it's a good thing to try and connect the game to some existent aspect of car culture. Ken Block is in it, and I know him. I knew who he was before he died. I've seen the HOONIGAN cars with 43 on them. Do you know who Ken Block is? Fine. Do you know who Magnus Carlsen is? Magnus Carlsen is a chess player, I can't even make my own point properly. Do you know who Magnus Walker is? He's a guy with a beard who really likes Porsches. He pops up with no introduction. Everybody loves him, he's the best driver ever and everyone wants to beat him. Who is this guy?

Do you know who Nakai-san is? Do you know who Shinichi Morohoshi is? No. The characters do though. They idolise them, but they don't seem that bothered in explaining who any of them are. All of this - the lifeless map, the absurd characters, the apparently significant Icons who are never introduced and whose terrible acting talents make the cutscenes even more surreal - just ends up feeling like it gets in the way, really. As entertaining as the terrible cutscenes were, and as brief as the storylines are, they all felt like they were getting in the way of the driving I was enjoying. That's never good.

At release, much was made of this game being always-online. You can play solo, but you need to be connected and if you're in an online map there will be other players driving around who you can challenge to races, or who can do the generally online open world thing and just drive into you. I completed and platinumed the game without this ever really being a problem - I'll come to my experience with the limited online later - and it occurred to me how desensitised I've become to the notion of online-only games. On the face of it I'm fairly traditionalist in my approach to games. I prefer to buy where possible, and buy physical at that. Trophies and the notion of completionism have turned games into something of a checklisting experience for me, but on the whole I feel that's a positive improvement because I get more out of a game at the time, even if I don't return to as many as often as I might have done before.

The notion of a game, or console, requiring an online connection to function is pure bullshit, however. It's not something I would ever support because it's so obviously unnecessary. The idea of not being able to access something for no real reason other than the publisher's whim is abhorrent. I played this game with very few of the online features making a difference. I applied some liveries to cars, but that's about it. Even still, there's a time where I would have heard about a game like this and never even contemplated it. I actually didn't realise it was a thing when I bought this game in a sale ages ago. Whoops.

One thing to add here is that, eight years after it was released, the online connectivity doesn't seem very stable. Play for a while and you'll get a message popping up saying "The server you are in will shut down in 30 minutes." This seems to be a problem the game developed over the years. I don't know why. The messages count down but you can easily quit and join a new game with a new server and no problems. I'm only guessing here when I say this is related to the game's age (perhaps I'm giving EA too much credit) but it's a strange quirk, and a frequent reminder of the game's impermanence.

Despite this, I don't really mind. I think I've become desensitised to this level of anti-consumer nonsense. Gran Turismo Sport is the most formative game I've played and that was always online. But then, the point of that game was online competition. I suppose in a very convoluted, unnecessary way, I'm trying to say games requiring an online connection are situational. If I lost internet access I'd still be able to play Rocket League, but the main gameplay mode would be inaccessible and the experience would be pretty rubbish. If I had no internet access I wouldn't be able to play Need for Speed, but if I could then there would be no appreciable difference to ~99% of the game's content. That's not right. I don't know where the trend for this sort of thing sits in the games industry overall for AAA games nowadays (this was 2015 and the 'live service' model has since exploded and died), but at least subsequent Need for Speeds ditched something so unnecessary. Good.

As I mentioned, some content got added to this game post-release. Part of this content was Prestige Mode, which added new levels of targets for each event. This was the reason I actually bought this game, as the trophy for earning a gold medal in each Prestige event is one of the hardest racing game achievements there is. I've managed quite a few hard racing games in my time. Gran Turismo 5. Trackmania Turbo. WipEout HD. Need for Speed has forty events. I tried two of them in Prestige mode, got a silver medal and a fail, and gave up.

There are videos online of people speedrunning Prestige. Getting gold in every event one after the other. I think all of them take about three hours. Any sort of skill-based game looks easy when you see it played well but I didn't even need it to realise I was never getting near this mode. It wasn't just the gameplay, or the weird graphics that put me off. It wasn't the other cars on the road which I just know would have had me throwing things at the wall. It wasn't the very deliberate means of car control for each game mode. It wasn't even the violence with which I was having to steer, and knowing I could easily go through several controllers and not actually beat anything.

No, none of those things put me off trying to do Prestige mode. Actually that last one with the controller did a bit, I can't overstate how much I was wrenching the steering around. What put me off eventually was just a lack of interest. For the first time in a while with a game I was able to look at what I was trying to do - something I wanted to do, something I had fully intended to do, something I'd be proud of doing... and it didn't matter. I'm alright with leaving it. I realise I've veered quite far into self-indulgence if you've read this far, but I'm surprised and quite heartened by how quickly I gave up.

What can we take from all this? A few things. The original Midnight Club remains unmatched, and anyone making a street racing video game should be made to play that to 100% first. Games with heavily integrated online functionality will only persist in the hearts and minds of people who cherished them. If you have a can of Monster in your hand you should probably rethink your life choices. Especially if you're being filmed. Life is too short to play video games you're not going to enjoy. It's taken me a long time to write this because I'm getting increasingly procrastinatory in my old age so it might not all make sense, but I think I'm done. I enjoyed my time with it, but that was enough.

 

[The Nemesis]

Been playing a bunch more retro stuff.

Tonight I just finished The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (DS, 2009) for the first time as part of my bid to try and complete every major Legend of Zelda game before I even consider buying Tears of the Kingdom (because my backlog is huge and in spite of loving Zelda I had only beaten like 3 of the games in the series before last year).

I like the aesthetic of the game (it's toon link/zelda in the vein of Wind Waker) and I love the fact that the core gameplay has Zelda as a companion who is there to help you solve dungeon puzzles as Link. It's a unique twist from usually having Zelda as the damsel in distress or an outside force who only intervenes at a handful of important moments. She also gets to have a real personality as well, being playful and sarcastic and seemingly enjoying getting to have a friend in Link rather than being a solitary princess and that's a fun change of pace.

But....

1) I can do without the stylus controls being a thing ever again. I hated them with Phantom Hourglass and hate them here. If you don't have a screen protector on your DS they will destroy your screen because you spend so much time drawing fast, sharp lines and scribbling on the screen.

2) the train-focused gameplay is something that I bet was done because excessive train fandom is a hugely Japanese thing. Train otaku are everywhere and train fandom bleeds into everything (seriously, when Japan took the wheel for the first time in making Transformers cartoons in the 80s with Headmasters, one of the first major original characters they added that weren't based on something Hasbro was doing in the west was a train combiner). It's cute at first but by halfway through the game it becomes infuriating. It's slow as balls, restrictive, repetitive, and makes all the backtracking and meandering across the maps that's usually part of zelda games an absolute chore. Like if people whinged about the sailing portions of Wind Waker, these are a hundred times worse. It's made worse by the fact that train upgrades are locked behind a treasure-exchange system that uses randomly gained treasure types. So I got to the end of the game never having the right quantities and types of goods necessary for the game's biggest upgrades (which are the only ones that really matter in some cases). Train upgrades should've been made part of the standard story progression.

3) Minigame and sidequest mechanics were stupid and infuriating and I ended up abandoning them, making this the first Zelda game in a long while where I didn't try to collect everything. I finished the game with less than the full 20 hearts, without upgrades to my sword skills, without a few upgradable items, and without having completed several sidequests because catching the damn rabbits with the stylus was so frustrating that I just gave up before reaching any of their unlocked tiers of awards. Seriously through about 75% of the game I made a point of getting everything. Over the next 10% I was down to being about 50/50 on doing extra quests or missions. And for the last 5 percent I was in full "screw it, I just want this over with" mode.

4) While I liked having Zelda as a companion, having to alternate between controlling her with stylus paths and controlling Link to make it so that she could get through obstacles without being stopped or damaged was frustrating. There's a section where you get an item that solidifies the floor so she can walk on it and you have to 1) solidify the floor, 2) switch to controlling her to send her in the right direction and 3) switch back to link to keep solidifying the floor so she won't fall through when the floor breaks up far too quickly.

5) The musical segments that have become a big part of Zelda games are at their worst here. The pan flute requires you to use the microphone to blow to make the flute play, but sliding your stylus to hit the right notes or, worse, skip a note to do consecutive notes that are multiple tones apart is annoying and far more difficult than it should be

6) The final boss fight was a chore because it ran on a sequence of defending Zelda while she charged up. But if you failed to defend her and she got struck the process started again at the very beginning no matter how far along in the chain you were. So one slip up with the squirrly stylus controls and it undid several minutes of work.


The charm and style of the game are enough to make me give it a 4/10 because I really enjoyed the parts where I wasn't tearing my hair out. I just tor out hair frequently enough that I don't see myself ever replaying this one.

I also finished the 5 Game Boy Mega Man games that I bought before the 3DS eShop shut down but I'll do those in a separate post after I get some dinner.

 

[The Nemesis]

Alright, so the other games I beat were the 5 Game Boy Mega Man games released between 1991 and 1994.

Mega Man in Dr. Wily's Revenge was disappointing. They kept everything sized consistently to the NES games, but didn't account for the fact that the screen real estate on the Game Boy is so much smaller. So the enemies are hard to avoid, the jumps are difficult to make, and it's really hard to get a sense of where you are and where you're going. Also it really failed to capitalize on mix-and-matching the bosses from Mega Man 1 and 2 from the NES because the 2 Robot Masters are just part of the Wily Castle gauntlet instead of in their own stages and the weapons have a lot of overlap and are not all broadly usable (like there's 2 fire weapons that have no really strongly different utility)

It's a bland, boring 3/10

Mega Man II was even worse. Sure it gave you 4 full stages for the MM3 robot masters instead of kludging them into the Wily stage, and the weapons were more balanced in terms of integrating the selection of robot masters from 2 and 3, but the stages were ridiculously short and the game on the whole is baby-mode easy.

1/10

Mega Man III is an improvement in stage design and content but it goes too far in the opposite direction difficulty-wise and it's not good enough otherwise to make up for that.

It's... fine. 5/10

Mega Man IV is possibly the best of the quintet. I liked its selection of bosses, it offered some unique takes on the old robot master stages, and Ballade is maybe the best of the "Hunter" bots that are the running specialty of these game boy games (Enker, Quint, Punk, and Ballade)

7/10

Mega Man V goes the most outside the norm as it features no retro robot masters and instead has "stardroids" named for the planets. They're a bit easy to beat and the weapons you get are a mixed bag but I really applaud the creativity and there are some fun quirks in the stages that the franchise could stand to try and do more often.

7/10

On balance the game boy games are a massive mixed bag where the bad is really bad and the good is kinda good but not great. They probably balance out to a 5/10.

I wouldn't go buy an expensive Mega Man Game Boy Game collection the way I bought the collections for the core series (1-10), X and Battle Network, but I wouldn't hate if they were bundled into a catch-all "these are the games not collected elsewhere" collection with stuff like Mega Man & Bass, Battle & Chase (a Japanese Mario Kart clone that was only ever done here in the PS2/GC X Collection) Rockboard (a Famicom board game) and the unique dolled-up remake material (Wily Wars from the Genesis and Powered Up! from the PSP).

 

[Frankie Spankie]

System Shock - 9.5/10

I didn't play the original System Shock, this is my first experience, and what a game! I just couldn't put it down, finished it in about 18 hours in just a few days because all my free time went to it. The game is supposedly a faithful remake of the original and it reminded me of how hand-holdy games are today. There are some things they could have modernized, mainly how the inventory system works. It would be nice if they had buttons to rotate inventory or auto-sort even instead of having to right click on something and then click rotate. Well, that was my only complaint so let's get on to why I loved this game!

The story, while minimal, is done through world building and exploration. There are no real cut scenes. You don't have objective markers. You explore every nook and cranny, looking for audio logs and emails. For those who don't like to go reading through lore, don't worry, maybe 15% of the story/lore items you find in the game are emails, they're almost all audio logs. The audio logs are what you need to listen to to find out where to go next. Occasionally, you'll get a call with some guidance but the majority of your story guidance will be from audio logs. As a result, you'll have to listen to them carefully! You'll probably even go back and re-listen to them to be reminded of something like a pass code.

Shodan is a terrific villain. She is the AI in control of the entire space station, always watching you, always sending robots out to kill you. You can limit the enemies she'll spawn in the level by destroying surveillance cameras. After all, if she doesn't know where you are, how is she going to know where to send enemies to kill you? The dialogue with her is phenomenal. Every corner you turn, you'll find dead humans. You'll find skulls. You know, the way she talks about not only you, but the entire human race, that she's out for total annihilation.

The combat is about what you'd expect. There are plenty of useful grenades, a range of guns to find that you can upgrade, and even an awesome melee weapon you can find rather early in the game. You can even unlock it very early in a second play through after you know where it is and can make a B-line straight for it. And that's what's great about the game! The space station is open to your disposal. After you get most of the way through the second floor, you can go practically anywhere next! There's an order you'll approach each floors when listening to audio logs and as a result, you'll be facing enemies that scale appropriately, but there's nothing stopping you from doing things in the order you want.

This game has some of the best exploration. I heard complaints about "maze-like" levels but these aren't a maze. Maze like implies that you'll constantly be getting lost but I never felt lost. There are a lot of winding corridors but referring to the map and just paying general attention to your sense of direction, you won't ever really feel lost. Towards the end, I felt like I could confidently speed run any floor of the space station because the floors really aren't that confusing, they're just big.

System Shock is a phenomenal title and I'm so glad this made it through development hell for me to experience if for the first time. I've always heard about how Shodan is one of the best, most underrated villains of all time, and I finally got to experience why. If you like games like Deus Ex, Prey, etc, and want to see what inspired those games, give this game a go! It's definitely worth your time.

 

[Osprey]

Wow. You finished it already. I haven't even started it yet because I was trying to finish up Grounded (which I finally did last night. One the new bosses that they added last month is really hard).

The idea of audio logs and other voiceovers telling the story probably seems done to death nowadays, but it was really novel when System Shock and its sequel did it in the 90s. Shodan really is a great villain. I think that it's because her presence is always felt. She isn't just the final boss and hurtle to complete the game. She toys with you the whole game. I believe that Nightdive got the original voice actress, too.

If you want more, there's System Shock 2, which was arguably even more influential. It hasn't been re-made (yet), so it looks pretty dated, but I believe that the version on Steam and GOG includes an unofficial patch to make it run better on modern systems (i.e. in DX9, in high and widescreen resolutions and so on). It's an interesting story because the patch (called SS2Tool) came out of nowhere and it wasn't clear who made it, but the author seemingly had access to the original source code. What I've read is that one of the devs at Nightdive who originally worked on SS2 made it, but since he and Nightdive didn't have the rights to the System Shock IP at the time (obviously, they do now), he had to release the patch anonymously. Anyways, there are also mods if you want to boost the appearance a bit and a modding guide on Steam that has links.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

I got it when the Kickstarter was originally going and I still need to start it.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

I was kind of shocked I finished it this quickly too. I just couldn't put it down. I backed it on Kickstarter like 7 years ago so I had a key already paid for. I pretty much gave up on Cyberpunk right before it came out and at that point, I decided to just jump into it right away. That's a good point about Shodan though. She's there since the very start, constantly mocking you, constantly toying with you. Everything that happens to you and everyone else on the station is because of her. Seeing it all as you explore makes it all feel so much more impactful.

I'm a huge fan of Deus Ex, I still think the original Deus Ex is the single best single player game of all time. I know it was heavily influenced by System Shock. I've been meaning to play System Shock 1 & 2 for years but figured I'd wait until the remake then kind of forgot about it with how long it took. I'll probably jump into SS2 before a remake is ever made at this point. I did hear rumors that Nightdive is going to jump into a System Shock 2 remake but who knows how long that will take. Pretty crazy that this one still took 7 years from when the Kickstarter started.

 

[Osprey]

I'm a huge fan of Deus Ex, I still think the original Deus Ex is the single best single player game of all time. I know it was heavily influenced by System Shock. I've been meaning to play System Shock 1 & 2 for years but figured I'd wait until the remake then kind of forgot about it with how long it took. I'll probably jump into SS2 before a remake is ever made at this point. I did hear rumors that Nightdive is going to jump into a System Shock 2 remake but who knows how long that will take. Pretty crazy that this one still took 7 years from when the Kickstarter started.

SS2 is a lot like Deus Ex (or the other way around, since it came the year before). If you love Deus Ex, you shouldn't have much problem getting into SS2, even though it's dated. I wouldn't wait for Nightdive's enhanced edition, but, hopefully, that won't take another 7 years. SS1 was so much work to remake because the original was very clunky and, in trying to modernize it, they apparently changed too much at first and went back to the drawing board to make it more faithful, and they also completely changed engines from Unity to Unreal at one point. SS2 should go more smoothly, since it's a more modern game to begin with and they can just transfer a lot from this remake to that, so I imagine that they could make it in half of the time, but that could still be 3+ years from now.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Yeah, I heard that they originally made a lot of changes and reverted it back to be more faithful to the original due to community backlash. I have a couple games I want to play next. I don't typically play sequels back to back. I feel like I end up getting burned out on the games. I do suspect I'll end up playing System Shock 2 later this year for sure though.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Marvel's Spider-Man 7.5/10

Spider-Man looks and runs great on PC. The draw distance with how much is going on is impressive and I'm surprised it ran so well even with a really high end rig while swinging through the city incredibly fast. The swinging was also a really fun world traversal tool. I feel like world traversal is very important for an open world game so it definitely gets points for me there. While the story was like a typical comic book, I did really enjoy it.

The combat was solid but I just couldn't help but feel like the game was very repetitive. There's not much enemy variety. From the beginning to the end of the game, I never really played any differently. Sure, they introduce some new characters that require you to take them on in one particular fashion but it's all stuff you do naturally as you play the game. Some enemies require being tied up in your webs before you can attack, some require you to dodge behind them before you can attack, but that's already stuff you instinctively do while fighting even standard enemies. It just felt more like a change you had to make while fighting a particular type of enemy rather than changing your whole style to take on somebody. In fact, throughout the whole game, there's really only 4 enemy types. Standard thugs with nothing, thugs with shields, thugs with guns, and big thugs that will block everything until you web them up. They add a couple of jetpack enemies very late in the game but they're not much different than any of the others.

Even the bosses felt very similar. Every boss was basically swing around in a circle until the boss tires himself out, then rush in to attack or web the boss until he's stunned, then rush in to attack. The last phase of the last boss fight summed up my opinion on the bosses perfectly. Without spoilers, you fight on a wall of a building in a very cinematic shot. The animation keeps repeating itself over and over. I honestly thought I was doing something wrong since I noticed the same exact animation and camera movements 3-4 times in a row. I thought I was supposed to do a particular attack after a while to trigger the next animation but after another attack sequence or two, it just ended.

The mission structures also all felt the same. I did love the stealth sections as Spider-Man but there weren't many of them. It was very reminiscent of what the Batman Arkham games were like with stealth, also my favorite part of the Batman games, but throughout the main story, I feel like I only got to do it 3-4 times. Meanwhile, they did try to change up the missions a bit by forcing you into boring sections where you stealth as MJ or Miles. The stealth system is super basic so it wasn't very fun nor challenging. I found myself just rushing through those missions. Same goes for the random puzzles in Otto's labs. They're so basic they just felt like they were thrown in there to pad time for the story. The other missions are all fight off thugs until you clear an area or chase someone. The chases also just felt very hand holdy. If you're doing too well and get too close, they pull away at light speed. If you mess up and fall behind, they slow down so you can catch up. It kind of takes away from feeling like a game and feels more like you're just watching an interactive movie.

The game is solid. Everything works well and the game looks/runs great. I know it looks like I came up with a long list of complaints but it's still a fun game. It just isn't as great as people made it out to be. I don't blame people at all for stopping and giving up on the game early. It's a solid Spider-Man game where they have a good basis but I definitely feel like they need to take some more creative liberties on game play and progression. I don't think it's the must play a lot of people make it out to be unless you're a huge Spider-Man fan.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Wildfire - 7.5/10

Wildfire is a stealth 2D platformer where you have magical powers and can control the elements to get around guards or solve puzzles. The game play was quite enjoyable but seeing trailers, it looked more like an immersive sim while the game didn't feel like one, it felt very on rails. The game was still fun but it left me wanting more hoping for more freedom and options within each stage. The later city stages had some more freedom which made those levels particularly fun but it was only a couple of stages.

It is still a fun indie title. I was hoping for a bit more so it left me a little disappointed but I still think it's worth your time. I would definitely look forward to a sequel with larger stages that gave you more options to solve each situation.

 

[S E P H]

I bought the DLC (Thebes one) for Assassin's Creed: Origins and it is so bad. It takes forty hours to load the game and granted I haven't played it for like a year or two, it got insanely harder. To the point, I had to use the free upgrade to make the game playable because I hated to desynchronise since it took forty hours to reload the game. The next aspect is that the controller layout is so bad, what sort of layout has both attacks as R1 and R2 with L1 as the shield? Then they made the map again, two times larger than it should've been, even for a DLC. I found myself starting/playing other games to the point that I completely dropped this. I will probably give it another chance sometime down the long-distance road, but there is a reason why I am dropping it now and that's because it is no fun whatsoever. Comes across as too much of a grind.

 

[Jovavic]

The one in Set is much better than that one

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

Stray - 8.5/10.

This is the kind of game I needed to get out of my funk. I've been really struggling to get myself to play new games and especially single player games as of late. To the point where for like 3 weeks, all I played was NHL 23, and pretty much ignored gaming on my PC. I basically had to force myself to play this game at the start but when it got going, I wanted to finish it with no force involved. I've been struggling like this for the last several months and I f***ing hate it. Games I want to play but I keep psyching myself out from playing this for one reason or another, but I'm glad I chose this one.

I love cats and this is a great cat game (even if it's not the exactness of a cat). It has a lot of heart, soul and care for you and the world around you. It's fun, it's playful, it's thoughtful, and I'm really happy I played this game. It can be a tad slow, but it's nice that it's a simple enough game without having to do too much thought to get through, which allows you to enjoy the game for what it is. It provides many cute moments for the player that just warms up your heart a bit.

If I had to give it some negatives, I guess in some parts of the game, it's TOO simple? Jumping can still be a tad weird or a tad overzealous, but you can then usually make up for it. Glad it's a game where you can't just dive to your death every time. I guess I personally also wanted a tad bit more of a conclusion? Maybe we'll get a sequel at some point? Either way, highly recommended and I'm very glad I played it.

 

[robertmac43]

Stray - 8.5/10.

Also recently beat this game. Definitely great for getting over a gaming funk!

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Ghostwire Tokyo - 8/10

What really caught my interest about Ghostwire Tokyo was the atmosphere/setting. I don't really know much about Japanese culture or Tokyo but I'm told the setting is very accurate. The accuracy of it wasn't really what made me interested though. The literal ghost town seemed very intriguing to me. It's open world and you unlock more of the world by cleansing Torri gates. If you don't cleanse the Torri gates, the area will be covered by a death fog that will quickly kill you as you enter it. It was a pretty simple way to lock parts of the world for progress while keeping you focused on certain areas.

The story was really interesting. I don't want to go into details on it for spoiler sake but it definitely kept me going, as did the exploration. I saw a lot of complaints about repetitive gameplay and while it's not amazing, it's still fun. The stealth is fun as well. What I didn't really get about the complaints is that it feels rather comparable to a lot of FPS games these days. There's 3 spell types, both with a quick attack and a charge attack. You can also melee attack or use a bow. How is that really different from your standard FPS game these days where they have say a shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle? You often use the same 3 guns in most shooters and people don't complain about repetitive in those games.

The game is really enjoyable. It looks great and admittedly could be optimized better. Even with a 4090, I was getting several hiccups at max settings at 1440p. Reading up a bit, it's likely Denuvo at fault. I would absolutely recommend the game though. I personally don't really agree with the complaints in the negative reviews. It's not an amazing game but it's still worth your time in my opinion.

 

[Ceremony]

​

Project Cars 2 (PS4, 2017)

Project Cars 2 is... well, it's a racing game. You drive cars round tracks in races against other cars.

I don't like writing about games by comparing them to others, but after finishing the first Project Cars last year and more or less jumping straight into this it seems worth doing. Even if you reading this right now have no idea what I thought about the first game. Luckily, I can be even more succinct than in my opening. I liked Project Cars, and Project Cars 2 is Project Cars but a bit better in pretty much every way.

The career structure in the first game didn't make any sense and was very awkward to navigate even when you worked it out. Here, you start off in one of three starter-level classes and complete one season of them. When the new season starts you pick a new championship to compete in. There are six tiers of championships you can progress through, of varying lengths and of increasingly sophisticated or high profile cars/series. In addition to these championships there are Manufacturer Drives, with four stand-alone races each for different manufacturers which you can unlock and participate in whenever you want. There are also Invitational Events, split into five categories offering an even greater range of individual races. You can compete in these whenever you want. The career makes full use of all the game's content, which is a massive improvement on the first game.

I finished Assetto Corsa last year and I think I forgot to write it up. This was in part because I didn't really have anything in-depth to say, but I enjoyed PCars 2 for mostly the same reasons. I just enjoyed the physical act of driving. I play with a wheel and pedals and an extremely rudimentary knowledge of the things that affect race cars, and after 150 hours I'm not bored with the game. I don't feel the same sense of completion I do with most games after I've earned the platinum. I could go back to playing this semi-regularly and just be content with it. I could start the game again from the beginning, working my way through and enjoy it just as much. Maybe even more if I decided to make the races longer. It's rare for me to experience this in a game these days, so I think it deserves credit for this.

Each circuit in the game has fully dynamic 24 hour time changes and changeable weather, with everything from bright sunlight to snow and fog and storms and track conditions which change accordingly. Like the first game the graphical quality of the cars can vary, but the environment and lighting effects are genuinely spectacular. I think Gran Turismo 5 is the high point for me in terms of actually feeling immersed in time and weather changes, but there's a chance that's because it's the first game where I experienced it. Here though, it always just looks great. The shift from sunset into night is practically worth seeing at every track, just to experience it as much as you can.

Similarly, the weather and track conditions changing feel mostly natural and obvious. Dry and wet lines appear accordingly as a track dries or gets wet. Track temperatures play a role in your car and tyre performance (and other mechanical things), and all of this combines to make the conditions as much of a challenge as your car or the cars you're racing against.

I said mostly up there because of the problems I had with cars aquaplaning when they hit puddles. I remember watching F1 in the early 2000s. I remember Martin Brundle explaining that aquaplaning happens when there's too much water on the track surface for the tyres to touch it and grip, so your car just skids because the wheels spin and there's no traction. In PCars2, if you hit a puddle you feel as if one of your wheels has fallen off. There's no way to describe this other than to say no matter the car, no matter the speed, tyre, anything - if you hit a visibly wet spot on the track your car will pitch and lurch to the side. This eventually makes certain conditions practically undriveable, and it was wildly annoying. It was especially annoying when it didn't seem to affect the AI, but this is a problem I'll go into in more detail later. I'll happily admit I don't drive and don't know how realistic this is, but it doesn't feel right.

PCars 2 is much closer to the simulation side of the racing game spectrum than the arcade side. In addition to the weather and time changes, the level of technical detail in the cars is huge. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about cars, or know anything about the many decades of road and race cars covered here, but you can tune near enough every aspect of a car's performance. There's also a simplified Race Engineer option where you can tell it which parts of the car you're struggling with and it makes suggestions to change the downforce or suspension settings for example, but in my experience this is overly simplistic and doesn't really make much of a difference. As an example, when running an Audi R18 at Le Mans the custom setup I used from the internet made a difference of about ten seconds a lap, and there's no way I could have done that using the game's options.

Back in my Gran Turismo 4 days I remember obsessively tinkering with the tuning of the cars I was driving. That was obviously massively simplified compared to now, but even then I just don't think I have the time or inclination for it anymore. I think this is one of sim-racing's biggest obstacles. Any one of the race cars you drive in this game could have hundreds of people involved in its design, construction and maintenance. In a game, the player is effectively given all of the options, a few lines of description for what they do and is left to get on with it. The base setups are largely manageable, but the difference when you use one from someone who knows what they're doing makes it feel like a different car. In my limited experience the sense of community is one of the best parts of sim-racing, but the massive time investment it can be never really stops being daunting.

Fortunately, if you don't feel like a crash course (ahem) in engineering before every race, there are sliders to change the AI difficulty and aggression levels. I think I got better at the game the longer I played it, because I found myself able to turn the difficulty up as I progressed through the career. This made me feel quite smug, I'll be honest. One problem here though is how this can vary depending on what or where you're driving. Road America? The AI goes through corners at a pace I just can't. Circuit of the Americas? I don't know how the esses at the start of the lap work but when I try and take them flat I go off road, when I slow down I get punted. The same goes for the rain too. One of the Porsche events has 70s classics racing at the old Hockenheim layout and it's simply physically impossible to drive through the rain at the same rate the AI does. I remember setting the difficulty to 30 (out of 110) and still getting left behind. After the amount of time I spent with the game I largely had a feel for what settings I needed to use to get a good race, but this really seems like one of the game's biggest weaknesses.

One other thing to mention here about the career mode is being able to change the length of races. If you just want to blast through as quickly as possible, go to minimum length and everything will be 3 laps or 20 minutes. By the time you reach the final tier of championships you'll be doing 24 hour races, or 90 laps of Long Beach in Indycar. Really, the game can be as engaging and realistic as you want it to be. You can also pit in and switch for an AI driver if you need a break in one of those endurance races, and if anything this is even more tense. I used it a few times and again I was back to watching B-Spec Bob in Gran Turismo 4 and 5, willing him round. It's a bit detached, but you still will the car round every corner. He only hits the other cars sometimes.

One of the original Project Cars' biggest failings was the collision physics. Touch another car? You're now glued together and going off track, sorry. This has been changed in Project Cars 2, but sadly the main reason I know this is the AI's fondness for terrible driving. I wasn't on a high difficulty, I wasn't on max aggression, but the AI seemed to love doing things that would get a driver banned for life on pretty much every lap. The amount of moving under braking into a corner, throwing cars into a gap at a corner that's never going to exist, it was honestly remarkable to see. The moving into corners always got me though. I don't know what the inspiration was for this driving style, but I suppose at least if you hit one of them they'd just go off, rather than taking you off with them.

The best example of this in my experience was found in IndyCar racing. There's a trophy for driving a full distance, 200 lap race at Indianapolis. The Indy 500. One of the world's most famous races, and with properly licenced teams and drivers the Indy championship is actually great fun once you're far enough through the career to play it. Rather than just turn the difficulty down and coast I decided to try and do the race properly, with a semblance of competition. I'd say it was almost worth the aggravation. Frantically following a leading car to get slipstream and keep your speed up and your fuel consumption down? Well he'll start braking for the pitlane with no warning before he's out of the last corner, so you're going into the back of him and your race is over after 140 laps. Or maybe there's been a crash and all of the AI cars are travelling at 60mph to go around it and by the time you've caught up it's too late to brake and you're out. Or maybe you're side by side going round a corner and the AI will just veer into the side of you and you're into the wall and upside down and two of your wheels have fallen off.

I spent so long trying to do that race I actually developed a fondness for oval racing. The level of concentration and precision required is exactly the sort of joy of driving I mentioned at the start of this review. With the variable AI quality this was one of the most challenging parts of the whole game for me. It's just that most of that challenge was trying to anticipate completely unnatural movements.

One addition to the game from last time was off-road racing, specifically rallycross and ice driving. There are several contemporary World Rallycross cars and tracks in the game. I can't really drive off-road in games on my setup so I can't comment with certainty, but as far as I can tell it's all a complete waste of time. I've played plenty of rally games with a controller and been fine. Wheel or gamepad though, you just can't in PCars 2. There's no grip, you can't slide, there's just... nothing. You can imagine what it's like trying to race the AI I've just described when you can barely move your own car. I don't understand why a pretty substantial amount of content exists when it feels this laboured to play.

Slightly related to this, while the Manufacturer and Invitational events are great career additions, some of them can feel as redundant as the off-road stuff. There's one in the Supercar menu which takes place at the short layout of the Red Bull Ring at worst a lap under a minute. You're in supercars and hypercars - Paganis, McLarens, basically the fastest road cars that are in the game. Conditions are always the same. The race starts early in the morning in the fog, so it's cold. There's not much track temperature, so there's not much grip. Fine. As the race progresses it starts raining. Eventually the track temperature is 33 degrees Fahrenheit or 1 Celsius. The event was so stupid I actually had to convert the temperature and find out how cold it was. The track surface is basically ice, and you're trying to drive a short lap in a car that slides around even if you're in 6th gear. Things like this and the off-road stuff just make me wonder - who designed this event? Who approved it and put it in the game? How could anyone think it was a good idea? Why bother?

I played the game with all the DLC so I'm not sure off-hand what was base content and what wasn't, but I know some of my favourite parts were extra. Driving the classic Le Mans and Spa layouts in Porsches, Ferraris and Fords from the 60s and 70s was absolutely as terrifying as it should be. I think I remember watching a Jimmy Broadbent video about this long ago that made me buy the game in the first place, the experience holds up.

I think even if you're using a controller, even if you don't know anything about cars or motor racing you can find joy in combinations like this. I think even with the various problems I've described the game hits the right mix of depth and accessibility, with an appeal to people who've never played a racing game in their life or people like me who by now have spent decades with them. There are still things I would improve, but it was still 150 hours well spent.

 

[x Tame Impala]

@Ceremony I don’t always read your reviews or read all of it when it’s on a game I’m interested in but I think it’s cool you write out such long and detailed reviews. It must be cathartic to gather your thoughts like that and type it all out. Almost like a creative writing prompt.

Good for you dude.