The last few games you beat and rate them 5

x Tame Impala

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Aug 24, 2011
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For what it's worth, Blood & Wine won the Best RPG of the Year award in 2016, the only DLC to ever do that. I spent a lot of time with it when I played the first time, but I loved the new map and really didn't want my Witcher 3 experience to end so I was dragging it out.

I'll reiterate the others: HoS has an outstanding story and should be done first (and before end game ideally), Blood & Wine should be last and after the main story. Both can be done after the main story though without any issue, it just fit better for me to tackle them that way.

Also I love one of the 'new' (to the game, not the world) characters you meet in B&W, one of my favorites of the whole game.
I should do HoS before deciding what to do with Cirri?
 
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Frankie Spankie

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Feb 22, 2009
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434
Dorchester, MA
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine - 8/10
I kind of blew this game off on release, picked it up at some point, maybe in a bundle, and forgot about it. Seeing the success of Space Marine 2, I wanted to finally give it a shot and I'm glad I did. I really don't know much about the Warhammer universe but it was fun going through this one.

The game is fairly repetitive but it basically plays like a dated third person Doom. You go out there and you ♥♥♥♥ orks up. You will grind them into a red paste, kill tons of enemies that come running towards you with whatever you have in your arsenal. Rifles aren't fast enough as hordes rush you? Time to bust out the melee weapons! Everything transitions really well.

I was interested in playing Space Marine 2 with all the praise it has received, after playing this, I am now excited to play it. It's a little dated, it's a little repetitive, but sometimes this kind of mindless action is what you need to have some fun!
 

Bocephus86

Registered User
Mar 2, 2011
6,294
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I should do HoS before deciding what to do with Cirri?
That's what I did when I replayed after the DLC came out. I started a new play through after I got both DLC. Its been a few years, but I think I switched to HoS right before the point of no return in the main story. I can't remember if I purposely traveled back to take it on or if there was a reason I was back in Novigrad that late game.

It doesn't hurt to do it after either.
 
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Jovavic

Concept of a Plan
Oct 13, 2002
15,677
3,348
New Born Citizen Erased
Dave the Diver - 8/10

I finished the story and I guess you can keep playing to get trophies you missed or whatever. Anyway, fun game with great gameplay loop of diving then sushi bar. The characters are pretty good for what they are and most of the 5-10 seconds clips that would show for various things had me cracking up. Some things aren't explained very well but I guess that's what internet guides are for.
 
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Tw1ster

Registered User
Mar 12, 2008
7,309
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Final Fantasy XVI - 8.5/10

I really enjoyed this game. As I’ve said in another thread, I found it quite a bit better than Rebirth and think it’s incredibly underrated. The combat was probably the most addicting I’ve experienced this year and it got better as the game progressed. The dark tone of the story was a welcome change from the over the top quirkiness of past Final Fantasy games and I found Clive to be one of the strongest protagonists in the series yet And might end up being my favorite. For negatives, the story was a bit convoluted at times and the side quests were pretty shallow for the most part even if some of them had some great world building. The last dump of side quests before the final quest was a huge slap in the face especially to someone with OCD like myself who has to clean up the map before moving on, with that said, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the Chadley bullshit from Rebirth. Overall great game that I will likely never play again
 
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Tw1ster

Registered User
Mar 12, 2008
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West Coast
Another 16 fan! Did you happen to try out the DLCs?
Actually no, I’ve totally forgotten about those, are they worth it? I’m moving onto Metaphor this weekend but if the FFXVI DLCs are worth it, maybe I’ll return to the game after all
 

Frankie Spankie

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Feb 22, 2009
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434
Dorchester, MA
Bionic Commando (2009) - 7/10
I wanted to give this game a shot because sometimes despite how bad the reviews were, I heard some good things about the swinging mechanics and I wanted to give it a shot. It took me about 5 hours to complete so it's rather short.

First, the game play is pretty janky. The story is really generic. The gun play is lame. Even the one liners are corny. I can see why this game wasn't well received.

However, the swinging mechanic is really fun! The levels are really linear but designed in a way for you to swing through them. It's really fun swinging across the map, seeing bullets whizzing by, as you try to race to your next objective. With how lame the gun play is and how fun the swinging is, I'm convinced the developers wanted you to race through the game as much as possible.

Of course, there are sections that force combat and those can get tedious, even frustrating. One part that really sucks is the zip kick is fun to do to basic enemies but is just broken for stronger enemies. The enemies are clearly designed for you to zip kick from behind but most of the time, I'm just left stuck in the air and I can't ungrapple until I take damage. Sometimes you can shoot them in the back while you're stuck in this animation but depending on the enemy, you'll run out of ammo. There were actually times where I had to reload a save because I was just stuck in an animation to zip kick and the enemy would just flail around. I found the best strategy against these stronger enemies to not zip kick at all and try to throw rocks or vehicles. If there were none available, I found myself reloading a save and conserving ammo for the best guns I could get and using those.

The game is really janky, some things just outright broken, but there's a charm here that kept me playing. Is it a great game? No. But it was pretty good and it tried something new. It didn't always work but in an industry of nothing but cookie cutter games that all feel the same, this one dared to be different and had some fun unique mechanics.

Also, it has one of the funniest easter eggs I've ever seen. In one of the boss fights, you get a dialogue where your commander says "you have no choice but to fight that thing," to which you reply "my pleasure." If you die and start the fight over, the voice line changes to "you have no choice but to f*** that thing," and you reply with just an "ummm..." It caught me completely off guard and the voice line for the "ummm" even sounds unscripted by the tone of the voice actor. That alone gives it bonus points in my book!
 
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Frankie Spankie

Registered User
Feb 22, 2009
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Dorchester, MA
They Always Run - 7/10
This is a solid 2D action platformer. I really enjoyed the art style throughout and the story was pretty interesting. The combat is solid but the boss battles left a bit to be desired, particularly the Mueller one which wasn't really challenging, it was just tedious. He only has two attacks and you have a very small window to attack. Both attacks are easy to avoid so you're just waiting for your window to attack, get a couple hits in, and run away. The fight felt like it took 5-10 minutes and was never a challenge...

I also enjoyed the platforming. You could sort of race around and towards the end, you have to mix and match your movement abilities you unlock as you progress. Early on, you're caught chasing the bosses which was a fun thing, you know, just as the game is named. But that gets kind of abandoned in the second half for some reason. Overall though, it was still a pretty fun game for what it was with some great visuals.
 

Mikeaveli

Registered User
Sep 25, 2013
5,949
1,878
Edmonton, AB
Astro Bot (PS5)

Picked up another PS5 to play NHL on so I got this game as well. This is a really well made platformer. I could do without the motion and microphone controls, and the game crashed once. Also, the art and character designs are kind of generic/uninteresting and because I'm not particularly a fan of Playstation the constant fanservice is more of a distraction than anything. Other than that I don't really have any complaints.

8/10
 

S E P H

Cloud IX
Mar 5, 2010
32,340
17,754
Toruń, PL
I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Holy smokes, what an upgrade from the original game. Everything, and I mean everything is an upgrade from the prequel and most if not all of them are great upgrades. Additionally, considering that this is an EA game, it is also pretty well-polished for the most part which I am quite impressed with.

The problem is that the game still struggles with a lot of environmental glitches and bugs. A ton of accidentally jumping into walls and had to restart the game because I got stuck moments. The gameplay is also very average at best, being quite slow and being a button masher, but without the smoothness you get from GoT or Nier: Automata. The gameplay is still a big positive from the first game and getting all the different lightsabre classes was pretty wicked.

The worlds were good for the most part, but for some reason, Jedha was a very low point. It was very much created with it having a grind mindset because a lot of parts in it are just getting from one point to another, while having the majority of upgrades locked for your character. It was a big turn-off for me and even though I almost trophied everything on Kobah, I barely touched this planet.

The story was good and I liked it for the most part, but the amount of betrayal got a bit boring. I got all the characters except Bode, who just randomly becomes a Jedi because everyone in these two games is probably Jedi. I got the story though, finding a hidden planet to revive the Jedi Order is a worthwhile task, but some parts missed it for me which I can't put my figure on. Like, I loved fighting Droids and the Empire, but it seemed that some of the major parts came off too Hollywood cliche. That doesn't mean it was bad, but just too predictable at times. I liked the game though, definitely one of the best EA has produced in the past ten years quite easily.
 

Ceremony

How I choose to feel is how I am
Jun 8, 2012
114,138
17,088
After playing and enjoying Gone Home a while ago, I played a few more walking simulators. I can almost remember enough about the three of of them to write them up, so here we go.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster (PS4, 2020)

A woman receives a letter from her mother upon her death telling her to return to the family hotel and sell it. The woman (Nicole - I didn't remember the game well enough to recall this) returns to the hotel and a wave of memories from her adolescence come flooding back as she goes on a trip down memory lane.

I didn't really care for this. From a mechanical perspective it was annoying. You moved just a bit too slowly, and the game was split up into days where you'd finish at one part of the hotel, then awaken somewhere else only to have to walk back to where you'd previously been to start the next bit. This happened more than once in the two or three hours the game lasts for. This is bad. Despite this doubling back I often found myself getting lost which didn't make it any more enjoyable.

Considering the setting is a snowed-in hotel somewhere in the forest, the location is lacking too. It's clearly inspired heavily by The Shining but doesn't have any of the atmosphere, intrigue or characterisation that makes the Overlook the dominant character in that film.

The uncovering of the story comes in standard procedural walking sim order, and it doesn't really make much sense. Or at least it doesn't have as much impact as it clearly did on the characters at the time. I think too much happened and the bits we get to see here don't do enough to convey the significance of what's affected the characters so much. Nicole seems to have repressed much of what happened around this time but the balance between that and what's being discovered by the player isn't met very well.

The final crucial thing a walking sim needs is an engaging player character and Nicole isn't one. Part of the reason the plot doesn't really have any impact is what we see of Nicole - she's not a typical girl, she plays the bass and plays hockey and is really really fierce and independent, honest! There's a contradiction between how she's depicted in isolation versus in relation to the events we learn about, and it undermines everything that happens. Plus her teenage years supposedly happened in the 1980s yet she's clearly got a hand drawn picture of Alex Ovechkin on her desk.

The ending is also, well, no. It has the same problem as being a bit of an overreaction to what's come before. I think this might be a game that benefits from a second playthrough, but I'm a busy man. That's why I've probably played fewer games in the past six months than at any point in the last ten years.

Tacoma (PS4, 2017)

This was made by the same people who brought us Gone Home and you can tell. It just feels and looks the same and has a suitably ethnically and sexually diverse array of characters. You arrive on a space station and are told to investigate what happened to the ship's crew. You do this with the help of the ship's computer which logged conversations you can eavesdrop on, as well as doing the usual exploring to see what interesting artefacts are lying around.

Tacoma is a hard game to split up into paragraphs because every part of the game ultimately suffers from the same problem. There's too much stuff squeezed into too small a space. There are seven characters for you to learn about. The game lasts for two hours, maybe three depending on how thorough you are. It's about capitalism, it's about AI, it's about the ethics of human and machine consciousness. It spurts these out in really condensed sections that don't let anything sink in before you have to move on. It's a game filled with a lot of ideas and elements which could be sustained for a lot longer than they ultimately are.

The space station is a well-realised environment and is enjoyable to move around. The atmosphere is good, the controls are good and the characters you uncover are all varied and complex enough, there's just never enough time spent on anything for it impactful. I feel as if the story and premise is the sort of thing that Netflix could make as a six parter which would go viral for a week then never be heard of again. As a game though, I just feel it could have been more.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PS4, 2014)

Paul Prospero turns up in a town to discover what happened to Ethan Carter. You are Paul Prospero, a detective whose voiceover says he's seen all this sort of stuff before, man. You start the game by emerging from a tunnel into some trees before going on to investigate some murders as you find dead bodies lying around.

This is a strange game, structurally. It follows a largely linear path out of the woods and then in and around some houses in an apparently abandoned town next to a river and dam. You're free to explore as much of this as you want and there are some additional bits of information that flesh out the world if you do, but for the most part there is one route you need to follow. This is different from almost all of the walking sims I've played (it's like a more structured version of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture) but this just weakens the sense of place. You don't feel the weight of the town weighing on the characters as you do with the other two games mentioned here.

Despite this, the game looks and sounds outstanding. A lot of work went into the views and things depicted here. Wikipedia tells me the environment was inspired by a mountainous region of Poland. Lucky Poles is what I'll say if this is any indication. The combination of the environment, music and sound effects constantly had me thinking of something else, and about the highest praise I can give a game. It reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus. The mountains, lakes, trees, the huge, seemingly abandoned human environments like a train station, a dam, some houses, a church, the haunting orchestra music in the background, it was constant. The imagery of the game will stay with me for a long time.

The central gameplay mechanic is a pain in the arse. You know how in Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human you have to investigate crime scenes, only since it's a video game they had to include a button which would instantly reveal all the relevant evidence as long as you walked around? That doesn't happen here. You find a body, then you need to find the spots nearby where the events leading up to the murder happened, then you need to move things back if they've been moved, then you go back to the body, then you get some ghostly outlines of people in places and have to pick what order they go in to reveal what happened. And the game doesn't actually tell you any of this, you have to figure it all out for yourself.

I finished this a few days ago, though I actually tried to play it about a month ago and got annoyed because it took me an hour to get past the first area. I think the game is supposed to encourage the player to work things out themselves but if your central gameplay mechanic is something that David Cage can do a better job of you may want to rethink.

The game has pretensions towards the supernatural. As you discover various family members and see what they did there are frequent references to The Sleeper, some kind of evil force which is controlling the people and making them do bad things. As you go through each recreation you try to piece together what this actually is and what it means and I'm pleased to say that I guessed what was going to happen about halfway through.

In a way I think Ethan Carter is probably the inverse of both of the other two games I've mentioned here. The setting is physically huge and memorable, yet empty and largely redundant. It doesn't have any bearing on the characters or events outside of enforcing a general sense of isolation. What you uncover is dotted around and could have been framed within a contained location, with a bit of imagination. It's still distinctive and good that the location is what it is, but it's interesting to consider three similar games at the one time and make this comparison in real time.

I don't know if I've already reached the high water mark of the walking sim. The three games here ranged from foregettable to I Wish This Did More, but they were all cheap and all clearly made with heart, even if they didn't all fully realise their potential.
 

Frankie Spankie

Registered User
Feb 22, 2009
12,418
434
Dorchester, MA
I added some games to my wishlist and I was wondering if anyone has played any them?

INDIKA
Still Wakes the Deep
Nobody Wants to Die
Shadows of Doubt

Shadows of Doubt looks super interesting to me. I heard about it when it first came out but part of me thinks as awesome as it looks, the game play loop is just not for me.

Also, I was going through the Steam page for Indika and got really confused when the game was all nice 3D graphics and then has a couple random 8 bit screenshots lol

Bramble: The Mountain King - 8.5/10

Bramble: The Mountain King is a dark linear adventure game that is has some light platforming and puzzle/stealth mechanics. The game isn't overly difficult but it's all about the journey through a horror setting. The game is absolutely gorgeous, awesome soundtrack, and super interesting story based on Nordic fables which I didn't know about. It was cool going through it and learning some interesting fables for the first time.

There's not too much game play but it works great for what it is. It kind of reminds me of a game like Inside except more of a 3D setting for it. It's really dark and is not afraid to show some gruesome deaths. It's short and sweet. I definitely recommend this if you're into darker theme adventure themes, it's really great.
 
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Rodgerwilco

Entertainment boards w/ some Hockey mixed in.
Feb 6, 2014
7,907
7,303
1730120834035.jpeg

9/10

I’d hardly call finishing the story of “Under the Waves” as ‘beating’ the game. Moreso the game (emotionally) beat me.

I’ve been gaming for 26+ years and I’ve never had such a deep and visceral feeling toward a video game as I’ve had toward Under the Waves.

I cried, I laughed, I cried… and then I cried some more. If you want to be emotionally wrecked then this game is for you.

This is the type of video game that makes me feel angered that a contingent of people still don’t take video games as a medium of media seriously.

Sure some of the animations are janky (mostly opening chests and operating switches), but the story and atmosphere of the game are right up there with the best of them, for my money. I’ve never felt the feelings I felt with this game with any other game, or movie (save, The Whale) as I have here.

If you like emotional story-driven games and can stomach the underwater setting I can’t recommend this game enough.
 

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