The last game you completed

[ClarkPete]

Blade Of Darkness / Severance

For who knows which time from 2001 till today. Tomorrow will be the 20th birthday from its release. It was my first "souls like" hack and slash game.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

A couple of my friends who were brothers had Severance back in the day, my PC at the time couldnt run it. I remember how amazing it looked back then on theirs.

Does the gameplay hold up? I just vaguely remember it being really hard.

 

[ClarkPete]

Does the gameplay hold up? I just vaguely remember it being really hard.
[/QUOTE]

Yep, its still hard but still so fun, as back in 2001 I never experienced an NPC to be smart, to tactically avoid you and when fighting 1 v 2-3 opponents they systematically attacked you, while NPC in other games at that time just all rushed towards you.

Its not hard as Dark Souls, but as I was a kid back then, it sure felt like it. But still a really fun an interesting game to play. The lore is amazing, music is superb, atmosphere even better.

Only downside is that Win 10 has some issues with some maps, but it think that can be fixed.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

@ClarkPete Nice, looks like its also abandonware now so I might give it a go as its free.

I finished a first run through of Suzerain yesterday. Its an (I think?) unique take on a political strategy game. You play as the newly elected president of a country in a 1950's era Eastern european style country called Sordland thats surrounded by both capitalist and communist sympathetic countries, with USSR and U.S analogue powers playing some realpolitik idealogical games in the other countries all around you. You get to choose which path to follow and have to deal with the consequences of what you decide.

It plays like a choose your own adventure book, all decisions are made from multiple choice replies in conversations with the many characters in the game,members of parliament, ministers, business people, and foreign leaders as well as your family. You have to decide both foreign and internal policies, and you can be everything from far right to loony left and in between on the political spectrum. You can also be as corrupt or as clean as you want. All your decisions come back to haunt you at some point though, sometimes in ways I didnt expect and some of the choices you find yourself considering are actually horrifying.

You also have a family that has its own problems. I did like the fact that they are trying to humanize politicians in by putting you in the shoes of a family man who is also President. You are at times forced to sacrifice one for the other and sometimes the decisions are very tough.

I liked it, I'm not sure whether after multiple playthrough the seams would show as you are kind of bottlenecked into some situations or if its completely different every time. I'll definitely be trying again. It was also only about a tenner.

 

[DXCHASE]

Completed Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War the other day. Not bad, not bad at all tbh. The story is short but they have a good zombies campaign this time around. I didnt buy this for the MP but having played some theres much to be desired there but the campaign itself is pretty good. Its less just running around shooting people and more stealth options, but not too much as to break the flow of combat.

 

[Ryzengang]

I've beaten a fair few games as of late, but most recently I have started the Bioshock series. I actually never played them when they originally released and decided I would give them a shot. So far I've only beaten the first game and have not yet started Bioshock 2.

Overall, Bioshock 1 holds up pretty well considering it's nearly 14 years old at this point. I quite enjoyed it overall. I must admit, though, that I do not consider it a great game. It is above average in pretty much every respect, but I don't think there is anything "next level" about it. Of course, it's possible that if I played it when it was originally released my opinion would be different. But despite Bioshock 1 being a fairly unique game even today, it didn't stand out to me as particularly special.

 

[AsphaltCat]

The games I play have no end.

 

[Zloth]

I never really bothered to 100% many games...

I never bothered to 100% *ANY* games! (Though I got 100% in Subnautica without trying.) I think we're just talking about "got as far as I wanted and am going to quit now" when we say 'completed.'

 

[Johnway]

Although i didn't play it on the PC (it was on my DS/3ds), you can get the game on the PC as part of the Zero escape: the Nonary games. (which is rated quite highly on steam atm). TLDR Take this review piece with a massive pinch of salt. The steam version may fix a lot of niggles i'm about to address. But i liked it enough despite (imo) flaws and issues.

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So i finally finished Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. A visual novel game and the title speaks for itself really. I had this game in my back collection, still shrink wrapped for over 6 years and i decided to get round to it. Not exactly the longest game nor is it the hardest game. did i like it? yeah, i enjoyed the story and game enough that I'm interested to play the sequels. Which i will start tonight!

I do have a few niggles such as the UI issues (limitations of the DS) that its recommended you play this with a sheet of paper in hand so you can reference info back and forth and work things out. The game whilst gives you a calculator, you can't refer to it whilst in the puzzle itself. So you have to step away from it and then use it. Nor can i write notes down either.

The story narrative is a bit ham-fisted in places. The main endings are fine, they provide a satisfying ending. The other endings that end in you dying are complete cop outs. They come completely out of no where and whilst plausible, for a story ending its feels rushed and half arsed. In fact one of the endings i heard is quite literally "To be continued" if you do everything right and was on course for the golden ending BUT you didn't see the (canon?) standard ending? Too bad! can't progress! Unlock standard ending before seeing golden ending! But that standard ending, whilst gives closure still ends a bit inconclusive. If you played Halo 2, remember that ending and how it felt? yeah, that's how i felt with this game.

Mercifully its not long and requires you to explore all options (who goes into which room and what 1 or 2 actions you take) to understand the story as to why the 9 people backstory and what happens to them. On the one hand, its interesting to find out new info, but on the other its bloody tedious to go through the same puzzles and story to make changes. if there wasn't a super fast skip dialogue option in this game it would have been torture. Especially when there was only one save game on the DS. The golden ending itself felt like it had a few cracks when it comes to plot as well, but enough consistency that it doesn't fall apart and it does have some decent twist and turns.

 

[Gvaedyn]

Sekiro. I was going for 100% achievements, but gave up after I realised how much of a grind I'd have to go through to get all the skills.

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

Sekiro. I was going for 100% achievements, but gave up after I realised how much of a grind I'd have to go through to get all the skills.

A little bit, but if you know the good locations for it, it's easy to do. Just have something to listen to in background on on second monitor, if you have such setup. That's how I did it

In the meantime I am not finishing any games 'cause I made the mistake of buying Football Manager 2021. My life is over, once again.

 

[Ryzengang]

Been playing a few games recently. I've most recently completed A Plague Tale: Innocence. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The story had some very touching moments, and it's a visually stunning game; I really enjoyed the art direction. The gameplay isn't perfect and there's some amount of clunkiness but the experience overall was good and I would recommend picking it up on a sale for those who haven't tried it.

 

[JazzyK]

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. I give it 9/10

Now I'm thinking of starting to play all Call of Duty from first to last.

 

[McStabStab]

Finally completed Blood & Wine for The Witcher 3, so I've completed the main storyline, Hearts of Stone, and now it's a wrap. Almost 130 hours of a single playthrough. What an adventure.

 

[Zloth]

I guess Styx: Master of Shadows is done. It was pretty good for about 20 hours then started getting repetitive. It's $2 again on Steam through March 31 and is definitely well worth that price, even if you don't finish it. If you do find you like it a lot, they give you the ability to go through missions again so maybe the first time through you kill anything that gets in the way and try to hunt down all the little coins and the second time through you try to get through fast without hurting anyone. The challenges are quite different depending on the goals you go after.

X4 is out with both expansions now, though. Ain't got time for it.

 

[Ryzengang]

So I've finished playing Prey (2017) recently and it is a bit of a difficult one to rate. It nails a lot of aspects. The atmosphere is very good, the visuals are good, the story is solid and the characters are generally believable. The level design is good and the game performs solid overall with zero crashes on my playthrough. Unfortunately, the combat is legitimately awful, and that really hurts the game overall. It is strange to me that a game that does so much well really messed up the combat system. The core mechanics just don't feel good and it is clunky throughout. Another gripe is that I really didn't like the enemy design, and they all ended up feeling rather samey; not a whole lot of variety. On the whole, I think the game is very strong in a lot of areas but the combat really weakens the overall product. I still enjoyed the experience and would recommend it, with the above caveats in mind.

 

[Zloth]

Unfortunately, the combat is legitimately awful, and that really hurts the game overall.

Wait, COMBAT? Ryzengang, you were in a FIRST CONTACT situation! Yes, I understand that it is somewhat stressful to have your coffee cup turn into a spider-like thing that tries to eat your face, but you must keep calm and make every attempt to diffuse the situation - to wit, letting it chew your nose off then asking it nicely to go away.

 

[Ryzengang]

Wait, COMBAT? Ryzengang, you were in a FIRST CONTACT situation! Yes, I understand that it is somewhat stressful to have your coffee cup turn into a spider-like thing that tries to eat your face, but you must keep calm and make every attempt to diffuse the situation - to wit, letting it chew your nose off then asking it nicely to go away.

To swing back to what I said in my original post of this game being hard to rate, I think it is an interesting discussion about the idea of an immersive sim and design decisions. Because, in a lot of ways, it makes a ton of sense that in Prey Morgan would be fairly inept at fighting, especially fighting creatures that are relatively unknown. So in that sense, it sort of succeeds by incentivizing the avoidance of combat because in real life, you'd probably want to avoid contact as much as possible. Past that point, it's rather subjective whether that is overall desirable or successful. Personally, I find combat being mechanically good and feeling good to be more important than any kind of immersion a character's ineptitude may create. However, I do know some feel different about this.

 

[largeGAMER]

I do not have the patience to complete games and I also just prefer online play.

The last game I ever completed was Duck Tales on the NES hahaha

 

[Volley]

Just finished Rage (2011, id Software, Bethesda Softworks). This game was sitting in my Steam library for almost ten years. I played it for a couple hours back when it first came out but was massively disappointed with the texture pop-in (Halo 2 for original XBOX style) and overall blurry textures, as well as boredom. I figured over the weeks after id would patch that up real quick. They didn't.

I finally fired it up again last week, made use of some of the graphics fixes and improvements the community had presented via step by step guide, and actually found myself enjoying it. Once you get past the first few missions, the game starts to grow on you. The skybox is really beautiful, with some gorgeous lighting and clouds. Most of the game is your typical 50 shades of brown that id is notorious for, but some areas present all sorts of colors, like the greens and yellows in the caves in the DLC, or the reds and blues at Capital Prime.

There's two maps, Western and Eastern Wastelands, and then all the smaller fighting areas and towns/encampments within. You get a few types of buggy vehicle with minigun, rocket, and pulse cannon capability. There are some races to do which let you buy upgrades for your buggy. I found the races to be pretty easy on Normal difficulty, so upgrading the buggy didn't take long. In the wasteland, vehicle combat is actually a lot of fun and enjoyable.

The game feels shorter than it should be, unfinished, many characters under-utilized, it almost feels like later in the game that the devs needed to get this game out there asap so they had to reduce the size of the main story.

Most of the enemies are the same, with the same voices behind them. It gets very repetitive. If you max out your wingstick it makes a great alternate attack on most of them. I found myself enjoying the Shotgun and Sniper Rifle the most. The Scorchers DLC is alright, but it's over pretty quickly. I didn't use the nailgun as much as they probably wanted me to.

I'd say Borderlands and Fallout was most of the inspiration for this game. Overall I enjoyed it, 7/10, not ids best but it does have its moments. The game needs a little passion, some patching & I'd be game for a "Snyder Cut" of this. Now onto Rage 2.

 

[Johnway]

Well I'm calling it, i've finished Assassin's creed Origins. beat the story and DLC missions to 100%, explored all areas (i'm sure i'm missing one or two and unless the game tells me where i'm going by the stats) and clocked in under 99hrs. more if i bothered to complete the last few challenges and did the discovery tours. Might go back to cross them off but... meh.

overall, very good. A generous map and a massive refinement in some of the controls made for a much more interesting game. Took a while to learn how to play as it was more dodge then parry defense i was familiar with. A well designed game world with plenty to see and do. The loot system... i'm not sure, with so many weapon drops, i found it just more practical to break everything down rather then spend cash on resources or weapons. i found myself just keeping a few of the weapons and upgrading them to the latest levels. Whilst i had plenty of weapons on offer, i always just fell back to the trusty sword to keep things simple.

DLC wasn't bad either the curse of the pharaohs a real highlight the fantasy setting really was great.

So... the elephant in the room. What about t he MTX's? i knew i wasn't going to buy anything in the story so i would exterminate the local wildlife and i had more then enough to craft everything. Wood and copper/iron was easily obtainable by just dismantling all the weapons you collected. anything blue/purple was destined into the bin. The problem is not the animal skins but the more rarer materials like the carbon or the star shards which were only really viable when you played the DLC. Whether the last few tiers in crafting are available without DLC i'm not sure, but personally its a bit on the grindy side .Yet, at the time savers are waste of money at the same time and only to ensnare those with more money then patience which is pretty greasy.

Oh well, i'm done with it. I'm going to start on playing the division 2 i'm at lvl 5 and already i'm having misgivings about the game. doesn't look like i'll be playing this game for long...

 

[McStabStab]

Death Stranding

Holy hell, the ending chapters were like 1.5 hours of cutscenes, but damn, this game was WORTH IT. One of the best games I've ever played. The sum is way more than its parts, a total experience. I wrapped the credits at 49 hours in and I think I'll dabble a bit more to see if I can get everyone to join the UCA. Not going to go for a 100% because I think it'll take forever but honestly I would consider starting the whole game over again just to see it from the perspective of knowing the full story.

 

[Johnway]

I guess i'll add it to the list. not quite PC game but i finished sukioden 2 on my raspberry pi at work. On the whole the game was a massive improvement over the first one. That said i'm going to spend more of my time now discussing the criticisms of the game rather then the positives. Although it was feature rich some of the implementation was just half baked. The Advance wars style battles were pretty woeful as moving soldiers around was slow and combat was pretty hit and miss in places. There was a trading system for more money but its boring and tedious as you did most of the leg work for money. Ultimately it was just easier to murder monsters then buying and selling items.

Spoiler: Involves the story and how it rubbed me the wrong way

When you kill the main villain half way through the game i think you'll have a real hard time trying to carry it. The whole reason why your best friend turns on you for the most unconvincing reasons. "oh i wanted to unite the 2 countries under the highland banner. So i will prolong the war! even though i was trying to stop the highland empire from doing it in the first half of the game!" It just seemed naff. if PC and Jowy just accepted to rule their respective countries or jowy just accepted rule of highland and took the slow political steps at fixing relations and strengthening bonds peace would have been achieved. But no, it was just an excuse to create some unnecessary conflict.

Oh well, whatever, i didn't save nanami as well (FFS i hate it when pivotal characters die at a certain point unless i do challenge x. if i knew that i would have done all the work before attempting it). But i had fun with the game. now to wash my palette of JRPGS with more violence; Crusader No remorse on the PSX. The main take away? Christ those controls are cack.

 

[Frindis]

Dishonored 2

Good parts:

• Good story and some interesting characters.
• Cool combat system, especially for doing quick slice&dice maneuvers. Bone charm system kind of felt like a gimmick though.
• A couple of very good level designs, with Clockwork Mansion being the winner. I am very impressed as to how they managed to put that level together. If there is a level you should go slow through, it is this one. Genious!
• Some interesting sound effects, especially at the Dust District and of course at the Clockwork Mansion.
• Clockwork Mansion brought the game up a couple of notches for me. I say it again: "WOW!", what a brilliant map!

Bad parts:

• A.I. I played on hard difficulty and it was not really challenging. What I mean is that there was NO time at all that I really felt I had to fight for my life. I have not played the "no powers mode", so hopefully that will change it up a bit.
• Most of the maps feel quite similar and linear. I understand that you can choose a different way to go about them, but they just feel so bloody cramped. I mean, just look at anyone speedrunning the game, and you can see how small the zones really are and that is without glitching into the terrain either.
• Side quests. Really, cause I as hell did not see many of them.
• The endless chatter from the NPC's!!!! Seriously, what the **** is going on? Did we not learn that endless loops of NPC banter really suck when you are trying to immerse yourself in the game?

 

[Zloth]

That clockwork level was an interesting one.

The levels in Dishonored (and the new Deus Ex games, sometimes) are really small but really dense. I could spend ten minutes in a little apartment going through everything!