The last game you completed

[Furr_Man]

Half-Life 2: Episode 1. I've been playing a lot of older shooters I never got the chance to play.

 

[Brian Boru]

only thing that did dampen my fun for the game was how i held back my soul power even despite being maxed out as i would save them for a very bad situation

I used to be the same in the days of medkits being few and far between. The eternal Q of 'Do I use it now and there may not be another for an hour, or do I save it and risk dying from a surprise attack?'

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

What did you think of it?

 

[Furr_Man]

What did you think of it?

I liked it, mostly better than the base game I'd say. Gets a little slow with waiting on and listening to NPCs, but at least you're not getting constantly body blocked by Barney like in the base game. I'd say it still holds up without me having personal nostalgia or it having the "wow" factor of cutting edge graphics.

 

[Hamidou Cisse]

Score Hero

 

[Johnway]

I used to be the same in the days of medkits being few and far between. The eternal Q of 'Do I use it now and there may not be another for an hour, or do I save it and risk dying from a surprise attack?'

i hear that originally as soon as you maxed out the soul bar it would automatically activate so it was hit and miss whether you maximized your usuage or not. The recent change to allow you to trigger it is a pretty good QoL change. Soul power use against bosses with the right weapon would absolutely wreck the bosses. The Ice Mace thing on soul power just absolutely murdered them in under a minute.

 

[CharlesMNeal]

Last weekend I finished playing AC Valhalla and now started the Demon Slayer; CyberConnect2 real did a great job with this game; I think it is the Best Video Game Adaption of an Anime Series, also heard that they are making the DLC for it as well.

 

[Amine38]

Final fantasy

 

[Pifanjr]

I have now finished The Guild of Dungeoneering. It was a lot of fun and perfect to play for a few minutes at a time. I wasn't surprised when I saw there's an Android port as well, it would be perfect to play on the go.

The game is fairly simple, but has enough complexity to keep it fun and enough different classes to give some variety in play style and keep the game from going stale too quickly. It's also difficult enough so you'll probably lose a few missions, maybe even the same one two or three times, but it never feels unfair.

The game isn't very long, but I think it's the perfect length so you don't get bored with it before the end of the game.

 

[Johnway]

Well 2 more games added to the completed list.

The First one was VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action. A visual novel of sorts where the most input you get during the work evening is mixing drinks and talking to people and getting to know their stories. I did have a vested interest in the regulars stories to keep playing and they're likable enough (Dorothy is most amusing and interesting imo), but if you're not into VNs this one won't win you over to playing more of them. It does have a nice soundtrack though and it does come with prologue DLC and demo that fleshes out a bit of the backstory events at the bar. i would agree with the metacritic score of 77% seems to be about right. If its sequel Nirvana eventually comes out on sale, i might snap it up to see what its like.

The next game was Rusty lake Hotel it looks interesting. Its not particularly long puzzle game. its not complicated but i did feel that it suffered from pedantic when trying to solve some of the puzzles. One was trying to catch the butterfly in the jar i had the right idea, but the game just refused to do it and through random chance i succeeded. Not to mention some of the logic is a bit naff, when the boar asks for a sandwich why would i make it using Boar poo? was it just a weak pretense just to get him to move away from the couch to solve the puzzle? It does end on a cliffhanger but the rest of the rusty lake bundle does look interesting. But will i get it? meh i'll leave it for now.

 

[Johnway]

So another game completed. This time its Goetia. Won't lie, this one was painful and frustrating. So much so that i cheated my way through the puzzles. there was no way i was going to solve some of the puzzles when you had no knowledge of musical notes etc. Plus the game was tough and my tired brain was having none of it.

A bit of a shame really, the story had some interesting stuff in it and the ending isn't bad. had some decent musical work . It Just seems like it would have been better as a drama or some sort of super natural novel that stephen king would have wrote.

Now i've crossed off a few indie games that were more puzzles its time for some murder time. I'm going to play Shadow of War. A sort of fitting choice tbh as i played shadow of mordor back in 2014/2015 around this time so sentimental reasons i want to visit it. Whether i'll have fun is a different story. a 109gb download makes me wince tbh. But get it out of the way and move on.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I don't have a ton of time to play games, so it's slow going for me. But the last game I completed was Skyward Sword HD on the Switch. I love Zelda games. The last time I played Skyward Sword was on the original Wii, and it's one of my favorites.

On PC, the last game I played was called The First Tree. You play as a fox that is really a guy dreaming and trying to get through some trauma. It's a decent game, but very short. Played the whole thing in a night.

This year, I also played through Skyrim again, and also a second play of Breath of the Wild. I played it originally on the Switch, but this time, I dumped my own Wii U disc of the game and played it in an emulator at 4k@60fps. Was pretty cool. I didn't want to download the game illegally, so I went to a heck of a lot of trouble to buy the disc and dump it to a file. I doubt if I'll mess with doing that again.

 

[Shadycase]

God of War

 

[Zloth]

Now i've crossed off a few indie games that were more puzzles its time for some murder time. I'm going to play Shadow of War. A sort of fitting choice tbh as i played shadow of mordor back in 2014/2015 around this time so sentimental reasons i want to visit it.

There are some fun characters in that one!

 

[ZedClampet]

I finished Satisfactory, but it's an unfinished game, so I'm not sure that counts. Was quite fun to go ahead and finish it this time. I had previously been stopping after aluminum. Uranium was a complete nightmare. You end up with massive amounts of nuclear waste, which you can either reprocess (not easily) into a lesser amount of less efficient nuclear fuel (which still produces more waste), or you can just build enough storage somewhere you don't want to ever visit and store the waste there. Unfortunately, I stored it on-site, not realizing that the whole area would become Chernobyl.

I noticed from checking the power grid that my nuclear reactors were off-line and had to ride the train back to the site and started picking up radiation damage before the train even hit the station. The problem, I figured out, was that I had run out of storage for batteries. Sulfuric acid, which is produced when you make fuel rods, had backed up and stopped all the machines. The problem is that I didn't really have any used for batteries because I wasn't using the enormous, electric drones for anything. So I just built a bunch more battery storage and went on about my business.

BUT, it took two days to prepare the space elevator for launch. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Probably not good. But it was my first time doing that and some of the factory needs were a bit unexpected.

 

[Zloth]

Mechwarrior 5 is complete! It was fun stuff, I really enjoyed it. Like BattleTech, you run a small mercenary outfit that travels around the galaxy, shooting things for money. Between battles, you'll need to repair all damage to your big, stompy robots. You'll be able to buy/salvage new mechs and customize them with different weapon loadouts and armor. Unlike BattleTech, this one has live action, 3D battles instead of being turn based, overhead views.

The basic gameplay loop is pretty simple: fly to a star in a conflict zone, pick a mission you like, complete it, get paid, fix your mechs, and repeat until you get a lot of cash. When you do get a lot of cash, go mech shopping at some industrial planets. Repairing mechs is cheaper on those planets, too, so you'll also go there if you get thrashed. There's a campaign that provides a series of missions to run and a story to go with them. The story is full of weak sauce (THEY killed your dad, now you're going to kill them back - killing several other people along the way!?) and is delivered by talking heads, but the missions are fun.

I think the key to the game is the progression of mechs you use and fight against. There are a lot of strengths and weaknesses to balance as you grow your stable of mechs. Customizing them allows a lot of creativity, too. You'll have to balance whether you would like to bring another medium laser, or if it would be better to leave the laser at home and bring an extra ton of ammunition for your autocannon. Do you want to put that nice, high level PPC on your arm mount? Arms get shot off pretty often - maybe it would be better to put it in another mech's right torso? But torso weapons have to shoot more-or-less forward, while arms have a wider field of fire...

The game autosaves whenever you go to another star, whenever you start a battle, and whenever the battle finishes. You can also make manual saves, but NOT while a battle is going on. The battle has to be played out from start to finish! A typical battle lasts about 10 to 15 minutes. Some of the really big campaign battles have you trudge through a lot of scenery, so could take longer than that.

The DLC is worth it when on sale, IMHO. You don't need the DLC immediately and Steam offers the game+DLC in a bundle, so there's no problem playing the base game for about 10 hours and then deciding if you're going to play the game enough to justify buying the DLC.

The game also has a pretty strong mod scene going. There's some nice graphics enhancers and game play mods out there. A mod to help the game's AI (but allies and enemies) proved especially useful!

 

[uaelady]

Forza horizon 6

 

[Ryzengang]

So, I finished the Halo Infinite campaign on Heroic last night and overall I'm very impressed. It was an interesting game as a long-time Halo fan because throughout the process it was hard to know how fair I was being on the game. Early on, the game felt wrong atmospherically and the differences related to world design felt off. As I kept playing I really spent a lot of time thinking about how I was analyzing the game. Is it fair to expect the same thing as the original trilogy? Is the fact that it is different actually a bad thing? Given my past with the series, is it even possible for a new Halo game to surpass the older titles in my mind?

After thinking about it a fair amount and beating the game, I really think this is about as good as I could reasonably expect from a new Halo game. The gameplay is simply amazing. It feels classic but with some nice "modern" features like sprinting, sliding, and vaulting. Additionally, the grapple hook is just straight up amazing. It is so fun to play with and really adds to the game. The story is a weaker point, but I enjoyed it overall and my lack of understanding is probably at least partially due to my disinterest in the series after Reach. Still, I think the story is a bit unclear and it is my understanding that a lot of important info is hidden in games like Halo Wars 2 (which I don't like; don't put important story info in spinoffs that a fraction of the audience plays). Nonetheless, I think this is a really stellar Halo game. It is definitely different from the earlier games, but I think that over time it is necessary to change things to some extent. Further, given that the Halo trilogy contain some of my favorite games of all time, I can't expect a new game to reach those heights, honestly. That being said, this is easily the best Halo game since Reach, and it may even be better than Reach (though I haven't played Reach in ages so I'm really not sure).

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Took me 172h and I almost got my save "rekt" just before heading to the last story mission (game crashed everytime I tried to save), but luckily got saved by a patch.
So in short.

Good:
- writing
- characters (Ember is a treasure)
- sheer amount of options
- reactivity and changes to the world/story/quests/characters based on your choices and mythic path
- mythic paths (lich FTW)
- great amount of personalization in difficulty options
- literally few tonnes of improvements from Kingmaker
- the graphics and little details that just oooooze atmosphere
- much more balanced with difficulty
- long
- as a lich you can desecrate your enemies and resurrect them, forcing to serve you and it's amazing

Bad:
- combat difficulty spikes, especially in the end game (fighting same group of same demons again for a n-th time and knowing they can still kill some members of your party is tiresome)
- some optional bosses are tough as nine hells - some of them took me a lot of tries
- puzzles for Nenio. Seriously, no, stop that.
- performance. On my old rig, game could drop to quite surprisingly low fps in some locations.
- longer than expected
- yes, still buggy but hey, that's a feature in long cRPG!

In the end I wanted to finish it and when I did instead of straight uninstall after satisfying session I went into "what to play next as" mode and I hate myself for it. But seriously wondering if pure solo run is even possible.
*googles*
Oh. OH.

Anyway, recommended for every lover of Pathifinder: Kingmaker and pure blooded cRPGs in general. Owlcat knows how to make these and their passion shows.

 

[Zloth]

Wasteland 3 is done. There's another DLC I've got, but I'm going to skip it. The game is a real strong mix of great stuff and some fairly dumb stuff. Overall, well worth playing, just be ready to hold your nose from time to time.

Bad stuff:

• I played on hard ("Ranger") difficulty. At first, the game really was pretty hard. As time went on, though, the game got easier and easier. Battles went from almost overwhelming to ho-hum over the course of the game. Worrying over every bullet turned into tedium of having to keep ammo from running out. This is a pretty common issue in RPGs, unfortunately, when you do most of the quests.
• You have to play guess-the-relevant-skills. Lockpicking is a BIG help in this game. Toaster repair, not so much. (No, that's not obvious! The game is goofy, so it's hard to be sure.)
• The game has a 'junk' classification for items that can't be used for anything - pretty standard stuff in modern RPGs. Except that sometimes you DO need the junk! It wasn't common but, as soon as I noticed that I couldn't craft something I wanted because one of the components was sold off with the other "junk," I lost my trust that the junk really was junk and stopped selling it.
• The game still has some bad bugs. The AI in random encounters might bug out, making it impossible to end because the combat never actually starts. A critical NPC may simply not show up, forcing you to load an older save, then hope it works. Pets seem kinda buggy, too, with crazy AI (see my post from a few days ago) and odd recruitment rules.

Good stuff:

• The humor is great and plentiful, right from the outset. (Hmmm, I think I'll give my character the Goat Hater quirk...) It gets deep sometimes, too. (Wait, are they making fun of patriotism, or are they using it as a much more benign form of craziness than most of the other groups!?)
• The music is fun, too. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's painfully ironic, and sometimes its even stirring.
• The crafting is pretty good. The UI for it could use some help, but the results are good, and I like balancing using the raw materials for it against other things.
• The battles are fun. It's a turn-based, squad style battle system similar to XCom.
• The ammo system works out well, for the most part. You'll find ammo for all sorts of weapons in the levels but there won't quite be enough of it (at least on Ranger difficulty), so you'll need to buy/craft ammo from time to time. However, if you get two+ characters using the same kind of ammo, you'll burn through that ammo type faster and find yourself buying/crafting it more often. It's a nice way to push you toward diversity without requiring it.

A mixed issue is the respec system. The system itself is pretty standard: pay money and you can build or re-build characters, with the amount paid increasing every time it's used. However, with the way the game is set up, you're going to want to make a character entirely devoted to crafting skills that's never part of the party except when crafting for them. That seemed like walking backwards into older MMO habits. It also undermines potential companions you get later in the game. If you want to use one of those characters, you're going to need to replace somebody you've been using - but that somebody is bound to have specialized in some skill like hacking or explosives. So you're going to need to boot out the old character, then re-build the new character with most of the booted character's skills! Why bother?

The DLC for the game is another mixed bag, but this time I would recommend skipping them. The problem is that the DLC is integrated into the main game, adding substantial content. I did the first DLC and it was interesting and new, but it also meant leaving my pets behind or giving up on doing it "peacefully" (which I didn't end up doing). Why would they undermine a skill like that?? The real problem, though, is in my first bullet point: doing most of the quests already gives you too much power. Adding more content makes that problem all the worse!

I didn't play Wasteland 2. There were references to that game, but they were explained well enough that I didn't feel like I should have played 2 before 3.

This was the best InXile game I've played in a long time! I found Torment: Tides of Numenera to be pretty bland. Bards Tale 4 had awesome music, but the combat got so tiresome that I didn't even make it through the whole game.

 

[McStabStab]

My wife and I rolled the credits on It Takes Two this past weekend. What a ride that game was. Although mid-game the story took a darker turn, the experience overall was fantastic. The diversity of game mechanics and level design through each chapter was incredible. Switching the roles and tasks your character fulfills makes this title a fun house of teamwork experiences that often has you belly-laughing at mess-ups and failed attempts.

I've said it before, but shocked this didn't get the co-op GOTY award from PCG. This, in my opinion, was more innovative than Back 4 Blood.

 

[DXCHASE]

Just wrapped up DAYS GONE. I actually sat through the credits for this game too! Very well done in my opinion and was definitely better than i thought it was going to be. I managed to complete the main quest and all side quests along with most of the objective based side-stuff. The endgame is ok, I have to eradicate hordes of zombies but its always a thrill tackling them with my arsenal, so im doing that at a slow pace.

So, id give this game a 9/10. Great story, good graphics, good voice acting (for the most part), the AI could have been tweeked a bit and you cant swim (apparently your character is afraid of water according to the lore) which is annoying, but all in all, a solid game that i recommend if you like survival/horror, third person shooter with bike riding (more like dirtbike riding but still).

 

[Johnway]

So another game finished. This time Middle Earth shadow of war. Honestly i left feeling disappointed by the end of it. The problem was that it was far too repetitive, the game stretches shadow of Mordor's premise/story x4 times and you'll see everything the game has to offer by the halfway mark. Taking over the strongholds 4 times is just too tedious. Sod playing end game content, i've had my fill of it. I did have a few highlights playing the game like random gondor soldier saving my hide by killing the captain that was about to execute me.

So what about the DLC? Won't lie, its well made. Certainly more effort was put into DLC compared to other devs and games. That said i felt that the outlaw and slaughter tribe DLC is pretty worthless. Just more opportunities to fight more orcs and bag epic/legendary gear. i pretty much ignored it as it would have been more effective to do it near end game to get higher leveled gear.

But back to the story expansions were they any good? They were ok, certainly wasn't essential .The desolation of Mordor did enough to make it interesting. Felt like Batman: a Just cause mordor edition as you could use a grappling hook to travel and use a parachute to fly around. The Blade of Galadriel was more of the same with nothing significantly compelling but i guess it wraps up some loose ends with Galadriel. I would say that perhaps the missions to obtain legendary gear is nothing short of obnoxious with most of the orcs being immune to all forms of damage except one and/or decked out with loads of strengths. Thank god i didn't need to play it to beat the DLC.

So would i recommend it? eh, its ok i guess. The entire lot can be bought for a dirt cheap price so why not.

 

[McStabStab]

So another game finished. This time Middle Earth shadow of war. Honestly i left feeling disappointed by the end of it. The problem was that it was far too repetitive, the game stretches shadow of Mordor's premise/story x4 times and you'll see everything the game has to offer by the halfway mark. Taking over the strongholds 4 times is just too tedious. Sod playing end game content, i've had my fill of it. I did have a few highlights playing the game like random gondor soldier saving my hide by killing the captain that was about to execute me.

So what about the DLC? Won't lie, its well made. Certainly more effort was put into DLC compared to other devs and games. That said i felt that the outlaw and slaughter tribe DLC is pretty worthless. Just more opportunities to fight more orcs and bag epic/legendary gear. i pretty much ignored it as it would have been more effective to do it near end game to get higher leveled gear.

But back to the story expansions were they any good? They were ok, certainly wasn't essential .The desolation of Mordor did enough to make it interesting. Felt like Batman: a Just cause mordor edition as you could use a grappling hook to travel and use a parachute to fly around. The Blade of Galadriel was more of the same with nothing significantly compelling but i guess it wraps up some loose ends with Galadriel. I would say that perhaps the missions to obtain legendary gear is nothing short of obnoxious with most of the orcs being immune to all forms of damage except one and/or decked out with loads of strengths. Thank god i didn't need to play it to beat the DLC.

So would i recommend it? eh, its ok i guess. The entire lot can be bought for a dirt cheap price so why not.

After feeling like SoM was a pretty decent grind I decided to pass on SoW. I never was a Lord of the Rings buff but I really appreciated the nemesis system cause that’s what really made the game. As the recent PCG article talked about, the length of games sometimes can work against them.

 

[McStabStab]

I just put a bow on DOOM Eternal. The game was certainly difficult which leads to the question, “what makes a game fun?” Is it overcoming its difficulty by developing good timing and use of skills through repetition (Dark Souls, Cuphead, etc.)? Or is fun something that comes from the other elements, like the story telling, level design, and gameplay mechanics?

Truly the perfect combinations of the above vary per gamer, and my level of enjoyment ping-ponged between satisfaction and frustration often, but in the end I’ll say DOOM Eternal is a bold step forward to evolve the systems of DOOM 2016, albeit not to everyone’s liking.

So in the end, no it’s not my favorite game I finished in the past year, but I did enjoy the ride most of the playthrough. If you’re looking for a challenge there’s plenty here to pique your interest.

 

[Brian Boru]

“what makes a game fun?”

Now there's a question worth its own thread!