The last few games you beat and rate them IV

[Ceremony]

​

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PS4, 2016)

You know what I thought when I played the first three Uncharted games earlier this year? I spent the entire time thinking "I want more Nathan Drake." I just can't get enough of this smug, boring mass-murderer who never shuts up, and never actually says anything clever or witty despite being extremely full of himself. I need more! Well, it seems Naughty Dog actually found some people who think that because with Uncharted 4 not only is Nathan Drake back and insufferable as ever, he's got a big brother who's exactly the same. And he's now married to Elena who's got even worse patter than he does. Fantastic.

Standard Uncharted plot applies - you are Nathan Drake and with the usual assortment of accomplices there's a treasure for you to go and find. Rather than semi-mythical concepts like El Dorado or Shangri-La however he's off looking for some pirate treasure. Now that I think about it, it's quite a literal interpretation of the concept of a treasure hunt. I don't care about the plot to offer more details. Gameplay is the usual combination of third person runny jump climby cover shooty, with the occasional ropey... swingy section. Sorry. I'm going to do this review the opposite way round to usual - gameplay first, plot/themes/narratives second.

Gameplay is what it is. I suppose with the amount of third person games Naughty Dog have done since the first Uncharted they should know what they're doing by now. There are a few additions to the series. The rope swinging sections where you can jump from a ledge, swing a grappling hook to a pole and swing to the next one, they're okay I guess. There are some sliding sections too, but both of these just seem inserted for a bit of variety when moving from one place to another, there's nothing exciting about them. Halfway through the game there's a new climbing mechanic introduced, the piton, where you have to press square to dig into a section of wall and jump to another ledge rather than go straight from ledge to ledge. This just proves they're adding stuff for the sake of it. It doesn't serve any purpose. It's just busywork. There are areas where you can easily reach the next ledge with the standard jump but can't until you've jammed yourself into the wall first. Why? Just get on with it.

Two of my biggest problems with combat in the first three Uncharteds were melee combat and stealth. Melee is fixed by finally being a much smaller part of the game. It's there if you want to, but you're not forced into it aside from one or two scripted scenes. Good. Stealth is back and there are quite a few open areas with lots of enemies and lots of different ways to approach it. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but every such area I can think of right now always has the same problem. You can stake out one enemy, watch their path, finally decide to go in for a stealth attack only to discover one of the other fifteen guys in the area can suddenly see you, and a gunfight ensues. Unlike previous games where stealth was an option but never felt tangibly rewarding, here you're encouraged to do it in areas where it's too awkward to do properly. I don't think the open-ended areas offer much to gameplay either for the same reason. Even if you plan an attack on an area the controls get too fiddly during combat, with the same button for rolling and taking cover making what you actually do when you press it a complete lottery.

In addition to less melee than before, there aren't as many puzzles in Uncharted 4. This is bad. The puzzles in the first two games were insulting, the third game brought them up a good bit, then here there are about three of them in the game total and they're not hard. This makes the game feel generic more than anything else, and it's a real drawback. If there's an aspect of your game that offers a bit of variety and lateral thinking, why not stick with it? Now that I think about it, the game's dumbed down in other ways. Even if you turn off the very pushy in-game hint notifications, you still get them. Stand still for more than five seconds and either Nathan or his companion will say "Hey! Try going over to this area which is extremely obviously the way through the level!" Leave me alone.

New to the series is a more open-ended feel to some of the sections. In some cases this is just a few extra possible paths to reach the end of a platforming section, in one or two it's a huge area with some buildings to explore. Now that I think about it though, this one section in particular acts mainly as a vehicle (heh) to listen to the character development (and I'll come to this later). While searching for pirate king Henry Avery and his treasure, Nathan, brother Sam and Sully go to Madagascar. You get a jeep and a big open area to drive around in with some vehicle based platforming which, for the most part, is a nice diversion. While there are some buildings to explore and some pointless collectables to find, none of it serves any purpose. I find it strange that a game centred around characters who go on these wild adventures is so shallow in terms of your interaction with the world.

Since I played the first three games on PS4, I didn't get to experience their multiplayer. Uncharted 4 has multiplayer. I played it. I was useless. It's been a long time since I played a shooter online, but this seems very focused on people who've played it for a long time having a massive advantage in terms of weapons and equipment. There's also a Survival mode which I'm still in the process of playing. To call it cheap would be an understatement. I understand it's also gone through a series of patches and rebalancing which made payable DLC weapons more effective and then less effective, so it's deliberately cheap. Still, it offers something markedly different if you enjoyed the combat. There's a massive range of weapons in the game, so it's a chance to work through those if nothing else.

When I come to games some time after they've been released it's usually for the same reasons. Like everyone else nowadays I have a massive backlog and little reason to buy anything when it's newly released. In rare cases if it's a game I have some interest in but don't need immediately, I try to ignore it and coverage of it until it's time to play so I can go in unspoiled. As a result the only thing I really knew about the Uncharted series was how everyone loved Nathan Drake, how he was so funny and great and it seemed like everyone who played the games really bought into his character.

After the first three games, I did not share this sentiment. After the fourth, I would pay full AAA price for something that just lets me harm Nathan Drake and all his friends in as many creative ways as possible. I don't get this guy at all. He doesn't have a personality, he has impeccable hair and an inability to shut up. His big brother Sam, retconned into Nathan's backstory, is the same (although he's balding). Having two of them chatting shit to one another somehow isn't even worse than Nathan on his own, it's just blander. One shit patter merchant begets another, and I don't see the point in adding one.

The interesting thing about Uncharted 4 is that for a brief, beautiful moment there actually is a suggestion of a character. Nathan is past his treasure hunting days. He's married Elena and they live in a suspiciously large house on his salvage company wage and her sporadic travel writing. They have an irritatingly cutesy relationship where they play Crash Bandicoot to decide who does the dishes (side-note: Nathan complains about that game having loading times, but when they're in Madagascar he champions having pen and paper with him because phone signals are unreliable - make your mind up) and he occasionally retreats to his attic with all his stolen wares from his past to reminisce. This is the first time in an Uncharted game where I was interested in what Nathan Drake thought about things, and what he did in the world. It lasts about twenty minutes.

If his relationship with Sam is annoying, it's nothing compared to when Elena catches up to him. Aside from a brief part of Uncharted 3 she's always been a particularly beige female character, someone who's just sort of there and is so obviously the inevitable love interest it's like she doesn't bother acting upon it because it'll so obviously happen. Fine. Here though, when she finds out Nathan lied to her about going on a salvage job, there's conflict. She's had enough, she storms out. When she goes to pick him up after they've reached the island along with the mercenary army who're there to get the treasure too, she tells him she almost didn't go back this time.

Great! I think. We're going to get conflict, we're going to get someone telling him what an arse he is for a change. Nope. One faux-earnest monologue later everything's back to normal and Elena's returning the awful banter with more enthusiasm than Sam ever did. Great. It's somehow even more annoying from her. It's like Naughty Dog saw an opportunity for some interesting characterisation and deliberately didn't bother.

There are some comparisons to make between the characterisation in Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us. During a driving section Nathan tells Elena why he never told her about his brother. The conversation eventually drifts away to some piano music while you're driving through a river and a waterfall. This isn't character development. The Last of Us' success was based in the grounded, desperate nature of the characters. Trying to transplant that into a different series that's never been like that doesn't work when it's done so briefly. You can't give people personalities in twenty seconds when they don't have any. To be clear, I don't think the characters in The Last of Us were any good either. But that style of writing is completely unsuitable for the Uncharted series, and when it's done so sparingly it just draws attention to how out of place it is.

The kindest thing I can say about Uncharted 4 is that its ending is seemingly unequivocal. It's an ending. I'm not going to be rushing to play any more Uncharteds that happen to be made. Number 4 isn't a bad game, but I have no interest in the characters or what happens to them. If I feel that way after nearly ten years, I guess it's just not for me.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

What the Golf? - 7.5/10

What the Golf? is like a golf version of Warioware. It's just a ton of mini games all with different spins on them. I'd probably say like 40% were really fun, 40% were OK, and the final 20% were downright frustrating. Some of them were just really bad and they really stuck out because of it. I did 100% the game in about 5 hours. Only achievements I'm missing right now are complete 18 daily challenges, 10k strokes, and 10 hours played. I might go for them just to get all the achievements but it'll require just idling for the most part. It's pretty fun overall, nothing mind blowing but a good way to kill some time here and there.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Darq - 7/10

Darq is kind of like a puzzle/platformer in the style of a point & click adventure. I say that because you have to run around like a platformer and find certain items that interact in certain areas. The game's really short but it's still fun. I beat the whole game in about 1.5-2 hours. It has a horror theme but doesn't do jump scares or anything like that. You run around as you find what items can interact in what areas to open up new passages as you find your way to the exit of a stage. There's 7 stages but the last is more like a race than a puzzle. Each stage will probably take you 10-15 minutes.

 

[Le Barron de HF]

The Evil Within - 8/10

Good story and decently long. Genuinely scary at times and nerve wracking. Would recommend.

As anybody on here played the sequel, is it any good?

 

[Ceremony]

​

Need for Speed Payback (PS4, 2017)

I have played three Need for Speed games in my life. The first was Shift, a more realistic circuit-racing based effort from the studio that would eventually put out the Project Cars games (a series which ironically has gone full arcade with its 3rd instalment, released in 2020). The second was Hot Pursuit, effectively a less colourful version of Burnout Paradise but with real cars.

The third was 2017's Payback. It took me 32 hours over about two and a half weeks to finish. It is, quite comfortably, one of the worst games I've ever played.

When I think about video games I often lament that there aren't really any car-focused open world games anymore. Take the original Driver for instance, one of the finest examples of the genre. A map, a car to drive around in. It works. Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3 though, you had to control the human too. You had to get out and shoot things. I wonder what it would be like if you had a proper 2020-scale open world focused on the car, or even at least vehicles. Could you still make a game like this and make it good?

Payback certainly isn't that game. You are Tyler Morgan, Mac, and Jess. You live in... er, a fictionalised version of Las Vegas and you all like driving and racing. There's a corrupt casino called The House that fixes all the street racing to make money off it, and our heroes fall foul of this. They then have to work their way back up through Fake Vegas' local street racing leagues to take on the House.

The main problem with the characterisation, the writing and the world building in Payback is how generic it is. At the start when the story and characters were being introduced they all felt so bland and uninteresting it was almost uncanny. The whole game feels like it was designed by committee to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. Weirdly though, there are times where it feels as if it tries to mock that kind of media. There are some 'characters' that talk like stereotypical online streamers/influencers and I'm clearly supposed to feel like I'm in on the joke with the game. It's like parents in a bad American sitcom trying show how down with the kids they are, breaking your spine with cringe in the process.

The best bit is when you're working your way through the racing leagues. Each league has a boss and your character talks to them at the start of a race. Except the cutscenes don't feature people and only show you the front of the cars next to each other on the road, so it's like there aren't any people at all and it's the cars that have come to life. That would be more interesting.

I only mention how bad all of this stuff is because the game tries to make it engaging and fails. I could easily overlook this if the gameplay compensated for it adequately. On the face of it there's a lot of potential here. There's a large range of cars and upgrade options for them. You can upgrade the starting cars as much as you want, but as you progress through the story you can buy faster, more expensive cars which ultimately have better stats. There are five types of racing you can build a car for - Race, Offroad, Drift, Drag and Runner. Each car type handles differently and the variety in gameplay does keep the game interesting as you switch between disciplines.

This, sadly, is where the potential ends. I have never played a game with cars in it with physics as bad as this. You play an arcade racer, you expect to be able to easily slide a car round corners. Especially a map with as many long, open curved sections as Payback. You can't. You have to effectively force handbrake turns everywhere, a combination of handbrake, regular brake and as much sudden violent steering as possible. Trying to manage this is just baffling, and it barely gets any better even when the cars are upgraded. That's just trying to move a car on the road, offroad is much worse. No matter how much power you try to put down, the car will fishtail. You won't get it back. Considering the offroad racing still requires you to go on the offroad paths or be slowed down, the lack of control makes keeping up your speed almost impossible.

The story is centred loosely around a particular car, the Koenigsegg Regera. This is a very powerful and fast car. It's also the biggest example of how bad the physics are in the game. I got one as I was trying to finish some of the speed run activities dotted around the map where you have to maintain a certain average speed over a stretch of road. You push, push and push to try and make the thing rotate in a corner, nothing happens until you go over the limit and you lose it.

There's a live tuning menu in each car that lets you change a few tuning aspects while you drive. They do make a difference to the handling, but it only seems to be a different kind of unmanageable. It didn't make the Regera any better with full downforce. I turned on 'Stability Control' and it made no difference. I like the idea of the tuning menu, and each discipline of car has different things to alter, but the differences it makes to your cars performance are negligible at best. And here's a thing. You press down to open the menu, but you have to hold it for two seconds to close it. Why? All this does is force you to come to a stop every time you want to change something, or you'll be distracted long enough to crash into something if you're still driving.

Drag racing was interesting. You have to do the gearshifts manually and time them properly to go as quickly as possible. That's good and interesting and what I imagine a Need for Speed should be. It's undermined a lot by happening on non-straight public streets with seemingly randomly-spawning cars, but it's a nice holiday from the terrible handling model found elsewhere.

Upgrading your cars is an especially obnoxious experience. You can buy Speed Cards with the in-game currency to upgrade one of six parts of your car. If the tune-up shop doesn't have an upgrade you like you can spin a slot machine to try and get one that will help your car. You need tickets for this and you earn a lot less of those than you do the in-game currency. Not to worry though, you can always spend as much real money as you like!

Here's an idea. Don't make a boring game then put microtransations in it to give players good cars. I don't even know why you'd bother spending money when you can just change the difficulty setting. Just create a closed in-game economy which is properly balanced where you can upgrade your cars by playing it. Super simple stuff.

So, how to sum up Need for Speed Payback? A game that controls horribly, writing that has the nerve to try to be clever but is nowhere near intelligent enough to manage it and a story that's fundamentally boring anyway, an uninteresting map and while there's some variety in the gameplay it's so dull and repetitive that the entire thing just feels like a checklist to complete. The game has no redeeming qualities and the bad aspects of it are outright obnoxious. The boring content, awful story and terrible upgrade system just make the game feel lazy and cynical, and since it's published by EA I suppose it is. Like the most rudimentary means of taking up someone's time, offering nothing new or engaging but having as basic a sense of progression as possible so you don't feel like you're wasting effort.

Oh! I forgot the soundtrack. In games like this you want something that's either iconic or something that just sits there in the background without you noticing it. It does neither. It's bad. Bad enough to turn it off. You can almost admire how bad it is, it stands out against the rest of the horrific backdrop I've described.

 

[Le Barron de HF]

Ori and the blind forest: 9/10

Fun little game that can be challenging at times. The upgrade system and abilities that can be unlocked were pretty creative.

 

[Warden of the North]

Far Cry New Dawn - 7.5/10

Another solid entry in the Far Cry universe. I like the atmosphere considerably more then the base game of Far Cry 5. It reminded me a lot of "The Walking Dead" without zombies. Scavenging, home built weapons, different communities with a mix of old world tech and natural fortifications. The Highwaymen and Micky and Lou felt very much like the Saviours and Negan.

If it had been a full sized game I'd probably bump it up to 8.5. My major complaint is the series of missions you have to complete for the guy with handlebar mustache at the end. Too many missions that dont fit the Far Cry style all smashed together right at the end of the game. Like, I dont care about sneaking around unarmed, gladiator arena fights, or roller derbies. These things arent really Far Cry IMO.

I liked Micky and Lou as villians. While we're on the villian discussion, I simply do not understand the Vaas fanpeoples when ever best Far Cry villian is brought up. Having recently played FC3 for the first time, I'd rank him at the bottom of the list after Min, Seed, and Micky/Lou. He was boring and in the end fairly inconsequential.

I like how The Judge was Rook from Far Cry 5 and the lore that went in to creating that character. I liked the French pilot guy and the Expedition missions.

It was worth the $15 Canadian dollars I paid for it, which is all I can ask of a game in the end, really.

 

[Osprey]

I finished Borderlands 2 the other day (yes, I'm now up to 2012 in my backlog; yay). I guess that I'd give it a 7/10. It was fun, though not amazing. I enjoyed the looting and strategy when it came to using the right weapons against the right enemies. On the other hand, it also got rather annoying that I needed to frequently swap weapons in my inventory, depending on the enemies, and keep multiple types of each weapon, which took up a lot of inventory space. Also, the maze-like maps and sometimes having to travel 5 minutes just to return to base got rather tedious, especially later in the game, when I was tired of journeying and just wanted to fast travel around. That said, even after I finished it, I was still hooked enough that I played through all of the DLC. I was enjoying it less and less, but I couldn't give it up. I suppose that that's what an addiction is like.

 

[Warden of the North]

I finished Borderlands 2 the other day (yes, I'm now up to 2012 in my backlog; yay). I guess that I'd give it a 7/10. It was fun, though not amazing. I enjoyed the looting and strategy when it came to using the right weapons against the right enemies. On the other hand, it also got rather annoying that I needed to frequently swap weapons in my inventory, depending on the enemies, and keep multiple types of each weapon, which took up a lot of inventory space. Also, the maze-like maps and sometimes having to travel 5 minutes just to return to base got rather tedious, especially later in the game, when I was tired of journeying and just wanted to fast travel around. That said, even after I finished it, I was still hooked enough that I played through all of the DLC. I was enjoying it less and less, but I couldn't give it up. I suppose that that's what an addiction is like.

Borderlands 2 is such a great game. Its one of the few games that the direct sequel is VASTLY superior to the original. It makes Borderlands 1 look like a proof of concept in comparison. Its usually my pallet cleanser game between larger games. Fits like a perfect pair of jeans whenever I go back to it.

 

[Osprey]

Borderlands 2 is such a great game. Its one of the few games that the direct sequel is VASTLY superior to the original. It makes Borderlands 1 look like a proof of concept in comparison. Its usually my pallet cleanser game between larger games. Fits like a perfect pair of jeans whenever I go back to it.

It's been a few years since I played the original Borderlands, but the sequel felt just like it to me. I didn't perceive the huge improvement that others talk about. Maybe that's partly because I didn't play the original until a few years ago. I think that I played it before the enhanced version, but it was after all of the other patches and DLC, so maybe those made it more polished than the game that most people played 10 years ago. I also play on PC, so any console-specific issues with it wouldn't have affected me. Who knows. I just know that they felt very similar to me, personally, not that that's a bad thing. If I were to load up the original again, maybe I'd see what you mean, though.

 

[GlassesJacketShirt]

​

Need for Speed Payback (PS4, 2017)

I have played three Need for Speed games in my life. The first was Shift, a more realistic circuit-racing based effort from the studio that would eventually put out the Project Cars games (a series which ironically has gone full arcade with its 3rd instalment, released in 2020). The second was Hot Pursuit, effectively a less colourful version of Burnout Paradise but with real cars.

The third was 2017's Payback. It took me 32 hours over about two and a half weeks to finish. It is, quite comfortably, one of the worst games I've ever played.

When I think about video games I often lament that there aren't really any car-focused open world games anymore. Take the original Driver for instance, one of the finest examples of the genre. A map, a car to drive around in. It works. Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3 though, you had to control the human too. You had to get out and shoot things. I wonder what it would be like if you had a proper 2020-scale open world focused on the car, or even at least vehicles. Could you still make a game like this and make it good?

Payback certainly isn't that game. You are Tyler Morgan, Mac, and Jess. You live in... er, a fictionalised version of Las Vegas and you all like driving and racing. There's a corrupt casino called The House that fixes all the street racing to make money off it, and our heroes fall foul of this. They then have to work their way back up through Fake Vegas' local street racing leagues to take on the House.

The main problem with the characterisation, the writing and the world building in Payback is how generic it is. At the start when the story and characters were being introduced they all felt so bland and uninteresting it was almost uncanny. The whole game feels like it was designed by committee to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. Weirdly though, there are times where it feels as if it tries to mock that kind of media. There are some 'characters' that talk like stereotypical online streamers/influencers and I'm clearly supposed to feel like I'm in on the joke with the game. It's like parents in a bad American sitcom trying show how down with the kids they are, breaking your spine with cringe in the process.

The best bit is when you're working your way through the racing leagues. Each league has a boss and your character talks to them at the start of a race. Except the cutscenes don't feature people and only show you the front of the cars next to each other on the road, so it's like there aren't any people at all and it's the cars that have come to life. That would be more interesting.

I only mention how bad all of this stuff is because the game tries to make it engaging and fails. I could easily overlook this if the gameplay compensated for it adequately. On the face of it there's a lot of potential here. There's a large range of cars and upgrade options for them. You can upgrade the starting cars as much as you want, but as you progress through the story you can buy faster, more expensive cars which ultimately have better stats. There are five types of racing you can build a car for - Race, Offroad, Drift, Drag and Runner. Each car type handles differently and the variety in gameplay does keep the game interesting as you switch between disciplines.

This, sadly, is where the potential ends. I have never played a game with cars in it with physics as bad as this. You play an arcade racer, you expect to be able to easily slide a car round corners. Especially a map with as many long, open curved sections as Payback. You can't. You have to effectively force handbrake turns everywhere, a combination of handbrake, regular brake and as much sudden violent steering as possible. Trying to manage this is just baffling, and it barely gets any better even when the cars are upgraded. That's just trying to move a car on the road, offroad is much worse. No matter how much power you try to put down, the car will fishtail. You won't get it back. Considering the offroad racing still requires you to go on the offroad paths or be slowed down, the lack of control makes keeping up your speed almost impossible.

The story is centred loosely around a particular car, the Koenigsegg Regera. This is a very powerful and fast car. It's also the biggest example of how bad the physics are in the game. I got one as I was trying to finish some of the speed run activities dotted around the map where you have to maintain a certain average speed over a stretch of road. You push, push and push to try and make the thing rotate in a corner, nothing happens until you go over the limit and you lose it.

There's a live tuning menu in each car that lets you change a few tuning aspects while you drive. They do make a difference to the handling, but it only seems to be a different kind of unmanageable. It didn't make the Regera any better with full downforce. I turned on 'Stability Control' and it made no difference. I like the idea of the tuning menu, and each discipline of car has different things to alter, but the differences it makes to your cars performance are negligible at best. And here's a thing. You press down to open the menu, but you have to hold it for two seconds to close it. Why? All this does is force you to come to a stop every time you want to change something, or you'll be distracted long enough to crash into something if you're still driving.

Drag racing was interesting. You have to do the gearshifts manually and time them properly to go as quickly as possible. That's good and interesting and what I imagine a Need for Speed should be. It's undermined a lot by happening on non-straight public streets with seemingly randomly-spawning cars, but it's a nice holiday from the terrible handling model found elsewhere.

Upgrading your cars is an especially obnoxious experience. You can buy Speed Cards with the in-game currency to upgrade one of six parts of your car. If the tune-up shop doesn't have an upgrade you like you can spin a slot machine to try and get one that will help your car. You need tickets for this and you earn a lot less of those than you do the in-game currency. Not to worry though, you can always spend as much real money as you like!

Here's an idea. Don't make a boring game then put microtransations in it to give players good cars. I don't even know why you'd bother spending money when you can just change the difficulty setting. Just create a closed in-game economy which is properly balanced where you can upgrade your cars by playing it. Super simple stuff.

So, how to sum up Need for Speed Payback? A game that controls horribly, writing that has the nerve to try to be clever but is nowhere near intelligent enough to manage it and a story that's fundamentally boring anyway, an uninteresting map and while there's some variety in the gameplay it's so dull and repetitive that the entire thing just feels like a checklist to complete. The game has no redeeming qualities and the bad aspects of it are outright obnoxious. The boring content, awful story and terrible upgrade system just make the game feel lazy and cynical, and since it's published by EA I suppose it is. Like the most rudimentary means of taking up someone's time, offering nothing new or engaging but having as basic a sense of progression as possible so you don't feel like you're wasting effort.

Oh! I forgot the soundtrack. In games like this you want something that's either iconic or something that just sits there in the background without you noticing it. It does neither. It's bad. Bad enough to turn it off. You can almost admire how bad it is, it stands out against the rest of the horrific backdrop I've described.

I feel like Burnout Paradise might be worth a shot, even if I far prefer 3 and Revenge.

 

[GretzkytoKurri9917]

Last of Us 2

7/10

Masterfully crafted but ultimately hollow. Significant pacing and storytelling issues. Gameplay is tighter than the original, but the driving purpose of that gameplay loop is much weaker, which made me want the game to just end already long before it finished. It made me want to replay the original more than anything.

B.S. what happened to Joel.

 

[aleshemsky83]

​

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PS4, 2016)

You know what I thought when I played the first three Uncharted games earlier this year? I spent the entire time thinking "I want more Nathan Drake." I just can't get enough of this smug, boring mass-murderer who never shuts up, and never actually says anything clever or witty despite being extremely full of himself. I need more! Well, it seems Naughty Dog actually found some people who think that because with Uncharted 4 not only is Nathan Drake back and insufferable as ever, he's got a big brother who's exactly the same. And he's now married to Elena who's got even worse patter than he does. Fantastic.

Standard Uncharted plot applies - you are Nathan Drake and with the usual assortment of accomplices there's a treasure for you to go and find. Rather than semi-mythical concepts like El Dorado or Shangri-La however he's off looking for some pirate treasure. Now that I think about it, it's quite a literal interpretation of the concept of a treasure hunt. I don't care about the plot to offer more details. Gameplay is the usual combination of third person runny jump climby cover shooty, with the occasional ropey... swingy section. Sorry. I'm going to do this review the opposite way round to usual - gameplay first, plot/themes/narratives second.

Gameplay is what it is. I suppose with the amount of third person games Naughty Dog have done since the first Uncharted they should know what they're doing by now. There are a few additions to the series. The rope swinging sections where you can jump from a ledge, swing a grappling hook to a pole and swing to the next one, they're okay I guess. There are some sliding sections too, but both of these just seem inserted for a bit of variety when moving from one place to another, there's nothing exciting about them. Halfway through the game there's a new climbing mechanic introduced, the piton, where you have to press square to dig into a section of wall and jump to another ledge rather than go straight from ledge to ledge. This just proves they're adding stuff for the sake of it. It doesn't serve any purpose. It's just busywork. There are areas where you can easily reach the next ledge with the standard jump but can't until you've jammed yourself into the wall first. Why? Just get on with it.

I tend to agree with you on the platforming/climbing areas. I honestly dont know who that crap appeals to but I tend to disagree with your take on the combat, I see the criticism a lot. I think its really polished and has come lightyears since the first Uncharted. Originally it was just aping gears of war, the gameplay now I feel has come closer to vanquish. The shooting sets up great sandbox enemy encounters that reward movement and using the environment and that really shines in the multiplayer modes (and its 60 fps online which is nice too). Its all those boring obstacles and dragged out scenes that hurt peoples view of it but get the review scores up. I wish they would find something else but I guess its proven so what can you do.

B.S. what happened to Joel.

Do you honestly believe that guy hadn't read the spoilers and wasnt just pandering to the rage boner that was flooding the internet?

 

[heatnikki]

I finished GTAs 3 and Vice City 100% most recently. Currently in Las Venturas procrastinating

 

[Ceremony]

I feel like Burnout Paradise might be worth a shot, even if I far prefer 3 and Revenge.

If you want an open world arcade racer, I'm certainly recommending Burnout before a Need for Speed.

I tend to agree with you on the platforming/climbing areas. I honestly dont know who that crap appeals to but I tend to disagree with your take on the combat, I see the criticism a lot. I think its really polished and has come lightyears since the first Uncharted. Originally it was just aping gears of war, the gameplay now I feel has come closer to vanquish. The shooting sets up great sandbox enemy encounters that reward movement and using the environment and that really shines in the multiplayer modes (and its 60 fps online which is nice too). Its all those boring obstacles and dragged out scenes that hurt peoples view of it but get the review scores up. I wish they would find something else but I guess its proven so what can you do.

The combat only could be better than the original games since it's on a new console with a more refined controller. As good as Vanquish is, if your best comparable for Uncharted 4's combat is a game released six years before on a different console then you're struggling a bit.

 

[Ceremony]

​

Dirt 4 (PS4, 2017)

Dirt 4 is not the fourth game in the Dirt series. It's the eleventh full release in a series that started with Colin McRae Rally in 1998. After the various different game modes besides rally driving that featured in Dirt 3 the series spun off into the dedicated Dirt Rally game of 2016, which aimed to be a more serious sim than the more accessible regular Dirt series.

I'm fed up of saying 'dirt' and 'series' by now, so I'll get to the point. Despite Dirt Rally's existence Dirt 4 still features rally driving as the primary game mode, alongside Rallycross and "Land Rush," which is effectively Rallycross but with bigger cars, jumps, and no tarmac sections on the circuits. There are a few different game modes. Online you can compete against people in daily, weekly and monthly time trials. You can compete against other people unranked in a standard multiplayer lobby with changeable settings, or you can play the Pro Tour mode where you do rally stages against other people at the same time but not on track together. The game's quite old so it's hard to get a match, and I won all but one of the races I did.

There's a mode I don't even remember the name of. Joyride, I think. This is similar to what I remember of Dirt 3's Gymkhana modes where you have a closed area with a range of surfaces and obstacles for you to drive around in in any of the game's cars. In addition to free play there are time trial courses and Joyride mode itself, where there are a range of blocks dotted around for you to hit within a time limit. This last mode is pointless because you'd need to try each course several times before you figured out a route that allowed you to hit every block quickly enough. The time trials are also pretty repetitive since they're on a closed course, with different sections coming up repeatedly.

The career mode comprises the three disciplines I mentioned already, although they're not weighted evenly. You can finish all the Land Rush events in about two hours. Rallycross is a bit more than that, while Rally goes on forever. It took me over a month and a half of playing this game pretty regularly to get to the end of the career, and I didn't even finish every available championship. While this sounds like it's got a lot of content, it actually just feels like a slog.

In addition to the career mode there's a "My Team" option where you can invest your winnings in a few things. You can buy cars for competing in different championships. You can upgrade facilities and hire engineers to work on your car during events and a PR agent to negotiate with the engineers and your potential sponsors, which you also add to give you some extra cash. This whole process feels very sterile, with a big disconnect between what I do in a car and what happens afterwards. Upgrading car parts and hiring good engineers doesn't matter much. In my time playing I think I over-ran the allotted time for car repairs once. By the time you have a full team of the best engineers you could repair a write-off in twenty minutes for peanuts.

The biggest reminder of how futile all of this is comes at the start of every stage. Your co-driver always says something to the effect of "if we do well here, we can get some cash-flow for parts." No matter what you've won or how much money you have. I don't have an issue with the My Team section as a concept, but it doesn't seem connected to any of your achievements. It doesn't help that you don't actually need to use it to progress through the career. You'll always have offers from other teams with a range of cars to drive. Come to think of it, the only benefit of buying and running your own cars is picking and colouring one of the seven custom liveries and having some awkwardly placed sponsor decals. I don't see the point.

I mentioned earlier that the career is a slog, and it bears repeating. Rather than distinct stages Dirt 4 has a feature called "Your Stage" which randomly generates the courses. Given the nature of rally courses this is something that in theory is a good idea for this style of racing, and I suppose it does work. There are times on longer courses where you'll notice corners are repeated. In all honesty though, the career mode is long and it took me a fair amount of time to realise the courses were randomly generated, so I can't fault it for this. The biggest problem with it is probably the effect it has on the graphics. The original Colin McRae Rally is the first racing game I remember playing where things you did changed the appearance of the car, whether it was damaging it or driving through dirt and mud. While this fine tradition continues with the cars which all look great (Rallycross in particular benefits from this here), the course and surrounding areas are genuinely embarrassing. I was amazed when I started playing the game and saw how bad they were, especially when I considered that Gran Turismo Sport was released the same year.

The main problem with the career is that it just doesn't end. With the stages all being generated there's technically no difference between finishing those and loading up a bunch of custom stages of your own. There's no sense of achievement, and this ties in with the disconnect between the career mode and the custom team settings. It feels like a lot of thought went into the content, only with no structure to give it any meaning. The Land Rush and Rallycross sections of the career being so brief doesn't help here either, with no distinction between preparation for them outside of actually being in a car and racing. The Rallycross events are on real tracks and you drive against all the real world championship drivers, but again it feels hollow.

This lack of refinement in the details is evident in the menus and the racing. There are times where your co-driver is actively dangerous - they make mistakes and tell you the wrong thing about corners that are coming up. I did some research and discovered this is intentional. In theory this is fine and I suppose it's realistic, but it's so jarring it doesn't feel like it's meant to happen. There were times too where a car had crashed on the stage ahead of me and I didn't get a warning about it until after I'd passed them. I don't see why there was focus in areas like this when the main bulk of the content is so dry and repetitive. A special shout also has to go to gravel stages where TV helicopters would hover about ten feet above the road at corners, meaning you're going into a massive cloud of dust at 90mph and you can't see the corner coming up. Rally has a long history of fans and media coverage getting as close as possible to the cars and road while they're running, but if a helicopter ever did that to me while I was driving on a stage I'd stop, get out and start throwing rocks at it. A truly infuriating inclusion.

Everything I've described could still yet be saved if the physics were good. Dirt 4 offers two handling modes, Gamer and Simulation, just to further drive home how conflicted the game is after the Dirt Rally spinoff. Since it's a main series Dirt game and since I was playing with a controller, I played on Gamer. The game was unbelievably easy. On the highest difficulty I was winning stages by at least twenty seconds, each time. I enjoyed pushing myself since you could still easily go over the limit, but a month and a half is a long time to be time trialling. Strangely, the same difficulty level on Rallycross was actually a fair contest, while Land Rush as a mode was so infuriating I put the difficulty as low as possible to get it out the way. Different categories of car aren't noticeably different on Gamer handling, with one or two Group B cars (the most high performance rally category ever) being the only things I really struggled with.

There are five different locations for rally stages to be generated on, and they all offer a different type of surface. There's a notable difference between those, probably a bigger difference than between the cars. The only one of these I'd really complain about are Sweden's snowbanks, which don't seem to reflect any physics found in the real world. If you clip a snowbank you stop and get wedged in it. If you have drive at speed and have a high ride height (it's rallying - you do) you might get beached on top of it. You don't get stuck to it like a magnet or get launched into the air and do several barrel rolls.

I think I've covered everything. Dirt 4 isn't necessarily a bad game, but I don't see what purpose it served when it came out. The more realistic Dirt Rally series had started two years previously and largely usurped the bulk of 4's content. The more freestyle aspects of offroad racing I remember from Dirt 3 feel like an afterthought here, which in turn reflects the structure of most of the singleplayer content. The more accessible driving physics make the game too accessible. I realise I'm more experienced with racing games than most of the audience that would be interested in this game, but even with that in mind it feels too easy.

With Dirt 5 releasing recently (and after Dirt Rally 2.0) there doesn't seem to be a lot of consistent direction with the series. Dirt 5 doesn't feel connected to 4 in the way that 4 didn't feel connected to 3. Ultimately, 4 felt like a way of passing some time. It wasn't a challenge, it wasn't memorable, it was just there.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Trine 4 - Melody of Mystery DLC - 9.5/10

Trine 4 Melody of Mystery is a new DLC for Trine 4 and it's great. Gameplay is really more Trine but the puzzles were a lot more challenging than the base game, especially the puzzles for the collectibles. Some of the puzzles will really leave you scratching your head and possibly even looking for a guide to solve. There's 6 levels, all of which are essentially as long as the base game levels. Considering the base game had 18 levels (3 of which were character intro levels,) this feels almost like 40-50% of the content of the base game. If you enjoyed Trine and you want more, give Melody of Mystery a go!

 

[GretzkytoKurri9917]

I finished GTAs 3 and Vice City 100% most recently. Currently in Las Venturas procrastinating

Nostalgia.


Great Games.

 

[GretzkytoKurri9917]

I tend to agree with you on the platforming/climbing areas. I honestly dont know who that crap appeals to but I tend to disagree with your take on the combat, I see the criticism a lot. I think its really polished and has come lightyears since the first Uncharted. Originally it was just aping gears of war, the gameplay now I feel has come closer to vanquish. The shooting sets up great sandbox enemy encounters that reward movement and using the environment and that really shines in the multiplayer modes (and its 60 fps online which is nice too). Its all those boring obstacles and dragged out scenes that hurt peoples view of it but get the review scores up. I wish they would find something else but I guess its proven so what can you do.


Do you honestly believe that guy hadn't read the spoilers and wasnt just pandering to the rage boner that was flooding the internet?

Don't know if it's true but supposedly he did what he did because of losing a parent and the connection with Joel.

 

[GretzkytoKurri9917]

I finished GTAs 3 and Vice City 100% most recently. Currently in Las Venturas procrastinating

Delete.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Ghost of Tsushima - 9.5/10

A masterpiece, a beautiful game, great gameplay, and a story that sucks you in and keeps you engaged throughout

 

[robertmac43]

Ghost of Tsushima - 9.5/10

A masterpiece, a beautiful game, great gameplay, and a story that sucks you in and keeps you engaged throughout

Going to go down as one of my favorites of the generation.

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

I feel like Burnout Paradise might be worth a shot, even if I far prefer 3 and Revenge.

A Burnout 3 + Revenge remake would be a rare day 1 purchase for me. Lazy and greedy dinks at EA only chose Paradise as it was the only last gen Burnout game so they basically just changed the resolution and FPS.

 

[GlassesJacketShirt]

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury (2004)
Developed by Zombie Studios (PC, Xbox)

Military FPS: The Game. Circa 2004. It's games like this that made me realize how special the original Modern Warfare was.

Score: 4/10

A Burnout 3 + Revenge remake would be a rare day 1 purchase for me. Lazy and greedy dinks at EA only chose Paradise as it was the only last gen Burnout game so they basically just changed the resolution and FPS.

And yet Revenge was also on the 360, so they can't even use that excuse. A modern remake of Revenge would be a smash.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

South Park: The Fractured But Whole - 9/10

I was a bit nervous to grab this game after seeing a good amount of negative reviews but I'm glad I gave it a go anyway. The combat's different from Stick of Truth, it's more of a tactics style than JRPG. There's a lot great humor in here. I loved all of it. The price still seem high, it should definitely be lower. Wait for a sale to pick it up but if you're a South Park fan, you'll still likely enjoy this. The end fight was a bit disappointing compared to many of the others though.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole - From Dusk Till Casa Bonita - 9/10

I loved the story in this one. You play at Casa Bonita where the vamp kids are having a party and they're bringing Kenny's sister, who you have to save from becoming really lame! You get a new character class that I thought was a ton of fun, definitely the best class in the game. The end boss was a hilarious surprise and you even got a new buddy to play with that had some hilarious dialogue. Definitely the stronger of the DLCs IMO.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole -Bring the Crunch - 8/10

Not as good of a story as From Dusk Till Casa Bonita but it was still enjoyable. You also get a new character class and a new buddy. I thought the new buddy felt like he was weighing you down and the new character class was pretty decent. Overall, this whole DLC felt like a bit of a step back from From Dusk Till Casa Bonita but if you can grab the season pass on sale, it's still worth a playthrough.

Both DLCs were about 2 hours and I finished the base game in about 16. I got the whole thing at 90% off on Steam so definitely a great value for my <$10 that I spent!