The last few games you beat and rate them IV

[Dolemite]

Wolfenstine - New Order - I’m really digging the series again and the awesome sci fi story it’s been telling. I just started the latest one (Youngblood) and while the story is great again the game mechanics took a step down.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Omno - 5/10

This is supposed to be a relaxing adventure game similar to games like Journey. I don't know, I just don't see the appeal to these games so average score I guess? Controls were fine, no challenging puzzles or anything. Just a forgettable experience for me.

Two Point Hospital - 8/10

I didn't actually finish this game but I'm pretty much done playing it. That may sound strange with me giving it this score but it was still enjoyable. I'm not a huge fan of tycoon style games but there's some great humor in the game and it was fun for the first 10 hours or so, which is a long time for me in this genre. I started getting a bit micro-manage-y and spent a lot of time just AFKing to hit the objectives and at that point, I lost all interest. I did really enjoy it while I was playing it up until that point, which is about half way through.

 

[Randy Butternubs]

Axiom Verge 1 gets an 8.5 out of 10 from me.

Back tracking and the lack of a fast travel/teleport system irked me. Same with the map/no way to track if you've collected or seen anything in an area. The story is intriguing, but was tied into collecting everything. Which... is an issue is I can't tell if I collected everything in an area.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Chernobylite - 7.5/10

Chernobylite is a bit of a strange game to try to describe. There are some minor stealth/shooter mechanics but it feels more like a scavenging simulator. The characters are all unique and well written and the story is interesting all the way through. I love the atmosphere. I got the game because I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and saw this game has pretty much the same great atmosphere. That being said, I feel like if I wasn't a huge fan of this setting, I don't think I would have really enjoyed the game.

The stealth mechanics are pretty good for a first person game, I enjoy that you can hide in bushes and still see enemies while they can't see you. I liked how upgrading your PDA was a great tool to contribute to stealth/combat as well as scavenging. The gunplay was OK. It wasn't great but it wasn't bad, just average for this style of game.

There's a base that you can build up if you're into that kind of thing. There wasn't much benefit from what I saw although I tried to mostly keep all the categories at least neutral. About 2/3 of the way through, I had so many materials I just went kind of crazy and maxed out all the stat categories and didn't notice any changes. I'm guessing it helps your friends recover faster when resting but not sure. My main issue with the game is that there are basically 5 maps that you run through over and over and over. It makes the game feel really repetitive. At first I was exploring everything each time for resources but when I had a ton of resources, I just started speed running missions. Each mission had a different location and story line but the maps weren't that big so it definitely felt fairly repetitive, especially when you got two missions on the same map.

With all that said, it's kind of a toss up for me. I'm a bit biased because I love the setting and came here from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. I suspect people reading this review are looking at the game because they're in the same boat and I would still recommend it to them but know that it's not as much of a shooter as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is. If you haven't played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, I would first say go play those games because they're amazing, but I would also be hesitant to recommend it unless you're truly interested in the setting.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Superliminal - 7/10

Superliminal is a really interesting and unique puzzle game about perception. The puzzles are challenging and a lot of fun to try to figure out even when they take really unexpected twists and turns. The game's short, I finished it at just under 2 hours and it looks to be the standard length for people's first playthrough. It's definitely a lot of fun, if you're even remotely interested in a title like this, you'll probably like this one.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

The Room 4: Old Sins

I'm not really a fan of point and click games, but The Room games are always a lot of fun for me. I didn't really care for The Room 3 too much because you were in a big mansion and had to constantly look all over the place. this one also had multiple rooms but you never had access to more than 3 rooms at a time and none of the rooms were particularly large. It felt like it went back in the same direction of 1 & 2 which I really appreciated. It took me a bit under 4 hours and reminded me why I loved the Room franchise.

 

[Osprey]

I just finished Lifeslide on PC. What a brilliant game. It reminded me a little of Starfox for the SNES. I highly recommend it if you feel like a relaxing but challenging little flying game. For more information, here's what I wrote up a few days ago:

The other day, I saw that this little game called Lifeslide has a 100% rating on Steam, so I had to check it out... and, yeah, it's pretty awesome. You fly a paper airplane through gorgeous, surreal courses and rely on efficiency and collecting powerups to reach the finish line. Your only enemies are gravity and plane integrity, so you have to keep your speed and "health" up to avoid stalling and crashing. Hard turns kill your speed and can be disastrous, so the trick is to try to make as subtle course corrections as possible to avoid obstacles and grab powerups to keep you going. It has simple controls (just up, down, left, right and one button/key for using powerups) and deceptively simple gameplay (stay airborne), but there's a subtle complexity that is satisfying to uncover with each run. The game somehow manages to be both very relaxing and challenging at the same time, which is impressive.

 

[Ceremony]

Rise of the Tomb Raider (PS4, 2016)

A few months ago I played the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot and I didn't write it up. I had nothing to say. I didn't think anything about it. I'd played it before on PS3, I remembered bits of it but the whole thing sort of passed me by the second time. Looking at the reviews of it from the time it seems to be well-regarded in pretty much every aspect, which I find a bit surprising. Maybe playing it several years since made it feel generic, because there wasn't much that really stood out. I mean that literally - the environments and characters are all drawn from the same palette of browns and greys.

Fast forward a bit to Rise of the Tomb Raider and... shouldn't she rise in the first game? Is it because she seems to go up a lot of mountains in this? I don't know. Anyway, Lara Croft is on the hunt for something her dad was looking for before he died - the source of immortal life. It seems he was getting close, so Lara sets off to Siberia to look for the lost city of Kitezh, which I've just discovered is actually a real place of legend. What follows is your standard third person runny jumpy shooty climby crafty adventure.

After something like two hours of Rise, I was delighted. That period alone was better than anything I remembered from the first game. The platforming was extremely Uncharted and the presentation was still gratuitously cinematic like the first game, but it all felt and looked better. In the first semi-open world area you have to scrounge together some resources to make some poison arrows to get past a bear that's blocking your path. Great, I think, as the crafting system is going to be more convincingly survival-focused this time, rather than the last game where you just collected bolts from boxes and then made stuff. You need to collect different plants and resources to make different types of ammo or health, so I thought it was going to be an interesting challenge as the game went on.

I'm speaking in the past tense so that probably tells you what happened after that. Weapons went the same way as the first game. Crafting went the same way as the first game. You're still swimming in materials. Apart from when you try to upgrade a weapon, then there's always one thing you're missing. As a result you might struggle for that first hour or so, then you have more than enough ammo for the crossbow and you can safely neglect everything else. The game even seems to acknowledge this, as upgraded weapons make little difference outside of adding silencers to guns to allow for proper stealth. That's only for human enemies though, you can have a fully upgraded military rifle and still need to empty the magazine and more into a bear's face to stop it charging at you. Or you can upgrade Lara's climbing axes, with four upgrades to unlock where three of them are "unlock locked boxes even quicker". I'm not kidding. The same goes for Lara's upgrades, with her Skill Points ending up only unlocking slightly more convenient ways to do things that already work fine.

Gunplay is okay, but not amazing. The crossbow is ultimately the best weapon, with poison arrows taking out almost every enemy silently and instantly. There is a real option for stealth and it's fun trying to sneak around and get headshots, but enemies aren't really much of a challenge either way. It's also often quite difficult to separate groups of enemies, so you're going to have to be lucky with an area effect attack or else everyone within a hundred feet is going to be after you.

This being a Tomb Raider game there are some tombs for you to raid and this is one area where the game notably improves on its predecessor. There are lots of tombs and caves, and there are actual puzzles to solve with a range of gameplay mechanics used to solve them. They're not overly complex, but it's the only times where I really felt engaged by Lara and what was going on.

The plot is absolute nonsense which contributes to the under-developed characterisation. Lara is searching for 'The Prophet' and 'The Source' somewhere in unspecified Eastern Europe. She's being chased there by the mysterious organisation known as Trinity, who've tried for centuries to do what a girl with a rich dad managed to do in about a week. They're led by a guy named Konstantin who thinks he's Jesus, and his sister Ana, who romanced Lara's dad for a bit to find out what he knew about The Source. She's got a cough which is supposed to make her seem less evil, even though she was the one who gave her brother stigmata to make him go looking for The Source, so who can really say?

I really don't understand why I'm supposed to care about either side in this. Trinity are the generic corporate military group who have an unending supply of bad guys and body armour, Lara is Lara Croft who teams up with the local rebels who've lived in the area for centuries and continually defended it from invaders. It should be easy to see which side you want to win but Lara kills so much and causes so much destruction it all rings hollow. There's a post-credit scene (I think it was after the credits) that sets up the next game and is presumably supposed to add to the mystery about what Trinity is and how it connects to the Crofts' lives and just... no. I'm not bothered about what happens up until now, I'm not going to care after a few minutes of cutscenes thrown on at the end.

There's a lot of DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the one I want to talk about is Endurance mode. In theory it's a perfectly focused example of the core gameplay. You get dropped into randomly generated terrain and you have to survive, collecting as many artefacts as possible. There are hunger and warmth meters you need to keep filled by killing animals and finding/making fires, and as time goes on enemies get harder and resources get more scarce. There are tombs dotted around for you to raid, and while they don't have any puzzles in them there are traps you'll need to avoid. There are also shelters which are effectively enemy outposts - do you go searching for supplies, or do you avoid the ten tooled up guys with rifles and armour?

This is a mode which is, to a point, enjoyable. If I really liked (or thought anything about) the main game I'd probably love it. It suffers from the same problems though, in that the pacing isn't very good. Run about a lot on your first day and you can find plenty of resources and weapon parts. You can earn enough XP to upgrade all the important skill points, and if you unlock enough things you'll be able to see enemies and traps and pretty much anything you need to with her instinct skills. That's if you didn't use any of the game's token card system to start you off with skills and upgrades, which can completely remove all challenge from the game. This is definitely the sort of mode I would have loved when I was younger and didn't have many games. I would have found the repetition of areas helpful rather than unstimulating, and I would have really tried to score as highly as I could. Now though, there's just very little to care about.

I didn't really think about the Uncharted games as I was playing this, but I've been unable to shake them since I've been writing this. I didn't really like the Uncharted games for various reasons I wrote about at the time. I don't remember the finer details all that well, but I do know that certain things were clear - the characterisation, the stakes, and the visuals. The characters were all dreadful, but there was some variety in them. The games were centred around mythical treasure which doesn't exist, but what you were doing felt like there was a tangible connection to the real world as it existed in the game. This was reflected in the depictions of the areas you visited, which all looked spectacular.

None of this applies to Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is an iconic video game character who exists here as a posh accent and some breathy exertion noises. She sets off to find The Prophet and The Source in some hidden part of Europe, and a group of bad guys goes to try and get there first. Any challenge in the gameplay is mitigated early on, and I even forgot to mention I played on the second-highest difficulty (which I think is the same as the highest but without perma-death) and had no problems at any point. There is nothing challenging about this game on a mechanical or intellectual level. As I reach this point in writing it up which admittedly is some time after I played the game, I realise why I had nothing to say about the first Tomb Raider reboot. Here is some more of it. The end.

 

[Osprey]

Well hello there, Lara Croft. I see that Edios had the same infatuation with butt shots that BioWare did.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Fallout: New Vegas 9.5/10

Gave it another go after quite a few years, FO3 is still my favorite, but this runs a close 2nd. Played through the main game and all DLC and clocked in around 95 hours or so, only disappointment is not being able to keep playing after completing the main story as I'm sure there was some side stuff I missed

 

[Frankie Spankie]

House of Da Vinci - 7/10

House of Da Vinci is a puzzle game similar The Room series. If you enjoyed those, you'll enjoy this. I think it's a small step down from The Room, sometimes the angles make the controls awkward. Also, this has more puzzles like sliding puzzles in it rather than discovery type puzzles which is what The Room is more about. Still a fun game though overall.

 

[Ceremony]

​

Grand Theft Auto III (PS4, 2015 - originally PS2, 2001)

Grand Theft Auto III is one of the most important video games in history. Released early in the 5th console generation's life cycle it transformed its own series and video games in general. Wildly popular with the buying public, it set the course for its own series' future, its developer Rockstar's future, and every other video game publisher who has since put out a 3D, third person, open world game. "Sandbox" as a term exists because this game exists, and Vice City, San Andreas, IV, V and the seemingly endless GTA Online have all followed, with V and Online in particular dominating games for the past eight years in a way which has ironically rendered the creation of anything as influential as III redundant.

I've played it over the last few weeks. It has not aged well. You play as Claude, a man with no voice and remarkably square shoulders who is left behind by his girlfriend when a heist goes wrong. He escapes the police and finds himself in Liberty City, a pastiche of New York City, and has to fend for himself. He ends up involved with an array of criminal gangs and other colourful individuals, trying to survive his encounters with all of them. Along the way he ends up involved in and terrorised by the hot new drug that's sweeping the city, Spank. In addition to these story missions there are a range of now standard GTA activities for you to partake in - side-missions, stunt jumps, pointless hidden collectables. All in all I spent over forty hours with the game, so you can't deny that it's filled with content.

The story is largely irrelevant. Once you've finished a certain character's story thread they and their gang will turn on you, meaning you get shot at relentlessly when you're driving around. It doesn't really matter which gang you're involved with at any one time, since missions don't offer much in the way of variety. Although limited in scope the game's writing and characterisation is very good, with several characters memorable despite their questionable appearances and limited screen time. Donald Love and Asuka are my personal favourites, with the mafia guy's off-screen haranguing mother in the background whenever you turn up at his restaurant another highlight.

Now, the gameplay. It seems that on PC you can play this game with an assortment of mods that make the game look a lot nicer. From what I've seen that is genuinely nice, but not essential. From what I've seen you can also play with control of the third person camera. You get a crosshair you can move around manually. I honestly can't explain how it feels to not have independent camera control. Imagine trying to walk without feet. Imagine not being able to move your neck from side to side. Then imagine it being even more awkward. Whenever I play older games I can easily make excuses for them. Rayman 2 remains one of my favourite games and I could play it right now with no problems. I never got used to GTA III though. Not being able to move the camera when on foot and having to rely on very vague aiming mechanics when you're surrounded by enemies means you'll have the health and armour cheats memorised quickly, and you'll be using them a lot.

Mission design isn't great in this respect, as you're usually faced with a group or groups of people shooting at you. Complete some missions and you'll have people shooting at you the whole time as you start angering the various gangs that populate the streets. There are a few design and mechanical choices like this that feel a bit poorly thought through, with ideas that seem good in the moment but just get annoying quickly when you have to deal with them for any length of time.

The worst part of the game which is bad from a historical perspective as well as in its own right is the map. It's awful. There isn't a viewable map in-game and I don't have a physical one since I was playing a digital version of the game. The minimap only has two colours and doesn't distinguish when roads are on top of one another. As you progress through the game's three islands this gets worse. The first area is fine. The second area is a bit more complicated with alleyways and overhead bridges making things a bit more complicated, but it's manageable. The third area is the worst of the lot, with about four separate areas with only one route between each. By the end of the game I'd almost remembered how to get around. Bonus points too for your safehouse here being in the least logically designed part of the map. If Vice City has a map you can access through the menu and custom waypoints, I'm happy to take back everything I've said about III's influence and transfer it.

That said, there is enough detail in the game to find charming and overcome its flaws. The different handling characteristics of the different cars is noticeable. Same goes for driving offroad or in the rain. As mentioned the characters are mostly well-written and entertaining, certainly enough to compensate for the lack of engagement from the player-character. Several radio stations are brilliant. Rise FM is amazing and it's nice to hear the original version of Chatterbox. If I was able to overlook the flaws I've described and stick with it for forty hours, the good points surely have to count for something.

All in all, my verdict is wait for the remakes supposedly to come in 2021. I know people generally think highly of Vice City, so at least I have that to look forward to.

 

[Osprey]

Now, the gameplay. It seems that on PC you can play this game with an assortment of mods that make the game look a lot nicer. From what I've seen that is genuinely nice, but not essential. From what I've seen you can also play with control of the third person camera. You get a crosshair you can move around manually. I honestly can't explain how it feels to not have independent camera control. Imagine trying to walk without feet. Imagine not being able to move your neck from side to side. Then imagine it being even more awkward. Whenever I play older games I can easily make excuses for them. Rayman 2 remains one of my favourite games and I could play it right now with no problems. I never got used to GTA III though. Not being able to move the camera when on foot and having to rely on very vague aiming mechanics when you're surrounded by enemies means you'll have the health and armour cheats memorised quickly, and you'll be using them a lot.

As a PC gamer, I rarely mod games to change the graphics. I want to play old games with the original graphics, or at least close to them. When I mod them, it's almost always to address control/UI elements that I find irritating or uncomfortable. I remember that it took me several days to fix GTA3 to the point that I was comfortable to actually play it. One of the big things was that you couldn't steer with the mouse... or maybe it was that you couldn't use the mouse to rotate the camera while driving. Either way, it was very annoying and showed that not a lot of work had gone into the PC port. I don't remember the rest of the mods, but it took quite a few to make the game comfortable enough for me. At least I got there and enjoyed the game. Also, I seem to recall that I didn't need to mod Vice City as much, which was nice.

 

[Andrei79]

Just completed Hollow Knight.

My score is something between 9.5 and 10. A brilliant game and a masterpiece of the genre. It's my favorite metroidvania.

Rich lore and story, incredible music and art style. Gameplay and exploration are my highlights. I loved the combat. Every area was a joy to explore and was its own thing. Going through the City of Tears and the Soul Sanctum was amongst my favorite gaming moments ever.

Can't wait for Silksong.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - 9.5/10

This is probably the first game that felt next gen for me, beautiful visuals, smooth fast paced gameplay, great music, and wonderful voicework. Great game

 

[The Mars Volchenkov]

Psychonauts 2 - 9.5/10

It’s been a long time since a game brought me pure joy, and this one did it. Every level is designed so well and is so unique. I was actually sad to finish it and want to go back and replay it. Right now it’s my GOTY.

The PSI King/brain level is one of my favorite levels of all time. So good.

 

[NinjaKick]

Bioshock -10/10

the best voice acting in any game imho. loved it from start to finish. and the game still holds up to the test of time.

 

[Ceremony]

​

Far Cry 3: Classic Edition (PS4, 2018 - originally PS3, 2012)

Far Cry 3 was really the first Ubisoft game which established and perfected the open world formula which would go on to dominate their release cycles. A world, a bunch of collectables, some crafting, a bunch of enemy outposts you need to flush out to take over the area. With the 7th and 8th console generations this formula was expanded across several franchises and eventually made its way into the online realm, with the concept of games as a service becoming Ubisoft's main business model. The result is a seemingly endless production line of games which differ little in gameplay, with only the aesthetics and characters changing.

With this change came a lot of success, as it seems (the only one of these I've ever played is Far Cry 3) the formula is actually quite enjoyable. Since Far Cry 3's release the workplace culture that defined Ubisoft was largely horrific, with widespread and appalling accounts of sexual abuse and a general abuse of power by those in charge. Despite the head of the company saying things about inclusiveness and accountability very little has happened. The games keep coming out. Nobody has been punished. It's almost amusing playing Far Cry 3, since almost every character is a sadistic, arrogant lunatic, and you can easily imagine most of the dialogue having been said somewhere in a Ubisoft building over the past ten years.

Far Cry 3 is an open world game where you play as Jason Brody, a horrible person who along with his horrible friends end up stranded on a tropical island where they're captured and tortured by the pirates who inhabit it. Jason escapes and is reluctantly thrust into a fight against the pirates, the rest of the island, and finds out what the true history of the native population is.

Gameplay is okay. You have a range of weapons you can quickly unlock. You'll need to as well, I was playing on the easiest difficulty and in the early stages I found enemies have a bit of the bullet sponge about them. It's worth pointing out that I didn't realise the menu in the weapon store scrolled down past the options on screen, which meant I missed out on "Signature Weapons" which were all much more powerful. There are only a few missions where you'll have to rely on pure firepower though and you can carry four different weapons as well as a range of (awkwardly controlled) explosives, so you can brute force your way through most tough encounters.

The controls are a bit weird, and I can't tell why. I think it's to do with the frame rate of the original. Aiming, even with auto-aim enabled, feels swaying and unresponsive. It's like what you'd get if your character was drunk, but there's no blurriness, just poor control. You sort of get used to it but it never really stops feeling weird. Getting around the island is relatively fun. There are a range of vehicles to drive which handle hilariously. You eventually unlock a wingsuit and parachute and have access to hang gliders which let you see parts of the island in a bit more detail, and there's no denying it can look spectacular. The biggest criticism I have of moving around is the amount of fall damage you can take. One of the things I liked best about Horizon Zero Dawn was being able to move around the world so easily. Here, if you fall three feet off a ledge then half of your health disappears. It gets old.

In addition to the story there are Radio Towers dotted around which you have to climb to show up the map in detail. These are a nice idea in theory but as you progress in the game the towers get harder to climb, with narrow ledges to walk on and jump to. First person platforming isn't good. It seems like a design choice made to stop a repetitive part of the game from feeling repetitive, but it's just annoying. There are also Outposts occupied by the enemy, and you have to infiltrate and kill all of them to reclaim the island. The intention is for the player to approach these from a range of perspectives, but you can't. If you try and run in all guns blazing you'll get flattened. If you manage to kill one or two guys and survive they'll trip an alarm and reinforcements turn up and you'll get flattened, so the only real option is stealth. Some locations have an animal like a tiger or a bear locked up in a cage which you can unleash to do the work for you. It's quite fun observing an outpost, tagging enemies and trying to take them out one by one, but there's very little difference between them.

On that note, there's no denying that Rook Island is well-populated with enough animals to make it feel like a genuinely threatening world. You can be looking for some plants to craft a syringe, or just exploring, then all of a sudden some tigers will run out of the trees. Or a pack of rabid dogs. Or if you're in a cave, some komodo dragons will appear. While the whole environment has lots of detail there's not much that's interesting about it. It's due to the additions like animals and enemies that it's rarely repetitive and it really does feel like you're a scared, out of your depth city boy trying to survive in it.

I remember when I played this eight years ago on the PS3. I was bemused by how much people seemed to like it. It wasn't that I thought it was bad, it was just... there. Now though, I found the story and the characters much more engaging. For Jason there is genuine development as he makes his way through the jungle and becomes more able to deal with it. He'll gradually make more enthusiastic noises as he kills people and animals for instance, and less scared or disgusted ones. This is subtly played off against his friends as he rescues them one by one and you can sense them growing apart, as they all just want to leave while he's suddenly feeling more at home on the scary murder island. The end of the story results in a choice you have to make and really, it's one of the few choices I can recall in a game where it wasn't only easy to pick, but the easy choice was the thematically logical one too.

The antagonists are probably what this game is best known for, and there's no denying that the mohicaned, scarred, maniacal Vaas is a memorable figure. The scenes with him are the highlight of the game. Everyone's just a bit too wild to really be relatable and I won't even go in to what the natives get up to, but near enough everyone is just a well-crafted, exaggerated character who fills their role perfectly. The story and the setting have one major weakness here since you reach the halfway point and discover there's a whole new section of map and story which feels like two separate narratives thrown together because they couldn't be a game in their own right, but you're generally having too much fun to really notice.

Far Cry 3 has its flaws, it has its forgettable moments but it has a lot of enjoyable moments too. I don't think my opinion of it has changed too much since I last played it, but I don't feel as if I've wasted my time going back to it.

 

[Ryuji Yamazaki]

Bioshock -10/10

the best voice acting in any game imho. loved it from start to finish. and the game still holds up to the test of time.

One of my favorite series, along with Borderlands.

"welcome to the circus of values!"

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

Bioshock -10/10

the best voice acting in any game imho. loved it from start to finish. and the game still holds up to the test of time.

Did you play the original or the trilogy remake?
I haven't played the game since it was released and never played the other two, might have to pick up with the remake trilogy when it's on sale again.

 

[Ceremony]

Did you play the original or the trilogy remake?
I haven't played the game since it was released and never played the other two, might have to pick up with the remake trilogy when it's on sale again.

I played the remasters at the end of last year: The last few games you beat and rate them IV

The frame rate is better and everything looks a bit sharper. That's pretty much it.

 

[Jovavic]

I finished The Last of Us Part II last night and it didn't turn me gay or whatever bullshit reasons people were concocting to shit on a game with two female leads (one being gay, and the other being jacked which I guess upset the masculinity of some)

Anywho, 10/10, king of the Sony made PS4 exclusives

 

[NinjaKick]

Splinter Cell = 8 out of 10. the stealth game that started it all. Can't wait to start pandora tomorrow.

Did you play the original or the trilogy remake?
I haven't played the game since it was released and never played the other two, might have to pick up with the remake trilogy when it's on sale again.

the 360 version... I know I'm late to the party. I decided to skip the xbox one and ps4 generation because I own hundreds of 360 games. I do plan on getting a ps5 soon though.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Destroy All Human! 7.5/10

I never played the original Destroy All Humans! but remember hearing that it was a lot of fun. This was my first experience with the game. There's a lot of dumb humor if you're into that, I personally enjoyed it. The gameplay is also just a lot of mindless fun. The game's rather easy except for a frustratingly tedious final boss and it's pretty short. I finished it in about 6 hours.

It's not some mind blowing must play experience but if you're looking for some mindless fun in a unique setting, give it a go.

 

[Ceremony]

Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition (PS4, 2014)

Guacamelee! is a 2D roguelike dungeon crawler in which you play as Juan, a farmer from the village of Santa Luchita. One day the evil demon Carlos Calaca turns up and kidnaps the girl he likes to use her in a plan to merge the world of the dead and the world of the living, and rule over both. Juan tries to fight him and is swiftly killed, before being given a special Luchador mask which gives him powers. He then jumps and punches his way through an assortment of rooms to try and stop Calaca before his plan succeeds.

In theory, I'm not a fan of this kind of game. I generally find backtracking and multiple paths through an area trigger some form of OCD in me where I'm afraid I'm missing content. This is basically the perfect game to introduce someone to the genre. It's mostly linear with a bit of exploration, and an easy to follow map which lets you make sure you've covered everything. The gameplay is the right mixture of platforming and attacking, with an array of powers and moves you unlock as you progress through the story. Some fights can feel overwhelming especially if there's lots of enemies in the one room, but it's never cheap and really satisfying when you work out an effective strategy for dealing with enemies attacking you in different ways.

The enemy design is wonderful and varied too, and the overall aesthetic is a really strong part of that. The Mexican, cartoony and slightly hand-drawn feel to everything is a very strong and consistent look, and all characters really play into that. The boss fights are no exception to this. Neither are the locations with side-quests, with relatively charming NPCs offering you small fetch quests. It doesn't always feel like a very deep world, but it's a nice one.

Movement and exploration are both varied throughout. Some places require backtracking once you've unlocked certain abilities, but for the most part they're easy to get to. The obvious highlights are when you can turn Juan into a chicken to get through small gaps. The squawking noises he makes are worth it alone. The fast travel system is pretty awkward, with each main area having one area you can teleport to. This means you could go back to the end of a long area to discover a missed collectable at the start, and given the swift nature of the rest of the game it seems like an oversight rather than a deliberate choice. It's not too big a problem though, and probably only applies if you're as I've described, paranoid about missing things.

In addition to the strong art and design, the writing is great too. All of the dialogue is text-based, but it's funny. It's not consistently wacky, it's not that irritating early 2010s meme-based irreverence, but it's distinctive and enjoyable. There are quite a few pop culture references in addition to the Mexican theme, and it's nice to see a game made with such love which acknowledges its influences. I remembered the Journey reference from when I played this on PS3 and it still hits.

As far as criticism goes, it's short. I got 100% while playing on hard in 13:40. I used a guide for some of the collectables, but that's still not very long. It's also worth pointing out that the PS4 version includes the PS3 version's DLC but adds new DLC of its own. With a few new characters you can play as. I didn't actually realise this and I'm pretty sure I paid more for the DLC than I did for the game itself. This feels like a pretty cynical way to get some extra money out of people, but I've spent more on things I've hated and spent less time with, so I can't really complain.

All in all, good fun. It also offers four player local multiplayer, which I'm sure would be great fun. It's definitely worth your time.