Paid Members RedTwoster Posted January 6 Paid Members Posted January 6 4 hours ago, Ironic Indie Lad said: You need to collect a quite frankly absurd number of green crystals before the game lets you progress. The crystals are pretty much the only thing in the baron open world area of the game. I didn’t want to ruin the experience for you, but when I read your initial post, this portion of the game is what immediately came to mind for me. I really hope they patch this at some point and lower the requirements; not so that I can play it again, but simply to improve the game for other people. It’s just busy-work. Up until that point, I was enjoying the game. Quote
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted January 7 Paid Members Posted January 7 A couple of hours in to Clair Obscur and I'm a bit baffled by the huge praise for it. Feels like a pretty standard turn-based RPG complete with over the top magic and messy fantasy visuals. I'm hoping it'll click with me soon or the story will get a bit more interesting and it'll live up to the hype. Quote
Paid Members RedTwoster Posted January 7 Paid Members Posted January 7 21 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: A couple of hours in to Clair Obscur and I'm a bit baffled by the huge praise for it. Feels like a pretty standard turn-based RPG complete with over the top magic and messy fantasy visuals. I'm hoping it'll click with me soon or the story will get a bit more interesting and it'll live up to the hype. It’s definitely a game that’ll suffer from the level of hype it’s had, when you go into it not knowing what to expect it’s always going to be a very different experience than if you’re going into it knowing it’s a beloved game. If you’re not sucked into the story and world by the end of Act 1, I’d hazard a guess and say it’s not going to happen for you. I’ve played it several times now, and it’s dunking it out with Final Fantasy VII to be my favourite game of all time. But the fact FFVII is the other contender for that spot for me should tell you something - I love JRPG-style games, so a particularly strong one was always going to gel with me. Quote
Paid Members Jazzy G Posted January 7 Paid Members Posted January 7 (edited) I started that Marvel beat em up and it's fine. It's more TMNT Shredder's Revenge with a different coat of paint . It's got a big roster of characters, but to stop you just picking the same ones all the time there are some character specific goals to unlock on each level. They also have Cathal Dodd, who does the voice of Wolverine in the 94 X-Men Cartoon, the Capcom X-Men and Marvel Vs fighters from the 90s, and X-Men 97 and whose voice I always hear when I read a comic with Wolverine in it as Wolverine. I'm sure I read somewhere that Christopher Daniel Christopher Barnes is the voice of Spider-Man as well, but I could be wrong. Edited January 7 by Jazzy G Quote
Paid Members RedTwoster Posted January 12 Paid Members Posted January 12 I just completed Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta, and while it’s a very good remake, I can’t help but feel that the game it’s based on is a bit overrated. Almost every boss is a variation on not being able to see an enemy, with you having to figure out a way around that. And it’s not particularly hard to do that, it just makes a lot of the fights endurance tests more than a tense and exciting, especially the battle with The End. The script - as is often the case with Kojima games - is beyond horrendous. I imagine he wakes up every day wondering why, in an era where high quality video game TV/film adaptations are everywhere, no one has attempted to adapt any of his franchises. But MGS is like a parody that doesn’t realise it’s a parody, there’s really nothing you could do with it that wouldn’t be awful without drastically changing the source story. The fact it’s wacky is probably part of the charm, but the gameplay hasn’t aged well, even with the remade elements. I found it a bit of a slog. It’s the only MGS game I’d not completed, so I’m glad I’ve finally done that, but never again. Quote
Paid Members Jesse Posted January 12 Paid Members Posted January 12 I hit Like because I agree that 3 is overrated, it's my least favourite MGS, but I can't get on with your feelings about the script which I think is the best part of it, especially the Revolver Ocelot stuff. Quote
The Gaffer Posted January 12 Posted January 12 I've always thought of Snake Eater as being the most loved one - definitely the most loved of the sequels - by people who just loved gaming rather than being avowed Metal Gear Solid fans. It makes complete sense. There's a sort of self contained whacky blockbuster vibe to it the rest don't have, and even though it's still full of lengthy cinematics it's still easily got the meatiest gameplay of the main series unless you're counting that unfinished clear the outposts game they done. It's always been my least favourite, too. 2 - regardless of how you feel about it - took a pretty courageous step in pulling the rug out from under the most hyped game on the planet at the time and made a deliberate attempt to push some pretty farsighted themes in its narrative and - in doing so - essentially ended on a cliffhanger. As soon as I finished it I remember thinking "When a sequel to this comes out, it's going to shoot for the moon". I was picturing the most daring, futurist looking and feeling game ever made. Instead it was a...Bond movie? The script is still pretty out there compared to most other games, but there's just something about how it winks at the camera a little too much. I basically registered it as a spin off, and then when 4 eventually did come out it had flashes of what I thought the sequel I imagined in my head all those years ago should have been, but it was just all over the place and felt like it arrived too late. 2 should have had a direct sequel - basically a much tighter, less shit 4 - within a few years before they went back in time. Quote
Paid Members FLips Posted January 14 Paid Members Posted January 14 Been making my way through my Christmas games and got 1000g on two of them. Once Upon a Katamari is absolutely fine. It's a Kamatari game, and there's no individual qualities really to any of them. Really fun games but completely interchangeable. Thankfully nothing too taxing in this one to get every achievement but finding all the characters and medals is a grind as you have to replay some levels 3 or 4 times as things don't unlock until you sequentially play them. I can't really judge a game based on how hard the achievements are though because that's not why I wanted to play it. I wanted to play it because I like Katamari games and I liked this one. Robocop Rogue City: Unfinished Business is a standalone DLC to the original Rogue City game, this one taking place in the Dredd-style Omni Tower. This one brings the content from Robocop 3 you never got in the original RC so you get Jetpacks and the Kanemitsu Corp ninja cyborgs, the latter are done really well too. They pad it out with some really interesting spin-off side missions, such as one where you play as pre-Robocop 1 Murphy to set up his relationship with the main bad guy, and one where you play as a henchman looking to stage a coup against the main bad guy but they could have definitely done more with the latter and had him fight Robocop, but instead he sneaks about while Robocop is attacking elsewhere in the building. There's also a really fun mission where you play as ED-209 and basically blast through a floor of the tower with machineguns and rockets. Sadly the game lacks a lot elsewhere due to taking part in this made up tower, so you don't get the phenomenal feeling of being that you got in the original RC when you could roam the streets of Detroit and walk around the Police Station. It's also absolutely filled to the brim with glitches, bugs and stuttering, like it barely runs on a Series X. At one point I had enemies that could attack me but I would clip through them, and I activated a slo-mo power that turned the world upside down and clipped me out of the ground, then re-flipped me back to normal when it ran out. Really poorly made. All in all though I had fun with it, the gunplay is fun and it still throws enough minor dialogue in to keep that satire in. Worth the price you can get it for if you liked RC. Quote
Paid Members FLips Posted January 17 Paid Members Posted January 17 It's MuLtIpLaYeR MaYhEm!! After leaving the Gamepassphere a few months ago I've been suckered back in with firstly a £1 for the month offer for the high end tier and now my mate, who's PC isn't set up buying me a month of the lowest tier so I won't abandon him. For these reasons I've been playing a lot more modern multiplayer games than I usually do and I'll be honest while it's been fun playing online with my mate, it's been mostly shit and cemented why I left in the first place. First off we have Deep Rock Galactic which is a randomly generated cave exploring/treasure hunting game where you play as a team of Dwarves getting dropshipped into a cave to complete missions. Fair play to this one, it's a blast even with only 2 of us. A lot of thought has went into the humour and the gameplay loop is satisfying enough if very repetitive. It has a cartoony quality to it that I like and only takes a game or so to fully understand it. You find all sorts of different materials on your missions to upgrade your weapons, and gain skill points to upgrade one of your (I think 4 or 5) classes. The fact you have to find the materials and also successfully deposit them into your ship or MULE (little walking storage box) adds a fun danger that stops it become a random loot grind. It has a real money store for accessories and stuff, as MP games all do now but it only has I think one currency and I don't think there'd ever be a need to buy anything from it to enjoy the game. Rock and Stone! Next up is Chivalry II, a something mad like 60v60 medieval battle game where one team attacks an objective and the other defends it. This one is heavy hitting and a bunch of fun, but dragged down somewhat by the game length, which is comparable to something like Star Wars Battlefront or Battlefield where if it goes back and forth enough you're stuck in the same game for a long long time. It's decent though, and bloody and sluggish and has enough variety in terms of objectives and classes so one game never feels identical to another. You can use trebuchets to launch rocks at castles and they crumble very satisfyingly, and you can run up into a 2v1 fight your teammate is losing and slug a guy with a hammer to even the odds. I don't honestly know if this game has a real money store, I assume it does because there is a currency you can buy things with but that gets earned in-game too, but I never saw it or felt a need to look for it. Excellent game. Then we have Red Dead Redemption Online which I think I briefly mentioned before when we were playing it. It doesn't work, simple as that. The matchmaking system constantly breaks us up and throws us into our own servers, some of the towns are inaccessible due to hackers, there's no private session option like GTA Online had, and the missions are lifeless and dull "go from A to Z and come back" stuff. There is obviously a real money store, and actual multiplayer progress and mission types are locked behind it. You can earn the Gold Bars by doing daily missions and stuff, but earn crumbs. For example to do Bounty Hunter missions you need I believe 15 Gold Bars. Doing daily missions earns you about 0.2 Gold Bars. You'd need to play it weeks before they unlocked or you can conveniently just buy them. We haven't been back to it since maybe November, early December. Also fuck Rockstar. While I had the high tier Gamepass I found myself playing a lot of Call of Duty Black Ops 500 and honestly don't have much to say about it. You play one you play them all. The matchmaking is slightly better in this but still not without issues or hackers. I would mostly just play NukeTown 24/7 between calls at work. The whole Call of Duty experience is a brutal one now, with the game having it's own launcher and between opening the game and starting a match you must get blasted in the face with a dozen or so battlepass and DLC offers.I tried one game of Zombies, which usually I do enjoy when I've played it but it was crap this year. Didn't touch campaign but my mate who did said it was awful forced multiplayer. The faintest praise I can give it, is it's the best game on Gamepass in terms of money saved. I played about what I wanted of a £70-75 game for £1 and now it's gone I don't miss it but I got more than £1 out of it. Next two games are somewhat embarrassing. Firstly is Terminull Brigade which is a free to play looter shooter chock full of anime girls. The store page did just enough to convince us maybe it wasn't, by making it look like a 3rd person Borderlands and throwing lots of screenshots of what turns out to be one of the few male playable character in there. We've been had. It's all jiggle physics and women that look like when incels repost edited pictures of other female protagonists they find too manly. Everyone's hair is pink, purple or silver and their heads triangular. The gameplay is fine enough, it is what it said on the tin, a looter shooter where you go into missions and clear waves of enemies for new upgrades and loot. If you want something like that it's absolutely fine, but there's really not a lot of variety to the stages and some of them feel pointlessly short. Now we're in free to play territory though, it's made Red Dead and Call of Duty look modest. This game to my confused count has: Free Battle Pass Premium Battle Pass No less than 10 different types of currency Loot boxes with purchasable keys Purchasable Bonus Tokens Event Shop (currently a tie in with Evangelion) It throws so much shit at you as soon as load the game up. Adverts for paid content, adverts for paid currency, it has dozens of seperate challenges and collectable pages that between every level you're spending 15 minutes in the confusing menus figuring out what you just earned and where to use it. The whole thing is a rotten mess and my biggest praise of it is that it's too confusing and too niche to sucker kids in. They'll all be on COD and Fortnite, they won't have time to pull out a map to navigate to this game's shop and then a walkthrough to figure out what they can buy. While I was down the anime girl rabbit hole I figured in for a penny and downloaded Genshin Impact which everyone says is a gatcha nightmare but describes itself as some sort of Breath of The Wild style action adventure. I've played maybe half an hour and so far it's very much the latter, if nowhere near as good. Straight off the bat it clumps you with some brutal high pitched anime fairy girl thing that follows you about and refers to itself in 3rd person. The worst. The gameplay is uninspired but fine. It's all lifted out of BoTW from the stamina bar to the climbing mechanics to the cooking, and design. It's a knockoff to be frank. I just reached the first town and have a 2nd character. Maybe the game has something left to give, I don't know. I'm working later today but it's only 2 of us so it'll be a quiet one. I'll play a bit more and see where it goes but I can't see myself sticking with it. Fair play to it so far though, this egregious loot box/gatcha system hasn't reared it's head yet. Just seems like a normal if slightly annoying cheap imitation of a better game. Outside of Gamepass, I picked up a few games on Steam that me and another mate have been playing. Firstly is Peak which is a randomly generated mountain climbing game, but I think it only generates every week or month or something, so it gives you time to practice the levels without making you start mentally at square one as well as physically. It's pretty fun and uses proximity chat so you can easily lose each other on the mountain if you explore too far off on your own, and then the panic sets in as the fog starts rising up to kill you and you're alone and your mate has all the supplies in his backpack. Once you scale to the top, you reach a bonfire with resupplies and items and a new area opens up. In ours it went Regular Mountain - Jungle/Swamp Mountain - Desert Mountain and that's as far as we made it after multiple attempts over days. On our furthest effort, my mate picked up a skeleton powerup on the 2nd mountain that turns you into bones so you don't get hungry or effected by things like heat, cold and poison but makes you brittle so you can't fall. Upon reaching the desert area I found the same powerup so jumped at the chance but then entered the new area to be met with nothing but large Wile E Coyote style drops and a big tornado. My bones were shattered to peices within about a minute. Really fun, and I imagine absolutely killer with the maximum team it allows (4 or 6 I think). Then we had REPO which is one of those games you've probably seen on TikTok or Youtube Shorts or whatever. I think it got pretty big at one point. You play as these little weird Mr Chips looking bin people who are sent to clear abandoned houses of their treasure. The houses are dark and filled with weird monsters but you have a flashlight and can spend extra earnings towards things like mines, grenades and other various powerups and traps. It's the 2nd of the Proximity Chat Trilogy I've played, so don't wander too far off or it's a nightmare. It's very Luigi's Mansion and thankfully, while the turning around and seeing a big slimey monster is scary, it doesn't rely on screaming jumpscares which I was worried it would, there's thankfully none of that. It also mixes in a good humour with the monsters, one case saw my mate walk into a room alone and come out screaming shouting "HAUNTED BIKE!!!" and then this little red tricycle came wheeling out after him, stopped and rang it's little bell dingding and went back into the shadows without a care. He felt like a little embarrassed baby. Another time we were getting stalked by a little girl leaving big red balloons everywhere. He went to go take something back to the drop off point so we lost proximity connection and he didn't come back for about 10 minutes while I waited at the other drop off point. When I went looking for him, his corpse was just laying in a field of red balloons. I took it to the ship to revive and he said he accidentally popped one and she came and got him almost as soon as he left my line of sight so he's just been laying there the whole time. Good stuff. Highly recommend this one too, we're looking to get another mate on this weekend as like Peak and like my next game, the more the merrier we think. Lastly, and the game off this entire list we've put the most time into is RV There Yet? A driving simulator where you play as what look like fat little stout Yorkshiremen driving an RV across the country. It's the perfect storm of weirdness, awkward controls that make simple things more difficulty and moments that make you look and say "oh fucking hell how will we do this?" In the very first area it feels like easy sailing as you get used to the controls of the RV and explore all your tools and how to do basic things, and then a bear will run out of the woods and start smashing up the RV and everything you thought you knew goes out the window as you panic search the cupboards for bear spray while your wheels fly off. Then come a plethora of dangers such as crocodile swamps, wobbly bridges, landmines, narrow mountain paths, lava and an attack helicopter. Every checkpoint feels like a deserved respite from constant danger. This game's Proximity Chat moment came when my mate was out fixing the side of the RV and a bald eagle swooped down and launched him hundreds of feet across the map. Now he's face down dead in the grass somewhere and I'm running around basically playing Marco Polo while dodging an eagle. Absolute nightmare. Another one that's great fun and has a really unique style of it's own. Get a group together for this and I imagine it's a fantastic time because it was even in 2 players. I think one day we played it for 6 hours and didn't even realise. When we finally finished the game, there's a 2nd area they've released that's all snow so comes with new mechanics and dangers. We started it up to see what was in store and it starts you at the peak of a big hill with conveniently placed inner tube rings. Within seconds we were bombing down the mountain full speed without the RV. Total fun. So yeah I think the moral of the story overall is if you want good multiplayer games, avoid Free to Play and avoid the likes of CoD and Red Dead. Go with the mid-tier stuff like Chivalry or Deep Rock, or scoure the Steam Sales for a few £4-6 offerings. Quote
Paid Members Scratch Posted January 17 Paid Members Posted January 17 (edited) I’m currently hooked on Snooker 19 which, somewhat surprisingly, is the most recent ‘major’ snooker game to have been released. I randomly stumbled across a bloke streaming himself playing it and saw it in the Switch sale so picked it up. Second hand copies on consoles are still commanding a fair price and it doesn’t seem to be a game that’s often in the digital sales, which seems a bit odd. But the controls and mechanics are great and it has made me what to keep playing so I can turn the difficulty up and up - so it feels more than worth the £15 I spent. You can keep your Call Of Shooty, GTA Online, Fortnight and FIFA, I’ll be over here scraping a 1-frame win in the qualifying stages of the Gibraltar Open over Fergal Quinn. Edited January 17 by Scratch Quote
Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted January 17 Moderators Posted January 17 (edited) Nice! Look forward to the post in a few weeks where you've bought a VR headset and a cue shaped controller with haptic feedback built in. Edited January 17 by Chest Rockwell Quote
Paid Members Jesse Posted January 18 Paid Members Posted January 18 (edited) 16 hours ago, Scratch said: I’m currently hooked on Snooker 19 which, somewhat surprisingly, is the most recent ‘major’ snooker game to have been released. I've been dying for a good sports game experience. The big EA stuff feels too spendy, and the Cricket games are shite. For £15 you've sold me, gonna give it a bash today EDIT: Happy to report that I'm as shit at this as I am real Snooker Edited January 18 by Jesse Quote
Paid Members Jazzy G Posted January 18 Paid Members Posted January 18 15 hours ago, Scratch said: I’m currently hooked on Snooker 19 which, somewhat surprisingly, is the most recent ‘major’ snooker game to have been released. I randomly stumbled across a bloke streaming himself playing it and saw it in the Switch sale so picked it up. Second hand copies on consoles are still commanding a fair price and it doesn’t seem to be a game that’s often in the digital sales, which seems a bit odd. But the controls and mechanics are great and it has made me what to keep playing so I can turn the difficulty up and up - so it feels more than worth the £15 I spent. You can keep your Call Of Shooty, GTA Online, Fortnight and FIFA, I’ll be over here scraping a 1-frame win in the qualifying stages of the Gibraltar Open over Fergal Quinn. I couldn't get on with the controls. I much prefer Pure Pool, which has a snooker mode. Quote
The Gaffer Posted January 18 Posted January 18 17 hours ago, Scratch said: I’m currently hooked on Snooker 19 which, somewhat surprisingly, is the most recent ‘major’ snooker game to have been released. I randomly stumbled across a bloke streaming himself playing it and saw it in the Switch sale so picked it up. Second hand copies on consoles are still commanding a fair price and it doesn’t seem to be a game that’s often in the digital sales, which seems a bit odd. But the controls and mechanics are great and it has made me what to keep playing so I can turn the difficulty up and up - so it feels more than worth the £15 I spent. You can keep your Call Of Shooty, GTA Online, Fortnight and FIFA, I’ll be over here scraping a 1-frame win in the qualifying stages of the Gibraltar Open over Fergal Quinn. Really like Snooker 19. In many ways it's so flat and lifeless in its presentation that it feels like a half finished demo, but because of the sport it's based on, that oddly sort of works out okay because of what it does get right. It's slow paced, the mechanics are sound, it's got all the nice little snooker noises and you can easily laze through it of an afternoon with music on in the background and your preferred intoxicants/cups of tea/what have you. Quote
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