Well it turns the unspoken poetry of the Nintendo game into the stereotypical animu crap you’d expect from something supervised by Koei.
I just skip the cutscenes now and enjoy kicking ass with lovely characters, without having to endure the cringe, and I’m all the better for it, so it is pretty easy to go around that regretable, yet expected, bad aspect of the game!
It’s got to be Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for me. I think I have around 45 hours played in this game so far and I’m still having as much fun with it as when I started. The storyline keeps me engaged too.
I wrapped up Tenderfoot Tactics a couple of weeks ago and loved it. I was tempted to go back in and try a more ironman-like run with a smaller party of goblins but got sucked into Hades instead which is probably going to be my game of the year. One of the most addictive games I’ve played in a long time. ‘Just one more room…’
Such a great game!
Yeah, it’s a big weird inscrutable mood piece that totally hit the mark for me. The final quarter is something else.
Great to hear. I’ve been curious to check this out!
Imperiums Greek Wars
Watch Dogs: Legion
Dungeonmanns
Silent Storm Sentinels
A very short game sadly.
Serious Play:
Super Lucky’s Tale: I can see why they made New SLT, the difficulty spikes in this game and the tightly sequential area gating are not kid-friendly. Different enough to be interesting yet familiar. Probably won’t be squeezing out all of the achievements for this one.
Untitled Goose Game: What I learned from this game is that Geese Are Dicks. Since I’m playing the goose, that’s great. Screw with people all over the town. Charming art and sound. The last few timed achievements can be brutally tight and dependent on timing outside of your control. Tip: pull the stool out from under the old guy sooner rather than later, if you wait till the last moment he’ll notice. Counterintuitive, but that’s the mechanic.
Gnomes Garden, 2, 3, 4: I used to play this sort of logistics game (manage resources to build assets to complete goals) on my smartphone, and using the joystick as a mouse control is less than optimal. The levels can range from fun and easy to brutally hard to time out correctly. Been eating these games up like popcorn.
Doug Hates His Job: A short, fun, and funny game about a guy who keeps having to isometrically brawl his way out of his job-related encounters, with a scattered handful of other genre examples like driving, rail shooter, or 3D arena fighter. The price matched the length. Made for a pleasant couple of hours. Tip: you pretty much have to cheese the last boss fight, just keep jump-kicking him as he’s getting up.
Sundered Eldritch Edition: I wish this game hadn’t turned suckingly hard after getting past the first zone. Could have been a 4.5 star metroidvania, but it becomes close to unfinishable after about 3.0 stars worth of fun. A great big FU to the designers for making progression-necessary areas impossible to clean out by designating them constant combat areas. And they mean constant.
Glass Masquerade: A short, pleasant picture-puzzle game.
Toe-dipping:
Trailmakers: I get the idea, explore the zone to enhance your vehicle and build your escape rocket. The implementation sucks, though. It’s too spread out, making exploration tedious. Vehicle control is too imprecise for the car-based combat the game is asking you to do.
Destroy All Humans Remake: I forgot how tedious this game could get when it asked the player to do stealth-based tasks.
Glass Masquerade 2: “fixes” the original by adding a lot of progression mechanics. Not impressed.
Bard’s Tale Remastered: I guess this was funny back in the day. The remaster is pretty hit-or-miss as to what assets got upgraded to modern standards.
Adventure Pals: Another game with neat “cover” art and pixellated play. Sigh. Still, doesn’t play bad in short bursts.
Hyperdot: Speaking of short bursts, I don’t see how anyone could play this for multiple hours in a row. Too much twicthyness required.
Tetris Effect Connected: It’s Tetris, except with trippy techno music and Lumines-style changing bricks. Balls-hard once the speed level gets over 9. And this one goes to 11 and 12. Stops being fun surprisingly quickly.
The first half of the month was all Sniper Elite 4 all the time. I had signed up for an Xbox Gamepass trial for $1 and blasted through this game as fast as possible to complete it by the trial ended. I enjoyed the experience so much I picked up both Sniper Elite 2 Remastered and Sniper Elite 3 during a Steam sale. I also picked up Sniper: Ghost Warrior Contracts during a nice Xbox sale.
I’ll get to those… eventually.
The second half of the month was non-stop Assassin’s Creed Origins on Xbox, a game that’s been in my backlog forever. This is the first Assassin’s Creed game in ten years, a d the only one I played for more than a couple hours, and the first one I finished. I still have AC: Odyssey waiting in the wings, but I wanted to cleanse my palate before diving into another AC game.
Spent most of the month with Xenoblade Chronicles on the Switch. Took a while to get used to the combat system, and it can still be a little annoying, but having fun with the game. First JRPG in a while (aside from DQ XI) where I look forward to every cut-scene (they’re well produced, decently written (for a JRPG) and have very good voice acting).
I also continue my long-standing trend of jumping from game to game and not finishing any but am proud of myself for finishing my first game in over a year: The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.
Bought the trilogy on sale for Xbox and had a blast with the first one. Skill system was rather limiting with the low level cap, or rather, I thought it would be but I finished the game just as I hit my final level. Still, felt like I was limited to only one or two active abilities unless I spread my points out and gimped myself with a bunch of low level ones, so combat could be too simplistic. Game made up for that by throwing more enemies than I’ve seen at once in this type of game and I died a hell of a lot more than I did in Diablo 3.
Started the second game in the series which was a direct continuation, but took a break.
With all the excitement over Valhalla, I started playing AC: Odyssey again, which I hadn’t gotten very far in. Enjoying it but that damn bounty hunter that magically shows up every time and kicks my ass turned me off enough to leave the starting island, but now I’m dying to wolves constantly. Maybe I need to lower the difficulty level. Intend to get Valhalla, but only after I finish one of the last 3 AC titles.
Great game! I need to get back to it soon.