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[SupahEwok]

The drones don't just show up after a certain time; when you approach the third base, they'll also appear, so make sure to clear out as much as you can of the first two.

That's not true. The only scripting is the timer. The drones will show up at about 7 minutes remaining.

snip

I generally recommend hitting the first base as quick as possible and wiping it out, prioritizing the transport planes while they remain on the ground. Then clear out any fighters above you (they're worth points as well), then taking out the small convoy heading towards the second base for a few points, then heading to the refueling line (it's actually in-mission dialog that tells you that you can begin to use the refuel line; yes, the mission briefings are only good for the broad strokes of the mission, and do not inform you of the in-mission scripting). Then actually skip the second base (the one that's all canyon-y) in favor of flying to the third one. The second base doesn't have as many targets as the third, and with the canyons making approaches and strafing difficult, it takes more time to hit them.

If you feel up for it, there's special dialog that's triggered from flying through the small tunnel at the third base.

I think the drones spawn in closer to the second base than the third (it's been a while for me), so I think this strategy also buys you some time.

As NerfedFalcon said, try to use bomb special weapons over ground missile specials. Bombs deal damage in an area, so for weak and clustered targets like buildings, they'll blow through them faster. And using the machinegun well is probably the greatest difficulty curve for the entire gameplay, but once you get decent at it, it provides a ton of utility. However, I don't really recommend the A-10C, except for on Easy. AC7 is particularly bad about having a surprise air-to-air challenge in the middle of what's supposed to be a ground attack mission, and in this mission, that's the drones showing up. The A-10C is slow and terrible at dogfights, so you may manage to get through the mission with it only to be gunned down. Easy difficulty gives you enough health to just tank it, likely. But in general, the fastest plane that you can load up with the heaviest ground-hitting ordinance that you can refill at the refuel line is the way to go on ground attack missions.

If you've had limited exposure to flight sims (or using a standard controller for one), don't be afraid to play on Easy. Playing flight sims are not like playing other kinds of games, you're building new reflexes from the ground-up. Simply mastering flight is the biggest challenge, and it honestly took me a couple of playthroughs worth of AC5 to get pretty good at it.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

As NerfedFalcon said, try to use bomb special weapons over ground missile specials. Bombs deal damage in an area, so for weak and clustered targets like buildings, they'll blow through them faster. And using the machinegun well is probably the greatest difficulty curve for the entire gameplay, but once you get decent at it, it provides a ton of utility. However, I don't really recommend the A-10C, except for on Easy. AC7 is particularly bad about having a surprise air-to-air challenge in the middle of what's supposed to be a ground attack mission, and in this mission, that's the drones showing up. The A-10C is slow and terrible at dogfights, so you may manage to get through the mission with it only to be gunned down. Easy difficulty gives you enough health to just tank it, likely. But in general, the fastest plane that you can load up with the heaviest ground-hitting ordinance that you can refill at the refuel line is the way to go on ground attack missions.

The problem is, at that stage in the game, the only plane you can get with UGB is the A-10C (or F-4E if you have a certain DLC, but that's a plane for masochists), and GPB doesn't have a good enough splash radius even if you dumb-fire it at the Tu-160s.

Admittedly, the A-10 isn't very maneuverable, and while it does have more HP than most planes, that still may not work out well. Probably better to just use missiles and machine guns to take them out.

(Also, they're bombers, not transports, but that's nitpicking.)

 

[Chupathingy]

I started playing Kessen, a series I've been meaning to try for a long time.
I've played two battles so far; the first was the tutorial which was pretty straightforward, then there was the second battle which went for about an hour and 30 minutes. I was pretty damn surprised and impressed to see the game just throw this massive battle at you so quickly. It started off pretty shaky when I made some brash tactical choices expecting the battle to be easy and got one of my best generals routed as a result. I learnt my lesson and took a more careful approach for the remainder of the battle.

The only really annoying issue I've come across so far is the incredibly slow cursor and camera movement.

 

[Dalisclock]

The next mission is where I feel like the game really hits its stride. Don't give up, you can do it!

I ended up getting the A10 for the 4GM weapon and it helped a lot. I was able to reach the point limit with minutes to spare and then ended up running out the clock. Admittedly, I did it like a little ***** by running to the return line, repairing to full, then doing it again when the drones damaged me too much. Is it cheap? Yeah. Did it work? Also yeah.

I did a couple repeat missions to grind points and eventually tried the MP. MP does grant a lot of points just for participating, which is good because I fucking suck at it. I tried a couple matches(I could only find BR so it was me versus everyone else) and never managed to shoot down anyone while I kept getting killed. But I got my A10 and passed the mission, so I'm happy. It also reminds me why I don't play MP.

I finished the next mission as well, which was a lot more fun and I managed to get to the drone part(thank god for checkpoints in this one) before getting killed, and passed it the next time. That was actually pretty cool, weaving through the canyons, hitting SAM and RADAR sites and then having to contend with the lightning....and then the Ace Eursean Old guy pilot from the cutscenes whose name I can't remember how to spell ATM.

I'll admit, the mission chatter is pretty funny a lot of the time, especially between Bandog and Spare Squadron.

Spare Pilot"Well, Trigger has been doing all the work"
Bandog:"Why are you so proud of that?""

I haven't played flight sims in a long while, the last one maybe being X-Wing Alliance(more of a Space Sim, really) but I get the gist of how they work. I'm just new to Ace Combat, and trying to figure out the Lore has been.....interesting. It helps that there's only a couple games I really need to care about, since the first 3 apparently don't matter, so that just leaves 4-6 and 0.

 

[Dalisclock]

(Also, they're bombers, not transports, but that's nitpicking.)

There are transport planes on the runway in mission 2 which you can also blow up during takeoff. They create really big blue fireballs when they explode, but I believe that's where the confiusion was.

 

[Buyetyen]

I've had Divinity: Original Sin in my Steam library for a couple of years and have only just gotten around to playing it. A couple boss fights have been a little bullshitty, but other than that it's good stuff.

 

[SilentPony]

I've heard it's there's a bit of 1920's racism, but between fish people and monkey people because....why the hell not? Which, I guess is one way of acknowledging it the setting.

I played the demo for spiritfarer. Basically the idea is that your job is to ferry souls of the deceased to their final afterlife and you have a ship you ferry them on that you can build a small town on to accommodate them. The demo is pretty basic but shows off that it has a crafting system, a farm, you cook things, there's a basic fishing mini-game and you do tasks for the spirits to help them feel ready to pass on. Also, you can get money by letting lighting strike you, which doesn't hurt you because reasons. So that's interesting. It feels vaguely like the concept for Spirited Away.

The art style is cute and it looks like it's meant to be fairly chill. I'll probably end up picking it up when it drops as long as it has some meat to it beyond the premise and the basic town/life sim mechanics every other game in existence has at this point.

There is racism, but again its super on-the-nose, almost comical racism where it doesn't even feel like racism. Like the big family of the town can trace their noble lineage back to the great Kings of Africa. And they're monkeys. Straight up monkey men, in that talking gorilla sense from Futurama.
And it would be racists, implying Africans are less than human and Lovecraft's whole thing, but everything else is played so again, on-the-nose, it feels like a parody. Like "Oh my God, the African family are seen as monkeys! How racists!" and the game is like "No no, they really are monkeys. Its not allegorical, its Planet of the Apes."
Same with the Jewish analogy of being loyal to their own kind, and slimy subhuman creatures but in the game no, no they're just merfolk.

Like I said oddly charming.

 

[SupahEwok]

There are transport planes on the runway in mission 2 which you can also blow up during takeoff. They create really big blue fireballs when they explode, but I believe that's where the confiusion was.

No, the only confusion is that it's been a year since I played the game and I didn't bother looking up that specific detail.

 

[Samtemdo8]

I have just beaten Resident Evil 1 Remake on the Gamecube in Real Survival Mode and as Chris Redfield.

Real Survival mode essentially removes the features of the Item Boxes where they are all linked, so in this mode if you put an item in one box, it stays in that same box. And that's on top of it being defaulted to Hard Mode with Hard Mode rules like more enemies and more damage from them, and less resources.

And Chris Redfield has only 6 inventory slots, and doesn't have the "easy rout" things like Jill where she gets a Grenade Launcher, more Ammo from Barry, and can get the Shotgun far earlier then Chris thanks to Barry.

I am essentially a Resident Evil playing pro.

 

[Baffle]

Xenonaughts.

 

[laggyteabag]

Its been a while since I last posted here, so lets see...

Assassin's Creed Odyssey was admittedly better than Origins in almost every way, but it still didnt save the game from being overall lackluster. There was just so much stuff, and yet so little of it was worthwhile.

I can really see that these last two games have really tried to emulate The Witcher 3's format, but the only thing they managed to improve on was the combat. Otherwise, the games feel just so soulless and boring.
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Ape Out, which is this short ~2hour game that I got for free from the Epic Store. I suppose the game is pretty much a great example of less is more - having really only 2 buttons that you need to press in combat, but there is quite a bit of nuance in those two actions. It was also the perfect length - any longer, and it probably would have started to get quite boring.
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I also played GTA V. Ive had the game for a while, and got maybe about half way through when I tried to play the story mode the first time, before dropping it for whatever reason. Decided to pick it up again after the free week on the Epic Store reminded me that it existed,

Whilst the story, characters, and heist missions were a lot of fun, the open world wasn't really anything special. I must say though, Rockstar's mission design of "You will play the game EXACTLY as we tell you, or you will fail the mission" was quite a bit in force, here.

My girlfriend enjoyed driving around and beating people up with a golf club, though.
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We also played Telltale's Batman Season 2.

Season 1 was a bit of a bore-fest, and it was a struggle to get my girlfriend to pay attention, as she was the one making the choices. I had always heard really good things about S2, so we decided to give it a go.

It was so much better. The characters were more enjoyable. The situations the characters got themselves into were much more enjoyable. Everything was just miles better compared to the first season.
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Hades, which is Supergiant's Roguelite game, was a fantastic time. Aside from quite a long grind towards the end, I was gripped throughout.

Interesting weapons, interesting upgrades to unlock, and a well-paced upgrade system in between runs. Really enjoyble, and probably one of the best games that I have played this year.
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Right now, im playing Splinter Cell Conviction.

Ive played the sequel, Blacklist, and I really enjoyed it, but playing Conviction, and the game just feels... dated. For a game that is trying as hard as it can be to be an action-focused cover-based shooter, it seems to have completely missed out on all of the lessons from much better games that came before it, like Mass Effect 2, Gears 2, and Uncharted 2.

Everything is just so damn clunky.

Credit where credit is due, though, I really like how objectives and flashbacks are displayed on the environment, instead of being a normal HUD element - but I feel like they could have gone further with that, especially with the button prompts.

 

[Chimpzy]

Outland

Not to be confused with Outlast or Outcast. Anyway, another one from the backlog. It's this mid- to late PS3 era metroidvania platformer that mixes things up a little by adding in bullet hell mechanics, in particular Ikaruga's polarity thing where bullets that are the same color as you are absorbed while the opposite color hurts you. It also has a nice art style of these sort of tribal shadow puppet-like silhouettes starkly contrasted by bold dashes of color. It's not the most smoothly controlling or tightly designed game of its time, and after a certain point the difficulty ramps up really hard, but it's a nice little diversion now that I've got nothing new on the horizon until about halfway July.

 

[Dalisclock]

No, the only confusion is that it's been a year since I played the game and I didn't bother looking up that specific detail.

Fair enough.

 

[Gordon_4]

I’m just about to do the Suicide Mission in Mass Effect 2. It’s been a while since I’ve played ME2. Story is still great, and this game still has the best crew of the trilogy and why oh why couldn’t we have Zaeed Massani as a full squadmate? How can you relegate that awesome goddamn old codger to DLC? And Grunt is Shepard’s baby boy and no bastard is telling me different.

That said ME2 has a very limited pool of guns compared to 1 and 3 and while I understand it was in aid of class balance, the strict weapon restrictions until the Collector ship mission was asinine. Shepard is a career soldier and current special forces legend. They should know how to fire a fucking rifle. ME3s weight system and cool down penalty was a much better way of doing this.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

There are transport planes on the runway in mission 2 which you can also blow up during takeoff. They create really big blue fireballs when they explode, but I believe that's where the confiusion was.

Ah, right. I was talking about the Tu-160s in Mission 6. Glad that's cleared up. And hey, good to hear that you made it work.

 

[Dalisclock]

Ah, right. I was talking about the Tu-160s in Mission 6. Glad that's cleared up. And hey, good to hear that you made it work.

Yeah, Bandog is very insistent on splashing those big boys so I tend to prioritize them.

It is honestly kinda wierd to think about this fictional world that has flying drone fortresses powered by EM fields and a (presumaly working space elevator) but 90% of the planes are pulled straight from the real world and there's like no consistently at all which air force uses what planes. F-16's fly next to Tu-160's on the same side next to harriers next to drones next to apaches. I know, I'm overthinking it.

Edit: FInished the Pipeline destruction mission. Part 1 was fun and full of spoldy goodness, but Part 2.....hunting those fucking trucks was a giant pain. You know, Bandog, I blew up a couple billion gallons of precious, flammable oil that's now not going to keep planes/drones/tanks going(we'll not delve into the environmental disaster....). But god forbid a couple trucks with about a hundred thousand gallons escape in a ranging sandstorm.....Fucking perspective bandog. And of course, spending time whittling down the drones gets me yelled at too, but if I don't I can't spend time hunting for the trucks because MISSLE MISSLE MISSLE MISSLE MISSLE MISSLE MISSLE because the drones have no problem seeing me in the sandstorm.

I finished with 6 seconds to spare. Yep.

 

[Catfood220]

Still playing Persona 5 Royal and have just beat the main game and am a little bit into the new content. I'm still enjoying it, about 140 hours in and I'm not bored yet. I beat the God of Control, much than the first time I faced him. Maybe its because I knew what I was doing this time, maybe because I was at a higher level. Or maybe as I've suspected for a while, Normal is the new Easy mode. Anyway, enjoying the new content, it continues the surreal twist that the game took after you beat Shido however, I will try to avoid spoilers for those who aren't as far as me. I liked the way that the new Palace ruler is not in the same type of moustache twirlingly evil villain that the rest of them have been and genuinely wants to do good. It also asks some interesting questions. I do have a few other things to say about this game.

There is not a hell of a lot to do once you have maxed out most of your confidants. You are basically hoping each day that one of the few you haven't maxed out yet want to hang out.

I wish Kasumi was in this game more. She was a massive part of the advertising for the game and she only appears a few times here and there.

Yusuke always seems to be skint. I know he is supposed to be a starving artist, but Joker being the player character with all the money you make from exploring Palaces and Mememtos. You'd of thought he'd kick his buddy a few yen.

As well as P5, I did start Diablo 3 and after playing for a while, one thought came to me. This is basically Gauntlet. You endless take on waves of enemies and the action never deviates away from that. I don't think I'm going to be playing this too much, I am already bored with it.

 

[laggyteabag]

Still playing Splinter Cell Conviction, and its just not a good game.

The controls feel way older than a game from 2010, and movement feels like you are controlling a tank, not a person. Weapons are HORRIBLY innaccurate, with wider crosshairs than most other game's shotguns, and the bloom effects are absolutely massive. Most gadgets are also completely useless, and seem to be entirely antithetical to the game that this is trying to be.

The game just feels like it is having an identity crisis. Yes, Splinter Cell is traditionally a stealth game, but this game is not - or at least not primarily. Sure, there are stealth elements still there, like a visibility system, and climbing walls and pipes to avoid enemies, but many encounters are either too lit up for stealth to be viable, or it doesnt seem to be possible at all. At the same time, just straight up shooting people seems a lot more effective in most encounters, than slowly waddling around, taking guys out one by one - yet because weapons are so horribly inaccurate, and your health pool is so criminally low, every approach just seems to be discouraged.

Its just so weirdly designed.

 

[happyninja42]

Phasing out of playing AC: Odyssey, me and the wifey tried to do the Fate of Atlantis DLC but....I just felt so rudderless in it. I didn't care about what was going on or why.

Playing a lot of Days Gone though, and I'm enjoying a lot of little things they did with that game. Some other things....not so much.

Like, the fast travel system in that game, I REALLY like the in-universe reason for how it works. Basically:
You still actually travel the roads, and it consumes fuel and time like normal (which I like). But the various hostile camps make travel dangerous, so if your autopath for the fast travel goes through an area contested by an enemy camp, you can't go that way. So you are forced to either redirect, and take up more time and fuel, or go clear out the camp, thus clearing up the fast travel route.

And that's really cool to me.

 

[Gordon_4]

I finished the critical path of Mass Effect 2 last night. No casualties from the Suicide Mission, so now it’s time for post-game DLC like Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker.

It’s been an interesting run because I played a class I’ve never used before: the Sentinel. Half tech and half biotics, the class isn’t terribly strong in terms of pure damage (though it does get powerful) it has three big advantages: overload, warp and tech armour. Overload and Warp will strip shields and barrier/armour respectively and Tech Armour is basically a big free shield boost with a shockwave detonation built into its failure state. The main downside is that like most hybrid classes your weapon selection is shit: limited to SMGs and Pistols in a game with a really anaemic selection of both and no baseline ammo powers to balance that. Once you hit the Collector base you can get training in one of the other three weapons - I personally chose Assault Rifles - and once a loyalty mission or two is done you can get an ammo power to round out your damage.