What are you currently playing?

[BrawlMan]

I finished Sonic Blast Man (SNES). It's an okay brawler with a decent move list and finishers, but a bit too slow paced and padded for my liking. It is satisfying to hit people, but the second game is obviously better.

I got Blazeblue Cross Tag Battle (PS4) using store credit at Disc Replay. I got a lot left over, so I did not have to pay a dime. I am not buying any DLC until I know I am going to enjoy the game, and that the DLC goes on sale at PSN again. I know the game is on sale on Steam, but I wanted a physical copy any way, and I am not sure if my laptop can handle it. If there's a demo on the Steam version, I will stress test it.

 

[laggyteabag]

Finished Far Cry 5, and left it a rather unenthusiastic review on Steam.

I've decided to jump into the spin-off/sequel New Dawn to see if the RPG-lite elements spice things up. I've heard it is quite short, so even if I don't really love this one either, it wont be a huge loss.

So far, it is at least a very pretty game.

 

[BrawlMan]

Finished Far Cry 5, and left it a rather unenthusiastic review on Steam.

I've decided to jump into the spin-off/sequel New Dawn to see if the RPG-lite elements spice things up. I've heard it is quite short, so even if I don't really love this one either, it wont be a huge loss.

So far, it is at least a very pretty game.

The RPG lite mechanics really don't add anything, but have fun.

 

[Drathnoxis]

FF7. I hate the City of the Ancients. I can never remember what the heck "the key is where even sunlight can't reach" means and spend an hour just wandering around everywhere looking in all the houses and shadows before looking it up. Oh, of course what they meant was "leave the area and go underwater." Great hint. I don't even know why we're looking for a key since we just want to get back to an area we were already at earlier in the game, but whatever.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

I just upgraded to a GTX 4070 and I'm trying to think of what I've got that'll 'break it in', so to speak. Admittedly, I'm not enough of a videophile to instinctively know the difference in terms of texture resolution or shadow quality, but I can work with framerates, and I tended to build my graphics settings around that first. I'm not sure where I'd notice the difference the most, but I'll probably think of something sooner or later.

...I never did finish Doom Eternal. I've heard of 'does it run Doom' but this is ridiculous.

 

[Summerstorm]

I have been playing "Never Second in Rome" - Second released game on Steam from a lone developer: Alessandro Roberti.

Played and liked his first game "A Legionary's Life", so it was on my wishlist for consideration. At the moment in early access.

So in this second one you don't play a base legionnaire in the war against corinth (and others) But this time you start as a centurion under Caesar rampaging through the Gauls' Lands (France, Belgium. Short expeditions against the Germans and English. The early access covers 10 chapters so far. (The story goes over... eh, i will say that every Chapter is a "War Season" - Maybe not all, but quite a few years and ends after you get assigned to another century - if you can make it)

So you start with fresh 74 legionnaires + admin staff. Set Attributes and a background for your centurion, roll up your optio, signifier and tesserarius - Set training weights and manage these young lads through the campaigns against those FILTHY BARBARIANS.

Game is heavy on historical correctness and the many, MANY fights are super-slow, very in-detail. You (should) play not only the tactical combat, line vs line (or wild storming barbarians) but each individual short clash between your main officers (+4 significant legionnaires: 8 characters in total). This takes SO much time (The most negative reviews are solely pointing it out. The fights are very slow and deliberate: Always looking at your stance-bluff-feint-compose yourself, trick, stance shift.. AHA, OPENING - Cut his Leg - didn't get him, regain composure - Ah, clash over: see you next rotation, Belgian savage - NEXT TIME you WILL be more tired...)

So there are three layers:
1. Bad season (Living in the fort, training, a few events here and there but you mostly shuffle just training-points around to maximize skill-gain and morale)
2. War season - Mostly some texts with some checks and decisions to take some risks or do stupid stuff. Sometimes small clashes, duels, ambushes or army-stat checks.
3. Main battles. Sometimes in multiple tiers - encapsulating a LOT of short clashes.
4. Sometimes bonus games - Engineering: Building bridges, forts and traps, or foraging/scouting. Those are just mostly 2-3 Buttons for how much you want to drive your dudes and get hated for it, or improving quality etc.

Also: The path is fixed. Caesar or the Legates tell you where to go, and what happens is what happened in real life. It is just uncertain if you are promoted, if your were the one coming up with some intel or a clever tactic or someone else; how many people you lose or if your century is one which just gets crushed in a siege, ambush or main battle. And if you let your people devolve and plunder, pillage and rape or hold up honor and duty and discipline.

Overall i liked it. Very grounded. I see some Problems with:
1. Checks are: Have the stat high enough or not. It doesn't tell you the difficulty directly, but shows a bar. (I can just measure the bar and calculate if i can make it, or not.) Needs a slight random element for risk/reward.
2. Needs more small events AND some more options. (It is often just "Do Check and get something", or "do nothing")
3. Needs a perfectly fair auto-Combat for your 7 hanger-on characters. (It does have a "Skip Fight Button, but tells you it will not generate heroic victories for those characters (which are important - it is one of the measurements of the Century and your success))
4. Maybe a bit more differences and some more options in training and management, so far i think only small adjustments make sense. A bit more stuff to spend your sesterces on (I would like to not only get myself quality gear, but give my old equipment or buy some gifts for heroes in my command, bribe some people and so on.
(So far you can only get some better gear for yourself, buy slaves, art, luxuries and Once a Season hold a feast for morale))

So: 40 hours in (Played 5 Characters, one through all 10 chapters, 3 dead (i play ironman, no save-scumming - And it turns out challenging a foot-taller-than-me warchief-gaul with a giant axe to a duel after being exhausted by a night of fighting in formation is a bad idea.)

So: ~6/10 + niche appeal with a lot of room for improvement (Which could realistically happen)

 

[BrawlMan]

Final Soldier (PC-Engine/T-16) - The last game in the Star Soldier series. I am working my way through, and it's a fun shoot'em up. The unique twist with this game is you can select your weapons load out before starting the game and how difficult you want the game to be. It feels to be the easiest of the four games so far, but it's not a bad thing. I like the music. Right now Soldier Blade is still my favorite of the franchise so far.

 

[laggyteabag]

Far Cry New Dawn definitely plays better than Far Cry 5.

The sense of progression is much superior, here. In FC5, all you really needed to do was put a silencer and your preferred scope on literally the first assault rifle that you picked up from the ground, and that could realistically last you for the entire game without ever losing its effectiveness. In this game, enemies have ranks, and improved health pools, which can be combated by purchasing higher ranked weapons. Additionally, the weapon customisation system is gone, and it is replaced with pre-built guns, with set attachments - so you can't get an M4 with a silencer anymore (at least in the early ranks), you need to put up with whatever weapon combinations are available.

Its not groundbreaking by any means, but at least it is something to incentivise you to use more of the weapon sandbox, rather than just intrinsic preference.

The story doesn't seem to be quite as interesting here though. The Highwaymen are about as generic as your usual bandit group. I doubt this is going to unveil too many surprises.

 

[FakeSympathy]

Following Metroid Zero Mission, I also did 100% run on Metroid Fusion


This game felt a lot harder than zero mission, as Samus feels very vulnerable to everything at the beginning. I feel her power up sequence is very slow, until you get the plasma beam.

Which does make the game a bit more scarier, especially with the SA-X encounters. IIRC, this was also the first game to do a bit of deep-dive on Galatic Federal and Adam, which was really interesting. Can't believe they thought they could actually control both parasite X and Metroids.

Anyways, still a great game. Some puzzles were really annoying to solve, tho

 

[Bartholen]

I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 again recently, mostly clearing out side stuff and dicking around in the open world. The level of immersion in the game still blows my fucking mind. Merely traversing the streets of Night City feels like a reward in its own right. It's not just the amount of detail, but the level of care and precision that goes into the environmental storytelling even in locations that have literally zero mission content.

Gameplay wise it has a big problem though: the power curve basically plateaus around the end of the main story, which is at best only halfway through the amount of content in the game. Once you've completed your build the core gameplay experience stays basically the same for the rest of the game: sneaky characters sneak, hackers hack, gunners go guns blazing. As fun and satisfying as all the different abilities can be, the game simply has too much content to avoid becoming repetitive.

It's also got a bit of a problem with how the different playstyles interact with the systems: barging in and shooting places up basically always plays out the exact same way, but using a combination of hacking and stealth will give a much more interesting and varied experience: checking enemies by looking through cameras, distracting them with the environment, using turrets against them, keeping track of enemy movement and so on.

 

[meiam]

I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 again recently, mostly clearing out side stuff and dicking around in the open world. The level of immersion in the game still blows my fucking mind. Merely traversing the streets of Night City feels like a reward in its own right. It's not just the amount of detail, but the level of care and precision that goes into the environmental storytelling even in locations that have literally zero mission content.

Gameplay wise it has a big problem though: the power curve basically plateaus around the end of the main story, which is at best only halfway through the amount of content in the game. Once you've completed your build the core gameplay experience stays basically the same for the rest of the game: sneaky characters sneak, hackers hack, gunners go guns blazing. As fun and satisfying as all the different abilities can be, the game simply has too much content to avoid becoming repetitive.

It's also got a bit of a problem with how the different playstyles interact with the systems: barging in and shooting places up basically always plays out the exact same way, but using a combination of hacking and stealth will give a much more interesting and varied experience: checking enemies by looking through cameras, distracting them with the environment, using turrets against them, keeping track of enemy movement and so on.

Last time what I did to vary things up is respect half way trough the game into a different spec, helped a bit (but not having the hacking implant to at least hack camera is annoying).

 

[Bartholen]

I also started a new playthrough in Elden Ring after not having touched it for like 10 months. And man, I don't know if I can muster the interest to play it again. Shadow of the Erdtree really burned me out on it, and having played it like 4 times through I just feel zero drive for it. Perhaps the greatest strength Elden Ring has is its sense of exploration and discovery, so once you've combed the game all the way through you're left with a gigantic map where you have to do like 2 hours of chores and setup if you want to do a themed build. Gather the Golden Seeds and Sacred Tears, get the Physick Flask, get this, get that, go here. It's where the open-endedness and size of the world turns on itself, and the game loses a lot of its organicity and consequently immersion. Once you know the world inside and out it becomes more of a place you pass through in between the legacy dungeons rather than engage with.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

In the interest of clearing as much of my backlog as I can before Deltarune and/or Hollow Knight Silksong take over my life upon their respective releases, I knocked out Antonblast finally today. The last few levels and the final boss were a lot more difficult than I expected, even after 101%ing Pizza Tower, but it's a really fun game that I will probably never be able to 100%.

Now I'm actually going to get back to Doom Eternal next. Though considering when the last time I played it was, I'll probably have to start over to get my head back in the game, unfortunately.

 

[laggyteabag]

Between Far Cry 5 and New Dawn, whoever is writing these games really needs to find a way to tell their stories without having your interactions with the antagonists be either radio conversations, or "I could kill you right now... but I wont".

 

[BrawlMan]

your interactions with the antagonists be either radio conversations, or "I could kill you right now... but I wont".

All the writers are doing is just copying what they did from Far Cry 3. Technically, FC2 did first a couple of times with Jackal.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

All the writers are doing is just copying what they did from Far Cry 3.

There's a reason I say "I've already played Far Cry 4/5/6, because I've already played Far Cry 3."

 

[Catfood220]

Well after 140 hours, i beat Metaphor Refantazio and honest;y, meh. I expected to like this game more than I did, but towards the end, it felt like a total slog. The main characters are all paragons of goodness, the bad guy is just generic JRPG bad guy number 2, broody blonde hair soldier guy. The music is forgettable, which is sad considering it has some guy doing his best Scatman John impression and the colour pallet appears to be mainly shades of brown. I didn't hate this game despite everything I just said, there are bits I really liked, but it starts slowly and then just hits a pace and never really ramps up, there are interesting ideas here which I would love to see explored in the sequel. But this game didn't do a lot for me, I hope Persona 6 is better.

 

[FakeSympathy]

Between Far Cry 5 and New Dawn, whoever is writing these games really needs to find a way to tell their stories without having your interactions with the antagonists be either radio conversations, or "I could kill you right now... but I wont".

Ahh Yes, Far Cry 5; probably one of the earliest Ubisoft games that left me confused and divided.

On one hand, the Mid-west depiction was phenomenal, and Hope county was so much fun to explore. I normally hate doing side contents especially in open-world games, but here hunting, fishing, flying, driving, etc were all fun to do

On the other hand, I hated the silent protagonist (which became more tolerable than voiced protags of later Ubisoft games), and all the characters and story was so poorly written. There were very few reasons for me to care to make progress with the story, which probably made the side contents more enjoyable.

Of the whole Seed family, I especially found the military dude to be insufferable, because he hammers you with the idea of "cull the herd". That's the only thing he has going on. I mean all of Seed family are more bland than Uwe Boil movies, but everything about the military dude was ear-grading to listen to

I never even got to play New Dawn, but as soon as I saw who the main villains were, I knew it was gonna be a skip for me.

 

[meiam]

So I'm replaying front mission 4 at the moment (PS2 game for the young one).

The story take place in the close future on earth, the game change the name of nation for anonymity, but its obvious who is who. The story is about Russia infiltrating Europe leadership to drive up tension between it and the US while at the same time destroying its ability to extract natural resource to force Europe to resume trading with Russia. There's also a side story about a dictator in Venezuela who look incredibly like Manduro (this was written while Chavez was still alive) whose been supported by Russia. So huh yeah, I'd say the written did their home work when it came to world building.

Sadly some of the actual story is kinda non sense, at one point your group is trying to hide from a suspicious group of people who don't really have any beef with the group of main character, their just kinda suspicious. This is working just fine, until one of the main character just randomly decide to shoot at them, unprompted, for no reason. Its really awkward and is just there to justify the other group of people attacking you.

Oh, back on front mission world building, they release another game set in the same universe in 2019, in it, Ukraine is divided in two, one half attack the other half and you eventually find out that Russia are pulling the string behind that invasion. That was after Russia took Crimea (irl) but before the full on war. Its actually a pretty neat game, its stealth game set in a city under brutal military occupation, you actually really want to avoid combat because you play as just regular people while there's an army of soldier and giant mech patrolling the street, they can reduce you to mice meat in 1/4 second if they spot you, its almost like playing a survival horror, its neat.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Started a new Doom Eternal file. Decided this time I was going to start on HMP, because I did a lot of the game on UV last time before a rage quit incident. Then I decided it wasn't stimulating me enough to enter The Fun Zone and turned it up to UV halfway through Exultia. Carrying 8 extra lives into Cultist Base and I feel like even being on UV is probably not going to get me through all of them, not that I intend to touch Nightmare at all - I'll end up back in balance at some point regardless.