What Was The Last Game You Played?

[54_and_counting]

Bought Midnight Suns on the sale (the 26 quid one with the season pass dlc etc) 

Anyone who has played xcom style games will get the feel of this, only theres only a small battlefield you operate in and your moves are determined by cards you draw

Each hero has their own card set, more unlocked etc as story progresses, same for more heroes, cards, gear etc all csn be upgraded, heroes level up

Having played xcom 2 to death (love it) id say this is more tactical, your guys go first always, and the cards drawn are random, but you can redraw a certain amount per turn, you can chain cards together etc or set up moves and stuff, 

But its also a bit tough as you sometimes feel you are always on the defensive healing etc

The graphics are damn good though, same as the voice acting (spiderman is voiced by same guy as insomniac games one, and i could swear that venom is tom hardy lol

Not far into the story but throughly enjoying it so far

[Ludo*1]

Played Mafia Definitive Edition since it was going for pennies basically. Heartbroken at the story. Brilliant, old school, linear game perfect for someone that can't sink hours upon hours at a time but still get stuck into a great story.

[GiGi]

I got Death Must Die today. Great Roguelite, it's like Hades meets Vampire Survivors and those are two excellent games.

Highly recommended for fans of the genre.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Disney Speedstorm (PS4, 2023)

Disney Speedstorm is "the ultimate hero-based battle-racing game, set on circuits inspired by Disney & Pixar worlds." It was released in early access early in 2023 and went free to play in October. I started playing it then and I've played it every day since.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that it's an extremely good kart racing game. It's an extremely good racing game. Handling and drifting is easy to pick up and quickly feels intuitive. There's a range of powerups available for both attack and defence which adds a frantic layer of tactics to your racing. Races are short - usually lasting two minutes at most - and rather than feeling superficial or unfair this somehow fits the style of the game. Couple this with bright, rich settings for tracks and an assortment of characters (I think I have 34 unlocked at time of writing), and it's almost impossible to not feel engaged.

Obviously the Disney name is a significant part of the game's appeal, and gives it an almost limitless potential for new content added in updates. Since going free to play, Aladdin and Frozen characters have joined Mickey, Toy Story, Hercules, The Jungle Book and others. It's been a long time since I watched any Disney films but lots of these were an integral part of my childhood so if the old frozen head in a jar wants to cash in, why not? Steamboat Mickey also features, but he's not doing some of the other things I've seen him doing online lately.

In addition to the standard drift and boost mechanics of a kart racer, there are different types of racer you can play as and a variety in powerups linked to that. There are four different classes - Speedster, Defender, Trickster and Brawler. Each gets a slightly different set of powerups, so controlling a race as one class will require a different focus from the others. This helps keep the gameplay fresh from race to race, and each racer's own unique ability which can eventually be unlocked potentially swings the race in your favour even more. 

Characters each have a good amount of personality in a number of ways. They're all physically recreated pretty accurately. They even have some of the real voice actors. Robin Williams isn't there obviously and they got Tom Hanks' brother who apparently does voiceover work for him when he can't be bothered, but James Woods! Tim Allen! Well they probably didn't have much else on. Maybe Steve Buscemi and John Goodman were busy. Either way, if there is any part of your inner child left in this jaded, dying world you will raise a smile somewhere if you spend any time with Speedstorm. Racing on the various tracks is also soundtracked by remixes of all your favourite Disney classics - A Whole New World, Bearnecessities, Let it Go - if you wanted a light techno version of any of these, you're in luck. 

The second reason I've found it so easy to return to this game so much is the structure of it. There are two multiplayer modes, ranked and regulated. Regulated puts everyone at the same level and goes with it. In ranked you use your own unlocked racers and you can rank each of them up by racing, earning rewards along the way. This is fine, although the game had problems when it went free to play because players with a low online rank were being matched against players with a high character rank. This was allegedly addressed in a patch, but I've noticed literally no difference.

The notion of levelling up characters is another part of the game's appeal, although it exposes part of my ignorance of modern multiplayer games. The only multiplayer games I've played since even just getting a PS4 have been Rocket League and Gran Turismo. In Rocket League you play Rocket League. You can unlock cosmetics but gameplay doesn't change. In Gran Turismo you buy cars in-game and race them. Easy. 

Speedstorm has what seems to be every trapping of a modern day free to play game. A Golden Pass, microtransactions, three kinds of currency and multiple time-limited events every day. For a Disney game that's full of Disney characters to have the somewhat aggressive shop this does makes me feel quite uneasy. It's easy for me to ignore this (and the game isn't shy in giving you various rewards), but that's not the point when it comes to games where you can spend real money. Gameloft do listen to feedback regarding the shop and prices, rewards and items for sale have changed for the better over time, but it still doesn't really sit right with me. I checked the main purchasable currency, tokens, once to see what you actually got for them. £16 worth could get you a new outfit for Jafar. You could buy Tokens and spend them on proper upgrade materials too, but a large part of the store is geared towards expensive cosmetics. In a Disney game that's going to be popular with younger players I just don't get how anyone could look at this and go through with it. 

Single-player content comes in two main forms, Seasonal events and Limited events. The game runs in 60 day long seasons centred around different Disney franchises, with new events becoming available each week. Limited events are races against the AI with varying criteria. Some are one off races, some are time trials, some offer multiple rewards for winning a race multiple times, or for other objectives like stunning opponents or drifting for a certain amount of time. These all offer pretty substantial rewards for improving racers, so there's a strong incentive to keep coming back. 

The other side of the free to play microtransaction-ridden nonsense comes in here as it pertains to upgrading your characters. Each character has a star rank out of 5, and a level rank out of 50. Their level is limited by their star rank - the highest a 1 star character can go is level 15, a 2 star level 25, and so on. This can be frustrating when a character is stuck at a level which you have upgrade parts for, but not enough shards to raise their star level. Of course, this is the point and is supposed to usher you into buying the resources you need, but I'm not doing that so I often end up abandoning characters until the chance comes up I might get what I need.

That said, there is plenty of opportunity to get what you need to upgrade characters. Ranking characters up online gives you resources. There are free boxes and shards you can claim each day, and the Season events offer substantial rewards. So does the Golden Pass, and you can quickly earn enough tokens to upgrade this and earn even more. In addition to characters there are crew members who offer stat boosts to things like each characters speed or acceleration, so there's plenty to upgrade and you will upgrade things frequently if you play frequently. If you do find a limit, due to the game's apparent nature of being something you can dip in and out of you can easily shift your focus somewhere else when this happens.

I don't know how much longer I'm going to be playing Speedstorm. According to the game I'm around 40 hours of racing in so far after two months and I'm showing no signs of stopping. If you want a review, there you go. 

Actually, reading this back I realise I've spent more time describing menus and time-limited events than actual gameplay or content. Why am I still playing this? Stockholm Syndrome? Lack of fulfilment elsewhere in life? Desperately chasing dopamine like a lab rat with a car battery wired to its genitals? Who knows. I still like winning races online when I steal a place with a well-timed powerup at the line. That doesn't get old no matter the game. 
 

[Miguel Sanchez]

Lego 2K Drive (PS4, 2023)

I remember when the PlayStation 2 came out. I got it for Christmas. I got four games. All PS1 games. Two I don't remember offhand. One was Porsche Challenge, which was effectively just an advert for the Porsche Boxter. The other was Lego Racers, a game adequately described by its title and something that was pretty much perfect for a young boy who was really into Lego and racing games. Then came Lego Racers 2. Then came Drome Racers, and all of the real life sets to go along with it. I still have fond memories of all of these, and I still have my copy of the original. 

 

Imagine my excitement a few months ago when, seemingly out of nowhere, Lego 2K Drive was announced. The first Lego racing game in over twenty years? Yes please. And it looks fun! All nice and bright colours and wacky personalities and everything you get in a Lego game nowadays. And there's your problem. Outwith the driving games I've listed the only Lego games I've ever played are the original Star Wars games and The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game. I still remember Star Wars, a bit odd, a bit quirky, suitably childish because it's Lego and it's Star Wars and because the characters make suggestive noises instead of speaking. I cared less for The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game. Constant self-referential humour, an endless cacophony of noise, colour and far too much happening on screen with no way of following the plot or any of the endless parade of unbearable 'characters'.

 

Anyway, sorry, enough about some other game, what's 2K Drive like? Constant self-referential humour, an endless cacophony of noise, colour and far too much happening on screen with no way of following the plot or any of the endless parade of unbearable 'characters'. Ah. Oh dear. 

 

First things first, this game is just not enjoyable to play. I usually think a game can be saved by its gameplay or its story if it's lacking in other areas. A racing game is easy to salvage if it's fun. 2K Drive constantly feels like something that just never received any refinement. There are three types of vehicle you can drive - street, off-road and boat. It's an open world game so you pick one for each class and switch automatically when you're on each different surface. This can often happen so quickly you don't really feel like you're in control of what's happening, and the dramatic handling shift from surface to surface doesn't help. It's good because there's a decent amount of variety in what you're driving on, but in races and just exploring I often found myself wanting them to be better separated. 

 

The game makes use of a drifting mechanic. Unlike most other arcade racers I've played where you tap the brake to turn and start drifting, in 2K Drive you have to hold the brake. This is fine, assuming you're already going full speed. If not you'll have to let go and start the drift again and keep fiddling with it until you're either past the corner or, more likely, you've overshot it entirely, gone off road, then started sliding more than you want because there's so much less grip off road. You have to do this because, oddly, holding on to the brakes slows the car down, so if you don't time it right you'll start losing speed. The whole experience just feels awkward, and in a driving game that's about as big a mistake as you can make. 

 

There's a boost mechanic and powerups too. Boosting is weird. It feels like the things on screen around the car move faster but the car doesn't change at all. In fact this is a recurring problem. As you win races and complete events you level up, and as your level increases so does your vehicles' overall ability (each vehicle has its own strengths and weaknesses besides this). But from level 1 to level 30 I noticed very little difference in handling or performance at all. It was as much of a struggle to begin with as it was at the end. And no matter what I did, I would always run out of boost in a race right when I needed it.

 

Weapons are a pain too. Cars are destructible, with bits flying off when they take hits, eventually respawning if they're destroyed. The problem is a race usually lasts 2-3 minutes, and at the rate the AI jumps or dodges your weapons you're barely going to gain an advantage. The best weapon attaches two canisters of fruit to your car and fires ahead of you for a good amount of seconds, but then the canisters block most of the track and your surroundings so you can't see where you're going. Driving is awkward, weapons range from ineffective to a hindrance as much as a help, and the environment often gets in the way too.

 

Fortunately the AI are... pointless. You've heard of rubber banding. You've heard of chasing the rabbit. 2K Drive manages to do both. The entire thing might as well be scripted. In fact it probably is. No matter the race length, no matter your level, or the difficulty rank (each of the 24 races has three different difficulties - you play a certain one as default as you progress through the story, and can go back later), you will start at the back, gradually work your way up, and only ever compete for the win on the last lap or final few corners. I found it quite stressful the first few times until I realised the first 90% of the race didn't matter at all. If this is an attempt to make the game more child-friendly, it's a bad thing. They need to learn, and they learn by spending hours trying to beat Basil the Batlord without any friends or big brothers to help them. 

 

Outside of races there are actually lots of things to do. The game is split up into three distinct areas. Each has a range of collectibles and things to find by exploring. There are also lots of 'On-the-Go' events, miscellaneous challenges with a time limit to beat. The variety here is huge and one of the game's few strengths. The thresholds for a gold medal on these can be surprisingly harsh, especially on drift events, but there's a lot to do and they really play into what sense of world building the game has. 

 

On a technical level, I'm torn. I played the PS4 version of 2K Drive and it's often quite ugly. Like Lego games nowadays everything except buildings and the environment is destructible. I'd guess the sheer volume of objects plays into performance which is understandable, but you move around so quickly the blurred edges of your car and the things you hit are noticeable. That said, the game's long loading times include the entire world you travel to, and you can drive around at full speed without ever hitting any stutters or problems. My PS4 was also silent throughout, so there's something technically impressive happening here. The worlds are also very bright and as much detail and attention has gone into them as there is in your average Legoland exhibit, so there's some good and some bad. 

 

As I've been typing this I've been watching a longplay of the original Lego Racers on youtube. Aside from the obvious nostalgia hit from the introduction and the music I'm mainly wondering what this framerate is. I'm not sure it's getting above 20. Aside from that, the first menu option is "Build." You create your racer and build your first car. I've tried not to compare 2K Drive to any other games but here I'm really going to lament the missed opportunity. It's Lego. If you're a child playing this, you have or have played with Lego. If you're an adult playing it like me you probably just wish you were a child playing with Lego. The idea of extending that to a virtual world where there are no parents or things like money to limit the amount of bricks you have is a dream. 

 

2K Drive has an extensive builder system with a seemingly endless amount of bricks you can use, with lots more to unlock as you progress. It has an extensive, if annoyingly voiced, tutorial about how to get the best out of it. And after you spend an hour putting together your basic little car with some wedges at the front, a wing at the back and some of those grill bits to make it look like an engine you'll start playing and unlock a car shaped like a chicken that you'd need about a month and two university degrees before you could think about trying to build it yourself. Oh and all the vehicles you unlock or can buy from the stores or download from people who've been here first and are smarter than you all have stat boosts too which means if you want to drift, or you want to be fast enough to actually win a race, your painstaking labour of love will be forgotten about immediately. 

 

The basic problem with 2K Drive's creation aspect goes back to my comparison between Star Wars and Ninjago. There's too much. I remember getting The Sims 2 on PC because I liked it so much on PS2. But when I played it I was overwhelmed by the amount of extra content and detail in it. The same goes here. Not only is there too much choice and variety on offer for me to make my own car I can be proud of and be attached to, there's pre-built stuff available in-game which looks cooler and goes faster. Maybe there is enjoyment to be had here if I had the time or patience or mental capacity, but I get the feeling I'd just wish I was playing with real Lego instead. The back of the case says "Build and customise brick by brick!" and the picture to go with it looks like some sort of twin-drilled mining vehicle and there's just no way I'm getting near that. 

 

While the game's areas are easy to navigate and filled with detail, there's a lot lacking too. Areas where there is Lego are great. There are buildings and characters and it's all very vibrant and engaging. I go back to the Legoland comparison - it's just exciting to see that much Lego built into things that look cool. The problem is that these actually take up very little space. The whole world isn't made of Lego. It's natural surroundings - water, land, rocks, mountains - with bits of Lego dotted on them here and there. And because of how quickly you can drive you can blast through an entire town or city in about five seconds without actually noticing anything. For all the detail in these areas it almost seems like you need to make a concerted effort to take any of it in. When you do that, you realise just how superficial and shallow it all is. I can still remember Sandy Bay in Lego Racers 2 with its four buildings, or the bases on Mars. I barely remember the names of the three places in 2K Drive. Like the sense of scale which ruins the fun of creation, the world itself just seems fleeting and almost redundant because of how small it really is.

 

My final problem - and I promise this is my final problem, because I'm boring myself right now, is the characterisation. That characterisation exists at all. I've already said there's virtually no point in creating a driver or creating a car. I'm going to go back to Lego Racers again. The intro movie sets things up nicely. You see Rocket Racer, the guy on the box, winning a race and being crowned champion. He's mean to his pit crew and he cheats, so he's the bad guy. You see some mild slapstick comedy along the way. Nobody speaks. There's the odd bit of facial movement. There are a few bosses you beat in championships along the way before taking on the big man himself and winning, bringing justice to the world. The childish joy of transplanting your own personality and characterisation onto the silent figures is the same simple joy that's made Lego so popular. You can build what you want, and you can make them do what you want. Anything else is irrelevant.

 

Sadly, if you're reading this you've probably seen the picture I opened with. A screenshot of the head bad guy saying something about jaded Gen-X references nobody gets. And therein lies the problem. There are a lot of characters in this game. There are 24 races dotted around. Each has their own racer you need to listen to, and beat, and each race is themed around them somehow. This is mildly amusing the first couple of times, but when you're done you just forget about them. There's a main guy with a racing team you come back to every now and then and isn't it hilarious, he has an unruly dog! Haha, woof woof, am I right? I'd actually be curious to see the ratio of time spent listening to characters talking or reading their intro messages to total time spent doing the game's core races. I think it would be quite a bit closer than you'd want to believe. 

 

I'm thinking about it now and I don't think I can honestly say I enjoyed any part of 2K Drive. It's not fun to play, it's not rewarding to build, it's not inviting to explore and other features like online racing (getting dropped in mid-race is great) or the game's apparently compulsory battle pass and multiple currency microtransactions just seem an inevitably hollow reminder of why games like this are made nowadays. 2K Drive was released in May 2023. I bought it in a Black Friday sale, and the following week it was announced as one of December's free PlayStation Plus games. Despite everything I've said I don't mind this because it was still cheap and I still wanted to play it, but after the time I spent with it I can really see why.

 

How can I play Lego Racers 2 again, and in perpetuity?

 

[Stellaboz]

Got a deal on Hogwarts Legacy a few weeks ago. Played a couple of hours until visiting Hogsmeade and I've got 3 days coming up where I can get really stuck into it in the evenings. 

[54_and_counting]

14 hours ago, Stellaboz said:

Got a deal on Hogwarts Legacy a few weeks ago. Played a couple of hours until visiting Hogsmeade and I've got 3 days coming up where I can get really stuck into it in the evenings. 

Enjoy it mate, don't get too sidetracked doing side quests constantly etc vary between each side quest and the main quest and you wont get bored or feel repetitive 

Once you unlock your broom to fly across the map its just a phenomenal game imo

[Miguel Sanchez]

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4, 2018)

 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider begins, as many AAA games do nowadays, with an on-screen message declaring that the game was made by a diverse team of people of many genders, ethnicities, backgrounds and sexual orientations. I think the first time I saw this in a game was Mafia III. In a game set in the American deep south in the 60s where you play a black man, a message saying "there is racism in this game and racism is bad" is at best, patronising. What, then, could Shadow of the Tomb Raider possibly be apologising for in advance?

The Tomb Raider formula isn't altered much here. You play Lara Croft, one of the few video game characters ubiquitous enough to exist with little in the way of introduction or development. The game picks straight up from where Rise of the Tomb Raider left off. Off the top of my head I remember finishing that and not having the slightest recollection of anything that happened. Shadow goes one step further, as I had almost no interest in what was happening the entire time I was playing. Lara finds a dagger in a temple in Peru. Then she sees a mural carved into a wall that tells her to go somewhere. She and her sole remaining friend in the world (the last one she hasn't got killed) head off to find it, and so does a guy called Dominguez who is bad and shouldn't get it because he'll do bad things with it.

The story and characterisation in this game are extremely bad, but as I think about it, every area of this game is lacking in the same way. Do we learn anything about Lara? Not really. She was an annoying, extremely privileged child. She goes Rambo mode at one point. She cares so much and just feels like she lets people down. Do we know anything about the bad guys? "We can reshape the world." Oh can you, okay. Do we learn anything about the extremely forgettable extras we meet along the way? Not really. Nothing of the story and nothing of the characters will live long in the memory.

Does the gameplay compensate for this? No. Standard third person runny jumpy climby affair, although in arguably the most impressive turn of events the third game in a trilogy manages to have the absolute core gameplay mechanic be vague at best and outright broken at worst. Trying to shoot an enemy? Better pick a gun with good damage because you're only hitting on ten percent of your shots. Combat is limited compared to the previous two games and there's a focus on stealth, but this is clunky and let down by how awkward it is to move Lara around. Eventually you'll unlock arrows that turn enemies against one another and it becomes a foregone conclusion anyway.

Platforming is even more infuriatingly imprecise. When you're climbing along a wall and trying to jump to another section it's often a lottery whether or not Lara will actually attach. This quirk was at its most irritating during my playthough on the hardest, stingiest with checkpoints, difficulty. I jumped, Lara got stuck on the side of a cliff and couldn't move, I then had another twenty minutes of platforming and swimming to redo. And while I'm here, how can she climb sheer cliffs, or even overhanging cliffs, while wearing sandals?

While things like that are irritating, it's not as immersion breaking as the times Lara has to jump or swing to a ledge. Good platforming is centred around an instinctive understanding of how the player character interacts with environmental elements. The player understands how the character moves, jumps and climbs. The player understands how to interact with different surfaces and objects. Every now and then in Shadow you'll be going along a (completely linear) path and come to a stop. You'll see a ledge or another bit of rock or something that's definitely too far away. Lara can't jump there, that can't be where you're supposed to go. So you look around for a bit and wonder if you're missing something. If you're on the easy difficulty you press R3 and a big glowing thing tells you that yes that is the way you're supposed to go.

So you take the leap of faith that's definitely too far for Lara to reach. Several extra frames appear during her jump and she sort of floats in mid-air until she reaches wherever she's going. It's like Wile E Coyote jumping off a cliff. Considering one of the game's central premises is about what Lara does to survive when faced with a private military contractor that's slaughtering hundreds of people to try and find the same hidden treasure she is, the fact that she reaches these pivotal moments by effectively floating through the air undermine this somewhat.

The game is largely linear, although there are three main areas where you can explore a bit and do some side-missions. Each of these is basically pointless. The people inhabiting them are irrelevant to anything that's going on. Trying to navigate them is also a nightmare, the main area of Paititi is particularly bad for the Borderlands problem of having areas built on top of other areas with an in-game map which doesn't differentiate between them. And you don't have a mini-map, so you have to bring up the menu every ten seconds to make sure you're going in the right direction. Things get worse if you're actually looking for something like a collectible, you can be standing on top of one and not realise.

There's a greater focus on the raiding tombs aspect of the series here compared to the previous two games, but I don't think it works very well. These sections effectively see the game switch from platforming to timed platforming. There isn't much in the way of puzzles, and I'll let you imagine what a game with less than fluid platforming becomes when you need to time jumps to avoid being crushed or stabbed or burned or drowned. The greater focus on these sections is at the expense of combat, but both parts of the game are so unremarkable there's not really any occasion to favour one over the other.

The game isn't very good from a technical standpoint either. Playing on PS4 Pro with the HDR on and performance mode activated turned my console into a jet engine. Realising I could prioritise frame rate and turn the brightness down turned my console into a jet engine going ten miles an hour slower. I don't know where all the performance goes either, the game only exists in green, brown and grey and everything looks exactly the same. It's not loading times either, you constantly run into those tight squeeze sections that only exist to waste some time. Actually there are some sections which are thick mud instead of a small gap, but the point stands. 

Come to think of it, I lied. Despite these various tight squeezes you can still hit a loading screen if you go quickly enough. And this brings me on to the most disagreeable part of Shadow - the amount of times Lara gets stuck somewhere in apparent mortal peril. I tried to keep track but lost count of the amount of times she's underwater and ends up having to struggle through a small gap in the rocks, where you have to spam a button to push or climb through. Where you hear her making muffled straining noises. It's not only underwater either, there's one part where you're in a temple used for human sacrifices and she has to climb what seems to be a waste chute filled with blood, limbs and other gore. Same format applies. This happens so often I honestly started thinking it was a poorly disguised fetish from someone involved in development. Someone who just liked watching Lara get stuck somewhere. I'm not claustrophobic but I've had dreams where I get stuck in the kind of spots Lara goes through where I can't move. I don't know why it happens so often here.

Come to think of it, I lied again. The most disagreeable part of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the sheer scale of it. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this game. Combat, platforming, performance, characterisation, plot, it's all pointless. I can't imagine a world where this is anyone's favourite video game. It just feels like a solid lump of stuff, with no more specific detail than that. "Would sir like a video game? Certainly sir, how much video game would sir like? Ten hours? Here you are, I'll get it wrapped up for you."

So a modern AAA video game is a bit bland. This isn't unique or new. What is unique however is something I discovered once I'd finished. According to Wikipedia, this is the tenth most expensive video game ever. At least for games that have actually released. It seems like this cost over one hundred million dollars to make. I don't know how much of that went into development or how much into marketing, but just let that actually sink in. One hundred million dollars. On the third game of a trilogy, so surely the basic framework for it existed already. And what do they have to show for it? The most uninspiring, unremarkable, boring, pointless game imaginable. 

Remarkably, having finished the PS3 versions of the first Tomb Raider, then both Rise and Shadow, Tomb Raider is now my second-most played series in the post-2008 PlayStation trophies era. Lara Croft is an enduring, beloved, original video game character and my experience with her has ranged from generic to aggressively forgettable. Perhaps there's a message in all of this. All I know is I'm glad I'm done.

[54_and_counting]

Stick of truth and Fractured but Whole double pack for a tenner the now on ps store, currently making my way through SoT and having never played either before, im enjoying it to the point its south park humour, 

Won't be gunning for sll trophies etc though as the combat is getting a little repetitive already, but still a good laugh given the price 

[Mr. Brightside]

Playing through Dark Souls III again, it's absolutely magic.

[BFTD]

Vampyr and The Sinking City. Similar types of games. Played them both before and enjoyed them. Would recommend.

Both have small wooden crates littered everywhere - the former lets you run over and flatten them; the latter does not. Ergo, the former is clearly better.

Actually, Vampyr even has a thing where, if a wooden object is strong enough to survive you running over it (like a wee table), it might still collapse if you fall on it from height. Forget about Rockstar and their horse testicles - this is the kind of attention to detail that the games industry requires.

[Boo Khaki]

Enshrouded

Epic roaming/building adventure in the mold of Valheim, but on steroids. 

It's very polished for an Early Access title, but at the same time there are still the usual issues with imbalanced classes/weapons/skills, crafting progression is a bit clunky, and most of the looted gear is useless garbage you recycle for currency. There are parts of the game (the vistas and the sense of scale) that are genuinely stunning, and hopefully the work to flesh it out gets done in due course. If you are remotely interested in this sort of stuff you should pick it up. It can either be played Single-Player offline, Multiplayer on a realm hosted by one of the players, or Multiplayer on public servers, and you can play the same characters on all formats if you like. No binding of characters to specific servers or online/offline, so it's quite refreshing in that regard.

Edited February 6 by Boo Khaki

[Miguel Sanchez]

Dirt 5 (PS4, 2020)

Before Dirt 5, I had played four Dirt games. Dirt 3 was a fun mixture of different kinds of offroad racing and Ken Block. It also had Manchester Orchestra on the soundtrack. Dirt 4 was a strange mix of that and normal rally driving. Dirt Rally cleared that up by being much more focused on one thing, and also included the full Pikes Peak hillclimb course. Dirt Rally 2.0 is one of the most infuriating games I've ever played, and I may yet finish it one day. 

Dirt 5 has, DLC included, 227 career events. Almost all of them are races against other cars. Some are time trials. Some are 'Path Finder' events where you go up a steep, severe rocky hill climb. Some of the DLC events include checkpoint races on custom courses, and there are Gymkhana events where you have to do stunts to beat a certain score within a time limit. The game features a range of off road vehicles including rally cars, rallycross, buggies, pickup trucks, and others.

There you go. I've described the entirety of Dirt 5. I can't say this in any great detail or with any insight, but if you've done one race in this game you've done them all. Nothing has any consequence, no race has any stakes or strategy, there's no setup to change, you just drive for five minutes and win and that's that. 

I spent about thirty hours going through all of these events and the most impressive thing was how consistent the game is. Consistently unremarkable, but consistent. It's probably ironic that this much consistency in a racing game comes across as such a negative to me, but here we are. There are some secondary goals for you to aim for in a race - time spent above a certain speed, time spent in the air, overtaking while drifting, that sort of thing - which let you increase your standings with sponsors. The sponsors are irrelevant though, you unlock a couple of stickers for custom liveries you're never going to look at and you'll have more than enough money from winning the races in order to buy every car anyway. 

I don't remember Dirt 3 well enough to know if it had any sort of structure in the background outside of the racing, but Dirt 5 apparently has something resembling a story. Between races you occasionally get some guys on a podcast talking to you about offroad racing and how amazing it is. And how important the Dirt Tour is. I guess that's what I was racing in. And then there's a final boss race against a guy named Bruno who they don't like. But you never see these people, and the talking comes over the top of the music in the background and while you're still going through the menus looking at stuff, so I think I was halfway through the game before I stopped treating it as an interruption rather than something I might have benefitted from paying attention to. 

Ultimately this very thin attempt to introduce context is as shallow and flimsy as the races themselves. Since this game was released in late 2020 I don't know if Covid played a part here but the racing feels like the basics were finished then left, and the voiceovers were thrown in last minute. The people talking may as well be disembodied voices inside my head.

I could look past all of this if the game was enjoyable to drive. It's not. The sponsor objectives encourage you to drift, but any attempt to get the car sideways sees you lose lots of speed and lots of places. For an off-road racing game the environment seems very inconsequential too. You notice some sliding when driving on ice, but there's very little difference between tarmac, mud, gravel, rocks, snow or puddles. The water effects are especially hilarious. Nothing happens to your car when you drive through water. It doesn't get bogged down, no splashes come up, nothing. As you might imagine, this all contributes to the game feeling quite basic. 

It doesn't look that great either. I played the PS4 version. This was also one of the first PS5 games, so I'm sure a better version of it exists. But then Gran Turismo Sport was released on PS4 in 2017, and look at that. Three things stand out about how Dirt 5 looks. First one of my recurring pet hates in racing games, a photo mode you can only access by pausing a race. There's no replay feature, so if you want to take a picture of a dramatic, exciting race you need to stop it and spend ten minutes fiddling about with the filters and effects. Terrible. 

Most races also feature a rapid time of day change. Too rapid, because the longest race is about five minutes and you're just very aware that the sun doesn't come up that quickly and it doesn't get that bright that quickly. It feels like style over substance, but it's not even style done well. And on that note, the third graphical problem is trying to drive at night. The headlights on every car are like something from one of those Top Gear specials when they're in the middle of nowhere in Asia driving something with fridge lights for headlights. If you're driving at night in this game you cannot see a thing, and that ends up as fun as it sounds.

For all its blandness, there is one interesting part of Dirt 5. The Playgrounds feature lets you create custom tracks and events and share them for others to play. Much like any such feature it's filled with hugely complex, imaginative courses already which feel like they'd take you months and a few degrees to figure out how to make yourself. The options for searching through these to find good ones also seems a bit awkward. Plus there are lots that are like those custom races in GTA Online where you end up way up in the air driving on shipping containers and narrow planks. These courses don't really serve much purpose in themselves, but they're almost always a bigger test of your driving skills than the base game, so that's something. 

I don't think there's going to be a Dirt 6. Good. 

[BFTD]

Arcade Paradise - been on my wishlist for a while, but is currently part of an excellent Fanatical bundle, including stuff like Vampire Survivors. Only 11 days left to buy for £15, which is a quid less than the RRP for Arcade Paradise alone.

Your rich dad puts you in charge of an old laundromat which has a few arcade machines in the back, and you set about turning it into a proper arcade. Part light business sim, part retro arcade game simulator, as you get to play the machines (which are surprisingly good). It's great for just dipping in and out of, with a surprising amount of detail - the games and soundtrack seem like they're from an alternative-timeline Nineties. Recommended.

[LiviLion]

Just finished Spider-Man 2 with the platinum trophy to show for it, loved it. I get a lot of complaints about it being short but tbh these days it's probably perfect for how long/often I sit and play, meant I could have it completed in a few weeks. The Kraven storyline actually got me excited for the film even though I know it'll probably be shite, and thought the Venom storyline was excellent. Seems fairly obvious who the main villains will be for the third game, with a couple wee trails they've left for who might pop up on the side.

Now back to Red Dead 2, which I've now started 4 times (fucked it and lost my PS4 save data twice, then started it on PS5, but went so long after playing it that I decided to start again), actually got a few missions out the way now so pretty confident I won't be forgetting about it and sitting doing the tutorial for the 5th time.

[Mark Connolly]

I've also just finished Spider-man 2, and although it was excellent, I also felt a little underwhelmed by it. Maybe because the first one and the Miles stand-alone were so good, I'm probably judging harshly, but I wasn't drawn in so much this time round

[54_and_counting]

Just finished Guardians of the Galaxy, might go for the platinum trophy as the trophies seem decent enough to go for

Defo enjoyed this one, game was good and they did quite well in making it a single player but in control of the guardians at points in battle with use of button commands, its quite good watching your team go into battle and the AI does it quite well without making them too good that you can sit at the back doing nothing 

The chapters/levels have varied levels of exploration, the levels are good looking especially Knowhere, the game does hold your hand a wee bit too much when going through the levels though

Where the game shines the best is the story and the interaction between the guardians, the ones available will ealk through levels with you and there's constant chatter slaggings etc between them, when you leave the path to explore rocket always has something to say about you for example lol. For anyone who has seen the films the game does recreate the aspect of them all thrown together but somehow working very nicely

The story is a new one created for the game, and is good enough to keep you interested all way through 

My one gripe is that during battles where theres numerous enemies and obviously all the guardians, it can get a bit confusing where everyone is and whats happening, but certainly isnt game breaking

Edit to add, it has an absolutely banging soundtrack including a made up band called star lord just for the game, the songs chosen for the game are fucking tremendous 

 

Edited February 29 by 54_and_counting

[GAD]

23 minutes ago, 54_and_counting said:

Just finished Guardians of the Galaxy, might go for the platinum trophy as the trophies seem decent enough to go for

Defo enjoyed this one, game was good and they did quite well in making it a single player but in control of the guardians at points in battle with use of button commands, its quite good watching your team go into battle and the AI does it quite well without making them too good that you can sit at the back doing nothing 

The chapters/levels have varied levels of exploration, the levels are good looking especially Knowhere, the game does hold your hand a wee bit too much when going through the levels though

Where the game shines the best is the story and the interaction between the guardians, the ones available will ealk through levels with you and there's constant chatter slaggings etc between them, when you leave the path to explore rocket always has something to say about you for example lol. For anyone who has seen the films the game does recreate the aspect of them all thrown together but somehow working very nicely

The story is a new one created for the game, and is good enough to keep you interested all way through 

My one gripe is that during battles where theres numerous enemies and obviously all the guardians, it can get a bit confusing where everyone is and whats happening, but certainly isnt game breaking

Edit to add, it has an absolutely banging soundtrack including a made up band called star lord just for the game, the songs chosen for the game are fucking tremendous 

 

I liked this as well, especially agree with you on the strengths of the game and how decent the story is. My big gripe is how the combat really started to drag towards the end. Just wave after wave of the exact same fight over and over again, kind of meant I couldn't wait to get it finished by the end, which is a bit of a shame. Dunno if you thought the same?

[54_and_counting]

7 minutes ago, GAD said:

I liked this as well, especially agree with you on the strengths of the game and how decent the story is. My big gripe is how the combat really started to drag towards the end. Just wave after wave of the exact same fight over and over again, kind of meant I couldn't wait to get it finished by the end, which is a bit of a shame. Dunno if you thought the same?

Yeah apart from changing your elemental guns to suit the weaknesses of the enemies it was pretty samey, think a big part of this is because quill only had a couple of attacks (apart from specials) and this was probably down to the buttons being used to control the other guardians, apart from shoot and punch/kick you couldn't do much else

I did like the huddle up part in fights, thought that was another interesting aspect of a team relationship, plus in the middle of a massive battle, you huddle up to raise everyone, game starts up again and the bold Rick Astley starts belting out, superb stuff

If the story and interaction between the guardians wasn't as good id have struggled to finish it maybe, 

Is it too sad to say that i downloaded all the Star Lord songs, given it was a made up band for the game 

[Jives Miguel]

I've been playing self-hacked Pokemon games on my 3ds recently. Played Emerald, but I changed all of the wild Pokemon to Pokemon I actually like (f**k off Zigzagoon) and now playing Pokemon Y with completely randomised wild Pokemon and trainer Pokemon. First battle of the game against a level 5 Mewtwo was certainly an eye-opener.