The Surge

Put 100 hours into Dark Souls 2 and, before hunting down the last few hidden bosses and fighting the final boss, decided to take a break. That break ended up being a 54 hour stint of The Surge, a.k.a. Dark Souls in Space. Even beat the first NG+. Fun game, liked how you can change your build on the fly by switching up implants, but not really as good as DS or DS2 (haven't played 3 yet). Now I hope to put DS2 in this list before too long.

Just "finished" Super Mario Odyssey on Switch. I say "finished" because so far I've only beaten Bowser, after which the credits rolled. I also already "brought peace" to all the worlds, e.g. defeating their unique bosses and resolving other big crises. I've only collected less than half the moons thus far, though, and apparently there's still A LOT of content left, including more worlds and endings. Anyway...

My first impressions of the game were pretty bad, actually, although it may have a lot to do with the fact that I first played it in handheld mode - the game really loses a lot of its appeal this way. However, my first issue with the game was this: I haven't played a 3D Mario game since Super Mario 64 and that game is almost 25 years old. I expected that Mario has hugely evolved since then but Odyssey feels shockingly similar to Mario 64 - the basic move set is almost the same, the moves are largely even triggered the same way and also the worlds don't feel much bigger.

It actually still follows the format introduced by Mario 64 and that tons of other 3D mascot games from its era used (and I beat a lot of those during the last two years). Odyssey may look great and be more refined than those oldies but in the end it neither feels much bigger nor far more advanced than those - most of the new stuff in Odyssey is rather gimmicky and feels like it could have just as well appeared in an N64 or at least Gamecube title. Even Odyssey's main feature, the ability to assume control of enemies which gives you entirely new options and allows you to solve all sorts of puzzles, feels super similar to Banjo-Kazooie's transformation feature.

That said, once I was able to play it on a big TV and with the Pro Controller I pretty much fell in love with the game, at least once I got a few more levels in. Even if it basically is just an updated Mario 64: that one was a hell of a game and so is Odyssey and Odyssey fixed pretty much everything I disliked about Mario 64, in particular Mario's handling and the camera are vastly improved here. And while Cappy, Mario's anthropomorphic hat, is mainly about being able to control enemies it also adds a ranged attack which is much easier to use than any attacks in Mario 64 and makes the whole experience far less stressful.

But what really matters is that the game just oozes joy and love - it's a ridiculously innocent game simply designed to make you feel good and you can feel it in everything: the graphics, the sound and music, the character designs, the animations, the dialogue and a million of small details that most developers wouldn't even think of. And it is often quite imaginative and will surprise you and reward you with the weirdest things. And while I complained about the scale of the worlds at first it does make you feel like you're embarking on a grand adventure as is beautifully captured by the Fossil Falls theme.

However, there's still some things that bothered me a bit about the game. For starters: it has possibly the most forced and unnecessary implementation of motion controls I have ever seen in a game - most things triggered by motion controls either aren't very important or can be accessed via button presses as well but there's one very useful attack that can apparently only be triggered by quickly turning the Joycons or Pro Controller. It's kinda insane that they did this since it's not only awkward (and potentially dangerous to your controller - I once almost threw my Pro Controller halfway across the room), these moves actually don't work in handheld move at all. It's particularly crazy since the game only uses half the buttons in the first place.

Then there's a problem I have with various Nintendo games: the lack of urgency or progression. There's really nothing in the game seriously urging me to go on. I mean, it's Peach being Peach, getting abducted and all, it's obvious how it ends, and the world's different crises are just too silly for me to take them seriously. And there's also no motivator in the mechanics. Usually games like this have growing health bars and unlockable manoeuvres - there's nothing like that here. There's tons of unlockable outfits but at least the ones I've obtained so far don't affect Mario in any way whatsoever, other than allowing him to enter certain optional areas. That kinda sucks. Only certain outfits unlocked via Amiibos seem to provide mechanical benefits. The saving grace is really that you regularly encounter new enemies or other objects that you can "capture" to temporarily get some new abilities.

Oh yeah, and the game was a tad too easy in my opinion. There seem to be a lot of tougher optional challenges but just getting through the game to rescue Peach is a walk in the park, even boss fights killed me maybe two or three times. I feel like the game could have been just a tad more challenging.

Anyway, I could go on and on but in summary it's just a fantastic game, easily a 9/10 title for me and that's even if there were not much content left after defeating Bowser but it seems that there's actually still quite a lot waiting for me and while I most definitely won't do 100% (I mean, I still haven't collected HALF the moons in the game - the thought makes my head spin) I will certainly try to get to the next ending. Nothing I will find will make it a 10/10 game for me but it may very well reduce some of my bigger complaints.

Also, I have a serious crush on Pauline now. Don't tell Peach. Or my wife.

I've just finished Half-Life 2. XD Pretty late, but now I realise how amazing it is. After so many years it is playable, looks great, and, most importantly, interesting.

Far Cry 3: Classic Edition (PS4)

This game is an open-world FPS with some RPG elements (earning XP to unlock skills). This version of the game includes all the DLC, and has been made to run on the PS4.

I’ve previously played (and enjoyed) FC4 and FC5, so I thought I’d give FC3 a try. I found it to feel like a less-polished version of FC4, it’s more-or-less very similar though, it still has the open-world fun sandwiched around crap story missions (which include things like on-rails shooting segments (bleh), boss battles (double bleh), and worst of all QTE!!)

Thankfully, the open world is fun and I’d still recommend this game to Far Cry fans who have not played it before. If you’ve never played FC before though, I’d recommend FC4 or FC5 instead.

Hollow Knight

With the recent announcement of Silksong, I picked Hollow Knight up on GOG and beat it for the 4th or 5th time. I am sure everyone has heard enough of that game, but playing it again really amps me up for what Team Cherry will do on their 2nd go.

Just Cause 2 (Steam)

Explosions!!! The series that one reviewer described as "taking real world physics and telling it go f**k itself". I loved JC3 when I played it on PS4 when it was a PS+ title and I had a subscription. I liked it enough to 100% JC3. So I decided to get JC2 on sale (it still is right now A$1.79) and see how the older game holds up.

One immediate advantage over JC3 is performance. I could not quite manage 4K at 60fps, but 1800p was locked 60 at max settings- and that's still pretty good for such a big open world game- with so many Explosions! It looks pretty decent too for a 10 year old game made with last gen consoles as a target.

Mainly it's just like the newer entry I played. Grapple and parachute around the map, blow shit up, unlock story missions, blow shit up, fly helicopters, blow shit up and just generally do outlandish stupid things that even B-grade movies don't think of. But mostly blow shit up. Voice acting is still terrible in a cheesy way.

It's almost as much fun as I had with JC3, but a couple of later refinements make all the difference. No wingsuit for a start, that was fun in the later game and was missed along with the wingsuit challenges. Another little thing I missed was that you couldn't hack the SAM installations, all you could do was destroy them. In JC3 I loved dropping into a base, hacking a SAM or two, stealing a helicopter and watching all the scrambled air support get shot down by their own SAM's...Explosions!
The biggest problem with JC2 though was taking over the towns and bases. I 100% cleared the map for JC3 because it was fun flying around and just blowing shit up. But in JC2 to take control of bases and towns you also have to find chests scattered around each area, and finding them is slow, boring and not much fun. So I decided not to clear the map this time, which is optional. I did do all the faction missions though, even though you do not have to do all of them to complete the story.

Yeah, so not quite as good as JC3 for me, but still lots of enjoyment for about 30 hours and it runs way better as well. I also got the 360 version for free long ago and started it up for comparison on an XB1X- runs well, but 720p vs 1800p, no comparison.

I never got around to that one before selling my Switch. If you like turn based squad tactical games for something different, I really recommend trying out Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle, awesome game once you get past the really easy early learning areas.

I just finished the main campaign of Witcher 3 for the first time, so now I'm heading off to the add-on content...
I still got much to explore and gear to find but fighting the wild hunt was my top priority.
later I'll try new game+ for a while and then I'm going back to finish up pillars of eternity (I had to take a break because my PC had serious hardware problems - cpu died - and on the new setup I started witcher 3)

Too bad. It's thus far my favourite game on Switch, enjoyed it much more than Breath of the Wild.

That's actually the first game I bought for the Switch. I kinda have to like squad-based tactical games since I've been developing them for a living over the last couple of years. :D

And yeah, it's pretty good, I really love how differently it plays due to all the movement options (jumping, pipes) and the ability to build combos or actively push enemies around. But as much as I enjoyed it, I got pretty tired of Kingdom Battle by the time I reached the third world. For starters, it kinda suffers from the same issue I had with Odyssey: the simplistic absurd plot does not motivate me much to keep going and also character or enemy progression isn't particularly interesting. I feel like there's nothing to look forward to after twenty battles or so. My friend had the same impression and stopped at the same point as I did (at the beginning of the ghost world). After Odyssey I'm kinda in the mood for more Mario again, though, so I may decide to finish it soon.

Wild West Story - The Beginnings

A very boring Match-3 game. It's way too easy (even with the time limit) and no matter what you do, you'll never lose (except for one level in which you mostly need luck to succeed).

There's a story and you can buid new buildings in your Wild West city. That unlocks some also boring Hidden Objects level. But because of the game being so easy, you'll probably will have everything unlocked in the middle of the game and have to play 50 more boring levels just to see the conclusion of the story (which was boring as well).

Now, can somebody please explain me, why I have completed this crap? ;)

Complete list of finished games in 2019

Okay, just finished my first (long) playthrough of Into the Breach. Holy shit, this game is amazing. Obviously this game is designed for many playthroughs, with a short campaign and tons of unlockables, so I'm not sure how "qualified" I am at this point to comment on it but dang, I can already say that this game is amazing and worth its money.

First off, I was instantly mesmerised by its presentation and setting. As tired as I am of pixel art, this game gets it right - it just looks very nice and inviting, especially the animations were done just right - they are simplistic but they pack a punch. And that whole apocalyptic time traveller setting, with this really cool music (which reminds me a lot of Jesper Kyd's work from Assassin's Creed II and Darksiders II) got me seriously engaged in this epic struggle for the survival of mankind (in different timelines). Add little details like (written) comments by your guys or blinking eyes on their portraits and shit gets real. Awesome.

So, the game's true beauty lies in the core mechanics which are all about predictability and readability. You always already know the enemies' next moves, they are rather clearly conveyed via tons of UI helpers, and most attacks I've seen so far allow you to push enemies around. The cool thing is that an enemy will perform the attack in the same direction and distance after being pushed. So the obvious thing is that you can push enemies out of the way or shield buildings with your own mechs and stuff but there's also tons of amazing combos you can do. You can have several enemies kill each other in a single turn, make them block spawn points for upcoming enemies, utilise environmental hazards etc.. And what's really great is that besides your own mechs you also have to protect civilian buildings or other structures or units depending on the mission - that naturally creates dilemmas through the mechanics, often you will have to decide whether to let a building go or let a mech take a hit, evaluating if he will still have a fighting chance during the next turn. Importantly, seeing a building crumble and reading how many people died really moved me every time. It's not only a mechanically pure but also emotionally strong game, even if there's almost nothing going on in terms of actual story telling.

The gameplay that results from all of this is pretty amazing. Every turn is like a separate puzzle. Sometimes I spent probably more than five minutes going over all my options (even though you usually only have three units) - and finding the solution was just immensely satisfying. And in spite of this emphasis on predictability the game is full of suspense: for starters, there are a few random mechanics. You don't know what the enemies will do next (after the already queued attacks) and you don't know what enemies will pop up from the ground (just where) so there's this moment where the enemies move around and prepare their next attacks - basically the game is generating the next puzzle in front of your eyes and you just keep hoping that things won't be too bad. And there's this intense moment after you think you've found the right solution, just as you move on to its execution, where you question if that's really it, if it really works and if that's really the best you can do (although that may just be me). It's a turn-based game yet I could literally feel my heart pounding like during the most intense moments of a fast-paced multiplayer shooter. The tension is extreme. Partially that's surely due to permadeath...

So, while it's not a roguelike the developers again decided to give you only one save per profile. I'm often pretty allergic to such stuff but here it works because the game is pretty short. This was my first playthrough, where I still needed to figure things out a bit at first, and I beat a long campaign in seven hours and a half (it should probably be an hour less or so due to going AFK and stuff), I guess a long playthrough may later only take about four to five hours or so, possibly more on hard difficulty. The one thing I'm not a big fan of thus far is the gameplay between missions, where you buy and equip items or assign pilots. It will take more playthroughs before I can say if the balancing is right and such but from what I understand this is the layer where the game's predictability mantra goes down the drain with huge randomness in what weapons you will get - there were weapons that changed everything and I don't know how I would have managed without them. And you don't just need equipment, you also need reactor cores which are highly expensive and rarely acquired as mission rewards so it's often kinda frustrating how close you are to having a good setup but just fall short. Likewise, heroes differ a lot in their usefulness, apparently, but it's random which ones you get. Plus, the shop is only available after completing an island (of which there's a maximum of four per playthrough) which I felt is a tad too rarely. Then there's the thing that you can't do all missions in a single playthrough and you don't have much information about a mission before starting it, you only know the objectives and the map layout and the rewards. So choosing missions is kind of a crapshoot, not a genuine strategic decision. E.g. you will sometimes get a "high threat level" warning before an allegedly particularly tough mission but in practice that says literally nothing about the difficulty. Some of these missions seemed pretty easy to me, actually.

And of course I can't comment on the meta gameplay yet. From what I've seen you get special coins for each playthrough which can then be spent on unlocking new squads, which have different mechs. I don't know yet how much they differ and stuff - from what I understand you can also create a custom squad from mechs belonging to different teams but I presume you won't be able to unlock "squad achievements" this way (different challenges depending on the squad you're playing with). Also, in consecutive playthroughs you can choose to start with any pilot you've hired at least once, which is neat since the default one sucks hard. And of course there's a ton of achievements that need at the very least 10 playthroughs (since you need one playthrough per team).

As for the difficulty: I did a full playthrough on normal on my first attempt, lost only a single pilot and got close to losing maybe once towards the end of the game. On this difficulty it's a fairly easy game for anyone taking their time. I can't even say with certainty that experience with tactical games will help since this one differs a lot from any other tactical game I've ever played. Will have to see about hard mode.

So there's still a lot of stuff ahead of me, I don't know how much additional playthroughs will affect my opinion on the game but they shouldn't make it worse. It's at least an 8/10 game for me already, 9/10 if I will feel like additional playthroughs are worth it (because one playthrough is a tad too short).

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

Great game. I got much overleveled - lvl 217 when I finished ng and tracked down all the hidden bosses, but it was still hard for me because I lack in the skills needed to avoid damage and not get killed and stuff :)

X: Beyond the frontier. The reward at the end shields i got, but the laser i didn't since i already had 2 lasers,went to save quickly and remove one laser goes back no more laser there :(
Did enjoy this game but too much going around like backtracking if you didn't know before what you had to do.
Guess am gonna play around with x-tension a little before i continue x2

The Devil Inside - cool TV horror show themed game, pretty short (3h, and they said old games are longer, heh), guess it's a game from the era where GOG won't step in, where patches and compatibility modes are not enough.

Lot of guns and ammo, and that cave level with constant MEOWing was testing my patience.

Fallout Nevada was amazing but final boss was a b**ch to kick out with his constant resurrections. If you don't deal critical hit with Gauss Rifle in the right moment then you gonna have BAD time...

Regalia: Royal Edition

Enjoyed this game. It was a lot of fun with plenty of choices in relation to how to complete the scenario given.

POI

I loved it! It may not look like much compared to Yooka-Laylee, A Hat in Time or other big titles in the genre, and hardly anyone ever talks about it, but I think this might be my favorite collectathon game on PC so far. Yes, not everything is perfect, occasionally the camera, the hitboxes and other things can make it a bit frustrating and an exercise in patience, but it feels like a labor of love and I thought it was a ton of fun most of the times. There is so much to do and collect, so many small challenges to beat and secrets to find, and it's mostly quite fair, not necessarily a walk in the park, but very forgiving and never really that hard that you feel tempted to give up on it. If you happen to have difficulties with something, you can just do something else and come back to it another day, because for the most part it's possible to switch between areas and challenges pretty quickly. Don't expect a lot of linear story or character development, POI is more about the platforming and collecting; at its core it is a playground with a couple of open areas to explore and do mini-quests in. You can also choose and switch between playing a boy and a girl explorer, whenever you like. Plus, the game is very familiy-friendly, I think, and would be quite suitable for children or younger kids with some average gaming skills (and enough patience to persist in case they struggle with something).