Just finished Prey (2017) on PS4 on normal difficulty. I started playing this one expecting a rather linear shooter with some gimmicky powers and some interesting enemies that I would finish in 8-12 hours. Yeah no.

After a short while it occurred to me that I'm playing something that's as close to being System Shock 3 as it can be without using the System Shock license. There's a big consistent world, there's some RPG elements, there's stealth, some mediocre shooting, lots of hacking and repairing stuff and there are some moral decisions to be made.

According to the stat screen that is displayed after finishing the game it took me 42 hours to beat the thing. I'm not sure I was well-entertained. The story is kinda interesting and the game has a pretty cool atmosphere but, to be honest, Prey does virtually nothing novel or particularly interesting - I don't feel like it does anything noteworthy with the immersive sim formula that the likes of Thief, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex didn't do twenty years ago. Also the alien abilities, like being able to disguise oneself as almost any object or turning a human corpse into a phantom fighting for us, have left me rather unimpressed.

The biggest problem for me, though, is that the game utterly lacks character. There's no Shodan, no Big Daddies, no Andrew Ryan or Rapture. The space station, Talos 1, looks pretty much exactly the way you would expect it to look. The creatures we fight, the Typhon, are a decent sci-fi idea but aren't really an interesting villain. It doesn't help that eventually they aren't even that much of a threat and I feel like their background is a tad too obscure. I get that this is by design but it doesn't make the experience better, as far as I'm concerned.

That said, I wouldn't have (apparently) spent 40+ hours playing this if I hadn't enjoyed it and once in a while it gave me a good chuckle when I found a clever way to easily dispose of a strong enemy or two and it made me care about the fates of the other inhabitants of the space station. Also, Mick Gordon's soundtrack is fantastic and it's thanks to the music that I got goosebumps during more profound moments. However, at the end of the day it's just a competently made "immersive sim", as far as I'm concerned.

grimdawn

Yeah, I'd like to play this at some point, but whenever I see footage of it, the first thing that goes through my head is, "Wow, those enemies look so boring".

Prince of Persia (the 2008 reboot).

Positive:
-Loved the artwork. Wispy, painted, dreamlike world.
-Likable characters. Gotta admit getting tired of Nolan North. All I hear is Nathan Drake in every role he plays.
-Wonderful adventure music.

Cons:
-Some of the worst combat I've ever experienced in a video game. I have NO idea what they were thinking. It's like the Arkham series combined with a mid/late 90s fighting game circle. Except massively dumbed down and no ability to lose. Elika will save the Prince from anything and everything. Go make a sandwich in the middle of a fight if you like. When not fighting making your way to the boss with no reason to explore. After clearing the boss go back through areas you already passed to collect orbs. No reason to go above the 540 orbs required to unlock all abilities as all you'd get for collecting all 1,001 Nights... I mean Orbs... will get you a few skin unlocks.

I really wanted to like it but the death and combat system is so bad it just massively brought the experience down. Now I'll move on to the Sands of Time trilogy. I saved it until after the reboot as I'd heard the reboot was disappointing and that the Sands of Time games are the best in the series.

Love RtCW. I actually prefer the console versions now though as they added new content including a prequel chapter in North Africa, some new items, A SHOTGUN! and new enemies.

The multiplayer was astounding at the time and I lost countless hours to it. The Beach map inspired by Saving Private Ryan was especially popular.

They released a free standalone Wolfenstein game called Enemy Territory. It was originally intended to be a full expansion to RtCW that added a North Africa mission. It was scrapped as it had a team mate system (engineers and medics you ordered around) that the devs said just wasn't fun. I'm assuming the scrapped North Africa campaign was modified/reused for the console prequel.

I'd recommend the 2009 Wolfenstein game from Raven Software if you can get a hold of it. It has it's flaws, like regenerating health (seriously, in a Wolfenstein game?) but it has some impactful and fun weapons and powers in a Hexen inspired hub world.

The MachineGames Wolfenstein games are straight up trash though that should be avoided. Old Blood is ok though.

For the classics I'd recommend the fan game Blade of Agony. It's Wolfenstein perfected! Also, if you don't mind over-the-top gore Brutal Wolfenstein 5.0 is pretty awesome.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-wolfenstein-3d

Hollow Knight (Switch)

The day after I brought this the Indie Sale happened on GOG, which included Hollow Knight, slightly annoying. The game is a modern metroidvania set in a world dominated by anthropomorphic insects, which was decimated many years ago by a mysterious infection. The story is minimalist, and can be easily ignored but I think is very good. Gameplay is great, especially the bossfights, which are often difficult but fair. It sort of reminds me of dark souls, the way the story is unveiled and the difficulty of the fights.

I tried to 100% the game, including DLC. However the most recent DLC included a boss rush mode style quest, of which I could only beat the first 3, being stuck on the final boss of the 4th. I might come back to it at some point but for now I have other games in my backlog to do, I loved the game and would highly recommend it, it's probably my favourite metroidvania I've played.

Agreed. I wrote pretty much the same stuff about the game in last year's "Games Finished" thread. Unlike you I had only heard positive stuff about PoP 2008 before I played it and assumed it would be fantastic, so imagine my disappointment.

And yeah, in my opinion the Sands of Time trilogy is amazing (or at least it was when I played it ~15 years ago) and hope you will enjoy that one. Personally I still have to finish The Forgotten Sands, which is a late addition to the SoT series - I haven't finished it but even that one seems much better than PoP 2008.

Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard's Throne, Apr 23 (GOG)-I fully admit I sucked at this game. Even on the easiest difficulty I still had to resort to cheats to beat a couple levels and at the end I just gave myself unlimited gold and crushed my enemies. That part was rather satisfying. I'm not sure why I was so bad at this and why I enjoyed it so little compared to the first game which I rather liked and didn't think was too hard. It's been a while since I've played a strategy game I've really liked.

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I´ve beaten Ori and the blind forest many times. If you ever tried it, how does it compares?

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier (XB1X)

Just like the other ones. Well, maybe they made more of an effort for some of the decisions to actually mean something. But it's hard to tell without playing it again and making different choices, and I'm not playing it again. It was an okay short story to wind down with after 2 play throughs of DS3. If you've played the others you may as well see things through with this one at some point as well. Another new edition to Game Pass if you have an Xbox to play it on.

Holy Potatoes! A We're in Space?!
I got it from GOG community giveaway, donated by DampSquib

The game is much better than a weapon shop but it still has some major issues. The general tone of the games is the same - a lighthearted story with numerous pop-culture references (Doctor What) and cute graphics. This time, however, it's not so casualish as a Weapon Shop clearly was. The game can a bit difficult and before mastering the combat somebody will probably blow up your ship and you'll have to start again.

The games is very heavily inspired by FTL and while some parts are well done the overall quality is not even close to FTL. You start with a poorly equipped ship and two potato-sisters that are trying to find their grandpa. You move around galaxies, explore various plants and hope to find some clues. Or guns. Preferably guns, with them you can force other vegetables to provide clues ;) However, similarly to FTL you can't explore as much as you want because a dreadful ship is on your trail so you have to change between galaxies relatively often. This part is, however, a bit different than FTL - there you had a real race and you had to run for your life, while here things are at lower pace and you can still explore most of the planets anyway.

The exploration part is nice, even though the game is randomized the story line and some major quests remain the same (you may encounter them in different order) and some of them are quite complex so it's entertaining to solve a particular quest. Stuff like crafting new weapons, hiring new troops works pretty well as well.

So where is the biggest flaw of the game? Battles. Battles are repetitive and after some time boring. They are not as straight-forward as it may seem but basically you can fire your guns, move your shields and use special abilities of your captain. It takes some time to develop a good strategy and constant upgrades require some adjustments here and there but after some time when you know how things work each battle seems very similar to any other battle. And that's a shame, especially if you compare to marvelous complexity of FTL where you always have something to do like repair breaches, extinguish fire, repel invaders or even invade yourself and of course choose where to shot. In Holy Potatoes your options are very limited and there is not much you can do during the battle - you just continue your strategy without any need to adjust to some new situation like FTL.

So yeah, this is the problem of the game and the fact it took me several months to beat - not that it's a particularly long game, I just played for an hour or two every week (or even every second weak) just to keep things fresh. I can still recommend the game, especially if you enjoyed FTL but thought it was to hardcore. Holy Potatoes, while not casual, is definitely easier.


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It is hard, but never seemed unfair to me. Take early punishment for later payoff, full research till you get everything, trade for better spells you can't research if possible, hold your heroes dear, losing one is not an option, and level them to the limit each scenario, explore everything for the best gear... And don't waste much on defense. With some rare exceptions, I defended my cities throughout that game with 2 monks, and a lot of magic of course, and fully built defenses. Always save your magic when you may need to defend.
Doesn't work in Shadow Magic anymore though, mainly that defense, since units automatically surrender if overwhelmed. Not even a matter of such insane odds, but even battles I could have easily won were thrown away because my units surrendered, the attacker being stronger if just comparing the units themselves, ignoring defensive structures and magic. Plus all the fast traveling through the shadow world, and needing to make sure you don't stay there without shadow walking. Sure took a lot of tactical changes, and didn't like them...

Oh, PS: That final WT scenario was insane, yes, but I figured out there was no way to hold cities, so razed everything I captured, just held a base, if you will, to just weaken the enemy, and take away their potential to get stronger, until I could be confident enough to rebuild step by step and take the fight to the end.

PS2: And never shy away from forcing draws in battles, since the enemy won't attack again that turn. If they're stronger but you can outrun with at least one unit till the turn limit, do so. And exploit overpowered units (fliers with ranged attacks vs. ground melee - invincible in WT, no longer so in SM since breaths are limited to 3 for example). And of course exploit AI flaws, like not using transports (that spell that slowly floods the map coupled with this? gold!), or trying to get all units through one wall breach even if it means going all around instead of making another, AND assuming that a unit that can climb or pass walls and is currently stopped on a wall has made a breach and queueing the others behind it.

The Mark of Kri. This a Playstation 2 game that's a sort of hack-and-slash/stealth game hybrid. It's a typical sword-and-sorcery plot in that you control a brawny warrior who has to take down some necromancer who's trying to conquer the world.

There are seven levels and the majority of them can be mostly beaten with stealth. You have a bird friend who can find certain perches that let you get a look at enemy placement and patrolling (kind of like in the Beastmaster movie), then you sneak up behind them and break their necks or something, and then move on to the next. If you cause an alarm, a few tough enemies will pour of a nearby doorway but if you're good at combat you can take them down. It just makes things a bit more complicated is all, so thankfully there are no "he sees you, try again!" outcomes here. Usually there will be some kind of outright fighting toward the end of a level, and the final level is only combat all the way through, but the game is probably like 70 percent stealth/30 percent action.

The fighting system is pretty interesting. Instead of the context sensitive systems popular now, you use the right analog stick to map enemies to the X, O, or square buttons and then you can use those buttons to attack them, and you can unlock and remap the buttons again if necessary. The block button blocks attacks from everyone even if you're not locked on. You can do combos and there are four weapons you pick up along the way that have different properties, including a bow for ranged fighting/sniping.

The game is quite beautiful for its time. I think they hired actual Disney animators to help design it, so everything has a very clean animated look, but they didn't sanitize any of the violence like Disney did with its Tarzan adaptation. Your guy will decapitate guys, crank their heads around to snap necks, bash their skulls in, and pin them against walls with his sword like Michael Myers, among other things. It's basically the best Conan game anyone has yet made, although stylistically it's going for more of an East Asian/Polynesian vibe rather than Irish/European.

Finished Katana ZERO
Wasn't the longest game (took me 7 hours for 100%) but I enjoyed it a lot.
The graphics, music, gameplay and especially the story are all very good. The ending isn't "finished" but apparently there will be more in the future which I'm very much looking forward to. (Need to know what happens next!)
Will probably play through it again with one of the unlockable swords.

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans

So I've finished a more canonical side (orcs) and had a real blast! If I'm not mistaken the first time I finished the games was 24 years ago. I did a few replays later but it's safe to assume I hadn't played for at least fifteen years...

So yeah, nostalgia was a very important factor for me, the game aged poorly. UI can be easily fixed (Warcraft Mouse Helper) but the overall quality of the game is rather poor when compared to nowadays standards. Still, if you want to experience a milestone in RTS games, just play it!


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