Oh. Good thing I ignored most of the dialogue and made sure to shoot things as often as possible then :-P
Niggles: I played this game during a free Steam weekend for it.Maybe im in the minority, but i quite enjoyed it (yes the driving bits were a bit naff but hey....) - but you need to play it on hard (cant remember exactly the difficulty settings but you need to ramp it to the top or 2nd to top difficulty ). Had no issues with the graphics (unlike a lot of reports) - started and finished the campaign during that weekend :).
Yea, I have finished Rage twice now - iD shooters sort of have that effect on me, yes, including Doom 3. While there was a lot of pointless downtime in Rage (I could really do without the open world aspect), the quest hubs were actually nice, minigames were good fun to play (even the racing was decent for a bit... Before it became tedious anyway), but the meat of the game - the shooting - was just as exceptional as ever. Addition of multiple ammo types and various inventory toys which helped you kill dudes helped tremendously. Rage is actually my goto example when someone mentions that console constrols can't handle complex FPS games, it's just a bit of a shame it uses regenerating health, the game has all the pieces in place for medpacks to work well. And altho textures looked like ass up close, megatexture technology - or whatever iD called it - made for quite beautiful scenery. And, to be perfectly honest, when I'm playing games, I don't tend to stick my face into walls, but I do tend to notice the overall look of a location.
KiNgBrAdLeY7: Ultimately, the Metro Redux bundle. Was too short as a game, needed steam, gave me a hell of an adventure (key was duplicate and needed retailer replacement), combat was strange, Nikki was not romanceable. Maybe i should have grabbed the Evil Within, instead.
Metro is really best played on the Ranger mode - the one without any HUD, yes. And the game is bloody infuriating by default (I love it anyway). And yeah, Evil Within got extremely poor reception. Dead Space is fantastic as mentioned above. Then there's Alien: Isolation which is my surprise of the year.