I needed to see your rating first, and then I saw this and had to immediately, specifically agree the fuck out of it. absolute dreck.
there’s some pretty good music in the game otherwise, but eeeesh
just read the rest of your post and I basically entirely agree. perplexing but very enjoyable.
Just finished Stalker 2, on Steam Deck no less. Ran like absolute ass during the building-heavy final stretch, but was generally pretty decent. The game itself is a massive achievement I think. A lot of it made me think of the bits in Half Life 2 where you’re out in the wild and scrabbling around for a way forward - the stashes are basically all environmental ‘puzzles’ in that vein too. The story was immense as well, and stitched into the map perfectly. It’s pretty heady sci-fi with a tonne of lore to build on, so all the factions are a bit confusing at first, but when it all starts steamrolling ahead it feels dramatic and crucially, significant. It had a surprising amount of heart too, and I think that came from them not rushing anything either - it does pay off in the end.
There were two or three fights that actually made me want to quit though. Just awful game design. Really bizarre. And it’s still pretty janky. But I’m so glad I saw it through to the end. If you like imsims I’d say it was essential.
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes 10/10
Summary
Absolutely perfect. The map is big without feeling unwieldly, there’s plenty of variety with indoor and outdoor sections, and it feels like you discover something new and interesting after every infiltration. Actually struggling to think of better level design in any other stealth game. The stealth mechanics that interface with this feel slick, challenging and satisfying, as does the combat. Overall, just a really well executed experience that I kept replaying.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 7/10
Summary
Apu WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?!.gif
Sadly, this feels like a very different experience than Ground Zeroes. Won’t spend too long on it, as it’s been said already, but it really feels like there was a shift in direction that happened between developing GZ and TPP. It still looks stunning, and plays really well - the mechanics are all there from GZ - but idk…the curation that the prologue had isn’t there at all, having been substituted for TWO dull open worlds, games as service features, and really unnecessary bloat. Regarding the latter (and I actually came round to actually running Motherbase - it’s a very novel way to manage upgrades) the biggest offender is the base you manage being fully explorable for no reason whatsoever. It’s so frustrating to see where the bulk of development went in favour over the template that lovely Ground Zeroes laid out.
You also get the feeling that the developers had a bunch of good ideas that maybe hit two or three times during a playthrough - e.g. finding a Bananarama cassette or flying into a mountain pass in a fuck off helicopter - but then went ‘yeah, lets make the player repeat the same mission about 100 times’. Aside from two or three ‘set-piece’ bases, which are still a shadow on Camp Omega in GZ, you’re more or less just taking endless, unskippable chopper rides to the same few identikit locations, and it gets to be a huge grind. ALSO, here’s a bunch of heavy weaponry like tanks and APCs that you’re never going to use except for like 2 missions, but we lovingly created with multiple fire modes and everything.
All that said, I did have a great time at points. Da Smasei Laman and it’s main story mission was absolutely amazing, and I loved fighting Metal Gear. The combat and gunplay are really good, and the story and characters aren’t even that bad for MGS. I just hated having to plod around the same places over and over. The missions that ramp up in difficulty in Chapter 2 (the bit after the first ending?) are admittedly a lot more enjoyable because you can’t simply walk up to everyone and tranq them in the face point blank.
Had I not played GZ, I probably would have scored this higher, but the missed potential in serving this up instead of what was promised by the prologue really fucking stings. Probably being too harsh, but expected a lot better basically.
TopSpin 2K25 7/10
Summary
Enjoyed this a lot. Easily the best tennis game at the moment, and I didn’t hugely mind the usual 2K bullshit - microtransactions, pay-to-win, locked content etc. Very satisfying mechanics, and the courts all look stunning. It would be a different story at full price (think I paid 10 euros for it), since there is so much that is locked behind VC, but you can have a good, chill time with this regardless. Good podcast game too, imo. Loses points because of the 2K bollocks, and the roster of players is very small.
Hogwarts Legacy 6/10
Summary
Pretty crap, tbh. Wanted to play a mindless Assassin’s Creed type open world thing when I bought this (another sale at 10 euros), and pretty much got what I paid for.
On one hand, the combat is super fun, intuitive and original. I wasn’t sure how they were going to pull it off before playing, but I was really impressed with how it works. Like, you could easily just have made an entire game of duelling and I’d probably give it a higher score than this. The castle, forest and Hogsmeade are also exceptionally well done in a visual and layout sense. Probably the best video game castle of all time in that respect. I really liked looking after the beasts I’d caught while on quests, too.
But there’s fuck all to do in any of the locations, and it gets worse when you’re made to travel to the Scottish highlands (inexplicably full of cockneys) for every quest. I don’t really know what happened in the story as I skipped every cutscene from about an hour into the game, which are Kojima level in terms of length and fluff, but it seemed really crap from what I gathered through the unavoidable dialogue with other characters. The voice acting is appalling, I only looked at the upgrade system when I was required to do so for a quest, and 90% of the quests are the most insipid follow or fetch quests involving allies and motives that I never wanted to see or hear about again after finishing. Don’t even think it’s particularly good if you’re really into the Potterverse either, since your character is railroaded into being one of history’s most brutal psychopaths very early on into the game.
The presentation is really slick though, and I loved the combat, animal care thing, walking around the castle (for the first hour or so - there’s nothing to do there after aside from collect statues) and the flying was alright. The rest is an absolute binfire.
Doom (2016) 9/10
First Doom game I’ve ever played! What a Proper Haircuts of a game. Zero bullshit, just killing creeps in their dungeons and science bases. The bosses were very cool, but could have been a bit more challenging, idk. Loved it anyway.
these are some fun opinions!
3. Final Fantasy V (Pixel Remaster)
I think I’m actually going to take a Final Fantasy / JRPG break this time. Not least because Final Fantasy V really does feel like the end of an era for the series - knowing how 6 and 7 goes, this feels like a conclusion to everything they’ve been doing in the previous four and - as such - it’s the most accomplished one yet. Kind of underrated in a lot of respects too, maybe? Understandably 6 is often the one viewed as the precursor to the titanic ambition of 7, but there’s a lot of that game in this imo. Even though the story to 5 is still pretty barebones and basic - it’s elevated by that weird and slightly postmodern Final Fantasy sense of humour (more present here than in any of the previous four), by a greater depth of characterisation across its whole cast, and even by some light ambition in tying the plot to wider themes of environmentalism. Overall, it just feels like they have the Final Fantasy tone pretty nailed at this point and are ready to take it in some slightly more unorthodox directions in the forthcoming games.
The 7-ness goes beyond just the storytelling too. The job system in this game really feels like a precursor to 7’s Materia system - the game is much more loose and modular with job roles, allowing you to experiment with different combinations of abilities as your characters learn and master them throughout the game. The boss designs felt pitched perfectly to this - a lot of them demanding that you mess around and figure out the best party set-up to kick their fuckin heads in. For me, I felt like a bigshot figuring out you could basically level up the Monk job such that characters can then take the Monk’s Barehanded ability (i.e. you get two super-strong hits per attack) and plonk that on a Mage job, so they can master all the magic they need without being shit dweebs who can only prod enemies with rubbish staffs like twats.
Anyway yeah, I enjoyed this. I’m really looking forward to taking a bit of a JRPG break (maybe a point and click is in order, and then Indy when that comes to the PS5!) and then carrying on to play FF6 before embarking on another of my life’s FF7 playthroughs (while reading the FF7 Polygon book and probably making a big thread about it like I did with FF8)
Still the best Doom game imho. The second Bethesda one is good but enjoys the smell of its own farts a bit too much.
To The Moon. That moment when you sense how things are connected and then it finally shows you…aw damn! What a feeling. I have Finding Paradise too so I’ll get on with that when I’m ready for more heartbreak!
Jan 12th - Resident Evil 2 (PS5)
Mar 5th - Nier Automata (PS5)
Mar 14th - The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch)
Been playing this on long commutes on and off since launch. It’s a weird 6/10 game.
It rekindled memories of how I felt about Zelda after playing Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. I liked those games, but also found them intensely irritating.
All 3 needed modernising and speeding up in terms of interface. For example, theres a tedious ton of text to skip through, and every chat could be half the length. The cutesy character arcs feel like you’ve seen them so many times before. Making recipes one by one by one, over and over, with no ability to skip the tedious shopkeeper chat is galling; just let me batch make 4 smoothies Nintendo. There’s a sequence of boss fight phases that never ends and where the solution is obvious, but hard to do. And of course, there’s the companion who witters on endlessly pointing out the bleeding obvious.
But like those games, there’s also some great moments. It’s got some proper devious puzzles and sections where I was stumped what to do, more so than I ever was in the 3D Switch Zeldas. There are 2 really good, properly tricksy dungeons in the second half. And a couple of the characters you meet are really charming.
I’m also really torn on the games central premise of playing Zelda and using Echoes. It’s good they tried something different. When it works, it’s really interesting, largely in the end game where you need to mix up combat, traversal, elemental attacks and environmental puzzles on the fly. But the game gives you way too much stuff to manage that’s pointless, so you end up using the same handful of stuff a lot. And it gets very tedious stacking beds on top of one another to get across gaps. I should caveat that I totally forgot about an ability you have until my son accidentally rediscovered it tonight during the final area, so that might have made some of that playtime less dull.
The fact you unlock Links traditional fighting traits at one point might also point to the game knowing that the echoes combat is a bit hit and miss. Echoes often don’t do what you want them to.
It runs better than Link’s Awakening. The overworld is nice to explore. There are tons of secrets. And the music is really lovely; there’s some cracking Zelda tunes here.
But all in all, it’s probably still the worst Zelda game I’ve ever played.
[quote=“manches, post:45, topic:86254”]
4. Phoenix Springs
A short and sweet point-and-click adventure game, very artsy and narrative focus - one I’d definitely recommend if you’re into Kentucky Route Zero and Norco: this has a similar sense of magical realism, of noir, of dingy sci-fi melancholia. One key differentiator from those games is that Phoenix Springs has much more in the way of normal puzzles, which honestly I respect as someone who is growing a bit tired of this trend in artsy indie games to be either:
(a) all story and barely fuck all gameplay
(b) gameplay but centred around a tedious hardcore gamer fetish for being difficult
Said puzzles kind of do the thing I always want more detective / noir-themed point-and-click games to do: inventory puzzles where clues = items. It was such a good idea, it works really nicely, it hasn’t been replicated anywhere near enough. Even as the game progresses and leaves more straight-through-the-line detective territory into more abstract and surreal places, I never felt like the game was unfair - but I also never felt like it was a total breeze, either. I had those moments of “ah-haaaa” without having to resort to a walkthrough, which frankly is design genius for this genre of game. I suppose one criticism would be that the interesting series of locations you have at the start gives way to really exploring the same space for maybe the last two-thirds of the game, which can feel a little exhausting. The art style though is beautiful - I mean just google it and look at literally any screenshot, and even THEN that doesn’t do justice to how this game looks on-screen: the subtle little movement of things, the strangely cutty and staccato style of animation, how the visuals interact with the oddly detached voiceover.
The story itself is really interesting too: if I was being harsh, maybe it’s more boilerplate “ambiguous and arthouse” than Kentucky Route Zero’s encyclopaedic interest in its myriad themes or Norco’s Dick- and Pynchon-inspired absurdism but it’s well served by the presentation and I certainly had an idea of what the titular location represents as a sort of (failed?) attempt at escaping from the material world and its inevitabilities.
Dunno what I’ll play next but I’m feeling pretty low so bound to buy something in a vain attempt to cheer up a bit
1. Kirby and the Forgotten Kingdom - 10/10
2. The Booze of Monkey Island a 7/10
3. The Secret of Monkey Island
Ha! I didn’t realise Booze was the last thing I completed!
I got through this in just over four hours. I’m kind of sad that I can remember enough of the puzzles to complete it that quickly these days. God knows how many hours I spent on it in my days as a teen before internet walkthroughs were a thing.
Anyway, a lovely trip down memory lane. So much charm, so many great moments, the humour stands up very well too. I hated the smoothed out remastered graphics so spent most of the time in glorious pixelated sprite-o-vision. The still shots still blow me away. Absolutely beautiful works of art
I think I prefer the second game but it’s been a while so might have to get that on soon!
9/10
I am rubber, you are glue
I have this with so many LucasArts games - Grim Fandango especially
Oh yeah? I’m shakin’! I’m shakin’!
I think I’ve only completed GF twice but one of those was recent enough that I need to wait a few years too play it again
