 |
|
Mar 21st, 2020 at 18:06:06 - Outlast 2 (PC) |
I did not enjoy this as much as the first game. The story was worse / more convoluted, and the perpetual darkness and looking through night vision on your camera got real old. Does the game succeed at being scary? Yeah, I jumped a few times. Gross? Yeah, it's bloody disgusting. This is the only game I've ever played where the player-character endures a crucifixion AND the only game I've ever played where you witness a birth. I mean WITNESS. You see everything. Outlast 2 is not afraid to punish the human body.
You're a journalist, just like in the first game, whose helicopter crash lands in rural Arizona. Somehow, a crazy huge Christian cult exists here that has murdered thousands of their own people. Everyone lives in squalor, is disease-ridden, and very, very religious. You spend the game tracking down your pregnant wife (also on the helicopter), whom the cult wants to sever from her baby (the antichrist), kill them both, and eat you because you are their new messiah. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
There is a parallel narrative from the protagonist's past which, I assume, much of the present is something of a metaphor for. Basically, he feels responsible for a former classmate being assaulted by a teacher. Catholic guilt is real. This causes him to, in these stressful times, slowly lose his mind.
For gameplay, you just run and point your camera. There is some light platforming later on (walking across thin beams, jumping across gaps). You're generally doing these few things in pitch black darkness, so you need to use your camera's night vision. This requires batteries, so don't use it too much or you'll run out and I have no idea how you could possibly play this game without night vision.
Stupid fanatical cultists are patrolling everywhere. They'll chase and kill you if they spot you. I spent the first half of the game sneaking around, trying to stay in cover, watching their movement patterns. In the second half of the game, I just started sprinting through entire villages toward the well-sign-posted (always with a light) next area. This was much more efficient and made it so I didn't have to listen to the inane ramblings of the cultists.
You can also turn on your camera's mic, which detects sound, but this mechanic is inessential. I'm glad I will never hear these characters again. The game was tense enough, really dark, and the story pushed a lot of edgy buttons. It felt over the top in a bad way. Glad it's over!
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Mar 12th, 2020 at 22:58:33 - Super Mario 3D World (WiiU) |
Simple co-op Mario game. It's Super Mario Galaxy Lite. As a single-player experience, it becomes repetitive and grindy. At various points, you need more stars to progress, which is typical of these games. Usually, though, you have them through the regular course of play. This time, I was locked out from the next-to-last stage and had to grind 10 or so stars. I got what I thought was a lot from the last world and was locked out again. I needed 14 more (each stage has 3, so 14 is a lot, assuming that i got 1-2 on average per stage already). Don't tell anyone, but I just watched the last boss on YouTube. Grinding out another 14 stars would have taken a whole evening to do, and I was over this already, actually thought I would beat it last night. Then there was another world; tonight there was anotherrrr secret world. It dragged. Hard.
The game is charming and cute. The four characters each have different running speeds and jumping patterns. The gimmick is that they turn into cats. Like I said, cute. Some of the stages' mechanics were especially fun or clever, like the stage where you equip a flashlight and burn ghosts, the one where you ride blocks around (was a bit challenging too), the ones where you equip a cannon ball gun...basically most of the one-off mechanics were the best. There were some special stages to obtain extra stars, items, or collectible stickers, and the Toad stages stuck out as a lot of fun. You guide Toad through a 3D puzzle level to collect 5 stars. Think Fez. You can rotate the world around to see, and all Toad can do is walk. No running or jumping. So you rotate the camera around trying to figure out the way through the level, collecting all the stars.
That's it. I wouldn't recommend this over Super Mario Galaxy games. Those are way better. Though co-op probably adds to the appeal of World.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Mar 9th, 2020 at 17:32:53 - Assassin's Creed Origins (PS4) |
Completed both DLCs, The Hidden Ones and Curse of the Pharaohs. They were both good, but I probably should have taken a break after beating the main game. The Hidden Ones is short (~4 hours with all the side quests) and told a cool story about the beginning of the Assassins after the end of Origins. The only distinct thing I remember about the game besides that is there were a lot of rock quarries and there were new roaming baddies called Shadows of the Scarab who were scary.
Curse of the Pharaohs is much meatier. It also brings in the supernatural. You get to travel to the Duat (afterlife), which is so cool. There are three or four different parts of the Duat you visit, and you kill ancient pharaohs and other divine beings. The Duat looks incredible in each location. The boss battles, unfortunately though, are very samey. Every pharaoh takes their mortal form and they just come at you with different weapons. One is faster, one is slower...but they all have "red" attacks that you need to dodge, they all try to heal, and they can all be beaten using the same strategy. Despite how neat this DLC is, the very end is incredibly stupid. Bayek gives an ancient relic of immeasurable power to a guy who throughout the DLC is a petty criminal. He's scared of the relic, but Bayek shouldn't be giving that to anyone! He should bury it or destroy it or something. It's like giving the One Ring to someone and telling them to get rid of it. That's not how powerful ancient artifacts work!
Anyway, both DLCs are "more of the same" gameplay, so play if that's what you want, if you want some more story, if you want to see some really spectacular locations in Curse of the Pharaohs, or if you want to keep listening to Bayek's superb voice actor. Odyssey is on the shelf, but I don't imagine I'll play it for a long while. I got my AC fix.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Feb 28th, 2020 at 08:01:01 - Assassin's Creed Origins (PS4) |
I'm done with the main game. All side quests are completed, I've killed 3/4 war elephants, explored every tomb I could find, completed about half of the treasure hunt riddles, found every view point I could, found every constellation I could, and spent a long time just admiring the scenery. It took right around 50 hours. The game is bloated, and I hear Odyssey is even worse. Side quests and "stuff" to do could have been halved and it would still be a lot. But, I'm going to plunge ahead into Origins's DLC soon, and I'll get in to Odyssey at some point because I am impressed with the slightly new direction of Assassin's Creed, despite its liberal borrowing from The Witcher 3 and Dark Souls. It still retains its own identity, and for all the questions I had about the game, the end resolves many of them.
So, here are some thoughts on how the series has changed and how I ruined my playthrough.
1. Change - As I noted previously, Origins borrows from The Witcher 3. Geralt, the titular Witcher, solves monster-related mysteries. Our new assassin, Bayek, solves assassin-related mysteries in exactly the same way. You enter an "exploration area" and pixel hunt for an little icon (never figured out what it was) or look for something out of the ordinary. I am surprised at how similar this feels!
These genre shifts are part of why Origins often doesn't feel like an Assassin's Creed game. The setting is right, but the gameplay is more generic. I noticed that there are no "crowd assassinations," and really no assassinations at all! Yes, you can assassinate people according to the UI, but this refers to stealth kills. There are no true assassinations of politicians, generals, and so on, built up in the main story. Yes, you kill big baddies, but these more often take the form of melee boss fights. Rampaging through forts is easier than sneaking around. In fact, the crowd mechanics built up across previous AC games are not here. You don't trail enemies, you don't learn their paths, you don't eavesdrop on conversations. I cannot emphasize how the lack of these unique systems makes the game feel generic and (gameplay-wise) bland at times.
There is, oddly enough, a compelling narrative reason for this, which is revealed at the very end of the game. (The hint is in the title.) I loved how the story concluded, but making me play as a half-ass(assin) for 50 hours first was a little overkill. I fully expect the DLCs, and especially Odyssey, to bring back more of the older AC games. I want to feel like an assassin.
2. How I Ruined My Playthrough (Almost) - Origins is a ridiculously easy game. I played a lot after work because it was so chill. Why? Welllll...I might have realized halfway through that I wasn't supposed to have all legendary equipment from the start. I purchased a complete edition and it came with all sorts of fancy items. I didn't think it odd and assumed that the nice things I started with were normal to start with--a couple legendary swords, shields, and mounts. I never buy special editions so I don't know these things!
You can upgrade your equipment in Origins, so if you really like the stats, you can keep boosting it to your character level. So The Fang (fast sword, huge critical hit bonus damage, poison on hit) just kept getting better with age! I contend it is the best weapon in the game except the one I just found (which apparently is a Final Fantasy XV tie-in--weird). Its stats may not be objectively better, but I used The Fang for the entire game and this FFXV sword sparkles. I upgraded my equipment every 10 levels or so to offset using legendary items, which means I was constantly underpowered. Still, I rarely died.
I previously predicted that given the Dark Souls controls and new combat style, the challenge would ramp up; it never did until the last boss that Bayek fights. All of a sudden, the game introduces the supernatural. He was the only boss that felt like a boss, with the exception of the optional war elephants. Here's how much the game's ease lulled me into successfully spamming R1 for its duration: after attempting the boss a few times, I remembered that...I could use my shield to block. How novel! Yeah, I never used my shield the whole game! I beat him on the first try after that, but after I beat him, I realized that there were extra arrows in the room to restock during the fight. There are two phases where arrows are really useful, and I kept running out then. But I had never run out of arrows in the entire game before; therefore, I had never needed to pay attention to extra quivers laying around!
The game throws another difficulty spike your way in the very last segment, but I won't spoil that here. Just get ready for some tedium and frustration before it's all over because the game forces you into a different play style with different weapon types than you might have been playing with. Also, speaking of tedium, the ship battles get old real fast. If I never have to sail another ship in this game, I'll be happy. Black Flag, this is not.
The narrative is slow, but worth it, especially if you've played a bunch of these games. I really enjoyed the main characters. Bayek and Aya are more complex than I originally thought. There is some good foreshadowing (Bayek losing his ring finger is symbolic for different reasons that I initially thought!). You even learn where the Assassins symbol comes from! The Egyptian setting is phenomenal, and it's cool how it transitions to Roman toward the end of the game. I really felt like I was experiencing political and cultural change over the course of the game. There are a billion things to do. Side quests in particular add a lot of time to the game. They are never worth it for rewards, but I enjoyed the little stories. They do get repetitive in their objectives (rescue this person, eradicate this base, steal this thing), which is my argument for just reducing their number by half. The side quests are immeasurably better than side quests in previous Assassin's Creed games, but they don't touch The Witcher's. Hopefully Odyssey's will improve further.
All in all, I'm glad I played this to see how the series is changing. I'll continue with the DLC because the first moves this story along and the second I have read is excellent for other reasons. I hope that Odyssey essentially picks up where Origins leaves off. But since it's even longer than this one, I am dreading the time sink. I suppose I could just...not play it...or just play the main quest. I would sort of like to wait until another entry comes out that gets overwhelmingly positive reviews before committing, but I do always enjoy these games, even for their faults.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
