Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
In my ongoing efforts to play all of the still-meager handful of extant PlayStation 5 games currently out there at the moment, I finally got around to booting up Immortals Fenyx Rising this week. And despite having a name so generic I’ve had to look it up twice just during the two whole sentences I’ve been writing this column already, I’ve genuinely been having a blast with Ubisoft Quebec’s brightly colored open-world god game. For a start, the writing is shockingly good; given how awful most video game comedy writing is, the genuine enjoyability of the Zeus/Prometheus double act that provides the game’s narration is a minor miracle all its own. But also, there are just a huge number of appealing aspects that Eternals Bird Go Upsie deploys in its own favor, from interesting powers that allow the title character to move and drag objects in the environment, to a design that puts an emphasis on lots of small, self-contained dungeons rather than big sprawling caverns, to an ethos of exploration that encourages the players to look out over the vistas, pick out a mountain, and glide their way over there to climb it with nothing but determination, grit, and an extensively upgradable stamina bar on their side. Why, I ask myself while playing it, hasn’t anyone made a game like this before?
What’s that, you say? Breath Of The What? The Legend Of Whom?!
In interviews, the game’s associate director, Julien Galloudec, has attempted to float the frankly ludicrous assertion that Unaging Chicken’s Climb is not a blatant riff on Nintendo’s 2017 genre breaker, The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild. While acknowledging that “we took inspiration from many games, including Breath Of The Wild,” Galloudec ultimately claimed that the two games are actually “very different,” presumably with a straight face that must have been an absolute nightmare to maintain. The truth is that there are so many aesthetic and design touches that appear in both games—from big things like the overall ethos of exploration, all the way down to the visual effects when you’re dragging giant metal balls into switch-containing recesses—that it would feel far more honest if everyone involved just admitted that they’d decided to take a beloved game as their blueprint and run with it.
Because here’s the thing: As someone who did not especially like Breath Of The Wild—gasp, shock, horror, the throwing of rotten fruit, monster parts, and half a dozen nearly broken swords, etc.—I’m really digging my time with Mummies Ostrich’s Ascent. What it loses of Breath Of The Wild’s admittedly admirable sense of scale and place, it makes up by being far more accommodating to play, and far more satisfying in the hands. (Also, it’s not written like a third- or fourth-run afterthought, which is a major step up from Breath.) The combat is far more instantly accessible, the navigation less onerous, the Korok seeds less infinite in their presence. If Breath Of The Wild is a game where you find your own fun, Ubisoft Quebec took the revolutionary step of just putting the fun front and center, where everyone can get to it without a lot of searching. And none of that refinement would be possible if their game wasn’t aggressively cribbing from Nintendo’s playbook.
The old adage holds that good artists copy, and great artists steal—and it’s nowhere truer than in the world of video games, where the job of creating the Next Great Thing is as much an engineering challenge as one of writing or artistic intent. It’s one of the things that makes those occasional patent attempts on mechanics like “mini-games played during load screens” or “a system where enemies that kill you remember you and get stronger” such a drag, because the only way revolutionary game mechanics turn into staples of great design is by being refined upon, and that’s a process that one studio typically can’t do all on its own. The things that make Breath Of The Wild beloved are genuinely great, even if they get bogged down by the game’s focus on repetition, and the Zelda series’ notoriously excessive wordiness, and they deserve to be explored.
Immortals Fenyx Rising—it’s okay, we’ve got like five Post-Its stuck to our monitor now, to remind us—is not an especially innovative game, as much as the people who made it might like to think it is. But it is a refined game, one that codifies, expands upon, and even improves much of what was exceptional about the title it’s imitating, openly or not. And that’s worth celebrating, too. We can’t all climb the mountain first, extendable stamina meter or no. But we can still find a better route.
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As someone who did not especially like Breath Of The Wild—gasp, shock, horror, the throwing of rotten fruit, monster parts, and half a dozen nearly broken swords, etc.Trust me – I feel your pain.
I haven’t tried Immortals yet though articles like this one make me think it’s worth checking out.And while I imagine it’s probably rather more innovative than Immortals, one thing I really admired in Horizon: Zero Dawn was the degree to which it clearly borrows gameplay elements from a lot of known sources, very thoroughly makes them its own, and executes them beautifully. Imitation is the highest form of praise/all the best artists steal/etc.
(In other news: I cannot wait for Forbidden West to come out.)
Currently replaying HZD, as I never got around to the Frozen North expansion. God, it’s a beautiful game.
I didn’t really ever click with BOTW, but I do have an affinity for Assassin’s Creed games, especially the recent trilogy. Immortals scratched the AC itch for me but also clicked more for me due to the fact that it is more contained. The game suffers from the same Ubisoft bloat of having 1000 map objectives but honestly none of it super necessary. I think I beat the main story with 60% of the upgrades and even then the difficulty was “meh”. The shire equivalents in IFR kind of all over the place, but were a nice way to break up the pace. I am hoping the next story DLC drops soon so that I don’t get too rusty between finishing and starting the DLC.
Playing BOTW and Horizon at the same time (they came out pretty close to each other) was…less than ideal. I’d often try to climb up a mountain in Horizon only to quickly get crushed by a Ravager. Both excellent games, though.
I’ve more or less escaped the daily grind of Genshin Impact for now. Instead of focusing on daily quests just for the (admittedly pretty good) quest rewards, I’m just chipping away at it at my own pace. Being diligent about daily maintenance takes 45 minutes or more, depending on how much time you want to spend in menus optimizing gear and levelling up, but now that I’m no longer taking the game so seriously, I’m free to absorb story content at my own pace. I’ll eventually hit a wall again, I’m sure, but for now things are going relatively smoothly.I’m not very far into Persona 5 Strikers, i.e. still on the first Jail. I find the combat a little too chaotic at the moment, but that’s only because I haven’t played this kind of game in a while. I’m sure I’ll be able to ease into it after a few more hours.
While I am enjoying Immortals it does feel a little less inspired than its most obvious antecedent. The game’s combat is quite good but MAN there’s a lot of it- every single puzzle or chest is guarded by a small squadron of dudes and there are like 8 kinds of minibosses you blunder into while just walking across the world. It’s not uncommon for one battle to spill into another and while this does happen in BotW sometimes, here it becomes a bit much. Even the rifts, which are sort of analogous to BotW’s shrines, are all guarded by enemies, and while you can just jump into them, that just leads to problems when you leap out. More importantly, there are Wraith Zones, which suck. Every so often Typhon gets really angry and the screen gets an ugly red filter and meteors start falling from the sky, and there’s some legendary warrior pursuing you, and you kinda have to drop whatever you’re doing and either fight or run for like five minutes. You can shut off the warriors by going into their lairs, but that’s yet another miniboss battle. I have no idea why this mechanic exists, it’s not fun, it doesn’t incentivize anything, it’s honestly worse than BotW’s thunderstorms.Like I’m enjoying the game but there are these bits of, well, UbiSoft design that keep it from greatness. Also I’ve discovered a problem with Picross S5- I am too good at picross. I just blazed through all the normal puzzles and have gotten through most of the Color Picross ones as well. Mega Picross is still something I’m wrapping my head around, but honestly, just give me a whole bunch of regular picross puzzles. (Also the music’s nowhere near as good as in Murder by Numbers.)
One of my favorite elements of BOTW is the degree to which it lets you play your own game. My gf played it before I did and was shocked and confused that I played BOTW basically as a stealth game for like the first 20 or so hours. I avoided almost every fight if I could and focused on getting shrines down.Mandated combat during Blood Moon-esque situations sounds like a legit nightmare and I would have fucking HATED it
fwiw, the wraith encounters can be avoided, but it can take some effort. I’ve gotten so many skills and equipment that it’s just easier for me to face the wraiths and move on, but running away or hiding for a few minutes until the wraith encounter timer runs out are both definitely options.
Most of the time I just ran away when Typhon got angry, eventually he calms down.Plus you can just track down the cursed hero and defeat him for good, thus saving you from Typhon’s anger for that area of the game (there’s four of them to defeat, they’re good boss fights).
Personally, I feel like there’s a lot of everything in the game, which is starting to make it drag for me. There are enough small details to keep me slightly interested, but so many of the fundamentals are repetitive that I’ve started to get bored playing the game. For example, the rifts all offer slightly unique spins on the various platform puzzles found throughout the game, but they all have that similar 3-tier challenge structure (introduce you to the concept, give you a slightly more difficult variation, conclude with the most difficult variation) and almost always revolve around “put object X into slot Y” or “shoot various targets with arrows” that it’s hard for me to stay interested. It’s been a while since I played BotW, but I always felt like the shrines were kept pretty short and sweet (1 or 2-tier puzzles at most) and had enough variation between them that it stayed interesting. Which is a shame, because the unique environmental details that are included are almost always interesting on some level. But I’m really tired of fighting the same fights over and over to work through very same-y platform puzzles. So I decided to take a break for a second playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, then I’ll maybe come back and focus only on Immortals’ story mode so I can just see the unique stuff (it helps that I have enough skills and equipment unlocked that I’m not really sweating any of the fights anymore; wraith Odysseus has been the only one that ate through a ton of potions).
I only recently got a Switch Lite and have been enjoying/not enjoying doing Picross puzzles. Problem is, I used to do these with pen and paper and am used to doing gigantic puzzles (100×100 or larger) with terrific art and am kinda frustrated by the tiny puzzles available on the Switch.
Pinch and zoom, people, pinch and zoom!
I only recently got a Switch Lite and have been enjoying/not enjoying doing Picross puzzles. Problem is, I used to do these with pen and paper and am used to doing gigantic puzzles (100×100 or larger) with terrific art and am kinda frustrated by the tiny puzzles available on the Switch.
Pinch and zoom, people, pinch and zoom!
To me, it seems like IFR’s greatest strengths are its bursts of originality – or as close as you can get these days without stumbling upon a genius auteur. Zeus and Prometheus are the number one draw, and the story’s consistent commitment to affirming that the gods are assholes is a fair second.After that, it’s derivative and tired. It’s a BotW clone made poorer by all the Ubisoft Game stuff, and the open-world Currency Cancer, and the need to UP THOSE NUMBERZ (even though it’s not due to a literal number atop each enemy’s head that can be compared to your character’s own number-halo, so, you know, totally different, problem avoided, right?) I mean, I kept up with it for a bit, and normal mode was still simultaneously too easy and too health-spongey. BotW was no great shakes on that particular front, though, so I’m hardly looking to elevate it by comparison.
I’m not really sold here. I think my thesis would be: IFR demonstrates that offbeat ideas can pay dividends across both gameplay and non-gameplay presentation, while cribbing some other game’s cool gameplay stuff has severely diminishing returns – especially if you dilute it with stuff that’s even more tired and derivative and grindy and spongey and oy vey.I do have some notes about the game’s story, characters, and dialogue outside of the dynamic duo, but I didn’t finish the game, so I won’t go into them. I suspect those critiques will be incomplete at best without finishing the story.
Breath of the Wild is a true masterpiece, I’ve never fell in love with a game like it.
I’m still about Dragon Age Originsthis week, After finishing the main game and Leliana’s Song DLC last week, this week I played the Awakening expansion, and basically 100%ed it by completing every single side quest in the expansion. This meant that neither Vigil’s Keep, nor the City of Amaranthine got destroyed by the Darkspawn armies, and all the companions (aside from Mhairi from the prologue) in the game lived: Sweet boy Anders, the happily drunk father Oghren, and zealous old Justice guarded the Keep, while Dankh, my Dwarf Commoner Warrior Warden, crazy rude Velanna, the mostly honorable Nathaniel Howe, and death wish dwarf Sigrun went through the city chopping down the Architect and Mother after doing the underground stuff.
That done, I fired up another DLC campaign, The Golems of Amgarrak which turned out to be basically a dungeon crawl with a bunch of tough-ass combat fights. I did like the idea of the different phases and switches as puzzle elements and might steal that for a table top one shot, but with less needed back tracking. To finish off the story, I’m going to run my Warden through the Witch Hunt DLC to find out what happened to Morrigan after she disappeared in the base game. So far I’ve watched the prologue cut scene and had my faithful Manari hound, Baskerville join me in the Kolcari Wilds. I suspect we’ll be running into more evil Janeway Flemeth rather soon.
And because I’m enjoying the story, I’m probably going to give in and buy Dragon Age II, and Dragon Age Inquisition plus their DLC campaigns…
DA2 is rough to play after the much more technically impressive DA:O but stick with it. The character stories you get out of it will be some of your best video game experiences. Sadly, unlike a lot of other games DA2 doesn’t really have a lot of mods you can slap on it to “fix” it but there are some good cosmetic ones that are worth a look. The DLC for DA2 is also worth playing, but if you find yourself not that in to it you won’t miss out a huge amount by skipping them. Mark of the Assassin is fun and teaches you a lot more about the Qunari, but you learn all about it in Inquisition, and Legacy is actually super important to the storyline of Inquisition but that game tells you literally everything that happens in that DLC.When you make it to Inquisition it is absolutely worth it to get all the DLCs. Descent is a short DLC but adds some incredible new aspects to the lore of Dragon Age. Jaws of Hakkon is a much bigger DLC and has a lot of content as well as a great view of the Avvar barbarian tribes, and Trespasser is a MUST play epilogue with what is essentially the real ending of Inquisition.
I thought Immortals was more or less Assassin’s Creed: Hyrule. Which sounds like a blast to me
I fired up Super Smash Bros Ultimate last week, played a few matches, found the World of Light, unlocked a couple characters, and promptly became frustrated at some combination of gimmicks or another. I powered through, unlocked another couple characters, and became frustrated again at a completely different combination of gimmicks that repeatedly led to instant KOs during what felt like otherwise great attempts. I looked up a gimmicky solution, chose an appropriate character and complementary spirits, powered through, unlocked another couple characters, and found another frustrating battle that I more readily looked up a strategy for.World of Light has three difficulties: Laughably Easy, Boss Fight, and What the Hell Just Happened? The easy fights feel like a necessity to give you the spirits and currency you need to construct builds to counter the unfair fights, and the unfair fights test your ability to piece together or look up a gimmicky one-note strategy for a situation that would be a chore to beat without gimmicky one-note strategies. That leaves boss fights as the one truly enjoyable level of challenge in the mode, and so far I’ve only seen 4-5 of them.Part of me likes powering through the easy fights and unlocking things as a way of giving myself a slow, steady sense of progress, and the satisfaction of panning around to see that there are no more rainbow wisps left on a map that once looked completely crowded by them. But the challenge is so uneven that I’m considering just flipping over to doing classic mode to unlock one character per playthrough. And then when I unlock everybody… I dunno. I may find something else in the game to keep me entertained, or I may just cross this off my list and hawk it on ebay. Online play isn’t my thing, and I think I’m past the point in my life where I’d have friends over for 4-player video games. Unless I become fascinated by sandbags, I don’t see this game as a permanent part of my collection.Meanwhile, I’ve come back around to Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove, which constantly surprises me in how perfect it is as the sequel the original game always deserved, 25 years later. I’m having a blast unlocking new hats and presents and modes, finding ways to unlock tricky achievements, and just going through the same 25-level gameplay loop I grew up on. I like the new presents, appreciate the very limited elements of TJ&E2 they borrowed, and love that there are several ways to cancel enemy aggression to balance out the addition of upgraded enemies in the late game. I don’t know if there are many people who consider the original game to be as essential a classic as I do, but it and now this sequel are such reliable sources of joy for me.Finally, I just barely cracked the surface of Xenoblade Chronicles last night, finally answering my question of, “Who the hell is this Shulk person in Smash?” I don’t have a good handle on the mechanics just yet, as I’ve only done the intro and then fought a handful of minor enemies as Shulk. I’ve been hearing stellar things about this game for a few years, and as much as I really don’t need my backlog to be any more full of RPGs, if I enjoy this game, there is a sequel. What still remains to be seen is if I have the attention span for an RPG right now. If not… well… more Smash.
“Online play isn’t my thing, and I think I’m past the point in my life where I’d have friends over for 4-player video games.”Same, but honestly, keeping a game like Smash around is more than worth it for the once or twice in a year I’d be breaking it out.
Well, it seems games won’t be able to “steal” for much longer. WB interactive was granted a patent for the Nemesis system from its Lord of the Rings games. https://www.geekwire.com/2021/warner-bros-roils-game-industry-patent-nemesis-gameplay-mechanic-kirklands-monolith/amp/ Because the thought of someone using something they made FOR FREE keeps them up at night crying angry corporate tears. Never mind how many other game mechanics that they didn’t invent went into those games.
The family and I are always hunting for great 4 player couch co-op games and discovered Moon Hunters last week. It’s really hitting the spot. My 6 year can play without issue. It keeps my 13 year old engaged. It’s a top down style game so my wife can play without a headache(she can’t do FPS style games) and I just think it’s fun. The fact that one run only takes about an hour or two means it’s even a good play for a weekday night. It’s a fun little game and another awesome discover thanks to Gamepass.
This game is sitting on my shelf ready to be torn into, but I’m going to spend the weekend on The Pathless first: I hear it’s a shorter, cleaner bite, and while following with the Breath of the Wild model as well, has some more unique elements.(Basically I’m just biding my time until I can pick up where I left off on FFVII Remake when the PS5 version comes out.)
Backlogged: Another Blaze of Glory EditionThis week in my ongoing quest to experience all of the games
I’ve missed out on over the years, I knifed a guy while rollerblading.
That’s right, we’re talking Streets of Rage 2.Before we get to that though, it’s been a couple of weeks
since I wrote about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, but I did go back
and play through all three paths. It was interesting to see how locations were
reused across alternate paths without rehashing the same puzzles, and in
particular how certain characters’ allegiances shifted in response to events unfolding
differently. On the flip side, the Fists path’s combat system was a clear
misfire; I won every fight I couldn’t avoid by relentlessly clicking on my opponent’s
head. Still, given the genre, I’ll give them a point for trying. Anyway, on to
the main event…I’m on the record as not being a huge fan of beat-em-ups,
what with their repetitive gameplay and oft-punishing difficulty, but I enjoyed
the first Streets of Rage for its killer soundtrack and distinctive vibe, so I
was optimistic about the sequel. Fortunately, Streets of Rage 2 lived up to my
expectations, raising the bar for all future (past) street-brawlers in the
process.The presentation has been kicked up a notch from the first
game, with larger sprites and more fluid animation, and Yuzo Koshiro returns
with a soundtrack that kicks even more ass; I replayed the first stage with all
four characters, and never got tired of the opening riff from Go Straight. Though
I primarily played as the perfectly balanced Blaze, the two newcomers to the
cast, hulking Max and nimble Skate, offer genuinely different fighting styles to play around with and master. Meanwhile,
dynamic movesets for all four characters (expanded from the first game) help keep
the fighting fresh, especially when the game’s colourful, chaotic bosses force
you to mix things up. It’s my favourite beat-em-up so far, and given that I’m
nearing the end of the genre’s golden age, I’m not sure it’ll be topped any
time soon.Anyway, that’s it from me this week. Next up in my tour of 1992
is the Japan-only Final Fantasy V (praise fan translations!), and while I suspect
there’s a reason the original never came to the West, I’ve been itching for an
old fashioned JRPG, so I suspect I’ll be playing that for the next little while.
See you folks next time!
Galloudec ultimately claimed that the two games are actually “very different,” presumably with a straight face
Developers were instructed to stop, collaborate, and listen.
Ubisoft is back with what they insist is a “brand new invention.”
Honestly, the game is more a ripoff of any other Ubisoft game than it is Breath Of The Wild. It’s got the same old open world UI with the constant annoyance of what you’re supposed to do next. Nothing really compelling you to explore anything for the sake of exploring.
I finished this game a couple weeks ago. Initially, I was quite impressed with it. But the more I played it, the more its Ubisoft-ness started to raise its ugly head. It’s just WAY too damn long if you go for any sort of completion (I got the platinum trophy), with way too much filler content. For example, in stark contrast to BOTW, every single non-combat vault feels like it’s too long. Almost every single one of them uses the annoying pattern of “tutorial puzzle, much longer puzzle, even longer puzzle.” Just start with the hardest one and don’t waste so much time! By the end of the game when I’d fully upgraded everything, I just started instantly leaving any vault I went in if it wasn’t a combat one cause they were just too tedious. Plus, after you’ve hit a certain threshold of gear, almost none of them have any rewards worth the challenge – it’s all just cosmetic options and stamina upgrade items that once you hit the cap only offer tiny increments to stamina efficiency. In BOTW, every single shrine felt worth doing, and the only one I’d rate at being as annoying as the harder ones in this was that DLC one with the moving spike walls where you died in one hit.The “main dungeons” might be of appeal to those who wanted BOTW to be more like traditional Zelda games. I, however, found many of them to be overly long, tedious, ugly, and repetitive, especially the one with the blocks you had to hit to make them float. The puzzles are not always intuitive, either, and occasionally they feel downright sadistic (one where you had to repeatedly go around tracks hitting tons of targets with arrows was bad news, I hated the ones where you had to roll boulders through obstacle courses, some very nasty platforming ones with appearing snakeheads/laser fields that kill you almost instantly, etc). I had to look up solutions online for a few “bonus chests” or even open world things. The most egregious example I can recall was one chest that was locked that ended up being unlocked by dropping a rock into the pupil of some statue’s face that was on the ground some distance away. There was no button prompt for doing this, no hint, no previous puzzle whatsoever to tell you that this was a thing that could unlock something.The open world is similar – there are just WAY too many damn puzzles. Like, those constellation ones are insane. You run around doing 5-6 puzzles to solve it, and get the same reward as you get for those little obstacle tracks that take 30 seconds.
It feels like they were told to just bloat the game up and get it to hit some arbitrary hours requirement to be a real Ubisoft game. The size of the world is fine, the GIGANTIC amount of cut/paste content is not fine at all.That said, it’s far better than AC: Valhalla cause at least the hundreds of map icons are basic combat or puzzles and not utterly pointless, annoying activities like stacking rocks or chasing tattoo designs or playing card games.The only thing I like about it more than BOTW is that your weapons don’t break! The combat is fairly fun. It just stagnates around the middle of the game, where all the enemies reach their highest level and all your abilities reach their highest level. No new enemies get introduced for the rest of the game, really, and no new techniques get added to your combat arsenal, so it starts to feel very repetitive. Certainly nowhere near something like Horizon: Zero Dawn with its plethora of combat options and enemy types.
Well put, I agree.
Getting around to finally start playing Hollow Knight. I have not read anything about plot and progression, so I am starting fresh. Very interesting so far in first level with gameplay and art giving me serious Dark Souls & Metroid vibes. I like it so far!
Love Breath of the Wild, Love Immortals. It is refreshing to not have to worry about weapons breaking, for sure. Breath of the Wild just has a bit more sense of place for me, whereas Immortals feels like a Theme Park, more structured around you, the protagonist. But truly enjoye them both.I am still playing Immortals, AC Valhalla, Watchdogs Legion, Control, Streets of Rogue and Planet Coaster. Hard to bounce between so many. Then I am also going back and checking out what miracles the PS5 performs on my older games. Will most likely end up playing Ark with my Youngest again. Not sure how I will find time for the PS+ games this week.
Between two strolls in Skyrim’s bugland, I’m trying out the new War On The Sea, a WW2 naval strategy/tactics game by Killerfish (of Cold Waters fame, but they split after it, half of them went to do Sea Power which will be out in 2022). It’s essentially a one-man-studio now, and it shows. They launched an early release version as a full product, and the backlash has been rough. But they work relentlessly on fixing the bugs and tweaking the painful UI. My main drive for sea-based games is the sea. It’s very nicely rendered, with nice weather effects. The ships roll and heel nicely. But they are very basically rendered, even compared to Cold Waters. No visible crew, and no visible damage apart from a vague darkening (Cold Waters showed visible breaches, even if just in decal form) and Elder-Scroll-like fire effects. It doesn’t play like an RTS at all, its interface would match a turn-based simulation more (hit pause, select ship, change its speed and course sliders, select its gun, ammo type, spread type, click on the target function and select a target, and repeat that for each vessel of your fleet, then watch out for collisions, and get ready to hit pause and give new commands). Its (first, at least) single battles reenact very asymmetrical historical encounters where the historical outcome is difficult to avoid, and its campaign has very strong pace and balance issues, with the AI opponent’s resources being managed very differently than yours and full, slow 3D encounters being played out, fully simulated, even when no gameplay is involved (the enemy spamming enemy planes at your fleet, forcing you to passively watch the anti anticraft guns fire at them for a few minutes each time). It’s not fantastically enjoyable so far.But it’s still an impressive engine for a potentially good game. It tries to do so much at a time, to model everything, to offer one same interface for boats, submarines and airplanes, and to let you manage all aspects of the Pacific war. Its weak AI just doesn’t offer the Man of War experience it seems to aim at. Too many different scales (temporal, for instance) to cram into one gameplay.I have a lot of esteem and respect for this game, maybe more for what it attempts to do than for what it does. It’s an ongoing effort, and the game’s shortcomings are being acknowledged and worked on. I’m actively trying to meet it half-way, and am optimistic about it. I’m naturally forgiving towards games or movies taking place at sea.
Been playing a lot of different stuff to finish up the backlog. Finished Star Wars Squadrons. It was ok… I just grabbed Earth Defense Force 5 and I’m excited to dig into it. It’s a great franchise for mindless shooting. I need to stop buying games for a while
I haven’t finished Immortals yet (I got swept up in Valhalla and haven’t gotten back to it), and I’ve definitely enjoyed it but man, the puzzles get so repetitive and tedious, for me at least, that it’s kept me from wanting to race back to complete it.
I just bought Luck Be A Landlord last night and it’s way more fun than a slot machine game ought to beProbably because it’s actually a roguelite where you pick symbols to add after each round and depending on your luck they might synergize really well
I’m rather relieved that someone else besides me wasn’t into ZBOTW; I thought I was the only one. No shade on anyone who loves it, and maybe I’ll go back someday and love it, but the breaking weapons, endless recipes, etc just made it feel like such a drag.
My PC delivery got delayed last week, so I’ll be continuing to just push that including playing Fortnite and Minecraft with my son. I’ve got a mini PC coming tomorrow that I intend to set up as a Minecraft server for us and his friends actually, so I’ll probably end up working on setting that up for a while too. If I’m not working on the server and the kids are still up, I’ll be playing Ori: The Collection (only just started). I also want to hope back into some VR, notably Star Wars: Squadrons because I wanna see how much sharper it is with my new card as well as an actual Oculus Link compatible cable instead of Virtual Desktop.
While the kiddos and wife are busy with other things or asleep though I’ll be playing through Persona 5 Strikers. Very interesting experience thus far. I did make the mistake of starting on hard mode though. While it was not terribly difficult, it made the experience pretty stressful since it is NOT what I was expecting out of the game. I was expecting a more traditional Musou game, but it is very much not that. The combat certainly is, but it’s structured more like Persona 5. This made for combat that’s less hack-and-slash power fantasy and more a resource management and combat avoiding experience, especially on the harder difficulty. I just dropped by down to normal so I could actually fight without a major hit to my SP and items. Also, there’s no real time element to this game despite the calendar being prominent in the intro scenes which made me think it was, so I was way overextending myself to save days. In reality though, you can really just pop in and out of the Metaverse with no consequences to refill your health/stamina for free.
I liked it a lot. However, I’ve been playing the DLC “A New God” which is basically all Trials – basically vaults of Tartarus – and the DLC is buggy as hell. I’ve had to put it down and wait on a an inevitable patch because I literally can’t finish the last trial.
It seems a little silly to imply that Fenyx Rising stole from Breath of the Wild. BotW stole way more from Assassin’s Creed than Fenyx Rising (a game made by the people who make Assassin’s Creed) did from BotW.
I like the game. Have just gone back to replay Breath of the Wild and I can at least say that I enjoyed Immortals more than my 2nd playthrough of BotW. Though BotW’s first playthrough made it one of my all-time favorite games.
The old adage holds that good artists copy, and great artists steal—and it’s nowhere truer than in the world of video games, where the job of creating the Next Great Thing is as much an engineering challenge as one of writing or artistic intent.And this is why it’s so frustrating that WB successfully patented the , which many folks had agreed was good and should make an appearance in more games, but now is even less likely to. 🙁
That those MFers decided to go with “Fenyx” was an automatic NO from me.
I gave Immortals Fenyx Rising a shot and I find it hard to care about the world. The world design feels much more complex than BotW, and it is really well thought out from what I played so far. It just feels lifeless. There’s so much stuff everywhere and so many random buildings that you don’t really ask yourself why they’re there, you just do the puzzle, get the chest and go to the next one a few metres away. Obviously this is personal, it’s a game, it has lots of stuff to do, it succeeds at being a game. Which is where it falls short for me. BotW was immersive, I loved taking my time and suddenly chasing something I’d see in the distance. I saw IFR compared to a theme park somewhere and I can’t help but agree with the sentiment.Also, the “shrines” puzzles are kinda boring and the ball physics are not consistent for some reason. For example, in Achilles’ lair (I think that’s the name?), there’s a ball you have to get on a platform before it rolls off. Basically, the ball appears and rolls towards a vent, goes up, gets lifted by a second vent which sends it to the platform. Half the time, it doesn’t reach that second vent and just hits the wall and falls. Somehow I expected more lol
Another game in this vein is Stardew Valley. It’s basically a Harvest Moon game with some tweaks, but as a fan of HM, it’s decidedly better than the ones I’ve played, especially in the late game.
Plus, it has same-sex romance, which was a big deal to my lesbian ass.
As a non Nintendo person , doesn’t BoTW steal from the Elder Scrolls games anyway?
I liked it enough I have it on PC and switch and if I can get it on series x for $20 I’ll buy it there too lol. It has crosssave so progress from 1 platform carries over. They took a page out of Microsoft and nintendos book.The game itself runs on the same engine as Assassin’s Creed so you will feel some similarities in the controls but this is definitely it’s own game and one well worth playing.Next up…prince of persia remaster.