Apologies for the lateness in this one. I’ve been so busy lately that I outright forgot to update this post.

ReCore

This was one of those games that was meant to be a selling point for the Xbox One, but much like that console as a whole, it’s kind of shit.

It’s an incredibly boring game. Moving around is slow and tedious, with few fast travel options and no way of covering large amounts of ground quickly. The combat is horrid. It’s a third-person shooter where you just dump ammo into fast-moving robots and then pull out their cores once they get low enough. It’s extremely repetitive. Also, the enemies have levels, and many high-level enemies are in the same areas as low-level starting enemies. So if you take a wrong turn somewhere, you’ll either get minced or spend forever dumping ammo into someone.

The platforming sections are decent, but the crappy movement mechanics don’t do it any favours.

And the cherry on top of this shit pile? Shit tons of crafting bullshit that feels like a serious afterthought.

I did not bother finishing the game. It’s a complete waste of time.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

One of the two Uncharted games I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet, the other being the Vita game, Golden Abyss. I went with the PC version of the game, as I quite frankly cannot be arsed to turn on my PS4 these days. The PC version seems to be mostly fine. I know it’s received multiple updates since its launch, which have greatly improved performance, among other issues.

The easiest description of this game would be that it’s the “buddy cop” film of the Uncharted series. Chloe from Uncharted 2 & 3 returns along with Nadine, the big afro lady from Uncharted 4, who is in the running for the worst-written villain ever. Nadine is still the worst character in this series by a long shot. She is a perpetually pissed woman who refuses to relax or even reconsider her mistakes.

The two characters are constantly talking to each other in the modern video game way. Which is to say, it is extremely annoying.

One chapter is a very large area where you get to drive a Jeep around, going to various points on the map. This was probably the most interesting section of the game. Going to different places in any order to fulfil a main objective. Each area being its own puzzle or challenge. There’s also a hidden monkey temple you can access by finding a collectable specific to this area.

The gun combat is still not great. It’s always been a bit weak in this series. Swimmy controls and aiming, general lack of precision, and bullet-spongy enemies are something Naughty Dog refuses to improve on.

Finally, the villain. He’s just a collector looking for more stuff and becoming greedy about it. And of course, he has a private military at his fingertips. The easiest way to describe him is “half-arsed.”

That’s not to say I dislike the game, but I wasn’t that impressed with it either. There are some good ideas, but I’ve gotten so sick of modern video game tropes that Naughty Dog practically pioneered that it lowered my opinion of the game as a whole.

Full playthrough here.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii

Yet another spin-off in the Like A Dragon / Yakuza series. This time, everyone’s favourite one-eyed crazy man, Majima, becomes a pirate. Which is possibly the most hilarious and fitting premise for him. Unfortunately, the execution is a bit disappointing.

Majima starts the game with amnesia and meets a young boy named Noah, who has a dad who’s a bit of a drunk. After Majima beats the shit out of him and the people harassing his bar, one thing leads to another, and we end up running a pirate crew on a ship. This is then followed by going to the island from the end of Infinite Wealth and meeting the religious group there. After that, you get wind of treasure and go off on your merry adventure.

Noah is a bit of a drag. He can’t do much, as he is both a child and an asthma sufferer. I generally hate kids in games, so I won’t waste much time on the point. I just don’t like him much as a character.

Majima in general seems like he doesn’t care about what’s going on in the plot. He acts uninterested a lot of the time, or worse, uninvolved. Giving off a “Why am I here” kind of vibe.

Getting into the gameplay, it’s an action game again this time around. They’ve added a jump button, meaning that Majima can do aerial attacks and juggling. I hate to say it’s some “anime shit,” but there’s not much else I can compare it to. Combat styles return. You have his standard Mad Dog style and then the Pirate style. The latter gives you a gun and a grappling hook. It’s certainly interesting, but it doesn’t really provide the variety this series desperately needs.

The ship combat is certainly new and inspired heavily by Assassin’s Creed IV. But unlike Black Flag, I struggled to enjoy it that much. It’s really slow, there’s a lot of annoying micro management, and the colosseum battles relating to it are bloody awful after a while. I’ll give them credit for trying to do something different, but it really sucks after a while, especially if you’re the type that tries to do all the side stuff.

At 5 chapters long, you’d expect the game to be short. And for a Yakuza game, it is. However, it’s about 50-60 hours if you want to do EVERYTHING. And once again, side quest hell is a thing. But it seems to be fully encapsulated inside of chapter 2. Or rather, everything gets dumped on you then. No other side stories appear in the later chapters; it’s all dumped then. My playtime at the start of chapter 2 was 10 hours-ish; by the end of the chapter, it was closer to 40 hours.

This was also a bit of a problem in Infinite Wealth as well; I would spend so long on side content, I’d completely forget the main plot.

With all that said, the lead up to the ending seems very quick. The progress made in Chapters 4 & 5 ends up being fast-tracked, and then it’s all over.

Before I get to my concluding points, the Minato Ward Girls side quest ending was a fucking fever dream. Basically, you gather a handful of girls to meet your first mate, but what follows is a fully live-action dating show-esque nightmare, complete with watching the real actor for your first mate bathing himself. What the fuck.

Anyway, I’m hoping that they’ll finally move on from these characters. I’m praying Stranger Than Heaven changes things enough and is successful to the point where they can finally put these characters to rest. Majima has stopped being the sinister, crazy, and loveable man that he originally was but is also not the cool-headed man he was in Zero. He’s basically a clown at this point. And clowns are not fun to hang around with long-term.

LocoRoco 2

I remember liking the original LocoRoco when I played it on PSP many eons ago. Unfortunately, this one got on my nerves after a while.

Don’t get me wrong, the visuals, music, and overall vibes are still very solid. All the LocoRoco, NPCs, and enemy designs are nice and vibrant. Seeing all the various things animate is neat too.

That said, it comes at a cost. Emulating the game is surprisingly demanding. It runs like a tortoise through sludge at 1080p, and I was only able to get it to run stably at 540p, which is around the resolution of a PS Vita.

But I digress, my issues with the game. Predominantly, the physics-based platforming becomes extremely frustrating, especially near the end of the game. And having that borderline OCD thought process where I have to collect every single dude to make myself bigger, taking damage, which would cause me to lose them, due to some wonky physics enraged me more than it should have.

Furthermore, most of the levels have areas that you can’t access because you lack the skill to do it. But these skills are just randomly tutorialised to you at points in the game and are not an item or anything. They just show you the controls, but for some reason, you’re not allowed to use them until that point. This is more annoying in context, as I saw the tutorials and thought, “Why couldn’t I do this before?”

However, by the time I finished the game, I lost all motivation to go back to get the rest of the collectables. I was so fed up with the game.

Full playthrough here.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2

SPACE MARINES?! The Sequel. After many years, they made a sequel and actually added proper co-op this time. Not that I played that way; I stuck to single-player.

That said, it’s about as repetitive as the first game. There’s a real lack of enemy and gameplay variety. All the guns feel the same, all the melee weapons feel the same, and most of the enemies die in the same way.

The swarm is impressive technology-wise, but actually fighting them is quite brain dead. The forgiving parry system for every single attack that they try renders the enemies little to no challenge at all. However, once you get later into the game, the swarm is replaced by Chaos Marines. But this does not alleviate my criticisms. They’re no fun to fight either.

If I were playing in co-op, perhaps I would have had a more enjoyable time, but as-is, I found the game to be very average. Also, I only played the main story campaign and did not try the co-op-specific missions.

Story campaign playthrough here.

LEGO BrickTales

One of my biggest pet peeves about Lego games is that more often than not, it is Lego objects inside of a normal world, and rarely do we ever see a fully Lego world. Where everything is made from Lego. And I mean EVERYTHING.

However, Lego BrickTales falls into the latter category. Every object, every world, and every character is Lego, no matter how big or small.

Anyway, the game is about travelling to different Lego worlds in order to find crystals that power up a machine that helps you rebuild your grandad’s theme park. And the key selling point is that you are the one building the structures inside the game.

At various points in the game, you’ll get asked to build bridges, helicopters, and various other things. Once complete, they’ll exist in the world exactly the way you built it. And it can actually be somewhat challenging at times. During your first time doing the puzzles, you’re given a limited pool of pieces to use. And once you make your structure, the game then runs a simulation on it to see how sturdy it is and if it can withstand a player walking on it or if they get stuck at all.

I really like it conceptually. But it’s a bit of a boring collectathon outside of that mechanic. You can get a free-build function after finishing each puzzle, but I rarely bothered to do it unless I really wanted to improve the look of something.

Full playthrough here.

Rise Of The Ronin

This game takes place at the tail end of the Shogunate’s reign in Japan. And follows the story of Sakamoto Ryouma. But unlike Yakuza Ishin, you don’t play as Ryouma himself. Instead, you play as one of two twins from a secret ninja clan that are trying to stop the evil gaijin menace from ruining Japan.

Basically, you get to make your own evil twin because during the first mission you have to choose which one you get to play as, and then for the rest of the game they betray you and play the villain for the rest of the game.

Getting back to Sakamoto Ryouma for a bit, he’s a fun character. Very likable, extremely supportive, and caring for the main character. Unfortunately, if you know your history, you know what happens to him. Or so you would think. As it turns out, the story changes based on your decisions and what missions you do. So you can change his fate, along with other characters.

There are three chapters with three areas to explore. Yokohama, Edo (Tokyo), and Kyoto. Each one taking place during different points in the timeline.

To get around, you obtain a glider. Which is a bit far-fetched, but hell, it’s a video game. You also get a horse. And this game does a small thing that I really appreciate: when you call your horse, you immediately mount it. It doesn’t just stand there or run past you. Eat your heart out, Red Dead.

But let’s get into the combat. It’s not quite Nioh, but it does have different combat stances. There’s a jump button and a parry button, but not quite like Wo Long. It’s a very robust combat system. Certainly way better than Ghost Of Tsushima, as it is way less floaty and weird. Loot is also part of it, but again, it doesn’t go crazy like Nioh does, but there’s a good amount of stuff. But once you get orange gear, you basically stick with it.

Tsushima does have one thing over Ronin: far more interesting exploration. Ghost Of Tsushima’s puzzle shrines are far more interesting than most of the explorable places here. That’s partly because Ronin isn’t great at rewarding the player. Tsushima gives you a specific key item; Ronin just gives you another piece of equipment that you more often than not have a better version of anyway. Like getting another sword. More often than not, I was hunting down cats for a particular NPC. A quest line that only gives a couple of cosmetic rewards that are worth having.

That said, exploration is certainly beneficial. I became so overpowered that most encounters were outright trivial. So I decided to challenge myself for a few of them and fight them non-lethally, either using wooden weapons or fighting people barehanded. Which was a lot of fun. You can play the entire game like this, and in certain conditions, it can affect the outcome of a mission.

Finally, there’s a romance system. It’s nothing crazy, really. But you can get into a relationship with someone, break up with them, and then get into a relationship with someone else. I do somewhat regret playing as a female character, but the game does let you romance both male and female characters regardless.

Rise Of The Ronin is an underrated game. The performance problems certainly bring it down a bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game and played it damn near constantly for several months.

Death Stranding 2

Norman Reedus going for a really long walk, the sequel. This is certainly an improvement to the original game. Some of the jank has been polished away, and the game now showers you with tools and weapons early on to make your life easier and faster. As opposed to the drip feeding of them in the previous game. You get vehicles and suppressed guns in the first area if you’re willing to 5-star the people there.

Also, there are non-lethal guns now. I can’t remember if they were a thing in the original, as I think I stuck to using the bola gun. But it makes encounters a lot easier to deal with at any rate. Plus, there are suppressed weapons as well, so stealth is back on the menu. The game does give you quite a lot of weapons and tools, but I didn’t use that many of them. Popping people in the head seemed the most effective method. One last note on guns: you can input a code, and it will make any gun lethal. But I never used that.

Except when it comes to BTs. The most effective way of dealing with them? Summoning your own BT like a goddamn Pokemon! That’s right, the nightmare tar creatures, which, upon touching a human being, will cause a nuclear-tier explosion, can now be pulled into a BT fight to assist you. Except they’re horribly overpowered. What’s worse, there’s no limit on which ones you can capture, including bosses. So every time I had to deal with a BT, I would summon “The Tar Lord”, a BT you can obtain from a submission about 2/3 of the way through the game, and it would just smoke whatever I was up against.

There are roads to be built, of course. And I spent so damn long building them. Along with monorails. It does make getting around easier, but the sheer amount of resources and time spent building them, only to not really see the fruit of your labour until the very end of the game, takes its toll.

For every main order or new facility added to the map, I probably spent about 2 to 10 hours just doing infrastructure building and levelling up the facilities. I’d find myself going from one end of the map to the other and then back again, and then back again, and then back again, and so on. Each time with cargo from either new orders or just picked up from the ground. I likely extended out the game’s playtime by several dozen hours.

Unfortunately, this had the side effect of completely pulling me out of the story and slowing the pacing to an absolute crawl. Now perhaps it’s partly my fault, but keep in mind, I would have to do these upgrades after the end of the game anyway, and I would always prefer to do most of the content before the end rather than after, because once I get to the end, I basically lose interest in playing any more.

On the subject of the end of the game, it’s a cool set piece, but it’s completely unplayable. It’s entirely a cutscene. But as a kick in the shin, it’s the kind of thing that was playable in MGS4. If you know what section I’m talking about, you would understand why I’m not happy about it.

Overall, I enjoyed Death Stranding 2. But it is a podcast game, a very long podcast game. It refines much of the first game’s mechanics and ideas, but the novelty of it has long since passed. I don’t know what they could do from here, but I think they should explore other aspects of the world and perhaps other gameplay ideas. I think a co-op big BT hunting game could be neat.

Crimson Desert

I originally jotted down this game with the expectation that I would play more of it. Alas, I’ve only put in maybe a dozen hours at most. Considering the game is about 300 hours or so long, what I’m about to talk about is from very early in the game.

The game starts with a character who is a Greymane, which I think is the game’s equivalent of being Scottish. As such, everyone hates you for some reason. After a tutorial fight, you’re killed and then brought back to life again. And then I get dragged to some town where I have to do a bunch of boring side quests, including cleaning a fucking chimney. Which I end up keeping the broom from because inventory management is a nightmare.

The controls are a complicated mess. Combat requires literal fighting game inputs. Talking to people requires you to aim at them and then press a button. But sometimes it’s a hold instead of a press because this game is very inconsistent. And then God forbid you need to pick something off the ground. Because you can pick up EVERYTHING, so if there are multiple things on the ground, you’re going to be grabbing all of it in the struggle.

The map is massive. With a huge fog of war covering all of it. There are bells in the world you can ring to clear the fog, but the game does a bad job of highlighting them on your map. Likewise for fast travel points. Which not only do not get highlighted when nearby but also require you to step on them for multiple seconds to activate them. So if you’re looking to fast travel to a town and wondering why you can’t, that’s why.

You do get the ability to fly and glide early on, but it’s incredibly slow. There are flying mounts and even jet packs, but I’ve not run into those yet.

As for performance, well, after several patches it has improved a bit. But initially, my PC was struggling even at low settings. Now I can get a good mix of medium and high with some help from DLSS. Although the early days were rough. Flickering lights, LODs being broken, and more. It’s certainly in a better state now.

Input is a problem; there’s a delay to everything, and the character feels sluggish to move around.

Generally, the game is a mess to figure out. It’s like they piled on a hundred and one ideas without thinking about the consequences to the controls, the gameplay, or the player’s understanding of both. Sometimes more content is not the solution. And it certainly isn’t a replacement for Dragon’s Dogma that I was hoping for. But I’ll keep chipping at it when I can.

Ryse: Son Of Rome

Do you yearn for Rome? For me, not so much. More of a British Empire guy myself. But anyway, this game was an Xbox. One title back in the day that eventually got a PC release. Developed by Crytek.

Starting off with performance. Initially, it was terrible. Constant stuttering and a lower than ideal framerate. After a few config file changes, I got it running smooth as butter.

Being a Crytek game, there’s an expectation about graphics, and I’m happy to say that the game still looks pretty good. There are some dated models and textures here and there, but overall, it’s still quite impressive what they managed to achieve.

Now is the game good? Not really. But it’s not exactly bad either. It’s very mediocre.

The game is extremely one-note. There is combat and nothing else. I hope you like X, X, X, Y button mashing with colour-coded finishers, because that is the entire game. And I do mean the entire game. Every encounter is just combat. The only changes are times when you have to gang up with your Roman comrades to build a shield turtle to assault a position and when you have a reason to throw a spear at someone.

No puzzles. No deeper combat mechanics. It’s mind-numbingly mundane.

As for the story, there’s a subplot involving gods pulling strings to manipulate things, but primarily, the plot is about the main character getting revenge for the death of his family. And if that sounds like the plot of Gladiator, congratulations, you’ve figured out the game’s main point of inspiration.

It can’t recommend the game, but it is at least pretty. Also, there are elephants at one point.

Playthrough here.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

I really enjoyed the original RE4. It was very whacky in places, but that is part of the charm. The significantly more serious remake has disappointed me in several places.

The core gameplay, the combat, especially the shooting, is considerably worse than the original’s. Less accurate, more randomness, and a lot more weight. The animation priority system also gets in the way, throwing me off my target or letting an enemy grab me from several metres away. It’s considerably more infuriating than the original in my opinion.

There are many similarities in the maps. Some feel mirrored from the original, while others have been condensed down. But there are many sections just missing outright. Remember the lava level in the castle part? That’s gone. Plus, several boss fights have either been removed or changed over to Ada’s story.

Ada’s story is actually longer than the original but is lacking some key fights. The horrid Krauser fight is completely omitted, but the fight against Saddler has changed in location and is a bit more interesting. Although it’s also harder due to being able to get stun-locked easier.

I wish I had more to say about the game, but it’s so lacking in the charm and humour of the original that it ends up being forgettable. I had more fun playing Resident Evil Village and RE2 than this. And I certainly enjoyed the original way more. But that’s not to say it’s a bad game. I could easily recommend it, but I can’t say that it’s better.

Full playthrough here.

Other Games

Planet Of Lana 2

The first game was a fun little experience in the same vein as Limbo and Another World. The sequel maintains the quality of the music and art while expanding the world a bit. There are new biomes like a snowy mountain, a jungle, and even a city. However, you’re never really in these locations for too long. Which is fine because it keeps things varied and helps the pacing. The game ends on a cliffhanger, so I suppose a third game is planned.

Playthrough here.

Forza Horizon 6

This is just the same game as the last four, but now it’s in Japan. The cars still drive like a boat, the events are incredibly stale, and I outright muted the game because everyone still talks like an utter prat. But hey, now it’s in an incredibly corporate, sterile, lifeless husk version of Japan! Where basically no one is Japanese.

I haven’t been arsed to even finish it, as I ran out of races to do, but the game wants me to do dumb events like speed traps just to be able to get to the last part of the game. But I’m too damn bored of it.

Replaced

Some years back there was a pixel art cyberpunk game that caught everyone’s attention called “The Last Night”. This isn’t that, but it does tick some of the same boxes. The combat is very Batman-esque, but the animation priority often causes you to take damage in the few frames between finishing an animation and gaining control again. You also can’t break out of these animations, but you can be damaged during them. Which breaks the flow and causes it to become frustrating.

The story is lame. Basically, you’re an AI inside of a human brain, and that causes all manner of issues, so now you have to go back to the lab to try and fix it. Meanwhile, you’re being chased by everyone. The writing feels like a teenager wrote it. The characterisation is lacking as well.

And lastly, there’s a side quest involving a girl repairing old arcade machines that you can play. And they’re all terrible.

Playthrough here.

Anime Corner:

Needy Girl Overdose

What the fuck did I just watch?

I would like to leave the summary there, but I’ll continue to explain. This is an anime adaptation of an indie game, but instead of retelling the story, they added a bunch of new characters and significantly more backstory. Although it starts off a bit pretentious, it gets weirder and weirder. With wild art style changes and getting into some pretty nasty subjects. There’s a lot of bodily fluids on display as well. Not for the faint of heart, but an interesting watch if you can stomach it.

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Once again, I am late with this. Try as I might, I don’t think I’ll improve the situation. Other blog posts will return soon, and the next one of these will be at the beginning of next year.

ADMAN