The Witcher 2 and Thronebreaker: The witcher Tales

After finishing both, I am pretty confident in saying: CDPR doesn't know how to balance a game. If it wasn't for the writing, the games would be mediocre at best. It's sad, cause the pieces are all there.

In W2, the difficulty was all over the place. Some encounters were trivial, others were impossible hard. Hurtboxes were everywhere and nowhere. The crafting was useless. There was always a new weapon upgrade just around the corner, but crafting was far too expensive for such a short-livedness. And potions had a far too short duration. I stopped really caring for potions after they wore off during cutscenes. Before some harder fights, you couldn't even drink potions.
And finally, the game ends in an infodump. Gives me the feeling that the game was supposed to be longer, but they had to wrap it up and tie up all loose ends.

Then we have Thronebreaker. Art design and story are top. The battles ingame are being faught with GWENT. GWENT is love, GWENT is life. But once again the balance was pretty shit. As you might have heard, the game is legendary easy. The battles are all trivial. The puzzle battles weren't any different, while still enjoyable, far too easy. There were only 2 battles, that gave me problems. In one the core gameplay was changed without notice and a certain mechanic was being punished, after a little change in cards, the battle was trivial again. Then the final boss, just braindead point spam from his side. They gave him a 90 card deck and every time you destroy a card he get's a new card from his deck. So control decks are borderline useless there. You could probably win the easiest by just buffing your own cards.
Unfortunately the same ineptitude for balance is shown in the online part of GWENT with their Homecoming "release". So sad. With some better balancing there you would have a really good game.

As an aside, I only finished 20 games this year. It's a lot, but I kinda feel like it could have been more.

Pyre
I won it in bjgamer’s giveaway, thanks again!

Not a typical game for sure but I enjoyed it a lot. The story is about being in a purgatory land with a chance to ascend (liberate) to a better world via mysterious Rites. These Rites are actually sport matches. It's usually three player against three players. Each team has a pyre that the opposite team should extinguish with an orb: you simply grab it and run to the enemy's pyre (or throw it). Each person has an aura and touching an enemy with it makes him/her banished for a few seconds. You can also shoot your aura to take down your enemy from a distance. There several characters, some are big with huge aura but slow, others are fast but with very small aura. Jack of all trades is here as well. Where is the trick? There are two of them: a person who hold the orb has no aura at all so he/she's vulnerable. And both you and AI can control only one person at the time, the others are standing still and doing nothing so they are vulnerable too. You can add some special powers of some characters and/or items but still the match is fairly simple and fast paced but requires some thinking as well. Early Rites are quite easy but later on it's good to plan the match, position your team well and pass the orb between them while efficiently banishing your opponents. So it the later part of the game you can expect arcadey gameplay that requires some thinking, which is pretty nice in my opinion. It's important to emphasize that in general I don't like sport games on computer but Pyre is quite enjoyable nevertheless.

These matches is not the only thing you can expect, luckily there is more: in between Rites you can talk with your teammates (they have well thought personalities), trade and make many interesting choices. The latter is the most important because what's really amazing the game continues even if you fail a match so the ending always depends on how you performed. It's very nice and well done mechanics because with so many interesting characters (both your team and the opponents) it's good to choose who should and who should not be liberated. It's a very strong part of the game that provides some decent replayability because there are many possibilities of what may happen at the end of the game.

As I said at the beginning it's not a typical game and I can imagine some people not enjoying it at all so you may want to watch some videos (preferably of early Rites so that you want spoil the story) before picking it up. Nevertheless I do recommend it, especially to those who like to try different and atypical games.


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Sounds familiar to what I heard a friend say about The Witcher 3. And what I've seen of The Witcher EE didn't really contradict it either ...

Castlevania - Lords of Shadows on Steam

Whoah, that game is LONG despite being ~20h long. A lot of short level and 12 chapters gives that.

I was surprised to find that people responsible for Severance - Blade of Darkness (FFS Codemaster get your trash together and bring it back to GOG!) made some changes and now work under MercuryStream studio.

I can see some connections with Severance. I swear that grunting noises of Garbriel (somewhere in the finale) were the same like Barbarian gruntings.
But most notable are stone faces. That one on the book cover in main menu looks like the one from Sword of Ianna...

Let's talk about Castlevania - pretty goergous game for a 2011 game! Too bad AA and VSync don't work as intended...
Combat would be better if most combos weren't that long and complicated.
Puzzles were ok, never used scrolls with solutions. I had one graphic glitch in some level, where sunray from mirror didn't show up, confused me a bit.
Platforming - mixed. Both forgiving but sometimes not responding right. Some levels like Music Box suffers by this issue.

Worst level - Music Box, platforming + making right colors order to get blue rose.
Worst boss - not Satan. That title goes to Dragonlich for obnoxious climbing section that drags on and on. Oh and if you jump on ledge when HOLD [e] TO NOT FALL - you start again.
Worst puzzle - blood maze after beating Olrox - reaching 3rd cup was pain in the back. I swear that's because framerate issues influenced the timer!

But most important question - is that game playable on KB+M?
I would say yes.
Until you reach these two boss fight moments, where you have to grab object and throw it back via QTE by either rotating stick on the pad or become master pianist maestro and spam WSAD in right order in less than second. Good riddance with that.
I had to dig out my old $3 gamepad, use something like XPadder and set WSAD to stick to pass these QTEs.

Some people may ask "why did you not play the whole game on pad?". For some baffling reason my attack buttons didn't work properly... because I had to press Jump and then Attack to make it work. I have no idea why it was like that...

Seems I used up my character limit for my list, so I'm continuing here:
part 1
150. CHUCHEL - GOG - December 27, 2018
151. The Wolf Among Us - GOG - December 30, 2018
152. LOOM - GOG - December 30, 2018
153. Maize - GOG - December 30, 2018

I'm almost giving up on HK... With only about 5 hours played and aware that the next bosses are much harder I don't know if it is worth investing so much frustation on it. For sure I won't be able to finish it this year :)
I admire your persistance!

Skylar & Plux: Adventure On Clover Island

A short, easy and overall enjoyable 3d platformer. Really didn't care for the way the story ended though.

The Breathe

A weird and extremely short diving frog thriller.

Honestly, aside from a few bosses, I didn't find it all that hard. I think it's possible you're attempting some optional fights that are better left alone until you've gotten some more upgrades & charms? For example, an NPC prior to the Mantis village straight up tells you that you better upgrade your weapon in the city before facing the Mantis Lords. I didn't try seriously fighting them until I got two nail upgrades, and succeeded on the second try I think. Some other bosses took me many, many tries. I found that after watching someone fight them on youtube, I had a much better success rate. I also didn't do the hardest optional fights like Nightmare Grimm and Pantheons 3+ (these are all endgame stuff though.)

HK bosses are also all the types to have patterns that can be exploited, but obviously having more health and abilities and dealing more damage is always good :)

So my advice is to try a boss fight a few times, and if you don't see yourself succeeding any time soon, just leave it alone and continue adventuring. When there's no where left to go that's not blocked by hard bosses, then pick the easiest one. Also don't forget to search for secrets (attacking likely walls, walking through corners, climbing EVERYTHING once you get the ability which is a pretty early one). And, as with any metroidvania, keep notes of where you find obstacles that are likely clearable with future obtained abilities, so you know where to revisit later.

Tomb Raider (4): The Last Revelation

I had to use a walkthrough at multiple parts and had to download a savegame from Stella's TR site b/c I missed a crucial piece, but it wasn't a terrible experience overall. Currently $2.49 too, good sale price.

Tyranny (GOG)

Last one for the year. I played the game from the start with Bastards Wound additions and the save game time says 50 hours- much more than the 16 to 20 that some people are saying in reviews...what can I say I read everything and explored every last inch of every map. Still I find it hard to believe you can finish in 16 hours.

Anyway, this one is an interesting game. It looks like your old isometric RTP games of old, but it felt quite different. It's not your usual fantasy story of control a lowly no one on a great world saving quest to find the sword of ass reaming to lay the smack down on mister bad guy. In Tyranny you control a glorified public servant (basically a mobile judge and jury upholding empire law), so you begin the game as someone with an established reputation and position- which is defined in a prologue "choose your own adventure" mini game of sorts. You are then thrown into a world something along the lines of Game of Thrones- in terms of faction power struggles. It's a refreshing change and reminds me of how Dragon Age 2 tried to do something different as well- but Tyranny is far more successful.

Of course the downsides of this type of story is a more linear game- at any time you have only a couple of new maps open to you to go to and explore/extend the narrative. The game story keeps a tight reign on you. Still, not every RPG needs to be an open world epic, though I like those too.

Mechanically it took me a while to get the hang of this one. I haven't played Pillars of Eternity yet, so I assume many of the systems here are the same. But I'm more used to the very different AD&D rule set of the old infinity engine games. Though, once I got used to things and worked out the level system it was all good. Basically it uses a system like Elder Scrolls- level skills by doing, which leads to character levels in time. Like most RPG's, specializing on level ups is better than spreading your talents across multiple trees.

Party members were pretty good, except for Lantry who was an annoying boring old fart. Party member side quests were a bit of a letdown.

The game ending makes sense in the context of conquering the Tiers area, but has obviously been set up for sequel material as well. Music was excellent, graphics average and, like many Unity engine games, seems to make the GPU run hot. I had no game bugs, but the game did crash from time to time when saving- something I found could be minimised by always starting the game from a fresh PC reboot. Pretty good game overall and well worth playing (it feels like it may have some replay value as well), though it probably will not go down in history as a great classic or anything either.

And my personal 2018 GOTY awards for games I finished this year (not necessarily released this year):

Top 5:

1.AC Odyssey (140 hours and still sad it ended, means I must have liked it)
2.Forza Horizon 4 (greatest arcade racer ever- same thing I said last year about FH 3)
3.State of Decay 2 (this years rough pick)
4.Wasteland 2
5.Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (just edged out Mutant Year Zero)

Biggest disappointment or failed to live up expectations:

Zelda Breath of the Wild, edged out Hellblade because I actually finished Hellblade but not Zelda.


Best 50 or under Metacritic game:

Homefront The Revolution- I actually really liked it.

Great year overall though, with very few actual bad games played.

Thanks for the tips, I'll look into some vids too to better understand the bosses and try to get more charms first

Top 10 games of 2018

Life and a lack of interest reducing the number of games completed, but still a few good games.

10. Skyrim: Legendary Edition

9. Shadow Complex: Remastered

8. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

7. Doom 3: BFG Edition

6. Deus Ex: GOTY Edition

5. Gorky 17

4. Final Fantasy XV

3. Serious Sam

2. Xcom: Ufo Defense (The Final Modpack)

1. Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Remix

Last year I said I hoped to finish Dark Souls without using a walkthrough, was stuck on Nito, spent a few days to reach Gwyn before getting distracted by another game, hopefully next year.

Well here's to 2019.

Games finished in 2018 on GOG:


- Breach & Clear
- Carmageddon TDR 2000
- Gorky 17
- LIMBO
- Nosferatu : Wrath of Malachi
- Oh...Sir !! The Insult Simulator
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Shadow of Chernobyl
- Saints Row 2
- Shadow Warrior Classic Redux
- Sir, You Are Being Hunted
- Unreal Tournament GOTY
- Vertical Drop Heroes HD
- Ziggurat
- Zombie Shooter

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Dec 31 (GOG)-Phew got one more in before the end of the year. I'm torn on this one. I really enjoyed the story especially the Stark conspiracy parts (Arcadia revolution was less interesting) but this game is really light on actual gameplay. At one point at the end of the game there's a 50 min cutscene then 20 minutes of play then another 30 minutes to close out the game. But I think I would prefer this, story-heavy gameplay-light, than try to force terrible gameplay (Deadly Premonition I'm looking at you) into a story-heavy game. So you can kind of think of Dreamfall as a western visual novel almost. At least that's how it felt to me but I've never played a visual novel so can't say for sure. I also thought the voice acting was excellent but the game was unnecessarily silly in some parts. Even though the plot got a little wonky at the end and it ended on a giant cliffhanger with a ton of loose ends I had a lot of fun.

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