Omno (XSX Game Pass)

Released a week ago, 4-5 hours long, light puzzle/platformer. It obviously shares similarities in feel with slightly shorter games like Journey and Abzu, but as it goes on I'd say it depends more on platforming- that being the main way of solving the light puzzles. You work your way through approximately 10 worlds linked by short linear sections. Each open world area has you finding at least three orbs to unlock the way to the next area. For full completion (optional, but I did it) you can also find extra orbs and story/wildlife collectibles. It's relatively relaxing and easy, but the platforming near the end ramps up a bit, but nothing the skills you've learnt along the way shouldn't prepare you for.

Great art and relaxing music as well. Pretty good little game overall.

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition

+ Fresh setting, great graphics, good voiceovers and sounds, overall fantastic atmosphere. In this regard it might be the most immersive GTA-style game I've played - the city feels very lively.
+ Loved the mean little details: How people fiddle with their smartphones, shelter themselves from the rain with newspapers, eat fast food, and when you bump into them they drop all of it and curse at you. How you can pick up their umbrellas or bags and use them as weapon. How people get angry at you for disregarding traffic rules and shout after you that you're the worst driver ever and other things in Chinese that luckily I could not understand. :D
+ Driving is a lot of fun. Vehicles all feel differently in speed and handling, can all take quite a bit of damage, there is left-hand traffic for a change, you can slide into curves, and the police is rather lax and usually won't chase you for causing chaos, unless you do it right under their noses.
+ When driving at full speed, the game starts measuring the time you can go without crashing into anything. This "drive safely" challenge gives you something to do besides marveling at the landscape while you're getting from point A to point B. It also measures how far you can jump with your car or motorcycle.
+ The radio stations were pretty interesting and had lots of cool and varied tracks, both Eastern and Western.

+/- Gunfights were standard cover shooter fare but fun. Probably on the easy side with Normal dificulty, as I managed well enough despite using a gamepad only.
+/- The main story is classic. In other words, extremely predictable. ;)

- At the same time it also felt a bit fragmentary to me. The missions didn't always build upon each other directly and at times I didn't really know why I was doing this mission now and why I should care about these new characters. Maybe I just didn't pay enough attention, but I feel that could have been done more smoothly - unless that was exactly was they were aiming for, showing a few seemingly random scenes from the work with the Triads that the players themselves had to connect to build a linear story themselves?
- Wei Shen's "date" missions also felt a bit weird und unfinished. In the first part you get several missions about dating or spending time with different women (one of them voiced by Emma Stone even), and I'm still not sure whether these missions are meant to show his unwillingness to commit or whether the player is expected to choose. There was a side mission about shadowing one of the women and finding out she was meeting another man, and Wei Shen accused her of cheating, although the game had shown nothing even suggesting that they were in a relationship or even that they had slept with each other. And she retorted that he was dating others, too, which was true in my playthrough, because I tried to do all the missions, so I wondered if that could have gone differently if I had skipped the other dates, or if that would even have been possible. Then again, these episodes suddenly stop and are not developed any further, and since this is not an RPG, I assume they really are just there to show a bit of his character, and once that is established, this part is dropped entirely. Feels a bit pointless though.
- There is a bit of a discrepancy between the story and the open world gameplay. Within the triad missions Wei Shen is brutal enough, but it's never about harming civilians, while in the open world gameplay that can happen quite quickly. Initially I felt very bad when I caused a little accident and a civilian would not stand up again, and then the paramedics would arrive and comment sadly on his demise on top of it, since I felt that should not be a sidenote in Wei Shen's story. But since I only ever saved manually on quitting the game, I did not feel like reloading either. In the course of the game I caused more civilan deaths, there hardly were any penalties for it either and the story did not care, so I stopped caring too and just pretended Wen Shei was still who he was in the story, despite all the things he had done when I was controlling him in the open world. Some side missions and activities even encouraged reckless driving. The most hilarious ones were about Hong Kong police thinking it a good idea to stop street racing by driving all participants off the road with utmost force, ramming them etc. The races themselves could never have caused as much damage as my righteous police fury did. XD Other missions were rather silly, too, like speeding after a signal through pedestrian zones etc. I'm glad the game had no civilian kill count. And I mean this is not Saints Row, in general the game was quite serious. It just didn't fit that well.
- Often you cannot see or guess what a side mission is about and you will only learn that once you start it. But then, if you die in it and choose to abort it, you are transported to the next hospital and have to pay the bill, and if you abort it without dying, you are teleported to your next home instead in many cases. So the only way to get a chance of continuing from where you were in the world is to complete the mission successfully, even if you're not in the mood for it. Then again, this side missions and activities become repetitive pretty soon, too, and I thought the only real use they have is for getting enough Face xp to unlock the display of health shrines on your map. I abandoned the idea of 100%ing this game, just not worth my time.
- At the end of the game I had upgraded all police and melee skills, but didn't have enough XP to unlock the last triad skill, and I think the only way to get more triad XP would have been to replay main missions. That was a bit odd. Not sure if that means it's not balanced that well or whether it's just an indication of my bad performance, heh.
- I never really got the hang of all the melee combos. And it seemed to me like most of the time you don't even have time to execute them fully, as you constantly need to counter the next opponent, Arkham-style, while you're still in the midst of it. So I tended to just wait for the opponents to attack, countered, got a few punches in, then countered the next one and so forth, which made the combat a bit tedious and boring after a while. But maybe I just sucked at it. I hated the big grapple guys with their QTEs, but quickly pressing all buttons at once often worked well enough, and fortunately the number of these guys did not increase that much in the course of the game, the difficulty of the fights mostly stayed the same in main missions and open world gameplay. I avoided the melee competition activities though, as it was annoying to easily survive several rounds just to be beat by the stupid QTEs.
- The camera could become a problem in melee fights for zooming in to closely in tight spaces, but that was mostly an issue in the DLCs, not so much the main game.
- Changing radio stations with the gamepad was clunky and should have been easier. You do it with the D-Pad which didn't work that reliably for me, sometimes, the game did not react to my button pressing, so I had to press again, harder, and even if it worked, I always had to press twice: once for making the game display the current station, another time for switching to the next. I'd have preferred immediate switching of the channel and then another button just to display the title of the current song.
- The mini games (hacking, unlocking, tracing a phone) were nice enough at first, but got repetitive pretty soon, and were no real challenge either, so just a waste of time. The "guess which person on the videofeed to arrest" game was the worst.
- I managed to glitch outside the map on two or three occasions which meant either falling to my death or being stuck and having to restart from the last checkpoint.
- During the showdown, my character was suddenly switching his outfit in the cutscene, and I mean right in the middle of it. He jumped into the water with naked torso and torn clothing, came out in the next cutscene fully dressed in a suit... XD That was really weird, especially considering that the rest of the game was perfectly capable to register what he was wearing, even in cutscenes.
- I started the two story DLCs after the main game, but I'm not sure whether I will complete them. They are really just a series of repetitive side missions passed off as a story, and the one with the hopping ghosts is particularly silly, not fitting the tone of the main game.

That being said, despite the wall of text concerning what I perceived as flaws, all in all I still think that the positives are awesome enough for me to give the game the thumbs up.

I just beat Catacomb 3-D: The Descent. Yes, "the original first-person shooter". I bought Heretic during the recent Bethesda sale, started researching source ports for these various early shooters and discovered that Catacomb 3-D actually has two solid recent ports: Refkeen, a very faithful port, and CatacombGL, a port with hardware accelerated rendering and a bunch of quality of life improvements like full WSAD + mouse controls and an auto map. I felt that CatacombGL changes the feel of the game too much and makes it too easy so, being the dumbass that I am, I went with Refkeen. So effectively I played the original Catacomb 3-D with a more stable frame rate. Anyhow...

It's a very barebones early FPS game that - much like Wolfenstein 3D - feels more like a maze game than a shooter. Find the exit in a labyrinth built out of squares and shoot some enemies that you will encounter on the way. Instead of having guns you can throw fireballs from your hand, a stronger one if you hold down the button. You also find more powerful consumable spells, Bolts and Nukes, but those effectively to the same thing that the standard shots do, just more quickly with more intensity. Especially the Nukes are useless, though, since they fire in three directions and you rarely find yourself in situations where that will do you any good. The best thing to do in this game is to just mash the fire button anyway, since there's no ammo and you can throw fireballs this way very fast and even stun lock enemies - doing so also makes up for the rather clunky aim.

What perhaps hurts the game the most are the enemies, almost all of whom can only do melee. Soon enough you encounter stronger enemies who only seem to differ in how much damage they can take (and probably deal) and especially the late game ones are ridiculous bullet sponges that only hurt the experience. You will also encounter a ranged enemy type who I thought would make the game more fun but with the super claustrophobic levels and rather awkward controls they aren't quite fun to fight. Still, I've played worse.

So it's a very primitive game but I did appreciate a few things about it. For one, healing potions are a consumable that you can use whenever you want, so Catacomb does not suffer from that nonsense that's been plaguing most shooters since: that you waste healing items by accidentally walking into them while almost at full health. There's oddly enough also no limit to how many you can carry, which makes the game far too easy. Still, frankly this made the game more enjoyable. What surprised me the most, however, is that the game is not entirely linear. Some levels have multiple exits, one of them even kinda works like a hub, and you actually have to read hints from a scroll or two in order to find the right way. You actually don't even have to beat all 20 levels in order to win the game. It's very basic stuff but it was a nice dungeon crawler accent that at least made the game feel a bit bigger than it is.

Anyway, I guess the sad part is that the developers didn't take the game too seriously and especally the ending is pretty darn silly. I know that the game was quite the technical marvel at the time but I can't shake the feeling that it would have taken just a tiny bit of additional effort to turn this into a game as meaningful and memorable as Wolfenstein 3D. Still, it could have been worse and I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would.

I've never played that one, but in the 90s I liked Catacomb Abyss better than Wolfenstein/Doom.
Until I discovered Ultima Underworld 1/2.... they became my "benchmarks" for first person games (mostly the second one).

The Saboteur

A bit difficult to review at this point because I played most of it many years ago, but then I got frustrated by a buggy mission with annoying checkpoint placement or something, and I took a long, long break from the game. Now, after finishing Sleeping Dogs and having a look at Mafia 2, I thought I might just as well give this one another try, and I was able to beat the particular mission this time. It wasn't that easy to get back into it though, I had already forgotten a lot, and the following missions also turned out be somewhere between meh and frustrating, although none of it was really hard. When I was about to give up on the game for good, I realized it was almost over already, so I pushed through, with mixed feelings. I know there were things I liked about it a few years back, but now I mostly saw the shortcomings.

The music was nice and atmospheric, the city was fine too (if you turn a blind eye on the pedestrians' curious tendency to throw themselves in front of the next car). Though for a game set in Paris, there was very little French about it (with regard to music, voice actors etc). The writing wasn't great, and all the fake accents, edgy cursing and puerile "sexy" stuff I found rather silly. I did not really care a lot about the characters. But it wasn't that bad either, all in all a pretty servicabe open world game. What irritated me most at the end was that the game sometimes felt like the worst mixture of "I'm not telling you what to do" and "I want you to do it exactly my way". Freedom doesn't come from simply withholding info about linear paths. If there's no true freedom on how to approach a mission, I'd rather have pointers telling me what the game expects of me. The implementation of the map was awful, too (go to menu, click map, click full map, zoom out - now we're getting somewhere! -, return to game - oh, want another 'quick' look at the map? Rinse and repeat!).

But like I said, my view is probably a bit distorted by the long break I took, so I'll just stop here. It's an okay game, some interesting ideas, but in execution kind of average.

Finally finished Dark Souls 3 in 2021. Awesome game.

Mass Effect Andromeda is done.

Bought in April 2020 but had to take half a year break as I got tired of it! but its done and in a way i am sad. but glad i am done.

Ghost of Tsushima

Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age (XSX Game Pass)

Very different game to other FF's. First of all it feels far more like a western RPG. The story isn't as bizarre as usual for a Japanese RPG and the combat is much closer to western games as well. It plays closest to a real time with pause system. You control one character at a time, whilst the others can be either be set to a system of self made scripts (called gambits) or you can just pause and micromanage like I did. Basically, I set all team members to the "attack party leaders target" and just paused and cast healing spells when needed on my direction- like I said, pretty much classic RTwP. The overall systems are quite deep, much more than they at first seem. I came to really like it as the game went on. It's probably the FF game that people who normally despise JRPG's would be most likely to enjoy.

The worlds structure is more like a western RPG as well. No over world, just lots of connected areas that can all be returned to as you like. The world is quite fantastical, like usual for Final Fantasy, this is not your typical Tolkien fantasy- much closer to Star Wars than anything.

The game has lengthy cut scenes to flesh out the story but, at least until the end game sequence, they just came at story milestones and not during game play. Unfortunately it came undone in the final few story sequences which consisted of multiple boss fights full of annoying cut scenes where everyone stops mid fight for a chat and to let the enemy get away again. At least the bosses were not all that difficult- tense, but not difficult I'd describe the final few bosses. Also I did not do much grinding and was the same level as the last story boss with my three main characters, and beat him first try.

The Zodiac Age version is the one available to purchase still today. It is remastered from the original PS2 game, but more importantly has a lot of quality of life improvements and balance changes- most notable being the ability to increase game speed up to 4 times to go through trash mobs faster and an autosave feature when you enter any new area. I know some people that played FF VII when they were a wee one, despise this game, but I liked it way better.

Art of Rally (XSX Game Pass)

Awesome stylized game that takes you through the history of Rally racing up to the mid 90's. The game has no official licenses but you can tell what all the cars in game are representing- for example the Eski is obviously the Ford Escort. The game even has the BMW 2002, a car I actually owned in the past. The individual cars all handle differently from model to model and era to era. Playing through full career mode really highlights how difficult the Group B and S cars were to drive. I completed a full career mode and also found all the collectibles in free roam mode.

Maps exist to cover stages for dirt, gravel, snow and tarmac - dry and rain. Finland, Norway, Sardinia, Germany, Kenya and Japan. Unfortunately the game could do with some more different regions, you have seen pretty much everything well before half way through the career mode.

Controlling the cars is difficult. It takes lots of practice and you're just feeling you're getting the hang of things and then you get into Group S and you have to learn again. Excellent isometric view racer and I love the historical aspect. I'm reminded of the best Need For Speed game ever- Porsche 2000 and wish more racing games took a tour through history for a single marque or racing class (like 80's Group A for example).

Just beat the 2016 PS4 reboot / remake of Ratchet & Clank on PS5. I felt like playing something that is simple fun. And well, now I can play Rift Apart, one of the few big PS5 exclusives thus far, with a clear conscience.

Anyway, it's a good game but frankly I was pretty disappointed by it. Over the last couple of years I've played a whole number of classic mascot games, like Banjo-Kazooie, Jak and Daxter as well as Spyro and was very positively surprised by pretty much all of them. Given that Ratchet & Clank was Insomniac's next big series after Spyro and for some reason has quite the cult status, my expectations were pretty high and the game just failed to meet them.

For starters, Ratchet & Clank is basically a third-person shooter or 3D run 'n' gun game if you will. Platforming and exploration are present but frankly very limited compared to the many other mascot games, including Spyro. There are many worlds but each one of them is depressingly small. It's really a shooter first and in my humble opinion not a very good one. My first contact with Insomniac was through their Resistance series, which inherited a bunch of things from the Ratchet & Clank games (most notably a wide array of diverse weapons which are picked from a radial menu) and sadly that includes pretty awful aiming caused by an unnecessarily large deadzone and (I'm pretty sure) some weird acceleration and/or sensitivity curve. To top it off, the collision detection is all kinds of wonky and reminds me way too much of early 2000s console shooters.

Now, don't get me wrong, the action is still pretty fun and satisfying, especially thanks to the aforementioned diverse, imaginative and often ridiculous weapons. Some are rather impractical and become increasingly useless as you get more universally effective guns, like grenades or the Groovitron that makes enemies vulnerable by forcing them to dance to disco music, but they are still fun. Then you have pretty cool twists on rather standard weapons like the Pixeliser, which is basically a shotgun with ridiculously huge spread that makes enemies appear like 8-bit sprites for no good reason or a sniper rifle that reveals the enemies' weak points which you have to hit for a critical hit (and given the diverse anatomy of enemies here it actually makes perfect sense). But I can't shake the feeling that the combat is just okay and is certainly a far cry from the likes of Doom 2016 or, say, Returnal. Neither the enemy nor level design is as good as it should be in a very arcadey AAA shooter.

Oh yeah, and Ratchet is a mechanic, his melee weapon is a wrench, his sidekick is a little robot and the main currency is... bolts. So I expected that the game to revolve around mechanical puzzles and whatnot, I thought that maybe you'd construct stuff. Meanwhile the game does literally nothing with this. You have the occasional environmental puzzle, especially in short sections where Clank is on his own, but the whole "mechanic" theme is just utterly wasted. Really, you kill thousands of enemies and destroy gazillions of boxes, farming all these bolts but ultimately you just use them as currency to buy guns and ammo at shops. I honestly don't know why they even bothered making Ratchet a mechanic or why there are two characters for that matter. If it weren't for the 3 or 4 brief puzzle sections in the game where Clank is on his own, there wouldn't even be a single reason for the game to have two protagonists.

Then there's the story and overall visual design and stuff. It's clearly a game that has ambitions to be like an interactive Pixar movie. There are high quality cutscenes with the best cast that money can buy and an orchestral soundtrack. Yet, somehow, the animation isn't even as good as in the original Jak and Daxter. It's just not as fluid, lively or expressive as in Jak, which I frankly found almost shocking, given how much newer and "bigger" the Ratchet & Clank reboot is. And well, the story is okay - it's basically a space opera for children. It's Star Wars or Mass Effect with cartoon characters. And again, on some level it's enough of a reason for the game to exist and to be worth playing but there are just so many wasted opportunities here. There's this large cast of characters with great visual designs and voice actors and they barely get any screen time - I can literally only remember the names of the villains. It's just such a waste. And sure, you get some silly dialogue and slapstick like in a Pixar movie, but also this is played utterly safe. The game made me chuckle a few times but it didn't get a single laugh out of me.

Finally, there's one particular thing that irks me about the game. The big selling point of the game is that it's a high-budget child-friendly space opera. And that's why it bothers me that the game is so utterly focused on gun violence. It's bad enough that besides destroying tons of robots you also mow down legions of sentient alien beings but what really bothered me was when Ratchet exclaimed a few times that he likes weapons. I would be perfectly okay with it if it was a game targeted at adults that just uses a cartoon style but it's not, it's a game rated E by ESRB and 7 by PEGI. It's a perfectly innocent game that just happens to glorify guns and resolving conflicts by mowing down everyone in your path. Call me a snowflake all you want but I think that that's just utterly tasteless design and one of few cases where the age ratings are below what they should be. And I'm saying that as someone who generally enjoys over-the-top violence and black humour.

Anyhow, in summary: it's a good game, just not a great one.

I finally set up PSVR on my PS5 (actually because my in-laws were visiting us recently and were really curious about it) and I decided to finally play Blood & Truth which my wife got me for my birthday last year. I'm only playing this one now because the develoeprs had announced PS5 enhancements before I get around to playing the game.

Blood & Truth is notable in that it's - as far as I know - the dedicated VR game with the highest budget. Well, probably after Half-Life: Alyx. It builds on a brief demo called London Heist which the same studio had created for PlayStation VR Worlds, a launch title for PSVR. London Heist was pretty darn impressive and one of my favourite VR experiences, so a full-length game in the same style seemed like a dream come true.

Well, long story short: it's merely an okay game as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure that I would have very different feelings about it if I had played very soon after getting PSVR but once you've gotten used to the idea of VR itself, the game isn't all that impressive anymore. Ultimately Blood & Truth is just a rail shooter and frankly not a particularly good one. What sets it apart from typical rail shooters is that you have a bit more control over movement here. Basically waypoints are scattered throughout the levels and you control when the protagonist is going to move to which one - sometimes you can strafe back and forth between several points but generally you keep moving forward. The game felt the most fun to me when you were gunning at enemies while the protagonist kept running forward or during vehicle sequences but you will spend most time sitting around in cover, like in Rebel Assault II or something. To make it worse, enemies will usually just wait around in the back until you get close. The result is that this game, that is advertised as this super intense ride, is a lot more static (and less fun) than, say, the House of the Dead games. So I think that ironically I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if it had been a more traditional rail shooter.

And also the action itself could have been much better. The combat isn't too imaginative, enemies are very samey, the only thing that changes over time is that later on bullet sponges become somewhat common which only slows down the action even further. Likewise, it didn't feel like the different guns mattered all that much. I quickly arrived at the conclusion that wielding two SMGs is the best option throughout the entire game (well, whenever available), if only because they are pretty devastating and, with their huge mags, you can aim more easily since the tracer bullets allow you to effectively guide your aim. For whatever reason the developers made laser pointers an endgame reward that you only get for getting a crapload of collectables (I didn't even get half the required amount) so the only "correct" way to aim is to use the gun sights but, the way PSVR works, doing so will usually hide the headset from the camera and cause all sorts of wonky behaviour. Ergo, automatic weapons. Sadly especially shotguns suffer from these design decisions here. They have a small spread, a small rate of fire and no lasers - and a pumping mechanism means that you have to swing around two hands in front of the headset. IMO they are virtually impossible to use.

Finally, the story and presentation. Frankly the story is such generic stuff to me that I couldn't care much for it. You're an ex elite soldier who also happens to belong to some super powerful family and you soon go on a path of vengeance and there's a barely developed political intrigue. That's about all I remember. Luckily the delivery is better than the story itself. The acting and animations are top-notch and the characters feel as real as it gets. The audio is all in all fantastic, with extremely juicy spatial sound and a super oomphy soundtrack. The graphics, on the other hand, are very uneven. The characters look great, as do the guns, but the environments tend to lack detail. Especially sequences where you're hanging above or jumping over very deep chasms, which should feel super intense, just didn't move me at all because the abyss below me just didn't look real at all.

But for all the criticism: it's still a pretty fun game. Even if the combat isn't particularly well-designed, it is fun. Dual-wielding and blind-firing at legions of mooks in a high-budget VR action thriller is obviously still about as fun as it sounds. Some of the more intense sequences are pretty darn impressive. And also some of the interactions like picking locks or sabotaging electronics were surprisingly enjoyable. If you have PSVR it's still pretty much a must-have title, just don't expect more than an okay rail shooter.

I've started and finished Tales of Arise Demo on my PS4. I have preordered the game, so I wanted to have some glimpse on the gameplay and visuals, and I am now very satisfied with that decision. Both field and characters are really gorgeous, English voice acting is high quality as well. Unfortunately, the combat is not as satisfying as in some of the previous Tales of titles. I hope that this will change in the final version of the game.

All my games finished in 2021 and before can be found HERE.

Assassin's Creed II. I played the first game a few years ago and thought it was something like okay once you get past the horrible PC optimization. I figured I might as well try out the more acclaimed sequel (I seem to have accumulated most of the series through Ubisoft giveaways or something). It's...okay.

It's more refined than the first game, as sequels tend to be, and the Italian Renaissance is an interesting setting, but I find that I'm just not consistently interested in the core gameplay of this series. At first I was having a relaxing time just running and jumping to explore everywhere and clean stuff off of the map, and then I realized about halfway through that I was getting bored and would just play until I got to something I found annoying, and then I'd pick back up a few days later, mostly out of a sense of obligation to finish it.

It's not a challenging game - I think I died a couple of times when my guy got bugged and accidentally leaped off a tall ledge without a haystack underneath him. The combat is kind of a joke in that you just block and counterattack whenever someone finally takes a swing at you. The free-running aspect is kind of neat at first, but it starts getting irritating when you realize that you have to go running back across the whole city yet again to start the next mission. More fast travel options would have been welcome.

The graphics and stuff are fine. I guess people enjoy the characters and story? but I find the sci-fi aspect tedious and unnecessary. It's sad to me that the makers apparently felt that a good bit historical fiction wouldn't have been sufficiently involving and instead came up this National Treasure/Chariots of the Gods/Da Vinci Code horseshit to justify the concept. I think I read that they dropped it not long after this and if so that was probably a good call.