Hero of the Kingdom III

Another casual game on the laptop. I must have been bored out of my skull, considering that I actually finished this. It was mildly addictive at first but later on I could only play it in shorter bursts because instead of everything getting better and falling into place, this becomes even more of a slow-paced grindfest the longer you play. In the end it was barely sufferable.

I had played the second game in the series a couple of years ago while I was traveling, and I thought enough time had passed for me to give the third one a try. Everything good that can be said about the Hero of the Kingdom series, I've already written down in my review of the second game back then. The third one was basically more of the same, except now the concept wasn't new to me anymore, and everything that is different in the third part is worse. It takes about twice as long to finish, but only because it does not respect your time.

The first flaw that I noticed, though that might have been just as bad in part 2 already: While the animations for each single action like harvesting resources are kind of cute at first, they become very tiring as soon as they pile up. I guess that's true for almost all games involving a lot of crafting, but it's all the more painful the more grindy a game gets. Worse though is that waiting for the animations to finish is not enough yet, you have to click on the same hotspot again, once it's done, in order to confirm and collect the end product. And you can't do it whenever you want do, the game won't let you click anywhere else until you've done so. It's the equivalent to a window notification you have to click away every time, and you can't just click anywhere on the screen to continue, you need to target that small window hotspot with the mouse again. Alternatively you can press SPACE, but that's still a lot of pressing keys in a game that should comfortably work with mouse controls alone, it doesn't really ease the frustration. It would have made more sense for a game like this to allow you to click on other stuff while animations for the first action are still playing out and then let you collect everything at your own leisure whenever you're ready, without halting the game for it. I do realize it's a casual clicking game and these things tend to waste your time in general, but it's just painfully obvious in this one how much time you spent just sitting there waiting for animations to finish and then clicking again in order to be able to take back control. A good "time waster" game, as insidious as that sounds, at least wouldn't have you notice how much of a time waster it is.

While it's enough work already to gather essential resources to keep yourself afloat, some NPCs actually task you to grind the same precious resources in higher number and give them up to them, for meagre rewards, and most of these quests are not optional but necessary to progress.

The most annoying mechanic though is the RNG factor which randomly causes your tools to break, and I had the suspicion that the chances of that to happen became ridiculously high later in the game. Every two or three fights I would have to grind not just for resources and potions in order to beat the next monster, but buy or smith an expensive weapon again, on top of it (and smithing has a random chance to fail, too, wasting your resources). All of that serves no other purpose than to increase the tedious busywork. You can't really optimize anything or prepare for all occasions, because while resources respawn, some of them don't respawn fast enough to balance this out, and in the end, it's all just more clicking and clicking, no processes are sped up later in the game, there are no tangible improvements because your skills have increased - they are just used as a gatekeeper for you to not get ahead too quickly. You are required to raise your skills by repeatedly performing the actions connected to them, so in order to get skilled enough to beat a tougher monster, you first need to beat a bunch of other, weaker monsters. But a lot of times you can't reliably tell whether fighting a monster that does not stand in your way will actually raise your fighting skill or not. Part of it might be random, another aspect could be how much of a challenge for you the monster is still considered, but the game gives no indication for any of it. Later in the game it's increasingly happening that you need to fight random monsters because raising your fighting skill is required to progress, but more often than not, fighting the monsters does not raise your skill anymore, and sometimes you don't even get any other rewards, you're just wasting your precious resources on a game of chance, which means more grinding afterwards. And the same is true for the monsters that drop resources for crafting poisonous potions. You will need poisonous potions quite often to fight certain monster types, much more often than poisonous creatures actually drop these resources. The balance is just off. I do seem to remember the second game was more like a puzzle of resource management, while this one is much more random and grindy.

The gameplay loop is basically "I can't progress here without X, so I need to collect stuff by clicking on the screen and watch animations, then craft X, and by the time I got what I needed, too many other resources were used up in the progress or things broke, and now I need to take care of that first, because I still can't progress despite having X now, since now I need Y - rinse and repeat", in the most aggravating way.

TL:DR
I thought this might be a mindless but relaxing game. It is mindless alright, but more exhausting than relaxing. Too casual to be captivating, too frustrating to help you wind down. Play it only if you hate yourself and don't value your time, otherwise be content with Hero of the Kingdom II, or pick games with actually enjoyable gameplay mechanics that don't just feel like doing chores on the computer.

Just finished Halo 4, the 360 version. I'm gonna just get my thoughts down in bullet points and see how that goes.

-The story in this franchise has never been good but this one felt actually stupid. The game itself does a poor job of explaining anything going on, I had no idea why there were Elites in the enemy side but I will grant I may not have been paying attention. Everything about Chief being a sort of alien predicted, DNA engineered space messiah is just kind of cringy, at least to me.

-Cortana and Chief's relationship in this game is slightly uncomfortable for me and feels odd. I don't want to get into it too much but it does not feel right compared to the first game.

-The Prometheans are tiresome foes who play like rejects from Metroid Prime. They also cut back on the variety of Covenant enemies. The either entire or near lack of Brutes is good, I do not like them and think that the franchise started its lurch into mediocrity in the second game in part due to them. Also, the Promethean weaponry is basically analogous to human conventional weapons. They did not feel especially fun or original.

-Visuals for a 360 game are very good but suffer from changing in rendering (I am not a programmer, this is just me trying to articulate what I observed) methods around this time which make some things look less good compared to previous entries. For an example, look closely at Promethean weaponry when being held.

-The name Promethean actually bugs me as well as Didact. The universe feels really small when the naming the enemies apply to themselves as well as the story itself revolves around humanity so thoroughly.

-Mission design either feels like schlock FPS "stay there and kill dudes" or "go there and push that" similar to a Metroid game. Neither one really feels that good and I found myself looking for ways to skip firefights which in an FPS is not a good sign.

-Chief's insubordination to the captain feels simultaneously like a way to partly deconstruct the Chief as well as a take that to the captain, who is cast away from the story and makes no return by the end for it.

-Chief talks entirely too much and his voice, which has never been good, sounds phoned in for some scenes and he sounds even more like just a tired old man, which he is.

-Cortana is a difficult topic in this game. I could go on but suffice to say that the game wants to tackle the ghost in the machine and artificial intelligence questions without really wanting to consider them too far. Chief never questions his attachment to a computer program.

This game is somewhere next to Halo 3. Some things are good, others bad. The general gun play is fine for the most part and it looks good. It is only slightly more memorable an experience than the 3rd game, which I have played more than once and hardly remember outside of one or two specific memories.

The ranking for the franchise seems to be for me: Reach, ODST=Combat Evolved, 3 and 4, and then way in the back is 2.

Edit: The scope of the story in this game feels not only really small but also a very contrived way to start a trilogy they supposedly had any plan on from the beginning. By contrived, I mean in that "let's start this trilogy off with this threat that makes all the previous threats looks small to alter the landscape dramatically moving forward but deal with it exclusively in this entry" way.

Also, this game introduced mechanical/robotic enemies seemingly to play with physics and damage models in the same way that Vanquish, Binary Domain, and Gears of War 4. This is not a good or bad thing but I enjoyed it more in those other games than this one.

Played through Halo Infinite, tag teaming it with my brother.

I actually really liked this game, so if if means anything I thought this was a worthwhile game to play. It's not a very long game, long for a shooter but not even short RPG length and I would consider that a strength. Another thing to point out is that the game is open world-ish. There is a point where the game "opens up" which thankfully only takes a few hours to get to. The game prior to that is more fun than Halo 4 in its usual level design and resembles to a better degree resembles the first game. In a similar way that I thought Breath of the Wild was a natural evolution of the original game's vision this one is also close to that but it does follow a few trends. That said, some good things:

-The guns in the game never became less useful or useless. That was a big plus, the pistol you get at the start of the game is just as useful in the endgame. Bear in mind it's not like there are no tougher enemies that get introduced with time but there is no need for you to look at DPS and stare at health bars over grunt's heads as you unload whole magazines into their bodies and wonder aloud what difference, aside from a few hours of gameplay, is the difference between these grunts and the ones I one shot at the beginning of the game. This is something that speaks to me because the introduction of minor, crappy RPG elements into FPS games is really annoying to me. (Worth pointing out, the bosses have health bars over their heads, and they are a mixed bag)

-The large environment is fun to go around and fight Covenant in (they are called Banished, but they are Covenant). It looks like the first Halo game and, Brutes aside, they did not reintroduce annoying enemies like the Flood or Prometheans. The closest we got were the Sentinels were aggravating when they crowd you.

-The story is decent. It's not all that good but it was not actively proving it was garbage. The story reminds me of the trajectory the Star Wars Sequel trilogy took. The first one (Halo 4) had a zeal to cheaply remind you of the first game while still trying to be radically different. Neither worked. The middle one did something to annoy people (Luke Skywalker's character, Cortana is a bad now). The next one feels less like it was a result of soul searching as much as the boss saw the response to that last thing and the boss said it will not happen again. So, they go through what may or may not be a sloppy fix for that character they ruined's character. I think this worked fine in Infinite, not in Star Wars, but I'm talking about Halo, Star Wars just worked as a nice analogue.

-Chief's character was decent, he talked a little too much but not nearly as much. They introduced some vulnerability but not too much. Weapon was appreciably less annoying than Cortana was in 4. I should clarify, I did not play 5 but plan to. I tried out the campaign in this game and found it fun enough to keep playing. Back to Weapon and how she is a fun, mostly funny character. Occasionally, she relies on millennial cringe humor but that aside hopefully we never have to return to emotionally damaged, emotionally manipulative, clingy, and megalomaniacal Cortana again.

-Graphics and sound are also all pretty good. The graphics do not feel as detailed as they could be, but I thought the game was actually impressive to behold.

-Multiplayer has bots and is more fun than small matches locally in older games.

Some mixed and bad, should be short:

-Bosses were kind of annoying. Not too bad, but they felt too tough compared to normal enemies without really feeling like bosses either. The... I forgot what they are called... assassination targets? Those were better. The presence of a health bar is a little annoying too. Also, the checkpoints are inconsistent. I do not know if they are dotted in some boss fights or not at all, it seemed like an accident if they worked.

-Brutes. I do not like fighting them and never did, but at least they are better than Prometheans.

-No Firefight is bad and there is nothing else to say.

-The game going off the story from Halo Wars 2 apparently, a game I had no real interest in playing.

Shadow tactics: Blades of the Shogun

After several aborted runs I finally beat this in a day of binge gaming. Played on hardcore difficulty, and it is indeed challenging. tbh I found the final mission a bit much at times, took me more than five hours and had to change approaches several times, because I got stuck, definitely one of the more challenging levels I've ever played in a video game. But also pretty mind-blowing, definitely an achievement in memorable level design.
It's a pretty good game on the whole, takes the Commandos formula and modernizes it. Lots of cool touches in the user interface, many great features (e.g. you've got three different quick save slots, so less chance you ruin your game by saving in a situation without hope of escape); also some very interesting mechanics, like night missions and an emphasis on verticality in the level design (some of your characters can climb around on roofs, walls etc. and the like). I think it still hasn't quite displaced the original Commandos and its expansion for me, somehow I had more fun with those games. But Shadow tactics is the only thing that's come close for me to the Commandos experience. Level I most enjoyed was Mission 12 (Myogi pass), really intricate, but not so bad that I ever got stuck, reminded me in a good way of some of the Commandos: Beyond the call of duty missions.
Story and setting unfortunately didn't do much for me...samurai with their honor codex, ninjas etc. just don't interest me much. The game tries to give its characters some personality, but tbh I found it pretty superficial. I also didn't like the ending, which seems to preclude the possibility of a sequel (which is pretty unfortunate imo).
Anyway, good game, recommended for Commandos fans, but be warned, it's brutally hard in its later levels, imo more so than any Commandos game.
My rating: 4/5.

I'm a little ashamed to say that I didn't play as much as I wanted this year, in fact I hardly played anything. Although I held back from buying more games my backlog is now bigger because of all the free stuff we got during the sales lol

There's still time for a few more games if you hurry!

The Bureau XCOM Declassified

Having started this game many times prior, I finally sat down to finish this black sheep 3rd person shooter of the XCOM series.

Set in the early 60's and centering on the newly minted XCOM's battle against an alien invasion, this game knows art design and atmosphere -- War of the Worlds meets Dr. Strangelove with a Patsy Cline and surf guitar soundtrack. And having worked in a war room (not used in wargames against ETs... or... not that I know of...?), I had flashbacks in the XCOM bunker facility! They did a brilliant job creating the Cold War era... and the alien ships -- although the alien technology levels do start to look very similar in the last act.

Gameplay is a riff on the style of squad management and tactics of either the Brothers in Arms series or something like Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 Vegas... with some Mass Effect, futuristic machinery, and "powers" mixed in. Gunplay is a bit floaty, but works, and ally AI is good enough not to make this a complete baby-sitter simulation and exercise in frustration. There are a number of ill-defined elements (ie no scale to measure weapon damage when choosing weapons for yourself or your team), but it never feels game-breaking.

Story-wise, I loved most of the game -- even though it's generally linear (with a couple of decisions working toward different endings). It's not emotional, but it is creepy B-movie fun and referential (a lot of tips of the hat to various alien invasion movies). The last act is a bit strange IMO, but again, it wasn't problematic enough for me to stop marching toward the end credits. After those credits rolled...

... I really wished this game had spawned a sequel (a secondary XCOM series).

Good tactical 3rd person shooter gameplay with such great 60's design and atmosphere...

... too bad it got trashed critically.

Cleo - a pirate's tale

Loved almost every second of it besides the cannon fodder (an extremely luck based and mandatory) card mini-game, at least there ar not that many times you have to play it. :)
Everything else was amazing from the quirky characters to the cute ending.

I hope the dev sells enough copies to finance another game. :)

King's Quest VII. I've played the first six games multiple times, but this is my first time all the way through this one and having now finished it I feel generally positive about it. It definitely feels like a bit of a step down from VI, which many would say was the peak of the series, but it's generally in line with the level of quality of the series. The animated Disney-like look they were going for probably seemed like a great move at the time but I think it's aged worse than the pixel art of the other games. The voice acting is good for some laughs, some intentional and some unintentional.

The opening act got off to a rocky start with me with a boring desert section that I kept getting lost in, but it improved a lot after that. I found the forest and horror sections of the games a lot of fun in particular. I think the game went on a bit long, though, and the last couple of acts, in which it feels like you're frequently wandering back and forth between locations (and the walking speed is slow) isn't fun, and then there's a bunch of stuff that comes at the end that I had trouble following because it involves revelations about characters who weren't really present in the game. The general thrust of the story is that Rosella and Valanice have to find each other and reconcile, but then after that's done the game is like "Oh, yeah, and what about fairy prince?!" and I felt a bit lost because that's all rooted in the opening cinematic and isn't really referred to again after that. I watched that bit once and forgot about it pretty fast.

So now I'm morbidly curious to see what happened with #8...

and last game of 21 is Batman Arkham Knight + all the stories

In previous games i generally ignored all the riddle stuff unless they were just there for easy picking.

This game as well.

unfortunately in order to get the full ending you got to have 100 percent of them to fight Riddler.

so spent 7h or so just collecting them through whole maps and even wasted 2h on trying to find last ones when no informant was spawning.

didnt realise that they were underground not showing up on the main map (subway)

anyway

I think the game had too much racing with batmobile, after a while i got accustom to it and did not care anymore while in first few hours i despised it.

Otherwise it was really fun. some of the story was weak like Azreal and Hus which both were bigger things in AC.

Anyway

I found it better than City which I did find a bit dull Still Asylum is the best in terms of feeling and story. while the gameplay is weaker, the battle system not yet fully developed, the atmosphere of the game, the way how batman is stuck on the island. how he got played by Joker is one of the best in video games.

AC for me had terrible atmosphere, I never really clicked with the story, the characters.

Knight was better in that regard. Better Bosses, better feel of suspense.

I wish the remade Asylum. Modern graphics, updated combat system, few additional 'quests'

Never played origins. maybe one day.


List of completed games in 2021

Not much this year

Diablo 3 does not really count as it was almost beaten two years ago. just had one final battle to complete the story mode

Andromeda i started in APril 2020. was a bit dull so took huge breaks.

Imperator rome took so much of my time this year. 200h of gaming this year. I could learn a guitar, day trading, cooking, I could have picked up second job...
meh
worth it.

Just few days after finishing the last game, I have decided to boot up Hyperdimension Neptunia VII on my PS4, for a second playthrough. The goal was to finish the game with the True Ending and before the end of 2021, while unlocking at least one annoying luck-based trophy before starting the final Platinum Run. Luckily I was able to unlock both of them. The Card Master trophy, where you need to get 33 cards out of the virtual bags of chips, became one of the least favourite trophies, I've ever got. I had to open probably more than 1000, to get the 4 super-rare cards, to get this trophy out of the way. Still, this game is definitely the most enjoyable Idea Factory game, which I've played.

Complete list of my finished games, can be found here

Shadow tactics: Aiko's choice

An expansion for Shadow tactics, containing three large levels and some fairly short interlude missions (only two of which feature gameplay to any significant extent, the others could basically be cutscenes). The levels are well-done, intricate, but not overly frustrating. I had a lot of fun with them. Story is pretty thin, but has some nice touches.
At its current full price it's definitely over-priced imo, so only buy if you can't wait or want to support the devs (who certainly deserve it, Shadow tactics is a pretty cool game), otherwise wait for a sale.
My rating: 4/5.

· Portal 2
· SiN
· The Adventures of Shuggy
· Another World
· Syndicate
· Half-Life: Uplink
· Clive Barker's Undying
· Diablo: Hellfire

All good to very good. I don't feel like awarding top score to any of them though, for a reason or another.
(Well, I completed Portal 64, too... but I didn't quite like it - short, and the level design isn't that great. However, since it's a free, amateur project, and since maybe the whole portal idea itself doesn't translate too well into a 2D environment, it seems pointless to complain).

So few games completed this year... well, the fact is, I started some others but I didn't get around to finish them:

· Titan Quest: I had a great time at first, but then I hit a wall (those who have played the game will maybe figure out where), and I don't like having to grind. A pity, since the game was perfectly paced up to that point. I don't know if I'll ever be able to complete it - it's huge...
· Far Cry: great game, but difficult and a bit fatiguing in the long run. I put it aside momentarily for other games and then I never resumed it, but I'll finish it next year, that's for sure.
· TRI: Of Friendship And Madness: nice and original, with high artistic values, but also somewhat cryptic and slow-paced. I think I am a third of the way through. I'll try to reach the end in 2022.

And there's a bunch of games I've started just these holidays, clearly too late to finish them within the end of the year:

· Doom (yes, the classic FPS from 1995 - better late than never)
· Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War
· Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
· Crime Cities
· Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood

For what I've seen so far, the first three are truly great games, well-crafted and fun to play; I'll certainly stick with them.
I'm less excited about Crime Cities: it's got great atmosphere, but I'm not sure I'll keep playing it until the end. It looks like that kind of game that, while not bad per se, always takes the backseat in favour of something better.
Finally, my reaction to Robin Hood is very much a mixed bag. I've played the first two missions, until I reached the camp in Sherwood Forest. The game is absolutely beautiful, and charming in the extreme, but also really difficult, at least the way I'd like to play it. I prefer to go stealth and the game even rewards you for sparing lives; but if you try to avoid combat as much as possible (and sometimes it just seems unavoidable), it becomes very very complicated, so in the end I get a feeling, I'm not really supposed to do that, and I'm playing against the grain, so to speak. Or maybe it's just me. I'll try some other missions and see how things progress.

First new game I'll start next year: Bioshock 2

Other games I'm looking forward to playing in 2022: Crusader: No Regret, Diablo 2, Descent, Thief 3, and others.

Happy new year to all GOGers!