The Witcher 2. I've always felt this one was the least of the trilogy, and with a fresh go at it I find that opinion still holds. This time around I went with the Iorveth path and I found it generally well-executed, aside from a big battle scene at the end of the chapter 2, which needed some more imaginative set-pieces beyond "stand on the wall and kill a bunch of guys in a row". Using aard to make the enemies go flying off into space was fun, though.

The story is much more political, which is fine but I prefer the folklore aspects of the character. E.g., my favorite side-quest in the game is dealing with the bridge troll.

I hate the user interface. It looks like a closeup of fresh puke and it just doesn't handle well, presumably because it was designed with consoles in mind. At one point early in the game I discovered Geralt was running everywhere barefoot because I accidentally sold his boots without realizing it. You'd think they'd give you an "are you sure?" prompt when selling stuff you've got equipped.

I discovered an option this time to make quicktime events easier, so I used that because I hate QT events. Dice poker was more fun and easier to read in the first game. That's a general problem with the game - it feels like there was a lot of focus on presentation without much attention on what a player's eyes will be drawn to, so the environment and objects feel crowded, murky, and generally off-kilter.

The combat has always been the big problem. It's got a similar thing going on as Alpha Protocol in that it looks and handles like a pure action game, but then you realize you're hitting monsters and not doing anything to them because the game is calculating your "dice rolls" as misses. It's easy to attack the wrong enemy a lot, and the environment tends to emphasize narrow pathways in a way that often leads to your view being blocked when the camera swings behind a tree or something. Fortunately, it becomes less of an issue later on when you get so powered up that you can mow through everything. Hurray for no level scaling! In retrospect they were probably trying to maintain the RPG feel when they should have just fully embraced being an action game.

It's still worth playing if you liked the first one or the source material, but IMO the various changes amount to something that's less comfortable to play than the first and third games.

TOEM

Another non-violent, kid-friendly exploration game in the vein of A Short Hike, Haven Park, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, and Beasts of Maravilla Island. And another Coming of Age story involving an elder relative, but no grave aspect to it this time, no themes of conflict or loss, just cheery cute fun. Grab your camera and go hunt for quests and collectibles. I really liked it, and for a completionist like me, taking it slowly, it lasted about 6 hours (but I'm sure it can be completed much much faster). Too bad it's not on GOG.

Syberia (1,2, and 3)- It's a enjoyable story and I really liked the different characters in it. Not elaborating on who it is but the character at the end of 1 and in 2 is so adorable, I just want to give him a big hug. Even Oscar is great in his own way, but no I won't show him my ticket again!

I enjoyed 1 and 2 the most I think, though 3 was okay. I had a lump in my throat at the end of 2. For number 3 I don't know if I was really happy with the way it ended... I'm in two minds about that really.

Fallout 4

Though I reached the Brotherhood of Steel ending and still plan on going back to reach the Institute and the Railroad endings (via earlier saves), I decided to already make this post here, since my opinion isn't going to change on the game. I will also play through Nuka World later, for reasons listed below.

Fallout 4 manages to be both amazing and incredibly frustrating, often at the same time. It has some of Bethesdas best designed systems and worlds, combined with ideas so obviously terrible that it's impressive that they managed to put them in the final game.

The Commonwealth is a very well crafted world, that is very enjoyable to explore, even if it, quite often, doesn't make much sense (200 years into the apocalipse and all that the people living in a city that's still mostly standing managed to re-build is a bunch of isolated gueto-like communities? Really? With all that tech lying around?). Most of the game systems, from player abilities and evolution, to crafting, are the very Skyrim's systems refactored to fit the Fallout formula while improving various tidbits here and there. Armor designs leave a lot to be desired (running around in green army clothes with a bunch of PVC tubes attached to your body because that's the most advanced armor around doesn't exactly beat Daedric Armor in aesthetics), but the weapons are quite nice.

I loved what they did with Power Armor, it being a frame where you build all the pieces around it, allowing for all kinds of weird combinations, and it's great that you can improve each piece's quality and add extra abilities, but the energy management aspect of it (that improves a bit later on), coupled with some weird usage problems (very often you can't use computer terminals because there's a chair in front of them. You have to exit the armor because you can't move a chair), and the fact you can't directly craft pieces or the frame itself, make for some unecessary annoyance. Still, there's plenty to go around and by the end of the game I had a 20 plus collection of full Power Armors and a few extra incomplete ones on top of the Red Rocket settlement.

Settlements are another incredibly half baked aspect of the game, that end up being absolutely irritating. You can construct and populate 30 settlements around the maps, but you can't terraform anything, there isn't a definite rule about what already existing buildings you can or cannot remove, and the construction systems themselves are janky as hell. In the end, you build a somewhat good enough whatever in each area and move on. Would have been better to just have a couple of really good settlements to do what you like with. I also understand that even though the system is janky, it has a lot of appeal for many players, but comming from games with way better build systems, it was just frustrating for me. But, the absolute worst, are the random, very frequent, invasions that require you stop doing everything, including missions, to help one settlement or another, even if you pack them full of automated turrets.

Like Skyrim before it, Fallout 4 is a game utterly obsessed with keeping your journal populated with tasks and quests to attend to, and this can get unwiedly very quickly. The worse example being the almost unending "radiant quests" of helping settlements generated by one of your companions, who auto shoves another one into you whenever you deliver the last one. It doesn't help that the bizarre dialogue system was built around automating a lot of the conversations and always limiting your character to 4 answers, most often, a variation of the combination "Yes", "Yes, but why?", "Yes, with sarcasm" and, "No, but actually yes".

The story gives a strong impression of having been written around the idea that someone on the team wanted a bunch of specific stuff to happen, but nobody could actually write a proper story to make it happen. So things like the initial mistery of who kidnaped your son and why, have conclusions that turn out to be utterly idiotic. There's an attempted narrative of asking the question if synthetic humans with freewill are people or not with 3 different groups fighting around it, but the game makes it very clear what it wants you to think about it, at the same time that it gives you no narrative tool to change the opinions of the groups involved in the conflict. To make matters worse, the game more or less forces you into all 4 groups in the game and, then, forces you to betray and destroy most of the others in all but one of the paths to the ending.

I like what they did with the companions, but I think they overdid it. Half the companions with slightly more complexity each, would be better. Since most of them have their own opinions on your story choices, and the game is perfectly playable solo, you'll probably just max affinity with a select few for their perks and keep them away from the rest of your game.

Most of the DLC I played through doesn't add a lot of narrative complexity, being fun extra stuff to do and adding a lot to build. Far Harbor is the more complex one I played and, different from the main game, allows you to solve the 3 faction conflict in it in a variety of ways that includes forging peace between all factions, in an interesting way. I haven't played Nuka World yet, mostly because it forces you into conquering your own settlements, an annoyance that I just kept delaying so far.

Finally, the UI is the worse I've seen from a Bethesda game so far. It's impressive how they managed to use so little of the screen real state in every UI screen, making for terrible inventory navigation, and terrible save game navigation as well.

Last, the game can be quite a slog to load, even when installed in a SSD, sometimes you exit a building and it takes forever to load. The HD texture pack also doesn't offer much improvement to be worth keeping installed.

Rainbow Six Vegas (XSX)

Xbox 360 version played under backwards compatibility, which provides no enhancements here except AI machine learning HDR. Tactical 3rd person shooter that focuses on combat mostly in building interiors, as you would expect. Overall it's not quite as good as the Advanced Warfighter games that I played last year, Vegas neither has the variety in levels, or vehicle support, and gives less control over your squad- you cannot issue orders to individual squad members for example. Interestingly, The Advanced Warfighter games were actually developed by the original Rainbow Six devs, while the Rainbow Six games were handed to another dev.

What does work in this game is the overall feel. The weapons really feel and sound like they have power to them. When you hit someone they go down hard without all the silly rag doll physics that some games have. Even the impact sounds of bullets hitting interior walls is all done really well. The level designs are quite good and emphasize breaching and clearing interior rooms quite well.

The game only drops the ball slightly in the final two levels- namely a few too many scripted ambushes where you have to wait for one of your members to slowly hack some computer out in the open whilst remarkably well trained terrorists rain from overhead on ropes. In these sections you lose all tactical flexibility and they represent something of a difficulty spike, not to mention feeling very artificial- in real life the operatives would simply deal with the terrorists and then hack the computer at leisure. But that's not Hollywood enough. Then there's that ending...I'm not someone that holds endings accountable too much if the game play is good. But still, I like there to be an actual ending. The ending is literally a screen saying "to be continued". Right at the climax of the game. Luckily I do have Vegas 2 then...

Do you meet the requirements for that? They were very steep when the pack came out.

Sorry, I don't remember, but I do remember it taking extra 60 GB from the disk. It made the already slow loads even slower as well.

EDIT: I originally read "Do you know the requirements for that?" XD I do meet the requirements, but as I said, it's just not worth it.

Finally finished Death Stranding.

Maybe its because I went in with low expectations but I really enjoyed the game.

Its very different and one of the few games where players are strongly encouraged to help others, creating buildings and leaving stuff so other users can use the equipment and make it easy for both you and them. Although the timefall/eroding buildings feature is annoying, it makes sense and users luckily do get enough materials to build stuff without needing to grind for materials which can be obtained through deliveries so supply shortage is not a big factor.

I do have gripes with getting 100% and the combat though. The game was not really built for combat (your character is a delivery guy, not a soldier) but there are some boss fights which require good gunplay which makes them big spikes in difficulty. Im not a great third-person/first-person shooter gamer so it could be a problem with my skills though. Also, grinding for the final few trophies was kind of annoying.

Still really enjoyed the game. I can see its not for everyone and you need to go in knowing what to expect (its a game about delivering parcels and not a combat heavy/become a badass game).

Just finished Cultures: Northland an hour ago. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that it took me around 4-5 years to finish a game with only 8 story missions. In fact, I believe I took a 2-year break after beating the fourth mission. As someone who enjoys the series' heavy emphasis on village-building, I tended to treat all the normal missions like sandbox modes, only turning my attention to the objectives when I was sufficiently satisfied with my near-perfect Viking economy. The main drawback to playing this way is that I'd burn out after a mission or two and then shelve the game for a long time.

As much as I like the Cultures games, I have to agree with anyone who's ever complained that the military portions are a complete afterthought. Even with the aid of abundant berry bushes and Nourishment Potions, keeping your soldiers fed and well-slept was endlessly tedious. This is particularly bad in the "dungeon" missions, as you need to guide your soldiers through winding mazes while trying desperately to fill their hunger and sleep meters. These missions also expose the clunkiness of the AI pathfinding, which leaves a lot to be desired. I nearly gave up and uninstalled during "Hel's Realm" due to wandering baddies interfering with my navigation of the switch puzzles, but my perseverance paid off in the end.

After that huge slog, I don't think I'll touch 8th Wonder of the World anytime soon. I'm a sucker for economy sims, but I'm not enough of a masochist to enjoy this level of military chaperoning.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (XSX)

So this is what they meant by "to be continued" in the first game. Basically you play a different Rainbow Six team during the same operation, the one you sometimes heard referenced during the briefings and radio chatter. So the story meshes with the first game and sort of ties up the loose end.

I didn't like it as much as the first game though. When it's just being a tactical shooter it's really fun and satisfying to use somewhat realistic tactics to clear areas safely and efficiently. But this time they really doubled down on the scripted ambushes and scripted failures. It's so frustrating to be doing everything right and then get screwed over by forced stupidity scripting. Take the end sequence for example- you have the golden opportunity to take out the final bad guy with a shot. But no, you go (alone, without your team!) and have a chat first like an idiot from some JRPG. Of course you get ambushed. Didn't see that coming. Or that time when I was advancing through a penthouse and I called in a thermal scan, which showed only a single enemy two rooms away. So we advance and get ambushed by three enemies jumping through windows from the balcony and three from the room next to us...why didn't they show on the thermal scan then? Because they weren't really there until the scripting spawned them in and a smart player would avoid the ambush that way, and we can't have that.
Okay, the game was still fun when it wasn't trying too hard to be Hollywood. It could have been a lot better.

Age of Barbarian. A side-scrolling hack-and-slash game that is a homage to sword-and-sorcery movies. Some of which are classics, but many of which are cheesy knock-offs like the Deathstalker series. This game doesn't discriminate. It also homages some classic games; for instance, you can do the decapitation move from Barbarian on the C64.

You have to battle your way across the map, level by level, rescuing maidens and eventually take down the bad guy. The end-boss is literally Necron from Fire and Ice. He has a henchman that is Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer. You control either a thinly disguised Conan stand-in or a nubile warrior princess. In either case, the hero/heroine wears as little clothing as possible. Very much an "R-rated" game, with lots of gore and nudity. If you ever thought games need more full-frontal ape nudity, this game is for you. The extended cut version includes a couple of DLCs, one being a fantasy version of the first act of Return of the Jedi right down to having a sarlacc pit monster and the other involving a war on a spider cult that requires you to uncover various secrets through the game.

Perhaps appropriate considering the movies it's paying tribute to, it's a relatively low-budget game. It's pretty buggy, some of the animations are pretty janky, the controls sometimes decide they don't want to respond right away, the English translation is pretty rough (it's an Italian game), and the user interface is just awkward. The hardest thing about the spider cult DLC was its repeated crashes to desktop. Despite all this, it's genuinely impressive how good the game is when it all works the way it's supposed to. The combat is easy to pick up but it has enough wrinkles to it that it stays interesting throughout the game. It's not especially hard, but you do have to pay attention. Some Prince of Persia-like platforming, even down to the spike traps. There are some basic RPG elements like leveling up and expanding the moves list and buying new weapons and items. There's some kind of hunger mechanic I never totally figured out. Sometimes the game pesters you to eat something but I couldn't tell what the hunger meter was doing to me no matter how long I let it go without action.

The graphics are...interesting. It's like the guy was going for a very specific mid-90s Video Toaster aesthetic, where everything looks like glossy plastic and the colors can get really garish. I think the idea was to create a world that was appropriately fanciful (purple and yellow skies, multiple moons...) but could still feature relatively realistic characters without going full Mortal Kombat and just digitizing actors. I would say it looks better in motion than in still screenshots.

For all its rough edges, it's just plain fun, especially if you have any fondness for the genre. The guy is making a sequel that looks like it's going in more of a Golden Axe direction and I will check it out when it's available.

Sundered Eldritch Edition, May 26 (GOG)-I really liked this but I found it rather hard. The combat itself wasn't hard, it was actually rather easy for 95% of the game. But knowing where to go next was very difficult for me. I'd get lost and just kill hordes racking up money to purchase upgrades. I eventually had to look up a walkthru for where and how to get the final upgrade. The third area's boss and the final boss were the only difficult fights and each took a couple tries but the rest were pretty easy. Usually what killed me on a particular run was constantly being pushed into environmental hazards. The upgrade system reminded me a lot of Rogue Legacy and I liked it and the various perks. I thought the atmosphere was really good but the areas with robot-type enemies seemed a little out of place. I preferred the Lovecraftian areas and enemies.

Full List

I was tempted long time by local gallery to play Still Life. As in Syberia games artistic design is great, here evolved with more mature content. Unfortunately, game has terrible path finding, sometimes I had problem find useful tool (pixel hunting) and sometimes it is necessary do something in exact order or it would not be possible take some item as it will not be active on the screen. At the end I finished it wilh walkthrough only to know how story ends. I can recommend to do it same way and consider it as one time experience.

This year's top 3. God of War 4, Deathloop and Battletech.

Forza 5 was massive disappointment.
Death Stranding was good. Confirmed sequel is coming too. Hopefully they add more sand, road building etc was best.

So, I beat Doom Eternal earlier today. I actually wrote an extensive review earlier which apparently surpassed the character limit in posts on the GOG forums. So, here's attempt number two.

Content-wise I didn't like it much. I loved what Doom 2016 had done: it basically took the Painkiller formula for the gameplay and fused it with a basic Doom narrative. There were characters, all the locations had context and it really added value to the brutal arcade action. It was a simple and beautifully edgy story about human greed and hubris unleashing the forces of hell. There were only traces of some more advanced lore and as far as I'm concerned that was fine.

Where Doom kinda remade the original game, Eternal follows Doom II and deals with "hell on earth". I was really looking forward to this but ended up getting very disappointed. The thing is that: 1. There is almost a total lack of human presence and, as a result, the Earth levels feel more like abstract arenas that have been decorated with post-apocalyptic and hellish urban stuff than like the action is actually taking place on Earth during a demon invasion. It's probably not a coincidence that the levels that got me excited the most were those where some presence of humans (or other sentient beings) was at least implied and did make me feel like there's a purpose to the action and I'm fighting in an actual place. 2. Most of the story deals with some space Vikings who are ruled by yet another alien race and explains that whole Doomslayer myth some more. It really didn't resonate with me and frankly most of this stuff bored me. I appreciate that the story and/or lore of Doom Eternal ties the new games into a single canon with the original two games but I really would have preferred a focus on mankind's struggle against a demon invasion. Alas, that's stuff that you mostly only read about in notes that explain the backstory. Sure, nobody plays Doom for the story but still, it did hurt the player fantasy for me.

Now, gameplay-wise Doom Eternal is weird. It's seemingly just Doom 2016 with a bit of new stuff but Jesus, there's so much here that I found the game to be overwhelming. Even just looking at the basic stuff: it's like they've added dozens of little nuances that, taken together, turn Eternal into a chaotic and unnecessarily complicated mess. They not just doubled down on the combat economy of Doom 2016, which rewarded aggressive play, they tripled down on it. There's a whole bunch of abilities on cooldowns and a special melee attack that gets recharged by performing glory kills, there's a double jump and dashing, then there's ten guns, most of them with two separate weapon mods which you can switch mid-combat and each of them useful against different enemies or different contexts.

There are some super powerful weapons that can only be charged with heavily limited ammunition and you also find extra lives (remember those from classic Doom? no you don't because Doom never even had those). And then some enemies are pretty complex, where some can be disarmed by targeting the right body part with right weapon, some of them have pretty complex attack patterns, the archvile makes all other enemies go berserk and there's even one guy who is only vulnerable for a split second just before hitting you (but he also has other attacks that don't make him vulnerable!). We're still talking about a fast-paced shooter where you get ganged up on by a dozen enemies or even more at a time, not Souls.

It took me a while to internalize even just a portion of it all. Admittedly it was very satisfying when I finally managed to think quickly about my entire arsenal and I started using the flamethrower and freeze grenades and certain weapon mods at just the right moments in order to quickly resolve pretty complicated situations during frantic action. However, for a long time all this complexity did make the game less fun to me. I admit: the game offers an insane potential for player mastery - it's almost Devil May Cry level shit right there. But I feel that to regular mortals the game is often unnecessarily chaotic and challenging as a result. It has been quite a few years since I played Doom 2016 but I don't remember getting cornered in frustratingly narrow spaces all the time and it's an experience that Eternal gave me a repeatedly in spite of my best efforts to keep moving and in control of the situation. I feel that Eternal is missing a certain flow and elegance that Painkiller, Serious Sam and also Doom 2016 had.

And on top of that Eternal has a clusterfuck of a progression system with a TON of different things to find and unlock. Besides your basic collectables like notes, music, cheats and action figures you find unlocks for new weapon mods, you find tokens for upgrading weapon mods (yeah, that's separate), you can unlock the final upgrades by overcoming challenges (but you can also skip those with yet another kind of token), you find stations where you can upgrade one category of suit upgrades, then there's a resource for unlocking a different type of suit upgrades, then you unlock relics (of which you can equip only three at a time) and there's "sentinel batteries" for unlocking rooms in the hub world. Oh yeah, and then there's optional encounters which grant you keys which unlock another thing. And finally there are two separate XP bars (I think) which unlock cosmetics. I wish to remind you that I'm talking about Doom, not Monster Hunter or something.

And finally: there's platforming. Lots of it. You regularly have to double jump and dash in mid-air, sometimes through something that recharges your dash in mid-air so you can dash some more and there are even climbable walls. Now, personally I didn't struggle with it all that much but it was certainly an unnecessary annoyance and I know players who rage quit the game because of it.

However: it's still a very cool, brutal and fun game. I enjoyed portions of it immensely and I do want more Doom, especially now that I've mastered some of this clusterfuck, and will definitely play the DLC. However, less would have been more in my opinion.