Go around a little island, snapping photos of all the common and exotic animals which you share it with. Help out around town to progress the story. I never needed an external guide. It's real chill. Simple, accessible, comforting, and satisfying!
It's an okay shooter. Narrative's alright. Skill tree does its job. It tries to give you a lot of reasons to do the story again: collectibles, arcade mode, bigger skill tree... but after doing the story the first time I was disinterested.
What matters most in an FPS? The gunplay. Metro 2033 has good gunplay. There are only around a dozen weapons but they're all respectable, and you'll find your hand is forced to switch between them so you don't expend all of that ammo type. One of the first weapons you get is a revolver, and it lasted me to the end of the game with a couple upgrades attached. The in-game economy is pretty good. At the start you have to be very conscious about military rounds (the currency), then as you progress it gets more generous, to the point you will think about loading your gun with them. It feels rewarding to explore the levels and find an ammo cache. There will be sections with a big firefight, after which you will expect to be handed plenty of ammo to restock. But you will come up empty-handed and be forced to conserve. Great design IMO. Knocked off some points because of the enemies. There are lots of enemy types (great!) but they're mostly one-and-done. Towards the end, there's a short section (3-4 minutes) where there's a new enemy. It's interesting because it's fast but the flashlight hurts it and causes it to retreat. Then it never reappears. I swear 75% of the time, you're just fighting nosalises (the basic enemy type). Overall it's great fun, an FPS romp that kicked off a good series.
I think Saints Row 2 is just barely better than Saints Row: The Third, making it the best in its series. Compared to other open-world crime shooters (GTA, Mafia, Sleeping Dogs, etc.) it's extremely silly. However, compared to future Saints Row games, SR2 is fairly serious and grounded. The core experience of the first three games is really entertaining: wresting control of the city from three different gangs, each with a distinct personality, and doing wacky activities and just messing around in the city whenever you feel like it. It was designed 2007-2008 for the XBox 360. It has some flaws. Most can be fixed with mods. The real problem is the crashing. Sometimes I'll play for all of 5 minutes and CTD (without warning), sometimes for 3 hours with none. I don't know of any mods which can fix this. If you own an XBox 360 (or newer thanks to backwards compatibility), I believe that's a better platform to play this game for the sake of stability.
The combat can be quite punishing in this game. Playing on normal difficulty, I found the balance was fine, except just how hard some of the enemies can hit. Getting hit in melee can be 60% of your health in the midgame. Graphically, the game is veeeery nice. The developers even released an update to support NVidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR just a few days ago. The facial animations are impressive too! The story...? Well, Aloy's story is kinda boring. You can recognise this early on when, as a kid, she says something about being determined to win the tribe's contest - and then TRAINING MONTAGES into her adolescence. However, she is a real character in dialogue. She acknowledges that she's a badass, and voices her exasperation when she gets sent on errands. However, the setting for the game - the faux-organic machines, the tribal factions, the gigantic ruins - is just so darn... cool! The story gets so much more interesting in the second half when you start investigating humanity's downfall and revival. Where Horizon loses a star is rewards and progression. Quests give lots of XP which is useful. But you never get any useful items from them, only generic reward boxes. The merchants have nothing worth buying, so you end up with loads of currency - then when you reach the big city about a third of the way through the game, you can probably afford a couple of the best weapons/armour in the base game. The collectibles only have generic rewards taped to them, which is sinful. Collectibles with no rewards, and rewards that are too easy to obtain, in the same game! I'm miffed. So I was very happy to see them fix it in the DLC!!! In the new area, collectibles ARE the currency and you can get unique weapon/armour modifiers from doing quests.
My only issue with it is that about 6 times, Lara gets tossed around in old vehicles and buildings in the middle of falling apart, almost gets crushed by falling rubble, slides down a mile of slopes or river rapids, falls 5 meters onto cold hard stone - then says "urgh, that hurt" in her posh accent and walks away with no injury.
As others have stated, there's not much gameplay to speak of, so the only thing going for it is its plot. The set-up is interesting, the characters are quirky, and there aren't any plot-holes I'm aware of. The meat of the plot was "good" but the ending left me dissatisfied (I won't go into details for the sake of spoilers). I'm left wondering: "Why add the gameplay, if it contributes nothing?" It is good storytelling (and good music) bogged down by the medium of a videogame.
Yep. A decade on, it's still the best game ever made. The faction system is flawless. Its return to the roots of Fallout makes it a lovely balance of strategy and skill. Oh, you're no good at shooters? Melee build. Oh, you're no good at that either? Pacifist build. A few really likeable companions with their own quests, which all have important choices at the end. Four main factions vying for power, each with their own important goals and flaws, resulting in four main endings. All in all, it's a game about choices. Bethesda would have never made, probably will never make, a game with the sheer creative intuition that Josh Sawyer and the rest of Obsidian masterpieced in Fallout: New Vegas. Oh, and it's got a couple flaws. But hey, just install some mods and it's alright.
The Witcher Enhanced Edition Director's Cut (TWEED) shows some age, but is brilliant once you get over that hurdle. The story is pristine. I never read the books, but I could tell the developers really did. The worldbuilding is perfect. It's fun to read the bestiary. The plot is interesting, and takes some turns and dives. The characters stand out. Choices in the story are interesting. Geralt hates politics, so what does the game do? Makes you to decide between the oppressed (but terrorist) elves, the knightly (but insensitive) religion, or take the Witcher's Way and be forced to fight them both. Side quests also have choices. Do you kill an elderly, small-time cannibal who will be dead in a few years, or do you turn a blind eye in return for a rare recipe? The combat is simple, riculously so. It's just click, click, click in a pattern you learn in the tutorial, and it never gets more complicated than that. However, the game complements this with a focus on preparation. Just swinging your sword won't always cut it (pardon the pun). You should craft potions, venoms, bombs. You should try a different weapon. Heck, even getting drunk before going into battle is a viable early-game strategy. In conclusion, it is a true RPG with fantastic inspiration, but the combat is not really skill-based.
One thing I did really like about the game was the plot. It explores brotherhood vs. lust in a cowboy setting. It really catches the tone of old Spaghetti Westerns where the plot is easy to follow, as it's mostly about the action. The gunplay is split into two halves, because most chapters you get to choose which brother to play as. IMO Ray is very fun and action-packed. Thomas is focused on stealth & sniping, which the game isn't really designed for - it's more of a cover shooter. Overall though, I'd say the gunplay has aged well. At the end of most chapters you are forced to do a duelling minigame. When I did it the first few times it was frustrating - then when I got the hang of it, it became boring, the same thing every time. Conclusion: Good gameplay, good story. Enjoyable... and forgettable.
