I thought that Metro 2033 was an excellent game that nonetheless suffered from some rough edges. The stealth sections weren't always the most sensible and some parts such as the Librarian segment didn't really do it for me. I still loved the atmosphere and the uniqueness the game had to offer. In my opinion Last Light improves on 2033 in virtually all ways. The levels are more cleverly put together and are more intense - especially the encounters with the mutants are much better staged this time and can be quite hectic. The game is also longer, but still really well-paced, and the stealth is better thought out this time. There are some chunky stealth sections here with a refinement that I didn't find in 2033. And as was the case in 2033, it's entirely up to you how to handle stealth. You are never forced, but there's an immediate payoff in it nonetheless. Everything else that was great about 2033 is firing on all cylinders here. The ammo system still works like a charm providing you with a strong motivation to play well, ranger hardcore is just as playable and fun if not more so, the atmosphere, environmental storytelling and sound design are astounding and the beautiful graphics and art hold up effortlessly. Story-wise, I was particularly impressed by how the game handles the final third of the game. Multiple plot threads are brought to satisfying conclusions and I tremendously enjoyed how the Little Dark One was written. You know, it takes skill to make a companion not just a burden, and 4A does a great job here making the Little One endearing, helpful and interesting. I played the game with the Russian voice acting and I'd recommend anyone to do so. The English dub adds a sort of goofy vibe to the game that is entirely unneeded. I also think Metro plays best at the higher difficulties, but that's for anyone to decide. In any case, this is a really well made game. It has heart and class, it's clearly made with care and as such it's an easy recommendation.
Another weak and overrated Obsidian release. By the time you hit the Strip, you're subsequently hit by an "Is this it?", as the game grinds to a halt. The factions are ridiculously lopsided - the NCR gets all the quests and involvement, while the other factions get jack. The representation of the Brotherhood begins and ends in a single underground bunker. The Khans and Caesar's Legion are even more underdeveloped. And while the game may try to sell you the idea of factions in conflict, it's not actually what you'll ever experience. You always feel like you're out for yourself. RPG-wise this game also suffers from the awful Bethesda-style "Eventually you'll get everything anyway, so who cares." All checks, all requirements, all uniqueness is eventually obliterated within a single playthrough. And as with most Bethesda games, there aren't any obstacles to overcome, nothing that requires knowledge or thought. The world isn't meant to provide you with that; it's meant just to simply spend time in. The game also doesn't have any sort of visual flair. The Strip is disappointing and unconvincing, while the rest of the world lacks the more impressive architecture and environmental design from Fallout 3. Everything is empty and everything is yellow. Combined with the fact that tons of assets were copied over straight from Fallout 3, this is about the most artistically bankrupt game I've ever played. Gunplay, stealth, inventory management and loot, character building; all the gameplay elements are weak here. They were so in Fallout 3, and ofcourse Obsidian did nothing to change that. Simply having fun is always a tough task in any Obsidian game because of this persistent problem they have with their games. They can do writing - at times. They don't do gameplay, and they don't do fun. The game also crashes a lot.
Damn those hitscanners. Nearly every single mob in this game is hitscan. At first you're like, oh I'll be real careful and snipe them before they spot me. But after a while you realize they WILL get the drop on you first, so the best tactic becomes quicksave spam and reloading after some guy hits you for sixty damage from his Mauser. Then carefully peek around the corner to find that little opportunity to snipe his legs or whatever body part peeks out. Quicksave, go next. Enemies barely respond to getting hit. They take body shots like absolute champs, you'll get a minor grunt at best. They're not stopped in their tracks, they don't stop shooting, nothing. They don't have animation frames for getting hit. Quake 2 did this much better, in fact Quake 2 did a lot of things better, which is a sad realization. The music is repetitive. The soundtrack of the sub pen level is literally TWO BARS. I usually don't give games a hard time for the music but this is ultra lazy. The maps are equally barren. Barely any props or decals, just big empty industrial spaces. Recycled hallways - often even on the same floor - and monotone color schemes. "Nazi architecture", sure. No but really it's just a lack of development. There's barely any colored lighting. You get the occasional ambient red lighting and there's some nice 32 bit light-sourcing from industrial lights and spots every now and then but otherwise it's tremendously absent, even compared to Quake 2 let alone Unreal. I'm gonna cop bad ratings for this, but I have at least finished this game. The downvotes will be from people who remember playing this game two decades ago but haven't passed the second map since. Well, I have. I love Unreal, Half Life is good, Blood is good, I do a Quake 2 playthrough almost ever year. I've finished all those classics, I've finished Doom 2016 many times, big fan of Fear, Deadspace 1 and 2. I have context. I know what I'm talking about. RTCW doesn't belong in that list of great shooters.
This game is garbage compared to the REAL Baldur's Gates or the magnificent Pillars of Eternity series. BG3 shouldn't carry the name it does, because it is NOT a Baldur's Gate game in style or tone. This game makes you help people you don't WANT to help. It makes you run around with party members that hate your guts. You will find no Imoen or Edér here, nothing like them at all. The companions are unpleasant and annoying. The combat is bad, because it drags on way too long and the animations look silly. Reloading a long fight feels even more like a chore than doing the dishes. Your party isn't a cohesive whole, greater than the sum of its parts. Rather it's a bunch of awkward looking clowns moving around slowwwly and killing things even sloowwwwer. The enemies you fight are entirely forgettable. I thought that Divinity Original Sin 2 was an unenjoyable clunker of a game, but at least it had its own charm and the game felt complete and rich. Baldur's Gate 3 borrows from Divinity, borrows from BG and ends up a weak freaky mismatch of ideas. This Early Access stuff is also an affront and needs to end.
Pillars of Eternity is a good game, but I think you need to have a certain approach to the game to be able to appreciate it. First, you will do yourself a huge favor if you don't try to keep up with all the exposition the game throws at you. There's quite some enjoyable quests and writing in this game, but there's also a LOT of abracadabra about spirits and souls and ethereal realms. Believe me when I say that I have tried to like this game multiple times, and I only succeeded once I stopped feeling forced to make sense of all of it. In other words: enjoy the fun stuff, which WILL come, and try to sort of juggle the esoteric stuff as well as you can. Obviously some people will have a higher threshold for this than others, but I just don't think this game is well tailored to most people's expectations, even those who generally love RPGs. Second, gameplay. This game has really fun combat, but it's very uneven. The key is that you MUST have a cypher. Cyphers are the only class that can easily debuff enemies for dozens of minus deflection and this is what can melt mobs. However, the first cypher the game has to offer is the Grieving Mother and she only becomes available a few levels down the road. So I'd recommend making a Cypher as soon as you get to an inn. I'd also advise maximizing Perception on any class besides tanks and chanters, as Accuracy is probably the best stat in the game. It's not only needed to deal normal hits, but also to overcome ALL saving throws. So do I recommend this game? Well, I can't say. I could totally see any person very quickly getting fed up with this game's storytelling. But at the same time, I can't deny its qualities either. I do love the graphics. And I do love the atmosphere. There's many things I like about POE, I just can't say I love the writing or the companions, and that's a problem for any RPG.
In case you're wondering why this release has such a low score, well imagine this. You've heard they're remastering Baldur's Gate. You've eagerly awaited this moment and are now among the first to install it. But gasp! What you discover is that not only did Beamdog include new companions that stick out like a sore thumb (and deffo not only because of their voiced dialogue), but also Minsc's lines have been altered to include some jarring political reference now. You realize this is nothing more than a re-release of the basegame but with stuff thrown in that you never asked for, or needed, or wanted. It's a thorn in the game's side and you feel it damages the integrity of this beloved classic. Ofcourse then, as a Baldur's Gate fan, you're gonna be pissed off. Even the 1080p thing is mostly moot because the game still runs at the same sharpness, it's just that you can zoom out a bit more. When you lower the camera to respective levels, It still looks basically the same as the 1998 version did. So what does this mean for someone who's a bit more at a distance? Well, luckily you don't even have to touch the new companions with a ten foot pole, and the Minsc thing has been walked back. What you're left with is actually a quite well done re-release with much appreciated bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements. It's not a remaster by any means, but that's probably for the best, anyway. I will be short about Baldur's Gate itself. There's so much that's great about it that going through all the superlative stuff is just cheesy at this point; it's all been said over the course of twenty-plus years. Instead, just go play it and see what you can take away from the experience. You'll probably start off not seeing what all the fuss is about, and be hooked come the third chapter.
I'm probably not as big a fan of The New Order as some, which was a game I moderately enjoyed on my first playthrough but got really critical of beyond that. I think you'll find upon closer inspection that The New Order actually holds a lot of the same problems The New Colossus does. TNO gets a good rep but I think much of it is because it came at a good time and it hid its true nature much better than TNC was able to. A lot of identity politics, a lot of downtime, all while BJ talks about "we're here to kill some Nazis!" yet the game goes out of its way to find opportunities and reasons to NOT let you do that. I think The Old Blood is probably the best that has come out of the Wolfenstein reboot. It's a game with the best art out of the bunch, by far the best atmosphere and a straightforward story. So why am I not really talking about The New Colossus? Well. The truth is that to me, there is no point in playing any of these Wolfenstein games when you can simply go for another Doom 2016 playthrough. Doom is everything that these Wolfenstein games are not. Thoroughly playtested, creatively beautiful and coherent, and FUN. But if I had to talk about The New Colossus, I'd say that it is ultimately a frustrating shooter with poor weapon selection and some crap ideas. Fighting in a wheelchair is dumb and clunky, but also narratively, the Nazi takeover has no dramatic weight and the attempts at humor are often downright worrying. There are some bits that I genuinely thought were well done (a lot of the flashback material clearly had lots of love put into it) but they never coalesce into something impactful because the story is a directionless mess. There's a sort of staccato gameplay experience where every time the shooting gets going, it stops because of a cutscene or forced stealth segment. Again, very similar to The New Order. Every time I think of these games, I circle back to the thought that some other games just do everything way better.
It was the time when Blizzard would release Broodwar, and then Diablo 2, and then Warcraft 3. And we didn't even begin to question if these games were gonna be amazing. Ofcourse they would be, they would be instant classics but we were having so much fun that we didn't even realize the concept of a computer game classic. They say that "You don't know what you got til it's gone." Well, that's the prevailing thought I have when trying out a new Diablo 3 season. Or when looking at the sad state Anthem is in. Because it wasn't only Blizzard that was at the absolute top of gaming. Bioware was the other company that woed so many people with their unique game design. Not as gameplay oriented as Blizzard, but more narrative heavy, their games had legions of fans. And for good reason. Bioware had an uncanny ability to not just get some good writers and have them tell a complex, intricate story. But to understand that computer games needed a different sort of writing. It needed to be concise; it needed to contain all the charm and wit in as few lines as possible. It needed to discuss simple things; earthly stuff that any person could relate to. Don't talk about the space-time continuum; talk about how people regret the past. That is a big part of what made Bioware rpgs so great. You were always interested to hear what any character had to say because you knew it would be worth your time. Bioware's games were a testament to the idea that brevity is the soul of wit, even though their games were sprawling and epic. KOTOR is from this unforgettable generation of games. Bioware took the Star Wars license and made a game that's terrifically similar to A New Hope in terms of soul and character. It looks at its source material with young, naive eyes, and again, isn't interested in complex matters such as politics or science, but much more so in capturing that sense of wonder and adventure we all know from our childhoods. It's Bioware at its finest.
I am very big on gameplay and don't usually bother with the sort of games that lack a decent challenge or that don't have interesting combat. Also, I think open world is a great idea on paper but so far has been proven to be a problematic concept that simply doesn't translate to fun. In most cases I'd say the open world ends up a detriment rather than an asset. Sooo... Witcher 3 is an open world game with bare bones gameplay, uninteresting mechanical character development and no good loot to be found. However, despite all this I can excuse these flaws. Why? Well, it's because of creativity. The sheer amount of fantastic things you can see in this game have moved me to tears on more than one occasion.. The desperate weeping trees in Velen, the wonders and societal layers of Novigrad, the deep, rich side quests with all their beautiful moments. The excellent cprg writing that employs brevity and humor to build stories in a magical world, realized with more color and personality than I've ever seen in any game before or after. The tender moments Geralt shares with the memorable people around him. It is sometimes overwhelming the beauty this game can conjure. Once you finish this game you will never forget it and you will forever take any chance you can to tell people to go play it. Even if you dislike "interactive movie" games, even if you are jaded by all those times playability was coldheartedly thrown out of the window in favor of more impressive graphics, even if you think modern gaming is a sh*tshow, even if ALL this applies to you: You need to play Witcher 3. And play the DLCs after!
