I managed to beat the Hollow Knight true ending and really enjoyed my time with that game. Up to about 8 hours into Silksong, I was happy enough; it was noticeably harder but still enjoyable, and the early boss fights felt like dances again. But things turned very quickly, at about 10 hours now and I don't see myself being able to beat this game, so I'm going to cut my losses early. I still have no meaningful upgrades and even normal enemies are best avoided since beating them takes a minute and gives nothing of value. Never mind the bosses, which can kill you in an instant because apparently iframes were nerfed to the ground and you also take two points of damage just by standing a little too close to a staggered enemy. I might be able to get out of Act 1 if I spend all of my free time grinding, but honestly I can only see it getting worse from there. It feels like they were testing a NG+ "enemies do double damage and have double health" mode and left it enabled by default by accident. If you managed to beat the highest challenges in Hollow Knight hitless, this is the game for you, otherwise steer clear. What remains is a deep feeling of sadness because I was really hoping this would be my game of the year.
After encountering odd behaviour I've played around with compatibility mode and scheduler affinity, and it seems like I'm now able to play it, but there are still strange things going on - supermarkets that are not selling products and don't have the normal buttons to add them, crashes when hitting certain keys, and such. Can't really comment on the quality of the game because I think I'm giving up on it before even getting past the first tutorial (incidentally, you can fail the tutorial by taking too long to read the texts - that's also quite broken).
I wanted to like this game, but... the experience is too frustrating. Lo Wang's special abilities are activated using multiple keypresses followed by mouse clicks. In the heat of battle, this is unfortunately not reliable. More often than not you will fail to activate the ability you want - and with two dozen enemies ganging up on you, that means hitting the quickload button. Press D twice, then hold RMB and you should heal - in theory. In practice it often doesn't trigger, and even when it does, it takes about a second or so after your input for the animation to start showing, leaving you uncertain whether the game has accepted your combo or not. Do you restart it, losing more time? In a proper old-school game you wouldn't get stuck on "decorative" objects lying around - in games like Doom and Quake you could move around quickly and freely. In Shadow Warrior, you're likely to trip over something and get stuck in the scenery just as you're being chased by a horde of enemies. The fact that your vision goes darker as you take damage contributes to this problem. The game still has frame rate issues, and it is the only game where this is a problem on my computer (and that's after turning the resolution down to 1280x800 instead of 1920x1200). If none of the above problems kill you, the frame rate drop will combine with the darkened vision and demons moving at incredible speed to make you entirely unable to tell what's going on.
Occasionally, people voice the opinion that SC2k or SC3k are better games, and I can understand how one might think so. SC4 didn't initially grip me in the same way as its predecessors did, and it does feel a little unwieldy at the start. However, once you spend sufficient time with it, it will reward you with depth and possibilities that other Sim City games (and other city building games in general) just don't have. Once you have a few cities under your belt, go to sc4devotion.com or simtropolis.com to find all manner of great add-on buildings. However, there's one point of criticism here - while the modding community produces awesome content, there is a pervasive petty possessiveness that prevents people from producing easy to download and install mod packs. So, while things like CAM are great ideas and offer rewarding gameplay, in reality I expect few people will want to go to the trouble of spending a few weeks to set it up.
I completed this game for the first time last year, and I was somewhat disappointed, and actually quite annoyed with the game by the time I had reached the end. There are a number of gameplay choices that I felt were harmful, first and foremost the respawning enemies. I found the inventory management tedious, the lack of ammo annoying, and the need to backtrack through 10 levels or so (full of new monsters) to fetch some mildly useful items ridiculous. A lot of these features don't create genuine difficulty, they are just make-work for the player. The hacking minigame (which requires no skill at all) is another example.
