Bought in 2018, I played it a bit but was put off by the creepiness. I was pretty early in the game, walking around getting suprised and smacking everything with a wrench. I tried it again this month and had no idea what was going on at my save point, so I restarted. This time I persevered a bit more and was pleasantly surprised when I found a tool to let me identify mimics pretty quickly.

Not the easiest game to get a lot of achievements on. Some require full playthroughs (killing everyone, killing nobody, linked to alien enhancements, linked to no enhancements). I played being a nice guy and grabbed a couple of extra at the end but still only managed about 30% :( So, it's into the beaten pile and onto the next game.

Bought in 2017, I got pretty far in this and then got stuck. I think I was 3-4 levels from the final boss. Took me a long time to get past that part and I struggled with the controls a lot. Initially I couldn't work out how to use Relics, then I was using them accidentally all the time. Total amount of time in the game is pretty low and It's a terrible achievement rate, but there's no way I'm playing through that again as other characters or trying to get more collectibles. I'm just too bad at it!

A pretty embarrassing 9% of achievements dragging down my average, but it's heading to the beaten pile so I can forget about it!

I had the original Dead Island already and beat it way back in 2013, so why did I pick up the definitive edition? Well, to be honest I only wanted a DLC which isn't available separately anymore. I bought the definitive edition hoping it would just add the DLC to my existing game, but it created a completely separate entry in my library. So, anyway, I beat the game again, got a few extra achivements and played the DLC that I wanted. So, beaten again!

The impetus for all of this was a kind of challenge. I'm in a Discord group that has 'bounties' posted. which are basically game achievements. If you get the achievement and prove it with screenshots and the achievement on your account, you get xp in the channel. There's no real tangible reward for all this, but it's fun. When I first joined the server, they were all bounties for games I didn't have and wasn't intersted in but recently more interesting ones have appeared. I got a few for games I own and missed out on a couple as other peopler picked them up. It got a bit addictive and while this wouldn't get me to play a lot of games and I certainly won't suddenly become a better player and magically get difficult achievements, it is an incentive to play games I already own and sometimes pick up other games if I can find them cheap. Which leads me on to...

In a Humble Choice recently that I didn't get but there was an achievement posted on the bounty board (see Dead Island post above) that looked doable and the game was reasonably interesting to me. I did a trade and picked it up without having to buy it.

Not really a difficult game. I only have one other racing game in my library (Wreckfest) but still managed to win most races on my first try with the standard car at intermediate level. There were some tricky tracks and as I got further in the game I found myself buying some cars just for variety and to get past a few races I struggled with. Overall pretty repetitive. There are a limited number of tracks that keep coming up. The achievement I was going for was to race every event, not necessary win or get on the podium. Seemed a bit strange, so I added the additional element of getting on the podium or the equivalent for time trials. Took me 16 hours overall, but it was pretty fun. I should add that it got quite mixed reviews. I'm not sure how many of those were from people who played earlier Dirt games, but this was my first game in the franchise and while I might not buy any more soon It wasn't a bad game. 45% of achievements (could probably get 2 more if I did some grinding and got better at one of the events) but the majority of those remaining are related to DLC. Into the Beaten pile it goes!

In a Humble Choice recently that I didn't get but there was an achievement posted on the bounty board (see Dead Island post above) that looked doable and the game was reasonably interesting to me. I did a trade and picked it up without having to buy it.

Had this on my wishlist for a while and managed to get it for a good deal. I haven't played any of the other Desperados games, it reminded me of the old game Commandos a little. Not really a story-driven game but the story was more prominant that I thought it would be. I also quite liked the different skills that the characters brought to the game, although to be honest I tended top use the same one or two characters for most of the levels as I found them easier to use. Beat the game and managed to get 63% of achievements in the process too. Beaten and onto the next game!

Another Humble Choice game that I skipped over then picked up later. The main thing that put me off was the setting, the same thing that put me off Skyrim for a long time. When I first started playing, I thought I'd made a pretty big mistake actually. Controls were very difficult with mouse and keyboard and the start of the game was 90% cut scenes. After switching to a controller for 90% of the game (still used the mouse for a few parts) things improved a little.

The next issue was combat. No guns (as expected) and the only ranged weapon is a bow and arrow - no crosshairs, hand wobble and the arrow dips. All very accurate, but difficult to use. The majority of combat was hand to hand, also very difficult. It did make my improvements in combat more satisfying, but even by the end of the game I felt like I didn't really have a good command of it. One more criticism - bugs and glitches. I redid one quest 4-5 times because it didn't go the way I expected for no apparent reason. Then there were a few quests that seemingly stopped working. There was no dialogue or warning to say that the quest couldn't be done, I did what was asked but the quest giver wouldn't take the goods after I'd got them. Very annoying!

Onto the more positive parts. There were a lot of parallels to Bethesda/Fallout games, which I like a lot. Some aspects they improved a bit, like the pickpocketing and lock picking. The side-quests were much less repetitive than other similar games, and probably the most impressive part was the story and voice acting. After the initial cut-scene fest at the start of the game, there were far fewer interruptions but they were all interesting and built oin the story. A few twists and just overall really good. Graphically, the scenery looked great. Clipping in the distance was a problem and annoying, but generally the background looked great. Even down to small things like rain, thunderstorms and butterflies fluttering past looked great.