• Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered
  

  20 hours playtime

  16 of 57 achievements

• Red Faction: Guerrilla Steam Edition
  

  17 hours playtime

  10 of 60 achievements

• Neon Chrome
  

  24 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

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February

Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered

There seems to be a few instances on Steam when publishers give you an updated/remastered version of a game (in addition to the original) that means you have to finish both or have one languishing incomplete in your library. In my library, this is an issue with Darksiders (Darksiders and Darksiders: Warmastered Edition) and Red Faction Guerrilla (Red Faction Guerrilla Steam Edition and Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered).

This month, I completed the main story of Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered. For a while, I was trying to do all the other side missions, but there’s one vehicle delivery mission left that I tried to do A LOT and have given up on. I could probably get a few more achievements if I really tried, but never going to get 100% as there are a lot of multiplayer missions and the servers are empty. The game was pretty fun, mainly due to the fact you can destroy the environment. There’s nothing else that really stands out. Missions aren’t particularly good or varied, there isn’t much of a story, and the physics are a bit screwy (particularly driving). The graphics are dated as it was released in 2009 (there didn’t seem to be much difference in the remastered version to me). I certainly don’t like it enough to go back and finish the main story in the other version of the game I have. So even though I only beat one of the versions, I marked both as beaten on my BLAEO profile.

Neon Chrome
Delayed my February post by a few days to finish this one. Pretty fun game overall. I didn’t really think about the achievements for a long time, then had to grind a little to get all the weapons and complete every secret level. Beating the game wasn’t that difficult. The fact that you can spend money on stats and get new guns after each try makes it easier. Haven’t completed a game fully for a while, so nice to get this 100%.

Mass Effect 3
Continuing the Mass effect marathon, I finished the third in the series on Origin. The initial part of the game felt like it was very limited in choice. The first missions were very guided and involved me just following another character or on-screen prompts. Thankfully this didn’t continue throughout the game and later on it felt more like the other two in the series I’ve played.

The story made it feel different to the other two games in that I was being pushed towards a final aim rather than what seemed like more open exploration in the previous two. I enjoyed it, and it was nice to run into characters from the previous games, but I think I liked Mass Effect 2 better.

When I was very close to the final mission, I started to wonder about Galactic Readiness. No matter what I did in the game, this didn’t seem to be changing. I’m glad that I searched online, as I probably would’ve finished the game and got a less than ideal ending if I didn’t. There was an online element to the game that increased this readiness when the game was first released. It didn’t seem to be an option playing it almost 7 years on, but thankfully they replaced this with a kind of online game. There was no skill to it at all, just clicking and waiting for a few hours then clicking again. It delayed me completing the game for 2 days while I prepared this online aspect of the game. In the end, I think it helped me to get a better ending to the game (there are multiple, I don’t think I got the ‘best’ one).

Overall, a good game and one that was fun to play. In total I put 23 hours into this, but at no point did it feel like a grind. It seemed more difficult than 2 (perhaps I didn’t level up my powers/guns as much) but not unfairly so. The story was interesting and the missions varied.

I actually went straight on to Andromeda after I finished this, but was not impressed at all. The graphical style of the game is completely different and doesn’t seem to fit at all. The characters are uninteresting and some of the voice acting is pretty bad. Even the depart from the story arc was a little disappointing after all the time I spent with the characters from the original 3. I guess I might go back and give it another shot, but I’m not really feeling it at the moment.

One more thing
Almost forgot. I tried the Origin subscription thing this month (Origin access) as it was reduced. It meant I could try a couple of games that had been on my Steam wishlist for a long time without actually buying them - Hyper Light Drifter and Duskers. They were okay, but I wasn’t particularly impressed, so they’ve been knocked off my wishlist. Not exactly reducing my backlog, but it did help me decide not to buy them and so stop me from increasing the backlog!