March report
Heyo,
Here I am again late with another report, but at least I’m not the only one looking at posts below :D
This month I played four games and written a review I’ve been playing before march. But I’m not done with Apex Legends and I also started the new Enhanced edition of first Borderlands game and so far it’s pretty fun, played most of it with friend. Single player is ok-ish but I can’t see myself completing the whole game and all expansions alone. Right now I’m lvl 34 Soldier or Brigader? I forgot what’s it called in game.
Probably gonna start Ancestor’s Legacy this month, which I bought physical copy of with OST included because it was really cheap on local store.
After that at least one PoP game and then we’ll see.
Anyway here are the reviews - if you stalk my profile for w/e reason, I took some hours off Broken Age and Refunct since I had some hours of idle long time ago and AFK’ed a lot with Broken Age.
Literally a 10-minute first-person-perspective platformer. Tho you can beat it under 4 minutes if you rush it up and know the way.
You jump on platformers and paint them, reach the glowing red button and press it, more platforms spawn with another button, repeat until you reach golden button and boom, game finished. There’s some cubes to collect for achievements.
It’s a pretty easy game to beat, but I found it pretty boring when I replayed it for achievement. It’s cheap, but I would argue it could be a dollar and euro cheaper. It’s bare bones and short, but it works I guess. Regardless give it a shot if you own it, it’s a quick -1 for your backlog :P
Another FPS platformer, this one has some story and gameplay going on.
The story is mostly told and narrated through the protagonist who tells it his daughter as a nighty nighty tale. As a title suggests, it’s a story about protagonists uncle, who as a child, one day visiting his uncle finds him missing and after wandering the house, trying on a sort space/aquatic suit that was made for him, finds a jump pad that literally sends him on a different planet.
The suit you found gives you a power to jump really high or very far if you sprint, but shortly after starting you find a crystal that let’s you attach and pull yourself to the surface, which you will do most of time to move around. There’s a limit to how many times you can use pull in air, each crystal gives you one more use and you find two more, three pulls in total. To reset it you have to touch the ground and you’re free to glide. Later on you’ll get rocket boots that give you a little boost in some places.
Gliding through air is hmm, pleasant? That’s perhaps the best description I can give, you still have some control in air, you can fully stop in mid air and fall down and use your mouse and movement keys to maneuver in air. But personally to me it feels a little sluggish, if you ever bunny hoped in something Half-life or played old FPS-es you know how fast you can move in those games, the ASAMU feels slow compared to these games. Even running in a modern game like Apex Legends feels faster than flying in ASAMU.
What this game really does well is a sense of scale. The levels are HUGE and it’s impressive it runs so well and you only have few loading screens through the whole game.
The game feels a little bit unfinished at some places. Remember how you reset your pull ability by landing on ground? There’s a speedrun achievement and some later levels have quite a few places where you’re not supposed to land, especially the last one where you move above the supposed path and skip some parts. It didn’t feel like an intended way at all. But it’s the fastest way and pretty much every guide used these spots.
You will meet some creatures on your way and the animations are horrible through most of game, I found some creatures that are literally frozen in a pose. I guess they couldn’t afford good animator.
But it’s still a pleasant game if you play just once and forget about it. The narrator has a nice voice, the game is easy and has nice looking environments, a lot of checkpoints, ok OST and is easy to learn.
Favorite tracks:
03 – Sanctuary
06 – Welcome Home
09 – The Wishing Stones
A 2014 adventure from Double Fine.
I don’t have much to say here other than if you played any other adventure game like Grim Fandango you already know how it plays. Lots of dialogue, try clicking on everything and everyone if you’re stuck. Game has 3 Acts and Act 1 and 3 are pretty easy and not filled with adventure game bullshit where solutions to puzzles make no sense or feel random.
Act 2 is the longest one and the one I had to use guide as there’s so much to do at once and I admit maybe I wasn’t paying my full attention during some dialogue, so I made it harder for myself.
A unique aspect of this game is that you have two protagonists that you can switch between at will. I really liked it as if I felt like I got stuck, I could just switch and progress with other character.
Everything looks hand-drawn and it’s really beautiful. Voice acting is great too, one of the protagonists is actually voiced by Frodo (Elijah Wood) which was a surprise to me. OST is excellent too. Pretty much every audio-visual aspect of this game is great.
This game lacks interesting and/or funny characters. Grim Fandango was much better in that regard, I really liked Manny and others he interacted with.
Favorite tracks:
Good OST overall but I didn’t felt like going through it and picking my favorites or the one that caught my attention this time, sorry.
This could easily be 8/10 and frankly it soon might be for me when I start NG+.
A debut game from Reikon Games, RUINER is stylish and brutal game set in a not very original, but a beautifully made dark cyberpunk setting very heavily inspired by Blade Runner when it comes to looks and tone.
A top-down shooter, RUINER is pretty challenging game that throws waves on enemies on each arenas as you progress through the level. You are equipped with a full-auto gun with unlimited ammo and a pipe as a sidearm, but you can get better weapons from every enemy you kill although they have limited ammo on them. You also find better weapons lying down between arenas and inside weapon caches that you unlock doing a really easy mini-game. Each weapon is more or less unique, you’ll get a flamethrower, minigun, a shotgun where each pellet explodes on impact, a gun that shoots balls of lightning as well as some standard weapons like SMG’s that only differ in rate of fire etc. Melee weapons other that your pipe are also present but from what I noticed most of them only differ in looks and damage done. But frankly melee weapons aren’t the focus of this game, you will be using firearms through most of the game.
Fighting is fast and challenging and later on it got reaaaally fun after I got some decent skills and got used to controls, which could use a little improvement on K+M. You will have to dash constantly and be aware of what’s going on constantly.
Talent trees are present and most of them give you active abilities with a little video clip attached showing you what exactly it does. I could see starting game with different builds but I can’t imagine that a lot of them would be very good, at least on hard difficulty which is what I played on. Especially that one tree that gives boost to melee weapons, since every melee breaks except your pipe break and enemies pretty early in the game can dash to avoid your attacks. There are also passive skills that just boost your health, damage done with weapons etc. Pretty basic and boring, but kinda essential.
Between every story level you get to hang around in the city which is basically a hub area. And ehh it really lacks a purpose in this game. There’s almost nothing to do except a quest for one character which give’s you some extra chests to open in next level, it’s pretty climatic city with great background music, but the game could really do it without it.
Story is kinda predictable and not that great, but through the whole story you stay in contact with “Her” and she tells you about the locations you visit as well as motivates you and she really likes to use Japanese emojis. She’s also the only person that is friendly towards you in the game and you’re her puppy 🐶
But the OST is so fucking good. I had trouble picking just few tracks from it, most of it is so good I really recommend giving a full listen to those tracks I picked below, maybe that will encourage you to give this game a try :D But note for future, don’t buy the OST on steam as it doesn’t contain all tracks ,it’s untagged and comes in WAV (but IMO that’s still better than selling MP3…).
Visually game is gorgeous, a heavy use of dark industrial areas combined with dark red and sometimes pale white light makes for a beautiful spectacle through levels. I had to play on minimal settings but it still looked beautiful.
Boss fights – mixed feelings. Some of them are well designed and have different phases and moves you can learn and counter them. Others just feel like really buffed version of standard enemies you encounter.
I was surprised to find out it was this their first game and it’s made in my home country Poland. According to their site this studio was started by veterans who worked on all 3 Witchers, Dying Light and Dead Island. I’m really looking forward to their next games.
I will soon start my second playthrough on NG+ and as I said it might turn to 8/10 for me, I really started to love this game somewhere in the middle. A lot of you probably own it from Humble monthly like me so give it a try! :D
Favorite tracks:
01 - Sidewalks and Skeletons - Memory - (start)
12 - Zamilska - Duel 35
17 - Sidewalks and Skeletons – Drifter
18 - Zamilska - Smash
19 - Zamilska- Army
25 - Sidewalks and Skeletons – Disappear
26 - Sidewalks and Skeletons - The End
After playing some BR’s like PUBG, Realm Royale, CS:GO Danger Zone and Fortnite, I can say this is easily the best Battle Royale on the market right now.
For most part it’s a standard BR, jump from ship, land, loot, kill people. But you get to choose one of nine characters that each have one passive skill, one active and one ultimate ability. Though 3 of them are behind a paywall, you can still unlock them for free if you grind levels and get enough of the free currency.
Personal favorites of mine are Bloodhound, Bangalore and latest addition, Octane. Bloodhound is tracker that can see tracks, which in game translates as showing you little icons of footsteps, opened doors etc. and the more red they are, the fresher they are. It’s pretty easy after some playing to tell the time when they were left there. Active ability scans area around you and shows a snapshot of any enemy in area and its ultimate boosts your speed and turns your vision black&white but enemies are colored red, making it very easy to spot them, combine this with Bangalore smoke grenade and you can see enemies through smoke while they can’t (unless they have their own Bloodhound :P).
Bangalore’s passive gives her a speed boost when an enemy is shooting in her direction, can use aforementioned smoke grenades that cover quite a lot of ground and her ultimate calls an airstrike that drops bombs with delayed trigger that cover a huge area, but you have time to either hide or minimize the damage with proper positioning.
And added just recently Octane, who look’s A LOT like a Borderlands character, is speed junkie with passive health regeneration and can give himself a speed boost with injection that also slightly damages him, but obviously your passive mitigates it. Though that active ability has no cooldown and you could potentially kill yourself with it, but I’m not sure if that’s possible lol. His ultimate has a pretty low cooldown and he throws a jump-pad that anyone can use, it allows you to either travel a little faster with long jump or get to higher ground.
Each character has a unique personality and look that reflects that. I really like the design of all the character Respawn made. E.g. from my favorite trio, Bloodhound is a gas masked hunter with a pet raven and some kind of pagan religion centered around hunting. Bangalore is ex-military with typical military jargon and she often comments about gun's and their strengths when you ping them on ground. Octane is Spanish(?) junkie that rocks that Borderlands Psycho look and constantly wants more action. None of the BR’s I played had characters like that, usually it’s just a blank that you can decorate with cosmetics.
There were some triggered alt-righters and “””gamers””” because of course only one of the characters is a white male and apparently Bloodhound is non-binary and Gibraltar, a different character is gay. This of course triggered the fuck out of these people. But it’s nowhere written on official site nor said in the game. Frankly I couldn’t tell you what gender or what sexual preferences each character has from their dialogue or behavior. It was confirmed in an interview with a dev but that’s all. The in-game characters are not preachy or bragging in any way, as I said before I couldn’t tell you who they fuck.
No vehicles in this one, but through the whole map there balloons with ziplines that you can use to zip into air and then land whenever you want. There’s a lot of ziplines in towns and cliffsides that let you travel fast. Pathfinder can spawn a temporary zipline for his teammates, Octane jump-pads and Wraith can spawn a portal that works both ways. Each of these spawned abilities can be used by your enemies too though.
Cosmetics and loot boxes are present, but for an EA published game it’s not that bad. Everything can be unlocked with free currency for leveling up, loot boxes actually have drop chances written on shop and you get free one each lvl up to like level 20, after that it’s every few levels. Most of it is cosmetics, only 3 characters are blocked from start but as I said you can unlock them too with grind. But apparently EA had zero influence over this game. And considering it’s F2P and like 90% of content is available from get-go (not counting cosmetics) it’s really not bad :)
Lots of different guns to shot, SMG’s, AR’s, pistols, shotguns, snipers, LMG’s. Each can be equipped with modifications you find in the world, some weapons have special attachment called hop-up that give it a buff or change how they behave e.g. Havoc is a gun that needs 2-3 spin time to shoot, a legendary version of hop-up makes shooting instant.
Right now you can only play in 3-team squads, which is my biggest gripe with Apex. Premade squad or with randoms. You don’t have to talk to them ofc and you can use built in ping system that works pretty great and we use it even when we play on discord. You have different pings for loot, enemies, places to go, with proper key binds you can use it at ease.
And the game just works. It worked from the get-go unlike PUBG with took years to fix. Netcode in this one is great, I can get stable 60fps @1080p on 660Ti and FX-6350. Though I have to set most of things to minimum to keep it at 60fps on all situations, but I don’t mind considering it’s a fresh game.
And oh wow, OST is pretty great too, although it’s pretty short.
Favorite tracks:
It’s super short, so I’m gonna leave all of it
Everyone is playing borderlands I’m trying to wait but its so hard when all I see now is all my friends and people like you playing them.
Why wait, better play it now before everyone else stops :P But if you did just storyline quests you could finish this in 2 or 3 hours, not kidding.
Wasn’t that long ago since I played it for the 2nd time so I’ve been just waiting to play it when borderlands 3 comes out in a year. I want to finish of saints row before I start anything big off again anyway so that should deter me from playing it
Ah gotcha! Well if you gonna wait for BL3 on steam than you still have more than a year to finish other big games :D