killergege

Monthly Report - July 2020

  • Won : -
  • Free : -
  • From bundles/gifts/sales : -
  • Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior

    3 hours playtime

    2 of 2 achievements

Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior - completed

I don’t remember how I got this but I wanted a fun quick game, and I selected this one.
That was quite fun… I think it took me more time than necessary to finish it as I never played any Viscera Cleanup game so I didn’t really know any of it mechanics and it took some time to understand them all (for instance, I quickly got garbage when trying to get a bin or a bucket, so I thought there was a finite number of uses, also I didn’t know what to do with the name tags). I found that blood / objects detector is more annoying than useful though, it could be improved.
But overall this satisfied my detail oriented brain :).
Achievements : I’m quite thorough in my cleanup and collection so I got the achievements easily :)


  • Machinarium

    5 hours playtime

    12 of 12 achievements

Machinarium - completed

Hum… Difficult. The game looks nice, it is a charming puzzle/point & click game, and I quite enjoyed the game. I also liked that it gives you the solution of the puzzles if you complete a annoying minigame, and I think this is good: no need to check for external website if you’re stuck, and the minigame is annoying enough that you don’t abuse it :).
But the game lost some save files several times (not sure why, I don’t understand the pattern), and I cannot recommend a game that is not able to properly handle such a basic feature. I don’t care of the technical details, this is not normal, and a lot of users seem to complain about the issue. For a game that old, this is not acceptable, moreover the developers added workarounds (you can skip levels, there is a tool that you can download to manually backup them…), which makes it even more surprising and annoying.
Achievements : Very easy, you just need to finish each level.


  • Far Cry 2

    10 hours playtime

    no achievements

Far Cry 2 - unfinished

I still didn’t finish the game but I already have things to says, so I’ll do a partial review and maybe another one when I finish it, if my feelings changed.
First, I just read my review on Far Cry 1, and I could write exactly the same thing : stealth is not really a viable option (they are spotting you randomly : sometimes you are behind a big rock, they see you, sometimes you are well exposed and they don’t), direct combat is usually easier and more efficient, there are a LOT of bugs. Although they improved on the checkpoint system, now you can save, which I appreciate a lot (especially considering the number of times I died because of bugs). And again, the story (so far… ~25%) seems forgettable.
But I feel that they managed to make a worse game : it is ugly (everything is brown/grey, at least Far Cry 1 was colorful, I think the models & landscapes are less detailed), the weapon jamming is very annoying and quite useless, as well as the malaria mechanism, the enemy repop is atrocious (sometimes you just come back a couple of minutes later and they are all there again), and the world is quite empty (except for a few story missions, camps are not very populated, and everything is almost always the same), I would have preferred camps with more enemies, harder to capture, but without repop, at least not that fast. Moreover I feel that there is not much interesting things to do and it’s very repetitive.
I also don’t like that they limit the weapons you can have. If I had the choice, I’d have a sniper riffle, an automatic weapon and a pistol, but the riffle and automatic weapon are in the same category and you can only have one of each. This is probably intended, but it reduces my fun (and sniper riffle is overpowered anyway, enemies will usually check the cadaver so you can just snipe them one by one). Explosive weapons effectiveness seem too random to risk it. The weapon shopping could be nice, but you are expected to buy weapons without even knowing what they are (sorry I’m not a weapon expert so I don’t know what those letters and numbers mean), a small description would have been nice (most games display stats : accuracy, fire rate, clip size…), or at least a way to test them.
Also the AI is dumb : a lot of enemies are doing nothing during a shooting or are moving randomly without hiding, and a lot of enemies get stuck in scenery so you have to look for them.
So overall, so far, a “meh” game. I don’t remember well Far Cry 1, but even if I also found it meh, in my memories, it was better.
Achievements : None.


Arbiter Libera

Have you considered modding Far Cry 2? It makes it a lot more manageable.

ModDB

killergege

Indeed, I quickly decided to mod it (but keeping it how it was intended, mostly trying to fix bugs), which improved slightly things and this is the reason I’m still playing it :).