Monthly Report - May/June 2020

Forgot to write my report last month ! Oups.

• Won : Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter, Thomas Was Alone
• Free : The LEGO® NINJAGO® Movie Video Game
• From bundles/gifts/sales : Don’t Starve Together, Graveyard Keeper - Stranger Sins

• Redeemer
  

  15 hours playtime

  40 of 40 achievements

Redeemer - completed

Won it on SteamGifts.
Great game. Super fun, very responsive and very fun to play. I think I played the whole thing over a few days.
I don’t remember why this game ended up on my wishlist, but I’m glad I won it, I went not knowing what to expect and I’ve not been disappointed.
The story is forgettable but who cares when you can slaughter enemies like that :).
Visually it is nice, it feels great to play, there are very good ideas (for instance you find a lot of weapons and ammunition but all clips are quite small, so you are never really empty but you change often, pushing you to try things).
This is challenging, but doable (upon finishing it, I immediately restarted in hard mode, and managed to finish it).
Only very few issues for me : a few bugs that forced me to restart a level (camera getting stuck…), a few bugs that helped me (enemies getting stuck, allowing me to manage its friends before them) and a few very bad checkpoint location (ie BEFORE an unskippable dialog - never do that game developers !). I also noticed a few difficulty spikes that I didn’t notice on replay so maybe I was just tired :).
So overall, fun game, I recommend.
Achievements : I liked that each level has a different achievement, specific to that level, a lot of them were unlocked just by playing, although a few of them annoyed me by being dependent on the game registering the action properly, forcing you to restart the level if you missed (like “Reptile”). Thanksfully all levels are replayable, so this is great for achievements.
The only really annoying one was parrying X times. Because parry is for the weak ;). So I had to replay a level and just… parry. A lot.

• Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter
  

  15 hours playtime

  25 of 25 achievements

Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter - completed

Won on SteamGifts.
This one is hard to review. The game is nice, plays well and I like the idea. But there are several cases/plots, and not all of them are equal.
The first one is very nice and is a good introduction to the mechanics. The story is interesting and the clues you find allow you to build a logical story. I liked it.
The second one is very very bad. It started well, you find a lot of clues that allow you to build multiple stories, the mystery is exciting and intriguing, and this is great… But if you think about them (and you do that a lot ^^), none of them are fully logical… Even the “right” one doesn’t make sense. There are a LOT of plot holes. If I were a real investigator, I would have so many questions that I would have asked and are not answered here. It is as if they just added throwaway lines just to make you doubt, but they didn’t even think about the implication of those. Looking on the Internet to see if I missed something, it seems that I’m not the only one thinking this one was badly written. Also the starting “action” sequence almost made me stop the game, too long, too boring…
The third one is also a nice one, you have multiple suspects, interrogations, contradicting testimonies, it is also quite funny thanks to a secondary character.
The fourth one was a nice surprise as its mechanics are very different from the other investigations and was really fun to do as you need to find the exact sequence of actions.
The last one is forgettable, more linear, more story driven but using basic puzzles more than investigations.
The main issue I have with the game is that each chapter has an “action” sequence (usually right at the end). But the game and controls are not really made for that, so this is clunky, and they are way too long, repetitive and boring. Yes you can skip them, but achievements are tied to them (I skipped one because I was bored… and had to replay the whole chapter…). The game was fine with only investigations, they should have stuck to that. Just improve the writing of some stories, and you have a great game, no need to artificially increase the length by annoying the player.

Achievements : They all unlocked by playing the game, I don’t think you even have to find the “right” answer. BUT you cannot skip the action sequences :(.

• LEGO® Harry Potter: Years 5-7
  

  27 hours playtime

  no achievements

LEGO® Harry Potter: Years 5-7 - completed

Well… This is a LEGO game. I already reviewed the first years… This is pretty much the same, so my review is the same : the game loves to waste your time, bonuses that you need to enable each time you start the game, not as funny as the Batman one…
But it improves a little bit on the previous one : they fixed a few issues I had (for instance they fixed the character unlock screen), I had less crashes, less characters stuck, less bugs. I also appreciate that they added/changed some spells.
I also found that it was harder to follow the story. Maybe it is because I don’t remember well the movies, or because the story becomes more complicated but I didn’t really understand a lot of the scenes. Maybe they rely a little too much on you already knowing the story.
Achievements : No achievements, but I unlocked everything.