kubikill

October + November 2019 Progress

Finished games:

October

Playtime: 143.8 hours
Played on Steam

An action-RPG game.

Wow, I was looking forward to this game for a very long time. I heard many conflicting stories about it - some people said it's a bad game, others said it's good and I really wanted to see Fallout 4 for myself.

F4 improved companions a lot. I liked how they were more like actual people and not just some blind followers or meat shields. They would actually comment on things around them or the things you do. They could also voice their opinions during conversations with other NPCs. I liked the weapon and armor modding systems as well, which were vastly expanded compared to NV which was limited. Base building was ok at first, but I got bored of building settlements and just installed a mod to let my companions automatically take care of the settlements. Apparently power armor was improved as well, but I barely used it. From the bad things, the game went from an RPG that's trying to be a shooter to a shooter that's trying to be an RPG. I missed skills, traits, skill checks and even the weapon/armor repairing system. The dialogue also sucked, you can only choose from 4 dialogue options at once. I hated how the game wouldn't tell me exactly what I would say when picking one of the options but fortunately I could fix that with a mod. Performance also sucks, I probably shouldn't be saying this as someone who played this with just 4GB of RAM but the frame rate could've been better.

Even though this game has a lot of flaws I still managed to enjoy it. It pains me that we may not see an another good Fallout game after what happened with Fallout 76 but we have The Outer Worlds so it's not that bad, I guess. Recommend.


Reventure

8.9 hours, 100 of 100 achievements


November

This War of Mine

45.7 hours, 55 of 55 achievements

A survival game.

I'm sure most of you played this game already, so I'll keep it short - it's a really fun game that also makes you reconsider how it's like to be a normal citizen during a war. However it gets too easy when you learn fully how the game works. The DLCs were solid for the most part, Father's Promise and The Last Broadcast were really good, Fading Embers was ok, and honestly nothing would've changed if I played without The Little Ones. The devs recently released a final update which adds the DLC locations to main game, which is nice. Definitely recommend this one.


Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter

15.2 hours, 35 of 76 achievements
Played via Serious Sam Fusion 2017

A HD version of an old-school FPS.

It's pretty much the same thing as The First Encounter, but with new levels, weapons, powerups and enemies, which help keep the game fresh and more fun.


Deus Ex: The Fall

8 hours, no achievements

An action-RPG game.

I've heard a lot of bad things about this game but honestly, as a mobile game, it's actually quite good. It's pretty much a shorter and simplified version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The story is good, maybe not as good as the other Deus Ex games but still good. Gameplay is mostly the same as HR, but slightly worse since some mechanics were cut. The touchscreen isn't made for FPS games and aiming is a bit difficult - because of this during my playthrough I relied more on melee takedowns than weapons. Surprisingly, the graphics look well, too. This game was supposed to be just the first episode of a larger thing, but the next episodes were never released, which is a shame - I would definitely play them as well.
PC players are reporting that the game is super glitchy but I haven't ran into any issues on the Android version. The mobile version has microtransactions but trust me, you won't need them at all.

It's impressive how they managed to make a mobile game that was so close to Human Revolution in 2013. If you loved Human Revolution and have a phone/tablet, give this game a go.


Hidden Folks

3.1 hours, no achievements

If you remember "Where's Wally/Waldo" then this is pretty much the same thing, except you can interact with objects. Hidden Folks was fun at first but after 2 hours I got tired of it. It turns out I might not like hidden object games as much as I thought. But I can see that the creator worked hard on this game. I didn't go for 100% completion for this one and I skipped the DLC as well.


Shadwen

9.4 hours, 48 of 48 achievements

A stealth escort game.

An escort mission except it's a whole game and all the bad things about an escort mission are gone. Lilly will make a move as soon as there's a clear path ahead so you don't have to babysit her. Oh, did the guard turn around just as Lilly was running past him? Nah don't worry, the guard won't care and Lilly will just run back to her last hiding spot. Missed a gap in the guard patrols? Got spotted by a guard you didn't notice? A guard accidentally died because physics? Nothing that can't be solved with unlimited time rewind. Also time doesn't move unless you do so you have all the time to think. It gets a bit repetitive towards the end and there isn't much to the story. But as a stealth game, it's really good.


Portal Stories: Mel

11.6 hours, 28 of 28 achievements

A Portal 2 mod.

This mod takes place between Portal 1 and 2. It adds a new storyline and several new test chambers for you to solve. Puzzles were challenging, Virgil was a good Wheatley replacement, overall it just felt like it was an actual Portal 2 expansion. And it's free, too. It's so good that I wouldn't mind paying for it.


Open World Game: the Open World Game

1.4 hours, 20 of 20 achievements
Limited profile features

Wow this game is so amazing!!! The world's full of various locations, there's deserts and plains and… things! Also there are no invisible barriers! See that mountain? You can climb it! Quests are awesome as well, there are 1000s of quests that were definitely handmade and I loved that moment when I had to complete a 10-button QTE to pay respects at the graveyard. Microtransactions are cool as well, you can pay $100 to instantly complete the game! Isn't that great?

9/10 It has a little something for everyone. Too much water, though.

Ok jokes aside, this is a free satire game about open world games. All you do is go around the map picking up markers, complete QTEs and play a fishing minigame. Super simple. You get a new journal entry every time you pick up a marker, and those are interesting to read.
Also the game's volume was set to 0% for some reason and like the dummy I am, I played through it without audio. Oh well, I enjoyed it anyway. It's free so if you have an hour or two to spare give this game a go sometime.


Receiver

1.9 hours, no achievements

An experimental FPS with focus on advanced gun handling.

The manual gun handling in this game is awesome. It's something that's very rarely seen in video games. I would've loved to play through this game to the end but the enemy turrets and drones really frustrated me - sometimes they go down after 1 shot and sometimes they won't go down after multiple shots! You get shot once, you die and you start from the beginning. I didn't want to spend too much time on this so I dropped it. I hope someone can take this concept and make a full game out of this.


Yooka-Laylee

19.6 hours, 35 of 35 achievements


Unfinished games:

  • Just started State of Decay: Year-One Survival Edition. Seems like a decent survival game so far. Quite glitchy, though.
  • Serious Sam 2 feels so different compared to The First Encounter or The Second Encounter. Some of the humor feels forced but other than that, it’s still just as fun.
  • Both Shenmue 1 and 2 seem absolutely marvelous. Gameplay is very slow-paced, but I enjoyed walking through the busy streets of Yokosuka and Hong Kong’s Wan Chai.
  • I barely made any progress on Gothic II, Dust: An Elysian Tail and Deponia: The Complete Journey because my laptop broke. More about that below.

Current progress

31.58% (168/532)
7.71% (41/532)
11.84% (63/532)
48.87% (260/532)

does not include "won't play" games

Notes

So at the end of October my laptop broke. It turns out that the GPU got fried and now I have to replace the whole motherboard… Yeah no, I thought it would be better to just buy a new laptop instead, and since Black Friday was just one month away, I decided to wait until then. Because I was without a laptop for a month, I had to stop playing Gothic II, Dust: An Elysian Tail and Deponia: The Complete Journey and I couldn’t work on BLAEO Generators too much. But now I managed to snag a nice Dell Latitude E6430 not only for less than my previous laptop, but it also has slightly better specs! Can’t wait to spend an entire day installing Windows and Linux and setting this bad boy up when it arrives next week.

Speaking of Black Friday, did you score any good deals? Other than the laptop, I only got a Steam Controller (if that counts, as I bought it on 26th). I was thinking about getting a New 2DS XL too, but I decided to pass and buy it sometime next year as I spent a lot of money recently.

I’m too tired to write reviews for Yooka-Laylee and Reventure but I’ll answer questions about them if someone has them.

That’s all for now. Have a good December!

malabagaa

Is the “more” button on Yooka-Laylee missing on purpose?

kubikill

Yeah, I was too tired to write a review for it and for Reventure as well. But if you have any questions now, I’ll answer them.

malabagaa

I see :) because it was among the others and couldn’t tell if it was missing on purpose or if it was some HTML error preventing it to show.. no, nothing in particular, dont’ worry, just curious about the game in general :)

kubikill

Yeahhhh I was tired when I made this post so lemme fix this a bit now. The game’s pretty good, see my reply to Trent’s comment if you want to know more about the difficulty.

Trent
  • I am one of the few people apparently who enjoyed Deus Ex: The Fall on Steam. My review points out that the main reason it was received poorly on Steam is because 1) it started as a mobile app 2) it’s a watered down Deus Ex experience (duh), and 3) it’s only part of the story and the rest will not be written. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun. Oh well. :)
  • Dust was a lot of fun. I got all but the two hard achievements. :)
  • What was the difficulty level of Yooka-Laylee? I never played these games as a kid, so I’m not great at platformers. Is there an Easy difficulty setting, and should I use it?
  • Thanks for the reminder about Portal Stories: Mel. I should try it out sometime.
  • Shadwen looks fun. It looks like it takes two full playthroughs to get all of the achievements (pacifist and trigger-happy)?
kubikill
  • Oh, so you played the PC version of The Fall? Is it really that buggy? Also your review is well written, have an upvote!
  • Aw yeah Dust is awesome! I kind of missed it when my laptop broke, but fortunately the new one arrived today and I should be able to continue in a day or two :)
  • Yooka-Laylee was mostly easy, except for bosses which were a bit hard and some challenges have tight time limits. There are no difficulty options and if you die you just respawn with your health refilled and no progress lost, either at the last entrance you went through or near the level entrance. Not a big deal as levels are open. There are collectibles that can extend your life and energy meters. You can also equip a tonic (only 1 at a time though), most of them will make the game a bit easier but a few of them are cosmetic (one of them doubles health regen, another one disables fall damage and there’s another one that just gives you a hint if you’re near a rare collectible - this is the one I used for pretty much the entire game).
  • Yeah, you need 2 full playthroughs to get all achievements for Shadwen. Order doesn’t matter, you can either do pacifist first (like I did) or the “kill everyone” run first. The murder run was still fun and it was shorter, too - I managed to beat it in one sitting.
Trent

Thanks for the reply, and the thoughts on Yooka-Laylee. Maybe I’ll get to a certain point past which I can’t proceed…that’s certainly happened to me before.

I don’t remember any bugs in DX:The Fall PC version.

kubikill

I don’t really think so, if you fail at something you’re almost guaranteed to perform better during your next attempts as you’ll know what to expect. If you get stuck somewhere, you can always come back later with more health/energy or new abilities/tonics.
If you’re not going for 100% then you can just skip it, all that matters is that you get enough pagies to unlock next worlds (and quills for the abilities). Heck, I think the boss fights are skippable as well, but don’t quote me on that.

Hmm then why are there so many complaints about the bugs? Weird. Maybe you just got lucky?

Trent

Yeah, I don’t know about the bugs…maybe a bunch of them were patched. Far be it for Steam reviewers not to go back and update their negative reviews. ;) Or maybe I got lucky.

Arbiter Libera

Don’t think I haven’t noticed you sneaking in those new Steam art assets in there. Looks great. ;)

From the bad things, the game went from an RPG that’s trying to be a shooter to a shooter that’s trying to be an RPG.

This seems to have been a core issue for people. Hell, even Todd commented they “went too far” with the whole dialog system dumbing down, for example. I wonder if Fallout 5 is still on-board with fully voice acted protagonist. Would you say it was worth it?

Both Shenmue 1 and 2 seem absolutely marvelous. Gameplay is very slow-paced, but I enjoyed walking through the busy streets of Yokosuka and Hong Kong’s Wan Chai.

I played the original ages ago. Makes me wonder how I would even classify Shenmue today. Exploration adventures? It sure ain’t no action game.

kubikill

Thanks! I had to mess around with the code a lot but I’m happy with the result. Looks super nice on mobile, too! Now I just have to add it to the generator.

Honestly it doesn’t matter much to me if the protagonist is voiced or not. If I had to pick between that and a better dialogue system, I would’ve definitely picked the dialogue system.

Wikipedia lists those genres for Shenmue 1: action-adventure, life simulation and social simulation. There is a bit of action in form of QTEs and fighting segments but other than that it’s pretty much it. Some say it’s detective-style, since you talk to people a lot to find more information. But in the end I don’t really know as well.

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