Monthly Report - April 2019

Again, a nice month for completion ! Cool !

• Won : Sniper Elite, Hidden Folks
• Free : -
• From bundles/gifts/sales : -

• Mafia II
  

  66 hours playtime

  67 of 67 achievements

Mafia II - completed

Mafia II is THE game I played this month. As mentioned in my Mafia III review, I loved Mafia I & II and scanning my library I noticed that I had a lot of achievements missing and that I didn’t played the DLCs. I think that I played the game before having it on Steam and probably bought a pack during a sale.
This was a good occasion to replay it !

So I started with the DLCs : my feeling of both is the same : they suck. Jimmy’s vendetta is slightly better, because the mission are less annoying but not by much. The “story” is told through text, so you don’t feel as involved as in the main game where everything is voice acted, with mostly boring missions, they added scoring & a leaderboard, which means that now all missions are time restricted, which may make them very frustrating if you fail just a few meters from the end. There is no checkpoint, so if you fail, you restart everything, and to make it worse, a lot of missions start with boring things (like following someone), without much difficulty and end with a more difficult action to perform. So you don’t take much risks as you don’t want to play again the boring part. So you play safe, and it sucks. The cops are everywhere and just a constant annoyance (and not even a real threat), especially because of the time restrictions : a lot of objectives cannot be completed if you’re chased, and you’re very often chased : in my main game playthrough, it was pretty rare for me or my car to be “wanted”, although I did some pretty nasty things, but in the DLC, it is almost a permanent state… You can’t do anything, this is very annoying.
Joe is a fun & likable character in the main game, here it is just a random skin on a random character. Nothing interesting. Jimmy, I don’t even really know who this is (I don’t have The betrayal of Jimmy DLC), so I don’t care.
Honestly, at some point I was wondering if it was worth it to finish the DLC missions, it was so boring ! Especially when you look at the achievement list (more on that later).

After that, I replayed the main game. First because I wanted to be sure that I remembered the game properly, and it was not my memory that made the game better than it was, and also because I had some achievements to complete !
So I restarted the game in hard mode. And it is a good as I remembered ! Great characters, compelling story (although, their behavior is a little bit stupid, but the game never present them as smart so it works ^^). Driving feels great (at least with the right cars ^^), the shooting too. Loved it. I especially loved how they linked this game with the previous one, very good !
The hard mode is not very hard, just the right level of challenge, so this was a pleasure to play again !
Achievements : So… the achievements… They made the DLCs even worse. Especially Jimmy’s vendetta. A lot of them are just grinding. But not simply grinding… Stupid, very very stupid, and boring grinding. The worse being having to drive 1000 miles (1600 km). At the end of the DLC, I drove something like 200 km. So the game expected me to drive around a city I already know by heart (having played the main game + joe’s adventures + jimmy’s vendetta), with no specific purpose, for hours ? In a way, yes this is an achievement, but sorry for this one I cheated and found a save at 999 miles. Most people use a glitch in the map and let the car fall through the ground for hours… Stupid achievement, stupid workarounds.
A few others felt like grinding. And I don’t count the buggy ones, like “Reach 200 points for one Jump”. Should be pretty easy… but the jump pretty much always finished with “speed points” or “drift points”. I don’t know how many jumps I had to do to get that one, but that’s a lot.
Most of the other ones were okay, a lot are unlocked just by playing, some required a few retries (thanksfully, you can replay missions & chapters, I like games that do that… this way no achievement is really missable !), and I liked the “Jack of all trades” (reach 10 different score actions in one mission), quite fun & not easy (yes, the shooting & driving is great in this game, but grenade or molotov throwing is… not great ^^).
Even the main game had an annoying achievement : the wanted posters collection. I have nothing against collectibles, but here, there are 160 posters to collect, that’s a lot and they are all in very hidden places, and the game doesn’t help AT ALL. I tried to collect as many as I could during my playthrough and probably found something like 10-15. Without a guide, this is probably a PITA to complete, so I didn’t really try. For something like that, the game should have provided something to help locate them. At least a small zone on the map, just to know where to look for them, or a ping when you’re near one, something… For instance the playboy magazines collection wasn’t really an issue, because most of them are on the main path, or near, not very hidden. So I found most of them without a guide.

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• Sniper Elite
  

  16 hours playtime

  no achievements

Sniper Elite - completed

After finishing Sniper Elite v2, I entered all Sniper Elite games giveaways, as I liked it a lot, and managed to win that one pretty quickly.
And I must admit that the first impression was pretty bad. The game is old, and didn’t age very well, so I barely played the first mission and decided that No, I won’t play it anymore. But I decided to give another chance a few days later and in fact this is an okay game. It has a lot of issues though : the textures are ugly (I don’t know which game from the same era to compare it though), the sound management suck (if you are near a tank, the sound is there, or not, nothing between… Which gives you a crappy sound if you’re at the limit ^^), the controls suck (your character is moving as if it was running on ice), the shooting is not very satisfying (I blame the sound design, and the visual feedback), the game constantly changed my difficulty settings, even during a mission, the enemies are dumb…
But… I don’t know… I kind of liked it. At least enough to finish it. The missions were varied, difficult & interesting enough. I felt that the game was more difficult than V2, mostly because it doesn’t help you as much : there is no map with the enemies location, low resolution textures means it is harder to see the enemies, and the snipers are harder to locate, as there isn’t the visual cues that help you in V2, and they hide very well (well… it depends, on a mission, you have to kill some snipers that were overseeing some locations, after spending some time trying to locate them, I finally found them in the street… a little disappointing… I guess they were fed up waiting for me ^^).
Even if the shooting is not as satisfying as in V2, sniping is still fun in that game, and that’s the most important ^^.
So reviewing this one is hard… My first impression was pretty bad, but my overall impression is “okay”, although it has a lot of issues. So I finished it, but probably won’t play again.
I’m really happy to see how it evolved though. They improved a lot between that one and the sequel.
Achievements : No achievement.

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• Sniper Elite V2
  

  32 hours playtime

  39 of 47 achievements

Sniper Elite V2 - already beaten

Speaking of Sniper Elites V2, I continued playing that one. I still have the multiplayer achievements to do and it looks like you can play the campaign in co-op ? I love that !
I played with a friend, and we liked a lot the co-op “overwatch” missions (one player is on the ground and has tasks to do, while the other one covers the area). We also played a few “Bombing runs” but maybe didn’t really understand well how it works, we tried different things but failed a lot :).
So, still a great game, and we’ll probably play again, at least to complete the achievements, and maybe even after that :)

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• Hidden Folks
  

  6 hours playtime

  5 of 7 achievements

Hidden Folks - beaten

This is a kind of black & white “Where’s Waldo/Wally?” (in my country, he’s called Charlie, so not sure in yours ^^), where you have to find things/people in a crowded picture.
This is a fun game, the drawings are funny, the sound design is amusing (everything is done “by mouth”). But it starts quickly to be a little repetitive.
To fight that, they add a few mechanisms in each level, which makes the game a little more interactive, but the concept is maybe a little too simple to make it interesting for more than a few of hours.
I finished it, but I couldn’t play it all in one go. I got bored quickly, and my eyes were very sore after scrutinizing a black and white screen for hours (but I just discovered that there is a night mode… maybe it would have helped).
But this game is probably nice to get, if you want something where you don’t kill anybody, a more relaxed game, that would probably be great on a touch screen in a couch, and that would probably make you laugh (or at least smile ^^).
Achievements : Not much to report. All the achievements are linked to the completion of the levels. Some achievements require the DLC, I’ll probably get it on sale.

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