November '20 Play Log I

First things first, this game gets very dark. If the subject matter bothers you, don’t play this game.

Overall I think this is a well made game and, above exception aside, I would recommend it to fans of story heavy games. It’s one of those games where there is some room for debate/interpretation as to what exactly happened, it’s not overly open ended though.

Pros:

• It does have a spooky atmosphere. I imagine it would be extremely tense playing it in a dark room with headphones. Which is why I played it in my living room with the lights on :).
• The voice acting is very good
• The sound effects are done well. There are no jumpscares, but the occasional creaks and bumps that one expects in an old and poorly maintained building. The type of things that may make you think “I’m alone, so what made that sound?”
• Personally I didn’t find the story predictable, but then I don’t generally put too much effort into trying to predict stories. I could definitely see others disagreeing on this point.
• The graphics are very good. Even the less important areas of the hotel were well done.
• The map you have is a sketch of the building layout, not a minimap with your location shown. I really like this since it avoids skipping a map for atmospheric purposes, and even adds to the atmosphere. Be warned though, the hotel can be a bit maze like, so you’ll have to work to figure out where you are and where you’re trying to get to.

Cons:

• The story is broken down into days, but some of them feel pointless, as if the developers wanted the character to spend a certain amount of time at the hotel, but didn’t really have anything to fill the day with so they skipped it.
• The story sometimes feels rushed. There’s this huge hotel, but beyond curiosity most areas end up being pointless. I think the game could have been made longer by having more information/backstory scattered about for the character to comment on.
• You can pick up certain objects to examine, but as far as I could tell there was never any reason for this.
• You can zoom in on some things, but not certain papers that looked like they could be interesting.
• Throughout the story you’re on the phone with a guy who’s helping you. But the way it worked was sometimes a little weird. Like one sequence: “push the button”, “Ok”, hangs up phone, pushes button, calls back again. Why ever hang up? Granted, in some cases this was probably necessary to avoid the conversation getting ahead of what’s happening because the player could have gotten sidetracked.

Verdict: 8/10

The worst AC game I’ve played so far. The entire thing felt disjointed. Like you got to play a few sequences of missions from a much larger game, with no more than a sentence (if that) to summarize what you’ve missed. Sometimes it was whole story segments, other times a crucial cutscene.

Pros:

• No pointless out of animus sessions. I enjoyed the Desmond out of animus sessions, but in Rogue they were little more than filler.
• No pointless ship grinding

Cons:

• Disjointed story that seemed to skip huge portions, and left questions unanswered.
• What story there is is entirely underwhelming. Once again it hurries too much without getting you emotionally invested in the character or her cause. It makes me wonder if Ubisoft even have any idea why AC2 & Brotherhood were so successful.
• The 3 personas thing seems promising, but is rendered more or less useless by the fact that only a single story mission gives you any choice at all in which one you use. But just because you’re forced to use the slave persona with no armour and limited weapons doesn’t mean you won’t also be forced for fight a dozen enemies.
• The CitezenE sections were pointless. They seemed to serve no purpose beyond the developer saying ‘we haven’t forgotten this is supposed to be a simulation’. Though you’ll be very thankful it exists when you get to the ending.
• Buggy. I had to restart missions numerous times after they bugged.
• The infamous ‘I tried to climb so why the h*ll are you jumping the opposite direction’ type issues are as bad as ever
• Very few side quests, and they don’t appear until more than half way through the story. You could be forgiven for beating the game without realizing they even exist.
• Surprisingly some of the voice acting was quite bad, though not much

Verdict: 2/10

I found this game surprisingly addictive. It has some flaws, but a lot of these appear to be improved on in the 2018 version.

Pros:

• You don’t need to know a lot about cars
• Great for playing while listing to music/podcast/etc

Cons:

• I have no issue with DLC adding more cars, as long as the base game has a reasonable variety. Unfortunately it has very little variety
• The parts you can repair vs the ones you can’t seems unrealistic to me, but I could be wrong here
• No garage management aspect, you just pick jobs and get paid
• Money serves very little purpose until you can buy cars at auction. By the time you unlock something you’ll have more than enough money to use it
• When you replace body parts they come in the correct colour, which makes painting seem a bit pointless

Verdict: 7/10

Very good FPS that is definitely worth playing. The letter collectables were interesting, but after reading a few I found them far too depressing to keep reading.

Pros:

• I really enjoyed the story
• Alternate timelines can change some surprising things, it was interesting to see how
• Good weapon variety
• Good graphics
• Excellent voice acting

Cons:

• In terms of missions, goals, and how you achieve them, both timelines are identical. This seems like a missed opportunity.
• The gold collectables seemed entirely pointless

Verdict: 9/10