• Yakuza Kiwami
  

  31 hours playtime

  30 of 55 achievements

• Darksiders
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 43 achievements

• Darksiders Warmastered Edition
  

  21 hours playtime

  23 of 43 achievements

• Offspring Fling!
  

  10 hours playtime

  3 of 10 achievements

• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
  

  23 hours playtime

  40 of 99 achievements

August

Steam

Yakuza Kiwami
I really enjoyed Yakuza 0. There were some repetitive elements, but as a whole it had quite varied gameplay and the story was fun. I played for 65 hours to get 56% of achievements. That’s a lot more than I play in most games, but it only started to feel boring towards the end of that play time.

Yakuza Kiwami is a much shorter game, 33 hours to get 56% of achievements, but the repetitiveness meant it felt much longer than the first game. The first was set in two cities and you controlled two different characters, the property and hostess bars were fun mini management games within the main story. These elements helped to keep it interesting. Kiwami was based in one city, didn’t have these management elements, and it was pretty much the same map from the first game. There were a lot of the same characters, and some of the fetch quests were very repetitive - “Get me some tissues, thanks. Get me some more tissues, thanks. Oh, can I have some more tissues? Best get me two packs”. There were 2-3 moments like this, no reason for them at all and they were very frustrating.

I’m complaining, but I did like it enough to beat the main story and poured a lot of time into it. It was okay in short bursts and I could just play for an hour beating people up and didn’t really have to think. So, it’s off my backlog and I’ve removed Yakuza Kiwami 2 from my wishlist as I’ve had enough of the series!

Darksiders / Darksiders Warmastered Edition

An old Steam Gifts win from 2012. I won the basic version of the game and the Warmastered edition was a free upgrade in 2016. I guess I didn’t play it at all before that upgrade, 4 years without playing a win, terrible behaviour!

I put most of the time into this game last month, but did the last few hours to finish the main story this month. Hack and slash game with a decent story. Pretty difficult at parts, but I had most trouble with bosses before the final 2-3. The basic controls were fine but secondary weapon aiming with the analogue stick was difficult. Not the sort of game I’d normally get, but this win was from back in my early days of SG when I entered for a lot of games without thinking too much about it (16 of my 20 wins were in 2012-2013).

It’s a little annoying that the achievements only appear on one version of the game, but there’s not much I can do about it and I won’t be sinking another 20+ hours into the other version of the game. Another two games marked as beaten.

Offspring Fling!

I’d tried this a few times before, but struggled as I couldn’t get my controller to work with it. This time, I abandoned the game settings and used Joy2Key instead.
A puzzle-platformer. It was one of those games where you get stuck on a level for what feels like forever, but then realise it’s only been 10 minutes because each run is so short. There are 100 basic levels, I got through them pretty steadily and only needed to get hints for about 5-10 of them. There are ‘bonus’ levels, but they require you to beat regular levels within set times. I only managed a handful on my first run and fewer than 2% of people have managed to beat these bonus levels, so I’m not gonna try! Despite the low number of achievements, the main game has been finished and it’s ‘beaten’.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Bought this on the strength of Tomb Raider, which I picked up for free and really enjoyed. This didn’t disappoint. Mainly more of the same, but it was all good stuff. I don’t have much to add on top of the last review. Pretty good story, nice variety of missions without a reliance on fetch and retrieve (take notes Yakuza!). There’s something about the game design that makes it quite involving. Perhaps it’s the voice acting and little extra sounds as you move around, I’m not sure. No other game series has given the feeling of claustrophobia or a sense of urgency as I swim and possibly run out of air, so whatever it is it works well with me. I didn’t really go out of my way to get achievements, so there are a few more I could probably get without trying too hard but 40% is respectable and above my average so I’m gonna leave it at that for now.

Backlog Additions

Fall Guys and Embr. Probably shouldn’t have got these as they will distract me from other single player games with achievements and my backlog in general. I usually try to avoid games that are mainly based on multiplayer as eventually the servers will dry up and they take up a lot of time if I get into them. Fun at the moment though! :)