Fnord

Two posts in a month? What is this madness!?

Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory

11 hours, no achievements

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This is another game I got to review! Sadly it did not live up to expectations :(


Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach - Legacy of the Weirdboy

13.4 hours, no achievements

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A year or so ago, I beat the base game, Sanctus reach, and I really enjoyed it. It depicted a war between the Space Marines of the Space Wolf chapter, and the savage Orks, form the side of the Space Wolves. Now you get to see it from the side of the orks. This is considerably shorter than the base game, that took me nearly 40h to beat, but it's still very good. The orks feel different to play. You're not controlling a force of elite warriors here, but rather more of a horde, with plenty of cheap, expendable units, backed up by some heavy hitters, and with most of your units being strong in close combat. So with the orks, the trick is to use your cheap units to draw fire from your units that can actually fight well.

The campaign here was great, easily on par with what the base game had. And there are still two more DLCs to look forward to! (I've not got either of them yet though).


LEGO Jurassic World

12.6 hours, 30 of 49 achievements
SG Win

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My co-op partner bailed on me, so I had to complete this on my own :(

LEGO Jurassic World is yet another LEGO world, this time it's focused on Jurassic Park, and its sequels. While it's named LEGO Jurassic world, it actually deals with the first 4 movies. If you've played any other LEGO games based on a movie, you know what to expect. You play through the events of the movies, in a slightly condensed form, and with LEGO characters and logic. And nobody ever dies. Someone might have got eaten by a raptor in the movie, but in the game, they're fine. This is a kids game after all.
And I thought it was surprisingly fun. It feels weird to say this, but the puzzles in this game are actually harder than those in most games aimed at adults. That's not to say that the puzzles are in any way shape or form hard, but you still have to think more about how to progress than you do in most other games.

The game looks nice, but the sound quality is sometimes downright terrible. A lot of the dialogue are taken from the movies. These are no studio recordings, they've just been ripped straight from the films, so you often get background noise. Sometimes they've tried to clean up the audio, and sometimes they've not. A few lines seems to have been re-recorded for the game, but not all. And it's distracting, when you suddenly hear completely different background noise when a character speaks compared to when they don't. Still, overall this is a pretty good game. Completionists beware though, there's a silly amount of things to collect.


Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory review

robilar5500

Paranoia has got to be a difficult table top game to translate to a video game. Just the sheer chaos and anarchy presented in the game, the Monty Python meets dystopian society vibe, the six clones and different scales of access, and so on, seems like a difficult thing to transition into a structured video game. If anything, it really lends itself better to being a crazy MMO or somesuch. Still would like to try it out on Epic one day though. It was a lunchtime game for my friends and I in high school or college (I don’t exactly remember when I originally bought the boxed set and handful of other books for the game. Somewhere between 1986 and 1994 though).

Fnord

The game actually does the bits unique to the setting surprisingly well. You’ve got 6 clones, people are treated as expendable, and you need to follow the rules the setting demand, like don’t step over the coloured line unless you’re of the right security clearance, be careful about asking for information about the mission as the mission might itself require classified information and so on, and after each mission you’ve got a debriefing where you report to friend computer, and where your team members can tell on you if you’ve done treasonous things (or you can tell on them!). Where it falls apart is the humdrum gameplay and just a feeling of it being rushed. I strongly suspect that they had a few more missions planned for it, that just got cut close to launch, which results in a weird story pacing. Some mechanics are also really under-used.
Wait for a major discount before getting Paranoia. It’s not worth the 30€ asking price, or even 10€, but maybe it can be worth it at 5€, if you’re curious. My avatar is from the older Paranoia editions, so that should give you an idea of my thoughts of the setting, and I think someone who already likes the setting will get more out of this game than a newcomer, but sadly, even as a fan of the setting, it’s just not a particularly good game.

robilar5500

I’ll take your advice for sure. I’m sure by the time the next major Epic sale rolls around, it’ll be marked down appropriately (and probably will also get $10 coupons again as well lol).