Batch 28 finished

Beaten: 10-Nov-2019

Well... damn. That was good!

I have to admit going into it I thought I would be underwhelmed. That was put to rest even within the first episode which got things off to a rousing start. Compared to the last entry of The Walking Dead that I played just before this one, Batman has a faster moving and much more exciting plot. And I played the last three episodes in one sitting.

The story focuses early in Batman's career. While definitely not in the main DC comic universe, you are introduced to the Dark Knight already making inroads with Lieutenant Gordon's trust, but the main villains haven't surfaced yet. Catwoman is a person of interest. The Penguin is simply Oswald Cobblepot and former childhood friend of Bruce Wayne. Harvey Dent is still Gotham's D.A. Very shortly life for everyone is careening through city-wide chaos, and even if you are a knowledgeable Batman fan the story has many surprises. The writers took character histories and wrote them in a way that while staying mostly true to their comic-book counterparts, differ enough to make for unexpected plots twists and introductions. It feels like a parallel dimension Batman story where so much is familiar and yet key elements are strikingly different.

It's a fun ride. The quick-time button presses are fast and well-balanced during combat sequences. You also get to do crime scene analysis by discovering clues and linking them together to reconstruct events. There are several points where you must choose where you are going, leaving the other choice an unknown quantity or an event without your presence. Of course it's Telltale so ultimately nothing is at risk by making a "wrong" choice, but it adds a bit of weight to how you want to play the character and you can view how your choices affected things by the end.

Good game. Play it!

Beaten: 16-Nov-2019

Played this one immediately following Batman - The Telltale Series and it proved even better, earning a half-point higher on my overall rating!

Building off the choices from the previous game, Batman/Bruce Wayne now has new problems and complications hitting him from all angles. The plot gets thick quickly, and I don't want to give away key details. Suffice to say this definitely ranks of one of Telltale's top games.

The story also continues to present its own version of characters and their re-imagined histories. It works well in the context of this Batman universe and helps to keep the surprises coming as Batman comes to rely more on outside help to give him the advantage over new and more deadly enemies.

The quicktime combat is even better than the previous game, with many more options and cinematic moves and actions. Unfortunately there was less of the crime analysis this time around, but that was more a function of the story.

If you have these two games in your library, they are well worth playing!

Beaten: 1-Nov-2019

In playing the second round of Dishonored, I have to admit that I was wondering if they could top the previous game. And I would say that yes, they did, and a damn fine job of it as well. It makes me wonder then why the game didn't get as good of reviews as the original.

The story is fairly straight-forward and picks up about 15 years after the events of the first game. Delilah, a previously unknown elder sister of the late Empress Jessamine shows up to claim the throne from the now grown-up Princess Emily, and with surgical precision launches a coup that quickly incapacitates one of the main characters and leaves you (your choice as either Emily or Corvo) conscious long enough to escape the palace and then figure out how to stop her. This immediately takes you to where most of the game is played out -- in the southern city of Karnaca where Delilah put together her plot along with several co-conspirators. Karnaca is just as corrupt as Dunwall, and soon you are moving through the back alleys avoiding guards and gangs, gathering clues and targeting those responsible.

The choice of character means having a slightly different set of powers granted once again by the Outsider (or a "no powers" run). For the record, I chose an Emily/high chaos play-through. But the really striking thing about this game is the level design. It's magnificent, with two missions that stand out in particular -- the Clockwork Mansion and the Stilton Estate. I don't think I've ever seen that kind of creativity in level design before, even on Arkane Studio's newest title that I also played in this batch, Prey. Of course like the previous game you also get tons of agency to approach any mission depending on how you spec your abilities, gadgets, combat vs stealth, lethal vs not, mixing in confrontation or going full ghost, and simply what choices you decide to make as the plot unfolds.

Combat is solid, should you chose to use it to solve your problems. Moving around with the Blink power can still be a little wonky at times but nothing that interrupts game flow. Also you get the new ability to craft bone-charms and runes if you invest the skill points to do so. You still have to acquire bone-charms and destroy them to add them to your menu of craft-able traits, but with the appropriate skill you can apply the same trait multiple times to a charm, creating yet another powerful way to customize your character build.

I'm not sure how much more praise I can add without delving into plots details. If you liked Dishonored don't hesitate like I did. This sequel is well worth it and boasts character choice that can give a different flavor to second play-through. Highly recommended!

Beaten: 21-Oct-2019

If you're looking for a good sci-fi game, you can't go wrong with this high-intensity action/thriller for at least one play-though. Prey brings several elements together in the form of in-depth story, stealth, FPS and skill trees in a high-tech space setting similar to BioShock and including the art deco design flair. The game manages to balance these elements quite well while never fully delivering a wow-factor on any of them. But it gives you freedom to approach situations with different strategies depending on how your character is spec'd.

You play as Morgan Yu (male or female, your choice), a principal investor and researcher of TransStar corporation, who is caught up in the midst of an alien invasion of the Talos I Space Station in orbit around the Moon. Neuromods (like plasmids/vigors in BS) can give you enhanced human abilities at first and then alien abilities a little later. Acquiring alien abilities has consequences that will force you to adapt your gameplay and can effect the final ending. For my playthough I chose to go the full human route (for which you get an achievement) and played with the alien abilities (again for achievements) after making saves I could reload to continue my chosen path. This gave me what I thought we be as close to a horror experience as possible keeping the aliens as "them", but I don't think this really bore out in the overall end result.

Part of the problem with playing this as a horror game is that the aliens are not that horrific. They are mostly blobs of black goo that sprout appendages as needed. But for all that the mimics (the first Typhon type you run into) are actually cool and dare I say somewhat cute. I often thought it would be great to have one as a pet. The fact that they can turn into ordinary looking objects ignores their incredible usefulness. The other side is that when you gain mimic ability via Neuromod that enables you to also turn into a coffee cup at will, there's an element of unintentional comedy that subverts the horror aspect of the game. If I was playing this again, I'd totally go for seeing how funny I could make certain situations by trying to sneak past enemies disguised as random objects.

There are non-alien enemies to contend with as well. Without giving away spoilers, there's a point toward the end where enemy robot assistants spawn repeatedly from indestructible machines that are never too far away from your location. This led to various complaints about the game being too hard toward to the end. I found this to be true even playing on easy mode and only having human abilities. Even if you avoid getting swarmed, these never-ending waves are a huge drain on ammo which you constantly have to loot from the environment or make from raw materials at fixed locations, so playing on normal or hard would make this phase incredibly challenging. It probably pays then to play with alien powers toward the end that allows you to avoid detection or kill at a distance as long as you have psi point healing packs.

The primary fun of Prey for me was the exploration. Talos I is a huge place with lots of interesting rooms and areas plus the environment outside the station which can be used during non-plot moments to get to different sections and also loot for floating resources. If you follow side-quests like I did you'll have a lot more reason to poke around these spaces trying to discover their secrets.

Overall, it is a fun game and worth playing if you are inclined.

Beaten: 6-Nov-2019

Note: This game is listed on Steam but currently only available for purchase on Epic.

I've reached the end! Both sad and glad I finished.

It's hard to discuss this game without spoilers since Telltale games are all plot and choice-driven.

On a technical note the improved graphics are really nice, but the new "movement freedom" caused more trouble for me than in previous games. So much so that I often found myself getting impatient as I failed five or six times before getting things right to progress through the story.

Part of the problem is that the enemies will often home in on you and you have to maneuver so that you can kill or slow one down temporarily without getting mobbed by the others. But the space you can do this in is limited and has invisible walls, and turning the character is different directions is stiff. Also half the time you move at a leisurely stroll in these moments when if real life you'd be moving much faster to avoid getting trapped. Oh, I died again! I preferred the older method of just needing to react quickly with button presses or mouse clicks.

But back to the story... I would definitely say the it is worth polishing off the series if you want more Clementine. The worst of the series is Season 3. But thankfully there are no direct tie-backs here to Season 3, so you can skip from Season 2 to this one and not miss anything other than a short sequence around how Clem and AJ re-unite after being separated for a short time. Still, IMHO I liked Season 2 better than this one.

I'm not going to include spoilers, but don't read past the warning it you want to retain the element of pure surprise or avoid having my opinions color your own judgment before playing.

-- YOU'VE BEEN WARNED. ---

I think the writing team was correct to avoid another "bad town" narrative. They don't quite escape it here, but instead push it to the margins. However, the overall arc of the final season felt like they picked a setting that posed a difficult hurdle to creating a good story.

This time around the community Clem and AJ join up with is a group of teens and younger kids in the remains of a school for troubled youth. It's hard to write good depictions of kids who are naturally in the process of developing emotional maturity and experience. It's also hard to believe that such a dysfunctional and unskilled group would have lasted over five years in the post-apocalyptic aftermath when other more capable groups have fallen apart so quickly. The few adults that are featured in the story are generic bad guys you mostly use for target practice when you aren't fighting off walkers.

The game's relationship focus is squarely on Clementine and AJ -- and that's the good part. It's well-developed over the course of four episodes even though it lacks the touching nature of other parent-child relationships earlier in the series. But the secondary characters are flat. There are no equivalent major supporting characters of the same stature as Kenny and Jane or minor roles like Luke and Rebecca where you feel like they are contributing something to the narrative that makes them important. So the kids come across as stereotypes instead of fully developed human beings, and that causes a massive drag on the story in the parts where you have to personally interact with them to explore who they are. It made it difficult to agree with Clem's statement that the school and the kids "felt like home".

I went nearly two months between playing episode one and two because the story and supporting cast wasn't compelling to me. It picked up in episode two -- once past the majority of forgettable teenage emotional turmoil. The best episode was three when the stakes became important. And lastly the first part of episode four has frustratingly obvious set-ups for "something bad is going to happen" that seemed like they were created to fill out time rather than critical to the plot. After that the game found it's glide path for proper closure.

I didn't cry like I did in the first two seasons. All in all, I was satisfied with the conclusion, but those moments of da feelz were few and far between. It's not a bad game like the third entry, but it felt dull a lot of the time due to the lack of engaging characters apart from the leads.