Traqie

3rd December 2020

Hey hey people,

Not much has changed here, I’m still playing Destiny 2 :D I bought an expansion “Forsaken” and been playing around with new talent trees in pvp and pve since then. I also got access to Forsaken campaign and some other stuff. There was recently new expansion Beyond Light and I’m probably gonna get it soon, we’ll see ;)
There’s still a partial lockdown going on here, but hopefuly the corona virus will be over by the summer, as you may have heard there’s not one vaccine, but three on the horizon!

If this is really over in summer 2021 or earlier, what are you plans for that part of the year?

13.9 hours
+8/10
Played on Steam

04 – Totem 1
05 – River of Souls

This is my favorite game, after Black Mesa and Dishonored 2, that I beated this year. It’s an improvement in every regard over the first Turok game. My main complaints with the first game were – boring & same looking levels for most part, stupidly buffy enemies on harder difficulty and console-feel.

Let’s start with difficulty. Since I like to 100% games, I started the game on hardcore difficulty, prepared to be very frustrated. It did felt at start like enemies are very buffy and they are, if you don’t aim for the head. Enemies can take shitload of bullets but if you headshot them they die pretty quickly. It’s a small but a really neat change, it encourages player to actually aim instead of shooting into enemy’s direction. But what about explosives? They are still very effective, it feels like choosing hardcore difficulty has no effect on dmg from explosives because most enemies die from one or two shots from grenade launcher or rocket launcher. So in a way the game can be actually too easy! But I like it because it’s done in a way where skill is rewarded, because you have to actually aim.

Next, the world. In first Turok you mostly explored different flavors of jungle. Here we start in something that looks like ancient South American city, on to Death Marshes, into underground cave system that’s very confusing (even devs acknowledge this by giving achievement called “We don’t need no stinkin’ strategy guide!”), next a spaceship of mantis-like aliens, it looks organic from inside, kinda like Aliens lair in the “Aliens” movie. The last level is another spaceship, this one more metallic and filled with robot enemies, kinda boring but the whole package is so much better than in previous game. Oh and we still have hub, but this time it’s a set of small islands floating in space.


Everything bleeds so nicely in this game...



The whole game is less consol-y just by changing the aim system from first game.

The story is a little more fleshed out this time, when entering a new area for the first time we get a short cutscene explaining what happened, what we need to do and glimpses of the level. The turok from the first game is our ancestor and we basically are a warrior trying to stop evil forces from conquering the universe, that’s my understanding of it. In each level there’s also a teleporter that once activated, takes us to some weird factory/spaceship that’s filled with unique enemies that you don’t see anywhere else. They are some new kind, possibly what we are really trying to stop and my guess is they are the main baddies of Turok 3. That one is still sadly not on PC, I wish Nightdive would bring it on steam too, even if it’s just more Turok 2 I would gladly play it. Oh and also the one explaining our mission is a weird alien lady. Besides teleporters to the oblivion monsters, there are also teleporters to her, where you can manually save and get free health and ammo from her. Weird addition, but I sometimes would find myself running out of ammo, even if I looked for secrets and searched every corner, so she was very helpful.

I really recommend this one, tbh even if Turok 1 is not that bad, you could skip it and play this right away. Oh and it would be a crime not to mention one specific weapon in Turok 2 – A bee launcher that attaches itself to enemy head, drills into it and then explodes :D


Half-Life 2

MO:Astray

7/10
9.7 hours
26 of 26 achievements

12 – Monsters
18 – System
23 – Dylan
27 - Extremergy Life Form

Waaaah I feel like I would enjoy this so much more if not for horrible K+M controls! I gotta warn you right now, if you plan to play it, do so with a controller as aiming where to jump with a mouse is horrible and you will do a lot of jumping, more than walking. It’s a platformer where you play as a blue blob named MO that can stick to any solid surface, but it will drop or slide down after a few seconds. You jump by holding LMB and arrow shows a direction where you will jump, release it and you jump. For some reason the game recommend using inverted controls for jumping if playing K+M, I don’t know why the hell they think it’s a better option, I personally find it less annoying by playing normal controls. And you may be surprised why I gave this a good rating but I just got used to the controls and it felt more or less natural, but it took me HOURS to get used to it.

Ok but controls aside, this is a first game by this Chinese dev team Archpray Inc. And for a first game it is pretty impressive what they pulled off. The game has a very beautiful art style, it looks just slightly pixelized up close and has really pretty background art but I don’t know if it has any name. Just look at the screenshots! The game is in full 2D and once I got used to controls, I feel like it’s really well balanced and constantly challenging. Everytime something new is introduced it slightly ramps up platforming difficulty and I don’t remember it going too hard or too easy. There are puzzles too and there were few that got me stuck for a while but nothing brain-breaking. Music is ok, the first half works well withing the game but I find it average outside the game. Later on it has much better tracks.


You'll walk...

You'll swim...

You'll float...

and ride a giant mech!



Game is set on some alien planet where the ship in which we were born crashed. The first levels are inside the ship and later on we get to the surface. We are guided by a female voice who, without spoiling the story, is somehow connected to us. She “talks” to us and by talking I mean making various sounds like “oh!” “ah!” “aww” (I promise it doesn’t sound sexual in actual game lol) and by looking at subtitles you can see what she is saying. It’s fine for most part but I don’t like the fact she does it in middle of boss fights, I can’t be asked to dodging attacks and reading subtitles at the bottom of the screen at the same time. After finishing every chapter we get a short comic telling us some backstory. There are also memories to collect, while giving some story too, if you collect 5 of them you get extra health point to total health pool. At one point you gain the ability to attach yourself to head of a monster and you can read some of their memories that give you little more backstory. Overall the story is ok.

I think this could be said about every aspect of the game but the execution of platforming and boss fights is excellent. It didn’t felt like the devs were trying to innovate here, just make a good game. There are multiple boss fights and every single one is different and challenging. At one point you even get to ride a giant mech and kill hundreds of enemies.

I’d recommend this one but play with the controller, otherwise be ready to spend few hours getting used to controls XD

Half-Life 2

My Friend Pedro

7/10
5.0 hours
27 of 30 achievements

03 - Nounverber - V A P E
12 - Battlejuice - Low Life On The Highway
21 - Noisecream - Mist Of Rage

What a meme game. It’s basically a 2d platformer focused on shooting bad guys in style, while skateboarding, double wielding Uzi’s and shooting in slow-mo, that sort of stuff, all while dubstep plays in background. There’s dumb humor too and your companion is a talking banana that lives inside your head :V

But it is a fun to play game once you get handle of the controls. You can have unlimited slow-mo as long as you keep killing, you can make it look really stylish with various flips, wall-jumps etc. There’s not much weapon variety and frankly this game doesn’t need it, I had the most fun with my double-wielded pistols and Uzis. On later levels you kinda have to use sniper rifle and AR as enemies get tough or are very far away and they have sniper rifles.

And it’s on those levels where MFP loses steam :/ The last level is full of commando-style enemies that are tough, half of them use sniper rifles and gameplay changes from charging ahead, killing in style to taking cover, killing them one by one. Boss battle before the last, is really bad too as you pretty much fight your clone, she moves like you and has same abilities. The bosses are mixed bag in this anyway, some are silly and fun like where you drive on a highway and shoot shitload of cars and bad guys on motorcycles as they chase you.

Story is non-existent, it feels like devs made it up as they built the game lol. You wake up with amnesia in a basement, banana tells you he’s your friend and you need to make revenge on people who put you here yada yada.

Levels are more or less varied and fun for most part. Devs also insert their dumb humor into them, so like the first set of levels is a neighborhood that consists of retired gangsters, so you just shoot elderly people in sportswear, second set is a building site where it just happens that bounty hunters decided to throw their Christmas party, so you shoot bounty hunters wearing ugly Christmas sweaters. My favorite one is a sewer set (and don’t worry, they do poke fun at this with “oh wow sewer level how original XDDD” not direct quote btw) and it’s filled with GAMERS that try to kill you for fun, some of them LARP as knights so you’ll have to worry about getting shot AND getting sliced by a fat NEET.

But it’s all ruined by the last set of levels that completely change the pace of game :/ Such a shame, because it’s really a fun game. I should mention it’s also score-attack game, you get scored for every kill, how you did and of course you have a multiplier that vanished over time. At the time of writing I haven’t yet 100% this game which requires getting S rank on all levels, but as far as I can tell if you want to S-rank all levels, just be fast and don’t let your multiplier reset, it doesn’t matter how you kill people in the end.

Would I recommend this? Yeah, but expect last hour of the game to be bad.

Half-Life 2

The Wolf Among Us

7/10
9.5 hours
35 of 35 achievements

07 – Opening Credits

Woooow how I wish HBO would make a show based on Fables comics! This Telltale game is set in New York, in modern times but no idea what exact time period it is. Anyway for those that don’t know, Fables is a world where all characters, monsters, creatures etc. from fairy tales and legends live in real world in hiding and we play Bigby, the big bad wolf from Little Red Riding Hood and who is a sheriff and who is feared in his community because of his past.

We can change the opinion of the community if we make right actions but as it is with Telltale games we often get thrown into situations where it’s hard to not say or act as a big wolf or we may not the get outcome we want. I played previously The Walking Dead S1 and S2 and so far gameplay wise this feels very similar. You have a simple item system where you hold onto items and sometimes can use them on other items or show to people. There are short QTE’s every now and then, and sometimes you get thrown into a dialogue that may have an impact on the story. But as it is with Telltale games, most of it is just an illusion and very few actions have an actual impact.

I haven’t read the comics but I really like this world and characters, they’re excellent! It’s so bizarre no one tried to turn this into a TV show, according to Wikipedia there were some attempts by ABC and NBC but they never went past writing script. Aaaaand as it is with all Telltale games I played, the characters and world is the only thing carrying this game. Let’s be real, gameplay wise this is very shallow and not at all innovative from older adventure games. The first Walking Dead worked so well because of Clementine and rest of the team but also it really felt like every dialog had an impact on story, there was this great illusion that literally every action had an impact. But it takes one look behind the curtains to see that’s not the case (and it would just be really hard and time consuming to make so many branching paths lol). So I hope the later Telltale games try to innovate a little because next time great characters and setting might not be enough. But I enjoyed The Wolf Among Us and I recommend this to everyone. Heck, check out the comic if you don’t feel like playing Telltale game.

A note on Halo. I read this book (the 2019 edition) before playing it for the first time. The book actually came out BEFORE the game and it tells the story of how Master Chief was made who he is in the game, the first contact with the Covenant and who they are and of course the fall of Reach battle, which is main story of “Halo: Reach” game. The game picks up exactly where the book ended and it kinda assumes you read it, but you don’t have to really. As for the book itself, it’s a pretty decent military Sci-Fi, though they could really develop Master Chief himself more in this and his squadmates. They’re kinda shallow even in the book. If I had to rate the book based on my enjoyment I would give it 7/10

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

Halo: Combat Evolved

+7/10
22.2 hours
46 of 700 achievements

CD1 –
04 – An End of Dying
09 – Flotsam, Jetsam
17 – Strung
CD2 –
02 - Lions and Tigers and…
11 – First Step
14 – Cloaked in Blackness

Dope classic that’s still fun to play, I’m really happy MS brought this whole collection to steam. Mind you I haven’t plated MP yet so this will be strictly about SP.

I played blind for the first time and on legendary difficulty, hence so much playtime for just SP D: It’s really tough as your shield depletes really quickly and your health doesn’t regenerate. Everything hurts really badly and while common enemies are not that tough themselves if you use covenant weapons, it’s hard to get a good shot as there are always multiple enemies. Through like 60% of game you will fight covenant, an alien empire? or some kind of religious alliance that has multiple alien species in its rank. A group of covenant enemies consists almost always of 3 types of aliens – grunts, small and weak cannon fodder that likes to throw grenades and uses plasma pistols or a kind of nail gun that instead of nails uses small crystals and they can track enemies. Jackals, that have head of a vulture and carry small shields that block damage. And elites that are the toughest and have plasma rifle or blades and will try to melee you. Even the ones with plasma rifles sometimes tried to rush me when I was behind cover. They have their own shield similar to Master Chief so you have to break them first before you can kill them and they do regenerate like yours. But if you manage to attach plasma grenade to them it’s no problem :) They are also higher rank and if you kill them before grunts or jackals, those two will be disoriented for a while and run in fear.

And these three will be your main enemies through not just the game, but AFAIK they also appear in all the other Halo games and I wonder how are they made it not boring in next games lol. Having same enemies in a game is fine as long as the gameplay loop is fun. But I’m not sure if I could stand these same enemies through 5 games. The AI is rather basic. You quickly learn to either clean grunts and jackals fast and leave elites for last or other way around, you’ll do this a lot through the game. But for now I had fun and the loop here didn’t bore me for most of the time.

Luckily you’ll be thrown into different and fun scenarios every now and then. You’ll get to storm the beach with USMC marines, drive a tank and take part in a huge assault where there will be enemy tanks, hover light vehicles, banshees (covenant planes), assault a facility in Warthog (armored vehicles with mounted turret) with the marines. There were plenty of these situations and I really love when the game throws you into mini-wars like this where there’s lots of enemy and friendly AI and they fight with each other. The Marines are not bad fighters either as long as it’s just grunts and jackals 😅

But like I said that’s just 60% of enemies. The rest is called The Flood and it’s a type of a parasite that consumes every biological thing, zombifies anything that can be used and tries to turn everything into its own homeworld. When fighting them you’ll fight against fellow zombified marines that charge at you shooting whatever gun they had and then attacking from melee. Same with zombified Covenant Elites. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to fighting just waves of waves these guys and it’s long and gets boring really quickly imo. They just charge you mindlessly and it’s easy to die. On mentioned chapter you only get few useless drones that try to help you but they die after like two shots. The very last fight is also you vs them, though sometimes a small distraction is thrown between you and them.




You can only carry two weapons at the same time and you have two types of grenades for your disposal, standard frag grenade that explodes exactly when it stops and a plasma grenade that explodes after a few seconds, but it can stick to enemies. Funny thing with these nades is that if one explodes near the other uncooked grenades that enemies drop, you can start a chain reaction and a shitload of them will explode. I died few times from this :D From human weapons you start with AR that’s pretty good on short range against grunts but is terrible against anything tougher, at least on legendary diff. Later on you get a shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, pretty standard stuff. Of course there’s the famous pistol and yes it is one of the best and deadliest weapons in this game. It’s very precise and does lots of damage. Covenant weapons consists of plasma pistol that can be charged for one powerful shot, great for breaking jackal and elite shields. Needler, the weapon I mentioned earlier is kinda poopy IMO, maybe its because of the difficulty. And plasma rifle, IMO one of the best weapons against covenant, not so much against the flood. But it’s great overall.

The story focuses on Halo and The Flood rather than Covenant. I don’t remember the game explaining who covenant are or why are you fighting them, it assumes you read the book. Hell the game starts EXACTLY where the book ended. It’s pretty bare bones without the book, not much to talk about.

You also have option to switch to old graphics on fly and the implementation is not great. Visually it looks ok but the new models don’t always match the old. For example a tree is much more wider on new graphics but it’s not as much on old and the way enemies “see” is with old graphics, so you thought that tree covers you when in reality it does not. Hell you can shoot through parts of it. They also planted more foliage that you think would hide you but it’s not there when you switch to old graphics so it’s just a cosmetic change. Covenant ships received a really bad redesign, on old graphics they have a completely different color palette and it does look kinda alien, on new graphics they turned covenant ships into these shiny, white-grey rooms that look nothing like the old. But even the old graphics are not properly implemented! It’s because they used port made by Gearbox years ago and from my understanding, they’re not the highest quality that was available at the original release. So your Halo with old graphics will look worse than Halo on original Xbox.

But overall I had fun with this for most part, still gotta try that MP tho!


The new visuals of covenant ships...

...and the old one. Personally, in this instance I prefer old one.

Another example of IMO botched implementation of new visuals. See the next screenshot

Same level, same time of day, it's so much darker and IMO this has better feel.



Half-Life 2

Layers of Fear

6/10
5.5 hours
27 of 27 achievements

To paraphrase LeoTurambar’s summary, this whole game consists of “open door - good build up to nowhere – repeat”. Which is a shame because I was hoping for more.

We play as a struggling painter trying to make his last masterpiece. He also has schizophrenia or something else that makes him mental and is the source of his horror. We start at the entrance to our house and we are free to explore it, not much happens at first and the game really starts after we find the key to the painting room and start working on our last masterpiece.

After touching the painting a scary noise plays and nothing else happens. No one or nothing appears, nothing changes in the room and you think to yourself “well maybe something in the house changed?” – So you open the door and find a completely different hallway. You keep going and you find completely new rooms and hallways and so on. And now you know it started.

There’s no way to go but forward through most of the game, every time you enter new room the door behind you closes and is locked. You will revisit some rooms more than twice but usually they’ll be a little different in some way, there are letters and mementos to pick up that give you some background on our guy, his relationship with his wife and kid. Three endings and your actions determine which one you get but it’s very very difficult to tell when you are presented with a choice that impacts the ending. I got the “self-portrait” on my first, blind playthrough.




To 100% this I had to get all three endings and I had to find out how game determines the ending so I don’t replay it just to get the same one. So this game uses points system, there are many actions and small choices that you can make that add score to certain ending and at the very end you get the one with most points. Actions like picking certain mementos, small actions in room like looking at something or ignoring something. Hell there are rooms where you get points just for NOPE-ing out of the room.

But back to the beginning of my text, this sounds great and this game has some great build-up at times but it always ends with a disappointment :( It’s just not that scary. It is sometimes even hilarious (to me at least) when it tries to be scary, especially in the chapter with your child. Maybe some of you saw that AngryJoe clip yeah that’s not scary to me either, I laughed too when I saw it. I have to give props to dev to at least not using jumpscares to create fear, there were few but most of the game was without them. It’s surprising to me this game has over 90% positive reviews on steam, it wouldn’t surprise me tho if a lot of these are positive because the game is not that bad to give it a negative review, but when presented with just a binary choice a lot of people picked positive because it’s closer to what they feel about this game. That’s the case with me for sure, if I had to make it a steam review.

But maybe I’m wrong and some of you will love this one. Mild recommendation


Those eyes can pierce a man's soul

Layers of Fear: Inheritance

Layers of Fear: Inheritance

5/10
1 hours
27 of 27 achievements

In this DLC we play as daughter of the protagonist. Like in base game there are three endings and our choices impact which one we get, though in this DLC it was more obvious to me when we are presented with a choice that will have an impact. It’s short, took me around one hour to complete on my first playthrough, which helps this DLC because it is more of the same, but less scary.

It’s set in the same house but our heroine doesn’t seem to have same mental problems as our father, we can safely wonder around and other than our flashlight malfunctioning every now and then, not much happens. Instead what happens when you approach certain objects in the house, it triggers a memory where we get to hear our parents. Hear, because we never actually see them.

There are three memories and once you complete them, the door that was never accessible in the main game (before shenanigans started happening) opens up for us and our heroine makes a judgement on her father. There you’ll get ending 1 or 2, but to get the ending 3 you’ll gonna have to explore the house a little more carefully AND make proper decisions inside memories to form a map to a hidden room where you can discover your true inheritance OOooOOoOO!

The memories are quite varied at least, one is very similar to what happens in base game, you loop around the house, but you see it from a perspective of a small child, like 5 year old child. For that reason the devs decided to change the way you see, everything feels gigantic when you’re close but zoomed out when far away. The other one you have a painting lesson with your papa and if you make more childish decisions, you are transported into a world where everything is made of cardboards and crayons, if you follow your father it’s more Layers of Fear. Last one is short and very simple and I’m not gonna spoil it.

If this DLC is canon then it’s not even clear which ending you got in the base game is canon, IMO “the wife” ending is most likely canon after playing this DLC, but “self-portrait” could work too. Not recommended if you found base game average or worse, you won’t find anything interesting here. Unless you want to 100% LoF then I’m afraid you need to finish it at least 3 times :(

6.4 hours
None
+7/10
Played on Steam

04 - 20,000 Tits Under The Sea
08 - A Dark Forest Where My Heart Used To Be
12 - Steve's Been Sitting At This Desk For Years And Years
15 - My Highest Nature

I went completely blind into this (no pun intended :V) not even sure what game genre this is. This is a pretty standard point’n’click adventure game, although a little simplified and it borrows a little from other game genres in some sections.

Most dialogues are straight forward, you don’t get to choose what you say and you just click on, watching it play out. Even when you can approach someone and talk to them there’s at most 3 things you can ask them about and you don’t unlock any new dialogues after that. Puzzles are rather easy and it’s impossible to screw yourself, when you need to solve something the game locks you in 2-3 panels and everything you need is somewhere nearby. Puzzles are usually easy, but you often can’t pick something until you do a specific thing or listen to someone and ta-da, suddenly the object you could only look at now can be picked.

We play as Bartholomeus, an Apostle of God who is sent to the town of Rotbork that seems to be corrupted by several powerful demons and each feed off different vices of the city folk. Our dude is 2000 years old and when he is sent to the town, he arrives in a small boat laying on his back like he’s in a coffin or something. He was awoken yet again to fight another demon infestation. When the game starts we literally save a girl from getting raped by a huge bearded guy who is under demonic influence, we cut his hand off and he escapes and we begin the game by trying to find him and find out more about the town. The girl we saved will also assist as later on and we even get to play as her later on.




The game has a really great, dark atmosphere and the town really looks like it’s going to shit. It’s dark and you only find some color in whore house and local bars with it’s neon lights. Music really sells it to, from more ambient and dark tracks that play in darker parts of town to my favorite that plays in a whore house – a mix of electronic music with yells straight from porno with some demonic layers on top of it :D I LOVE IT! Please even if you ignore the tracks I put at start, give this one a listen.

This game like’s to switch genres for a few minutes in some sections. One time I had to play arcade shooter where I had to shoot down incoming projectiles and I could manually reload my gun by aiming at reload button. Once on shooting range where I had to prove myself to a gang the game became FPS for 2 minutes. On final battle you’ll see something else too. It’s a nice change and I enjoyed these little sections.

Oh and this game is a little edgy too and VERY stylish. The “cutscenes” are made like comic panels and you’ll see those panels during dialogue too. It tries to be funny too at times but sometimes it didn’t work for me.

The only issues I had with this game is once it got stuck on a cutscene and I had to alt-tab and close it manually. Luckily I lost no progress. The English translation has some typos too and there were few sentences that didn’t make full sense to me, felt like something that was missed during fixes.

I highly recommend this to any Point’n’click fans and anyone who plays them from time to time like me. It’s a hidden gem IMO and I hope more people give it a shot.


Jaded

I really love the idea of The Wolf Among Us world building made into a HBO show! Ahh I want it so bad now haha.
…Might be a bit close to what Once Upon a Time tried to be, but was a bit too childish comparatively..

Traqie

Never heard of that one but it does have some similarity from what I read.
Also I just saw your avatar in a bigger size for the first time and I noticed it’s a face, it always looked to me like Jason’s hockey mask in miniature lol

Jaded

I enjoyed Once upon a Time in the first season or two, but it really got ridiculous. I finally stopped trying at like season 4(?) when they brought in Frozen.
Haha oh dear >.>

devonrv

[In MO:Astray,] Everytime something new is introduced it slightly ramps up platforming difficulty and I don’t remember it going too hard or too easy. There are puzzles too

Can you go into a bit more detail on that? For example, are the new things introduced safely so you can figure out what they do before you’re in danger? Does the game keep introducing new stuff throughout the game, or does it stop and focus on building difficulty through trickier level design and combining previously-introduced things? Do the puzzles teach you how the puzzle mechanics work, or is figuring out the mechanics the entire puzzle (or are they just switch-hunts)?

[My Friend Pedro’s] Levels are more or less varied and fun for most part.

…did we play the same game? When I played My Friend Pedro, I encountered next to no variation in the levels until the final world. It was always the same enemies that’d aim directly at you and fire, occasionally ducking behind cover. It was pretty monotonous outside boss fights, and the level design did little to make combat any different. I actually liked the last few levels more than the rest of the game because it introduced the lasers and trip-wires, focusing more on platforming than combat.

Traqie

MO: Astray Game introduces new puzzle element or mechanic usually in a safe way, then it combines that with something you’ve seen before, be it another mechanic, puzzle element, enemy, obstacle etc in next rooms. Most of times it doesn’t tell you what something does or what something is, if it does you - like if you unlock a new ability - it tells you via pop up text what it does, but that was an exception for new abilities from what I remember. Game saves a ton, not just when you enter a new room but when you complete a certain step in the room, but it was very hard for me at start, I blamed it on horrible mouse support as you read. Also I just remembered there were few bits where difficulty felt unfair (especially one “memory” level with a giant worm…) but those I could count on one hand.

My Friend Pedro
I had the most fun with this game when it was about speed and going forward blasting enemies or when it placed you in cool scenarios like going down on a lift and enemies shooting from different angles or in a room with lots of doors and enemies poping up from different doors. While the last levels were indeed different from rest and the played differently, they also were much slower and made you use cover more. They also were full of these buffy enemies that take shitload of bullets to kill and only sniper rifle was very effective against them.
I don’t mind monotony and gameplay loop as long as its fun and doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Maybe the levels aren’t as varied as I thought now that I remember, but they usually introduced new things with each “world”. Construction levels introduced skateboard and frying pan and really started using a lots of ropes, there was this one world with haters and tough platforming, canals is one where I enjoyed the humor and it has LARPing knight gamers, not a very original enemy in terms of its behavior but still! Though I remember now that canals also introduced these commando type enemies near end D:<

JaffaCaffa

The art of The Blind Prophet looks so cool, thanks for putting it on my radar!

It’s funny, I played all the Turok games as a kid but I don’t remember 2 being so confusing…and yet every review I read mentions this above anything else. And it’s scared me off replaying it as I’m not a fan of get lost in games, tend to get frustrated. Yet 8 year old me was apparently fine with it. Oh how I wish I had the patience I once had with video games sometimes. haha You’re a also one of the only people I’ve seen recently who actually enjoyed it though, so perhaps I’ll give it a go anyways! I recently got a tv for my room after moving & have my N64 so I’ll be able to play it once again. :)

Great reviews, you nailed why someone may or may not enjoy the games, while giving your own opinions. (I’ll be sure to use a controller with MO:Astray, thank you in advance!)

Traqie

I’m happy to see at least one person got interested in The Blind Prophet, this game deserves more love! :D

If you replay Turok 2 some day, one advice I might give you on that specific level is if you have a choice between a teleporter and a hole in a ground, always go down the hole :) My first ever FPS was Half-life so I don’t mind playing these old shooters, I like to explore and see what I missed from that time period.

And thank you for your kind words! <3 I’ll look forward to your posts!

Py

I’d definitely recommend reading the fable comics. The story/character/world are even more awesome than in the game (for me at least).

Traqie

Hmm I never was much of a comic reader, but I guess if I ever try to get into comics this could be my starting point :)

Vito

I’m no comic reader either, but they are definitely well made (spoiler: I didn’t really like the story though, so I stopped after about 3 issues)