Umineko When They Cry (Question Arc)
47 hours of playtime, 22/22 achievements
Positive reviews: 99%
An endless visual novel, might be the longest I've played. Unlike Higurashi from the same developers, this game includes all four chapters in one package, so it's like four games in one, which explains the playtime. Finishing it all takes a great amount of patience, but in the end I snapped and auto-played the whole last chapter at fast speed before I lost another 15 hours (by the way, this game is only 1/3 of the whole(?) Umineko story, so you can imagine my frustration). It might be wise to play it chapter by chapter, with some breaks between them.
My impressions are mixed. I think it could be a great detective story (an isolated island, a mansion, a mysterious host and his guests and servants), and the game had some strong points (they're trying to use logic tricks like Raven paradox, for example) and unexpected plot twists. What discouraged me is the amount of supernatural stuff, examples of extremely annoying/generic/violent characters, overuse of "the evil laughter" sound effect, too many pages of unrelated or boring reading, and the overall quality of dialogues and conclusions.
Shardlight
6 hours of playtime, 18/19 achievements
Positive reviews: 90%
A very nice post-apocalyptic old-school point and click adventure developed by Wadjet Eye Games. I liked it more than similar type games such as Primordia and Technobabylon, and a bit less than Gemini Rue. The art was lovely, the atmosphere of the decaying world was very inspiring, and even the fact that the game was pretty easy and short didn't affect my impressions. One of the characters strongly reminded me of Bioshock Infinite's rebels, and the situation here was somehow similar. I'm thinking of playing it again with developers' commentaries.
OneShot
6 hours of playtime, 11/11 achievements
Positive reviews: 98%
Can't say much about it, because it might be dangerous to have a negative opinion on this game =o Well, it's not actually negative, but mixed. I can say only that I've expected more from this game, especially after playing Undertale, but it seem to be hard for anyone to reach TobyFox's level of creativity (yeah, I know that the first version of OneShot came earlier). Also, there were a few compatibility issues with meta elements on my PC.
Mass Effect: Andromeda
Currently playing...
Metacritic user score: 4.8/10
It's not bad at all, actually! I've bought it after the patch which fixed "the scary eyes", so the faces look better comparing to what you might see on Youtube. I'm currently setting an outpost on the second planet, and there are too many things to do, and it's not even remotely getting boring. At first, it reminded me of No Man's Sky, with all that scanning around =) If I compare it to other franchises, Andromeda is like Fallout 4 - might not be as good as New Vegas in terms of story, but with an overwhelming amount of content. It's hard to describe it briefly, there are things I like more (for example, access to all skills - there are no classes any more), or less (there is no paragon/renegade system). I think I'll write a bit more about after finishing it (by the end of the month, I hope). My Ryder is on the last screenshot =)
Thanks for sharing the experience of playing ME:A! It’s one of my to-play games for the year. I love the ME universe and I look forward to playing this eventually.
Look, if you had … OneShot, or one opportunity
For the Umineko part remember you only played the Question arc. A lot of stuff you think happened one way actually didn’t, a lot gets debunked in the answer arcs. It still has supernatural elements but much less than what the first episodes have you believing. And yeah it is A LOT to play at once, it’s highly recommended to go 1 episode at a time, take a break and come back at a later date. I played it while the English fan patches were still in development so that “gated” my progress for a few months at a time, which in the end actually added to the enjoyment.
It is however 1/2 of the Umineko Story. There are fandiscs besides the 8 “main” episodes but they’re not part of the series, they’re just expanding the lore.
As for the scanning in ME:A worry not, it’ll get a looooot less. In fact I might even had gone hours without even pressing G after the first hours on Eos. And the skip option when you travel between planets is gonna save you a looooot of time, trust me, that one was insanely annoying before.
ME:A doesn’t look bad at this point, but it’s also not amazing. That’s why I will wait for GOTY and fully patched game.
Wonky animations aren’t that important, but this scannning in Nomad is annoying. Also I really lack minimap in open-world exploration game. Like why?
Combat first impression is - woah D. But after some time I hit a wall of only 3 abilities. Sure, if you focus on weapon build it will be ok. But I like to play as Sentinel with lots of tech / biotic combos, and having only 3 abilities feels wrong. You can assign 3 others abilitiers to other favourite slot, but their cooldown is resetted upon switching. So I can’t have tech abilities in one fav menu, biotic in other and stwich them smoothly mid-combat. Which is huge downside, I hope someone will create mod to change that.
But apart from that plot looks interesting, which is good for game that should be story-driven :D
I think, scanning is moderately annoying in every ME game, although the process is different every time =)
About minimap: after Skyrim and Fallouts I think I’m used to its absence. I only wish that points of interest, like camps or ruins, appeared on the radar, and my current quest objective was shown more clearly on it.
About abilities: yeah, this doesn’t look good. I’m playing as a pure engineer for now, so I didn’t experiment with different skills yet, but I feel a bit limited already. In previous games I actively used my companions’ skills for combos, it’s too bad I can’t do it now.
Well after my first 2 - 3 playthroughs in ME2 I started to use cheat on x platinum and so on. I coulndn’t be bothered with scanning those planets so many times, as I beat this game like 10 times. So I don’t have “problem” with this here :D
There is difference between Skyrim and ME:A. In Skyrim only factor that limits you from going straight to your POI is… your obstinance. You can climb pretty much every mountain by spamming space all the way up. And that’s not case in ME:A, as Nomad can’t climb such streep hills. So you can drive in your direction, and have to turn back to look for some wehicle route, as you met dead-end and can’t drive further. Or accidentally fell down, so you have to bring up whole map too see where is route to the top. Which is annoying.
One of my favourite thing to do was to throw singularity with Liara and detonate it with my push. On this field ME3 combat is superior to ME:A.