#additional various two to three hour long playthroughs

[blumoontf2]

TF2 x Poker Night Headcanons!

Defence Class! :D

I love this game. If you haven’t seen the Offense class post, this is about Poker Night at the Inventory 1 + 2!! My favourite comfort game! See my first post on this for more details :3

We look at Heavy, Engie and Demoman :D Heavy’s already in the game so his sections a bit short :(

Heavy

I’m starting with Heavy because he’s already in the game so uhm…

In the First Game he’s closest with Tiny Heavy (Strong Bad), then Max, and is least close with Tycho for being ‘Blu’

For the second game I think Heavy would get along with Brock and Sam…? Would have probably met Sam prior because of Max in the first game. Brock has the same sort of physical build (aka large neck and muscles) so I’d like to think they could have a civil and relatable conversation together. He kinda disturbs the people of night one with some of his voice lines, but I’d like to think the Night two cast would see him more… normally? Like Brock and all his violence, Claptrap being from Pandora, Ash… would probably be a little freaked out as would Sam.

Heavy would respect Glados I think. He respects all the workers at the Inventory.

With Reginald they also have a pretty neutral relationship? Kind of canonically too. Probably holds less favour with him for being the one to bring the TF2 cast to the inventory

Engie

Night one… I can’t see him being close with any of the cast similar to Spy. Probably gets along with Winslow and Moxxi more than the table cast. Could probably talk code with Tycho but that’s about it. Strong Bad would probably admire him to some degree, I could see it.

Night one, Engie wouldn’t be a player. He’d be at the bar I’d say, getting a feel for the environment.

Night TWO however is a different story! Glados, Claptrap, Ash Williams. The robot guys! Would compare his arm to Ash’s, would want to try and fix Claptrap’s voice box if he can. And don’t get him STARTED on Glados!!

Oh my God, Glados - baby - one chance… (to deconstruct you and figure out how you work). Engie would be impressed but I feel like he’d treat Glados less as a person and more like machinery because of it…?

Again, probably talks nicely with Winslow. Probably a neutral relationship too though. Treats Moxxi with respect. Helps with damages where he can. Makes his teammates pay for his labour too.

Demoman

Again, same as Sniper who, like Spy, will be in the next post - he’s just kind of chill with everyone in poker night one. The cast isn’t DISLIKABLE but Tycho is a freak, Max is Max and Strong Bad is. Uh. Maybe he’d get along with Tycho? The real question is would Tycho be friends with Demo… so if anyone maybe Max? I feel like drunk enough he wouldn’t care who’s in his company.

Originally I was going to say Moxxi but I feel like she would get sick of his drunk ass. Same goes with Winslow as well, he’s sick of the damages Demo makes when drunk

Same as Engie, he wouldn’t be a player in Night One. He’d be at the bar. Night TWO however, he’d be drinking and playing.

Night Two, I see him being friends with Claptrap and Ash mostly. Sam as well but that’s honestly because I feel like genuinely Sam would get along with everyone? Ash because HAUNTED SWORD. NECRONOMICON.

Gets over Glados quickly. Same reaction as Sam at the beginning of Poker 2. Surprised at first, shrugs ‘I’ve seen weirder’, carries on with his life.

Reginald Van Winslow would HATE- dislike Demo for property damage. Or the costs of such for cleaning. He wouldn’t get banned though, I don’t think. Close to it! He’s on three strikes…

[biscuitreviews]

Biscuit Reviews Megaman X5

With the Megaman X series going strong and getting stronger, Keiji Inafune was wanting to move on from the X series and have a new series that featured Zero as the main character. Inafune and his team then decided to close out the Megaman X series with Megaman X5.

Megaman X5 follows suit with X4 being more easier and forgiving than its predecessors. Although the start of the game does have you pick between X and Zero, you are allowed to play as either throughout the duration of the game rather than picking one of them and playing as them for the entire playthrough.

The story has Sigma returning and this time he’s no longer working in the shadows like he did with X3 and X4. The space colony Eurasia is coming to Earth and is projected to cause massive damage in 16 hours. It’s up to X and Zero alongside, Signas, Alia, and Douglas to stop the space colony from crashing down to Earth and to once again stop Sigma.

Starting as X will allow you to keep the Fourth Armor from X4 with the subtraction of the near infinite ammo for special weapons upgrade. This made X5 incredibly easy, much easier than X4 for that matter. Starting as Zero, will cause X to lose his Fourth Armor.

X can now use his normal buster gun when equipped with the special weapon. The special weapon will act as a second attack allowing players to have two different weapons for X. Zero can also use his buster gun as a second attack. It gives you a long range option as Zero, but the buster gun itself is slow to fire.

Speaking of making things easier, when you’re first introduced to the 8 Mavericks you have to defeat, you’re given the order on which you should defeat them. Yes, Signas tells you the order. If you follow the order, you’ll have an easy time with the Maverick bosses as you’ll have the weapon their weak against immediately. My guess was this was most likely done to have players feel more at ease as you are timed to complete certain events. Doing each stage uses up one hour on the clock. It does seem immitading that there is a timer of some sort, but honestly, considering how the game tells you the order on how to defeat the Mavericks, I felt no pressure at all to get the job done quickly.  

There are also two armor sets that X can collect as well in this game. The Falcon Armor and the Gaea Armor. The Falcon Armor has an ability that will allow X to fly through the stage for a short period of time allowing him to avoid enemies and obstacles. The Gaea Armor allows X to walk on spikes. The Falcon Armor is a great help in the final stages allowing you to save resources for the boss fights. The Gaea Armor is needed to get the various heart tanks and sub tanks hidden throughout the stages as most upgrades are found along a long spiky path making getting this armor necessary. However, once you get all the upgrades, the Gaea Armor is pretty much useless at that point as you can’t use special weapons.

X5 also brings in the introduction of parts. These parts grant X and Zero different abilities to use in stages, such as running faster. Having a longer dash, and charging your weapon faster just to name a few. This gave some additional customization options for both X and Zero but again.

Another bonus was the end game Maverick boss rush. Honestly, I loved the developers did for this particular rush as these Mavericks got stronger making it really feel like a test of your combat abilities as well as conserving your resources. I also enjoyed how the end stages were a celebration of the Megaman series and I also loved how the game further expanded upon the connection with the original series.

Overall, as far as Megaman X5 being the intended ending of the Megaman X series, it would have served as a good ending. But as we know, it didn’t end there as three more Megaman X games would be released after X5 which would mark beginning of the end for Megaman X’s reputation.

Megaman X5 receives a 4 out of 5

[yesgamesonline-blog]

Free Download Gear 5 PC

GEAR 5

Gears 5, I've been looking forward to another entry in this franchise for a wee while now and have since burned through the campaign and I’m preparing second playthroughs alongside continued play of the Versus, Escape and Horde modes.

Is it the second coming of Gears?

Not quite, but it provides some really incremental improvements on a lot of features from games past, as well as some new ideas that help refresh it for the future. So let's get into it. Some minor spoilers here for the opening hours of gameplay, but no plot spoilers here, you're safe with me. Gears 5 has all of the core gameplay components that we've come to expect of the franchise: the cover shooting mechanics are just as satisfying and well-constructed as they've ever been, with it once again having that weight of movement and impact that seldom few games have ever been able to replicate.

 There are some minor changes, partially the control scheme gets a wee tweak to accommodate the new mechanics for handling Jack (your AI bot companion) as well as a tweak to melee combat, but overall the core of the game's mechanics hasn't really changed. There are some fun changes involving enemy AI characters and design, which I'll come back to in a minute. However, the rote linear design of Gears levels is the big element that gets shaken up. The first act of Gears 5 feels distinctly like its predecessors: playing as JD while fighting through war-torn environments facing off against enemies of various shapes and sizes. But after that first 2 or 3 three hours, the game opens up and becomes a semi open-world experience: with acts built around hub worlds that you can explore to find upgrades (yeah there's a skill tree now) as well as collectibles. It helps the world of Sera feel more realized than in previous games and amazingly the transition from focused linear levels to big open-world hubs works incredibly well.

 GEAR 5 PC

For some I imagine the navigating around these spaces might prove tedious, but I found it a lot of fun. What is even more interesting is that after the first act, you playas Kate for the rest of the game which is helpful, given she's the far more interesting character of the two. Dare I say it; it's the writing that's kept me involved throughout the campaign. Gears 5 picks up not long after the conclusion of Gears of War 4. It's continuing the story of new main characters JD - the son of series mainstay Marcus Fenix - plus Kait and Del. Without a doubt the major change that Gears of War 4 brought was the inclusion of this a new generation of characters that helped bring a fresh perspective on things, as young adults who have been raised in a world ravaged by conflict, first by the pendulum wars and then the war of attrition against the Locust Horde. For me they were a breath of fresh of air, given we're rather used to Marcus's gruff moaning and Baird's sarcasm. Sure, it better fits more contemporary culture as well given their desire to tell jokes and mess with each other, but it also opens up more opportunities in the storytelling given their views on the authoritarian and rather fascistic Coalition of Governments (of COG) as well as their connections to existing characters or storylines. 

Gears have often suffered from its inability to deliver any emotional weight and that in-part is caused the characters seem unable to grow or develop from their gruff archetypes and their position within the established politics. In the original trilogy we had Marcus' complex relationships both with the COG government as well as his father and the underlying tensions of how the COG have caused just as much harm as they have good throughout the Locust war. But given Marcus and his crew are walking slabs of monster-killing meat you seldom get a chance to let them grow or develop, be it Cole's fall from fame, Dom and the loss of his family and Baird who... is just a dick really. But interestingly the same themes of working with or against the authoritarian a regime of the COG, as well as facing our legacies are the come themes of Gears of War 4 and 5, but the characters still have tremendous room to grow and adapt. JD desire first to rebel against his father and now seeking his approval is an interesting avenue but the game makes a smart move in transitioning over to Kate. As we shift to Kait, with Del helping out, the game seeks to address her family, her relationships with the CoG and some big reveals for the franchise.

GEAR 5 GAMEPLAY

Act two is notably a great segment of the game given it not only opens up the world as mentioned, but it's some of the best writing the franchise has had in years. It's always been a problem of the franchise - much like Halo - in that it often fails to communicate a lot of the more interesting aspects of its narrative. But here it allows some of these new characters to grow, to foster new relationships with existing ones and addresses plot points from the original franchise that were never properly explained until now. Moving away from the plot, there new Swarm enemies that crop up throughout, once again creating new and interesting combat situations for you to address, plus some of the annoying beasties from previous entries make their return. It's all building a top that cores combat layer and forcing you to re-evaluate how you use cover, attack the enemy and use your abilities and weapons. I'll avoid getting too much into it for now, given I'm going to be doing a design dive episode later this year analyzing the AI of Gears enemies, but I found them all to be welcome additions. Even if some of them are a real pain when in the heat of combat, but it's kind of the point.

                                CLICK HERE TO FULL DOWNLOAD

[vrwork]

Grim Fandango Remastered - Double Fine - 2015

Commenting on the commentary.

One of my most significant direct contributions to a video game was my work on the developer commentary for Grim Fandango Remastered. I joined the project as a newly promoted assistant producer in summer 2014 and had to take on many roles that were new to me. In the case of the commentary, I had to help plan the recording sessions in which members of the development team talked for about four hours per group. One interesting limitation was that we needed to limit the recording sessions to four hours but a game playthrough is much longer, so some of the commentary was recorded only from watching the first half of the game. I sat through all the sessions and jotted down notes to remember the timecodes for particularly engaging commentary.

I had to take on the responsibility for the commentary audio as well since our audio team was stretched thin working on this game and Broken Age, both games that have a ton of dialogue. I had to pore over those sixteen or so hours and pick out the most interesting commentary to include in the game. That required listening to the complete tracks and marking the segments to extract with the Audacity audio editing app. Thankfully, Audacity includes a feature which allows highlighting segments with a text comment and then exporting those segments with the comment as the filename. I had to consider the commentary that should appear in certain locations and those anecdotes that were more generalized and could be placed anywhere in the game. I was also mindful of the length of each segment, since I felt that players don’t want to be stuck in a room for too long as they wait for commentary to play. It was an unfortunate limitation of the game that commentary could only within the room it is triggered. The final commentary in the game is a bit over two hours and fifteen minutes, but I believe my original extracts added up to more than three hours.

Once extracted, I had to design the commentary’s placement by selecting the places in the game where the player could look at an object or enter a room to receive a prompt that indicated they could press a button to play the commentary. This design document was for the programmers on the team who would have to hook up the triggers and the audio that should play when that trigger is hit. I didn’t have much context for this type of design except for the commentary from Portal, so I modeled my choices on my memories of Portal’s implementation. As for the commentary that would play, I was mindful of various factors. I wanted to make sure commentary was about the room or situation in which the player was currently located as much as possible, but I peppered in the more general anecdotes in some places, especially the latter half of the game which wasn’t viewed and commented on by some of the guests who came in to record. I also wanted to make sure that I balanced out the commentary as much as possible to include everyone and make sure the player heard different bits of commentary from the range of personalities and roles of the participants.

So eventually I had a defined list of audio clips representing all of the commentary that would play in the game and the programmers had the audio clips working in the game. Initially, I didn’t think we would need subtitles for these commentary clips, but I was convinced by Mark Cooke from Shiny Shoe (co-developer of all three of Double Fine’s remastered LucasArts games) that we should have subtitles, and that missing subtitles would be a huge omission and a let-down for the fans. I came around on the idea and agreed to take on the role of transcriber as well. I used a transcription app that opens a audio clip and allows the user to type out the commentary as they listen. It was months of work to transcribed it all myself. The final step was to also fill out a JSON file or something similar that outlined when each audio clip began and ended, which was required for determining when the subtitles should appear and disappear on the screen. It was well worth the effort to make sure that the subtitles were there for players who need or prefer that option in their games.

We began work on the game in summer 2014 and finished the base game by December, with a release in late January 2015 and several updates and ports to other platforms afterward. This was all in addition to my other duties both as assistant producer on this project and for Broken Age, which was due to release in spring 2015. This formative experience always stands out to me both for the first time I had my hands so directly on a game’s content, but also for the opportunity and trust I received from the team and in particular the executive producer, Matt Hansen, to take on the responsibility and make decisions that would directly impact the gameplay experience. This is how Double Fine operated as a matter of course, but it was an empowering and daunting first project on which to flex those underutilized muscles.

[trainerfox25]

Civilization 6 Release Date

The bane of gamers across the world who have to get to work early next morning, the Civilization franchise is perhaps the most addictive set of games ever created. You look at the clock, and you know that you should probably go to sleep. What’s the harm in just one more turn, right? Well, before you know it, hours have passed, the birds have started chirping and the rising sun’s orange glow has begun to stream through the windows. This is a story that most Civilization players are all too painfully familiar with.

Civilization 6 Xbox Release Date

Civilization 6 Android Release Date

Civilization 6 Portugal Release Date

First launched nearly three decades ago in 1991, the Civilization series has since gone through 6 different iterations in the main series, with several spin offs such as 2014’s ‘Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth’. The latest game in the main franchise, ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization VI’, launched in 2016 and has since been treated to two expansion packs as well. Traditionally, this would be about the time when developer Firaxis Games would start work on their next title, which may very well be ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization VII’. While it is still early days, here’s everything we know about the Civilization franchise and a potential ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization VII’ game in the future:

Civilization VI initially released the New Frontier Pass in May of 2020, but we’ve continued to see new pieces of it drop, and now, we finally know what to expect in the sixth and final DLC. The long wait agony has finally ended for the Sid Meier Civilization fans, when Civilization: Beyond Earth, or Civilization VI, has been finally released to PC gamers last October 24, 2014, while Mac user had to wait just a little bit and got the release on November 27, 2014.

Civilization 7 Plot: What is it About?

The Civilization games are a series of turn based 4X games, and currently one of the oldest ongoing video game franchises in existence. As the player, you are put in complete charge of an ancient civilization of your choosing sometime right after the dawn of the agricultural age. Every empire has its own unique backstory, strengths, weaknesses, structure and leaders. As the leader of your kingdom, you must build cities and infrastructure, cultivate food to feed your people, research new technologies, build and maintain armies, spread your religion and much more through the centuries while constantly dealing with other foreign civilizations who may, or may not be hostile to your cause.

At its core though, the story in any Civilization game is what you make of it. While every Civilization in the game has its own backstory, traditions, predilections and quirky leaders inspired from real history, the actual storyline of every single individual match of Civilization differs from player to player, and playthrough to playthrough. A player striving to win via diplomacy and political maneuvering will have a very different story to tell compared to his compatriot who might prefer to raise massive armies and obliterate everything in his path.

Civilization 7 Gameplay

The Civilization games perfectly embody the sentiment “Easy to learn, but hard to master”. Being a turn based strategy game, the player is provided a bird’s-eye macro view of the game world and tasked with ensuring the total victory of your empire on the world stage. This type of strategy game is often also referred to as a 4X game, referring to the four basic gameplay tenets of this genre – explore the world, expand your empire, exploit the available resources and exterminate your enemies.

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Similar to many board games, players take turns one after the other to move their units, build new structures, generate new units, research new technologies, formulate their religious, economic and social policies and much more. The primary currencies in the Civilization games are gold and various resources such as food, livestock, iron, coal, etc. found randomly littered across the map. The player can use these resources to set up trade agreements with the other civilizations, or even gift them in exchange for political favors.

Up until ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization IV’, the world map was divided into square grids which formed the fundamental basis for unit movement. Units could move from one square grid to another, and multiple units could be stacked on a single grid as well. However, 2010’s ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization V’ introduced hexagonal grids for the first time ever, along with a restriction on stacking multiple units on the same grid. This was a welcome enhancement, as it allowed for more granular military strategy and movements, as well as giving the world a more organic feel.

The newest addition to the series, ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization VI’ also utilizes the hex based grid system, but also supplements it with some sweeping changes to city development and city management. Now, certain city improvements can only be made in specific specialized districts. For example, military units can only be trained in Encampment districts whereas the Campus district is focused on science and research. This new district mechanic adds another layer of strategy to the game, as invading armies can launch targeted strikes against specific districts of a city in order to cripple its regular operations.

Bootstrap parallax template free download. The technology tree in ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization VI’ has also undergone a facelift, now with two distinct pathways – the Active Research System which is dependent on your civilization’s scientific output, and the Civics tree which oversees the civilization’s ideological and cultural progression.

If you find all this to be a tiny bit overwhelming, do not fret. All of the newer Civilization games feature a robust advisor mechanic which assigns you a personal advisor who will guide you through some of the more complex game mechanics and strategies.

Civilization 7 Developers: Who Are The People Behind It?

Civilization 6 Xbox Release Date

While initially conceived and developed by MicroProse Software, which was co-founded and led by the legendary game designer Sid Meier, every Civilization game since 1996’s ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization II’ has been developed by US based video game developer Firaxis Games. Sid Meier continues to serve as Director of Creative Development at Firaxis. Industry behemoth 2K Games has published all Civilization games from ‘Sid Meier’s: Civilization IV’ and onwards. In all likelihood, the next Civilization game will also be developed by Firaxis Games and published by 2K Games.

Civilization 7 Release Date: When And Where Can I Play It?

While there has been no official confirmation yet, the Civilization franchise is so popular that a sequel is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It is not a matter of if, but rather, when. Based on recent trends, Firaxis and 2K Games tend to release a new ‘Civilization’ game every 6-7 years. For instance, Civilization 5 came out in 2010. Six years later Civilization 6 released in 2016. Which means, we should expect ‘Civilization 7′ to release sometime in 2022 or 2023.

Civilization 6 Android Release Date

Civilization 7 Trailer

Civilization 6 Portugal Release Date

Obviously Civilization 7 trailer is still some time away. In the absence of that, why not enjoy the trailer of Civilization 7.

Read More: Best War Games

[unboundedworlds]

-Persona 5- [11.10.17]

Also currently playing: Stardew Valley, Dragon Quest VIII, Destiny 2

[For the most part this will be spoiler free, though I will be talking a little about the end-game and ending but I’ll make sure to stick up a spoiler warning in advance.]

It took me way too long but I finally got around to finishing this game, and I’m so glad I did. I’m a huge fan of the Persona series (from 3 onward - I’m yet to play SMT Persona or fully complete Innocent Sin), first playing Persona 4 Golden in 2014 before going back and playing Persona 3 Portable, and now Persona 5. While I’ve played a fair share of them now, I’m still reasonably new to JRPGs so I’m by no means good at the games, but even so I was able to beat and get an incredible amount of enjoyment out of all three entries. This wont be a review of the game, just a basic overview and my thoughts and feelings about my time with the game. 

Persona 5′s fundamental mechanics are similar to what you’d be used to from Persona 3 and 4. Like the previous two games, you’ll be spending half your time in modern day reality, meeting new people and forming bonds, working part-time jobs and attending school etc., and the other half of your time you’ll spend raiding Palaces (this game’s dungeons) where you’ll need to fight Shadows and levelling up your party members and Personas. That’s a very (very) basic summary of the gameplay. One of the biggest reasons you’ll pick up a Persona game is for it’s story and the connections you as the player/protagonist make with the people you meet in this world.

I absolutely loved this game’s world and all of the characters you get to meet and bond with throughout the game. All the characters are unique, interesting, memorable and all have very distinct personalities, storylines and troubles that the player can assist them in overcoming should you choose to. This game took me roughly 131 hours on a completely blind playthrough to reach the true ending, and in that time you find yourself truly connecting with these characters and genuinely caring about them and how their stories are going to turn out. As with all Persona games, there’s degree of sadness to be had from finishing the games as you’ll no longer be able to go into that world and continue bonding with and helping these characters you’d spent so long getting to know. However, since it’s very tricky to max out all Confidants (known as Social-Links in the previous games) in your first blind run, this adds a lot of replayability to the game as in a second or third playthrough you can spend time with people you perhaps didn’t have time to in your first playthrough.

I wont talk too much about the gameplay as I’ve already briefly covered how the game plays, but I have to mention about how polished and great the game feels to play, both in the RPG parts and the real world parts. Navigating the real world has convenient ways of quickly getting to all the various locations, while exploring dungeons both in and out of combat feels smooth and brilliantly made. Movement, the (simple but effective) stealth system and combat all feel better than they ever have before, and flow seamlessly between one-another, making both dungeon exploration and fighting Shadows extremely enjoyable. I can’t talk for the prior games, but combat from Persona 3 onward has always been extremely satisfying, intense and just damn fun, and that doesn’t change here. In fact it’s only enhanced with the addition of the newly introduced Gun, Psychic and Nuclear damage types, alongside a vast new selection of moves and skills your Personas can learn, and the reintroduced Demon/Shadow negotiation system from Persona 2 (and possibly 1?). All in all, Persona 5′s gameplay is seriously incredible and such a blast to play. I never once found myself getting burnt out from playing this game, and that has a tendency to happen to me with RPGs.

This is getting pretty long so I’ll quickly cover just a couple more areas. I especially want to talk about Persona 5′s presentation because, even after finishing the game and putting 131 hours into it, everything about it still blows me away. The 3D modelling, animations and locations all look incredible, the game’s art style is (in my opinion) damn near flawless, and following the Persona trend it has an absolutely wonderful soundtrack. While in general I think I still prefer P4′s OST, this game’s soundtrack definitely comes very close, especially with certain tracks. (That final boss theme though. ‘Rivers in the Desert’, if you’re interested in giving it a listen.)

[This paragraph will contain brief spoilers] I wont talk about this game’s story itself as it’s huge and long and great but I’m v lazy. I did really, really enjoy the story of this game though, and as you approach the end it only gets better and better. A slight worry I had for the first portion of the game was that I didn’t feel like a whole lot was at stake, unlike in Persona 3 and 4. It didn’t feel like the work the Phantom Thieves (your team) were doing really had any large scale impact. That worry subsided the more I played the game though. As you progress the team will start to tackle bigger and bigger tasks, and start making much more of an impact to society and the world around them. ESPECIALLY at the end. While your first job is to tackle a corrupt teacher, the finalé has you fight through a twisted, distorted reality in which you end up fighting a literal God. And it was SO great. So yeah, I think my early game worries definitely got resolved. Also, some of the scenes after the final boss had me crying my eyes out for hours, so if you get emotional over fictional stories like me then be prepared. (Still not quite as bad as Persona 3′s ending hit me, though. *tears up*) [Spoilers stop here]

I’ve gone on way long enough already so I’ll wrap up here.

This and the previous two Persona games are very, very special to me for many reasons, and I’m so glad Persona 5 was able to live up to the incredibly high standards Persona 3 and especially 4 had set. I’m yet to grab the platinum trophy for Persona 4 Golden, but I have full intentions to go back to Persona 5 one day for another playthough or two to see if I can get myself this game’s platinum too. I’d recommend this game to anyone, it’s such a blast to experience. This isn’t something I’d usually do or plan to continue doing, but if I had to give Persona 5 a rating it would definitely hit 9.5/10, as with Persona 3 and 4. These games are great. Real great.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Synchronized Sinking

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/the-dark-pictures-man-of-medan-review-synchronized-sinking/

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Synchronized Sinking

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games’ proposed Dark Pictures Anthology–a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you’ve played Until Dawn, you’ll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan’s weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.

The game’s plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You’ll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it’s also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan’s main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you’ll uncover and experience along the way.

In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you’ll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.

The story isn’t engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the ’40s, you spend Man of Medan’s four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship–which is riddled with dead bodies–contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.

There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They’re mostly unlikeable, too–There’s the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex’s outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia’s obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story’s opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters’ interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what’s happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.

There’s also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous–the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.

There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You’ll also occasionally have to check in on ‘The Curator’, an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He’s a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the “good evening, boys and ghouls” merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn’t quite fit.

Multiplayer is Man of Medan’s big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that “don’t go in there” feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan’s relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don’t particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying–being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.

However, so many of the game’s issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you’re playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You’ll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.

Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you’ll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.

This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game’s story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we’d done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won’t see every scene when playing this way, and it’s entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.

No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It’s very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.

Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it’s an excellent experience; but if you’re after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it’s very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired.

Source : Gamesport

[cheswirls]

i have so many thoughts and its about 430 am so lets get started before they get scrambled.

i decided to read red potter and the middleground, but because i finished one so early in the morning, i had to hold off on the other for a bit, until this -past, i guess- evening. i had read for sure a chapter of the middleground previously, maybe two, but i’ve read too much now that the recollection isn’t coming to me like it came in small bursts through reading through chapter one again. i think it was another instance when i got extremely busy and had to put it down, maybe tac2 took over, dunno, but i got back to it now bc im still on the post-playthrough-of-white high and anything deep in unova is good and lu is fantastic so i knew this would be fantastic and is was right.

it’s a very dark read? unexpected, then again, its centered around a war, so also i shouldve expected it. the realization hit me around the third chapter, i think, when the nimbasa incident happened. very dark and very good. and emotional, i dunno how many times ive cried tonight but its been a night/twilight. the whole story basis with the center legend of unova and all the olden history is really good, its all really boosting my unova high like this is exactly what ive been needing to find, and all the characters it brings in despite the animeverse of it all -benga, n, touko!!- and the roles they play just really made it better, its kind of shallow but i like it even moreso because of the additions and though the story kept me highly entertained and drawn in there were a couple moments when i wished like oh man i hope the story has n in it bc n man jus n i need n content and then bam mentioned and now hes officially in it sort of i mean yeah he is. in the story. and this was early on like during the first few chapters so i had to hold out but it was worth it like, the story is interesting with the anime characters and i knew it was gonna be aniverse going into it and it was good and fine and still is good and fine. 

i dont remember when i started wishing for touko but man oh man it happened and i was like damn this could happen i wish she was kinda here bc i think i had begun to pick up on something and then later i really picked up on it which i will get to later and them bam another happy revelation and i am still like. touko. shes here. shes a part of the story. this is awesome.

anyway before this gets too long to massively too long, this is basically going to be a big analysis and happy-rant post, so if you have not read the middleground by the amazing @pkmncoordinators, you should do so here but then like leave this post until you do and then come back, that would be good. the rest is under a cut to save peoples dashes, sorry this is mega long already aha.

i played ghetsis’ battle theme through a chapter and it mustve been a shorter one bc it lasted me -30min- near the entire chapter. maybe the one beginning w the drayden and alder talk? or the dragonspiral tower one? or maybe theyre the same, its been a long night of binging this entire work. anyway. it set the mood for whatever chapter like i intentionally was like oh this theme is a little foreboding lets play it. and i had it down so low sometimes i could only hear the percussions to it, but it was still there, setting the tone.

otherwise, i found myself only keeping to n music. maybe there were a couple plays of unova e4, way in the very beginning of the first/second chapters, maybe, but for the most part, i kept with n’s songs. the bridge, some, the castle and battle theme, a lot. some renditions of such in b2w2 style. i tried to play through the music of n’s room in the castle, but i had to stop after a little into it, maybe ten minutes, because it was getting all these feelings out of me and i felt like if i played it all i would ‘tire it out’, so to speak, even though that hasnt happened w any of the tracks thus far, but i really want that to be a special one i  have on to draw inspiration from. later into the night/morning, whenever, i did decide to try out a remix of it via the b2w2 track of the same theme. the tune is in a slightly different pitch, but more than that, it gets distorted, almost corrupted, throughout and differentiates itself that way from the original, so i did end up playing through that no problem. i cant recall now if i ever played a theme back to back, i think i switched after the 30min was over, which, understandable, it’d been looping for half an hour. but i think i did play it again maybe once, which is fine. good.

but enough with music meta. its interesting, maybe thats where the draws of ‘where’s n?’ came from, but its not the focus.

oooh boy lets talk about various things that i will address here bc its 5am now and i need to not lose track. the n thing. um. the touko revelations. remember liberty, because the truth will set you free. the hero of truth. the opening chapter remarks. the possible sourgrapes. the viewpoints thing. there is probably more i will get to later in a different post but these are the current things for the morning.

first i wanna talk abt touko, hilda, whatever. small note so i dont appear brash, to ppl who dont really follow my content, i just dont really like the names hilda and hilbert. hilda is slowly growing on me, but missy always called the protag touko, and it really grew on me, and i live the name now, so thats what i always defer to her as. jus a preference thing.

so, i had no idea and i had every idea. oh my god. lu, you are so good at the foreshadowing stuff, serious. a master at it. i didnt pick up on the nimbasa trainer mention, or maybe i did but its been long ago now and i dont remember it. if she appeared before then i already dont remember the callback to it, oops. anyway. it was after that, for sure, if not before, that i did pick up on the brunette trainer and thought ‘damn if that was touko tho thatd be so rad’. really thinking it was in the electronic store in striaton, but that seems so far away from nimbasa like there mustve been something in between but i dont think so? so that. and then in the next, black city? abt the brunette trainer watching the tv, and i think i had the same thought except it was during ghetsis’ speech so between both moments brunette trainer was mentioned. i think i picked up on the repeated mentions of brunette trainer when she and iris locked eyes to see her also packing to leave the center. it was a thought more along the lines of ‘brunette trainers seem to be standing out to me more or are i guess being detailed more than other trainers’ than out of suspicion. i was picking up the repeated characteristic, but more of the notion that it was being named over and over, instead of anything real behind it. like, okay, there are a lot of brown haired trainers around, that works.

it was maybe in icirrus if that was the next thing, i tried to look and think i confirmed that was the next thing based on the recall conversation, so yes. in icirrus, my memory is really failing me sorry!!, somewhere, the first mention or maybe if that first mention was the brunette trainer across the hall in another room, my mind clicked. and it was like, oh, this brunette trainer might actually be all the same person. and i started to think again, wow, what if that person was touko bc i was really passionate abt it and i couldnt come up with who else bc i didnt have the focus i was still actively reading the store yknow? if was nothing about the being followed, i had to wait for the others to catch on and tell the reader before i got that aha. but i did! get! the touko part. it was when iris woke up from the comatose and all those scenes started playing out, maybe she mentioned not disturbing the others or cilan when they were talking, or georgia when she ran off, or something abt the trainer in another room, or a revelation dawned i guess somewhere in those scenes. and i was like oh my god that has to be touko god wow. im really losing my original train of thought i apologize. still recovering from sickness, and the whole long night thing. so something along that thought, but then it sorta got forgotten bc shit got real w virgil and the truth seekers being there, and i didnt recall again until she approached cilan during the counter sheidl -niiiiice throwback, by the way- training, and i was like !!!!!!!!!!!! that HAS to be touko and then she led him away and the whole scene played out and i remember scanning the page briefly, jus flicking my eyes over to see if i saw the namedrop and didnt, so i got entranced in the scene and then benga was like ‘hilda get the other three’ and TOUKO!!!!! WAS THERE OMG!!!! like confirmed, in the flesh, it was great its great what a great thing to add wow. and then the recall conversation happened and i began to pick up and was like wow they were being followed and didnt even remember the brunette trainer mentioned in nimbasa, barely remembered someone with a samurott led the charge to put out the fires, so that was a surprise. of course, that was such an intense scene, and i remember having a small breakdown around then bc burgundy said something about how she couldve been in one of those rooms and that chilled her and it sent me wild bc it was scary to think about, it really was chilling, this story really is dark che wow. 

so i was proud of myself for picking up on that, the touko thing, but i probably wouldve been in the dark completely had i read it and not recently played through white and mind being constantly on that region and those characters right now. 

that was super long. um. next thing is liberty bc i can remember it. the line is, im pretty sure, just remember liberty, because the truth will/can set you free. and its really only because im so into unova right now, but back at the first chapter today, my mind immediately picked up ‘oh liberty island’. except its not island, its liberty garden-island, thing, but still. the liberty just connected, and i had it, and so like when iris busted out like hey we’re not flying to nimbasa we’re going to liberty garden i was like yh guys cmon take a hint. but i really think it was probably creative and thought-provoking to others, a bit of a twister, to liek other readers like this isnt a callout on an easy riddle, jus a notion i picked up on easily. actually i remember the castelia thing confusing me, but there was also some disconnect because the liberty line want being used, it was just being mentioned that everyone seeking the seekers was heading to castelia, like the two were never paired i dont recall of. and it happened every time. i was like okay yes theyre at libery garden, then castelia was mentioned and i was like okay theyre at castelia. they never really crossed so they never crossed in my mind. it wasnt until the group landed in castelia i think that my mind connected, ah yes, liberty garden is off the coast of the city. i do wonder how plasma figured it out though. i think earlier speculation was on the touko-n relationship compromising the location, though im not sure how that would work in the first place, so it seems more likely someone jus picked up on the insinuation like i did, jus made the connection, tho i dunno who.

really quick hero of truth revelation thing. it took me a couple reads to grasp, like iris realized something cilan didnt but he went away and it took me, i had to read it over a few times because she realized something so therefore the readers have to realize as well, and then i made the connection that cilan was related to the hero of truth therefore making him the hero of truth. that couldve been phrased better unless cress and chili are somehow included which i think not, too many motifs, but the point comes across. i might not have made the connection had i not read earlier in the day about iris slipping cilan reshiram’s pokeball, something i stumbled upon before i started reading the entire thing oops so maybe that was a giveaway that helped me work through it, maybe i just connected based on the ancestor stuff, dunno. 

i still havent figured out whos writing the chapter intros and its getting to me!! i dunno if we’re supposed to know yet, at first i felt like cilan, and then a vague collection of others, maybe trip with the camera capture in black city, and then maybe touko at the end tho i feel like something was mentioned that was confidential and that she wouldn’t have known about. then again i suppose sharing stories and then recounting could come into play, in which case benga could also be writing them.. i dont’ feel like its someone currently irrelevant, tho. like, i don’t think it’s luke, or bianca, or someone kinda disconnected like that. its probably a spoiler for you to say whom, which okay, fair, but i hope someone signs off on the intros in the last chapter, or that theres something to pick up on to discover it ourselves, or maybe its not important, but i really gotta know eventually.

someone mentioned days ago about something like not being into wishfulshipping and then something about sourgrapes was mentioned, i really dont remember that well, but i started to pick up on it throughout, especially with all the camping scenes, and remembering you liked sourgrapes so much, and is it possible to confirm that thats a ship in this fic? or, has a possibility? i think i’m picking up on it, but it could be friendship, im not sure.

these next two are the last two for now i think. first, viewpoints, because this story delves into such a cast of characters and i think the same story told from the viewpoint of others would be so interesting, like told through the eyes of benga or touko, or even elesa possibly, and if you ever like wanna divulge in that or after you get done wouldnt mind someone taking a shot at it and working with for accuracy reasons, that would be pretty cool. and you have your first volunteer.

second and last is the n thing. i think a little is just meta, which i want to make a full post on later in time, so this may or may not tie in not sure. just, real brief, isn’t n such an interesting character? i really just, i dunno if i like him like i like others, but i really find his dynamic interesting. keeping it short, bc meta, the boy really grew up differently than a “normal” human. the proper socialization was there, sort of, because he can walk and speak and was educated like hes a math geniusa nd stuff, but he wasn’t socially educated. a lot of people dont realize the two are different, i didnt until i took an intro to sociology course this past fall semester. anyway tho. he really wasnt socially educated, and you can see that through all representations -cant speak for spe actually i havent read the arc yet- even in the anime, though far less likely than i would have liked, having rewatched the n arc a few days ago. the disconnect from people is there. n had tutors, but other than that he was in a room with his only company being pokemon formerly abused by people. that was it. not even normal pokemon, but those he had to gain the trust of first because they were misled by trainers. he doesn’t really know how to act with people. he talks fast, hes very blunt, he doesnt know the meaning of personal boundaries, et cetera. he was, practically, raised in a cult. led to believe only the cult’s beliefs. and its only through getting out of his room and around unova, at least in the game, that he begins to develop his own thouhgts and ideas and morals, that he begins to doubt what hes been preached his whole life. this is getting a bit like so im gonna cut, but i just, n is such an interesting character. the tie in. already, in the tv announcement, his voice is ethereal and i could picture it, could play the sound in my mind based off the anipoke and the gens voices, because both of those are genuinely how n sounds to me, i can see it perfectly it just works like there is no other voice for him. i could picture that when he spoke. and already, with the dreamy, far-off gaze, and it hardening, i can see his characterization is going to be so great in the middleground, and im so excited. i recently finished a fic where his characterization to me was absolutely perfect, and even as it evolved, that standard didnt diminish, because the evolution was so seamless and good that the changes to him felt right, felt realistic.

im realizing now this sounds like a do-good-or-there-will-be-consequences thing, which is not my intention. im just, i really wanted a story with n, one i knew would be good, and the middleground is it at the moment. and i know youll do a good job because i liked tac so much, which featured n, and already its the little things with middleground!n that are already so good, and this was really just me saying thank you and i cant wait, and so thank you and i cant wait for more. i cant wait to see more of n, no matter how small a role, or how big iunno, he plays, its already so good for such a complex character with such a grey background. morally grey, ethically grey, realistically grey, just grey. 

all in all, the middleground is amazing so far, i love it so so much, and once again, i cant wait for more. thank you for such an amazing piece thus far, lu. its past 6am now so its taken me a bit to get through this post, i hope the majority makes sense. and i cant wait to see what comes next with the story.

[arcanevalves]

Persona 5

What I Played: I initially started the game on Normal, but then dropped to Easy when I realized I had zero desire to lose any progress in a 90 hour game. Based mostly on blind play, I tried my best to maximize confidants and social stat grinding, although later on I did look up best methods to increase kindness. I used a persona calculator to solve the Strength confidant and otherwise just blind fired with combinations. I successfully maxed out about half of the confidants and pursued a romance with the Star confidant. I did reach the True ending and used a guide to avoid the Bad or Good endings (although I guess I probably could have reloaded the saves right beforehand, shrug).

I’m going to divide my thoughts into three areas: P5 as art, the thematic content based on the characters, and P5 as a game.

BLESS ART

Whatever negative things I might have to say about P5 in the other sections, it should be emphasized that the visual and auditory design of the game is astounding. While I was initially concerned that the menus might be too visually distracting, I overcame my own bewilderment and appreciated how they flowed and also matched the content. I am not in any way a visual artist, but the way that the game picked out a color scheme and stuck with it (here, mostly red and black) really appealed to me in terms of unifying the game visually. When the game stepped away from this, it was often for compelling reasons that stand out because they broke away from the mold (e.g., many of the All-Out Attack splash screens).

Likewise, the music is very pleasing and Last Surprise is up there with all-time great RPG battle themes. The use of instrumental and vocal versions of songs was also very compelling as I would find myself humming along to a repeated song only to realize that a vocalist had now rolled up on the scene. The use of new songs in the later palaces also helps keep the game fresh. Some of the music does get stale towards the end, but this is perhaps the unavoidable consequence of a 90 hour game. In this it reminded me a bit of Xenogears - an excellent soundtrack made to stretch over a very long game.

CHARACTERS

I am not truly convinced that the character arcs in Persona 5 pay off in the end.  In particular, the main character’s arc is the most anomalous because in the end, none of his confidants really mattered? The narrative presents his criminal record as his greatest problem and, accordingly, the one that is resolved in the final act of the story as the substantial evidence is presented to overturn the record. However, despite the main character’s relationships with the various confidants and player characters and, in particular, a romantic relationship, the main character returns to parents and a hometown that he simply did not appear to miss? The main character never expresses any desire to return home nor any fondness for his parents. Perhaps I am overlooking some assumption that the main character desires to return home, but if any there were any inference I took from the opening, it is that the main character was incensed about receiving unjust treatment from all parties involved, including his parents and hometown.

A critical flaw in the game is, unfortunately, that none of the confidants tie in or pay off in the main narrative except for the ones that are tied to the main plot (Sae, Goro, Morgana, Fool). I happened to pick a romance option in Hifumi who was mostly isolated from the main narrative, but I can imagine choosing Ann or Makoto or Haru or Futaba and feeling somewhat bewildered at various interactions. Furthermore, some of the confidants I simply did not finish and so I feel less able to evaluate their journey because the game’s constrained calendar system simply left me unable to finish them out. Characters like Yusuke, Haru, Chihaya, Makoto just didn’t get finished and I was not going to a NG+ playthrough to discover how their subplots end up. Kawakami I should have finished but apparently her confidant subplot cannot be finished because you can’t do that shit once MC isn’t in school anymore.

As for the characters that I did finish, some were satisfying and some were not? Interestingly, many of the confidants required the use of Mementos to solve some problem and then this clued in that particular character to the Phantom Thief nature of the MC. This wanton use of the Metaverse to solve problems for friends struck me as an even bigger reason that the righteousness of the use of the Metaverse to steal hearts is largely left unexamined. I was initially very excited by the appearance of Goro because I thought he was going to push on this issue because he believed from working within the system. However, Goro is ultimately a clever narrative puzzle (and I did very much enjoy the November surprise) rather than a voice for pushing back on the ideology and actions of the Phantom Thieves. The morality of stealing hearts is ultimately thrown out the window.

Ultimately, the main thematic pull of P5 seems to be on placing blame on all of us collectively for speaking truth to power. The real villain was not any single specific abusive teacher or corrupt politician, but the collective will to accept injustice in exchange for comfort. However, the final dungeon and set of encounters still left me unconvinced what exactly our collective action was to this. How much was the final boss a metaphor for battling the collective will and how much was actual SMT plot exposition that a demon hijacked our collective consciousnesses. I’m not against the idea of putting the onus on all of us together to speak truth to power and perhaps this is exactly what the final subsequent sequence demonstrated: the collective action of the MC’s confidants was enough to overcome the injustice he bore in the form of a criminal record. This is the meaning I can take from the story that is the most satisfying and I think encourages us to rely on our friends and family and push them to not accept injustice in our everyday lives.

Personally, I found the romance with Hifumi to be very satisfying and this path was cemented for me when she appeared as an option on the Hawaii trip. I often find myself segmenting parts of my life apart and Hifumi’s separation from any other character in the game was deeply appealing to me as was her generally reserve demeanor. That dress is also cute, I will not front.

Additional note: P5, which spent some time pointing out examples of oppression very similar to real life, overlooked oppression relating to gender and gay stereotypes. Ann’s appearance and storyline is confused and not at all coherent or satisfying. Kawakami’s is likewise. Lastly, the two men who appear in Shinjuku and at the beach are aberrations and the blackest mark on this game.

P5 AS A GAME

I have only played Persona 1 and have not yet visited any other Persona or SMT game. Generally, I enjoyed the dungeon layouts and navigation and I also further enjoyed the flow of battles as the game initially presents it. What the game, however, fails to tell the player is that in the end game, enemies will have no weaknesses and so, simply, stat buffing and enemy debuffing is simply more important at the end of a long road in which covering elemental weaknesses was more important. I found this to be very frustrating. Coming from mostly playing FF, I often assume that status effects simply do not apply to bosses and so never bother with those and instead look for elemental weaknesses.

Initially, I thought this would be a pleasant game which gave me the opportunity to pace myself and do the dungeon or confidant or social stat building as I enjoyed it. However, by the summer I had begun to realize this was not a leisurely stroll. This was one of the most ridiculous min-max efficiency experiences I’ve ever encountered. Budgeting time to maximize social stats and confidant affection over 90 hours (including looking up the correct confidant responses to maximize confidant efficiency) is ridiculous and I would have been much more happy if the game had simply invented a way for me to repeat days or otherwise get the rest of the social links without having to do an entire NG+ playthrough. Knowing his now, I imagine my approaches to P3 and P4 when I get to them will be with a guide that points out to me these unknowable efficiencies so I can get on with my life.

P5 is beautiful, but I think it would be even better were it not chained to the SMT way of battling and the calendar system that has come to define the series.

[aion-rsa]

Outriders Impressions: People Can Fly’s Co-op Shooter Wants the Loot Shooter Crown

https://ift.tt/2Yxxhb2

You have to admire the sheer tenacity of People Can Fly. After developing one of the most underrated first-person shooters ever in 2011’s Bulletstorm, the Polish studio was quickly snapped up by Epic Games to help ship a small indie title called Fortnite. You may have heard of it.

However, Outriders is the developer’s opportunity to once again shine on its own. The team’s latest is a co-op shooter that takes heavy inspiration from The Division, Destiny, and Mass Effect while adding its own flourishes to the sci-fi shooter formula. During an online virtual demo earlier this month, I got to play three hours of fresh mission types and try an all-new character class called the Technomancer.

We previously previewed Outriders back in January and found it to be a “shooter that seems tailor-made for superhero fans.” This is still the case seven months on, with the game’s unique mix of supernatural powers and tight cover-based shooting delivering all the thrills appropriate for an original sci-fi universe looking to engage you and friends for potentially hundreds of hours. Taking down legions of monsters as part of a battle-hardened trio offers up a lot of variety and chaotic action on par with the studio’s past shooter work.

Set on a ruinous planet called Enoch which humanity has failed to colonize after fleeing Earth, Outriders wastes no time in setting up a murky and dystopian atmosphere. My gameplay demo took place roughly 15 hours into the base campaign, yet judging by the amount of dust still present and the blood orange sky leering over me, it didn’t feel like humanity was any closer to claiming this world.

So, after picking my preferred weapon loadout and popping some class points into my desired upgrades, my team of three players hit the road towards one of the game’s main locations, Trench Town. Our initial objective was to reach the hub town while simultaneously defending an RV, which, in addition to being a cool-looking cyber truck, serves as Outriders’ main mode of transport.

This mission may have been simple, but it was a great scenario to truly take the new class for a spin. Unlike the Trickster, who touts a wide range of time-orientated melee abilities, or the hulking Devastator that specializes in rock manipulation, the Technomancer shares more in common with the flame-powered Pyromancer class in that it can deal a lot of ranged damage. Unlike the Pyromancer, though, this fourth class is the only one able to heal others – a handy function to be sure.

The team I played in was made up of two Technomancers and one Pyromancer specifically, meaning we were most successful in keeping the hordes at bay when shooting and playing strategically from afar. The demo let me take three of the Technomancer’s supernatural powers for a spin, the most effective being the ability to summon what’s called the pain launcher. This essentially operates as a futuristic rocket turret primed to rain hell on enemies from above. Using the Pain Launcher to bring down chaos on my enemies when things got a bit hairy was satisfying, to say the least. Setting this beauty down at the right moments granted me and my team enough breathing room to turn the tide of battle every time.

Teamwork is vital to succeeding in Outriders, and it was impressive how The Technomancer’s powers cleverly combined with the Pyromancer’s. I lost count of how many times I froze our enemies into an ice block using my Cryo Turret ability, only to have my fire-focused co-op partner send a ripple of flames their way to finish them off. I’m hopeful that all of the game’s classes will work as well with each other as the Technomancer and Pyromancer did.

Despite there being only four classes in the game, they can all be further customized toward a specific playstyle. There is a skill tree that allows you to unlock and improve certain abilities and you can also mix and match the powers you have equipped. This meant it didn’t matter that there were two Technomancers in my group since both played differently enough to from each other.

Of course, we can’t forget about the weapons themselves. And luckily, the game doesn’t look to disappoint on this front either, with everything from shotguns, RPG launchers, and even handguns to play with, each packing their own gratifying punch. Enemies did feel worryingly spongey at first, which led to an overreliance on supernatural abilities on our part, but eventually, things leveled out when my team acquired new artillery, taking Outriders from The Division-level of sponginess to that which is more in line with Destiny 2. We progressed through two World Levels during my three-hour stint with the game, always finding and equipping better gear as we pressed on.

I was relieved to discover during my playthrough that Outriders in no way resembles a live service game, with People Can Fly reaffirming that this sci-fi adventure will have a definitive beginning, middle, and end. It’s structured similar to Borderlands and Diablo in this way, with the story advancing naturally as you venture to various hub-like towns to help factions in need. This might disappoint players wanting a regular stream of non-stop content, but there is a confirmed endgame loop to Outriders waiting to be revealed. How this will explicitly be handled is anyone’s guess, though there appears to be enough content here to keep things fresh at launch.

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Following the initial escort mission to Trench Town, we made it to this hub location, where I got some time to look around and engage with the locals. But it wasn’t long before my team took on a Bounty quest involving a decrepit individual known as the Bloody Baron, whom we were required to hunt down and kill. Doing so involved taking a short detour away from the next main campaign mission, mowing through as many foes as possible on our way to kill the target. Side missions like this seem like a nice distraction, but it was a little disappointing to see that enemy encounters didn’t change much between the trip to Trench Town and the bounty.

This goes doubly so for the next full single-player mission. After claiming our reward for slaying the Bloody Baron in Trench Town, our next goal was to find a missing faction member and pull him out of what’s called the Wreckage Zone. Thankfully, it’s here that were introduced to a new enemy type known as the Broods, which play a lot smarter and swifter compared to your typical human foes. This Wreckage Zone portion of the demo showed how different combat in Outriders plays when you’re not just taking on enemies at ground level, but above you as well. Suddenly, ground cover wasn’t as effective, forcing our team to pop out and play more aggressively.

My preview culminated with a mission called Onslaught, which looked and felt very much like a futuristic take on a WWII skirmish – not least because trenches played an important role. Capturing the insurgent bunker at the other end of the field proved quite a challenge, so much so that all my team members were downed at one point. We considered dropping the mission down a difficulty level before eventually giving it another crack as is, this time making sure to take out any large enemies before making a run for it.

Even in just the three hours I played, the importance of teamwork in Outriders was evident at every turn, leaving me to wonder how successfully these same scenarios will play out for solo players. We’ll have to wait and see.

In the end, there are the makings of an enjoyable co-op shooter in Outriders. It may not be doing anything particularly new gameplay-wise, often feeling like a melting pot of mechanics and concepts from other franchises, but they all coalesce in a decent manner and the ability to switch between superpowers and shooting on the fly helps give combat an edge. Should the story live up to People Can Fly’s original sci-fi concept and the endgame also be well thought out, we could be looking at another excellent loot shooter to kick off the next console generation.

Outriders is out later in 2020 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia.

The post Outriders Impressions: People Can Fly’s Co-op Shooter Wants the Loot Shooter Crown appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[ladala99]

Spyro Reignited Countdown - Skylanders Swap Force (Console)

Vicarious Visions takes the reigns for a game, and at the same time, wins me over.

I honestly didn’t want this game at first, but eventually decided to try it with the bare minimum of figures a few months after release. To my surprise, I loved it, and there was soon enough a sale that let me get the rest of the Swap Force leg types at half price. I never really engaged much with the gimmick, but the game itself made me want to buy the rest, and that’s what a Skylanders game should do.

Gameplay

On the surface, it’s the same as the first two games. There’s one major difference, however: the presence of a jump button. Yeah, it doesn’t seem to do too much, but as someone who grew up on 3D platformers, being able to dodge attacks in three dimensions was so much easier than just using the two.

And there’s also some very minor platforming. Not enough to make it really a platformer, but enough to make platformer-starved me delighted. Seriously, the world before N-Sane Trilogy and Mario Odyssey was a dark place. Because for some reason I never thought to, you know, buy games for the PS1 and PS2 that I had previously missed out on.

Oh, and the Swap Force gimmick, where you can mix and match the different top and bottom halves of the Swap Force characters. I didn’t use it much (I think I was using only one of them on my official playthrough team), but it added some interesting variety as you figure out which attacks work best together.

The biggest thing, though, is the new combat balancing. Enemies now will be pushed over and back when you attack them powerfully enough. This makes combat so much more satisfying, and also makes melee characters usable in Nightmare Mode.

The Gates

It’s still early in the franchise, and thus everyone gets to be included.

We’ve got the original Elemental Gates. These are unchanged but are quite a bit less common.

We’ve got new Dual-Elemental Gates. These can be unlocked two ways: 1. You can make a Swap Force character with those two elements, or 2. You can enter 2-player mode and use two different elemental Skylanders to open the gate, then exit 2-player mode if you desire. This was a fun and fair way to do it, imo.

We’ve got Giant Chests, that only Giants can open. I don’t think these counted for percentage points and were just another way to get treasure.

And finally, the Swap Zones. These are minigames that require you to have a Swap Force Skylander with particular types of legs. These were fun. At least, doing all bonus stars were really fun. Plus, you know, they’re minigames, and I love gameplay variety.

Old Figures vs. New Figures

Vicarious Visions restatted all of the characters for this game, so everyone’s on approximately even ground. New characters, old characters, they all do around the same amount of damage, and they all use new mechanics well.

The characters made for this game do take advantage of the new combat styles better than older characters, and some of the older characters’ abilities are now completely phased out of usefulness when at least they could be used in Adventure Packs in Giants, but those are minor cases.

Old characters retain their value in that they continue to be able to open up Elemental Gates, and Giants have some use with the Giant Chests. Still, Giants are significantly less useful in this game than in their game, aside from Nightmare Mode because it is actually possible to use them here.

The Swap Force figures obviously have the most to do, but it doesn’t feel unfair when everyone else has something to do, too.

The Collectables

We’ve got a lot of returning stuff, being Treasure Chests, Hats, Winged Sapphires, Soul Gems, Legendary Treasures, and Story Scrolls.

Legendary Treasures now give stat bonuses. You can choose which ones to display after a certain point in the story and the ones on display give you bonuses, like the Luck-o-Tron Wheels in Giants.

There’s also random stuff that’s different every level. These contribute to level completion and are always hidden in the main part of the level that anyone can access.

Finally, there’s Bonus Mission Maps, which give you extra stuff to do in the Bonus Mission game mode. More variety!

The thing to mention, though, is that everything other than Treasure Chests and the level-specific collectables are found behind Elemental Gates and Swap Zones. This makes it much more frustrating figuring out whether you’re really missing something, or if it’s just a place you can’t go to because you don’t have the figure, and makes upgrade discounts locked behind additional figures.

Additional Game Modes

The game has a few different game modes, and they work a bit differently to other games in the series.

We’ve got the Adventure Mode, which is the main story.

There’s Bonus Missions, which are unlocked through Adventure Mode, are small tasks to perform, similar to Heroic Challenges but locked only behind standard gates rather than each individual character.

You can complete the Swap Zones in various difficulties and with various other tasks for stars.

There’s Arena Challenges, which were also present in Giants but the improved combat mechanics makes these much more fun.

Each Skylander also has individual quests that unlock more stats. The bigger your collection, the more replay value! Although a lot of them are pretty repetitive.

Bosses

I remember them being pretty fun. They have levels to themselves, now, so they have their own set of stars and sometimes those are pretty difficult to complete!

The fight with Kaos’ Mom is actually really interesting as well, using your portal as part of the battle. This series doesn’t do fourth-wall-breaking things nearly often enough when it comes to gameplay.

Levels

The only real issue is how long the levels are. Like: expect to take an hour or more exploring them. They’re so long they all have a mid-level checkpoint for sanity.

But I actually didn’t have much of a problem with that. Sure, there’s fewer levels than in the past games, but the gameplay you get out of them makes up for it.

Other than that, they’re fairly fun to go through and pretty well-designed with some hidden areas in the main level rather than all being gated. There are getting to be a lot of gates, though, and that can be a bit frustrating if you don’t have everything needed, and that is objectively more expensive than it ever has been before, given that at minimum you’ll need to have a Swap Force character of each leg type, and you can double-up and get each element at the same time. So minimum of 6 additional $15 figures assuming you got the Starter Pack.

Story

Kaos found this Evilizing volcano and is spreading darkness throughout the Cloudbreak Isles, trying to corrupt the Elementals. It’s up to you, our Portal Master, and your Skylanders to stop him!

Oh, and Kaos’ Mother’s actually one of the main villains. She is never referred to as anything but Kaos’ Mother.

If Kaos’ Mother actually had a name or any particular characterization, this game would be more interesting. As it is, it’s the standard save-the-world plot with a slight twist.

Kaossandra is a lot more interesting in the Skylanders Academy TV show.

Unique in the Series?

It’s the only game that actually tries to make previous gimmicks have a place. It’s the only game with quests for each individual Skylander to complete to get extra stats (I think?). The Swap Zones never return. The clay-like artstyle never returns.

Yeah, it is pretty unique. But it also builds up the series with new types of gameplay that will continue in the future. Starting with this game, the replay value goes up a lot in the series aside from just playing through with different characters. It made a lasting impression, even though it took some risks.

Conclusion

Swap Force is one of my favorite Skylanders games. It’s only behind the other Vicarious Visions Skylanders games, and that’s because this game plays it a lot safer than they do, and I like the way they experiment.

Swap Force is the reason I don’t hate Skylanders after Giants disappointed me. Not bad for the developers behind Spyro Orange.

[thomasroach]

Remnant From The Ashes Preview: Sci-fi Cooperative Mayhem

The post Remnant From The Ashes Preview: Sci-fi Cooperative Mayhem appeared first on Fextralife.

Recently we were given the opportunity to check out Gunfire Games’ new Sci-fi third-person shooter: Remnant From the Ashes at their preview event in San Francisco. The following are our impressions of the game based off the time we spent there playing both single player and co op game modes. If you haven’t heard of Remnant From the Ashes before, then read on to find out more about a game that has us very very intrigued.

Remnant From The Ashes Preview: Sci-fi Cooperative Mayhem

Genre:  Action / 3rd Person Shooter Developed by: Gunfire Games Published by:  Perfect World Release date:  August 20th, 2019 Platforms:  PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One

After playing the game at E3 2019, I really wasn’t sure what to think about Remnant. One hour with the game was not enough for me to get a good sense of the game’s concepts, especially without much direction on what to do or where to go. After playing again last week in San Fran, with devs showing me just how everything works, I got a much better idea and was pleasantly surprised just how much I enjoyed myself.

Remnant From The Ashes is is extremely difficult to compare to other games, and even more so without saying something like “It’s the Dark Souls of…”. It takes mechanics from games like, Immortal Unchained, Warframe, Dark Souls, and maybe even some rogue-like games, and sort of mashes them all into one. Strange right? Well it just works. No seriously, it just does.

The General Concept

Players will shoot or hack their way through mobs of enemies in order to find loot and gear that can improve their character. They will stumble upon Dungeons that have randomly generated maps, so they will be different with each successive campaign. One playthrough is supposed to take between 12-15 hours, and you will see less than half of Remnant’s Bosses during that time. Once you finish, players can then generate a new campaign to play through with their existing character, in order to fight even more of the game’s Bosses and gain even more loot. It will likely take you 3 or more playthroughs to see everything resulting in somewhere around 25-30 hours of gameplay.

While this might sound very basic at first glance, Remnant is extremely challenging, and features a loot and character progression system that adds more depth than you would expect. A big part of the game is building your character the way you want, and using a load out that makes sense for you. Note that the game doesn’t feature “loot quality” and that the Weapons and Armor are very much like Dark Souls, in that they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Remnant From The Ashes Character Development and Equipment

In Remnant, you begin the game by choosing one of three Classes that follow the archetypes of: long-range, mid-range and short-range combat. However, these Classes all have the same base Stats, with the only differences being the Weapons and Armor you start the game with. Since you can purchase the equipment of the other Classes, this isn’t that big of decision, but it does serve the function of providing some variation in the early parts of the game.

Weapons

Players can have 3 Weapons equipped at once: a Hand Gun, Long Gun, and Melee Weapon. They can change these on the fly any time they wish, and Weapons function the way you’d expect. For example, you can use a repeating pistol that fires quickly for lower damage a shot, or you can use a revolver that has a slower rate of fire but does devastating damage. There are sniper rifles and shotguns, so players will have to decide which Weapons work best for their style of play. Weapons can be purchased from vendors, dropped from Bosses or Crafted.

In addition, these Weapons can be upgraded to +1, +2, +3, etc at various vendors, to further increase their damage, much like Dark Souls. They can also be outfitted with Weapon Mods, that have various effects. Some examples are granting a damage shield for 60 seconds, or marking all enemies on the screen so that you can see them through the walls. The Mods must be activated to be used, so you cannot use them constantly, but instead will need to “fill up” your Mod gauge in order to use the Mod once again. This is done by shooting enemies with the Weapon, and since you can slot them onto both the Hand Gun and Long Gun, there is some incentive to use both Weapon types.

Armor

Players will have 3 Armor Slots: Helmet, Body Armor and Boots. Each piece of Armor provides protection against various types of damage, as well as providing a certain bonus to the player. For instance, some Armor pieces will grant Stamina Cost Reduction, and others will provide increased Weak Spot Damage. You can mix and match pieces of different Armor Sets as you see fit, however, using all the pieces of the same Set will usually grant an increased bonus. That is to say that you get 7% Weak Spot Damage with one piece, 15% with two pieces, and 25% with three pieces.

Unlike Weapons, Armor does not have Mods. However, it can still be upgraded to increase the amount of resistance each piece has, though it doesn’t improve the bonuses the Armor provides. Players are encouraged to find the Armor combination that works best for their playstyle, and then upgrade it to further protect themselves.

Amulet & Rings

Players will also have 3 slots for one Amulet and two Rings. These accessories grant some sort of passive bonus, like damage reduction or increased evade window when dodge rolling. Players will mix and match these as they see fit to further enhance their character, and they cannot be upgraded.

Traits

As players make their way through Remnant, they will gain Trait Points that they can spend to further upgrade their character. Players must choose when and how to spend these Trait Points, which will define just exactly what they are good at. Players can increase their Health, Stamina, Mod Power Generation, Reload Speed, Resistances and others. More and more Traits become available as you progress the game, so you may wish to save some Trait Points for when they do.

Co Op Gameplay Is Where It’s At

The game is three player Co Op online, allowing you to play with up to 2 of your friends, adding to the both the chaos and fun. The game scales with more players, increasing the damage, health and number of enemies for each present in the game. This serves to keep the game balanced, while simultaneously keeping the game challenging, no matter how many people are playing.

Remnant was very much designed to be experienced with Co Op, though you can play single player if you wish, because many of the game’s Mods effecting your teammates as well. For example, you can heal in an AoE, restoring Health to all players near you. You can mark targets for all players to see, not just yourself. Additionally, there is also a Teamwork Trait, that makes you more effective when fighting alongside others.

Final Thoughts

Pros

What I really love about Remnant From The Ashes is: the controls feel really really good for a shooter, the game has a good ���weight” to it, and the dodge roll is godly. The iframes you get when Dodging feel amazing, and it really allows you to get up close and personal, and it’s even possible to play a melee focused build with a bit of time and practice.

The character customization is much more than you’d expect, and both deep and simple enough for just about everyone to find it enjoyable. While I don’t know how many people will create new characters, to use different Builds, it will definitely add something to your first few playthroughs that you may not have anticipated.

The performance of the game was really pretty good. There were a couple bugs, and some minimal screen tearing, but otherwise it ran really smoothly, which was quite impressive for a smaller studio.

Co Op is just stupid fun, and things really get crazy with regularity. I can’t recall the last time I had so much fun Co Oping, and we had no issues while doing so, so that’s a big plus point. Hopefully there won’t be connection issues when it launches, and I’m optimistic based on what I’ve seen.

There are plans to keep adding content after release, so I fully expect this game to be even better down the road.

Cons

The game isn’t very long at 12-15 hours, and I expect successive playthroughs to be even faster. I worry the game will be very short and sweet, when I want to keep playing.

12 Armor sets in the game is not a lot, and I don’t think the gun variation will be enough to warrant the creation of multiple characters for different Builds. Although, the shorter length of the game may encourage this.

Though there were only a few bugs, the ones that were present seemed severe. For instance, my character would randomly melee sometimes while reloading. This happened on different machines, with different controllers. This is rather glaring, and one bug that can’t be present when the game is launched.

Remnant: From The Ashes has all the makings of a short but sweet title that might tide Action Roleplayers over until the rush of RPGs in September is upon us. I wish the game would be here sooner, as August 20th is cutting it a little close, but it should still give you plenty of time to finish before then. For 39.99$ USD, 25-30 hours of Co Op action is definitely justified based on what I’ve seen so far, and I can’t wait to play again next month! We’ll have a review up for you guys a bit closer to launch, so if you’re still on the fence, stay tuned for that!

If you enjoy learning about Remnant From the Ashes be sure to check our our developer interview with Gunfire Games. You can also watch the previous trailer released in Remnant: From The Ashes Cyclops Trailer Released. If you want to know all the latest info as it’s released you can drop by the Remnant: From the Ashes wiki.

The post Remnant From The Ashes Preview: Sci-fi Cooperative Mayhem appeared first on Fextralife.

Remnant From The Ashes Preview: Sci-fi Cooperative Mayhem published first on https://juanaframi.tumblr.com/

[schultz35mullins-blog]

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Far Cry 5 PC Review - Fear and Lore in Hope County

By the time my law enforcement colleagues and I arrived to take The Father, Joseph Seed, into custody, Hope County, Montana, had been consumed by his Eden’s Gate followers, known to the locals as Peggies. The situation was dire, and I felt a chill the first time I saw his compound. The Father, the game’s main antagonist, reminded me of David Koresh, who was the leader of the real-world Branch Davidians. It was a narrative tone that I wasn’t expecting, but it was welcome. Soon, however, the unsettling mood set by the prologue gave way to the fast-paced, non-stop action that open-world Ubisoft games are known for.

Welcome to Hope County

When I was eventually set free in Hope County, I spent about half an hour being introduced to the various concepts and mechanics of Far Cry 5. I found a prepper stash, had the chance to swim, used a zipline, and even hired an NPC to help clear the game’s first region, Dutch’s Island. Once through that, I was free to go where I wanted and do what I pleased.

After clearing Dutch’s Island, I picked up a quest to liberate a lumber mill, so I set off on foot with my hired NPC fighter in tow. I generally don’t like to fast travel in open world games, but I didn’t even drive to this mission. My immediate goal was to get a feel for Hope County. It looked gorgeous on my PC in 2K, and I wanted to get lost wandering around the woods and mountains. 

The first thing I noticed beyond the beauty of Hope County were the sounds that brought the world to life. Be it the burst fire from assault weapons over the hill, the creepy voice of a cultist over the radio, or the hissing of a snake I couldn't see but knew was close, sound was as essential to survival in Far Cry 5 as it was to my enjoyment in the game.

Unfortunately, the temptation to enjoy outdoor life in Far Cry 5’s stunning environment was contradicted by the density of the game’s dangers. I couldn’t go five feet without being fired on by Eden’s Gate, or mauled by a bear. This sometimes lead to hilarity, but there were few, if any, quiet moments in the early going where I could stop and enjoy the world. My first attempt to go fishing was met with violence, and hunting isn’t really hunting when you need an automatic rifle to defend yourself from your intended prey. I used both activities almost exclusively to earn money in the early going, but eventually I was swimming in cash and had no gameplay incentive to return to either.

The lumber mill mission also turned out to be my first outpost, and those generally worked the same as they did in Far Cry Primal. Each one had numerous enemies, an alarm or two that needed disabling, and some loot and lore could be found once the baddies were gone. Liberating these outposts gave control of it back to the non-cultist citizens and opened it up as a base that I could operate out of. There was always a shop to buy guns, ammo, and items, and usually a vehicle bay or two. Liberating an outpost also presented additional side missions and allowed me to hire wandering NPCs to fight by my side.

I enjoyed everything about outposts in Far Cry 5. The fighter I hired on Dutch’s Island helped me clear the first one, and I was pleased to see that I could give him orders with a single button press. If I tagged an enemy and then sent my fighter after them, he’d try to use stealth to take them out. We cleared the first outpost without being detected, and it was nice to see that the area was now back in the hands of the good folks of Hope County. The more outposts and locations I cleared, the less influence Eden’s Gate had, which led to a true feeling that I had liberated the region.

Lock and Load

As satisfying as clearing an outpost was, though, a major mechanic was missing. Far Cry 5 doesn’t have the option to go prone, and it worsened my experience with stealth gameplay. Ubisoft perfected going prone in Ghost Recon Wildlands and Rainbow Six Siege, and I think that made the lack of a prone mechanic here sting even more. I realize it wasn’t an option in previous Far Cry games, but I don’t get the design decision.

Prone notwithstanding, combat was enjoyable. I used a DualShock 4 controller even though I was on PC, and I never took issue with the button layouts, even with vehicles. The control scheme always felt intuitive, and this helped to keep the flow of combat moving. I was never fumbling around trying to figure out what to press. Switching weapons and tossing explosives was effortless, and all of this tied into the weapons and perks in Far Cry 5.

Getting weapons and gear in Far Cry 5 wasn’t satisfying. Beyond the Compound Bow I found during my time on Dutch’s Island, everything was purchased through vendors. I felt robbed of the need to look for a sniper rifle or assault rifle. Gear acquisition became boring. Some weapon upgrades were locked behind progression, which was fine, but for the most part I found the system unrewarding. Even finding the bow was less exciting once I realized I could have just paid for it.

Perks also fell a bit flat for me. There were a few that were useful, such as the Grappling Hook or Lockpick, but beyond that most were forgettable. When I finally finished with everything I wanted to do I was only missing a couple, and I didn’t bother to read their descriptions before spending the points to unlock them.

Earning the points to unlock the perks was the best part of the system for me. Perk magazines (each worth one perk point) could be found in prepper stashes and unlocked through gameplay. The few times I needed a perk I knew I could quickly earn the required points by catching a new fish or using a weapon I’d been ignoring. Perk points were also awarded for kills that fighter and specialist companions racked up, which pushed me to give each one a try.

Good, Hard Working People

Fighters and specialists enhanced the combat experience of Far Cry 5. The former are regular NPCs that you bump into. They each come with two unknown perks that are revealed and unlocked after they get a certain number of kills. They can be hired or let go as desired, and you can have three on your roster at any one time. I ended up with two I found useful, but the third spot became a revolving door of fighters who didn’t fit in. Since I could mix and match specialists and fighters, and can only ever bring two at a time, this wasn’t a huge deal.

The nine specialists were all unique characters that unlocked after the completion of their related mission. Each comes with different perks and personalities, and it’s when they start to interact with each other that things got fun. Nick would compliment Jess, while Hurk would tell her stories and call her “lady girl” constantly. Jess would insult Hurk. These interactions were a subtle touch, but they made me want to try different combinations of specialists to see what crazy things they might say to each other. My favorite was when Nick and Jess would be tagging along, and because Jess favored the use of a bow, Nick would chime in with, “I tried hunting with a bow once. That shit’s hard.”

The main appeal of a companion was the violence they brought to the table. In the early hours of my playthrough I would take Jess and Boomer with me. Boomer (the dog) would mark enemies, and Jess (killer with a Compound Bow) would take them out silently. It worked well with my preference for stealth, and it was also effective for hunting wildlife. Slowly, though, I found myself preferring to travel Hope County by helicopter. I grew tired of violent encounters every few steps and used air travel to avoid distraction. This is about when I switched to Nick and Adelaide as companions. Nick flew a plane and could strafe or drop bombs, and Adelaide provided the comedic tone and overwatch in her chopper. Together, we decimated Peggies and could clear outposts and missions in minutes. This built up the resistance in each region and progressed the story at a good pace.

Give Me Lore, Give Me Lore

The concept of clearing out Peggies and building a resistance in each region worked well. What didn’t work was how often Far Cry 5 interrupted me and dragged me into a story mission. The moment I would level my resistance in an area, one of the Seed siblings would capture me, ripping me from whatever I was doing. Once I could handle, but this occurred half a dozen times. It annoyed me enough that I logged out after leveling my resistance one night. I was exploring prepper stashes and had no desire to be dragged into another mission at that moment, so I put the game down in frustration.

It wasn’t that I didn’t find myself invested in the narrative, but collectibles and getting into prepper stashes were my favorite parts of Far Cry 5. Prepper stashes were usually bunkers that required me to solve a small puzzle to gain access. I was addicted to these from the moment I realized they existed and managed to find each prepper stash long before beating the game. My only issue was the use of waypoints everywhere. There was one prepper stash that gave me a waypoint that said “Find.” That sort of sucked the fun out of things. I did discover that I could tweak the HUD and gameplay settings, but this was long after it would have helped me.

Some prepper stashes, bunkers, and buildings in Far Cry 5 reminded me a bit of Fallout 4. In that game, each destination told a story that I could easily overlook if I wasn’t taking my time. Far Cry 5 had the same feel at times, which is the highest compliment I could give it considering how much I enjoyed Fallout 4. I’d often find that, when I slowed myself down and really paid attention, there were stories being told in Hope County that I could have just as easily walked right past. Hope County was full of lore, but I often found myself too busy ticking the boxes on the waypoint checklist to notice.

Not the Arcade I Remember

Far Cry Arcade was the last mode I tried. I loved the idea of designing single player, co-op, and PvP experiences with assets from previous Ubisoft games. However, I was quickly overwhelmed with what was before me and lost interest in building anything. This was more a reflection of my lack of creativity, though. The concept of building new gameplay levels and scenarios by using thousands of assets is interesting, and it could add longevity to Far Cry 5. Next, I jumped into some Far Cry Arcade PvP. Through my five or six games, I was underwhelmed by what I found. Weapon loadouts were limited, the gameplay didn’t stand out from anything I’d played in the past, and I couldn’t find a reason to want to return. It could have been fun with friends and chatting on the mic together, but I played with random gamers. Nothing about the PvP experience sold me on coming back to it. PvP just doesn’t interest me much these days, and nothing in my rounds of PvP threatened to pull me back to it. I’m a co-op man at heart, which brings me to my biggest complaint.

Co-op in Far Cry 5 was amazing to play but terribly implemented. I loved playing with a friend and seeing how combat evolved. I recall cruising down the road, him driving and me hanging out the window with a baseball bat, crushing the face of anything that got close. It was mailbox baseball with a twist, but the fun in co-op never stopped as long as we were insane enough to try something.

The problem was when I left his game and returned to my own. I kept my perks, cash, and weapons, but story progression was lost. We probably went through a dozen missions, only for me to return to my game and have to do them all again. How this slipped by the game’s designers or was considered a good idea is beyond me. Co-op was the single most anticipated feature for me leading up to Far Cry 5, but I began avoiding it because I didn’t want to repeat quests in my own instance.

Just Say Yes

Far Cry 5 was a good game that could have been great. Had Ubisoft not been so concerned with holding my hand, or overwhelming me with clutter to keep me from getting bored, Hope County would have gone down as one of the better open worlds I’ve stepped foot in. The  game’s narrative was a great idea that turned out better than I expected, but the value for me with an open world will always be in how much I enjoy existing in it. How motivated am I to explore and discover? With Far Cry 5, there were hints of that, but all too often I was shown the answers. This left me feeling slightly robbed of how I experienced things.

At the same time, Far Cry 5 met all my expectations for exciting combat and hilarious moments. Whether grappling from my helicopter because a random NPC jacked it, or hearing Adelaide discuss why she stocked up on olive oil before Eden’s Gate took over, there were more moments of hilarity and brilliance than not. A few things missed the mark that shouldn’t have, but I generally got what I expected from Far Cry 5; a fun, open-world game worth the price tag and not to be taken too seriously.

Far Cry 5 PC Review - Fear and Lore in Hope County published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[watercat5-blog]

Why Slay the Spire isn’t good

It's not often that a game manages to get over a 95% overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam. Slay the Spire (StS) was able to do just that and in early access no less. With close to five thousand reviews and boasting a review score to match universally acclaimed games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, does Slay the Spire achieve the same degree of perfection? I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to say that StS isn't at that level and still has a long way to go. Despite that, many players are enjoying the game, and it even draws thousands of viewers on Twitch.

But popularity isn't a reliable indicator of quality, and this is certainly the case with StS. The game has many problems in its current incarnation, and several of these issues are simply impossible to solve with the games current design choices. I'll be giving a brief explanation of the game's mechanics in the next several paragraphs, but after that I will be discussing exactly why StS fails to offer an experience worthy of what its review scores might indicate.

What is Slay the Spire?

Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelite where you pick from a variety of procedurally generated paths to advance up the floors of the titular Spire. As you fight enemies, open treasure, and complete events, you gather cards, relics, gold, and potions to empower your character.

To begin, you select your character. Currently only two are available, but a third is on the way. The Ironclad and The Silent each have their own starting relic and deck. They also have a different set of cards that you can acquire throughout the game, leading to a distinct difference in playstyle between them. After character selection, you select a room to start in and begin your journey.

The types of rooms are very simple. There are ordinary fights, which will pit you against enemies in card-based combat. Should you prevail, you will get gold, the ability to add a card to your deck, and possibly a one use potion. When picking a card to add, you are given three choices, or there is the option to skip it entirely. I'll get more into the nuances of this later.

You can also fight elite enemies which give enhanced rewards and also a relic. Relics are potentially powerful items that give run-long boosts to your character. You can also find relics in chests which appear in the middle of each floor, occasionally in mystery rooms, and in the boss chest at the end of each floor. In shops, you can use your gold to buy cards, potions, relics, or remove a single card from your deck. Campfires litter the floor layout and provide much needed healing and an opportunity to upgrade cards. Lastly, there are mystery rooms which can give a large variety of events.

Combat will take up most of your time in Slay the Spire. By default, you get five cards and three energy per turn. Each card in your deck has an energy cost and an effect associated with it. Normally you discard your entire hand every turn, drawing a totally new set of cards on your next go around. Once you run out of cards in your draw pile, your discard pile is shuffled and placed back, cycling all your cards back in once more. Your goal is to damage, weaken, and eventually kill your opponents while simultaneously defending their attacks and debuffs they assault you with.

Essentially, that's all there is to know about the game. You advance room by room, gaining cards and other boons (or banes) that will affect your chances of victory. On death or victory, you gain progress to various card and relic unlocks.

What exactly is fun about this? From various reviews and other opinions, the deck-building seems to be the de facto point of interest. There are many synergies and combos to explore for each character, and the effects can be pretty spectacular. It is not that uncommon to create a deck that can play itself infinitely or to construct one that can destroy a boss with a single blow. Just looking at the game's cards can fill your head with ideas about different builds and strategies. However, the game is much more than just the cards, and these other mechanics and aspects tend to be the source of most of the game's frustration.

The Problem with Combat

Currently, the Spire is composed of three floors: each more deadly than the last. Unfortunately, the same can be said about how enjoyable each floor is. Simply put, the first floor is extremely boring unless you get a select few relics to make it interesting. You start the game with a deck of five strikes and five defends in addition to a couple special class cards. None of these do anything particularly unique besides doing damage, blocking, or applying some basic debuffs. You draw your beginning cards and have to think “what cards will be best against my enemies?” In standard TCG games like Magic or Hearthstone, oftentimes the solution to this question is not clear. You have to consider what cards you can draw, what cards your enemy has, what they might play in the future, and all manner of other considerations. In StS, this entire thought process is killed by its simple card design and the usage of intents.

Enemies in the Spire will have an icon above their head on your turn, signaling what they will do once their turn comes up. These icons are referred to as “intents” by the game, and the name is pretty appropriate. The intents go so far as to say exactly how much damage enemies intend to do. After a couple playthroughs of the game, even an average player will be able to tell exactly what action any enemy will perform on the next turn.

I'm sure many people if not all reading this have played Tic-tac-toe, but if you haven't, you might want to read about it before I continue. If I asked you to play Tic-tac-toe with me, would you? Even if you knew me quite well, you would likely only do it to humor me. Tic-tac-toe is simply not fun because it is just too simple. The optimal move is always obvious. In fact, it is so mind-numbingly simple that anybody who has any business playing StS can understand that Tic-tac-toe is also mind-numbingly boring. A sufficient level of complexity has to exist for a game to be fun, and in combat StS usually doesn't reach a high enough level to be fun.

In Slay the Spire, you will very frequently find that your turns play themselves just as obviously as Tic-Tac-Toe, and this is largely due to the intents the enemies will display. An enemy is attacking you for ten damage? Then you should play two blocks to block ten and then play an offensive card if you can. There are some scenarios where this is not the case. Your health is the ultimate resource in StS, so minimizing health loss is the measure of how well a fight went. Some enemies will buff themselves and grow stronger or make you weaker throughout the fight, meaning you may take more damage if you insist on always blocking the maximum amount. In these cases, taking a bit more damage up front to be more offensive is a wise choice, but this strategy is also fairly obvious. Once you have fought all the enemies, you will know the rate at which they get stronger and can plan accordingly. Even without the intents being shown, eventually the enemies' patterns will become ingrained in your mind, and then you will be able to predict their turns even further in advance.

Many roguelites suffer from a similar problem. The beginning is often too easy due to having simple enemies and not enough resources to perform difficult or interesting actions. StS takes this to a new level though as the enemies are so predictable, as is the way you interact with them. Playing cards is just not satisfying. The animations and sounds are basic, and there is no real skill involved in dragging a card over an enemy to attack them. The cards are straightforward, and so the game does an excellent job presenting information to the player. However, this makes the actual strategy of playing the cards trivial. Even well into the end game of StS, the act of playing a card is boring mechanically, visually, and audibly. Combine this with the mostly obvious turn orders, and you will quickly grow tired of combat.

I'm sure people will argue with me on this, so I will try to address some counter-arguments now. I don't think anyone can argue playing cards is mechanically difficult in a meaningful way. In terms of visual and audio effects, there is always a matter of taste involved. The animations and sounds are simple but done well.  Obviously, Mega Crit Games can alter/add effects since the game is still in development, and they have. They just recently added a fast mode to speed up animations which makes slogging through the boring combat go significantly more quickly.

Many players will also probably disagree on what exactly constitutes an obvious turn. Even professional TCG players make mistakes in StS, but many of these errors are just from playing to quickly trying to rush through the game's combat. The main source of actual reasonable errors is from effects that draw cards. IF your hand does not have card draw, the hand will nearly always play itself optimally, and quite simply at that. Most cards will either do damage, buff yourself, debuff enemies, or block damage. Your health is very precious, so you always want to end a fight with the most health possible. You gain nothing from finishing the fight faster (the only exception being thieves which will flee with your money if you take too long). The only complexity in the decision of what you play is whether or not the enemies can outpace you. In an effort to not make this an hour long read, I will not spell out every possible way enemies can outpace you, but if you play the game or watch it, you will soon find out. The rate at which enemies surpass you is predictable due to their intents and patterns. IF you can draw cards, planning your turn becomes much harder, and this is the cause of essentially all complexity in combat. As I will explain later, drawing extra cards each turn is integral to making your deck grow in power, so almost every deck will have some form of card draw. Even drawing cards can be a very simple decision though. For example, you might have a hand full of blocking cards, but the enemies are not attacking. Therefore, you want to draw cards that have some other effects. With some decks, drawing is easy. You may constantly be digging for a specific powerful card that is the lynch-pin of your deck, thereby incentivizing always drawing if you can play this crucial card. Other decks might draw to try and fill their hand before playing a card that buffs their entire hand. A deck with draw is not necessarily a complicated deck.

Anybody with basic arithmetic knowledge will be able to play the majority of turns. I actually took a tally of several runs I played, and I found that usually at least half of my turns had a clear and optimal play. It's possible I make decks that are straightforward, so for those of you who own the game, feel free to track it yourself and see what results you get. You might get something different, but probably not by much.

The simplicity of the enemies as well as their predictability combine with the basic card functionality to create a very simple and unrewarding combat experience.

The Problem with Deck-Building

So, combat is fairly boring, but what about deck-building? In fact, the game's deck-building is its most lauded feature looking at the Steam reviews. With over a hundred relics and even more cards, Slay the Spire already has a large number of tools to change how you play each run. You will almost never end the game with the exact same set-up. Furthermore, each card is quite unique. Once you get an idea of what's available to you, a huge array of possibilities unfolds before you. It's unfortunate that the game does not allow you to explore these different paths reliably.

There are a decent number of ways to get relics and cards in Slay the Spire, but all of them are random. This makes it difficult to make a deck because getting certain cards or relics is not guaranteed. Even worse, you do not know when you will get them. Suppose I get a really interesting relic, but I get it on the final third floor. That means I have only one floor or less to make my deck work with it well. This is incredibly problematic because of a number of reasons, which I will discuss in the following paragraphs.

Firstly, you cannot know what cards you will get until you get them. When drafting decks in other card games, you will usually be able to select your entire deck at once. In StS, you draft the entire deck piece by piece. After each battle, you will get a choice of one card between three, and you can also buy cards at shops with gold obtained through combat and events. Already there is a problem. Because you do not know what cards you will get later, picking the wrong card early is a liability. Since your deck reshuffles when you run out of cards, any bad card will just be taking up space permanently, preventing you from drawing your good cards unless you can remove it. Removing cards is very costly. Some special events can remove cards, but mostly you are going to spend a lot of gold to remove cards at shops. There are only so many shops though, and constantly paying to remove cards prevents you from buying all sorts of other tools. You can get cards that will exhaust your bad ones, effectively removing them from the current combat. However, you still have to draw the bad cards once and have the necessary cards to remove them in the same hand. At worst, you may fill your deck with even more bad cards, and at best you still must waste part of a turn to exhaust them.

What this means is that the best early game strategy is to pick a couple generally good cards to add to your deck. In most scenarios, you will not know what your endgame strategy is going to be at the beginning, so you pick a few good cards to make your deck better. Why is this necessary? Because you need to fight elites. Fighting elite enemies gives you more gold, better cards, and relics. These fights are what will make your deck become truly strong, and there's no reason to be making a wimpy deck. Simply put, the best way to win is to fight as many elites as you can. With the basic deck, you will struggle against elites and take a lot of damage. Gaining health back is costly and usually requires resting in the early game. Avoiding rests means you can be more aggressive in fighting elites, or you can upgrade your cards at campfires instead. You need to add some cards to your deck to make it good enough to take on elites if you want to have a good deck (and why wouldn't you want a good deck?).

Now ideally, you fight some elites and maybe get a couple rare cards and some relics. With these you can start developing a strategy that will tailor your future card and relic choices, and you are off on a grand deck-building adventure. Of course, this is not always the case, and it usually isn't. Even though you fight elites, you are not guaranteed useful cards. Simply speaking, there are a lot of garbage cards or simply neutral cards that don't lend themselves to a particular strategy. Similarly, many of the relics are either very bad (Prayer Wheel) or don't offer anything specific to your deck (see the relics that just raise max hp). Worst of all, you remember those few cards you added to make your deck decent enough to fight elites in the early game? They probably don't all fit your strategy and now are just mediocre additions that overall will make your deck worse. Good luck removing those when you probably still have several strikes and defends that are even worse.

But inevitably, you will fight the first boss. Assuming you've picked up a couple decent cards and gotten some relics from elites, you should be able to win. This guarantees a rare card as well as a boss relic. Boss relics can be very powerful, giving you extra energy per turn or some other powerful ability. By this point, you probably have a feel for your deck and what you should get in the future. Immediately, several cards and relics come to mind, and you add them to your mental wish list.

The second and third floors are where the game gets an opportunity to be more than an arithmetic simulator. You now hopefully have a more well-defined play style that influences what cards and relics you are gunning for and how you play your hand. Enemies get tougher and have some more unique effects, so you will probably start to lose here on your first couple runs if you aren't used to building decks. Even still, the turns are usually straightforward. The enemies seem strange and difficult at first until you realize their attacks and mechanics. Then fighting them becomes the same as before: figuring out what their intents say they are going to do, and what your hand can do to get you out ahead. Most cards and relics still do simple things. The relic Vajra gives you one strength, and Storm of Steel discards your hand and replaces it with zero energy shivs to attack with. Yes, there are some truly strange relics that shift the value propositions significantly. Snecko Eye is one such relic that randomizes the energy cost of cards you draw. It makes high cost cards much more valuable and low cost cards worse. While this does turn the game on its head, you just need to adopt a slightly altered perspective to realize that it doesn't change much at all. You still want to achieve the same goals in combat. It's just the card values fluctuate proportionally to their energy cost, and you have to factor that in. In fact, Snecko Eye can make turns trivial when things are all either free or very expensive. The relics and cards you get do not really do anything different in the end. It's all just an arithmetic game to figure out how much damage you can do while minimizing health loss.

For example, let's look at some Ironclad cards. A basic Strike card does six damage to an enemy for one energy. Another common attack is Cleave, which does seven damage to all enemies for one energy. Obviously, Cleave is better against single targets and against multiple, unless there is some downside to hitting enemies (which there is sometimes, but again it is very obvious when this is). So in almost all scenarios, if you draw a Cleave and a Strike, you're going to be playing a Cleave. It all boils down to which number is bigger. Only drawing cards can disrupt this hierarchy as I've said before.

The real joy of playing the game on these later floors is finding those cards and relics that take your deck to the next level. If you are playing a poison deck, you may be looking for the rare card Corpse Explosion to deal some powerful area damage. If you are playing many attacks per turn, you could look for the relic Shuriken, which increases your strength when you play three attacks in a turn. So many cards and relics flit through your mind as you imagine what could be. It's unfortunate that you have little agency in actually fulfilling those fantasies.

The cards you want most are usually rare or at least uncommon. I frequently go five or more runs not seeing some cards. I unlocked the Entrench card several runs ago, and I didn't see it until just recently even though it's only an uncommon card. Relics are hard to come by as well. Often you can only buy one good relic per floor, and the rest are random drops from elites. I have only once found myself with every relic I really wanted, and that was due to extraordinary circumstances (I started with Black Star, fought two to three elites per floor, and also got the Shovel early, so I had almost every non-boss relic in the game). Even if you do get all the sweet cards and relics you could want, your deck will still probably never be the best it can be because you have a bunch of garbage cards from the early game clogging up your deck. Removing all of them is not possible unless you specifically get the relic Peace Pipe, which allows you to remove cards at campfires. But if you want to remove your cards at campfires, you have to probably skip other sweet stuff like elites or shops, making your deck worse than it could be anyway.

You will never be able to make a “perfect” deck because of this. The only possible exception to this are decks which combo infinitely, which is technically perfect in the sense that you will win on turn one taking no damage. However, these infinite decks are as boring as pressing left click a hundred times. Congratulations, you've managed to make the combat even more boring. Yes, it's fun to do once, but making these infinite combo decks that consist of a handful of cards is just not interesting to play.

I'm not going to go into great detail about every deck archetype you can make. What I will say, is that you will struggle to be able to make it as good as you want it to be. You will struggle to remove the weak cards from your deck, you will struggle to get the key cards you want, and you will struggle to get the relics that can elevate your deck to its highest potential.

Each time you play the game is like throwing a token into a slot machine. You gamble away an hour of your time to see if you can get something good, and your definition of good will change as you play. First you will be content with winning. Then, you need to win twice in a row. Eventually, you will look to do more than win and construct either extremely powerful decks or very specific strategies. Much like a slot machine though, you will find that you hit the jackpot very infrequently. Even if you do manage to reach those lofty goals, what do you do with your amazing deck? You just steamroll the game in a somehow more boring fashion, just with bigger numbers probably. Is it really worth spending hours of your time trying to get that jackpot of a deck just to coast through the end of the game and then have to start all over? The answer to this question will probably determine if you enjoy Slay the Spire for an extended period of time. Of course your definition of a jackpot deck matters too. Every deck is just more damage or defense in the end, and personally I've long grown tired of finding just more ways to do the same thing.

The Problem with Enemy Design

Now that all that is out of the way, we will revisit the enemies and why they are simply not fun. Beyond their simple, predictable selves, there are some enemies that create a whole new level of frustration. The reason for this is that decks in Slay the Spire possess two ways to gain power. You can increase the effectiveness of your cards via relics, upgrading, and card buffing, or you can simply find a way to play more cards. Usually most decks will employ both strategies at once, but one of them tends to be more dominant. I personally like to imagine a spectrum between the two extremes. Each deck you make lies somewhere on this spectrum, and based on where it lies, the late game enemies can wreck you in an extremely unenjoyable way.

What exactly is an enjoyable way to lose? The definition can vary greatly between different genres I think, but I know of one condition that must be met. The game should not force the player to lose. The main, unifying feature of games compared to other media is the player's capacity for interaction. A game that strips this capacity away ceases to become a game. Of course, if a player causes themselves to lose and then blames the game, then they are not exactly justified. But if a player truly makes the best decisions available to them, then there should be no reasonable way for them to lose. Obviously, many games use randomness, and there usually exists a chance to be completely screwed over by the RNG. However this chance should be small enough for it to be a one time occurrence.

There are several enemies in Slay the Spire that will punish you for picking certain strategies. These strategies are not bad by any means, but merely the act of picking them can doom your run. This is obviously not good. If a player can successfully execute a good and valid strategy, why should they be punished in such way? In many other games, similar situations exist where you will have trouble trying a specific strategy. However, the key mechanic in Slay the Spire is its cards, and this is also the source of a lot of inflexibility on how the player operates. In other games, maybe you are fighting an enemy that is strong against what you have been doing, but you can swap out a weapon or alter your playstyle to still come out on top. Honestly, most games simply don't create a situation where one strategy is completely invalid like the enemy I'm about to discuss. In StS, you cannot alter your strategy mid-fight. In fact, altering your strategy at all is very difficult once you get to the third floor. You've already committed to some particular deck, and if you want to retool it, you have to remove probably ten or so cards and try to get new ones to replace them. This is simply impossible to do. You cannot alter your strategy on the fly due to the inflexibility of the card system. In this case, punishing a player's strategy that by all other accounts works is not fun as the game is essentially saying, “You picked this deck, but our RNG says you must fight this guy and lose. Sorry about that.”

I will say first off, nearly every encounter favors buffing cards in favor of playing a lot of them. This is why the Ironclad is better than the Silent in terms of win consistency. The Ironclad can buff his strength to an extreme degree, thus making every attack incredible. In fact, strength buffing is by far the most consistent way to win. While this is a general rule, it is not always true. Several enemies are pains to fight including the aptly named Nemesis, but I do want to talk about one enemy in particular.

The Time Eater is by far the most terribly designed enemy in StS, but his existence is a symptom of an underlying problem that plagues the base design of the game. The Time Eater is a final boss that has one very annoying feature: after you play twelve cards, your turn is forcibly ended and the Time Eater gains strength. Note that the twelve cards do not have to be played in a single turn. If you play eleven cards one turn, then you can only play one the next turn. In a nutshell, the Time Eater destroys decks that play a lot of not powerful cards. Remember the spectrum I talked about? The Time Eater exists as a line on that spectrum, and once your deck goes past the line towards the “play many cards” strategy, you lose. He exists to unfairly destroy a subset of decks for no particularly good reason.

Why would the developers make such an enemy and not remove it? I'm not sure why they haven't honestly, but the Time Eater provides an important feature. Namely, he serves as a limiter that actually punishes strong decks more than weak ones. The Time Eater is not that strong by default. He only becomes strong when you play too many cards, and weak decks lack the mechanisms to play a large amount of cards. I had a run as the Silent where I took zero damage on the third floor. It was easily top ten in terms of strength that I have ever had, and it played probably fifteen or so cards per turn on average. I had no very strong buffs in my deck. It was just playing a lot of good basic cards and manipulating my energy amount and hand (for those wondering, I had ice cream and just an insane amount of energy creation as well as mummified hand). However, the Time Eater did manage to kill me. This was partially due to some unluckiness as I had some bad draws, but I had bad draws before as well and still took no damage. The issue is that I could not play my hand management cards because the Time Eater would end my turn before I could utilize what I drew. There was basically nothing I could have done. Fully half my deck did nothing other than draw cards or give me energy. If I didn't play those, I lose because I would be playing a non-buffed mediocre set of cards where half of them are dead draws. I had to race the Time Eater, and I just couldn't keep up.

The Time Eater, and other such annoying enemies, exist for the reason of trying to limit the power of certain decks, namely decks that play many cards. In most scenarios, the increase in power of the player will far outstrip the enemies if the player is competent. The developers could just increase the numerical values of enemies to make fights harder (which they try to do with the ill-conceived ascension mode), but this is a foolish way to increase difficulty. In my strongest Silent decks, I can accumulate over 50 block per turn quite easily. If the enemies were buffed to be able to even approach close to that, there would be a problem since one bad draw would get you killed. Also, the Ironclad has no way to consistently put up that much per turn, meaning he would become useless. Average decks or decks from unskilled players would be slaughtered since they wouldn't be strong enough. There wouldn't even be a chance to fight. There is a limit to how difficult enemies can be numerically. If this limit is exceeded, the game becomes singularly not fun in any way. Control is wrested from you as the the game says, “Sorry, your deck isn't good enough. Please try again.”

So, in a bizarre attempt to try and make the game artificially more difficult for stronger decks, the Time Eater is created. His mechanic is designed to punish specific strong decks more than weak ones. You could imagine a similar enemy whose purpose is to punish decks on the opposite side of the spectrum, those decks that play a few hugely buffed cards. Unsurprisingly, such an enemy does already exist although he is not as ridiculously heavy-handed as the Time Eater. The Awakened One is a boss that gets strength for every power you play. Powers are one of the key ways you buff your character mid-combat, and nearly any deck will have at least a few. I had one particularly strong deck where over half the cards were powers (another mummified hand run). This run was one of my first really strong runs, and I ended up dying to the Awakened One because I had to play powers to thin my deck at the very least. If I didn't play my powers, then over half my deck would be useless, unbuffed cards.

These two bosses serve as important examples. The player has access to so many cards and relics that they easily outstrip the game's current numerical scaling. A skilled player will nearly always be able to accomplish this should they choose to. The developers cannot simply raise the enemies' numerical values to make them stronger. There is a limit to how far they can go as I said before. Even if they approach this limit, the act of doing so would invalidate many deck types along the way. So, in an attempt to challenge players who have conquered their simple game, they have created enemies designed to limit strong decks without punishing lesser decks to the same degree. Why should this even be a thing? It shouldn't obviously. Imagine playing a First-Person Shooter and being told that because you are good at shooters, you get to do less damage. This concept is just unfun, plain and simple. But even this is a bad comparison. Shooters generally have mechanics that can still make the game fun, and skilled players will use them to overcome such a handicap. Slay the Spire is so simple in its gameplay that such a thing is not possible. There is no room to outmaneuver your opponent since they are mindless patterns that tell you their every move. Your deck is so simple that it limits you. The source of your strength can become your downfall all due to fighting a specifically designed enemy meant to counter your deck. Enemies like the Time Eater should simply be removed, but this won't solve the problem of the game not being sufficiently scalable. It's not fun to play against these limiter enemies like the Time Eater, but it's also not fun to just destroy basic enemies over and over. How can this be reconciled? Well, with the current state of mechanics it can't. The way the player interacts with the world is too easy and straightforward. If you want to hinder the player, the hindrance must be just as straightforward since it too must obey the game's rules. Increasing the enemies' numbers or giving them heavy-handed mechanics like the Time Eater does not make the game more difficult in a fun way.

Early Access

For the final section, I just want to talk a bit about early access. A lot of people cut games slack because they are in early access like Slay the Spire. Of course, this is deserved to some extent. For example, the developers at Mega Crit Games have been updating animations which helps make the game look a little nicer. However, there are some aspects that cannot be changed without great difficulty.

Some things can be changed easily like art, music, small enemy tweaks, UI improvements, and other great additions like the newly done “fast mode”. However, the key things that plague this game cannot be easily changed.

I've seen a lot of discussion about adding cards to the game. This is just a bad idea unless they are talking about adding a new character with their own set of cards. Adding cards to existing characters is bad, and the developers agree with this according to an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Already, you will have trouble finding certain cards. Even common cards will sometimes elude you. Adding more cards would further dilute the card pool and make it so much more difficult to make a coherent deck. Instead of increasing the number of viable strategies, it would actually narrow it since decks that require specific enabling cards would have a difficult time finding what they need.

Ah, but we could make finding the cards you want easier! This is a sentiment I've heard a lot as well, but it's no surprise that there is already a problem. If I could choose what cards I wanted, I'd win every time. The game's difficulty is not in how you play the combat because the combat is so trivial as I've said. The probability of you winning is directly related to the strength of your deck. Making picking cards easier means that deck strength would go up. Why is this an issue? As I've mentioned, there is no good way for the game to scale to match. Increasing the difficulty of enemies numerically is frustrating, and creating bosses like the Time Eater is unfair. How else can they try to challenge the player? Simply put, they cannot. Making cards or relics easier to find does not solve the problem here. If this idea of making drafting decks easier still appeals to you, I would suggest you might simply like constructing decks. If that's the case, there are plenty of card games that let you directly construct a deck however you want to without having to deal with the randomness and time investment of Slay the Spire.

The game needs something that the current design does not offer. There are a number of things that need to be revamped to make the game good, but honestly the idea of a card-based roguelite might just be bad. Some genres or ideas are just doomed from the start. I wouldn't go so far as to say the entire genre is just bad, but there are already a lot of issues. To start off with, the game needs to rework it's base mechanics. This attack and defend system is just too simple and is the root cause of many issues in my opinion. Cards are how the player interacts with the game the most. If the cards and how you play them are so trivial in scope, how can you stop this from trivializing the player's experience?

I could talk about Slay the Spire for hours as several people have had the misfortune to experience, but I will stop here and give a small recap. The base mechanics of the game are very simple, and while this does benefit the game in terms of its clarity of information, it makes combat trivial as well. The enemies follow predictable patterns that are even directly telegraphed to you, making combat even more trivial and boring. At this point, I don't even pay attention to combat on the first floor. Building decks can be interesting, but due to the random nature of getting cards and relics, certain deck types are frustrating to build. If you want to win, prepare to make the same decks over and over with slight variations. Even if you do develop a strange and novel deck, it will probably never reach its full potential. Frankly, novelty is all the deck-building has to offer after a certain point since playing the cards themselves is so boring. After all this, you still have to worry about the annoying enemies in the game designed to unfairly punish certain deck types.

All in all, Slay the Spire serves as a brief foray into the realm of roguelite card games that quickly loses its luster due to overly simple and frustrating design choices. The brief longevity of the game is due to the endless and ultimately futile pursuit to make interesting decks and find the perfect form of them. Even if such a deck did exist, it would be wholly unsatisfying to play. Unless the base systems of the game are revamped, Slay the Spire will not be a good game.

I am beginning to wonder if single-player roguelite card games even have a capacity to be good using just card mechanics, but that is a discussion for another time. To end this article, I would just like to comment that even though I think StS is a mediocre game at best (and there is evidence to support this opinion), that does not mean people can't enjoy it. I am speaking about the quality of the game, which is not a direct indicator of how much you might like it. If you enjoy the game, then by all means continue to enjoy it.

Thanks for reading,

Water Cat

P.S.

I have a strange inkling that some people reading this will think I am just some baddy who is upset that the game beat him. While I will not say I am the best, I do win quite frequently with about a 50% winrate. Furthermore, many of my losses are just me trying to make stupid decks and failing due to the game not giving me important enablers, or I sometimes just quit the runs mid-game because they are boring. I believe I was ranked 30th or so in the world for a while with a 10 win streak as the Ironclad before I lost by knowingly playing like an idiot with the new fast mode.

For those of you who incorrectly think my arguments depend on my skill playing the game, take solace in knowing that I am good, and you can stop worrying about it.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Ship Of Ghouls

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The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Ship Of Ghouls

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games’ proposed Dark Pictures Anthology–a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you’ve played Until Dawn, you’ll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan’s weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.

The game’s plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You’ll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it’s also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan’s main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you’ll uncover and experience along the way.

In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you’ll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.

The story isn’t engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the ’40s, you spend Man of Medan’s four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship–which is riddled with dead bodies–contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.

There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They’re mostly unlikeable, too–There’s the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex’s outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia’s obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story’s opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters’ interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what’s happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.

There’s also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous–the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.

There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You’ll also occasionally have to check in on ‘The Curator’, an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He’s a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the “good evening, boys and ghouls” merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn’t quite fit.

Multiplayer is Man of Medan’s big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that “don’t go in there” feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan’s relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don’t particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying–being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.

However, so many of the game’s issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you’re playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You’ll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.

Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you’ll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.

This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game’s story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we’d done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won’t see every scene when playing this way, and it’s entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.

No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It’s very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.

Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it’s an excellent experience; but if you’re after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it’s very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired.

Source : Gamesport