Tharsis is pretty cool. It’s one of those “bad choice simulators”. Your situation is fucked, and you have to juggle disaster mitigation and the competing needs of your crew by making choices that always have a downside.
I appreciate that there are no “gotchas”, you’re never made to feel like you made a bad choice due to hidden information. But there are dice rolls and mayyybe one or two mechanics too many. It all gets to be a bit much for me.
I tried a few runs but that’ll do for me.
Killer 7 update: I finished through the second mission, maybe technically the third as the second seems broken into two rather distinct parts. On the one hand I feel like I am having much more luck meeting the game on its own terms this go around. On the other had shooting makes up the vast majority of the actual gameplay part of the experience and I think it is undeniably poorly done? A good deal of the shooting comes down to “hit the weak point for massive damage” and it feels like I hit said target with a shot quite often and it doesn’t count with it feeling more like a side effect of janky implementation than anything else, and that kinda sucks? Also had a boss fight recently where I had to use the slowest guy to shoot the ceiling above a quick enemy to have it fall on him and it felt like I simply wasn’t fast enough to not eat several shots first. I did fortunately unlock critical lock-on for someone but even that seems to have a habit of only working so well.
So yeah, for now my opinion of the game has been upgraded from “this is just awful” to “the implementation leaves a lot to be desired”.
Finished Control and the DLC. Rad as hell.
oh yeah the shooting is awful, game is 100% vibes
In The Good Life Naomi Hayward, photo journalist with no equipment, travels to Rainy Woods a quaint English village with a secret. The secret is they turn into cats and dogs at night. Except not that was just the whole premise of the kickstarter but is so marginalized as to be pointless.
The actual plot is Naomi has either 30,000 or 30,000,000 pounds of debt (depending on the text box), is a new yorker (with nothing that signals this), and is now trapped by a debt collector and the job to this town to find it’s secret (that they turn into cats and dogs at night.)
But then the wheelchair bound hostess has been found dead in the woods stabbed by excalibur?? Now you gotta transform into a dog and a cat to finish boring fetch quests and telephone quests. Meet a cast of zany with one line descriptions they won’t let you forget. Solve the murder, pay off your debt, post pictures to twitter for money, farm, cook meals, collect bullshit, use bullshit to make outfits.
It’s the most designed by crowdsourcing game I’ve ever played with no direction buried in it. It is terrible to play. I find it almost comforting in playing something this numb-bad.
Also it is somehow racist against people from Boston (around 40:00):
Just start riding that 15 second skip button to also witness the horrendous pacing. The motorcycle guy is the racist one.
The game has so little to do with the cat/dog premise you wonder why it is there.
“I don’t care what that gimp wants to tell me”
UhOh
Yeah Killer 7 has that klunk. I kinda feel like its ok for a horror game to not have sharp control.
Now Im wondering if the weirdness/freshness of K7 in 2005 means anything in the current games climate.
In Bravely Default 2 chapter 2, I devised a simple strategy to end every random battle in about 10 seconds and 7-10 button presses (including post-battle healing) The game’s become a bit dull since, as you can imagine.
How it goes :
Obviously we’re at max battle speed.
Everybody defends until Adelle’s turn. Adelle « braves » twice to borrow two turns from the future, then uses the Berserker ability Level Slash three times. Level slash uses 30% of Adelle’s max HP and hits every enemy for huge damage.
Weak enemy groups die in 1 level slash, regular ones die in 2, very strong ones in 3. Crucially, Adelle has an anti-counter passive ability that ensures the three Level Slashes will be used and she will not be stopped. There is no escape. And Adelle doesn’t need to give back the two turns she borrowed, because the enemies are all dead at the end of it.
After battle I autoheal, and every 10 or so battle I give my autohealer an ether. Ethers are mega cheap.
Boss battles don’t feel very tense because resources are limitless. I have 99 ethers and incredible healers. There is nothing to fear. I am playing on the hardest difficulty and there is no friction
I won’t even make a joke about continuing for the story / characters. The game does have one saving grace right now: the collectible card game, which is very reminiscent of Triple Triad but without the annoyances. I love it, but not enough to continue BD2
Yeah, that was my impression of Bravely Default 1 as well. The story and dungeon design are mediocre, so people must play this for the innovative battle system, I guess? But the battle system is obviously terrible. Why even have random battles in the game when the title mechanic trivializes them?
Somehow it was well-received anyway so the devs improved nothing in the sequel, sounds like
i can’t think of a game that made me as angry as Bravely Default did in the last decade
doom eternal???
Doom Eternal finally made me share the rage of Doomguy through the device of bad game design
The promise of the early scene in Doom 2016 where he punches through the screen that’s burbling plot at him, finally fulfilled
there are still parts of eternal that are very good and unlike anything else other than 2016 but the whole package is pretty gross and misunderstood
In the time I’ve been playing Halo Infinite, the fatigue I did not yet feel but knew to be building during my time with Doom Eternal seems to have finally emerged. Maybe that’s just me, but the games feel similar in unfavorable ways.
They’re both obsequiously eager to please
ooo fair.
but no! like i figured out what i didn’t like about Doom Eternal in a few levels. Bravely Default scammed me until the very end
Go on…
Is Killer 7 a horror game?
I ask that earnestly, I am multiple days into it and I hadn’t considered it might be.
I have been struck by the feeling that if I played this (without the sensation of wanting to smash my own head with a hammer) back nearer its original release a lot of the presentation stuff and general oddness would probably be more striking.
I’m currently up to the past of the game in a small town where enemies seem to spawn constantly in most areas (occasionally as giants) and it makes the whole experience of it a drag. The big ones seem to not hit me all the time if I say to hell with it and just keep moving so I’m gonna try to just tank the hits and hope I don’t die for a bit. If the whole constantly respawning enemies thing is a thing moving forward I don’t know that I’ll manage to finish this even with my best intentions.
Mortal Shell is a short and basically adequate way to do some souls style combat while you wait for Elden Ring. If you have PS+ then give it a try. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend paying much for it.
It’s funny, the game is trying to imitate the mysterious and abstruse lore of Dark Souls but it just doesn’t have FROM’s artistry. It’s a total mess of non-sequiturs that don’t really seem to add up to much. Sometimes that’s funny though. I went up to a book on a pedestal and got a “recite” button prompt. Pressing it caused my character to grab the book, tear out a page, and crumple it into a ball that then turned into a spider and climbed up his arm, biting him in the neck, causing him to fall to the ground in anguish, and then get swallowed up by a giant worm fish emerging from the ground, depositing him in a foggy room where I had to fight a training guy to get a new weapon. Like… excuse me? Quite the recitation, lol.
The game does have a huge fuck-you mace you can swing like a golf club to putt guys all around though, so that earns it a ton of points with me.
I thought it was hot trash and the combat doesn’t feel good and the “harden” mechanic is poorly explained