What Was The Last Game You Played?

[Miguel Sanchez]

Yeah it's not a struggle to find ammo in BioShock.

[BFTD]

Probably not worth starting a separate thread for mods, but I can thoroughly recommend Colourful Hell for old-school Doom: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=47980

It's an entertaining randomiser that allocates a class to the enemies when you start a map, each of which has different abilities and a colour to help you identify them so you can run away screaming. Haven't met any top-tier white enemies yet, but I did find a black one on one map, which resulted in a fifteen-minute chase through the whole level just to start monster in-fighting and distract it from kicking my arse.

Definitely adds a fun new element to the old levels. Remember; save early, save often!

[Miguel Sanchez]

Donut County (PS4, 2018)

In the Annapurna Interactive Deluxe Limited Edition, Donut County is introduced with a word from its creator: 

Donut County is a game about a raccoon named B.K. and a girl named Mira who works at his donut shop in Donut County. Any time someone in Donut County orders a donut from B.K., he sends them a hole instead and this swallows them and everything around them pretty quickly the entire town ends up underground and angry at him. 

I didn't know what I was going to get from Donut County and I was pleasantly surprised. Gameplay is pretty much as described. In each level you get a hole in the ground. You move it around so objects fall into it and the hole grows. Occasionally you need to interact with the surface, such as buying a catapult to fire objects back up to flick switches or hit other objects. It's fun. Calling it a puzzle game based on this would be a bit of a stretch, but there are places where it's fun figuring out how to get through an area. If anything, more could be made of this. 

The overall aesthetic of the game is charming and cartoony, with bright colours and sound/music which complements this nicely without being annoying. Graphically it can look a bit rough. The cutscene-esque moments in between levels look a bit jaggy. That's about the only technical deficiency. The actual physics of making stuff fall in the hole is natural and oddly satisfying. There's one puzzle near the end of the game where you need to press switches with a wobbly snake that's sticking out of the hole and it turns out you can effectively hit the switch twice without realising, which made me have to look up what I was doing wrong. This is the only real problem over the game's three hours. 

The writing and characterisation plays quite heavily on raccoons and the place they have in contemporary internet culture. Cute little trash guys! I don't get it. Is this an American thing? I don't think you get raccoons here. The other residents of Donut County are all animals so there's a degree of intra-species conflict which is again charming in a cartoony way. The overall aesthetic of the game is just nice in a familiar and comforting way, and the characters are a big part of that. B.K. and Mira go through scenes texting each other on their phones and it's a bit too modern and punctuation-free for my taste, but it all fits well with the game. 

Donut County isn't a game I would ever have played if I didn't own the Annapurna Interactive Deluxe Limited Edition, but I had fun with the few hours I spent with it. It also reminded me of the Peter Molydeux twitter account, and I had great fun looking at that again. 

[Miguel Sanchez]

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure (PS4, 2021)

Last year I played Borderlands with a girl and had the time of my life. After finishing up the rest of the trophies this year I decided I needed some more Borderlands in my life so I played the recently released Tiny Tina's Wonderlands: A Borderlands One-Shot Adventure. I say recently released, it's DLC from Borderlands 2 released as a standalone thing because there's a new game out centred on this concept. I didn't write up Borderlands because I didn't really have anything to say about it, but I'll try here.

You are one of the Borderlands 2 characters, you're in a magical kingdom which is the creation of Tiny Tina, a... girl who's playing a tabletop RPG with all the Borderlands characters. I don't get it. I'm not into this kind of thing and the humour and references to it are something I'm only tangentially aware of because of the internet. It's very big on nerd culture in a way a game from 2013/14 would be. There are several meta references to the game within the game but it's never really enough for me to be consistently clever or funny. It's as if every couple of hours someone remembers "Oh! This is supposed to be a game" and throws in a token comment. If you're into this sort of thing you'll probably love it, most of it just washes over me.

One thing I can comment on definitively is the gameplay. It's so much better than the original Borderlands. Guns, grenades and the assorted numbers that determine how effective they all are are so much more refined and diverse. The Borderlands series will always be games that work best played with multiple players to complement each other, but for those of us with no friends it's a much better solo experience. I'm not going to say it's easier because it isn't, but if you're conscious of getting the right gear and the right setup, you can get a real challenge out of it. If you do struggle though, there's a well done Easy Mode which can make things less tedious. You take less damage from enemies, but your own damage isn't affected. It makes the game more accessible but still requires you to keep on top of what you're doing. 

Most of the time though I suppose it's standard Borderlands. Get a gun with some numbers on it, kill some enemies, find some more guns with better numbers and switch to those. Repeat. There's not much else to it. For a single DLC episode there's a good amount of content. For a standalone game I'm not sure it works, because without the context of the full game before it you always feel as if you're trying figure out what's going on yourself, rather than it actually being explained. I had the same problem when I played Tales From the Borderlands several years after I'd played Borderlands 1 and 2. Considering this was released on its own because of the new Tiny Tina game, I'm not sure how much it would entice people to buy the new game if they're not fans already. And if they are, why bother?

I wanted more Borderlands, I got it. Better guns and combat than I'd had before. The same occasionally infuriating map design. I think this would have been a better experience if I hadn't gone for all the trophies. Realistically I spent... many hours more with it than I would really have liked. It wasn't bad, it just took a bit longer than I would have liked. 

[Albus Bulbasaur]

Been playing Dying Light 2 over the last few days. 

Really good fun, not too dissimilar from the first one and I can't see any massive improvements but generally speaking graphics wise and smoothness it's worth making. 

Couldn't really care less about the story but the free running combined with melee zombie combat is fundamentally fun. It reminds me of a Ubisoft game but like they've actually tried to make it enjoyable to play. 

[BFTD]

I somehow got the Doom 3 BFG Edition for free years ago - naturally, like any normal person, I played through Doom 1 & 2 then shelved it away with the other ridiculous number of games I've acquired on Steam. Lately I heard that it had come with a new bonus Doom 3 mini-mission, so I figured I'd give it a go. It was OK - tougher than the original game, as you'd expect, but with nothing new added in terms of weapons or enemies. A decent, albeit pointless addition.

It did give me the hunger to play through the original again, though, and this might annoy some fans, but I've been enjoying it more as they made some fundamental changes. Despite being an action-horror FPS, iD designed survival horror aspects into Doom 3, making it dark as f**k but famously giving you a flashlight that you could only use by lowering your weapon and allowing enemies to get the drop on you. Ammo for the more effective weapons was also pretty scarce, making you rely on the lower-powered guns in case you emptied your plasma rifle and discovered a troupe of double-hard b*****ds around the next corner.

The original Doom 3 was a game that was developed and designed for ideal conditions - a darkened room with headphones, or a surround-sound system and no distractions. It irritated me as a result, and I was a bit torn between appreciating what they tried to do, and annoyed by the fact that I rarely had the chance to play it as intended. That, and the fact that it's essentially "Jump Scare: The Video Game", with massive quantities of screeching sound designed to sound similar to actual monster noises, and constant creatures jumping out at you from the closets they've been hiding in for some reason. It also felt like a bit of a chore, as it's not a terribly short game, and you had to work through it quite patiently or risk getting gangbanged by demons appearing from out of the darkness and kerbstomping your squishy ass.

The BFG edition has basically made it a different game. You're given a suit-mounted flashlight, so the panicky delay in raising a weapon is now gone; you only have to worry about the flashlight charge temporarily running out. They've also littered the maps with extra health and ammo, so you're rarely going to have to worry about switching weapons, even on the harder difficulties.

I like this version a lot better. I can play it in a lit room while other things are going on. I'm zipping through it at a faster pace, as the constant confused weapon/flashlight panic has gone, and the excessive pickups make a mauling less of a disaster. It's not what was originally designed, but it's far more fun as a game, so I'm happy with that. Pity they didn't include a mode for people who want the original experience, though.

Maybe I'll make it more than five minutes into Resurrection of Evil this time.

[Boo Khaki]

Wartales PC

Interesting enough, and could be really enjoyable at full release provided they keep developing it at pace, but right now the combat gets quite dull and repetitive very quickly and feels more like a chore than a thrill, and most of the NPC interactions are one to two lines of text at most, meaning the majority of locations in the game feel somewhat empty and lacking in any real immersion. Still, it's got the bones of a really good game.

[BFTD]

f**k knows how it ended up on my Steam wishlist (there are 170 things on there now, going back a good decade or more), but I just picked up Kitty Powers' Matchmaker for £1.74. No idea who Kitty Powers is, but it's a cartoony casual dating sim where you run an agency trying to hook people up based on interests and appearance.

The underlying message is pretty awful - to find lasting love, change your appearance to match what others expect, and lie your ass off to pretend you have things in common - but I do like having a supply of games that can run in the background while I'm doing actual work, and this is a fun little diversion that meets all the criteria. I don't get the impression there's a lot of depth, and it's been pretty easy so far, but...less than £2, people. There's easily enough here to justify that.

There's a wee bit of cheap DLC and a sequel that's reduced for the next few weeks, so they may well get my money for those too.

[Stellaboz]

Fired up Fallout 4 the other day again. Went looking for that place in the top right corner corner the map with the mini nuke and the death claws, totally missed it and ended up in a factory full of synth. 

[BFTD]

Finally pulled the trigger on Not Tonight. It's a quite shockingly blatant rip-off of Papers, Please, only set in a dystopian post-Brexit England as it careers towards vicious full-bore fascism (or a satire on what the silly Remoaners thought would happen, depending on your views).

The rip-off element had put me off, but it's surprisingly good. It's a little easier than Papers, Please, which often felt as though it was actively trying to catch you out - you don't get names on documents being off by a single letter, for example. You still need to pay attention to what's going on, or you'll struggle. The pixel art is really well done, with a cracking soundtrack, and the whole game is full of lovely little background touches to look out for.

The storyline's quite engaging, with characters and dialogue that are often amusing. Every now and then you find yourself thinking "this is becoming a bit grim", as you slide from bouncing at nightclubs to turning away foreigners from polling booths, although it doesn't have the moral decision element of Papers, Please, where you've have to decide to save a stranger's life or keep your own family safe. It's great for playing in short bursts. The ending is unfortunately shite; although it does have a "your decisions decide your fate" element that's nice, the story gets wrapped up in a deeply unsatisfying manner.

Spoiler

It essentially amounts to the kind of ending a kid would put on a short story at school - "and then the bad guys got sorted out and everything was immediately OK again the end."

There's definite replay value, although maybe not as much as Papers, Please, and I'm not sure that it's quite worth the £16 asking price. I'd say it's a definite buy if you see it on sale for a tenner or less, though. Quite keen to try the DLC and sequel now.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Note: After checking this over I'm not completely happy with how it reads, but it's been too long since I played it and I just want this out the way. I think it says everything I want it to.

God of War (PS4, 2018)

The first time I was called "Sir" in a shop is when I bought the God of War Collection for the PS3. I was probably 18 or 19 at the time, and from what I remember the boy serving me was quite young himself. Maybe he was new and nervous. Maybe he felt bad for ID'ing me and was trying to over-compensate. I remember being sort of stunned by it and not really knowing how to react. There are certain points in my life where something has happened and I've just felt old, and that's one that stands out. 

How life comes full circle then as after playing God of War (2018), a Kratos for a new generation, I feel really, really old. The game sees the angriest, second-baldest man in gaming shift from the Greek mythology of his previous six games to somewhere up north and covered in snow so he can slaghter everything in Norse mythology. You play as Kratos and new for the experience is his son, Atreus, who you have limited control over during fights against the assorted monsters you run into on your travels.

The first thing I should say is that I went into this game with no expectations and very limited knowledge of what it contained. I knew Kratos had a beard and a child. I think I knew it involved Norse gods. That was it. The joy of the backlog and not really playing AAA games is coupled with not really following the development and release of them, so I can go into something genuinely blind. I knew it was popular, I knew it was well-regarded, that was it. 

Even while I was playing I wondered what I thought of the game and what I was going to say and aside from one specific moment which I'll get to eventually, I realised quite early that I didn't think that much of the game. That's not to say I didn't like it, which I didn't really, but I just didn't think about it a lot. Since finishing it I've gone through every measure of a game I can think of - story, gameplay, characters, graphics, world-building and none of them are in any way remarkable. But the thing is, they're not really bad. Some of them can be terrible and I'll get there but for the most part... I suppose explaining why it's so forgettable is better than just saying it's forgettable. 

First up, story. The game starts with Kratos' wife dead and he and son building a funeral pyre for her. Then it turns out she wants her ashes scattered from "the highest peak in all the realms." What follows is a seemingly endless excursion into various realms to try and find the peak. Great. Quite early on in fact the game stopped making any sense at all and I just followed objective markers, did whatever I had to do and then followed whatever came up next. The way you interact with the world made me really indifferent to discovering Kratos and Atreus' role in it, and I never really felt absorbed by anything that happened as a result.

Bizarrely, this didn't make me feel as if I was missing out on anything. I've seen praise for the way the character of Kratos' dead wife is depicted through hints and memories but for me, a game starting in medias res like this needs to do more. Both Kratos and Atreus clearly care deeply for this person, and by the end it turns out she was leading them through everything all along!, but for me there's very little to be invested in. As a result the central conceit of the game and the relationship of the two main characters the game is built on are largely meaningless to me, so right from the start I'm not really caring.

I'm going to switch the order of my topics around a bit and combine characters and world-building together. It's been a while since I played the original God of War games but from what I remember I killed everything in Greek mythology. Literally everything. As I recall you kill Gaia, literally the earth, so there's really not anywhere else to go from there. Perhaps I'm biased because of my own literary background but there's a familiarity with Greek mythology for me where the actions in those games mean something to me. Even briefly, I put on the first God of War the other day and it starts with Kratos on a ship being attacked by the Hydra. Head into the ship a bit and Poseidon turns up, says he's king of the sea and he can give Kratos powers to kill the Hydra. Athena turns up and hints she's Kratos' conscience. Kratos goes and kills the Hydra. Great. I know who everyone is, why they're there, what they're doing. And it's really cool because I've just killed a mythical sea monster using magic powers given to me by the king of the sea.

In contrast, I can tell you three things about Norse mythology. Thor is a god who has a big hammer. Odin is a god. Loki is a god. Fourth thing, people who die in battle go to Valhalla. That's it. That's all I knew. It's all I know now. If you've played the game you'll know that despite being referenced in relation to literally everything and everyone you encounter, Odin doesn't turn up at any point. Neither does Thor. Neither does Loki, really. This is bad for two reasons. First, I spend the game hearing about the fearsome, terrible Odin doing all of these things to the lands and the realms and the giants and... he's not there. At all. Second, the characters who are there are meaningless to me because I don't know who they are and they all just sort of turn up, so there's little consequence to what's going on. 

Take the guy who largely features as the game's main bad guy, Baldur. Here I thought Baldur was just a character with a gate in an RPG but no, he's... is he Odin's son? One of them? Either way he turns up with no explanation looking like the smuggest millennial barista you've ever seen - topless, body covered in shit squiggly tattoos, braided beard and the sides of his head shaved. Great, very fearsome. And all our encounters with this person feature a thundering trade of blows between him and Kratos. Only he's immortal so even when Kratos drops a cliff on him or throws him off a dragon, nothing happens. Great. 

For several years now I've had a fear popular culture has passed me by. There are many reasons for this I won't go into but there are many times where this feels like a very modern game to me. The design of Baldur is one thing but in a game with very few characters, it's remarkable how generic some of them seem. Take the two dwarves who you can visit to upgrade your weapons and armour, the obvious comic relief of the game who seem to exist in a twitchy, ironic way where they're clearly supposed to be funny because they're a bit kooky and a bit adult and just so done with everything. It's annoying. They're annoying. 

Talking of Baldur and modern popular culture, there's a sequence when he turns up. I forget why, but you end up fighting him. I think he steals Atreus and flies off on a dragon, in a sequence which in no way looks anything like Shadow of the Colossus. I'll complain more about the camera in the game later but you jump on, chase after Baldur then you start punching him. Then he starts punching you and you can dodge. Then you punch him again and he falls off. Here I realised what this game reminded me of. It's a Marvel movie. It's characters I don't know, who you need a comprehensive knowledge of multiple prior works to understand or care about them in any way, doing something ridiculous which is completely disconnected from the player, and then nothing of any consequence happens to them after. I don't know who these people are, I don't know why they're fighting, but I do know the fight will end with nothing happening to either of them and the game will make out that this is just the start, and an audience I don't relate to will think they've seen the greatest work of human creativity and imagination.

By far the most baffling character in the game is Mimir. Mimir is a man who was Odin's assistant until one day Odin did what Odin does and put Mimir in a tree so he could torture him. At some point Kratos needs to cut Mimir's head off and take it with him so from that point on he has comic relief and convenient exposition with him at all times, not just when he's visiting the dwarves. Mimir is also, for some reason, Scottish and of course when I first realised that I just felt my stomach drop. I don't get it. The accent is actually the least bad part of the head because it's accurate. I have too much else to say about the game to focus on this but it was still just a source of endless cringe.

Let's forget about his accent now and focus on how God of War (2018) does world-building. In a previous life I played Final Fantasy XIII and I had never played a JRPG before. I had barely played an RPG. I got... some distance into the game and I had no idea what was going on. For a largely linear game it was very bad at introducing characters, setting or any detail about the world. It did have a very detailed section of data logs in the pause menu though which told you what was going on. You know, rather than explain anything as it actually happened when you first experienced it. I can still remember the Zero Punctuation description word for word: "This is not good story-telling! You're supposed to weave exposition into the narrative not hand the audience a fucking glossary." 

In God of War (2018) there are frequent 'Rune Markers' which only Atreus can read. You press square and a note appears in his diary which you can open and read and get a nice story about something from Norse mythology which isn't actually featured in the game, you just get to read it in lieu of the world itself having actual interesting things in it. You get updates to his diary whenever you meet a new enemy as well, usually updates about how to kill them. You can also find shrines dotted about the world depicting the giants doing some stuff, and when you go out into the game's attempt at an open world section the head will start telling you about the history of a giant you've never met, which has no connection to anything you're actually experiencing at that moment. There's a seemingly endless selection of these things so if you like reading, this is the game for you. 

I say the game attempts to do open world and I don't really know how else to describe it. I've been trying hard here to not compare this to the previous God of War games because I don't think it's relevant and I think the game is supposed to be different enough to be considered distinctly, but it's worth doing here. The camera in those games was fixed. It moved as you moved through levels and it might have been annoying on occasion, but it almost always worked. With a largely linear path for you to take, this was fine. God of War (2018) has a largely linear path that the main story takes place on but there is a wider world and several other areas for you to explore at your own leisure.

This structure has many flaws. The first is those stories I mentioned. Both those and things Atreus says reference things which could have happened at any time. If for instance you focus on the story and do most of that, then do some rowing and exploration, you get a bunch of dialogue which feels incongruous with where you've actually reached in the story. This doesn't help my earlier complaints about the story and its singificance, and it ends up leaving the game feel disjointed and poorly structured. It doesn't help here either that the map itself is borderline useless, with the only actual map you can look at being a stylised version in the pause menu which you need to keep checking every few seconds to make sure you're going in the right direction. It also doesn't help that aside from one or two areas which are fleshed out, most of the world you explore is all pretty boring, with some basic puzzles, the same wall climbing you get everywhere else and the same drab, grey rocks everywhere. There are different realms you can visit but there's very little difference between them aesthetically.

The world itself suffers from my earlier complaints about Norse mythology. The game takes place in the realm of Midgard. You are inside Tyr's Temple on the Lake of Nine, which has a bridge you can move round to visit statues. Inside Tyr's Temple is Yggdrasil the tree of life and if you collect the nine travel runs you can use them on Yggdrasil and travel to the other realms. You must travel to Alfheim to fill this flask the witch gives you with the Light of Alfheim in order to power the realm travel. While you're there you need to get involved in the endless war between the light elves and the dark elves. Along your journey you can collect runes so you can travel to the realms Muspelheim and Nifleim and eventually to get to Jotunheim the realm of the giants you have to turn Tyr's Temple upside down. Also within the Lake of Nine there is the World Serpent, a giant snake eating its tail which the world is built upon who you talk to and as you talk to him he comes out of the water so the lake recedes and you can explore more of the land. 

This game is absolutely incomprehensible to me, and this is why I told that story about God of War making me feel old when I was younger. At just about no point in the story of God of War (2018) did I have the faintest clue where I was, what I was doing, where I was going or why I was doing it. There might be a story in here somewhere but a combination of the open world design being very poor and the explanations of that world being out of sight and unengaging, I had no idea. I don't think it was a long game, I'd say 12-15 hours would get you through the story, but it felt like every time I put the game on I was being faced with a new place and new creatures with new names that had no connection with what I had encountered before. This made the whole experience feel inconsequential and uninspiring.

On to gameplay now, and this isn't great either. The problems with the camera really shine through here now. In previous God of War games you had levels and you had enemies. The camera showed you all of them and you could direct your attacks accordingly. In God of War (2018) you get maybe five or six enemies at most, and full third person control over the camera. But the camera is always a bit too close behind Kratos, so there are really awkward indicators which pop up if there's something behind you, so you turn when they flash red and you can't actually find the enemy that was apparently targeting you because it's moved or because it's such an unremarkable design you can't actually see it immediately. It doesn't help that the main weapon is an axe, which requires you to get up close to anything you want to kill. But then sometimes there are enemies a bit further away which you can target with your axe to throw it at them. Using a control system which feels like projectile aiming was shoehorned in about five minutes before the game reached the shelves. Eventually you adapt and attack enemies from miles away, throwing the axe at them until they're done. You unlock Kratos' classic blades later on but even the fun is taken out of these, the range is much smaller and it just feels like a much less involved experience than a button mashing, hack and slash game should be. 

That said, the enemies themselves don't offer much. Standard enemies all look the same and differ little in their attacks. There are tougher enemies with more health but they move slower and you can still dodge roll them easily. The minor boss fights feature trolls or ogres or something and they appear in several different colours throughout the game, with no difference in the actual act of fighting them. Some enemies are blue and some are orange, this means you use your ice axe against the orange ones and the fire blades against the blue ones. Eventually I gave up and put the difficulty on easy, not because I was struggling to beat anything but because I was getting bored having to press R1 so many times. 

Even these boss fights feel detached. In previous God of War games, a mini-boss fight usually ended with a quick time event with a few buttons for you to press at the right time which did a cool cinematic and really showed off the gore. In this game there's nothing, you just attack until it stops moving. If you hit enemies enough times you can stun them and then press R3 to do a finisher on them but this does nothing for me either, and it's usually awkward to do if there are other enemies around.

With that in mind I need to mention the Valkyries. This is a side-quest in God of War (2018) where the Valkyries, who guard and protect the souls of the dead, have had something happen to them. You have to go and find and fight and defeat eight of them to then be able to face the Queen at the end. This is the hardest boss fight in the game and after playing most of the game on easy, let me describe the difficulty spike here. The entire game is basically a flat line. Then you reach this final fight and the difficulty curve turns at a right angle and shoots off into space. I hated this last fight. It was so cheap, so inexplicable, so out of place with everything else I had faced I could barely believe it was happening. It was like every complaint I had about the combat being easy had been saved up and thrown back at me at once, with attacks which took away far too much of my health and seemed impossible to dodge. After this battle, I knew I was never going to play a Soulsborne game because this was not fun. This was not satisfying. This was tedious. Despite everything I've said and I'm going to say, this is the only part of the game I genuinely hated.

My struggles to beat the Valkyrie Queen led me to one of the game's most annoying modern foibles - the menu system. The armour, the weapons, the upgrades for these and the colour-coded rarity system with random drops which you just get in games nowadays. I'd love to know when the meeting happened and it was just decided you don't get upgrades any more, you get random drops and you get resources in crafting and everyone can play a unique way! Which is exactly the same as everyone else's bar one or two numbers being different and someone having the Magic Cross of the Ancient hanging from their belt rather than the Enchanted Cross of the Not Quite Ancient Burning Souls.

If the runes and lore and the enemy information was in a menu I was never reading, my attempts to understand the armour and the upgrades more than made up for it. To me, this sort of system exists to cover up a team too lazy to balance a game themselves. I don't think the combat is varied enough to need any of the myriad different enchantments and types or armour or weapon you can use. I don't know if higher difficulties make better use of this, but even then I could see it just being an irritant. You can't 'save' an armour set for instance, so if you wanted to swap your equipment for a different kind of enemy you'd need to keep track of your best setup, or get used to reading all the descriptions every time. Just give me a balanced, continual growth of health and abilities, which might even mirror the growth and experience of the character I'm playing as, and  centre the game around that. Don't cop out and give me infinite options with very little variance between them. 

I almost forgot this one last detail, but there's one other factor which exemplifies everything wrong with the system. You can upgrade your weapons with certain unique resources you find in the world. Fine. The final upgrade requires one object. Except you don't just click on upgrade while you're talking to the dwarves. You have to change the magic fire of timewasting into something else, then use it to upgrade the weapon. Why? There is literally no reason for this. It's an unnecessary step of administration that serves no purpose. None. There's no reason for it. Why is it there? Why don't you just press a button that says UPGRADE? Why do you need to change the thing into another thing - with no cost, no time, nothing - to use it? Who made this system? Who came up with this? I'm glad this came at the end of the game since I'd long since stopped caring. Maybe similar stuff happened before the final upgrade I don't know, but... why?

This is where I start to feel old. This sort of system was in Horizon Zero Dawn and it's the sort of light, non-committal RPG and crafting elements which just add nothing which get to me. There are games where finding armour and weapons and resources to upgrade them and tweak your character's stats to affect gameplay are a central aspect of the game's design. They're extensive, well-rounded and add something to the experience. Here, they just feel token, as if they're just in the game because that's what games have now. They also feel completely out of place, given how little affect they have on a hack and slash game which purports to have as much depth as this does.

One last note about the gameplay which will lead into my final point. Atreus has a bow and arrow which you can use in battle. In addition to pressing R1 and R2 and wrestling with the camera, you can press square and he'll fire an arrow. Eventually you unlock electric ones which stun enemies and chain the electricity to others once you've upgraded them. That's it. 

What then of this game's crowning glory, the relationship between Kratos and Atreus? Dad of Boy, after all. God of War 3 saw Kratos at his most human and vulnerable, with more detail about his dead family and then his surrogate daughter used to show his feelings. Here he has an actual young child with a newly dead mother, and he has to show and teach this boy how to live in a world that's trying to kill him. All while wrestling with how to tell him he's actually a god. To start with this relationship is interesting and explored delicately, as it's clear Kratos is realising he has to be a complete parent rather than just teaching the boy about fighting and survival. 

It's possible I missed it and I'm not going to check now but I'm not sure what age Atreus is supposed to be. I'd guess pre-teen. From what I've seen of the promo artwork for the sequel he barely looks like a teenager in that either. That or he has severe babyface. Anyway, Atreus is young and for the most part the youthful innocence he faces situations with is appropriate and it's an easy but effective counter to Kratos' usual approach to things. While the rest of the game was washing over me I latched on to this relationship as the only engaging thing being presented to me. 

Eventually though he does tell Atreus that he's a god. Then things change.  He starts acting like a spoiled brat. Admittedly this is a pretty accurate reflection of any young god in any mythology - they learn they're invincible and start acting like it. In this game though it comes out of nowhere and seems so incongruous with Atreus' character up until that point. He's sensitive and a bit distant from Kratos because of it, then suddenly he switches to be annoying. Then you go a bit further in the story, you have that stupid fight with Baldur and he stops and goes back to the way he was but a bit apologetic. This is where the problem of the open world comes back too, he was apologising for acting like that several in-game hours after it had happened, I just hadn't heard it at the right time. Even if I had I don't know if it would have made things any better.

The Kratos/Atreus relationship was the one thing I was vaguely aware of going into this game and I'm surprised at how badly it let itself down. There are very few characters in the game and as I've said even fewer of them feel properly explained and now the two the game is centred around have a very uneven relationship. In addition to providing exposition when it's required, Mimir throws in the odd moment of comic relief. Kratos saying "quiet, head" every so often is funny and I did like the added moments of brevity from Kratos. Really the only success I can honestly say the game has is rounding out Kratos as a character a bit more, it's just a shame it had to come from such a mediocre game. It's also a shame this was still all it really had going for it.

The downfall of that father and son relationship ultimately sums up how I felt about the game. This one saving grace I was holding on to as something to interest never mind excite me just stopped, with little warning and barely believable justification. Yet, I wasn't upset. I wasn't angry, I wasn't disappointed, I was just briefly incredulous at how sudden and out of step it was with everything else that was going on, but I didn't care. I was too uninvested in the rest of the game to care, and I don't think I can imagine a more damning description of anything, not just a video game.

By every measure I apply to video games, God of War (2018) wasn't good. It didn't play well, it didn't look special, the characterisation was uneven and largely uninteresting, the world wasn't presented very well and I really didn't care about any of these things. Technically there must have been something going on because I've neglected to mention the noise my PS4  made when it was on. In five years it's the loudest I've heard my console. Even at the start menu before I'd pressed "New Game" the noise was absolutely intolerable. That was probably the most impressed I was at any time playing the game. I suppose I'm just glad I pre-emptively followed Kratos' advice and didn't have any expectations because if I was looking forward to this I would have been very, very unhappy. 

[Theroadlesstravelled]

Farming simulator.

Hella good way to pass the time.

[SweeperDee]

Am I playing Ghost of Tsushima wrong if I’m finding the world a bit…boring? It’s very nice to look at but the characters I’m meeting all sound the same, wooden and lifeless. Haven’t found much in terms of interesting landmarks either. Most exciting things I’ve found in the world are bears…

I’m still relatively early in the game, just finished the first section of the Sensei quest, found out about Tomoe, but it’s not gripping me. Spider-Man on the other hand is fucking brilliant, as is Death Stranding.

[accies1874]

I don't remember there being (m)any landmarks, just great landscapes. I'm pretty sure there are some really great side quest storylines and characters too. Could be misremembering though.

[Gaz]

On 30/07/2022 at 21:45, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Farming simulator.

Hella good way to pass the time.

Try Stardew Valley.

I'm currently playing Stray on the PS5. It's great fun.

[Benjamin_Nevis]

I'm currently faffing about between PGA2K21, GT7, Battlefield 1 and considering downloading Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. 

[yoda]

On 27/07/2022 at 13:03, Miguel Sanchez said:

 words

 

On 03/08/2022 at 07:46, SweeperDee said:

Am I playing Ghost of Tsushima wrong if I’m finding the world a bit…boring?  

Gorgeous looking game. Tedious and repetitive busywork after a few hours though. 

[Stellaboz]

Went back recently to play Fallout 4. Really enjoy it, did the Minutemen playthrough for the first time but the real game is exploring and living the wasteland life. 

I heard that they're bringing out a London DLC? Is that right? 

[BFTD]

22 minutes ago, Stellaboz said:

Went back recently to play Fallout 4. Really enjoy it, did the Minutemen playthrough for the first time but the real game is exploring and living the wasteland life. 

I heard that they're bringing out a London DLC? Is that right? 

Not Bethesda, but a group of fans: https://fallout4london.com/

I like the idea of games set in London, but I'm thoroughly sick of "wacky", chirpy cockernee London, which this is bound to be. You know, Austin Powers and that We Happy Few game (wacky home counties, but it counts). The Americans are mad for that shit, but it seems like English people like it now too. Gives me the boak, much like stereotyped shortbread tin Scottish stuff.

[Miguel Sanchez]

37 minutes ago, yoda said:

Why do you like it?