Currently Playing

[Animalmother]

Just finished it and it's very good. Took me exactly 4 hours to complete. I'd advise anyone planning on playing it to give it a while so that the various bugs can be fixed. There's nothing game breaking but there's a few annoying things that could probably be easily remedied.

[Lenny Solidus]

Destiny 2

My word, do I hate myself for installing this.

Navigating this game for what you might still have access to depending on what mood Bungie are in that week after the reset or how much you paid into it is not actually the worst thing about it all, the very worst bad I wish I didn't thing is that Bungie's gun play and straight up power trip/fashion drip are so sexy so fine-tuned and makes you feel so very formidable in both PVP and PVE. Due to this it's far far too easy to completely set aside all of the glaringly obvious issues Bungie has created in total, very much highlighting why their profits are down by 45% I believe. The weapons, the unlocks, the progression, those damn abilities and the crazy sense of power are all just too great to ignore.

Gambit mode though has and forever shall remain a borderline unhealthy addiction for me personally, ending our Primeval in a tight-knit Gambit squad is just the best, those closing seconds so exhilarating my finger still tends to continue tapping my mouse and my heart is absolutely racing ten to the dozen as the dopamine spike quickly ends. Some cheeser type invades using something like Thunderlord and your team manage to take them down in the very final moments, giving their Primeval more life and clutching that win.

This game just devolves me into such a horrible try hard type, I'm not proud of it, but it's also in turn one of those very rare games in which I feel very consistent in how I perform - whereas everything else in the same genre I'd fall off so hard and never manage to recover. I know someone somewhere out there knows where I'm coming from when it comes to Destiny 2 internal struggle - I hate it...I love it.

[Drarok]

Destiny 2

Gambit mode though has and forever shall remain a borderline unhealthy addiction for me personally

It's very hard to get a feel for the general feeling towards D2, partially I think due to the very vocal and polarised player base. I never play The PVP mode (Crucible?), I am terrible at it, I don't "get" it, I hate it. I've always quite liked Gambit up until some fairly recent re-work at least. Reading online had me convinced "everyone" hated Gambit, but there are always matches, so...?

I reinstalled it recently having played bits and pieces over the years inc. Witch Queen, then nothing until the last couple weeks... it still has some of its charm, but has lost a huge amount of its pull on me. The gun play is great, the abilities too, but you spend so much time feeling like a puny weakling, grinding the same event over and over for a point or two extra that seems to do absolutely nothing...

I doubt I'm going to bother with the latest instalment at all, might just read a wiki summary so I at least get closure on the lore side.

[Wrathbone]

Picked up Ready or Not in the Steam sale. It's great fun in single player, very much SWAT 5 in everything but name. The state of your squad carries over from mission to mission too, including emotional states, which doesn't reflect well on me given that my entire squad is now critically stressed and I've been told off by a doctor for my reckless performance.

[Lenny Solidus]

Destiny 2

Gambit mode though has and forever shall remain a borderline unhealthy addiction for me personally

It's very hard to get a feel for the general feeling towards D2, partially I think due to the very vocal and polarised player base. I never play The PVP mode (Crucible?), I am terrible at it, I don't "get" it, I hate it. I've always quite liked Gambit up until some fairly recent re-work at least. Reading online had me convinced "everyone" hated Gambit, but there are always matches, so...?

I reinstalled it recently having played bits and pieces over the years inc. Witch Queen, then nothing until the last couple weeks... it still has some of its charm, but has lost a huge amount of its pull on me. The gun play is great, the abilities too, but you spend so much time feeling like a puny weakling, grinding the same event over and over for a point or two extra that seems to do absolutely nothing...

I doubt I'm going to bother with the latest instalment at all, might just read a wiki summary so I at least get closure on the lore side.

I am not at all a fan of Crucible either, but I will admit that kind of did all recently change when the hallowed Ros Argo IV dropped for me randomly only a few days ago, and I've been doing a bit better even though it's hardly considered a go to PvP weapon and far more PvE. It's just so damn fun to use - especially when coupled with Lost Signal. Gambit firmly remains my main draw though I have fallen a little into the trap of being a little blood drunk where I just want to demolish enemies (get my 15 motes) and allow the rest of my team to hoover up all the remainders that I cannot carry...though saying that the approach doesn't always work out.

I have never even had an issue getting a match in Gambit and I will never understand the supposed hate the mode receives, it's always a blast to have a quick sesh or three on. I think it's best to simply limit what aspects of the game to play and not allow the grind to control you too much, I've still yet to complete more than a single raid and so much of the content requires extra's I don't own so keeping things nice and simple is key to keeping it fun.

[Alan]

Deathloop
Finished! That was a well written, well acted, well designed, fairly original bit of fun that overstayed its welcome a bit. Very good game. I would quite like to see IO do something like this where it's less handholdy and you're just pushing dominoes around and seeing what happens and working it out more for yourself.

[Wrathbone]

Thank Goodness You’re Here

As someone Yorkshire born and bred, I can confirm this is effectively a documentary of my home town. I’ll be delighted if any of the humour lands outside of God’s Country, but I can’t imagine Americans having the faintest idea what is going on, and that’s part of its brilliance. It’s so aggressively northern (quite often specifically yorkshire) that I can’t see how some of it would translate.

Worth noting that the game takes under 3 hours to complete and is uniquely bizarre, but if that’s not an issue then it’s worth a look.

[Sly Boots]

Thank Goodness You’re Here

As someone Yorkshire born and bred, I can confirm this is effectively a documentary of my home town. I’ll be delighted if any of the humour lands outside of God’s Country, but I can’t imagine Americans having the faintest idea what is going on, and that’s part of its brilliance. It’s so aggressively northern (quite often specifically yorkshire) that I can’t see how some of it would translate.

Worth noting that the game takes under 3 hours to complete and is uniquely bizarre, but if that’s not an issue then it’s worth a look.

Funny you should mention that...



Had a fun time with it so far!

[Wrathbone]

Nice, will give it a watch!

[Animalmother]

Doom and Doom 2 got added to Game Pass again except they seem to come with everything ever now. All the expansion packs, Sigil, mods and new music. Played a bit and it's Doom in all it's original glory.

I haven't checked the mods yet but I'm hoping that Brutal Doom is in there somewhere. Highly unlikely but it would be a fantastic addition.

[Wrathbone]

Yeah, I picked it up. The enhancements all seem great and it plays just like it always has. I’d forgotten how insanely fast the movement is!

[Wrathbone]

I picked up Shadows of Doubt yesterday, based on this article. It’s janky, it’s not 100% intuitive and it is incredibly good.

The core concept is that you are a PI in a city who investigates murders, all of which is procedurally generated - the city, the people, their jobs, their routines, their relationships, the crimes, the evidence, the motives - all of it. You go into a crime scene, find evidence, follow leads, break into homes and offices to gather intel, map everything together on a pinboard like a conspiracy nut job, then eventually submit a case file with the details of the murder you think are correct (possibly having arrested the suspect yourself). The game doesn’t handhold you, so you may end up getting the whole case wrong if your detective work is shoddy.

I can’t believe how well it works. I actually felt like a detective solving the tutorial case (where there is some handholding). It’s far from perfect, with dialogue being rudimentary and the interface being a bit clunky at times, but the core of the game is a triumph. Looking forward to delving into a new case tonight. Look out, crime!

[DjchunKfunK]

I picked up Shadows of Doubt yesterday, based on this article. It’s janky, it’s not 100% intuitive and it is incredibly good.

The core concept is that you are a PI in a city who investigates murders, all of which is procedurally generated - the city, the people, their jobs, their routines, their relationships, the crimes, the evidence, the motives - all of it. You go into a crime scene, find evidence, follow leads, break into homes and offices to gather intel, map everything together on a pinboard like a conspiracy nut job, then eventually submit a case file with the details of the murder you think are correct (possibly having arrested the suspect yourself). The game doesn’t handhold you, so you may end up getting the whole case wrong if your detective work is shoddy.

I can’t believe how well it works. I actually felt like a detective solving the tutorial case (where there is some handholding). It’s far from perfect, with dialogue being rudimentary and the interface being a bit clunky at times, but the core of the game is a triumph. Looking forward to delving into a new case tonight. Look out, crime!

I really enjoyed playing some of this last year, been waiting for the fill release, which is due this September, before properly getting stuck in.

[DjchunKfunK]

Deadlock

Snagged an invite from a friend, so if anyone else would like access to Valve's new shooter which is basically a FPS version of DOTA let me know.

[Sly Boots]

Spoiler

I'm just hoping it gets a PC release sooner rather than later.

I also finished a game I very much enjoyed over the weekend; Jedi Survivor. It's a better game than its predecessor, and extremely generous in terms of content (I think I clocked up about 55 hours in total, I'd hunted down 95% of the cosmetic boxes). I'm still not really sold on the more expansive maps (it doesn't really feel like a true open-world game, but it contains some wide-open areas that require animal mounts to traverse), but they do at least give you a fast travel option in this one which was a big failing of Fallen Order. The new lightsaber styles add variety that the first game didn't have, and I ended up settling for the Blaster / Saber combo and Double-ended. It's generally quite forgiving in terms of difficulty, so much so that I played the vast majority using the perk that decreases the parry timing window to grant a boost to your black-gauge damage. Despite playing on the second-highest difficulty setting, most bosses I managed to defeat in two or three attempts, although there was one I simply had to turn the difficulty down for (big story spoiler here):

Spoiler

It's Cere's fight with Darth Vader. I'm not sure what it was, but I just couldn't click with this one. There were just too many unblockable attacks with timing that felt unintuitive and unfair. I could reliably get to the last phase, and there were a couple of times I got him down to within one or two hit's worth of health, but it got to the point of being so frustrating that I called it quits. Maybe it was the fact that it forces you into playing a different character with a lightsaber style I was unfamiliar with, I reckon if I'd been playing as Cal I'd have made short work of it. It's also quite irritating that an obviously pivotal story moment ended up being a tiresome slog and, by the end I just wanted it to be over. I mean sure, making that fight easy would have been to do the character a disservice, but Vader does so much to interrupt your flow that it was more annoying than exciting.

I can't remember the first time I ever actually bothered with a New Game + run, but I've leapt straight into this one. You're given a handful of new perks at the start that increase the difficulty that sounded fun. There's one that massively increases all damage (both taken and dealt), meaning your lightsaber actually does one-hit kill a lot of enemies, but you can also only take a single blaster hit before you need to heal. There's one moment during the intro area where you're grabbed from one of those narrow passages and thrown off a ledge into an arena by a Security Droid (who are normally quite dangerous enemies when they attack with others). The cutscene ended, Cal took a step back, and then just sliced the thing in half in one swing, which was beautifully cinematic. It makes the crossguard saber attacks (Kylo Ren's saber style) extremely satisfying as they have a long wind-up time and are clearly meant to look powerful, and it's how most people imagine a lightsaber to work. I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it as the bosses doing one-hit kills are maybe a little much (I may just use the perk that upgrades enemy types instead).

Technically it's a mixed bag. I think I'd said back when I started that I wasn't having many crashes; that comment didn't age well. There's a repeating crashing problem around the home-base area of Pyloon's Saloon, which happened often enough that it made me actively avoid the area, or at least regularly visit save points when I was nearby. I don't think I had many crashes in other areas. The loading times however are excellent - the game does run through a shader cache building every single time you start it which takes a minute or two, but after that the load times are maybe three or four seconds at most, even when moving to entirely new areas. It's a little frustrating how many animation glitches there are, particularly with fabrics that jitter all over the place, and I don't really understand why they gave you so many cosmetics that your holstered lightsaber clips through - it's not like that position ever changes. There are lots of little bits that don't quite work right, and while the map is generally very good at pointing out places you haven't visited yet but have the ability to access, the game just does not point out the narrow gaps that are almost a trademark of this series - in the first game they tended to be marked with good use of texturing to draw your attention, but in this one they just haven't bothered and they're far too easy to miss.

The biggest problem I had was a bloody annoying design choice that makes it impossible to drop more than a certain height before it just fades to black and puts you back from where you last had your feet on the ground. The game involves a hell of a lot of vertical traversal, and there's an invisible boundary that stops you from jumping back down again, despite Jedi being shown to be capable of falling from enormous heights without issue. It's clearly designed as a general catch-all to put you back where you started when failing a tricky bit of platforming, but it affects the entire game rather than those specific instances where it would be helpful.

Quoting Raid again as his post is relevant, but putting it in spoiler tags as it's quite long lol.

But just to say, after several months of on-and-off play, I've finally finished Jedi Survivor. I can only really echo a lot of Raid's above thoughts - I also thought it was largely excellent and an improvement on the first game (which I also enjoyed).

As he mentions, there were one or two difficulty spikes with certain bosses that I also encountered, the [redacted] one above, and also certain creatures who have an unblockable special attack that basically kill you in one hit if they land (which, for me, they often did lol). One - admittedly optional - encounter put you up against two rancors at once, an enemy I barely killed the first time I faced one, and as a pairing I found one always staggered me while the second did its 'grab and bite your head off' insta-kill attack. I tried it a few times before I just noped out, having barely landed a lightsaber on either one. A quick look at Reddit suggests I wasn't the only one who thought that encounter was bullshit

The falling damage thing really irked me as well, not least when mid-game you unlock the ability to do a mid-air horizontal dash, that immediately halts your downwards momentum... in other words it should have been eminently possible to fall almost any height, hit the dash button just before you land, and be absolutely fine. But no. Even more irritatingly, late-game you're in this cloud city-type environment. I'd just run out of health stims and across a large gap and a ways down ahead of me was a shortcut leading to what I knew was a save point where I could replenish them. The gap was too big too jump, but on the other ledge was a grapple point, where all you have to do is hit the E key when you're within a fairly generous range to attach. The distance to the grapple point would have been achievable, but the vertical distance I had to fall in order to come within range of it was beyond the game's instant-death range. It was quite annoying to know that even with an extra second of falling I'd have been able to reach it.

On a technical front saw the same type of jitters and glitches (on one of the worlds I had one where the sound would weirdly cut out for a second every so often), but nothing game-breaking. In fact, I didn't even have the crashing problems Raid did at that point in the game he mentions.

So, some grumbles, but overall a great experience and glad I got the chance to play it via Gamepass.