Currently Playing

[Alan]

After loving Q1 I never got on with 2. I can appreciate the tech but everything else about it just felt like a step back and with really bland enemies. Quake 1 still plays great, as does Blood though I dont remember liking Hexen 2 much. Terminator Future Shock was better than Quake 2 never mind Skynet

[Raid]

See, I hated the original Quake at release; I thought it was just about the ugliest game I'd ever seen compared to the speed and colour of the likes of Doom (which in fairness is no different to my opinion of any other first-gen full-3D game), and the levels just didn't seem very interesting.

I mentioned SkyNET and purely for the release date, I watched my brother play it but never actually did so myself.

[Alan]

Oh it was certainly ugly and its style was all over the place but it played great and jings if the tar babies didnt make me jump every time.

[Lenny Solidus]

Days Gone
I don't think I bought anything full price this year because nothing frankly deserved the pennies. Then someone recommended this at a bargain price if indeed you have not yet played the game I strongly urge anyone looking for an atmospheric narrative driven experience to give it a go.

Outriders
Played in cooperative mode is where the game shines brightest having two very differing builds fighting as one is a true pleasure one person slowing chaining or freezing enemies while the other gets in close and personal to finish them off, especially rewarding when you take out an entire group in a slowed bubble as they all explode into pieces at the end of your combined attack. Game is much larger than it appears too.

[Sly Boots]

Yep, I had a very good time with Days Gone, glad it's finding something of an audience.

[Snowy]

Yep, I had a very good time with Days Gone, glad it's finding something of an audience.

Picked it back up over the holidays and really enjoying it. Just got past the horde mission in the town (closing in on the end I think) and man that was tough!

[Sly Boots]

Yep, I had a very good time with Days Gone, glad it's finding something of an audience.

Picked it back up over the holidays and really enjoying it. Just got past the horde mission in the town (closing in on the end I think) and man that was tough!

Is that the one when you're testing the homemade napalm? There's an even bigger one to come yet!

[Animalmother]

I don't know why but I just can't get into Days Gone, just didn't grab me. Plus I'm playing the PS4 version which I don't think is great.

I'd be curious to see how Outriders has changed after the update, the game pretty much vanished after the initial release. The grind was a pain in the balls so if that's improved I'd have another look.

[Snowy]

Yep, I had a very good time with Days Gone, glad it's finding something of an audience.

Picked it back up over the holidays and really enjoying it. Just got past the horde mission in the town (closing in on the end I think) and man that was tough!

Is that the one when you're testing the homemade napalm? There's an even bigger one to come yet!

Oh balls, only got past the first because I managed to get into a position the zoms couldn't get to me and I could take them down with bombs and guns.

@AM, I know that the game got pretty slated on the consoles, maybe it is just a conversion thing, works better on PC, but I have enjoyed it. The player character can be a bit whiny but it is a bloody good game.

[DjchunKfunK]

The poor reviews of Days Gone on PS4 had very little to do with performance.

[Alan]

You really hate Days Gone dont you? That and Horizon

[DjchunKfunK]

You really hate Days Gone dont you? That and Horizon

*shrug* I just think they are the blandest of the bland when it comes to openworld games, not terrible, just not interesting in any way.

[Raid]

Halo 4
I said some pretty harsh things about the console version of this when I started it a few weeks back. While the PC version was actually playable and not an exercise in banging my head against a controller in frustration, it was clear this wasn't the Halo I used to love. The new enemies are awful, the new weapons are awful, it gives you a tiny ammo pool for every single weapon, and it throws so many enemies at you that many encounters feel like there are a million strategies you could use, and 999,999 of them get you immediately killed. I wasn't even playing on Legendary, I was on Heroic.

343 took away so much of the... feel, of the series, and I'm not even talking about the combat (which was rubbish). Firstly, Chief and Cortana now seemingly love each other, like, romantically. I must have missed something while Chief was in cryo sleep, because that sure as hell wasn't how those characters were left in 3. And then there's some of the theming; in the first 3 games, the UNSC ships all have these wonderfully poetic names; Pillar of Autumn, In Amber Clad, Forward Unto Dawn... in this they named the ship Infinity, something so basic they may as well have gone with Vengeance, Armageddon or something else equally banal - it's something that bugged me all the way through, as if the game were a cheap knockoff of Bungie's work. And frankly that's what it felt like.

...and yet I finished it. I hardly ever finish the games I really like, never mind the ones I find extremely disappointing. There were multiple occasions where I very nearly rage quit, but something kept dragging me back. I'm not sure if that was the game or my sheer bloody mindedness.

I'm not going to bother with Halo 5; they never did a PC version and I'm not going to go back to a controller. I'll watch another Youtube summary and move straight onto Infinite.

[Mantis]

I've just given up on Infinite. The moment to moment gameplay is the best that 343 have ever done with the franchise but it's padded out by an absolute non-entity of a game. Utterly bland open world segments with the absolute worst offender of all, bullet sponge bosses. Nothing saps my will to play a shooter more than confronting a boss for 15 minutes where all I'm doing is dodging left and right whilst pumping thousands of rounds into them, even on Heroic difficulty it is just an enormous grind where one unlucky mishap starts the whole process from scratch. They are objectively awful.

I know plenty of people say that Halo was never about the story, but frankly they are wrong. They are the exact people who aren't really big fans of the series and never really followed it closely precisely because they weren't bothered about following the story beats. Halo 1 through to 3 (and Reach to an extent) have a very rich story which you can follow in a cohesive way with a great and expansive cast of characters which all serve to enhance the really epic set pieces of the scripted moments in the levels. Infinite quite simply offers none of that.

[Sly Boots]

You really hate Days Gone dont you? That and Horizon

*shrug* I just think they are the blandest of the bland when it comes to openworld games, not terrible, just not interesting in any way.

Each to their own, I guess. I enjoyed them both very much.