Steelrising (PS5)

Spider's take on a Soulslike game, and I think they have found their niche. I haven't played Greedfall, so cannot comment on that one, but other Spiders games have had some interesting settings but let down by some rough edges and probably budget restraints. Steelrising is, by far, their best game of the ones I've played.

The setting is French Revolution (the most well-known one, there's been more than one). This version of the revolution has the King using an army of clockwork Automats. You play as Aegis, the Queens personal Automat who is unique in having free thought and can speak. You meet and do quests for many of the historical figures of the era. It's a really good setting.

The game play backs up the story well. It's "soulslike", but this could be one of the most accessible of its type. It is the easiest such game I've played, though you still need to build your character well to make it easy. I went with a dexterity build and used the first set of fans that I stated with- just upgraded as I went. There is not a huge list of weapons, but they all feel unique and have their special ability- the fans I used convert to a shield. My secondary weapon was a set of pistols that could freeze enemies in place briefly. For the first play through your stats cap at only 20, so after I maxed dexterity, I switched to Engineering which increased my armor. NG+ increases the stat caps. The combat initially feels a bit jerky (you are a clockwork automat after all), but I came to really like it after I started optimizing my build around my chosen weapons.

As good as the setting and game play are, the real star of the game are the maps. The regions are huge and a lot of fun to navigate. I'd almost say too huge and mazelike, but this game gives you a compass that you equip to your tool slots- you have to select it to show the direction to your objectives. It's the only "soulslike" that gives this convenience as far as I know. The game also has 7 major side quests that tie to the major characters- these quests generally take to areas of the maps that you would not explore during the main story. Like Elden Ring, doing some of these side stories is needed for one of the endings (the one that I got). The other aspect of the maps is navigating them fully required abilities that unlock from the story- so the game also has a "metroidvania" aspect as well.

Awesome game as far as I'm concerned. I did all quests and got the Royalist ending and am well into NG+ for a straight story play through for the other ending. Overall, it's not quite the equal of From Software titles or Lies of P, but it sits well with my other favorites like Mortal Shell and The Surge 2. I played the PS5 version which ran fine, I cannot remember any issues of frame drops and the only technical issue was a few times the voice of Aegis would drop out during story scenes, and I'd have to rely on subtitles. The game was a monthly PS Plus account bound game a few months back, so if you picked it up, then I say play it whenever you have an active subscription.

I Beat Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes which is a repackages version of Stardocks 4X Failure called Elemental War of Magic or something like this.

I loved the latter game despite its buggy nature. It was like a crossbreed of Heroes Of Might and Magic, Crusaders II and Civilization. Amazing gem.

The new game has a wonderful premise but is/was deeply flawed. The main "campaign" consisted of 3-4 scenarios in which you essentially cant lose.

Your champions cant die unless you mess up really bad.

Your sovereign cant die at all.

In the scenarios where you technically can't die the AI simply doesn't play the same game you play and you outlevel it even on hard difficulty massively early in the game by doing quests and defeating monsters. I beat it on Steam but here is on GoG with a nice discount: gog.com/game/fallen_enchantress_ultimate_edition

It doesn't feel like any kind of accomplishment because I couldn't lose. But that's not to say it doesn't have charm. The spells re cool and varied, the city building is the most charming Ive ever seen, with our city actually expanding on the world map, the quests that are in the world map are fun to play through.

It actually reminded me of a much better game like it that Im gonna replay now called Thea 2: gog.com/game/thea_2_the_shattering

If you like Strategy games with RPG elements and deep story then these two titles re worth checking out. Though they are both somewhat flawed, one more than the other.

God of War, Mar 30 (PS Plus)-A solid game that I enjoyed more than I expected to since I don't care for open worlds or so much crafting nor the combo based combat. The story wasn't bad and had some unexpected twists in the last 15-20 minutes. I liked the voice acting especially Mimir. I sucked at the combat and mostly relied on Atreus to survive. There were a lot of side quests/areas that I only partially explored because it seemed like they were just for grinding and to pad the game. But despite it all I enjoyed my time with it. I did take me nearly a year to complete though. Eventually I'll play the sequel but I need a break right now.

Full List

After installing it god knows when I finally getting around to finish the Age of Empires Definitive Edition campaign on moderate difficulty

The pathfinding is really-really bad and some of the mission took a very long time. Holy Man, The Revolt of Spartacus, Pyrrhus of Epirus to name a few are a real pain in the ass.

But I'm happy as I back in the day never play the original and jump straight to its sequel. But as much as I like to install play another real time strategy right after this I decided to take a break from playing another one. Perhaps one of the reason why RTS not as popular as another genre currently is because it really take some time and commitment to play it as it could drag on and on.

The Quarry (XSX Game Pass)

Played this twice on PS Plus last year. Decided on another play through since it just hit Game Pass. I've already saved everyone previously. This time I just played to see some of the dumber choices you can make. Lots of the morons died this time! Supermassive are the best at these cinematic telltale styles of game. Outstanding graphics and production values, excellent voice acting- even if it is deliberately B-grade horror movie style acting. Short enough that you can play these a few times just to see what happens when you make silly choices.

Deadlight: Director's Cut
The Walking Dead (settings) meets Flashback (gameplay) in this side scroller that works best at the start, before you get your weapons and at a certain point later on when you lose them for a while and it becomes more of a puzzle platformer than a action / survival horror one,


SC2VN - The eSports Visual Novel
Visual novel, not about the political machinations of the Protoss, Terrans and Zerg but about the Korean Progamer scene of the mid naughts, some fascinating insights in amoungst much work-man-like dialog but a documentary film would have been better, honestly

FULL LIST

Infamous Second Son, Apr 3 (PS Plus)-A solid if unspectacular game. It reminded me of a mix between Rage 2 and Crackdown 3. Or maybe just a much better version of Crackdown. The powers were fun but each new suite of skills completely outclassed the previous making for repetitive combat and encounters. I think I would have preferred puzzles or platforming that required use of the earlier abilities rather than just the most recent ones to fight with. The boss fights were pretty unique and interesting. Unless you absolutely love the game and series its probably not worth a second playthru to see the ending you didn't choose. But the game is short enough that you could still do that if you wanted to.

Full List

Open Roads (XSX Game Pass)

Narrative driven walking sim where you explore your environments for clues about a newly discovered family mystery involving your recently deceased grandmother. So, it's a bit like Gone Home without being a lesbian. The story unfolds on a road trip with your mother. It's okay without being anything exceptionally memorable or anything. One of those games I'd never think of actually buying, but glad I got to play it through on Game Pass anyway. I always enjoy this type of game to relax between bigger or harder games.

Endling Extinction is Forever, Apr 5 (PS Plus)-Interesting little survival game where you play as fox in a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to protect and care for 3 of your cubs while constantly searching for the 4th. I never really got attached to the foxes and I mostly considered the cubs annoying game mechanics I had to deal with. The game takes place over 30 nights which is probably 10-12 nights too many as there wasn't much to do that you didn't already see in the first few nights. When I wasn't search for the lost cub, which could only be done on certain nights, I was mostly wandering aimlessly. It didn't help that I didn't know there was a map until midway thru the game. After that I was able to target my exploration a bit more but it was mostly more of the same. Also you were told to get back to the den before sun rise but I frequently stayed out after the meter expired and so no ill effects. Overall the game wasn't really for me but I could see how people could get attached to the fox and quite enjoy it.

Full List

Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Apr 7 (PS Plus)-I have mixed feelings on this one. The game is gorgeous and the voice acting is excellent. But the plot is all over the place and the gameplay never really drew me in. I mostly just wanted it to be over despite how good it looked and sounded. I also played the Nightmare zombie campaign. They ramped up the difficulty here with nearly endless hordes of zombies, some of them runners and some of them explosive, plus they nerfed the loadout. I also encountered a couple issues in the Nightmare campaign in a feature causing guns to jam if you pressed the shoot button too quickly which I understand to be an attempt to prevent cheaters in multiplayer games and if I loaded a game in the middle of a level I'd start with the pistol or sometimes no gun at all rather than the weapon I had originally saved with. The Nightmare campaign overall felt like a kinda janky A-AA experience with new voiceovers over the original cutscenes. But despite all its jank I think I still enjoyed the basic plot better than the main game. I still have no idea if this takes place in lieu of, concurrent with, after, or in an alternate timeline to the main game. Overall two middling campaigns for the price of one.

Full List

Fallout 2. I used the Restoration Mod with this one. Regardless of how you play it, though, it's just Fallout but more of it. It's significantly bigger in the ground you cover and the amount of time it will probably take to win (no time limits). The issues with the first game, such as the crummy inventory management, persist, but it also has a lot of the strengths of the original, too, in that your build matters and a lot of quests can be solved through multiple means. I do think the first game is better in that its smaller size makes it easier to just jump back into a replay. Fallout 2 is more like a classic RPG in its breadth and pacing, and as much as I like the genre, I rarely replay games because they're so long even when you know short cuts.

I guess the most controversial aspect of the game is the perception that its tone varies too much. I suppose I don't really see it, or maybe I just don't care that much. Yeah, there are random encounters that reference Monty Python and Star Trek, but they're just random encounters (I didn't get any of the Star Trek ones this time) and the first game did similar stuff (e.g., finding the Tardis in the middle of the desert, the flying saucer with a portrait of Elvis). This sort of enthusiasm for geek humor was also pretty normal for gaming up until the 2000s, too, which is about when everyone got really hung up on immersion and never breaking the tone ever. Because games were supposed to be serious art now, dang it. To me it also feels in keeping with Fallout's dedication to replicating a table top experience, where settings often allow for being very serious or very silly depending on the DM and the players involved.

Fallout > Fallout 2, but they're both classics.

Beacon Pines

Started it two days ago, just to see what kind of game it is. I expected it to be a something like a Visual Novel (not my favorite genre), and in a way it is. Yet it managed to hold my interest for almost nine hours, spread over three days. I just wanted to keep playing and see what's next. In some ways it reminded me of Night in the Woods, although it's about younger kids and doesn't treat topics as serious as depression and such. It's more of an adventure/mystery story, but at times it can be a bit creepy and dark or sad as well. Another difference between the two games is that in Beacon Pines, choices are not mutually exclusive, but you're expected to explore all of them to completion, in order to learn the whole story (a bit like in Omensight). It mimicks a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, but you can always go back and try other paths without losing your progress on the current one.

The cute graphics, the characters, the nice music and sounds, used to good effect, the great narrator voice acting and the fact that you're allowed to walk around freely and decide who to talk to next, as well as some (limited) choice about the order of paths to try made me overlook that I'm just following a story without much actual gameplay or challenge. It was all so well told, nicely written and presented, and mostly well paced as well, feeding enough little chunks of info and revelations to me as a player to keep me invested.

On the technical side, the game only has one save game slot (which wasn't really a problem though), no manual saving, and there's no clear indication when it saves, but when you go to the pause menu, it tells you exactly how long ago the last save was, which I thought very helpful. So kudos for that, too.

All in all, I really enjoyed Beacon Pines, much more than I had expected.

The Last Guardian, Apr 9 (PS Plus)-This game looked and played like a late PS2 early PS3 era title which felt pretty bad on PS5. The camera was finicky, the controls were unresponsive, and the companion, Trico's AI was terrible. Trico never did what I wanted him to do and often he took so long to respond at all that I was never sure the button prompt registered. The interactions with Trico were so frustrating that by the end of the game when most players had probably developed a connection to the characters I just wanted to kill Trico. And the plot, especially at the end, made no sense to me. I will say the platforming and puzzles were generally good when Trico actually followed commands. In that respect the game felt like Prince of Persia without the combat.

Full List

Persona 5 Tactica (XSX Game Pass)

P5 spinoff with tactical turn-based combat. All the characters from the main game return for a new adventure. This time all of the relationship and team building content is absent between dungeons. The path between battles is a purely linear one with nothing much to do except fuse persona's and buy better guns.

The battles themselves range from really fun to, sometimes being a bit too puzzle oriented for my liking- especially the bosses. Overall, though, it's a competent game as far as spinoffs go- and far more to my liking than the rhythm game spinoffs. It's about 30 hours long and has the usual high production values of the original game when it comes to art, music and general presentation. It's best played after the main game, as the story does follow on and prior knowledge of the characters, and their history, obviously makes the experience better.

Tomb Raider: Chronicles - 2/5

This feels like a compilation of things that were cut from previous Tomb Raider games, and then just slapped together with a loose narrative (...and minimal playtesting).

Definitely the worst out of the PS1-era Tomb Raiders. This is how I'd rank them:

1. Tomb Raider II
2. Tomb Raider
3. Tomb Raider III
4. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation
5. Tomb Raider Chronicles