Mario Party 3 on switch still holds up and the mini games are challenging enough on Super Hard.
Tears of the Kingdom. The best fights were when I went to Ganon with 3 hearts and no gloom healing but still. The game was difficult and I still haven’t gotten all the shrines. Getting all the light roots brings back the heavy exploration that you got in Breath of the Wild in the over world. Of course the over world was the only world.
I played the remake of Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life and it’s pretty good. It lacks a lot of gameplay when you compare it to Stardew Valley. But the family aspect was compelling. The game is a challenge tho but I like that.
Empyrion (you love sandbox games with endless content with very little guidance? Try it, I’m on HWS RE server and after 260h I’m still just scratching the surface)
Marvel Midnight Suns (top notch on many levels)
Chrono Ark (one of the best roguelite deck builders for me)
The scroll of Taiwu (perfect cultivation sandbox RPG, official translation should come in 2024)
Worst : Not much… I just don’t understand why I can’t get into Thea 2. It’s supposed to kinda be my dream game. Yet, I’m always bored after 30 min.
Shoutout to Archmage Rises. It has a long way to go but it could possibly be my GOTY 2024.
I played the balls out of the Dead Rising series through the third game. Definitely check out 2 if you like the first one. Off the Record is a fun retread of the second game if you take a break before playing it. 3 was a bit poorer received at launch, but on an SSD, it’s still a damn fun game.
Never got around to the 4th game. It sounded pretty soulless from the reviews
It's weird that as I continue to want to play more of it, I'm annoyed by just about every design decision they made along the way. I want to get into the gun design thing even, but the perk tree system puts a roadblock in my way.
The skill tree stuff makes me feel like Bethesda finally listened to all those players who bitched about it being too easy to become “overpowered” and blamed it on how easy it was to level up and not the poor balancing with how level scaling works. So now, all the actually good, fun and useful shit is all the way at the top (or rather the bottom) of the tree, with a bunch of “milestones” you have to hit in addition to simply being the right level and/or having the previous skills in the tree.
I don't even think it's that. Lots of RPGs have had "do X more to level up X", including old Bethesda games, but it's riddled with problems, which is why most games don't do it anymore. As for level scaling, at least they finally got rid of that, but the way they guide you through the galaxy in line with your level involves basically being equally far along in each faction quest line at the same time instead of having low level factions and high level factions.
The only one that really sticks out is Starfield. Most other games I played I knew what I was getting into. For some reason Starfield surprised me, probably because it was on Gamepass (so effectively free) and because I trusted Bethesda. Oh well.
Considering the number of great games this year, that’s not too bad.
Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me. They’ve been leaning on the creation engine for too long, to the point that so many of the features, not the least of which being the goddamn shouts, are all carbon copies of one another, the base building is literally just a fucking resource sink, the gunplay sucks and the enemies are all bullet sponges unless you dip into late game planets and filch a late game gun, the jobs are 90% basic bitch fetch quests, and the core gameplay loop of “go place --> grab shit --> sell shit” has not evolved since Morrowind.
I stop playing games when they start feeling like a second job, and for me that point in Starfield was about three hours in when I was trying to complete survey data for the homesteading program and I was wandering around this deserted planet, looking for samples of flora and fauna, and I scoot back from my desk as I realize, for 20 minutes, I have done absolutely nothing meaningful or engaging. The closest I’ve come is, I’ve pointed a scanner at a bunch of procedurally generated animals hoping they don’t land a hit on me because they’re too spongy for me to kill, so I can fill a meter, so that when I’m done filling meters I can go back to BDG and tell him this place is suitable for people to live. That’s not fun. It barely qualifies as gameplay, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
Tears of the Kingdom: what else is there to say about this game that hasn’t already been said? It improves on Breath of the Wild in just about every conceivable way. The only real downside to me is that it raises the bar so high for the next new Zelda title that it may not be possible for it to reach that height.
I can’t really think of a game I played that would be considered “bad” this year so I don’t really have a Worst, but just making a post acknowledging that TotK was hands down the best.
That said, I didn’t really play too many new games this year in general, so here is what I did play: Fire Emblem Engage, Persona 5 Royal, Pokemon Ultra Sun, Fire Emblem Echoes, Lunistice, Symphony of War, Super Mario RPG Remake.
If I had to give out a Worst among that list it would probably be Symphony of War because it doesn’t really have the polish of the others, it’s an inexpensive indie title and it shows, but I can’t definitively declare it the Worst because just about all the other games it’s compared to above are from big studios and that’s not fair to it, pretty much an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I got a lot of games with AMD hardware or other give aways, games I normally would not buy anyway. Imo Forspoken, Starfield, Redfall, Dead Island 2, Callisto protocol, AC Mirage and Harry Potter I did not like.
Glad there have been a lot of games I did enjoy recently, Dave the Diver, my time at Sandrock, Thalos Principle 2, Stray. I did like AAA Jedi Survivor although some technical glitches occurred.
The marketing for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and The Man Who Erased His Name seem to have worked on me because I decided to start playing Yakuza 0 on my Steam Deck. Sticking to pure easy mode and mainlining the story. It’s got some weird jank to it but I also kinda like it? If it hooks me, maybe I’ll take the plunge on the others. Yakuza: Like A Dragon looked like a lot of fun so I’ll probably stop and smell the roses when I get to that one.
Otherwise, Fights in Tight Spaces is my current non-story focused game I’m making my way through.
Intraveneous. Game got a lot of love and as a huge stealth fan I was really into the idea. Got it and hated every second of it. It’s tedious and punishing even by stealth game standards and the story wasn’t great either. Mechanics were poorly explained and it felt like the keymapping was made by a person who had never played a keyboard game before. ugh. I was really disappointed too because it was marketed as a stealth game that didn’t punish you for failing stealth which is true but the issue is that it’s so damn easy to fail stealth that you might as well just go in guns blazing anyway. It wasn’t like MGSV where both options make sense depending on the circumstance. It was more like “stealth is nigh impossible so we made guns-blazing a fail safe for people who aren’t nuts at this game”
Atomic Heart. Yes I bought this game and I am ashamed of it. No it wasn’t for the robot porn. I thought it looked like an interesting Bioshock / Wolfenstein mashup and both of those are my favorites. Game was just… slow. Combat, stealth, everything felt like you were moving through syrup. The character’s english voice acting is also horrifically cringe. Like, just awful in every sense. Made me hate the MC more than the villains.
Dying Light 2. I loved the first so I was seriously disappointed by this. Main issue was really with the movement. Gave me motion sickness dozens of times with how the camera is set up, and I was expecting something like Mirror’s Edge (Catalyst) but it felt just awfully floaty. The game also did… fuck all… in terms of explaining what you… do? so I just was super confused. Uninstalled after like 10 hours in frustration.
Ghostrunner. Played this in December of 2022 but I wanted to add it in as a hot take. Overall great but the boss fights are pretty terribly designed after the first one and pretty much ruined the game for me. Plus there’s useless parkour sections that added nothing. Surprisingly little time spent being a ninja badass for a cyberpunk ninja badass game.
Not many. The obligatory 50% of all mobile games that I played for 5 minutes and went “I hate this”, obviously. But PC games? Hmmm. Probably “Lost Ember”, I guess. What really puzzles me about this is I played “Spirit of the North” and was utterly in love with it, to the point that it’s in my top 5, and “Lost Ember” is very similar in many respects. I ought to have loved it, and I cannot put my finger on what I didn’t like about it. I just didn’t like it.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne