Slogging through Cronos: The New Dawn, probably around the 60% mark now, maybe a bit more? I’m at the Hospital area, which I think is the final main area out of three. I have a lot of things to say about this game, and not too many of them are positive sadly. I’m really on the verge of dropping it and have actually taken a break from it today playing other games.
And it’s a shame because Cronos does have its qualities. It’s beautiful to look at, both visually stunning and with environments displaying immaculate art direction. The atmosphere is on point, and both the alternate-reality Poland with its brutalist nightmare architecture and the sci-fi future tech is fantastically realized - with the caveat that the “Travellers” the protagonist belongs to might be a tad derivative of Bioshock Big Daddies.
Where the game falls flat, sadly is the gameplay. First of all it’s a survival horror with a heavy emphasis on survival and a very weak “horror”. The game is not really particularly scary, even accounting for the occasional cheap jump scare. Instead it’s an absolutely gruelling action slog where the real horror is inventory management and ammunition scarcity. And this would have been fine if the action gameplay was good, but it’s just… boring, stale and uninspired.
The enemies are just the blandest garden variety zombies you can imagine, the touted “merge” mechanic feels cosmetic at best and doesn’t factor in as much as you’d think and without a dodge button a lot of the fights are just running around kiting and waiting for a chance to charge up a shot and repeat. Most enemies are slow enough that it doesn’t even feel particularly thrilling, you’re not really in danger and are just waiting for them to go into an animation you can punish.
On top of that the ammo scarcity is so ridiculous that I often feel compelled to reload my last save if I miss more than two shots in a fight as I don’t want to risk getting soft locked. I know I’m not a god gamer and my aim isn’t the best, but it feels too harsh. And yes, I’m charging every shot to conserve ammo already.
On top of that the body-burning mechanic combined with the restrictions on flamethrower fuel dispensers leads to repeated situations of running back-and-forth between bodies and a dispenser for like 10 minutes straight, which feels like an enormously unfun waste of time and just adds to the endless tedium and frustration the game delivers constantly.
And it’s a shame because the story is actually kinda intriguing. It’s what’s kept me going this far. I do like the world building, the mysterious “Collective” you belong to has me interested still and when the story delves into some more philosophical musings occasionally I am enjoying myself. It could still all fall flat though, as this is a time travel story and those often devolve into timey-wimey messes full of plot holes that fall apart under close inspection. But so far I’m still wanting to see how it ends.
After 20 hours of manually placed footsteps… Baby Steps is complete! Probably one of my favorite games this year, the story was thin but the writing was hilarious and kept me climbing to reach the next cutscene. The credits screen shows a dotted line of your path as you went and, since I played with my partner, we were constantly laughing as the dot rolled down hills and reminded us of our tumbles. If you have patience and are okay with occasional immature humor it’s worth a play. I thought the ending was perfect for what the game was.
I also finished Sniper Elite V2, it was good but showed its age. The new games were still too expensive so I got the Zombie Army Trilogy (an offshoot of the Sniper Elite series) for $5 as the autumn sale ended and have been having fun kicking skeletons apart
What’s Dying Light like? I played the first a bit and had fun, but haven’t been following the series lately
I really like dying light! The first game is one of my favorite zombie games. Above average open world game imo. Dying light 2 is decent but not as fun as the first imo. The beast so far has been really fun though. None of the games are anything too special, but the combat and parkour are pretty satisfying
Is it still mostly melee combat? Games with good melee are tough to come by, and I remember the first being pretty good with all the running and jumping
Yeah definitely mostly melee. The way enemies respond to hits in different parts of their body is suuuuper satisfying haha. There are guns and bows and arrows but ammo is pretty sparse
I finally finished satisfactory! I’ve played during early access but there wasn’t really an ending for it then. 2,600 hours total in game, 550 of those were this last factory. It’s done!
Yes it ended too early because of GW shittery, but something glorious has risen from it: Hunter the Parenting! Go watch that when you are finished with the Emperor.
I’m just being that guy on the internet as usual, but Symphony Of The Night is a PS1 title, not PS2. I’m sure OP can run a PS1 emulator on his her Deck if she wants to, though. It is a great game.
It was released for both then. I have a physical PS2 copy. Not really surprised. They did that with a ton of titles when hopping from one generation of console to the next.
I was not aware it was released in that packaging, but I’m pretty sure that’s still a Playstation 1 disk dressed up in a PS2 style DVD case, meant to be used with the PS2’s backwards compatibility mode. To my knowledge SotN was never rereleased as a native PS2 title and wasn’t rereleased at all until the PSP version. (And then later the Xbox 360 and PS4 as downloadable titles, and also the ghastly mobile phone versions.) If you have a PS1 kicking around you can try it and see, I suppose.
For what it’s worth my copy is the green-stripe “Greatest Hits” reprinting, so what it’s worth is alas not much.
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