PC Gamer has given it 60/100 (which some take to mean a terrible, terrible, scathing review but to me, idk, 60/100 seems like a fun time?)
This has been a thing for ages, and I suspect it’s got some psychological explanation in how our brains are wired. But 5/10 is not an “average game”, it’s a quite bad one. In fact, anything below 5 is usually literally unplayable, despite 4/10 really being just below average. 7/10 is typically the score for “a fun time if it aligns with your interests, but by no means a great game”. Everything below 7 tends to be actively bad.
OpenCritic - 35 average - 0% recommended - 18 reviews
Dear lord you don’t see that often. I mean, it’s no surprise and it’s definitely deserved as the game is a hot pile of garbage but even then. They didn’t buy off a single reviewer?
I’ve probably talked more about XV than any other supposedly bad game, so maybe I’ve developed some sort of Stockholm Syndrome. But for an objectively pretty bad game I enjoyed parts of it and it did elicit emotions out of me at times.
The game has many problems, but maybe the biggest is the huge overambitious “multi-media experience” they attempted. The game itself suffers because its content is spread so thin as it’s stretched out over a movie and a comic and the DLCs and I don’t remember what else. An anime? Even the Royal Edition still suffers for not integrating the DLCs, and it’s kind of awkward to have to stop playing at the appropriate times to go so the DLCs for the maximum impact. And even then the planned Lunafreya DLC would have added so much to the story, but they never got around to that as the game flopped (in large parts because crucial story elements were scheduled for fucking DLCs instead of included in the game!)
I do agree that the combat is fun, and they did have a really good vibe going with the bros and the road trip. There are some really nice heartfelt moments where the game shines. And the fishing minigame is absolute top drawer, one of the best in gaming. But ultimately I look at it as a huge pile of wasted potential.
Absolutely gorgeous music though, some really powerful leitmotif work like Sunset Waltz/Valse di Fantastica and Ardyns themes.
I’m back on my first playthrough of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided after a two-month break for Blue Prince, Clair Obscur and F.E.A.R… It’s a great game, but I think I did it a disservice by taking the long break, I can feel I’m so much less invested now than I was when I began playing it.
It’s very unfortunate that the series ended on a cliffhanger, what they have here is really good and in many ways an upgrade on Human Revolution. A third game from the studio would have been a true masterpiece, I think.
He does deserve that, but I wish the single biggest modding hub on the internet and a load bearing pillar of an entire gaming culture wasn’t sold off to an unnamed party with no transparency and only vague reassurances that “nothing will change”.
What with the late stage capitalist society we’re living in, I’ve been conditioned to think that good things being sold off rarely amounts to good things.
Even though Greedfall is hardly a great game I think it has too much charm to really fit here. I found it too memorable to really be a “mediocre slop” contender.
I said any Call of Duty from the past decade as answer to the original comment, and I still think that is a solid candidate. However, another game I played recently that qualifies I think is Sleeping Dogs. Perfectly cromulent 7/10 GTA clone but ultimately not pulling up any trees.
These posts are some of the best content on Lemmy and bring me back to the early 00s days of reading the physical PC Gamer magazines in all their glory.
Great article. The entangling web of endless progression systems is one piece, but one thing they failed to mention is time gating and daily quests. It’s very important for these games to force you to play a little bit every day, instead of in large chunks all at once. This helps move the game subconsciously in your brain from “a game” to “a habit/a hobby”, and that makes your purchasing decisions very different.
Hearing the bit about rights hell and patches makes me feel a lot better. House at the End of Time followed by that final broken capital area was just some of the least fun gameplay I’ve experienced in a CRPG. And I was there back in the day getting one-shot by Gibberlings in BG1! I’m not as big a fan of the epicly mythic type of narratives and settings as I am of more grounded stories, but if it makes the combat more fun and better balanced I might stomach it.
And if the game is genuinely that amazing I might bump it a bit on my priority list. I already bought it on sale last year, but the Kingmaker slog (what is it, 200 hours or so?) kind of wore me out on western CRPGs for a bit.