Halo 4 in the MCC It's never quite as good as the Bungie produced games but it does have some good parts. I liked the space combat segment towards the end of the game. 7/10.
After 11 years I finally finished Portal 2. I suppose it better than Portal 1 in about every way, yet Portal 1 is still a master piece of innovation and originality, and because of that, I enjoyed 1 more than 2.
I recently completed God of War: Ragnarok. Almost everything about this game was extremely impressive, and for the most part the Game of the Year and various other award nominations are merited. However, a rather significant issue I have with the game is that the difficulty tuning is quite poor, which I will discuss in a bit. Graphics, sound, storytelling, characters, acting, ect. are all superb and among the best of recent cinematic Sony games. The storytelling had some very clever twists, and the way they set various situations up, often much later in the game, was quite impressive. The storytelling was quite powerful, both the serious dramatic moments and the surprisingly pleasant bits of humor. I really have no complaints about even the minor characters. Casting was pretty impeccable to be honest. I particularly liked Mina Sundwall's (from the Lost in Space Netflix series) minor but impressive character but won't say anymore due to avoid spoiling anything. Sony Santa Monica's take on classic characters like Thor and Odin were also impressively constructed and acted. However, I do have a fairly substantial criticism that may or may not affect you depending on your preferred level of difficulty. The Hard and Very Hard settings, called Give Me No Mercy and Give Me God of War, are substantially harder, like a jump of 2 to 3 difficulty levels versus Balanced/ Normal compared to GMNM/ Hard, but along the lines of final boss in a fighting game, meaning absurdly cheap and frustrating rather than tough but very fair and satisfying like a FROM game. For example, with the bifrost status effect, it is possible to go from fully upgraded health bar at 100% down to 1hp in a single hit. Many of the more difficult battles involve both a strong and obvious duel-type boss demanding precise timing and a flooded area of obnoxious mob type bosses that fire AoE projectiles, grab you even out of your ultimate/ super moves, stagger you into oblivion, ect. That is, this game was obviously tuned for lower difficulties, and you definitely notice it constantly above the Balanced/ Normal difficulty setting. It's not designed in a way that skill will allow you to consistently avoid getting hit or dodge things as long as you have the proper timing (such as in most challenging FROM encounters), but the fights usually demand that type of precision and movement. If you're fine with button mashing on Normal difficulties, disregard this issue. I think that is why this criticism is getting so thoroughly overlooked. You only notice it if you go above Balanced/ Normal difficulty, which is typically the first thing I do booting up a new game when difficulty levels are selectable.
Hogwarts Legacy I finished the main quest so I'm mostly done. As a Harry Potter game I'd give it a 9/10. As an RPG I'd say 7/10.
Doom The Dark Ages I thought it was just okay. It was just good enough to keep me playing until the end. I think 2016 and Eternal were quite a bit better. It has too many gimmicky and useless weapons. The dragon and mech segments felt like filler to pad out the length of the game to justify it being $70 at launch. 6/10
Metal gear solid delta. Really good remake. Let's see if they bring out Vol 2 next Sent from my ASUSAI2501C using Tapatalk
I've been on a big Cyberpunk kick lately. I've played through it on PC, PS5/Pro, and Switch 2. I decided to play builds with gear I typically wouldn't use like a melee/ shotgun build and a netgunner build with smart weapons, and it has been pretty fun.
I still haven't played Cyberpunk. I kind of wrote it off because it was such a mess when it launched in 2020. Worth it now? Did they actually fix it?
Cyberpunk is 100% worth it. I waited until they fixed it before i played it and it is one of my favorite games of the past few years.
The DLC Phantom Liberty is also very high quality, among the best in recent years. I think you can probably get the game and DLC for the $30-something range now.
I've been playing the Arc Raiders free weekend, where they are stress testing the servers before launch. I really wanted to like this game, but I don't. I think the extraction shooter genre doesn't fit my lifestyle at the moment. I have limited time for any gaming, so any game where 20 minutes of work can be wiped out by another player in the end, its not worth it. I played multiple sessions yesterday, where I collected loot for upgrades, snuck my way carefully back to an extraction elevator, cautiously waiting for it to be ready to extract, only for another player to come out of seemingly nowhere at the last minute, kill me and I lose everything I worked for. The game play loop incentivizes camping the extraction points for players who want to either raid other players or just to grief. On top of that, I am trying to get better at the game, but I cannot fight back against higher ranked players because I have to keep crafting low tier weapons due to never getting enough good materials back to extraction. If I was younger with more free time, maybe I could stomach this, but I only have about a hour at a time to play any game, and for 20 minutes to be wiped out and for me to feel bad about my time spent, I just can't justify that kind of torture. Pros of the game are the graphics are pretty good, and the sound design is phenomenal. The sounds implementation is a core part of the experience. Cons are the standard gameplay loop is fine, but not good enough of compensate for those feel bad moments I mentioned above. If I want PvP, there are games I can play with lowers stakes where a loss doesn't feel so incredibly demoralizing to my games progress that I don't even want to play anymore. This might be enjoyable for some people, but i have learned that I am not one of them. I will probably skip this one.
The sound of ARC Raiders is what impressed me most. It sounds REALLY good through HE1000se headphones, among the best headphones for gaming on the planet. I wish Embark's other game The Finals made it this easy to know where things are via sound. Clearly they are capable of it but choose not to do it in that game despite being a competitive multiplayer game that needs that functioning properly. I'm not really into the Tarkov type of games but I have some friends that really love them. It was a cool experience, but I'm not sure it's my type of game. I am similarly annoyed by people who just hang out in strategic spots by exits just to kill you and take your stuff or even just to kill you even though they don't need what you have or don't even have enough room to carry any more gear. You sneak around for 20 minutes only to lose everything to some jackass teenager who just kills you for their amusement.