Topic: Last Game You Beat

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and I liked it but not adored it. As I mentioned several times I don't do horror (had some bad experiences with the first resident evil games and I dread jump scares) reason why I always skipped this one and because of that I knew from the start about the Lie which obviously removes a lot of the tension. I also made myself more comfortable by putting the brightness to the max, but I still felt the game was very dark at times although I managed to cheese the blindness trials as I could easily see where to go and avoid the scary creatures.
I did play on Auto difficulty but I did not die once to the combat so not sure how that affectedy experience, as all attacks are easily dodged as as long as you take your time and position yourself well there is no problems. In this way I only died probably 6-8 times due to environmental hazards like fire and shadows, etc.
Finally I like the Vikings setting and was always looking forward to finding the runes to hear the backstory (found everyone on the first playthrough) but not so much about Senua's story lol. I hope they go a little bit more focused on the why she has the voices in the sequel.
Regardless of it I am happy I pushed myself to play this game and I am now looking forward to May!

Beyond Good and Evil which I have to say I did not become a fan of. It is fairly clunky (and buggy), the stealth sections suck ass and the story is mediocre. It is fairly short at least (it took me a good two hours under hltb with 93% completion and all achievements)

@Balta666 Quite surprising as it's one of those games that appears to be almost universally liked. Haven't played it myself - although I 'think' I've got it on PS3 and just never got around to playing it. It's on my download list, but I can't remember if it was possibly a PS Plus game, or maybe just a demo so don't know if I'll actually be able to play it 😂

I've been tempted to get it on Xbox as it gets fairly regular sales - only around £2 at the moment, but might as well make the effort to check if I've actually got it on PS3 first.

@dmcc0 yah, I also have it on both GameCube and Xbox . Some of these a lot of people have nostalgia but are hard to come about new in this time (games like super Mario 64 or ocarina of time are flawless games in my eyes lol, but I have also recently played games like God of War, ratchet and clank, Jak and Dexter, perfect dark, etc and liked them a lot more than this one).

@Balta666 Yeah, I've been pretty hit & miss with going back to some older 'classic' games. I played the first two God of War (HD Remakes) and a couple of Ratchet & Clank on PS3 back in the day and enjoyed them at the time, but haven't gone back to them recently - closest thing would probably be Dante's Inferno which I thought was similar to GoW (at least how I remember it!) at least in gameplay if not the themes. It was OK.

Funnily enough, Mario 64 is one that I have no nostalgia for and having played it fairly recently, don't really like it. Actually a lot of those N64 era games like Banjo, Perfect Dark, Conker etc have done nothing for me having gone back to them in recent years. I think in general, a lot of the 3D stuff from pre-X360/PS3 hasn't really aged very well at all.

@Balta666 So I've given it a crack and am now on to Gears 4 digging it so far.

@phillipgcox cool! I only played the initial trilogy so far but I definitely want to play the others this year.

Robocop Rogue City. For the most part, it was such a great experience that I absolutely loved. The gameplay, the dialogue, the authenticity. Having Peter Weller reprise his role as robo was awesome. It felt like another movie that you were apart of. Blasting enemies, punching them, finding evidence, giving tickets, all great.

My only real gripe were 3 sections. They were boss fights which I won't mention due to spoilers. But they were a SLOG. Bullet sponges with robo being slow as all get out, little ammo, no health. It was a giant time waster that really dampened the experience every time you faced this boss. I hated it. The final boss took me an hour and a half, on easy... I finally switched the last couple of missions so I could finally move on.

If not for those time wasters, and frustration enducing sections, it wouldve been a great game, like a 9/10. A couple of regular enemies were bullet sponges too, which was also annoying. But overall, a solid 7.5-8/10. I can still recommend it. But it was just a tad annoying at some parts.

@NintendoByNature Sounds good. After I finish Yakuza: Like a Dragon, that will be next on my plate. I didn't realize they brought Peter Weller back. That is really awesome.

@Tasuki yea, it's truly awesome. The entire game is awesome actually, with the exception of those few sections. You'll know when you get there.

Just finished Gears of War 2. Really great time, much like the first game. Marcus Fenyx might be one of my favorite video game characters.

Granblue Fantasy Relink (PS5).

This was really fun. Combat is very fast & slick (a lot of people compare it to Tales, but it honestly felt more Ys like to me, which I enjoyed because that's probably my favorite Action JRPG battle system).

The main story mode manages to feel just as exciting as FFXVI at it's best points, but without hardly any of the downtime or time consuming fetch quests holding it back, and this assuredly at a fraction of the budget. It's an all killer, no filler, 15-20 hour adventure you won't want to put down as you can't wait to see which wrinkle it'll add next (during battles on the deck of your airship you can man the cannons to shoot down foes before they board, there's a boss fight that calls to mind the kind of scale you'd expect from Shadow of the Colossus, even boss fights where you'll take control of the series' version of Bahumut & fight other massive beasts akin to FFXVI's showpiece Eikon battles, and more).

Now, it does seem to expect you to be somewhat already familiar with the cast (from the previous mobile game) as your party is already complete from the get go, and aside from a very brief moment in the prologue are never separated. This means that I never really got quite as invested in the group as other JRPG parties, as you really don't see them narratively grow as they normally would (also in part due to the fact that the big console game is the spin-off, it's a footnote in terms of the narrative of the franchise as a whole). That said they're a likeable enough group & I liked spending time with them. I'd levy similar thoughts to the story as a whole, as it hits all the cliches you'd expect to find but isn't as thematically rich as a Final Fantasy or Xenoblade Chronicles. However it's very wonderfully produced (the fantastic art direction goes a long way as well), and easily holds your attention for it's duration. If you do wish to learn more about a character's backstory, they each have "Fate Episodes" you unlock as you progress (most of these are text only affairs, but a few offer a playable segment) that brush you up on their history (and they give stat boosts upon reading/completing them, so you might as well).

Of course, if you really get into the gameplay loop the story mode is really only the opening salvo, as the real meat is in the extensive quest system (a few of these see you taking on waves of enemies under various conditions, but a good 90-95% of them are rematches against the game's many bosses with ever increasing difficulties). Easy & Normal rank quests are available during the main story, but once you clear the story mode you can work your way up through Hard, Very Hard, Extreme, Maniac, & Proud rank quests, where the grind really comes into play. There are about a million & one different ways to buff up your party (and heck, there are about a dozen different new party members to unlock as well, even though they're not story relevant), and while you don't have to explore these much to see story mode to the end, you'll need to get to grips with it all if you want to clear harder quests (at least clear them with good scores), and it can get pretty grindy when you need to start taking on certain quests multiple times in order to grind out drops. Seriously, each character has two seperate skill trees, one for offensive buffs/abilities, the other defensive, and each one is absolutely gargantuan (each one is just as large if not moreso than what you'd expect a character's entire skill tree to be in any other JRPG). Seriously, my main party members are all level 88-92 and yet each of their two skill trees I only have 60-70% complete. I haven't worked on anyone else (let alone the myriad of optional unlockable characters I mentioned), and that just accounts for one way you can power up characters (Fate Episode stat boosts. weapon crafting & upgrading, which BTW each have their own tiny skill tree. Sigils, which take the place of armor/accessories here, you can equip up to at least 10 and you can upgrade those as well). Heck, even once you do have a character's skill tree maxed out you can apparently still spend skill points on them to raise stats randomly (I'm not sure if there really is a hard cap on how strong a character can get).

I can definitely see the appeal in the grind, and I do enjoy it in doses, but I definitely enjoyed the exciting cinematic story mode moreso than the post game grind. It's important to note too, as completing story mode only puts story completion at 95%. You see, without getting into spoilers, there are few loose ends, and in order to tie them up and hit 100% story completion you are required to advance through Extreme rank quests (you'll slowly acquire lore notes as you grind your way up through the rankings, and along the way you'll unlock the last couple big cinematic story moments, the last of which is truly awesome). This leaves Maniac & Proud rank quests as truly the only optional ones if you really want to see the story to it's ultimate conclusion. It took me 20 hours to complete story mode, and a further 16 grinding my way up the quest ranks just to knock off that last 5% of the story. Definitely enjoyed the first half of the experience more, though it admittedly felt good seeing the story to it's true end.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps... and that's me done with hard as nails 2d platformers haha!

Actually found it harder than Blind Forest, which doesn't seem the general consensus... but getting a bit old for these sorts of games now, my poor heart can't take the rage

Return to Grace. 2 hours or so to play through, quite enjoyed it though got the baaaad ending haha

Hot Wheels: Unleashed Technically not quite finished it, I've only got a couple of time trials to complete, but I'm done with it. Overall a really enjoyable arcade racer which looks great and controls pretty well once you get the hang of the drifting and the physics.

The only real issue I have with it is the difficulty, which seems to be all over the place. The general race stages are pretty hard - even on normal setting, where a single mistake can easily lead you to a last place finish, although are do-able with a bit of practice. The 'boss' races are even more difficult though and require a 1st place finish to progress - I resorted to dropping the difficulty down to 'easy' for a couple of them after multiple failed attempts. Dropping the difficulty down to 'easy' makes it far too easy though, and you can crash multiple times and still win comfortably - it needs something in-between I think. The time trial tracks generally pretty hard too, but strangely, the difficulty setting only applies to the AI racers, so the time trails still have the same punishingly difficult target times regardless of the difficulty setting.

Change of pace for my next game - Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is up next...

Finished Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice last night. I really liked this - probably the best game I've played so far this year. I thought the Viking setting was interesting and the story was really good too. I also felt the length (took me just over 8hrs to complete) was perfect - it didn't out-stay it's welcome at all and felt just right. No side-quest padding to speak of apart from collecting the 'backstory' Runes which are don't appear to be too difficult to find - I think I missed only about 5 or 6 of the 40ish runes and wasn't particularly looking for them.

The combat was one of the few things that I didn't think was great. It wasn't terrible, but it got a little bit repetitive after a while. Thankfully, there wasn't really a huge amount of combat for the most part and it did break up the puzzles and story quite nicely. There was a fair bit more in the last hour or so than there was in the rest of the game though.

Oh, and I also didn't like the insta-death-fire-demon-chase section during one of the shard trials. I died on that bit more than every other part of the game combined. In fact, I think I might've only died once outside that section - got caught by one of the creatures during the blindness trial.

The game recommends playing with headphones and I have to say, I agree. I've got a fairly decent surround sound setup so thought I'd be fine with that and played most of the first stage without headphones. Tried headphones the next time I played and it was like night and day - so much more immersive. The voice of the Shadow proper freaked me out the first time I heard it with the headphones on, it was so deep and felt like it was speaking directly to my soul 😅

Finished metro exodus. Wow! Great game. Thinking I will get the DLC next.

this is on the list of 4 or 5 games I'm going to play next... can't wait to try out my new headphones

Beat the main quest line for Arkham Knight on Friday. Decently scary final sequence, no wonder the Xbox store lists it as horror! I’ll probably go back and do all the other side quests and check out the dlc I got bundled with the game