Topic: Now Playing on Xbox Series X|S

@KilloWertz Yeah I mean, I would've never actually paid for the game since it's online only and I've heard other bad stuff about it e.g. you have to grind a lot and so on. But I've been playing through the campaign and it's awesome. At first I was going to complain that they should've marketed the game differently as you're clearly not playing as the Avengers all the time. You're just playing as this random girl. But then I realised that this random girl is apparently Ms. Marvel, a superhero in the Marvel universe, lol. So now it makes a lot more sense and I take that all back. It's a great game but I'm still glad that I'm playing it through Game Pass, it's definitely worth checking out.

So I've been playing Halo Infinite for a few hours now and so far it's an incredibly fun game that feels significantly different than previous Halo titles. It's going to be hard to go back to the previous games now without having things like the grappling hook. That thing makes a huge difference, it opens up so much freedom when fighting enemies or just traversal in general. I'm also finding the story to be very interesting and it appeals a lot to me as a person who's played all the mainline games.

It definitely feels like Halo has finally become a modern franchise now with this entry. Can't wait to play more of it!

I also started Halo yesterday. I've only played a bit and have just reached the the very first part of the Halo ring. It seems very much like Halo of old but with added niceness and the grapple is a good thing. I'm playing on normal and I must be a bit rusty as I'm getting killed more often than would be ideal.

I fired this year briefly last night. Made it past the first section. As someone who has only played bits of Halo 1-3 via the Master Chief collection on Gamepass, this feels and plays far better than those older titles. It's not quite Doom Eternal either control wise or visually but it's close.

I'm surprised at how well this runs on Series S. A buttery smooth 60fps. I never noticed any dips in the framerate. Digital Foundry say both modes on the S are capped at 1080p which was also surprising as the S is capable of running harder than that. Hopefully 343 will release an update to lift the resolution.

As it stands it looked pretty sharp on my 4K panel.

Just finished up Halo Wars last night and i started up Halo Wars 2. Im so close to finishing up all the pre Infinite titles that i decided to stay the course and hold off on Infinite for one last game. Halo Wars 2 is supposed to be the closest relation to the infinite story would be odd to skip this one.

@Krzzystuff Nice one! I still haven't played the Halo Wars games but I plan on doing it eventually. I'm just not that big on RTS games. Would you say that the first HW is pretty accessible for newcomers to the genre or is there a steep learning curve?

@LtSarge they are very accessible. It's not like StarCraft or old school command and conquer. And it handled comfortably on a controller as well. Highly recommended giving them a go at some point, I'm still very early into 2 but they got me with the story and cutscenes already. Atriox is a great villian

@Krzzystuff Sounds very promising then! I think I'll give them a shot sooner rather than later now, especially since I've been playing Halo Infinite for a while now and I'm absolutely loving it. I don't think I care that much about playing the Halo games in order because I've realised that there are tons of things you'll miss out on by not experiencing all media besides video games and that's just too time-consuming for me. It would probably help to play the Wars games before Infinite because I have no idea who the Banished are, but I might as well see those games as prequels that I can play afterwards lol.

Just finished outer worlds and in general I liked it but the end got a huge difficulty spike out of nowhere as the rest of the game is a breeze on normal. I think I Will try dishnored next. I never played arkaine games so let's see if they click

@Balta666 Nice! We played through Dishonored on Game Club earlier this year and I really liked the game. Do share your thoughts if you decide to play it! I'd definitely love to play Dishonored 2 on Game Club eventually.

Before starting dishnored decided to give a go at Shadows awakening (as I got in on gold) and it hooked me. Nothing groundbreaking but so far a couple of hours in an enjoying my time with it. I think I will finish it

Played another session of Halo Infinite and wow, the open world aspect is seriously awesome. I think the best part of it is that it really emphasises you being the Master Chief. You're all alone in a world overrun by enemy forces and you're slowly reclaiming it one step at a time. Capturing FOB bases, rescuing marines who then will follow you around, finding Spartan cores that will provide significant improvements to your equipment and so on. Not to mention all the chatter about Master Chief, it just makes the experience so wholesome. This is definitely the most well-crafted and detailed Halo game I've ever played. So much fun!

@LtSarge I agree with everything you said and then some. The game is absolutely fantastic, and I love how the open world seamlessly flows between side quests and main quests organically. Everything you do has a purpose.

@Nerdfather1 Have you been playing more of it since your last post? I played another session today and man, this game just gets better and better. I was introduced to the enemy vehicles, such as Ghost and Brute Chopper, and they honestly make the open world experience so much better. I didn't realise this until now, but the vehicles in the Halo games have never really felt that useful in the previous games. Now that you can use them in an actual open world, they feel super useful, I love them! It makes traversal much faster and you can take down enemies much easier, you just feel like a complete badass. And the way you discover them really makes the experience so special. I was just wandering around and randomly stumbled upon an enemy who was driving a Ghost. Instinctively, I decided to use my grappling hook on the enemy in order to attack it, but instead the Chief just decided to board the vehicle and kick the enemy out! Didn't expect that at all and I think that's great game design. The entire process just felt so natural.

Now that I've gotten a taste for the vehicles, I've become even more encouraged to do all the side activities in order to earn enough valor to unlock the vehicles.

Because it takes a lot of current-gen storage and because I had planned it after beating all Gears of War campaigns and Doom 2016 recently, I have beaten Doom Eternal. At first, I thought I wouldn't want to replay it because of its intensity but after beating the final boss, I just went back to the game and get 100% (normal difficulty).

Doom Eternal is not perfect. For instance, the final boss relies once again on multiple encounters to raise the difficulty but this is one of the best shooters I've ever played. It's an evolution of previous Doom games but it's also an evolution of things I loved in the past like Metroid Prime. It has exploration, platforming that works like a charm with an Elite controller and, most of all, the gameplay is brilliant as long as you've played long enough to know all your weapons. Acrobatic fighting moving throughout the available space is something that usually doesn't work in games but here it just works and it makes the gameplay more engaging, more challenging and more rewarding than your average linear action game.

I went back to Doom 2016 that I had completed not 100%, trying to understand why I didn't like it that much and planning to get the missing collectibles but I realised that Doom 2016 is more boring and it's more a chore. It was well received, probably as well as Doom Eternal and some people prefer Doom 2016 but I can't bother anymore. I just don't like Doom 2016 but Doom Eternal is fantastic. I wonder if anyone else feels the same.

@BlueOcean Glad you loved it. I've had it installed for a while now. Now I just have to actually play it someday.

I think some people had issues with the game's difficulty and platforming, especially the latter. You are one of the few people I've read so far that has had 0 issues with the platforming. Not saying you're wrong obviously, but that is something I'm not especially looking forward to when I finally play it. As for the difficulty, I'll likely just play it on Easy and be ok with it. Maybe I'll get one less achievement if they have separate difficulty achievements like some games do, but I'll be ok.

I actually really liked Doom 2016, aside from the few platforming bits they had in that game as well. Again, not faulting you, but I don't think a game like Doom should have platforming portions. If it was a 10-15 hour game of pure intensity (aside from collecting the collectibles), they would probably be even better.

@KilloWertz Actually, the platforming in Doom 2016 is worse. For instance, the level where you climb a structure round a nuclear reactor is awful. The collectibles are annoying to find in Doom 2016 in spite of being more sparse, partly because in Doom Eternal you can upgrade the map features easily and it's a bit of a puzzle to get them once you reach the spot. It's fun. The platforming in Doom Eternal is more integrated in the exploration and gameplay, it's a bit more complicated because of the new dash move but it became one of my favourite features. Dash becomes also another strategy element in Doom Eternal, especially in battles. Because of all this, the gameplay and the exploration is better in Doom Eternal even if the controls and platforming are a bit more complex because of the additional control that the player has.

With a regular controller is a bit more challenging but if you use an Elite controller is a piece of cake because you can map the dash, jump and melee action to the paddles, the latter move also used for holding on to surfaces. You can play with a regular controller, too. If you dash, you hold onto surfaces automatically. You also hold onto edges automatically. The way that the platformer elements are integrated into the game is better than in Doom 2016 and it reminds me of Metroid Prime but backtracking is more fun than in Metroid Prime. Doom Eternal integrates platformer gameplay elements more successfully than both Doom 2016 and any Metroid Prime game where you usually look down while jumping because Samus can't hold onto edges. Last but not least, the level design and the battle design are better.

Started playing Lake on Game Pass. I've had it on my watchlist for a while now but for some reason, I really was in a mood to play it today after having read its description. It's a mail delivery game, kind of like Death Stranding. You drive around in a rural American town set in the late 1980s and the gameplay loop is basically to deliver mail to different houses and places. It's a very chill game, you can listen to the radio while driving and sometimes you get to talk to the townsfolk while you do it. It sounds boring on paper, but man if there's one job that makes for a very fun video game, it's mail delivery. Question is how long the gameplay loop will remain fun, but at least so far it's been a great time.

After finishing Shadows awakening was undecided about ehat to play next but I am happy to say I went for Dishnored and I am deeply enjoying it. For someone that played a hell of a lot of Commandos back in the day it is a fairly easy game to stealth through but I am still save scumm all over it lol

Halo 2. As a few people already know, my recent playthrough of Halo CE was not very enjoyable since the game aged pretty poorly for me. Halo 2 is a different story, as it's as enjoyable as I remember it being well over a decade ago back on the original Xbox. It also looks even better than I expected it to. Kudos to whoever did the remaster for it back when the MCC was first going to be released. I'm not quite halfway done with it, but obviously I'm highly enjoying it so far.