Topic: Xbox Games You've Recently Beat

I have started and finished the game with the biggest name aka "Record of Lodoss war - Deedlit in wonder labyrinth". It is a metroidvania in the style of Castlevania and a fairly shorts and simple game (only got stuck for a bit once) with two things that make it different (and interesting).
The first One is that you have a wind form and a fire form that you need to swap to hit different enemies but also because some parts it gets to be a bit of bullet hell and like ikaruga you are hit only by the opposite type (while it charges your MP on yours) and the second is that as you hit enemies you also charge your attacks up to 3 levels in each form (and go down one level when hit) but the best part is that on level 3 you start regaining health so there is a dance of swapping btw forma whenever you're hit so you manage to allways have one form on level 3 (it is quite cool!).
Basically this is a good one for one or two sittings (it took me about 5h to beat)

Finished Lake this evening. It's a nice short game kind of like Firewatch. Basically you play a woman who comes to a small town for a week to take a temp job at the post office. You delivery mail throughout the day but you can also interact with the various people on your route and after your shift as well. You can date one of the towns people if you choose to as well. After the week you have a big decision to make.

It's not an overly deep game, it's rather short, six to seven hours long but it's a nice pallet cleanser game. It does have replay value to a point as you choose different choices each time you play so there's that.

It's a charming game to be quiet honest and as I said it's a great pallet cleanser after playing a deeper game. I quite enjoyed my time with the game.

My two most recent completions are Guardians of the Galaxy and The Artful Escape.

Guardians of the Galaxy really impressed me, and I'm not a big Marvel fan. The writing was wonderful and I greatly enjoyed the Mass Effect-lite space travel and combat. I found the story to be pretty compelling and the voice acting and character animation made some scenes pretty moving. Playing it on the quality mode with ray-tracing meant it looked stunning, too.

The Artful Escape is basically a walking sim with Simon Says button prompts... yet it's awesome. There's so much imagination to the world, and I was hammering the capture button like no one's business throughout. There's a sense of self-discovery and overcoming to the story, which struck a chord (wahey) with me, too. It's pretty brief but highly recommended and it's made me commit to trying more indie games over the next year.

Got Sonic Generations lined up next, and it looks great with the recent upgrade.

Hope you all enjoy whatever it is you're playing at the moment!

Just finished Renegade Ops on Xbox 360. Awesome game! I've had this one in my backlog since 2011 and over a decade later, I've finally finished it. When I first played it, I didn't think much of it as there were lots of games like this back then. But playing it ten years later when there are less of these games has made me enjoy it even more. It's been such a long time since I played a twin-stick shooter with arcade elements. It's simple, it's chaotic and it's so much fun. Highly recommend it!

I might purchase the DLC that comes with more levels since the base game was fairly short. There are only nine missions and you can finish the game in pretty much 3-4 hours. The DLC adds three more missions so I should be able to get another hour of enjoyment from it!

I rolled credits on the Halo Infinite campaign last week. I think with the campaign and all the multiplayer I've played I have like 60 hours or more into the game. I enjoy it quite a bit, but I already feel myself ready to put it down for a while.
Edit: last night (1/24/22) I rolled credits on Mario Kart 8 deluxe. Just the wimpy difficulty, but I was happy to get an entire run through all the courses nonetheless. Now I can shelve it until the wife and kiddo want to play.

Currently making my way through Warhammer Chaosbane.as a Witchunter… I ended up buying the Slayer Edition this past week for 12 bucks on Xbox. Worth it.

I just finished Mass Effect Andromeda after 66 hours of playtime (clocking in at about 97% completion) and this was simply a brilliant game. It exceeded my expectations and proved to be a much better game than I thought. While I think Mass Effect 3 had a much better story, it also had a trilogy of build-up while Andromeda is a one and done game. Despite this, I think Andromeda is the best overall game that I've played in the series. It just improves upon so many things and I'll be touching upon them in my review: https://www.pushsquare.com/forums/retro_and_other_gaming/user...

Just watched credits roll on Lake. Good. Short. It’s length was what I liked most about it. Relaxing for sure though.

An oldie but one i had started years ago but just finished L.A Noire (XB360 release), i got my first achievement on the game back in May 2012 so almost 10 years to complete but got it done eventually

Have to say that it's still technically very impressive with the speech and facial qualities. It's dated graphically but i was actually able to lip read some parts and thats something i can't say about any other games off the top of my head.

As for the "game" itself, i enjoyed it and was intrigued by having to uncover the truth behind the overarching case and was glad that it was sometimes able to spin the crime in a way i didn't see coming. Like sometimes i'd see the crime scene and automatically make assumptions that i knew what had happened right away but then it turned out to be something else entirely and i liked that.

The driving mechanics were very flighty but i feel this was to give a sense of the game being set in the 1940's and the cars weren't going to be taking 90 degree turns at 100mph (not many cars were able to hit that speed anyway). And speaking of the setting, i loved the way the recreated that time frame with accents, peoples attitudes of the times, the cars, the architecture, the music etc

I would have liked them to have done a sequel to this back in the day but there's reasons why that didn't happen

Overall, a good game that i'm glad i went back to after all that time

Just rolled the credits on the Hunk last night. It was an enjoyable game, nothing to long or too intense. Good game to just chill out with. Jumped into a Plagues Tale afterwards and really enjoying that so far, finished 4/17 chapters.

Finished my first play through of Mayhem Brawler the other night. I have to say I was impressed with the game overall. It's quite a good beat em up that I am sure flew under many people's radar. It's easy to see why with games like River City Girls and Streets of Rage 4 reading around the same time.

Mayhem Brawler is a very well polished beat em up that just felt good. The controls were responsive the artwork was beautiful and there are branching paths to increase the replayibility. The one negative thing I have to say is the levels seemed short. Three screens of enemies and your fighting the boss already, and there is only seven levels.

The asking price is $19.99 which given the length of the game feels a bit high I personally think a $14.99 asking price would have been better.

Overall if you are a fan of beat 'em ups than you would enjoy this, especially if your looking for something new. It's just slightly below SoR4 in my book but a solid game nevertheless.

Just finished Yooka-Laylee yesterday. Enjoyed it and would be interested to see what the devs do next. It has some issues such as the camera and some control issues (mainly when flying)

There is also no voice acting so everything is just in written speech in speech bubbles - i would have loved some good quality voice acting as i think it would have added to the charm. The level design is great and the abilities and the pace you gain them all works well too - as i said before, i'd be interested in a full sequel with some of these drawbacks being tackled

There is some self aware humour in the game too with references to video game culture and platforming clichés which may border on being overdone at times but it's a fine balance that they almost get right. In terms of 3D platformers, I've played Psychonauts 2 and New Super Lucky's Tale in the last year or so and it's nowhere near as good as P2 (my personal GoTY 2021) but not far from NSLT which i enjoyed a lot

This was a free GwG so can't complain about the price, it's currently £6.99 on the store (4 days left) and i'd say that about the price i'd be willing to pay

@VOODOO85 you should try the "sequel" that is a 2d platformer on the style of donkey Kong country and really good

I did try Impossible Lair out a while ago and just couldn't get into it but perhaps i didn't give it long enough to grow on me. Might check it out now that i'm more familiar with the world etc

Gunk. Really enjoyed it and would recommend it.

Halo 2

Beat it at the beginning of the week, but forgot to post about it. As expected, I enjoyed this immensely more than I did Halo CE. I did notice repeated things here and there, but it was nowhere near as bad as the first one where it was constant after you got to the middle of the game.

I also have to commend whoever did the remastering of the game back years and years ago. It looked better than I expected it to on my Series X, and the cinematics were fantastic looking.

I know this will be nowhere near as long as the game deserves, but this pretty much made slogging through Halo CE almost worthwhile. I obviously highly enjoyed Halo 2 and would still consider it one of my favorite FPS games, and games in general, of all time. On to Halo 3 someday...

THE MEDIUM REVIEW

The Medium is not a bad game. The protagonist moves like a character from the first version of Telltale's engine but that's not as important as that she is not consistent. There are also graphical glitches that I'm surprised that haven't been ironed out after a year. The stick doesn't have a dead zone when browsing the inventory and that can be an issue sometimes like when you're reading letters. The graphics are arty but not optimised. Resolution and frame rate aren't a priority here, not even on Series X.

Unlike Layers of Fear, the only other Bloober Team game that I have played, The Medium is actually a game. It tries to be a bit like Resident Evil and Silent Hill cult classics but the camera angles and the puzzles are more confusing than intriguing. The protagonist, like a modern Lara Croft, speaks to herself too much about herself but although Lara seems to be more connected to her current circumstances -even if she is tiresome too often-, Marianne is lightly and random. A few jokes here and there might work but the ones used here don't. She speaks to the bolt cutters, too. The character is just not well built.

The first two hours of the game are really boring and had me literally yawning. Two hours felt like four. The Medium is mainly a narrative game and the beginning is too vague to click. Beyond that, it becomes a point-and-click fetching adventure with random puzzles instead of psychological horror with some gameplay variety. It overdoes the awful Layers of Fear item gameplay.

Gameplay also takes ideas from A Plague's Tale and it reminded me of that game because in both titles gameplay doesn't work as intended and becomes problematic. What about the world that is rendered twice? It's basically a couple of rooms and, well, it's just a gimmick, it doesn't expand gameplay in any meaningful way. The latter part of the game alternates two characters and it actually gets better with a water plant puzzle that seems to be taken, as some sounds and effects, directly from the Resident Evil games.

In conclusion, the worst thing about this game is actually the gameplay, which barely makes sense. Going back to the last checkpoint when you are killed by a (the) monster because of the lack of directions, a place to hide or proper view is what will really scare you because you'll have to solve the same puzzle and listen to the same dialogue between a girl and a certain girl she cares about and the reflections about that relationship and her name by the protagonist. In spite of all this, the story gets tighter and better as it develops and even gameplay gets slightly more interesting towards the end, so it left a better impression at the last minute.

6/10

I have finished Lost Odyssey last night. It is a good JRPG but I cannot say I got in love with it. The characters are interesting (even Jansen that is quite cringy grew up on me) but I don't feel Gongora is a good rival and would prefer if they decided not to reveal he is the bad guy almost from the start.
I had some issues with the voice acting at first but they disappeared after disk 2 and had some troubles with cutscenes without sound that removing one option on the system settings resolved (thanks you Google)
Gameplay wise it starts very dull with no options but it opens a lot when your roster increases and level up but I would prefer for everyone to level up even outside and not a fan of Magic moves that take more than one turn (or to give up on one member for two turns to do one of those quicker and health options are stupidily low for some reason...). On the other side 5 members is my favourite number for Turn base RPG and in the end you can be a powerhouse with everyone absorbing all types of Magic and mana pools that never decrease.
As I did not realize the last disk locations flashing were all side quests when I got to the final sequence of events I was super strong and nothing could even scratch me so that last part felt underwhelming. And I am not that happy with the ending as I would prefer to see the other side and understand why they got there and why are they immortal.

Story mode in King of Fighters XV. Bit nonsensical, especially in that anime type way but still enjoyed it and really love the gameplay, lots of fun.

Most recently completed both Halo: Infinite on Legendary and the Gunk....

I beat Halo Infinite LASO the other day which makes it the 4th time of finishing the campaign. I might have to do a 5th to mop up any missed collectables due to the missing level select feature.