Rate the last game you've played - Crowd sourcing game reviews for Metacritic

[Janus Vesta]

We have a thread for rating films, why not one for games?

Tell us what games you've been playing recently, your thoughts, and rate them. Or don't, whatever, I'm not in charge of you.

Syndicate (2012)
Syndicate takes all the atmosphere, style, and strategy of the 1993 original and throws it out the window. The game is a very straight forward FPS with the main gimmicks being the Datascape vision, a combination of Batman's Detective Mode, bullet time, and damage resistance, and the Breach abilities, or "Hold E to win".

The gunplay is pretty good, it's nothing special, and the three breach abilities do little to make the gameplay more fun. The first ability is "suicide" where you force an enemy to kill themselves, the second is an overload ability which temporarily stuns enemies and makes them take more damage, and the third ability is called "persuade" though it's just a mind control ability. The later parts of the game are brought down by a combination of enemies you can't damage until you hack them and destroy their shields accompanied by enemies who outright prevent you from using any abilities.

There are some good parts though, a few sections where you use a very satisfying minigun with infinite ammo and one part where you get to run around with a flamethrower. There's also a part where you fight in the slums where only your stun ability works on the enemies and it's quite fun to use their (weirdly much better) weapons.

There are hints at a better game throughout but overall the game is unremarkable, and unfortunately you don't get to go full corporate villain and end up in a fight against the corporation for the last couple of levels. The game also ends on a limp as fuck sequel hook where you know that everyone who made the game knew there would be no sequel.

It's not really worth playing but it isn't particularly bad and it's only 5-6 hours long, so it may be worth picking up on a sale if it's very cheap.

5/10.

[Noob©]

Moonlighter is the safest indie production video game you can play this year

6/10

[Pramadito]

Frostpunk is have very great atmosphere and scenario (example : because how the harsh the situation is , you become blind for what is good morale and bad morale then suddenly you turn into fasism ) but sadly the game have zero replayability for now

9/10

[Milkeo]

Rust is ok but im only getting 60 fps like wtf EA.

6/10

[The_J_Hat]

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Hadn't played any of the recent Deus Ex games for whatever reason, and now that I had a real cyberpunk itch, I figured I should give them a go. I enjoyed Human Revolution, despite finding some of the plot elements to be a little ridiculous (Eliza Cassan being an AI, the whole anti-aug movement felt contrived) but otherwise, it was fun. It had an appropriate blend of stealth and action, that, while at time lackings refinement, still worked well together.

Mankind Divided was a lot harder to appreciate at first. The stealth and gunplay felt more polished, but right off the bat, things felt like a step backward. Prague was bigger than the other hubs, but having one hub city felt lame, and there were times when it felt hard to navigate around. Not a big problem, but it made the early game a hassle. The story, despite doubling down on the anti-aug sentiments, I think I enjoyed a little more than HR. Considering the events of HR, the aug stuff felt a little more reasonable, although trying to pass it off as a new apartheid for the 21st century still feels ham-fisted. On top of that, MD felt like it was a third shorter than HR. The climax feels appropriate, but it could have used a little more buildup, more missions outside of Prague.

At least when it did end, my choices actually felt like they mattered by the end, unlike how it was handled in Human Revolution.

Mankind Divided isn't a perfect sequel. The improvements are appreciated, but it felt like a step back from Human Revolution. Hopefully SquareEnix and Eidos can learn and improve upon MD for the next one.

[chipsnapper]

Halo: Reach
So I just bought Gold again to play with friends, and I assumed that more people would play this now considering it’s playable on Xbox One. So yes, the MP is still very robust and matchmaking finds you a game quickly. Some playlists are a ghost town, like anything in the “Evolved” category outside of BTB. Grifball is still an XP grindfest, and MLG is 100% dead (big surprise there, Reach was never a competitive game like Halo 2 or 3)

I always notice that people talk of the glory days of Halo 2 and Halo 3 and how everyone had a mic, and how everyone would party up after games and invite each other to custom games, etc.
That just doesn’t happen anymore (on any Halo game really) because of Xbox Live Party Chat. Before the 360’s NXE Dashboard updates, people had to party up in games (and actually talk to people). On top of that, whatever Bungie.net and File Share options were left got shut down in April this year because of preemptive GDPR changes at Microsoft.

Whatever, maybe I looking for something here I just can’t get anywhere anymore.

All things considered, the MP part of Halo Reach is a 7.5/10, but I’ll give extra points considering it’s still got a player base after 8 years. The original Halo 3 is pretty much dead now.

[Noob©]

WILL: A Wonderful World

It has its moments but otherwise a compilation of mess that tries too hard with melodrama and adult themes. Also surprising amount of trial-and-error.
Would be so much better if they just stick to a singular, coherent theme. I don't know what the Chinese see in this game to warrant high praises. (English translation 3~ months ago)

6.5/10

[Janus Vesta]

Road Redemption

A randomly generated Road Rash clone where your objective range from race to the end the fastest to kill fucking everybody. There's a surprising amount of depth to the combat system, that is to say there is a small amount of depth to the combat system. Long weapons deal more damage than short weapons and (obviously) reach farther but have the downside of swinging much more slowly, swords are bad against people wearing helmets but destroy energy shields quickly and if you kill someone with a sword you get double the money, health, and nitro for a decapitation bonus.

Between every mission you're able to access a shop which gives you a choice of six (later twelve) randomly selected upgrades, or a nitro or health top up. When you die your run is over but you can then spend all the xp you earned through the playthrough to unlock permanent upgrades, such as more health, better starting gear, or even new bikes. As you play through the game you'll unlock new riders with unique stats, such as Santa Claus who is a pacifist and can only damage bosses or Shovel Knight, who is legally required to be in every indie game ever made.

If you complete the campaign you are given a special reward. You get to do one final race on Rainbow Road Full Spectrum Highway with ridiculously cheerful music playing.

The game isn't perfect however. It isn't super polished and the world outside of the single road you drive on is pretty much featureless and the game is very resource intensive for what it is. Also you can't do wheelies and ramp off oncoming traffic, which is a glaring oversight.

7/10, definitely worth grabbing before the sale ends if it sounds interesting.

[Omilinon 👻]

I'm playing Yakuza 0 for the first time. Only a couple hours in so far, but it's really fun and hilarious. I came into it completely blind, only going off a friend's recommendation. I'm very against Japanese melodrama bs (leading me to not watch a lot of anime or read a ton of manga), so I was kinda worried going into it. Especially with the first scene, I thought it was gonna be a game that would take itself too seriously. Until I started doing karaoke. Then, I realized this game is going to be pretty damn awesome.

It's a good mix of fun and humor with serious moments. Yeah, it's a little trope-y and has a ton of Japanese cliches, but it's honestly charming in that regard. I haven't groaned or cringed from the dialogue, and Kiryu is a cool protagonist that acts as the "straight man" in comedic moments, which is great. Animation is kinda janky, and facial expressions are ehh, but the dialogue and voice acting keeps me pretty engaged throughout it all.

Combat is your typical run-of-the-mill action beat-'em-up stuff, with a few cool things sprinkled in. Obviously, I haven't got into depth with a lot of it yet, because I'm only a very small amount into the game so far. But it's satisfying and not clunky, which is all I really ask for in an action game.

Easily a 8/10 first impressions. I'm excited to keep playing.

[Janus Vesta]

RAGE (2011)

8/10
I've decided to put the score at the top so people can skip the text if they want. This will be a long post, I meant to do this yesterday but Rage is a lot longer than I remembered. Sorry.

There's a great game in Rage, too bad it was a technical show-piece for a shit engine primarily. To get it out of the way the idTech 5 engine is a mess that was pushed out the door too early, it got better over time but Rage suffers the full brunt of the engines issues. The texture load times are terrible and the textures themselves are very low quality, even for a 2011 game, thanks to the megatexture system used by the game. I have the game installed on a Samsung 850 EVO SSD and seeing textures pop in when you turn quickly is not uncommon, it looks like an Unreal Engine game at times.

The game itself is very odd to play today as it simultaneously feels like a relic from the past while being ahead of its time in others, with features that aren't even present in modern games which really should be. It has a mission and story structure almost identical to Jak 2 of all things, you spend the first half of the game fighting mutants and raiders down in shit holes ruins while doing races on the side to upgrade your car, before the second half of the game where the game becomes aggressively linear and plays more like a standard shooter. Also the vast majority of people are Australian in homage to Mad Max, which is a little on the nose.

Driving around the overworld, and I call it that because this is not an open world game, feels a lot like a precursor to Avalanche's Mad Max from 2015. You fight against other vehicles using dual miniguns, rocket launchers, and at the end of the game a pulse cannon, which pretty much invalidates the other two weapons by one-shotting every other vehicle in the game. Occasionally you will be giving a mini-quest while driving which will earn you extra money, mostly this involves killing a number of enemies in the area but sometimes you have to chase down feltrite meteorites (more on that later). There are also 'stunt jumps' where you smash drones which hang in the air, which grant you crafting materials.

The enemies move very dynamically, climbing over the environment and dodging sensibly rather than the typical instant side step when you line up on them many games have. The mutants are mostly small fucks who run straight at you but there are a couple of special enemies, on called the Kraken who has tenticles for arms, and a giant enemy who uses an artillery cannon as a gun. The raiders even have little personality moves that don't help them at all, sometimes you'll see a raider do a little 'combat roll' that barely takes him anywhere and you just get the feeling he's trying really hard to be cool. The only game which comes close to having animations as dynamic is DOOM. Another feature which is really good is enemy communication, often I heard enemies giving each other instructions and actually following them. Notably in one fight I had shot but not killed an enemy, another shouted "Back up, I'll cover you." He then popped out of cover and started shooting at me as his friend ran away behind him. The Authority enemies later on also move in groups and communicate your position to each other.

The gunplay in Rage is quite good too, most of the weapons feel satisfying to use and there are different ammo types which change how some of the weapons work. You start off with just your fists but they're completely useless, the game flags that you can always hit enemies if you're in a tight spot but melee in the game is about as effective as slightly blowing at the enemy. There's an array of weapons, most of which are useful and cover a specific niche.
-The Settler Pistol is a shitty handgun which fires tiny bullets which do no damage. It takes 8 body shots of the 12 in a cylinder to kill basic enemies, or 3 headshots instead. The pistol can also use Fatboys, which are more limited to 6 shots per reload but can actually kill things, Fatmamas which reduce the ammo count to 4 but deal massive damage, and the Killburst ammo which uses the entire magazine in one shot though it still requires multiple shots to kill anything above basic bandits (and it changes the gun into a pistol rather than a revolver).

-The Assault Rifle is an AK which is held together with tape, it fires either steel tipped rounds or feltrite armour piercing rounds. Once you have access to the feltrite rounds there's no reason to use the steel tipped rounds again. This weapon has little recoil and a decent rate of fire, making it a great primary to use through the game, though the hip fire spread is a little much to rely on. It can later be replaced by the Authority Machinegun, but its lack of a scope may make it preferable for general use.

-The most useful weapon is the shotgun. If you're like me and you judge shooters by their shotguns have no fear, this is a good gun. The hip fire has enough spread to make it the ideal close range weapon while aiming down the sights tightens the spread and increases the weapon's range. The shotgun can also use Pulse Slugs, electric ammo which can disable Autority shields, damage robots, and activate electrical boxes in the environment, though this has limited use. The most important feature however is the Poprockets, these are miniature rockets which instagib most enemies in the game and stagger everything else. They kill minibosses in only a few shots too. To be honest they kind of trivialise the game once you get good with them. The shotgun gets an upgrade to make it a semiautomatic magazine loading weapon, rather than pump action as it starts.

-The Desert Striker Crossbow is shit. The standard steel tipped bolts don't do enough damage to justify the low fire rate. The electro bolts can electrify water, but it's very situational and is usually faster to just shoot the enemies. The mind control bolts are just a very slow means of blowing enemies up, and the dynamite bolts are just grenades that you have to reload every shot. The game makes a big deal about Dan Hagar giving it to you, he should keep it.

-The sniper rifle. It's a sniper rifle. It has an upgrade to make it semi auto. It doesn't even get an alternate ammo type. It's okay.

-The rocket launcher, it comes with a tracking system so you can lock on to enemies, and there are Viper rockets which only lock on to vehicles. There's not many reasons to use the rocket launcher, you'll be using your vehicle's weapon in the overworld, and there are very few enemies strong enough to justify using rockets on.

-The Authority Machine Gun is mostly an upgrade over the Assault Rifle with a faster rate of fire, more damage, a larger magazine, and better hip fire accuracy. It does have more recoil and an integrated scope means it's not optimal for close quarters combat. It uses standard machinegun ammo and AV2x ammo, which is like the Assault Rifle's feltrite ammo, pretty much a direct upgrade over normal ammo.

-The final weapon in the base game is the Authority Pulse Cannon. It's a minigun, it's a BFG. It's acquired after the briefing for the final level. Buying max ammo for this as soon as you get it isn't a terrible idea, though it isn't required.

Every weapon can hold 999 + one magazine of the current ammo type. So you can have 1,007 poprockets, or 1,039 machine gun ammo, if you pick that ammo up while at the cap. You also have access to quick slot gadgets. These are crafted in the inventory screen and range from quite useful to a complete waste of time. You have the wingsticks which are quick offhand weapons which slightly home in on enemies, a sentry bot and a sentry turret which are powerful, an explosive RC car which is a waste of time and resources, and various healing items and buff which I never used.

The missions are all very straight forward, go in kill everything and occasionally grab a thing or flip a switch, and the levels are fairly well designed. Some can be a little too simple at times, and they can be very dark. As the game goes on the strictly linear levels become more akin to Final Fantasy 13, with the final level taking place almost entirely within one long, winding corridor. Though linear the missions tend to twist around on themselves allowing you to see future areas early and to engage enemies who filter in behind you.

The story is forgettable and nothing much happens. The Earth got hit by the asteroid 99942 Apophis in the year 2062, destroying most life on the planet. Luckily the government (only America is mentioned) has created the Arks to hold 8 super humans each to repopulate and fix the Earth. Those people are trained to survive in extreme conditions and filled with nanomachines called "nanotrites" which give them generic enhancements that make them better than normal people, in other words they're the protagonists. You emerge from an Ark as the sole survivor as the internal systems of your Ark are inexplicably damaged, causing everyone else to die and mummify for some reason. You are attacked by bandits as soon as you leave and are saved by Dan Hagar, voiced by John Goodman. From there you run errands for anyone who asks until the game remembers it needs to have a story, when it introduces the Resistance who are fighting the Authority. Very little is explained except that some general from before the asteroid reprogrammed Arks filled with his allies to activate early so he could take over, thus they formed the Authority. The Authority activate and track down Arks to either recruit or kill the Ark survivors, they also are slowly expanding their control over the wasteland.

Also, 99942 Apophis is made of feltrite which is meant to be some super material but it's never explained what it is. If combined with plutonium it apparently makes a shit ton of energy, and otherwise is used as armour piercing ammo. You find chunks of it in game but it's only handed in for one side mission and sold otherwise.

The characters all have great models, well detailed and I'm pretty sure that every single 'villager' is unique. The animations during dialogue are really good too, which surprised me, and the characters mostly have a noticeable personality. The missions they give out are far less interesting and the game has a weird method of having characters explain the mission and then bringing up a text description of the mission which was just described to you. You can accept or decline every mission even though there's no reason to decline anything.

I remember liking Rage back when I first played it and coming back to it I was very impressed with how it held up. I never played the DLC before, because it refused to install on my 360, so now that I've played it on the PC I'll give a mercifully short review of it too.

The Scorchers DLC is a chain of side missions which take place in the first half of the main game. It takes you into a number of new environments including "actually interesting caves" and "suspiciously intact ancient ruins". The missions are more interesting than in the main game and you get a sidekick called Sarah who kicks some ass along the way, before being kidnapped. The story is incredibly simple, there's a group of raider called The Scorchers, they're mining feltrite and oil and planning on burning everyone, kill them. Playing through the DLC will get you a free Assault Rifle (though I had already bought one), an early rocket launcher, and a nailgun, the new weapon added to the game. The nailgun has 3 ammo types but each ammo type changes how the weapon works radically.
-The nailgun configuration is a highly inaccurate, very weak SMG that holds 100 nails in a magazine and shoots faster than anything else. It's only effective against the weakest enemies.
-The rebar configuration is the crossbow from Half-Life 2. The Crosssbow should have been this.
-The railgun is overpowered. It lets you see and shoot enemies through walls, it can penetrate infinitely. The only downsides are that the ammo is expensive and it gibs enemies, so you can't loot their bodies.

The Sewers DLC adds new job board mission to go into the sewers and kill the enemies for $100 each. The sewers already existed in the game, this just adds the missions. It's free so it's at least not a rip off.

The Anarchy and Campign DLC are pre-order bonuses you can't get any more. They add a double barrel shotgun much like Mad Max's (in the Anarchy edition) and the Fists of Rage which is an upgrade to the fists (in both editions). I don't have these DLC weapons and I don't care for them, I just thought they should be mentioned.

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Now that that is out of the way, thanks to those of you who read all that. Sorry again to everyone else. Replaying Rage has made me quite excited for Rage 2, the car combat is similar, but inferior, to Mad Max's car combat. If Avalanche Studios bring that into the game along with gunplay informed by id I can see Rage 2 being really good. Many of Rage's problems have to do with it not fully embracing any of the open world car gameplay and the limited combat encounters. The longer I played the game the more the colourful elements of Rage 2 appeal to me. Rage used all the shades of brown on the spectrum. It even mocked it itself with the all brown Quayola crayons item, which is an obvious reference to Quake.

I hope that they don't throw out everything from the first game in making the second, but Kvasir was in the E3 trailer so I don't think that'll happen. I also hope they bring back the player character, who is apparently called Nicholas Raine, because I never like when games have player characters who do world altering shit and then act like they don't exist in the sequels.

[DiscoInferno]

I see how it is. I'm not one of the cool kids so you resurrect an old thread while mine is still up. The things I've given to this community...

Shadowrun Returns

Everything fantastic about this game is overshadowed by the miscalculations that mean 80% chance to hit really means 5% because I just got through some straight bullshit bad luck runs.

Fucking this game 1/10

[Halflight]

I have this friend who regards the Metal Gear Solid series as basically the best thing which ever happened to the world of videogames, with me joking about this pretty much constantly.

Since he got his hands on the Metal Gear Solid Legacy Collection on PS3, he proposed me a deal: he would had played all the games from the Kingdom Hearts series released this far on the PS4 (a series I often talk about with him, since my friends mock it every chance they get) if I promised to play all the Metal Gear Solid games directed by Kojima (escluding missions or time trials modes of any kind and the first two games ever from the franchise, Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake).

I accepted.

Metal Gear Solid (Hideo Kojima, 1998, Playstation) - Between a 8 and a 9/10

Let's just say in advance that this game didn't age very well. Not surprisingly, since it's now 20 years old.

To be more precise:

The controls take some time to get used to, especially the directional controls and moving Snake around for aiming (no analog stick here), and even then they are exceptionally clunky. This is a problem because several encounters relay on the player having enough good reflex to switch his aim and/or gear quickly, with certain death awaiting you if you can't get into the flow.
At the time of the game's release the lenght and general aboundance of cutscenes and speeches, with a greater emphasis on plot, was a very welcomed novelty, especially for an action game such as this. Nowadays, however, this can't look as groundbreaking as in the past and, worse still, the number of cutscenes interrupting the (admittedly short) playthrought may be a bit too much for a modern audience.

All of that said, I did enjoy the game. The stealth gameplay still holds up to this day and the whole game is basically you moving from one unique boss encounter to the next, and they are each very, very good. It also helps that basically all the characters, be them on the good guys or bad guys side, are each extremely memorable and Kojima manages at several points to integrate gameplay and story in ways I've never seen done elsewhere.

I was worried that Kojima's unique flavor of writing was going to be too over the top for my tastes (I problem I have with most of the Japanese production these days), but while the game is filled with cheesy lines, absurd situations and seemingly very odd plot turns, the whole narrative managed to stay grounded and mature enough, as far as I was concerned.

To be perfectly honest though the very final stages of the game really tired me out, to the point I tried to get to the end as fast as possible out of sheer frustration.

Basically:

While the game has lots of backtracking to be done in general, towards the end the simple act of inserting a code card in a terminal to seemingly stop he big bad's plan becomes an occasion to make you backtrack THRICE through the area you just visited. And the last two slogs aren't exactly short either.
The big bad and final boss shows an utter refusal to stay fucking DEAD. First you have to destroy his Metal Gear. Then destroy the Metal Gear, but this time is harder. Then have a yer olde fistcuffs fight with him at the top of said Metal Gear. Then you must shoot him with a gun turret while you are making an escape via car. Then he finally dies in a cutscene.

For fuck's sake.

[Janus Vesta]

Resurrecting an old thread to talk about a zombie game. Rather appropriate I think. I won't write a book this time, I swear.

Dying Light (2015)

7/10, you spend too long at the start with restricted abilities. The game shines once your skill tree is all unlocked but that takes way too long.

Dying Light focuses heavily on melee combat and free running, two systems which work remarkably well when the game isn't actively sabotaging itself. Dying Light uses a levelling system with 3 skill trees, the problem is that the agility and power skill trees mostly serve to limit your access to abilities the game was very clearly designed around.

In one of the earliest missions of the game you're tasked with arming traps around the city, but you don't gain the ability to use any traps until you reach a certain level and have the prerequisite perks. It also takes 3 perks to unlock all the trap types. The traps don't even appear in the game world until you have the ability to use them. This makes it feel very much like the game was designed without the perk system at first and it was shoehorned in later.

Similarly the melee system is severely limited until you unlock the ability to do charged attacks or drop attacks. Zombies are also ridiculously durable, surviving upward of ten strikes to the head with a hammer at times, until I unlocked the melee finisher I dreaded having to actually engage in combat. At the end of the game, once I had weapons that could actually kill zombies quickly, I had a great time playing the game. You don't need damage sponge enemies when you have literally endless hordes of them with complete justification.

Guns are very satisfying to use, but they're somewhat clunky to use in an effort to encourage melee combat. This works in the game's favour as it means guns are best used against human enemies or as an opener against strong zombies. The encounters with humans are mostly quite good, with the abundance of armed enemies and the small ammo pool encouraging you to push forward, while ammo is never actually in short supply.

The special infected are mostly just annoying, though that's a problem with pretty much every zombie game so not much to say about it. Having enemies which just tank damage, dodge your attacks or cover your screen in shit is rarely fun.

The story is fine, it's pretty predicable but it gets the job done. The few characters you do interact with are likeable while the bad guys are hate-able without coming across as cartoonish. Crane, the player character, is pretty good. I especially like how he isn't a doormat and actually comes up with shit to do. The biggest problem is the game is mostly made up of fetch quests and "Go run into this obvious ambush" scenarios.

Dying Light: The Following (2016)

8/10, big improvement. Too many toxic barrels on the roads though.

The Following adds a buggy to the gameplay allowing you to mow down zombies in style. Much like the base game the buggy's skill mostly serve as a way of locking off abilities. Unlike the base game these abilities are just nice additions (like a flamethrower) or the ability to craft better parts for the buggy, which can be found in chests to varying degrees. Also the driving skill levels up quite quickly, you get points for driving quickly (with more points the faster you go), smashing obstacles, and running over zombies. The game also offers challenges for going fast or smashing things which give a lot of experience, making levelling a much more natural part of play.

The missions in The Following mostly ditch the fetch quest formula (mostly) and instead settles for "Go to X, kill Y". Which is just as basic but it doesn't require you to go back to base to just get the experience. Crane is also much more talkative during missions, which helps keep things interesting.

The story centres around a cult who have the ability to prevent people turning into zombies and it's pretty interesting. The cult seem creepy but are actually kind of legit, and the people are pretty cool once you earn their trust. Earning trust is meant to be a mechanic but I managed to max it out just by unlocking all the safe houses at the beginning, so it was never a roadblock for me. It did make the radio messages a little disjointed when I was old I was a faithful follower followed by being told I need to deepen my faith to earn the cult's trust. There's an obligatory 'moral choice' at the end of the story and I actually had to think about it for a bit. For those who care I chose to nuke Harran.

The expansion adds a bunch of new melee weapons which are mostly cosmetic differences to the old weapon types, but are fun enough. It also adds a pump action shotgun and two SMGs to the game, with the SMGs being much more powerful than their stats would imply. By the end I was running around with 3 swords and a spraypaint SMG, which made me very powerful.

Altogether the game and expansion are very good, but the first 10 or so hours of levelling drag the game down. I played for 69 hours according to steam and I feel like 15 of those hours were a waste of time. I hope Dying Light 2 cuts down on the grind and focuses on making interesting missions and levels.