The most annoying thing is that TES VI won't have better graphics than these.
Who needs TES VI when V, VI, III, and even II are still great games. (Arena I never got into, so personally I don't consider it great.)
Skyrim I'm nowhere near done with, at least SE. It has infinite replayability with mods -- and that Extended Cut one looks like it will add at least dozens of hours, assuming it lives up to even some of what the trailer says.
Doom Eternal
Maybe a little late, but finally I found enough time to finish new Doom. While I played the original trilogy, reboot from 2016 was one title which went right past me, mostly because at the time my hardware simply wasn't good enough to handle it and after an upgrade, my backlog was so packed, the thought of playing it didn't even cross my mind. But based on what I've heard, Eternal is very loosely connected to the previous game, so carried by the hype built around it while looking for some lighter experience, I decided to start with the sequel.
Right to the point, Doom Eternal is straight up awesome. It's a frantic, (mostly) oldschool shooter, with an extremely wild pacing, in which staying in one place for a couple of seconds, might end in a death. DIfficulty level, because of that, might seem very high, but I think it's completely fair. Often you face against enemies so various and numerous, that you might feel like winning is impossible, but with time you just find the right rhytm to all of it and then, when everything goes silent and only living things beside you on the battlefield are the crawling zombies, serving as a moving armor and health containers, you start looking back on all of that happened while wondering how the hell you managed to get through all of that, while at the same time feeling an immense satisfaction from the fact that you did. What's more, most demons possess weak points, which are not necessary to kill them, but make the encounters much easier, so you don't rely just on a quick fingers in a fight, but on a quick thinking as well.
Doom Slayer in his (holy) quest of exterminating the demonic hordes, which invaded the Earth, uses a wide variety of tools, including his guns, most of which have two additional modes, which might completely alter the way they works, providing you with more options of taking down the hellish spawns, so for example Heavy Cannon, which normally acts like a rifle, can be turned into a sniper rifle or missile launcher with a press of a button. Personally I relied more on the faster weapons, like Heavy Cannon, Plasma Rifle and Chaingun, but Rocket Launcher and shotguns too proved themselves to be quite useful in majority of encounters, especially against stronger demons. On top of that, we have some additional weapons and skills in our repertoire, such as two types of grenades (exploding and freezing types), flamethrower, chainsaw, strong punch and much later we also unlock something called The Crucible, which allows us to take enemy down with just a single hit, but it requires a special ammo, which is why I didn't rely on it too much, outside of the final boss battle. We can regain health via executions (called Glory Kills) and the armor by setting our enemies on fire with a flamethrower, which also helps to maintain the crazy pacing of the game.
Doom offers quite a bit of additional content. Outside of multiplayer, we have an expert levels, additional outfits to unlock, secrets on the map, like cheats, action figures and music from the previous id Software games, which are later available in Doom Fortress, our hub between levels, and even hidden in-game Doom 1 and 2. During levels we have an additional challenges to complete, including Slayer Gates, leading to especially difficult encounters, for completion of which we are awarded with a special weapon (although, on a personal note, I found it a tad disappointing). There are stations and collectibles spread across the maps, which allow us to upgrade our Doom Slayer in an RPG fashion, but to me it seemed like only the weapon modifications and runes made a true gameplay difference and everything else were just an afterthought to make the game look deeper then it really is, which doesn't really fit such an oldschool FPS like that. Outside of combat, the game creators added a bit of diversity via platforming sections, in which we need to rely on abilities such as double jumps, wall climbing and ledge grabbing. I enjoyed most of them, because they were pretty simple and fun, while providing a nice diversion for my trigger finger, but some of them were pretty poorly thought out, like the one which require from us to fight the enemies while being slow down by the sludge or when we need to swim across the section of the level. Those are rather poorly designed and only detract from the rest of the experience. Fortunately there is not that many badly implemented ones.
Although the core gameplay is excellent, not everything around it proved to be as high in terms of quality, more specifically I'm talking about the story here. On one hand, it's very robust and you can see that developers put a lot of effort into it, judging by the extensive descriptions of locations, characters, demons and lore, which we can unlock via exploration. On the other hand, it affects the gameplay so little, it was impossible to me to get engaged by it. Reading this extensive and dramatic lore, just to in the next second jump from platform to platform via illogically placed energy launchers and collect hovering above the ground and brightly lit power ups, I had a feeling that the team had a few aspiring writers who were locked in separate room to not distract the rest of the team working on the gameplay and locations. The story and rest of the game feel like two separate entities, which results in the plot only distracting from the gameplay rather then enhancing it. While the first person cutscenes at least somewhat maintain the over the top style of the rest of the game, third person ones feel like they were ripped out from a Gears of War, they are just so pompous and deadly serious. Sure, you can ignore it, but it's such a big part of the game, it's a shame it wasn't implemented in a more sensible way. I didn't enjoy the humor of the game as well, since I felt like it was limited to just two routines: Chuck Norris jokes, but with a Doom Slayer and cultist "this is fine" propaganda, which became repetetive pretty quickly.
However, despite the weak story and inconsistent tone, the gameplay itself is a insanely satisfying rollercoaster, which is just as challenging, as it's engaging. As a pure action game, it has barely any competition among the modern titles and just because of that it's definitely worth buying. I strongly recommend it!
Pros
+ challenging and satisfying gameplay
+ diverse arsenal of weapons
+ tightly designed enemies
+ large amount of secrets and extra content
+ enjoyable platforming sections, which requires a bit of thinking
Cons
- extensive, but unengaging story
- inconsistent tone and cutscenes take player out of the experience
- some platforming sections are boring filler
- repetetive humor
8+/10
Maybe a little late, but finally I found enough time to finish new Doom. While I played the original trilogy, reboot from 2016 was one title which went right past me, mostly because at the time my hardware simply wasn't good enough to handle it and after an upgrade, my backlog was so packed, the thought of playing it didn't even cross my mind. But based on what I've heard, Eternal is very loosely connected to the previous game, so carried by the hype built around it while looking for some lighter experience, I decided to start with the sequel.
Right to the point, Doom Eternal is straight up awesome. It's a frantic, (mostly) oldschool shooter, with an extremely wild pacing, in which staying in one place for a couple of seconds, might end in a death. DIfficulty level, because of that, might seem very high, but I think it's completely fair. Often you face against enemies so various and numerous, that you might feel like winning is impossible, but with time you just find the right rhytm to all of it and then, when everything goes silent and only living things beside you on the battlefield are the crawling zombies, serving as a moving armor and health containers, you start looking back on all of that happened while wondering how the hell you managed to get through all of that, while at the same time feeling an immense satisfaction from the fact that you did. What's more, most demons possess weak points, which are not necessary to kill them, but make the encounters much easier, so you don't rely just on a quick fingers in a fight, but on a quick thinking as well.
Doom Slayer in his (holy) quest of exterminating the demonic hordes, which invaded the Earth, uses a wide variety of tools, including his guns, most of which have two additional modes, which might completely alter the way they works, providing you with more options of taking down the hellish spawns, so for example Heavy Cannon, which normally acts like a rifle, can be turned into a sniper rifle or missile launcher with a press of a button. Personally I relied more on the faster weapons, like Heavy Cannon, Plasma Rifle and Chaingun, but Rocket Launcher and shotguns too proved themselves to be quite useful in majority of encounters, especially against stronger demons. On top of that, we have some additional weapons and skills in our repertoire, such as two types of grenades (exploding and freezing types), flamethrower, chainsaw, strong punch and much later we also unlock something called The Crucible, which allows us to take enemy down with just a single hit, but it requires a special ammo, which is why I didn't rely on it too much, outside of the final boss battle. We can regain health via executions (called Glory Kills) and the armor by setting our enemies on fire with a flamethrower, which also helps to maintain the crazy pacing of the game.
Doom offers quite a bit of additional content. Outside of multiplayer, we have an expert levels, additional outfits to unlock, secrets on the map, like cheats, action figures and music from the previous id Software games, which are later available in Doom Fortress, our hub between levels, and even hidden in-game Doom 1 and 2. During levels we have an additional challenges to complete, including Slayer Gates, leading to especially difficult encounters, for completion of which we are awarded with a special weapon (although, on a personal note, I found it a tad disappointing). There are stations and collectibles spread across the maps, which allow us to upgrade our Doom Slayer in an RPG fashion, but to me it seemed like only the weapon modifications and runes made a true gameplay difference and everything else were just an afterthought to make the game look deeper then it really is, which doesn't really fit such an oldschool FPS like that. Outside of combat, the game creators added a bit of diversity via platforming sections, in which we need to rely on abilities such as double jumps, wall climbing and ledge grabbing. I enjoyed most of them, because they were pretty simple and fun, while providing a nice diversion for my trigger finger, but some of them were pretty poorly thought out, like the one which require from us to fight the enemies while being slow down by the sludge or when we need to swim across the section of the level. Those are rather poorly designed and only detract from the rest of the experience. Fortunately there is not that many badly implemented ones.
Although the core gameplay is excellent, not everything around it proved to be as high in terms of quality, more specifically I'm talking about the story here. On one hand, it's very robust and you can see that developers put a lot of effort into it, judging by the extensive descriptions of locations, characters, demons and lore, which we can unlock via exploration. On the other hand, it affects the gameplay so little, it was impossible to me to get engaged by it. Reading this extensive and dramatic lore, just to in the next second jump from platform to platform via illogically placed energy launchers and collect hovering above the ground and brightly lit power ups, I had a feeling that the team had a few aspiring writers who were locked in separate room to not distract the rest of the team working on the gameplay and locations. The story and rest of the game feel like two separate entities, which results in the plot only distracting from the gameplay rather then enhancing it. While the first person cutscenes at least somewhat maintain the over the top style of the rest of the game, third person ones feel like they were ripped out from a Gears of War, they are just so pompous and deadly serious. Sure, you can ignore it, but it's such a big part of the game, it's a shame it wasn't implemented in a more sensible way. I didn't enjoy the humor of the game as well, since I felt like it was limited to just two routines: Chuck Norris jokes, but with a Doom Slayer and cultist "this is fine" propaganda, which became repetetive pretty quickly.
However, despite the weak story and inconsistent tone, the gameplay itself is a insanely satisfying rollercoaster, which is just as challenging, as it's engaging. As a pure action game, it has barely any competition among the modern titles and just because of that it's definitely worth buying. I strongly recommend it!
Pros
+ challenging and satisfying gameplay
+ diverse arsenal of weapons
+ tightly designed enemies
+ large amount of secrets and extra content
+ enjoyable platforming sections, which requires a bit of thinking
Cons
- extensive, but unengaging story
- inconsistent tone and cutscenes take player out of the experience
- some platforming sections are boring filler
- repetetive humor
8+/10
Nice review!
I haven't played eternal yet, but I really liked Doom 2016 even if I usually dislike FPSs. This one is on my list for 2021, as soon as I'll have time for it.
I believe I didn't posted my review for Yakuza 0 here, just my general impressions before I even finished the game, so here it is.
Yakuza 0
Yakuza (in Japan known as Ryu ga Gotoku, which can be translated as Like a Dragon) was one series that caught my eye many years ago, around the time Yakuza 3 was coming out, but since it was a Sony exclusive, I was unable to check it out myself, but that changed with the release of the PC ports for Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and Kiwami 2. What's more, Yakuza 0 act as a prequel to the whole series, while Kiwami games are the remakes of the first two Yakuza titles, so that made them quite a nice entry point for a new fans such as myself.
As one can expect after title like that, Yakuza 0 is a game heavily inspired by the style of the japanese gangster movies, the world of more or less honorable, tattoos and fancy suits wearing badasses, whose every word sound like a clang of steel, following (when it's convenient) only their own set of rules and resolving heated disputes via bare fists more often then with lead. Game number Zero takes place in the 80's in Kamurocho, Tokio's entertainment district, and Sotenbori, part of Osaka famous for it's cabarets, in the middle of japanese economy golden hour, when yen seems to flow almost endlessly, each business brings more profits then ever before and the overworked office workers spend millions on various pleasures the city has to offer. In a paradise for an opportunistic businessmen like that, the presence of Yakuza is pretty much unavoidable, in case of Kamurocho the one pulling the strings on their side is Dojima Family, who also wishes to obtain their own piece of that delicious cake.
In above circumstances, we meet the franchise main protagonist, Kiryu Kazuma, Dojima Family's soldier, for whom a regular extortion in, seemingly, random alley turns into a frame job for an unauthorized murder which he didn't commit. And not just any old murder, but one that puts in jeopardy Family's plans worth billions of legally owned yen. Becoming a target of his own organisation, Kiryu now needs to prove his innocence and find out who is behind it all... or so it seems in the beginning, but his goals change with time, which of course I'm not going to spoil. Story of Kiryu is connected to the second playable protagonist, Majima Goro, Mad Dog of Shimano, who after falling out of grace with his boss, gets banished from Yakuza and is now forced to make up for his betrayal by working as a manager of cabaret in Sotenbori, but unexpectedly he gets a chance to return to organisation. In order to do so, he just needs to complete a single task: first time in his career take someone's life.
Right away I must say that story and characters in Yakuza 0 are one of it's greatest strengths. Story cutscenes are expertly directed, written, acted out (in Japanese only) and full of style typical for above mentioned Yakuza movies (developers even got an actors known for this genre to provide a look and voices for some major characters). Sure, sometimes it might feel a little like a soap opera, which is not uncommon even in the movies it's inspired by, but the narrative as a whole is so well done, it's hard to get angry about it. Characters are very engaging and memorable thanks to game writing and their voice acting, which includes our two leads. Kiryu is honorable, loyal, noble in his own way, direct and takes everything very seriously (which is a great source of comedy during some of the side activities), so it's difficult to not like him. Majima is a charismatic and cunning businessman who behind pretty and gentle face hides a caged beast ready to take over (in metaphorical sense, of course). Even less important characters didn't left me indifferent to them, although at times I felt like some of them were removed from the story a little too soon, like developers had not enough time and money to fully implement the storyline that they planned for them.
Three paragraphs about the plot and I didn't even mentioned anything about the gameplay, but I assure you, it's not because I found it lacking. Yakuza is an action RPG, in which combat plays out in a style similar to classic beat'em ups. In battles we use two types of combo attacks, ability to grab enemy in order to smash their face from up close or to throw them on the ground, blocks, dodges, various interactive objects that we can use as a temporary weapons (like signs, bikes or... oranges) and equippable weapons (swords and guns, among others), which we can only use a limited number of times, after all our primary form of combat is fist fighting. Kiryu and Majima have four different combat styles, in both cases the fourth one is a combination of the other three and unlocked only after completion of a long sidequest. Styles used by Kiryu are Brawler (solid balance between the speed and the attack power), Rush (greater mobility with less power) and Beast (low mobility, but great attack power), while Majima relies on Thug (similar to Brawler, although it relies more on dirty tricks, like shoving your fingers into enemy's eyes or choking him from behind), Slugger (weapon based style with baseball bat as default mean of pressure, with great power and solid range, but not very useful in closed spaces) and Breaker (mix of martial arts and breakdance, making up for a lack of power with attack speed and range). Each fighting style has it's own skill tree with additional buffs, new abilities and moves to unlock, but instead of experience points, for that purpose, in a spirit of prosperous japanese economy, we are using our own cash, literally investing into ourselves. The crucial part of the combat system is a Heat Gauge, which increases during the fight, as long as we avoid getting hit. After it's reaches a certain level (represented via aura around our character), we become stronger and tougher, but on top of that we can use up our Heat Gauge on so called Heat Actions, a contextual special attacks dealing a significant amount of damage. Those Heat Actions depend on certain conditions, like environment (for example, smashing someone's head with a door of the car next to us), position (for example, to perform the chokehold in a Thug style, we need to find ourselves behind the backs of disoriented enemies) and the weapons we are currently using (like bike, which we can literally break on someone's head). Each style serves a purpose in the game and learning them might lead to a pretty flashy combat encounters.
Outside of combat and the main story, we are free to explore above mentioned districts, which combined are closer in size to Vizima from The Witcher 1 then Novigrad, however in such a limited space developers packed a tons of additional content. There is around 100 sidequests, in which, as opposed to more serious main story, devs were allowed to go crazy and came up with some really creative issues for Kiryu and Majima to deal with. Most of them have something unique in them and tell a full fledged story, some even introduce characters and plotlines from earlier/future parts of the series. Like with a Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you don't know what exactly you will find in it, sometimes quest which starts in a really absurd way might lead to a heartfelt story or it might be the other way around. Some of my favorites are the dialogue heavy ones, like Kiryu doing job interviews or Majima infiltrating a sect.
Even if we would choose to ignore sidequests, Kamurocho and Sotenbori offers a wide variety of different side activities, so many in fact that hardly any open world game matches Yakuza 0 in this category. Shops with various items, restaurants and booths with local dishes to try out, bars when we can have a drink while listening to trivia from the bartenders about the beverages we are having (there is one interesting sidequest tied to that, so it's better to pay attention), mahjong, shogi, fishing, collecting the telephone cards with the photos of (dressed up) porn stars, karaoke, disco dancing, watching softcore porn videos, illegal martial arts tournament, billard, dart throwing (with a few variations, including the drunken one), RC cars racing (with car customization), phone dates, several types of games with dice, betting on a "catfights" (as I said before, of scantily clad women, not actual cats, thank God), real estate management, cabaret club management (best minigame in a video game history, Gwent and Pazaak have nothing to say on that), blackjack, baccarat, texas hold'em, roulette, bowling, UFO catcher machines, a few Sega games for arcades, baseball and some others as well. Yes, I spend this whole paragraph on just naming most of them. Thanks to their variety, everyone should find something for themselves. Many of those minigames can be played online as well.
Some people might be turned off from the game due to it's low budget in a certain aspects, like for example scenes which are not related to the main story are not voice acted, they have very limited animation in the cutscenes, much lower quality models and very repetetive music (which otherwise is amazing). Even story cutscenes are not exactly consistent when it comes to presentation, they can jump between beautiful prerendered cutscenes, much uglier in-game cinematics and even occasionally switch to still shots with a voice over. However if we can look past that, Yakuza 0 is an insanely stylish and robust game with great story and enjoyable combat, which offers dozens hours worth of content (main story with majority of quests and some side activities took me more then 80 hours and you can easily get more then 100 out of it). It's one of my new favorites and personally I can't recommend it enough.
Pros
+ engaging story and characters
+ general style and presentation
+ fun combat with a lot of variety
+ creative and interesting sidequests
+ staggering amount of side activities
+ excellent soundtrack
Cons
- side content is made on a budget, which might turn some people off
- repetetive music during sidequests
- certain characters could use a little more screen time
My rating: 9/10
Yakuza 0
Yakuza (in Japan known as Ryu ga Gotoku, which can be translated as Like a Dragon) was one series that caught my eye many years ago, around the time Yakuza 3 was coming out, but since it was a Sony exclusive, I was unable to check it out myself, but that changed with the release of the PC ports for Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and Kiwami 2. What's more, Yakuza 0 act as a prequel to the whole series, while Kiwami games are the remakes of the first two Yakuza titles, so that made them quite a nice entry point for a new fans such as myself.
As one can expect after title like that, Yakuza 0 is a game heavily inspired by the style of the japanese gangster movies, the world of more or less honorable, tattoos and fancy suits wearing badasses, whose every word sound like a clang of steel, following (when it's convenient) only their own set of rules and resolving heated disputes via bare fists more often then with lead. Game number Zero takes place in the 80's in Kamurocho, Tokio's entertainment district, and Sotenbori, part of Osaka famous for it's cabarets, in the middle of japanese economy golden hour, when yen seems to flow almost endlessly, each business brings more profits then ever before and the overworked office workers spend millions on various pleasures the city has to offer. In a paradise for an opportunistic businessmen like that, the presence of Yakuza is pretty much unavoidable, in case of Kamurocho the one pulling the strings on their side is Dojima Family, who also wishes to obtain their own piece of that delicious cake.
In above circumstances, we meet the franchise main protagonist, Kiryu Kazuma, Dojima Family's soldier, for whom a regular extortion in, seemingly, random alley turns into a frame job for an unauthorized murder which he didn't commit. And not just any old murder, but one that puts in jeopardy Family's plans worth billions of legally owned yen. Becoming a target of his own organisation, Kiryu now needs to prove his innocence and find out who is behind it all... or so it seems in the beginning, but his goals change with time, which of course I'm not going to spoil. Story of Kiryu is connected to the second playable protagonist, Majima Goro, Mad Dog of Shimano, who after falling out of grace with his boss, gets banished from Yakuza and is now forced to make up for his betrayal by working as a manager of cabaret in Sotenbori, but unexpectedly he gets a chance to return to organisation. In order to do so, he just needs to complete a single task: first time in his career take someone's life.
Right away I must say that story and characters in Yakuza 0 are one of it's greatest strengths. Story cutscenes are expertly directed, written, acted out (in Japanese only) and full of style typical for above mentioned Yakuza movies (developers even got an actors known for this genre to provide a look and voices for some major characters). Sure, sometimes it might feel a little like a soap opera, which is not uncommon even in the movies it's inspired by, but the narrative as a whole is so well done, it's hard to get angry about it. Characters are very engaging and memorable thanks to game writing and their voice acting, which includes our two leads. Kiryu is honorable, loyal, noble in his own way, direct and takes everything very seriously (which is a great source of comedy during some of the side activities), so it's difficult to not like him. Majima is a charismatic and cunning businessman who behind pretty and gentle face hides a caged beast ready to take over (in metaphorical sense, of course). Even less important characters didn't left me indifferent to them, although at times I felt like some of them were removed from the story a little too soon, like developers had not enough time and money to fully implement the storyline that they planned for them.
Three paragraphs about the plot and I didn't even mentioned anything about the gameplay, but I assure you, it's not because I found it lacking. Yakuza is an action RPG, in which combat plays out in a style similar to classic beat'em ups. In battles we use two types of combo attacks, ability to grab enemy in order to smash their face from up close or to throw them on the ground, blocks, dodges, various interactive objects that we can use as a temporary weapons (like signs, bikes or... oranges) and equippable weapons (swords and guns, among others), which we can only use a limited number of times, after all our primary form of combat is fist fighting. Kiryu and Majima have four different combat styles, in both cases the fourth one is a combination of the other three and unlocked only after completion of a long sidequest. Styles used by Kiryu are Brawler (solid balance between the speed and the attack power), Rush (greater mobility with less power) and Beast (low mobility, but great attack power), while Majima relies on Thug (similar to Brawler, although it relies more on dirty tricks, like shoving your fingers into enemy's eyes or choking him from behind), Slugger (weapon based style with baseball bat as default mean of pressure, with great power and solid range, but not very useful in closed spaces) and Breaker (mix of martial arts and breakdance, making up for a lack of power with attack speed and range). Each fighting style has it's own skill tree with additional buffs, new abilities and moves to unlock, but instead of experience points, for that purpose, in a spirit of prosperous japanese economy, we are using our own cash, literally investing into ourselves. The crucial part of the combat system is a Heat Gauge, which increases during the fight, as long as we avoid getting hit. After it's reaches a certain level (represented via aura around our character), we become stronger and tougher, but on top of that we can use up our Heat Gauge on so called Heat Actions, a contextual special attacks dealing a significant amount of damage. Those Heat Actions depend on certain conditions, like environment (for example, smashing someone's head with a door of the car next to us), position (for example, to perform the chokehold in a Thug style, we need to find ourselves behind the backs of disoriented enemies) and the weapons we are currently using (like bike, which we can literally break on someone's head). Each style serves a purpose in the game and learning them might lead to a pretty flashy combat encounters.
Outside of combat and the main story, we are free to explore above mentioned districts, which combined are closer in size to Vizima from The Witcher 1 then Novigrad, however in such a limited space developers packed a tons of additional content. There is around 100 sidequests, in which, as opposed to more serious main story, devs were allowed to go crazy and came up with some really creative issues for Kiryu and Majima to deal with. Most of them have something unique in them and tell a full fledged story, some even introduce characters and plotlines from earlier/future parts of the series. Like with a Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you don't know what exactly you will find in it, sometimes quest which starts in a really absurd way might lead to a heartfelt story or it might be the other way around. Some of my favorites are the dialogue heavy ones, like Kiryu doing job interviews or Majima infiltrating a sect.
Even if we would choose to ignore sidequests, Kamurocho and Sotenbori offers a wide variety of different side activities, so many in fact that hardly any open world game matches Yakuza 0 in this category. Shops with various items, restaurants and booths with local dishes to try out, bars when we can have a drink while listening to trivia from the bartenders about the beverages we are having (there is one interesting sidequest tied to that, so it's better to pay attention), mahjong, shogi, fishing, collecting the telephone cards with the photos of (dressed up) porn stars, karaoke, disco dancing, watching softcore porn videos, illegal martial arts tournament, billard, dart throwing (with a few variations, including the drunken one), RC cars racing (with car customization), phone dates, several types of games with dice, betting on a "catfights" (as I said before, of scantily clad women, not actual cats, thank God), real estate management, cabaret club management (best minigame in a video game history, Gwent and Pazaak have nothing to say on that), blackjack, baccarat, texas hold'em, roulette, bowling, UFO catcher machines, a few Sega games for arcades, baseball and some others as well. Yes, I spend this whole paragraph on just naming most of them. Thanks to their variety, everyone should find something for themselves. Many of those minigames can be played online as well.
Some people might be turned off from the game due to it's low budget in a certain aspects, like for example scenes which are not related to the main story are not voice acted, they have very limited animation in the cutscenes, much lower quality models and very repetetive music (which otherwise is amazing). Even story cutscenes are not exactly consistent when it comes to presentation, they can jump between beautiful prerendered cutscenes, much uglier in-game cinematics and even occasionally switch to still shots with a voice over. However if we can look past that, Yakuza 0 is an insanely stylish and robust game with great story and enjoyable combat, which offers dozens hours worth of content (main story with majority of quests and some side activities took me more then 80 hours and you can easily get more then 100 out of it). It's one of my new favorites and personally I can't recommend it enough.
Pros
+ engaging story and characters
+ general style and presentation
+ fun combat with a lot of variety
+ creative and interesting sidequests
+ staggering amount of side activities
+ excellent soundtrack
Cons
- side content is made on a budget, which might turn some people off
- repetetive music during sidequests
- certain characters could use a little more screen time
My rating: 9/10
Oh s**t! That reminds me, I think I have a copy of the game on GOG that I totally forgot about
Schweeet.Oh s**t! That reminds me, I think I have a copy of the game on GOG that I totally forgot about
Enjoy your scrab cakes too! Make sure you wash 'em down with an icy cold SoulStorm Brew.
It appears in The Witcher 3 (as you might know):
So, my guess would be an artist from CDPR made this.
Yeah sure
That's where I saw it for the first time. My point is, I am looking for the specific artist - probably an in-house artist or maybe freelancer. I digged through artstation and other sources where I could find the author, but unfortunately I didn't find any. I'd love to see more artwork by this artist
OOOOOhh! That looks good. Hopefully Skyrim will be available on GOG by then, so I can play it again.
Post automatically merged:
You do raise an interesting point, in that I think video game artists frequently don't get the recognition that they deserve. Some of them are very talented.Yeah sure
I'd love to see more artwork by this artist
Yes, that artist deserves recognition for sure - personally it was the most impressive and moody moment in game for me...
and yes, I agree about recognition for artists in the industry (as one of them)
Since that would spoil the whole game for anyone brave enough to browse the internet, I'm pretty sure it will release on the 10th of December or a few days later and the shops just needs to update their pages.
The perfect excuse for me to finally give this trilogy a try. I’m not expecting a dramatically enhanced remaster, all I need is for it to run on modern machines and perhaps some gameplay improvements here and there.
Yep, current gen with next gen compatibilty plus improvements to be more precise, according to the link on the tweet:
That's awesome. It's kind of funny of how they say it's going to be forward compatibilty. My first time hearing somebody saying that.