Ok... so here is another edition of "Awful Games I have Been PLaying" or "Thank God I didn't pay for any of this crap!"...
First up to bat is the latest Bioshock... I have spoken elsewhere on this forum about my dissapointment for this game. My friend wouldn't shut up about how great it was, and what a neat concept it held. And he was half right... the concept was neat, but it's execution was awful. You know, I should probably post spoilers or something, but I'ma save you some trouble and jsut reveal the ending anyway. You go back in time and kill yourself. Absolutely nothing you do in the game has any impact, or matters in the slightest. So from a story standpoint, you wasted your time... hell if you want the exact same story, only without the pointless grinding, watch Butterfly Effect, as awful as that movie was, it was still a better story than this.
The combat was average, about what you would expect from any FPS, which is also dissapointing, because I don't care for FPS games, I want to see my character doing the cool shit. The characters... well really there are only two that matter... you and the chick, who at least you don't have to protect every second, even though she is really just along for the ride. Every other personality that shows up in the game is as utterly forgettable as the plot.
The one shining spot in the game is the concept of dimensional hopping... ti's done really well here, certainly better than Rifts, but even that fails to live up to potential, because rather than starting off in a groudned reality, and coming to this world of steampunk and floating sky islands, you are dropped right into the crazy, so ther is never really a sense of wonder about your surroundings, it's just there. The fact that the game is completely linear doesn't help either, a game where one of the themes is infinite possibilities falls laughably short when the reality of the game = straight unbroken line with no deviation.
Yeah, this game sucked, but it was fun, it was free, so it could have been worse.
Metro 2033.... this is the next game on the list. It was actually pretty enjoyable. I had been wanting to play it for a while, being the post apocalypse buff I am, and wanted to see what the Ruskie idea of post apocalypse was hd a certain intrigue and appeal to me. Unfortunately, while the game was fun, it was lacking pretty severely in some signifant ways. For a post apocalypse game there is surprisingly little salvage... sure there is some stuff, but it only falls into 2 categories... guns and ammo, and Gas Masks and Filters. Both of these are a bit problematic in that there are really only like 10 firearms available in the game, each with varying degrees of customization, but you can only ever carry 3 guns, and the amount of ammo you can carry is pretty limited as well.... which means you are leaving behind vast swathes of wealth. And if your gas mask gets damaged and you swap it out ofr a new one, your air filter time drops to zero... this can be a big deal as some of the levels that require it can be pretty difficult because of pixel bitchiness and vidion obstruction, and that fact that for he most part you will never have more than ten minutes of breathable air. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but the few vendors you can trade with are scattered throughout the game, and all but one takes place in an extra area where you can not return to or from... and even then the vendors don't sell filters, just guns and ammo... so in the salvge and barter aspect, this game fails pretty hard for me...
Combat is decent, it's first person, which again, I don't like, but it does a passable job.
Much like Bioshock, this game is compeltely linear, which is something else I do not care for, as I really think games should have moved past this nonsense by now. Yes, I do truly believe that open world should be the standard for games these days, in this generation... but thats me.
It's kinda wierd playing a game made by russians where you are fighting communists, I mean it totally makes sense, but it still feels wierd. Nazi's being there makes a little less sense, as you never see any minorities in the game anyway... so not sure what they are bitching about... but nazis are fun to kill so meh.
The monsters... mutants... whatever... are just lame... they never give me the thrill I get when fighting the human antagonists, but at least they aren't goddamn zombies.
At the core of the game you are running about the ruins of moscow looking for some mutant kid thing, which turns out to be kind of interesting for a thing with a face that looks like a rotten vagina. I could have done without the moster subplot, but oh well.
My biggest preoblem with the game is that nothing ever feels fully realized. You can feel the potential oozing t of every poor in the game and it's characters, but nothing ever feel as if it's being done justice. While Last Of Us had a very similiar feel, everything in that game, even for a linear platformer, felt realized. You wanted more, but what you got was satisfying and brilliant. This game doesn't have that. It could have, but it just didn't. I really wanted to explore the populated areas more, but they just felt so damn tiny... And the constraints of where you could move in this game felt all the more silly because of this, with invisible wall syndrome popping up in just plain silly places.
Overall I enjoyed it, but more for the feel of the tunnels and the people who live in them than anything to do with actually playing the game.
And this brings us to one of the worst games I have ever played... Remember Me is a game I was very much looking forward to playing, and much like Deus Ex: Human Revolution it dissapointed me utterly... but I went into this game without the excitement and hype I had for DE, and was still utterly shattered by how truly god awful this game was. Everything I hated about DE was amplified in the game, and it didn't have any of the things that made DE at least playable.
I am gonna start with what I liked about the game... because it won't take long. I like the idea of recording, storing and sharing memories on a grand scale and the ramifications of such. It's a neat idea, pretty much Braindance though it's not really presented as such. In fact it's talked about, and the effects of addiction are seen throughout, but it's never really shown as anything other than a plot tool, so even here they drop the ball. There are a few bits where you can go in and retro-actively fidget with a persons active memory, which is a tech level far above anything I hope CDRed tries for CP 2077, but it was kind of fun, though cheesy in execution and underutilized in the game seeing as how thats supposed to be the hero's special talent. Of course the real problem is that it is every equivalence but physical, rape. The character forces herself into someone elses mind, and violates them compeletely. In one instance causing a man to commit suicide, in another causing a woman to believe her husband is dead, and in another, using it to give her mummy a guilt trip. it wasn't long after this that I stopped playing, but more on that later.
Most of the scenery is pretty cool, it's your standard cyberpunky near future setting, projected hologram viewscreens everywhere. But the setting never once feels alive, where Deus EX at least had people on the street, having conversations, people who would react to you in at least a limited fashion, this game has none of that. In fact the number of times you encounter civilians on the streets is countable on one hand, a hand that's missing a couple of fingers. Then you have the ridiculously vast warehouses prisons whatever, which are apparently these huge places, that you can only get a glimpst of. Again Deus Ex suffered from this as well with all it's levels, but at least there there was a sense of urgency, the music tightened up, things happened around you to remind you that you are supposed to be in a hurry. Nope, this is just impossibly big shit because the designers thought it looked cool and put no more thought into it than that. Deus Ex, for linear platform bullshit, did it at least fairly well.... this game fails at it so miserably it makes your head hurt.
Combat.... oh holy shit... the combat in this game is mind numbingly repetitive and poorly done I thought I was going to stroke out. In the first place, it's a cyberpunk world, but there are apparently no sidearms... actually there are, we see a total of one gun in the game, it's usd by a guy to commit suicide after you mind rape him. Apparently every other gun in the game was destroyed... I dunno... I do know robots have missile launchers, Aerodynes have machine guns... but no one has a rifle or a handgun... and it feels fucking stupid. Instead you kung fu your way through the game... and the kung fu is weak. Seriously, it's the only method of combat in the game, and it is blown away by the kung fu in Sleeping Dogs... how the fuck does that happen? You get to set your own moves for combos, which also regenerate health and build up you special power reserve faster, but I have never been one to get the timing right on shit like this, so it just added to the frustration. The fights are never, ever, ever, interesting... they are just banal and bland, and of course, utterly frustrating. You progress in power in the game, so it compensates by just hrowing more of this crap at you... at which point you ask yourself, whats the point of progrerssing... and why doesn't this cunt pick up a knife, or a stick or a length of pipe... something... You gain powers in the game, which are almost well done, almost. Except they act like a laser gun somehow... and firing data at people makes them disappear somehow... I dunno, by the point I picked up the ability to shoot people with my nintendo power glove I had stopped caring really. I kept playing, because I am a glutton for punishment I guess, but I no longer cared.
You build up your powers and kung fu by finding random shit scattered across the board. Sometimes you get hints in theform of hologram posters apparently people leave fo you... but the thing is, on several occasions, there is no clear "end of level/are" hint, so while exploring and looking around, you can accidently shut yourself off from that shit you will absolutely need later in the game. It happened to me SEVERAL times. And ther eis no way at all to go back, except by exiting to the main menu and starting the entire "episode" over from scratch which is completely not worth it. Fuck this game sucked.
The enemies are so fuckingboring I thought I was playing a nintendo game. Not only that, but they get so ridiculously frustrating you will hate playing the game... towards the end that was what made me quite. Game designers need to fucking learn, if your players hate playing your game because you make the basic act of playing so fucking grating that players want to kill their own beloved cats with their controller because it seems the cats are laughing at them.... then you have fucking failed at making a game, and are in fact making a really shitty torture device.
And then we get to the story... fuck me.. fuck me with a dead salmon.... you know what... I am just gonna say this, the story sucks. I am not going into detail other than to say your character is a mass murdering terrorist and serial rapist who blindly follows any suggetion given to her, no matter how obivous it is that the shit she Is doing is as bad if not worse than the villians. So on top of everything else, she is also dumb as dirt.
Idon't really know how it all ends, I stopped playing, I think I was close to the end, I was in amall or some shit, and I just got tired of the bullshit fighting...
Seriously, I haven' played a game this fucking awful since X-MEN for the NES. Even for free I feel ripped off and pissed for wasting my time one this.
I have Payday 2 downloaded, yet another FPS... (what the fuck is with all the games being first person all of a sudden), It seems kinda fun, Anything is better than Remember Me...
