Super happy to see all the recent Hollow Knight completion posts. I finished it last year on PC and it's
so fucking good. I think about replaying it at least once or twice a month.
Anyway, I haven't updated this in over 3 months at this point so this is going to be a long one. Let's just call it Main Post 2!
Main Post 1
April
16: Glass Masquerade - 3 hours
A simple puzzle game using beautiful stained glass art. This felt really peaceful to play and was a nice way to unwind. There isn't much challenge and there isn't a ton of content, but it feels reasonable for the low price.
7/10
17: Dark Souls 2 - 30 hours
I've played through most of the Soulsborne games but this was the first one I played through in co-op. It was fun to play with a friend but it robbed the game of some of the tension and dread that the series is known for. More noticeably, co-op undermined the challenge of every boss in the game. Instead of having to memorize unique patterns and make your own openings, you're simply waiting for the boss to turn and attack your team-mate instead: that is your opening, for every boss. Again, I had fun playing with a buddy, but it made for a very different Dark Souls experience. As for criticism of Dark Souls 2 itself, the bosses were the least interesting I've seen in the series and they all felt very samey. The map also didn't feel like it linked together in surprising ways. Part of the magic of the Soulsborne games is pushing deep into a dangerous area, worried about what is behind every corner, only to find a shortcut that brings you right back to somewhere familiar and safer feeling. DS2 comparatively feels much more linear, and because the map doesn't connect back to itself in interesting ways, you're never surprised when you find a safe area.
7/10
18: Battlefront 2 -18 hours
I know people have trashed the BF2 single player campaign and after playing through it, it's … serviceable. I liked the basic set up (tell the story of what happened to regular soldiers in the Imperial Army after the end of Episode 6 and the defeat of the Emperor). The story potential is squandered shortly in by large numbers of fan-service devoted missions where you play as Han, Luke, etc., and the missions that are directly devoted to the Imperial solider (Iden) push through the narrative too quickly in a way that doesn't give you time to care about the characters and makes nothing feel earned. Overall, the actual gameplay content of the missions is the weakest part, with repetitive bog standard FPS campaign objectives that expect you to stay interested based on the Star Wars aesthetic alone.
The multiplayer is simultaneously the best and worst part about the game. It's fun and it plays well, but even after the removal of microtransactions and the progression re-vamp, it feels completely unfair to play. As a new player you will be matched against people who do more damage, have better abilities, and have more/rarer starcards than you. If you die to one of those players the game then rubs their advantages in your face on the death-screen in-game, showing you not a death recap that might be useful or informative, but instead showing you the star cards the other player was using and how rare they are. Is it possible to beat someone who is doing significantly more damage than you? Yes. Is it fair or fun to try? No. Even after playing MP for over a dozen hours, I still didn't have the abilities I want unlocked; let alone the rarer/better versions of those abilities. The progression revamp removed the lootbox randomization of multiplayer progression, but introduced a long mandatory grind for every single ability and card rarity instead. Because the multiplayer is built in such a fundamentally flawed and unfair way, if I was rating this game on MP alone I would have given it a 4/10. You can legit play dozens of F2P multiplayer shooters with fairer and better designed progression systems, so there is no reason to play this unless the Star Wars aesthetic matters that much to you.
5/10
19: Nioh Season Pass - 23 hours
I'm counting all 3 of the Nioh DLC expansions as one game because they really do feel like they are all part of one large storyline. The Nioh Season Pass is a pretty good package. You get a large amount of new missions and 3 new areas, 2 new weapon types/skill trees that feel very unique to play, lots of new gear sets, and an endless Abyss mode if you finish everything else. Collectively the Season Pass campaign content adds ~30% more story mission content on top of the base game. I think the thing that I liked most about the story is how it felt like it was actually adding to the post-game narrative of the original campaign, but not in a way that would feel mandatory if I wanted to skip it and wait for Nioh 2. It was a considerate balance. The content itself is pretty good and I liked the new areas and enemies. While there are a few standout bosses, the DLC largely relies on human samurai or warlord-type enemies for bosses and they start to feel really similar as you go along. Still, this was one of the better and more thoughtful pieces of DLC I've played for a game.
7/10
20: A Way Out - 7 hours
A co-op
only game with no AI partner option is a pretty radical concept in 2018 given the high cost to make games these days. Regardless of the quality of the game, I loved that it got made. It was really fun to play through something with a friend that felt like it was 100% designed to be played that way. I was surprised at how many creative interactions there were between the two players, and I liked how the forced-split screen let you share the experience 100% even if you were playing from different states. The gameplay variety is pretty surprising too given the potentially niche audience for the game and the low price tag, with a mix of competent melee combat, stealth, driving, shooting, etc. The biggest shortcoming of the game is that the game is tries to tell a pretty serious story but doesn't quite pull it off. The melodrama between characters fell flat most of the time, especially with a co-op partner sharing and commenting on the whole thing. I did like the game overall though and, without saying any spoilers, I thought the way they ended it was really cool too.
8/10
21: Moss - 5 hours
Other than RE7, my favorite PSVR experience has been the short Robot Rescue platformer from the Sony Playroom game. The sensation of 3D made it feel easy and natural to land jumps between platforms, and I was surprised at how well the freedom of perspective with a VR headset lent itself to the genre and finding hidden things. I was really excited for Moss when it was announced, thinking we'd finally get a full-game version of something like Robot Rescue. Moss doesn't quite hit the mark unfortunately. The 3D platforming feels a bit sloppy and less reliable in comparison and while you can tilt your head around to get different view angles of the rooms you're in, it rarely feels necessary or rewarding. I did like the sense of scale the game conveyed and how it made it easier to feel for your tiny mouse hero.
7/10
22: Assassin's Creed Origins: Curse of the Pharaohs - 7 hours
AC:O DLC is a tough sell because the base game has such a ridiculous amount of optional content as it is. In order to rise above unplayed optional stuff you may have already skipped, the DLC would have to change things up dramatically in order to have any appeal. Curse of the Pharaohs smartly meets that demand by leaning heavily into the fantastical/spiritual elements that the base game only skimmed the surface of. Mummies, gods, and the afterlife are all quintessential parts of what I think of as Egyptian mythos and I'm glad that the DLC focused on them. While I liked the DLC overall, I don't think it quite stuck the landing. It feels like they ran out of money at the end, with the final quests and story beats being rushed to a conclusion and with the final beautiful mystical areas in the game being really large and detailed but having almost nothing to do in them. This is not quite the quality level of Witcher 3 DLC or some of the Japanese DLC expansions (The Old Hunters, etc.), but it's pretty close & a major step up in quality over any other DLC I've played in an Ubisoft game.
8/10
23: Ni No Kuni 2 - 36 hours
I loved Ni No Kuni 1 even though I was not a fan of the combat and didn't manage to finish it. It was magical to play something that felt like a Studio Ghibli game. The original game had an ambitious real-world storyline alongside the more conventional JRPG fantasy world story, but the characters in the game, the pacing of the story, and how genuinely it felt like it handled a story about childhood loss all felt quintessentially Ghibli.
Ni No Kuni 2 is not the sequel to that game. This feels wholly detached from any Ghibli DNA, with the only resemblance at all being similarities in the character art style. It feels like a generic, if not pretty well-made, JRPG. The unique, albeit flawed, qualities of the original are missing and it feels like they discarded what made the story of the first game special. Much has been said about how easy the game was but that was cool in my book given how generic the content in the game is.
7/10
24: God of War - 30 hours
I had a strong dislike of the old God of War games. The combat always felt really button mashy and boring, with huge sweeping attacks spammed across the entire screen. What I disliked most was the tone of the game though, which felt like it was trying to make cruelty fun. Imagine my surprised when the 2018 continuation of the series came out and had both excellent combat where your actions and the results both felt very deliberate and satisfying and where Kratos had actually become a somewhat likeable character. I loved the way the game focused on the relationship between Kratos and Atreus, how the side content was handled and the way the game unfolded, and a whole slew of other things. In 4K with HDR on a OLED TV it's also the best looking game I've played so far by a significant margin.
9/10
May
25: Pizza Titan Ultra - 5 hours
This is Crazy Taxi + Rampage, where you smash through a city and the alien enemies within it to deliver pizza. It's got a great sense of humor too and a lot of it would probably feel familiar to ResetEra's community (Hawaiian Pizza is a hot topic). It's a cool arcade game with some fun ideas, but unfortunately it's also a bit repetitive and unpolished. It doesn't have quite the same addictive hook or challenge of Crazy Taxi where you push against seconds on the clock to extend your rides as far as you can, or where you're making split-second decisions about what passengers (or deliveries) to take, so the pizza delivery stuff largely feels like a low-stakes after-thought in each mission. The combat is fun but it also feels imprecise so I largely avoided it unless the mission required it.
7/10
26: Witcher 3: Blood and Wine - 16 hours
I was initially apprehensive about this expansion because I misunderstood the storyline to be solely about the politics of rich entitled royalty in a comparatively peaceful region of the Witcher world, but I loved this. The vampire-based enemies and mythology is the best in the series and I think this has the most interesting storyline in the game besides Bloody Barron. Overall it's a really beautiful & fitting conclusion to the game and a well-deserved send off for Geralt.
10/10
June
27: Dishonored 1- 15 hours
Dishonored 1 felt like a fun mix of an immersive sim and stealth game. I expected to be annoyed by the stealth, but the game has really fun and competent combat. So while I tried to play it as a stealth game, I wasn't upset or annoyed when I was detected by enemies. I think the stealth itself also does work well, and it's pretty clearly-communicated when you will and won't be seen. The setting was pretty cool too: I enjoyed the decaying and diseased rat-infested city. It did feel really obvious that this was a last-gen game, so I'm looking forward to playing the recent sequels soon.
8/10
28: Yoku's Island Express - 8 hours
This game is a super bizarre concept: a Metroidvania Pinball game. I'm not a huge fan of pinball, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this. The pinball feels fair, not like it's designed to suck quarters out of you, and the game does a good join of balancing pinball sections between more general exploration and light platforming. It felt just a little thin on content compared to most Metroidvanias, but not every game can be Hollow Knight.
8/10
29: Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion - 11 hours
This had some really unique ideas and felt like a great value. While the 80 stages can start to feel a little repetitive, they aren't mandatory and the stages that conclude the DLC are better than the regular Splatoon 2 campaign. It's much harder than the base game, but I enjoyed the extra challenge for the most part. I wish failing at a stage didn't have such a stiff resource penalty though. With some of the harder stages, it felt like I needed to cut my losses and skip the level rather than to continue losing resources and potentially have to grind old levels as a result.
8/10
July
30: Octogeddon - 9 hours
The designer of the original Plants vs. Zombies's followup project is really admirable in its simplicity. There are only two buttons: rotate left and rotate right, but the game is bursting with variety and never feels boring. It feels closest to a shoot-em-up genre wise, but the variety and customization of all the animal arms your octopus can equip means that you have a great deal of options to deal with enemies many of them don't play anything like a typical side scrolling shooter. Bonus points to the game for having a great sense of humor too.
9/10
31: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle: Donkey Kong Adventure - 8 hours
I loved Kingdom Battle when I played it last year even though it drags a bit in the second half with the lack of variety in enemies and objectives. The Donkey Kong Adventure DLC is more of the same, for better or worse. The new Donkey Kong and Rabbid Cranky Kong movesets are nice, and do change up the gameplay a little bit with the ability to throw objects/allies/enemies and some other new abilities. I still found myself thinking that the new stuff didn't feel very fresh though, and it déjà vu set in fast. It's a great value as far as DLC goes though: lots of new levels, music, characters, areas, etc.
7/10
32: Children of Zodiarcs - 11 hours
On paper this game sounds like a dream come true: a SRPG that uses card decks and dice rolls for combat. The final product is pretty cool too, but it doesn't quite live up to the potential of the idea. You don't have a lot of control over your party composition and each character you quickly discover has a right and wrong way to play, which causes you to streamline decks into the slimmest version possible that will consistently draw the few good cards for each character. As for the combat itself, it's pretty repetitive and you'll definitely find yourself dealing with the same 6-7 enemy types for the entire game without any real need to modify tactics. The story is a bit thin too, but what story there is is surprisingly dark.
7/10
August
33: Chasm - 8 hours
This game has beautiful pixel art which, combined with how fun the Metroidvania genre is, makes it look like a no-brainer. I was a bit disappointed with it after playing though. The gimmick of the game is that while the rooms are hand-crafted, they are combined in a way that is procedurally generated so that the map, items, and enemies in your game are unique to you alone. This is only a plus if you plan on replaying the game though, and the trade off is that the game loses the feeling of a carefully crafted map that defines most great games in the genre. The RNG-based item drops also means that your game experience could be super easy or extremely difficult based on your luck (or willingness to grind). The combat is also very repetitive and simplistic and the movement skills feel unresponsive and are a chore to use. On top of that, I hit bugs that caused me to lose 1-2 hours worth of progress twice. This genre has too many amazing games for this one to be worth playing.
6/10
Main Post 3
