Two Worlds

 

Two Worlds is a game developed around mid 2000s when Oblivion was all the craze. The devs have not seemingly released a game before it, hoping to pickup on the open world RPG craze of the time. They even are quoted as saying Two Worlds is the "Oblivion killer". Well, upon release the game was panned by everyone. People really had a hate boner for this game and had nothing nice to say about it. Its been sitting in my Steam library for years as I picked it up dirt cheap one time and my backlog is getting thin so I finally chose it to see why its reception is so bad.

The game starts off with some story about your sister being lost or kidnapped and you have to save her. The voice acting is the first standout thing, all the characters talk in this Ye olde english like Shakespere or something, and while its admittedly pretty awful, it also has this unforgettable charm to it. Like, what other game does this kind of stuff? Atleast it dares to be different. They constantly say things like "Forsooth" "Verily"  "Nay" and so on, its just kinda entertaining listening to all the different words theyre using and trying to talk to eachother in the same deadpan voices. You can visually change how the character looks, but its really minimal just a few faces and hair. You dont create a character with different starting stats and gear or anything.

You start off in this cellar, kill a few goblins, and pickup some items and get greeted to the inventory and looting screen and interface. It's a nice interface, the icons are very well designed and appealing, everything is well laid out and has personalized decorations, its a big deal to me the way the interface is laid out on RPG games. A bad interface could totally kill my motivation and desire to find new items for example. But in Two Worlds, the attractiveness of the icons and the way it uses Diablo style inventory tetris, already off the start made me want to collect all sorts of items, armors and equipment.

After this initial start, youre just plopped into this giant open world with little directon. The graphics are about average for a 2007 game, though the world is very huge with impressive draw distance and particularly satisfying reflections on the water and depth of field effects. The landscape is this typical European forested hillsides and villages, at times the game world looks identical to Oblivion which they were trying to compete with and it shows.

You start off on the very top of the North of the map, and I soon figured out that the further south you go, the game exponentially gets harder. In a way, this game design kind of reminds me of how in Diablo 1 you start off at the top floor of a dungeon, but the further down you go in the dungeon, the more and more it gets harder. This game world is like that too, except its just the direction South on the open world map. I like it a lot, it makes it so its linear feeling despite it being this huge open world, youre never really too confused about if youre in an area thats too hard, if its too hard then just walk more North and fight enemies more akin to your abilities! Admittedly, this took a few hours to all figure out, and the struggling until then was a bit confusing.

A lot of the games mechanics are sort of obfuscated and take a few hours to really understand how it works. The main questline, for example, is hard to even follow and figure out which quests are even the main ones. On the map screen and quest log, it sorts the quests by area that youve picked them up. But it turns out, the main quest is called "Tainted blood". It doesnt have a different color than any other quest, it doesnt look particularly different, so its very easy to accidentally do tons of sidequests  even though all you want to do is the main quest. Thats something I wished was better laid out. After I realized the main quest is under "Tainted blood", things started to progress a bit easier, though.

So to do the main quest, you read these entries under "Tainted blood" and theyre all vauge without much direction. This game isnt as much like modern RPGS like Oblivion or Skyrim where it just has a big arrow pointing to exactly where you have to go, its instead more like Morrowind where you actually have to carefully read every word in the quest log and actually read the location or even general compass direction of where it expects you to search. Although it does have quest icons on the minimap and game map, theyre extremely confusing and it took me a dozen or so hours of gameplay to even figure out what they all mean. The quest icons are these tiny little colored dots, Green dot, blue dot, red dot, etc. Honestly, I still dont really know what all the different colored dots mean. But they generally point you to some direction of a quest, or even just a place where you first obtained a quest.

Actually, my main complant and critique of the game is the whole Map quest icon system and minimap is just bad and hard to follow. The icons should of been made better and easier to decipher whats going on. For instance, the main quest is all about picking up these different magical stones to give to a guy called Gandohar to help you get your sister back. You need Earth,Wind,Fire,Water. After you get all these stones, the games basically over. At the beginning of the game, it gives you a vauge hint where one or two of these stones are. One of the stones is held by the leader of this military clan in some outpost. But, when you get to him, its locked behind a gate. The seemingly only way to actually get the main quest objective is to do a bunch of side quests. Thats another thing I dont like. A lot of the times, in order to progress the main quest, you are forced to do random side quests and youre not even sure if what youre doing is making progress towards the main goal or not. Its always some tangentically related thing like you need X object but in order to get it you have to do side quests for this person so you can build reputation for their clan so they will help you, stuff like that. So once I got to the Leader who has access to the quest item, I had unlocked like 5 different side quests for these guys. This part of the game was pretty confusing, it was all sorts of head scratching stuff like I have to go to so and so location, but I had no idea where it was, or I could just kill a certain person, but it doesnt tell me where he is, theres a real lack of direction and the map system's different colored dots dont even point you in the right direction, more often than not they just point to where you've obtained the quest and thats it. Eventually I found out where to go somehow, and reading the quest log one path I could take was to simply walk inside some guys house and pick up some Forged document on the floor, return it to the leader, and then I had access to the main objective stone. Ok, cool, one down.

At this point I'm just starting to understand all the systems and what the game expects of you. As for the combat, I was commonly scratching my head and wondering if I'm understanding it right. The combat is very simplistic and minimal. You just press mouse1 to attack, tap a few times to do a few different followup animations, and you can press Q to do a backstep almost like Dark Souls invincibillity frames. So you just wait for the enemy to swing, backstep, click once or twice for a few swings ,repeat. I sort of like how the core of the combat is really minimal, again, it reminds me of something like Diablo 1 or 2. Of course you can supplement this basic combat with 'Active skills', these are skills that add abilities with new animations such as swinging your sword in a circle to hit more enemies, but I found a lot of these active skills are just not as good as the basic attack (More on the skills later).

So with the basic combat, I just started roaming around the start of the map killing any enemies I found, looting their stuff to sell later, and get myself some equipment. Well pretty soon I kept finding sudden, massive difficulty spikes. Like I would go from easily dealing with a group of enemies, to suddenly a Silver wolf would instantly annihilate my health bar in one hit, killing me. Its very jarring when this first happens, it makes you feel like youve missed something or you dont understand the game. Whats happening is that I simply encountered enemies too high for my characters level. In retrospect, the color of the name of the enemy gives a hint. Green means theyre below youre level, yellowish means around your level, Red means danger and they will kill you fast. So what youre intended to do is keep sticking to the North part of the map where the enemies are easier, level up, and slowly make your way to the southest part of the map where the hardest enemies are. Once I grasped that combat the sudden huge difficulty spikes were mostly gone, leaving me to happily explore, kill bandit squads, goblins, attacking wildlife, to level up and get more loot to collect.

On my way to completing the main quest, I knew I would probably have to level up a ton to get the upper hand on the increasing enemy difficulty as I progressed south, so I'd frequently kind of just wander around, discovering new areas of the map (uncovering the black fog), Following the main Red roads, killing lots of bandit camps I come across. While the combat is really minimal, it also surprisingly frequently throws a ton of enemies at you at one time. Its not uncommon to see a group of 10-20 enemies trying to attack you all at once, its weird because the combat system doesnt really seemed designed around accounting for that many targets. So what you end up doing is kind of just kiting them around, getting some swings in here and there, running in circles, etc. Luckily lots of weapons have different ranges and swings can hit multiple enemies, so the combat is still overall enjoyable even in these huge awkward battles, despite how clunky it can all seem and look.

So I began exploring the map and leveling up, finding all sorts of dozens upon dozens of different armor pieces, Chest, boots, gloves, helm, 4 Ring slots, 1 Hand weapon + shield or 2 Hand weapons, etc. The loot is really enjoyable! There is even a feature where you can hover over items, and if two highlight Green, it means you can instantly combine them by simply dragging ontop of eachother and it just adds them together and upgrades the stats, with no downside. Once I realized this it was really fun to try to find the same items over and over again, unlike other RPGS where it gets annoying to find similar items, in this game it encourages it and is a resource. 

It almost feels Arcade in its gameplay and design, I think thats one of the reasons I found it so addictive. There is horseback riding, too, but its one of the most janky and clumsy parts of the game so I mostly ignored it. For starters, you can only find horses randomly in the world which you basically just steal, then the controls and animations seem to have a mind of their own. Its only marginally faster than running on foot, its not even that big of a difference. You can do combat from horse, but I never even cared to do it because I just didnt like the horseback mechanics. I guess a complaint I have is that travelling across the world can be tedious and boring sometimes, like you can teleport from various different teleport shrines once you unlock them, but sometimes theyre few and far between, or you have to spend 10 mins just walking on foot back to the nearest teleporter because you cant simply just open your map and teleport, you have to do it from one of these stations. The horseback riding could of been better, but at the same time, Im kind of glad it isnt and youre moreso compelled to just be on foot the whole time, I never much like horseback mechanics in games anyway, except maybe Mount & Blade.

The level up mechanics aren't very complex either, its quite easy to grasp and work with for the most part. You have your standard 4 attributes, Strength, Vitality, Wisdom, Dexterity.  These are almost self-explainatory, though Dexterity is the one I was most confused with. I was never quite sure exactly what it does. Does it make me have more attack speed? Does it make me miss less often? Well I dont even really miss already. Does it do something else entirely? I still dont really know. I ended up mostly ignoring the Dex stat the whole game, except for raising it to the bare minimum required for some items. The game could have added some tooltips explaining exactly what this stuff does. I mostly focused on pumping Strength as high as possible for the most damage, and Vitality for when I felt like I needed more health. Every level you get 5 attribute points and I think 2 skill points. You also can seemingly randomly get skill points for doing quests or progressing certain quest areas.

The skills are the other category. It's just a small page with a few different sections. Theres a section dedicated to archery related skills, Mage related skills, Non-combat skills like Lockpicking, Stealth, pickpocket etc,  and then you just have your core combat melee skills. Beyond these categories, there are also two different 'modes' of upgrade. There are Passive skills, which as it sound just give you a permanent buff. Then there are 'active' skills which you have to add to your hotbar quick key and use like skills from an MMO or something. I mostly ignored all the 'active' skills in favor for getting as many permanent buffs as possible, which is a very viable route it seems. There arent that many, either. Maybe 5-10 really go-to skills per 'build'  (archer, mage, warrior I guess are the possible builds, really).  So I just went for the Passive abilities like, permanent damage increase, Critical strike, Knock down enemies, and so on. Each skill can only level 10 times, too. I like the skill and stat system ,its very down to earth and easy to grasp, but it also has enough to play with where it felt exciting and rewarding to constantly get levels, I found myself caring and wanting to plan ahead of exactly what I was gonna do with my character, and it all worked out in the end and I made a pretty satisfying and powerful character just by using my intuitions about the system.

The weird thing about skills, though, is that at the start of the game most of them are Locked. It doesnt really explain, but the way to actually unlock the skills you want and actually spend your skill points in useful ways, is you have to first find a Skill Trainer that for a fee, will unlock the skill for you. Well for the first like 6 hours I could not for the life of me find one of these guys, and just walked around the whole time with 10+ unspent skills. Its weird that there isnt skill trainers sooner in the  game, but the first time I found them was when I went to one of the major cities and there was a place with like 10 of them.

The game also has a rather unique and complex Alchemy system where you have a whole section in the interface dedicated to potion crafting. I dont know a whole lot about this, but theres also a passive skill dedicated to it, which I maxed,  then you can combine random ingreidents from your inventory to the 5 different alchemy slots, for a total of 10 ingredients per potion. These ingredients seem to come in two varieties: "Temporary" and "Permanent" So you can find items that say like "Temporarily raises Strength by 20 for 5 minutes"   OR you can find items like "Raises strength by 5. Effect is permanent"  -- So the thing is you can actually create potions which permanently increase your stats! The way to do this is weird, though, and took some headscratching to figure out. I really only did this at the end of the game also, Its totally fine to ignore Alchemy for the whole game, I only checked it out around the end of the game because I was curious to see all the mechanics the game had to offer. But yeah, to create permanent potions you strangely have to add up to any 9 Permanent ingreidents, then any Magic potion. If you do anything other than this, it will turn the end result into some random thing, or turn it into a temporary potion. Weird, but once I figured that out, the knowledge it brings is insane. Constantly able to craft potions which permanent increase your health and armor is pretty nutty.

So I was getting so much enjoyment from just exploring, leveling up, looting items killing enemies and pushing my character further and further South to the more difficult content, trying to complete the main questline, One day I found myself just waking up and playing Two Worlds for like 8-12 hours straight! Shocking, I know. I thought this game was supposed to be awful? I was finding it strangely addicting, charming, and enjoyable. The soundtrack, atmosphere, the all around personality of the game is unforgettable. A lot of moments of the soundtrack sound like something from Runescape, but then other times it has these oddball piano/techno songs too, it seems obviously out of place, but in a way its also enderaing and nostalgic sounding so I rather enjoyed it and made the experience feel cozy. It's just a world I found myself experiencing for the most part.

The game is obviously rather rough around the edges, the animations are especially janky looking. While the game runs at 60fps, it looks like the animations are barely at 20 they look super choppy and weird. For some enemies, especially later on in the game like the Dragons, its possible to sort of stunlock them over and over and it makes their animation look horrid and instantly repeat its self, making the game look like some sloppy Alpha game. But maybe all these things come together in some strange way which gives the game its own personality and aura. The ridiculous Olde english voice acting, the main character being so in love and gushy with his sister that it seems insestious at times, the random out of place techno music, the hand decorated interface and colorful detailed item icons, the way the character will randomly announce stuff to himself in the enviornment  like "It's raining, its snowing"  or when you attack enemies sometimes the main character with laugh with glee like an evil maniac. It just oozes with a soul of its own and is hard for me not to appreciate. Some games feel like they were put together by robotic inhuman corporate drones, but games like this, while rough around the edges, feel like they were made by actual people that put their own personal touches on what they were working on, creating this interesting world that I found myself not wanting to put down.

The game can be fairly buggy, I think picking up one of the main quest objectives failed to trigger some script when I picked up the Air main quest item. Apparently its supposed to trigger some goblin invasion that kills the whole city, but it just never happened and the quest remained incomplete on my log. Not that big of a deal, I could still progress, but it sucked that the log was incomplete. A few other times it seems like it was giving me quest icons on my map despite the log contradicting it. Like for the Fire objective, the log would say "No one has any clue where this is yet" -- But on the map, it would show me an icon of where to go all the way south of the map, past my characters level and ability! Not sure what was going on there. The game is very open ended and doesnt hold your hand much at all, its possible to entirely miss areas, main cities, locations if you arent paying attention. I almost missed the entire Desert section because either my game sort of bugged and didnt point me there, or I just went an alternate route. The different areas of the map have all sorts of different enemies, the desert has these stone dragons and weird animal warriors, theres a burnt forest area down south that has Hell warriors in full plate mail among other things, theres another area with a lot of these huge scorpian things, the game has tons of enemy variety so that also made it really fun to keep exploring and pushing my character to the next level. There are ghouls, zombies, even at night time there is this mechanic where enemies you kill can come back as Ghosts, and you cant even hurt them unless you enchant your weapon with some Element! The first time you encounter this its a mindfuck.

 Luckily enchanting your weapon with some ability is really easy, you just need a element gem which are really easy to come by. However once you imprint an element on your weapon you have to stick with it and cant undo it, so I had to make sure which one to use (Fire, cold, Spirit, poison etc). The game has a lot of mechanics that are simple, yet satisfying to try to wrap your head around and figure out exactly how they work. Another one of these mechanics is the whole 1 hand VS 2 hand issue. You can use a shield, but theres no actual way to block yourself. Shields say "Parry" on them, but Im not really sure what it means? Does it just mean I have some automatic chance to block hits? I'm not sure. I opted to instead go for 2 handed weapons and go full out on damage. There is so much weapon variety, Polearms, Axes, Swords, Two hand swords, Blunt weapons. Each weapon has different categories of damage. Slashing, Piercing, Blunt. Each enemy can have strengths and weaknesses to any of these damage types. Like a skeleton would be almost immune to Slashing damage, so using a blunt weapon would suffice better. Its cool and clever having to think about that stuff. I like that it makes you make all these decisions. For the first half of the game, I went with this two handed mace that I sometimes upgraded using the combination feature. Later on, I started using two hand swords like Katanas and Flamberg that I bought from city merchants. The actual aesthetics of the armors and weapons for the most part are appealing too. Some of the later armors look a bit too fantasy, but for the most part I was getting into gearing up my guy with all sorts of different Chainmails, platemails etc, and everything you put on is reflected by how you look.  

For the most part, this is one of those kind of games that start off really hard since you dont know what to expect. Like if you dont realize enemies with RED names will fuck you up, you can easily get one shot by random seemingly weak enemies like Wolves, bears,etc. Thats what happened to me. I thought the game would be trash and annoying because I would randomly encounter enemies that would one shot me. But once I realized I just had to back off and level up some more, then return, the game was really enjoyable and easy! I went from a total chump getting shit on, to becoming a God making the whole world mine. Thats what a good RPG does for me. Unlike Oblivion, this game DOES NOT have level scaling. In oblivion, as you level up, so does the world around you. Almost paradoxically making leveling up being a bad thing and making your character worse (In modern days, Diablo 4 is now guilty of this..). In many ways, Two Worlds actually IS the Oblivion killer, atleast they dont have this shitty level scaling! It feels great to better yourself and come back to a challenging area and now dominating it with your new gear and stats.

Though, there are still a few places in the game where these weird difficulty spikes show up. Like later in the game, there are these Giant variations of enemies. Like Giant scorpians, or Golems. I can easily kill all the surrounding enemies without losing any health, but get touched once by these Golem or Giant variations and its instant death. Its almost like theyre programmed to be One hit monsters to keep the player on their feet. Weird design decision I guess, but understandable. Death in this game isnt even a big deal. Theres not much penalty for dying. You just spawn at a respawn location nearby and can run right back to the enemy you were just fighting and their health is even the same. I guess its kind of disappointing that you can cheese the game so easy and have no penalty, but its also not that big of a deal in a massive RPG such as this where its not so much about player skill, but about stats, gear, and knowing how to properly plan your character. For me, its a matter of pride of being able to actually 'fairly' beat the enemy, so if I die multiple times I dont just corpse rush the AI, I try to back off and go level up some more first.

Once I finally got all the main objective Element stuff, it was obvious to me I was near the end of the game. Sometimes the quests are really obtuse like at this part it was telling me to "Find someone who supports the pentagram" I have no idea how to do that, ended up having to Google it. Turns out I had to go to one of the random necromancer towers and kill the guy ontop, ok, easy enough. After that it gives you a quest to "Free kira" and tells you to go fight Gandohar, the villian guy youve been dealing with all game. Well, since I didnt even want the game to end yet, I held off and just walked around doing side quests, exploring the map, messing with Alchemy and items because I was having so much fun with it. Thats the sign of a good game, not wanting it to end!

The game has multiple main cities which are absolutely brimming with dozens upon dozens of citizens. At first its overwhelming because I had no idea how to differenciate generic copy paste NPC with 'special' onces, but luckily there is a way. The icon that shows up when you hover on NPC tells you what they do. Green means Quest, Bag icon with coins is merchant, Red means skill trainer, Blue means respec.  Once I realized this it was a breeze and excitement to run through the big sprawling major cities often stocked with dozens of traders, looking at their wares, etc.

Well after I decided to finally continue the main quest, it came to a halt really quickly. I went up to the big bad boss stronghold, killed all the enemies around him like the cool Hell demons and dragons, zombies etc. Then a big red monster spawned which could one hit me (and did once) But because I had been leveling my gear and character, using alchemy for permanent potions etc, using the Magic system (which I havnt touched on because I usually ignore magic on RPGs first time around, I just used the most basic minimum level spells 'Blessing' to give myself temp strength buff, and Heal spell)  I was able to kill that boss very quickly. Then, the main villian Gandohar talks to you and basically asks to join the dark side, or to kill him. I choose to kill him. The shocking part is he was REALLY easy. He acts like any other regular NPC enemy, he barely could do any damage to me, and I kill him in 2 hits. Then, you get a really short cutscene of you and your sister riding off on a horse, and the game kicks you back to main menu. Not even any end credits! Doesnt seem like you can even play after the game ends, you can reload previous save thats it.

I think Two Worlds is a very underrated RPG. It may be janky, have sloppy programming, rough around the edges, confusing quests and worst of all a bad minimap and hard to navigate quest system, but everything else about the game was engrossing for me especially the looting and sense of character progression. I think people back in the day were too enamoured with Oblivion to ever entertain any alternatives, its a shame because this game needs a lot more love, I could see myself replaying this in the future, sure. Theres even a sequel, Two Worlds 2,  which I am pretty excited to play now.  I beat the game in about 25 hours, by the way. Could have beaten it in 15 if I didnt wanna stick around so much longer just enjoying it, so that says something.

7/10

Bound By Flame

 

Im running low on newthings to play on my Steam library so Im just checking out some meh looking RPG's. Bound by Flame is a relatively obscure one from early 2010s by some sort of unknown rpg dev by the name Spiders

This game came out around the huge hype of the Souls franchise and immediately I can tell they're trying to capture some of that audience. Even from the first tutorials and introduction in the game, I can notice many similarities. Even the first enemies you see look almost identical to the Hollow soldiers from Dark Souls. Wow. The combat has the same type of lock on system and similar controls, and the difficulty is particularly ramped up to be stupidly hard seemingly to jump on the same sort of trend as the Souls games, too. So they were trying to target a certain audience here it seems.

Bound By Flame's premise is...I don't really know, its a nonsensical RPG plot where the plot is some kind of high-fantasy good VS evil demonic possession thing going on where you get a band of allies which you can swap in and out taking 1 of them at a time with you on your travels across the world to..defeat the evil guys. A lot of the plot just went over my head or I skimmed a lot of the writing because after a few hours it just got so convoluted, stupid, and fantastical that I stopped giving a shit, the writing and story is just another dime a dozen generic fantasy plot. The game is really heavy on narrative, cutscenes, and dialogue, and that actually might be one of the best things about it, which usually isn't saying much, which usually I dont say about games because I dont really typically care about game stories, but the sad fact is the game just doesnt do anything right or enjoyable so atleast a brief reprise from the awful combat and laughing at the stupid dialogue is the most entertainment I've found here. The dialogue is this baffling blend of taking its self too seriously but also constantly juvenile undertones where the characters cuss frequently dropping bombs like "dickhead"  "balls"  "asshole"  "fucking bitch"  and making fart jokes. Its just so out of place and awkward. The voice acting is hilarious too, it sounds just like someone with a stone-faced expression reading off a sheet of paper most of the time, despite the content of the writing supposed to be some dramatic shit.

I could write a bunch more about the story/plot/writing dialogue etc but I just dont want to. I really didnt enjoy the game, like at all. Theres a few different main character NPC's that you can swap in and out taking on your journey, standard 'class' types like a wizard girl, a healer girl, a warrior guy, and a archer guy. They all have stereotypical, boring, dull personalities, I never got invested in anything they said beyond the shallow humor of their half assed voice acting and stupidity of some of the juvenile cuss words they kept saying or the sexual innuendos constantly.

The real failure of this game is the actual gameplay, RPG mechanics, level design, etc. The combat is just awful. For starters, it has these two 'stance' modes. Warrior and ranger. You press a button to swap between the 'stances'. In warrior mode, you can only use 2h weapons like Swords, axes, and maces. You also get access to a block button and parrying ability. In 'ranger' mode, you can only use daggers, however instead of blocking you get a dodge button. I just hate this. Just let me use whatever weapon I want and dont lock different controls behind each stance. But the thing is, the game has 3 skill trees.  Warrior, ranger, and pyromancy. It doesnt really seem viable to dump points into all 3, so you have to just pick one or two. Well, playing the whole game with two little daggers just isnt appealing to me, so I initially picked the Warrior tree. It's sort of mundane standard type of upgrades, more health, better parrying, more stun , stuff like that. It's nothing that interesting or exciting, but it means now I cant really swap to the dagger stance because it has no points and its not levelled. The problem is that the game seems to be either really badly balanced or just really stupidly difficult in a really unfun way. For example, it just never felt like my character ever did any damage. Sure, the game has loot you can find, different weapons to equip and modify, new armors you can put on - But its few and far between. I changed my body armor / gloves etc maybe 3 times in the ENTIRE game, because its that rare. I changed my weapon maybe 5 times total. No, the RPG stats doesn't really seem to matter that much in this game, its just designed in such a way that it artifically wants combat to be this annoying tedious slog where your character can never do significant damage so even generic 'weak' enemies like fucking flying mosquitos take 20 hits to kill, while they can kill you in 4. ALL of the combat just becomes this really annoying tedious dance of waiting for an enemy to play out its animation and then swinging once or twice, waiting again, repeat. Like a single enemy can take 60+ seconds to kill of just waiting for animations to play out and tediously get your jab in. I know theyre trying to capture the Souls audience or something, but they fundamentally dont fucking understand what makes those games fun and challenging. In Dark Souls you can kill all of the first half of the games enemies in just a few hits, you can easily upgrade your weapons to one hit most enemies in the game. But this game doesnt get that, it thinks difficulty and challenge is just in making your player being a boring, weak piece of shit that cant do any damage and dies in 4 hits. The controls are just awful, having no dodge button as a warrior just sucks and makes it turn into this janky, clunky  walking around in circles to avoid damage thing instead of exciting combat, the moveset doesnt even make sense. Every weapon seems to have the same fucking animation/ability, theres only 2 attacks: Standard attack, and this circular sweep thing.

There are a few other gimmicky combat things you can do like laying traps, pressing a button combination to shoot with your crossbow, but I just never was interested in that style of gameplay. Theres a crafting system where you combine items together in a menu to get other things you might need like health potions and such, you can craft health potions using pickups from killed enemies but it takes a ton, you can carry as many health potions as you want at one time. The main way to get health is either health potions or health regeneration upgrades on the skill tree and on your armors. Its a pretty bad and boring system.

I knew the game was gonna be bullshit because even in the first few hours, all of the enemies take dozens of hits to kill, and frequently gang up on you which just doesnt make sense gameplay wise. But the bosses in particular is where the game is just downright trash and broken crap. The first boss is this werebear thing that attacks really fast or does huge AOE stun abilities, since my only attacks are using these big two hand swords that attack too slow, my options are to carefully run out of the way/block/parry and time my hits. Well, the damage on bosses is a joke. I'm talking each hit does 0.5% damage or less. So its this huge tedious task of grinding down the bosses healthbar over a dozen minutes of carefully waiting for the right animations to get your swings in. Its so bad. The boss can kill you in a fraction of a second, WHY the fuck is it impossible to do any damage in this game? I just dont get it. What the fuck were they thinking? Were they trying to be "hard just like Dark souls, cause thats popular and people are buying it!"  - Yeah, it wasnt because you do no damage, thats not it.

After dying tons of times I finally got past the first fucking boss but the game is just downhill from here. For one thing the level design is really uninteresting and boring. The game basically only has 3 areas, 3 acts. Act one is this generic copy paste maze swamp. Act 2 is wintery landscape castle place. Act 3 is like... a sewer and then more wintery shit. Act 1 is by far the worst, its just a terrible introduction to the game. All you do is trek through some really boring swamp place and the only enemies are these nonthreatening looking flying mosquitos but take dozens of hits to kill. Why did they think this is an exciting intro to the game? They should of used Act 2 winter castles as the intro to the game or something, maybe that would of fooled some more people into playing it more thinking it has something good to offer. Atleast the game has a useful overlay map thing you can toggle on which shows you where to go for the main objective, I liked that, it reminded me of the Diablo 2 automap. Basically, you just go around following the minimap to the objective, fight hordes of really boring enemies with bad combat, then get to really bullshit bosses that are hard for the wrong reasons.



After awhile I started to realize that no matter what you upgrade, youre probably going to have to upgrade the pyromancy tree. So I started dumping points into that, mostly the ability that adds fire onto your weapon.  Still doesnt make the damage output any significantly better. Beyond the three skill trees you can level, there is also a sort of perks menu where you can get passive upgrade perks. These are simplistic too, stuff like 10% more magic, more health, chests make a noise when youre near them, more damage or stun ability etc. Yeah I looked forward to leveling up , getting experience, to be able to make my character stronger to try to overcome the gruelling difficulty of the game, but it never really got much better. The game is just designed in such a way where your character is forced to be this really weak awkward janky piece of shit and all the enemies are supposed to be tedious to fight and take 20 hits each to kill, it sucks.

Theres all sorts of side quests, and you frequently get them without even noticing, and it automatically tracks them and pops up on your minimap and for the first few hours of the game I kept accidentally progressing side quests thinking it was a main quest. So its this annoying thing where you have to frequently keep opening up your quest log and unticking side quests that get added since I dont want to do any. The game is already unappealing enough, I dont wanna do any optional shit I dont have to.

After killing that werebeast thing you keep progressing Act 1 swampy marsh area, you go back to an outpost, you can trade with some vendors and buy weapons and armor but theres not that much to choose from and its all too expensive, eventually you go into a cave and the game introduces this Demonic possession plotline where you can choose to let yourself be overcome by this talking demon, apparently altering the storyline. I just let it happen because otherwise It wouldnt let me enter the cave as easily without doing some optional shit, so yeah. All it amounts to is your character talking to him self in some alter ego demon voice about wanting ultimate power or some bullshit. It was entertaining in a so bad its good way. But inside this cave is boss #2, this ghoulish vampire guy. Hes almost just as bullshit as boss #1. Lots of tedious deaths and the same annoying AOE stunlock moveset. Many deaths and frustration, it doesnt get better. Then, shortly after that, it makes you go back to the village and already its boss #3. This one is just stupid. Its this minotaur guy with a big sword and he keeps doing this big AOE freeze which gives you a frost debuff and makes you slow for 30 seconds, as well as being able to kill you in like 4 hits. The game is just way too hard. Its not the sort of hard gameplay thats fun to overcome or to "tryhard" at. Its just annoying bullshit. The game doesnt have the atmosphere, lore, level design, interesting enemies and equipment to back up being so brutally difficult unlike the Souls games does. In those games you want to get better, you want to overcome challenge, you want to persevere, because the world is so interesting, the controls feel good, the equipment is interesting, in Bound By Flame its just difficulty for the sake of it and to follow some trend they dont even understand.

This stupid minotaur boss is where I was at a point in the game where I genuinely just wanted to uninstall and be done with it. I noticed in the menu settings you can change the difficulty at any time. So I was on difficulty 2/5. I then put it on easiest difficulty from the menu. Fuck it, I'll just breeze through it to end credits, I just want this shit out of my backlog. To my surprise even the game on easiest difficulty is still very hard. Still died multiple times to bosses. Generic Enemies still take a dozen or two hits to die. Game is still stupid and shit. But atleast I got through it faster than I otherwise would have. I got to act 2 which is atleast better than 1, its a bunch of wintery landscapes and these frozen castle mazes. Enemies are slightly more interesting instead of just mosquito things its like weird frost ladies and spellcasters, except now everything freezes you and debuffs you with slowness which isnt fun.

 Its weird its almost like they stopped developing new ideas or the game at this point. You fight this one new boss this concubine weird lady demon thing. Then you get to act 3 and its still the same sort of frozen snow castles like Act 2. In act 3 it basically just has you going around to different boss arenas killing 5 or so of the same copy paste boss from act 2. What? Its like "Go kill the stalker, kill the Malevolent, kill the Watcher" but its all the same boss copy pasted lol. Once you do that, you get to the last boss which is insanely bullshit guy that shoots these black spells at you across the map which kill you fast and you have to dodge them like youre playing some shoot em up arcade game, its stupid. Atleast by this point ive crafted myself like 30 health potions so I just chugged them the whole boss fight and was able to beat it.  

The game is just bad, I hated the controls and combat system, I hate the 'stances' system with the daggers or 2h weapons playstyle, thats it, I hated the lack of loot variety, yeah it was sort of exciting walking around finding chests and looting the rare corpse here and there and finding a new big 2h axe or something, it just doesnt happen all that often, the equipment is marginal. I hated the annoying out of place music all the time with corny soft female vocals that sounded something out of an anime opening intro. I hated the boring generic story and plot, the only entertaining part was listening to how lazy and bad the voice acting is and the dumb humor of how the characters would randomly use cuss words or say stupid childish shit, I hated the bosses and unfair stupid difficulty, I hated the level design and boring uninspired maps and areas, I hated the enemy design atleast for the first half of the game especially with the copy paste mosquito enemeis, I hated how every single enemy is a damage sponge, I hated how unbalanced or unplaytested the whole experience is..theres not much to like. The graphics are medicore, I guess the interface/HUD/Menu systems were OK...some of the weapons and armor looked kind of cool? I guess the most interesting part of the game is how you can modify your weapons and armor, like put a new sword hilt on, change the blade, and it changes attributes like how fast it swings or how much it stuns, you can modify your armor to give health regen or more magic or resistances, thats about the only nice thing I can say about the game. Oh, I liked how despite being an RPG, it only took me 8 hours to beat! Yeah, thats the best thing I liked about the game - It's short. Usually, when a game is good, and it ends, you dont think to yourself "Yay im glad thats over". When a game is good you get sad when its over. But I was just speedrunning to the end credits while playing Bound By Flame, cause I was hating every minute of it.

3/10

Doom Eternal

 

After Doom 3, I was waiting many years for a new game in the series. Eventually, Doom (2016) came out, and while it felt like a weird departure in many ways, i also enjoyed it quite a bit and thought it was a decent shooter game. Doom Eternal is the sequel to that flavour of the series, and I went in without any expectations.

Soon after playing the game for just an hour or so it was clear to me that Doom Eternal was nothing really like Doom 2016, or even any game in the franchise really.

All of the mechanics from even Doom 2016 are changed here. Its not the same formula at all. First of all, the game takes its self much more seriously in tone. Whereas in Doom 2016, you had a few quick short almost sarcastic cutscenes where they would even mock having cutscenes at all like that one scene where a computer starts talking to you and the character just smashes it and says shutup or "no time for talking" or something - In Doom Eternal its like they're trying to constantly do this big grandiose lore-dump at the player and trying to build this complex narrative but its like what the fuck? its just missing the point of Doom.  The tone is just all off. There's cutscenes constantly of just characters talking to eachother or listening to voice logs and its all just boring and contrived its like forced-lore and I just found it all out of place especially in a Doom game, it felt more like Halo or something. They tried to give the main character a sort of personality, the subtitles even say "Doomguy" and whenever he interacts with other humans they treat him like a celebrity and are sycophantic, its just weird. The only story I needed was that demons are bad and kill the demons, all this other shit just felt shoehorned.

The artstyle is kinda off too, which makes it worse. Like the graphics arent terrible, but everything has this nu-overly modern look with too many multicolors and flashy effects. It's not dark and gritty enough, its too flashy and neon glowing sign. The demons have really nice textures and models for the most part, but some of them look too much like cute toys or something with over saturated colors.


The main drastic changes are mechanically. The game is brutally difficult and unforgiving, even on difficulty 2/5 which is the one I played on. What you come to expect from a Doom game is just minimal mechanics, no RPG bullshit, its just the player and his skills against the hordes of demons. But in Doom Eternal it has layer upon layer of these awful roleplaying almost skill point systems. You have these 'runes' which add 3 perks to your players, then you have your weapons each with different attachments you can level up, then you have this glyph wheel which adds even more perks, then you have Sentinel crystals which add permanent stat boosts like more health and ammo/armor and bigger perks. Like what the fuck? I dont want to deal with this shit, it just means the game has trouble keeping balance with its self because it has to try to account for the player missing upgrades. Like in order for the game to 'progress as expected' the player has to search around the map to make sure not to miss any of these crucial upgrades or later in the game he'll be way too weak and "underleveled", or the opposite, if he finds too many upgrades, then the later game becomes easier than the beginning of the game - totally screwing up the balance and pacing. Why do they insist on putting this level up bullshit in Doom games? one of the main reasons I wanna play Doom is to GET AWAY from that kinda stuff. I'm pretty sure it was in Doom 2016 to some extent, but theres like 5 different ways of levelling up in Eternal and its just a fucking mess and is annoying to deal with.

Its particularly jarring because in the first quarter of the game I was really struggling to come to grips with the games mechanics. For starters, it has way too many controls and they're clunky as fuck too. Not only do you have 8 or so weapons, which fine cool whatever, you also have these left and right extra gadget abilities that shoot flamethrower/freeze bombs or hand grenades. And its like mandatory to use this shit because they make the enemies drop armor/ammo. So its like a clunkfest trying to constantly swap weapons and using these left/right gadgets, I kind of hate it.

Not only that stuff, but the enemies are designed almost like mini-classes from a Hero shooter like Overwatch or team fortress or something. By that I mean each enemy type has a very specific 'weakness' that requires a very specific gun to hurt them easily. Like for example the spider weakness is shooting their guns on their back, using the machine guns sniper scope (Yeah, the machine gun attachment is a sniper scope. Its dumb and clunky too) But then other enemies, like the Caco demon, its weakness is shooting a Sticky bomb in its mouth from the regular shotgun. So what the game expects you to do is constantly swap weapons every 5 seconds like an ADHD ridden sperg, while jumping around constantly, while constantly dashing, while constantly doing these quicktime animation Glory kills for health, its just really quicking exhausting and even annoying to play. It doesn't really feel like I'm doing crazy skillful stuff, it just feels like I'm some dumb tard spamming a million buttons and swinging my mouse around like an idiot, I just really dislike how they've done the mechanics in this game.  Like instead of you deciding for yourself what gun you wanna use in what situation, it almost forces you to use THIS specific gun for THIS specific enemy, I just dont like it, other doom games arent like that, the whole 'weakness' system just hurts the games fun factor, as does the whole multiple attachment system, as does the whole 'generate health/armor/ammo' from glorykills/chainsaw kills shit. I don't like it!

So , like I said, the way the mechanics work is that you start off with very low amounts of maximum ammo. Like 20 shotgun bullets. Even by the end of the game I seemingly barely was able to upgrade my maximum ammo that much. So what the game expects you to do is use this quick-press animation grab Chainsaw button, which instantly kills weak enemies and then a bunch of confetti pops out which gives you ammo. Now, I didnt realize for the first half of the game, but this thing regenerates slowly. You can go around the levels picking up gas cans which gives you some, but I didnt realize it also regenerates. Out of all the popups and tutorials the game has, I guess I missed that. But I just dont find it a mechanically satisfying way to play the game. Its like this constant obnoxious micromanaging and juggling of all these different mechanics. The UI and onscreen hud is just bloated and confusing too. By your crosshair you have these different tiny icons showing your chainsaw attacks, your left/right gadget uses, youve got to keep track of all of it and constantly remember to keep using the quick-kill animation Glorykills and chainsaw kills. Its like half the game is just watching animations play out. For the first 4 hours or so I was just constantly doing these Glorykills on enemies to get my health back, it just felt bad, I dont want to play a game where I press a button and I have to watch a 5 second long animation of my character doing something. I want all of the mechanics to be directly attached to my button inputs, no constant 'mini cutscenes'.

I just didnt really enjoy how they revamped the mechanics in this game, from the micromanaging, the chainsaw to kill enemies to make them drop confetti and ammo, the glorykills to get health, the left/right gadgets to get armor, it just feels convoluted and spammy and overly annoying to deal with. I hate to compare to classic doom games, but those games were so good precisely because they had minimalistic, simplistic mechanics and controls. Easy to learn, hard to master. Doom Eternal is like the opposite, it throws everything and the kitchen sink at the wall and tries to see what sticks, but nothing really does, it comes across like a bloated mess of confused controls and mechanics and upgrades that is just exhausting to have to deal with. I could only play the game for 1-2 hours at a time because I just left feeling annoyed with the whole process.

Actually atleast half the game isn't even doing combat.
The way the game works is you traverse these enviornments towards some arena, once you arrive at the designated arena, you cant progress until you kill all the enemies. So its not like classic doom games where youre constantly progressing through a level with enemies naturally placed in strategic places, no - its like you walk into an arena, the doors lock behind you, then it procedes to randomly spawn in demons almost like its a multiplayer deathmatch map instead. Thats about 90% of the combat in the game. Yeah, it feels like little instances of multiplayer deathmatch arenas instead of actual coherent singleplayer levels like classic doom games, I just dont like that style of gameplay. Give me a level with enemies hand-placed in clever places, not this arena shooter stuff. It seems like they just fundamentally misunderstand Doom, arena shooter doesnt literally just mean some closed off multiplayer arena with randomly spawning enemies...

In between arriving at these arenas, the game gets a lot worse.
You have tons of these almost puzzle platforming sections where you have to jump across monkeybars and look for these white patches of walls where you can Grab onto it. These walls almost look indistinguishable from normal walls, so much so that theyre extremely easy to miss. Frequently after ending combat I would spend dozen minutes or more just walking in circles trying to figure out what the fuck the game expects me to do next. The level design is mostly just atrocious and doesnt make sense. You have to climb all sorts of walls, punch boxes to stnd on, flip these big glowing switches sometimes in the most hidden places, Jump-dash across huge seemingly impossible gaps, its so tedious. Why is this even in the game? Why is there hours upon hours of puzzle platforming gameplay in a Doom game? Every single time I end a combat segment I can fully expect to spend the next 15-20 minutes doing nothing but jumping around like a dumbass trying to find the next place on the wall the game wants me to grab or the next gap I need to find my way across or the next puzzle or door I need to open, I hate it.

The game has a Dash mechanic where you can spam a button to do this quick burst of speed, but essentially youll just be spamming this the whole game which in effect makes the whole game annoying because it has an obnoxious visual effect and sound effect. A lot of effects in the game are just bad. Especially the Low Health indicator. The whole screen gets this obfuscated red tint and makes it really confusing to even look at whats happening.

I cant help but shake the feeling that the game plays and feels more like Halo than a Doom game. Everything about the presentation, the story, the jumping around arenas in low gravity dashing around like a coked up bunny rabit, the tryhard serious lore dumping, its just so off. I don't even like how the weapons look, they all look way too bulky and futuristic, none of them are all that fun to use, the only gun I liked really was the Double barrel shotgun, with the 'mastery' with the hook grab. This gun was kind of fun because you can press a button to hook yourself onto the enemy, generating armor, then you blast them in the face. So I just spent the whole game hooking myself to enemies then using the chainsaw to generate more ammo. The other guns are just okay. The rocket launcher has a lock on attachment ability, the plasma gun attachment has this microwave beam that blows enemeis up but makes you stand still and is really slow, I never really enjoyed using many of the weapons. I mostly just hate this weird dance you have to do where you have to shoot enemies enough, but not TOO much to kill them, just enough to make them 'glow' and get into the glorykill animation so you can get health from them...feels clunky.
Of course theres ammo and armor and health placed around the maps, so frequently you will be running around the arena looking for health and armor, but the bulk of generating resources is from doing these quick-kill animations and such.

The game has the standard DOOM roster with a bunch of new additions, all of which I pretty much hated. I'm not gonna remember all the names but it has this one guy I think called Maurader whos this guy that blocks all of your shots with a shield, and unless you stand in Medium range you cant hurt him. You have to wait for his eyes to glow green then you shoot him to stun him, THEN you can damage him. So you just stand around waiting, tanking damage, while he spawns this dog to attack you, waiting to be able to stun him with the cue, again, just tedious gameplay. And a clusterfuck because usually the game likes to just throw you into a closed arena and spawn a billion random enemies at once and see if you can sperg out hard enough swinging the mouse around like a maniac swapping guns like someone on cocaine long enough to survive. I just think I dont like this game, really. Its not for me. I like the simplicity of classic doom, I like the tension and horror and 'groundedness' of Doom 3. I even liked Doom 2016, which upped the excitement and action even more, but its mechanics werent as bloated and unnecessarily  demanding and fucked up with Upgrades shit like Eternal is.

I dont know if I should be ashamed to say it, but the first 5 hours of this game I was dying constantly. Every single checkpoint I would die multiple times. Finally I got the hang of understanding the game demands that you engage in constant animation kills, you need to constnatly be 'generating ammo' and spamming your stupid left/right gadgets, you need to be constantly opening up your 'Codex' to find out each enemy types weakness, swap your gun accordingly, and...Its just not the kind of gameplay I like. I hated having to think that if I dont mindlessly explore every inch of the boring levels and find these upgrades, I might be too "weak" in the end-game to do anything. Why is this even a concern? Its like I'm playing a RPG and I have to grind for levels or something, so stupid.

Another complaint is that the individual levels are too long. I'd want to jump in and play a quick session , only to find a single level taking 1-2 hours. Why isnt it more cut up and condensed? Another thing I love about Doom is usually the levels are bite sized, thats not the case here. Its like this grueling slog of a gauntlet just to get past one level, again, its exhausting, especially with all the puzzle platforming nonsense.

Frequently after missions it will throw you back to this very generic and boring Main base, where you can walk around the base and use this collectable called 'Sentinel battery' to unlock rooms that give your character upgrades, stuff like new weapon attachments, new perks, etc. I didnt realize this was a thing except a few hours into the game, because the base is so annoying to navigate and everything looks the same. Took me a good amount of time to even figure out how to get upstairs and start the next mission at one point, the staircase is tucked away in the corner instead of being some obvious place, just why. One of the most annoying hubworlds of recent memory.

None of the levels really stand out, yeah some of them have some cool locations and big crazy monster corpses and weird shit on the ground, but again the artstyle is still a bit oversaturated and almost cartoony at times. Like the whole feel of the presentation at times is like a mobile game or something like that, the constant "Rewards!"  "Congratulations!"   "Unlocked this! Unlocked that!"   all the shit all over the HUD, etc. Its too much.  I cant even remember a single name of any level or much of what I had to do except constant bad platforming and then being locked in a arena.

Towards the end of the game, thankfully you start to go into hellish places which is actually interesting and wakes you up a bit. The game has a few "bosses" but really most of them are just regular enemies that you kill once as a boss then gets put into the regular roster of enemies you have to fight. Its kinda weird how the game has constant handholding and tutorials too, like everytime a boss happens or new enemy it will pause the screen and tell you exactly how to kill him and even show you a little video demonstration, EVEN for the last boss...

The game has all sorts of features and optional things you can do, theres a "master levels" segment where you can play custom challenges, I'm sure theres lots to do, I was hoping I would really like this game, I was hyped for it, but unfortunately upon playing it, maybe its just not for me. I can understand some people liking it, but everything about it was just put together in such a way that I didnt really enjoy. Yeah, sometimes the combat can be satisfying, zooming around the arenas and gibbing enemies, it has a lot of callbacks to classic doom like the powerups and Rip and tear stuff, its got all sorts of mechanics, the graphics at times can be thrilling with all the hyper-paced stuff going on, the monsters in particular are really highly detailed and it is exciting to see all the different ways you can destroy them, so maybe one day I'll try to replay it, I dont know, but as of right now it just wasnt for me I guess. Oh yeah, and the music is dog shit. The sound track is just really bad and annoying. Its all djent mixed with electronic bullshit or something. I just found myself feeling irritated by it constantly. It's like comically stupid and bad how dumb it sounds. Fuck the music.

4/10

Sniper Elite

 

At this point ive played most of the Sniper Elite franchise, but I find myself wondering what the original 2005 game was all about. Only until now I actually bothered to go back and check, might as well since I've beaten most of the other games in the series, right?

This game came out in 2005 and it shows. I don't even think its just because of the 2005 era, I've seen tons of games from 2000-2005 look way more visually appealing than this. Everything is flat and dull, with bad textures and it just looks very boring overall. Its drab and gray but the lightning most of all just makes everything look flat and 'fullbright' and static, its awful. It looks more like a 1998 game with more polygon models or something, I dont know. The game has 8 or so episodic like missions, where you pick the episode from the main menu, then choose the difficulty (theres 4, I just picke 2/4), then each of these missions has cut up indiviudal small levels of varying amounts until the actual full episode is done. Sometimes it can be just 2 levels, sometimes 3, sometimes 6! I hated how inconsistent it was in this regard. Sometimes I just wanted to come launch the game and play 1 'mission' from the title screen, but found myself playing 6 individual levels in a row before it was over, begging for it to come to an end.

And thats not even the beginning of the flaws and annoyances I've had with this game. Frankly, I hated it. For the longest time I put the game off because it either seemed intimidating at first, or too difficult, but upon actually sitting down for a few hours its just a stupid, janky, half-baked, tedious mess of a game. The whole experience feels like some early alpha pre-release thing, not some actual game. It's very rough around the edges. For starters, the control are just fucking awful. I've never seen a game where your character slides aruound nonstop as if hes on a permanent ice rink, but thats what you get here in Sniper Elite. I thought it might be some old engine quirk with the game being 2005 and running at too high framerate, so I even manually capped my framerate at 30fps just to test more around what a machine of the time would of had, but no, the ice skating feeling remains albeit a little better. Not only the awful movement, the control scheme just sucks too. Mouse wheel gradually changes your movement speed, like what the fuck? You press Z to go from Crouch to standing to Prone but also if you run while Crouch he stands up anyway so he constantly goes back and forth from couch to stand, its just a mess god DAMN. You have some sort of 'inventory' which controls like some archaic shit from Duke Nukem 3d where you have to press I to bring up another menu on bottom right, then for whatever stupid reason use COMMA , & . to scroll through items, THEN press X to select the item (TNT, Bomb, Medkit etc) THEN press X again to attempt to use it/put on ground but more often than not for the TNT and gadgets he wont fucking put them on the ground except really specific parts then it plays some huge animation and half the time it glitches out - IT SUCKS BAD. The movement feels awful clunky shit, generally controlling your character and going around the enviornment is one of the worst feeling things ive had in a game.

The game is this really annoying 'quicksave-shooter' where youll find yourself wanting to spam F5 to save after everything you do, only to turn a corner and lose all your health to some guy across the map then mash F9. The problem is they cram the levels with so many fucking enemies that its such exhausting trial and error bullshit that most of the gameplay I'm doing is just mashing F5 and F9 over and over between actually playing for 20 seconds, I hate it, I hate it.

Theres so many things to complain about, maybe Ill try saying something nice?

I liked how it actually shown your weapons on your characters back, how theres animations for taking them off your back and using them. Its a cool touch of a sort of realistic gritty warfare or something. Despite the game being this frustrating quicksave shooter, it atleast is self-aware enough to try to decentivize the player from spamming quicksave, because theres this arcade points system and if you quicksave too many times a big message pops up on screen like "Warning, you are saving too much, if you save more it will deplete your score!" -- Like ok cool, its commendable that it atleast tries to dissuade you from save spamming but like, who gives a shit? This isn't pacman in 1980s arcade, I dont give a fuck about my score I just want to progress. And trust me, halfway or so through the game this piece of shit would be absolute torture without spamming quicksave, even with it, its awful.

 
All the levels pretty much look exactly the same, its just these drab gray ww2 city streets, over and over and over. Sometimes you go inside a factory or something but its few and far between. Theres thankfully not much in the way of story or cutscenes, just a short voice over briefing section before each level, and sometimes you get cutscenes of watching the few characters talk to eachother with voice acting that seems like its just the developers working from home talking into a Logitech webcam mic which was pretty hilarious. The game uses objectives system to complete levels, so youll start a level and press TAB to open your really awful map which I never figured out how to use properly, and also see a list of objectives. Of course the controls on this menu suck balls here too so you have to use arrow keys to read the objectives, usually just shit like Secure the area, blow up the tanks, really frustrating escort /defend X person missions, go talk to this guy etc. Theres a red arrow on your compass which thankfully mostly just points you where to go, but its inconsistent with what it wants you to do sometimes and sometimes it doesnt even point anywhere but expects you to go read the objective and walk half way across the map instead of looking at the objective arrow. Its just stupid and confusing. Like at the beginning of some levels you will have 4 objectives, but it will ever only point to Objective 1, you cant manually select any others as far as I know. Pretty much everything about this game is a grueling chore and mindless, tedious gauntlet of suffering through endlessly quicksave spamming and getting shit on by hordes of nonstop ganking enemies with retarded superhuman giga accuracy shoot you across the map with a PPSH insanity. They fucked this game up, bad. I wanted to like it, usually the first game in a franchise is the classic but no, this first one is dog doo. The other ones are atleast enjoyable co-op shooters with more polished mechanics. Fuck this game.

Oh man what else, oh yeah, frequently the game will have you go inside buildings and facilities to do some objective but its a SNIPER game so of course the secondary weapons like machine guns you can pickup are absolute shit. The accuracy on them is trash and its hard to get ammo because you only pickup like 4 bullets at a time from corpses, so these inside sections just didnt make any sense  and just turns into this slowly creeping around endurance test swinging the camera around corners to try to get the visual on the enemy artifically so you can spray him around a corner or something, its bad and it just feels like RNG if im gonna win most of the time. The game has a couple forced or mandatory stealth levels, yeah, really bad too. Just super frustrating , it has stealth mechancis like prone makes you % stealth meter go up, its just so damn boring to try to sneak your way around while spamming quicksave so most of the time I just sprinted across the map and quicksaving when I didnt get caught.

Another really bad thing is by default, the game will spew random tutorial hints at you. Its not like an actual tutorial, its just a lazy menu option called "Tutorial" on/off. All it does is every X amount of seconds it will PAUSE your whole game no matter what youre doing and display a random hint message at you, like the kinds of random messages you see on loading screens in modern games. Most of the time it will have nothing to do with what youre doing. I could be aiming at some guys face a mile away , about to shoot, then BAM my screen pauses and it tells me a hint about "Did you know that you can use TNT to blow up tanks" - What the fuck? Im nowhere near a tank , fuck off, you just screwed up my shot. I had to turn this shit off after like 40 minutes of playing the game, its so bad. They were too lazy to design an actual tutorial level I guess?

I'm just glad this shit is over, the last level is some Airstrip where again, it has nonsense objectives where it has this Side objective where you can do optional stealth to 'distract' enemies and I went out of my way to do it but it seemed like it did fuck all. No clue, waste of time. Then you have to do all this shit with killing enemies on the airfield then a plane shows up and you have to make your way to the plane, killing enemies, then it just gives some ending cutscene of you jumping on the plane, plays some cutscene about the war ending, then credits roll. Took me about 8 hours to beat it. Never wanna think about this shit again, I could of wrote a lot more gripes with the game, like how everytime you pickup ammo it does this long annoying animation that fucks you up, about how switching guns is clunky as fuck and gets you killed cause how long the animations are, but the games just shit, alright? dont believe me, try it yourself, I dare you to get to end credits.

3/10

Far Cry 6

 

Everyone knows Ubisoft's antics in the modern age. It needs no introduction. Every game in the Far Cry franchise since FC3 has been the same fomula with minor deviations.  It's not a formula I particularly enjoy. But when it's co-op, I can atleast stomach it.

So the gimmick with these modern Far Cry games is that every one has a villian antagonist that you eventually go up against. The plot is always setup in such a way where you're the savior of the world basically, and you have to go around these big open world maps working your way towards finally dealing with the antagonist. Of course FC6 is no different in this regard. This time, the antagonist is the actor from Breaking Bad the one that owns the fast food shop. Kind of a weird choice but ok, I guess it appeals to normies or something? Like "hey this game has an actor I know from that popular show, I'll buy the game now!" but it doesn't do much for me. This guys face and his son is plastered all over the marketing campaign for FC6 they really make it a big deal and try to make it this big important event. So the plot of the game starts off showing you this dictator and his son, and almost immediately theres no vaugeness in the morality of the situation. It becomes immediately obvious that the dictator guy is "just wrong" because from the get-go youre seeing him call his soldiers to pull civillians out of their cars and murder people in the streets and stuff like this. It's just annoying how a lot of these modern plots are so in your face without any ambiguity at all, its so base and one dimensional. So yeah in FC6 the gimmick is that its set in some third world spanish country I cant even remember where, and everyone is speaking in spanish lingo and constantly blasting loud mexican music which really sucks and is annoying, and youre some head of a revolution to take down this evil antagonist guy and his son. Enough about the plot for now, thats the basic gist.

The game thankfully has co-op, but you dont get access to it until like an hour into the game for some stupid reason. Why do modern games do this? Whats the point? To try to introduce each person into the game without outside influence? its just stupid. Let us just coop from the beginning. Anyway, the general gameplay loop is the same here as the past 5 games. It's a massive open world, with admittedly beautiful graphical effects such as lighting, draw distance, shadows, and water visuals, but it also feels like most of the map has just kinda been procedurally generated rather than hand crafted monuments, so a lot of the map is just forgettable or uninteresting generic dirt road side paths and generic village #400. You travel back and forth to the quest givers then spend another 10 minutes travelling to the actual quest location. Just like every other modern Ubisoft game and most modern sandbox game design, frankly I'm just sick of it. In previous Ubisoft games, it was kind of easy to spawn a Helicoptor to atleast make the travelling bits less tedious, but here in this game you can spawn helicoptors but theyre only at specific fast travel outposts, and even then half of the map has these red minimap radar No-fly zones where if you go into them they shoot down your heli so its almost more of a pain in the ass to even bother. Halfway through the game we pretty much just gave up on using helicoptors and instead the game lets you spawn a car almost anywhere using the weapon wheel, so we just kept spawning the default car and slowly driving to the next objective. The driving controls are alright, its fun enough, but sometimes the vehicles first person view is so zoomed in its hard to see what the fuck is going on . I guess its realistic, though right? Theres also a button you can press to enable 'auto-drive' where the car attempts to drive towards the location, but it doesnt work that great you still have to atleast put in some input yourself. Also, when you select objectives it doesnt automatically show you a line on the minimap, you have to manually go place a waypoint yourself to get the minimap line. Just why? give me the line when I select the main mission, its annoying.

Something very notable is how the weapons and 'level' system work in this game. In previous games, it was more RPG feeling, with level up's unlocking lots of new weapons and attachments, as well as having skill trees. However, In FC6, there is simply no skill tree! A bold decision, and actually I don't mind it. In this regrd, it's atleast something to bring back a more skill based retro feel to the gunplay. AT the same time, though, almost feels like it was due to just them being too lazy to properly develop new innovative skill trees so they just ripped it out entirely. The thing is, what does leveling up even do in this game? You still get experience from killing enemies, you "Rank up" but I dont even know what it does even after beating the game. You can apparently buy new guys from "Juans shop" but the only guns he offers there are these really gimmicky stapled together niche guns that I dont wanna use, I wanna use realistic regular weaponry not bullshit gimmicks, so I ignored his shop the whole game. I think the only thing leveling up does is add more shit to his store but I dont know. It just feels so pointless, why even still have ranking up in the game? Just take it out too. It seems like they just couldnt decide where to go with the mechanics in the game and half assed everything. Like, even in FC5 (if I recall correctly) you had these gun shops that had tons of weapons you could buy, but in FC6 you only unlock weapons by randomly getting them from chests in the world, which can be hours between new gun unlocks. Like for the first few hours of the game I was stuck using the default pistol and rifle because I couldnt figure out how to unlock any new weapons, the new weapon unlocks come in too slowly to be exciting or interesting. I eventually got new weapons like AK, Single shot rifles, bolt actions, snipers, and so on, but really none of them are that interesting or fun to use. Once I got the AK I just used that for the rest of the game because it seemed to be good enough. The game does seem to have a lot of weapons, because I can see which ones im missing, but theres also a lot of 'Unique' weapons you can unlock that have some sort of gimmick to them like they shoot fire or something, but I didnt enjoy using any of these because they look stupid and arent even that effective. You can put attachments on your guns, but it seems even more watered down than previous games, theres really not that much to choose from and all you do is stare at the statistics of your weapon and pick the ones that improve the stats, atleasts all I did, cause i didnt really give a shit at this point. Its even more confusnig the disconnect between the lack of skill tree, weird rank up system, lack of gun loot, but then you can still apparently find "Gear" in the form of clothing,  pants, shirts, gloves, boots. You have slots to equip different pieces of clothing, but even after 20-30 hours of gameplay and beating the game I maybe found 3 different hats, 3 different pants, and so on. Where the fuck is all the gear? Is it all side content optional shit? Yeah really dont care enough, I'm good. It's just odd and seems like the devs had no idea where they wanted to go with this game, none of it makes any sense.

So the whole main mechanics of the game are just totally uninteresting, the actual combat is just OK. The shooting feels polished, the controls are decent enough, but thats all I can say. Of course its decent, because its just the same combat thats been copy pasted from the previous 10 years without much change. I guess the health system is a bit different, you die pretty quickly, it has regenerating health, but (it took me hours to understand this) - you get One instant heal and then its an invisible cooldown you have to wait to get the instant heal back. Bit of a stupid and confusing system, but it works. The guns have a lot of recoil on them by default, but when you put on the compensator attachment it gets more managable. I guess I can compliment the game on having more 'realistic' tactical combat because you can die pretty fast, and atleast the enemies dont look like bright colorful cartoon characters like previous games, but its still just average combat. Your friend of course can pick you up, its all the standard generic shit you can expect. Its just middle of the road completely in the combat and driving compartments.

So the game has really lackluster mechanics, halfassed loot and RPG implementations, a forgettable map, middle of the road combat, well it gets worse. The objectives are just awful for the most part. Not only will you have to constantly travel across the map and look for fast travel points to get closer to even starting the mission (Thankfully the UI isn't as bad as Breakpoint) but the actual content of the main missions is just either downright awful, or completely mundane and boring. Youll be doing stuff like "Blow up the yellow tanks" , but then once you blow up the tanks the minimap will still be Red, as if theres more shit to do there, but its just bad game design in that youre actually supposed to leave the area and drive 2km somewhere else, this confused us time and time again. Other objectives are just forgettable mundane meaningless shit like "kill X person"  "Retrive X object"  "Steal the truck or plane and bring it back"  "Secure the area"  "Survive"  "Escape the room full of gas"  its just stuff like that and all blends together to be a completely boring forgettable experience. Sometimes theres 3 different objective markers on screen and then its like "ugh this shit? I gotta drive all over the map?"  like it doesnt feel fun at all most of the time.

The actual plot/story/writing...its just bad. The game has an overly political tone , but even worse its like a moralizing tone where it tries to make the answer "obvious"  and is shoving down the players throat what they ought to think. Its not like you have any choices about anything. Theres even one mission where the objective says "Stop the propaganda bullshit" or something. Like, can I decide for myself if its bullshit? No, of course not. Theres no thinking allowed in this game. I'm not a political guy either or take sides generally but I was constantly cringing at how the game is just blaring this loud message of far leftist kind of Marxism at the player nonstop... like, bro, I'm just here to play a video game. Stop trying to send some "deep meaningful message" about society or whatever, I don't give a shit. It falls completely flat at sending any sort of meaning behind its ineffectual moralizing, all of the characters, dialogue, and writing, is just stereotype after stereotype of spanish culture from the loud music blaring all over the place, to the people themselves. If I was hispanic, I'd probably be annoyed at how stereotyped they made me seem, its that bad.

Sure, a few cutscenes here and there are sort of entertaining and interesting featuring the main antagonist and his son, such as these torture interrogation scenes, how he deals with basically trying to groom his son to become the next dictator (is this supposed to be about Fidel castro or something?) but beyond that, all the cutscenes are just BORING especially basically anything involving the main character. The main player character is just utterly boring, I dont know what else to say about him. Hes just some generic hispanic hero character whos bog standard in every way possible to be least offensive and appealing to common denominator audience. Its bad. All the supporting characters are equally the same, except of course it shoehorns in more moralizing political crap such as having a transgender character which you have to do missions for about how they got their breasts removed or something, like what the fuck am I playing? Makes me wish I was playing Super Mario or some shit, fuck this.
It's also weird how the game is co-op, but theres no character creation, so the whole game youre just looking at a copy paste of the same main character for each main player, its lazy and stupid.

Dont know what else to say about the game, theres a few missions in particular which just sucked, one of them was this "follow the pipelines to the main objective" one which just wasted tons of time going to the wrong place. The game took us 24 hours to beat, most of it was once again, driving back and forth to the main objectives. The actual content of the missions is lackluster, and all the writing just sucks. Theres even one mission where you do nothing but walk aruond some beach and collect random shit for a BBQ. Thats the whole mission. Yawn.

The game also shoehoens in other random mechanics such as having a pet aligator the whole time, apparently you can unlock other pets but we never unlocked any, I'm guessing its from optional side content shit. Who cares. Towards end of game it teleports you to some random island and takes away all your guns and gives you stealth guns, but theres not even any enemies around so you just walk into the main mansion and then it gives your guns back. What was the point? Stupid. Fight your way through the antagonists main mansion, run past all the enemies on the streets, theres like not even any final boss. We just like ran past everyone and triggered some ending cutscene of the antagonist killing his son because he didnt want his son to live in a world where he "Lost" or something, i dont know. Side characters dying left and right but we never gave a shit about any of them. Game ends, roll end credits, then it pops you back into the world about some stuff about doing daily missions with some 'endgame' content. Yeah, I'm good. No thanks.

If the next Far Cry game doesn't drastically change up the formula and innovate then I'm just done with this franchise and Ubisoft in general, for fuck sakes I'm sick of this slop.

4/10