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This is going way back, but I'd like to talk about mediocre garbage for a second, specific Mercenaries 2. Before it came out, I was a fan of the first game and was hoping more of the same, but higher quality. Instead, it's a game that had the potential to be good, but instead is just pretty much a constant string of disappointments. Examples:
- Compared to the first Mercenaries (which is also flawed, but not as much), Airstrikes are... a bit inconvenient. In the first game, the grand majority of strikes are either done with a laser designation or by satellite guidance, meaning you can do it from a distance, everything else was done by smoke or by beacon and was generally not that useful. In Mercenaries 2, just about everything is either smoke or a beacon, with the other forms of targeting being used in high-end strikes accessible pretty much at the end of the game. Want to call in a Daisy Cutter? You know that thing with a huge blast radius? Well you better run real fast after you toss that smoke grenade because otherwise you're going to be blown up pretty quick. - That said, when the game offers you poo poo like Daisy Cutters and the MOAB, it's kind of hosed how bad they are. I realize that it's a last gen game and not particularly far into the console life cycle, but calling in a MOAB (by lazily tossing a smoke grenade) and having it blow up maybe a couple buildings at best is... a bit underwhelming. It also has a problem that a lot of games have, with missiles, namely things like surgical strikes, lazily gliding at their target at 40 MPH. I know I'm just being picky with that, but it just looks dopey. - Commits the old GTA sin of having you lose all of your weapons when you die outside of a mission. You get nothing but a pistol and get sent all the way back to the far side of the map, which is not exactly close in the end game. Granted you can call in weapons and transit (if you have the fuel/money) but it's just an extra loading screen and more tedium. - Huge repetition outside of main story missions, I think you generally had to complete the same task 3 times before you finally get all of the rewards for it (usually stuff for you to buy) and by the end game it gets a bit ridiculous to drive the same truck filled with parrots through a battle zone so many times. - Bounty targets that apparently have a boner for running into flaming buildings, apparently. - RPG Houses: so imagine a building with a bunch of windows and these windows constantly have guys with RPGs hanging out of them, firing at you constantly, only stopping if you destroy the house itself. On paper, maybe not so bad, in practice, just kind of bullshit, particularly if you have a few houses in the same area. - Co-Op tether. I guess better that than no Co-Op but come on now. - The story is garbage and the characters suck and even Peter Stormare can't save it, somehow. I know that's not the main draw for this kind of game, but it's real dumb. I never understood how your support pal would say things like "The Venezuelans say we're their only hope  " when it's like "dude I just blew up most of Caracas, no homes were spared". Open world games generally have a disconnect between what you do in game and what happens in the story, but for whatever reason it seems real bad in this game.For the record I haven't played this game in probably like 5 years, but it was such a huge letdown that even now, in 2017, I sometimes think about how cool it could have been.
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Feb 6, 2017 23:27
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Olive Garden tonight! posted:I gave up on it during the late game when the button-mashing hijacking QTEs became impossible for me. Jesus I had actually forgotten about those. I know they wanted to make vehicles less vulnerable but they did it in the dumbest possible way.
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Feb 6, 2017 23:46
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moosecow333 posted:I really wish Just Cause 3 was optimized better. I'm running it with a 1080 TI and even then sometimes the FPS drops to 30. My dude, just be happy you aren't on a console. I made the mistake of buying the game for my PS4 and if I got 30 FPS I was thinking "holy poo poo this is silky smooth". Content, I've gotten part way through No One Lives Forever 2 and it's great, but the walking speed is incredibly slow, especially for a game in which you sometimes need to backtrack. It had a snowmobile section too that I wasn't crazy fond of either. In the very least, the stealth is actually not horrible like in the first game. It's not great, but it's playable!
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Jul 13, 2017 00:55
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I've been playing through Borderlands 2, after playing through the first one many times years and years ago. I overall enjoy playing the game and everything, but the whole thing is just surrounded by stuff bringing it down: - Having to wait a few levels before you actually start spending skills is a really strange decision, particularly considering how dry the game is already when you don't have many points to invest or that many weapon options. Borderlands 1 had the same problem so I don't know why they didn't seem to learn from it. - There really is too much junk in the game. For instance I don't think I've ever seen a Bandit manufactured pistol that's been even remotely worth using; they always look neat in theory but they just never seem to be practical at all. Every weapon class seems to have one manufacturer who is the best overall and at least one that winds up being a total turkey. I might be wrong on that though, I haven't finished the game yet. Either way, actually getting good, practical stuff seems to be way too infrequent. - They seem to have actively reduced the number of rare items that you find over the first game. Pretty much every piece of gear I find is white or green, with the occasional blue to shake things up I guess. I don't remember exactly swimming in legendary weapons in the first game, but it seems rare to actually find something rewarding when opening a chest or killing something really dangerous. - They still have arena missions. They were the most tedious garbage in the first game and the one I've done seems to be actually worse somehow. It's mystifying. - The game has the same problem as the first in that it's got some serious level gating going on with regards to how strong enemies might be in a certain area. If an enemy is even a few levels higher than me, it seems like I do almost nothing to them while they can kill me in a few shots, I'm guessing like in the first game there is some damage scaling that goes on in the background depending on your level, or something. I don't particularly understand this decision; it's not like you'd be able to get overpowered loot in an area you're not supposed to go yet (since you're likely not going to be hitting the required level) and the areas usually don't have valid quests until you're supposed to go to them anyway, so I don't really get the point of gating them like they do. I just kind of want to explore and see other areas, go off-script a bit, preferably without being punished as harshly as I am. - The writing is pretty much entirely garbage and most of the humor either hasn't aged well at all, or was never particularly funny to begin with. When the game tries to go for humor, it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer; I can't even begin to count the times where someone will say something and then say "oh that was a joke" or something to that effect. It's honestly just kind of draining. On the other hand, when the story tries to have any gravitas at all, it falls hilariously flat because so many of the characters are either non-characters or so unlikable that it's hard to care about what happens to them. I kinda like how the original characters from the first game are portrayed, all being basically terrible people, but outside of them it's just a black hole of charisma. - The game is also filled with some of the weirdest tonal whiplash I've ever seen in just about any piece of media. I just went from a mission that ended with an audiolog of a kid watching her parents die (or something) and the mission after that ended in someone committing suicide due to terrible poetry, which was played for laughs. It was seriously awkward and just didn't really work at all. Handsome Jack is particularly bad for this too, they seem to want to portray him as a character as a sort of whimsical, ruthless psychopath, but his lines are so stupid and he just seems so passive and ineffectual that I've begun to actively tune out whenever he drops in with some badly formed threats on the communicator. - This is kind of a weird one, but the game goes out of its way to be woke as possible and I don't really have a problem with that, outside of it being a bit hamhanded at times. What's odd about it is that for all of the good points the game tries to make, it makes all of the less good things like all of the "midget" enemies, the various gay and incest jokes and so on stick out like a sore thumb. I dunno if it's just a case of it being a product of it's time and maybe if I played it in 2012 I'd never notice. It just weirds me out when it happens. Honestly if it wasn't for the character building aspects and overall gameplay loop I probably would have bailed hours ago. It seems like a one step forward, two steps back situation compared to the first game. I'm still enjoying it all the same. That being said, I've also been told that after a certain point (after the first playthrough maybe?) it becomes incredibly obnoxious and unfun to actually play. Is that the case?
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Jun 18, 2018 02:57
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Barudak posted:Rares were made turly rare (like sub 1% for boss drops) and that makes sense and is fun for a singleplayer game where equipment even three levels behind is trash Yeesh, that explains a lot. I genuinely don't know where a lot of the design decisions for the game came from, it's like they actively made the dumbest and grindiest choices they could.
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Jun 18, 2018 03:17
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DoubleNegative posted:If you're playing on PC you owe it to yourself to track down the cheat engine script that edits the game's loot tables. Being able to manually adjuat the drop rates so they aren't terrible makes the game slightly more playable. There will still be a lot of trash, but it'll be interesting trash in a variety of loot colors. I'm playing on PS4 like a sucker unfortunately! It's a real shame though, I can't imagine the pre sequel is much better since it looks to probably be like the second game with a thin coat of paint over it.
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Jun 18, 2018 13:23
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John Murdoch posted:TPS does objectively improve one thing you mentioned: you now get your active ability at level 3 instead of 5. Also it adds a vending machine that lets you grind up useless guns and spit out a new one (with various caveats for determining rarity) so it at least has that going for it. There's also beam weapons and the ice element added, both of which work really well and help flesh out the drop pool further, on top of a few new/different special gun types. And the skill trees are generally more interesting and better designed. That all sounds actually pretty cool. I've been looking up the different characters in it too and have seen a couple options that could be fun to try. I might wind up getting to it if I'm not completely burned out on the series after 2, so we'll see.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:59
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Terminally Bored posted:It's faithful but not in the aspects that really matter. Looks beautiful, the music's remastered but they hosed with hitboxes and jump heights so now mundane stuff like getting over those lava puddles require not just good but absolutely perfect timing. It's really noticeable if you played the originals. It's one of those things that you don't really notice until you start getting into some of the harder sections. When I was a kid, I could blow through Crash 2 very quickly with no problems at all, but with the new version some of the jumps go from reasonable to borderline unfair, especially if nitro boxes and/or ice are involved. It was funny, I was actually kind of bummed at first and figured I just sucked at it now, but then I looked it up and it turns out that the game has some strange, allegedly oval-like hit boxes that make things more awkward than they have to be.
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Jul 3, 2018 03:15
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I recently bought the remastered version of Crash Team Racing and it seems like it is way, waaaay harder than the original. I'm trying to play on the medium difficulty and it's usually incredibly touch and go, sometimes even a relatively minor mistake can cost me an entire race. It's all still pretty fun, but they maybe could have toned it down just a small bit. I'm fairly decent after all these years but it doesn't always seem to matter much. I have to wonder what it would be like for someone who doesn't know the game trying to start on medium, I can imagine it coming off as kinda unfair.
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Sep 18, 2019 23:46
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I just tried a race on hard difficulty in the Crash Team Racing remake and I immediately understand why almost no one has the trophy for completing the Adventure mode on hard. The AI straight up plays a different game on hard, they don't seem to drift and boost a whole lot, they're just straight up faster than it's possible for the player to be. I managed to get in second place, but it was hard fought and the racer ahead of me had a good ten second lead so I'm not entirely sure what I could have done there, I had a particularly good race too. Pretty great remake overall, but the difficulty is all over the place, especially a kart racer. Easy is too easy and medium is way too challenging for playing casually with friends. It feels like there's a difficulty missing in between easy and medium. It's especially weird compared to the original, which felt just right even at the higher difficulties. Also someone else mentioned the load times in this thread and good lord they aren't kidding. It's not a huge deal, but it really sucks, especially if you're dumb as hell like me and you keep accidentally driving into the wrong track in adventure mode.
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Oct 8, 2019 02:34
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Captain Hygiene posted:Yeah...I'm struggling with the difficulty. You're right, easy is basically never-have-opponents-in-your-rearview mode but bumping it up is frustrating. Not sure what to do, but at least the racing mechanics are still fun enough that I want to keep trying. I want to say that I've gotten to a point where I can consistently beat races on medium but sometimes the AI is just so on point that if you make even a relatively minor mistake (like loving up very slightly on The Turn on Dragon Mines) it can be enough to cost you the race if it happens late enough. I mean that's perfectly fair for a racing game, but it's pretty unforgiving as kart racers go. I don't think I've ever played another game in genre where I have to put in 110% to have a chance to succeed, it's wild. The item boxes are... odd as well. In eighth place you often get some really powerful stuff like just about every other kart racer, which is totally normal, but on the other hand I've been in first and gotten the mask a handful of times and I have genuinely no idea why. I have to wonder if it's a glitch of some sort. dracula vladdy AF has a new favorite as of 03:19 on Oct 8, 2019 |
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Oct 8, 2019 03:14
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Ugly In The Morning posted:The fishing and hunting in that game was so great, it’s not often in games that I’ll spend a few hours dicking around with the sidest of the side stuff like that but it was so relaxing. Basically everything in the game that isn't related to the story in some way is dope. I don't think I've played another game that has absolutely not earned the ending they wrote more than Far Cry 5. It's almost insulting.
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Oct 22, 2019 21:56
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The thing about the Elusive Target stuff that folks need to know is that it is a tiny, tiny part of the game and you're barely missing anything should you be unable to partake in one. Hitman 2 has a pretty massive amount of content in it all told and the ETs are pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of it all. My main issue with Hitman 2 is that it's really weird about when it auto saves and is sometimes saving when I am in a particularly hairy situation. I know I should save manually more often but here's the thing, I am profoundly dumb
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Nov 9, 2019 22:11
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BioEnchanted posted:The treetops level in the Spyro remake is as annoying as ever to navigate and the remake's analog controls makes it worse, as on this one super-charge ramp that curls around a tree you need to hug the wall tightly to avoid falling off but you only turn right if the stick is as far right as it can go, anymore forward or back and you go flying off as he doesn't turn. I had to use the d-pad just to control that entire charge. The Dream-Weaver's world is definitely overall less annoying than Beast Makers world, I always hated Beast Makers. yeah tbh beast makers has always been absolute dogshit, not a single good level in the place. the gnorcs can keep it imo
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Nov 15, 2019 20:11
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The only good Borderlands character is the basketball player who jumps into space in the Pre-Sequel
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Nov 18, 2019 00:59
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The issue with the Far Cry 5 capturing mechanic is that it can't be avoided at all and any specific plans for what you want to do next immediately get thrown out the window. It's disruptive but doesn't really add anything positive to the game at all. Pretty much any other game would either have the scenarios be something that you opt into and MAYBE have the capture mechanic show up once or twice in the game, I honestly, genuinely don't know exactly why Far Cry 5 does it the way that it does. It's talked about so frequently both in this forum and elsewhere when the game is mentioned that I can't really believe that it never came up as a concern during play testing. The game just seems to be SO confident about the story it's trying to tell that it doesn't really seem to have much interest in what the player wants to do, which winds up feeling all the more annoying because otherwise the game is open and seems to want you to make your own fun and create your own approaches to problems. The missions are short, that much is true, but the missions themselves are rarely anything to write home about (though the mission that you basically repeat three times in a row in the northern area is particularly bad), being generally linear and basic as far as missions in the game go. They're just kind of there. When you add in the whole aspect where you have a bunch of weirdos spew uninspired monologues at you it just starts to feel like more and more of a drag. If the game's going to sometimes just go ahead and take control from the player, it'd be nice if it actually offered something good in exchange. I find the game on the whole was pretty disappointing. The whole experience was so strange since the game's bigger issues (the increasingly contrived kidnappings, guns feeling very samey, how dumb the plot is) all seem so avoidable but the developers just... kinda didn't. I wonder if there's some drama behind the game's production. dracula vladdy AF has a new favorite as of 05:19 on Dec 13, 2019 |
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Dec 13, 2019 05:15
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Morpheus posted:I'm playing through the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the moment, and man, it is full of a lot of bullshit isn't it? FFT is a weird game for me because I really enjoyed it when I was younger, but as an adult I just find it too tedious and time consuming to really enjoy. The early game in particular is hard for me to get through now, it's very dry. Weirdly enough I think I actually like Tactics Advance 2 more nowadays, even though it's an incredibly bloated mess with a number of sometimes annoying design choices. It's much simplified over the original Tactics in a number of respects (no zodiac stuff, beneficial spells always hit) but I find it to be for the game's benefit.
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Jan 17, 2020 14:57
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Cleretic posted:The fact that it's demanding actual combos is also unfair for a tutorial about base mechanics. It sounds like the right idea, since a fighting game is all about combos, but the problem is it only teaches you Batman combos. The really demanding inputs require you to master those combos, but they're combos that only Batman can do, so it's not a transferable lesson. They haven't effectively taught you how to play the game, they've taught you how to play this one character. In fairness to Injustice 2, it does also have fundamentals and combo lessons for every other character too, accessible after the tutorial. I think they just go for Batman in the tutorial since he's one of the more beginner-friendly characters, lots of stuff you learn from him transfers to other characters. I don't play a lot of fighting games but Injustice 2 was one of the few times where it didn't all feel borderline incomprehensible.
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Mar 14, 2020 20:54
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Folks, I've played Resident Evil 7 long after the fact and there's a whole bunch of things that bug me about it. For the record I haven't played many of the games before RE4 that much so that's a thing. I get the impression the game is made more for people that enjoy the earlier games with tank controls and more deliberate gameplay. - I really like the atmosphere and feel of the first hour or two, but I find the game winds up feeling tedious after that point. The slow and deliberate movement starts out cool, but as the game ends up more action oriented, particularly towards the end, it starts feeling not so great. All of the combat encounters in the last couple areas felt really clunky and I didn't find them terribly fun. - The boss fights basically suck throughout the entire game. I have no idea how a game has a chainsaw duel and it feels like garbage, that just seems insane to me. The fight against Marguerite was pretty cool and felt like a fight from one of the previous games, but beyond that most of the fights felt kinda lovely to me. The last Jack fight in particular felt more like a slog than anything else. - The whole thing where Jack would grab you and turn you around felt weird and janky. I imagine there's a good reason why he does that, but I still don't really love it. - The Not A Hero campaign where you play as Chris was pretty much entirely combat which wasn't really my bag to begin with, but they also went and added small, hard to hit enemies for it as well. For any other game I wouldn't care, but the aiming and movement is so slow in general that they felt more tedious than anything else. - Also Chris' perfect guard mechanic 100% should have been in the main game. It was a lot of fun to take advantage of in spite of everything else. I think at the end of the day the game is not really for me at all, but it kind of bums me out because I've actually really enjoyed the other games I've played in the series. I can completely understand how other folks like it. I think the game is cool in a lot of respects but I don't really like actually playing it. dracula vladdy AF has a new favorite as of 05:27 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 05:21
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The Shame Boy posted:Oh cool! A level with lots of ground targets! Lets take out the A-10 for this mission! Haha cannon go brrrrr What do you mean i now have to shoot down a flying fortress that's shooting lasers at me that has 20 fast as hell drones as it's escort One of my complaints with Ace Combat 7 is that the A-10 is absolutely a trap option, if there were more air to ground missions with no dogfighting curveballs that would be one thing, but the game just isn't really friendly to the thing at all. In previous games the A-10 was still pretty rough in practice, but there were at least some lower intensity missions where it could really shine.
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Nov 18, 2020 17:56
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This is all my own fault, given what year it is now and what year it is when the game came out, but the multiplayer of COD: Infinite Warfare is disappointing and a total mess. I've been playing it on and off since I bought it years ago but the issues the game has seem to become more and more apparent as time goes on and the player base become more diluted. This is going to be a lot of whining about an irrelevant game that no one has cared about in years. I really want to like it because there's a ton of really cool and fun things in it (Gun that can be split into two smaller guns! Black hole generators! Bubble shields!) and the setting winds up being aesthetically cool, particularly for this series. The problem is that the overall balance of the game seems kinda bad, for some examples: Most of the guns are usable and fine, but every weapon class seems to have one or two guns that are clearly way, way better than the competition. This isn't incredibly uncommon for COD, but usually patches address this stuff and the modern games are typically pretty well balanced so that nothing is completely overwhelming other similar choices. It's weird because most of these games guns narrow down into either "easy to use and pretty strong" or "high risk/execution and high reward", but the game strongly errs toward the former and it's extremely clear when you see other people's loadouts. The game has a weapon variant system, wherein the player earns supply drops that can, possibly, provide unique versions of base weapons but with an added quirk. On paper this system probably sounds bad and it's not much better in practice. Basically every variant is one of three things: it's either a tiny minor upgrade that doesn't do much, some huge gimmick that doesn't help the weapon at all, or is this huge, vast bonus that completely dwarfs every other variant and can cause the weapon to go from "okay" to "this is a meta gun that the best players use". As you can probably expect, the latter of these groups tends to be the hardest to get, it's not exactly pay to win, but it's annoying as all hell. In theory you can also earn a second kind of currency (ugh) and purchase the variants you want, but not every variant is available through this method and it takes an extremely long time to actually be able to earn anything interesting. There's also no way to try before you buy, so while that dual-wield minigun may sound super cool, you might find that "hey, this basically sucks to actually use" (this is a true story). The spawn system is maybe the worst I've ever seen in a shooter and that's not hyperbole, I actually mean that. I've been spawned right behind the person that killed me, in front of the person who just killed me, into airstrikes, in front of hostile turrets, into grenades, into bullets fired at a person directly in front of me, etc. It's not even all that uncommon or restricted to the tiny maps either, it just feels like it was never tuned, like it's unfinished. In an average match I'm going to die about three seconds off of my spawn once or twice. It's maddening, I don't understand why it feels the need to spawn so close to the opposition. The playerbase is down to two categories: regular people who maybe dip into a game now and then and the people who have been playing the game non-stop for half a decade. The skill gap between these two groups is vast, with the end result being that games of twelve people tend to be totally dominated by two or three people, all of which who are using pretty well the same loadout, same gun, same everything. Every match winds up feeling extremely samey as a result, you've either got the good people on your team and you're dominating without breaking a sweat, or you don't and the game is pretty well a foregone conclusion from the word go. I know this probably reeks of salt and I don't deny there's probably a little bit at least, but this game where you can shoot laser guns on a space ship that is on the brink of a black hole's event horizon winds up feeling so dry and samey, there's never any real excitement, any real sense of competition. Games are almost never close, it's nearly always a blowout for one side and it doesn't even seem to be all that fun to be on the winning team. I don't even think I'm especially bad at the game or anything either, but the people who are good are so much better than me that it stops being engaging entirely. Again, I know that I'm asking a lot for a partially dead COD from years ago, I think I'm just miffed because the game has so much potential and yet fucks up things and has problems that were already solved by games in the series that came out before. Even now in 2021 I boot up Black Ops 3 (the game immediately preceding Infinite Warfare) semi-regularly because I think it's legitimately good, outside of the loot box garbage. It almost looks like Infinity Ward looked at BO3 and were like "we need to have a distinct vision" and then designed Infinite Warfare specifically to be some weird alternate universe BO3 where everything is different for the sake of being different, regardless as to whether or not the final product is actually better.
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Apr 2, 2021 20:45
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Stexils posted:that probably is exactly the case. every COD with multiplayer doesn't just need to compete against other multiplayer games, it needs to compete against previous games in the franchise people are still playing and do so convincingly enough to establish a playerbase quickly. if they don't do things differently how are they going to sell people on a 60 dollar purchase rather than sticking with the game they already have and can play? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of them trying new things, I think the main issue is the implementation more than anything else. For instance, on paper weapon variants could be good, but when then they do it so that there are actual mechanical changes to the variants (as opposed to it being purely cosmetic) it falls apart pretty much as soon as the game is out, probably because they're suddenly having to balance 300 guns instead of 30. Specifically I think one of the big things they wanted to do with IW with regards to the game's identity was make it much more conducive to rushing and fast play than most of the other games in the series, so sprint recovery times are near instant regardless of the weapon, jetpacks recharge very quickly and you're actually penalized with weapon sway should you dare to aim down your sights longer than half a second. In the end though all that seems to have happened is that you've got a bunch of incredibly good players using the same LMG (since there's no real downside to it anymore) floating through the map. It's kind of neat to watch but sucks a lot of variety out of the game.
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Apr 3, 2021 00:29
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Folks, I have been playing Mortal Kombat 11. If you've played it for any length of time you can probably guess what is coming. Overall, fantastic game. Easy to get into, everything seems to make sense, all of the mechanics are really fun. It actual has a significant amount of single player content which is really great. I haven't played a game in the series since MK9 so it all feels amazing. I went to do a classic tower and decided to pump up the difficulty to hard, just to see how I could do. It actually went fairly well, I struggled a bit in some of the matches, it felt fair overall and I had to put in some real effort. It was fun, they I got to the boss. Kronika is the final boss of MK11 and she has a number of quirks that distinguish her from regular opponents. In particular she: - cannot be juggled (as far as I can tell) - cannot be thrown or command-grabbed - cannot be hit with a super (it just knocks her back and she takes minor damage, no animation plays) - eventually gets knocked out of combos, can also just teleport in the middle of a string - has a highly abusable teleport (zoning is out) - has about 40-50% more health than a regular character - after losing about 33% health, she calls in a random fighter to take her place. they have about half their normal health but are the same as they otherwise would be. Kronika does this again after losing 66% health. On medium difficulty it's possible, largely by just spamming jump kicks and uppercuts, Kronika's quirks make most of my character's toolkit irrelevant. She's a bit passive on medium so the whole thing winds up being doable, challenging with little margin for error, but doable. On hard I can't even really touch her. I tried four times and was never able to get her under 50% of health on any round. If I whiff, that's 25-30% of my health gone, if she teleports out of a string (like we're talking a two-hit string) that's health gone, et cetera and so on. Netherrealm has a pretty rough track record on bosses, in the sense that they seem to be operating under totally different rules than you do. Shao Kahn in MK9 is a huge bastard, Brainiac in Injustice 2 is also a nightmare, for example. I don't know if it's bias from having my rear end handed to me last night, but I think Kronika may actually be worse. Brainiac I could at least combo and more easily avoid his unrelenting 50% combos, but with Kronika I can barely get any hits in at all. It's super unfun and I get whiplash from it since the rest of the game is so good. Even the bosses in the Towers are way better, they also tend to have some ridiculous buffs, but you can at least actually perform combos on them or attempt to zone them out.
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May 2, 2021 21:28
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Tiler Kiwi posted:i refuse to accept that is actually happening I have played that game several times and it's just like that. It's an incredibly strange trip. Not a particularly great game by any stretch, but I wouldn't say it's ever all that uninteresting.
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Jul 11, 2021 16:09
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This isn't really something dragging the game down, exactly, but to me it's odd: I've been playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon tonight and man oh man I don't think I've ever played a game with a more jarring difficulty spike. Once I beat the Iron Golem and got into a new area the game was definitely done fooling around. Again, not necessarily a bad thing but got total whiplash from it. The overall pace and the things the game is asking for me are night and day from when I started. A thing that is dragging the game down though: the DDS system, specifically how rare the cards seem to be. Initially I thought the cards were just provided as you progressed but from what I can tell it's more that it's a total crapshoot. I've done my fair share of grinding in metroidvanias but I'm not particularly crazy about it and the game is rough enough that it's going to be even more of a chore.
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Oct 9, 2021 05:33
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Simply Simon posted:I played HoD quite a while ago so grain of salt, but that was my takeaway as well - it's just boring to move around in the game, and it requires a lot of it. So many flavorless corridors with nothing enemies, and then you get to the big surprise thing and it's just more corridors. I did finish it but don't remember a single fun thing about it, just mediocre boredom. I just finished Dissonance and you're correct on all accounts. One thing that is particularly bad about it on top of all of that is that proper teleport rooms are pretty much not a thing at all until you're in the last third of the game or so. Having to run back and forth through the castle winds up being beyond tedious since the game isn't very good at pushing you in the right direction and it's not at all difficult to inadvertently miss something earlier in the castle and have to trek all the way back to get it. I was stuck for a while and my god did the game drag. Also the soundtrack is godawful. I still wound up liking the game overall but it definitely feels like a lower tier metroidvania. Also wrt to Aria, can confirm that Bloodstained is a very good successor to the game and is probably my personal favorite metroidvania. It's still got a couple iffy parts in terms of progression (water mobility, bypassing spikes) but beyond that it's pretty much exceptional in most respects, so long as it's not the Switch version. The randomizer alone adds so much to the game.
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Oct 15, 2021 14:33
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The Moon Monster posted:Circle of the Moon was less in the SotN vein than others, so I get not liking it, but I think they did a way better job of making the game they were trying to make than they did with Harmony. You're probably right. I really want to enjoy Circle of the Moon but the difficulty just feels cruel. I don't mind harder games but some of the bosses feel overtuned and are frequently a slog.
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Oct 15, 2021 16:50
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Strategic Tea posted:Ditto for Elite Dangerous neutron stars. Mostly these don't really bug me anymore, except for the ones that rotate so rapidly that the jet is extremely broad and turbulent, makes charging up the engines really tense. Black holes are still bad though, especially when you jump to a system with one and don't realize it's there. I get close enough, start noticing the gravitational lensing and then just immediately grind to a halt to make sure I know exactly where it is. They don't even seem to be that dangerous, just unsettling and weird. White dwarfs are the absolute worst stellar object in Elite though. I've had a single close encounter with one and that was enough. I wasn't even that close to it, but the gravity well and heat were so strong that it was a pain to get away from it. I almost lost hours of progress. Hate it when I see one in a system.
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Oct 27, 2021 15:02
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This is probably more of a personal problem then something dragging down the game, but: I've just started Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it seems weirdly hard and I have genuinely no idea what I'm meant to be doing. The tutorial messages the game has provided do seem to shed some light on things, but I still feel almost completely lost. I've succeeded on completing some small quests at Fort Joy, but my successes in combat have been few and far between, it feels like I'm just barely scraping out wins and certain fights just seem to be way beyond what my party can do. In particular I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be at in terms of equipment, I've got some basic weapons but I can't seem to find much armor for the party and without that I tend to get rocked pretty hard by the enemy's opening salvo. Those crocodile things seem unbeatable at the moment. It's weird because I think I understand the way in which the game is supposed to work in theory, since I've played other games similar to this and done okay in those, but I can't seem to get started with this one. I've been able to win a couple of fights after of the voidspawn things outside the fort, but it was a lot of knockdown arrow spam and slowly whittling down the target. I'm playing on Classic difficulty, which I assumed was like the moderate difficulty, for folks who have played, am I mistaken here? The game is just A Lot and while I really like the setting, the writing and like everything surrounding the gameplay I'm having a really hard time getting it to click.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:29
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How! posted:I had to restart with about three different character builds before it clicked with me. IIRC it’s better to compose your party to either all do magic or all do physical damage, or a 3:1 split. 2 magic and 2 physical is much weaker. I read this somewhere, I think it was Before I Play, and have been trying to stick with a strictly physical party. I don't think I'm far enough in for it to make a major impact, but it's something.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:59
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I reinstalled Far Cry 5 to play the Goldeneye remake maps that someone made and they rule. One of the biggest issues in Far Cry 5 is that when you've caused a sufficient amount of chaos in one of the three regions on the map, your character gets tranquilized, captured and sent to one of the antagonists to be monoluged at for a few minutes. This can happen if you're in the middle of nowhere, flying in your wingsuit, in a plane, whatever. It's a particularly strange design decision since many other games with similar systems don't just take away control from you and railroad you into the newly available content, in almost any other open world game it just be a new mission icon on the map or something. So I boot up my save from a few years ago and within like five seconds my character is clutching at an arrow in her leg and immediately passes out. Like I walked forward maybe two feet and that was it. It was incredible. I feel as though I have probably posted about this in the past, maybe even in this thread, but Far Cry 5 is maybe the only game I have ever played where the story, both in terms of the way it is told and the specifics of the plot, really drag down the whole experience in a drastic manner. The antagonists have go away heat, they aren't nearly as interesting as the writers think they are, the points they try to make are not at all deep or intriguing and, for me at least, the interactions with them all just kind of blur together. The game also does that milquetoast thing that games frequently try to do (and mostly fail at) where they confront you with a whole: "oh so you like VIOLENCE, eh? Well maybe you're not so much better than the baddies are you? You're just making things worse!" This all comes about in a game where there are no non-lethal options or peaceful solutions and the game revels in the various weapons and options it provides to murder people with. It just seems completely at odds with everything else that's happening and feels entirely unearned. Additionally the cult you fight all game long are a bunch of one-dimensional murderous rednecks who have barely functioning brains on account of a magical macguffin drug that makes them crazy. In short, they make it easy to justify killing them. AND YET, the game still pulls some "hm maybe it would be better if you left these people alone," with the endings and it's just obnoxiously stupid. Like they're straight-up crucifying random people, come on now. Last thing I will say is that the main ending is still maybe the worst I've ever seen in a game. I genuinely believe it makes the whole product retroactively worse. Without going into too much detail it's a complete curveball (apparently alluded to in in-game radio stations that I have never actually noticed) that results in everything you have done up to that point being undone. The game has some surprisingly optimistic themes about communities working together to make things better and push back against fringe ideas like the religious extremism of the cult, but in the last five or so minutes it doubles back on all of it. It brings in this useless "nothing actually matters" message that doesn't really fit in with the rest of the game at all and just seems to be a downer twist ending for no reason other than to try and be shocking. Joseph Seed's stupid family can suck my nuts
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Jul 2, 2022 08:27
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I have no idea how it survived playtesting. There's no way that during development there wasn't at least a single person who said it was stupid after getting hit by a poison arrow while being hundreds of feet in the air. I wonder if its question of them having a ton of finalized dialogue and scenes built early on, later realizing "oh, this mechanic is terrible" and then just trying to make the best of it. But even then they could just make mission markers that result in the player getting captured. It would still be stupid but at least it wouldn't take away control.
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Jul 2, 2022 08:46
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If you read all of the hidden documents you find out the dog had it coming
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Jul 2, 2022 09:27
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Calaveron posted:It was so stupid too because some times you couldn’t even skip the cutscenes since they involved you having to push forward to make them proceed Last night I was caught in one of Jacob's missions which seem to be the worst, it's the same dumb bunker time attack thing like three kidnappings in a row. It's entirely linear, not interesting and kind of the perfect encapsulation of all the things wrong with the plot and kidnappings. IIRC they're trying to make a point of the player being easily conditioned and brash, but it's so rigid and involuntary that it just doesn't work at all.
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Jul 2, 2022 16:36
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John Murdoch posted:People would always fixate on the guns being too strong in DMC2 but what always stuck out to me was how your weapon options are: Vanilla sword. Longer sword that does less damage. Shorter sword that does more damage. That's it, those are the weapons. This is especially bad given how fun Ifrit was in the previous game. The sword types don't even feel especially different in terms of damage or reach, or at least enough for it to matter.
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Jul 15, 2022 16:11
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I have been playing SMT3: Nocturne for the first time and I am guessing I am about 70ish% the way through. Overall I like it quite a bit, but I still want to vent about it. HOWEVER, while I get that it's a game that has a reputation for being hard, I think that's not quite true. Instead I'd argue that the game is actually mostly easy, but there's just these weird moments of Gotcha! bullshit spread throughout. Like you'll be fighting a boss or possibly even a random fight and just abruptly die to an instant kill attack you didn't see coming and didn't know to prepare for. I don't think it would necessarily be that big of a deal if the game either autosaved in area transitions or had a checkpoint system. As it is it's a bummer to be in the situation I was in last night, where I spend about an hour trying to find Beelzebub in the Labyrinth of Amala, mostly have the boss fight under control until he starts spamming an instant kill move that ends things after I run out of resources to prevent it. The thing is that I can now prepare accordingly, go back and probably win, but it's at the cost of at least one extremely deflating hour and having to repeat a particularly irritating area. I don't really mind having to repeat content if I've made a reasonably foreseeable tactical mistake, but in this case it was really more of a "you have the wrong magatama equipped and don't have enough tetraja rocks, eat poo poo." It doubly sucks because the boss I fought before this one also had an instant kill move that, as I learned, can't even be resisted with instant kill immunity, so the game's not even very consistent in how the specific bullshit is going to work. But again, most fights, boss fights included, are pretty straightforward and reasonable challenges. It's just every once in a while the game decides it's time to die and you have to just pray that you've either blindly prepared correctly or the dice rolls play out in your favor. I also find the dungeons seem to vary in quality from "decent with an interesting gimmick" to "incredibly boring and samey 99% of the time". The Obelisk in particular was just awful and went on for at least 30 minutes too long. The Labyrinth of Amala is also pretty tedious aside from the Raidou floor, which was tense and actually ruled pretty hard. Last thing I can think of, the encounter rate is sometimes a bit much, like I'll do a fight, move a meter and the IMMEDIATELY get thrown into a second fight. It feels like an NES JRPG kind of encounter rate and I am not a fan. Also don't really love how towns still have encounters in them, since they eventually become a joke and I just find myself casting Estoma over and over again so my level 65 demi-fiend doesn't waste time fighting level 3 pixies or whatever. It feels like playing Pokemon where every spot in the world is tall grass and you're just using repels over and over again to avoid the tedium. Great game overall, the mechanics and atmosphere in particular are very good. It just doesn't respect your time very much.
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Oct 17, 2022 20:59
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Nuebot posted:There's a degree of assumption that you're familiar with the series, honestly. A lot of the series icons like Beelzebub are pretty much the same as they've always been, so if you're someone who's played the franchise before you know to prepare for death. But if you're not? Well, gently caress you. It's going to be someone's first SMT game at some point and the devs just kind of didn't care that much. Back to the save point with you. It's been interesting since the only other games in the series that I've played are Persona 3 and Persona 5, though the main takeaway I've got from those is that buffs are very good. Persona 5 is way more modern feeling and is just generally leas punishing than Nocturne and they don't really feel all that similar. Persona 3 on the other hand has a lot of the same problems imo, albeit not really to the same extent. Most of the danger in Persona 3 comes from either unlucky random fights or mid bosses in Tartarus (god what a boring dungeon) look for one specific strategy to win, but the penalty for a loss feels way more lenient and doesn't seem to happen as much. Also I got to the Diet building and it's a pretty inspired dungeon, I kind of wish we got more like it and less subway station/cave combos. What's been unique for me has been that before starting Nocturne, I was replaying Final Fantasy 10, which creates an interesting contrast as a JRPG that came out at the same time. It's a bit hard to compare the two as they have very, very different design goals and budgets, but it's pretty bold that Atlus made something as punishing and old school as Nocturne when other devs were changing with the times and making games that are a little less hostile to the player.
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Oct 18, 2022 04:31
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Another SMT3 thing: kinda lovely of the game to lock off advancing the bonus dungeon entirely by even just entering the last dungeon. I don't really see the point of it and there's no real indication that it works that way. Also the last dungeon sucks and is a long, loooong expansion of a previous dungeon, which also sucked.
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Oct 21, 2022 00:04
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I've finished SMT3 and while I liked it overall, I'm pretty happy to be done with it. That last dungeon was just plain awful, it's like the devs had a meeting to come up with all the most tedious and annoying gimmicks a dungeon can have and just chucked them all in at once. The last third or so in particular, with the maze with invisible teleporters, was just godawful.
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Oct 23, 2022 18:55
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I bought the RE3 remake on sale after really enjoying RE2 and it is just really rough. It's weird because on paper "RE2-style game with a greater combat focus" sounds great, but in practice not so much. There's some interesting ideas, like how Jill now has a dodge button, but the timing for the dodge to be successful is very spotty and it's unclear to know when to actually do it. The Nemesis also just seems way, way worse than Mr. X in the one segment where it's tracking you down through the downtown. He just knows where you are at all times and it's very transparent, there isn't a whole lot of tension involved, he just makes exploring during that one brief moment a massive pain in the rear end. His boss in front of the clock tower also suuuuucks, he just seems to have maybe twice the health he ought to have and the fight just goes and goes. I've also been stunlocked to death or near-death a number of times both by Nemesis and just random enemies, there doesn't really seem to be anything stopping a zombie starting its canned attack animation as soon as another zombie's animation ends. I don't really remember that ever happening in RE2, but it might be because there's seemingly so many more enemies in a given room. I dunno, I just find the game kind of irritating to play. It's not at all how I figured I'd feel about it going into it, especially after the first 45 minutes or so was solid.
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Oct 31, 2022 00:22
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