Over the past couple of weeks I've played through Wolfenstein, Watch_dogs, Ubersoldier 2 and Octodad.
Wolfenstein was fantastic. It's a really solid shooter that manages to blend old ideas with new ones. It's faithful to the original game in so many ways from the character design and the level maps, to the little details like the "Get psycked" intro, picking up health and armor and eating dog food. The gameplay is excellent and the length of the game feels pretty generous, clocking in at something like 20 hours for my initial playthrough. Really well written storyline and great characters. Only real let down to the game in my opinon is that there are inconcistancies in the story here and there and all the stuff about the "secret technology" and the hidden jewish order is never actually explained properly.
Watch_dogs was great as well. At the start it was hard to ignore all the criticism. There story is stupid. The vehicle handling is awful. Tons of little flaws that have been ironed out of other modern sandbox games are apparent in this one.
But the more I played of Watch_dogs the more I liked it. The story gets better the further in you get (all though it remains dumb) and you get a better feel for what kind of a man Aiden really is. The whole game makes more sense if it is seen as an origin story.
The gameplay also really grows on you. It's obvious that this game is built on the Ubisoft open world formula. If you dislike the way Assassins Creed and Farcry 3 does their open world design, then this game will probably also annoy you but it's made a lot of improvements.
All the worlds collectibles and side missions are tied to the games hacking mechanic and Aidens "job". Unlocking "towers" involve infiltrating a compound and getting into the master server. Unlocking hubs involves navigating sometimes entire city blocks where you hunt down junction boxes and navigate a buildings geometry. It's a really smart environmental puzzle.
Similarly, the "gang" missions play out like the Pirate fortress takeovers in Farcry 3. There is something quite thrilling about those missions. You can go in sneaky like an urban ninja, shooting people in the face with a silenced pistol or you can go in loud, having prolonged firefights with people urban combat style. That stuff is highly satisfying. It feels like playing the movie Heat, when you are ducking and dodging between cars firing automatic riffles at enemy cars, etc.
Ultimately I ended up liking this game a whole lot more than I expected. I think they could have made the game a lot more intelligent by having you pick what kind of character you wanted to be, based on your actions. For example in one side mission I had to track down sextrafficers. I executed every last one of those guys even though I wasn't prompted to and got bad karma for doing it. There's a lot of ambiguity in the gameplay. I hope the next one takes this into account.
Ubersoldier 2 is a bad game but I enjoyed playing through it. It's a low(ish) budget FPS set during World War 2. You're some kind of special agent/super soldier who is hunting down super nazis. The game is dated as all hell and the game mechanics are awful. You need to earn a hell of a lot of experience points to put into your accuracy before you can even hit anything, which is just plain bad game design. But it's a game where you run around shooting Nazis so really, what's not to love about this game? Interestingly the game uses comic book cutscenes instead of animations. They're kind of similar to Tintin or Modesty Blaze. The effect on the story is surprisingly good, to the point that I actually got a much better impression of the game just from enjoying the artwork.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch was an absolute delight to play through. Put simple, everything in that game comes together to form a videogame that is close to being perfect in my opinion. The gameplay is stupid and silly and it's highly amusing. The story is simple but clever and the character interaction is surprisingly touching. Somehow this tiny indiegame manages to have a better story than 95% of games on the market. Similarly who ever was in charge of the artwork and character animation managed a whole lot with very little effort. Octodad is a remarkably expressive octopus.
I'd recommend anyone who has 3 hours to spare to play through this game.
Currently I am playing Waking Mars and Deadfall Adventures.
Waking Mars is an OS port about a scientist astronaut exploring caves and fauna on Mars. The gameplay is very basic but the interaction between objects becomes pretty complicated. Surprisingly good story with more depth than you expect.
Deadfall Adventures is a B-movie videogame adaption of movies like Indiana Jones, Alan Quartermain and Romancing the Stone. So far the game seems surprisingly good considering how little attention it got and the middling score. Shooting Nazi's and solving tomb puzzles works pretty well so far.
This post has been edited by Apt Hoc: 17 June 2014 - 01:12 PM
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tiam, on 30 May 2014 - 05:12 PM, said:
I tend to get OCD with RPGs, so right now I'm putting together a mage-hunting party capable of fighting the Revenants in the elven forest, leveling my characters to get the skills necessary to do that. Overall, I'm enjoying the game and the trial and error strategy of combat.
