Darling Baphomet Posted January 2, 2023 Author Share Posted January 2, 2023 40 minutes ago, The Devils Reaper said: For a disabled trans person, you have an impeccable profile. Seeing games like Superhot VR and Skyrim VR at 100% should set an example for any fully abled gamers that complain about VR games, myself included. Your inspiration is unrelenting, a stunning and brave individual Aw, thanks. My disabilities are mostly not physical, save for severe chronic stomach pain (mostly medicated away now), although that probably just relates to being autistic because for whatever reason gastrointestinal issues are extremely common among us. I'm fairly agoraphobic and don't like to go out unless I feel like I have a reason to (e.g. going grocery shopping), so I've been trying to use VR as an exercise regime. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted January 6, 2023 Author Share Posted January 6, 2023 (edited) New year, new platinums! Three of them, to be exact. Nothing too hard yet although I've got a bunch of hard games in the oven - Killing Floor Incursion, Arizona Sunshine, After the Fall, Evil Dead: The Game, and Beat Saber. But most of those are going to take a bit, especially After the Fall and Evil Dead. Beat Saber's almost complete, though - just need to put in another good 3 hour session and then I can move on to my next fitness game - either Creed or BoxVR. ... I'm getting a rash next to my nose from playing so much VR these past few weeks. Maybe I need to loosen my headset up a bit. I'm very satisfied with my 2022 platinums overall - despite housing instability I was able to almost keep up with 2021 and get near my 2022 goal of 200 platinums, and I earned an abundance of URs and near-URs that I'm quite proud of - Sid Meier's Civilization V, Skyrim VR, The Binding of Isaac, Superhot VR, Planet Coaster, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt, Doom 3, and Disco Elysium, Back 4 Blood, Pistol Whip, and 8-Bit Invaders! I earned over a third of my UR platinums last year - so hopefully I manage to outdo that this year. Anyway, so, as stated, my goal for this year is to reach 275 platinums (which will require me to earn 83 platinum trophies), and additionally I'd like to reach the first or second page of the VR leaderboard - which luckily has yet to be touched by the stroker menace and those who stroke (derogatory). 194: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales - 50.14% ... How does this game have a lower rarity than Marvel's Spider-Man on PS5? I mean, one of these is a full game, and the other is a standalone expansion. Let's take a look... Ah yes, it's because of autopops. Of course. At least shovelware platinums are their own thing - autopoppers on the other hand ruin the rarities of PS5 games for legitimate trophy hunters. We're getting to the point (thank god) where enough people have PS5s that the influx of PS4 players autopopping PS5 games isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still incredibly annoying when it comes up. Trophy hunters sure do hate actual trophy hunting, huh? Anyway, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (christ, what a name) is a standalone expansion to one of the best PS exclusives of last gen. As one might expect, it's a lot shorter, but it stands out in its own right, has a very solid story, and introduces a bunch of new mechanics through Miles's powers, which helps the combat stand out from the base game. The story follows the titular Miles Morales, who - this is technically a spoiler, but the fact that this game is a thing at all kind of gives it away - was bitten by a radioactive spider near the end of Spider-Man. (What do I call it? Spider-Man PS4? No, because it's on PS5, too. Marvel's Spider-Man? Yeah, no shit, Marvel's Spider-Man. But I can't just keep referring to it as "the base game" for this entire review. Spider-Man works, I guess.) Spider-Pete has been training Miles, and the game picks up right as Miles is starting to get the hang of being a superhero - Peter has gone off to Europe, and so Miles has the run of the city for a few weeks. As expected, all hell breaks loose, as a gang called the Underground declares war on Roxxon, a corporation using Harlem as a site for a new reactor using an experimental fuel they've developed. But the heart of the story has to do with the rivalry between Miles and the Tinkerer, the head of the Underground. While technically an existing character, the character has very little in common with any previous iterations except for their conflict with Roxxon. I've seen people say they thought the Tinkerer was a shallow villain, but I quite liked them and the moral conflict they inspired in Miles, as I did the overall story - it's not all that long and it's unlikely to shock you with its twists, but it's competent and compelling. The gameplay primarily consists of traversing the open world and going from location to location or doing the various open world activities at your disposal, and combat. The traversal is fantastic. Miles' web slinging style is fluid and a joy to watch, especially playing in performance mode. It very much feels like his movement takes inspiration from the stylishness of Into The Spider-Verse. While on my NG+ playthrough (and during collectible cleanup) I started to just fast travel everywhere, for most of my playtime swinging through the city was a joy, and how many open world games can you say make getting from point A to point B fun? The combat is another matter entirely. Like Spider-Man, it has a very Arkham-esque beat em up sort of combat, where Spider-Man automatically locks on and dashes towards enemies during combat, employing a variety of combat techniques (e.g. dodging underneath a shielded enemy to hit them from behind) but overall being a bit less precise than I would like. Now, on paper "Spider-Man beats automatically beats people up and you use skills to spice things up" sounds like it'd get very easy and very repetitive, but both Spider-Man and Miles Morales solve this problem by flooding you with enemies. All of which are trying to kill you, many of which with guns which you should probably avoid if you don't want to die. On top of this, most enemy types have specific resistances - Miles has unique venom powers which are essentially electric attacks; he can knock people into the air, dash into them, punch them, and ground pound - requiring Miles to either use a specific power to take them out, web them, or otherwise disarm them before they can be taken down. All in all, this makes for a combat system that is fun and very cinematic, but ultimately becomes... well, a total clusterfuck as you advance in the games. Battles become a matter of keeping track of 4+ enemies all trying to attack you (which is important, because like Horizon: Forbidden West, even on easier difficulties enemies can knock out most of your health with one or two attacks), dodging AOE attacks which come with little to no warning and disable your powers, and trying to manage enemies' resistances all the while. It's fun when it works, and extremely frustrating when it doesn't. Luckily, this is where the game's stealth system comes in - if you carefully distract enemies and only attack them when nobody's looking (the game will handily mark them as 'safe' when this is the case) you can keep picking them off with one hit stealth takedowns, which, even if you only manage it a few times before being spotted, can significantly reduce the nuisances of combat - pressing square to win is, after all, much easier than trying to save up venom to hit them with all while keeping an eye for their near-instant, disarming AOE attacks. I often feel like stealth systems in open world games are tacked on with little purpose - they're often boring and make games too easy - but in Miles Morales, it is a welcome break. The open world itself is... well, fairly standard fare for an open world. You have your high budget main missions, some side quests which typically take you around the open world itself and are engaging if not too flashy, and then some side-side quests which will involve small tasks like tracking down stray vans. Besides that, you have your collectibles, your bases filled with enemies, and training programs Peter left for Miles in which he must traverse the city within a time limit or fight holographic enemies. One thing I will say, playing on PS5 - god damn there are a ton of pedestrians. I don't think I've ever seen an open world game this densely populated. You're usually swinging too high to interact with them, but running around on the streets you'll encounter civilians wanting to high five you, and crowds will form when you're fighting on the ground to watch. Open world games often feel more like checklists than meaningful game worlds, and both Spider-Man and Miles Morales are no exception, but for what they are, they do it well. The game worlds are gorgeous, and frankly, in the context of Spider-Man I couldn't imagine a game where you didn't have a sprawling city to sling around. Yeah, it might be nice if it were a little more fleshed out... but it works. So the summary: Miles Morales is a solid expansion to Spider-Man, and it's currently free on PS+ Extra (and you can use this to buy Spider-Man remastered for 20$ without having to buy the Miles Morales ultimate edition, if you wish.) I'd say there's no good reason for anyone who owns a PS5 and has PS+ Extra not to check it out. It's a solid game with a good story, fun (if frustrating) combat, and a gorgeous open world. What more do you want? 195: Operation Warcade - 5.31% This game is so janky. It's so, so janky. But it's fun. Operation Warcade is a... man, I don't even know how you would qualify this. It's like an arcade cabinet where you have a fake gun and you shoot enemies on a scrolling screen, except it's in VR and the arcade cabinet screen is a 3D world you can peer into (but not too much). And occasionally you can trigger 'immersion points' which will put you in various situations in the actual game world, to scale - as opposed to the normal gameplay, in which you are a giant shooting tiny, tiny people in a tiny little world. I guess it's meant to emulate how enemies on an arcade screen will naturally look smaller than people in real life, but it's an odd effect in a VR game nonetheless. The gameplay is... hard to quantify beyond that. You have your Mac-10, you have your grenades, and you shoot people, explosive barrels, and various enemy vehicles, which can explode and take down soldiers with them. Occasionally powerups and alternate weapons will show up - you can dual wield your guns, fire explosive arrows, and get a variety of ridiculous grenades that are extremely powerful, including one that doesn't actually explode but instead activates bullet time. Immersion points are where the game gets the most variety - there's sequences where you drive vehicles while shooting enemies, shoot people out of a boat, helicopter, or car on autopilot, pilot jets and helicopters (... this is terrible. I was only able to get it remotely playable using a DS4, and even then it was too janky to finish challenges with), and weapon specific challenges where you fight waves of enemies while using a bow and arrow, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, dual shotguns, or two knives, occasionally having a shield in your left hand instead of a second weapon. Besides this, you have to dodge or deflect bullets that are shot at you and shoot down mortar shells and jets before they blow you to bits, keeping you on your toes. The game has six different areas, however most levels in those areas use the same map except with different enemy layouts and immersion points. The game's repetitive, but it's fun. There's an odd amount of entertainment to be head shooting tiny people and throwing grenades that summon fire tornados at them. The primary mode of progression is completing challenges in levels, which unlocks new levels as well as upgrades for your weapons. If you're a trophy hunter, this will be your main objective. It's no laughing matter. The game has 108 challenges to complete, and three of those (at least for me) were unobtainable due to glitches. Another two I couldn't complete because of the jank ass aircraft controls combined with enemies de-spawning too quickly left me unable to kill enough soldiers in time. This left me with all of three challenges as wiggle room. Challenges range from "don't die and don't let any civilians die" (except they will run into explosive barrels or get run over, and for whatever reason killing them doesn't count as letting them die, so the ideal course of action is to gun them down yourself - making this one of the more realistic depictions of the US military.) to extremely specific ones such as using the gravity gun to throw an explosive barrel at a helicopter. The actual reason to be playing this game, outside of trophy hunting, though? Well, that'd be the leaderboard. Chasing high scores in this game is a daunting proposition because you can get absolutely huge amounts of points, but it comes with immense risk - you can get up to a 20x combo multiplier by chaining kills without missed shots, however you're also extremely vulnerable; regular soldiers are hitscanners, and if you take too long to line up your shots (or even just throw a grenade instead of gunning them down immediately) a group of six soldiers will kill you in seconds, taking a chunk out of your score and reducing your multiplier to zero. Keeping combos going is a challenge, and an engaging one at that, as demonstrated by having stayed up until 3 AM chasing the #1 spot on the global leaderboard a few days ago. The chase, you may be interested in knowing, concluded in my favor. As a last note, the game allows you to switch between two types of music - 'epic' which is about what you'd expect from an action-heavy military shooter, and 'dance' which is as video gamey as you could hope to get. I ended up favoring the dance soundtrack, which is actually quite good. Okay, actually, that isn't the last note. This game is janky. More specifically, it's buggy. The aircraft controls are terrible and as far as I can tell pretty much unusable with the moves. The whole game is much harder to control with the moves, frankly, and I ended up switching to DS4 halfway through and never looking back. The game also crashed a few times and had some truly bizarre glitches, such as one of my hands being moved about two feet back while using the DS4, which as you might expect made it quite difficult to aim, as my gun was positioned behind my head. Multiple challenges are also glitched. It's not too frustrating, all things considered, and I've had far worse glitches from much higher budget VR games. But goddamn do I wish they'd fix those aircraft controls. (Looking at you, Killing Floor Incursion) 196: 1976: Back to Midway - 42.86% Not a bad set of corresponding numbers there, I think! Anyway, 1976: Back to Midway is another game from the developer of Operation Warcade. It very much has a similar concept - you're playing an arcade game in VR, only this time it's a shoot em up and you're surrounded by plane parts looking up at a huge, theater-like screen that makes up your play area. The game feels a lot higher budget than Operation Warcade - the gameplay is far more in depth, as is the VR implementation; planes will fly in from above you, and alternatively, fly out past your head. Operation Warcade was a fun arcade game with a weird VR gimmick; 1976 takes that gimmick and fleshes it out to the extent that it really wouldn't be the same without VR. The gameplay, like Operation Warcade, is fairly standard arcade fare - it's a classic shoot em up. You have your plane, and you shoot a variety of other planes, as well as boats, turrets, and at the end of most levels, very, very big planes. Along the way you collect coins and go through immersion zones. We'll talk about those later. The game's hardly revolutionary, but it accomplishes what it means to accomplish very well - there's a wide variety of planes, the VR implementation is impressive, and the power ups and various weapons you can add to your ship (namely homing missiles and extra shots from other directions) by spending money are all fun to use. The game tends to lean towards bullet hell as you progress - turrets shooting lasers, planes firing large, homing bullets at you, and enemies flying through your path all make navigating levels while staying alive a challenge. It's also a hell of a lot easier on the eyes than Operation Warcade was, so that's good. If you like (or are partial to) shoot em ups and want a 5$ VR game that is just that but with significant VR bells and whistles... this is your game. Go play it. Alright, and now for immersion zones. I don't have all that much to complain about with this game, but immersion zones... you know how in Operation Warcade I said the aircraft controls were nearly unusable? Well, in 1976: Return to Midway, they're not nearly as bad. But they're still bad. And also, now all your immersion zones are aircraft minigames. Sometimes you're the gunner on a bomber, sometimes you're flying a plane in first person, sometimes you're flying a plane in third person - but it's all planes. None of your upgrades from the main game apply here, and the controls are... not good. For the most part, it would work okay, but you're locked moving forwards at a consistent speed, and as a result the game is constantly re-centering you to look forwards. This is bad, because you need to aim at things, and aiming is thus a struggle of trying to see if you can move your aim as little as possible without giving it no input at all and causing the aim to recenter. The challenge requirements for immersion zones also seem to believe that there is a competent control scheme to achieve them with, but there is not, and thus more often than not I would fail them, and often void a no-death challenge for the main level in the process. Luckily, they're entirely optional, and if you want to you can skip them altogether without it mattering much, since challenges are all but irrelevant here. All that matters is gold, and you can grind that to your heart's content, no skill required. So, with Operation Warcade, I had a, "so what's the point?" section. The biggest problem with 1976 is that... well, there isn't really one? The trophy list is simplified to the point of mundanity - there are no specific "do [x] thing" trophies, and there are no trophies relating to completing challenges, nor do they seem to reward you with more money, leaving them with little usage in or outside of the game. Admittedly, this is something of a relief, as they're much harder than in Operation Warcade, and I could easily see the game being a <1% platinum if you were required to earn all or even most gold stars. But the end result is that all you really need to do to get through the list except play each level and upgrade your plane a shit ton, and then you're done. And there's no global leaderboard, either, which sucked me in with Operation Warcade. What is there, though, is fun and well put together, and even if it's a short platinum, it's very much a memorable one. Oh yes, right. This game has a story. The story's told solely through cutscenes narrated by doctor Ivan Ivanovich (perhaps now is a good time to mention that this is a game developed by Ivanovich games). You are a skilled fighter pilot in a world overtaken by Nazis, and so you're being sent back into the past to fight Nazis and reverse their domination of the world. You get a cutscene like this before every level, some of which reference historical events and give you some background on them, and nearly all of which will provide some form of "uh oh, changing history has resulted in this quirky thing happening!" E.g. the Walkman was now invented before 1976, and tabletop RPGs are now an Olympic sport. Neat. It's not really in depth, but it is cool to have a mission briefing before each level to give them some character outside of simply shooting the shit out of everything you come across. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game Beat Saber QUBE 2 Beat Blaster Shadow Point After The fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Moss ON HOLD: Orcs Must Die Subnautica Destiny 2 Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island Serious Sam 4 DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cat Quest 2 Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher BoxVR Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Edited January 6, 2023 by Darling Baphomet 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted January 10, 2023 Author Share Posted January 10, 2023 (edited) Just got my new 2TB SSD yesterday and so I've been working on redownloading much of my backlog onto it. Only managed to download a few hundred gigs so far, so something tells me this is going to take a while. 197: Beat Blaster - 15.81% This platinum trophy is called "Level 30" and its description claims you must beat level 30 to unlock it. Something tells me Ivanovich doesn't know how platinum trophies work. Which admittedly is not nearly the jankiest thing I've seen in his games. Beat Blaster is a much more traditional VR title than the previous two Ivanovich games, Operation Warcade and 1976: Back to Midway - while those were VR-improved arcade games, Beat Blaster is fairly standard fare for a VR title. You move through levels with two guns in your hands (or one, if you so choose) and shoot targets while avoiding obstacles. It's a solid enough concept, although not quite as unique as the previous two titles I played. So first off, the 'beat' in 'Beat Blaster' would make you think this is a rhythm game - it's not. It's an arcade game with some musical elements in its aesthetic - objects in the world bob along to the beat of the track that's playing and walls have visualizers on them. Admittedly, the soundtrack is fantastic and probably the best aspect of this game's design. The visuals are rather rough and jagged on PSVR, sadly, and are fairly standard fare for a tron / arcade themed VR game. The game is largely an obstacle course - you dodge bullets, avoid walls and various moving objects, and sometimes have to shoot enemies or doors open. Every level up until the 20th introduces a new mechanic to the game, some of which get... very annoying, specifically the moving floors which seem almost impossible to use with the neck controllers due to the imprecision inherent to using your head as a joystick. (Also not great for your neck.) Like the previous Ivanovich games, I ended up using the DS4 as it turned out to be the superior way to play the game by a wide margin - which was perfectly fine in 1976's case, and justifiable even in Operation Warcade, but Beat Blaster was clearly trying to be an immersive VR game so the controls are disappointing. Overall it's a solid arcade-esque VR game with more than enough playtime for the 5$ I spent on it. The levels are kept fresh by having every run be randomly assembled out of component rooms, although some rooms are much harder than others so this can sometimes feel like you're waiting for a run that's skewed in your favor, especially since some combinations can lead to near guaranteed death. (E.g. the floor moving you all the way to the side of the room and giving you only a foot in front of you to move back to the hallway in the middle, which is filled with mines which will kill you if you're near them when they explode.) But the game's short enough that it doesn't become too much of a frustration, and the solid gameplay and, again, fantastic soundtrack is more than enough to make it a fun experience. 198: Beat Saber - 4.79% Beat Saber's one of those games where I feel like it's hard to come up with things to say about it, because everybody already knows what Beat Saber is, and it's not nearly complex enough to require a detailed dissection. But here goes: Beat Saber is probably the best rhythm game on PSVR. Gameplay wise, this title would go to Pistol Whip, but Beat Saber's sheer amount of content (including the harder difficulties which mean you always have something to work towards) make it the definitive rhythm game on the system, and honestly probably in VR in general. The core gameplay is extremely simplistic, and is essentially identical to those button masher rhythm games with the only difference being that you're using your arms instead of pressing a key. It's simple, but highly polished - well, save for a lighting bug that's been making levels look worse on PSVR for months. Beat Saber is much more unique than I may make it sound, though. The thing is that in button mashing rhythm games, there's nothing to chain between inputs, you're just pressing keys. The nature of Beat Saber turns every level into a sort of dance, as you need to be able to effectively and comfortably chain blocks together. In a broader sense, this means that throughout playing Beat Saber, you're being taught new moves - new patterns of blocks emerge, and you have to come up with the ideal way to deal with them, and that knowledge stays in your arsenal for the rest of the game. Combinations that once looked like somebody just vomited blocks all over the playing field I now instantly recognize as, "ah, I'm going to be spinning both my arms around". And that sort of thing. It's fun, and it only gets more intense and engaging as you progress through the difficulties. By the time I was nearing my platinum, songs that seemed impossible to me had become very much doable, and it made for a satisfying demonstration of the skills I'd picked up. The biggest disadvantage to Beat Saber is probably how limited the base game's content is. While it stands up on its own, it's nowhere near enough to justify the 24 hours of game time you need for the platinum trophy. While Beat Saber does potentially have the largest library of songs available in a PSVR rhythm game, the caveat is that you're going to be paying around 2$ a song (a bit less if you buy entire packs) to expand your library. The game also offers a variety of modes - one handed, no arrows (meaning you can slice blocks from any direction), and my personal favorite, the 90 degree mode, where blocks come at you from a variety of angles. But the problem is that very few songs actually get these modes, and when they do, it's usually only for one or two difficulties. All in all, it's a fun rhythm game and a hell of a workout. I'll probably return to this game on and off for the remainder of my time with the PSVR1, and depending on how the selection of workout games is on PSVR2 I may return to stack this game. Gotta keep the VR workouts going somehow. And to close this off, here's my crowning achievement in Beat Saber, which is full combo-ing a Linkin Park song on expert. 199: Severed Steel - ??.??% (Will update the rarity on this later. The PS4 version is at around 17% so I expect the PS5 version will eventually gravitate to there once it settles down, although since the PS4 version was unobtainable for a long while the 'true' rarity would probably end up being something like 20-30%.) If you've followed this thread for a while, you'll know that I tend to be a fan of retro shooters. Severed Steel isn't really a retro shooter per se, at least in the traditional sense, but rather feels like an evolution of the subgenre utilizing lessons learned in modern FPS games while staying true to the breakneck pacing that defines the boomer shooter for many people. The gameplay of Severed Steel is essentially a mashup of Superhot and Mirror's Edge. You're extremely agile, being able to wall run, dive (kind of like a horizontal, third jump), slide past enemies, and you're able to instantly steal enemies' secondary weapons just by running, sliding, or diving past them. You can also climb walls by kick jumping off of them over and over again. It's an intended feature, bizzarely enough. And lastly, there's bullet time - unlimited bullet time while you're performing stunts (including jumps and wall kicking.) The caveat? You are a woman made of glass. Not literally, of course, but if you stand still (or even just run without doing some sort of stunt) for more than a second you will die. Your movement abilities are your only shield - literally, as you do not take damage while performing stunts. This makes for gameplay that consists of running frantically through levels, diving through groups of enemies while taking them, rinse and repeat. It's intense, and more fluid than I can put into words. The weapon variety is also fantatic - there's multiple times of futuristic, SMG and assault rifle type weapons, several types of pistols including a shotgun pistol, a few shotguns, sniper rifles, and heavy weapons like grenade launchers and flamethrowers. Weapons are disposable things in this game - you cannot reload, and so you will constantly be swiping weapons off of enemies' corpses or belts. Why can you not reload? Because you have one arm, and the other is dedicated to your arm cannon, a Megaman-esque addition which allows you to blast holes in walls. Did I forget to mention that? Levels are fully destructible, and some even require you to blast holes through walls to proceed. This further adds variety and strategy to the game, as you can use your cannon to create new routes and opportunities on the go. The last of your tools are your kick and the ability to throw weapons at enemies - the kick is good for kicking enemies' shields away, beating a single enemy to death at close combat, or launching doors into enemies, and the weapon throwing thing... well, it's not going to do a lot of damage, but if you're throwing your gun at an enemy you probably don't have anything else to do with it. The levels themselves vary greatly in layout - some of them are mazes of tight corridors packed together, while others are large, empty expanses, sometimes with fans to help you traverse them. Two levels are set on trains, which I found to be a fun change of pace, even if said trains were amusingly blocky in their design. For the most part, the level design does a fantastic job of keeping the frantic pace of the game going, although a few levels felt a bit too large and empty for my taste. Though the size has its advantages - one level has you going through apartments executing executives, and at one point I breached into the top of one by shooting a hole in the wall with my cannon and diving into it, which was a highlight that I don't think I would have achieved if the game stuck solely with tightly packed corridor levels. Then there's the music. That's the other fantastic part of this game. The soundtrack is well worth listening to in its own right - it's largely composed of frantic, electronic songs which fits the fast paced nature of the game perfectly. Some of the songs feel like they could fit into Hotline Miami's OST, which is probably the highest compliment I can give a soundtrack. A lot of the tracks sound like something you'd hear at a nightclub, which goes well with the neon lights everpresent throughout the game's levels. There's over two dozen tracks in the game, ranging from melancholic to heart poundingly intense. The guns all sound fantastic as well, which goes a long way towards making them feel good to use. Which brings us to the graphics - they might be the weakest link in this game . While guns and enemies look fantastic, the levels are... very simplistic. The game uses a chunky, cel shaded style for its levels, which may have something to do with the fact that most of its levels are destructible. High detail reflections and bright, neon lights throughout most levels help it remain stylish despite its shortcomings, however there are a few levels that use realistic textures - one in particular uses a low res grass texture that makes me think of an early-mid 2000s free 3D games. For the most part, it manages to look good, and frankly, one does not come to an indie boomer shooter looking for a triple A game's level of detail. And everything else in this game is so good that it's hard to care about. All in all? It's a solid ass game. If you like intense games like Superhot where you're constantly only moments away from death and mobility shooters, you'll likely love this game. And despite how long it took to get the PS5 version patched, the developers have actually been pretty good with post-launch support; they just added a new roguelike inspired mode where you proceed through ten randomly selected levels, choosing cards that either give you buffs or weaken you but give you score multipliers after every level you clear. On top of this, they've been adding community created levels to the game, some of which are quite fun, although a few struggle to run on the PS5. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Moss Orcs Must Die! 3 Lucky's Tale ON HOLD: Subnautica Destiny 2 Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island Serious Sam 4 DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cat Quest 2 Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher BoxVR Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Edited January 10, 2023 by Darling Baphomet 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted January 19, 2023 Author Share Posted January 19, 2023 Jesus christ, has it been 10 days since I got my new SSD? I'm still not done downloading new games onto it. Hopefully I'll be done by tomorrow morning. I severely underestimated how good my internet was, it seems (or rather, how consistent it is, since at times I can be downloading 10 megabytes a second while other times I'll be stuck at a paltry 1.) Anyway, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered and Serious Sam 4 have been consuming my life, the former primarily, so I've been neglecting my VR library a bit. Hopefully that'll change soon. Once I'm done with Serious Sam 4 I'll probably boot up the collection - I bought it on sale on my German account because the US version didn't get a patch that fixed the trophy list, despite them sharing the same list. Also started up BoxVR since I finished Beat Saber; it's been three days since the last time I played it and my muscles are still sore. So it's safe to say it's a solid workout game, although I worry about the longevity of its trophy list. If I run out of fitness games on VR I may end up stacking them (not Beat Saber. Fuck you and your 15$ music packs.) to keep myself motivated, but maybe I'll have a PSVR2 by then. I'm hoping that the PSVR2 ends up getting a better library of workout games than the PSVR1 did, since there's a ton that never made it to PSVR1. Also might try shortening my game reviews since they've been running long for quite a while and I end up having a backlog of games to write about because I keep putting it off. 200: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered - 63.62% I played (and platinumed) the PS4 version of this game... exactly four years ago, according to when I posted my review for it. If I think about it that makes sense, but it still feels wrong to think that it was four years ago. (And five years since the establishment of this thread.) The passage of time is a bitch. Anyway, my thoughts on this game are largely the same as they were when I first reviewed it. The visuals are spectacular, particularly playing in performance mode on PS5 (it was the fluidity of Miles Morales at 60 fps that inspired me to replay this game, after all). The main story missions are fantastic, save for some mind numbing sneaking missions - to quote myself, "mind numbingly boring, to the point where I'd quit at every sneaking mission and take it up the next day..."; while I wasn't quite as bored by them this time around, I groaned every time I had to sneak around a building as MJ. The non-stealth missions feature fantastic setpieces and often take you on high speed chases through New York, and none of them feel like filler. The highlight of this game is probably the supervillain battles, and there are a lot of them, and they're all great. The story itself is also solid, and this is one of the few games that actually made me tear up at its ending - twice. Now for the less great - the combat is still a bit clunky in that free flow combat way. You auto target and attack enemies, which often led to me attacking the wrong enemy - a problem when there are enemy types that will automatically counterattack if you hit them with the wrong kind of move. It's a lot less annoying than Miles Morales' combat could get, but it still wore on me sometimes. The combat does manage to look good, though, to an extent I doubt it would if it were more hands on. And all in all I think it works pretty well; it's just a system that starts to show its flaws once it's pushed to its limits. This time around I actually used gadgets, which helped tremendously with making the combat feel less frustrating. The mobility options of Spider-Man are always a highlight, and they suffer from some of the same issues as the combat does - it looks and feels great swinging around the city, but for more precise, smaller movements it can get frustrating trying to get Spider-Man not to grab onto random surfaces or wildly overshoot where you're trying to go. Lastly, the open world activities. Good fucking god. Most of them are enjoyable enough, but the game tasks you with completing something like 160 repeatable crime activities, which essentially consist of swinging around the city until you get a crime notification, going there, and beating up some enemies. On occasion you get to partake of a car chase or defuse bombs, but it gets repetitive fast. Soul sucking, I believe I've referred to the crime grind as. This time around (and a significant motivator for replaying the game), I actually partook of the DLC. When I finished the game the first time around, I was so tired from grinding out open world activities that I couldn't be bothered; this time I saved the grind for afterwards. The DLC is very short, unfortunately, but still ultimately worthwhile; each DLC focuses on a specific character or two - the first focuses on Black Cat, the second Hammerhead / Yuri, and the third Silver Sable. And they offer interactions with these characters that very much hold up to the quality of the main game, though unfortunately the DLCs largely lack the dramatic setpieces that made the main game so good, with the exception of the third DLC. They also set up some very interesting plot threads for Miles Morales and beyond - I'm particularly interested in seeing Yuri's future as a vigilante, although I'm disappointed that Spider-Man's rather rigid morality will probably mean she'll be depicted as an enemy. Which... well, I mean, 'cop turned vigilante' is hardly the best moral basis for a character, but on the other hand she does seem to reserve her hate boner for mobsters moonlighting as serial killers, so... I dunno, 50/50, I guess. The rather traditional ethics of superhero comics are always a bit weird to navigate with the increasingly obvious failings of the US justice system, particularly those exposed in the last few years. Anyway, Spider-Man 2 hype! I won't be buying it at launch, but I'll probably rent it, platinum it, then rent it again and play the DLC once it's out (unless it drops to <25$ by that point.) 201: Moss - 8.26% Ah, Moss. This game actually shares some similarities with Marvel's Spider-Man - I first started it something like four years and four weeks ago, judging by my platinum time, but never got around to finishing it since I took an extended break from PSVR. Moss is one of the early VR darlings, which you may recall I have a mixed opinion of from my review of Superhot VR. Many of these games were good not because they were outstanding VR titles, but because there was nothing else. This is not the case with Moss. While it doesn't quite compare to Astro Bot VR, the other major PSVR platformer, it holds up beautifully nonetheless and is a solid game in its own right. Moss is a storybook-esque (and by storybook-esque, I mean the game literally starts with and regularly returns to you flipping through the pages of a book) 3D platformer starring Quill, a cute little mouse protagonist who finds a magic artifact. Using your power as a reader to influence the world, you help her navigate puzzles and together you undertake a journey to save her uncle. The first thing to say is that this game is absolutely gorgeous, aesthetically - while the game is limited by the PSVR1's low resolution, it manages to be one of the better looking games on the system, helped in no small part by the moody, atmospheric level design. Your journey takes you through massive forests, ancient ruins, and more, with massive trees, the armor of fallen (human, presumably) soldiers, and sometimes animals towering in the background, all adding to a magnificent sense of scale. Here's a screenshot of one of the early areas (not from the PSVR1 version, because PSVR1 screenshots look terrible): It'd be pretty as a flat game, and is even moreso as a VR game. The gameplay is simplistic, but solid. You can interact with parts of the environment, such as moving blocks and pulling pillars up, and additionally take control of enemies to operate buttons and shoot other enemies. Besides that, you also control Quill, who has a competent, if rather basic skillset - she can attack enemies with her sword, dodge roll, and jump and climb terrain. The levels are mostly puzzles of some sort or another, but often basic ones - move a statue forwards to activate a pillar or open a door, for instance, although the puzzles do get more complicated in the second half of the game. (Which was the reason I originally stopped playing; I had intended to come back to it, but I guess I just never got around to it. In retrospect, none of them are that complicated, but maybe I was tired and couldn't be bothered.) It's a competent setup for a game and between solving puzzles, platforming, and fighting enemies there's more than enough to keep you occupied for the length of the game, culminating in an epic boss battle and an ending that begs for a sequel. All in all, Moss is a game you could recommend to anyone who has a VR headset that can play it, especially VR beginners. The "giant player interacting with a tiny world" subgenre of 3D platformers is fantastic for anyone who struggles with VR sickness, and pretty fun in its own right. While the game is a bit short once you know all the puzzle solutions, playing for the first time you'll get a decent runtime out of the game, particularly for an early-ish VR title. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Orcs Must Die! 3 Lucky's Tale BoxVR ON HOLD: Subnautica Destiny 2 Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island Serious Sam 4 DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cat Quest 2 Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted January 31, 2023 Author Share Posted January 31, 2023 (edited) Been dealing with depression as of late and haven't really had the energy for long posts, so I figured I'd just review the Serious Sam series all in one go (well, save for those indie offshoots and Croteam's bastard child, Serious Sam 2)... which may not have been the smartest course of action since that's an even more daunting task. But regardless, Serious Sam is done with, at least until I get my hands on Siberian Mayhem. Since I'm going to be reviewing (almost) the entire series, I'll do it a bit differently this time - probably fit it all in under the Serious Sam Collection platinum. 202: Serious Sam 4 (42.54%) 203: Orcs Must Die! 3 (12.14%) Orcs Must Die! 3 is another installment in the decade long running series that mixes tower defense gameplay with that of third person shooters. The premise is simple - you're put on a map where enemies (primarily, but not exclusively, orcs) spawn from one to three areas, sometimes on entirely separate lanes and sometimes on ones that can be merged, and you have to stop them from getting to your rift. This means shooting them, placing traps, and herding them into killboxes or away from shortcuts. It's a formula that works well, as indicated by the fact that the series has had three installments spanning a decade, plus an F2P game that was shuttered a few years ago. The game starts off rather slow, giving you some simple, single lane maps and only a few slots for weapons and traps before gradually escalating into three lane abominations that can be a nightmare to play solo (the entire game is playable co-op, and between being able to rotate lanes with greater ease and have greater trap variety, it is undeniably the best way to play the game.) New to Orcs Must Die 3 are war scenarios, large scale maps with huge battlefields that cannot be turned into killboxes nearly as easily, featuring traps unique to them, including knights and mages, artillery you can use personally, boulder launchers, and trees covered in hornet nests. They're a fun addition and help to add variety to the game, although once you're trying to perfect everything letting them break past the battlefields and into traditional killboxes in your keep is usually the optimal strategy. The trap selection is massively diverse - briar patches that spread as they do damage to enemies, cannons that freeze enemies, gravity traps that lift enemies into the air, etc. Every trap can be upgraded multiple times, and once you complete a challenge specific to a trap (usually applying an effect or killing enemies with it X number of times), you can choose between one of two upgrades that can massively change how the traps function. This allows you to optimize traps for specific types of killboxes - choose the upgrade for the tar pit that increases fire damage taken by enemies, and you can go all in with fire archers, brimstone, and fire ceiling lasers. On the other hand, stacking freeze and acid debuffs and some physical traps (or your own weapons) can make for absolutely devastating amounts of damage. While Orcs Must Die 3! can be a pain to manage at times, it's always fun planning out layouts for a map and seeing a plan in action. You can never use the exact same loadouts, either - some maps have enemies immune to fire damage; others have kobold suicide bombers that'll take down your barricades unless you have passive damage to take them out before they get the chance, and the second campaign, Drastic Steps, introduce flying enemies who are... very difficult to manage without relying on the stone staff and it's overpowered petrify ability. Weapon selection is similarly diverse and just as crucial, even if your weapons aren't quite as spectacular in terms of damage. Bringing a flamethrower to a tar pit can make the difference between being overwhelmed or not, and on the other hand, good CC can stop a mob in its tracks. Unfortunately, you usually don't get that much money to spend on traps, and so the campaign levels can feel like just a taste of the ridiculous setups you can achieve in endless mode, which is damn fun in its own right. The maps themselves are also varied and plenty of fun to play on, save for a few that were extremely frustrating to attempt to get a perfect score on. Maps have an abundance of environmental hazards to kill enemies with, and are visually distinct. The DLC maps also add completely new enemy types to the game - cyclopes, including the absolutely fucking dreadful shaman, who can drop totems that disable nearby traps until you destroy them, and in the second DLC anthropomorphic lizards who for the most part follow the mold of orcs, but with different resistances including a cap to max damage taken for the heavier varieties. All in all, it's a fun ass game, particularly if you can get someone to play it with you, and one I'd recommend to anyone who likes both third person shooters and tower defense games. I do have some small gripes, so I'll list them here: fliers can be annoying since it doesn't seem like there's any traps really designed to deal with them, some maps are a bit awkward, presumably due to being reused from Orcs Must Die Unchained, the aforementioned F2P venture, and the game can struggle with framerates when there's tons of enemies on screen, particularly in endless where you'll have loads of traps firing simultaneously. Nothing major, really, and either way this is one of the better games I've played so far this year. 204: Serious Sam Collection (4.09%) And here we go! I'll review the games contained in the Serious Sam Collection - the First Encounter, the Second Encounter, Serious Sam 3 (otherwise known as BFE, guess what that acronym stands for), and then Serious Sam 4. This is almost the complete opposite of the order I played them in, although that's technically justifiable since 3 is a prequel to the First Encounter and 4 is a prequel to 3. TFE and TSE are perhaps the distilled essence of boomer shooters. There are two techniques you need to be aware of to perform well in Serious Sam - running backwards while holding the fire button and circle strafing. Secrets and ambushes add some spice to the game, but the core of the game is ultimately facing down massive hordes of enemies in large arenas, equipped with a ludicrous arsenal of weaponry crowned by the cannon, which is literally just a giant cannon you run around carrying - there is no greater joy than lining up four or five werebulls and watching a single cannonball pulverize them all. The First Encounter is the most distilled of the series - the entire game takes place in Egypt and has you running through mostly linear maps tracking down artifacts and making your way towards the city of Thebes. It features all the most iconic enemies and weapons of the Serious Sam franchise, who persist throughout almost all of the games - the headless, screaming kamikazes also featured in Shadow Warrior 3, skeletal horse-like enemies called kleer that almost always come in hordes and can be dispelled with a single close ranged double shotgun blast, werebulls, which is to say, bulls but alien, biomechanical hybrids that shoot lasers and rockets at you, winged harpies, and a few others. And worth noting is that the sound design in the Serious Sam games is fantastic. You *always* know what you're going to be facing next, because every enemy has very distinctive alert and attack sounds. On the weapons side, you have the Tommy gun, the grenade and rocket launchers, which would be standard fare if Serious Sam's didn't look so distinctive, an automatic laser gun, the aforementioned cannon, and a few other typical FPS weapons. All that's left is an abundance of secrets, cheesy one liners, and absolutely fantastic music. Seriously, how the fuck does the theme for a fight against a bunch of frogs go this hard? The HD remake of TFE elevates the game to (now dated) beauty - the Egyptian environments look great and blood and gore effects are very satisfying (for instance, killing a werebull mid-charge and seeing it leave a streak of blood on the floor as it tumbles to a halt.) But besides that, this isn't a high budget experience - cutscenes are almost nonexistent, with only a text summary of what happens between levels and why you're doing what you're doing, and player animations are a bit janky when playing in third person mode or seeing what cutscenes there are. But that's not what you're here for - you're here to shoot rockets at horse skeletons and try to juggle eight bulls charging you simultaneously. The level design is solid, although later levels start to drag on a bit, presenting you with locked doors you must collect artifacts to open, which starts to wear on me. The final levels also start to get to be a bit blatant with the "running backwards firing at hordes of enemies" thing, but I suppose there's only so much more you can do to escalate the near perfect chaos of the majority of the game. The game tops it off with a boss fight against an absolutely colossal enemy which is an epic fight if I've ever seen one. The Second Encounter kind of feels like TFE's Opposing Force (which I loved, mind you) - the weapons and enemies from TFE are there, but there's even more of them. Skinless soldiers, demons that shoot massive balls of fire at you, and a few other enemies join the fray, although none of them seem to have persisted in the series the same way that TFE's enemies did. Joining the arsenal are the flamethrower, god's gift to (clearing) hordes of kleer, the sniper rifle, which can one shot most of the game's medium enemies and two shot the rest, the serious bomb, which is essentially just a room clear, and the chainsaw, an actually effective alternative to the combat knife. Perhaps the biggest addition to TSE is level variety. In TFE we had all of one environment, while TSE gives us a comparatively very impressive three. The game takes you through Mayan temples amidst lush mountains, Babylonian cities, and finally medieval towns and keeps. It's a very welcome change from TFE, and makes for a game that feels much more varied (and colorful!) than its predecessor. Lastly, the game adds powerups - serious damage, invulnerability, and serious speed, all of which are self-explanatory. I was never that big on powerups in other games, e.g. Doom, however a serious damage will always be a very welcome sight when you have a horde of kleer to deal with, escalating the flamethrower from a 'fire and forget' weapon to a short range death ray. TSE all in all feels like a much more complete game than TFE - not that TFE was incomplete, but TFE just adds so much more to it. The game takes you through three chapters, each taking you through locations associated with a single civilization and capping out in a memorable boss fight (though sadly none are quite as massive as Ugh-Zan was in TFE). Every new chapter starts you out with only your pistols and knife once more, although the second two give you back your weapons rather rapidly, particularly if you take advantage of the secrets. Overall this is a massive boon to the game's variety, although it does result in the game having more horde corridor type levels than TFE did, as it seems to like to top off every chapter with at least one or two of them. The game also adds special physics based rooms - apparently toned down from the original version, which is a truly horrifying thought - which are... different. One such level has you sliding towards one side of a hallway or the other, like a bizarre sort of gravity, and when you hit the walls you're propelled in the opposite direction. This applies to other enemies as well, making for a nightmarish pinball game trying to hit headless kamikazes before they get close enough to bounce into you, which on serious difficulty can take out a significant chunk of your health. But it does have a snowy level where you fight a horde of enemies to a rock version of jingle bells, which I think makes up for any level design flaws elsewhere. As in TFE, the story is relegated primarily to text. Cutscenes between levels are nonexistent, although the game does do fly-bys of where you have to go in certain areas, which is a welcome addition for the numerous levels that follow the 'gather objects to open door' formula. The most significant cutscene you're treated to is the opening one, where you see Sam's spaceship get crashed into by a... space train of Croteam big heads - basically chibi-esque abominations with Croteam developers' faces that can be encountered in secrets and follow you while making weird noises - which causes you to crash land on Earth. This is not a game that takes itself seriously, if you haven't yet deduced that. The rest of the game is a nearly uninterrupted display of pure carnage. It ends with Sam promising to take the fight to Mental, a promise which we see fulfilled in 2... or not, since Croteam seems to prefer to pretend that game doesn't exist, and makes me wonder if they'll ever retcon it with a followup to TSE instead of the endless prequels we've been getting. Serious Sam 3: BFE, as the acronym suggests, takes place before the first encounter - or rather after, since it takes place in the near future before Sam manages to travel into the past. This game sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the series - while TFE, TSE, and especially Serious Sam 2 were bright and ridiculous with no story to speak of, BFE is a gritty, realistic shooter with an actual plot to it - not much, but your journey is narrated by... some woman you report to? Honestly, I have no fucking clue what her official role is. And we get cutscenes! With actual characters. It's a bizarre tonal shift, especially after SS2, and a large part of that is probably that it's a bit of a Frankenstein's monster of failed Croteam game projects stitched together - a military shooter that was cancelled provided many of the maps, while quite a few enemies (and presumably weapons) are from a pitched Croteam Doom game which never saw the light of the day. But for what it is, it's good. Not quite the evolution of the franchise many people wanted, but it's certainly not stale. Besides the story, the aesthetic and gameplay of BFE are virtually unrecognizable; while the classic "run backwards + hold down fire button" is still present, the game adds a bunch of modernizations - you are now able to sprint infinitely, which I'm not usually a fan of in shooters but which is unarguably a boon in Serious Sam, as for the first time ever you can actually outrun enemies. Groundbreaking, I know. You're not going to win a race with a werebull, but being able to outrun headless kamikazes or kleer is a game changer in a series where you're either running backwards or desperately trying to weave circles around your enemies. Secondly, there are glory kills. These are not amazing, especially since you can still take damage while performing one, and they leave you with a rather useless trophy you have to discard afterwards - which would be the expected outcome if not for Shadow Warrior 3's weaponized gore. But they're fun to do every now and then. Then there's iron sights, which are self-explanatory. The arsenal is also uniquely limited compared to all the other games I'll be reviewing here - the Tommy gun is replaced with a modern assault rifle, laser sight and all, the grenade launcher is entirely absent, and the laser rifle and sniper rifle, while technically in the game, are relegated to secrets and thus never have enough ammo to be more than a neat easter egg. The game isn't without its additions, though - for a melee weapon you're given the sledgehammer, which can one hit kill smaller enemies with ease and is quite satisfying to use; instead of the grenade launcher, you're given an explosive sniper rifle that can shoot through enemies, and lastly is C4, which you can attach to enemies or just cover the ground with, especially since the game has a generous amount of unlimited C4 supply caches. The rocket launcher is also massively improved - while aesthetically identical to the TFE / TSE rocket launcher, the animations have much more recoil and moving parts, which makes the previous games' rocket launcher difficult to return to. As for the enemy variety, most of the iconic enemies from TFE return, with the exception of the green-homing-ball-of-death-shooting reptiloids, who do make a return in SS3's DLC. A few new enemies are added, too - cybernetic hitscan soldiers, psychic, flying witch enemies, the fucking cave monkeys, and the wall crawling bug things. On top of that, there are the definitely-not-Doom enemies; a mancubus clone called the scrapjack, who is admittedly quite a bit different aesthetically, particularly with his circular face made of multiple conjoined heads, and the Khnum, who if I'm remembering my Doom enemies correctly, is Croteam's take on a baron of hell. The harpies, who were essentially just flying magic women in TFE and TSE, have also had a full redesign, now being grotesque aliens who wear their sexy faces as a mask but have a demonic face that reveals itself when they unhinge their jaws. Which is, y'know, probably a better take on the trope, although they are still butt naked, which makes for an interesting combination. Also, I swear, game developers trying to design feminine monsters go for the same goddamn trope every time. That trope being flying magic lady. Doom 3? Flying screaming heads. Quake 4? Floating Strogg with a skirt that does... something and has a scream attack. Serious Sam 3 has two of them. It seems like as soon as game developers decide they're designing a monster with tits that's all they can think about. A similar example is how every base female character in Overwatch is designed to be pretty (even Ana has that one young skin), while on the male side of things we have an exploding garbage man, a cartoonishly fat masked monstrosity, and one guy who's literally just a goddamn monkey. Anyway, that's enough about that. Level design in Serious Sam 3 is fairly solid, primarily taking place in cramped desert cities that are all shades of gray and brown. There's the typical monster hallways, plus some puzzles where you have to get behind sentry guns and disable them so that they don't near-instant kill you. It's all solid, although there are some later levels that consist of running around a map collecting keycards and / or artifacts which is something I never find that enjoyable. The boss fights are of a similar scale to TFE, which is very welcome - one has you face off against a giant battleship spawning hordes of enemies, while another has you fighting a massive alien with four legs who has to wrestle with a sand worm. Secrets are back, though much of Serious Sam 3's seem to rely on platforming, and platforming in Serious Sam has never been particularly good, so I ended up skipping many of them as jumping between air conditioners is usually not worth the paltry reward. The game also features the most absolutely egregious example of the Serious Sam monster hallway, namely in the final level, which has you spend 30-40 minutes running through a valley, then running back and firing at massive hordes of enemies, often using an infinite box of C4 and just standing there detonating them, which is fun for the first few minutes and then never again. I posted a status update a few days ago with a screenshot of a statistics screen from TSE reading 4/1047 enemies killed and an estimated level time of 1:20 - but even that was nowhere near as boring as the lead up to the final boss in SS3 is. But the final boss battle is fantastic and you get a jetpack, so it's not all bad. All in all? Good game, but I'm glad Serious Sam didn't stay in his mid-2000s depressing military shooter phase, because it has much better things to aspire to. Which brings us, finally, to Serious Sam 4! Serious Sam 4 is a perfect middle ground between the arcade carnage of TFE & TSE and the realism of SS3. Well, in theory, anyway - in practice the game's notoriously messy. But it's damn fun all the same. Sprinting and glory kills are back, and the latter slows down time now, leaving you less vulnerable, although the animations are much more simplistic (virtually all of them involve stabbing your enemy. The game also has the largest arsenal of any Serious Sam game I've played - every gun from TFE save for the revolvers returns, some of which now have alternate fire modes; the laser gun gets a death ray, the single shotgun gets a grenade launcher attachment, the grenade launcher can detonate grenades into a cluster of smaller grenades, and the rocket launcher can fire several homing rockets at once. On top of this, every new gun from BFE returns, and there's a few new ones - namely the autoshotgun and the FRPCL, or flaming rocket propelled chainsaw launcher, which from a balance perspective is an absolute fucking nightmare in that it's overpowered as all hell, being not only homing but going after multiple enemies before exploding. It can also be used as a chainsaw. And did I mention that with the right perks (more on that later) you can dual wield every weapon in the game? To all you sick fucks who want to dual wield miniguns, this is your moment. Yes, there are perks. As you progress through the game, you collect skill points that you can assign to a rather simplistic skill tree - the left side focuses on things like reload speed and dual wielding, while the right side focuses on melee weapons and glory kills. The glory kills are mostly for show, as in SS3, although the right side perk allows you to restore health through them which makes them slightly more useful. The left side is overall superior in every regard except that the right side allows you to commandeer enemies and use them as vehicles, which is hilarious. Riding piggyback on a giant man with a hammer and using him to kill other giant men with hammers? Not something I expect from a Serious Sam game, but I'm down. Additionally, the game adds gadgets, which are essentially single use items with a variety of effects, ranging in significance from restoring half your max health to detonating a nuclear warhead that trumps even TSE's Serious Bomb in strength. These trivialize the game's difficulty, as if you're grabbing secrets regularly you'll have a stockpile of gadgets, and just one or two of them can make any encounter far easier. And lastly: headshots. Headshots have never been a thing in Serious Sam games, and I think for good reason, so they're a bit of a controversial addition to SS4. Some enemies are trivialized by them, e.g. werebulls can be put down with a single well placed double barrel shot, but on the other hand, enemies like the Khnum are built around them to the point that they're absurdly tanky if you're not using them. All this comes together to make for the strongest Serious Sam game I've played yet, gameplay wise. The guns handle beautifully; they feel heavy and have recoil to match, the arsenal is huge, and enemies explode gloriously, spraying blood and whatnot everywhere. Explosions, too, are as significant as they've ever been in the series - whether it's a rocket or a headless kamikaze, explosions feel *good* in this game. A lot of people treat graphics and gameplay as entirely distinct things, but the combat would be far less satisfying if the enemies didn't react to your shots as enthusiastically as they do. The downside to this is that the game struggles performance wise - it aims for, but very rarely achieves, a steady 60fps, leaving for a game that looks gorgeous but feels unoptimized. It's still, overall, a very solid game and a joy to play, however, and I highly recommend it. Oh yes, and the game has a story. No, not like SS3 had a story, it has an actual story. And it's... well, it's not good, but it's entertaining. This game is chock full of cutscenes, and in at least a third of the level you're followed by an AI companion or two. The whole thing feels like an ultra violent B movie buddy comedy, with scenes like Sam and other soldiers chiding a newbie for not coming up with a good one liner to say after getting his first kill, or Sam and his (presumably) girlfriend going on a murder date. And y'know, it kind of works. Sam was always a cheesy motherfucker, after all. And it actually makes sense for a prequel to SS3, and gives the series a sort of continuity as the games get less and less character focused as humanity is exterminated by Mental, with BFE ending with Sam presumably being one of the last living humans, leading to TFE having no dialogue whatsoever except Sam talking to himself. A lot of people found the story annoying, particularly in regards to Kenny, a geeky rookie who gradually becomes more competent through the game, but I found it almost endearing. That brings us to the level design. This is probably SS4's biggest failing. Levels are colorful once more, which is a nice step back from the grit of SS3, but the actual level design is lacking. Secrets, with a few exceptions, are primarily composed of jumping puzzles or going to an obscure corner of the map. Levels tend to be large and empty - TFE and TSE had plenty of large, perhaps too large maps, but SS4 takes it to the next level, with some levels being just one massive arena after the other, and the 'free roam' France levels where you're given a bike to navigate the vast, empty countryside. And then later you have the bike taken away, and you roam that countryside on foot while enemies spawn sporadically. Now, I'm somewhat experienced with fun, and let me tell you: this is not fun. I loved the section where you first get the bike and rock music starts playing as you drive to your next objective, and the part where you drive a combine harvester and plow through hordes of enemies while hillbilly rock music plays are fun - I did not love the rest. This problem continues throughout, although the pre-final level was still a hell of a lot more engaging than SS3's final level was, boss fight aside. In addition to the previously mentioned vehicle sections, the game spices things up with a few mech sections and another where you have to finish a text adventure for a reward; these sections make for, if nothing else, an interesting diversion. Also, you can walk through trees and other narrow objects. I don't know if this is intentional, since it's also present in SS3, but it's... weird. One good aspect of the level design, though, is side quests, which are another new addition to the series - every now and then you'll get a marker (yes, Serious Sam has navigation now. Huzzah!) telling you that you can go do a side quest, which typically involves going to a side area disconnected from the main path and fighting a bunch of enemies, then retrieving gadgets, a weapon mod, or a new weapon. Weapon mods and weapons gained this way (as far as I can tell) can't be acquired for a long while afterwards if you miss your chance, so side quests are almost always worth it. (They also all have associated trophies.) The enemy variety is the best it's ever been. All the classic enemy types from TFE return, plus a bunch introduced in SS3, and on top of that there are a huge variety of new enemies, ranging from processed humans that swarm you with weak melee attacks to vampires (technically aliens, but as Sam says, "it's a fucking vampire, Kenny!") to giant flying metal snakes that shoot rockets at you en masse. The bosses are similarly impressive - one is a massive, headcrab like monstrosity, and the final boss is a titan who you must climb and place C4 on while a near-infinite army of human soldiers charges beneath you. (The final level utilizes something called the 'legion system', essentially allowing the game to display near infinite armies of both allies and enemies.) All in all, it's a fantastic, if flawed, game, and most certainly one worth playing despite its rough launch. (Particularly if you have a PC capable of playing it in uninterrupted 60fps, or if you're reading this in the future and have a PS5 Pro or PS6.) And surprisingly, it doesn't manage to overstay its welcome as a prequel, either, despite being a prequel to a prequel, although I do wish Croteam would get on with it already and give us a new SS2 or whatever it is they're planning on. And that's it for the main games! Both DLCs are rather short, and thus don't warrant that much of a description. The SS3 DLC is a set of three levels, one of which involves the usual running between places to collect artifacts, although the third one re-introduces the jetpack which is a very welcome change. The DLC also brings back the green reptiloid, and by brings back I mean I think they just took them directly out of TSE and put them in SS3. It also is actually built with the laser gun and sniper rifle in mind, so you not only get them through regular play, but actually get enough ammo to use them, too, which is a pleasant addition to the game, even if the guns were technically in the base game. The final boss is pretty impressive - he's a massive scrapjack redesigned a bit to look unique who fires huge cannon balls at you and can destroy the buildings around you. The TSE DLC, Legend of the Beast, is a fucking nightmare. It's an abomination. The consensus seems to be that the three maps that make up the DLC are alpha levels from TFE / TSE, repurposed to make a semi-coherent romp through Egypt. This is especially evident with the third level, which besides its boss fight is almost indistinguishable from one of the TSE levels. This might not be that bad, except the balancing is terrible. You're never given any of the weapons past the rocket launcher, and for quite a bit are expected to fight Arachnoids (a mid-tier enemy that can hitscan you even at long ranges) with the two starter revolvers, which is... absolutely terrible, as it takes several reloads of both guns to kill a single one of them, and if you're not constantly ducking behind buildings you'll lose a lot of health to them. On top of this, health, ammo, and armor are scarce, and often deposited around the very corners of the maps which leads to having to run all the way around an arena just to pick up 5 armor and 10 shotgun shells. One of the rooms in the third level is nearly impossible - it's just a room filled with dozens of Bio-mechanoids, who shoot bursts of laser fire or rockets at you depending on the variety. The rocket launcher is directly in the middle of the room, which is very difficult to pick up without being blown to smithereens, and even then it's a struggle to get enough ammo to kill the enemies in the room. I ended up just grabbing the key item in the back and then the rocket launcher on my way out and skipping the fight altogether. Then the final boss is just a Khnum from SS3 with an awkwardly modeled cape and crown, requiring you to run around a room flipping switches to damage him. It's unclear why this is a DLC for TSE too, given that there's only one enemy type from TSE used and the only TSE weapon you get is the chainsaw, and on top of that the entire DLC is set in Egypt, which is TFE's domain. But anyway, I'm glad to have been able to play through this beloved franchise of mine (except for you, Legend of the Beast!) and write up this review for it. Serious Sam may not be the most high profile arcade shooter series, but it's a goddamn fun one all the same. Think I'll pick up Siberian Mayhem soon to top it off - I hear that one's getting patched to be actually obtainable soon. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Fortnite Lucky's Tale BoxVR ON HOLD: Subnautica Destiny 2 Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island Serious Sam 4 DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cat Quest 2 Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Edited January 31, 2023 by Darling Baphomet 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheBusToYoker Posted February 5, 2023 Share Posted February 5, 2023 On 31/01/2023 at 0:09 AM, Darling Baphomet said: Been dealing with depression as of late and haven't really had the energy for long posts I imagine this was the hardest part of your post to write. As someone who's going through the same, I won't drop any sympathys on you, as to not potentially cause you to feel overwhelmed. I'll just simply say, well done. So what the fuck I'm I doing here? I'm not exactly familiar with the culture and customs of checklist land, but I believe it's polite to make an effort in engaging with other people's content. So, while becoming more active in my own checklist thread again. I'm digging around the threads here. Not in the interests of looking to form a clique, a back and forth ass kissing club for reacts. I think that culture is a problem here in checklist land. That some people because of that can bumb their content endlessly , and others unjustly end up looking like they are talking to a brick wall, and end up buried. What is this place? A creative writing class? If anyone knows anyone who does run a creative class, execute them immediately for crimes against humanity. While I won't be going to war with any cliques, and nor do I think the mods would allow for open warfare in checklist. Still, you know what this town needs? As they say, the enema of my enema is...err my enema. Whatever. I'm going be travelling around like my username suggests to other threads. And will particularly be checking up on checklist threads I feel have been rather repressed, and try and support their content. While I won't lie and say what you write Darling isn't one hell of a slog. You'd probably think I'm far to concise in what I write. But that's the beauty of human expression. It comes in all shapes and forms. And I actually find it amazing how much detail you can write about a game, and it not look like just another weather report. An actual lived experience beyond what the game technically is, but still about what the game technically is. I don't think I can do that. No, TheBusToYoker writes about art. Like a pretentious wanker who's probably smothered in Waitrose houmous. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted February 5, 2023 Author Share Posted February 5, 2023 5 hours ago, TheBusToYoker said: I imagine this was the hardest part of your post to write. As someone who's going through the same, I won't drop any sympathys on you, as to not potentially cause you to feel overwhelmed. I'll just simply say, well done. Appreciate it. I've been trying to be more open and genuine as a person as of late though, which is difficult when you're so used to simply toughing it out. 5 hours ago, TheBusToYoker said: So, while becoming more active in my own checklist thread again. I'm digging around the threads here. I try to do that every now and then, although I don't get to it as much as I like - there's a few threads that I'll give a read every now and then, but I should probably give more of them a try. 5 hours ago, TheBusToYoker said: While I won't lie and say what you write Darling isn't one hell of a slog. You'd probably think I'm far to concise in what I write. But that's the beauty of human expression. It comes in all shapes and forms. Yeah, I've been trying to be more concise lately, both because I'm sure most people would rather read a summary than a whole page of text, but the last few years especially I've noticed myself becoming increasingly verbose - maybe it's the downside of getting into as many internet arguments as I do; I feel the need to back up and elaborate on everything I say instead of simply saying something and letting it stand as is. Could just be old habits, since I used to write a lot of purple prose. Although to be fair my last post did cover... five games and four DLCs, so I think it would have been hard to fit into a few paragraphs either way. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheBusToYoker Posted February 5, 2023 Share Posted February 5, 2023 (edited) 6 hours ago, Darling Baphomet said: Yeah, I've been trying to be more concise lately, both because I'm sure most people would rather read a summary than a whole page of text, but the last few years especially I've noticed myself becoming increasingly verbose - maybe it's the downside of getting into as many internet arguments as I do; I feel the need to back up and elaborate on everything I say instead of simply saying something and letting it stand as is. Could just be old habits, since I used to write a lot of purple prose. Although to be fair my last post did cover... five games and four DLCs, so I think it would have been hard to fit into a few paragraphs either way. I've never had an argument on the internet in my life. Honest. There's nothing wrong with it per say. I don't think anyone is in danger here, in Checklist Land, of winning a Pulitzer Prize. Though some might think they are, and that is an actual problem, but a separate issue from this one. No one is a professional reviewer, and very likely never will be. And, trust me. You probably wouldn't wanna to be. While there's no shortage of knowledge and passion on display for gaming, people seem completely lost what the readership broadly wants for them. That's what happens though when you have cliques of people who get most of the attention, with everything they write getting the same response of "nice write-up bro" in a million different guises. The other members follow suit in thinking they have to write in the same way if they are to get in with the in people, but they don't get themselves in, because they aren't one of the in. No matter what they write they are an outsider. The quality of their writing suffers, and the clique looks like they got their on the forum by being better. Here's an example from my Wolfenstein II "review". "It's hard to fathom how this talented group of Swedes have gotten themselves so far off course. They are like Vikings who have just accidently sailed to North America. No longer in their European safe space, deep in foreign territory, and aren't cognizant or confident in delivering a competent product. Did they just not have the necessary resources to survive in these uncharted waters? It's possible their involvement in Doom (2016) might have left them marooned. Machine Games have shown a fetish for saying yes to everything Bethesda asks of them; and always have been a Swedish gaming brothel begging to be prostituted by a publisher. As professionals of course, they would be reticent in showing embarrassment for any gimping they've been be receiving. A little bit like Swedish Blaskowicz actually. Well, as he'd say, sometimes Christmas, sometimes birthdays, sometimes mayhem, suffering and death. And sometimes people just want to make video games, even it doesn't feel so good." You'll probably notice right away that it's verbose, but is also concise. The flow of the writing as well has a fast pace, but not so fast I'm giving the reader the impression of I'm just glossing over what I'm saying. This isn't easy for a lot of people to pull off, but it can be done. That you can perhaps do something similar when writing your words for still fully expressing them, but exercising more control over over them for better structure. Anyway, nice write-up bro.... EDIT: Quote The harpies, who were essentially just flying magic women in TFE and TSE, have also had a full redesign, now being grotesque aliens who wear their sexy faces as a mask but have a demonic face that reveals itself when they unhinge their jaws. Which is, y'know, probably a better take on the trope, although they are still butt naked, which makes for an interesting combination. Also, I swear, game developers trying to design feminine monsters go for the same goddamn trope every time. That trope being flying magic lady. Doom 3? Flying screaming heads. Quake 4? Floating Strogg with a skirt that does... something and has a scream attack. Serious Sam 3 has two of them. It seems like as soon as game developers decide they're designing a monster with tits that's all they can think about. A similar example is how every base female character in Overwatch is designed to be pretty (even Ana has that one young skin), while on the male side of things we have an exploding garbage man, a cartoonishly fat masked monstrosity, and one guy who's literally just a goddamn monkey. I particularly love this bit being all arty farty as I can be. What I'm thinking from reading this is you wanted to offer deeper comment on the design of character models, but fell into oversharing other aspects that were perhaps more redundant for what you just wanted to convey; and so you didn't get to the deeper place you wanted. I'm a mad Scottish bastard. If I want to describe a games studio as a Swedish brothel, I'll damn well describe them as a Swedish brothel. Sometimes you got to take the attitude of fucking sue me, and give no latitude or quarter in standing your ground. You're after all the writer, and you're in control. You want to say I'm sick of sexist monster designs, then say it. Give my hopelessly heterosexual male self something to pause and think about. Like shit, I never knew that was a problem. They really do design this stuff in a sexist way. Edited February 5, 2023 by TheBusToYoker 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted February 9, 2023 Author Share Posted February 9, 2023 On 2/5/2023 at 5:03 AM, TheBusToYoker said: There's nothing wrong with it per say. I don't think anyone is in danger here, in Checklist Land, of winning a Pulitzer Prize. Though some might think they are, and that is an actual problem, but a separate issue from this one. No one is a professional reviewer, and very likely never will be. And, trust me. You probably wouldn't wanna to be. Been meaning to reply to this but kept putting it off - been addicted to Fortnite: Save The World again, which is about as nightmarishly grindy a platinum as you can go for. Yeah, online journalism seems to be in a pretty bad place lately and I can't imagine people are getting paid much for their work. Still, it's nice to keep things engaging. On 2/5/2023 at 5:03 AM, TheBusToYoker said: I particularly love this bit being all arty farty as I can be. What I'm thinking from reading this is you wanted to offer deeper comment on the design of character models, but fell into oversharing other aspects that were perhaps more redundant for what you just wanted to convey; and so you didn't get to the deeper place you wanted. Lol, yeah, I have the habit of doing so sometimes. Particularly when an opportunity arises for me to talk about something that's been brewing in the ol' noggin for a while. On 2/5/2023 at 5:03 AM, TheBusToYoker said: I'm a mad Scottish bastard. If I want to describe a games studio as a Swedish brothel, I'll damn well describe them as a Swedish brothel. Sometimes you got to take the attitude of fucking sue me, and give no latitude or quarter in standing your ground. You're after all the writer, and you're in control. You want to say I'm sick of sexist monster designs, then say it. Give my hopelessly heterosexual male self something to pause and think about. Like shit, I never knew that was a problem. They really do design this stuff in a sexist way. Yeah, it's not even that it's offensively sexist, it's just... disappointing. With enemy designs it's not that bothersome, just a minor nitpick - it's more annoying in a game like Overwatch where you're actually playing as the characters. Particularly as someone who tends to identify with more tomboyish, less conventionally attractive women in games. (I am a huge fan of Abby and her relationship with Lev, for instance.) To be fair, it's probably more symptomatic of the game industry employing primarily cis men than anything else, since it's easier for most people to identify with characters of their own gender than otherwise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Puppeter04 Posted February 9, 2023 Share Posted February 9, 2023 On 2/1/2023 at 7:55 AM, Darling Baphomet said: Aw, thanks. My disabilities are mostly not physical, save for severe chronic stomach pain (mostly medicated away now), although that probably just relates to being autistic because for whatever reason gastrointestinal issues are extremely common among us. I'm fairly agoraphobic and don't like to go out unless I feel like I have a reason to (e.g. going grocery shopping), so I've been trying to use VR as an exercise regime. are you fk kidding me?! That's the reason for my stomach problems?! autism diagnosed here. Imma keep reading the whole 10 pages, Imma be back soon enough to talk about more than my inability to eat or digest food ?! See ya 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Puppeter04 Posted February 9, 2023 Share Posted February 9, 2023 (edited) ok, I'm back, just wow. If you ever doubt again about writing a lot, don't, I loved every sec of it. You expose your thoughts easily and are good at it; I'm a sucker for that. First of all, let me introduce myself, I'm Lucy or Leo (non-b person), and I've been wanting to read about ppl's opinions on sexual/gender/sexism/long etc matters in videogames for a looooooooong time, so I'm happy I found your trophy checklist. Quite a good platinum list btw, so excited to see more and surprised that you have AER, so underrated. To be honest, sometimes I'm not better than "men" themselves, but it's true that sexualization in some games is excessive. At least, now, in some games, when you point the camera/view at your female character, you cannot see the huge bazookas, which is a good thing. But I think the difference radicates in, for instance, me drooling over Kassandra (AC Odyssey) fully clothed instead of a semi-nude character. That is, I am attracted to personality much more, which makes the character more attractive. And I'm happy that you chose VR as an exercise. Even that is a huge accomplishment and makes me, as a nutritionist and health specialist, proud of you Edited February 9, 2023 by Puppeter04 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted February 10, 2023 Author Share Posted February 10, 2023 7 hours ago, Puppeter04 said: are you fk kidding me?! That's the reason for my stomach problems?! autism diagnosed here. Imma keep reading the whole 10 pages, Imma be back soon enough to talk about more than my inability to eat or digest food ! See ya Yeah, it's an extremely common comorbidity, lol. I got lucky because an ADHD medication I got put on (Welbutrin) also happens to be good for gastrointestinal health and freed me from almost all the pain I was getting. 5 hours ago, Puppeter04 said: ok, I'm back, just wow. If you ever doubt again about writing a lot, don't, I loved every sec of it. You expose your thoughts easily and are good at it; I'm a sucker for that. I'm glad you enjoyed it! That's very reassuring, because I felt like I was making myself work harder and making my posts unreadable at the same time ? I'm probably gonna cut back a little bit just to make it easier since I've been getting a lot of platinums these last few months, but I'll definitely try to keep up the descriptiveness. 5 hours ago, Puppeter04 said: First of all, let me introduce myself, I'm Lucy or Leo (non-b person), and I've been wanting to read about ppl's opinions on sexual/gender/sexism/long etc matters in videogames for a looooooooong time, so I'm happy I found your trophy checklist. Quite a good platinum list btw, so excited to see more and surprised that you have AER, so underrated. Yeah, I haven't talked about that too much but I've been being more vocal about those sorts of things here lately. And AER was a good game! I'm a big fan of small indie games like that, and I have dozens of them on my backlog. 5 hours ago, Puppeter04 said: To be honest, sometimes I'm not better than "men" themselves, but it's true that sexualization in some games is excessive. At least, now, in some games, when you point the camera/view at your female character, you cannot see the huge bazookas, which is a good thing. But I think the difference radicates in, for instance, me drooling over Kassandra (AC Odyssey) fully clothed instead of a semi-nude character. That is, I am attracted to personality much more, which makes the character more attractive. I think a big thing is how much agency the characters have in their sexualization - for instance, I have trouble playing a lot of JRPG type games because a lot of them go for creepy, non-consensual fanservice. It seems like there's a big Madonna / whore complex at play in those games, where they want to sexualize women, but they also want those women to be 'pure' and innocent, and so they compromise with things like awkward panty shots and the classic "falling down on top of a woman and giving one of her titties a big ol' squeeze." Or outright fucking creepy shit like that one game that allowed you to grope Definitely Adult schoolgirls in their sleep. There was a horrid Vita game I played years ago where your characters' clothes would rip as they took damage, and you would get fan mail when their clothes got ripped often enough which was basically just people being extremely creepy. Some of the characters were literal prepubescent girls, and all of this still applied to them. On the other hand stuff like sex scenes in, say, Mass Effect or The Witcher don't bother me much because no matter how sexualized the characters are are, it's consensual and nobody's being violated. I'm fine with outright porn games as long as they're done right. 5 hours ago, Puppeter04 said: And I'm happy that you chose VR as an exercise. Even that is a huge accomplishment and makes me, as a nutritionist and health specialist, proud of you Thanks! Yeah, I don't like going out unless I have a purpose behind it - probably an autism thing, and jogging doesn't really fill that requirement for me, so VR has been a godsend for exercising regularly, since while I do regularly go on several mile long walks to go shopping and such, it's not nearly often enough. That sounds like an interesting job, too. Do you enjoy it? And what does it entail? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Puppeter04 Posted February 15, 2023 Share Posted February 15, 2023 On 10/2/2023 at 4:57 AM, Darling Baphomet said: I'm glad you enjoyed it! That's very reassuring, because I felt like I was making myself work harder and making my posts unreadable at the same time I'm probably gonna cut back a little bit just to make it easier since I've been getting a lot of platinums these last few months, but I'll definitely try to keep up the descriptiveness. Even if you cut back a little, im still very happy to read about it !! On 10/2/2023 at 4:57 AM, Darling Baphomet said: On the other hand stuff like sex scenes in, say, Mass Effect or The Witcher don't bother me much because no matter how sexualized the characters are are, it's consensual and nobody's being violated. I'm fine with outright porn games as long as they're done right. That sounds like an interesting job, too. Do you enjoy it? And what does it entail? Thats the point, THANK YOU. We are on the same page here And about my job, yeah, it is interesting, I enjoy, mostly, working with kids. I do 3 types of job, two of them are nutrition-related, I work at a hospital and I also do conferences for them at schools, highschools whatever, also for more professional ppl. And my other job, I work at night, the gay night, in Madrid and Berlin, so I travel quite a lot too ^^ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted February 18, 2023 Author Share Posted February 18, 2023 (edited) 205: Manifold Garden (28.95%) ... Yes, that weird ass blob of color is the platinum image. It... fits, I guess? Manifold Garden is a game I associate with Superliminal, since they're two puzzle games that came out close to eachother that focus on impossible spaces and physics. Of the two, Manifold Garden is far more technically impressive - levels are infinitely repeating (or more accurately, looping), like fractals, and levels frequently make use of portal-gates that are flat or just hollow from one side, but lead to an entirely new area from the other. Beyond this, you also get the ability to switch gravity by walking up to a wall and reorienting yourself to it, and the ability to move blocks around. It's simultaneously simple while also mindbendingly complex. The puzzles generally require one of two things: getting boxes onto buttons, and redirecting water. Which is seemingly simple until you factor in gravity and impossible spaces. Besides that, there isn't much else to the game - there's a soft, muted aesthetic to the entire game, in place of story you get weird, looping visualizers after you complete every main area, and the ending is a kaleidoscope. The levels take you through various structures, many of which loop infinitely, or are suspended in space and loop infinitely. There's the occasional blocky tree, but besides that the game is very minimalist with its levels, and there isn't much in them that isn't functional in some way. When I say the level loops, what I mean is just that - go too far in any direction, and it takes you back on the opposite side of the level. It's not just a one off gimmick or pretty feature, though - one of the first puzzles requires you to get a block past a gap in a walkway by walking off a ledge and dropping down onto the opposite side of that walkway. You cannot jump, and to make up for the absence of a jump you have to find surfaces to gravity flip onto or loop around levels. While it's an initially neat mechanic, it can get a bit tedious by the end of the game, as levels are often massive and traversing them ends up taking a long time, especially if you need to keep falling through them. All in all, it's a very solid puzzle game with very impressive gimmicks. A solid game and one I'd wholeheartedly recommend on sale if you like puzzle games. The trophy journey isn't hard, either, requiring one full playthrough of the game and a second one that uses level skips and alternate routes to bypass one of the game's main forms of progression, with only one missable trophy. 206: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (29.98%) Battle for Bikini Bottom is a lovely remake of a classic Spongebob collectathon game, and while I never got to play the original, I was quite interested in this remake when it came to PS+. All in all it's a solid game and a competent remake, although at times it's seemingly bogged down by a low budget, resulting in some janky animations and game portions. The gameplay is pretty standard 3D collectathon fare - you go through various locations from the Spongebob series collecting golden spatulas and other collectibles, gradually unlocking new areas and abilities as you progress through the game, allowing you to collect even more collectibles. There's platforming, combat, and a few boss battles. The platforming all holds up pretty well, and the levels are fun to go through due to a variety of interactable elements - buttons to press, platforms to lift, new paths to purchase, etc. The levels are colorful and all distinct from eachother, which definitely doesn't hurt, either. You primarily play as Spongebob, who can unlock new abilities as he goes through the game, but you also get to swap in Patrick and Sandy on occasion - the latter of whom is by far the best character, having fantastic attacks as well as a glide that makes platforming much easier. The combat is where the game starts to falter a bit, as characters' attacks are where you'll notice the jankiness of the game's animations the most. It's nothing unmanageable, though, and the enemy variety is solid, providing you a variety of robots to deal with. The boss battles are probably the game's biggest disappointment - they all pretty much follow the pattern of "dodge boss's attacks until they stun themselves, then hit them" and definitely feel like an afterthought, but they make up very little of the game so it's not too big a deal. The story is... well, as present as it needs to be. Plankton tried to create an army of evil robots, and they took over instead, and now Spongebob needs to collect golden spatulas and fight robots. I'm not sure why the golden spatulas are necessary - I started this game before my mid-year shenanigans last year and only got back to it recently. They probably explained it in the intro. But I have no fucking clue. All I know is you can unlock new areas using them. The level-to-level character interactions are far more prominent - every level has a few of the franchise's iconic characters hanging around to give you quests or whatnot, and they help the game worlds feel much more alive. Though the dialogue cutscenes are ... a little janky. The playable characters also have callouts for just about every situation (I am so tired of hearing Patrick say "hard as a rock", and no, I will not provide further context for that) which are fun, if a bit repetitive after a while. I'd say overall I'd give this game maybe a 7.5/10 - it's a solid game and fun to get through, although there are some frustrating platformer sections and enemy placements (not made any better by the robots laughing every time they hit you). The core game is very solid, though, and I feel that with a higher budget the formula would work fantastically - and hopefully they got that budget in the Cosmic Shake, which I've yet to play. We'll see in a few months, I suppose. All in all a solid PS+ title, but one I probably wouldn't recommend without a hefty discount if you didn't get it through Plus. Edited February 18, 2023 by Darling Baphomet 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted February 26, 2023 Author Share Posted February 26, 2023 207: Stray (31.60%) And without further ado I present to you... cat souls. Well, not really, because this game couldn't be farther from being a Souls game. But it is a bit of a meme game and likely wouldn't have had anywhere near its level of success if not for its feline protagonist. Stray is a rather short (it can be completed in under two hours without much difficulty, which you have to do for a trophy) game wherein you play a cat trying to escape a cyberpunk city populated entirely by robots. The bulk of the gameplay is traversal. Not really platforming, since you don't have any sort of free jump and can just press x to automatically jump onto things - which is probably for the best, as it allows for realistic level design that would likely be extremely difficult to navigate if you were doing everything manually; hopping on air conditioners, that sort of thing. It works fairly well, although it can be a bit finnicky with locking onto the right ledges if you're trying to move quickly, which can disrupt the flow a bit. Besides that, there are some puzzles, usually involving barrels or moving boxes, but there aren't a whole lot of them and they're generally pretty easy. Save for one level, there's no combat, and whenever hostiles appear (namely sentry bots and these chibi headcrab looking things that try to eat you) you typically have to sneak around them or run away from them. There's also a... dedicated meow button. The most impressive thing about this game is, by far, its visuals. While animations can be a bit wonky, which gives the feline protagonist a bit of an uncanny valley feel at times, the actual characters (and especially the environments) are extremely high quality and the environments you roam through look gorgeous. The music is also good and matches the tone well, although it's typically fairly lowkey and in the background, but there are some standout tracks. The story is... surprisingly good, too. I wasn't expecting much of a narrative from this game, given that you are a cat, and cats are not exactly known for their ability to communicate in any human language. This cat, however, despite being very realistically depicted in every other way - you don't ever try to communicate with other characters, nor do you show any understanding of what they say when they talk to you other than using that knowledge as the player - appears to be able to both read English and understand it. And perform highly complex tasks, like disabling a reactor. A few chapters into the game, you're united with your robot companion, who stays with you for the rest of the game and is able to translate other robots' speech for you - which is a bit odd, given that cats are not, as far as I can tell, masters of linguistics, and as such having a cat who has never interacted with humans be able to understand English but not robot speak kinda feels like a weird design decision. I mean, I guess the robot could be speaking cat? But then you'd think the two would be able to communicate back and forth instead of the robot just talking to the cat and the cat meowing once in response. It's perfectly fine, and it works, I just can't help but feel it's funny to have a completely normal cat in a perfectly realistic world have the power of language for no reason whatsoever. ANYWAY. Right. I was supposed to be discussing the story. The game starts with you, as a cat, hanging out with a bunch of other cats. You take a nap, then you go off with them, only to fail a jump and plummet into the abyss. You wake up in the sewers(?) of a domed city, and based on the course of the game, your goal is to get out of that city. There are no humans in the game, and a fair bit of your journey is solitary, although there are also quite a few hub levels where you'll run around doing side tasks for robots and progressing through your interactions with them. In truth, there isn't really much of a story to the game so much as there is a setting, and I guess an overall plot direction - there are some twists, but they're hardly revolutionary and mostly serve to carry the game forwards. The setting is where the game really shines - the city is gorgeous, and the lore behind it is genuinely interesting and makes you want to learn more about the futuristic setting the game takes place in. This is helped by the previously mentioned gorgeousness of the city - there's so much detail and intricacy in every level, especially the populated ones, that it gives a mysticism to the setting it might not have achieved otherwise. All in all, it's a solid game and a good PS+ offering. I still think it's a bit of a meme game and definitely overhyped - it's a solid 7.5-8/10 in my book; it won't challenge you, nor is its gameplay particularly revolutionary, but it is an enjoyable experience throughout and offers more than enough variety to keep you entertained. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The Fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Fortnite Lucky's Tale BoxVR Destiny 2 The Sims 4 ON HOLD: Subnautica Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony Powerslave Exhumed PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island Serious Sam 4 DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cat Quest 2 Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond Cozy Grove Tangle Tower Phlegethon Seum Shadow of Loot box The Mage's Tale Train Station Simulator RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted March 3, 2023 Author Share Posted March 3, 2023 (edited) 208: BoxVR (6.63%) It's been a few days and my shoulders are STILL sore from the two hour monster session I pulled a few days ago to platinum this game. BoxVR and Beat Saber sit on opposite ends of the VR music game spectrum. Beat Saber, while physically active, is quite underwhelming as a workout game and focuses more on the gameplay elements of a rhythm game, which it does quite well - despite the minimalistic visuals, it looks great, and the notes feel great to smash, especially the newer, Synth Riders inspired notes they've started adding to new songs. BoxVR, on the other hand, is... a bit underwhelming as a game. The hit detection isn't always the best, and there isn't nearly as much feedback for hitting a note. But it excels as a workout game. Beat Saber's swinging your arms around really doesn't exercise all that much of your body, whereas the shadow boxing of BoxVR manages to get your arms, shoulders, and some back muscles, to say nothing of the fact that squats actually appear consistently in BoxVR, whereas in Beat Saber they're a rare novelty. BoxVR also has a much better library of songs in the base game, with something like 150 songs ranging from hiphop to electronic, most of which I enjoyed quite a bit more than the weird, dubstep-y sound of many of the base game tracks in Beat Saber. I really can't overstate just how much BoxVR excels as a workout game. Whereas I could go for ~4 hours in Beat Saber (with a few breaks), when I started BoxVR I was nearing exhaustion in BoxVR after only half an hour. It is intense. And unlike Beat Saber, with its limited library of songs in the base game, and expensive as fuck DLC packs, it is a fantastic value for your money. I've played at least 15 hours of the game so far and I haven't come close to experiencing all of the songs in the game, whereas Beat Saber's library can be exhausted in a few hours - though part of this is the fact that BoxVR expects you to play for a long time, and thus the main section of the game is 'classes', which are basically premade playlists of songs ranging from 2 minutes in length to 60. (The majority are between 9-25 minutes.) You can also create your own custom playlists and choose each song manually, however I was quite satisfied with the classes, and they provide a lot more motivation to keep playing than Beat Saber's individual songs do. I would note, though, that Beat Saber is far better at communicating difficulty, whereas with most BoxVR classes you are going in entirely blind outside of knowing how long you'll be playing for. One thing of note is that the PC and PSVR versions of this game have been abandoned - however, from what I can gather from the Steam reviews, this is actually a good thing. The Quest version of the game has been rebranded to FitXR and apparently makes a few frustrating changes to the game - the worst offense is that it now operates on a subscription model, and besides that it has coaches talk constantly (whereas in BoxVR they are very much silent), removed environments, and removed the ability to use your own music in custom workouts (which is not available on PSVR for obvious reasons, so I can't comment as to how good that feature was.) I don't think I would pay 10$ a month for this game, so I am quite glad that I was able to get this relic, abandoned or not, for the <15$ I paid for it on sale. 209: Cat Quest (76.13%) Hey, this is that cat game everyone's talking about, right? Right? Cat Quest is a mobile RPG where you play a magic cat in a fantasy world full of cat people. RPG is really a bit of an overstatement there, as for the most part it's just one giant overworld map and you run around fighting enemies by pressing square to do melee attacks and occasionally using spells and dodge rolling. The RPG elements boil down to doing side quests and equipping armor an weapons. The story is... minimal. I don't think I can really convey how minimal it is. Your sister gets kidnapped, and then you need to go fight some dragons. The main quests mostly consist of going to location A and fighting dragons, which is as short as you would think, broken up occasionally by some side objectives that take a bit longer. There's more story in the side quests, although even those have very little dialogue (though some of the concepts are rather novel.) What dialogue there is is... strange, which is largely because the game doesn't take itself very seriously, but sometimes it takes that to an extreme, for instance your companion spirit very passionately proclaiming that we have to slaughter a cave full of bandits to the last man because they stole some supplies from a merchant. Despite its simplicity, the game manages to be surprisingly addictive. Finding new quests and dungeons to complete is satisfying, as is finding new equipment. Cat Quest very much feels like a "numbers go up" game, and this is helped by the fact that it's not that hard to create an OP build, allowing you to get damage high enough to challenge enemies twice your level (one dungeon is 2x the level cap), so long as you're intimately acquainted with the dodge button. That's not to say it doesn't get repetitive - because it does - but it's satisfying, and not long enough to really start to drag on. It's most certainly worth the few bucks you can get it for on sale, and the trophy guide's estimated 12 hours to platinum. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The Fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Fortnite Lucky's Tale BoxVR Destiny 2 The Sims 4 ON HOLD: Subnautica Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony Powerslave Exhumed PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond Cozy Grove Tangle Tower Phlegethon Seum Shadow of Loot box The Mage's Tale Train Station Simulator SuperMash Soundfall Max: The Curse of Brotherhood The Eternal Cylinder Road 96 RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Edited March 3, 2023 by Darling Baphomet 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted March 15, 2023 Author Share Posted March 15, 2023 (edited) 210: Cat Quest 2 (65.42%) Cat Quest 2 is... kind of the perfect sequel. It's still very clearly a mobile game, but it expands perfectly on everything in Cat Quest. The visuals are massively upgraded, although the overall aesthetic is similar, the gameplay has been improved with more spells and with ranged, magic weapons offering an alternative to the "go up to enemy and whack them" combat which was the only option in one, and on top of that the game is built with co-op in mind - playing singleplayer, you get control of two characters, a dog and a cat, who have separate builds. The unused character is invincible and helps you attack, so it's not a burden to play singleplayer, and playing multiplayer allows you to specialize each character into different things. The story is also massively improved - while the first Cat Quest's story could barely be described as such, Cat Quest 2 manages to actually provide a somewhat consistent narrative, and greatly improves on the quest design as well. All in all, it's not a particularly hard game, nor an incredibly in depth one - like Cat Quest, the RPG mechanics are ultimately extremely basic and primarily consist of leveling up (with no manual stat allocation) and equipping / upgrading weapons and armor. But everything in the game works, and it works well. It's a very worthy game, especially at the few dollars it frequently drops to on sale. 211: GRID (6.92%) Having quite enjoyed Dirt 5, I figured I'd give GRID, the street racing equivalent, a try. And... well, it's okay. Honestly, I don't have too much to say about it. It has a long enough campaign, and a decent selection of cars and tracks. It's technically an arcade racer, but it doesn't feel very much arcade-y and it has handling more peculiar than actual sim racers I've played - you're more likely to find a bigger challenge trying not to spin out than you are from racing against the AI. This varies between vehicle classes, with some of the faster classes being very sleek and easy to control, which is a breath of fresh air, but then you go back to the slower vehicle classes and the pain begins once again. You also technically have a racing team, however this just amounts to having a second racer in every race who can earn you a little extra money, and it feels so minimal that I question why it's even in the game. The difficulty is extremely inconsistent. Some cars require barely any caution and can be driven as recklessly as you want, while others spin out after the slightest error. Some tracks allow you to easily go from 16th to 1st in the first lap, while on others it's almost impossible to advance. You can do "hot laps" to determine your starting position in the race proper, however these are easy enough to get first place in that they utterly trivialize the game's difficulty. The game also allows you a few rewinds, which are a necessity with handling as sensitive as this game's is. One of the more interesting features is that if you bump into other drivers often enough they'll become your nemesis for the rest of the race, or the rest of the event if it's one with multiple races, meaning they'll become very aggressive towards you, which can become a serious hazard if you're constantly switching places with someone you've angered. But with all that said... it works well enough. I'd probably give it a 6.5/10 or so. It gets boring at times, but it's not bad. Honestly, its worst flaw in my opinion is that it doesn't have any in-game music, which required me to use my Spotify racing playlist to compensate. Hopefully Grid Legends is better. 212: Prodeus (14.62%) Ah, yes. I've been waiting for this one for a while. Prodeus is yet another fantastic entry in that burgeoning subgenre known as the boomer shooter - in particular, Prodeus is essentially Doom 3 if it hadn't abandoned its arcade roots in favor of being a gritty jumpscare shooter. So first up, the gameplay. As an arcade shooter, that's obviously where Prodeus lives or dies - and Prodeus passes this mark with flying colors. Its gunplay is fantastic - weapons feel heavy and responsive, and enemies explode into fountains of blood that make every kill feel chunky and responsive. There's also a lot of them. Three regular bullet weapons, three shotguns, three explosives, one energy weapon, and three chaos weapons. Plus your fists. Your character can unlock a double jump and an air dash as you progress through the game and collect more ore, alongside some weapons that can't be obtained in the regular levels. And this game's weapons are great - the second weapon (or rather pair of weapons) you obtain is two dual wielded SMGs, and besides that you've got a quadruple barrel shotgun, a classic grenade launcher (something I very much miss in modern FPS games), the swarmer, which fires a burst of micro missiles, a gun that shoots giant blobs of goo that do damage over time, and a fantastic railgun revolver which is one of the more original guns I've seen in a recent FPS. There's also a level editor, although I don't think it's available on console, meaning that there are a lot of fantastic custom levels. And I do mean fantastic - these aren't just copy pasted corridors, but rather some truly mindblowing stuff - a high speed level where you're jumping between moving vehicles in a vaporwave setting as they shift and sometimes spin wildly out of control or explode. Another has a very impressive cyberpunk setting. Another takes you through three realms and features a genius (as in, I have no idea how they got this working using just a level editor, because it's not an NPC) boss fight against a giant spider boss while you're on a platform that's falling down a massive pit. If you play this game without trying the custom levels (which is unlikely, as the campaign will only net you a ~third of the kills you need for the platinum) you are missing out. Some of the levels also grant you access to a very fun weapon which sadly did not make the campaign, essentially a souped up version of the energy rifle which fires larger, far more weighty feeling energy balls with damaging lasers that link them. And all this can be played in co-op, which I highly recommend. Speaking of that cut weapon, that ties into what is, unfortunately, my biggest complaint with the game - it feels unfinished. That's not to say the campaign is short - it's quite long, with its 28 levels - but its ending is very clearly rushed. You spend the vast majority of the game going through various facilities, then you have a detour into the Prodeus (enemies that are essentially angels) dimension which spans a few levels, then you return back to regular reality for a fantastic level featuring a space station. All is good. A new enemy gets introduced after the space station level - one of the deadliest yet, and you get to fight it for... two or three levels, which also introduce the first new weapon (the aforementioned fire blob gun) in ten plus levels. And then you go to the Chaos (covering the regular, demonic enemies) dimension, and you have one fantastic Quake-like level in a massive, hellish fortress... and then that's it. The final level is just a single, generic arena that whips out a big new chaos enemy who is really not that impressive for a boss fight (nowhere near as impressive that custom level's spider boss, for instance), and you have a very brief, unimpressive fight against him, and that's the end of the game. It's extremely anticlimactic and in no way feels like the end to a game. Combine this with the multiple weapons that didn't make it into the campaign (the previously mentioned energy weapon, the Plexus, which is accessible through the level editor, and the Void Cannon, which cannot be accessed normally but is in the game), plus two melee weapons that were planned but not implemented, and the four empty ? slots left in your inventory as a result, and you're left with the distinct impression that there was either supposed to be more to this game. But, again, the game's campaign is lengthy - were it not for the fact that the ending feels more like an abrupt cutoff than anything else, it would be more than adequate. And it's a lot of fun regardless. There's also the game's oft criticized respawn system, where when you die, you respawn at the previous checkpoint, but your progress is saved - e.g. every enemy you've killed remains alive - meaning that the game's impossible to lose, since *any* challenge can be overcome by simply throwing yourself at enemies enough times. This makes sense for co-op, but really makes no sense at all for singleplayer gameplay. It's not that bad, I guess, but it's bizarre and most certainly doesn't add to the game. The sound design of the game is good - weapons sound good, which is a crucial part of them feeling right, and hit / kill noises are similarly satisfying. The music is also solid, although it's one of those soundtracks that is good without being incredibly memorable. The game's visuals are... weird. In 4K, the enemy models and levels look fantastic, however the game is designed to be played in 360p, as demonstrated by the fact that your weapons, explosive barrels, and human corpses are all sprites. Or rather "sprites", since they're not actually sprites - the game uses a strange system where it converts 3D models into 2D sprites as you play, which I would imagine is a significant time saver, but makes the sprites look a bit odd, both because they're shaded like 3D models would be, and also because they have none of the consistency of sprites, being rendered based on where you are and thus having infinite permutations as opposed to a few set frames that rotate with you. Played at 360p with 3D models for enemies (which luckily is included as a toggle), the game does nail its aesthetic - despite the quite modern graphics, the lower resolution successfully adds chunk to the game, and it is a pretty game regardless of what resolution you play it in. All in all? A solid ass boomer shooter and one I highly recommend. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: Evil Dead: The Game QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The Fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Fortnite Lucky's Tale Destiny 2 The Sims 4 ON HOLD: Subnautica Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony Powerslave Exhumed PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond Cozy Grove Tangle Tower Phlegethon Seum Shadow of Loot box The Mage's Tale Train Station Simulator SuperMash Soundfall Max: The Curse of Brotherhood The Eternal Cylinder Road 96 RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy Edited March 21, 2023 by Darling Baphomet 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darling Baphomet Posted March 29, 2023 Author Share Posted March 29, 2023 213: Mundaun (15.79%) Mundaun is a psychological horror-esque mystery sort of game. It's creepy and bizarre - emphasis on bizarre - you're going to be having to sneak around monsters from time to time, and there is no way to avoid the one (yes, there is only one) jumpscare in the game, but for the most part you'll be focusing on exploring a quaint town on a mountain filled with supernatural weirdness and bizarre characters that always seem to be hiding things from you trying to figure out what happened to your dead grandfather - all while being taunted by the old man, with his ever shifting, twisted visage. It's an odd game through and through, from the vagueness of the dialogue to the penciled sepia aesthetic, which alongside the dialogue spoken exclusively in Romansh - a language with under 60,000 current speakers - gives the game a folksy charm I can't say I've ever really seen in another game. The gameplay itself is fairly mundane; you, for the most part, go from point A to point B looking for key items and talking to people, and occasionally you will need to drive a truck or sneak around enemies; there is not a huge variety of enemies in the game, but it is not a particularly long game, and so it works, and what enemies there are are distinct and fit the game perfectly, from the bizarre living hay bales to the hovering beekeepers. Of course, there are also a few ways to dispose of enemies, if you're so inclined. Along the way you can pick up collectibles that increase your stats, from bread and other left out food that increases your health to coffee, which increases your sanity and is a bit of an ordeal to prepare, requiring you to find a source of water to fill a pot with, get wood for the stove, and finally boil the pot of water with coffee in it. All in all, it's a unique, charming indie horror game and there hasn't been anything else I've played that's been quite like it. It won't shock you with gameplay innovations, but it knows to keep things fresh, and it's unlikely to ever get stale during your playthrough. Worth noting I only found out about this game because I saw a review of it on Grimbeard's channel. He does game essayists and I'm quite fond of him, so maybe give him a look if you like obscure and sometimes old horror / supernatural games. 214: Creed: Rise to Glory (4.82%) The first thing I need to say about this game is that VR boxing is a lot of fun, and it's a damn good workout. The second thing I need to say is that Creed: Rise to Glory does not make VR boxing any more fun than it already is. While, initially, I was surprised by the relatively impressive story mode and the uncharacteristically good graphics for a PSVR1 game, the flaws begin to show rather quickly. Creed is a competent enough VR boxing game in terms of content available and polish, but it makes one fatal flaw that is a killer for VR games - it doesn't respect the player's agency. What do I mean by that? Well, there's a stamina system, and it is horrid. After a few punches your punching arm (or arms) will no longer function, instead limply dragging in the direction your actual arm is, forcing you to play on the defensive. What's worse is that enemies can land powerful blows that instantly exhaust both your arms, then follow up with combos that are extremely difficult to block, leaving you exhausted in game for the 20-30 seconds it takes for you to be knocked out there while you stand there waiting for the game to allow you to actually move again. Add to this that opponents have massively buffed stats compared to your character, they don't seem to ever get significantly exhausted, and that sometimes they can hit through your blocks (including with the powerful blows that exhaust you that I mentioned earlier), and you have a game that holds you back at every turn. On top of this, dodges just... do not work very well; most of the time even when I completely ducked IRL or sidestepped it wouldn't count as a dodge, but then other times I would be standing still and trigger the slow motion of a successful dodge. The penultimate example of this game not respecting the player's time is a fight in the story mode against some guy from the movies named Ricky Conlan. This fight fucking sucks. The opponent is immensely more powerful than the player, seemingly never runs out of stamina, and you cannot do any damage to him until the final round. The reason for this is that, apparently, they wanted to have the fight accurate to the movies (apparently Creed is some kind of followup to the Rocky movies? Don't know, don't particularly care), and so this is meant to be an autolose fight. Except that (and this isn't explained to you anywhere in the game) if you lose before the final round, you apparently didn't lose correctly and the game demands you start the fight over. Against an invincible opponent. Who's been made absurdly strong just for this fight, because it's meant to be an autolose fight. So at best, you're going to be blocking this guy's hits and punching on him for something like 10+ minutes not understanding why he hasn't gone down yet, and if you somehow persevere through that, you might be able to knock him down in the final round (which will still be treated as a loss.) I ended up just walking around the ring for the entire duration waiting until the game would allow me to actually lose properly. It's fucking egregious. With that said... the foundation of what could be a good VR boxing game is there. As said, the graphics are good; the characters are all heavily stylized and have different stats, and make up a very interesting roster to play with. There's PVP, which is just as exhausting as it sounds. The entire game is exhausting, really; as brutal as BoxVR could be at times, nothing has knocked the wind out of me like this game has. And again, VR boxing is fun. And Creed is fun because of that. It's just that you're constantly reminded of the fact that the game could be more fun if it respected the player's agency and time. If you can get it on a good sale, it's worth the few hours it'll occupy you for, even if some of that time is going to be frustrating. 215: Evil Dead: The Game (5.04%) Have you ever said to yourself, I want an almost completely nude, flying rotting corpse of a woman to smother me with her breasts? If so, this may just be the game for you. Evil Dead: The Game is essentially Dead by Daylight with guns. And overpowered survivors. And cars. (You're going to need those, as some of the maps are fucking massive.) Personally, I've never been able to get into Dead by Daylight, but the far more fast paced gameplay of Evil Dead, where it's not just the killer doing the killing, was far more appealing to me. I've never actually engaged with any of the franchise besides that one semi-recent TV show, but as far as I can tell, this game just about fully represents the breadth of the Evil Dead series - there's even four different versions of Ash, one for every class (oh yes, we have classes), from different iterations of the franchise; one from the first Evil Dead, one from the second, another from what I assume is some kind of medieval spinoff, and then lastly, the aged Ash from the TV show. And then you have an assortment of what I assume are iconic characters from the franchise - I know it has Kelly and Pablo, and they're pretty iconic, so I assume the rest of the cast is similarly recognizable. The gameplay is fairly standard for a DBD type of game. The survivors spawn into a map and must scavenge for supplies (including better weapons) and pieces of a map while trying to avoid detection by the demon - you can fight back, but it's best to delay doing so as much as possible, as the demon gains xp from fighting and the survivors do not. The demon, during this time, will be flying around the map, setting traps that spawn deadites when triggered, searching for the survivors and keeping an eye out for any hint of them (gunfire, survivors' fear levels getting too high, and cars being driven all alert the demon to the survivors' position). The maps are large, and so the hiding in this game is less hiding and more just being stealthy and efficient. Once the pieces of the map are collected, you need to collect the Kandarian dagger and lost pages of the Necronomicon, two control point-esque objectives which the demon knows the location of - confrontation is inevitable at this point. The demon will summon various unit types at you, culminating with the powerful boss unit (including Henrietta, the aforementioned bloated corpse with her very questionable attacks.) To add to this, if survivors' fear levels are too high, they can be possessed and made to attack their fellow survivors - which can be dealt with if their teammates are paying attention, but I've wiped more than one team by possessing a powerful warrior or hunter and going to town. It's fun, and makes for an engaging push and pull between the survivors and the demon... when it works. There are balance issues. We'll get to those later. Besides that, there are a variety of different weapons and characters to play as, both as the demon and the survivors. The survivors have four classes, and characters of each class are somewhat similar to one another. There's leaders, who are rounded out stat wise and have powerful auras that buff nearby teammates. Including Ruby, a somewhat recent addition whose aura is bugged, resulting in her essentially being a P2W character universally hated by demons and even some survivors. Then there's warriors, who are the melee attackers of the game. Then hunters, who are that but for ranged weapons - which are very powerful, but typically don't get used until the second half of the game due to gunfire alerting the demon to where you are. And lastly there's the supports, who are squishy but can heal teammates by using healing items on themselves and have various other supportive abilities. On top of this, every survivor has a unique ability, some of which are ridiculously strong, e.g. Hunter Ash can immediately exorcise the demon from a survivor or basic unit, which can force the demon to change their entire playstyle around him, baiting out his exorcisms on weaker units before hitting with their main force. (Speaking from personal experience, here...) The demons are similarly varied, although this is where the game's balance issues start to get more noticeable - due to there being a massive power gap between demons, the one you're going to see most often, especially from higher level players, is the Plaguebringer, a witch whose boss unit can unleash devastating ranged attacks. The Puppeteer, my main of choice, is the second most powerful demon, and can power possess units, turning even the otherwise easily disposed of basics into powerhouses capable of taking down an entire uncoordinated team. Then there's the Necromancer, who I'm told is situationally powerful, and then there's Henrietta, of face-to-tit action fame, who virtually nobody plays. And speaking of demon, it's time to get to the balance issues. So, the demon playerbase has been shrinking for a long while, and nowadays it can take upwards of ten minutes to get a match as a survivor due to this reason. Demon has a bit of a problem. See, against less prepared, uncoordinated teams, the demon is obscenely powerful - as Puppeteer I win most of my games - but against a well coordinated team, there is very little the demon can do; sometimes all of the map pieces will be collected in only a few minutes, which is barely enough time for the demon to get high enough level to summon basic units. On top of this, high level survivors will often make use of cheesy game mechanics - tossing weapons when their fear level gets too high so they're useless once possessed, constantly vaulting back and forwards through windows or over railings since the demon cannot follow and has to go around the long way, and the dreaded Ruby + Hunter Ash combo, which combines Ruby's glitched aura with her ability to lower cooldowns, making Hunter Ash's ability to force you out of a unit even more devastating. It's bad enough that I just started idling or quitting whenever I ran into a HAsh + Ruby combo, because it's bad enough trying to manage one HAsh without having Ruby there to refresh his ability before I can do anything. And, again, on the other hand, the demon can absolutely slaughter less skilled teams - all I need is one lone survivor (amusingly, many of these are prestiged hot shots who think they can solo the game) to focus down and then I can snowball to victory from there due to the sheer amount of exp afforded by downing a player and guarding them until they bleed out, to say nothing of the potential to use their body as bait and repeat the process. Despite this, I largely had fun with demon - though I can't say the same for many of the teams I played against. While I had many games against teams I just could not do against (all the worse when they're assholes who flashlight spam constantly), the vast majority of my games were a thrill. There's an excitement to how you're forced to use every resource at your disposal as demon - possessing cars and driving them off to slow down survivors, possessing survivors and running them out of objectives so the cooldowns go back down, and flying around the map summoning useless units just for the exp while you try and find where the survivors are. I ended up finding demon a lot more fun than playing with survivor, since survivor is so team based and such a crapshoot in solo queue - which is funny, because when I first started I was afraid to even touch demon. Also, they added a battle royale mode. It's... something that exists. I don't play it. All in all, the game's fun. I enjoyed it. But it has major, glaring issues that stand in the way of me recommending it - namely the long queue times as survivor, steep learning curve, and how unbalanced the game can be. If you're willing to put up with these things, you might find the game rather enjoyable, though. 216: Mythic (76.19%) Mythic Ocean is a lovely little indie game where you play the role of someone who's lost their memory and has once again (apparently) been thrust into the beginning of a new cycle, wherein you must interact with various gods, and based on your interactions with them, help decide who will become the creator of the new world. It plays something like a 3D visual novel, with gorgeous 3D environments and tons of side NPCs to talk to, some of which have amusing little side stories. The main gods are all fun to interact with and have a lot of character, and you can help change their characters by guiding them through conflicts with other gods. The biggest thing with this game is that it's gorgeous. The underwater environments look fantastic, and the gods are unique in their designs as well. And the music is absolutely fantastic, contributing an odd but charming electronic underwater feel to the game. It's a treat not just to play this game, but to be there to listen to it. The story is the biggest thing in this game. Kind of. Your interactions with the characters are the real focus of this game, and as said, the characters are all unique and interesting to interact with, and it's fun being able to guide the outcomes of their meetings with other gods. The game is, however, very small in scope - while you can affect the gods' characters and change the outcome of some interactions, you will ultimately go through the same events (though perhaps in a different order) in every playthrough. And the story is similarly simple. There's a fair amount of lore to uncover, but ultimately, this isn't some grand, epic quest, and you're not going to fundamentally change the nature of the world or anything else - this is just one more cycle in a series of cycles. And that might be intentional, as the game seems to have respect for nature as a big theme, which is often extended to cycles of death and rebirth. Mythic Ocean is, in a way, the epitome of the 'short and sweet' game. What is there is fantastic - the characters are great, the music is enchanting, and the underwater environments look lovely. But it's all very small. There's not that many gods, and the game isn't particularly long. But I greatly enjoyed what was there, and despite being initially disappointed that the endings were presented in a traditional VN style instead of in the 3D of the rest of the game, I found the endings interesting enough to play the game through again just to experience a few more of them. All in all, I'd say I'd recommend this game. Here's an example of the the music, for the curious: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=4IDZ0APLHZY And lastly, I would like to present you with a photograph of the rare and highly esteemed "el creaturo" Yes, this is one of the game's gods. CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction! Spoiler NOW PLAYING & MORE: NOW PLAYING: QUBE 2 Shadow Point After The Fall Killing Floor Incursion Arizona Sunshine Fortnite Lucky's Tale Destiny 2 The Sims 4 ON HOLD: Subnautica Manifold Garden Songbird Symphony Powerslave Exhumed PLANNING TO PLAY SOON: THE BACKLOG PROPER: NEW YEAR NEW SPENDING PROBLEM (2023+, baby!) Telefrag VR Innocence Island DragonRideVR Danger Scavenger No Thing Star Renegades Cthulhu Saves Christmas Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! The Maskmaker The Assembly Cave Digger: Riches Mortal Blitz Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher Twin Mirror AI: The Somnium Files Rush VR XING: The Land Beyond Cozy Grove Tangle Tower Phlegethon Seum Shadow of Loot box The Mage's Tale Train Station Simulator SuperMash Soundfall Max: The Curse of Brotherhood The Eternal Cylinder Road 96 RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022) Prodeus Marsupilami Hoobadventure Megaquarium Mini Motor Racing X Mythic Ocean Mundaun NeonHat Operation Warcade Paradise Killer Powerslave Exhumed Pathologic 2 Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Return of the Obra Dinn Saturday Morning RPG Shadow Legend Sniper Elite VR Super Daryl Deluxe The Walking Dead Onslaught Time Carnage The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Wind Wind Winds & Leaves 2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022) Far Cry 6 Hero Land Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022) Rogue Legacy 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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