Despite still never giving a proper go with the works of H. P. Lovecraft, I’ve had a lot of experience with art and entertainment based or inspired by his writings. That included the previous most recent videogame official adaptation of his “lore” in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth from 2005. Despite its shortcomings and multiple issues that game was genuinely interesting and had numerous great moments and ideas (and I really should revisit it soon, since it’s been a while). This new Call of Cthulhu? Well… There’s hard to find many good things to remember this one by.
Tag: Not recommended
Disapprove: Call of Duty: WWII (Singleplayer)
Three years ago I decided to catch up on all the CoD games I’ve been missing out on since Black Ops II and it turned out that there were some occasional attempts at making a fun single-player campaign. The one I found most enjoyable, despite it’s dumb QTEs and the still infamous “pay respects” scene, was the Advanced Warfare entry as it had both fun gameplay elements to it and an actually good-ish story. It lacked the really creative “choose your own adventure” ideas from Black Ops II, but storytelling was solid and the characters were memorable, so I had somewhat high hopes for WWII, as it was made by the same team at Sledgehammer Games. I was extremely disappointed.
Disapprove: Darksiders III (with DLCs)
While revisiting the first two Darksiders games late last year in their remastered editions I was planning to get into the third title the day of release. I actually had it pre-ordered, something I rarely do, back then and had high hopes for the game. Then the reviews hit and I, for the first time ever, withdrew my pre-order and decided to revisit the title after patches and DLCs hit. Well, that happened and the current version of Darksiders III is supposedly the most complete it will ever get. A game I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.
O tempora: Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Of all the Infinity Engine-based games that I’ve played (I’m to play Icewind Dale 2 next for the first time, but otherwise all of them) Icewind Dale was the only one that I had barely any memories of. I remembered playing it, remember it being obnoxiously high on combat and not much else, but otherwise, I couldn’t remember anything else. Now that I’ve replayed the game in the Enhanced Edition version (with the expansion and the add-on to the expansion I’ve not played before included), I understand why it was so.
Disapprove: Finding Paradise
When I first played To the Moon 7 years ago I had certain expectations. The game was talked a lot about, with people describing it very emotional and moving. The “I cried” sentiment around it, in fact, turned into the same bandwagon stock phrase/meme similar to whatever would form around any hugely popular game. And I liked it. It didn’t move me in the same ways it seemed to affect people and it was mechanically annoying at times, but it was also a nicely put together story that I was glad to go through and could easily recommend to others. Though, I also said that the free Mirror Lied from the same developers was a much more engaging title and still stand by that.
Then A Bird Story happened. An absolutely pointless title with a story that could’ve and should’ve been told in about 10 minutes Since that was supposed to be somewhat of a prequel to Finding Paradise, my expectations were quite a bit lower this time around. And even with that, Finding Paradise managed to disappoint, despite having a strong central story.
Late thoughts on the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy
Despite following the development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl ever since GSC set out to create “our own Ukrainian Fallout”, I wasn’t really into it when it came out. I admired the game for what it was, but I didn’t have fun. Yet, I still bought Clear Sky as soon as it got released and… never finished it. When Call of Pripyat was announced, I originally took it as a joke and then simply ignored the game altogether.
For years I wanted to give the series another go. And I finally got in the mood to do that. No mods, no enhancements, no fan patches, just the final versions of each game as they are. Let’s see how they feel in 2019.
Read more“Late thoughts on the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy”
Disapprove: Q.U.B.E. 2
The original Q.U.B.E. was one of the still quite few examples of well made First Person Physics-based Puzzle games, when it launched over 7 years ago. While never fantastic, it was a solid and stylish simple puzzle game with no story, atmospheric tunes and really cool visual design, combined with some fun puzzles all based around manipulating parts of the environment. It was then followed by Director’s Cut, a misguided re-release of the game that did remove a rather annoying puzzle, but also added a completely unnecessary, badly written and pace breaking narration and, to fit the new narrated mood, a more ambient score instead of a more pronounced music of the original.
And now, a couple more years later, Q.U.B.E. 2 was released. And I cannot figure out why.
Disapprove: RiME
Ever since Ico became popular I’ve seen a lot of games attempt doing something similar – a puzzle and platforming 3D game with no spoken narration, simple but beautiful artstyle, moving music and some central concept/idea to it all. And as more and more indie developers became enabled to use powerful engines that allow creating something mechanically simple, but beautiful and, hopefully, evocative, the amount of games of this type went up dramatically. RiME is just another example of this type of game. Made with lots of care, genuinely good looking, with a good story concept behind it and yet all too familiar, not particularly fun and ultimately forgettable.
Few thoughts on Tokyo Xanadu eX+
It’s a rare thing when I write an opinion about a game I haven’t finished. And it’s rare (in fact, have not happened before) that I don’t finish a game from Falcom. But here we are.
Disapprove: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (Gold Edition)
It’s been a while since I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with an Assassin’s Creed game. I play them more out of weird interest in the series, than out of love or even liking anything they have to offer lately. They have good ideas, but usually fall flat at being actually interesting. I think last time I was genuinely invested in the AC game was with 3 – there was a truly great storyline, which devolved into crap, but had really strong themes. Black Flag and Rogue had some fun gameplay and Rogue wasn’t a complete flop as a story. Unity had potential to be the next AC1 – properly well done story driven stealth action adventure, but turned out to be a mess. Syndicate tries to be something like Brotherhood to Unity’s ideas. Tries is the key word here, though.
Read more“Disapprove: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (Gold Edition)”