It’s not necessarily overwhelming odds or unexpected enemies that wear me down; I don’t like when I lose party members or party effectiveness to secondary or tertiary game systems. Like in Darkest Dungeon, for example, you can level and equip an amazing character only to have him suddenly become afraid of the dark and completely ineffective. I know that’s just a game stat or system to manage but it irks me…
Chuck em all in the meat grinder and let RNjesus sort em out
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Yup, I had the same problems with BB as I did with DD. On paper I love the concept, but these are Turn Based versions of Souls Like games, I find them brutal. I only made it 8 hours into Battle Brothers before I just thought it was more work than fun.
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Pathfinder Adventure Card Game app…again. The app certainly has its rough edges but I keep coming back for more from time to time. It’s an Asmodee app now, so abandoned, but I still love the game design.
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Max Payne 3. Playing it again for a lark as it was cheap on Steam. Now, I love the shooting sections (with some reservations), but shooting is only about half the game. The other half is, painfully, little cut scenes. You play for about 30 seconds, there’s a little scene where Max walks through a door or something, then you play for another 30 seconds, he uses a lift, then you play for 30 seconds, repeat. The shooting and slo-mo are the best they’ve ever been, but I would have easily taken 50% less fidelity for game ‘sections’ that aren’t one room and one corridor.
Sticky cover is arguably the game’s biggest mistake. This, combined with the new physics which means your shootdodge can be interrupted when Max hits something (which he does a lot because: small environments) means the game is prone to bogging down as Max uses cover, or spends a lot of time hitting walls, or shootdodges onto a desk and only gets a fifth of the slo-mo he was expecting and is shot to death. Previous Paynes knew that while it looks ridiculous for Max to slide down walls as rigid as a board, or slip across desks as if they were greased specifically to facilitate his antics, it was necessary for the player, in order for them to have a nice, smooth shooting experience and navigate the shootouts. Imagine pressing ‘block’ in a fighting game and your character randomly blocks and punches themselves in the face. It’s infuriating. There is a special burning hatred in my heart for this combined with the game’s love of Max going up slopes and stairs, because if you shootdodge as you go up, as enemies are invariably hosing you down, you get about 10% of your usual shootdodge time, before faceplanting into the ground and being shot to death. This, in a game where bullet time is usually not available. Max Payne is not about going up the same set of stairs ten times and being shot to death. It’s about going into slow motion and shooting everyone.
This in addition to the lack of ‘action stacking’ and responsiveness in the controls makes the game way more frustrating than it needs to be. As well as the long delay when you do begin a shootdodge, if you press reload at any time when Max isn’t still, he does not reload. Just getting up? Taking some painkillers? Not reloading, mate. Fuck you.
Score attack makes all these flaws even more obvious, and you still can’t skip most of the cut scene because they’re loading screens, but it’s super enjoyable shooting half a dozen people in the head in one move for bonus points. Takes me back to my days playing The Club.
In summary, a world of contrasts.
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Love that game, PACG. Plenty of replayability. Real shame it has been left abandoned by Asmodee.
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The only thing I remember about Max Payne was the bullet time mechanic which was really cool and the first game I recall to use it. I did love Remedy’s most recent game Control. 3rd person action shooter with a trippy story. I’m usually not a fan paranormal stories or 3rd person shooters but this game does both well.
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Seems like a fair summation. MP3 was not horrible, but when discussing the games you would definitely mention the first two in on breath and the third one in the next. It didn’t really do the series justice.
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Control is second only to Ghost of Tsushima for me in the category of “games I can’t wait to forget enough that I can play them again and enjoy them”. I recall reading that it was visually striking and also set entirely inside an office building, and I thought that sounded like bullshit. Friends, it is not.
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Humble Bundle has just announced a pay-what-you-want Ukraine Benefit package of games for about 120 items (not all games). Unless I’m missing something, there are only a few games that are remotely of interest, including Slay the Spire, which I assume everyone already has.
If you see something great in there that I missed, please correct me : )
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That’s worth the donation just to get a 3D printable Yak!
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Sir, that’s 10 hours a day…
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Yes.
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This looks so interesting, but I don’t know if I can take another game where it’s going to pummel me into unconsciousness…
On beginner difficulty, it’s actually been fairly reasonable. I ran from one fight that had bad rng, and had a squad wipe in a fight that I could have ran from, and was obviously going to be a close result.
Now I’ve moved up to medium difficulty and I’m having the no lube experience I signed up for
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I enjoyed crying suns until I didn’t, and I loved my time with kingdom 2 crowns. I also played kerbal space program many years ago in an early build. I’d be curious to see what they did with it from there
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It’s not very forgiving, but it is very rewarding.
For those who’ve played XCOM 2, but not BB: if you try to apply XCOM 2 tactics to the battles, you’re gonna lose. In combat, unit positioning and management are more critical in BB than in XCOM 2, IMO.
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Agreed. The battles can be incredibly punishing, but in fairness, you can always run away, and it’s possible to get into multi-faction battles or have other forces on your side, which makes some fights much easier. Watching a spearhead of orcs just crash through waves of zombies to get to you is great.
There’s a good armour system where armour is great but not perfect protection, an excellent morale system whereby even good troops, in a bad enough situation, will simply run for their lives. I watched an orc berserker decapitate 5-6 militia in a row, and a wave of panic made 10-15 militia flee, until their officer rallied them. And you can use whatever mix of weaponry you want, they all have some advantage that you need to exploit.
I love this game and I’m going to be buying all the DLC.
Looks like orc’s back on the menu, boys.
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