robio said:

I was never able to beat the first boss in bloodborne. Father what's his name...So yes, I would say those bosses are hard.

Father Gascogne I believe. Looking forward to facing him myself, heard much about him.

travo said:

Glad to see a renewed interest  in Uncharted on this site.  I wish U4 single player would download properly so I could've played through it too.

I’m going to have a lot of Uncharting to do when I get a PS4. Have The Collection, 4, and Lost Legacy sitting here waiting now.

31.

Yooka laylee doesn’t hide what it’s trying to be, a clear hinge to Banjo Kazooie and the old rare style 3D platformer. These games were more about exploring and solving little puzzles than straight platforming so it never captured me like the Mario games did which were far far more platform centric. So if you lived Banjo this is a giant love letter to that, but I didn’t love banjo so this was mostly a slog.

It’s only five worlds long plus a hub world. Each world starts off small and you can expand it so basically you do the worlds twice. There is good variety in those five worlds so I did enjoy most of the game. There are plenty of characters to talk to, cool varied worlds to explore. I liked the ability to change your character into some new vehicle in each world. Some bosses were fun, some were a pain in the ass for all the wrong reasons like the final boss which is just a mess.

It’s a giant collectathon and I like collecting stuff. When it was focused on platforming, using your skills to get around obstacles and solving puzzles it’s great. And the majority of the game is that, really neat situations that make you think and use skills. But there are a lot of just find this anywhere kind of missions so you wander around. Everything around the game feels old fashion , the camera hates you, things feel low budget because it is. It doesn’t have the level of polish Banjo did. The controls aren’t as tight, this comes into play on some horrible mini games like the mine cart... wtf I want to fire the people that made that horrible controlling garbage.

I finished it so it’s not bad it’s just not great in anyway. I get it’s trying to be old school and it’s low budget but that’s why you go old school with a low budget you should be able to mimic older games just fine, even improve on them today even with a small budget. But somehow this is just more sloppy and slightly worse than what came before. Great homage, slightly above average platformer.

Score: 6.3

32.

What the hell happened to this series. The second I started playing this game I had a strong reaction to the feel of the guns, this was not the halo I knew. Bungie have always been masters of gunplay, their games feel so tight and fun to shoot, destiny continued right where Halo left off. Now I don’t remember 4 that much but this game felt so off compared to what I expect from this series. I felt I could have been playing any random FPS, and that’s the whole campaign... it’s just any FPS.

This is a mostly linear game with an ebb and flow of shooting grunts in a small area and every once in a while getting in a vehicle. There is way more on foot sections and they don’t really evolve at all. After the first two hours you basically have seen everything the game has to offer. Sure there are big vehicle sections but those have been done in past games so much better. This game has the promethians introduced in halo 4 mixed with classic covenant enemies, they have different strategies to fight but it’s not all that interesting to fight these hordes.

One really strange aspect is that this game always has four squad teammates, if you are playing solo they are run by AI and they will come over to you to heal you if you are downed and you can do the same for them. This means the whole shield and health system is taken a back seat cause now you get knocked down and have to hope a teammate is near by. No health pickups at all. That feeling of being the lone badass is gone. It feels like every crap coop shooter from the PS3 era.

This game has two protagonists, cause they know you don’t actually want to play as Master Chief, naw random nobodies are better. I wish the story was any good but it’s just a race against a Cortana that has turned evil and unleashed giant robot monsters on the galaxy, the usual chase and shooting ensues. Oh and the game literally just stops after like 6-7 hours, it’s worse than a to be continued, it just ends. There are some decent hype moments, with the awesome theme song playing which service to heighten the action. I wish the level design was good in any way but it’s just basic go forward and in traditional halo fashion lots of the same looking locations over and over.

It’s still a competent shooter with weapon variety, a new power dash and slam move. Driving the classic vehicles is always great. I am sure it’s more fun in coop and when you turn on arcade mode, I can see this being a far better score attack game than a narrative campaign. I also did not touch the versus modes so I am not reviewing that. This is simply a review of the single player campaign and I found it to just be average at best. This series deserves so much better.

Overall score: 5.5

travo said:

Archangel3371 said:

I’m going to have a lot of Uncharting to do when I get a PS4. Have The Collection, 4, and Lost Legacy sitting here waiting now.

You have the games but no console?

Have you forgotten all those hobo purchases that I’ve been making recently? Yo Ho Bo!

Been scooping up as many PS4 games that I can get while I can still get the physical version for cheap. Just waiting for Sony to further drop the Price of the PS4 and PS4 Pro before I get one of those.

I finished The Last of Us.  I forgot how good the pacing is in this game, really spotlights how bad it is in Part 2.  Such a fantastic game that I'm glad I revisited.

Finished The Last of Us 2!

Finished Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It was a good game, but my expectations were probably a little too high. I guess I was expecting a Metroidvania with some new ground breaking features, and really this was more of the same even using some of the worst ideas of Symphony of the Night (stupid ass spikebreaker/aegis armor for getting past a spiked cooridor). Also the soundtrack, which is almost always god-tier in Castlevania games, was completely forgettable in Bloodstained. Still, it was a fun by-the-numbers Metroidvania by one of the godfathers of the genre who knows what works. Best thing about it was probably the lore and backstory. Miriam as a character was pretty bland, outside of the segments with the villager who kept getting lost, but all the in-game story was great. Really makes me want to check out the Curse of the Moon games to learn about more of it.

Anyway if I had to give it a score, solid 8/10.

I beat the Touryst on Xbone over the weekend.  It's an adventure game in which you explore small islands dotted with minigames, do some light puzzle solving and the occasional platforming.  There's a faux-voxel style which is easy enough on the eye, and the developers clearly love the Mario platformers of old, with some references in the sound effects and such.  Part of the game also takes place in the monuments, mini-dungeons that offer puzzles and platforming challenges, but typically only are a few rooms in size.

It's a bite sized adventure, with bite sized challenges, that seemed to take longer than I'd expect it to be, yet also kind of just stops when things really get kicking.  - 5/10

18/08 : Xenoblade Chronicles definitive edition.  I beat the game with a paltry 58 hours on the clock.  I frequently mixed up my party in an attempt to experience the game differently from when I played the original 10 years ago, but often with mixed results.  I can now say that Iga's way of playing, with a near naked Dunban isn't magically better than just using Rein as your tank.  Also, you can get Dunban's agility stat much higher by giving him armour and the right gems than by just having him fight without any armour.  So 10 years later I can finally say: Iga, you were wrong.

It's still a phenomenal game.  It's not much changed from the original release, mostly some work has been done on the characters that are central to the story.  It blends in nicely.  I was often amazed at how good the game and its artwork hold up today.  I obviously didn't tackle much of the sidequests, or did much exploring.  There's still huge sidequests I could do, like the giant trials to get the different monado's, or going after the high level beasts that roam the world and still outlevel me.

Anyhow, amazing RPG with an even more amazing world and great pacing.  I was going to give it a 9, but what the hell: 10/10

What surprised me most was that I wasn't underlevelled by the time I reached the end.  Well, I was maybe 2 or 3 levels below in the last bit of the game, but nothing that held me back in combat much.

I also might start a new game+ some day.  I wanted to do more of the heart-to-heart's, but affinity progress is so slow that I think it's near impossible to get a significant portion of them in one playthrough.