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Jun 27th, 2022 at 18:17:31 - Far Cry 4 (PC) |
This had been on my wishlist since it came out in 2014 and the price never dropped low enough for me to grab it. But then it was a freebie through Amazon Prime last month. I had Watch Dogs 2 queued up to play soon, but I downloaded this to play first. Keeping my Ubisoft open world games in order! I hope that Watch Dogs 2 is sufficiently different from this and Assassin's Creed (Odyssey is next after Watch Dogs 2) so that I don't get Ubisoft-open-worlded out.
Being Ubisoft-open-worlded out is a real concern because I feel like I've played Far Cry 4 five times before. It plays the...exact...same as other open world games where you capture the towers to reveal the map, liberate the bases, explore the question marks, do the zillion side quests and "activities", etc., etc. I suppose this makes sense and is somewhat forgivable here since this was made in 2014 and helped solidify these genre features. I don't remember exactly when open world games started including 10000 collectibles for you to find and cluttering your map with icons.
So I was really playing this for the bad guy, Pagan Min. He always looked intriguing, with his pink suit and fashion haircut. He doesn't disappoint. What a cool bad guy. He took over Kyrat (the Himalayan country the game is set in) in a coup and runs it with an iron fist, very Kim Jong Un, but with more personality. He's got a few lieutenants whom you mow down before confronting Pagan Min (unless you follow his instructions in the beginning of the game and complete it in 15 minutes). Most of the characters have eccentric personalities and are fairly amusing, but they can border on the annoying (the radio DJ, for one). One of Pagan Min's lieutenants is an American expat who lies to his family about where he is. He says he's on a business trip. He'll be torturing a soldier, his phone will ring, he'll stop and pick it up and talk all lovingly with his wife and daughter for a few minutes, then say he's got to walk into a meeting, hang up, and kill the soldier. It's pretty funny. I got a kick out of the two stoner guys as well, who use Ajay to experiment with drugs. Their side missions were trippy and some of my favorites.
The BEST missions though were the Shangri-La ones. This is an optional side story that, along with the trippy drug missions, reinforce that the coolest thing about Far Cry is when it goes all fantasy on you. You seek out five parts of a painting depicting the story of a warrior seeking paradise. Each time you find part of the painting, you "enter" it and play the part of the story. You have a bow and a knife, but can also command a tiger, fly on wind tunnels, and ride a rampaging elephant, as you free bells and get closer to defeating the evil spirit that is trying to take over Shangri-La. Where did Far Cry 4 go? Who cares! This was the best part.
I generally enjoyed myself while playing. Exploring the map, completing quests, liberating bases, it's all very methodical, and I get into doing that kind of thing, even if I am aware of mundanity and repetition. But there were a lot of really, really, annoying things about the game. I rolled my eyes a lot upon dying. I'll list some at the top of my mind:
1. Healing - You heal in two ways, by using a healing syringe (takes a second, heals all the way with upgrades), or by manually using bandages, setting bones, and so on (takes a few seconds, heals up to one-third of your health, upgraded). The thing that drove me the most nuts is that you can't choose. If you have a healing syringe (which you have to craft from gathering plants), then you will use the healing syringe. Often, I didn't want to use the healing syringe. If there are no enemies around, if it's not urgent, why would I use a syringe? I can just manually do it. But no. It forces you to use the syringe if you have it, which is wasteful and makes you have to go pick so many green flowers. The second thing is that it takes so long to heal manually. I got shot dead so many times while the healing animation played. Super irritating.
2. Rampaging Enemies - There are, of course, enemies roaming the map. No problem. There are also, though, enemies roaming where they would not roam (e.g., enemy trucks leaving outposts that you've captured--how did they get in there??), or seemingly endlessly spawning and attacking you and bases that you've liberated. I "failed" to protect outposts probably 30 times, as enemies would randomly attack them. When that happens, the game removes your current waypoint and changes it to the outpost. At first, I thought I had to go defend the outposts, like the enemies would take them back over if I didn't save them. But one time I ignored it, and it just said I failed, and life went on. Nothing happened! Then what's the point?! It draws you out of whatever you are doing, deletes your waypoint, but then if you ignore it, nothing happens.
3. Climbing and Wingsuit - Oh man, I hated climbing and I hated the wingsuit. You press spacebar near a specific type of vertical ledge to climb it, which usually just made you jump (spacebar also jumps) until you line it up better. The main character, Ajay, seriously needs to work on his ability to scale a rock as tall as he is. He will not jump over ANYTHING unless it's a nice vertical rock wall about 8 feet tall. A sloping rock? Nope, he won't walk up it. The game, being set in the mountains, also features rappelling, but your rope gets stuck on rocks all the time and you have to reset the rope. Now, the wingsuit. You activate this by pressing shift and jumping off a cliff. The problem is that shift is also the sprint button, which you are always holding down. The other problem is that the wingsuit doesn't just activate on tall cliffs; it activates on anything that is like 6 feet tall or higher. Which means that you will unintentionally deploy your wingsuit constantly. Ajay doesn't know how to safely land in a wingsuit. He has to deploy a parachute to land and not die. So, you will often run off of a low rock with no intention of flying, the wingsuit will deploy, and Ajay will immediately crash into the ground and die. You were just running three seconds ago; now you are dead. I cannot complain enough about how bad jumping, climbing, and the wingsuit are.
4. This doesn't have to do with dying, but also made me roll my eyes. The Golden Path (the good guy rebel army fighting Pagan Min) is led by two people, a man and a woman. You occasionally choose which of their methods to use to complete a given task. For example, the enemy has poppy fields that they use for drug production. The woman wants you to secure the poppy fields to use to fund the resistance; the man wants you to burn them down. Eventually, only one of them will lead the Golden Path, so your choices theoretically matter (they don't actually matter until the last one). But I eventually realized that the choices are ridiculously artificial. For example, the woman always wants to utilize Pagan Min's production facilities or whatever to fund the Golden Path. She wants to modernize. The man wants to return to tradition and wants to tear down everything Pagan Min has built. I sided with the man over and over because I didn't want to produce drugs. Destroying heroin production seemed like a good idea. The woman starts making their rivalry a gender thing, which I suppose is suppose to tug on the player. She wants a progressive society with equality. He wants to go back to tradition and maintain Kyratian culture. This is when I started switching sides because it turns out that "tradition" includes men taking child brides. Great. So I can either choose the woman / drug lord (but feminism!) or I can choose the man / child brides (but tradition!). I switched my allegiance after the child bride thing and after talking to a would-be child bride, who "didn't know who she wanted to be the leader." Girl, you're telling me that you're cool with being married off at 12 years old to a much older man? Nah. So I sided with the woman and killed the man.
And of course, I let Pagan Min live.
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Jun 25th, 2022 at 08:02:35 - Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft (PC) |
Quickly, I played this recently on an airplane at night, which set a fitting mood (and possibly weirded out the person next to me). I really enjoyed this visual telling of a Lovecraft story. It's simple. You're in a 3d environment, first-person viewpoint, a Lovecraftian hellscape made real. The excellent narrator tells his tale. You can move the camera around to look at things, and click on a door or in the distance or wherever to progress the story. Occasionally, there are bits of interesting trivia you can reveal by clicking on other items of interest. That's it. I'd definitely play more of these. Enjoy the horror.
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Jun 4th, 2022 at 14:19:10 - Among the Sleep (PC) |
This was a freebie on Epic around Halloween, where I also got Darq (a hidden gem) and another one or two spooky games. Among the Sleep, not so much a hidden gem though. I played it, despite its relatively low review score, because it was short and people generally said it was worth it for the interesting perspective of playing a scary game from the perspective of a two-year-old toddler. I couldn't help comparing it to Amnesia: Rebirth, which I just played and which will stick with me also for the interesting perspective, but of a pregnant woman instead of a toddler. Among the Sleep does have a creepy atmosphere and it certainly offers a novel perspective on psychological horror and the game's themes of alcoholism and abuse.
However, interesting premise aside, you can't save your game, and if you exit in the middle of a level, it takes you back to the beginning of the level, wiping all progress, even though it will say "saving" in the bottom right. Apparently the "saving" text is only an indication of a checkpoint, which wipes if you close the game. I had to replay a level because of this. Why doesn't it say "checkpoint" or tell you that it's not actually a save state, or tell you that you have to complete the game in one sitting, or something? I had to replay the same level a third time because I clicked on some DLC or something and it overrode my save, so when I went to "continue story," it continued it from the DLC. Super annoying, and if the game was longer, I would have quit.
The "drag" action often doesn't work. You'll have to move chairs and boxes to crawl on them or get them out of the way, and it sometimes doesn't register, or drags the opposite direction of where you are moving. The animations are wonky, with hands going through objects, climbing animations looking like the kid is scaling nothing but air, and so on. A couple times, I did climb onto air, and either got stuck, or, my favorite, bounced super high into the air (?!?), and then the monster in the level appeared beneath me, I fell into its arms, and died. The toddler constantly falls down when he runs, and the screen shakes when you move from crawling to standing and back. I appreciate that this is realistic (a toddler is going to alternate between crawling and standing, and can't sprint for a long time like an adult character would), but it is all really annoying and disorienting. I felt low-key nauseous after playing for a while.
And I could NOT stop thinking about all the safety hazards this poor kid was running into a la the game Who's Your Daddy?, which added some unintentional humor. "No, don't crawl on top of the stove! It could turn on any second!" "No, stay out of the cabinet with bleach! Do not drink that!" So yeah, neat little experience, but I'm glad it's over quickly.
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Jun 4th, 2022 at 14:01:49 - Batman: Arkham Knight (PC) |
I went back and read previous entries for Arkham Asylum (2010!) and Arkham City (2012!), and I realize just how lukewarm I am to Arkham Knight. The first two games impressed me very much, but I can see how the things that I didn't like about Knight were extensions of the direction City headed in and the criticisms that I had for Assassin's Creed II when I compared that and City a decade ago.
First things first though, the combat is still excellent. Combat sequences were my favorite parts, along with the more elaborate Riddler challenges, especially the ones with Catwoman, and every moment spent with Joker. The Riddler is even craftier than in City. So, I cannot convey how annoyed I was when I thought I was finishing his story and learned that, no, you cannot complete his story until you find literally each of the 243 Riddler trophies in Gotham. Why? WHY?! I found, I don't know, maybe 50 through the course of the game. Who knows how long it would take to pull up a guide and hunt the remaining 200 of those things, just to get closure with the Riddler.
This is emblematic of the tedium of side quests in this game. As City was for Asylum, so Knight is for City. The scope of the game is expanded (City took me about 20 hours, Knight about 12 [I did way fewer side things, which is why it was so much less], but Knight took me almost 30, and it felt like it!). There are tons of villains in the game and you can progress through all of their side quests and toss them in jail as you play the main story. For example, Firefly is burning fire stations, and you have to find and put out all the fires. Man-Bat is flying around the city, and you have to find him and inject him with serum a handful of times. Two-Face is robbing banks and you have to stop all the robberies. Some are more interesting, like Mr. Freeze's and Killer Croc's, but most are of the "do this thing 5-20 times" variety. Seriously, like 20 times for some quests: One has you disarming mines all over the city; another has you getting rid of road blocks; another has you finding and saving firefighters, etc. These are so fucking boring, and I feel for the completionists out there who are compelled to slog through it all.
I completed some of the more interesting or low-hanging side quests along the way. But when you've finished the main story, you learn that you don't get the game's ending (like no ending, no credits) until after you have completed like 10 of the villains' stories. I had done 5 and it said something like "you need to finish 5 of these to get the ending." I had 5, but one of them was the main story, so I thought maybe I actually had 4 and needed one more. So I finished one more, and then it said I needed 4. Ugh! So I watched the end on YouTube, irritated that the game was going to make me spend hours disarming bombs in the street and engaging in repetitive and over-long tank battles.
Add to the unwelcome amount of busywork side stories for like 15 villains, the 243 Riddler trophies, the oodles of AR challenges, and so on, and you get a game that feels unfocused and ballooned out of proportion. I mean, it's pretty, there are fun parts, the story is neat, Joker is AMAZING as always (and this time he's in your head; seriously, the best part of the game), but all that didn't lift it. I would give this a hard pass unless you really have a thing for side quests or you can go straight through the story, which is what I would have done if I knew then what I know now.
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