I figured the new year is a great place to finally start cataloging my thoughts on the games I play each month. Over the course of January I finished 7 games, got through 10 hours of another, and then started 3 more games but put them off to the side to play for later. Thankfully, most of the games I played this month were pretty good! The wide variety of genres I experienced as well as the different years of release from all the games that I played this month really provided a good contrast and helped me put each game into the proper perspective.
Completed
Her Story (2015)
Her story isn't a very believable game, but that didn't stop me from fully enjoying what this game had to offer. It does a good job of giving you small nuggets of information and leaving it up to you to follow the breadcrumb trail to get answers of what's really going on. The moment of stumbling into a fascinating entry from searching a seemingly innocuous term is super intriguing and finally reaching the moment where you put all the pieces together makes you feel like you're a real detective. Her story is filled with entries that make you say "Huh?" and they entice you to continually go deeper into the well in order to make sense of it all. Even though you have to suspend your disbelief a bunch in the way that the game is presented and the story that the game tells, its still a super interesting premise that does some really innovative things and tells a intriguing, albeit ridiculous story.
Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection (2015)
Hey, the set pieces in Uncharted are pretty cool. Yeah, I know that almost everyone on the planet is aware of this by now, but now that I've finally had the chance to get a first-hand look at all three of the Uncharted games back-to-back-to-back I can say that feeling holds true for me as well. The first one doesn't quite have have that spark of imagination that made the next two so special; there's a bunch of backtracking through areas you've been and suffers from a slower pace which makes Drake's Fortune the odd man out in the series. But I do think that Uncharted 2 and 3 serve up numerous moments of amazing action that are fun to look at and play, no matter how much control over the situation you actually have.
Uncharted 2 is definitely the gem of this trilogy. From the fantastic intro, to the train sequence to the part where you're jumping between vehicles in the mountains... I mean I could go on and on and you've heard this all before but its both fun to play and fun to look at. They do a good job of making every chapter feel special and like every moment is specifically crafted to be a unique experience. Even though the final chapters (with the bullet-sponge enemies) kind of dragged I couldn't help but feel great about Uncharted 2 as a whole. Still a great game in 2016. Uncharted 3 made a significantly less impact on me, but overall I still enjoyed the experience. My main complaints with the finale of the trilogy include the shooting felt like a step back from the previous game (only slightly) and there just weren't as many cool set pieces. But there was still more than enough stuff in there to make it an entertaining ride. The two main parts that stood out to me were the cargo plane and the cruise ship. The fact that this game still looks excellent 5 years later is a testament to how well those scenes were crafted. One of the reasons I really like the Uncharted series is that few games make me stop and say "Boy, what I'm doing right now is super cool" and this happened a fair amount over the course of them.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)
It was free on Xbox 360/One for January so I figured I'd finally give this one a shot. Deus Ex's futuristic world is a great one that's a lot of fun to explore. The numerous different ways to approach a particular area is definitely its strong point and they lean into it in a great way. Being able to have at least three options for almost every scenario allows you to approach the game in whatever way you want, putting attribute points into your character based on the way you to play it. The combat definitely feels more stiff than I would like it to, and the stealth in that game doesn't rate compared to a game like Dishonored, but the multitude of options you have at your disposal sometimes allow you to bypass combat completely. Having never played the original Deus Ex, I was pleasantly surprised with much freedom they give you to approach a situation however you'd like. In certain spots you can definitely tell this game is almost 5 years old, but many other aspects still feel great in 2016.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2013)
Even though I'm terrible at character action games, I still managed to enjoy Metal Gear Rising. You already know Platinum Games has a sterling track record of making these style of games fun to play, and I was pleased to find out Kojima didn't go too crazy off the deep end in this game(save for one pizza-eating security guard that made me want to throw my controller across the room). Revengeance strikes a good balance between giving us more insight into the post SOP world of Metal Gear and not creating new unanswered questions that we'll never get answers to. Kojima's writing has never exactly been my thing, but there enough interesting characters, ridiculous cutscenes and fun battles to keep me entertained throughout. And hey, slices enemies in half (or into hundreds) and gnawing on their innards is super satisfying.
Syndicate (2012)
I wish I liked this game, but seeing as I played Deus Ex right before this one, I'd much rather take that cyber future over the one created by Syndicate. Through its short 4 hour campaign, nothing about Syndicate really stood out to me. The shooting didn't really feel all that great to me, and the powers were cool at first but became stale after the first few times I used them. It doesn't really do much with its story beside the well-worn trope of future mega-corporations wreaking havoc on society and I found it really hard to understand the motivations behind the characters in the game. Your sidekick, Jules Merit, is just terrible, spewing out idiotic dialogue and murdering civilians without any reason as to why he's doing so. I had more fun with the co-op but it just didn't have the staying power that I was hoping for. There aren't a whole lot of maps to choose from and they don't do a good enough job of having variability between them. Most of the maps have very similar objectives and the ones that are in them are not particularly exciting. Most of the time its either "Kill these enemy agents" or "shoot guys and then breach a thing if you have to". I beat it and am pretty sure I'm done with it.
Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015, Xbox One version)
Thanks to @ltdestroyer I got myself a copy of the new Tomb Raider. After putting 25 hours into over the course of a couple weeks, I can say I really enjoyed my time with it, its a major step up over the first one. It uses its open world format to greater effect, whether you're hunting for materials or scrounging for collectables. Once the game opens up it gives you a lot to explore and a lot to do. The gunplay is serviceable, if unspectacular but they give you enough weapons and abilities that you have many more options other than just shooting people. In addition it tells a more interesting story, making Lara a more relateable human being as opposed to the nice lady-turned-murderer that she was in the first game. Also its one of the numerous games that added a grappling hook to its repertoire, which was a little tricky to understand how to use at first but eventually I got the hang of it. Overall it was a game that I enjoyed enough to 100 percent it, finding every tomb, getting every document and completing every challenge.
The Witness (2016)
Even as a person who doesn't always enjoy puzzle games, I found myself really enjoying The Witness. You can definitely count me as one of the people who "get" what the game is trying to do. Although some of the areas combine mechanics from multiple areas, no two of the areas are exactly the same. I really like how each area has its own unique feel to it, both in an aesthetic sense and also with its own specific puzzles in that style to solve. It strikes a good balance between puzzles who solution only requires you to look at the information presented on the panels and puzzles who solution requires you to take in information from the external environment. Figuring out what is going on with those external environment puzzles is often super satisfying. There are a bunch of areas that really put your intellect to the test, from the ability to scour the environment to solve a puzzle to paying attention to subtle audio or visual clues, to your sense of spacial awareness (Damn you, tetris piece puzzles).
The "Jungle" and "Keep" areas weren't especially notable to me, but that was offset by me having an extraordinary time with the "Treehouse" and "Shady Trees" areas. It was a lot of fun solving puzzle after puzzle in those areas and the series of progressively harder challenges ramped up smoothly enough that it wasn't frustrating or too easy. Jonathan Blow did a good job of taking a particular puzzle and tweaking it slightly, so that even though it looks the same its actually much harder. The variations on puzzles you already know make you think differently about the puzzle you're solving, not every puzzle is going to have the exact same way to solve it. There's also a thing about the specific way you solve puzzles having an impact on the world that I shouldn't really talk about, but suffice to say its pretty mind blowing. Moreover, putting all my knowledge to the test in the "Town" area was great. Having everything I've learned up until that point culminate in puzzles that take mechanics from numerous areas seemed literally impossible at first, but then lead to some serious "A-HA!" moments that were among my favourite in the entire game. I didn't love the open world as much as a lot of people, but I do feel like The Witness uses its open world well. Being able to go to a different area when you're stuck on a puzzle is a smart idea and the different styles of each area were able to come together cohesively onto one island. Overall, I really loved the Witness. It used its basic to premise to great effect, getting a ton of mileage out of something so deceptively simple.
Half-way done
Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam (2016)
The Mario and Luigi games has been an up and down series throughout their 13 year lifespan. As I asked here, it seems like we've reached the point where not very many adults have much interest in this series anymore. Even though Bowser's Inside Story was a fantastic game, their next installment, Dream Team was horribly paced and just not interesting enough to hold my attention for very long. Paper Jam is a step in the right direction, but not really enough to completely renew my faith in the series. To talk about the positives first, the combat is much improved and its probably my favourite part of the game. Having three characters to play with strikes a good sweet spot and makes it trickier, but not too hard when you're on the defensive side. I've always loved how when you're being attacked if you time to your button presses well enough, you can always mitigate taking damage entirely or even do damage to enemies.
The combat and dialogue are good and the pacing is miles better than Dream Team, but there's still a bunch of dumb mini-games that keep Paper Jam from being wholly enjoyable. The times where you're forced to collect Paper Toad's in order to build your giant Papercraft range from boring to frustrating. While I do feel like the game would benefit from a nice distraction the Paper Toad collecting is a needless addition that doesn't do enough to justify its place in the game. In addition, the Papercraft battles themselves are also not a great addition. There's no depth and the combat basically boils down do you getting behind the enemy, knocking them over and then jumping on them. Add to the fact that all of these mini-games take a lot of time to complete makes large chunks of the game rather boring. There's a lot of things that drag Paper Jam down, but its not quite enough for me to put the game down entirely. Its not a bad game, but its good enough for me to keep playing it because I'm a big fan of this series. After I'm done with Xcom 2 I'll be jumping right back into Paper Jam in order to finish it up.
The "I started it but I'll play this later" Pile
Civilization V, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, & Divinity: Original Sin
Three really long games that I just picked up recently and got through the tutorials for all of them, but don't want to fully delve into until I know I can devote a lot of time to playing them. The Witcher and Divinity are both major wild cards that have a lot of good things going for them, but I'm not sure if the design of those games fully appeal to me. Obviously I've seen a lot of accolades thrown their way and hopefully I will be among the group that really enjoyed them.
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