bigsocrates

I was kind of upset when Serious Sam 4 was a Stadia exclusive on console because I'd hoped to play it on Xbox or PS4.

This stream has made me no longer upset about that. Woof. Everything about this game looks bad. It's the cringiest game writing I can remember in the last 10 or so years. It's like 2007-2008 level terrible writing, and even bad for that time period, which had some pretty great writing in games like Mass Effect and even COD4.

So, umm, thanks Jeff for making me feel better?

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams had a gimmick where you could shift between the two sisters and it would change the world and the enemies and allow you to pick up different collectibles etc... That was the main mechanic of that game, and it was fun enough, even if it overstayed its welcome a bit.

This game is just that game without the gimmick or interesting level design which...no. I liked Twisted Dreams enough to finish it (7/10 feels about right) and I have zero interest in this game.

Either they were underfunded and rushed this or they lost the designers who actually had ideas, and replaced them with terrible writers trying to make the game "funny." Either way, this game looks like a pale imitation of a Giana Sisters game from 5 years ago, with a lot of annoying stuff layered on top.

This has the smell of a studio killer. Too bad.

@onemanarmyy: Chick's review reads as either supremely sarcastic or like he was high when he played the game. I do not recognize Agents of Mayhem in the game he described. Of course He gave Forza Horizon 2 one star and I put 100 hours into that game and loved it so maybe he and I have opposite tastes in games. Regardless, his review is utterly baffling to me.

Even on those terms it fails. The loot is half-baked and literally ran out for me two third through the game (I got all the gadgets and vehicles so the only things left were skins.) None of it is game-changing. This is NOT Diablo 3 or Borderlands in any way.

The characters themselves are the best part of the game, but they're shallow and don't evolve.

A Diablo 3/Borderlands style action RPG needs more content. More to do.

And even if there were five times as much loot the cut and paste lair design would still be dire. Diablo 3s dungeons showed a ton more variety and had much more interesting stuff to do.

I agree with most of this, except that I thought the boss battles were all pretty bad. They did offer a little relief from the monotony of the rest of the game's cut and paste design, but taken out of that context they would have been mediocre 10 years ago. The bosses from the original Gears of War game were all better designed and more interesting.

Now compare that to the boss battles in Sunset Overdrive, a much better game with many similarities to this one, and you can see how mediocre these bosses really were.

This game was made cheaply and it shows.

@glots: It's impressive from a technical perspective for sure. It looks nice, runs pretty well, and has a big and somewhat varied world.

However, hearing that they're adding "more" content doesn't sound appealing to me at all. The game is not lacking in amount of content. The issue is that the content itself is all literally the kind of throwaway stuff I hate in other games. It's fetch quests and busywork. If they radically expand the farming system to make it interesting, while fixing the inventory and currency issues, then...maybe...it would be fun as a kind of farm sim game? I could imagine that, kind of. But Harvest Moon had relationships with the townsfolk as a secondary feature for a reason. And Stardew Valley has that AND combat. I don't think there are any games that remain engaging without that secondary stuff to give context to your farming.

While I played this I thought a decent amount about No Man's Sky. Both games create interesting "worlds" to exist in but don't give you anything worth doing. Both could have heavily benefited from a game designer and a writer (though No Man's Sky had some interesting atmospheric writing around the shrines and stuff you'd fine.)

The difference is that I think No Man's Sky was going for its vision of space as a lonely desolate kind of pointless place. It's just not a vision that's fun or that interesting to experience. I think Yonder wanted to be more of a Stardew Valley type thing, but it lacked the game design and writing chops to make it engaging.

I don't play DOTA but I really like this series. It's a great background video to throw up while you're doing something else. Maybe that sounds a little insulting but it isn't meant that way. That's actually an important niche of Giant Bomb content. Brad and Ben have a nice, laid-back, chemistry and the game has its moments and it's just a good, chill, video thing.

Thumbs up!

I wondered why they were playing Serial Cleaner on Xbox One, since they don't play that system a ton for non-exclusives, but I should have known that Dirty Dan had a filthy plan.

Great match, and honestly a lot more entertaining than the Serial Cleaner quick look. The quick look was fine, don't get me wrong, but Dan and Vinny playing Soul Calibur is top tier content for this site.

Audio please! Though raw audio feed from video is also fine. I don't watch the video as it is, just leave it running in a tab and listen.