Welcome to my dumb list of games I played in 2017.

This could have been titled “The Platinum Year” since I ended up buying 3 games made by Platinum games, alas I only finished one of them so I don’t feel comfortable talking about the other two at large.

2017 was a bit of weird year for me, since I skipped a lot of the “must haves” either because I couldn’t buy them in the language I wanted - Wolfenstein: The new Colossus” or simply because around August I decided not to spend so much time in front of a computer and pick up a different hobby. I did end up playing an awful lot of games though this year, here are some of them:

Nier: Automata

The only thing I played of Nier was the prologue/tutorial section, then the game crashed on me and I have to admit I haven’t touched it since. Partly because I read that the PC version might use a patch or two. What I can say is that I ended up buying the 3-Disc edition soundtrack after 30 minutes of playing or so. It is pretty good.

Vanquish

The second Platinum game and THE Platinum game I finished, after a 3 month break or so.

Vanquish is at heart a cover-based shooter. There is a twist to it though and that is the ARS suit Mr. Protagonist gets to wear.

With said suit you can dash on your calf mounted rocket boosters from cover to cover and enable “augmented reaction mode”, basically bullet time. Both drain from the same energy bar and you never want said bar to completely empty otherwise you are fucked. Boosting is necessary in order to quickly swap from cover to cover since cover can and will be destroyed and “augmented reaction mode” helps you line up headshots while ass sliding away from danger.

The story is… “interesting”, a weird mix between Anime and cliché North America, including Protagonist-San starting to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the fight only to toss it out as a distraction for the Evil Russian robots you’re fighting against.

Vanquish is probably a game for highscore chasers and speedrunners. If you play just for a single playthrough you probably are going to be disappointed.

The Bureau - XCOM: Declassified

This was free for a limited time on Humble Bundle.

The Bureau is a classic cover-based shooter set in the 60ies, so classic it makes the same mistake games like Mass Effect 2 and a few others make. That is you know that combat is about to happen before it actually happens. Chest high wall syndrome and all that. Anyway my gripe with the The Bureau is getting in and out of cover. I’d say the holy grail of all cover based shooters is the correct way of handling entering and leaving cover and The Bureau feels clunky in this department, so I died a few times cause I was unable to leave cover and there was a grenade right next to me. The other annoying part was when your AI controlled squadmates refused to revive you and you just died. For all the failures this game has, it does manage to make encounters tip over in the outsiders favour really quickly if you lose focus for a few seconds and then you end up reloading from from a checkpoint. It also oddly doesn’t manage to do the 60ies flair completely and I don’t know why? This might be because you only every visit a single town, otherwise you run through abandoned farms and countryside.

In between missions you spend time at “Site X” your secret underground base where you can have conversations with other people, including a suave as fuck Liam O’Brien and do some minor side quests, so far so standard.

What is “cute” about the story is the justification of your camera angle and if you pay attention even briefly you know what is going on before the BIG reveal. The game does peter out at the end though, the final bossfight is basically a gauntlet and ends with a voice over epilogue.

ACE COMBAT ASSAULT HORIZON Enhanced Edition

Unlike the majority of other Ace Combat Games this is not set in “Strangereal” but instead in the real world. This is my first time venturing into the Ace Combat series and therefore I am hard pressed to make a definitive statement about how much “Strangereal” affects the enjoyment of the series. Anyway the plot is EVIL RUSSIANS are doing evil russian things cause love or something, honestly the plot is not really that interesting. What is interesting are the existence of turret sections and the dogfight lock-on which basically is the way to kill Ace pilots in the game and a variation of a QTE sequence. It’s ok, and the system is used for high adrenaline MICHAEL BAY moments but occasionally freaks out a bit and puts your plane into a weird position. The turret sections are dumb and don’t really add a lot specially if you play them with a controller.

Iron Wings

Iron Wings is an arcade style flight action game set in World War 2 made by an Italian studio mostly doing mobile and 3DS titles. Dramatis personæ of the game are Jack and Amelia a Tuskegee airman and a WASP service woman respectively both flying for the Iron Wings unit which, oddly enough, seems to consist only of those two.

Anyway this a fictional story set during the 1940. Gameplay consists of you and your wingman flying missions consisting of dogfighting and occasionally providing air support for ground troops. You can switch between Jack and Amelia anytime since they fly specialized planes, Jack handles dogfighting and special abilities, Amelie does bombing runs and photo reconnaissance. Planes appear to have no stats so they are purely cosmetic, weapons however do have stats and are purchased with money earned during missions. The cardinal sins it commits is not giving you a way to try out guns or bombs before purchasing and presentings stats of weapons in a meaningless way. Some of the issues in the game are its repetitive lines - “Proceeding with the contact point”, missing tutorials - how do I order my wingman to engage a target? - not really helping to a game that gets frustrating at times.

Warframe

There will be spoilers for endgame content of warframe.

Warframe this year had one of its larger updates with the Plains of Eidolon. Yes Plains, The game managed to escape its space ship rat mazes and fake “open world” planet tilesets and released a 3 by 3 kilometer large square map, complete with day and night cycle for you to run, jump, fly and slide down hills while murdering foes with glee. Adjacent to the plains lies Cetus, “city” of the Ostron people though it’s more of a hamlet or village actually. Centerpiece of Cetus is the market place where you can buy things, turn in your spoils from the plains and do task for the local populace in order to gain favour with them. DE managed to take established game systems and put them into a new environment. None of the warframes currently in the game had to be changed for this update, however some gained more favour with the community again due to the sheer size of the map and the need to zip from A to B quickly. Same can be said for the guns, sniper rifles now have a place to shine and see regular play, though shotguns are currently still regarded as the ruler of all weapons.

Activities in the plains include bounties, multi-tier missions, earning you standing which in turn you can use to buy blueprints or tools to help you gather more fish and ores and gemstones. Yes you read that correctly, you can now go spear-fishing in Warframe and cut ores and gemstones for use as crafting materials. DE unfortunately added a new slew of crafting materials to an already considerable amount of existing ones. During night the plains namesake makes an appearance: the Eidolon, a large towering “raid” boss wandering the landscape ready for you to take down and reap its rewards which in turn allow you to craft better gear to murder him faster. The ever turning grindstone called Warframe.

Between fishing, ore farming, standing farming and the occasional Eidolon runs I am somewhat hard pressed to fit in time for some of the games other activities and DE might reach a point where the different farming hotspots might overwhelm part of their player base strapped for time.

Gallery

League of Legends

League this had some major changes, the rune system in the game since beta has been replaced and merged with their Masteries system, gone are the tiny singular boni - 1.5 more magic resistance per rune for example. I like the new system, the runes are more interesting since you now have to perform certain actions in order to trigger effects and it also allows for a bit easier time to specifically tune your setup on a game per game basis. Worlds this year were held in china and oddly enough Faker did not win, but rest assured a korean team did win the championship. On my end nothing really changed, still no pentas, Yasuo still most killed champion, still low elo.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

This is a RTS game in lieu of Supreme Commander or Planetary Annihilation, meaning a larger focus on resource management and marco style play. It is not really necessary to command individual units and frankly not possible since you build more than 100 units in the first few minutes of a game. What does separate it from the aforementioned titles is the map node system and usage of global abilities. The map you play on consist of interconnected nodes and the default setting requires you to have an unbroken connection to your nexus building in order to gather the resources of the node. The games has 3 resources, metal, radioactives and Quanta. The first two are gathered by capturing nodes, the third one by building generator buildings. Quanta is mostly used for super abilities and to increase unit cap. Unlike spells of hero units in WarCraft 3 for example, super abilities are not character bound and range from production boost to direct damage abilities and defensive shields.

Ashes of the Singularity is a cold game at heart, like most RTS games. However, Ashes takes it a bit further by only having robotic units, which means you don’t really have any endearing unit quibbs or other stuff going for it. The music strikes a similar tone with especially the tracks for the “Substrate” faction being somewhat melancholic in nature.

The game has two faction for to choose from, the “Post Human Coalition” and the “Substrate”. There is a plot but its presentation suffers like all RTS games from a certain lack of immersion. Briefings are held via talking portraits similar to StarCraft and even if you had a more “interactive” environment something just doesn’t click for me. Maybe it is because the first thing the “Post Humans”, entities capable of changing matter by sheer thought are doing is being afraid of a non hostile artificial consciousness. It is suffice to say that said consciousness is the later later and founder of the Substrate. Even in the far distant post-singularity future petty wars exist.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The Modern Warfare games following the first ones always feel like they HAVE to one-up Modern Warfare. This time we have the ISS blowing up, Keith David yelling at you to protect this here Burger joint and “No Russian”. Let’s talk about the the Burger joint first. Unlike most Modern Warfare games this particular mission is not a corridor but a box and you spend your time running from one fast food restaurant to the next in an ever changing battlefield. It’s a nice change of pace and somewhat cleverly done. Now “No Russian” is not cleverly done. “No Russian” tries to incite an emotional response from the player, rather heavy handed though, especially if you’re the type of person who is always a bit more distant to most media in terms of immersion and “No Russian” felt really dumb to me, let’s just ignore how you are shooting airport security personnel on a russian airport, wonder what nationality they are. From a gameplay perspective the slow methodical walking you are forced to annoyed the hell out of me. Oh right the magnificent beard of Captain Price makes a triumphant return halfway through the game.

Call of Duty: World at War

They managed to get Gary Oldman as crazy russian. That and BANZAI yelling charging Japanese soldiers jumping out of the ground is all I remember from that game.

Path of Exile

Path of Exile is the game if you want to figure out game systems, break them down and prove? you understand how they work by figuring out THE build for a class. It also probably has one of the better F2P systems in place. This years expansion revamped the difficulty level and added several new acts. If you have the time at hand and are looking for that kind of challenge this is probably the game for you.

Crysis 2

I played through both Crysis games this year again or I am in the process of doing so. Crysis 2 is a big departure from the previous Crysis trading the wide large maps for smaller more confined areas in New York city and a more streamlined approach to nanosuit powers. There is a plot and a story but it makes the mistake of being a bit too mystical at times for the player to really understand what is happening with the player character. The other story going is easy enough to follow. There is a novelization by Peter Watts, who has gained a bit of a reputation for writing social dystopias and it does provide a bit more context but doesn’t really spell it out for dummies what is happening with ALCATRAZ after PROPHET puts him into nanosuit and kills himself handing the ALCATRAZ of to a Nathan Gould a scientist who punctuates his sentences with “man” and occasionally “bro”. The game sees you fighting a somewhat mundane war against a private military organisation and the “ceph” cephalopods wearing power armour giving them a high level maneuverability, thankfully there is cloaking and C4. The game is fun at times having some neat map design setpieces, a shootout around a cathedral and infiltrating roosevelt island. The final confrontation however is not an epic boss battle, but another gauntlet run against cloaked cephs, that have been stalking you since halfway through the game and a QTE sequence. It does take place in Central park though, suspended several hundred meters in the air between mechanical tendrils.

Crysis 3

Crysis 3 reverses the map shrinking of Crysis 2 and extends the maps to a larger area, mixing in destroyed buildings overgrown with vegetation and gives you a hunting enemies in the high grass moment. It also hands the player a compound bow which is fun to use and nice change of pace and requires some skill in using.

On the plot and story front the game makes the mistake of skipping ahead several years and covering those years with a lame intro monologue narrated by on the NPC so I ended up having a hard time reconnecting with PROPHET and PSYCHO. The game introduces a new take on the upgrade system by allowing you combine different powers into a set and store several set for quick swapping on the run. On normal difficulty however I feel it is not really necessary to exploit this system to 100% meaning always having the optimal upgrade active for the given situation. Oh and ALCATRAZ's story get concluded in a collective note: "Unable to restore file, too badly damaged". There is a final boss battle and last player controlled sequence is the hacking mini game, which auto solved for me because I had the hacking assist power activated.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Currently I am sitting at 50% completion according to the savegame I last played in April or so. What annoys me most about Andromeda is that I’m not sure why I don’t like that game. Let’s recap what the game is and what it is about, at least on the surface.

Warning there will be spoilers and I don’t really care about the technical problems the game had at launch. Yes I do find it somewhat questionable that some of the animation bugs did go through QA or what that the QA manager or their higher up thought when they winked them through and said ship it. However I think the game has more pressing problems that are not related to technical side of things.

Mass Effect Andromeda takes place in the Mass Effect universe, specifically 630 years in the future in the Andromeda galaxy. The player character, one of the Ryder twins, is part of the Andromeda initiative. A privately funded project to build several arcs, fill them with willing colonists and cross the deep void over to the Andromeda galaxy. These arcs launch successfully sometimes between Mass Effect 2 and 3, which means that the player character has no idea about the Reaper threat and how it resolves. Convenient isn’t it?

There are some hidden message left by Liara for Ryder senior and some of these were recorded during Mass Effect 3 and there is a high chance that the reason the Andromeda Initiative was founded was the reaper threat. Anway the overall plot is as follows, you arrive after 630 years of travel in suspended animation and everything is in shambles, previous selected habitable worlds turn out to be uninhabitable and surrounded by an unknown phenomena. The Andromeda Initiative, due to these setbacks had to deal with inner political strife leading to two factions abandoning the initiative and settling their own respective planets. This lead to the diplomatic fronts being hardened and “exile” being the capital punishment.

The player character as one of the “Pathfinders” specially trained and augmented is tasked to figure out what the hell is going, secure habitable worlds and ship the dangerous waters of politics and meeting two new Alien races along the way: The kett, which end up being the antagonists of the game and the angara, native inhabitants to this part of the andromeda galaxy.

What follows are various types of missions ranging from plot advancing grand schemes to tiny dumb MMO fetch quest level tasks, which is part of the problem. There is so much to do to keep you busy while exploring planets and most of these things are rather mundane, however somebody saw fit to add enough plot to them that it made me question why? For example on the first planet you land, an arid landscape, you end up taking over a mundane task for a presumed dead engineer travelling to several waypoints and activating a McGuffin while the Engineers terminal ill child pre-recorded pep-talk messages play in the background, trying to convince the father to carry on and accept the child's death. The point I try to make here is that they spent a lot of time and effort fleshing out the “collect 10 bear pelts” quest type missions and I would say that dropping those type of quests completely and instead focus on improving or adding less but more involved quest might have been more beneficial to the game. Other times I spent what felt like 4 hours on the icy fields of Voeld hunting down McGuffin’s the game places randomly at kett camps.

MUCH.FUN.TO.BE.HAD.

Bear in mind I liked the way Voeld looks. The game can serve up pretty vistas from time to time and visiting different planets and exploring them is fun at times, until you open the map and see all the fetch quest you can possible do or when quest break for you, then it turns into a chore.

Politics is a major keyword here as most CHOICES the game throws at you, or most CHOICES I encountered so far had an political undertone. Do you vote to keep the established Pathfinder for the Asari, a highly decorated and almost legendary commando in place even though she acted questionably in the line of duty or do you demote her and appoint a replacement for her. Politics, politics and Kumail Nanjiani voicing the salarian politician/administrator for the Andromeda Initiative adds to this and honestly was one the better characters in the game. He nailed it for me.

The thing is, Mass Effect tries to be its own thing with its own character so to speak, at the same time there is so much derivative about it that it hurts. You end up getting your own ship, the Tempest which lo and behold is based upon construction plans of the Normandy SR-1 and therefore looks awfully like the normandy. The nomad in slightly changed forms also makes a return. The other thing is how the game makes it hard to have “your” ryder be a thing as the developers had a rather young somewhat playful personality in mind and don’t really check what kind of responses you choose and disable or change your out of conversation chatter. For example Ryder is serious business at one point only to gleefully say “whoops” five minutes as they run over kett soldier in the nomad. Things like that break the character a bit for me. Currently it is unclear when and how Mass Effect as a franchise continues.