That daily game progress thread...

I finished Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel

It's the expansion for Hexen. Really just more of the same. Same massive hubs with hidden switches and unclear goals. I don't think they really added anything in terms of new enemies or weapons. After beating the base game, I was sort of all Hexened out, so this one felt like a bit of a slog. Probably would have been nice to have when the original game came out, but now with so many games out there, the expansion felt unnecessary. At least it did feel a bit more difficult. Particularly the first hub. They throw most of the enemies types at you right from the start while you still don't have all your weapons yet. I think playing as the Fighter on the first hub might have been one of the hardest sections in either Hexen or the expansion. Lots of enemies shooting projecties and the Fighter doesn't get a projectile weapon for a long time.
 
Finished Hellblade, it got better, the first two areas sucked compared to the rest of the game.

This game had some excellent visuals, and the sound design was also excellent, it is a shame that they felt the need to repeat some of the simple puzzles too many times in some chapters, but I guess they were too afraid of making a game that was too short?

I kind of felt the same with some of the combat encounters too, they could have cut some waves as the combat was not fun enough to drag things out.

This game needed more walking sim and less actual gameplay, I don't regret playing it though, but I'm going to skip the sequel if they don't make the puzzles more fun to solve.
 
Finished Just Cause 4.

The Good?
The game is just silly fun almost the whole way through.
- Fun combat
- Great looking destruction
- Good vehicle controls. I actually liked driving and flying vehicles around
- Story also managed to make me laugh, good level of cheese :D
- Graphically pretty, even all this time later. The proper 32:9 support was also just :drool:

The Dislikes?
- Hated the pre-rendered cut scenes (they looked terrible too)
- No skip on end credits was a terrible idea. Whoever let that happen needs to be slapped lol
- Really wasn't big on the various challenge quests. I only did enough to unlock my stuff and will never go back to them.

Hope we actually get Just Cause 5 at some point.
 
I'm a couple of hours into Rise of the Tomb Raider. It was received well at the time (2016), looks very pretty, and is completely functional: puzzles, tombs, exploration, combat, a bit of hub world gaming, lots of crafting and upgrading your stuff, a story line with some mystery and betrayal to it... But honestly, I'm not really "feeling" it. Lara doesn't feel so isolated, and the gameplay loop feels overly familiar, even for 2016 standards.

It's a bit as if I'm playing the Call of Duty version of Lara: the safe tombs she's known for coupled with the popular hub world & crafting elements, and lots of explosions to cover up that whenever things get hectic, you're essentially holding the "move forward" button with a few jumps in-between.

At the same time, I don't know exactly what I would expect from a Tomb Raider game. But its biggest equal in gaming, which will have been Uncharted 4 at the time, had much more interesting character dynamics, was far quicker in sending Nathan from one interesting environment to another, ánd was a bit smoother to play in my memory.

Oh well - onward we go, it's still a pretty fun popcorn game.
 
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