Recenzii recente de DeerTrivia

Haven't regularly played a wrestling game since Smackdown! 2 on the Playstation. Saw a good deal on WWE2k16, figured what the heck, I'll try it.

There's a lot to like in the game, but matches can often go from fun to absolutely infuriating based on the dumbest things. I get that handicap matches are supposed to put the player at a disadvantage, but there should not be the *added* disadvantage of having the game ignore you when you're trying to target a specific opponent. For example, in the Showcase, there's a Stone Cold vs. Vince and Shane McMahon ladder match. I can't even count how many times I would turn Austin towards Shane and try to strike or grapple, only to have Austin magically spin around and flail in Vince's direction. The game's decision for when you can or can't target someone seems completely arbitrary.

Similarly, attempting to grapple an opponent standing right in front of me works 90% of the time, but 10% of the time, inexplicably, my character just sits there doing nothing, allowing the opponent to recover, often costing me the match. This is inexcusable.

On top of that is the counter system, which basically turns every match into a game of chicken to see who's going to blink first. If I have four counters, and my opponent has four counters, the first one to use a counter is at an *immediate* disadvantage for the remainder of the match. For example, let's say Austin vs. Rock, each with four counters. If I'm Austin and I counterattack to get out of a bad situation, Rock has 4, and I have 3. That means my BEST CASE SCENARIO is Rock counters (3,3), I counter (2,3), Rock counters (2,2), I counter (1,2), Rock counters, (1,1), I counter (0,1), Rock counters (0,0). We're now both empty, but because he got the last counter, he has absolute control of the match, and I can basically just put my controller down and walk away for a minute or two, because I can't do ANYTHING. Counters recharge over time, but as soon as I've regenerated one, he's regenerated one too, and he's still controlling the match, which means I HAVE to use mine first, but as soon as I do, he'll use his, and he's back in control again.

There's actually some strategy into how this can work in a tag team match or triple threat (though those come with the targeting/nonsense mentioned above), but in a singles match, the counter system effectively punishes whoever uses it first.

On top of all that, the game either has no real tutorial, or has hidden it well. The NXT career and Showcase modes offer some tips, but leave others out, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what is and isn't taught. For example, the game teaches you the submission minigame, but never teaches you how to actually start a submission on an opponent. It teaches you the collar-and-elbow tie-up minigame, but never teaches you how to initiate a collar-and-elbow tie-up. Never tells you how to climb ladders or cages. Never tells you how to target another opponent.

It's frustrating, because when the game isn't being super ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying, it can actually be fun! But the moment your character randomly decides not to grapple when you're telling him to, or decides to target someone outside the ring instead of the opponent standing next to him in the ring, the fun instantly stops; all that's left is yelling at your monitor.

EDIT EDIT: I'm officially changing my review to a thumbs up. I've tried most of the major expansions for a few hours each, and they still didn't tickle my fancy. But Expeditions have won me over, and there's simply no denying what a labor of love this game has been for Hello Games. Even if it's not my cup of tea, the amount of content they have added to this game is *absurd*.

To be clear, I still don't think any of the game's pillars - trade, combat, exploration, survival - are deep enough to provide long-term engagement. Not even the recent Frontiers update that has settlement management. It's shallow busywork. Compare this to something like Elite, where I can spend hours just being a space trucker, because the economic side of the game, and the flight controls, are complex enough to keep me interested. No piece of No Man's Sky is that engaging. Nothing is deep enough for "make your own fun" to work. This is how I felt from the day the game released, and that hasn't changed.

But *because* they aren't deep enough on their own, a curated experience like Expeditions ends up being a pretty fun way to play. You're incentivized to engage with the systems juuuuuust enough to get what you need out of them, but are never required to grind hours of boring and tedious nonsense. Think of Expeditions almost as miniature campaigns. The main goals are still the same - fix your ship, get off world, get to destination X - but you're led through this process through more concrete milestones, and rewarded for each one. And the game does a better job of pushing players towards the goal, and towards each other near the end.

The first expedition took me a few dozen hours, and I expect this current one will be the same. Expeditions seem to be spaced out by a few months, so I'm more than happy to fire up the game a few times a year and enjoy this mode.

EDIT: I've since tried out the Foundation Update, the Pathfinder Update, and the Atlas Rises Update. My negative review still stands.

Each of these updates added new spaceships, new land vehicles, new ship and weapon mods, new mission types, new craftables... content galore. The problem is it's all still unbearably boring to play. I started on a fresh save for the Atlas Rises update, and aside from the fact that the HUD has changed and the story is delivered a slightly different way, it still had me visiting boring, samey planets, looking at boring, samey animals, scanning boring, samey rocks, crafting boring, samey nonsense.

There's more to do than ever before, but if doing that stuff isn't fun, what's the point?

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

I tried to like this game. I really, really tried. But in its current state, I can't recommend it.

The differences between the trailers and the actual game are well documented, so I won't go into those here. Suffice it to say that the trailers, the ones on this very Steam Store page, are not indicative of the visual quality or density of the actual game.

But even knowing that, if the game were still good, I could still recommend it. But it's not, so I can't.

No Man's Sky advertises itself as having four pillars, so let's go over each of them:

1. Explore - Exploring your first planet is pretty great. Exploring your second planet is a little less great, because chances are you'll start to notice that a lot of the environment looks the same. Third, fourth, fifth planets, you'll realize that every planet has all of the same features - every planet has drop pods and observatories and transmission towers and settlements and trading posts and bases and crashed ships and heridium pillars and golden rare mineral eggs. Every. Damn. One. Animals are no different. You'll be finding a lot of three birds flying in a circle, a lot of deer/dog/bear hybrids, a lot of jellyfish, a lot of dumb looking dinosaurs. The variations are all "Oh, that one has a horn," or "This one has a stripe." The amount of base animal types is painfully small.

By the time you start hopping systems, you'll begin to wonder why you should bother landing on any planets at all, unless you need to restock on minerals. And the same is true of the systems themselves - the colors may be different, but there are no unique characteristics to the systems themselves.

Of all of this game's failures, this is the biggest to me. I bought this game because I wanted to explore. But why should I explore when I already know what I'm going to find?

("Oh, but what about the Radnox squids!" I've seen them.

"Look at this weird monster I found!" Seen it.

"Anyone else found a planet with the stone donuts?" Seen 'em.

"Wow, this cave is so beautiful!" Just like the last twenty.

"Just found a whole cave full of vortex cubes!" You and everyone else.

"Have you tried going to blue stars?" I've been to stars of every color, many times.)

2. Fight - The on-foot combat is a joke. The Sentinels are total pushovers, and wild fauna can be avoided by climbing/jetpacking a few feet above them. I wasn't expecting Call of Duty or anything, but there's no depth of any kind to this.

Space combat is a little better, at least mechanically, but it all plays out the same. When I log on, I can rely on getting scanned and attacked by pirates within 5 minutes. Pew pew pew lock-on laserbeam them all to death, recharge my shields, I win. There's no incentive for seeking combat out, and even if you want to, your only options are to either hope that pirates show up, or become a pirate yourself.

3. Trade - I played a decent amount of Elite: Dangerous as a trader, and I enjoyed it. I know it's not for everyone, but for me, trading in that game was like Euro Truck Simulator, just... in space. It was very chillaxed, very zen, and I liked it. Go to a space station, take some jobs, grab some cargo, and plan out your run.

Nothing like that is even possible in No Man's Sky. Sure, space stations each have one or two goods that they pay more for, but there's no way to know which stations pay for what ahead of time, so planning a route is impossible. The best you could do is write down every high-value item for each station you visit, then when you realize you've found a good route, constantly craft a bunch of warp cells, go out to the galactic map, pray to god you remember how to get back to that one system you want to get back to, and use the incredibly limited inventory system to try and put together a cargo run worth the hassle. There are no jobs to take, there is no nuance to the economy, and there's no fun in the travel itself.

4. Survive - The game would have you believe that hazardous environments are a problem, but they're really not. Either your suit will drain slow enough that it doesn't even matter, or it will drain fast until you jump into your ship, a cave, a hole, a shelter, or a building of any kind, making it more annoying than fun.

There's just no 'there' there. There's no substance to this game. After your first few hours, you will see and experience basically everything that No Man's Sky has to offer. It's five hours of material stretched WAY too thin across an entire universe.

What a delightful little thing.

It's short, it's not particularly complex, and there's no narrative thread to pull you through. One could almost be mistaken for thinking this is a tech demo, or a proof of concept for a larger game...

... except, after playing it, I'm left wondering why there would need to be anything larger than this? It's sublime in its simplicity. It's a bite-sized piece of sunshine. It's a little burst of joy. It's just *fun*. From the moment I started playing, I had a goofy grin on my face, and it only got goofier and grinnier as time went on. My day was made brighter by playing it. What could be better than that?

Highly recommended.

tl;dr: if you're a casual golf game fan, The Golf Club is awesome. I can't speak for whether or not it will satisfy hardcore fans, because I'm not one.

So, I've been looking for a good PC golf game for a while. I'm not a golfer in real life, nor am I a particularly hardcore fan of the genre. I just played Tiger Woods '06/'07 on X-Box 360 a while ago, thought they were fun, and have been looking for something similar. I stayed away from The Golf Club while it was in Early Access because, well, I don't do Early Access. And I kinda forgot about it for a while.

A few days ago, Jack Nicklaus' Perfect Golf came out, and I thought "Hey, maybe this will be my cup of tea!"

I honestly can't even tell you if it's my cup of tea or not, because Perfect Golf's UI/UX is absolutely atrocious. After 20 frustrating minutes of fighting against the game just to try and learn the basics, I uninstalled it and got a refund. Maybe there is a good golf game in there, I don't know, but I should not have to untangle a convoluted mess just to understand the basics of the game.

Then I saw the Golf Club was out of Early Access, and I grabbed it.

Within THREE MINUTES, I had a handle on the game.

Now again, I'm not a hardcore golf guy, so maybe there's a bunch of depth to this game that I'm missing. There probably is. I can't tell you the difference between a chip and a pitch, and I can't remember which side is draw and which side is fade, and I've never adjusted the point of impact on the ball. All of that stuff exists in The Golf Club, so I assume I still have a long way to go to mastering it. But unlike Perfect Golf, the basics here are simple and intuitive. Everything about the controls, the menus, the UI/UX experience, makes sense. If you put a controller in my hand and tell me to play a game I've never played before, and I've got the basics down in three minutes? You have done something very, very right.

Bought it with the notion that I could play up to two hours, see if it was my cup of tea, and get a refund if it wasn't.

Within 10 minutes, I got my ass handed to me by a giant crystal lizard.

Spent most of my two hour preview just trying to kill that godforsaken lizard.

Worth it.

Was looking forward to this game for a long, long time. Really wanted it to be good. And it is good, at certain things. The first hour or so of the game is wonderful, thanks to the chemistry between Henry and Delilah. It's some of the best writing and voice acting I've seen in a long time.

Then it turns into an episode of the X-Files, and all the chemistry between the two leads vanishes.

I'm not going to spoil what twists and turns the story takes. Instead, I'll point out that the story starts out great and ends up falling flat, largely because of two things:

1. The pacing. The game starts with a slow burn. You're learning about the two characters, about the world, and occasionally a weird thing here, a weird thing there. That's fine. Then, all of a sudden, there is an abrupt turn into crazytown. I felt like I was just starting to settle into the groove of Hank 'n Delilah, when all hell breaks loose. Suddenly Hank and Delilah are bemoaning [spoilery thing I won't mention] plaguing them ALL SUMMER LONG, and I'm like "Wait, what? All summer? It was Day 2 of summer ten minutes ago. Then you jumped to Day 30 something, then Day 40 something, and now we're here." The game doesn't actually build a solid foundation between Hank and Delilah; it pulls the equivalent of "Two months later..." and expects that time to add weight to the proceedings. It doesn't. You can't just skip months of time and then have the characters say "Oh, all that time we've spent together" as if it means something. It doesn't.

2. The quality of the writing. The first hour is phenomenal. Hank and Delilah have charmingly awkward conversations about their pasts, about the job. You have opportunities to press a little, or hold back, and you begin to shape your relationship with this total stranger who is also your only lifeline. Once the game takes the aforementioned sharp turn into crazytown, though, every conversation basically becomes:

Hank: I found a thing.
Delilah: You found a thing?! What the hell? Are you sure it's a thing?
Hank: I am certain it's a thing.
Delilah: I can't believe it's a thing. I don't like this, Hank.
Hank: I don't like it either. I'm going to keep looking.
Delilah: We've got to find out about the thing.

Relationship building? Basically gone. Character development? Not so much. Sense of humor? Vanished. As soon as the plot kicks in, the core pillar of this game - the relationship between Hank and Delilah - is sucked dry of everything that made it interesting. As soon as the story takes center stage, they become a *stunningly* boring pair.

I don't even care about the actual plot. Weird stuff happens, more weird stuff happens, you're given a seemingly plausible explanation for some of it, the end. By the time the credits ran, I couldn't have cared less about any of it; I was still just wondering what had happened to those interesting characters I met in the first hour, and why they were replaced with Blandy McBlanderton and the Blandtime Band.

What a waste. So much potential, and the developers clearly know how to write compelling characters; I just can't understand why they would abandon those characters to focus on a completely run-of-the-mill story instead.

In a word: eh.

At first glance it's not much different than the 2013 reboot. And I'm always up for a sequel that's "More of the same, but a little bit better." While Rise of the Tomb Raider is definiteely more of the same, the problem is it isn't a little bit better. It's actually a little bit worse.

My main gripes:

1. The story. It's not bad, it's just boring. Run of the mill. You will likely guess every plot twist well in advance, at least one of them hours before it happens. The characterization is all over the place - at any given moment, Lara's motivation might be to clear her father's name, to make her father proud, to make a difference, to make the *right* difference, revenge, she needs to give up everything to protect Jonah, she needs to abandon Jonah to go after the Source, on and on and on, pinballing all over the place. She goes from "Imagine what incredible scientific breakthrough the Divine Source might lead to!" to "It's not meant for humans, it's too dangerous!" almost instantaneously, with no real development between point A and point B. The supporting cast is bland on a stick. And there are lots of annoying little inconsistencies - "The Deathless Warriors" can be killed with a knife to the throat like anyone else. Despite having MIRV grenade arrows, you can't blow up ice - you can only jerry rig a trebuchet to swing a counterweight into the ice to break it.

2. While the fundamentals of the gameplay are the same as the 2013 reboot, they're not really balanced all that well. I don't think I ever actually used any of the skills I unlocked, because I never needed them. I crafted one ammo pouch, which I ended up not really needing. Upgrades are borderline meaningless - it feels like the game was built from the ground up without them at all, and they just got tossed in. Never upgraded an outfit, never fully upgraded a weapon, only unlocked 5 different gear options... I guess maybe if you were to New Game Plus on the hardest difficulty, it might be worth it? I played on the Default difficulty, and the upgrade system might as well have not even existed.

Similarly, some of the gameplay the game suggests seems wholely unnecessary. "You can trap bodies to incapacitate guards who investigate." What? Why would I ever need to do that? I can stealth kill everyone in the room faster than it would take to even rig up one body. It would also be a terrible idea because the developers apparently think it's still the year 2000, and that when you break stealth, every enemy in a 5 mile radius should know your exact location, even if you break line of sight and hide from them. The one time I tried to kill a guard with a booby trap, I was in stealth when he died from it. Thirty freaking seconds later, enemies run around the corner (I'm still in stealth) and immediately see me and start firing at me.

3. On the whole, I found the setting itself to be incredibly dull. Your mileage may vary on this one, but I thought the Syria prologue was frikkin' rad, and I couldn't wait for more like that. Nope! Your choices are snowy forest, glacier, less snowy forest, glacier, and ancient castle under glacier. From a technical standpoint the game is gorgeous, but artistically, I just kinda shrugged.

All of this said, it's not a *bad* game. There's nothing particularly broken about it, and the main mechanics work just as well as they did in 2013. It's just... meh. There's nothing particularly interesting about any of it. At its best, it's perfectly functional but a bit dull, and at its worst, it's mildly irritating.

Don't trust the trailer. Well, sort of trust it. It shows a game that's all about going fast, which is great. Sometimes that's what the game is like, but sometimes it's not.

Defunct is at its best when it looks like the trailer - when you're racing over open terrain, chaining together boosts, making smart use of the whatchamadoozie to speed up down hills, figuring out ways to preserve your momentum uphill... all of that is great. What's less great is when the game decides that you need to unlock a door before you can continue. This requires you either finding keys or blowing up little red... things... to power up... some other thing... to let you move on. In these sections you're given wide open areas to play around in.

Here's the thing: opening these doors? It's not hard. It's not even that time consuming. So on the whole it doesn't detract *that* much. But it's a little disheartening to be on a tear, blasting through terrain almost as fast as the game can load it, only to then be ground to a halt so you can go do some mild platforming bits. The same is true of a few other sections, where it's not a door that blocks you, but a jump that's unmakeable the first time, so you fall into a pit and go through a convoluted new path to get back to the jump from another angle. And a few little interstitial moments between chapters where you putter along with your Broken Engine, watching other lil' robots zoom ahead of you.

None of these sections are bad enough to sink the game, but they stand out for the wrong reasons. It's a little bit like the 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games. You'll get one or two stages built for "Gotta go fast!", and then you'll get that Pyramid Stage from Sonic and Knuckles, or Casino Night Zone from Sonic 2. Sure, they're fun(ish), but the game gives you mechanics centered on speed, then drops you in a level not made for speed. Defunct occasionally feels the same way. "Let's make a game all about movement, but force them to slow down every now and again." If it was intentional, I think it was a bad call.

Fortunately, while those spots do stick out like a sore thumb, they are relatively few. Most of the time, Defunct is all about cruising at high speeds and navigating tricky terrain, and it does both very well. If you gun it through the campaign (for lack of a better term), it should only take you 30-40 minutes, but it's the kind of thing you may want to play again, this time trying a different path, or next time trying to collect all the doodads, or even putting on some music and just enjoying the ride.

tl;dr: It's short, mostly sweet, and replayable. Solid purchase.

Based on only an hour played, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I was hoping this would grab me like Braid, or the Talos Principle. Solving puzzles in those games rewards you with insight into the world, the story, the themes. Along with being fun puzzles in and of themselves, there was a reason for solving them beyond 'because they're there."

I got no sense from the Witness that there was anything beyond the puzzlees. I never felt like solving a puzzle resulted in a tantalizing, fleeting glimpse into what lies beneath. It just felt like... puzzles. A bunch of puzzles.

If that's what you want, then this may be the game for you. But if you want puzzles in service of something else - ANYTHING else - then move along. There's nothing to see here.

(I'm sure someone (possibly many someones) will say I didn't give it enough time. To them I'd say that if Braid and the Talos Principle (and many others) managed to hook me in an hour, then the Witness should be able to do the same. From what I experienced, it seems utterly indifferent to my enjoyment. It offered no hooks. It simply exists, and much like the island on which it's set, it seems completely unconcerned with me or my actions. I'll give Blow credit for thematic consistency, but that doesn't change the fact that it was not enjoyable to actually experience.)

EDIT: Originally I refunded The Witness after the review above, but I bought the Humble Freedom Bundle that came with a copy, and I decided to give it another chance. I've gotten much farther in this time, but sadly it hasn't really done much more to win me over. On the second attempt I'm much more willing to meet it without my old expectations, but the end result is a sometimes clever, sometimes frustrating, but still ultimately un-engaging experience.

The Witness is basically like being stuck in a room with someone who doesn't speak your language, so you go through the painstaking process of total immersion learning. When you finally learn something, there's a great Eureka moment. When it feels like the game is doing nothing to teach what you need to learn, you want to bang your head into a wall. But there's also the added bonus of not knowing who you're locked in this room with, or what you hope to achieve by learning the language, as The Witness offers no context or reason to care about anything that you're doing. I'd be more eager to jump back in and try harder to solve these puzzles if I thought there was any sort of payoff at the end, or even if I thought there was value in the skills I was learning, but there's just not, so... why?

Had almost no trouble playing the PC version. Maybe I just got lucky? I dunno.

Specs: i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 8GB RAM, Radeon R9 290x (4GB)

Anywho, if you liked the previous Arkham games, you will probably like this one. If you've never played previous Arkham games, this is not the best place to start - Arkham Knight's story benefits substantially from knowing what came before. AK's mechanics and story are excellent.

That said, this game does have one fairly substantial weakness - it lacks the creativity of its predecessors. Traditionally, the Arkham games have been pretty good about making getting from point A to point B interesting - I thought the sewers in Arkham Asylum, treading carefully while avoiding Croc, were pretty great. The frozen lake in Arkham City is another good example. The Scarecrow sequences from Asylum, the Ras Al'Ghul bits from City. Even the more standard style things, like Asylum's Botanical Gardens and City's Museum, were designed with a lot of variety. And both previous games also had straight up sidequests featuring the weirder members of the Rogue's Gallery - Mad Hatter and Hush from Arkham City stand out. The games allowed themselves some time to dip into the weirder elements of Batman lore, just for fun, and they benefitted greatly from it.

Many of Arkham Knight's missions and sidequests just aren't that interesting. Much of the game borrows from the Ubisoft Open World Game Formula - you have to liberate [X] watchtowers, you need to wipe out [X] enemy base camps, you must find and destroy [X] enemy mines. Of the sidequests that do actually focus on the Rogue's Gallery, many of them either focus on characters that just aren't very interesting (won't spoil who here), or show very little creativity - Two Face's crew robbing banks are just predator scenarios with a time limit. Penguin's weapon caches are just a whole lotta punchin'. True, Mad Hatter from Arkham City's scenario was just a whole lotta punchin', but at least it was creative in its presentation. Knight has no such creativity.

Mechanically, the combat is as solid and enjoyable as ever, so beating up thugs at two dozen different checkpoints is still fun, but Asylum and City managed to make combat fun while also making the context in which it occurs interesting. Most of the missions and sidequests in those games either gave you something interesting to do, or they gave you a familiar task but dressed it up in an interesting premise. Knight is almost entirely familiar tasks without the benefit of interesting reasons to do them.

I'm speaking separately of the main story; the story of Arkham Knight is fantastic, and the game is worth playing for it. But Asylum and City didn't just get by on good stories; they were interesting on a moment-to-moment basis. Arkham City's story was excellent, but each of its individual scenarios was *also* excellent, for one reason or another. I was invested in finding out what would happen next with Joker and Batman, but I was also invested in the task I was performing right at that moment, typically because there was a wide variety of interesting and creative things to do. Arkham Knight, though, feels very vanilla. The gameplay is rock solid, and very fun, but it's not really employed in any creative ways, and you're never given very interesting reasons for doing it, outside of "To see what happens next."

tl;dr: great gameplay, great story, lacks the creativity of its predecessors. Overall a very good game, but Arkham Veterans may feel a bit empty from the lack of interesting sidequests/scenarios.