Об играх
Love the style, love how weapons look and feel, hate permadeath mechanics.
Would be great if it was a singleplayer game. But I got shot in the head by some random Chinese dude on my first run, and lost all of my equipment. Not fun. Actually, I got so frustrated by that interaction I almost went and shot another random dude myself. Stopped myself just in time, though.
Also, probably there’s an idea behind not having mission markers, but I don’t have patience for this.
There’s a huge difficulty spike at the end of first act. At least if you decide to fight Sacred Coil faction first, as I did. First two fights are easy. But the boss attacks four times, inflicts status, and you also need to beat Gatekeeper, one of the toughtest enemies from XCOM 2. It all came down to luck, when Axiom, my melee brute, knocked down one of the bigger enemies on the first turn. Then Verge was able to “berserk” enemy flamethrower. And the boss simply got stuck on the ladder. Still, it was a very frustrating fight.
The situation with equipment is pretty sad. There is Regular Assault Rifle, Enhanced Assault Rifle and Mastercrafted Assault Rifle (lulwat?). And I’m not even sure those are different in terms of looks. The only bright side is that after completing Act I you start getting some missions with unique weapons available. Those not only look unique, but also have unique abilities.
AI find it very befitting myself that I started playing Hades a while ago, decided to play Transistor first, and then never came back to it. Well, until now.
Hades absolutely deserves all the acclaims it gets. Characters are very British despite being Greek gods and whatnot. The genre, roguelite, is certainly not my cup of tea, but I’m willing to enjoy it for all the art and humor and voice acting.
The game turned out to be more about shooting stuff than what I had expected. Or maybe it’s just my play style. But since there are a few opportunities to heal, it’s best to keep away from enemies.
I was absolutely sure I had both Ghost Recon Wildlands and Ghost Recon Breakpoint bought on one of the platforms.
But either I forgot where I bougth them, or I was mistaken, as they aren’t on Uplay for sure.
I don’t care about those games enough to buy them (again?), though.
Juri is confirmed for Street Fighter 6:
That’s all you need to know to buy it now.
Guess who got 3 4 similar legendary helmets now…
On the flipside, Blizzard is surprisingly generous about some aspects of the game. For example, you need to get every legendary item only once in order to keep its effect. You can “extract essence” in Westmarch, and after that you can always imbue another legendary item with this trait.
I like comparing how character look evolves in Diablo. But after you reach maximum level and start accumulating Paragon points, it stops being interesting. Your character just stocks on all-legendary equipment, which defines most of their looks. You don’t look that way because it’s cool, but simply because you need a trait from that particular piece.
That also means that if you play Diablo Immortal enough, you’ll know which traits are equipped on each character simply by looking at them. I won’t mistake that bucket helm or that armor for any other now.
An interesting XCOM 2 spinoff. Events take place after XCOM 2. Humanity won, and now humans, aliens and hybrids all live in the same megapolis.
The game is slightly more story driven than the original XCOM.
Game mechanics are mostly focused around breaching. Different points of entry, each granting different bonuses, like extra damage for the first turn.
And we have aliens of all kinds in our squad, which is always fun.
Our squad is basically a SWAT team. So much more emphasis on close combat, and even on capturing enemies alive.
All characters are unique, and loosing one means Game Over. I got woman-snake as my first hire, not because she’s efficient, but because she’s fun to listen to.
The only annoying bit is that enemy reinforcements seem to be endless.
I love to track the evolution of my character in Diablo-like games:
The game is in Early Access, but still feels pretty solid. It’s a mix of Diablo 2 and Path to Exile. Some Ancient Rome vibes here as well, and also huge skill trees for each skill.
But there are classes instead of a weird grid system of Path to Exile I don’t really like.
Was surprised that one of the first paladin skills is a “whirlwind”, which is also crazily effective.
Also, the health regeneration here is extremely fast, and you don’t even need special equipment for that.
Not sure if I’m going to continue playing it now, but maybe worth returning to it once it’s released.
Completed Inscryption.
For real this time.
Act II is much more sane and enjoyable than Act I. It’s basically Pokemon, and now you have four classes (in Hearthstone terms). If you loose, you can retry immediately, no need to replay the last hour or so. And you can alter your deck as much as you want.
Actually, with the Painter boss, I had to alter it quite a lot. And that’s what I like to do.
Act III is still better than Act I. Nothing is as bad as Act I in terms of gameplay.
You get checkpoints, and you can edit your deck a bit by exchanging cards. Some fourth-wall moments actually made me chuckle: like a boss that asks you to pick your oldest file from your real filesystem, then threatens to delete it.
The ending sequence made me chuckle.
Honestly, I can forgive the horrible first act for how awesome the ending is.
“We don’t need to keep score” and a handshake from your nemesis.
And a glimpse into other Scrybes Worlds and Games.
Completed Backbone.
It’s quite short, just 4 hours, and since there are almost no puzzles, it’s mostly just story.
We follow the science lead. Get into the lab. The Artifact is kind of a black goo that is able to create hybrids. Also, this is a postapocalyptic world where humans are apparently long extinct. The Artifact gets into us. That’s… unexpected.
From here, game turns into Weird.
There’s a fantastic scene where we walk through a crowd during a festival.
We meet our friend, Anatoly, the taxi driver. And that thing kills him.
We lay low with the homeless people. But the mafia finds us eventually and captures us, to experiment on the Artifact. There is a bunch of pointless inner dialogues, after which we escape. And… suddenly, that’s it. We are told that the mafia boss plans a revolution, our partner decided to work for her, and our hero either dies beyond the Wall or mutates beyond recognition.
Well, that’s a depressing turn of events.
Yet another detective noir adventure with furries. Not point-and-click though. At least not entirely. And with some elements of stealth.
We play as a private detective, of course, who’s hired to follow a husband that frequents a certain nightclub, so his wife could get a divorce. We find the husband in the basement of the club, not only dead, but also prepared to become someone’s roast.
We pair with a reporter to follow the suspicious trucks that have been seen around the nightclub. The meat is being delivered to a wealthy ape, who happens to be Minister of Science. Are rich people eating poor people?
We follow some leads on the missing prostitutes from the nightclub. Turns out one of them was spying on the wealthy clients for the nightclub owner, Bloodworth. Science minister and one of his employees mentioned “Project Artifact” a couple of times. We also get a visit from Bloodworth, and some beating from her henchman.
There was a free multiplayer weekend for Call of Duty: Vanguard. And I was surprised how much I appreciated the craziness of this game.
Customized boring as hell MP40 looks like something from steampunk:
Charlton automatic rifle (NZ-41), a total rarity:
And I have no idea what these supposed to be:
I don’t care. Those are great.
Completed what’s called “Act I”. The game likes to mess with your head. When you start the game, there is no “New Game” button, only “Continue”, which starts Act I. And once you beat the boss, you get “New Game” button in the menu as a reward. But “New Game” starts a completely different game. Arguably, it’s a better game. It’s not rogue-like, nor inspired by “Five Nights at Freddy”. Instead, it feels more like a Pokemon game from the Game Boy Color era. You can repeat the fights as many times as you’d like. And you can also assemble your own deck. Honestly, I wish that this was the real game, and not just a bonus game mode, since I don’t have patience for it anymore, I’m afraid.
As a card game, it’s not very enjoyable. Each player has just 6 HP. Since your opponent doesn’t play by your rules, he can field a 3-blood 3-damage card on the first turn. You need 3 turns to do the same, so unless you are lucky to have removal, you are dead.
For me, part of the fun of boss fights in Hearthstone was building decks to beat them. Here, you need to build a single deck to beat 4 very different bosses, without much control what you put in it. Sometimes, you would just get bad options, and you can’t do anything about it. When I finally beat Trapper&Trader boss, I didn’t feel good about it. I just felt I got lucky.
An interesting mix of different genres. A rogue-like: you get to traverse discrete map with random encounters, and if you die, you need to repeat the process again.
And a card based game: you have classic HP/damage two rows system.
Cards attack at the end of the turn they were placed. Not the turn after, like Hearthstone. I don’t remember Gwent much, and I haven’t played other card games, so I will keep comparing this to Hearthstone, although I haven’t played it for a few years as well.
What’s interesting is that instead of a single resources like mana in Hearthstone, there are two. Some cards need “blood”, which is trading multiple cards for a single card. But some cards need “bones” instead, which you get after your cards either sacrificed or killed.
There is another layer to the game, though, which is an “escape room”. And there are two special cards that talk to you while you play and give you hints on how to escape.
The problem I have with this game is how much it expects you to remember. I feel like I need to keep track of what cards I have in my deck, and what different icons on the map mean, and I need to count the number of bone chips on the table.
Checked the guide, and turns out I either got incredibly lucky, or this game is designed very well. I traded an eye just to win the Prospector boss, and then when I was proposed another eye, I randomly picked the most peculiar one. Turns out that’s exactly what you need to do in order to complete the first chapter.
I think this game is best known for its art: World War I, but with mechs.
https://www.artstation.com/jakubrozalski
The problem is that besides the art, there’s not much game in there. The “Digital Edition” is quite literal. You are playing a tabletop against bots. That’s it.
Your units are just painted figurines, which are not animated.
The “fights” between mechs are just static image of two mechs, and the summary of the “fight”. Your actions are just list of resources you are going to spend and get.
This is all incredibly boring. Even Panzer General from ’94 felt more engaging to me.
Completed Loop Hero.
Didn’t expect that to happen.
Learned that the secret of this game is to build out the Mud Huts. Those look kind of useless. But are incredibly powerful once you build ton of them.
Each mud hut allows you to have more items in your storage. Each item gives you a very small bonus, like +1 to defence. But when you have 10 of them, this is equal to having a good shield from the very start.
After building enough of them, I started to beat The Hunter consistently, with all characters.
The final chapters puts you against all the bosses one after the other, and then the final boss 😨
I got lucky, though. And once I reached Omega, I actual beat him on my first try.
Getting to level 60 allows you to change difficulty level. And finally die from regular monsters, or at lest from elites.
Surprisingly, I got two set items, and both are from the same set. One from leveling to level 60, and another from one of the dungeon bosses.
There seems to be no more storyline after that point, but you get some sidequests related to characters that you’ve met some 20 hours ago.
For example Valla, a demon hunter we meet in the second chapter, is now tormented by a demon that recreates the horrible moments of her past: her family being killed by demons and all that.
At the end of that questline she gets her iconic red scarf:
I don’t play many F2P games at all. So for me the fact that Diablo Immortal has around 16 different types of resources seems kind of crazy.
With a lot of cursing, I also managed to beat the third boss:
The bosses design is great, but they have too much HP, or the character doesn’t deal enough damage. Instead of being a glass cannon, like in many other Souls-like games, you are taking potshots at the bosses most of the time.
There are tons of sidemissions, which occur on the same levels as the main ones, but at different times of the day, and with different starting locations and blocked paths.
Must say that I don’t particularly enjoy that game, though. Apart from how fragile the hero is, you also need to manage all those weapons that are dropped randomly, which is simply not fun. A shame, I liked the character design a lot. But life is too short.