Neue Rezensionen von CannonFodder

TL;DR: Semi-solid furry dingleberry on top of a magnificent Instagram-worthy meal ruins the whole affair.
TL;DR 2: Mick's older work is better, put on an hour loop of his DOOM 2016 bangers to help you get through tough fights.

Overall, Doom Eternal is a magnificent gameplay loop of flow-state shooting where the game keeps giving you one more plate to keep spinning as soon as you've just barely got the ones you've already got stable. It is exhilarating when one is operating at full tilt, carving a path through enemies that seem like they could go on forever, and sometimes you wish the encounters would, genuinely becoming sad or disappointed when you run out of demons to kill.

And then there's the Marauder.

He is too fast, too defensive, too tanky, and too powerful.

Not in absolute terms. In absolute terms, the balancing is just right. But in a game where the devs have consistently lauded "push forward gameplay" as a defining principle, and whose game design encourages you to exploit the weaknesses of your enemies to be The Doom Slayer, running into the Marauder is like slamming into a brick wall, or, worse yet, launching yourself headfirst into a charging Pinky. Even the Hotel Restaurant, a truly challenging encounter that had me throwing myself at it at least a dozen times on Ultra-Violence before I finally cleared it, is preferable to coming up against a single Marauder. And the game has the nerve to throw two of them at you, back-to-back. Fighting them is an experience that completely takes me out of that flow-state that I crave, and it makes me quit the game rather than keep playing. I know that I will one-shot him the next time that I start the game up, because I will be fresh and operating with a clean slate, and my mind will not have been focused into a playstyle that gets me killed against the Marauder.

edit: Upon the recommendation of a friend who saw how frustrated I was getting with the game, she suggested I turn off the in-game music, and put on music from DOOM 2016. Dubiously, I put on an hour loop of BFG Division.

It f***ing worked. I experienced a significant mood shift tackling fights. Rather than feel angry and tense at throwing myself at walls in the game, I became much more relaxed and thoughtful about how I needed to take fights, and when I *did* die, I immediately hit load checkpoint instead of exhaling, taking my hands off the keyboard, alt-tabbing to catch up on Discord, refresh twitter, and then meander back to the game half an hour later.

Bungie weaponizes FOMO to the point that it JUST BARELY tips the scale towards my not recommending this game. It's not "RUN, DON'T LOOK BACK!", it's "Be careful of what you're getting into."

It will be fine if this is your only game. But it will take up all of your time if you allow it to, making it hard to play other new games as they come out without missing something in Destiny. Which is annoying, because that's what people who play video games do, they play new games as they come out.

I have beaten this game, and come as close to 100% as is possible, due to a single collectible that I cannot go back for without playing through a chunk of New Game+.

I had been using the Tomb Raider games as a kind of loose stealth game, but SoTR takes a turn and heavily curtails combat, forcing a lot of focus onto exploration and tomb raiding instead. Which I guess is fine, but it's a shift away from what I was expecting, especially when the game disallows you, very frequently, the use of any of your guns, or bow, and instead insists, through narrative reasons, that you use your knife to stealth kill things. At any rate, it's MY preferred playstyle, so I didn't find things too disappointing, but my acquaintances who tend more towards going loud have expressed some serious disappointment. I'm just annoyed that I didn't get to do more shanking.

This port is 100% absolutely not up to NIXXES's prior work. On a 10-series NVidia card, Windows 10 Pro, and a 7700K processor, I am crashing at random either when I die, or I use a campfire, hardlocking my computer and requiring a hard power-off to recover. As of 2018-09-21, they have pushed a patch which seems to have heavily curtailed the crashing, but I still did have one death crash before finishing the game.

There is an option in the game to make the people you meet speak in their own language. I find this to be an admirable design decision, as it most certainly cost money and development time to implement that could have been just saved or dedicated elsewhere. But it completely shatters immersion when I walk up to someone and speak to them in the Queen's English, and they can understand me and respond back to me in Quechua or Spanish, or XXXX, when they have no logical reason to be able to understand me. It's especially bad in part of the game when you go in disguise, interacting with the enemy, who is supposed to be on the lookout for you, and they bark at you in XXXX language, while you respond in clear British English. On top of the disguise being the least convincing disguise ever. The incomplete nature of this feature, which really should have had Lara switching between languages depending on who she was speaking with, just makes it a continual drag on immersion. Do yourself a favor, leave it off, and pretend that Lara and the NPCs are conversing with eachother in the proper language, and this is just so that you can understand them.

There is zero replayability in this game. You may *want* to replay the game once, in order to secure a collectible that you could only get by being absolutely dilligent and getting it in a separate sequence in an area divorced from the rest of the game area. Especially considering that you cannot double back to get it if you missed it while in this sequence, nor fast travel back to get it. Additionally, the wonderful Endurance Mode from the previous game Rise of the Tomb Raider does not make a comeback. AFAIK, there are no plans to bring it back, so you might as well just play through it once, and uninstall.

Wait for a Steam sale, it's not worth it otherwise.

That ending just dashed every bit of good will I had for this game.

Seriously.

Given that my natural playstyle, whenever possible, is to "use sharp pointy thing to carve a path", the problems that this game has with Borderlands-style loot and juggling upgrades accordingly was not an issue for me. Guns were completely irrelevent to my playthrough, and the swords that shot beamblades became a useful ranged option, instead of "this is completely useless, I'd rather just use a gun instead". I upgraded a melee weapon, and a beamblade for some range, and then proceeded to dice demons into a fine julienne.

But the characters are fun, the writing is clever, and the dialogue is snappy (my one weakness) so I was willing to forgive what was otherwise an unexceptional story.... until the last 30 seconds of the game. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with an unexceptional story. But that turd of an ending at the last second... I sat through the entire credits, thinking there was going to be some kind of stinger.... but there wasn't. And that just soured everything about the game for me, because the first game was cool and good and had a proper, if somber, ending.

I am ashamed that I was a cheapskate and tried to wait it out until the price dropped more significantly than 20-30%. This game has proven itself to be well worth full price, and I don't think I'm anywhere near finished.

* Controls are razor sharp. Fighing the controls doesn't exist. If something went wrong, it's your fault.
* Environments are weird and wonderful and disquieting and varied without having to resort to Lovecraftian mythos.
* Powerups start out predictable, but then they get interesting. It's good to see there's room for a metroid game with something else in place of the overly-familiar metroid bits.
* The music is a work of art on its own. Do yourself a favor and get the bundle with the soundtrack.

After the fourth time my cursor swung around to do something completely different than click on the thing I wanted it to do, my entire party proceeded to run themselves through a patch of burning ground, thus suiciding themselves. The last party member, I forced to walk back through the fire patch, checked how long ago my last save was, then uninstalled the game.

One cannot even be absolutely certain what one is clicking on, because your target's breathing animation still may cause your target to change to the ground tile besides what you were trying to hit, making you walk all the way over there to stand next to an enemy instead of hitting them with your bow and arrow.

And clicking on rats is an exercise in frustration in and of itself.

A lot of this frustration could be rectified by having a "are you sure" dialog box, as is common with many turn-based combat games. This one does not.

The music is easily the best thing to come out of the game.

However, there are two strikes against it: One, is that steam doesn't allow you to buy just the soundtrack without buying the game.

Second, is that the beautiful atmospheric tracks which lack the game's transition sounds, (which are a man with a very deep voice saying a few words that include the segment's title) is marred by the words "Give Up The Ghost" near the end of each track, which is what the game plays to indicate to you that this is now the boss fight.

A middling bullet-hell shooter with dual-stick mechanics whose soundtrack far exceeds the game itself. I found myself wanting to just listen to the music more than actually play.

Several points make the game somewhat frustrating:

* Your attack rate is not consistent. It is tied to the beat of the music. While usually at a good clip, there are some spots where it slows down.
* Not shooting isn't really an option. When you stop tilting the stick, a significant chunk of the music goes mute, which diminishes my enjoyment of the game.
* Tied in with that, dual-stick shooting gets really old really fast when you can't let up.
* No bombs. You have to earn your bomb by closing to melee range at hitting enemies, which turns your ranged attack into a melee one.
* Doesn't feel good. I don't really feel in-control of movement, as the game feels too sluggish to warrant the "only your core takes damage" dodges that a bullet-hell shmup demand, and using the dash is an exercise in "point in a general direction and hope you didn't point the stick one or two degrees off". I recognize that the game is themed around dreaming, and sometimes when you dream you get a floating feeling where you fly around, but you can't have that in a bullet hell. It's gotta be precise.

If you can get the soundtrack alone, it's great. But I think the music is wasted on this game.

In general? It's a pretty good game. But it's not for me.

As a fan of stealth games in general, I thought I would like Sniper Elite V2. I was wrong. This game helped me realize that what I like are not stealth games, but games where I've got a large spate of ways to accomplish a goal, where I can then select whichever method I like, (usually the stealth route).

Sniper Elite is a series entirely about sniping. There is no opportunity to say "to heck with this" and go loud, there is no opportunity to sneak around and nonlethally take down everyone. While you can go around and plug people in the back of the head with your silenced pistol, the points earned by doing so are absolutely miniscule in comparison to a shot with your sniper rifle. Everything comes back to rewarding you for using only The Sniper Rifle.

I'm a bit mixed now that I've sunk two weeks into this game. Some of the good initial impressions of the game have given away to stark realities, instead, so this review should be fairly even keeled.

* Is it better than most of the other MMOs out there? An unreserved yes.
* Did Square-Enix learn from the mistakes they made from their past four MMOs? Yes.
* Is the story any good? Yes.
* ...are you sure? Look, it took a lot of balls to scrap the entire game and rewrite the entire story using the existing assets and build it all on top of a new engine, but by Cid's scruffy beard, they actually did it, AND they justified all the retconning into the story itself. If there's any company with the capability to keep this game afloat while they were fixing everything, it's Square-Enix, because of their sheer amount of resources. Credit given where credit is due, they did a good job.
* Is the voice acting good? My experience is that it seems to be a bit better in Japanese than in English.
* Can you set the VA to JP and subtitles to EN? Yes. Or any other permutation you like between EN, JP, FR, and/or DE.
* Is being able to level every class and every crafting/gathering profession on a single character all its cracked up to be? Not if you don't like the side job that you have to level in order to be effective at your main. I dislike GLA, for example.
* How hard is it to change classes? As easy as changing your weapon. Changing your weapon changes your bars, skills, stats, and everything.
* For crafting and gathering classes too? Yes. Crafting is interactive, not just queueing up 20 of X and letting a bar fill up. Gathering nodes are all per-player, and equally interactive. (YMMV with the interactive crafting bit.)
* Are you going to single-character everything anyways? Shyeah, man. I hate rolling alts. Also, I got the Lightning hair, and I ain't giving that up.
* Lightning hair? Yeah, there was a cross-marketing promo with FFXIII-3. You could get Lightning's hair, armor, Snow's hair, armor, and various weapons for all classes. There's allegedly going to be a DQX cross-marketing event soon, but that may be restricted to JP-only.
* Are they any good? The weapons cap out at level 13. (Get it?) An armor/weapon skin system is on the horizon, though.
* Is the default UI good? Yes. I can do most of what I had before in WoW with the stock UI, but I had a very minimalistic setup because I was my guild's OT. I miss having more granular threat indicators, but I can manage. There are rumors that custom UI mods are on the horizon. I miss ThreatPlates.
* Is now a good time to get into the game? Best time to get into the game would have been a month to two weeks ago, considering the 50% off sale, and age of the content leading up to 2.2 patch landing late this month or early next month. Because of it, now is a rapidly-narrowing window.
* How much FF fan-wankery is in this game? If you can't stand seeing Chocobos, Moogles, Cid, airships, Bahamut, Warriors of Light, Dragoons, and so forth, this isn't the game for you.
* How far have you gotten in the game? I'm level 41 now. My time played is a little misleading, I have occasionally accidentally left the launcher open, thus artificially inflating the time played.
* What's the best thing you've seen in the game overall? Because development is being headed by a Japanese studio, maintenance is scheduled during THEIR day, which means OUR (USA) night. Usually when I should be going to sleep anyways. Data centers are domestic to JP, NA, and EU regions, though, don't be alarmed.
* What's the- Hang on, I gotta squeeze in another thing: Second best thing is that this is an MMO you can play entirely with a controller, BUT does not compromise the UI for Mouse and Keyboard in any way. Both are well-refined and equally suitable to play this game.
* Okay, I was going to ask, what's the worst thing you've seen in the game overall? WAR (T2 Tank specialist) needs to level to MAR (T1 Tank generalist) 30 and GLA (another T1 Tank generalist) 15. I find GLA to not be my cup of tea, but since WAR/MAR doesn't get a taunt ever, you have to level to level 22 GLA and cross-class Provoke to get a proper taunt.
* Final Recommendation? FFXIV has a benchmark tool that doubles as a character creation toy, located at http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/benchmark/. You should download it, spend a lot of time playing with character creation to see if you like the aesthetics, and then benchmark to see if your computer can handle it.

EDIT 06-25-14: I am at four months playing this game, now. I won't inline edit things any further to reflect this, but:

* I have discovered there is an executable in the install directory to allow you to play the game without having to launch it through Steam. This has affected my time-played count. Maybe triple that, now.
* I am now at level 50 Warrior, and have several other combat jobs at 30 or so. All other jobs are at least level 15 to eliminate the time needed to go grind out the subclass for evolving to job.
* I am an omnicrafter now. I have maxed all the crafting jobs, and it is *very nice*, either to make gear for myself (in the form of levelling my incomplete jobs), my retainers, or for FC mates. I'm still working on the gathering professions.
* I'm letting my sub lapse for a bit. I'm going to TI4 in Seattle next month, but you can bet I'll be back afterwards.
* Patch 2.3 is slated to arrive July 8th and bring Rogues, Ninjas, Ramuh, Shiva, personal guild housing, and more.