FFVII rebirth. It’s very good but still a bit of a letdown. I don’t get why they went for Ubisoft style copy paste open world. The main story content is quite low in many locations. For me the best parts of the remake are the brilliant characters, the interesting world and the story, rebirth doesn’t play to those strengths.

Total war warhammer, always the newest one. I come back, play a campaign and forget about it for a few months.

Slay the spire

How’s kotor holding up? It’s my favourite game ever but I’m wondering how outdated it is.

Tekken8 reignited my love of fighting games as I used to play tekken3 all those years ago. The rampant cheating effectively encouraged by the company behind it prompted me to buy street fighter 6 and what a great game it is

Dhalsim is amazing! It’s great how you zone your opponent, shoot them out of the air when they try to jump you and so on, then when they least expect it you teleport in their face and rush them down. Feels so good when it works. Anyone else here playing fighting games?

There are many strategies, the most obvious one it to

1. get orbs so cards like capacitor
2. get focus so orbs do more, cards like defragment(most important!)
3. get generate lightning orb cards to fill the orbs
4. ideally get electrodynamics that makes every orb hit every single target
5. get evoke cards for massive burst damage

You can also do the same with frost instead of lightning, you’ll have so much block nothing will touch you, you can then use cards like claw for damage. Upgraded Buffer card might be my favourite in the game

The problem with defect is that the cards you get on a given run might screw you over, not fitting any strategy whereas the watcher always has a valid strategy based on switching between calm and wrath stances if he doesn’t get something better like divinity or alpha.

I’ve beaten the game(act 4) with every char except the poison one. The best phone game ever. The balance is a bit iffy though, Watcher is just way more consistent than other characters but Defect is my favourite

As for similar games I like Monster Train, I’ve enjoyed it nearly as much but it doesn’t have the same longevity imo.

God of war Ragnarök - kinda meh, unskippable cutscenes, pseudo cutscenes, mediocre story, worst/laziest difficulty design (enemies are damage sponges at higher difficulties), playable Atreus. Glad I got a used copy for relatively cheap and can regain most of my money.

Bloodborne - barely remember anything from the last time I played it. It’s still so good even with 30fps and meh graphics. The very first area (central yharnam) is better than anything in LotF, so good.

I’ve given another chance to Lords of the Fallen as I’ve realised I might have held it to the absurdly high standard of the masterpiece that is Lies of P and it’s a fun game, I’ve just reached the last dungeon.

It has a ton of problems: the jump is terrible, the lock on mechanic is the worst I’ve ever seen, camera is bad, the only challenge the designers seem to know is to gank the player with 50 enemies all the time, quests can be failed by beating a boss too early, selling an item(no buy back) or opening doors, bosses are kind meh and so on BUT it somehow is still fun and good, it’s like it’s more than the sum of its parts. 8/10 and I actually would recommend it.

Steelrising - extremely interesting setting, brilliant even and a decent but not great game

Tried lords of the fallen - biggest disappointment of the year.

Miasma chronicles - reached the bottom of my game list, it’s pretty good. Don’t really know why I bounced off of it originally

BG3 - got to act 2 on an evil playthrough

EA Sports WRC: I’d have though that EA would take the easy way, get DR2 gameplay which was ok, upgrade graphics to be next gen, rebrand to the official license and sell for 70$.

They have instead reworked the physics to the point they are probably the best ever a in non - hardcore - sim(RBR) rally game, tarmac is finally fun. They’ve added 12 rallies which is twice as many as DR2 had at launch and mostly based on real life stages, not fantasy, not to mention they are available in different seasons (Monte Carlo in winter with ice feels completely different to summer). There are plenty of cars which look and sound great. They have sacrificed graphics on the other hand, the game looks no better than last gen DR2 and there were stutters. All of that for 50$.

It’s very weird for EA but I’ll take it. They’ve been, surprisingly, well behaved this year although I don’t play their sports games so maybe they doubled down there to compensate 😂

Other than that I’ve finished my “normal”, good, 3 druid BG3 playthrough, started an evil, dark urge Bard one.

It is but perhaps because the last few years were just lacking any great games. For me there wasn’t a single title better than 9 out of 10 since DOS2 until this year.

Everyone had just been dumping pseudo big, pseudo long open worlds with a boring story. And the main strategy games are ruined by corporate greed with countless DLCs (just check EU4 price with dlc).

This year though: Lies of P, BG3, FFXVI, F1 23, just great and I still have lords of the fallen to play.

I don’t necessarily prefer the faster pace. It’s just that LoP happens to be the first game in the genre, that I’ve played, without major downsides, at least for me.

Everything else has either time wasting, lengthy runbacks or game breaking bosses to artificially increase the difficulty (see Malenia), or is Sekiro.

A modern DS1 like game without the tedium and with some new ideas is very much something that appeals to me. If it has RPG mechanics then all the better, I liked how LoP had perks on top of the traditional, simplistic attribute system and at least some choices.

Everything you say makes me want to play it more 😀

To each their own 😀

Thanks for the detailed response! Temporary bonfires seem to be a real solution to my main concern about this game.

I liked ds1 when it was new, I’d hate it now for being grindy and the time wasting runbacks but the level design was top notch.

From your response I gather it has the good parts of DS1 with modern graphics and a solution to the bad part. I’ll probably like it then and will definitely try it

How are the runbacks? Are they using the tedious=difficult mentality? DS2 was terrible because of that but on the other hand the recent lies of p is a masterpiece.

Yes and yes. BB is a flawed masterpiece, some great things ruined by some of the worst fromsoftwareisms, a bit dated at this point too.

LoP has a better and more varied combat, 60fps, better bosses, better weapon system, many QoL improvements, better story(in part because it’s actually told :D), way better graphics, no grind, no long runbacks(the longest has like 3 enemies you need to fight, BB was made at a time FS still thought runbacks somehow add to the experience or maybe it was a cynical attempt at padding the game length).

In LoP, once you “git gut” it’s just so satisfying to get a few perfect blocks on a boss combo and break his weapon, never gets old.

In my utterly subjective opinion BB is 7.5/10, LoP 10/10 in 2023.

Lies of p - absolutely fantastic. The first game I rate 10/10 since Mass effect 2 I think.

They took what is good in soulslikes and removed stupid fromsoftwareisms. The story is great and actually told, there are some indicators for npcs who have something for you, when an npc moves somewhere they leave a note etc.

The bosses are tough but fair, they don’t randomly recover from stagger into a one shot ability or heal off of hitting a shield, there’s no fake, game breaking, lazy difficulty like fromsoftware would do, you are not punished for doing something well.

The combat is great, no “rhythmic” parry spam, no dodge spam, you need to think about what to use, when you do the game can be rather easy for this genre.

There are 2 or 3 eldenringy bosses towards the end with ludicrous mobility and combo spam but most of the rest are really great.

If this is this devs first game I really want to see the next. First time in ages I’m doing ng+

They could also release a physical copy without the sony extra but why would you bother not being abusive. People will buy it anyway

Hate soulslike stuff other than combat, bonus points when there’s no checkpoint before a boss fight so you have to redo 50 fights just to die again and repeat the process until you’ve learned the boss moved… or shot yourself. Oh and you can’t pause so tough luck if you ordered food or kids want something. Fromsoft are masters or marketing to sell this bullshit as something great

Also hate unskippable cutscenes, good story like witcher, ffvii remake or kotor defends itself. If you feel the need to do it chances are your story is bad and so you shouldn’t. Just look at ghost of tsushima, good combat, great world and visuals. Easily an 8/10 or better potential but mostly bad story without skips makes it tedious and just not fun. A samurai fetching herbs for peasants 😂 Bonus points if you can’t even pause the mighty cutscene