The game made me rage-quit a couple of times. But that is something you should never do. When you quit, enemies respawn. And your valuable ammo does not.
The fight with the Archivist boss instead of being fun felt mostly annoying. The boss can pass through walls, has a ranged attack that kills you in two hits. And another attack which slowly drains your health, apparently? I couldn’t figure out how it works, and the game doesn’t explain it properly. And it can kill you as soon as you respawn. Sounds like fun?
Not as “fun” as backtracking without a map and with tons of respawned enemies. Funny enough, judging by the few game guides, there was a map at some point, until it was removed.
Inadvertently I finished the first episode. I expected that I’d be able to finish some quests, as meaningless as they are, but I was thrown right into the second one.
I rarely drop games, but I think for Graven, I’ll make an exception. Which is a shame, I did enjoy the art style. But the lack of saves, a map, and a combination of too many enemies and not enough ammo, coupled with some bugs ruined it for me.
Category: PC Gaming
Об играх
I expected Hexen 2 or maybe Heretic 2, but it feels more like Strife, with a proper town to explore, or even Arx Fatalis, as you expected to throw boxes around and burn wooden planks with fire spells.
It only takes a few hits for you to fall. Unreal was also quite unforgiving, but at least there was a save/load option. Here, I died a couple of times because I didn’t understand that there’s a lot of stuff that can blow up. Not just red barrels, but also red crates (no, they don’t contain ammo) and what I considered some altars, and turned out to be piles of tar. When you die, you lose some money.
Flying enemies are a bane in most FPS games. But here, they are tiny, hard to hit, almost black, and have an AoE attack that kills you in a couple of hits.
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Unto The End
Completed Unto The End.
I think that there’s a fine line between being vague and obscure. At some points you’re asked to make an offering or a trade, and it’s not clear what exactly is expected. I guess I guessed luckily and assembled a Wanderer’s Totem, that let me past the “Ancient One”. But I have no idea what would have happened otherwise.
One annoying bit is that the game has frequent checkpoints, but it doesn’t allow you to revert to the last one. The only option is to start the game from the very beginning. And sometimes you do get in an unfavorable situation, like not being able to see your enemies behind obstacles or losing your last torch, stumbling in darkness, unable to progress or die.
Some fights felt like too much guesswork for me too. In those case, you’d be lucky to have a spare spear. And I just ran past some of the enemies. Often they’ll leave you alone if you do.
Only on the last boss I discovered that there’s a setting to slow down fights. To my defence, I didn’t know it’s the last boss either. It’s not graceful, as it slows everything, including character movement. Luckily, the boss is quite fair and takes only a few hits to go down.
Categories
Unto the End
This is an interesting mix. Minimalistic interface, slow moving character and traps resemble a limboid. But there are fighting mechanics, with telegraphing enemies, resembling soulslike.
But then there’s no visible stamina, and no penalty for death, no bloodstains. There are campfires, though. There’s also roll vs block mechanic, but here the game adds something I haven’t seen in this genre, although it appears in fightings: high and low blocks. Every enemy telegraphs a chain of high and low attacks, and if you block all of them, you can riposte.
One nice detail is that you can upgrade your armor by collecting different junk, and it changes your appearance slightly.
Completed Chorus.
It’s quite a spectacular game, in the most direct sense. You’d rarely see more magnificent space battles as the backdrop of your exploits.
The final battle with “the Dragon” can get overwhelming a bit: swarms of nanomachines, space rays, and meteorites (what?) flying at you from all directions, while you need to chase the ever-rotating serpent. But thanks to checkpoints, it never gets to the point of being truly annoying.
The story is exactly what you’d expect: a Mass Effect, gather everyone together the beat the Cosmic Evil kind of story. But it’s well executed, in a classic sense.
Funny that although at the beginning, the game tried to force you to switch between weapons, by the end you can do fine with just the minigun.
And the final episode where you just spear through frigates is again, just spectacular.
The soundtrack of this game is just amazing.
As you get more skills, the game becomes more fluent and less annoying. The enemies that have impenetrable shields and set dozens of mines around them fall prey to the Jedi-lightning.
Despite the game having only three types of weapons, they still managed to have some variety with them. Miniguns can be replaces with slug throwers, which are slower, but pack more punch. And there’s an entire quest line dedicated to getting the Werewolf missile launcher and its upgrades, which, unlike other missile launchers, allows to ready a salvo of hard-hitting missiles.
There are a few annoying episodes. First is when you need to fight Faceless Swarms in a tight cave. You are expect to do so by spearing through them, but doing so in a cave is not the best of ideas.
Then when you replay Rasar’s memory, but without Rites. Dogfights without Jedi tricks in this game can be though.
Just as I complained that I’m not getting any orange drops, I got my first proper orange drop. And a bow at that.
I feel that there’s a lot of backtracking for a modern game in Diablo 4. Maybe that’s intentional, or maybe I’m missing something, but I often couldn’t jump to the dungeon entrance, like with the “cerberus” dungeon, or back to the quest-giver, like with the “druid on a tree”. Sometimes you have to mow through the same mobs again. Sometimes you’re just walking the empty halls. Both doesn’t add anything to the game experience.
Around level 30, end of Act 2, the game becomes a slump. The monsters are getting more and more meaty, but your gear doesn’t scale with them. And that “orange” bow you picked a few levels ago is now doing same DPS as the “blue” drops.
Also, because it’s an open-world game, and the monsters simply level up with you, there’s this discrepancy that you just defeated The Guardian of Cathedral of Hatred, but then you fell victim to a porcupine.
Ironic that the one of the best written quests is also annoying to complete. The sad story about the Goose Sign, I mean.
I wasn’t much interested in Diablo 3 when it was announced, as I didn’t even play the Lord of Destruction at the time. So to me all the promises and changes are fascinating, especially as I know the final product well enough.
Even more interesting that some things that they promised in Diablo 3 were actually later implemented in Diablo 4.
Piloting is quite tricky, as enemy ships are very agile, frustratingly so. Luckily, since we play as Sith turned Jedi, we have an ability to teleport behind an enemy, alighting the reticle while doing so. Helps a lot during fights with the smaller enemies.
Speaking of bigger enemies, Wraiths started to appear during missions, which I guess are frigates or maybe corvettes, the game doesn’t specify, I think. The game also only half explains how to defeat those. First you hit the thrusters to disable other shields. Then you fly inside wrecking everything. That disabled the shields around the tractor. Then you destroy the reactor and fly out as quickly as you can, since it is hinted that the explosion can take you out, although I haven’t stayed yet to validated. All that while invincible until the end turrets are hitting you.
The game world is divided into half a dozen zones, each an asteroid field, basically. The zones are quite wide, but not very deep, although there’s still some verticality. The main missions usually have multiple objectives, which you can do in any order. Then there are sidequests and even some random encounters. Can this be called a space-sim-RPG mix?
To add to the metaphor, equipment comes in “sets”, like the “green” items in some Diablo games. If you install 2 or 4 items, you’ll get bonuses. Quite significant, I must say: seeping enemy shields, for example.
That’s the game I was always confusing EverSpace with. And there are some good reasons for that. It’s also a modern arcade space-sim, for one.
But it’s very narrative driven, unexpectedly so. Nara, the protagonist, served the Cult, and even destroyed a planet with all its population once, which torments her. She has a sentient ship, Forsaken, which she calls Forsa, and the ship has a score to settle with the Cult too.
As I mentioned, I respect space sims that don’t just threat all spaceships as fighters. Here you’re quickly given a capital ship to pilot for a short while, and it’s interesting. It does have turrets, although not autonomous ones. But you can fire them in any direction, not just the direction the ship is facing, which makes a lot of sense.
Like in many other games, there’s the shields-and-hull mechanic. Some weapons are better against shields, some are better against hull, so you need to switch all the time. But here they changed the role of missiles a bit. Missiles are used against armoured enemies.
The mechanic Chorus leans heavily into is drift. And I’m not a fan. In some games, you have the inertia system, where you can gain velocity then spin in any direction and still follow your path. Here, by default there is no inertia, you fly where you point your nose. Unless you enable drift. This is a nice system, and in other circumstances I may have even liked it. But the beginning of the game is full of ancient temples with narrow corridors and regenerating locks, that you need to hit in a short period of time while drifting. And this isn’t fun at all.
Completed Everspace.
The final boss really requires to bring every trick you’ve learned up your sleeve. The cruiser summons fighters with Corrosion Missiles, that penetrate shields and just a couple of those can finish most ships. So my bet was on Gunship, that doesn’t have shields anyway, and plenty of hull. Front shield also helps negate some of these. Still, you need a lot of repair items, and a lot of luck. Cruiser regenerates shields quickly, and the missile flies slowly, so a few times it hit the cruiser when its shields were already up again. And you need three pairs of eyes, to watch both the cruiser with its wave of flame attack at the fighters, and their missiles, all at the same time. It’s not a fun mission, I must say.
I also finally figured out what to do on the Ancient Temple map. Turns out you can fly inside the temple and summon the Ancient, or whatever that is. Luckily, on the run I discovered this I was running a Scout with “sniper rifles”, and Okkar can’t chase you there, so you have all the time in the world to chip at this fire blob and hide behind asteroids. It’s ironic that the perk that I’ve got from achieving this task is that those Ancient Depots are shown on the star map.
Another interesting bit from this retrospective on the God Game genre: War for the Overworld and Dungeons 3, two tributes to the Dungeon Keeper games, should actually be quite good.
I also completely missed the fact that Peter Molyneux tried to create another God Game in 2015, Godus, which turned out to be a complete failure in the end.
The game becomes more interesting as you acquire more blueprints. At first it’s the runs are mostly about luck. Then you starting gaining the ability to craft Nano Injectors to preserve your Nano Bots and repair your ship when you need them most.
By now, I completed runs with all the ships, I could say. “Could say”, because once you collect all 8 DNA samples the corrupt admiral appears in a cruiser, which is impenetrable for your weapons, and you need to launch missiles from a silo at it.
As I mentioned, Gunship doesn’t have regenerative shields at all. But it does have an impenetrable shield at the front, that can be activated once in a while. Combined with a turret and some drones, that makes Gunship quite formidable. Managed to do a couple of successful runs with it.
One detail that enormously impressed me is that when you destroy a frigate, it doesn’t simply evaporates. It turns into a hulk, that you need to navigate in order to get some of the loot trapped inside.
The approach this game has for perks is… interesting. There are stations you can find that hold perks. But in order to open the door to the station, you need Access Key, that randomly drops from some enemies. And once you’ve got it, you also need to guess behind which of the two doors the perk is. The second door usually just holds bunch of powerful weapons, but nothing persisting.
On the 16th attempt, I even managed to reach my destination, with the Scout, no less. The main struggle was with a frigate that blocked my path at one point. With it, you cannot jump out of the sector.
Luckily, I had ARC-9000, which is Everspace’s version of BFG.
But even with that, I just wasn’t putting enough damage. But I had lots of resources onboard. So in a very sci-fi manner, I started producing rockets to finish off the frigate.
Storywise, a human admiral planned to set up a false-flag operation, and the original Adam was forced into cooperation by being poisoned. He escaped, kicked off a clone production, and put himself into cryostasis, in hopes to switch bodies with one of the clones that would reach the lab. But even you as the cloned that reached it is flawed. So now you need to collect DNA pieces to prolong your lifespan.
A solid excuse for a few more runs, I’d say.
I really respect space sims that get anything besides fighters/interceptors right. Unlocked the Gunship, and it is actually quite different from the Interceptor you start with, which is great.
The turret is not always active, you need to activate it when enemies get close, but is still very helpful, as are the drones you can emit. The downside is that you don’t have regenerative shields at all. So any damage you need to repair yourself.
Then I unlocked the Scout. At first I couldn’t understand how such a flimsy craft could be effective. But the more appropriate name for it should be “sniper”. As it is equipped by default with a weapon with twice the range of most of the enemies. And it’s the only craft that has stealth ability. So you can snipe, run away, and repeat.
The downside is the time. You’re bein chased, so after a few minutes the enemy fleet usually teleports into the sector, forcing you to escape to the next one.
Categories
Chernobylite
Completed Chernobylite.
Storywise, Tatyana, the woman in the red dress that Igor looks for, got kidnapped by KGB for being anti-communist. It’s not clear if she really was a traitor, or if it was just Boris ploy for Tatyana refusing him. Then KGB discover that she’s pregnant with a special child, and grow the child in a lab until he escapes.
Boris goes on to experiment on himself, his face gets scared, and he becomes the Black Stalker.
Chernobylite is a multidemnsional organism. When traveling through portals, people travel through its “veins”. And zombies-Shadows are the white blood cells.
It’s a bit annoying getting to the best ending, as the choices you need to make are very particular and not very obvious. For one, you need to interrogate Kozlov, any other way of disposing of him, and there are many, including a sniper rifle, will not give you all the clues you need. And you need to let the little kid out of his cell, not keep him there “to be safe”. The only way to know about that, is to play the mission multiple times, as bad outcomes give you clues to what you’ve been missing.
The final plot twist is good. Black Stalker is not Boris. He’s Igor. Then who you are? You’re Igor’s son, implanted with his memories. Brings everything together nicely.
The game is definitely not for everyone, and I’m glad that I set the crafting bit to “easy”. But still, very glad that I found it, as I enjoyed it far more than I expected.
Categories
Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer
This weekend Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer was free, so I gave it a try.
It’s like Modern Warfare 2.5. Few of the maps are the same I played last year. And funnily enough, the arsenal I unlocked last year, because there was some double-XP promo in Modern Warfare 2, is still there. So I dominated with the fully upgraded RAAL.
I found that I didn’t enjoy it, though. Felt very mechanical.
A cross between arcade space sim and roguelite. Every time you die, you get to spend all your hard earned cash on perks or new ships. And then start from the beginning.
Unlike some other space sims, you don’t need to manage your hull space much.
What you do need to manage is your fuel for hyperspace jumps. And I got stuck on a few runs without it. You can still perform a jump, but it will damage your ship internal systems, and repairing them is super expensive.
One of the most impressive features is that ability to explore asteroids and ship derelicts from the inside. You don’t usually get that, but here it even works pretty well.
The approach to quests is interesting. You meet a few characters, each with their own quest line, not just a single task. But the problem is, some of the rewards don’t persist between runs. Like the smuggler that asks you to bust an Outlaws base, and when you do, grant you a bunch of upgraded weapons. But I died shortly thereafter, loosing all of that.
Categories
Chernobylite
I knew this game will get me, but it still got me. On the 10th day, you die, no matter what you do. You start your day by dying. But this just brings you to the Fractal Memory. And here’s where the crazy stuff starts. The choices that you’ve made, that I was wondering about: not only they are all presented to you, you can also change any of them, if you have enough of chernobylite. This is basically flipping anything you know about making choices, and reminds me of Zero Escape series on 3DS, which I’m very fond of.
While the initial set of weapons is pretty standard: revolver, shotgun, AK, the authors went quite inventive with the railgun. First, one of the upgrades let it generate ammo. Infinite ammo for railgun! Who’d want to pick up crossbow bolts if you can have infinite ammo instead?
There’s a perk that allows you to see enemies. But I only got it on my second week. Another upgrade for railgun lets it shoot through walls. So, if you really want to, you can spot enemies through walls, and shoot them indefinitely until they die. Neat.