The Outer Worlds

 You may have noticed that my recent blogs have been quite short. This is due to the fact that I got really lazy and I have not written those blogs as I finished the games, rather it has been months in between so the games were not in fresh memory as I wrote the blogs. I will try to get less lazy, starting now, and will be writing this blog just after I finished the game. This would also be the first one that I am actually rewriting before publishing since I felt like the first version wasn't good enough.

The Outer Worlds is an open world adventure RPG that was released in 2019 by obsidian entertainment, the same people that made Fallout: New Vegas. The Outer Worlds had a pretty good reception but also some bugs that people weren't too happy about. This is a game that I have been waiting for a very long time since I really liked Fallout new vegas and have been wanting for a bit more modern version of that game. I've been waiting for a good deal on this game, a deal that still hasn't arrived but the deal on Xbox game pass during E3 is something that I did manage to grab for myself and I played the game through that. I did experience quite a few crashes when launching the game but I believe this is mostly due to the Xbox app not being very good and causing those crashes. 

The Game

The game gave me an almost nostalgic feeling. It had pretty much everything that the fallout games used to have. Open world for looting and fighting. Interesting skill system for leveling. bunch of different dialogue options based on skills and more. Only thing lacking in the game was the amount of playable content, something that I will most likely never get through game pass, so unless some time in there future there is a good deal on a GOTY edition that includes all the DLC, all that can be said about this game is that it is very good but awfully lacking in the amount of content. But enough for now about what's not in the game, lets look at the actual game then. 

The skill system in the game is interesting and something that I haven't seen before. This doesn't mean that it has never been done before, it just means that I've never come across a skill tree like this. So basically there are different categories for skills, like social or weapons, and those categories have 3 skills under them. Leveling them up works so that you first level the category, until two of the skills reach 50 and then you level the skills separately. This is an interesting way to make sure that most skills would at least have some sort of foundation and after that if you really want to focus on a certain skill you really have to spend some points on them. Like I said, interesting system, and it seems to work quite well, but I'm not sure if I like it or not. 

The weapons system is also fun and engaging. There are different weapon types, like handguns or long guns, which have their own skills. There are also three different ammo types for different guns but it seemed a bit random as of which ammo goes to which type of gun. I stacked up a lot on ammo but never really had a point after midway through the game where any of my ammo would fall under 1000. This could also just be because of me trying to get through everything without fighting but more on that later. The game also includes different damage types for weapons. The most common one of them is of course physical damage as most guns just shoot bullets and most melee weapons are just swords and such. To me the damage types didn't always make that much sense and I spent almost the entire game trying to learn which type of damage is good against which type of enemy. It was also interesting to see how long it took for me to naturally find a gun that had corrosion damage type, especially when I had to fight mantisaurs from almost the beginning of game, the enemy type that only really takes damage from corrosion weapons. Later on in the game I did find out that it would have been possible a lot earlier for me to modify a gun to have corrosion damage. Modifying gear and weapons was one of  those things that I didn't do much since I was hoping to get a really good gun before I started modifying them, and almost completed the game before even touching the modifying stations. 

There is also an ability that you can use that would slow down time for a short period. This ability was quite similar to VATS in fallout, although I didn't use it much. The combat was easy enough without the need to slow down time. Other things included in the game that I didn't really use were consumables that would boost different stats. Only consumable that I ended up using was the healing one. Science weapons seemed to be a big part of the game as well, but I didn't really touch them. I tried one of them as I received it but it seemed very underwhelming so I didn't even look up the effects of other science weapons that I found. Another problem with even trying to figure out the science weapons was, like I mentioned, that the game was over before I really even started to get the hang of it. 

Most of the game ran quite well though. Some areas included a lot more combat, while other areas where mostly just talking my way through. In fact a big part of the game was just using social skills to get out of trouble. Maybe this is partly my fault since that was the play style that I was trying to skill my dude up for, but even still I was hoping that there would have been a lot more fighting in the game, even if I did use all the dialogue options possible to get out of trouble. Maybe this is also speaks partly to the shortness of the game, since straight  from the beginning you can have high enough skills to speak your way through almost anything. If I ever do play this game again. I might have to roll a dumb brute who will smash first and ask questions later, because at the end, once you got the hang of it, the combat was really fun. 

The Story

The main story of the game is a very interesting one. (spoiler alert) A mad looking scientist has rescued you from an abandoned colony ship where you have been sleeping in a pod for like almost a hundred years or so. You wake up in a new colony for man called Halcyon which is completely ruled by something called the Board. Halcyon is run like a capitalist dystopia where bureaucracy runs wild, people work all day and earn barely enough to survive and the elite who own most of the wealth have their own gated community where they can just do nothing all day. The point of the story is to work either with the scientist and try to free Halcyon or work for the Board and keep suppressing the population even if that means that they will die out due to mismanagement. (end of spoilers)

The main story of the game is really short, only like a few missions long. The entire game is quite short since completing almost all of the side missions that I could find only took me 19 hours or so. For a 60€ game that is not a very good deal. Thank god I didn't pay that much for it. And even though the story was very interesting it does not an excuse for how short it was. There is also the possibility of replaying the game since there are some decisions you can make throughout the game, so maybe playing it twice, each time with a different focus but even then it's not that good of a deal.

The World

Another beautiful part of the game is its world and the environment. Even if the colony of Halcyon is still quite young, it has already got different populated planets, each with their own purpose and culture. Each planet has its unique monsters and wildlife, its unique strengths and problems to be solved. It is absolutely wonderful to travel between the worlds, or it would be if each place had enough content.

I know, I know, here I go again complaining about the shortness of the game, but this problem is a little bit of its own, and also very much tied to the shortness of the game. Each one of these planets have their own areas. Areas that are completely separated from each other. This is a huge part that makes the game feel even shorter than it is. The different areas are so small that you can explore a whole area in a very short amount of time and it would be nice if it wasn't like that. It would be much better if the planets that have different areas would be connected, to make the world feel bigger, and this way it would have made the game longer as well. Maybe by only making me walk longer distances, and as crazy as it might sound that was something that I was missing a bit in this game. Towns were so close to each other that there wasn't enough wilderness to explore and I really would have liked to explore more of the wilderness because that part was a lot of fun and it was very exciting. 

But the world was a wonderful place. After this first game the world is also going to change a lot and I wish that in the second game that seems to be on its way, we can have much bigger areas to explore in a Halcyon that would hopefully be much more developed. 

TL;DR

I truly enjoyed the game a lot and it had a lot of potential to being a straight 10 but for this amount of actual content for a game that costs 60€ I just can't give it that high of a score, not even close. So even if this was a great game, it was so lacking in content that it will only receive an 8/10

Superliminal

 Here is another short blog, not because I got lazy, I'm writing this mere hours after finishing the game, but because the game was really short I finished it in 97 minutes and one of my steam friends has an achievement for finishing it in under an hour.

Superliminal is a game that was released in 2019 and as far as I know it got a pretty good reception and I understand why, it was a good game

The Game

Superliminal is a very simple puzzle game. You manipulate your surroundings, mainly different objects, by changing the perspective. If an item looks big, it is big and vice versa. I've played one other game like this, I believe it was just called perspective or something like that. It was game that you had to download from some random website so it might not be easy to find. This makes for a very interesting puzzle game, the problem was that there was not a lot of it. Different kinds of puzzles run out very quickly and most of the game is about it's story rather than the puzzles. And the story is good, but I wish there was more to actually do or figure out. 

The Story

The story of the game is very interesting. Mainly the point is that you are in some sort of sleep simulation and are trying to change your perspective in life. I'm not going to go too much into it but the story is very good and worth playing, there is even a little life lesson at the end of the game.

The game and the story overall is very portal like. You are first playing through constructed levels and soon you go off the path you are meant to go through and find yourself behind the scenes so to speak. Only thing is that those constructed levels are very few. This makes sense for the story overall but like I mentioned before, I wish there was more of the game and that would have been a perfect spot to elongate the game, by making more of those early levels that are more focused on the puzzles.

TL;DR

Overall the game was a lot of fun but it was way way way too short. There is some sort of speedrun mode as well, I believe, but I don't see much sense in that since this game is mainly about puzzles and story, both of which lose their replayability after the first go. For this reason I can only give this game 7/10

Ratchet & Clank (2016)

Ratchet & Clank is a game that was released in 2016 by Sony interactive, so it was playstation 4 exclusive and it was made by insomniac games just like all the other Ratchet & Clank games. I don't know what kind of reception it had at the time but my personal feelings about it are very mixed. It wasn't a very good game all in all but I still enjoyed it a lot and played through it 2 times in 2 days. 

"Remake"

I have to get this out of the way first. This game isn't really a remake but rather a video game made based on a movie that is based on a video game. The video game that it is originally based on is the original Ratchet & Clank so there are many similarities. Mainly most of the worlds are the same same as the weapons and gadgets. Even when the game was a little bit different for some parts, it did give me a huge rush of nostalgia. 

I would love to see other Ratchet & Clank games, mainly the first 3, to be made in this type of remake, basically the same as the original but modernized. Doubt that it will happen any time soon but it would be lovely. Or just a HD remaster for newer consoles so that the older Ratchet & Clank games are actually playable because I don't have a working PS2 anymore.

Gameplay

The gameplay is very much your usual Ratchet & Clank. You have weapons and gadgets and you use those to kill enemies and solve puzzles. Some gadgets are not in this game however so not all the same puzzles are in the game as in the "original" but the most important one is, which is the hoverboard and the races associated with it. Some of the same Easter eggs are in the game and again some are not. The gameplay is exactly what you would get from a Ratchet & Clank game.

Story/world

This is where the biggest problems of this game are. The problems affect the whole game but is most noticeable in the story/world department. The biggest problem that this game faces is that it was rushed and/or unfinished for some other reasons. As I said the game is very much like the first Ratchet & Clank game, but this one is missing a lot of the worlds that are in the "original", and like I said it also doesn't have some of the gadgets, I'm not sure about the weapons tho. Maybe some of those gadgets would be found on the worlds that were cut or they would only have a function on those worlds. I can't say for sure. 

So the game is missing some worlds but what does this mean for the story? Well for the story it means that it seems to have holes in it. This isn't such a big problem in the early game. I think only one of the early worlds does not appear in this version of the game where you would figure out what chairman Drek is doing. This might have been the plan all along since that part is explained well later. The real holes in the story appear later on in the game. Some characters seem to appear out of nowhere and act as if we've met them before and a lot of things are not explained. This get's worse and worse as the game progresses all the way to the final boss fight which leads me to believe that the game was very rushed, maybe so that they could release it along the movie. 

Even after completing the game and gaining access to insomnia museum you can notice how rushed the game was. In other Ratchet & Clank games the insomnia museum has been a cool place that showed of concept art, cut content, told stories about the development and might even had some surprises. The insomnia museum in this one was literally just the cutscenes of the game but I guess it's hard to show off cut content since you couldn't even finish all that was originally planned. 

TL;DR 

All in all I liked this type of remake of a game and the nostalgia hit it gave me, so it is kind of hard to give it a bad score but the game was just so awfully unfinished that it does not deserve a very good score no matter how well they made the core game. If you don't mind the rushed game with missing content you might really enjoy this one as did I, but I can not justify giving it any higher than 5/10

Watch Dogs 2

 Watch Dogs 2 is a game that was released by Ubisoft in 2016. As far as I remember it had an ok reception. People weren't big fans of the original Watch Dogs so maybe they weren't that interested in the second one either but seemingly since the next Watch Dogs games has gotten a lot more publicity it would make sense that people did enjoy Watch Dogs 2.

Gameplay

I don't know what I could say that I haven't said previously. I mean this is open world Ubisoft adventure so you know exactly what you will be getting mostly the same stuff in other Ubisoft games like Far Cry and Assassins Creed. Maybe someday Ubisoft will make different games actually different and try to brake away from their usual formula. It does work but it gets boring so quickly. 

The only thing that really is different in Watch Dogs is the ability to hack different things like cars, vents, phones, computers or even buildings. The regular hacking where you can freely hack whatever works quite well and is fun to do. When it comes to hacking buildings or networks, that puzzles part of some missions, they sometimes feel like they are broken. In reality tho they just stop giving hints at the most crucial points and it might feel like you are absolutely stuck with no way out. So in short, puzzles are fun and increasingly challenging as they should be but sometimes overly confusing to a point of where I wanted to alt+f4. 

The rest of the game is very much your usual Ubisoft game where you have different guns, that are quite basic but fun enough, tho the combat itself is a bit too punishing IMO. A stealth system that could be a lot of fun but rarely works as it should. And vehicles, that drive. 

The World

The map in this game is pretty much the silicon valley / San Francisco area, which I just figured out by checking that area on maps. The area is quite good replica of the place which I guess is a good thing but also something that I am a not huge fan of. Not because I hate the area or I hate replicas but because that area is mostly water. A lot of that area is water in game as well, or at least that's what it feels like since the water area is so central and big. This again wouldn't be a problem if there was more to do with that water, more boats or something. But you can probably figure out from this that the map and the world was pretty nice since the only bad thing I have to say about it is "waa waa too much water". 

It's hard to say, which came first, the story or the map since they seem to be so well tied together, and the map is very good, but those never are the weak points in Ubisoft games.

The Story

Another part that is never the weak part in Ubisoft games is the story. Now you might ask then what is the weak part? The weak part is the repetitiveness, the copy and paste of Ubisoft formula but this part is not for that, that was earlier. The surprising part about this story is that it had pretty much nothing to do with the first game. Or at least from what I remember, it has been a very long time since I played the first one. In the first game we played as a dude who was just trying to survive and stay hidden from big brother by using his hacking abilities. In this game you still mostly play as just on dude but this story follows a group of hackers who are trying to take down the corrupt big tech companies in the government who are trying to follow every single aspect of peoples lives. The story has many twists and turns. It almost reminded me of the older GTA stories. So yes, very good. 

While the story was a lot of fun I kinda wished it would have been a small bit longer but it's not the end of the world. Also as I've mentioned before, a good story is not enough to make a great game, it does go a long way tho. For that reason, with this game I can only go as high as 7/10

Donut County

Donut county was a game that was released in 2018 and it was made by Ben Esposito. From what I remember there was no big launch but after I heard from it from some smaller sources, it was only good things. 

The Game 

The game itself is a very simple concept, you play as a small hole and your goal is to grow by swallowing bigger and bigger things as you yourself get bigger as well. The game isn't very long but it includes several levels, the only disappointment in that is that I had to start as a very small each level, I would have loved to see the hole get bigger each level to the point where I could have just swallowed the entire planet. Other than that the game was pretty relaxing and I had a lot of fun playing it over the 2-3 hours that it lasted.

The World / The Story

There is also a story in this game. The story is pretty much half of the game on top of the swallowing items with a hole. The story is not anything special but t is something fun to follow as you play through the levels. The story also tells a lot about the world that the game is set in how that works, why the holes happen and how to deal with them.

Very short review for a very short game. For how short the game was I don't think there is any way that it would be worth the full price but for a couple of € or for playing through the xbox game pass it was a nice couple of hours long experience. No more and no less than 8/10

Tom Clancy's The division

Tom Clancy's The Division is a game that was released in 2016 by Ubisoft. As far as I know the reception for the game was a lot of confused faces when content of it was first shown at some E3 but when it was released a lot of people liked it. Some people even play it till this day, even after the second game in the series has already been released. 

The Game

The point of this game is that it is kind of an RPG tactical shooter. And the game does both quite well but personally I've never been a huge fan of shooters that get too tactical. To my surprise, most of the game wasn't too tactical. 

The RPG portion of the game is somewhat simple: you level up, get new skills, get better gear, upgrade your hideout and so on. It's a big part of the progression in the game, since all the different areas have their own level requirements but it's not very complicated and if you know what type of build you are trying to create, then this whole system becomes almost too simple. However, I don't think they should add any, or at least not too many, different systems on top of this one. It would be nice if it was slightly more expansive. 

The tactical shooting part of the game is  more or less just that but again in a very simple fashion. Tactical part of the shooter comes from the fact that you can't really just run and gun through hordes of enemies, unless you are on a low level zone, since they will kill you faster than you can kill them. For this reason, pretty much all of the combat is done from behind cover and if you get unlucky or are horribly outleveled, even the cover isn't enough and you die. The problem with this system is that that's all it is. Stand behind a cover, shoot the enemy, and hope you have enough ammo, or that you don't get swarmed. And that is the game, no matter if you are killing random brutes or killing a boss, that is all the game is. And the bosses are tough as well. One boss fight that I will always remember is where you just run around a buss, shoot the boss in the back, wait for him to turn towards you, run to the other side of the buss, and then shoot him in the back again. This was the whole boss fight since you always have to stay behind cover and there is no real other way to fight. 

As long as you could stay the same level as the are you went into and had good enough gear, the game wasn't all that difficult. But if you were even slightly under prepared, or faced a really strong boss, there is a good chance all you did was die in this game and even if you were prepared and just fighting purple or yellow enemies there was a good chance that they would just run up to you and one shot you. 

The Story

The story in this game feels very generic. I mean it's about a virus that has destroyed a lot of the world, or at least a lot of the Manhattan. Apparently life isn't as bad everywhere and a lot of the Manhattan has been evacuated elsewhere. So a virus that left Manhattan almost abandoned. The only cool thing about this is that the virus was originally transmitted via cash money. 

The player has been sent into Manhattan to, I'm not even anymore to do what, Stabilize the area? Help civilians? Gather more data on the virus? Well those are at least some of the things that the operative, that you are playing, is doing. Helping all of Manhattan by yourself, or possibly as a part of a small squad, if you are into that. I tried to play the game all by myself so I could try and enjoy the story but I really can't remember what it was even about in the end, I certainly didn't enjoy it all that much. The setup is nice, and so is the post apocalyptic Manhattan, but there is a quite a bit of lack on the backstory and even the general direction of the story overall. 

The World

The world is, as I mentioned earlier, Manhattan, or a part of it.  A post apocalyptic Manhattan very there is trash and cars everywhere on the streets and, oh wait that's just Manhattan today. On top of that there is very small amount of people, only a few civilians roam the street. Most of the people are either hiding or scavenging the buildings and most of those people left on Manhattan are different gang members trying to cause harm. The Manhattan is quite nicely built in the game, it's much more compact than it would be in real life but I guess it would need a huge team and a beefy computer for gamers to be able to run 1:1 scale Manhattan in a game like this. The main attractions are there however. At least the ones that are in this slice of Manhattan, as mentioned, it is only a certain part of Manhattan that is in this game. As I've never been to NYC and don't know everything that goes on there I don't really know which part is in this game, or why they decided to only include some of the Manhattan, but I did find times square. 

Anyway, the post apocalyptic Manhattan is very cool place to explore. I just find it very weird how only some of it is included and I would love it if a lot more buildings were open to explore, but I guess you can't have everything.

Overall this game is a fun enough shooter game, it's very grindy and feels more like a past time game more than something that you would heavily invested in, that is, if it wasn't so infuriatingly difficult/bullshit at times.  For this reason I don't think I can give it a higher score than 7/10

Train station renovation

Train Station Renovation is a game that was released in April of 2020, so this time it actually is a last years game. It has got a very good review on steam but AFAIK doesn't have much more on the way of reviews since it wasn't a major release. 

The Game

The game is quite simple, you collect trash, repair, replace and clean the different areas of different train stations. It's a very relaxing game, for the most part, and it was a fun past time for as long as it lasted. There is a somewhat of a progression system in the game that isn't just getting to the next level and for the most part is a lot of fun. The different tools work quite well, the decorating of the trains stations is quite fun, although I wish there was some sort of blueprint tool or autocomplete tool for that part as it can get a bit tedious. That's the good parts of the game, now to the bad part. 

In this game if you complete levels well enough you can get quite a few upgrade points to upgrade the different tools you have at your disposal to do the work needed at the train station. One of those upgradable tools is a scanner that tells you what items need to be fixed or removed around you in a small radius. Leveling up this tool allows you to increase the range of it and how often you can use it. This might seem like fair enough gameplay aspect but in early levels it is sometimes impossible to find those missing bits since the range of the scanner is so small and the cooldown of it is so big that it would take forever to comb the area. Another thing that didn't work that well in the game was recycling. Some trash you could recycle and some you could not, the non-recyclable trash you could put straight on to a larger container that could fit a lot of different items. For the recycling part you could only put the recyclable items into very small recycling containers. This would mean that you would either have to empty them all the time, which cost money, or for some larger items you simply couldn't fit them in and would have to put them with the trash instead. That's a lot of text for quite small problems but I thought they needed to be said.

The World

The levels in the game are well built and are a lot of fun to clean. Some stations are very different than other and include some different problems, almost puzzles, that you have to solve. The problem with those are that sometimes there is very little information on how to complete the problem. Some stations are also quite large and I wish I could ran faster in them since it can get a bit boring just walking around, but it's good that those are included so that not all stations are the same. 

That's about it for this game. It's simple, relaxing, a bit short one, but despite its few problems, didn't have a lot of bugs in it. So for this nice little game I would give an overall of 7/10

Far Cry 4

 Far Cry 4 is an open world game developed by Ubisoft that was released in 2014. As far as I remember Far Cry 4 had a pretty good reception, especially after Far Cry 3 had made the series quite popular. This is obviously the 4th game in the series, but I have only played one of them before, which would be Far Cry 3. 

The Game

The gameplay of Far Cry 4 is very much like most Ubisoft games. (They don't seem to make the effort to put in anything really special into most of their games and make them all very similar.) Travelling in the world is quite simple as there are plenty of different ground and flying vehicles lying around. Gun play works fine and there is almost always the possibility for a stealth approach, as long as you have enough arrows for the bow. Upgrading pretty much anything is done by hunting for animal skins and using those skins to increase capacity for ammo or consumables. 

The game also had a plenty of other collectibles and side missions and outposts to liberate and towers to climb but all in all the gameplay is your usual open world shooter: shoot shit, collect shit and upgrade shit.

The Story

This is the part where things get a bit more interesting. The story of Far Cry 4 is quite interesting, as to be expected after Far Cry 3. There are some things in the story that I have definitely seen before, or maybe I just had a major Deja Vu when playing the game but some things were really predictable. Thankfully, this was only minor things and didn't happen that often, so the overall story still remained interesting and surprising. 

The story also offers two different paths of which to take. As you liberate Kyrat from the awful dictator that is ruling it, you can choose if you want the liberated Kyrat to become more conservative, or more progressive, however, sometimes it feels like actions are taken towards the opposite, to achieve the other. All in all the story was most likely the best part of the game, which is not surprising since there isn't really else really special going on for this game so I guess at least the story has to be good. 

The World

The world of Far Cry 4 is a place called Kyrat, which is clearly supposed to be a parody of Nepal, or some other country in that area since it is very mountainous and clearly has the Himalayas right nearby. The world of Kyrat is quite beautiful and surprisingly accessible, if you don't take into account the part of the story that splits the world in half for the first half of it. Kyrat is a mountainous region with lots of little villages and a lot of forest, all of which are full of life. There are plenty of flying vehicles and and cars laying around the place to make transportation easier. There are animals almost everywhere in this world, but I guess that's what you would need when a third of your game is hunting them. 

All in all the game is pretty allright, even with the bugs that I encountered along the way. Not in anyway is there anything special about the game but if you want an open world adventure then grab this one off a sale since it scores an amazing 7/10

Grand Theft Auto IV

 Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that was released in 2008. It got a pretty good reception as GTA's usually do, they are great games and it still is. But how does it hold up after all this years? Well here is some insight into that.

Gameplay

The gameplay of GTA games is generally good. The controls for PC are not that great for the earlier GTA games but for GTA IV, they work just as good as any shooter from around that time. Generally everything works as it should with some exceptions. The game is fun to play, as you would expect from a GTA and it has everything that a GTA should have. There isn't much to say about it other than the game plays well and there is lot to do, it's good. 

The story

Now this is something that Rockstar, the maker of the game, has always been good at. No matter what the rest of the game is like, the story is always fantastic. With these types of games I rarely dig much into the side missions and other content but playing through the main story line, it was fantastic. Without spoiling too much it has a humble and a reckless beginning, with plenty of twists and turns, full of action and a satisfying but even a little bit of a sad ending. The endings of which there are two but they don't differ that much from each other. A fantastic story, that is to be expected.

Open World

This is something that I've always had a little bit of a problem with, the maps of GTA games, mainly that they are all islands. Now this isn't a problem if you just think about it as a standalone game but when you think about the universe of GTA it does bother me a bit. (There is going to be some shit about other GTA games, if you don't care about that just skip the rest of this paragraph.) The problems that the GTA universe is meant to be a satire of the USA and it has all the major cities, like Miami (vice city), Los Angeles (Los Santos) and New York (Liberty City) but they are usually all on their islands and disconnected from each other. The worst part is the difference between San Andreas and GTAV where they are both basically set in the same city but the surrounding area is different and both are still portrayed as their own islands. San Andreas comes closest to being even a little bit realistic since it has a lot of other cities connected by land and you would think that newer games would have fixed this problem of just being an island as computing power increases but the problem has just gotten worse.

Now to the part of the open world that is actually about this game. The city feels quite alive for such an old game and is also very detailed. It feels a bit off how city is separated into different islands that you can't get into until later in the game, but I guess that's just how games handled unlocking new places back in the day. An easy solution. There is also one of the islands, the last one, that feels off on it's own. I don't know why as it is a vital part of the story and clearly seems to be doing its own thing, just like the other islands, but something about it feels wrong. Other than the world of Liberty City as an open world is a solid experience. 

How does the game hold up?

As this is a quite old game it doesn't always work as it should, especially with the very outdated "games for windows live" thing. Now I know that has been deleted, but I had to mention it as it did still cause me problems even after being deleted. This was maybe the third time that I started game but the first time when I actually finished it. The first two times were when "games for windows live" was still a thing and I lost my save game. It was most likely caused by changing hard drives, but the second time that the same problem happened I blame "games for windows live". I did no changes for my PC but when "games for windows live" was deleted from the game, the save game seemed to disappear as well. So I had to star the game third, or maybe even fourth, time over. 

The second problem I had was how the game ran. Even with having a pretty beefy computer that was built YEARS after the game came out, I still didn't seem to be able to max the graphics out and hold even 60 fps. As it turns out this was a blessing in disguise. In the late game there is a mission, that you cannot finish if your game runs over 30 fps, I believe, since that how the game original ran on consoles, I think. But since the game was still so demanding, all I had to do was to increase the graphics setting so that the game would run at 30 fps. For such an old game it's almost surprising that this was the only problem that I had. 

All in all GTA IV was a very solid experience, as is expected from Rockstar. I would only wish that they had fixed more of the problems that newer PCs bring to the game the same time that they updated it and removed games for windows live. This would total out in score format is 8/10

The Turing Test

the Turing Test is a puzzle game that was released in 2016.  From what I remember it had a pretty good reception and it has been been featuring on the steam front page quite often, at least for me, even though it isn't a huge budget triple A game. 

The Game

The game itself plays very well and I didn't notice any bugs in my playthrough, so safe to say it is quite well done. As is with most, or at least most that I've played, puzzle games do feel a lot like Portal. This isn't always a bad thing since Portal games are great games, and this is a good way approach individual puzzles and how they are set up. But if you are looking for something that is not a Portal type puzzle game then maybe look further. 

The Puzzles

The puzzles also weren't too difficult. Only having to look up for a walkthrough on maybe 1 or 2 puzzles, I could figure them out within a reasonable time. So even if you are a dumb fuck like myself, but enjoy puzzle games, then this is the one for you. If you are a 300 IQ, 4D chess grandmaster, then this game might be too easy for you. 

The Story

The story in this game was a lot of fun too. It's a lot of fun to figure out more about the story, level by level and uncover the twists within the story. There really isn't one bit that isn't too boring, but I guess you would need to enjoy sci-fi even a bit for that effect. The game has 2 different endings as well, that you can choose from, so it isn't anything special, and doesn't really add much to it but I guess it's a nice novelty. I mean you don't have to play through the entire game to get a certain ending, you just choose it at the end and even then it doesn't really account for much. 

There isn't much more to say about the game really since it was a simple game, with a simple design, nothing super special about it but still a very well made game. The game was a bit on the short side of things but then again most puzzle games aren't that long.  Fun little game 100% worth if you find it on sale of any kind. So the relevant score would be 8/10

Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012)

Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012) was a racing game released in 2012 and it was a sort of remake of the original Need for Speed Most Wanted that was released in 2005. The original reception for this game was that it was nominated for several awards. Only god knows how that happened since this was truly a hollow experience. Comparing to the the original Most Wanted, or any Need for Speed game from the playstation 2 era, or even some later Need for Speed games that I've played, this never Most Wanted game had nothing going for it. 

Gameplay

Starting from the top which wasn't the worst thing about the game but surely was not good, is the gameplay. It is very similar to the "newer" Need for Speed games but even bad compared to those when looking at the driving mechanics. The bad thing about the newer games when it comes to driving is that even a small pebble on the road will cause you to crash, this will result in a slowmo crashing sequence that takes a lot of time. Compared to the older ones, if you crash, you lose speed or at worst, spin out and you have to just accelerate again but you can still play. In this one if you are unlucky and you crash a lot, you are essentially just watching you car spin around MOST of the game, instead of driving it. But that's just driving and it's still the one of the best parts of the game.

When it comes to other parts of the game, the game felt like it was stripped naked and left like that. Compared to earlier Need for Speed games you had plenty of races, you had car dealerships, you had your own garage and a car tuning garage or both of them combined but a garage none the less, you had money to manage for buying and upgrading cars. You had an actual story to the game. In this new one all of that is taken away. All you have is a small menu where you can upgrade car or choose another car to go and collect from somewhere in the map, you have a limited amount of races and those races you more or less have to drive again on each new car when you want to get upgrades for it or earn "speed points". Mind you, speed points aren't currency, they are what used to be the bounty in the better Most Wanted game. So basically everything we had in the previous Most Wanted or most previous Need for Speed games are just taken away. The most basic components of a video game are just stripped and nothing added to replace. Even the story is nonexistent. (more on that later) 

And you can always argue that maybe this was meant to be a simulator and not an actual game. Well then if we ignore the fact that the game is called "Need for Speed" a game series that has never been a simulator, then even then it wouldn't be a good game. Remember previously when I said that even driving isn't that good? Well that is the main point of a simulator, a realistic driving, and you don't get that here, you get absolutely nothing. 

Story

Remember back in the playstation 2 era when you had those real life actors playing in proper cutscenes? Well that's no longer a thing. All you have here is a flyover of the city and a narrator saying "your goal is to be the most wanted and you do that by earning speed points and taking down races" or something like that. That's basically the story. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Basic idea behind this paragraph is to say that there isn't one. All the story you get is the title of the game. What else would you need to get from a game that historically has had some beautiful stories within a racing game?

AI

This part is here because the AI seemed off but I don't know if it has always worked like this. It feels like in the older games, if you played well, you could pull off a huge lead and then if you stumbled at some point, you could use that lead to still stay ahead. The system was fair, or at least it felt like it. Compare it to this steaming pile, where the AI usually always stays close. if you screw up a lot, they won't drive too far away, great, easy to catch up again so you don't have to restart. The problem is that it works the other way too, if you drive really well the entire race they will always be on your tail. The problem that his kind of "AI" brings is that it doesn't matter how well you drive most of the race, all you have to do is not screw up in the last quarter of the race or so. Driving well most of the race isn't rewarded and driving poorly most of the race isn't punished, just don't screw up before the finish line. That, to me, does not seem fair. 

Open World

There's not much to say about this, it's a very traditional open world for a Need for Speed game. Of course it is a newer game than the original Most Wanted and other games from that era so the world is much more detailed. But for some reason the world still felt kinda small. I'm not sure if it was, but it felt like it. Not much bad to say about that one. 

This game really was a steaming pile of dung. Even the fact that they named it the same as a previous game and were most likely trying to cash in some nostalgia points couldn't save this game. It was so bad that it did not feel like a Most Wanted game, barely even like a Need for Speed game and thus the low low score of 3/10