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