Just Cause 4: oh how the mighty have fallen

Just Cause 4 is an open-world action shooter that was released in 2018 with mediocre reviews. Just Cause 4 (JC4) is the fourth installment of the franchise which realistically peaked with Just Cause 2 in 2010. 

The game takes place on yet another island where Rico has to overthrow the dictator of that small island nation, and just like in the other ones, said dictator has some sort of weapon of mass destruction that needs to be dealt with. In JC4 that weapon is a device that controls weather and the real aim of the game is to destroy said weapon and after that get rid of the dictator. There are also some mentions of Rico's father who apparently helped build that weather controlling device. And that in all its simplicity is the story. There is very little of note about the story other that what was said as there is very little content in the game to begin with. 

How the game actually progresses is not any better. To destroy the weather controlling device, called Illapa, the player needs to destroy 3 different cores that the device has that control different aspects of the weather like wind, rain etc. And to get access to those 3 different core you need to clear different zones. The entire map is divided to 30+ zones that need to be cleared to gain access to the weather cores in the middle of those areas. Each zone has a different mission to complete to gain control of said zone. The problem with that is that there is only ~5 different types of missions so what you end up doing is the same missions over and over again just in different locations. The cores itself have their specific missions to destroy them and some setup beforehand but that is very little to distract from the tedious grind that taking over the island is. 

And that is not even the worst part, as the game is so simplistic, it doesn't take forever to grind through it. The main issue is that the game feels like the developers actually removed a lot of features compared to the previous games. Just Cause 3 had so many interesting and cool gadgets compared to Just Cause 2 but those have pretty much been taken away except for the wingsuit. The shooting mechanics in the game feels very bare bones just like the rest of the game. 

All in all Just cause 4 just feels like the devs just needed to make something and they rushed this featureless product out ASAP, or what this really is is just a demo for how the Just Cause mobile will work since it felt a lot more like a mobile game than a proper game and for that reason it will only get a 4/10

Kingdom Come: Deliverance; a diamond but not perfectly polished

Kingdom come deliverance is and Action-Adventure RPG. It was released in 2018 and it had quite good reception even though people were saying that it was riddled with bugs. Personally I didn't encounter any actual bugs but I do agree with the fact that this is an amazing game. 

The overarching story of Kingdom Come seems like a bit of a basic one, with the main motivation of the main character being revenge. You play the role of Henry, the blacksmiths son who lives a simple life but yearns for adventure and soon gets what he wan'ts but no in a way that anyone would want. The village you are from gets attacked and your parents get killed and you want to avenge them. The story does evolve from simple revenge to helping save the country from a foreign invasion, which again is nothing new but it does help with the evolution of Henry's talents as they are the best aspect of the game. Even tho the story has some, more or less, unsurprising twists, it is well built to evolve Henry from a simple townsfolk to a proper knight. 

And that is arguably the best part of the game. How brilliantly the increase in different skills is executed. In Kingdom Come when you level a skill it doesn't just give you a slightly higher number, although that is also a part of it, it actually makes Henry better at it. The best explanation of this is how combat becomes more complex. In the early game Henry knows how to swing his sword and that's about it but as the fighting skills increases he actually learns how to block, how to parry, how to do different combos to break the enemy, and those become easier to execute as you level up and also when you as a player learn to use them properly. 

Another great example of leveling skills is alchemy. Alchemy in the game is somewhat complex as you have to make sure you use all the correct ingredients down to the base, you need to add them all in the correct order and make sure you warm and cool the potion the right amount which can be quite difficult for a first timer. With this skill again you become better at it as a player and it is easier to create potions, but also as Henry levels up in alchemy, it is easier for him to succeed in creating a potion as even if you make a small unnoticeable mistake, the craft will still succeed compared to if you did that same mistake at lower levels. 

A great example of how alchemy level affects potions and how the outcome of quests can change based on it. There is one quest where you find a village that has been struck by disease and you need to find a cure for it. After some searching you are able to find out what is wrong with the villagers, what kind of cure they need and the recipe for it. At this point you can either try to convince an actual alchemist to craft the potion or craft it yourself. If you craft it yourself there is the possibility of the potion being botched. And when you botch the potion like I did, the game does not tell you "quest failed" or anything like that, what it does is go on as nothing had happened. You can bring the potion to the villagers, they drink it and seem to have been cured. Much later on you will find out that even though the villagers did seem to get better, in the end the potion did now work and they pretty much all died. A sad ending for the village but interesting to see how my actions actually affect the world around me as a I succeed or screw up certain parts. 

Unfortunately, even though the best part about the game are the skills and the combat and how it works, it's not all roses. There were plenty of talk at the launch of the game of buggy it was. Even tho I did not encounter any bugs, I did have a feeling that the game could have been more polished. The combat, even tho fantastic, did sometimes leave me wondering why did I die? It could be that it is just one of the consequences of building a more complex combat system, that it doesn't always work quite as it should. But that leaves a question if such combat system should then be built at all. In this case I believe the answer is yes but it can be very hit or miss. While in this game the combat system was one of the reasons of its success, one could argue that had it been slightly more off, or slightly more buggier it could have broken the game instead. This time it worked but might not be a risk worth taking every time. 

For this game, I need to mention the DLC as well. It is not often that I buy DLC for this type of game but since I got the game for free from Epic and the DLC was one that I really wanted to see in the game I had to buy it. Most of the DLC's seem to be just a separate short story lines that you play as different characters, but the one I was most excited about was building your own village. I read a lot about people complaining that the DLC was boring as they could just purchase everything straight up so it didn't offer much but I did not have the same experience. It could be that those people bought and played that DLC much after completing the main game whereas I bought it when I was still in the middle stages of the game. Perhaps for that reason I had to actually manage the village and make sure everything was going smoothly. The DLC itself was amazing. At one point of the stage you clear an old abandoned village that has been taken over by bandits. After that you are given the opportunity to restore it to what it once was. You need to make sure that the town is making enough money and resources to support itself. You need to go around the region hiring experts like blacksmiths or traders to you village and provide them with the proper tools for the job. And even tho all of that is amazing to play and see the town grow it had one major issue. You could not building all of the buildings. Now I would understand it if you had the option of building hundreds of buildings but that is not the case. A few of the buildings had a choice like building a butchery or bakery. Why can't I build both? Who knows. 

All in all the game was a fantastic play but could have used with some more polishing and patching. Next time I would also like to see a town building or a base of operations be part of the main game. Overall scoring for this game (not counting the DLC) will be almsot a perfect 9/10

Grand Theft Auto Episodes from Liberty City: why didn't I play these earlier???

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City is an open world shooter/adventure, I mean we all know what GTA games are like right? Episodes from Liberty City is basically two different Standalone DLC's for GTA IV and was originally released in 2009. 

And it took me over a decade to get to them. In my defense I wanted to play GTA IV first before getting to the expansions and I had to start over so many times because of losing my saves, thanks to changing PC's and windows live getting removed and whatnot. But in the end, I finally managed to play both of them. (You can find my review of the main game on this blog as well that I posted a few years back.) And thank god I did. The main game was good, a bit dated but good and this was just more of that good, if not even a bit better as it ties in beautifully to the main game.

Episodes from Liberty City is basically two different stories that run simultaneously to the main game in the same city with a few interactions and that is the beauty of it.  If you are afraid of spoilers to over a decade old game, they are coming now. A large portion of GTA IV is about dealing with stolen diamonds and the different factions that want to either own, buy or sell them. In these new episodes we learn even more about them, where they originated from and about the different factions wanting to get a piece of the pie and the best part, play as members of them. Of course the episodes aren't completely about the diamonds as these people that you get play as do have lives too but the diamonds are a big focus. The crescendo of the diamonds saga and the tie-ins between the games is the mission Museum Piece where Niko Bellic want's to sell the diamonds. He does so with a Biker friends of his and is ambushed by a person from a window who wants to steal them. The biker and the person in the window are both the playable characters in these new episodes, all three 'games' meeting in one mission where you get to play as almost all the parties involved just in different playthroughs. End of spoilers.

This is something that is not really made these days anymore and I wish more studios did. Now I'm not really a proponent of DLC's but when they are done like this I just can't stop screaming for more. Of course making DLC that is actually good is not always easy, but actually putting some effort into them goes a long way. These days it feels like there isn't even any proper DLC being made and it's just all just micro transactions, skins and expensive fluff instead. Of course stand-alone DLC has never been a big name in the video game industry and it is absolutely understandable but it is also a shame that DLC disguised as a full game is no longer a thing. DLC's were also not very popular when they were first being introduced to games but after enough good ones, they are something that have been normalized. So in a way you could say that Episodes from Liberty City was a product of its time and one we will probably never see again, unfortunately. 

The game itself plays very well. It had slightly more noticeable bugs than the main game. It is of course possible that these bugs were in the main game as well and has been patched, they just forgot to apply those patches to this one, hard to say. If you did enjoy the main game, you will enjoy these episodes as well, the core gameplay is basically the same as the main game, the only thing that really changes is the thing that Rockstar does best, the stories. 

TL;DR It's basically the same game as GTA IV. The originaly story is expanded with the help of 2 new playable characters. These new stories or Episodes tie in so nicely to the original game and just because I want to see more DLC like this I'm going to give this one a whopping 9/10

Quantum Brake: Good, but short

Quantum break is a single player action adventure game made by Remedy and was released in 2016. As far as I know it wasn't a smash hit like Alan Wake but it still had a pretty good reception and pretty good is what I would call it as well. 

Quantum Break is not a long game, in fact I would go as far as saying that it is not a full game. It took me all of 8 hours to complete the game and based on howlongtobeat you could 100% it by running through it a second time. This gives the game that launched with $60 price tag a whopping 16-20 hours of play time based on how fast you can clear the game and that is not a lot. Similar triple A games usually have a lot more content to keep you busy or much better replayability. And of course if we are talking about pure price per game time ratio there are so many indie games that offer much more for a much less. So purely based on $/h ratio Quantum Break is one of the worst ones out there but this is not to say that it is bad game. 

The story of the game, for example, is very interesting. For a nerd like myself, a story that tries to explain time travel and the issues that come with it is definitely interesting. At this point I am going to have to issue a mild spoiler alert. The approach that quantum break takes with time travel is not necessarily a new one, only the technology that enables it is. The technology that is used is a massive device circular device with a tunnel that let's you walk around it in circles. One direction to go back in time and the other direction to go forwards in time, but only into places in time where the device has been used before or will be used, so travelling to late 1800's to kill baby Hitler is not possible. There are several different approaches to time travel and Quantum Brake explores the quite known version of: whatever was, will be, and going back in time will not change anything as it has already happened. This approach definitely makes sense as the story is all about the big baddie trying to change course of history the player trying to stop them. End of spoilers. So the story of the game is not long, but definitely intereting.

They also did try to increase the replayability of the game by adding different choices to the story to create a different ending. There are several major points in the game where a decision needs to be made that takes the story into a different direction that is followed by a cut-scene of how that decision changes the story. Those choices also affect the game and how it plays throughout the next chapter and by doing a little experiment, it looks like that is the only thing that it changes. I tried choosing different choices in one of the cut-scenes and it looks like they start differently, but the end result is the same. Meaning that the game has an illusion of choice to make you play it again but the result will be the same. Now I will say that this might have been a planned feature that they never managed to implement but then they should have removed it completely. Just giving the illusion in the hopes of stretching the playtime is not a good thing. It will only make the players grow bored of running the same stuff again instead of ending in a high after finishing the game. 

And as the game is so short, it feels more like a tech demo than it does a fully fledged game. It does have some very interesting mechanics that I've not really seen in other games. I'm not saying they are revolutionary or even something completely new but nevertheless they are things that are not commonplace in video games, even 5 years later. One of the more annoying features was how the enemies avoided getting headshot. In single-player shooters like these I usually just run through levels by only using the pistols and headshotting everything as I don't have the hurry of will they headshot me first and I can just take my time aiming. This was not possible in Quantum Break. Every time I tried to aim at an NPC's head, they would lean to one side and then the other whenever I tried to aim at their head. This was a very interesting way of stopping me from doing what I always do, which was annoying but at the same time made the game a bit more challenging which I didn't mind too much. The other interesting feature was how Time worked through levels and how it changed them. It's really nothing new but still interesting to see. How time being stopped and then jerking back into flowing changed levels and how it affected the enemy troops.

TL;DR So overall the game was not very long, but still an interesting play. The story and the game mechanics are very interesting but nothing revolutionary and once you are done with the game I really don't see a reason to return to it. If you can pick the game up from a sale for like $15 or less, definitely do so, otherwise maybe just skip it. Just as a game though I would give it a rating of good, 7/10