Assassins Creed Odyssey; fun but not an AC game

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a game in the lengthy Assassin's Creed franchise and was released in 2018. AC Odyssey got a good reception with many people saying that it is a much better game than the previous, Assassin's Creed Origins, as if that was a difficult task to accomplish. 

In the timeline, AC Odyssey is set in ancient Greece, way before Assassin's Creed Origins happens and way before the first assassins came to be. Now you might wonder, how are we playing as an assassin if there were no assassins. The answer is simple: we are not. In AC Odyssey you play as a mercenary who travels around ancient Greece looking for her (or his) lost family and who fights on both sides in a war between Sparta and Athens. During her travels the mercenary comes across a secret order that controls pretty much everything in Greece and some old ruins. These ruins that you get to visit a few times every 10 hours of gameplay are the only real connection to the Assassin's Creed story-line which they don't really progress in any meaningful way. So it is safe to say that when it comes to Assassin's Creed and the story of the Assassins, Odyssey is more like a spin-off rather than a proper installment of the series. 

And yet the game is actually so much better than Origins. Whereas Origins was a poor combination of a generic Ubisoft open world game and an Assassin's Creed game, Odyssey has completely abandoned the Assassin's Creed part of the game and what we are left is yet another Ubisoft game following the same open world format. Now this doesn't make it a bad game, on the contrary, as a game AC Odyssey is pretty good. It uses a working formula and it shows, if you are looking for another open world adventure, this might be the game for you but if you are looking for an Assassin's Creed game, there is nothing here for you. As mentioned before the only mentions to Assassin's Creed are in the name and the fact that you can explore a few precursor ruins. 

Now at the risk of contradicting myself, you do get to play as a modern day Assassin called Leila. Yes the same Leila that was introduced in Origins. The good thing is that they have kept with the same modern day character and hopefully they can turn it into something as great as we had in the early AC games. However, so far there is next to no story, no progression nothing new that Odyssey really offers on that front. So yes, that is another mention to the Assassins, but not a significant one as it really offers no progression to any direction. 

Back to ancient Greece, if the game is actually pretty good what makes it so good? Well what makes any open world adventure good? Personally I would say that it's the freedom to do anything anywhere in the world and travel across the huge map completely freely. AC Odyssey doesn't accomplish this in the best way possible as you can only travel freely after you are max level and that would only happen after 70+ hours of gaming. The good thing is that even the lower level areas are so large that you won't run out of places to explore anytime soon. The funny thing is that not only for an Assassin's creed game, but also for an Ubisoft open world game, locking areas behind dozens of hours of grind is not a good thing. Some other Ubisoft games do have this mechanic but it still doesn't make it a good thing. It's just a lazy way of locking areas out of the reach of the player for the time being. 

And Unfortunately higher level areas aren't the only thing thing locked behind a level requirement, the actual story is too. Well not completely locked but you won't be able to complete them if you are too many levels behind. There are three main stories in the game and all of them are restricted behind hours of grinding and leveling. And isn't that just what every story driven game needs? An hour of mindless grind between every story mission so that you have no chance of fluidly following the story from beginning to the end. This means that to finish the main main story of the game that is probably not much longer than 10 hours in total, it will take you at least 50 hours of grind in between. But the reward is well worth it [spoiler alert]. The magnificent climax of the game, after fighting in a war that's torn the Greek world apart and after uncovering the dealings of a secret cult, you get to have dinner with your family. Yes, the main main story ends in you having dinner with your family. There is no real resolution to anything that is going on in the world, just dinner. Now of course there are two other main stories, but what do those matter? This was supposed to be the main main story.

[spoilers end]

Well as it turns out after you complete the main main story you still need to finish the other two main stories to get a satisfying end to the game. The other two main stories that are quite closely intertwined with the main main story and wouldn't really makes sense without the others. Then why not just have them all be a part of the one same story and have a satisfying story from start to finish and let players play that story at their own pace, because that's something that would make sense, right? But I guess that would just make a too short of game and make people feel like they aren't getting enough hours out of the game, but who knows really. 

In conclusion: if you want GTA ancient Greece where you can just fuck around and grind for dozens for hours and occasionally do some quests to strangers then this is the game for you. If you want an Assassin's Creed game, or a story driven game where you can blast through an interesting story and then move on to the next game, stay away from this one. It's a generic Ubisoft open world bash that I would rate much higher if it didn't have "Assassin's Creed" in the title because now I just feel like I've been tricked and thus I will only give it a 5/10

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

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

World of Warcraft classic

Here's an other old one that's getting a translation. Even though it's in a way 16 years old, it is now also a year old. This is a game that was originally released in 2004 and after a huge amount of updates and expansions has changed quite a bit. The version that World of Warcraft (WoW) classic is on is from 2006, so just a little bit before The Burning Crusade expansion. 

The story

The story in the original WoW is a lot more simple than it is compared to a lot of it's later expansions. We have seen a lot of expansions where the whole expansions is focused on a single story and later on we've had stories that span expansions. Originally there was no real big story arc that you work your way through but there is still a backstory to this world (of warcraft). The main story is a battle between the two factions, alliance and the horde. Even though this doesn't much show in a grand story line, it does still show in some areas and in pvp. The addition of actual storylines I think is good because it can keep me interested much better than classic. 

Gameplay

In classic you can clearly see that it was originally released in 2004. Even though the gameplay can be quite boring at times, it still brings out challenges that are difficult to find in a game these days. This includes quality of life issues that make the game harder to play, but also just the difficulty of combat where you can't just run though zones like these days. And since this is a patch from 2006 that is being played, it means that the developer had 2 years to fix on some of these quality of life and even balance issues but it took many more years since those issues were addressed, a lot longer than it took a lot of addon makers. 

The Audio Design

Is one of the best things in this game and compared to a lot of other games. The orchestral music that plays from time to time is a beautiful thing that you could listen to forever.

Open world

The world in this game is called Azeroth and it is open. You have the chance to explore the continents of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms and both of those places have a lot more smaller zones to conquer. The world takes a long time to fully explore, especially when you can only get a mount when you are level 40 (when the max level is 60) and even then you probably can't afford it right away. Thus a lot of the exploring is done on foot which can get quite boring when you have to travel to the other side of the continent to meet an NPC who might not even want to meet you. A bunch of people had said that the world seems larger without a mount and not being able to freely fly around, unlike in later expansions, but sometimes I just don't have to time to spend all day walking to the next zone. Later expansions have brought a lot of solutions to these issues and not everyone has liked those solutions but personally I feel like life is much more enjoyable the faster travelling to somewhere is. This is also true in real life. 

The review

Even though I did not play WoW originally and only started during the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, I still felt a little nostalgic. The game has changed so much since those days and being able to go back to places that have been completely changed since felt great. Playing the retail version of the game is much smoother than compared to classic but it also feels less rewarding. Maybe it has to do with the amount of content. When in retail you achieve something it feels like you are no closer to your goal but in classic, even finally getting that first mount felt so rewarding. I kind of hope that Blizzard will take classic in the same direction as Jagex has taken Old school runescape, or at least add those quality of life additions that we have seen in later expansions, while still keeping the gameplay of classic as it is. 

Even though I enjoyed classic, it wasn't as smooth going as retail and a lot of other games are these days. 7/10

Kingdom Hearts 3

Kingdom Hearts 3 is a game that was released in January of 2019 and it is one that the fans, myself included, had waited for a very long time. And after such a long wait, as the last official release, Kingdom Hearts 2, was released in 2005,  I have to say I was a little bit disappointed. The story follows a boy names Sora in countless Disney worlds that he and his friends Donald and Goofy are trying to save. Now this is something that I already wrote about in Finnish a year ago but it is now a much more better fit since it's actually a game from last year. This will be more or less just a translation of the original one but I will try to still keep it fresh. 

The Story

The story of the Kingdom Hearts (KH) franchise is one of the most complicated ones that there is out there so I am not going to get into details but I'm still going to try my best to make sense of it all here. The first two parts of the KH franchise were quite well connected to each other. Even when there were spin-offs between them, the story was still told quite well in KH2 where it was told that Sora had gone on an adventure and lost his memory in-between and is trying to regain them and understand what is going on. Between KH2 and KH3 there has also been some spin-offs, but it wasn't explained that well as to what had happened before, only in the form of flashbacks at some point of the KH3 story and starting of the game you are quite clueless. To properly understand what had happened prior you would need to play KH 3D on nintendo 3DS. I did play it but not enough to actually get to any of the story stuff that would be needed for this game. I mostly enjoyed the main releases of the franchise but it was quite difficult since right from the beginning all I was told that I need to regain my strength, again. 

The story of the game itself isn't that good either and this is a game that is supposed to be very story based. At times the story does not seem to progress at all and for certain characters it seems like it is going backwards. In previous games the travelling between different Disney worlds had been tied into the overall game quite well but not in this one. All that is said is that you need to gather your strength so go out there. I did some research beforehand to see what the stories of these new worlds were like and when comparing to the game, worlds like that of "Tangled" the story was almost identical compared to the movie and had nothing to do with the overall story of Kingdom Hearts. It is also said that this would be the last game of the series where Sora is the main character which would be such a shame since KH3 did offer an ending to the story but not really closure. 

I am aware that there is a new game that has since been released but I am unaware of that game affects the story, since KH3 left such a bad taste in my mouth that I had no interest in the new one. 

Gameplay

The playability of KH3 was quite good. The combat was for the most part quite smooth. KH3 took a lot of the mechanics that had been in previous games and made them better. Previous games had quite a few of different ways of getting through different levels, KH3 brought all of the together and enhanced them. The maps were also a lot more open. In previous games the worlds were divided into a lot of smaller areas whereas in KH3 the worlds were almost one continuous level. This might also be thanks to the advances in technology. The playstation 2 probably wouldn't have been able to handle all those big worlds as one but the playstation 4 definitely could. The travel between the worlds was also opened up a lot. Whereas in previous games you would fly a linear map, almost like a rail shooter, in this one you have there large areas of space where you can fly wherever you want and have lot more to do rather than just travelling to the next world. 

Open World

As I already mentioned the worlds have been opened up a lot. The maps have always been quite linear with the possibility to always go back to do something you had missed and this is still true but the feel of the maps is much more open. The addition of the open world space is an interesting one but it felt like it didn't really bring much more to the game. It felt a little bit like it only added some more collectibles, this is a good way to make the game longer to complete 100% but also a little bit lazy one. There were also challenges in the space part but I didn't really get into them enough to know what they were truly like. 

Comparison to the previous one

I feel like this review has been nothing but this so far so lets keep this short. Technically speaking it is a lot better than previous ones but that is to be expected when comparing a PS4 game to a PS2 game. As for the Kingdom hearts part, a lot of things had been improved upon, but the story definitely was not one of them. Then again in the first two games the story was still quite simple, whereas in this one, after all the spin-offs the story has gotten so complicated that only few can understand it. 

The review

After a wait of 14 years the expectations were big but this game didn't really deliver. Even though beating enemies is fun and maybe even the most fun it has ever been in a Kingdom Hearts game, it felt like it was completely without meaning. 14 years would be more than enough to add to game more than just more collectibles and an open world but apparently not.

as previously mentioned, only one part of the game can't save it completely 6/10

My Time at Portia

 My Time at Portia is game that was originally released in 2018. This game was the result of a successful kickstarter campaign, as far as I know. In the game you move to a cozy little town of Portia where you manage a workshop where you can build all sorts of different items, either to the different people of Portia in the form of commissions or to the town as a part of larger projects. The game is still receiving new content so you won't run out of things to do.

Story

The story starts of as you move to Portia to the old workshop your father, who you haven't seen in a long time, left you. The story then progresses as you open up new areas in the form of different projects that the major set up since he wants to develop Portia to be the center of all of the free cities. The game is set in a sort of post apocalyptic world but it isn't anything you would see in a Fallout game, rather it is after the world has cleared out of all of the nasty things and is again very pleasant and people are re-settling it. This means that there are a lot of "old world" artifacts to discover, one of them being an AI called the all source, which the latter half of the story is more focused on. 

Gameplay

The core gameplay is very simple but also very addictive. You manage a workshop and you create different items that the town or the citizens need. Either you can directly create these on a worktable, if you have all the materials required, or on a more complex building platform that often requires parts created by some of your other machines such as the sawmill or the rolling machine. To acquire these required materials you need to either mine for them in old ruins, as is the case for most ores or old world items such as a circuit board. Other main way to acquire materials is to cut down trees that are all around the world. You can also do some farming to gather some resources, but as your workshop has quite limited space for different buildings or farm plots it really is easier to just kill neutral or hostile animals for animal goods. Lastly you can buy some materials but this is not recommended as it will cost you money, and you will be needing a lot of that as the game progresses. So most of your days will be either collecting materials, or crafting. It can be quite boring at states but later on a lot of these processes will be possible to automate to a degree. 

Another gameplay aspect is relationships with different people. You can do quests for people, or gift them items you have made, or just any old junk to try and increase your reputation with them. Increasing reputation gives a variety of different bonuses depending on the people you increase it with. The end game being able to find a suitable husband or a wife that you can marry and move in with you. 

And this game also has a lot of excitement in the form of combat. You will encounter a lot of different enemies in the different old world places that you visit and at the end of them usually a boss fight. The bosses can be quite hard to kill if your gear isn't up to date, or even with better equipment but it is quite easy to learn the different patterns that the bosses attack in with some exceptions. 

Open world

The world of Portia is quite beautiful but on the design front there have been made a few mistakes on this part. As the story progresses, the world also opens more and more. Travelling it can be quite slow even with a mount. Very early in the game you unlock the option to fast travel but this takes in game time from your already short days. Some issues I found was being able to access an area that I had not yet unlocked, but unlocked a different area that let me access this "locked" area. This would have not been a huge problem if there was another way out of this place but the walls to this "still locked" area were full of invisible walls and I took my time to finally get out of there. Another issue I had with invisible walls was in the late game where I unlocked a certain type of travel and encountered invisible walls in places that had no reason to have them.

Comparison to previous one

There is no previous game in this franchise but there are is another game coming after this called "my time at sandrock". Sandrock being another city set in the same universe and I can't wait to get my hands on that one.

The review

This game is one of the best ones that I have played recently. For two weeks I did nothing else but play this game and after 70+ hours I finally completed the main story. For what it costs, this game is absolutely worth it, and it has much more content beyond that 70+ hours. The only reason I had to uninstall after the main story was because it had completely swallowed up my life and I have other things to do as well. If it wasn't for the invisible walls and minor bugs I would have given this game a solid ten but for now it is a 9/10

Assassin's creed Origins

 Assassins Creed (AC) Origins is a game that was released in 2017 and was said to be a breath of fresh air to the franchise, I'm really not quite sure. I have also heard that the game that comes after this one, Odyssey, is like this one but much better, which I don't think would be too difficult to achieve.

Story

The story of this game is quite similar to other AC games but this being the "origins" the assassins are not yet fighting for the common good but rather for their own end, and during their own quest they find a greater purpose. The setting for the story, ancient Egypt, is very interesting and is something that has been mentioned in interviews a long time ago. As for true AC fashion, the game features some known historical figures, such as Cleopatra, who is one of the main characters in the story. 

In short I guess I could say that the story is pretty good, but it is missing a lot of the "origins" that, I don't know those were ever promised, but it is the name of the game so one would assume it would be about that. There is more about the assassins and their creed at the end of the game but this would have been a perfect opportunity to bring back the similar style recruiting that we saw in "AC Brotherhood". That was the only thing I wanted from this game and it did not deliver.

Gameplay

From the gameplay aspect we can see that whole engine, or the whole base for this game has been revamped. All the gameplay features, more or less, worked the same way in previous AC games. In this one nothing worked quite liked they used to. This is probably one of the best changes they made for this game since I don't remember seeing any bugs or glitches in this game, compared to previous AC games glitches almost seemed like a rule rather than an exception. 

The biggest issue I had with this game gameplay wise was the level system. It would not have been such an issue if the story missions were implemented more like previous games where you had to all the missions in order. Especially for people like me who like to play these games in a way that I first go through the story and if I liked the game I would go back and do the rest. This game did not allow that and it made me mad as all hell. See the problem is that there are very few actual "main story missions" and after each one of those missions you need to have gained several levels if you want to have any chance of completing that next mission. I got really angry at the game because instead of letting me play through the story, how I like it, it forced me to do other activities on the side so that at some point I could progress on the story.

One of the ways to gain levels in this game, aside from main story missions, are side missions. These are a really weird bunch, because you do not need to do these if you want to gain enough levels to progress in the game. Side missions are the fastest way, as far as I know, but they are all optional, so naturally I skipped bunch of them and only did enough of them to be high enough level to progress the main story. This again isn't even the worst issue, the worst issue is that a lot of those side quests that I did do, felt like important bits of the main story, not all of them, but most of them. So what they basically have done is, made all these missions that are part of the story, then make some of them main missions and some of them side missions. This might very well be what they did if they stared to build this game in the similar format as all the previous one, and they really should have released the missions as all being main missions because this format just did not do it for me. 

Open world

The world in this one is very interesting. You obviously know what the world is based the fact that it is set in ancient Egypt, but you need to unlock a lot of the map to actually realize what is what and where everything actually is. A big portion of the map is also, I don't know, because I did not discover maybe third of the map in my playthrough. The areas that I never went to, were too high lever for me after I had finished with the main story, and leveling up to that point had been such a pain in the ass that I did not want to do it anymore and just uninstalled the game. So a good portion of the worlds is unknown to me but the part hat I did discover fit very well into the theme of the game. 

Comparison to the previous one

The previous being AC syndicate, I definitely enjoyed syndicate a lot more. Syndicate gave me what it promised, an AC experience in Victorian England and even with all of it bugs, it was still enjoyable. Origins promised me an AC game in ancient Egypt, I made the assumption that it would also be an origins story to the assassins. It sort of was and origins story, just not very good one, and It didn't much feel like an AC game either, other than the fact that you could climb buildings and assassinate people.

The review

This was the worst AC game I have ever played, people are saying odyssey is even better and I don't doubt them one bit because it would actually quite impressive if they managed to make a worse one than this. The new engine and the setting of ancient Egypt are the only saving graces of this game. 3/10