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

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