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