Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

@ishaajo840 Thank you for reading and for your kind remarks!

@RogerRoger I don't really have time to read it all right now, but I will later probably. Is it relatively spoiler free? I'm still way behind a lot of people around here. If it is, I'll definitely read it.

I did jump to the end of the review though. It's nice to see that it ended up being so positive for you, being one of the greatest games ever, with the shaky start you had with the game.

@RogerRoger 2 naps, a shower break, a dinner break, and a couple bathroom breaks later and I finished your review...

Seriously though, that was a pretty good write-up. I would say it raised my expectations for the rest of the game even further, but they were already pretty much at the absolute limit, so in the end I just hope the game continues to deliver on those already extremely high expectations.

My biggest issue so far gameplay wise would be the climbing. Games such as the Assassin's Creed Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla and even the Uncharted series have much smoother climbing. I almost feel like it worked better in Zero Dawn, as it doesn't always do what you want it to do, and then adding in having to hit the circle button to jump behind you just makes it all a bit overcomplicated. It doesn't ruin the game obviously, but does add a bit of frustration at times when you struggle to climb a bit or only make it up part of a mountain or whatever and then not be able to climb any higher just because the game says you can't.

Hunting would be another, as you have to kill way too many animals at times just to get one specific thing. You get meat way too often when you should just get the hide, bone, or whatever from whatever animal you have to kill to finish your Job to upgrade something. That was an issue in Zero Dawn as well, so it's a shame they didn't make it any better in Forbidden West.

Thanks. I still am right now. I don't remember exactly how far I am statistically (hours, %, etc.), but I think I'm around Level 25, so I still have A LOT of game left. I'm not complaining at all though of course, as while I have plenty of other games to play too and want to finally play Cyberpunk 2077 afterwards, Horizon Forbidden West is the main reason why I own a PS5. I have a feeling I will enjoy the ending.... whenever that will happen.

No More Heroes (Wii, Switch) - Impressions

After owning the game for over 10 years, I've finally finished No More Heroes 1 on Wii today. Managed to get both the normal and true endings, whereof the latter wasn't as hard to get as I thought.

Personally, this is a huge achievement for me, especially considering how discouraging it was to play this game due to its structure. The gameplay loop is simply awful. You have to do boring side missions like collecting garbage or mowing the lawn in order to earn enough money to unlock the next story mission. There were also assassination missions, but they were basically about killing everyone in an area and then moving on. It just wasn't fun at all and every time it felt like a grind. The developer needed some way to pad out the game since otherwise it would only be like 4-5 hours long (I finished it in 9 hours).

The story missions themselves start out great and they're definitely the highlight of the game as you go through varied levels and at the end, fight an interesting character. The problem here is that each story mission gets gradually worse and worse. At first you have fairly sized levels with different objectives in them, but later on the levels became much simpler and shorter. For example, in one level later in the game you're just walking down this long corridor for a couple of minutes and then you've arrived at the boss. On top of this, there are some difficulty spikes introduced rather early on, which I experienced even though I was playing on the easiest difficulty setting.

The game has quite frankly lazy level design and you could tell they ran out of time over the game's development. They spent so much time creating an open world where there's basically nothing to do in it. They could've just made a world map and have you choose where to go and then you just fast travel there, kinda like in the Persona games. In fact, this is something they did implement in the sequel and that game was so much better than the first one.

Yes, I did play through the second game without playing through the first one back in the day and I remember loving the second game much more. It had no open world but it delivered much better story missions with great level design and excellent boss fights. And instead of doing boring chores to obtain money in order to unlock the next story mission, you play fun 8-bit styled mini-games. In fact, I don't think you even need to play any mini-games in order to unlock story missions. The pacing was simply much improved.

So overall, I didn't like the first No More Heroes. There are some good aspects, such as the fun motion-controlled combat, which works great with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. But the awful gameplay loop and stagnating story missions left a poor taste in my mouth. I would not recommend starting out with this game if you're new to the franchise. Instead, I highly recommend starting with No More Heroes 2, even though it's the sequel. You will miss out on story references, but the first game is simply not worth playing through just to understand the story references. These games focus more on fun gameplay and the story isn't that serious or captivating anyway. So I wouldn't recommend ruining your view of this franchise because of its first entry since the second game delivers a much more satisfying experience.

@RogerRoger Yeah, people tend to speak fondly of games they played a long time ago even though some of them most certainly do not hold up today. Over at Pure Xbox on Game Club, we've been playing through titles like Dante's Inferno and Mirror's Edge. If you ask people who played these games back in the day, they will say that they were great experiences. But as I and other people on Game Club realised, they aren't as good as people say. It's one thing if you played a game back in the day when you were younger and more open to games compared to when you play it today and you're older and more critical. Not to mention that you tend to leave out or forget negative aspects of games you played a long time ago and only remember the positive stuff. I just don't feel like a game like No More Heroes is respecting my time by forcing me to play monotonous mini-games instead of just letting me experience the actual content.

The reason why I wanted to play this game besides crossing it off from my backlog is because I wanted to experience the first two games before diving into the third game on the Switch. There's also a spinoff that I might play, but I mostly want to experience No More Heroes 3, which came out last year on Switch. Apparently that game also has an open world so we'll see if they've improved upon that aspect. The game seems good from what I've seen.

@RogerRoger No problem, and you're fine. If you felt the game was that good, there's no reason to undersell it either.

Other than one or two things maybe, I'm only worrying about upgrading the pouches once to get the trophy for doing so. They've added more animals, but it's still a crapshoot whether you'll get what you need or not. It is less of a need in this game as there seems to be more resources around, especially the medicinal berries.

I'm playing this on Normal like I did with Zero Dawn for my first playthrough. Whenever I play it again, it'll be on Easy like I did with Zero Dawn when I replayed it a few months ago. I remembered being really frustrated by some of the really big machines, so I figured I'd just enjoy brushing up on the story. I'm used to games that used to have trophies for beating the game at different difficulty levels, but unless I missed something while skimming Forbidden West's list without spoiling myself, I didn't see multiple ones for this. Technically I could drop the difficulty to Easy if I end up getting pretty frustrated that it's hurting my enjoyment at some point.

@RogerRoger Fantastic HFW review! It sounds like the experience comes together well in the end, despite some of the aggravating flaws. It's a pity the game suffers yet another slow opening, which was also a flaw with Zero Dawn. And actually really disappointing to hear about the cumbersome controls, which are so important to get right. The real alarm was set off by the mention of pushing crates, though! It brings to mind bad memories of Naughty Dog's deeply boring epic The Last of Us, which padded out a lot of its non-combat gameplay sections with inane busywork like pushing crates around to create crossable paths in environments.

It sounds like the promise of early gameplay videos, which depicted liberating, BotW-style hang-gliding and promised the player would have much more freedom to traverse their environments, wasn't fully realized in this entry.

Despite that, it's good to hear the deeply engaging combat remains fun, and yes, the game must be a visual feast on PS5, which really highlights how silly a lot of the pushback against cross-generation game development is! Based on what I've seen, I can't imagine this game looking much better at all had it been developed as an exclusive. HFW's failings seem fully on the non-technical side of things.

And yes, those screenshots are quite insane to look at. Mixing your photographic eye with one of the most beautiful games ever made certainly makes for some gorgeous pictures.

@LtSarge Ouch! Sorry to see No More Heroes didn't resonate with you at all. It's interesting, because I usually hear people lambast the sequel for its lack of open world elements, but it sounds like this aspect just distracted from the game for you.

Admittedly, the idea of a game forcing you to engage in deliberately tedious busywork like lawn mowing before you can play the actually fun missions does sound like the sort of twisted sense of humor one would expect from this developer, even if it (probably) shouldn't have been inflicted on the player.

I've gone back and played a number of older games that people regard as classics, but they just sort of turn out to suck, and you have to wonder if the people playing them did so at a less discerning age, or if the standards of technological and game design advancement have just made it where some experiences can't really hold up as entertainment experiences over time.

Nice write-up, nonetheless. One day I'm going to finish a game I dislike that much, and have fun verbally lashing it like that.

@Ralizah Thanks! I do think it's a mix of both becoming older and viewing games differently but also advancements in game design. When you ask people nowadays if they prefer long or short games, you tend to hear people answer short games, or at least as short as possible. That's something that was frowned upon a decade ago, i.e. games had to offer dozens of hours of content for them to be worth purchasing. So I think if you look hard enough, you'll probably find more games like No More Heroes from that time that forced you to do unnecessary stuff just to make the game longer. I think the mentality was simply different back then, which is why this was acceptable back in the day. But now it's the opposite, we want as much rich content as possible. That's why people tend to dislike franchises such as Assassin's Creed and praise games like Witcher 3 or Elden Ring for delivering more worthwhile content. I mean, imagine if games like AC: Odyssey or Valhalla came out ten years ago. They'd be praised for offering hundreds of hours of content! But as we saw with the Dying Light 2 marketing, people don't want to spend 500 hours on one game anymore. We simply live in different times where we want our time to be respected, not wasted.

@RogerRoger I actually do think you can buy meat and other animal resources as well now that you mention it. I never really paid that much attention to it since hunting is cheaper, but I suppose I'll go that route if I ever need to.

Ok, thanks. That's what I figured since when I searched for specific difficulty levels on the trophy list online (better than skimming myself), it didn't find anything, but it's still good to get confirmation. We'll see if I ever get frustrated enough to drop the difficulty this time around.

Elden Ring

Platform: PC

Playtime: 82 hours

To be brutally honest, I wasn't excited for Elden Ring at all.

People who know me know that my experiences with From Software's games in the past haven't been terribly positive. I've tried a few of their PS1/PS2 games, and they're almost all about as clunky and aggravating as one could possibly imagine. Enchanted Arms on the Xbox 360, a traditional JRPG they developed, is one of the worst games I've ever played. I bounced right off of Dark Souls back in the day after a few hours. Prior to ER, Bloodborne was the first game of theirs that I played for any significant length of time (30+ hours), but even that turned out to be disappointing for me. So you'll forgive me when I say that Elden Ring, a game that looked like Dark Souls transplanted into an open world, didn't scream MUST PLAY to me.

You play as one of the Tarnished, a being who had lost the grace bestowed upon it by The Greater Will, who has returned to The Lands Between after the Elden Ring is destroyed by the demigod offspring of Queen Marika in an event known as The Shattering. Following this, different offspring took hold of various pieces of the Elden Ring, and it is the player's job to track down and slay these demigods so that they can become the Elden Lord. As in many other From Software games, the identity of your character is fully customizable, even down to the various classes you're able to select from the start.

Elden Ring is an open world game, but not in the traditional Ubisoftian sense where you're progressing through a linear story across a giant map filled with busywork activities to keep you sufficiently distracted. When this released, comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild were made almost immediately. Like Nintendo's industry-shaking classic, this was an open world steeped in mystery, and featured a similarly non-linear structure that would allow the player to complete the game in almost any order. Far moreso than in that game, however, it quickly becomes evident that, while sequence-breaking is possible, the landscapes were designed to facilitate a sense of progression through a series of key dungeons and boss encounters, with oodles of side content covertly packed into the caves, castles, and hillsides of each major region in the game.

The open world aspect of this title is both the best and worst thing about it. Spacing out the game's major dungeons (which are designed very much like areas in From Software's Souls games, and often feature complex, multi-layered design layouts), allowing the player to have a reference for their location at almost all times with the (very useful) in-game map, and the experiential breathing room built in via frequent lulls in action are almost all likely thanks to the shift in focus with this title. From Software has done a bang-up job of transitioning the essentials of Souls game design to an environment that makes it much easier to enjoy. With that said, the world itself is also empty enough that poking around areas can quickly become a chore. Oh, the numerous dungeons and bosses themselves are well-designed, but the world itself is a wasteland littered with mobs of enemies (and the occasional field boss) to kill to pass the time as you hunt around for new dungeon-y areas to plumb.

It could have been much worse, of course. Even FS knew they had to include some new elements to entertain players in the game's down moments, and so they wisely chose to include a crafting system. Thankfully, resource collection in the environments is made as painless as possible, and you'll be able to scoop up stuff from your environments as you ride your horse across the game's landscapes without even needing to stop. The logistics of yanking shrubbery from the ground as you ride a horse at a running pace beggars belief, of course, but it's a great gamey concession to player friendliness, unlike games such as Horizon Zero Dawn and Red Dead Redemption 2 where the developer's seem intent on making every in-game animation play out in full.

Unfortunately, as in most games that feature crafting systems, I didn't actually end up crafting much from the weeds I collected throughout the game. What I did need to craft a lot of was arrows for my bow. Your character fashions arrows from animal bones, which are harvested when you kill docile herbivores in this game. So probably a solid 5 - 6 hours of my total playtime was spent terrorizing the local wildlife. There's something simultaneously amusing and disturbing about riding around on horseback, swiping at the fictional in-game equivalents of sheep, deer, and rabbits as they flee in terror, and eventually winding up with a field strewn with small bodies ripe for harvesting bones from. This sounds gruesome, but between the lack of bloody details and no dedicated animation for picking out the bones, it doesn't end up being too much of a bother for someone who doesn't enjoy such senseless slaughter.

One of the biggest boons to this gameplay cycle is Torrent, the ethereal horse you're able to summon with a ring given to you by an in-game NPC near the beginning. Torrent is indispensible in this game. You'll likely ride him through 90% of the in-game map. You'll also frequently use him for fights against field bosses, because Elden Ring actually really nails the feel of combat on horseback. He's not a realistic video game horse at all, but that's only to the game's benefit: anyone who bothered taming horses in BotW knows that the things, in general, weren't worth bothering with. But torrent is fantastic: he'll always go where you direct him to go, can stop and turn on a dime, and can even double-jump! This jumping is so useful in some boss encounters. When a giant is swinging a sword as long as a truck at me, I want to be able to quickly double-jump over it, realism be damned!

And it's not just horseback combat that's fun. Fighting in general in this game is a blast, which is a good thing, because, like FS' other soulslikes, this game is 90% pure combat. The tight, Monster Hunter-esque combat system is largely similar to how it was in Dark Souls, of course, but some new additions really vary up the flow of your encounters. A stagger meter, ostensibly borrowed in part from FS' Souls spinoff title Sekiro, encourages players to use heavy attacks and jumping attacks to reduce the poise of their enemy. Reduce it enough, and you'll throw them off-guard for a moment, allowing you a precious few seconds to get some free damage in. It's a small addition, but it makes the moment-to-moment of combat far more diverse and engaging, versus something like Bloodborne, where I found committing to heavy attacks was almost never worth the time and stamina commitment versus just poking enemies to death with light attacks.

Another great addition is the guard counter. The usual parry mechanic is here as well, which allows you to knock away attacks with hyper-specific timing, but the timing windows on parrying manages to be a massive pain in the butt. Guard counters are much more forgiving, however. When you have a shield equipped, if you press the right trigger immediately after guarding against an attack, you'll be able to unleash a powerful counter against your opponent. This felt almost necessary against certain enemies that liked to turtle behind heavy armor and poke at you with spears and such.

Weapon skills are also a lot of fun. Like the special abilities in Monster Hunter Generations/Monster Hunter Rise, these allow you to use powerful abilities that often turn the tides of combat in your favor. These can be anything from combat skills that draw from your mana pool to deliver staggering strikes to buffs or even AoE attacks, which can be very helpful with mobs. Weapon skills can be customized with Ashes of War, which allow for a massive amount of variation in weapon builds in this game. Worth mentioning is that your weapon skills seem intimately connected with a weapon's affinity in this game, which affects how damage scales with certain stats.

Elden Ring, being a From Software soulslike title, is of course awash in a sense of mystery, but far less than I was expecting given my experience with Bloodborne and Dark Souls. The game helpfully and clearly explains what most items do. I always had a fairly good idea of what my stats affected as well. This even stretches to the narrative: while it continues the tradition of allowing players to piece together the backstory of the world and characters you encounter via dialogue and optional lore, I found the characters themselves to be just well-developed and straight-spoken enough that I found myself actually wanting to talk to them. You still have plenty of cryptic jabbering filled with Proper Nouns, of course, but not to the detriment of the player's experience of the game. I was also surprised by the number of NPCs I encountered throughout the game. It still pales in comparison to something like The Witcher 3 or Skyrim, obviously, but it feels more well-developed in this regard than previous From Software titles I've played. The setup is also self-explanatory and lends itself well to a minimalistic narrative approach.

With that said, Elden Ring still has the problem of quest-lines linked to certain important NPCs requiring leaps in logic to finish. It's not a huge deal, but quest design could stand to be dramatically improved.

The elephant in the room when it comes to Elden Ring since launch has, unfortunately, been its technical performance. This isn't a Cyberpunk 2077-esque mess, of course, but despite not being a technical stunner, the game struggles to run smoothly on almost any platform you play it on. Although, I will say, after hearing about how many issues people were having running the game with modern GPUs, I was shocked to learn the game runs acceptably on my ancient GTX 970 from 2014. Granted, there were little framerate hiccups throughout, and at least one area where my framerate tanked the entire time, but I steeled myself for far worse when hearing about how it was struggling on dramatically my capable hardware. It's definitely not unplayable, but there's no reason for the game to be running like this when far more visually complex and ambitious titles like Horizon Forbidden West run much more smoothly. It's also worth mentioning the game crashed on me several times.

On the plus side, despite not being a technical powerhouse, the game looks great thanks to the fantastic art design of the environments. You still have plenty of creepy environments like crypts, swamps, dungeons, and so on, but the larger, aesthetically diverse environments are often stunning, and help give a sense of identity to the different areas in a way that didn't exist with games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. This being a From Software game, the bosses and enemies you'll encounter are also frequently awesome, and I was happy with how much diversity there was in some of these encounters. You have your usual twitch-based fights that involve tons of dodge rolling and reading enemy movements, of course, but some fights included more diverse mechanics, or felt a bit more like setpieces.

The music is... well, it's a From Software game, so it's barely there outside of boss fights, to be frank. There's a lot of tracks in the OST, but most of them are the same sort of creepy, ambient tunes that fade into the background. It's another missed opportunity with this game, IMO, as the best games I've played have often used great soundtracks to elevate the experiences further.

The main menu loop is short and a tad generic, but it still stands out as one of the best tracks in this game.

While this game wasn't quite the triumph the ecstatic early reception would lead one to expect, I still ended up being quite happy with it. The mix of dungeon-crawling and open world exploration is thoroughly addictive, and it mixes together the best elements of many of From Software's previous titles while also softening some of their rougher edges. It's a great foundation for future games, frankly, and establishes the once niche From Software as a force to be feared in AAA game development.

8.5/10

@Ralizah This is fantastic! Thanks for the Elden Ring review. Written in your usual entertaining style, it’s level-headed and informative. As someone who has keen interest in this game for future purchase, I appreciated your take on it. Since you’re coming from the perspective of having misgivings with FromSoft games in the past, I think your praise is telling.

The technical issues have me the most concerned, but I have read that, counter to usual expectations, the PC version seems to have more issues than the console versions. Still, I’m hoping that I’m a few months it’ll be patched sufficiently.

In watching a few videos (which isn’t always representative of actually playing, I realize) I’m also a little disappointed that it’s not the looker that Demon’s Souls is. I probably emphasize graphics more than the average gamer — although I can live with them being subpar as long as the other qualities make up for it. Which this game seems to do in spades.

@Ralizah Coming from somebody with deep misgivings about FromSoftware, this (wonderfully written) review can be taken as high praise indeed! If you don't mind my asking what are you current favourite games of all times?

@Th3solution Happy to hear my piece read well. I'm trying to moderate the volume of them a little bit Say more with less. There's a lot of areas I didn't touch on, but if I was able to provide a decent sense of what the game is like, what's new, etc. then I'm satisfied.

There are definitely issues in the PC release, but they're not bad enough that I regret playing the game on there. It mostly ran smoothly at medium settings on my rig. With that said, I don't know how FS is about improving game performance after launch (I recall Bloodborne was patched to reduce load times, but otherwise kept the janky performance), but it's usually better to wait for games to enjoy rounds of fixes. And that will probably especially be true of a game that reportedly sold 10 million copies at launch just on Steam! I think expectations regarding game performance will probably start changing now that they've gone from making games played by a few million people to creating games that are some of the biggest in the industry.

For now, playing the backwards-compatible version on PS5 seems to be the best way to experience this game. PC is still very serviceable without a super computer, though.

Yeah, I imagine going from the gorgeous Demon's Souls on PS5 to this would be a bit jarring. It's not a bad looking game at all, but also definitely not the next-gen looker that Bluepoint's remake was. It'll be interesting to see how From Software's focus evolves with their next major release. Right now, most games are cross-generation releases, so it's sort of expected that games won't necessarily look as amazing as you'd expect from a native next-gen title, but given FS' history of releasing janky games that don't necessarily look amazing, I'm curious if they'll place more of an emphasis on the a/v qualities going forward.

Thanks so much for reading!

@LN78 Thank you! Yeah, if FS is even swaying skeptics like myself, I'd say they're onto something good here. Elden Ring feels more accessible than a lot of previous games, but without compromising the core aspects that have made them so popular with their fanbase. Even being critical of it in several respects, I can definitely say it's an early favorite for GOTY.

Favorite games of all time?

I'll do one game per series in alphabetical order.

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (PSP)
Corpse Party (PSP)
Cuphead (PC/Switch)
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Vita)
Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan (3DS)
Final Fantasy VII (PS1)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (NS)
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (PS1)
Metal Gear Solid (PS1)
Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA)
Monster Rancher 2 (PS1)
Persona 5 Royal (PS4)
Resident Evil remake (GC)
Shantae (GBC)
Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (3DS)
Silent Hill (PS1)
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (3DS/Vita)

@Ralizah I'm embarrassed to say I've never played a game from the "visual novel" genre - but I've heard a lot of mention of "Daganronpa" over the years - and just on here in the last few days, oddly enough. I've added the recently released collection (and "Doki Doki Literature Club") to my (ever expanding) Switch wishlist. I've got "Shin Megami Tensei V" and "Disco Elysium" on that system's backlog that I'd like to tackle first,though. Thanks!

@RogerRoger Why wouldn't you even consider playing a demo?

@LN78 I highly recommend starting out with Danganronpa as your first visual novel since it's straight-forward and its gameplay sections are very easy. The difficulty ramps up in the sequels though.

@RogerRoger @Ralizah I apologise for not reading your reviews, but I'd like to go in to both Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring completely blind, which is why I've also been avoiding other reviews and gameplay videos. I just wanted to clear that up as I have been more active in this thread in recent days and didn't want to give off a wrong impression. I look forward to any future reviews from you of games that I've already played or don't mind knowing about before playing!

@LtSarge Thanks for the tip - a few other people have said much the same thing. Very intriguing!

@LN78 In the case of Danganronpa, despite people calling them "visual novels," there's also a heavy gameplay component to them. They play a lot like Ace Attorney, where they combine point-and-click adventure gameplay with heavy amounts of dialogue and storytelling. Danganronpa also features twitch-based gameplay and minigames during the trials and light, Persona-esque social simulation elements, where you learn more about the people around you the more time you spend with them.

I really enjoyed SMT V, and Disco Elysium is almost universally widely regarded, so it sounds like you have some quality software to dig into in your immediate future!

@LtSarge No worries! Engagement is appreciated but never expected.

@RogerRoger Appreciate the feedback. I was having a bit of trouble actually writing anything recently, so I'm glad it didn't turn out horribly. I was hesitant about posting it because of concerns about the quality, but I suppose it turned out well enough.

I'm just glad there's finally one of these games I could enjoy. I wasn't going to play it, but through happenstance I was able to gain access to it through the Steam family sharing feature and couldn't resist trying after seeing the sky-high praise it was getting. And... yeah, the changes to the formula were exactly what I needed to really get hooked into this.

ER has been pretty impossible to fully ignore in recent weeks, yeah. The hardcore fanbase can't stop spamming the internet when the games are only moderately successful, so when one of them scores and sells like a tentpole Nintendo/Sony title? lol

Thanks for reading!

@RogerRoger As somebody who generally loathes the FromSoft fandom despite adoring Elden Ring, I totally get it!

@RogerRoger I see. Totally fair.