Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Here are my first impressions of Ancestors: the humankind odissey
After six hours of exploration, my clan was decimated by poisonous snakes, sabre-toothed tigers, crocodiles and rotten food. One of the only two babies was crushed before my eyes by a huge boa constrictor. And it was all my fault.
Controls may feel clunky at first, but repeating the actions you get used to them so all the deaths were due to my recklessness, in a perfect Souls style. Now that I know what I need to stop bleeding or to cure poisoning I feel better, but it's just me and a baby now. I have to explore more to find a female, but first I have to build me some weapon, somehow.
A great experience so far.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch) - Now that I've enticed K.K. Slider to my island, I've hit the endgame in terms of scripted events (thus this impressions piece), but due to new events throughout the year & the updates sure to come, it's a game that can't truly be "beat".



Welcome to Namek, where the people are friendly, and the neighborhoods tightly organized.

Gameplay:

• You start out as a new resident on a deserted island getaway package, and after designing your character, naming your island & the like, it's your job to collect resources in order to build tools (which allow you to get even more resources) or sell to fill your pockets.
• There are really two main goals. The first of which is to build up your island, which is done by taking on quests given by Tom Nook (the raccoon who invited you to the island), which result in new establishments (such as shops & a museum, which has it's own questline involving donating fossils & any fish & insects you find on the island in order to complete it's exhibits) & villagers moving onto the island. Once things are suitably built up, famed musician K.K. Slider will be encouraged to put on a show on your island, proving your island is now a thriving community.
• The other goal is to build up your own home. You start out with a small tent, but once you pay it off you can move into a larger house, and through a series of paying it off and taking out even bigger loans to pay off, you can add to it one room at a time. Of course you can decorate it as you see fit, with flooring, wallpaper, and furniture. Some of which can be created by various crafting recipes (which wash up on shore on bottled messages, randomly given out by balloons, given to you by villagers, bought with Nook Miles, or earned through special events), while others are obtained ready to go (either bought with Bells or Nook Miles in selections that change daily, randomly handed out via balloons, or earned during special events).
• There are two forms of in-game currency. The first of which are Bells, the traditional currency of AC and what you'll be using most often. It can be earned by selling things at the store (Nook's Cranny), but can also be earned by playing the Stalk Market (at a certain point you can buy Turnips on Sundays, and you have a week to sell them to the store before they go bad. They sell for a different price each day, and you can make a big profit if they're going for a higher price than you bought them. It is a gamble, though). It's also possible to dig up 1,000 once a day, one of the rocks on your island will drop them (instead of it's usual resources), and they can be randomly dropped by balloons as well. In addition to paying off your loans, you can also buy furniture, clothing, and other goods from merchants with them as well.
• The other in-game currency is Nook Miles. These are earned in large amounts by completing in game achievements (and at a certain point are constantly awarded in small amounts just for completing random tasks, such as catching 5 fish). Your first loan can be paid off with them (but only that one time), but otherwise they can be spent on crafting recipes & furniture exclusive to the "Nook Stop" (an ATM like machine in the resident services tent/building). You can also buy Nook Miles Tickets with them, which send you to smaller randomly generated islands that you can use to obtain extra resources (some even have things you can't get on your island, but can import, such as bamboo & coconut trees).
• Everything runs in real time (some buildings may take one or two real days to be completed), and this adds longevity to the game as the kinds of wildlife you encounter (and can obtain for your museum) change throughout the year based on their real life activity, plus there are seasonal events (such as holidays) which can be used to obtain exclusive crafting recipes & items which you can only get during those times. You can get around this somewhat by messing with the console's internal clock, and although there's no major punishment for this (any Turnips you currently have will automatically rot, and the villagers will start rumours about you), it'll only get you so far because many of the special events will be added in future updates & can't accessed at all currently.
• There's no rush to do any of this though, and you can play at your own pace (it doesn't matter if you pay off your loan a day from now, a week, or even a year), though you may want to upgrade your house at a regular clip, because the larger it is the more storage you'll have for your resources & items you collect. After having everything built up to a reasonable degree you'll probably get into a groove of checking into it just for a bit each day just to do a quick run through of your village to see if the shops have anything interesting & to grab your daily Bell & Nook Mile drops, while coming back more seriously for the seasonal events throughout the year.
• Once you do hit endgame you obtain the ability to terraform the island itself, putting in roads, rerouting rivers, cliffsides, and creating lakes as you see fit.
  
  
  
  Make yourself at home in my humble abode.

Audio/Visual:

• It has a charming cartoonish look to it, but it's absolutely packed with little fine details, and almost everything you collect can be interacted with in some way (from lamps lighting up, stereos/record players playing music you collect, and even flushable toilets that have a gameplay element).
• I want to give a special shout out to the museum, which is immaculately realized & is a place I'd love to visit in real life.
• It has a nice relaxing soundtrack that changes by the hour, and you can buy a variety of tracks for use in your own home (or can be obtained as a gift from K.K. Slider, once he starts playing in town).
  
  
  Rest up at scenic Kaiju Public Park (the "Godzilla" even breaths fire & roars when interacted with).

Conclusion:

• I haven't played anything quite like this before, and it was a pleasant surprise. Despite there being no urgent goals to complete or a world to save, I couldn't help but be sucked in to this charming world, and there's so much here that there's bound to be stuff I didn't even touch on (such as the online features, since I don't have NSO. I believe you can create custom designs for clothes, furniture, and & even terrain to share). It's the rare kind of game where when you're not playing it, you're thinking about doing so & can't wait for your next session/day to roll around. Some things could definitely be streamlined (such as the fact you can only craft things one at a time, which is irritating when you need to craft in bulk, such as fish bait), but it's so charming you can't help but put up with it, lol.
  
  Spend the evening in our rustic Cliffside Campsite (for your own safety, we request you don't venture past the fence).

@RR529 The lack of bulk crafting was a major pain in my rear until I bought the Split Pad Pro and used the turbo button on that to make life easier for myself.

Have you tried planting a money tree, btw? It's another good way of consistently investing your money.

Anyway, nice write-up, and I like the uniquely Japanese flair of your home. Mine is a random assortment of themes, depending on the room (I should probably disassemble my Easter Egg room now that Bunny Day is over, but... I don't have the energy).

@RR529
I've seen a few videos popping up, mixing Animal Crossing and Doom Eternal.
Such as this one: https://youtu.be/U4lz8MN6MQA

Do you think it's a fair representation?

@Ralizah, how do you do that? Plant a sapling in the glowing hole you dig Bells out of?

@LieutenantFatman, I've seen a couple videos like that, lol.

@RR529 After you dig up the money in a glowing money hole, bury a bag containing either 1,000 or 10,000 bells in it (other amounts might work, but these are the ones I can personally verify work). When it grows into a tree, it'll yield 3x the amount you buried. So the 1000 bell bad will yield a tree that drops three 1000 bell money bags. The 10,000 bell bag will yield a 30,000 bell money tree.

@RR529 Nice one! Your town looks great. My town (and the interior of my house) is somewhat... less planned and rather haphazard. The game is lovely and such a wonderful change of pace from almost everything else. It's become part of my morning and nightly routine, even if it's just a quick session to bash rocks and dig up the daily quota of fossils. My main criticism would be having to craft using materials from the villagers bag and not what's stored in the house. Around my outdoor workbench there's a ton of sticks, wood, rocks and iron dotted about.

@Ralizah I didn't know you could plant an Amber Rudd style Magic Money Tree™️. Thanks for the tip.

@RogerRoger Another ace review! Agreed with all your points If we take out Spider-Man and his unique characteristics the game wouldn't be doing anything particularly unique as an open-world game. We've seen it many, many times over. But that web swinging and combat is just exquisite and elevates it to a whole other level, allowing us to look past those flaws. For me open world games often hover a fine line between tedium and therapeutically ticking a virtual to-do list off the map, but Spider-Man is the right length and ticks a lot of boxes in the same way Horizon does. Really looking forward to the sequel and where it takes certain characters!

@RogerRoger Excellently written review, as usual. It's always apparent when you've been deeply enjoying something, but I appreciate how, even in the midst of your enthusiasm, you take the time to soberly discuss design limitations within the experience, even if those ultimately didn't do much to dampen your enjoyment of the game.

You're right that it's not always important for games to be daring with how they're designed. Especially in the case of something like a licensed superhero game, it's more important to properly capture the essence of the character and, to whatever degree possible, make it fun to inhabit their skin for a while. And it sounds like Insomniac has largely done that. Even if the design of the game itself is fairly unadventurous, proper care being paid to the presentation, controls, and gameplay mechanics can lead to it being a blast. Just as there's a time and a place for game developers to blow apart design norms and forge new philosophies of play interaction, there's a time and a place for game developers to draw from a safe, well-established toolbox of design fundamentals in order to craft a properly excellent vehicle for a beloved pop culture icon.

I'm not sure when I'll get around to Spider-Man, but it's good to know the game should be properly fun when I do so.

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot (PSVR) - VR Wolfenstein FPS with a focus on mech gameplay.

Gameplay:

• It's a singleplayer FPS set across 4 missions (it'll last you only a few hours, unless you want to play it on the harder difficulty settings), each of which puts you in control of a different piece of tech (except the fourth, which has you jumping between the three to complete it).
• Each mission is split into 3 segments. The first of which being in a lab/workshop setting where you have to tinker with & reverse engineer that mission's mech (captured from the Nazi's). These are stress free segments which provide a nice break from the action and make good use of the VR play space, albeit are a bit clunky with a Dualshock, as the camera can easily lose track of the light bar when you move the controller to the side to grab an object. It's not a major issue & I learned to adapt, but these segments probably play better with the freedom afforded by the Move controllers.
• The second part of a mission (at least the first 3) is a brief tutorial on how to control that mission's mech. From here on things play out much more like a standard FPS, and using the Dualshock isn't an issue. Each mech has two weapons (one fired with L2 & R2, respectively), an emergency weapon/action (activated by an in game button just to your left that you have to hit with a forceful "smashing" motion of the controller), and health regeneration (activated by pressing R2 after slotting the controller into a device just to your right, so you can't heal & attack at the same time). You move & control the camera with the analogue sticks, and aim via motion tracking.
• The third and largest segment is the main mission proper, where you use what you've learned to make your way through it.
• The final mission mixes things up as it (sort of) abandons the lab, and doesn't feature a tutorial segment, as you hop between all 3 mechs on your way to completion.

Audio/Visual:

• Being a "cockpit" style game it makes general good use of the VR perspective, especially given the fact that you're controlling machinery of varying sizes, with the Zitadelle being the traditional power fantasy mech that towers over your average soldier, and the Drone being exactly that, where every man is an oppressive obstacle to be approached cautiously.
• It has a cool retro sci-fi setting, with detailed environments (with many objects being destructible, particularly in the larger machines), where you're treated to helicopters & zeppelins flying overhead, and mechanized enemies explode with arrays of sparks & embers (I particularly like the way enemy Panzerhunds are reduced to molten metal when defeated).
• Of course such detail does come with a caveat, as although it shows the potential of a VR world with the backing of a larger studio, it's pressing on PSVR's upper limits (at least on a slim PS4), as the environment can get quite blurry with some texture pop in too. It depends on distance & segment (the tutorial segments take place in 80's style computer datascapes and look great, as does anything in your immediate vicinity such as the interior of the cockpit, and even the drone missions hold up well as they take place mostly indoors, but it's pretty noticeable outside. It was never so bad that it got in the way of the gameplay however, and is still mostly a cool experience (even at it's worst it still looks better than anything on Switch's LABO VR, for example). I imagine it's really cool on a Pro.

Story:

• Set in an alternate history where the Nazi's won WWII, you're a "cyberpilot" with the French resistance who pilots captured advanced Nazi war machinery for liberation. It's not too long before you discover the Nazi R&D lab (where they're developing even more advanced ways to kill people), and set out to destroy it.
• It's not the most original setup, but it gets the job done, and it actually has a pretty cool twist at the end.

Conclusion:

• It may end just when it feels like it's finding it's groove & pushes PSVR to it's graphical limit, but it's a cool & fun experience while it lasts and does some interesting things (and offers a nice array of experiences based on the different mech types).

@RogerRoger, Fantastic Spider-Man review. It's the game that started me on my PS4 journey, and it was great. As you touch upon, it doesn't really do anything new, but it's polished to perfection & it's simply fun being Spider-Man.

@RogerRoger I enjoyed the reviews, especially the deep dive into the DLC which, although I played every inch of the main game, I never indulged in the extra add-on content. At this point I probably won’t get the DLC, but it’s good to know it’s there if I get a hankering for the same web-slinging feeling. Spidey 2 is likely to be out sooner rather than later to satisfy the urges, but with all these delays, maybe it’ll be longer than expected. Also, the DLC sounds like it actually has semi-important story beats, which I didn’t realize. Hopefully Insomniac will fill in the gaps in the sequel for those of us who haven’t played the DLC.

@RogerRoger Arkham Knight... man, I gotta get to that. 😅 I was exceedingly close to booting it up a week or two ago and went with the Telltale Season 2 Batman “bedtime story with button prompts” (still love that moniker 😂) instead. Now I’m knee deep in Assassin’s Creed Origins so I’m at my ‘open- world’ limit.
But yeah, I’ll keep an eye out for a possible sale on the Season Pass. I’ll have to swallow my pride since my policy against pre-planned DLC is getting very outdated now. It’s just simply part of the gaming landscape whether we like it or not - like fetch quests, day 1 patches, and Call of Duty.

@RogerRoger Nice write up and I'm glad you enjoyed the DLC. I notice you shied away from mentioning anything to do with Screwball though

@RogerRoger I’m taking notes when reading your posts before I comment from now on..

Finally got round to reading your Spider-Man review @RogerRoger!

As it's already been said there's a wonderful sense of joy coming through your words... If I didn't already know you loved it from your previous impressions then I sure do now!

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yep, Mr Negative was created during Slott’s run on the comics during the Brand New Day storyline so roughly 2006/7-ish. I’m a nerd but it helps catch all the Easter eggs in the game!

@RR529 Thanks for the VR review. Good to hear there are still games being made for it. The blurry nature of psvr sucks in cockpit games. Probably why My favourites are usually up, close and personal.

@RogerRoger what a review Rog. Crikey that brought the whole game back to me. I loved Spiderman (my goty whenever it was released, although I hadn't played Astrobot at the time). The swinging was phenomenal. I liked the cookie cutter nature of the map, it's the PlayStation and better version of crackdown on xbox - you know what the challenges are and you can take your time swinging towards the next one at your leisure, like a personal spidy gym. The Trophies are great and the fan service is wonderful, J jonah Jamiesons radio show is class showcasing how your endeavours are the worst things ever, working against New York. Like an alternative version of fox news. I also enjoyed the walking / sneaking sections which were often derided at release, again a little change of pace before you are back in the true sequel to Tony Hawk Pro skater 3, with added webs and incoming rockets.

The criticism of the latter third of the game is spot on. There are too many bad guys with rocket launchers, its frustrating. Sometimes unfairly so. I ended up being extra careful picking off individuals prior to a full on assault, out of character for spiderman and dampened the experience for sure.

Ancestors: Humankind Odissey
The elements that characterize any classic survival game are here adapted to an unusual character, a primate who at the beginning of the game (10.000.000 B.C.) barely knows how to move, handle an object or relate to other primates. The exploration of the landscape, the discovery of new actions and their repetition let you collect experience to spend, activating various neurons, each one linked to a certain ability (agility, perception, intelligence, combat, sociality etc.).

The collection of rare items helps the learning of special skills, which will be inherited in the process of evolution: the primate, at first forced on the trees because easy prey even of a simple snake, will learn to defend itself with sticks and rocks, which later he will make more useful and lethal thanks to new techniques and he will also learn how to collaborate with the rest of the clan (for a max of 6 elders, 6 adults and 6 babies).

The aim of the game, suggested more by the list of trophies than by the game itself, is the complete exploration of the map and the transition to subsequent species over millions of years, which materially translate into at least 50 hours of gameplay.

The game has been released on console with all the QOL improvements included in the 1.3 version of the PC version, and it received a few days ago a new patch which added other improvements.
Suggested to fan of survival and exploration in a unique setting.

@andreoni79 Did you actually enjoy the game? The premise sounds really clever but I think the lack of direction (and how quickly things can be ruined) would frustrate me too much.