2014.33: Destiny

Completed all Story missions, all Strikes (many many times...), and THE RAID. Time played: 50hours 54mins

Let me start by saying the core game is great. The shooting, the universe, the graphics, the art style are all excellent. There was something about it so addictive you'd feel mad playing the same things over and over again but you still would. With very limited amount of content, it's amazing in itself it managed to keep me interested for nearly 51 hours.

The problem? Now I can't even look at the game. I have passed the point of being driven mad by doing the same things over and over again and I guess my limit is under 51 hours.

The game's "saviour", one Bungie pushed, was the PvP, but I'm just not interested in the PvP of this game. There is nothing really wrong with it, I just didn't like it, and I'm not much of a PvP player. If you are not playing PvP, you are playing the same missions over and over. Albeit weekly and daily challenges provide "modified" versions of them (read: Harder). But they are still exactly the same in design / flow / bosses etc. No thank you.

There are also other hooks thrown in an attempt to catch you. Like stranger coins to collect, planets to harvest for materials and upgrades but these all VERY SOON start feeling like grinding for the sake of grinding and get tedious very quick.

Imagine a mobile game designed with transactions in mind, where there is an artificial "play time" of 3 hours before you get something cool. It's exactly like that, but you can't speed up the grind via micro-transactions (which is good, may I add as it shows that's why they didn't design it like that but the design is still shitty). To top that off, you are never guaranteed to get anything good at the end of all that grinding. As Bungie seems to have taken the philosophy that RANDOM IS FUN in this game. Umm. Not sure when week after week people grind the same things in hopes of a 'reward' and they get something crappy that they enjoy that experience, but it's random so lulz. Similar in PvP, how well you do does not reflect on what loot you get. It's all random! Yay!

So there isn't really a feeling of "OK I'll grind this bit out to get this good reward" as you might just get something shit. Why bother. Far as I'm concerned I am done with Destiny. Expansion packs that add 3-4 missions here and there are not interesting to me. Now that The Raid included in the core release, which I considered to be the 'final boss of the game', is done, I can safely say I completed this game and move on.

Destiny has been a crazy and mad ride. And at the end, proves itself to be a great gameplay designed around some very lazy, artificially 'lengthy', grindy and tedious design that eventually will reveal its ugliness to you. For me it was just under 51 hours, for you it might be 20mins, for someone else it might be 100 hours. 

I will say overall it was a Very Good game (granted this feedback was mostly rant but do keep in mind I did play it for 50 hrs + the positives I started the feedback with do hold the game together very well). But please Bungie, more variety, and less insane decisions in the next one.

7/10.

2014.32: CounterSpy

This is a game of randomly (to an extent) generated missions that you do to collect enough intel to achieve your objective. There is the USA and the Russia and you can infiltrate both. They each have a DEFCON level that lowers or higher depending on how you perform in missions. Before selecting a mission you can also see what that missions has so if you want formulas to unlock weapons or officers you can hold up to lower DEFCON level, you can make a decision on which side to infiltrate based on that.

So that's the premise in a basic explanation and you repeat that until you collect enough intel to unlock the final mission, which takes place infiltrating the side with the highest DEFCON level (game allows you to carry on playing normal missions if you want to lower DEFCON levels before doing final mission).

It's a nice structure with a lot of flexibility and the gameplay holds up and doesn't over stay its welcome. It's fun to go back and play now and then due to the good length of missions and it's fun to play and experiment with weapons, one of my favourites being the Dart Persuader which turns the enemy you shot it at against his former allies. To boost his kills coun as Stealth kills, as the enemy doesn't know you triggered his madness. Mwahahaha.

So yeah, overall it's a good game.

6/10.

2014.31: Resident Evil: Revelations

  

Completed in 6hours:15mins on Normal

I always enjoy scenarios where you go to just going investigate a situation. On top of that, I enjoy them when they are isolated in the middle of the ocean, like a ship. Which is where this game takes place and thanks to that immediately hooked me in.

What follows is tense close corridor combat, some big areas where you have to manoeuvre around tough enemies smartly to take them out and a plot that is....Well, Resident Evil in nature.

There was enough entertainment here to keep me going for the 6 hours it took to complete and as it was a port of a portable game, it is broken up to 'easy to bite' chapters which makes stopping and coming back to it easier. Not something I thought I would enjoy playing on the PC, but in this game's case it worked well due to the nature of the gameplay and story as you jump between different characters at different intervals of the story.

You can also investigate environments for nice little secrets in forms of more back story or 'custom parts', which at weapon crates allows you to upgrade weapons with things like more damage, bigger clip size, faster fire rate and so on. These 'parts' can be applied to any weapon of choice and you can mix and match to your heart's desire. Me, myself ended up making a super strong shotgun with a big ass clip and reduced spread. Worked pretty well.

I enjoyed the setting and the action was fun enough, so I think overall this was a GOOD game,

6/10.