Just thought I'd start this up- Tell us what you've been playing, what it's like, if it's any good, and why. Simples.
Payday 2.
Fun as heck first person shooter. You're one of four career criminals (coop is highly recommended, as is having three friends who're good enough that they can be trusted to be left alone to do their separate jobs), and you knock over banks, steal drugs, priceless artifacts, gold and paintings, shoot it out with massive (god-fuckingly horrific in higher difficulties) waves of enemies. Apparently the police in this game don't give a shit about their own lives, or the lives of apparently every police officer, SWAT unit, et cetera within three countries, and they'll send all of them at you to stop you knocking over a bank where little old ladies store loose change and the occasional wad of cash.
AI is pretty bad. Games designers need to start bloody learning that a higher difficulty =/= LOL MORE HP AND DAMAGE ON BOSSES, KAY, THAT'S IT, WE'RE DONE FOR THE DAY, FOLKS, GO HOME. Get a decent goddamn programmer on this shit, it won't cost you as much as idiots designing pretty skyboxes.
Mechanics need work- they're rigid and inflexible. You can't close doors behind you after you've opened them, stealth is iffy at the best of times- some guys literally can't see you if you're crouched two or three meters in front of them, whereas some guys will instantly spot you, through floors or walls, whether you're close to them or not. Everybody can see loot bags or corpses at infinite range, meaning you're got to exploit AI (and break immersion) if you've got to hide a body quickly, or you can just pick up the goddamn thing, and they won' see it any more. Apparently a sports bag sitting on the floor is cause for instant alarm, but a guy lugging a corpse over his shoulder isn't.
But the game is fun as heck. Nothing beats the feeling of steathing a bank job- everybody on the team doing their part, and doing it all perfectly- disabling the tellers, cameras and guards, tricking the security company into not sending guys around, sawing or lockpicking open all of the safety deposit boxes, loading masses and masses of cash and gold onto a skyhook, then having a plane fly over and snatch it up, then getting the hell to your van and getting gone before the civilians who stroll by can call the police.
tl;dr: Get this if you want to be knocked out by a Sam Fisher who's apparently devoured Bruce Lee for his kung fu skills.
Wings of Vi.
HHHHRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHLLLLLRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHKKKKKKKKK
Rage-inducing platformer. You play as an angel, who, along with a friend, have just released a demon lord or some such from his prison in heaven.
Okay combat so far, though the controls are bloody awkward. I want to meet the guy who thought these controls were a good idea, so I can smack him round the back of the head and ask what the hell he was thinking. The jump button goes on the same goddamn pad the rest of the movement keys are on. Use a different fucking button for interacting with doors and people. I do not want to have to take my finger off the murder things button to jump, and I do not want to walk through a freaking door when I'm trying to aim my murderstick upward.
I'm generally not a fan of this kind of game- I like combat platformers, just not when they're a) More platformer than combat (negotiating through gaps millimeters larger than your character, ugh), b) Clearly designed for the obsessive compulsives who memorise the pixel-perfect arrangements of Touhou and speedrun games with microsecond timing, and c) Designed to be beaten through endless repetition rather than skill- and that isn't an unfair assessment. Trial and error is 100% required to succeed in this game. There will be nobody on the planet who does not die several hundred times throughout their first playthrough.
I wish I could say the game itself was fun, but the only really enjoyable thing about it is pulling off a pattern, breaking through the enemies you've memorised through countless deaths, and finally punching out that goddamned floating diglett that's been tossing fireballs at you for the last twenty minutes. I wish I could say I've gotten far enough into the game to comment on more than just that, but I don't think I'll play much more unless I feel like I hate myself just that much on any particular day.
tl;dr: Get this game if you're a speedrunner, or possibly an android with perfect muscle memory.
Dark Souls: Prepare to Die.
Third person action RPG, dark medieval fantasy. You'll probably know this one already. Nasu's big timesink, what he's spent the last few should-be-working-on-something-new-not-milking-old-franchises years on.
I understand him.
The game's hard, but in an entirely different way to the other two. It takes you and puts you in an unfamiliar situation, an unfamiliar environment, then shrugs and leaves you to it. There's no minimap, no glowing beacons to tell you where to go, no quest objectives or markers. From the start, you're given only the vaguest directions- the opening scene gives you just the world, and then tells you you're meant to... do something. Then some guy appears, gives you a set of keys to get out of your predicament, is also vague, and then shrugs, dies and leaves you to it. You go up against enemies that are in pretty much the same state as you- easily killed, not knowing what the hell they're doing, and then you come up against- again- that unfamiliar situation. Suddenly, boss. You get fucked until you learn the way to go, the way to beat it.
And that repeats.
Again and again.
Everywhere you go, everything is just that little bit tougher, or faster, stronger, or just plain weirder. It's never unfair, though- every death is your own fault, and you know that. You get better equipped, stronger- but you'll never win just mashing the attack button. Everything out there is just as tough as you are, and even after you've levelled up, trudged through some of the worst areas the game has to offer, going back to the beginning is still dangerous. If you ignore a bunch of walking corpses just because you're a hundred levels stronger than the last time you fought them, they're going to trap you against a wall and take turns gouging pieces out of your now-so-much-bigger-but-still-not-invincible health bar.
It isn't turn based. It isn't a Hack & Slash. It isn't cheap, and you can't swing a sword and cut down two hundred guys without breaking a sweat or taking a jot of damage. It's just you, and your weapon, and your opponent, and his weapon, and that's the only way it should be.
This is the best game ever, in my opinion. The spellcasting & bowmanship is pretty iffy, and no matter how much strength you pump, your character's still going to throw fireballs like a muscle-atrophied eight year old who hasn't left her couch in nine years, and the PvP scene is pretty horrendous at times, but the game itself, while flawed, is still amazing.
The sequel's nowhere near as good, "campaign"-wise, but if you like PvP, hundreds of weapons, armour and magic combinations, and the occasional hopeless three-on-one, get Dark Souls II.
tl;dr: Get this if you want to die over and over, read frustratingly vague and badly translated item texts, roam a dismal, desolate, beautiful, ridiculous land, murder hundreds of odd people and slightly less odd creatures, wear cool outfits and swing swird and wonderful weapons. If you see a man with a Zwiehander and a man with a bronze mask, turn off your console.
It should be coming off Games for Windows Live and to Steam, where it should've been all this time, sometime this month.
You guys go now.
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Originally Posted by Kotonoha
