4 Yrs✓#
GemminiDrodson
4 Yrs✓#
Hey folks,
I hope you like badly written reviews, cause that's all I've got! I've been trying to review most of my completions for the past year or so, or at the very least gather some of my thoughts and log them. Partially for future me, because I have the memory of a baboon and wonder how long ago it was that I beat x game and what I thought about it, and partially to share my thoughts with other people. My thoughts end up clashing with the majority opinion sometimes, and I'm trying to score my games on a 5-point scale. I'm not going to necro my old reviews, so this blog will start with my completions from 2023-06-15 (ISO date ftw!) onward.
To start things off, I finished a game last night:
Star Trek: Resurgence (PC) [09:19] ★★★☆☆
A telltale-esque game with a great 90s Trek narrative, mostly solid although sometimes awkward dialogue, and lots of rough edges.
The story and freedom of decision making are the strongest points of the game, letting you live out your dream of playing through a very old school Star Trek drama, with opposing factions, a few small plot twists, and a looming conflict that you need to solve. The writing of the main story is fairly solid, while the characters are somewhat mixed, with some good and some bad outliers, but overall they were alright. The voice acting was good, but would sometimes cut out during dialogue and skip to the next scene.
The game is overall very janky, and riddled with issues. Graphically it's a very mixed bag, sometimes looking pretty, but mostly looking like an early PS4 game, and not a pretty one at that. Frequently I thought the game looked worse than an Xbox 360 era game, while performing worse than modern games that look a lot better. The game struggled to maintain 30FPS on an 8th gen i5 and a GTX 1070, and slowed down to single digit fps at one point in the game. Granted, it's not the most up-to-date hardware, but it should be more than enough to handle a game that looks like this.
On top of that, animations look quite bad, especially facial animations. Also they sometimes start and cut out at very awkward and almost comedic times throughout the game. Subtitles don't match voice lines frequently, and sometimes the background audio just skips to the next track, or feels very out of place. It all feels very unpolished, and probably could've benefited from being delayed for half a year or longer to improve PC performance and cut down on the jank.
Gameplay is also fairly bland, consisting of choosing one of up to three decisions, doing some simple quicktime events, interacting with objects and performing little mini-games. There's shooting sections as well that are quite janky, because your camera wouldn't stay where you're aiming, but constantly pushes you back to the center of the screen, which didn't feel good.
The game would be perfect for the "we have telltale at home" meme format, as it's trying to be a telltale game, but doesn't manage to reach the same quality.
That being said, I did have a good time with it, especially as the story progressed and decisions started to matter more. Still, the game is overall a bit hard to recommend. I'd say give it a go if you're a Star Trek or general SciFi fan, or if you love telltale games and you've already played all their games and are hungry for more.
I hope you like badly written reviews, cause that's all I've got! I've been trying to review most of my completions for the past year or so, or at the very least gather some of my thoughts and log them. Partially for future me, because I have the memory of a baboon and wonder how long ago it was that I beat x game and what I thought about it, and partially to share my thoughts with other people. My thoughts end up clashing with the majority opinion sometimes, and I'm trying to score my games on a 5-point scale. I'm not going to necro my old reviews, so this blog will start with my completions from 2023-06-15 (ISO date ftw!) onward.
To start things off, I finished a game last night:
Star Trek: Resurgence (PC) [09:19] ★★★☆☆
A telltale-esque game with a great 90s Trek narrative, mostly solid although sometimes awkward dialogue, and lots of rough edges.
The story and freedom of decision making are the strongest points of the game, letting you live out your dream of playing through a very old school Star Trek drama, with opposing factions, a few small plot twists, and a looming conflict that you need to solve. The writing of the main story is fairly solid, while the characters are somewhat mixed, with some good and some bad outliers, but overall they were alright. The voice acting was good, but would sometimes cut out during dialogue and skip to the next scene.
The game is overall very janky, and riddled with issues. Graphically it's a very mixed bag, sometimes looking pretty, but mostly looking like an early PS4 game, and not a pretty one at that. Frequently I thought the game looked worse than an Xbox 360 era game, while performing worse than modern games that look a lot better. The game struggled to maintain 30FPS on an 8th gen i5 and a GTX 1070, and slowed down to single digit fps at one point in the game. Granted, it's not the most up-to-date hardware, but it should be more than enough to handle a game that looks like this.
On top of that, animations look quite bad, especially facial animations. Also they sometimes start and cut out at very awkward and almost comedic times throughout the game. Subtitles don't match voice lines frequently, and sometimes the background audio just skips to the next track, or feels very out of place. It all feels very unpolished, and probably could've benefited from being delayed for half a year or longer to improve PC performance and cut down on the jank.
Gameplay is also fairly bland, consisting of choosing one of up to three decisions, doing some simple quicktime events, interacting with objects and performing little mini-games. There's shooting sections as well that are quite janky, because your camera wouldn't stay where you're aiming, but constantly pushes you back to the center of the screen, which didn't feel good.
The game would be perfect for the "we have telltale at home" meme format, as it's trying to be a telltale game, but doesn't manage to reach the same quality.
That being said, I did have a good time with it, especially as the story progressed and decisions started to matter more. Still, the game is overall a bit hard to recommend. I'd say give it a go if you're a Star Trek or general SciFi fan, or if you love telltale games and you've already played all their games and are hungry for more.
9 Yrs✓#
CerosTheSkyPirate
9 Yrs✓#
Forgot that this was releasing, thanks for the reminder. And really solid write-up as well!
4 Yrs✓#
GemminiDrodson4 Yrs✓#
I knocked out some more completions! I've been a busy bee with my Steam Deck, and finally finished up Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well as Planet of Lana. Both great games that I quite enjoyed. Here's my reviews on both:
Kingdom Come: Deliverance (PC) [51:20] ★★★★☆
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a historically plausible (mostly accurate) medieval open-world game set in 1403 Bohemia.
Unlike other big open world games that feel comparable (maybe Skyrim?), you start off as Henry, the son of a blacksmith, and it takes you many hours of gameplay to become proficient at combat, which takes the form of either melee combat using several different types of weapons, or archery using bows. No magic! Combat is a bit of a mixed bag. At least in melee combat, it’s trying to reinvent the wheel by having you manually swing your weapon from one of five directions or do a stab right at the opponent’s chest. You can parry an opponent’s attack by pressing the block button at a precise moment and swinging from the opposite angle of the enemy’s attacks.
This all sounds good in theory, but in practice you end up getting parried and riposted 95% of the time you attack someone, leaving you very few openings to actually do any damage via regular attacks. You can do the same to the opponent a bit later on in the game, so combat tends to devolve into perfect parrying and maybe squeezing in a quick attack until the enemy is dead, or hoping they block rather than riposte, and you can get a combo off. Takes a while to slug it out with an opponent as a result. As you level up weapon skills (by using weapons in combat), you unlock combos requiring you to hit 3-4 attacks in a specific pattern to execute a strong special move. Sadly, the enemy riposting your attack or dodging breaks the combo, meaning getting off combos is more a matter of luck rather than skill, and the longer 4-chain combos are essentially useless as a result.
The combat system then completely falls flat once you’re engaged with multiple enemies, in which case it’s best advised to just run away.
A lot of the game’s systems are geared towards realism, like the survival system requiring you to sleep and eat regularly, less you suffer debuffs. Food goes off over time, and some foods decay faster than others. Items have a weight and Henry can only carry so much before getting slowed down, or eventually being unable to move at all. Brewing potions is a very manual process, in which you have to prepare the ingredients and follow a recipe in a book next to you to attempt to make it yourself. There’s your typical RPG mechanics in the game such as skills, buffs, debuffs, and perks you can invest. Skills get levelled up by playing the game and using them, similar to Morrowind. The worldbuilding created thanks to that is fantastic, though it does get in the way of the fun of it sometimes, such as with the combat system.
Sadly the game is also a bit janky. I’ve had a few characters T-pose and collision is a huge mess because you get stuck on bushes, and sometimes small objects yeet you off your horse and on the floor. It makes traversing the map a bit of a chore if you don’t have fast travel spots unlocked.
The main story is a revenge story of sorts but was in my opinion fairly well written and does a good job at immersing you into the medieval world. Some of the side quests were a bit heavy on fetch quests or requiring you to fast travel through half the map to pass some skill checks and then go back. The voice acting is decent enough and the game has some memorable characters.
Graphics are top notch, and I wonder why more games don’t use the Cryengine. Looks like a dream and can be tweaked to run on a weak system. I played the game on medium settings on my Steam Deck at somewhere between 40-60fps, and it looked really good doing so. I also played it in the past on my gaming PC on high/ultra, and it was really well optimized there as well.
Overall, it’s a very solid game, hampered in parts by it’s combat system and janky traversal. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes open world RPGs or games set in a medieval setting. As long as you don’t mind a slow start, a bit of jank, and a somewhat shaky combat system, there’s lots to like here.
Planet of Lana (PC) [04:21] ★★★★★
An indie gem! I absolutely loved this game. It’s a 2d cinematic puzzle-platformer like Limbo or Inside, but less depressing.
You play as a girl called Lana and play most of the game with a very cute cat-like alien companion called Mui, who you have to collaborate with to solve puzzles and progress in the story.
The game is only 4-5 hours long, which for me is the perfect game length for a game such as this.
You can direct Mui to stay, follow you, go to a certain position, or interact with objects it’s stood in front of. Then you can move yourself to interact with the world, but you’re much less agile than Mui. Using the tools at your disposal, you go from puzzle to puzzle as you go through the story. I admit I’m not good at all at puzzle games and read prior to my playing of this game that the puzzles were too simplistic, but I really didn’t think so. I didn’t have to think too hard for the first two hours of the game, but at that point I started needing a walkthrough because I couldn’t figure out the solution to a few puzzles. All in all, I had to consult a guide three times by the time I finished the game, which is less than I can say for most other puzzle games I’ve played. I’m happy the game isn’t too hard, or I would’ve gotten too frustrated and would have ended up dropping the game.
Which would’ve been a shame, because it’s quite the experience. The artstyle is absolutely gorgeous, the score is equally fantastic, and the story it tells without dialogue is interesting. Just a beautiful audiovisual experience all in all.
Unless you need your games to be long, and/or you need lots of action in your games, I can recommend this to anyone.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance (PC) [51:20] ★★★★☆
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a historically plausible (mostly accurate) medieval open-world game set in 1403 Bohemia.
Unlike other big open world games that feel comparable (maybe Skyrim?), you start off as Henry, the son of a blacksmith, and it takes you many hours of gameplay to become proficient at combat, which takes the form of either melee combat using several different types of weapons, or archery using bows. No magic! Combat is a bit of a mixed bag. At least in melee combat, it’s trying to reinvent the wheel by having you manually swing your weapon from one of five directions or do a stab right at the opponent’s chest. You can parry an opponent’s attack by pressing the block button at a precise moment and swinging from the opposite angle of the enemy’s attacks.
This all sounds good in theory, but in practice you end up getting parried and riposted 95% of the time you attack someone, leaving you very few openings to actually do any damage via regular attacks. You can do the same to the opponent a bit later on in the game, so combat tends to devolve into perfect parrying and maybe squeezing in a quick attack until the enemy is dead, or hoping they block rather than riposte, and you can get a combo off. Takes a while to slug it out with an opponent as a result. As you level up weapon skills (by using weapons in combat), you unlock combos requiring you to hit 3-4 attacks in a specific pattern to execute a strong special move. Sadly, the enemy riposting your attack or dodging breaks the combo, meaning getting off combos is more a matter of luck rather than skill, and the longer 4-chain combos are essentially useless as a result.
The combat system then completely falls flat once you’re engaged with multiple enemies, in which case it’s best advised to just run away.
A lot of the game’s systems are geared towards realism, like the survival system requiring you to sleep and eat regularly, less you suffer debuffs. Food goes off over time, and some foods decay faster than others. Items have a weight and Henry can only carry so much before getting slowed down, or eventually being unable to move at all. Brewing potions is a very manual process, in which you have to prepare the ingredients and follow a recipe in a book next to you to attempt to make it yourself. There’s your typical RPG mechanics in the game such as skills, buffs, debuffs, and perks you can invest. Skills get levelled up by playing the game and using them, similar to Morrowind. The worldbuilding created thanks to that is fantastic, though it does get in the way of the fun of it sometimes, such as with the combat system.
Sadly the game is also a bit janky. I’ve had a few characters T-pose and collision is a huge mess because you get stuck on bushes, and sometimes small objects yeet you off your horse and on the floor. It makes traversing the map a bit of a chore if you don’t have fast travel spots unlocked.
The main story is a revenge story of sorts but was in my opinion fairly well written and does a good job at immersing you into the medieval world. Some of the side quests were a bit heavy on fetch quests or requiring you to fast travel through half the map to pass some skill checks and then go back. The voice acting is decent enough and the game has some memorable characters.
Graphics are top notch, and I wonder why more games don’t use the Cryengine. Looks like a dream and can be tweaked to run on a weak system. I played the game on medium settings on my Steam Deck at somewhere between 40-60fps, and it looked really good doing so. I also played it in the past on my gaming PC on high/ultra, and it was really well optimized there as well.
Overall, it’s a very solid game, hampered in parts by it’s combat system and janky traversal. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes open world RPGs or games set in a medieval setting. As long as you don’t mind a slow start, a bit of jank, and a somewhat shaky combat system, there’s lots to like here.
Planet of Lana (PC) [04:21] ★★★★★
An indie gem! I absolutely loved this game. It’s a 2d cinematic puzzle-platformer like Limbo or Inside, but less depressing.
You play as a girl called Lana and play most of the game with a very cute cat-like alien companion called Mui, who you have to collaborate with to solve puzzles and progress in the story.
The game is only 4-5 hours long, which for me is the perfect game length for a game such as this.
You can direct Mui to stay, follow you, go to a certain position, or interact with objects it’s stood in front of. Then you can move yourself to interact with the world, but you’re much less agile than Mui. Using the tools at your disposal, you go from puzzle to puzzle as you go through the story. I admit I’m not good at all at puzzle games and read prior to my playing of this game that the puzzles were too simplistic, but I really didn’t think so. I didn’t have to think too hard for the first two hours of the game, but at that point I started needing a walkthrough because I couldn’t figure out the solution to a few puzzles. All in all, I had to consult a guide three times by the time I finished the game, which is less than I can say for most other puzzle games I’ve played. I’m happy the game isn’t too hard, or I would’ve gotten too frustrated and would have ended up dropping the game.
Which would’ve been a shame, because it’s quite the experience. The artstyle is absolutely gorgeous, the score is equally fantastic, and the story it tells without dialogue is interesting. Just a beautiful audiovisual experience all in all.
Unless you need your games to be long, and/or you need lots of action in your games, I can recommend this to anyone.
4 Yrs✓#
Dodo_dog
4 Yrs✓#
Planet of Lana looks really good. I have added that to my wishlist!