For gamers behind the times (2024)

Table of Contents
Bi-Weekly Thread for general gaming discussion. Backlog, advice, recommendations, rants and more! New? Start here! Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a game that I really tried to like, but it's too tedious Just finished Earthbound (1994) holds up insanely well Aliens: Dark Descent (2023) Dead Space - Predictable + Foot Stomp gameplay is baaaad Dave the Diver has been a disappointment Hollow Knight is a game I wanted to love but couldn't get into Wolfenstein: The New Order - Wow! I finally beat Alien Isolation - one decade later I just finished Cocoon Cyberpunk 2077 (and Phantom Liberty DLC) was exactly what I needed at the moment Playing Civilization 2 in 2024 is ROUGH (comparison with later entries) Outlast: Whistleblower: That was good DLC indeed, Mr Park... Was Shadow of War supposed to have its original length for creative reasons? Spoiler Far Cry 5: All style and no substance Back 4 Blood, a fun zombie shooty squad game with some neat customization options and fun set pieces, that unfortunately shows the glaring pitfalls of cross-platform play. Burnout 3 Takedown Review - King of the Arcade Racers I started my journey with the old Yakuza games with Kiwami (not Zero) and I think that might have been my mistake Asterigos: Curse of the Stars - (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly) Bi-Weekly Thread for general gaming discussion. Backlog, advice, recommendations, rants and more! New? Start here! Kingdom Come: Deliverance is amazing but terrible Played Ico again for the third time -- 23 years after the first Noita is 100% a game where I'm perfectly fine with modding with cheats While a commercial failure at the time, Blur is such a brilliantly fun racing game that took too long to get the love it deserved 1/4 of my favorite game of all time: Twisted Metal Black!

r/patientgamersu/AutoModerator1d ago

Bi-Weekly Thread for general gaming discussion. Backlog, advice, recommendations, rants and more! New? Start here!

15 Upvotes

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

56 comments

r/patientgamersu/Simke111h ago

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a game that I really tried to like, but it's too tedious

Upvotes

I got KCD on sale about a week or so ago and have put in around 40 hours so far (a little over half point main quests wise). I had my reservations about the game before I bought it, mainly around combat mechanic and save system. It is a slower paced game, which I have no issues with in general. However a lot of that slower pace comes from a lot of game mechanics/design becoming tedious after a while.

To start on a positive note, the in game world looks really nice, non-fantasy, historically accurate setting is good, and the story was interesting - up to about half way point. Levelling up Henry's skills also gives meaningful character progression.

Now onto the bad. First, the combat system. I have levelled up sword skill to 17 (out of 20) by training and fighting bandits, but still struggle with stronger opponents. They do perfect blocks almost every time, so combat comes down to slashing until I run out of stamina, hoping that I'll land at least one hit, then going defensive until stamina recovers, where half of the time pressing the block button doesn't do anything and I get killed with few consecutive hits if the opponent gets too close. Swinging your sword also feels laggy, as opposed to your opponents who can do 2-3 or 4 quick hits in succession.

"Area" objectives are like hunting in the dark. So you need to find out some information about something, you'll just have to go around the highlighted area talking to every person you see hoping they'll have the info you need.

When you do have a quest marker to talk to a specific person, better hope you get to them before they retire to their house for the evening, because you won't be able to enter the house once they are inside and have locked the door. No way to knock/get their attention, so you'll just have to wait until the morning when they wake up and exit the house, which could be anywhere from 7-10am.

Fast travel is slow. This wasn't a problem until about mid way through main questline, when quests start to become typical fetch quests which send you all over the map.

The need to sleep and eat. Now while I'm not a big fan of "survival" gameplay elements, this wouldn't be too bad if you didn't have to spend a lot of time waiting for people to become accessible/available. By the time time you've waited for someone to exit their house so you can talk to them, or have "fast" travelled to the other end of the map, you will be tired and hungry and will need to find a place to sleep. Which, depending on where you are, usually means travelling some more to nearest town that has lodgings. At least they could have given us the option to set up a camp like in RDR 2.

Having said all this, KCD isn't a bad game, but it is a game that will only appeal to specific audience that can put up with it's game mechanics, and unfortunately that isn't me.

30 comments

r/patientgamersu/waldorsockbat9h ago

Just finished Earthbound (1994) holds up insanely well

86 Upvotes

If you've played any JRPG in the past 20 years Earthbound has had an immense influence over the genre. One of would think that this would mean that Earthbound is a lesser then it's successors. Which is true depending on what game your comparing it too. This isn't comparable to something like Persona5 Royal in terms of technology, character designs or narrative depth. Which shouldn't be a surprise considering that this game is 30 years old. However this doesn't mean that Earthbound is devoid of those things or doesn't provide an excellent JRPG experience. Like most people my familiarity with Earthbound came from the inclusion of the character Ness in smash bros. Having finally checked out the game it comes across as a David Lynchean inspired story about a young boy who goes on an adventure with his friends. That starts out with you fighting dogs and snakes and ends with you fighting aliens from the future and hippes. All the while the story escalates in a way that seems natural to it's quirky tone and characters. I would be lying if I didn't say that there were moments that seriously frustrated me. Like with many games from the earlier eras Earthbound did not have a difficulty setting, which admittedly wasn't too bad but there were times I hit a difficulty wall. There are also many subtle features that I enjoyed that I'm surprised wasn't carried over to other JRPS. The fact that if your so over leveled the game will just insta kill enemies instead of engaging with them makes backtracking infinitely more convenient. Overall I can't recommend this game enough, admittedly the game is shorter than more current JRPGS but that isn't essentially a bad thing.

20 comments

r/patientgamersu/m0wlwurf-X22h ago

Aliens: Dark Descent (2023)

111 Upvotes

I picked up aliens: dark descent in a recent sale and I'm having a blast. I didn't see any reviews here, so I feel inclined to write about it.

I never played a game like this before, I think the closest comparison in my own library is probably Xcom, although there is one really major difference: aliens dark descent is not turn based. Instead, it's mostly real time and allows the player to use a slo-mo function in order to master more challenging situations and to issue commands. I think it's also possible to completely pause the game and still issue commands.

So what do we have here? A real time tactics game, in which you control a 4-5 man squad. The game has the official license of the "alien" franchise and makes good use of it in terms of atmosphere, although the only character starting both in the game and in the movies are the aliens. The story is basic but does its job, but the gameplay is extremely tense and exciting.

The best part of the game is the gameplay. Your squad is always heavily outnumbered, and once the aliens are alerted to your presence the situation escalates even more. So your best course of action is staying stealthy when possible, and dispose of attacking aliens quickly and efficiently when you are eventually detected. Your soldiers are not only taking physical damage in the battles, but stressful situations, e.g. fighting off aliens or seeing a squad mate getting a severe injury harm them psychologically. Culminating too much stress results in traumata, which make them even more sensitive to stress. You can cure this in your base, but this will take your best soldiers out of action for some missions.

The game manages to keep the stakes high in every moment, it's extremely tense and finishing a mission feels satisfying. Your squad members grow on you and in generally it feels like you are in (one of the good) alien movies. It might not be a all-time-great with infinite replayability like Xcom2, but it's a really solid game and I can only recommend to give it a try.

50 comments

r/patientgamersu/SalamanderOk69448m ago

Dead Space - Predictable + Foot Stomp gameplay is baaaad

Upvotes

I finally tried to play Dead Space.

Disclaimer: I tried to play Calysto Protocol and ran into the same issue which just ruined the experience for me frequently enough that I stopped playing the game. I expected the same to happen playing Dead Space.

It did.

I just can't get passed the terrible foot stomping gameplay. Dismember enemies and they fall to the ground to crawl at you. Then it becomes a face-off to footstomp the enemy while he's trying to attack your face. This is just objectively bad.

On the note about predictability, what I mean by this is that the game just feels like it's built on trigger volumes. While this is standard practice for linear experiences, that it stands out just makes the experience more predictable. Fight here, sequence here, etc. Btw, it's strange that you can't use stasis on all the character sequences that you run into around the ship.

Oh I guess I can complain about accessibility, although back when this game was made, things were a bit less refined, so these points can be forgiven. To remind myself of the controls for Statis and Kinesis, I didn't find them in Controls or Gameplay Settings where all the other controls are listed, but instead through the tutorials within the RIG's 4th menu. And I couldn't skip the initial intro sequence. But these things are moreso signs of the times rather than a core design failing of the game.

Overall, this game gives me the 'trying to be Half-Life' but not succeeding. Lots of potential here though. It's a shame it didn't evolve into a System Shock style game.

0 comments

r/patientgamersu/Mr_Lutece1d ago

Dave the Diver has been a disappointment

1.0k Upvotes

I started playing waiting for it to be the typical indie game that has gotten big praise thanks to an engaging story and well-thought-out gameplay elements. And I want to like the game with my heart, but I can´t

PROS

  • The characters are fun and the dialogues are well-written
  • Animations and cutscenes are well-crafted
  • All gameplay elements are interconnected and encourage you to be efficient with your fishing to make more money

CONS

  • The game gets repetitive after a while because of how easy are the big fish to catch and how grindy it feels to catch certain types of fish.
  • Money can only be used to get better gear that improves things like time on water (even though the really big limiter is the capacity of the storage)
  • Once you meet the sea people it becomes much more tedious. I was having fun diving into the bottom of the sea and once you reach the village you have stupid missions like retrieving a ball and getting stupid crap for people that I do not care
  • The restaurant minigame gets boring fast thanks to how boring the economic rewards are and how grindy fishing is
  • Exploration is cool until you reach the village and the game throws an uninteresting storyline at you. I'd rather have 2-3 more zones below the last one and have more danger and excitement going deep.
  • There are way too many minigames that are way too simple. The game feels as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.
  • There are too many things to do every day and those tasks make the game feel like a job, a boring one tbh.

Maybe Dave the Diver is for people who like completionism, and having a relaxing game that is easy to play and doesn't ask the player anything else besides checking the to-do list of the day. But if you are looking for a game about exploration and the challenging curve of managing a restaurant and fishing you will be disappointed.

375 comments

r/patientgamersu/Mr_Ruu1d ago

Hollow Knight is a game I wanted to love but couldn't get into

469 Upvotes

Disclaimer: this isn't a hate post or rant post. This comes from a bit of earnest passion and disappointment, so don't take any of this personally.

Hollow Knight is a game I've seen so much praise of, from almost every corner of the gaming space. It's one of the indie darlings everyone loves, alongside titans like Undertale, Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, etc. The hype for it is clear as day.

Besides the hype, the game itself just looks great. Its art style is simple but iconic, and its gameplay is quick and snappy from a glance. The OST is also nothing short of beautiful and atmospheric, from what I've heard.

All this seemed perfect to me and I felt from the get-go that I'd really sink my teeth into this once I played it.

..At least, that's what I thought, 3 years ago. The first time I tried it, I did indeed fall in love with all those little aspects but something about it didn't grab me. Maybe it was the weird map mechanics and how fairly simple the combat was, but I didn't go too far, only managing somewhere at the beginning of Greenpath and short of fighting Hornet before I unceremoniously dropped the game.

It wasn't until recent that I got around to trying it again at the behest of friends who sung its praises after I said I initially bounced off of it, with them saying I just didn't give it an honest shot, which is very true. As a metroidvania, Hollow Knight will start off simple and confusing until you get upgrades and learn more about it.

So with that, I recently booted it up again, started on a new save, and gave it the old college try: I swam right through where I initially stopped and played through what I feel is the midgame portion of the game, having explored a majority of the games' areas, upgrading my nail thrice, collecting many upgrades including the double jump, and fought what I feel was enough bosses.

Before I go further, I should state I love metroidvanias. I completed the likes of Super Metroid, Castlevania: SotN, Hyper Light Drifter, you name it. I also love the Souls series, which take many cues from Metroidvanias and which Hollow Knight definitely borrows from. The challenge and exploration are something I'm more than familiar with.

So unfortunately, even with what I felt was a proper playthrough of the game, I'm sitting here, two weeks later, not having picked up HK and not eager to get into it.

What is it that turns me off about it? I can't really say. The visuals are great, the story is fairly interesting, the world-building is nice, and the game just feels great, but something just doesn't click.

It most certainly isn't the challenge, as I feel I've cleared some tricky bosses, such as the Lost Kin and up to the 5th fight on Grey Prince Zote (!!). The exploration is also fine and I haven't had issues with where to go and am rarely lost.

I wish I could pinpoint it but I couldn't. A part of me says that the actual combat just isn't engaging enough, while another part says the upgrades aren't exotic or interesting enough to warrant looking out for more. I think more than anything, it was the gargantuan expectations that made me think this was a much more complex and grand game than it ended up being.

Whatever the case, I'm just sitting here, a little sad that I have no drive to pick up HK again even as I gave it a thorough try, upwards of 10 hours in my current playthrough. I'm almost convinced most of the "good stuff" is much farther in, but for a game to not grab me this far into the story feels like I'm missing something.

It's a real shame as I love everything about the game. It feels like I should have been hooked. I was already prepared to obsess over the silly little characters and the interesting world they live in. But unfortunately I couldn't stick with it.

Maybe in the future, I'll pick it up again to finish it off. Maybe then, it will grab me and I'll be one of thousands of diehard HK fans eagerly anticipating whatever Team Cherry cooks up next. But until then, I'll wait and see how I feel.

For those that also played HK: how did you get into it, if you did? Did you end up loving it earlier/later than me? Did you go in with high expectations? I'd like to know how others handled HK to gauge myself and see if I may have given up too early or not.

297 comments

r/patientgamersu/idonthaveanaccountA1d ago

Wolfenstein: The New Order - Wow!

121 Upvotes

Hell yeah.

I've never played any Wolfenstein before, ever. I don't know the first thing about the franchise, apart from the fact that it's basically a nazi-killing party. I also had some knowledge about its alternate history stuff. It scratched an itch I didn't know I had. And it did so in one of my favourite ways possible. On sale, lol. Obviously, spoilers follow, and I'll do my best to mark them.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a sort of soft reboot of the franchise. It's a jumping on point, essentially. Starting here does give you the feeling that there is some previous lore that you aren't aware of, but you can connect the dots on your own. The story begins in 1946, during World War 2. Immediately, it's obvious that something isn't right, considering that WW2 ended in 1945. You're thrown on an island occupied by dieselpunk-looking nazis, where it seems like the tech they're using is too advanced even for today's standards. I'm not going to lie, I wasn't a fan of that intro, didn't really like the look, or feel of it. But then, shit hits the fan, your protagonist gets shrapnel lodged in his brain, and spends the next 14 years in a mental asylum, completely paralysed. It is now 1960, and that's where the game really started for me.

The nazis have won the war, and in this alternate timeline, have basically taken over the world. Berlin is now a huge metropolis not unlike New York City, with its huge buildings and elevated railways, which include the proposed volkshalle, the huge palace-like building that would have apparently been so big it would have had its own weather...on the inside. Germany is basically an empire here. Your job is to report back to your old allies and prop up the efforts of the resistance, which is all but extinct. You visit various cool locations in each mission and you pretty much globetrot, gathering equipment and stuff you need to really take the fight to the nazis.

This game came out in 2014, simultaneously releasing for the then-new 8th gen and the 7th gen. Right here, there is a "problem". It suffers a bit from that cross-gen game problem, where it doesn't quite belong in either gen, on a technical level. Graphics are good, but you can definitely see 7th gen remnants. Gameplay is also good, but not quite as advanced as you'd expect from an 8th gen game, although it needs to be said that this is definitely an arcade-y game and more than likely keeping it simple was a creative decision as well. It also needs to be stated that it took me some time to get used to it, since your character moves and sways kind of erratically and that literally made me dizzy at first. Although, considering I had the same issue with Doom, it's probably a Bethesda thing, but I could be wrong.

The story, although equally arcade-y, was surprisingly touching. I found myself caring about the characters and what was happening to them several times, which I wouldn't have expected from a "dumb fun" game such as this one. It's very silly, of course, but it never winks at you in the meta way that has grown annoying in the past few years. It knows what it is, but it doesn't break character, so to speak. I also wouldn't say it ever outstayed its welcome, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of newer games.

As far as the aesthetics and ideas go, I thought that some of the tech the nazis possessed was a bit too out there, basically being science fiction, even for today's standrards as already stated. For example, they have developed artificial intelligence, though as far as I know they don't even have digital computers yet, which seems very unlikely, but anyway. To each their own. Once you get past that, you can just enjoy it for what it is.

All in all, this game left me feeling like I've been sleeping on the Wolfenstein franchise, which is great. I'm definitely excited to play the next games, and I recommend it.

56 comments

r/patientgamersu/ianzachary12d ago

I finally beat Alien Isolation - one decade later

173 Upvotes

Re-Edit: I missed a potential spoiler, changed my last sentence.

One of those backlogs games I’ve been putting off forever but regret sleeping on. I initially bought it for PS4 sometime around launch and really enjoyed it until I hit a point where I was too scared to keep playing 😂 I can’t count how many times I’ve restarted this game only to give up on the same section where we first encounter a Xenomorph - this “playthrough” honestly took a couple years with off & on sessions. It clicked for me on Series X because the FPS Boost option makes a night and day difference for me.

Gameplay is still crazy as ever - it feels like a testament to good game design how well crafted the stalking system is. I still think it’s wild that the AI will adapt to your playstyle, it always feels unpredictable the way there’s no designated path to keep watch for. Spend a lot of time hiding in lockers? Well now the Xenomorph will check those more often. Think save stations will spare you? Wait till you hear the screech running down the halls. Wasted all your molotovs? Good luck. Occasionally there will be ‘scripted’ moments but I feel like every playthrough is always a little different.

The graphics still look amazing, one thing I find noticeable is how well reflections and water hold up compared to some stuff we see today. Some of the human character models are a bit cold, but the Xenomorph still looks phenomenal; the Synthetics are a perfect type of uncanny. They nailed the aesthetic of the original film and I don’t have much to complain about on that front, if anything all I want is a 4K patch for consoles.

Another thing that deserves some praise is the sound design! The game never feels safe the way we constantly hear banging in the vents, I’m a sucker for all the random beep boop bops the machines make haha. I like the moments where it’s a cacophony of sound and you can’t really tell whether or not something is hunting you down or if it’s just the sound of a conveyer belt.

It’s one of the better narratives in the Alien franchise, although as a game it left a little to be desired. My biggest complaint might be the overall pacing; I don’t mind the playtime but something about the way the story unfolds has always felt a little sluggish. Idk if I’m tripping but 19 chapters feels like a little too much for a horror game, and that some of the tasks could’ve been trimmed down. Also I get immersive gameplay is important but why are the space suits so damn slow?? The ending is so abrupt too, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but it doesn’t feel all that rewarding after everything the player goes through.

With that all said, it’s a great experience that any horror fanatic should experience for themselves. I’m glad the game only seems to only garner more appreciation as the years pass by.

74 comments

r/patientgamersu/Nomsfud2d ago

I just finished Cocoon

187 Upvotes

What a wonderful game.

Seriously, what a wonderful game.

This is a puzzle game that really captivates you from the get-go. It starts out simple, and gets more complicated until the end, but at no time do you feel overwhelmed by the task at hand. Each concept is clearly shown to you and you are given enough time to master it before moving on to the next, until finally you're handling all the teachings of the game at once, flying through at a rhythm that just feels right.

I have not played a game this creative since I played the original Portal back in 2007. The ideas here are basic, just like walking through portals can be, but with everything on your plate the execution gets complex and beautiful. Everything starts feeling second nature, and at times when you want to try something out to see if it'll work, you'll find yourself amazed that it does.

If anyone is looking for a great experience, I can't recommend this game enough. Just try and find it on sale, because I clocked just over four hours and finished it.

42 comments

r/patientgamersu/broodkiller2d ago

54 Upvotes

Hey all, I know I am a few years late to the party, and I know it's been said hundreds of times already, but I just wanted to join the chorus of praise for Salt&Sanctuary (2016), since it's just such a fabulous game! It captures the vibe, style and difficulty of Dark Souls in a 2D, Metroidvania format just beautifully, and after having spent 35 hrs on it, I must say that I don't regret one single minute. Here are some thoughts I wanted to share.

The Good:

1. World

Long story short - the world of Salt and Sanctuary is massive, and it is beautiful. It captures the vibe of a decrepit, undead-but-not-yet-gone world beautifully. The diversity of biomes keeps the progression interesting, the variety of enemies in each biome keeps the gameplay fresh, and every boss fight is a unique experience to itself. Granted, some are more memorable than others (e.g. Murdiella Mal), and some are more difficult than others (Curse you, RONIN CRAN!!!), but the fact that there are over 20 of them in the game and each fight is different speaks volumes to the great game design. Plus, there's also different creeds you can belong to etc, so it really is the full package.

2. Builds

The amount of wiggle room the player has in this game is just fantastic. Sure, you have to pick a starting class/equipment, and they do differ a bit, but after a few levels you essentially free to play however you like, very much unconstrained. Overall, there's plenty of melee and range weapons, spells, armors and shields, and thus the variety of available play styles is so great that everybody can find something for themselves.

I myself played as a cleric in the Devara's Light creed, so focused on healing and prayers, you know, "the good guys". Except that my character Maaros decided that he wants to be a Death Cleric. That's right - my innocent guy wanted to bring the enemies to the other side as quickly as possible. Powering up every holy slash of the glass-cannon Maaros were the Divine Blessed Weapons and Guardian Blade prayers, all the while rocking the Haymarker scythe for the first half the game, only to be transmuted around midpoint into an even more powerful variant called the Purifier, which carried me til the final boss had to bend the knee, lower his head and get reaped, like everyone else.

Moreover, for most of the game, I was basically running naked, with no armor except for a very basic 0-level Cotton Tunic. It was only towards the very end that Maaros started sporting the Assassin Set, but that was mostly just to look awesome. Of course, armor and weapon weighs affects fast/fat rolling, which is a key survival mechanic, and in this game fast roll (<=25% total encumbrance) is very effective, to say the least, both to dodge enemy hits, but also get some distance for a heal/buff.

3. Fairness

Of course, I died a-plenty, which is very much par for course in a soulsvania. It is a testament to how well Sanctuary was done that even though the game could be brutal, it was never unfair, and kept pulling me in for more, which I gladly obliged! Outside of very few cases of a stunlock (and the frixin unicorns!), it was always clear to me why I died, and that the fault was mine - getting greedy with hits, not keeping the proper distance, not healing early enough, forgetting the enemy's patterns....all the usual failures that we face in a game of this type. As always, it served me well to slow down, take a breather, and remind myself of the immortal words of Treebeard - "Don't be hasty...!".

The Bad: (but not really)

  1. Let's get the elephant out of the way - there is no map, which can be annoying, especially later in the game. After a while you get used to that though, plus for people coming from Dark Souls games - none of them had a map either, and they slayed.
  2. Falling damage. Even though platforming is only present in a background role, there are a few sections where you need to really watch your jumps, or you fall to your doom and need to repeat an entire sequence. Also, some extensive wall jumping parts can get tricky, because if your muscle memory activates the 9th or 12th jump too quickly, it's over, you fall all the way down, with a beautiful bone-cracking sound, not dissimilar to the one from the original Prince of Persia.
  3. Story and characters - again, in true homage to the Souls series, the setting is mysterious, the lore is cryptic, the characters are weird/wacky and the overall plot is....there (apprently there was a princess somewhere...). It was serviceable for me, thanks to the gameplay stealing the show, but otherwise one can find it a bit lacking.

Anywho, these just some thoughts fresh on my mind - whomstever played S&S, knows what I'm taking about, a proper banger like that doesn't happen often. In my humble option it can take its rightful place among the best of the best in the decrepit *vania genre, alongside Hollow Knight, Ender Lillies or Blasphemous.

35 comments

r/patientgamersu/Blue-Baseplate3d ago

Cyberpunk 2077 (and Phantom Liberty DLC) was exactly what I needed at the moment

348 Upvotes

I'm writing this after just finishing Cyberpunk 2077 and the Phantom Liberty DLC. What an incredible game!

There's no plot spoilers in this writeup, so don't worry if you haven't played it yet. I do mention some gameplay related stuff and make comparisons to other games though.

I picked it up when it was on sale on Steam 2-3 weeks ago kind of on a whim because I felt like sitting on the couch and playing something graphically impressive on my TV instead of on the Switch for a change. Honestly didn't know much about it other than it's an RPG, it got pelters for being buggy as hell and for crunching workers, it had Keanu in it, and it had a reputation for looking absolutely stunning. I figured, if nothing else, I'd know pretty quickly if it was my sort of game and could always refund it if it didn't click in the first hour or so.

It's 85 hours of game time later and I cannot even begin to explain how much I needed an experience like that!

The story alone immediately pulled me in hard - in a way that few things in my life have. I haven't had a game do it to this degree since playing The Last of Us for the first time in 2013. I'm talking full on 'If I'm awake and have time, I need to see the next chapter of this story'. Having tried and bounced off some of the high-budget story-driven games of the last decade or so like Assassin's Creed: Unity and Syndicate, The Witcher 3, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Spiderman because I just couldn't connect with the setting or characters, I didn't expect to connect with Cyberpunk as deeply as what ended up happening. It's just a very thought provoking yet grounded sci-fi story. It honestly felt really refreshing and has kind of renewed my enthusiasm to try some of the big profile games I've missed out on recently.

I usually avoid in-game roleplaying and 'dialogue choices matter' style games because I find them more stressful than fun but I found almost every main and side character compelling and wanted to know their stories - even if it meant having to make difficult in-game choices. This is the first open world game in a while that I've cared enough to reload a save to play a different decision to see how things would play out. I love how your playable character actually feels important in the game universe without feeling massively OP. If I had any big criticisms of the characters in the game or the game in general, it's the interactivity with characters outside of completing missions for them. I don't feel like there's as many 'just socialising' dialogue options as there should be for characters as well defined as they are or for a game of this scale. It's most noticeable in the romance options. The number of romance choices felt quite limited compared to something like the Mass Effect trilogy and the number of activities is extremely limited compared to the GTA games. In retrospect, Cyberpunk is probably trying to do something more diegetic than those and more like The Witcher 3. It's not a deal breaker for me because I was more into the main story than looking for in-game romance, but I did wish I could talk to them about more than what was available. Hangouts felt very repetitive as a result. I do want to praise the voice acting and mo-cap performances though. They're right up there with Naughty Dog's recent stuff. And, in general, the dialogue options are excellent too. As engaging as the Mass Effect trilogy's.

I thought the Phantom Liberty DLC was the absolute standout and enjoyed it even more than the very good base game story. I actually ended up inadvertently finishing it before the main game ending because I was enjoying it so much. 'Futuristic espionage' is a genre I haven't explored for a while but it's so unbelievably my jam. It gave me the impulse to dig out my old Splinter Cell games and see if they still hold up or can give an experience similar to how the stealth infiltration feels in Cyberpunk. I really hope the people making the Perfect Dark reboot played this and were taking notes.

This game also reinforced how important the setting is for connecting to open worlds like this. I had so much fun exploring Night City - just for the sake of exploring - because getting in a car or on a bike and driving is so easy. Vehicles handle as fine as GTA, btw, and the vehicle based combat feels great. And, architecturally, every single building is interesting to look. It's such a dense and vibrant modern looking world and that resonates with me in a way that the high-fantasy medieval or feudal looking towns just don't. I still barely know the suburb names or where anything is, but I just love that feeling of looking around and going 'woah, that looks amazing'. It is the most fun I've had just exploring a city since GTA IV on the Xbox 360. I really, really want another dense, modern, open world like this to explore.

Probably the thing that stood out to me the most is how much flexibility you have to approach missions or objectives. I started by defaulting to a standard 'go in loud' classic FPS style gameplay because it's easy and comfortable. But as I played more and got more into the story, I started to explore different setups and weapon configurations and ended the game playing more stealthily as a silent assassin type with a wider combo of weaponry. I love that the game incentivises you to try different things - through mission incentives and a wide variety of readily available weapons. Speaking of which, the combat - especially the gunplay - pleasantly surprised me. It's a night and day difference to The Witcher 3. This feels as solid, satisfying and responsive as some of the better, big scale FPS games like Borderlands and Battlefield. The weapon based combat is a huge improvement and only part of the combat loop. The hacking component is unbelievably fun and surprisingly flexible. I got so much enjoyment in the early and mid-game sneaking around experimenting with hacking combinations trying to remain undetected - and then almost inevitably having to shooting my way out of a mess because I mucked something up. You live and learn.

A word on performance and bugs. It's still not a completely stable game. I've had 6 hard crashes in the 85 hours of gameplay. Only 2 of them were in missions (1 in a minor boss battle; 1 while doing a side mission) and I was able to load from an autosave just before both started. The other 4 were while free-roaming in different areas of the city. There's also numerous of mostly silly and weird glitches that you'd expect from an open world game - stuff like vehicles respawning in weird orientations or partially submerged in roads and NPCs and objects sometimes clipping through floors or walls. More immersion breaking than game breaking. I played on my PC (i7 1200K/3070Ti) and basically just left everything on default (DLSS balanced/ RT shadows only/High or Ultra everything else) at 1440p and it was a stable 60fps throughout. Felt great to play and looked even better in HDR on the OLED TV. I know it's already 4 years old, but this is going to be one of those games that will be great to explore again in a few years on the next GPU upgrade.

I'm realising having written this that the reason Cyberpunk 2077 + Phantom Liberty resonated so strongly with me is is because it pulls all these little gameplay elements from a wide variety of game genres that I've enjoyed in the past - including some that I haven't played for over a decade - and combined them into something greater than the sum of its parts when I wasn't expecting it to. I know this was a totally subjective word dump/ramble but I kind of just needed to get my thoughts down.

I loved getting to experience this game for the first time. I know it's already been discussed a lot and I'm sure will continue to be, but I'd also love to hear what you thought of it. Thanks for reading.

94 comments

r/patientgamersu/Patient_Gamemer2d ago

Playing Civilization 2 in 2024 is ROUGH (comparison with later entries)

50 Upvotes

Ok, this part was going to be longer but long story short: I grew up playing Civ 4, never got to play 5, only started 6 recently and out of curiosity I've played Civ 2, which is abandoneware. Just look on google "download Civilization 2" and you'll be directed to some forums with downloadable files which need no installing. In fact a part of me recommends this as a way to get into the series because, as you'll see later, Civ 1 and 2 actually have the least amount of mechanics of any Civ game, so it's not a bad way to start with 4X gaming. I might have to say that I have not played Civ 1 because I have limited patience, but afaik the gameplay is basically the same. The only difference between Civ 1 and 2 is that 1 was designed for MS-DOS and Civ 2 is made for Windows 95.

What follows is a list of every major departure from Civ 2 to later games, specially Civ 6, although some changes were already made in Civ 3. I'm thinking of making an ultra-large post somewhere explaining the whole evolution to the series, but for that I'd have to refresh Civ 4 and play 5, so for now, if you're interested in how older Civ games where, take a look:

  • Graphics: the elephant in the room. Yes, as a game made in 1996 it's 2D pixelart stuff. Not even the units are in animated 3D, like what happens in Civ 3. One major issue I had with this and that I cannot write anywhere else is that there's not such a thing as "fog of war". Like Dune 2 or Warcraft 1, here it's either lighted up or pitch black, but your units do have a field of view, so whatever's in inside your "detection range" or not is left confusing and un-explained. Expect barbarian units to come out of nowhere.
  • UI and controls: it's possible these are single worst thing of this game. It's hard to explain without a direct visual input, but just so you know, you don't "right-click" to move, you "drag" to move. Right click is used to move the camera. The other way to do so is clicking in the minimap, which has a second of delay, not scrolling. The action menu isn't in a part of the screen, it's a dropdown menu in lower part of the screen, as if this was Microsoft Word. The same goes for the main menu, the Civilopedia or almost all actions. You cannot put units/buildings on queue, you cannot move more than unit at once, the turn ends without giving you the option to press a button once the last unit has received an order... it's just a mess.
  • Civilizations: due to hardware limitations, no more than 7 civs+ barbarians are allowed in the same game, with each color only being available to 3 mutually exclusive civilizations. (in other words, if there are romans, there cannot be russians or celts). This means there are 21 "different" civilizations, with all the difference being names of leaders and cities and city aspect (greco-roman architecture, oriental buildings...) and AI of rival civs. Funny enough, each civ has two possible leaders, one male and one female, meaning that due to... "history" as a whole, they had to scrap the barrel and put Indira Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt or the Japanese Goddess Amaterasu to lead.
  • Victory conditions: unlike later games here the only main goal is space race, fitting that the civilizations are entirely symmetrical. I guess you could say conquest (ie. victory by elimination) and score are other two possible outcomes, but space race is the main one: no culture, no domination, no United Nations. Interestingly enough, the spaceship part itself if more interesting. Instead of just making different parts and winning once it's complete and launches, here you win when it reaches Alpha Centauri, meaning that the more thrusters and fuel tanks you build the faster it will move, and if you don't build all the necessary parts it's possible that it malfunctions and falls, having to do it all all over. Personally I see why they streamlined this.
  • Yields: personally I'd say these are the basics of all Civilization gameplay, as they your main profit of the land and the way you grow and expand. Contrary to later games, here there are only 3 main yields: food, productions and trade. Food and production work the same as in later entries, whereas trade can be used to get gold, science and luxuries (more on that later). The way it works is that you have slides you can decide which percentage of trade goes to what, like adjusting taxes or making the budget. Although this system is imo too flexible and I'm glad it was disposed of in Civ 5 in favour of separating each yield. There's no culture, faith or tourism, as is to be expected.
  • Population limit: each city two populations hard cap at 8 and 12, which can be surpassed by building an aqueduct and sewer system respectively. This would be replaced by health/housing in later entries. The way happiness (soft cap) works is more complex than later games as each individual citizen can be "happy", "content" or "discontent". Cities rebel if there are more discontent than happy citizens. Content citizens can be made with buildings and the luxury yield make happy citizens.
  • City limit: there's a soft cap on city limit due to the mechanic of corruption and waste, meaning that at some point you will get diminishing returns when making cities as more production and trade will be lost. This can be fought with courthouses and more advanced systems of government.
  • Military-production: experience is represented in only two levels: "green" and "experienced", with the barracks allowing you to produce "experienced" units. Obviously there are no promotions. Military units require maintenance in production, not gold, meaning each unit will be depending on the city that created it, with each city having some free units. In other words, you cannot designate a single city to be a "military production" city.
  • Military-combat: three stats govern combat: attack, defense and mobility, with each being pretty self-explanatory. Units can be stacked, there's no bombarding or "ranged attacks", meaning that "doomstacking" is the winning strategy. However, Civ2 has a way to encourage the opposite through "zones of control" that prevents unit from moving from a space adjacent to an enemy unit to another space also adjacent to the same or another unit, thus destroying all possibility of "slipping through" (again, it's hard to explain without a grid)
  • City planning: as every game prior to 6, every building and wonder can be located in any city. One interesting point is, because every city is basically just a small jpg, there's a "city view" option where you can see a more detailed picture of the city with every building. It looks hilariously bad.
  • Terrain improvement: there are no workers in Civ 2. Instead, every improvement is done by settlers which cost a population point to create and also have an additional maintenance in food. Yes, it's as tedious as it sounds. There are only two main improvements: irrigation, that needs to be next to water; mines, that only happen in hills; and roads that apart of improving movement it also provides additional trade yields. As usual, there are forts, railroads to improve roads later in the game... But the main improvements are those 3.
  • Resources: they don't exist. Well, no, they exist, but only as bonus for each tile, there are no such things as "luxury resources" and you can make knights without iron or horses and planes without oil. The only form of international trade is with caravans and freights that work more like AoE2 merchants.
  • Technology: there's no tech tree here. Well, there is, but it is not shown in game, and instead you have to jump from one technology to the next in the civilopedia. There is a tech tree in a poster the game was originally sold with in the 90s, but if you look for it online, you'll see it's a mess to look at. Overall, technology was designed in these early game caring more for how real life knowledge was created rather than game balance.
  • Government: in these early games there are entirely separate forms of government, like "monarchy", "fundamentalism" or "democracy", no mix and match, with each form of government being an entirely different form of government. Also in these 3 early games, "despotism" has a penalty that prevents you from growing to quickly but which is difficult to explain.
  • Diplomacy: I have not engaged personally in this mechanic, but for what I've seen you use diplomat and spy units the same way you would with any other. It's just that instead of dealing damage, they do other things like sabotage or bribe enemy units.
  • Mechanics that do NOT appear whatsover for having being introduced in later Civ games: culture and borders, with each city having a permanent range of 2 tiles away; religions, pantheons and faith; great people, with some wonders replacing them, like "Darwin's Voyage" or "Newton's College"; city-states, which were introduced in Civ5...
  • "Mechanics" that add flavour: as many people have pointed out, Civ 2 does add some elements that were gone in later entries, namely the throne room and the advisors. The former is basically a still image that gets improved as you progress through the game, manifesting your growth as a leader. The latter is basically 5 guys dressed in historically inaccurate outfits pretending to be a general, a scientist, a merchant, a diplomat and literally Elvis respectively, try to sway you to do what they say. While both of these elements are charming the first time you see them, or when you look at a video online, they overstay their welcome pretty quickly. The throne room has no use whatsover, and the function of the advisors is redundant if you know how to play the game. For example, the advisor of the treasury will always demand to have more banks and for the gold slider to be higher, but if you aren't using gold and want to rush science, there's no reason to. Their inclusion in later games as a small "(recommended)" text after some options is much preferred.

Edit: wow, people here are way older than I had supposed to have nostalgia for almost a 30 y.o. game LOL

Edit 2: people think I'm thrashing the game as bad. It's just outdated. Warcraft 2, Doom, or RE1 are similar in that regard. Consider this a fun time capsule from a newer fan.

76 comments

r/patientgamersu/CyanLight92d ago

Outlast: Whistleblower: That was good DLC indeed, Mr Park...

30 Upvotes

Outlast: Whistleblower packs everything great about the base game into a 2-hour package of sheer terror while throwing in some other surprises of its own. In other words, it's exactly what a good DLC should be.

Positives:

The asylum's atmosphere is as strong as ever, and prayers of escape that never seem to come true continue to be induced. All of the darkness, mad science, and blood only amplify this further.

The visuals are as good as they are going to get for a game of its kind, and Mount Massive's maximalist horror presentation remains effective. Tension is retained throughout, and the lighting remains immaculate.

The gameplay remains simple but exceedingly effective. The shorter run time requires fewer batteries and more judicious usage, but that's expected.

Samuel Laflamme continues to fulfill his goal of making the player suffer with his score. This DLC has no subpar tracks.

Mount Massive has a more creative layout this time, focusing more on the mad science aesthetic the base game barely touched on.

The characters have been given the quality over quantity treatment, and all of them, even Waylon are engaging to a degree—the cannibal Frank Manera, the slimeball Jeremy Blaire and the star, the groom Eddie Gluskin. You will remember them long after the game ends.

Mixed:

The enemy AI is sufficient but can still be defeated by jumping, diving into an air duct, or squeezing through a gap. Thankfully, that only has one or two chances of happening this time.

Waylon still has infinite stamina and can auto-regen his health. It can lessen the intensity of chases.

The story of Waylon Park, the snitch who told Miles Upshur about Murkoff's cartoonish level of corruption and who must now avoid said company stitches, is passable but not very special. It often relies on exposition and optional notes, though. The worldbuilding they provide remains cool. The story remains engaging thanks to an awesome opening, but the ending isn't as memorable as a trade-off.

The pacing for a two hour DLC is a bit too fast; by the end, you're still hungry for more fear, as demented as that sounds.

Due to said pacing, a couple of jumpscares are too close together to have their full effect.

The major characters have pretty good renderings. Unfortunately, the random variants you encounter still look outdated for several years and are ironically funny.

Negatives:

The beginning of the game shows the results of the dream therapy, which is both haunting and psychedelic. This makes for a cool visual aesthetic that is unfortunately dropped. There was no reason not to expand on this.

Score: 9 out of 10

Outlast: Whistleblower is the perfect icing to a delicious horror cake, adding to the positives of the base game in every way. The only downside is that there isn't more of it.

On a side note, I want to mention an IGN fail, but I don't think I'm allowed to do so here.

3 comments

r/patientgamersu/Va1korion3d ago

Was Shadow of War supposed to have its original length for creative reasons? Spoiler

48 Upvotes

Here's the hypothesis: act 4 of Shadow of War was supposed to be as long and tedious as it was on release, as opposed to what we have currently, for ludonarrative reasons. Shadow Wars are supposed to feel decades long.

Let’s start with a few disclaimer notes.

  1. I fully understand the impact microtransactions had on the game. Games have been balanced around those before and even more since. The suggestion here is that greed wasn’t the only reason.
  2. The game is probably more accessible for having removed a good chunk of Shadow Wars. If it’s better or not is the point of the discussion below.
  3. Players are not entitled to seeing all the content (that's the last time I use the c-word here, I promise) - averting players from some of it can and has been viewed as a positive (ahem, SoulsBorne series, ahem).

I completed the 3 acts of the game back in 2017, played a couple of sieges and went to YouTube to see the epilogue cinematic. It didn't have much of an impact on me back then, though Fires of War was a banger. The game wasn't on Steam for me, so no achievements, no extrinsic motivation to 100% it.

Then I bought it to keep the collection in one place and kinda forgot about it. And recently a I had quite a gap in gaming where I could fit a couple of open world experiences, and the choice fell to Shadow of War. I love free flow combat a lot and it seemed pretty chill for weekday hour-long gaming sessions. I completed the story up to Shadow Wars and went sieging. Played around with Nemesis, tried to nurture legendary orcs for my spec ops squad*, ventured into multiplayer** and before I knew it the Shadow Wars were over. I even completed both DLCs, though they are a lot less ambitious in scope, and got a perfect game on Steam in under 60 hours.

And that's where the true ending managed to make an emotional impact on me. After I've seen Talion descend into darkness it was quite a release to see him find peace.

Celebrimbor's lust for power blinded him, and yet I miss him. No war should be fought alone.

I am positive it did because I descended with him. I started optimizing the build to run into the strongholds head on, one man army style, playing around with captains, shaming them into madness, and kinda forgot that Ranger was protecting Gondor and avenging his family, not just guarding his own domain.

Nemesis on its own generates enough variance to keep the game entertaining for 4 chapters of Shadow Wars, I wonder if it has what it takes to make full-length Shadow Wars work. It doesn't have to be fun per se, I like to see gaming as a mature medium that can evoke different emotions, frustration and tedium included. The intrinsic motivation to complete it is already here in build variety and good skill ceiling, and the extrinsic could be represented by achievements***.

* I think before the micro transactions were cut, only the orcs from loot boxes could be transferred between locations. That is balancing the game around micro transactions, there is no excuse.

** I don't think multiplayer sieges count towards progression, which seems like a bit of an oversight. Still cool, as long as you don't encounter modded orcs too often. And you get some loot too.

*** There are a few fun ones like killing a drake riding a graug and killing a captain while riding an olog. Those were interesting to figure out, accidentally got a couple nemeses failing to do that.

So, what are patient gamers' thoughts on it, now that an 80 hour open world doesn't make a headline and many games have seemingly fallen into similar pitfalls without a system like Nemesis to offset it? Should Monolith have kept the length when they deleted the loot boxes? Have any of you completed the full length Shadow Wars?

22 comments

r/patientgamersu/Great_Gonzales_12313d ago

Far Cry 5: All style and no substance

250 Upvotes

Far Cry 5 is a weird game for me, because on paper it would be something I would normally love. A huge game set in the beautiful western US, a story about a Christian Doomsday Cult going crazy, and lots of customization options/quests to tackle? Sounds like something made just for me! Unfortunately after all of my time with it, I can't take more than small chunks of it at a time. I have been playing this game on and off for the last 3 years or so, and while I have had some genuine fun, the game just doesn't do enough for me to justify the gameplay loop.

Let's start with what works: The game is gorgeous and I love the setting and initial story set up. I love topics about crazy cults and people taking Christianity to extremes as a sort of "character study" on it. I love a huge open world setting in a beautiful area and I am tasked to interact with this messed up ideology and take down the cult. It's just something you don't see in video games and I applaud the creative team for moving in a more domestic, familiar yet horrifying direction instead of just "bad people/dictator in foreign country". The map is vast and the presentation is great. I want to call out the soundtrack in general, both the ambient music when you are on the map screen or the fake Christian music that plays on radios in the game. The attention to detail and classic "Americana" culture is great along with creepier elements like how the cult takes over places and crucifies victims as a show of power. All great stuff that makes me want to jump in and explore the game, but sadly much of the fun stops there.

My biggest issue is that while the premise and initial story is great, the characters outside of the villains just suck. I hate the silent protagonist in the game, it really, really hurts the narrative with no interaction. The sub characters you try to help are forgettable at best and sometimes pretty lame at worst. I want to fight the cult and save the town, but not with these lame characters and silent protagonist specifically.

The gameplay ranges from serviceable to just boring. The worst part about the entire gameplay is the AI, it is just braindead. It's super easy to stealth around, but if you are caught, every enemy knows where you are and swarms you. They aren't hard to kill, but many missions have ridiculously long firefights where you spend quite frankly too much time trying to clear a base or stop waves from attacking you. If you die the checkpoints also aren't that efficient, making cheap deaths really annoying. It feels like the lowest common denominator shooting galleries because the mission designers didn't know better. Combined with lame characters It feels like I was rushing through the story and sloppy missions just to enjoy the environments, exploring, atmosphere, and the rare times when I get to see and hear the real villains talk.

One more nitpick I will note is that I wish the game went farther with the cult's ideals and what they stood for. If you are familiar with Christianity already, much of what they do and say is very surface level, and often taking the Bible/imagery out of context. I am sure they did this not to offend people in the real world, but I wish they had the guts to make it feel a bit more realistic, as actual cults have done this before. One big example is how their logo kind of looks like a cross, but isn't one, along with quoting Bible verses that sound scary, but in context don't really work. I know they want to make a game that appeals to as many people as possible without offending, but the concept definitely had a lot more room to be more memorable and effective at what it wanted to accomplish.

I have not beaten the game yet, but I am near the end I believe (need to finish the 3rd area of the map). Overall from me it's a decent 6.5/10. A beautiful game with great ideas and a cool setting, but gameplay and repetition makes it something I can only play in bite sized chunks before wanting to play something else.

177 comments

r/patientgamersu/CactaurJack4d ago

Back 4 Blood, a fun zombie shooty squad game with some neat customization options and fun set pieces, that unfortunately shows the glaring pitfalls of cross-platform play.

94 Upvotes

So I've been playing Back 4 Blood because I had that L4D itch, but after several hundred hours that game gets very same-y.

Back 4 Blood is a lot of fun! The familiar beats are there but there's a lot more variety of what to do and how to do it. It also has this neat card system where you collect cards that give abilities and create a "deck" that fits your play style. For example, if you like running and gunning with an LMG, there's a card that makes you do more damage the longer you fire, make you move faster while firing but disables ADS. You get 15 cards in a deck and there are seemingly hundreds of cards.

The characters are fun to, er "cleaners". There not so much the rag-tag bunch like L4D, they're pros at this but they have their own quirks and character traits.

You also get to play dress-up with your cleaners and your guns and there's no paid currency in the game, it all comes from earned in-game points and reward sets known as "supply lines".

All in all it's very engaging. There is, however, one GLARING flaw. It's crossplay with PS4/5, Xbox and PC. Now you can turn off crossplay, but that destroys lobby search times, however that's not the issue. The issue is the STUNNING gap in control setup and difficulty tuning.

I like horde shooters, I play a lot of them, Killing Floor 2, Payday 2 et. al. I'm fairly good at them, tend to play harder difficulties but I mostly play them while watching YouTube or something, I don't get particularly sweaty about them. I run absolute circles around the console players, it's not even close. Twice their kill count is the norm, 3x isn't uncommon. That in it of itself is not the issue, the issue is the difficulty balencing. The lower difficulties are way, WAY too easy, and the harder ones are way, WAY too hard if you have console players on the team. I ended up unlocking the chapters in the harder difficulties with bots because they were more reliable than console randos.

It's still a fun game, and I really like dropping in for quick play, play through like half a chapter and bail out. But the M/K v Controller discrepancy has never been laid more bare.

82 comments

r/patientgamersu/Sgorilla4d ago

Burnout 3 Takedown Review - King of the Arcade Racers

204 Upvotes

Played on OG Xbox via Xbox2HDMI and MClassic.

I first played Burnout 3 around the time it launched back in 2004, back on my phat Playstation 2. Absolutely fell in love with the game, the graphics and the gameplay proved to be a potent mix to my middle school / high school brain. I loved the driving mechanics and the incredible sense of speed the game had. And yet… I think I only ever had it as a rental. In general, I’m pretty casual fan of driving games. Probably got about a third of the way through the game, did some of the online multiplayer, and called it a day. The pattern of picking the game back up, and finishing about a third of it would hold multiple times over the next ten years, on both Xbox and 360 BC.

Over the course of the last six months or so, I’ve finally committed and actually completed the entire circuit, all gold. And I’ll still hold that Burnout 3 is the best arcade racer game that has ever been created, bar none. I was a Burnout Revenge fan for a long time, but I now firmly believe that 3 is the pinnacle.

  • Car Physics
    • This game perfectly nails the arcade-y feeling you want when two cars slam into one another, and basically makes your car feel like a battering ram. When you shunt (slam into their rear bumper) an opponent, there is nothing more satisfying than watching their car whither and crash into a wall, like a satellite breaking up into the atmosphere. When side by side with an opponent, it is so much fun to veer far from their car, winding yourself up like a haymaker and then ramming into them, sending them careening into a wall.
  • Amazing Soundtrack
    • If you were a teenager in the early aughts like myself, this soundtrack was and still is absolutely killer. Franz Ferdinand, My Chemical Romance, Jimmy Eat World to name a few. And some great songs that fit right in with those and that era. And then the Ramones, cause why not.
  • Beautiful Graphics and Fantastic Framerate
    • Crispy 60 frames a second during races, and a very respectable 30 frames per second in Crash mode (so that they can have more stuff on screen. And splosions.) Burnout 3 is also a great looking game from this generation, especially on the Xbox running at 480p. God, I wish this game had a 720p patch. During this playthrough, I particularly noticed the reflections on the glass of your car. While most of the time it is just skybox, whenever you got through tunnels it’s neat to see the actually reflection.
  • Many of the modes are absolutely fantastic
    • Crash mode. Fun little puzzles where you try to cause as much chaos as possible (and hit the 4x multiplier). Quick little bites that are very fun to figure out.
    • Road Rage. Ram your car into packs of AI cars (which are generally nice and stupid as far as AI) and try to takedown as many as possible, within a time limit and without totally your car. In this mode, your car is basically a missile, and it is so satisfying to rear end an opponent at max speed and watch their car fly into a wall.
    • Race. Typical race + burnout mechanics. Works well, passes fairly quick. Rubber banding generally isn’t too bad.
    • Burning Lap & Special Events are generally just one lap time trials, which are a good way to get to know the new courses as they come up. Inoffensive.
  • I like DJ Stryker, there I said it
    • DJ Stryker is the announcer who comes on the radio from time to time to further establish this world crashing that you live in. He chats about the various tracks, introduces every race, and occasionally pops in during a race to chat about what’s happening. Generally, I find him pretty cheesy and fun.
    • Top DJ Stryker lines:
      • "I got a chaos theory for ya: slam into a crash junction and rack up as much damage as possible!"
      • "Now this is what we call a T.R.E. - Target Rich Environment. Pedal to the medal and meddle on the metal. That's how you eliminate. Get as many as you can before the clock ticks to zero, or until your car expires."
      • "Take one burner, a car filled with boost, streets crammed with traffic, spark the ignition and fly."
      • "Take one insane burner, a street filled with traffic, a car filled with boost... and ignite!"
  • AI Opponents are incredibly satisfying
    • The AI Opponents are super fun to race against, and seem to change based on the game mode that you’re playing. In a race, they are combative and fun, especially as you get into the faster cars. In Road Rage, they are absolutely dumb as bricks and it’s fun to be taking out tens of cars in a given event. The AI does a great job of adjusting to the event that you are in.
  • Some of modes are not fun
    • Grand Prix is just 3 races in a row, it feels kind of stifling given how quickly you can move between events otherwise. At least you can retry any event during the series, but really, why do we need this?
    • Eliminator races are where last place is eliminated after every lap. This means 5 laps, which just makes the event way too long. If you screw up near the end of one of these, it hurts real bad.
  • The F1 Grand Prix & Euro Grand Prix
    • When I was getting towards the end of B3, I started to see some folks posting about the two Grand Prix events at the end of the game, and how incredibly frustrating they are. The first time I ran the F1 Grand Prix, I completely understood. These last two races seem to be pushing the B3 engine to its limit. Each race starts with the cars scraping along the ground in the intro, as if some sort of artificial gravity is keeping the car from flying off the track. Even on Xbox, with the best draw distance and render resolution, these cars go just too damn fast. Additionally, if these cars touch the side rails, they slow way down, so much more than any other cars. These two Grand Prix’s are not a fun time. With some patience, they are doable.
  • The music is unable to play contiguously
    • Just annoying more so than anything. Load screen will start a new song. Any rewards will start a new song. Restart a race, new song. So it’s frustrating when you skip through 5 songs before you get to actually listen to something.
  • Boosting matters a lot less and is kind of a liability the faster your cars get, which feels kind of bleh
    • So. When I think Burnout 3, I think Boost. Always be boosting. A cornerstone of this game and the arcade-y style racing being delivered. In the back third of the game or so, I found that I would only use boosting the get to max speed, and once I was leading I wouldn’t use boost at all. Another issue with boost is the amount of screen blur that it causes. That coupled with the speed and draw distance, just makes the game so much harder. It’s a bummer that the boost doesn’t cause the car to go above the top non-boost speed. This makes the racing near the end of the game a little dry.

! I wish the restarts were a little faster.

Minor nitpick, it’d be cool if restarts were instant.

! I wish the game making announcements about getting unlocks didn’t get in the way of restarts.

If you finish a race and unlock something, you cannot restart the race until you receive the unlock, which means going thru a number of loading screens. It’s super annoying (especially since most of the unlocks don’t really matter).

! I wish the cars stats mattered more.

Just select the car with the highest top speed, and that’s all that matters. Acceleration stat doesn’t really matter because boost makes acceleration a non-issue.

All in all, I highly recommend Burnout 3 if you haven’t played it. The game is a little shaky by the end, but overall the quality of the racing is fantastic. IMO, King of the Arcade Racers.

52 comments

r/patientgamersu/stowrag4d ago

I started my journey with the old Yakuza games with Kiwami (not Zero) and I think that might have been my mistake

48 Upvotes

So to be clear, my first Yakuza game was 7/Like A Dragon, and I adored it. For reasons, I figured I should play at least the Kiwami games and Zero before continuing Ichiban's story.

Like a fool (not a dragon), I ignored the advice to start with Zero and went straight to Kiwami. I was never going to play in release order, but I wanted to be able to spot the references and Easter Eggs in Zero. I think this line of thinking was a mistake.

It boils down to I guess I just... didn't care that much for the story? It's not bad, but it didn't resonate. And I think Zero might have helped with that. Nishikiyama is the closest thing you have to a brother, but I never grew to feel that way about the character. That's less of a problem for Yumi and Reina. The little girl is fine. She did nothing wrong. The larger story itself too... I just wasn't that invested and forgot the details between play sessions.

Let's be clear: it's a perfectly fine game. More or less what I expected after 7. I didn't expect to like the old combat style (and I didn't!). I expected it to stay in the old map. I expected side stories and mini games. All of that is present.

The real problem for me is the combat though. This style is already a weak spot for me, but the balancing is all out of wack. The Majima Everywhere system is there to troll me, as I had as many as 4 back-to-back encounters with him at one point, and from then on, I started avoiding him. Savor the brief windows when he is not prowling for you.

The combat styles are also largely useless? For the back half of the game, I had settled into a habbit going full rush style for bosses, letting them complete an attack string before running in, getting some hits in, and then running out as they respond. Beast style is good at taking care of the weaker mobs. Apparently there's a good spamable move out there (Tiger Drop?) and someone may have told me about this, but I did not remember in time.

Only bosses with their unnecesarily large health pools (which they frequently stop to regenerate) gave me any trouble. The lone exception that comes to mind comes in the end game where you fight this dick and his two special forces minions and they are just... really good at taking turns kicking and shooting you so that no matter where you focus you're always being attacked from a different direction.

Everything else is just a matter of keeping stocked up on healing items, avoiding damage, and setting up heat actions when you can. Also: the encounter rate was way too high. For me, it's less difficult, and more bland, bordering on frustrating. The heat actions were cool, but it was so much easier for me to experience the wacky and violent parts of Yakuza in a more controlled turn based combat system.

Final total: Finished with ~50 hours/~67% completion

62 comments

r/patientgamersu/Zehnpae4d ago

Asterigos: Curse of the Stars - (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly)

50 Upvotes

Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is an action RPG developed by Ace Gamestudio. Released in 2022, Asterigos shows us what it would look like if Disney and FromSoftware made a crossover game.

We play as Hilde, a young warrior sent to find out what became of her father and those under his command. They had been sent to find a cure for the curse afflicting the king. The mystery leads us to the ancient haunted city of Aphes where a 1000 year old political spat could doom us all.

Gameplay is souls-like. Side quests have no indicator you're doing one, bosses spam attacks that will kill you in two hits, normal enemies ambush you at nearly every turn and of course there's no map. And it's all so very addicting.

The Good

Combat has good flow. It's a little more arcade-style than your typical souls-like because you can cancel animations and immunity frames are pretty generous. You can swap freely between a handful of weapons and each comes with a large array of unique combo's and special moves.

I'm a big fan of stories where everything ends up being morally grey. While you are unfortunately forced to side with a particular individual, I often found myself siding with my enemies. I enjoy a game where the bad guy is monologuing and I go, "No no...let him cook."

The Bad

This is one of those 'there's nothing outright terrible but plenty of irksome little things' games. Boss fights have 1~2 minute unskippable cutscenes in front of them. Often you'll see a chest but it'll be hours before you unlock the path to it.

There's a lot of verticality and climbing speed/elevators are painfully slow. The quest journal is useless to the point of I'd rather not have one at all. You'll get tons of throwing daggers and bombs but they are such a pain to use you just never do. And so on.

The Ugly

One of the main characters is named Eumenides. Why is this an issue? Because an ancient Greek philosopher walked into his tailors shop with a torn toga. "Euripedes?" asks the Tailor. "Yeah, Eumenides?" replies the man.

And now that stupid joke will be in your head the entire freaking game. You're welcome.

There's an alternate ending to the game if you manage to jump through a ton of hidden hoops like refusing certain quests or answering questions a certain way, none of which is well indicated. The good news is that this ending is mostly just a 'slightly more good' ending slide show so it's not like you're missing out on much that can't be googled.

Final Thoughts

If you've played Dark Souls and wished that you could play as Meredith from Disney's Brave instead, this game might be for you. Combat is solid, the story is decent (outside of Hilde's non stop whining but she is a teenager so...) and the length is just right. There is a DLC but it mostly just adds a few boring super bosses that reward you with weapon cosmetics. You can safely pass on that.

Interesting Game Facts

The developer did an anniversary Q&A where they stated one of their design goals is to tell a complete story and that any hanging threads are purely coincidental. As such while they are thinking of doing more games in the universe of Asterigos, Hilde's story is over and we won't be seeing a sequel.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

My other reviews on patient gaming

38 comments

r/patientgamersu/AutoModerator4d ago

Bi-Weekly Thread for general gaming discussion. Backlog, advice, recommendations, rants and more! New? Start here!

29 Upvotes

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

211 comments

r/patientgamersu/qqruz1235d ago

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is amazing but terrible

1.1k Upvotes

tldr: If you want a medieval game, or something Skyrim-y, play it, you'll love it. But please consider getting some mods first.

I love and hate this game. First of all, I dropped it not once but twice, in the opening part. What made me go insane was the decision of the developers to not include saving as an option. A bold choice for sure. The problem here is that the game is not like Baldur's gate 3 where you sort of fail sideways. Here, a single mistake can end many quests, and dramatically change the outcomes of main quests even.

But let's say you're hardcore. You never savescum. Guess what? You can get stuck in a bush with no way out and have to reload! And stealth is a nightmare if you don't quicksave, since whether you succeed in a takedown or not wake someone up is partially dependent on chance. Also, you can get jumped by 3 enemies and if they chain 2-3 hits on you, you can just get stunlocked and die. Annoying on it's own, but maddening if you lose an hour or more of progress. There is an item to mitigate this, but my honest recommendation is to just get a mod (the most popular mod for the whole game) and save as you like. In fact, it makes the game a lot BETTER in my experience.

And that was what made me click with KCD. Whatever I found annoying, I just got a mod for it. Herb picking animation? Removed. Weight limit? Removed. Equipment getting completely destroyed after 1 fight? Not removed but reduced through mods.

So does this make the game easy? Not even close. It's still a game where you are a poor schmuck and 3 dudes with bludgeons can kill you.

Being a poor schmuck is largely the appeal of KCD. You have no soldiering skills, nor anything else that a videogame MC needs. It will be a few hours until you get a real weapon, some more until you can hit anything with it, and a whole lot more till you start looking like a proper knight in armor. This progression is immensely satisfying, the best I've experienced in any game. Most of the time in games, you smack harder and enemies smack harder so things remain mostly the same. Here, you need to learn how to read, learn how to fight, slowly get a suit of armor, all so you can move up in the world. By the end, when you start pulling up on your horse all knightly like and people start saluting you, you really feel like you've become a different person.

Another thing that this game does like no other is immersion. You will not be sneaking around in 100lb of metal like a transformer. You will not be buying things from shops in the middle of the night. People will start screaming if you go into a town with blood on your sword. The items shopkeepers sell are literally there on the shop shelves, you need a torch in the dark, raw meat spoils but dried doesn't. You can spend hours just enjoying the amazing and simple world due to all the detail in it.

There are many flaws in the game, like the statchecking combat, the bugs, a weak last 1/4 and some other issues, but it is truly something special. Highly recommended.

382 comments

r/patientgamersu/Wolffe725d ago

Played Ico again for the third time -- 23 years after the first

67 Upvotes

Was browsing the Playstation store and saw The Last Guardian (which I've already played and completed). I watched one of the trailers and it also showed Shadow of the Colossus and Ico. This had thinking about how fond I was of Ico. I played and finished it when it was first released, and then I played and finished it again when the HD Remaster was released as part of the Shadow of the Colossus collection.

Decided to give Ico another go some 23 years after first playing it.

Team Ico have this way of making these magical environments with a certain dark, mysterious ambience that I just love. It never lost that magic, but I have to admit that the nostalgia wore a little thin this time around.

Pulling Yorda around was as endearing as ever... until she was faced with a ladder. She climbed so slowly that I just dreaded the sight of a ladder. The worst was probably the waterfall area as there are two tall ladders there that she had to climb and I had to do it a number of times.

Moving with relation to the camera angle also sucked more than I remembered. Ico ran around like a drunk unable to move in a straight line. I can't count how many times I fell off ledges (fortunately without dying). I also had more than a handful of times where Ico would just jump in some odd direction or just straight over off a ledge to his death. OMG I'm surprised I didn't break my controller in half at the water wheel -- which apparently wasn't in the original North American version?

Combat was also a bit of a frustrating mess. I didn't remember the fights lasting as long as they did. It really sucked to be knocked down (usually twice) and be lying on the ground helplessly hammering jump and attack to get back up while Yorda is flown off to some distant black hole that I had no chance of reaching in time.

Puzzle-wise, the game was never horribly challenging. I did end up getting stuck in the aqueduct area again for the third time though. I remember that the last two times I played the game I got stuck there... and it happened again. I always remember that the solution is easier than I think but I fail to remember it ever time. I did eventually figure it out on my own though as I was determined not to use a guide. Those two blocks on the walls always trick me into overlooking the obvious solution. Well played Team Ico..., well played.

The one place I did need a guide was the water pump behind the waterfall.I do not remember having to make that jump before and none of my attempts seemed to lead to anything. Even knowing what to do it took me many attempts to time that jump correctly. I can't imagine what if would have been like to reach this part with no assistance. I would have been pulling my hair out. It gives you no clue that you're on the right track.

Still, the castle was as magical as I remember. It was amazing at the time to see distant areas and know that you either came from there or would eventually get there. The castle was just so well designed. Graphics-wise, the art style was still ok. It would be amazing to see the castle in better clarity but it was definitely playable and enjoyable. The story, for as little as it actually explains, is still simple but intriguing. So many unanswered questions still. Overall, it was a fun 10-hour nostalgia trip...

I have to say that I was also impressed by Sony's streaming service. This was the first game I've ever played streamed and it played flawlessly. Really really impressed.

31 comments

r/patientgamersu/ohlordwhywhy6d ago

Noita is 100% a game where I'm perfectly fine with modding with cheats

448 Upvotes

If you guys don't know, Noita is that game where you play a mage and every pixel is simulated. You might've seen gifs of it. Chain reactions like an explosion starting a fire, burning a container and dropping a torrent of acid on top of the player.

There are so many interactions, it's like Larian's combat systems on steroids. Also there are so many spells which can be combined in ways you never imagined. Few games make you feel like you're actually creating something new for your attacks.

It's also like Souls games, it doesn't explain you much, you need to figure all out yourself. The result is I've been playing it for 10 hours and the game's still fresh, I learn something new with every run.

The fun of the game is learning how deep it goes and watching a world of tiny pixel art that feels more alive than most AAA open world games. The moment you step into a level, that level is alive. You enter a new are and find burnt structures and enemy corpses, it's a battle that actually happened, the enemies were fighting while you weren't even there.

It's also so unforgiving. You'll get shot from off screen. You'll touch a liquid and die. You'll fire off your magic wand and explode.

Which I think is the main problem, you get feedback but it's often in the form of a bus running you over.

Here's an example: you find a new wand. It contains several icons showing the spells it has in it. The spells themselves and the order they are placed in the wand determine what the wand actually does, like reciting magic words.

Then you test your wand and it explodes in your face. It was your first time seeing some spells and you died immediately on use. What was it that killed you? Will you remember all the spell icons you saw for a second before you die?

The game even tells you what killed you on the death screen. But it's not enough when often is an interaction of elements that kill you. Other times the death message says "Kakariki Projectile" after you got shot from off screen, you didn't even see what a Kakariki was because enemies in this game are insanely accurate.

To have usable feedback you need to get a chance to see what something does first and then act on it. In Noita you sometimes just die when you first encounter something new. It's hard to learn enemy behavior, spell behavior, what all liquids in the game do when you get blown up by them.

So if you actually get a chance to not instantly die all the time you can learn a lot and still have fun with the meat of the game which are all the interactions in its simulated world. So go ahead and get yourself some mods for the first hours of the game to make your experience easier then drop them off little by little.

101 comments

r/patientgamersu/Neggy56d ago

While a commercial failure at the time, Blur is such a brilliantly fun racing game that took too long to get the love it deserved

96 Upvotes

I'm halfway through Blur and I am having so much damn fun. I honestly sorely miss racing games that were just dumb fun dopamine fuel. Blur really amplified my opinions on the current state of driving games, which are just straight-up negative tbf.

Back in 2010 the game was panned and financially unsuccessful, took a big hit to Bizarre Creations with them shutting down after another fail of a 007 game. It was probably one of the few studio closures that hurt me so badly. Project Gotham was probably another IP that I sorely miss and its spiritual replacement (Forza Horizon) is a soulless shell compared to PGR.

Aaaanyway back to Blur, i noticed the game is becoming a bit of a cult classic! PS3/360 copies are getting expensive, at least in my region. And deservedly so, the game is just pure fun, unseen in current racing games with so much depth to its gameplay too. Progression feels good, the art direction is super-unique, handling is quite good although drifting is slow-ish. I LOVE the checkpoint mode surprisingly more than I thought I would.

Man, considering Activision remade Crash Team Racing and Pro Skater without Naughty Dog or Neversoft respectively, I'd love to see a take of Blur for modern systems

Now for you guys, whats your opinion on this gem? Did you enjoy it as much as I am rn? is it deserving of its cult classic status despite a rough launch?

36 comments

r/patientgamersu/Far-Comfortable-84356d ago

1/4 of my favorite game of all time: Twisted Metal Black!

35 Upvotes

Twisted Metal Black: If you have not played the U.S port of the game you are missing out. In absolutely amazing game. Twisted Metal Black is one of the few games I played that feel even better as an adult. I don't really have much nostalgia bias and have dropped many games but this one was different it's just too good.

Twisted Metal black features tons of characters from the world of twisted metal where they are mostly all mental asylum patients. They get meet by a guy named Calypso to grant them a wish but remember they are psychotic. They have to win a tournament so they all have their own unique cars and trust me they are all rememberable and very unique.

To establish how great of a game it is it features tons of mini stories for each character a unique small YouTube web series that shows more of the lore and creepy vibe and still has a small active online community and can be played split screen for the campaign and everything or against each other.

The balancing for such a old game is amazing too if your like very technical and play online sure there might be some cars better but from a casual or just simply good you would hardly tell the difference Twisted metal also combines abit of horror and racing aswell as d shooting all together on one game .

Twisted Metal Black is also a very beautiful game (it's ugly but in a beautiful way) the atmosphere and music adds to the dread the feeling of sadness and pain in the world you are in with tons of great size maps tbh. Twisted Metal is a game that not everyone might like because of how full and dread and sorrow it feels. But that's the point these people don't feel happiness. They don't feel any of that they are lost broken, sad sone are evil. Twisted metal black perfectly illustrated that.

Twisted Metal Black also has a ton of really cool specials and weapons some of my favorites being the gas can that can explode cars in front of you and specials like darkside that can use the giant truck she has to just ram you over. I also want to add on although small one of the games where enemies will attack each other and the ai aren't to bad in this game either.

To solidify how amazing twisted metal black is the maps as I mentioned before also has so much going on and you can create your own thoughts and ideas of the world. There's kinda a lot of detail for a old game that I just enjoy so much. So many secret locations and unlockables and not that it m matters to much but in one of the lives the Creator of twisted metal and God of war series states he liked twisted metal way more which should give an idea that they this game is very good and lots of reviews also give it 9 and 10/10 it's a phenomenal game a game that only few can match.

The maps in this game are amazing and come in many different sizes and designs to suit your play style. The atmosphere of the game truly pulls you into this world of Twisted Metal black with there being just the most beautifully but depressing maps you have seen. People running for their lives in fear that you truly do not want to hurt but, you must win. Those who are insane will love running them over. If you have a vivid imagination in the Suburbs the kids and mom are probably in the houses you run over. There are feelings of abandonment in some maps and even those where it is pouring rain.

I want to target more into some of my favorite characters No face who goes into a boxing match for a fight and he gets injured nothing to bad However, he went to a doctor and let's say bros doctor placed his bets on him and lost so much so much money that he ruined no face face (his original name was frank) he couldn't see he was ugly and disformed his face always hurt and he did commit a few crimes due to not being able to see well and had to go to a mental asylum in which calypo offers him to join the tournament and get revenge on the man who hurt his face.

That's one of the fun and enjoyable out of so many others my favorite being dollface and I'm not spoiling that one. It's such a shame this series doesn't get much love especially since the EU port of twisted metal black was destroyed with censorship and taking out so much content.

Twisted Metal Black is one of the few old games that shows the strengths in focusing on one department and creating an amazing game around it instead of tryna create multiple different types of gameplay and it perfects it.

The reason why Twisted Metal Black is my favorite over any game is because it does something no other game does it is their to really push the mind of your sanity and even make you question it or on the flip side really make you think of the pain you have suffered in your life and hit your depression part of your soul. Many games do not tackle this and Twisted Metal truly does this so perfectly It is not a game that tries to make you feel sad about a character only but it just makes you scared of how real some of these stories are in some ways and how far before you can be pushed to insanity etc.

Only 4 games including twisted metal black reach my unrankables games so good that I don't have a number one games that are legendary and my next review will be Alien Isolation 2/4 favorite game of all time.

edit: I know fans will get mad if I don't mention it Painted Black By the Rolling Stones goes so freaking hard in this game.

17 comments

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