Monthly Report - July 2021

Won : -
Free : -
From bundles/gifts/sales : -

Far Cry 3

47 hours playtime

no achievements

Far Cry 3 - beaten

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It seems that they fixed a lot of issues I had with FC2 : much more colorful and more interesting environments, a bit more interesting story, no weapon jamming, no constant repop (although they went a bit too far on the other side, as clearing a camp removes all enemies in the area), still a bit repetitive but far less with more variation, fast travel…
So overall I liked the game.
But as usual, there will be a big list of complaints, even if I liked it :).
First, although the story was okay, I hated my character, his behavior and the behavior of the other NPCs. A lot of them are not logical (or even stupid), I won’t go into spoilers but the choice they give you at the end is stupid, around the end of the game you killed thousands of enemies and liberated almost the full island by yourself, and people are still talking to you as if you were a newbie, a little gratitude would have been nice. You are “surprised” several times by enemies in cutscenes but it was obvious this was coming, you follow orders of some bad guy when you could just have killed them, even Vaas, the “main” bad guy, you had several opportunities to kill him.
Ok ok, we need to have a story… But couldn’t we justify things with better events ? Real surprises ? Even the “end” twist. Several scenes before that, you have material proofs that the twist will happen. So… you understand that I was complaining a lot during the cutscenes of this game :). It’s ok but a bit annoying.

The other pain point is the UI : crafting, inventory and skills is a bit painful to access and handle, the map is very slow to appear and moving the map is quite buggy.
I was a bit sad to notice that I couldn’t use both controller (for driving) and keyboard/mouse (for walking/shooting), which I could with FC2, and some other FPS games (Mafia…), and I like doing that. Here you have to choose.
But my big, main complaint is that the island is great, the world they created is great. There are a lot of things to explore, a lot of details and small stories everywhere, this is a pleasure to explore… But this world is empty. You find a lot of villages, isolated houses, or camps, they even bothered to put varied furniture in them. But there is no-one, nowhere, except on roads and main camps. There are a few full villages with a lot of details, some of them are used in the Rakyat trials, but not in the main world.
At first I was approaching each house carefully, just in case. Until I understood that everything was empty, always. I would have loved some random enemies (just one or two, nothing crazy) in some houses, just to add some surprise.
Which results in a game a little bit too easy (I quickly set the game to hard, because I felt there was no challenge). Money is never a problem (well… it becomes a problem because you have too much of it and constantly have messages that your wallet is full ^^). As a challenge, I forced myself to capture camps without raising alarms and if possible without being detected (playing stealthy works quite well and is fun, except a few issues with the takedown button - you expect a takedown and it does a “normal” hit, which is not silent - this is not a bug, just an annoying behavior caused by the fact that the same button does both depending on your position/target).

On the good side, I was also pleasantly surprised that the co-op community was still active. I almost played all chapters in one night, didn’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes to assemble a team (I crossed a few cheaters though, I don’t see the point in a co-op game). This was a good news. Although it seems that there are a few servers issues (servers were down for more than a week, and I got server errors several times when I played the main game).

A note about Ubisoft Connect (ex UPlay… Why did they change, the new name is even worse !) : it sucks; it slows the startup of the game a lot; each time I start the game it sends me a code by email, even when I didn’t need to login; it asks me to login way too often, with a magical “We’ve detected a change in your access pattern”; you constantly have errors messages during your gameplay when the servers are down (and it happens quite often); achievements are not tracked in Steam but in this shit and it doesn’t seem to be public (if there is a public profile, it’s not easy to find), what’s the point of achievements if you can’t show them ? :)…
What a joke.

So, a lot of complaints, but overall a nice game and, I think, a huge improvement over the previous game.
Achievements : No achievements on Steam. But I got all of them on Ubisoft Connect (still a shitty name) except one. As mentioned earlier, the multiplayer servers were down for more than a week and I didn’t have the opportunity the finish the last co-op mission. It should happen soon.
Besides that, I was pleasantly surprised that the relics achievement was triggered when I got half of them. There’s a bit too many of them !
“Rock always wins” was a bit annoying because usually I distract the enemies in order to kill them, which doesn’t count (you need to distract them AND they have to return to their position which doesn’t happen a lot with me ^^).
And I had to search on Internet for “Say Hi to the Internet”, as it is quite hard to find.

Hacknet

10 hours playtime

11 of 11 achievements

Hacknet - completed

Nice game. There are a few issues, but overall this was really nice. The game manages to make you feel a bit like a hacker. I know, I know, this is absolutely not how hacking works but I don’t know how, a few times you really feel like one. Even a few times it feels like REAL hacking, when you need to search computers and documents to find information in order to gain access to other machines (some kind of social engineering).
The game is quite easy, a bit repetitive sometimes, but I think they managed to give you varied tasks and new tools often enough to keep it interesting.
So I don’t have a lot of issues with it, just a couple times, it didn’t want to validate my mission although I did exactly what was asked (sometimes it was a bug, sometimes because I didn’t understand well what was expected ^^), a few times I would have liked that the system handled some multitasking (while doing a job, I forgot what I had to do or needed an additional information, and opening your email or connecting to another machine disconnects you from the current one).
I complain, but the game is quite nice to you: for most machines, once you hacked it, you keep an access to it so you don’t have to hack it again, and once you found a password, the game remembers it for you. Nice touch.
There is a story. Not very important but it’s nice and explains a few things (and one objection I had with the game ^^). You also find some bits of unrelated stories on the computers you hack if you take the time to read the documents.
Achievements : You’ll need to replay it at least once, as there is 2 possible paths, but when you finish the game once, it gives you some shortcut, and a few tips about what you may have missed. If you read everything carefully, you should have all information to unlock all achievement (except maybe “Rude”… I wasn’t sure what the game expected, and the moment to get it is quite specific). So the second playthrough can be very fast.