Monthly Report - December 2020

• Won : Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince
• Free : -
• From bundles/gifts/sales : -

• Metro: Last Light Redux
  

  35 hours playtime

  49 of 49 achievements

Metro: Last Light Redux - completed

I won that one on SteamGifts, I didn’t play 2033, nor the original version of Last Light, so I don’t know what they did improve.
I liked the game, although I felt that the last third (before the “finale”) is a bit strange storywise. Not an issue but surprising.
The game feels very good, shooting is nice, the sound design is great, exploring dark places is a bit stressful, well done. The story could probably be better (it is quite generic) but you are not bored as the gameplay is good. I just felt a bit frustrated on some “outside” levels. I like to explore and the filter limitation can be quite frustrating, but hey, it’s part of the game.
The only real annoying thing about that was a checkpoint just before a boss when I had around 1 minute of filters left… I couldn’t manage to finish the boss (well I did… but the animation after that is so long that I constantly died a few seconds before the end of the level ^^). I had to restart that one.
There’s a few things I noticed, that I guess were from the original game : even in survival mode (which is supposed to have scarce resources) I never had to buy any weapon (barely a few upgrades) or ammo, so I never had ammo issues and I ended the game with a LOT of bullets (=money), even after using them to kill bosses. I guess the original game was more difficult ? I’m curious, I might play the original to compare :).
Great game.

DLCs : there are a few additional levels that come as DLCs. Most of them are nice, and add a few stories around secondary characters. I liked the ones where you see an alternative point of view of the main story (Anna, Pavel)
A few special mentions :

• Kshatriya : awesome level. The gameplay is very different (you have to explore the level to find “old world” items, you start with pretty much nothing, earn money which allows you to buy ammo and filters, which allows you to explore the level further), and probably closer to what the game is supposed to be (you really have to keep an eye on your ammo, and filter remaining time was quite stressful: you have to plan for your return time ^^). I really enjoyed that one.
• Tower pack : I hated it… The principle is simple : you just fight waves. This is quite hard but with some training, it can be completed. But… On some waves there is one enemy that spit on you, which slows you… Why not. But it also plays a very high pitch ring (to simulate tinnitus). But I already suffer from very serious tinnitus, and each time this sound plays it was just physically painful, and triggered my tinnitus for hours… As you can’t disable it and playing with no sound is VERY hard, I had to skip those levels when those monsters appeared.

Achievements : If you thoroughly explore the levels like me, you’ll unlock a lot of them just by playing, but two playthroughs will be required (kill / no kill, spartan / survival modes, “bad” / “good” ending), make sure you choose your path before starting :). There is no achievement based on difficulty, and there is an achievement for each additional level. You can replay any level which is great when chasing achievements !
As mentioned, I cheated for the Tower achievement (“Test Complete”), but with in-game features (there is a combinaison of keys that immediatly mark the level as completed), I finished all the levels & waves I could though.