UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +20, ABOUT HAVING FUN WITH APRIL’S MONTHLY THEME (AND MORE).
Feels good to be participating in those monthly themes again :)
🕒 ~33 hours
⭐ 50/51
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten
✔️ LIKED: Amusing writing, great in-game songs. The narrator did a really good job.
❌ DISLIKED: The game always waits for your summoned helpers to get into some sort of a position before starting a cutscene, causing unnecessary delays. The boss’s tower has annoying, needlessly slow elevators.
🕒 ~8 hours
⭐ 30/30
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: Nice pixel graphic, fairly short levels (each level being a separate case that the titular detective worked on) with some neat references here and there. Mildly amusing. One case featured the ghosts of H. P. Lovecraft and E. A. Poe <3
❌ DISLIKED: The Mall bonus level. That one involved a lot of backtracking and the story wasn’t as appealing to me as the other cases.
🕒 ~6 hours
⭐ 19/19
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
(I played this after finishing the first part of Deponia: The Complete Journey, so I knew exactly what to do. That’s why the playtime is so low.)
✔️ LIKED: Rufus, obviously! ;D On a more serious note, it’s an alright point&click adventure.
❌ DISLIKED: Sometimes, the minigames won’t tell you what you’re supposed to achieve. Especially the one with pigeons and magnetic fields, that was purely trial and error. Not fond of that, myself. The “Droggeljug” achievement was incredibly annoying (you have to play through the game again, with every single word replaced by the word “droggeljug”).
🕒 ~14 hours
⭐ 10/15
⁉️ STATYS: Beaten
✔️ LIKED: Great visuals, great gameplay, simple and responsive controls. A lot of perks to customize your playstyle, even some stealthy ones. Thumbs up for everything being kind of themed after judges, from the JYDGE’s design through the weapon to the word “Mistrial” when you fail a mission. I think that’s clever.
❌ DISLIKED: In the game, the word JYDGE is pronounced as a regular “judge”. They should have put emphasis on the “Y” and really pronounce it as “jydge”. New story missions are unlocked by completing challenges from previous missions, so some amount of grinding is required (this can apparently be adjusted in the settings, though).
🕒 ~32 hours
⭐ 11/14
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten
✔️ LIKED: A game by the same developers who made JYDGE. The visuals, gameplay and controls are just as satisfying. I also liked the voice acting for the antagonist, there’s just something about the way he speaks his lines.
❌ DISLIKED: All in all, I liked JYDGE a bit better than Neon Chrome.
🕒 ~69 hours
⭐ 40/90
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten
✔️ LIKED: It’s an alright action RPG. Lovely graphic, with several tombs and cemeteries, which I’m personally very fond of (as some of you might know). Decent voice acting; I especially liked the “Voice” that talks to Victor throrough his adventure. If you are looking for some undead- and vampire-slaying action, you might find this game enjoyable.
❌ DISLIKED: I disliked the odd emphasis on co-op. I mean, the game is perfectly playable solo, but… it’s just plain weird. Stuff like emotes are dropping in singleplayer mode, making it more difficult to obtain useful items. Bounties and treasure hunts are handled by redeeming codes shared by other players - what? Why? It’s like the devs couldn’t decide between singleplayer and shared world, so they attempted to do a bit of both.
Oh, and also: many achievements are unobtainable without the DLCs, which bothers me maybe more than it should. Look at that completion score, though: 40 out of 90 achievs, when it’s in fact closer to 40 out of 50 for the base game. Why can’t the DLC-related achievs come with the actual DLCs instead of showing as if they were a part of the base game? Grr! ☠️
🕒 ~19 hours
⭐ 12/12
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: Gorgeous graphic, genuinely amusing writing and truly epic final boss fight.
❌ DISLIKED: The complete lack of any sort of in-game settings. The music was on a short loop and it got annoying rather fast, made worse by the fact that you can’t adjust the volume (other than turning off your speakers, in which case you’re obviously not going to hear the sound effects either). Extremely annoying world map that served no other purpose than to artifically extend the play time. Frequent loading screens (they are short, but there’s A LOT of them). Last but not least, the combat. Bloody hell, how I hated the combat!
I actually forgot how funny The Bard’s Tale was. As in, writing. Speaking of which, what did you think about Deponia’s voice acting? That seems to be oen criticism I’ve seen raised.
Among other things, I liked how they made fun of the “chosen one” trope in Bard’s Tale :D
As for Deponia’s voice acting, I don’t remember having any problems with it. The characters sounded like actual people and the voice actors didn’t sound bored while reading their lines, so I’d say it was standard. Perhaps nothing brilliant or really memorable, but certainly nothing that annoyed me :)
Didn’t know you could adjust anything related to grind(if I understood you correctly) in JYDGE, I must try the game again xD.
I haven’t trried it myself, but the game told me it’s possible to adjust the difficulty of the “challenges” to some extent, so that you should have an easier time unlocking new missions. That’s the theory at least :)