Report #23
Hello my lovely fellow assassins. We have had a beautiful October so far, with lots of sunshine and tons of work. So I was glad to pursue a few smaller games in the last month. Therefore I even allowed myself to play a new game, I haven’t previously had in my library (I know, I’m such a madman). There isn’t much else on my mind right now, so let’s get the reviews started.
Release Date: 2010
Darksiders is a hack'n'slash action-adventure game. The game takes inspiration from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with the player taking the role of the horseman War. The Four Horsemen are tasked with watching over the peace on earth, but when actual war erupts between Heaven and Hell at the start of the game, for some reason only War takes note and the other Horsemen are nowhere to be seen. War alone is not able to stop the war, mankind perishes and War is left bereft of his powers, seeking to uncover the reasons for the events that came to pass.
The gameplay is pretty much standard hack'n'slash. You fight your way through enemies, attacking, achieving different combos for extra damage and dashing out of the way of your enemies attacks. The game consists of 6 different chapters, each featuring a unique mapset and a boss fight at the end. With the souls of your enemies you are able to purchase new skills and improved attacks, while in addition there are multiple power-ups scattered around the world. Some of those require you to backtrack, because they are only reachable with skills you only get later on. Personally I quite enjoyed the gameplay, I think the controls are mostly on point and the character progression is satisfying.
The story features elements of Christian and Jewish mythology, which was very nice to see. Not because I'm especially invested in this subject, but because usually you only see angels vs. demons when it's Heaven vs. Hell, but Darksiders ventures (at least a bit) deeper into the mythology and features characters not seen in every other good vs. evil setting. I even ended up reading up a bit on the different characters on their respective wikipedia pages and although I'm likely to forget everything in a few weeks time, I enjoyed learning a bit about Christian/Jewish mythology.
While the story is not overly complex and deep, it still was enough to capture my attention and the cinematics telling the stories were made quite good. All in all this game really surprised me in many ways and (for me!) is definitely the best of the three games I present to you this time. I enjoyed it so much, that I decided to sometime play the Warmaster Edition I also own, instead just marking it "beaten in another version".
So why not 5 stars? It was a tiny bit too long for my taste. The second to last chapter was a bit tedious to finish and I was kinda glad when it was done. Also, while enjoyable, the story was not captivating enough to warrant a perfect rating. Like, there weren't any choices to be made for example. Still, those are only minor complaints and people following my reviews know that I almost never rate anything 5 stars anyway…
Achievements: All are obtainable in one playthrough. What a bliss! One achievement requires you to play the game in highest difficulty, but even not being a very skilled or patient player, I found it to be quite doable to start on it right away.
Verdict: Great action-adventure, fully recommended by me.
Doki Doki Literature Club
3.7 hours, no achievements
★★★☆☆
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Release Date: 2017
DDLC is a free VN. I chose to play it, because it's one of the highest rated free games on Steam. The game relies very much on not knowing what you get yourself into, so writing a review is kinda hard. I'll keep it brief and additionally put it in spoilers.
The game starts of as a (from what I can tell) typical lighthearted VN, but has a big twist about 1 hour into the game. From there on it only gets strange and weird and then strange again. Even without having much experience with VNs I can tell that the game is very meta. I probably didn't get a whole lot of that, others might appreciate it more.
While I think the game is well made and quite interesting even for someone not acquainted to the world of VNs, for me, the game fell flat after the initial twist. I was very apparent from that point on, in what direction the game will develop. I read up a bit on it afterwards and always stumbled upon reviews along the lines "this game gave me depression". Is this a meme? Or is it meant seriously? (Yeah yeah, obviously it's not giving people ACTUAL depression, you know what I mean by that…)
Achievements: None.
Verdict: Surely a must-play for VN fans, not necessarily for others though.
Release Date: 2012
DiRT Showdown is a racing game. It features a broad range of types of races, from standard to stunt races to demolition races.
The controls are okay, the game looks decently pretty, but it feels rather uninspired overall. It's like any other racing game. The "career" mode is totally boring, there is not incentive to actually progress (well, maybe achievements…). You get money to upgrade your cars or buy new ones, but I couldn't feel that much of a difference.
It's okay for a few hours, but there is no reason to bemoan the game being taken off of Steam's store.
Achievements: Don't get into the game for the achievements. Many are MP and take a lot of grind. They mostly are not actually hard, just really grindy as far as I can tell.
Verdict: No recommendation from me.
Those were three games starting with ‘D’ btw. I don’t know what I’ll play next yet, but you’ll see in a few weeks :)
So long,
Vito
I agree with your verdict about Dirt: Showdown. I always saw it as Dirt 3’s younger sibling that didn’t seem to get the full attention and love from the development team. They had the well-established assets and they tried new ideas in Showdown but didn’t make full use of it. The demolition derby style events were fun and a fresh change, so I couldn’t understand why they filled most of the career mode with repetitive lap races.
Well put! It’s always nice to see someone agree with one’s review :D As you say, the basics are definitely good, but then it just lacks in execution. I wish there was a bit more to do in career mode. Give me an overall leaderboard, let me see how I fare in the championship, I don’t know what…now it’s just a bunch of standalone races and as you say, some of them are entertaining, but quite a few… not so much.
Appreciate the heads up on Darksiders! I took at peek at the achievements and seems like there’s a decent amount of grinding? People saying they ride back and forth for a half hour on a bridge/needing to farm kills, plus finding all the shards. Did you find it was a lot of “extra work”/checking of guides or did you obtain most during the playthrough naturally?
I’ve been meaning to play Doki Doki for ages and finally got pretty hugely spoiled by a recommended video on YT with a certain spoiler plastered all over it. Wanna give it a chance and hope it manages to holds its own still. I mean it’s free, plus everyone and their mother has played it. Need to see what the fuss is about. :P
p.s. Lucky you about the sunshine! It’s been raining and chilly almost every day this month (even snowed a lil a few times). Most of the leaves haven’t managed to fall yet or catch up on the fact it’s supposed to be autumn! Enjoy being outside and the crunching leaves for me. :)
I used a guide for the collectibles in Darksiders, there were quite a few I missed on my own. But after you finish your playthrough you can freely access all areas, so it’s not a problem to play through the game blind and clean up the collectibles afterwards. There are a few achievements that require grind, yes. I’d say that’s maybe around 4 hours of my playtime, where I was just grinding for achievements. You can minimize it by working towards the achievements during your initial playthrough though. It’s not fun, but I’ve seen much worse :) For the riding achievement there is a certain bridge you can traverse to grind out the achievement. Once you reach it, cross it and put something heavy on your “back” key, so that it’s pressed down. That way you can go away and do something else in the meantime (I showered and did some laundry).
Ah that sucks that you got spoiled by accident so to speak. I think Doki Doki is still worth a shot, the game does intersting things in ways of storytelling. I’ll be looking forward to your review once you get to it.
Your autumn sounds quite different from mine :D But yeah, we really have a strange autumn this year. Almost no rain, same as in the summer, it’s quite hard on the farmers and nature as a whole as far as I can tell…Still, I’ll make sure to enjoy it!
I was wondering if that was the case, being able to backtrack after beating it. Thanks a lot for letting me know. :) I’ve found so many games don’t allow that, to the point it makes me not wanna get achievements anymore because then I’m constantly looking at guides in fear of missing one thing (which of course ruins the experience/whole point of why I play games). Might go after the chieves after all if I’m enjoying it! I also rarely on the hardest difficulty because I don’t wanna get totally stuck near the end due to my ineptitude, but you’ve convinced me to give it a try. Can still feel badass after, even if it is easier. :D
Haha yeah veeery different. Our summer was super rainy as well, and the days it wasn’t it was so hot hard to really enjoy being out in it. ;_; The weather sure has gotten more extreme in recent years. I’ll send some of our rain your way and take a smidge of the sunshine for myself, sounds like a deal.
I think at this point being spoiled for DDLC is inevitable, it’s made into meme so much. I agree with you that it fell flat after the big twist, the visual novel part was pretty nice though generic, the horror is pretty eyeroll worthy and the meta stuff didn’t impress me. Undertale did it better.
I have played the game multiple times and got all the endings but I’m not sure where the depression meme comes from either, maybe the Sayori storyline? Most likely people just took the already sad bits and exaggrate it for meme.
I completely agree with everything you say (or write). That sounds very likely, that they just exaggerated the sad bits and ended up with the meme.
Hi Vito! I appreciate your Doki Doki review - would you mind if I linked it in my VN masterpost?
It would be an honor to have it linked there!
Then honored you shall be!
I did think the whole ‘if you have depression, watch out! Be careful! The game might exacerbate it!’ warnings were a little goofy… like, as much as I enjoyed the game (and I did enjoy the game) those parts weren’t subtle or insidious or persistent enough to really fuck someone up. Like, gory scenes don’t trigger my depression, relentless hopelessness does - and you get to fight against that by releasing everyone.
Ive got doki doki on my backlog list to read, kinda hard to not be spoiled when lots of people are talking about it and i just ended up watching a game theory on it too so really spoiled, but now i know i have to go through the game more then once which I probably wouldnt have ended up doing to see all the details
Yeah, it wasn’t really apparent at first to me either, that several playthroughs are acutally not only recommended but required to get the full picture :)
yeah from what i get thats the kinda story you would tend to see how it ends and assume theres nothing more unless you hope different choices change it