Monthly Report - January 2021

Won : -
Free : Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator
From bundles/gifts/sales : -

Owlboy

16 hours playtime

12 of 12 achievements

Owlboy - completed

This game has very good ratings and seems to be praised a lot. I found it… okay.
The gameplay is nice, and controls are ok, but I often got confused between the different buttons (am I starting to be too old ? ^^) which resulted into failing to have the right companion active, or performing the action I wanted.
Maybe there a little too much backtracking / getting lost in levels / having to travel for a long time just to go to a specific location, a quick travel would have been nice.
Also the “stealth” part suck. The stealth elements are not reliable, and on some levels failing stealth generally means death or backtracking a lot.
On the good idea side : flying character in a platformer is original, and having to switch companions to perform some action is quite nice (although again, controls issue).
I found the story is forgettable (I already forgot most of it…). Strange thing is that you care for it during the game and want to know more, but I think that the end is a bit disappointing.
Achievements : A lot unlock by playing, a few can be missed but are in the starting zone so it should be easy to quickly restart to complete achievements. My main issue was with the coin collection. In one of the first levels, there is a mechanic that shows you were are the hidden rooms if you pay attention. But it is only used there… For all the other levels you need to lick all walls to find them. Too bad.
Besides that, the cannon challenge was the hardest one for me. But after a lot (A LOT !!) of tries, I finally managed to get it (note : there is a shortcut to quickly restart but it doesn’t work reliably and the game doesn’t tell you, another miss that could have been easily fixed).

Far Cry 2

30 hours playtime

no achievements

Far Cry 2 - beaten

I already did a preliminary review in my July report, and after finishing it, I still agree with most of what I wrote then.
Note that I played a modded version which is supposed to improve the experience (you can save anywhere, FOV, smarter enemies…) and fix bugs without changing too much of the original gameplay. And indeed I experienced way less bugs and the game was slightly better.
But the same issues remain : malaria mechanism is annoying and useless, still quite ugly (compared to FC1), weapon jamming is also annoying, enemy repop is the worst thing… at some point you don’t even bother, you just go straight through the camp and heal after, but it’s still annoying (especially in the last third of the game, when enemies that can one-shot you appear).
But the worst thing is that it is atrociously repetitive, every main mission is : mission briefing - destroy this / kill that person (usually very far), your buddy call you to suggest an alternative way to perform mission, you do that, you finish the mission, the buddy gets stuck in a shooting, you save (or fail to save) them, and loop. If you decide to do a side mission to change thing, they are also all the same : destroy that truck / kill that person, the malaria quests are : deliver those papers to X to get your pills, etc.
And the story is uninteresting.
The sad thing is that I enjoyed those main missions, because the location is (usually) new, with a little more complexity than a camp, with more enemies, and different possible ways to carry the mission. It is everything around it that suck : the long travel to the location, with all the repop on the way (there is a quick travel with bus stations, but it is barely usable, as their location usually suck. So going to the station, travel, and going to the location can be longer than driving), finding a weapon store because if you don’t renew your weapon, it’ll jam, random enemy cars that you can cross when driving (which is more annoying than dangerous)…
I also almost liked the last part of the game, but it is a few good moments separated by A LOT of running/walking (your character is tired if he runs for more than 5 seconds…). Why ???
On the good side, I liked the weapons gameplay (except rocket launcher, it seems completely unreliable) and the shooting is quite satisfying, which is probably the reason that I finished it in spite of all the issues that annoyed me.

I understand that this is a quite old game and our standards may have changed, but I don’t understand some of the choices that were made, it feels like they are artificially making the game longer, but by annoying the player on the way ? It seems to work as a lot of people seem to like it.
Achievements : None. I usually complete games, but here the side missions and diamonds collection are so annoying that I won’t :).