March 2022 Update

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Activated: 12/2021

Vampyr (Q2 2018) ⭐️⭐⭐☆☆

Beaten after: 3 months

RPG
32 hours | 0 of 28 (0.0%)

⇱ Click to show summary⇲

The good
- nice detailed graphic
- fluid controls
- good voice acting
- interesting characters

The bad
- no fast travel. I know map is small but having to go around through visited areas each time we need to reach other side is really repetitive
- enemies level up with player so it never feels like we make progress
- really cheesy ending
- some plot elements are just like "ugh"
- loading screens are wayyy too long for how simple the game is. Especially when it needs to re-load part of the game where we just died 2s ago, so it was already in the memory
- some of the dialogues have loading screen! It's like they needed to program dialogues as a separate mini game...
- pressing skip / continue button during dialogue doesn't skip only text visible on the screen, but next lines as well if they are one sentence. And it's not always easy to see if part of dialogue visible on screen ends with dot or comma

Conclusion:
Game looked way better at the beginning. And then went down to repetitive running back and forth between quests locaded on opposite parts of the city and sick people that need to be cured... Would I play it again? Maybe if we could fast travel between hideouts. Otherwise it feels like game just drags forever with little actual gameplay. Side quests can be of course ignored but they are only tangible way to get some experience, when you don't want to kill innocent NPCs.

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Story:

Game takes place during the flu epidemic after world war. We play as Dr. Reed, specialist in blood transfusion that is turn into a vampire shortly after coming back from war. He needs to understand the rules of being a vampire as otherwise it will be impossible to help fighting the epidemic. Plot looks deeper at first but in the end it ends in lame "omg love story" junk. You're turned into a vampire and in a span of few weeks fell into undying love towards another vampire. Just ugh.

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Gameplay:

💸 Microtranzactions	None	🏆 Achievements	Epic doesn't register
📊 Performance	Game was crashing due to lack of VRAM on loading screens. It also doesn't have many graphical options to change. Lowering details to medium solved the issue. Must be problem with memory management as game on ultra, FHD and all effects high used around 2GB of VRAM. So no idea where game was taking this 4GB overhead to crash >_>	💾 Save system	One automatic save without ability to change reload. Which is kind of meh as options we chose are not always what I would expect from the short description during dialogue.

🌍 Map	Really simple but detailed and easy to navigate. Fact map is flat does help here. Only annoying thing is that there are unmarked gates blocking our path all the time. I know they are there to add a bit of metroidvania to the game (they block areas forcing us to visit places in specific order in this otherwise semi-open map) but still annoying.
🎮 Controls	Nice and fluid. But it's mostly walking simulator, it would be an achievement to mess up controls in game of this type.
📇 Inventory	It is messy. There are no sorting options and all clues, books and notes are just dumped there in order of discovery. It's also not possible to sort weapons by type. Although there are not many of them, like 4 - 5 types each in whole game.
🏹 Weapons	Either two handled weapon or main hand + side arm combo. They do differ visually but main difference is if it focuses on damage, blood steal or staggering enemies. There are two types of guns but ammo is scarce so I was using those only for bosses. All of the weapons basically feel the same. Not much variety. Weapons start at 1st level and can be upgraded with crafting materials up to 4th level. Materials are found in chests, on dead enemies and small amount can be bought in shops. Leveling up weapons do give visible advantage in combat, in contrast to leveling up abilities.
🕵️‍♀️ Abilities	There are three ways to get experience to evolve. Killing enemies, which gives pitiful amount, do fetch quests which gives moderate amount, and killing non-enemy NPC. NPCs are localized in safe zones, and we can talk to them. Chatting unlocks hints about their character, and the more hints we have the more experience is NPC worth. If our mesmerize level is equal or higher to the one from NPC - we can lead them to secluded place and kill to get pile of experience. So it basically treats NPCs as pigs to be harvested. But doing so will drop zone overall health level, and if it drops to critical level NPCs will disappear and area will be populated with enemies. Our mesmerize ability levels up with story progression. Problem is enemies are always higher level than us so meh. I didn't kill anyone. Experience is used to unlock combat abilities (close-range claw / long-range spear / middle-range shadow attack), passives (more health, stamina, blood capacity etc.) and ultimate ability (which may be ok for general enemies but still deals pitiful amount of damage to bosses). Abilities are tiered and it cost between 600 - 1000 exp to unlock low tiers and up to 2 - 4k per high tiers. And as guideline - killing enemy gives 5 - 10 exp, completing quest gives few hundred and harvesting an NPC gives 2 - 4k. So if anyone wants to max out abilities they are forced to kill NPC. But it will also make enemies stronger and diminish all "investment". Game says that there are some ability combos to use but I did not see any. Both claw and spear deals small amount of damage (plus many enemies are resistant to blood abilities) so I went with high health / stamina / blood shield + single handed sword build. Active attack abilities also uses blood to work, which forces us to keep stunning enemies and feeding on them. Or having melee weapon with blood steal. We can't jump or run. Only walk and blink (which is used in fight as dodge and in small number of places to move vertically on scripted spots). Seeing that combat yields pitiful amount of experience and makes moving between locations a hassle - the best use for blink is to just skip whole districts when we need to move across the map. It's not possible to outrun the enemies or sneak around them but they can't keep up with us blinking across. It requires investing a lot in stamina though. To level up we need to rest. Resting also passes time and moves us to next night. Problem is - when next night comes NPCs in districts get sick all over again, and we need to again run around and heal them. Like if we couldn't leave some healing items at district "boss" and let them take care of it.
🤖 Enemy AI	They are decent. But all they have to do is not bump into few objects around them when trying to get to us. Not many enemy types and their moves are limited to 2 - 3 per enemy type so not much variety. They also don't interact with each other in any way. They will just circle around us, trying to score a hit.
🥊 Combat	It's not great, really bare bone dodge + hit. Easy enemies can be locked in a hit-stun if we have stamina but it requires only one button mash. Stronger enemies are just immune to it (not a matter of timing or weapon strength) so we need to attack them 1 or 2 times and dodge away. It all makes it really repetitive and thankfully it's possible to avoid all but boss fights later on by blinking away. Still surprisingly this walking sim from walking sim devs has better combat than ELEX... speaks how little they care about combat at PB. Vampyr has fluid animations, dodge that feels responsive and enemies that don't move like they have stick up their ass.

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Technicalities:

Graphic - ⭐️⭐⭐ - I think graphic is strongest part of the game. It's detailed and atmosphere fills into despair of the big epidemic
Music - ⭐️⭐☆ - Voice acting is good. But music is forgettable. Environmental sounds are also really basic
Bugs - ⭐️☆☆ - Some graphic memory problem where game that uses 2GB of VRAM for textures have spikes that makes it crash on system with 6GB of VRAM

Activated: 12/2021

Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden (Q4 2018) ⭐️⭐⭐⭐☆

Beaten after: 3 months

Turn based combat
15 hours | 0 of 54 (0.0%)

⇱ Click to show summary⇲

The good
- nice detailed graphic
- good tactical combat
- sneaking elements that are nicely woven into otherwise turn based combat
- ability to save anytime, including during combat

The bad
- plot is predictable and simple
- there are not many abilities and some look straight out useless
- weapons are really basic

Conclusion:
This game received a lot of praise and I do think it is solid. But I would not say it is extraordinary. I did play on normal as I did not like the idea of losing squad mates - they can die if they loose all health points and we don't manage to revive them mid-combat. On higher difficulty enemies simply have more health and hit harder which is lazy.

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Story:

After nuclear apocalypse people found shelter in arks - dirty and obscure city-hubs high above ground level, which is contaminated by nuclear fallout. People that stayed on the ground mutated after being exposed to radiation and pollution, and are led by psychic leaders that seek to destroy arks. We play as mutants - some weird animal hybrids that were raised on the ark and are sent to the ground on scouting and recover resource missions. There is no big and deep plot. We simply destroy bad guys and learn truth about character past.

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Gameplay:

💸 Microtranzactions	None	🏆 Achievements	Epic doesn't register
📊 Performance	No problems.	💾 Save system	50 save anytime slots.

🌍 Map	There is only over-world map that is also used as fast travel. But location maps are so small and simple they don't require minimap. Simply go back and forth from left to right and you will visit whole location in few minutes. There are no hidden areas or secret passes.
🎮 Controls	It's isometric game where characters are controlled with mouse and few keyboard shortcuts. It would be really hard to mess up this kind of controls. Obstacles are easily visible and character movement is easy to plan. I did find it confusing thought to move vertically on the map. Even main hero triumph ability - going mid-air to snipe enemies from above is useless because of it. There are no good and easy to spot places to use it.
📇 Inventory	Extremely basic. We can chose from few items in each category - helmet, body armor, 1st and 2nd weapon + up to 3 throwable weapons. There are no sorting options which makes it messy in the throwables category. Inventory is also based on big icons in small menus so not much is visible at the same time.
🏹 Weapons	Each character starts with default weapon that can be later upgraded to something better. Plus we can find one futuristic handgun, heavy weapon and sniper rifle with highest damage and crit chance. Weapons can be upgraded to higher tier to deal more damage with weapon parts (which are quite scarce on the battlefield). There is not much variety. We basically equip each character with one silent weapon and one heavy punch gun from small selection. Also there are not enough weapons to equip all 5 playable characters with good weapons. And not enough weapon parts to upgrade weapons for more than 3 most used heroes.
🕵️‍♀️ Abilities	Skill tree is really simple and there is no respec option. Unlocking ability is not enough to use it, it needs to be equipped in one of the available slots - one for combat active + one mobility active ability, and one for passive ability. We can also decide to upgrade character health. Because of this there is no point to try and unlock everything as we won't be able to use it anyway due to slot limit. Game heavily focus on use of critical hits, otherwise combats drags forever. Because of this passive ability focus on adding general crit chance, combat active ability focus on adding crit chance to attack, and mobility ability focus on stunning enemy (and we try to kill them with crit attacks when they lay on the ground). It really does feel like game rails players to playing in one proper way or they will have bad time.
🤖 Enemy AI	It's enough but enemies aren't smart. They will go behind cover and shot at us. They don't try to circle us around to catch us off-guard (unless they were already behind us when we started combat... but this doesn't count). They will try to kill target that is closest even when it's huge tank pig with tons of health and armor. Psy commanders will try to subdue characters wearing anti-subdue helmets etc. Not the smartest bunch. Enemies don't respawn.
🥊 Combat	It does feel like enemies get a lot of levels and health all the time. It does feel bit cheap that the moment we manage to level up and progress forward we just see the same enemies with 2x more health. As written in the weapons part above - game really focuses on critical chance and trying to play it other way would make combat dragging. Especially that we have 3 characters under our control, and there are often multiple enemies present with more health that we have. Game rails us into focusing on one enemy at a time and hoping to kill it in 1 - 2 turns with critical hits. Both we and enemies have armor and if armor rating is equal or higher than damage taken it will be nullified. Otherwise we will deal damage minus armor rating. Second part of the combat are stealth sections where we walk slowly on the map trying to find single targets that can be killed without alarming everyone in the location. Each enemy has awareness area and if we kill someone outside of everyone's awareness rating before they can alarm comrades we get bit easier fight later on. If we don't manage to kill singled out enemy with silent weapons (that deal less damage) in one turn they will raise alarm and enemies from half of the map will be on us. Which is bad. Here is where active mobility abilities come into play. If we can't kill someone in stealth mode in one turn we need to stun them and finish them off on the ground. It is satisfying to slowly clear camps from enemies that patrol the perimeter, but it does get repetitive. There are bots that can heal enemies (ofc we can't have one!) so eliminating those is always first priority. Otherwise enemies will just keep being resurrected. We need to use (really rarely found!) med kits on our characters, which restores only few hit points Not a percentage of total character health. So if we have downed character and use med kit on it - we can be sure they will be down again if the same enemy hits it again. I think med kits are more of "resurrect this hero and move it away from the fire so it doesn't permanently die" items. On hard difficulty health regenerates only half-way after combat (on normal it's full health). Outside of combat med kits regenerate whole health. Useful for hard difficulty.

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Technicalities:

Graphic - ⭐️⭐⭐ - Nice, colorful and atmospheric. But it's not possible to zoom in to see how many details there are
Music - ⭐️⭐⭐ - Mostly background noises. Voice acting is good but there is no character animation as they talk.
Bugs - ⭐️⭐⭐ - Didn't encourage any

I play now Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Epic and damn, hope it’s only issue with this version. Game keeps crashing randomly without any kind of error. Turning off web browser and email client does help. But game should not crash because it’s not only app running. It would also not run in DX12 mode, even when my card supports it.

First Spring (very late Christmas) party after me. I had no idea what to expect as this kind of event is not happening in Poland. But it was all right. Kind of fancy dinner with more cutlery I ever saw at the same time on the table, and then some light chatting and some dancing. Sadly it aligned with start of Ramadan so not all people from work could join us at the dinner.

Recent release of the Elden Ring made me think about accessibility. So from next update I will separate section for accessibility and general tuning up game. Some game (like Vampyr) has bare bone (even sad) configuration options as they are console ports and we don’t need to be able to adjust graphic setting on PC. And then there are games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider with tons of graphic options (helps to find good mix of visuals and performance) and you can fine-tune how game works in exploration, combat and puzzle sequences. You feel it’s too easy to have all parkour areas marked with white paint (which is nowadays standard in games) - turn it off. Think puzzles where interactive elements are highlighted are too easy - turn it off. You think combat is too hard? Drop it a notch. I was kind of annoyed for hand-holding in previous games puzzles and parkour sequences so I set them to hard. Which means there are no helpers. Does fact someone can go on easy in combat, puzzles and exploration make my game worse? Well no.

Accessibility is not only about dropping enemies damage or giving player enormous amount of attack power. Give map to players that gets lost easily in games (and IRL as well…) which is turned off by default for “proper experience”. Give players with mobility problems parry window that is 1s longer. Include colorblind option in puzzle games.