I did not get any achievements in this game, for some reason. Might be the press build. Eh, don't really care about achievements anyway. Despite the lack of achievements, I really enjoy this game. Enough as to give it my first "top score" on the site I write reviews for!

https://saveorquit.com/2020/09/21/review-vaporum-lockdown/

This game surprised me. I was going in expecting it to be a pretty mediocre 3rd person action RPG, that would be entertaining for an hour or two. But I ended up beating it!

You're following Jason, as he tries to bring back his dead wife. Along the way you'll visit a few places in and around Greece, and meet other mythological characters, like Pan and Achilles. The story is maybe not amazing, but it's good enough, and the different locations all have their own unique feel. All the characters you run into are also voiced, and the voice acting is surprisingly competent.
The games combat system is also not outstanding, but it's good enough. You're controlling Jason as he fights a bunch of different enemies (sadly there's not much more than a bunch of them, really should have been more!). At your disposal you have three different weapon types that you can switch between on the fly, and a few special abilities. It's nothing outstanding, but it's good enough.

Pretty much all the individual elements of this game are "good enough", without being great, but this really is a game where the sum of all the parts add up to more than the parts individually would. It's a solid action RPG that's worth playing, even if it's far from a masterpiece.

It took me 2 months to get through this one, and that should give you an idea of how much I liked it. Unlike Rise of the Argonauts, which as better than the sum of its parts, Arkham Knight is a game with a few solid parts, that gets dragged down by a few parts that don't work so well, and ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

On foot Batman is agile, fast, stealthy and all that good stuff. He's got access to a wide set of tools that he can use against enemies, and much like in the previous games, you need to be careful when attacking enemies that have guns, as Batman is not bullet proof. These parts are good.

The problem is that Batman is often forced to be in his car. The developers seemed really proud of this car, as enemies will constantly remark on how batman now has this super car, and how afraid of the car they are. Sadly the car is just boring. It's worse as a mode of transportation than gliding through the air, so if the game would not force you to use the car, it would likely not be used much. But you're constantly forced to use this car, and to make matters worse, there's something about the car that makes the game chug. The game runs well when on foot, but as soon as the car is in use, the games framerate drops considerably.

The games story is interesting, but could have been told better. It focuses a lot on Batman himself, his inner daemons, and also the fact that he puts the ones around him at constant risk. I like the idea, but it feels like the story is being harmed by the darn car! So many segments feel like they've been influenced by the fact that they need to push the thing.

Arkahm Knight is ultimately the worst (or second worst, if you count Blackgate) game in the series, by a wide margin. A lot of the parts work, and the story is even pretty interesting at times, but a slew of technical issues, and the need to engage with a boring car constantly just makes it a mediocre game.

Warning: Slightly rambly review of the game.

You know what? I think I hate this game.

Tom Clancy's™ The™ Division™ is yet another Tom Clancy game made after the death of Tom Clancy, and it's a game that really seems to lack any proper direction. Is it a realistic military shooter? Is it an RPG? Is it an MMO? Is it an endless treadmill? Well, according to Ubisoft it's a lot of thins, and not all of them are things that the game manages to be. For an example, Ubisoft said that it would be an RPG without cutscenes, with a large immersive world that reacts to your decisions and without scripted events. When Ubisoft said this, which was quite late in the games development, they clearly did not know what the game was going to be. The world does not react to you, the game has cutscenes, and it does the bare minimum to count as an RPG.

In The Division™ you're playing as an agent sent into a New York that's been infected by a disease, and apparently it has made everyone living there capable of taking 5 large caliber bullets to the head. So you move from area to area, doing menial tasks, listening to repeated voice clips. It is a very pretty city you're moving through though, the game looks great, there's a lot of attention to detail to everything around you, but it's just a pretty façade.

The game world is populated by evil people who has taken the opportunity to turn very evil when the world turned mad. So they do evil things, because they're evil. The games writing staff really did not care to make believable enemies, and the only ones that seem to even have a motivation that makes some kind of twisted sense are "the cleaners" who believe that anyone infected by the disease needs to be killed and then lit on fire, to stop the spread of the disease. The worst part was that there was no self awareness to the plot, the writers did not seem to realize how stupid the world they had written really were.

Then there's the actual gameplay. It's boring and repetitive. Hide behind chest-high walls, pop out to shoot at the enemies, then hide again and wait for your health to regenerate a bit. Use a health kit if you take too much damage. Repeat. As you move through the world you'll face people who have different coloured hats and shirts. They're totally different enemies. The only standout here is, again, the cleaners, who have big tanks on their back that you can shoot, which makes them explode. The other enemies are just regular humans who wears clothes with different colours, and at some point the melee enemies go from using bats to using shotguns. And much like the enemies, the missions don't really change over the course of the game. There are plenty of copy/pasted missions, where the only difference is that you're fighting in a slightly different looking building.

Both friendly NPCs and enemies have an extremely limited set of voice lines, and this gets extra obvious when they call out specific things. Like if you kill an enemy, they might shout "They killed Alex". A group of 10 enemies might have 8 Alex in it. And sometimes the clips that friendly NPCs play don't match what's going on, but they did not have a clip that did, so they just picked something that was "close enough".

This game things of itself as a bit of a looter shooter, similar to Borderlands, but with realistic looking guns, and this means that you'll keep getting new guns. Big problem here is that you'll just keep getting new guns with marginally better stats that the old ones. There's no real sense of progress here, you're just keeping up with an ever increasing health pool that the enemies have. So at the start of the game 4-5 headshots with your pistol might kill an enemy, and then at the end of the game 4-5 headshots with your pistol will kill an enemy. That's boring. Sure, I can go back to an early area and 1-shot enemies with my high level pistol, but what's the point? The RPG elements just acts to gate off later areas in the game, but they don't make it seem like you're getting more powerful.

So is there anything good about the game? Eh, the co-op works surprisingly well on a technical level. The game still looks and sounds good, and it was free. But I'll still say that this game is bad, really bad, and I suspect that it was made without much direction, other than the need to chase some open world looter shooter bandwagon that they could cram boring microtransactions into. Oh, incidentally, this game has some of the most boring cosmetics I think I've ever come across in a game that tries to get you to spend money on cosmetics.

This game does not really have an end, but it has a review!

https://saveorquit.com/2020/09/18/review-combat-mission-shock-force-2/