May 2021 Update
Next update (works only on profile page)
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (Q4 2014) ⭐️⭐⭐☆☆
FPS Co-Op26h hours | 31 of 63 (49.0%)
- less going back and forth than in previous games
The bad
- low gravity environment creates collision problems and car driving is even worse than in previous games
- enemies are brainless
- bosses are uninteresting bullet sponges
- Claptrap...
- there is literally nothing new in this game, feels like low effort asset reuse project to get few easy bucks
Conclusion:
The same stuff like in Borderlands 1 and Borderlands 2. Only that this one is shorter which is a good thing.
Story:
Gameplay:
💸 Microtranzactions | None | 🏆 Achievements | Bit grindy. |
📊 Performance | No issues. | 💾 Save system | Automatic check points but game saves quite often. So dying is not a problem. |
🌍 Map | Maps are smaller than in previous game but mostly because whole game is smaller. There is working minimap and it's detailed enough to not get lost. |
🎮 Controls | Micro-gravity makes controlling cars even worse than in previous games. Walking controls are the same as in previous games except for addition of jet pack that makes jumps longer in low gravity areas. Like usual we can run, jump, crouch. There is no cover system. It's possible to slam the ground in low gravity areas by jumping high and pressing crouch button mid air. |
📇 Inventory | The same basic stuff like in other games from the series. Menu made for consoles with limited number of inventory slots and basic stat comparison between gear. |
🏹 Weapons | There is one new type of weapon - lasers - in game, and one extra elemental effect - ice. Apart from that it's the same weapons. Only thing is that game is really stingy with loot and it's rare to find something better. Finding something above blue quality is also extremely rare, not to mention I was able to find only one orange weapon in the whole game. |
🕵️♀️ Abilities | There are 4 playable classes in base game. I played as Athena with a shield. Which is straightforward enough. Shield blocks all damage for a few seconds so basically acts as shield on top of the shield. Nothing exciting. Shield can also absorb incoming damage and release it when Athena throws it towards the enemy. It's not strong enough to kill even basic mob with full health though. I don't know how other characters are played but one has ability to have auto-aim with weapon boosts, 2nd summons drones that heal / deal damage, and 3rd is Claptrap. |
🤖 Companion and enemy AI | Enemies are dumb. Fact they need to compensate for lower gravity when they jump up and down is not helping. |
🥊 Combat | Go to objective area, kill everything, go further. There is no strategy here, enemies are bullet sponges and even bosses are brainless. Even last boss is not a challenge. |
Technicalities:
Music - ⭐️⭐☆ - Voice acting is good, music is forgettable, guns sound a bit cheap
Bugs - ⭐️⭐☆ - Collision problems that are introduced with low gravity environments
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Q3 2015) ⭐️⭐⭐☆☆
Action Stealth58h hours | 21 of 42 (50.0%)
- nice stealth sections
- good variety of weapons
The bad
- shadows are really unnatural and look like few pre-rendered textures are loaded in random order or they "crawl" on the ground with huge leaps
- way too grindy if you want to focus on base development but they ofc sell "time savers"
- upgrading base and weapons take hours of real-time that flows only when game is played
- plot is hard to understand for someone who did not play previous games
- enemies wake up from being incapacitated way too early
- empty and uninteresting open world that makes player waste a lot of time by going back and forth between objectives
- even when we're not interested in multiplayer part game forces us to do it through mandatory tutorial and prompts
- not possible to start game in offline mode by default
- each time we take stronger hit Snake "jumps into crawling" to the ground which makes running away from enemies annoying
- middle-game fight-only boss is bullshit if we focused gameplay on developing stealth weapons and approach
Conclusion:
I had wrong expectations about this game. I thought it's stealth game. But it's action game with stealth elements. Like Far Cry. Missions start from chopper (not possible to just pick next mission on the open world and play...). Walk around or kill enemies, grab what / who we need and run away. That's the base game loop. Game is needlessly grindy to try and force people to spend money on time-saving microtransactions. I've beat like half of the game (game is divided into 2 chapters and I was done with 1st) and decided it's not worth any more of my time. I heard from people that 2nd chapter is unfinished, short and rushed (as Kojima was already on his way out from the studio) so don't think I miss much.
Story:
Gameplay:
💸 Microtranzactions | Time-savers to "solve" problem of grind created by developers | 🏆 Achievements | Grindy |
📊 Performance | No issues | 💾 Save system | One automatic checkpoint which is not ideal for open world game with sneak elements... |
🌍 Map | There is no minimap but main map is nice and detailed without unnecessary clutter. My only problem is that it can take 1 or 2 seconds to bring up iDroid menu to see the map. And it's not possible to quickly peak in to map and go back to game as there is some delay between pressing button to load iDroid. Members of base combat crew can be sent on deployment missions from iDroid, which are basically automatic way to get small number of building materials on stable rate. |
🎮 Controls | This game is not so old to not allow for free exploration especially with it's open world. But! There is no jumping, our character will constantly trip / slide from small slopes, climbing is not contextual and require us to press "E" on prompt (or keep pressing "E" while in run to have "free flow movement"...), while crawling it's awkward to move character in other direction than forward as he doesn't move where mouse is pointed. If we're hit by stronger attack or explosion Snake "jumps" into crawl which prevents us from running away into safety fast. Horse controls are bad. Just meh. |
📇 Inventory | Weapons and gear are changed before the mission, so there is no inventory in strict sense. But it means that to change inventory we need to call chopper and start new mission or move through clunky menus in iDroid supply drops. There is base crew management tab but all that is required from player is to press "V" to auto assign them to correct positions. |
💶 Economy | To upgrade base, weapons and get more support from the units (air strikes, faster healing, faster research) we need a lot of resources that are gathered in open world. Fuel, metal, biological material, precious metal etc. can be found in boxes around the map. We can also find huge containers with raw materials that can be extracted and processed in base. But it takes ages to process those as they are on the timer which is influenced by real time, checkpoints, extractions etc. So without cough time savers cough enough determination it's not possible to freely upgrade base or research weapons. Game literally shows how many options we could have and then lock everything behind grind. And this game is not an MMO. So it's broken on purpose to lure people into spending few bucks to buy coins, that will allow immediately end long research or base upgrade. Like in shitty F2P mobile games where you can wait 12h to upgrade mill from level 2 to level 3 or spend in-game gems to skip waiting. |
🏹 Weapons | There are a lot of weapons from each category and there is good feel to them. But it takes ages to develop anything due to research taking hours of real-time (when game is running!). After 60h I was not able to get silenced sleeping dart sniper and it's something I wanted to have from the beginning. Also research menu is bloated with tons of items and is poorly designed with huge tiles which makes it hard to see which weapons are worth to develop. Silencers degrade fast and we need to call supply drop to get new one. |
🕵️♀️ Abilities | Snake does not have any abilities, there is no character progression. Only progression is through grindy weapon / gadgets upgrade route. We can shoot, run around, scan enemies to uncover their position and abilities, extract enemies and object with fulton (it's like balloon that jets them into stratosphere where they are picked up by chopper.. yeah). All stun abilities are like mosquito farts, so unless we fulton all stunned enemies they will take up after 1 or 2 min and raise alarm. Snake has prosthetic arm that can be equipped with sonar, rocket hand or higher weapon precision but I never found those to be useful. |
🤖 Companion and enemy AI | Companions mostly stay in distance and act as a support - dog is sniffing enemies, sniper can silently take out targets (fact it's hard to show which exactly target we want to kill is different matter), horse is used to move faster from point to point. I never used walking gear. Enemies are dumb, they will wait behind cover to get killed, don't throw grenades or try to flank us, it's enough to run away from our last known position for them to stop to pursue us. |
🥊 Combat | Really basic shooting. Nothing good or bad. Trying to take down enemy with tranquilizer gun may take a bit as they don't fall immediately (unless they are hit in the head). Open fights are not a challenge as it's enough to head shot everyone and run away from heavy enemies. I think my playtime is 50% longer than it should be as I was trying to play sneaky and tactical. While going loud and killing everyone in few min would be way more optimal approach. Enemies will call for reinforcements only once. And no more than 2 - 3 enemies will come as a backup. |
Technicalities:
Music - ⭐️⭐☆ - Voice acting is goof but music is non-existent. We only have some ambient environment / fight sounds.
Bugs - ⭐️⭐☆ - Nothing game breaking but those shadows that look like they travel 10cm at a time (instead of having gradual change in time) is annoying. There were also some texture problems where half of the game had weird dotted mesh texture.
Side note
This is first post that was generated by script I wrote. It’s interesting to see how many tedious tasks can be done with script written in some language. I knew we have BLAEO generators but I wouldn’t think it would be possible to basically make custom one for myself. I need to write actual review on my own but game information for banners is automatically downloaded from Steam.
Sadly last month gaming was not amazing, I feel like I wasted whole month on average and uninteresting games. But I bought 3 months of XboX Game Pass Ultimate for 1 pound and started to play Jedi Fallen Order. And I already like it. Parkour, simple puzzles, killing troopers with their own blaster shots, simple metroidvania elements. Star Wars Force Unleashed has similar vibe - mix of using powers to move through environment and lightsaber combat. And I liked it even when it was bit like interactive movie.
XboX app is still shit. This time I can’t even install game from it directly as it throws errors on me. I need to install games through MS Store. Error was introduced in update 9 months ago and is still not fixed :blobevil:
Also I just realized that it’s first month when I have nothing in “unfinished” category. Meaning I beat everything I started on Steam :spacecat:. Now I have 3 games in “didn’t start” category but they will wait most probably as I will focus for now on games from Game Pass.
I used icons from this page, to show gaming platform in my post:
https://icons8.com/icons
I feel like you are teasing all of us on purpose. Making sure you never get that 100% cleared that you are so close to
With Game Pass I don’t plan to buy anything on Steam, so I may be able to clear it.
Question is is it really cleared when I have so much on wishlist? And I just did not buy it so far :sweatsmile:
Ha! I would like to know about this review-writing bot as well, should you ever write one ;)
Well, not every month can be filled with great games, at least they were mediocre and not completely bad. MGS really sounds a bit tedious with all the grinding…Looking forward to your Fallen Order review!
Pls let me know when you find a solution to that. Or better yet, a script that plays backlog games and does a short write-up on each…
That’s what I thought when writing this line. “Oh would not be bad to have bot writing those reviews instead of me”.
:hehe: