Jawmuncher
Member
Is this for real?
I absolutely love it and with a name like that I'll have to be there day 1.
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STEAM Announcements & Updates 2014 III - Don't Believe The Tags
- Thread starter MRORANGE
- Start date
- Status
Is this for real?
I absolutely love it and with a name like that I'll have to be there day 1.
You're thinking of Steam Guard e-mails, which still do mention the IP address of the system that triggered it.
Is there an option to see who gifted or traded with me? I want to buy a couple indie games from Russia and I can't find a guy that I did that with before during last Steam Sale... I already checked chat history with all of my friends, but apparently it wipes itself after a couple of days/weeks. Maybe I can somehow check if he deleted himself from my friendlist?
Maybe they left feedback somewhere for you? On your profile?
Gift history (sent, not received): http://steamcommunity.com/my/inventory/, click "More" and then click "View gift history".
Trade history: http://steamcommunity.com/my/inventoryhistory/
TheFLYINGManga_Ka
Member
How long is this L4D2 sale? I was hoping we get something new.
Oh yeah your right.
What should I do? It could just be someone misremembering their username but I did have a friend request from some random trader as well.
I swear it's true.
My old Palit gpu had some kind of a cyber power armored frog in the box.
I thought that was pretty hilarious.
Looks like they threw Robo and Frog from Chrono Trigger into a blender. Or the used leavings from a badly written Chrono Trigger fanfic.
speculawyer
Member
Is Edge Of Space any good?
Also, anyone wanting to split the 12.99 package?
Also, anyone wanting to split the 12.99 package?
What happened to GAF using "Yesterday" as a post date? It's 12:15 here and my earlier post now has a full-length date attached to it even though it's just ~25 minutes old.
I'd say you have nothing to worry about as if the person did have access to your e-mail account your Steam account would be compromised by now. To be on the safe side, though, you could change the passwords of both.
I'd say you have nothing to worry about as if the person did have access to your e-mail account your Steam account would be compromised by now. To be on the safe side, though, you could change the passwords of both.
Giving away a good game today. Hope you all enjoy it. Made by one guy which is impressive enough but its also a really good game.
ModBot said:Instructions for Pakkidis:
Instructions for participants:
I am giving away a Steam key. To enter this giveaway, send a PM to ModBot with any subject line. In the body, copy and paste the entire line below containing the key.
Rules for this Giveaway:
- If you are a lurker you are not eligible for this giveaway. You need five or more posts in either the current Steam thread or the previous one to be eligible
- If you won a game from ModBot in the last day, you are not eligible for this giveaway.
- I really appreciate thank you messages, but please send them to me (Pakkidis, not ModBot!) via PM instead of in thread.
- This giveaway is a raffle. The winners will be selected by random draw 3 hours after the draw was created. Any games not claimed after that point will be given away first come first serve.
- Do not trade keys you win off-site to enrich yourself. Don't try to claim games you have no interest in collecting or playing. Don't claim games to give them to friends off-site.
- If the key is already taken you will not receive a reply. Replies may take a minute or two:
Dust: An Elysian Tail --MB-5AC37D20A730C37E- Taken by legacyzero. 3 entrants total.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Remember Me is the kind of game you'd expect a first-time developer that's not located in any kind of development hub to make. It's a science fiction auto-platformer (Uncharted, Enslaved, etc) brawler game. It's set in Neo-Paris; in the future, climate change refugees and income inequality lead to a European Civil War which ends with people using earthquake-bombs to destroy Paris. As Paris is being rebuilt (as Neo-Paris), a company called Memorize develops a technology to manipulate human memory -- erase bad memories, relive good memories, etc. Overuse of this technology leads to memoriel (pronounce mem real) illnesses, which are expensive to treat. The poor often become a sort of memory zombie outcast called a leaper (pun on the fact that they jump and on the fact that they're lepers). The corporation seems to control the government, which is never really mentioned. A group of rebels called the Errorists fight against the state / corporation. There are also a group of people called Memory Hunters, who seem to be able to steal other peoples memories or remix them. You play as a woman who wakes up with no memory inside La Bastille (rebuilt as a prison)--the Errorist leader, Edge, contacts you to break you out. You set off to recover your memories and take vengeance.
Game mechanics include a sort of climbing/traversal system which is quite fluid, light, and basically autoplatforming; brawler sequences where you have a set three or four pre-defined combo sequences and you define which type of attacks each button maps to + use special abilities; and finally a gameplay system where you "remix" the memories of others.
Combat... so, uh, I don't like brawlers. Don't like God of War, don't like Ninja Gaiden, don't like Bayonetta, etc. This is where you yell at me because my taste is shit or something, rather than understanding that different people have different tastes. The way it works in Remember Me is that X punches and Y kicks. You have the following combos: XXX, YXYXY, XYYXYY, YYYXXXXXY. You can go into a screen and set each button in a given combo to have one of the following effects: heal me; cause bonus damage; speed up the cooldown of my special abilities; amplify the effect of the previous button. Typically I'd set up one combo to heal me, and another longer combo to do damage and run the cooldown. Overall the combat felt fairly fluid... I'd compare it to sort of high-level play of the Batman games. I think people who like brawlers would probably find it shallow because the execution is so easy and varies so little throughout the game, but that's fine by me.
What doesn't work is the late-game combat. The back 25% of the game, you pretty much entirely fight electrified super-buff enemies. Any method of attacking them hurts you. As a result, you either need to attack them with an endless number of heal-me combo attacks (because the healing cancels out the hurting) or power up your special moves and use those to take them out. This wouldn't be so bad, but at the end of the game when you clear out a combat arena, they send a second wave after you, and so you've depleted your special moves from the first wave. It gets pretty frustrating. The early game bosses are really cool, the late game bosses boil down to defeating tons of trash mobs and then periodically being able to injure the main bosses. The boss of Chapter 7 (two invisible enemies that you can't hit without using a special move to stun and reveal them, 8+ trash mobs that regenerate as you defeat them and aren't impacted by the stun move; beat up trash, power up stun, use stun, attack boss, hope the trash doesn't come and interrupt your combo as you're attacking the boss because even though every normal enemy lets you dodge in the middle of a combo this boss doesn't) was a genuinely miserable experience, I died about 10 times or so.
Remixing is really cool. Basically, you hack into someone's memory. You watch the memory play out. At the end of the memory, you use the analogue stick to rewind (by circling the analogue stick, so it feels like you're editing video on tape, very cool control choice). At key points in the memory there are objects you can interact with. By altering the objects, you change the way the memory plays out. It's possible the result will be a memory bug--for example, changing someone's memory so that they die is not possible because how can you remember your own death?--or it's possible you'll lead to a desired alternate outcome. Then when you pop out of their memory, they might have a moment of clarity or conscience as their updated memory makes them reconsider their beliefs. Unfortunately you only get 3.5 of these sequences in the game and the plot never deals with how deeply disgusting it is to alter a character's memory to trick them into helping you; like, to give you an example, the first remix involves changing a woman's memory of accompanying her sick husband to hospital to a memory of the hospital killing her husband in front of her, this to get her to take your side in a civil war. And the character you do it to continues to pop up later. So is this woman not going to visit her husband anymore, because she thinks he's dead? What the hell?
The game has a really distinct visual style and some amazing views. Neo-Paris combines the messy dirt of Blade Runner with the bright sterile colours of Fifth Element. So expect to be overwhelmed by colours and distracted by grafitti and trash everywhere. The character designs are basically leather and latex future badasses. The main character wears thigh-high black leather boots over jeans, a cotton shirt with a black leather collar, a white leather half-jacket, one white normal sized glove, and one black elbow-length glove. She has red hair with multiple shocks of blonde-grey. It's one of those overkill, non-functional, style-over-substance visions of the future. Most other characters are similarly overdesigned. The weirdest thing I found was that large quantities of food is left on the ground, and at one point I found an entire lasagna just sitting on the ground, untouched. Who the hell cooks a lasagna and then says "ah fuck it" and throws it out the window? But some of the views are really really inspired. I wish the game gave you more of the outsides of Neo-Paris and fewer levels inside sewers or prisons.
The score is basically a big soaring orchestral score combined with some 70s sci-fi synth--I don't know how to describe this really, but not the kind of dark synth you think of from 80s sci-fi, a more optimistic synth--and then randomly injected with really digital, glitchy kind of techno. The combat music is really cool. If you get hit or flub a combo, the music stops. The better you're doing, the more glitched out the music gets. I felt some level of comparison to Parasite Eve in that at its best the combat music had a kind of acid lounge jazz feel, but more techno. Really cool, original score, and I'd listen to it outside the game.
Having said all this, I do have some problems with the game. The story is absolutely nonsense and the levels don't really fit together well, as if they made the levels separately and then had to thread them into a story. The dialogue is really really poetic but sometimes unclear, which makes me think that the game received fewer editing passes than most or maybe it's just the ESL coming through a little bit. The jargon-heavy nature of the script subtracts from the world rather than enhancing it--really, I need to follow the Remembrane to find the entrance to Memorize to save the Errorists. I unlocked a new S-Pressen ("Expression") or an upgrade for my SenSen and just found a Mnesist. Groan. The conclusion to the story is incredibly, incredibly stupid... I can't stress how dumb it ends up being. I won't spoil it here, but if you sit down and think about the motivations that went into starting Memorize corporation, as well as how those motivations translated into the way Memorize is ran and what it is shown doing in the game, it makes no sense. In addition, the motivation of the Errorist leader is equally stupid. The final boss literally begs you to kill him and then tries to kill you... err...
All the characters are psychopathic on both sides of the story which they do to try to make you question your loyalties or something but it doesn't work and mostly I just felt "holy moly, what a pile of jerks". Finally, there's somewhat significant environment reuse. You visit some version of the prison 3 times, and another level is mostly a sewer--the game only has 8 real levels. I am sure this reflects budget limitations.
Game took me maybe 9:30 or so (I lost maybe an hour to the boss I mentioned above, so maybe 8-9 hours) on medium. Performance was fine with some frame drops on normal settings on my 2008 machine.
On the whole, I'd recommend the game because of the interesting things that it does, including a biracial female protagonist and some really beautiful views. The platforming is so effortless that it feels pretty good and liberating to go through it. I'd probably recommend you play on easy to minimize frustration since I don't think you'd get a whole lot of satisfaction off of "mastering" the combat system by playing on hard. The game will never get a sequel and the developer will probably make another game, to say nothing of the way game budgets basically render stuff like this unlikely to exist more generally, so it sort of stands on its own as an interesting and unique artifact.
Game mechanics include a sort of climbing/traversal system which is quite fluid, light, and basically autoplatforming; brawler sequences where you have a set three or four pre-defined combo sequences and you define which type of attacks each button maps to + use special abilities; and finally a gameplay system where you "remix" the memories of others.
Combat... so, uh, I don't like brawlers. Don't like God of War, don't like Ninja Gaiden, don't like Bayonetta, etc. This is where you yell at me because my taste is shit or something, rather than understanding that different people have different tastes. The way it works in Remember Me is that X punches and Y kicks. You have the following combos: XXX, YXYXY, XYYXYY, YYYXXXXXY. You can go into a screen and set each button in a given combo to have one of the following effects: heal me; cause bonus damage; speed up the cooldown of my special abilities; amplify the effect of the previous button. Typically I'd set up one combo to heal me, and another longer combo to do damage and run the cooldown. Overall the combat felt fairly fluid... I'd compare it to sort of high-level play of the Batman games. I think people who like brawlers would probably find it shallow because the execution is so easy and varies so little throughout the game, but that's fine by me.
What doesn't work is the late-game combat. The back 25% of the game, you pretty much entirely fight electrified super-buff enemies. Any method of attacking them hurts you. As a result, you either need to attack them with an endless number of heal-me combo attacks (because the healing cancels out the hurting) or power up your special moves and use those to take them out. This wouldn't be so bad, but at the end of the game when you clear out a combat arena, they send a second wave after you, and so you've depleted your special moves from the first wave. It gets pretty frustrating. The early game bosses are really cool, the late game bosses boil down to defeating tons of trash mobs and then periodically being able to injure the main bosses. The boss of Chapter 7 (two invisible enemies that you can't hit without using a special move to stun and reveal them, 8+ trash mobs that regenerate as you defeat them and aren't impacted by the stun move; beat up trash, power up stun, use stun, attack boss, hope the trash doesn't come and interrupt your combo as you're attacking the boss because even though every normal enemy lets you dodge in the middle of a combo this boss doesn't) was a genuinely miserable experience, I died about 10 times or so.
Remixing is really cool. Basically, you hack into someone's memory. You watch the memory play out. At the end of the memory, you use the analogue stick to rewind (by circling the analogue stick, so it feels like you're editing video on tape, very cool control choice). At key points in the memory there are objects you can interact with. By altering the objects, you change the way the memory plays out. It's possible the result will be a memory bug--for example, changing someone's memory so that they die is not possible because how can you remember your own death?--or it's possible you'll lead to a desired alternate outcome. Then when you pop out of their memory, they might have a moment of clarity or conscience as their updated memory makes them reconsider their beliefs. Unfortunately you only get 3.5 of these sequences in the game and the plot never deals with how deeply disgusting it is to alter a character's memory to trick them into helping you; like, to give you an example, the first remix involves changing a woman's memory of accompanying her sick husband to hospital to a memory of the hospital killing her husband in front of her, this to get her to take your side in a civil war. And the character you do it to continues to pop up later. So is this woman not going to visit her husband anymore, because she thinks he's dead? What the hell?
The game has a really distinct visual style and some amazing views. Neo-Paris combines the messy dirt of Blade Runner with the bright sterile colours of Fifth Element. So expect to be overwhelmed by colours and distracted by grafitti and trash everywhere. The character designs are basically leather and latex future badasses. The main character wears thigh-high black leather boots over jeans, a cotton shirt with a black leather collar, a white leather half-jacket, one white normal sized glove, and one black elbow-length glove. She has red hair with multiple shocks of blonde-grey. It's one of those overkill, non-functional, style-over-substance visions of the future. Most other characters are similarly overdesigned. The weirdest thing I found was that large quantities of food is left on the ground, and at one point I found an entire lasagna just sitting on the ground, untouched. Who the hell cooks a lasagna and then says "ah fuck it" and throws it out the window? But some of the views are really really inspired. I wish the game gave you more of the outsides of Neo-Paris and fewer levels inside sewers or prisons.
The score is basically a big soaring orchestral score combined with some 70s sci-fi synth--I don't know how to describe this really, but not the kind of dark synth you think of from 80s sci-fi, a more optimistic synth--and then randomly injected with really digital, glitchy kind of techno. The combat music is really cool. If you get hit or flub a combo, the music stops. The better you're doing, the more glitched out the music gets. I felt some level of comparison to Parasite Eve in that at its best the combat music had a kind of acid lounge jazz feel, but more techno. Really cool, original score, and I'd listen to it outside the game.
Having said all this, I do have some problems with the game. The story is absolutely nonsense and the levels don't really fit together well, as if they made the levels separately and then had to thread them into a story. The dialogue is really really poetic but sometimes unclear, which makes me think that the game received fewer editing passes than most or maybe it's just the ESL coming through a little bit. The jargon-heavy nature of the script subtracts from the world rather than enhancing it--really, I need to follow the Remembrane to find the entrance to Memorize to save the Errorists. I unlocked a new S-Pressen ("Expression") or an upgrade for my SenSen and just found a Mnesist. Groan. The conclusion to the story is incredibly, incredibly stupid... I can't stress how dumb it ends up being. I won't spoil it here, but if you sit down and think about the motivations that went into starting Memorize corporation, as well as how those motivations translated into the way Memorize is ran and what it is shown doing in the game, it makes no sense. In addition, the motivation of the Errorist leader is equally stupid. The final boss literally begs you to kill him and then tries to kill you... err...
All the characters are psychopathic on both sides of the story which they do to try to make you question your loyalties or something but it doesn't work and mostly I just felt "holy moly, what a pile of jerks". Finally, there's somewhat significant environment reuse. You visit some version of the prison 3 times, and another level is mostly a sewer--the game only has 8 real levels. I am sure this reflects budget limitations.
Game took me maybe 9:30 or so (I lost maybe an hour to the boss I mentioned above, so maybe 8-9 hours) on medium. Performance was fine with some frame drops on normal settings on my 2008 machine.
On the whole, I'd recommend the game because of the interesting things that it does, including a biracial female protagonist and some really beautiful views. The platforming is so effortless that it feels pretty good and liberating to go through it. I'd probably recommend you play on easy to minimize frustration since I don't think you'd get a whole lot of satisfaction off of "mastering" the combat system by playing on hard. The game will never get a sequel and the developer will probably make another game, to say nothing of the way game budgets basically render stuff like this unlikely to exist more generally, so it sort of stands on its own as an interesting and unique artifact.
I definitely prefer this over the old polygonal women stamped over everything back in the day
any thoughts on this bundle?
https://www.humblebundle.com/devolver
https://www.humblebundle.com/devolver
Thanks Jasec
Its kinda meh for me, the $1 tier seems OK but $10 for a mediocre tower defence game and a game that is currently on sale for 3.50 does not ring my bell. I didn't look into the movies but the only one that interests me is good game.
Its kinda meh for me, the $1 tier seems OK but $10 for a mediocre tower defence game and a game that is currently on sale for 3.50 does not ring my bell. I didn't look into the movies but the only one that interests me is good game.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
The amount of sadness this fills me with is infinite. I'M SORRY I FAILED YOUR TEST CAPCOM.
Nice write-up though Stump.
spindoctor
Member
I wish Remember Me had cloud saves. I absolutely adored the art and music while playing it but the game itself was so dull and tedious that I got to the second last level and just uninstalled it. Now I kind of wish I could go back and finish it off :\
Started playing it myself recently because of the hype. First hour I wasn't really feeling it but then everything started clicking and it grabbed me by the balls and am now always looking forward to some free time to play it. Brilliantly designed game.Just finished Guacamelee!, man that was one great experience. Loved everything about it, from gameplay, atmoshpere (those tiny details like), humor, music... For a small indie studio, it's a pretty ambicious platformer. And a fantastic oneManny Calavera posters in the city
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
It has Steam Cloud support as of right now--I've got 45KB of data synchronized. Is it possible they patched it in, or is it that Steam Cloud isn't being used for saves?
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
Oh god I almost had a heartattack as I went to check and make sure I backed it up myself.
All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ
You're doing the game a huge disservice.
Daily Deal - Age of Empires II HD, 75% Off
omg i remember that mission
BinaryPork2737
Unconfirmed Member
Stump, your writeups are so good.
Dusk Golem
A 21st Century Rockefeller
All I know about Remember Me is that its soundtrack is amazing, by one of my favorite niche game composers, and I bought it when it was a bit cheaper for that I'll play it sometime and, like it or not, probably be able to finish it for the music and art direction alone, but of course will leave impressions here whenever I do as such.
Seriously though, the game has a great soundtrack. I wish the Composer, Olivier Deriviere, finds success as he's an amazing composer who often finds himself attached to B-Projects (The two ObsCure games, Alone in the Dark 5, Remember Me).
Some tracks for those who may have not heard:
Nilin the Memory Hunter
Remember Your Childhood
Chase Through Montmartre
The Fight
Some amazing music, I'll definitely be able to say that.
Seriously though, the game has a great soundtrack. I wish the Composer, Olivier Deriviere, finds success as he's an amazing composer who often finds himself attached to B-Projects (The two ObsCure games, Alone in the Dark 5, Remember Me).
Some tracks for those who may have not heard:
Nilin the Memory Hunter
Remember Your Childhood
Chase Through Montmartre
The Fight
Some amazing music, I'll definitely be able to say that.
Thanks for the writeup, Stump! It's always interesting to hear you articulate what you like and dislike about games (and why).
The disturbing thing is that I just read that "Roman" as Ronan.
SteamGAF's doing things to my brain. >.>
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
So in the last week or so I finished Thief (2014) and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 so I thought I'd write up my thoughts to help summer sale planning/price-point purchase decision making.
What I Liked:
If you hold the first two games sacred, don't bother with this entry. This game is not for you and you will be wasting your time and money. No one is asking for you to do community service and torture yourself with it. If you liked Dishonored a lot though, Thief 2014 might be worth checking out at the 15$ or less price range and you can pretend it's a spin-off from that series, because let's be honest, that is what the game feels like.
What I Liked:
I was definitely let down a bit by this sequel compared to the original. The modern day stuff felt like a total misstep and the stealth segments deserve all the hatred that the community has directed towards them. Still, I think fans of LOS1 should still check this out for the bosses and castle segments, at the sub 20$ price point. I don't think I would bother recommending this to anyone but fans of LOS1.
Double Conclusion:
I was able to play both these games for a grand total of 33$. I knew where to set my expectations going in which I think is the most important aspect of risky game purchasing. I felt that pricepoint was pretty fair for my enjoyment level. I appreciate my friend for family sharing his LOS2 with me and I will probably gift him the DLC since I'm interested in playing and it because I owe a brother one. Hopefully these impressions help everyone weigh what they value in a game and decide whether they should bother with either game on a sale.
What I Liked:
- The customizeable difficulty was a really cool idea and I enjoyed shooting for the 700 point challenge. Basically the game lets you pick a base difficulty and then set a ton of modifiers worth varying levels of points. My settings forced a game over if I was seen or touched anyone and I enjoyed having the option to do that.
- The game is completely ghosteable and it doesn't rely on abusing AI patterns or using glitches. Careful observation and exploration allow for some really useful alternate approaches similar to Dishonored. I was able to able to ghost (despite what the broken post-mission rating said) every single main mission and every single sidequest in the game on the hardest difficulty so props to the devs for allowing for that.
- The swoop mechanic is a joy to use. It is incredibly handy for crossing those small gaps between the darkness when you can't take out the light or ducking back into a corner after swiping some loot while a guard's back was turned. The animation and sound effect give it this nice agile feel and it's hard not to feel like a pro thief every time you use it.
- I really liked that the best loot was tied to exploration-based puzzles. It was fun picking through documents to find clues for vault codes or searching for ways to disable traps. The sidequests really take advantage of this and some of the later ones feel quite clever.
- Thiefing in general was fun. Pickpocketing has a nice feel to it. It's risky, but not overly hard. Picking locks is simple, but trying to do it before a patrol returns can be quite tense. The animation for cutting paintings out of their frames is superb.
- The full body-awareness is nice. I love all the intricate first-person animation (though a couple get old fast) and seeing your legs is always a plus.
- The devs didn't skimp on content either. The game took me roughly 20 hours to see all the content. The Client side missions are definitely worth checking out as they take place in areas separate from the hub and are pretty involved, taking anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.
- The AI is consistent and reads pretty well from the player standpoint which I think is the most important aspect of designing AI for stealth games. They aren't terribly clever, but they do feel like a threat.
- The art is solid. The visual variety is a bit lacking, but the style they went for works well with the theme and the character design is pleasant. Dishonored definitely takes the cake here, but Thief isn't without it's merits.
- The non-stealth segments are a bit goofy, but they make up a miniscule percentage of the game. The bridge sequence was actually pretty cool as a visual setpiece and it wasn't as jarring as the previous one had been.
- The third-person platforming stuff could have been used a lot more than it was. There were only 3-4 actual implementations of it and most of them were just there as the only way to reach a new area. I wish they had used this system to add more verticality to levels.
- The blatant streaming-in-the-new-area animations were really annoying. There are 2-3 of them that get used for the whole game and I would honestly have preferred a loadscreen if we have to compensate for shittier platforms. By the end of the game you never want to pry open another window for the rest of your life.
- The story execution is pretty terrible. The plot is poorly explained and important characters will show up like twice over the course of the 15-20 hour game. When I reached the end I was completely lost on why they even bothered. It's ridiculous and nonsensical.
- The sidequest organization in the city gets really old by the end due to the lack of fast travel. I would probably recommend just letting everything sit till the point of no return and then do it all then because if you do them as they become available you will be crossing the city back and forth twenty or so times. It gets really fucking old when you are ghosting the game and are creeping past the same guards for the tenth time.
- The game has a very stitched-together feel and the troubled development is obvious when playing. There are a couple segments that you can tell the guys who were trying to save the game couldn't do anything about short of completely redoing them, which wasn't an option after 5+ years of pre-existing dev time. It's a bummer.
- The pre-order bonus is one of the best missions in the game. It's a really well-fleshed out side mission where you rob a bank that has multiple levels of security. It was really fun and it bothered me that most of the people playing the game down the road probably won't be playing it.
If you hold the first two games sacred, don't bother with this entry. This game is not for you and you will be wasting your time and money. No one is asking for you to do community service and torture yourself with it. If you liked Dishonored a lot though, Thief 2014 might be worth checking out at the 15$ or less price range and you can pretend it's a spin-off from that series, because let's be honest, that is what the game feels like.
What I Liked:
- Every cutscene is a real-time cutscene! All those poorly encoded bloated files from LOS1 are nowhere to be scene and the narrative dumps now look gorgeous as a result. It also means the game is a fraction the size of the original and that the game will age much more nicely.
- The fantasy art direction is still world-class in my opinion. The castle segments are a sight to behold and the characters have a lavish amount of art direction put into them.
- I'm not very good at action games, but LOS2 does feel like an improvement over LOS1 to me. Not perfect, but an improvement. The aerial combat is way more fleshed out here and the game does a better job at encouraging exploration of the combo trees.
- There is an option to turn off QTEs! Every game need this option. It's seriously fantastic being able to just enjoy cutscenes after bossfights without having to pay attention to the controller or having the visuals marred by a massive UI notification that you need to press something.
- The boss fights were pretty great across the board, both on a visual and gameplay level. They incorporated enough of the gameplay elements you were learning that they didn't all feel the same and the attack sets they had were fun to learn without being frustrating. A bunch of them have multiple stages too, which is always a plus when a boss is fun.
- The game doesn't have the sense of journey that the first one had. It still feels really epic at times, but you don't get the journey sensation when you keep bouncing back and forth between two areas rather than traveling through a long series of varied ones. Still the bouncing back and forth keeps things on the fresher side of things.
- While I loved the bosses some of them didn't have as much of a situational build up as I would have liked. The first game was better about this. It wasn't a huge issue since the bosses are fun so who cares about build up, but I'm a sucker for atmosphere and buildups so I would have liked more here. An example of what I wanted more of is the Toymaker segment.
- The platforming is functional as a way to have downtime between combat, but I would have liked a bit more and for it to be a bit more involved.
- I'm not a total stickler for Castlevania lore, but I didn't mind the story. It was certainly goofy, but I love the one-liners from Gabriel and the twist made perfect sense to me (and felt fairly creative).
- The player-controlled camera works pretty well. While I do miss the sweeping camera from the original, this one is more functional on a moment-to-moment basis. The game helps you with it during combat, but it's not as consistent as I would have liked and it made things a struggle from time to time.
- The art in the modern city segments was a total letdown. It's not even in the same class as the fantasy art. It's bland to a fault and even the character design looks like it was taken from a seminar on "what gamers think looks badass and cool, 2003." Juxtaposed with the wonderful fantasy art certainly doesn't help it either.
- The stealth segments live up to the hype hatred. They are more puzzles than stealth segments and they are really irritating puzzles. Every time you make a mistake you pretty much have to start over from the beginning. It makes experimentation to figure out the puzzle painful. Really really bad game design. I recommend just youtubing the solutions to get them over with as quickly as possible to be honest.
- The rat power just isn't fun to use at all. The controls feel imprecise and the transition animation is annoying. They aren't ever really used in a creative manner either. Also, I'm the Lord of Shadow, fuck being a rat.
- There are a couple of the modern segments that felt incredibly sloppily designed from the gameplay standpoint and lacked a lot of visual polish too. The Train segment was definitely the worst offender. These segments really bring the flow of the game down though and hurt the overall picture in an inexcusable way.
I was definitely let down a bit by this sequel compared to the original. The modern day stuff felt like a total misstep and the stealth segments deserve all the hatred that the community has directed towards them. Still, I think fans of LOS1 should still check this out for the bosses and castle segments, at the sub 20$ price point. I don't think I would bother recommending this to anyone but fans of LOS1.
Double Conclusion:
I was able to play both these games for a grand total of 33$. I knew where to set my expectations going in which I think is the most important aspect of risky game purchasing. I felt that pricepoint was pretty fair for my enjoyment level. I appreciate my friend for family sharing his LOS2 with me and I will probably gift him the DLC since I'm interested in playing and it because I owe a brother one. Hopefully these impressions help everyone weigh what they value in a game and decide whether they should bother with either game on a sale.
I'd guess the former:
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)Ryse: Son of
Edit: Oh, right, the store update is now at 1am rather than 2am. Thank god that's over with... for now.
Last Baron
Member
Checking the daily: I don't know what I expected.
Ok then the question is, why does my Steam client keep showing L4D2 as the daily deal? I've refreshed the page, it's been L4D2 for days now.
Dusk Golem
A 21st Century Rockefeller
It's... Different. Least not Left 4 Dead 2 again. But also shouldn't the daily deal not change for another 40 minutes?
spindoctor
Member
Dusk Golem
A 21st Century Rockefeller
This is true, as as I was messing with my computers clock last night for a game I was playing, it might be off. Though it is still Left 4 Dead 2 for me I will say. XD
Fucking desynced daylight savings.
chrominance
Member
I was about to come with bad news regarding DONTNOD, the developers of Remember Me, but it looks like they aren't actually bankrupt like originally reported so hopefully that's good news. I really hope they get some more good games under their belt.
Nice writeups! Might actually give Thief a second look one day based on that, once it sees a price drop/good sale price.
Ugh. Always hate losing an hour. :s
It's not just you. I get the same thing in Chrome, too.
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