Shit games that could have been good

[Foltest]

I am a huge fan of the Cossacks game (some of the first RTS I played) but Cossacks 3 is a letdown.
To keep it short it, is more or less the same as Cossacks 1. The issue is that the game design has not aged well and is full of bullshit.
I still like them, but it could have been so much more.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I am a huge fan of the Cossacks game (some of the first RTS I played) but Cossacks 3 is a letdown.
To keep it short it, is more or less the same as Cossacks 1. The issue is that the game design has not aged well and is full of bullshit.
I still like them, but it could have been so much more.

I got both it and 2, but 1 was just boring the crap out of me even though it (with all the faction DLC) cost me more.
Having a million historical campaigns sounded nice, but the ones I clicked on seemed really low production value and low quality.

I think they need to reboot the franchise (again) with some quality of life improvements. I've come to like the idea behind the economic system and recruitment system in 2. Villages achieve the goal of making players fight for terrain, give a sense of back and forth and conquest (instead of just doomstacks roaming around hunting the main base like in any Age of Empires) and they automate all of the resources (you just worry about upgrading capacity, not herding villagers) except Stone and Wood and construction, all of which (this is genius) tie into expanding capacity so that you WOULD want to be able to redirect them.

The recruitment likewise is intended to be something you leave running. Unlike Cossacks 3 you don't have to have an officer to make a formation (the officer is an optional improvement to the unit), it lets you click a button to make a unit and it automatically selects it (making deployment easy), and when the auto-training means you basically keep a "pool" of reinforcements from which to manually reinforce or reconstitute a shattered formation. So, training, too, mostly goes on autopilot (a resource to draw off of) except for what you want to currently prioritize.

All of that allows you to, especially with understanding the hotkeys, focus on the tactical maneuvering and fire commands.

The biggest quality of life problem is that it has no (to my knowledge) hotkeys or flags (like in Company of Heroes 2) to quickly select a particular unit, which is a big problem when the game has so few units that it could easily be done and requires so much micromanagement that a single missed volley can send a unit off the battlefield for minutes.

I also think that for a Napoleonic game it features artillery way too little (its finnicky, sucks, and is heavily limited in number). Cavalry I'm somewhat ambivalent about. It doesn't, to my observation, have any real downside like in Total War games (where it will not survive a direct charge into pike or bayonet, and basically has to be used to shatter a wavering force or flank/attack the rear in repeated charges). But, the game also controls the speed at which you get cavalry to where you could view it as just being more like a hero unit.

 

[Electromagnetic Radiation]

Beast Wars Transformers for the Playstation 1

Even for its time, this is one of the worst games on the Playstation and quite possibly the worst Transformers game (It certainly is the worst beast wars game without a doubt, although the Beast Wars Transmetals fighting game isn't much better). Gameplay is extremely repetitious and sleep inducing, as you only really attack with a projectile weapon that each character has, There's also the Energon exposure mechanic (think of it as this world's radiation) that is really haphazardly implemented. Your beast mode is quite literally worthless and is only ever used to preserve your health and not die from said Energon exposure. But beyond all of that, the graphics are absolutely hideous and with how difficult it is to traverse in the game, it's a genuinely headache-inducing experience. (not to mention the map is horrible too) What i personally would have done is change the game from 3D to 2D, since is this is the PS1, 3D games age worse than 2D ones. Give every single character a varied moveset that isn't just using a weapon to shoot mindlessly at whatever enemy is in front of you and properly intergrate Energon exposure, to where only certain sections of the game have it. To make beast modes not entirely obsolete, they'd have unique attacks their Cybertronian forms don't have.

What's unfortunate is that Beast Wars as a concept would make for a great game and yet the only good Beast Wars game is the japanese exclusive GBC fighting game, which is really sad when you think about it. I don't expect a remake of the PS1 Beast Wars game and the Transmetals fighting game. But a colossal failure of Beast Wars as a game is just damn dissapointing and it doesn't look like we're getting anything related to it in the future

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

View attachment 6035802
My dudes. I love this trash fire of a game. Power bombing a villain out of the sky with The Thing or vaporizing Magneto with Iron Man or watching Storm in a skimpy outfit BBQ Wolverine. It is not deep, but fuck is it fun. The finishers were brutal. The Thing smashing his opponent into the ground over and over was my favorite. Not all the Imprefects are interesting, but the Marvel roster makes up for it. If EA wasn't such greed cocksuckers. I honestly believe it had potential.

Kirby Morrow was in it as Human Torch! It's messy as fuck but fun.

 

[Chieftain Coke Peanut]

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord takes the cake for me. It is THIS close to being a 10/10 amazing game but they just decided to say fuck it and stop adding content. We were THIS close to having a hybrid of Crusader Kings, Total War, and Elder Scrolls. And they fucking fumbled it. The only hope is for mods but they keep fucking updating the game to add one tiny shit thing and it breaks every mod! Fuck Taleworlds.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord takes the cake for me. It is THIS close to being a 10/10 amazing game but they just decided to say fuck it and stop adding content. We were THIS close to having a hybrid of Crusader Kings, Total War, and Elder Scrolls. And they fucking fumbled it. The only hope is for mods but they keep fucking updating the game to add one tiny shit thing and it breaks every mod! Fuck Taleworlds.

Better, in its current state, than Warband?
I never played either but after Battle Cry of Freedom I'm very interested.

 

[Chieftain Coke Peanut]

Better, in its current state, than Warband?
I never played either but after Battle Cry of Freedom I'm very interested.

That's a lot harder of a question to answer than you might think. The "bones" of the game are excellent, and in most ways it is better than Warband. Yet somehow it still falls a little flat to me. I think the problem is that all of the content is good up until you get a vassal and it all falls apart with no politicking, feasting, speaking to other lords, none of that. Another part of the problem is how fucked they made the economy. Nothing outside of smithing and selling the shit you loot is worthwhile.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

That's a lot harder of a question to answer than you might think. The "bones" of the game are excellent, and in most ways it is better than Warband. Yet somehow it still falls a little flat to me. I think the problem is that all of the content is good up until you get a vassal and it all falls apart with no politicking, feasting, speaking to other lords, none of that. Another part of the problem is how fucked they made the economy. Nothing outside of smithing and selling the shit you loot is worthwhile.

So it is essentially a worse political RPG even if the combat/basic jankiness of it is better.

 

[Bruce Campbell's Chin]

Splinter Cell Double Agent had such a fun and simple concept and they fumbled it so hard.

Spoiler: sperging

The undercover missions were an interesting idea, particularly the extra objectives you could complete to claw back any lost trust. However, they're not at all worth the effort since a) it won't undo the damage to your stealth score, which I believe can affect the equipment you get in the next mission, and b) the timers on these missions are too tight for the player to complete both the standard mission objectives and a recovery objective, and c) they aren't even interesting. Compounding this, most of the guard movements are scripted sequences, which can be easily avoided on repeat playthroughs, or by loading a saved game (which you're still allowed to make and load at any time). The story is cheesy and contrived, which would be acceptable as standard for a stealth game if it wasn't presented as srs bsns with emotional weight. The JBA wants to atomize New York and the NSA is worried that Sam might take their side because his daughter got run over? The daytime missions suck, too. Making the player rely on other forms of dynamic cover (water, a blizzard, a fireworks display, the fog of war) is a good idea and gels well with the original shadows concept, but it isn't implemented well at all. Instead you get schizophrenic guards that have to be manipulated Blood Money-style (except you actually get punished if they get a good look at you), and zero information about how hidden you are (you know, the most basic aspect of the series' gameplay).

The game has some great moments, a couple good songs (nothing as good as CT though), and is the only example I've seen of an espionage title incorporating organizational infiltration into its gameplay, but Ubi Shanghai's quest to be "cool" absolutely sank the game.

 

[Lei Wulong's Left Leg]

Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a survival-horror game set in an unnamed British archipelago where you, a gentleman of some mechanical skill, have been transported to. The archipelago is completely uninhabited save for a swathe of robotic gentry who have wiped out the entire human populace, save for you. Using your wits, trickery, the scavenging skills of the filthy lower class, a bit of stealth, and the good old fashioned attitude that allowed your granddaddy to pull himself up by his bootstraps, you traverse a handful of islands in search of artifacts to help you return back to your nondescript manor.
Now, if that sounds like a pretty good premise, you'd be correct. It even had a decent multiplayer mode that reminds me a bit of early-age SOS. However, the developers at Big Robot had a serious tendency to say "Cor, that's good enough" and move on to other things, resulting in world generation softlocking you out of artifact pieces, AI being clunky, and a UI system I would politely refer to as ham-fisted.
I have played the game a fair bit, and it annoys me that such a fantastic game could have such great potential, but seemingly be set back by a "good enough" mindset.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It's not a shit game as such, but Hardspace: Shipbreaker could be a lot better than it is.

In this case it's for the opposite reason than you might think. I'm one of the few people that actually came FOR the labor union stuff, because I have a huge interest (at this point, quasi-academic) in the West Virginia Coalfield Wars. I am there FOR the company towns in space angle.

But I think the game fails to sell its plots or themes hard enough THROUGH GAMEPLAY and that causes it to fail as a story entirely.

At first it's fun, though extremely annoying and shitty to have it not allow you to skip those one-sided conversations even after seeing them (want to restart a level? fuck you). But over time it slows down, like the plot just fizzles out, and you realize it's not going anywhere. I likewise am not really getting the feeling the journalist cunts claimed it has of having to work extremely hard and fast and dangerously. It's there, sure, but the problem is that there is no consequence to me AS A PLAYER of not performing faster and the tasks are not hard or dangerous. Every now and then, like in real life, you just plain fuck up (got crushed, accidentally blew the whole thing sky high with coolant, etc), but it has never felt like a clear consequence of me choosing to work harder, which is one of the big ideas (like coal mines and real life shipbreaking, the company does not care about the employee's life when the very tools they use are themselves products they sell).

As far as the characters go, I don't agree that it's woke at all. It's the old fashioned kind of stick-it-to-the-man sort of anti-corporate stuff with the Burger King Kid's Klub approach to diversity. The main character is a spunky Black dyke. It's annoying and I got to swearing anytime she'd call, so she's not exactly well written, but the character isn't malicious. There's two (?) Asians, but White Asian types, one a grizzled old ranch woman type. There's a kindly redneck manly blue collar type for the good White guy, so even though there's a schlubbish stupid White boss, it doesn't come across as a racial thing.

I think the game could have been a lot better as a roguelike. It could have been a narrowly focused, narrative roguelike, but still. You can kind of do that in that you can play with no backup lives, but there's a difference, see, because roguelikes are based around CONSTANT PRESSURE ON RESOURCES (not just death being bad), FAST PLAYTIMES (since it takes many attempts) and oftentimes (not always) WAYS TO GET HEALTH/LIVES BACK. To play this on one life would be like when I played Far Cry Primal on one life, except worse. It was a great experience in some regards because of the tension, but I know for a fact it would have devastated me to lose, it ruined some parts of the game by preventing me from playing hard parts without cheesing (boss beasts), and even then Primal is based around combat, not so much accidental cheap death.

A roguelike version of this would get rid of the debt and have resources. I don't give a fuck about how efficiently I work with expenditures on tools (how many tethers and charges and such) because money does literally nothing, you cannot pay off the meme debt bill at the start and it just doesn't matter. If the game instead had a design like this, I think it would matter:
1) You have to clear a minimum amount of salvage to maintain your job (room and board, equipment rental, all that)
2) Beyond that, you have the Papers, Please/Oregon Trail/Not for Broadcast/etc. style family resource management minigame. Have some narrative and some reason to care about how much you're sending "back home." That's the plot, you're sending the money back home to loved ones.
3) The minimum amount rises over time to continue to put time pressure on you, ESPECIALLY as difficult ships get introduced. This puts harsh pressure on you to upgrade to stay alive while also drawing off the exact resource that keeps you alive.
4) Lives cost a lot of money and are perhaps limited in some other way. Debt has a limit, can basically take on company debt but you can quickly exhaust your credit line
5) Eventually, when the union plot actually goes somewhere (if it is), it would be interesting to have choice (like working as a scab instead of participating in strikes, informing, things that undermine the union plot but help reduce the financial burden)
6) The I'm-going-to-steal-a-part-every-day-to-build-my-own-car thing is good, more of that somehow (like selling black market), maybe a mechanic to avoid ; as is, again, money doesn't matter and so I don't give a shit, maybe if there was some sort of surveillance you had to avoid
7) Go full Mine Wars and have sabotage missions. This could be like some big finale/late game stuff to win the union, like coal miners in real life using dynamite to blow up collieries, you go use your same tool set to completely fuck up the company's property on strict timetables (due to having to scram). Basically the final exam, if you got very efficient at ship teardowns you can get very efficient enough to tear down corporate space stations before the catchpole arrives.

What I've seen so far is mindlessly fun - extremely engaging, easy to autistically fixate on - in how you're basically playing LEGO in reverse, snapping apart a complex structure, tearing it down gradually while dealing with very petty/simple problems (how to depressurize, how to go about isolating the reactor, etc.) - but it isn't a good story at all. It's reverse LEGO. It's reverse Minecraft. It does a disservice to its own high concept.

 

[moocow]

What I've seen so far is mindlessly fun - extremely engaging, easy to autistically fixate on - in how you're basically playing LEGO in reverse, snapping apart a complex structure, tearing it down gradually while dealing with very petty/simple problems (how to depressurize, how to go about isolating the reactor, etc.) - but it isn't a good story at all. It's reverse LEGO. It's reverse Minecraft. It does a disservice to its own high concept.

It would be a legitimately far better game without the story element. Or maybe at least one that doesn't go full politics and maybe leans harder into a "science" mystery with maybe a hint of political intrigue. Think of the crapsack world of the Alien universe (e.g. Ripley, xenomorphs, Wayland-Yutani, etc.). There's legit scientific exploration to be had in that universe, but everyone's such a selfish prick in that universe practically nobody can get ahead unless they've got a lot of corporate assets backing them up. They could have done something along those lines instead of this "muh worker's rights" stuff. Then again there was still a little hint of that in the first two Alien films too.

But I think the bigger weakness that hurts the game is the lack of variety. There aren't that many ship types to tear apart and after not too long you've already seen everything the game has in its box of tricks to throw at you.

More ships, more stuff to rip out of them and/or screw up in the process, less chatter, more science stuff, less politics.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It would be a legitimately far better game without the story element. Or maybe at least one that doesn't go full politics and maybe leans harder into a "science" mystery with maybe a hint of political intrigue. Think of the crapsack world of the Alien universe (e.g. Ripley, xenomorphs, Wayland-Yutani, etc.). There's legit scientific exploration to be had in that universe, but everyone's such a selfish prick in that universe practically nobody can get ahead unless they've got a lot of corporate assets backing them up. They could have done something along those lines instead of this "muh worker's rights" stuff. Then again there was still a little hint of that in the first two Alien films too.

But I think the bigger weakness that hurts the game is the lack of variety. There aren't that many ship types to tear apart and after not too long you've already seen everything the game has in its box of tricks to throw at you.

More ships, more stuff to rip out of them and/or screw up in the process, less chatter, more science stuff, less politics.

See, if people just don't want the labor union plot (which to me is valuable, it's based in a very real and very fucked up part of both this country's history and the current day world) then they don't want it, but I think that it would have been a better game if it had used the plot in its gameplay mechanics. As is it's ancilliary, but the premise of being ground down in body and spirit and throwing your life away in avoidable accidents desperately trying to hit the quota could have been like this really intense challenge mode while the play-around do-one-ship-at-a-time mode still exists.

More hazards would achieve both goals of gameplay variety and story themes, too. I just haven't really seen anything that stumps me. The reactors sound like they're going to be dangerous, but it's not like you can't tear down everything around it, make it completely safe. When they were first introduced I thought it was going to be hard involving dragging the thing through a ship.

 

[Lei Wulong's Left Leg]

Really, Hardspace Shipbreaker needs a Battlefield treatment where the story is a contained world and the roguelike/co-op is in the same world.
Speaking of which, why isn't there a co-op mode with bigger ships?

 

[Active User]

Infamous: Second Son had plot issues surrounding how the conduits were handled, and I feel like it's so close to making something much more interesting of the situation. First off, conduits continuing to exist at all is a retcon from Infamous 2's heroic ending, but that I don't care as much about because that's a result of the devs underestimating the number of people who would go for that ending where you basically have Cole kill millions of conduits (including himself) to save billions of humans as opposed to the evil ending where he does the reverse and becomes The Beast. If we need a little retcon to have the game exist at all, go for it. Past that very first step, however, is where issues begin to show.

The basic outline of the plot is that conduits (empowered humans) are still around, and they're feared and discriminated against by the government. Their oppression is often primarily carried out by the Department of Unified Protection, or the DUP, which is a federal agency tasked with rounding up all conduits and detaining them as bio-terrorists. Ironically, it is led by an extremely powerful conduit with the power to control concrete, Brooke Augustine. The main character is a Native American man named Delsin Rowe who initially appears to be a smoke conduit, but in actuality his ability is to absorb those of other conduits. He's discovered, so the DUP swoops in, Augustine tortures him for information, doesn't get the answers she wants, and then tortures/cripples the rest of his tribe by growing concrete out of their bones which will eventually kill them basically out of pure sadism. Augustine's hidden agenda causes this to make basically no sense, but we'll get to that later. This kicks off the plot where Delsin travels out to Seattle, with the plan of accumulating enough power to take on the DUP directly, steal Augustine's powers, and use them to fix his tribe.

Now, as for Augustine's hidden agenda. It's revealed right at the very end of the game pretty out of nowhere that her real angle with all of this was to protect conduits from the military. In her mind, it's best to imprison all the conduits so the army doesn't go after them, while she can safeguard them in her own way and stop a total genocide. DLC later elaborates that in addition to this, she engineered certain conduit breakouts because at one point the DUP had just plain old captured all the conduits, causing the government to decide they didn't have a purpose anymore and moving to shut them down and transfer all their captives into military custody. To avert this, she secretly allowed for certain dangerous conduits to escape and cause chaos, so that her agency could save the day and prove they should still exist. You may notice that this doesn't explain why she just randomly tortures Delsin's entire tribe for no reason when he was fully willing to give himself up for their safety, a decision that leads to her downfall. I guess she's just racist. It also doesn't explain why she sponsors a bunch of inhumane experimentation on the conduits in her custody. She's the head honcho here and she supposedly is truly interested in their safety. She could just not do that. Revealing this motivation so late into the game without any real buildup is itself a very strange decision that makes me wonder if it was also just a super late addition in the writers room given how it contradicts what otherwise just seems to be a power mad sadist, but I think it's a failed attempt to recreate the last minute reveal with their main villain from Infamous 1 (which is that he's a future version of Cole MacGrath, the protagonist, who did what he did to jumpstart Cole's power development to prepare him for what's to come in the future including killing Cole's/his girlfriend) which I feel worked much better. Regardless, this isn't even where the issues with that sudden motive end. It's not just contradiction, but that they don't even make a whole lot of sense on their face given her capabilities.

Second Son I feel suffered from an attempt to have their cake and eat it too when it came to conduit power levels. They wanted their conduits to be super powerful for gameplay reasons, and I can get that. It's fun to have these impactful abilities that put you so far beyond humanity, and it allows you to design more interesting and varied enemies than just different types of real world military forces. However, for story purposes they also want conduits to be weak enough that they can be meaningfully oppressed by humanity at large and that despite their supernatural abilities, they're the underdogs. This is irreconcilable with things like a neon light using conduit being able to move at the speed of light and convert people directly from matter to energy (which is an insane amount of energy, there's a reason antimatter whatever is so popular in sci fi) and Augustine's a particularly bad example of it. She's ambushed with a rocket launcher by Delsin's brother (iirc) at one point and just sorta facetanks it, she can conjure giant concrete offshore platforms with a thought, and I'm pretty sure there's a statement somewhere that she's the strongest conduit seen since Cole MacGrath (the protagonist of Infamous 1 and 2) who at his peak literally hit harder than a nuke. Augustine's little scene showing her initial corruption has her and a little girl paper conduit wandering around a desolate city, trying to find a place to go and escape the chaos when suddenly the army bears down on her. She makes the decision to betray the girl, imprisoning her in concrete for the army to take, as the first step towards essentially becoming controlled conduit opposition. This is pretty dumb when the game otherwise establishes that she's so powerful that if she was to take on the army she'd just win. Small arms aren't a threat to her even without super mega concrete powers or trying to extrapolate from the matter-energy conversion girl, and she didn't even subtly free little conduit girl until like a decade afterwards, so if she really was just fearful of what would have happened to conduits what the fuck is she doing. Furthermore, pretty much everything that makes the DUP a threat is due to her. The ability to imprison conduits in the first place? She can just create these special prison complexes in the middle of open water and her concrete ostensibly disables the abilities of conduits. The ability for normal soldiers to not just fold to superpowers? She can bestow a weaker version of her powers to her men, basically turning the entire DUP force into mini-conduits. She's scared of oppression that only she could even possibly carry out, and the game doesn't recognize that. It also makes the heroic ending where she's arrested (for what? nobody knew about the engineered break out lol) really weird because the only reason those prisons can hold conduits is herself. She could literally just leave. And yet, despite this sounding like a mess, I feel like it's so close to being something much more interesting.

My proposal doesn't actually have to change that much. You can keep most of the power creep if you want (maybe not miss speed of light) with this. You can also keep the apparent sadism with this, and make it much less out of nowhere. You should just drop hints of this hidden agenda throughout the game. Brooke Augustine was a soldier herself before she got her powers, and you can have her be pretty deeply affected by this. A lot of military training is psychological, drilling the heavily regimented lifestyle and unwavering respect for authority into a grunt's head. It works as an exaggerated microcosm for society as a whole, where comfortable complacency is broadly preferred towards high risk and uncertainty. Therefore, make it so that the reason she doesn't fight the military off when they corner her and the kid is because she doesn't want to cross the Rubicon that forces her to enter a new world she can never return from. She doesn't want to fight the powers that be which she's so used to living and serving under. She, like most people, would much rather things just go back to normal. She'd rather enjoy mediocre security than take a big risk to fight for a fairer but more uncertain future, and this fear of taking a leap into the unknown and truly taking responsibility for her own fate is what keeps her in check, not really the fear of a conduit genocide which she's powerful enough to pretty much singlehandedly stop. Over time, she acclimates to this role, accepting the atrocities and abuses that go on under her reign, because there's always someone above her she can defer to. It's just the cost of doing business, and it's far better than the unknown. You can even keep the rather absurd situation where she's pretty much the sole lynchpin holding practical conduit oppression together as the end stage of this mindset she's developed over years and years of doing this, because some people just really do end up like that. Deep down, she just doesn't accept she's as powerful as she is both physically and institutionally because that's just far too much responsibility for someone like her to have. She really could just tear the system down by saying no, but she never will because of psychological conditioning that's gone on her entire life, from her time as DUP head to her time as a soldier to even her time as a normal American enjoying the creature comforts of modern life. This learned helplessness would put her in direct contrast with the protagonist, a rebel willing to throw caution to the wind and throw himself right into the fray in hopes of tearing it all down because he's got nothing left to lose, it would give the game a much more interesting message about freedom, fear, and the psychology of the intersection between the two concepts, and it really wouldn't even need to change that much about the setting. The fact the game is so close to what I consider a far more interesting idea is why I'm posting this here. The writing potential was certainly there, but instead we just end up with a really weird and contradictory character.

Got some other issues with the game, often gameplay related but another thing I don't like in comparison to Infamous 1 and 2 are how your karma level doesn't feel all that impactful on your day to day life, but I think this is enough text in one post on an old PlayStation game for today.

 

[Rhialtokourai]

The story of Pyre could have used much more edge. You've been exiled from a tyrannical "Commonwealth" to magic Australia for the crime of being able to read. Because Magic, you can't just fly back up; to send anyone back, you need to play magic basketball against other groups of exiles with the same goal.

Except there isn't really a reason to. Other than your character nearly dying at the exile landing point before the game starts, and one Howler attack that serves as a tutorial, there's no sense of danger to the Downside. Supergiant's vaunted art makes the Downside too pretty for what it's supposed to be. And there is a thriving economy in the Slugmarket, Rukey and Barker's connections, and the bog-crones. Other than not being able to say good-bye to loved ones, why not just live in the Downside? Another issue is the game wants you to continue from your losses as well as your wins like a visual novel, but all your team are goody-two-shoes who were unjustly exiled (except Hedwyn, but we'll get back to him), while every other team are assholes except the Fate and maybe the Tempers, so screw that noise.

Less safe, more edge: more injuries from Downside hazards instead of 1-2 point Hope debuffs. The Nightwings should be more like the pre-DEI Dragon Age companions: people who have irreconcilable differences with each other, who have nonetheless agreed that they need you to lead them, who will grow more (or less) accepting of each other and of both victory and defeat. Some of them should even deserve their exile. Hedwyn is a deserter who got his brothers-in-arms killed because he was busy chasing Harp tail, and the game does absolutely nothing with that - no strained relationship with Jodariel who raised him in the army, no nightmares, no self-doubt about whether someone else deserves his place more. Also, instead of Volfred's gay Plan to overthrow the Commonwealth based on the Commonwealth secretly welcoming exiles back for... no reason, the Nightwings could have visions of the Scribes and the Commonwealth in flames, making them reflect on their past actions. Then Volfred's reveal is that the Commonwealth secretly welcomes exiles because everyone who does the Rites gains limited clairvoyance, which is useful to the regime - or to a rebellion in the name of the Scribes.

But this level of edge seems outside of Supergiant's demonstrated writing capabilities. The dynamic between Hades and Zagreus in Hades proves that they can write assholes who slowly realise why they need to admit that they were assholes, while the other party slowly realises why the asshole acted that way. But many of the side characters in Hades suffer from the same safeness as Pyre has.

Magic basketball itself as a mechanic is take it or leave it, but I would play it more if I had better reasons to.

 

[Metallic Blood]

Not really an awful game, but I still want to sperg about Fae Tactics:

There's somethings I dislike about it, be the artstyle of the character portraits (anything that isn't the pixel art really) or having very few options of customization, but what gets me the most is the plot... and that is the lack of it.

Like, the overall adventure is pretty barebones (get the 4 elemental crystals and beat the evil bad guy), but what really pisses me off is that the game is constantly throwing somewhat interesting lore at you, but never does anything with it. One of the loading screens keep telling about "how savage river sirens can be" or "there's 3 famous warlocks which terrorizes people with their mighty power" and then proceeds to never mention them in-game ever again. And if by some miracle they name drop any of the cool parts, they never do anything with it anyway besides 1 line of dialogue.

I usually don't even care about stories in games, but with a plot this empty and being constantly reminded by the game itself that yes, "we have cool ideas but we never show it lol" is just so infuriating.

And that's the thing, I actually love the simplified gameplay of "no menus in-battle", the monster collecting actually puts Pokemon Conquest into shame imo. The soundtrack is absolutely amazing and I love the laid-back atmosphere it gives that I just have to share it.

It's really a game that I wish I could say "I love it", but with the amount of unfinished plotlines and cool lore moments, it kinda just makes me feel empty while playing it.

Alas, I can't tell what's more depressing: a bad game that could've been good, or a mediocre game that could've been amazing.

 

[Product Placement]

Would say all of these games are far cry from being bad, but all could have been better.

Shadow of the Colossus remake: On a tec level game is mostly amazing, but blue point put so little care in retaining the art style and graphical feel of the game, that it now looks super genetic. Take Last Guardian while in spots you can see it's PS3 origins. it still does a good job bring that Team Ico look into higher fidelity graphics and really what a SotC remake should have looked closer to. On same note from what I saw looks like blue point did the same thing with Demon's Soul remake.

Dead Rising DR: Game is now too easy, while some of these come from better survivors ai or other welcome changes, lot of it comes from it being easier than ever to level up and bosses being nerfed. While not game breaking, the removal of something like erotic photos misses the point, it was part of a commentary on how sleazy journos can be. Also new voice cast is mostly a step down from the originals. Would have also been nice if they added some extra stuff to do between the last mission and waiting to get picked up for the helicopter, just an extra boss or two would have been great.

Crash 4: Some of the levels you need to do are just way too hard for the type of game this is like Cortex Castle. The box placements in some levels are just bullshit and extra hidden, something the old Crash games never really did, having some sort of puzzle to get all boxes makes sense but busy work of checking all the level for hidden boxes is just not fun. N-verted levels are mostly bad, at worse have a headache inducing visual look to them, thankfully these can be skipped.

Resident Evil Revelations: Being a 3DS game really impacted level design and meant the most interesting part of the game the fall of Terragrigia just takes part in a office building rather than the city it's self which would have been too much for the 3DS to handle. The scanning monster and environments for items, breaks the follow of the game taking too long because how how many they are. Another big issue is that dodge is harder to pull off that it should be.

Spiderman 1/2: Remove Mary Jane stuff and the walking talking stuff, anyone who enjoys or says they added to the story are lying, if needed all could have been done in a far shorter cutscene rather than a dull in-game part that takes 5+ times as long. With Spiderman 2 add a few more boss fights to the main game to better spread them out, and you got your self a better game than the 6/10 they both are.

Ratchet & Clank remake: All they needed to do is take the first game and bring in the gameplay improves from later games, while balancing it around that. Instead we get a heavily cut down game with massive changes due to the movie and short dev time.

Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart: This game is still one of the best this gen only games, but it really lacks boss fights, it keeps reusing the same few ones over and over again. And the arena also lacks content compared to past games.

Final Fantasy 16: The combat is really good, but it's a combat for a 12 hour game, not a 30+ hour RPG. Game also skips over some parts that would be interesting in the first half like Clive's time as a slave, but then after the time skip wastes time on stuff I doubt most players really care about.

FF7 Remake and Rebirth: I enjoyed both games, but dear god they need a editor, so much stuff in the main game that should have been a side quest if not outright cut. I did play FF7 Remake on hard mode which was a blast, but with how long Rebirth is, I doubt I will ever do that for it.

 

[Stasi]

After playing a demo on Xbox 360 when it first came out and not touching it since, for some reason recently I remembered Two Worlds, a budget fantasy RPG from 2007, and gave it a spin.

It really is the perfect game for a thread like this. As you play it you can see so much potential and so many interesting ideas that with a little more development time would have made a game that if not outright great, would have at the very least been considered a cult classic like the original Divinity or a Gothic.

Unfortunately its a bit of a fucking mess and is at best mediocre. The combat has some interesting ideas - different weapons, dual wielding, different effect. However it is all so jank and the animations so busted in places it becomes a slog to play through. A lot of the skills are also either broken, don't work as intended or completely useless (there is one for unhorsing a mounted enemy but there are no mounted enemies in the fucking game!).

It has an interesting magic system and lots of interesting spells but again shits the bed. You can only properly hotkey 3 spells at a time (what the actual fuck), similar to melee combat a lot of the spells either don't function as intended or are completely busted and not in a good way. The biggest let-down for me are the summoning spells. Unlike a lot of RPGs you can summon a whole crew of creatures to do your bidding. Which would have been cool seeing a posse of skeletons and demons wrecking shit but again its fucking broken. The summon AI and pathfinding is horrendous and they literally cannot hit a target standing perfectly still. Whats worse, the way enemy AI works once they aggro to you they will keep chasing you until they (or you) die no matter what your summons do. So it turns into a fucking Benny Hill sketch of you all chasing each other.

The world is varied and in places looks really nice, if rough around the edges. Again though, traversing it can be pain in the ass, there is horse riding in the game but its like trying to control a hippo on roller-skates and you are better off just walking everywhere.

Oh and the game has some of the worst voice acting in any game ever. Though I don't really hold that against it, the voice acting in Final Fantasy X was way worse and no one gave a shit.