Styx: Master of Shadows and Lego City Undercover.
I have less to say about Styx, as I just started it. It's ugly, ugly as Hell. Extremely ugly. It was a AA game, but even for a AA game it's breathtakingly ugly. Bleak and dark too. I got it mostly because I like Big Tree. It's hard as shit, you have big areas you have to get through and if you're seen once you're pretty much fucked. Everybody jumped back on it after LOTR Gollum pissed everyone off. I think it will get good, though, once I get used to it (unlearn Assassin's Creed aidsbrain).
Lego City Undercover is disappointing. Now, most everything I have to say about it could be blown off with "it's a kid's game," but this is one of those things that I got because it had a huge adult fan base that swears its really good (so, the My Little Pony of vidya). I loved Lego Island 2, Lego Racers 2, Lego Rock Raiders, and Lego Star Wars as a kid. This one I understood to be GTA: Lego with Lego Game Characteristics, but it's really Metroidvania the Lego Game with an incredibly tiny world map (and I hate the backtracking Metroidvanias make their brand on). Why so tiny? Well, I suppose a kid may get lost if it was larger. The art style is really inconsistent with what's Legos and what isn't, but I suppose if it was all Lego the plasticky and glossy look might be too much to stare at.
Now, kids game, but so far I'm up to the Undercover level and I'm just not seeing anything here to like. There's basically no combat. If we had vidya in Boomer days they would have had cartoon acme guns that blow smoke in people's faces and stuff like that, nowadays of course they weren't going to do guns although they did lasers killing people in Lego Star Wars. Now you just get vaguely karate fighting, but it's impossible to lose. I don't know if it was possible to lose Lego Star Wars - i was a kid and kids are retarded - but it just isn't fun. Vehicles are slow as shit, like a teacup ride. The one thing it does well is that the parkour is actually surprisingly fluid and fun, and the high concept of going undercover as an excuse to have all these different scenes and characters to play as and giving them gameplay mechanics is gold.
Well, what about the plot/writing/comedy? People said - just like My Little Pony - how it had rEfErEnCeS fOr AdUlTs. Well, I don't get them. I know when there's references, but I don't get them, except the most obvious ones. Sometimes it's funny. The main character is actually really likable. But often it's not. Frank Honey, for example, is absolutely obnoxious. You've got this stock character in children's fiction, the Moron, who is the height of hilarity because his gimmick is being dumber than the kid audience. Admittedly, a lot of hackish adult writing has this too. I got sick of Honey really quickly. Even if I go watch cutscenes now on YouTube, I prefer the silly pantomime of the old, no-speaking Lego games. The whole beginning sequence was funny as Hell, after that it isn't.
What about the collecting aspect? Tiresome. I don't like having to smash up everything and having coins vomited at me constantly. The number goes up so fast I can't get hard watching it go up. I do like the thing about building up the world. Wish there was a lot more of it, actually. Member how in Lego Island 2 the island started off totally destroyed and you had to rebuild it all? That was cool. That would have been better here.
I think this one is a bust.
