Cancer of the Wild

A lot of my opinions aren't brand new or something that I haven't complained about earlier at great length, but I wanted to condense my thoughts into single post now that I've gone through the game

Pros:
(+) The shrines, even when I can whisk out the combat shrines, or the maze ones, or the ones that forced me to break my weapons or whatever, all of the shrines come together to bring an extra dimension to this game, I thought all of the gimmick tools were unique and the shrines really had some out of the box ways of making you use them,

(+) While on the topic of shrines, amongst the 60 I've done, I didn't need a guide for any of them, they've successfully made shrines that make logical sense even if you sometimes have to trial and error to figure out the exact system at play, and I really have to emphasis, some of these shrines with the extra mini-challenge for chests really DO an amaaaazing job, while others don't explore their mechanics in totality and just end as soon as they begin

(+) The story is nothing to write home about, but I think it works, anything that's more showing less telling is better and they don't exposition dump you genshin style where the text is literally bleeding out of the tiny text box

(+) On some occasions the game really has an interesting sense of cartoon-ism, oh you're destroyed a beast made out of bones? Well they can re-animate AND use each other's heads. You throw a bomb at a pig and the weapons knocks out of their hands, you can shock a horse and THEN find a way to tame it

(+) And finally and possibly the most underrated thing about the game, a layer of unpredictability, the game is filled with "aha" moments where you're like "will.....this work?" and then it does, I've solved countless of shrines where I was coming up with techniques on the fly to make my life easier and it was honestly astonishing how much creativity you can come up with

This is me scratching the boney frame of this game to dig out some positives, onto the negatives

Cons:
(-) The combat was designed by a team of developers who made it and then refused to let anyone playtest it, absolutely fucking cancer, the combat is at the level of atrociousness where it should be enshrined in the hall of fame for experience-ruining sections for games, the best thing you can do in the game is don't even hold up your shield to try to parry or dodge anything, go up to the enemy and spam normal attacks, or literally if you don't want to exhaust your weapons just throw bombs at them

(-) The OSTs are insanely fucking bad, I was running away from most combat encounters not only because they suck, but so that the fucking blood worm they unleased on my eardrums would stop burning up my ear canals, the composer took inspiration from pieces of rock falling down a mountain, and it's THE SAAAAAAAAAME IT DOESN'T CHANGE

(-) Open bodies of land that have nothing in it (believe it or not the game is actually pretty fucking short most of my time was actually spent going from A to B trying to unlock towers, hell if I even stopped doing that I'd have been done with the game in a week)

(-) Weapon breaking bad,
(-) Rain == slippery bad,
(-) "Grab this blue torch and go from A to B" bad,
(-) Horse kicks you off if you oversprint bad,
(-) Thunder shocks you if you equip a metallic weapon bad,
(-) Environmental hazards that require specific gear bad (they do this on 3 separate occasions, heat, fire and snow, all of them different variations of cancer)

These are mechanics that you're constantly dealing with and they put a damper on your experience insanely fast, the first time rain hit me outside the fish area I was like "oh.....so it's THAT kind of game", for the sake of pseudo-realism it creates embarrassing hurdles to simple tasks whose only way of completion is at the risk of being annoyed as opposed to being challenged,

Yes, these hurdles don't make the game meaningfully challenging, they make it ANNOYING

(-) Lack of direction splits two ways, for shrines and for the overworld,

Shrines:

I've talked about this at length but I can't emphasis how important having invisible direction is, some of the shrines are straight up "hit ball so it goes in hole" and it's as if they forgot that weapons break in 2 seconds in this godforsaken game, just put an invisible funnel or fix the shooting direction so that the player can go through the process more easily, why in god's earth are the puzzles designed so that you KNOW the solution but it takes FOREVER to solve, when in reality it should be the other way around, you should know the solution and the puzzle should solve immediately,

Other times the shrines NEEDS you to use arrows while it provides you with none, all of these are fixable issues if the game just GAVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED, don't make me go hunt for materials for trials,

Gyroscope puzzles are a better case for "how the fuck did they not add invisible walls or helpful direction to make this easier?" and they just didn't they didn't really give a fuck, on one hand there's 60 ways to solve a puzzle on the other executing the puzzle in it's intended format is a pain in the ass

Overworld:

The game teaches you about combat at specific parts of the game that you can entirely miss, this is also why I think the game's idea of freedom of choice is a veneer of bullshit, it fucks with the game's OWN interests, on some occasions you need to talk to a specific NPC so that ANOTHER specific NPC can pop up and sell you a bra and panty so you can enter le woman village,

(-) Bosses:

Thunderblight was cancer because the combat is cancer others were gimmicky and I don't really give a fuck about them, Ganon LOOKED really cool though, props to them for making him look all mushy and gross, very Silent Hill 5 final boss of them

Closing thoughts:

BOTW is a game where every critique you have for the game is at something that was designed with pure intention, none of this is an oversight by the developers, whether come rain or lightning, the game speaks to it's roots and builds on it's own archaic design

This is a PS1 game masking itself as a modern game, all of these elements you can find dating back to that era, even the beloved gliding of the game which brings ease of access you can find as a core mechanic in spyro the dragon (not to say gliding is some copyright design)

BOTW at it's core has all the right things to make it playable and interesting, but it's downfall is the inclusion of elements that exist only to beat and extend otherwise straightforward tasks,

Something as easy as climbing a pile of rocks is only an activity that could be made tedious and annoying in a game like BOTW, which perfectly summarizes why I did not like it at the end of the day

Cancer.

Breath of the Wild

I suppose that wraps it up for the base game. As much as I'd love to shit all over the game there are some aspects of it I ended up liking, unfortunately. But the cons still outweigh the pros and oh boy do I not have a lot to complain here

( + ) Lets get the positives out of the way first, the open world is competently designed, although quite generic at times it still holds up very well compared to the deluge of uninspiring and linear open world titles with no sense of creativity whatsoever. The fact that the main quests never really get in the way of exploration really adds to the sense of the adventure which is pretty much the entire selling point of the game and it does somewhat deliver on that front. The physics engine coupled with the rune abilities also pave the way of tackling problems and traversing through tricky terrains in various different ways. Lastly, there's the cell-shaded artstyle, which really helps to mask the overall age of the game when it comes to the visuals and still manage to look fantastic even by today's standards

( - ) This game can be absurdly tedious at times and I mean ABSURDLY TEDIOUS. Simply traversing through it can aid to more frustration over entertainment after the honeymoon phase is over because of the game doing absolutely nothing to give the players a more convenient way of exploring the massive open world. To rub salt into the wound they tie down sprinting in empty terrains to the stamina bar. Like, I understand the need for stamina while climbing mountains as it can gatekeep more difficult areas if you haven't made enough progress. But, there's absolutely no reason to deplete the stamina bar when the only method of faster travel is on a horse that controls like crap and surfing on shields that break within mere seconds, as it does nothing but waste time and in turn bore the players.
The game also suffers from being just all around repetitive in its structure. The 4 main quests leading up to the final encounter all basically play out the same and the side quests are just a bunch of random fetch quests that boil down to doing the same errands just for a different NPC. The shrines sprinkled throughout the open world also suffer from being incredibly samey. After reaching the halfway point I ended up mostly just using them as checkpoints instead of checking out whatever puzzle or combat encounters await inside as they're all roughly the same, especially the combat shrines.
The absolute worst aspect of the game would be its horrid combat and the laughably bad enemy/boss encounters. But you might say "Fa, it's totally normal for an open world game to have lackluster combat since the focus is put on the exploration instead." To that I'd say you're completely wrong since the combat is just as integral as exploration is when it comes down to these types of games because most of the times your objectives are centered around combat which is arguably more significant than the exploration part itself. And crafting a decent combat system doesn't really take all that effort so I can't really see the logic in these arguments so I just dismiss them as cop-out defense to shield any cohesive criticisms. Digressions and tangents aside, BoTW's combat being on the lackluster side could've been easily remedied by pinning link up against enemies with well thought out movesets or by having proper variety in the enemy department, since the combat revolves around pattern memorization it'd only make sense for the enemies to actually be somewhat capable of putting up a fight. But as it turns out the enemies/bosses in this game are COMPLETELY inept, most of the time the fight basically just boils down to finding out their gimmick and just abusing it throughout the whole fight to win. The only exception to this rule would be the Lynels, which are somehow more engaging than the major bosses despite being literal mobs. Mechanically weak encounters with more emphasis put on dumb gimmicks outright ruined any potentials of the game even having a half decent combat
As for the story, I couldn't bring myself to care about any of it. It's just a bunch of nothing with the core characters being no personality having losers that only exist to guide you towards your next destination or annoy you during the main dungeons or be a damsel in distress

the open world is pretty ok everything else tho not so much

This is one of the worst games I have ever played, unlike other entries which limit your SP so you kind of know where to stop grinding levels, this game has a fatigue system that you barely know when you're going to hit, and this fatigue carries over outside of Tartarus and makes your tired, you can imagine how this effects the SOL elements which are also insanely bad.

This game has an extremely unearned positive reputation that will never make sense to me, its so outstandingly bad, I remember having to forcibly see it through to the end because I didn't have wifi for a month.

The AI is also fucking atrocious. Anyways, some of the music is good at least

Imagine, if you will, a real-time strategy game where buildings could be constructed instantly, and didn’t require the use of workers. How could the game even function? As soon as a wall would go down another could take its place, and with no workers to micromanage, even the least experienced player could create an unbreakable defense.

Well, as you probably predicted, Stronghold Crusader is exactly that game, but this odd design decision actually makes it uniquely fun. Just looking at the box could tell you that the goal was to create a siegecraft RTS, and instantaneous construction plays with other mechanics to achieve that in a pretty elegant way. For one, if enemies are too close to a building zone, nothing can be constructed. This prevents enemies from just hammering the walls at long range without putting their own units at risk, since it will take them so much time and ammo to break down structures which pop back up anyway. That in turn means that walls aren’t the best target, the farms outside would be the better choice. These farms can’t be enclosed within the keep because they need to be built in grasslands, which often aren’t enclosed within building range for walls. So, just through the basic mechanics, players are actually attacking each other in little sieges: surrounding a town with their artillery, destroying the farms outside, waiting for their advantage to grow, and establishing a beachhead near weak points during assaults. Meanwhile, the players under siege can lower the food ration for a penalty, which can hopefully buy enough time to build up a force and break the siege. Trebuchets and catapults can be destroyed easily, and breaking into a castle even with ladders, assassins, tunnels, and stones takes a lot of planning, so each commander has to be clever with their strategy.

When compared to something like StarCraft or Age of Empires, Stronghold Crusader is a very simple RTS, but the way its simplicity creates such a unique flavor is something that impresses me year after year. I always revisit it when I need to relax, since it’s so fun to play in the classic childhood way of setting up the most defensive base ever and holding out as long as possible, or seeing if you can beat an alliance of eight easy bots. It’s not the best for dedicated and focused play, thanks to the slow pace and propensity of the AI to bug out, but the relaxing blend of creative defense and methodical attack gives it a meditative quality. With the genre being in something of a drought, I would love to see people give this game a second look, and take inspiration on how there’s more to the genre than being competitive.

This game is so close to my heart, the one that got me into open world RPG games and the fallout series and TES. It has that S.P.E.C.I.A.L touch that made a dry empty desert full of life. Obsidian Entertainment knew how to cook and I'm sure Bethesda doesn't want them to make another good game.

Fallout new vegas,

Starts differently than any other fallout. You play as a Courier, someone who already lived in the wasteland, so it made more sense how he / she able to survive in the wasteland with experience.You were shot by someone with a suit after he robbed and took the package that you were carrying. You wake up in a doctor's house where he tells you that someone dug you out of the grave. The main quest now is to get revenge and retrieve the lost item.

Character creation and building,

after you wake up you can create your character. fallout new vegas isn't the best looking game but you can customize how your character looks. Then you can customize your character stats which is S.P.E.C.I.A.L and it stands for:
Strength : how much you can carry, also effects melee and heavy weapons.
Perception : how far you can sense/detect your enemy presence in the compass.
Endurance : how much hp you have and how much damage you can resist from environmental hazards (poison, radiation, etc..), also effects unarmed
Charisma : (useless unless you want the perks or some interaction)
Intelligence : how effective meds are and how better you are at hacking and repairing
Agility : how much AP (Action Points) you have and how good you are at sneaking and using guns
Luck : how lucky you are : ) ( gambling and critical hits)

You can also pick major skills (extra points to 3 skills you choose(speech, sneak, barter, guns, explosives, energy weapons, science, survival, unarmed, melee weapons, lock pick, medicine and repair) most of these skills are self explanatory but if you get confused the game shows a description (a good one, unlike the S.P.E.C.I.A.L).

There are also traits. You can choose up to 2 or none id you don't want. Most traits gives you benefits but with a cost. example : (Four eyes trait gives you +2 perception when you wear glasses but gives you -1 perception when you don't).

Leveling system,

Easy. You can get XP by Killing stuff, finishing quests and discovering new landmarks. every level you get a couple of points you can put in the skills you want to increase, The number of points you get depends on how many points you have in Intelligence. Every two levels you can pick a perk, and there are a lot of them (you could increase one of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats by one point with one of the perks).

Gameplay (Combat),

Fairly simple and easy to understand. The combat is real-time so pick a weapon or use your hands as long as you hit your target they take damage. The accuracy and the damage dealt depends on what level your character is, how lucky you are in crit chances and how many points you have in the skill of the weapon's category, exp.(pistols/rifles -> guns, rocket launcher / grenades -> explosives , Melee -> Melee weapons or unarmed if you are using your fists, etc..). The game uses limbs system, if you deal enough damage to one limb it becomes crippled. You could use the to your own advantage, for example : some enemies are faster than you are so outrunning them isn't an option, but they use melee so if they have a lot of HP, instead of going for head shots for more damage and risk getting hit, you could cripple one leg to slow them down or cripple both using landmines to make them unable to walk. This systems also works for both hands(disarming or weaken their ability to use it) , head(better damage for some enemies), torso(to cut defense), weapon(making the enemies drop it or making it unusable). The limb system is also applied to you if you are crippled you could have the same effects (crippled legs = no walking/running, etc...). V.A.T.S system gives you a better idea on the combat and how to use the limb system. You press V (defualt key) on your keyboard and the time freezes the screen zooms to the nearest enemy or friendly (the nearest one from your crosshair) and show how much health do they have and highlights the limbs and how much hp it has before the limb gets crippled. In this mode you can switch between targets (you could pick more than one) and pick the limbs you want to shoot at, how many times you can shoot depends on how much action points (AP) you have and what kind of weapon do you use, some weapons can use a lot of your AP so you can only use it two times (maybe even one) and then wait for AP to recharge again (you could use Jet drug to restore a couple of action points). The maximum number of points you have is governed by how many points you put in the Agility stat. A nice refined combat system that keeps the RPG elements and makes a great mix between action and strategy. You could also have a companion that can help you in combat or carry some stuff for you, companions also come with an additional perk that is added to your perks unless you part from them (unfollow you) (every companion has a different perk)(one companion only can follow you).

Gameplay (dungeons),

dungeons are not so special but are really nice to get some good loot and might have some lore to them. dungeons are mostly caves, sewers and vaults (you can also count abandoned buildings/factories).

Gameplay (exploring),

It is easy to forget about your main obj and start exploring more and adding more quests to your list and discover hidden stories or trigger scripted events while walking.

Gameplay (karma and reputation),

What you do in the Mojave will be noticed by its people. Karma doesn't change the game or have any effect other than a couple of reaction with people you talk to like companions. If you kill to many innocent people, steal more often with no good reason or participate in quests that require steeling, killing innocent people or changing the Mojave to the worse, you lose karma, and you can gain karma by doing the opposite like helping, killing bad people, etc.

The reputation is different for every city/faction you can be someone who they idolize or someone who they see as a good person or you could be shunned and hated. If a main faction hate you they would send someone with a message threaten you that you have a couple in-game days to make things right with them or they will start sending high level troops to kill you and it wont stop until you fix your reputation with them. I really love this kind of game design.

Atmosphere,

This game is really good at capturing the feel of a deserted wasteland but every time you find a town or a city it felt alive when it is populated and has the haunted feel when it is empty and full of debris.

Quest design and freedom:
I love the quest in this game a lot of side quest felt like a different story. There are some quests that are just fetch or clear from enemies type of quest but most of them usually lead to something more. There are so many different paths to choose and how to approach and finish the quest, some quest even have you choosing a side and who you want to help or kill or neither. You are always free to do whatever you want, nobody is too important to kill, you can choose which path you want to go down.

Issues,

Well, this game isn't perfect. The issues are mostly engine related and how the game runs. I mean this engine is janky and runs like shit, and Bethesda still use the same old engine to this day (with some upgrades to it). The game sometimes just decide to crash. Fortunately, this issue isn't as common as in fallout 3. Bugs can be found sometimes (at least 2 bugs in a playthrough (from my experience of course) but you could reload a save and the issue is fixed unless the game decide that you are going to no clip inside a rock mid fight with a Rad scorp and the last time you saved or the game auto saved was one hour ago.

Conclusion,

I will always love this game even with these issues it just has the good feeling and the joy of discovering and uncovering new things on your own. Every time I watch a YouTube video, I Always want to go back to it. Truly a masterpiece in RPGs and the best one in the series. I don't do reviews but I did this review because my cousin said he would give the game a try if i reviewed the game.

Brief P review before the year ends

After only two complete playthroughs Lies of P already made it into one of my all time favorites and I don't plan on stopping here given the sheer amount of replayability present with genuine weapon (unlike most souls games) variety and without a shadow of a doubt the most impressive enemy variety I've seen in any game ever and not just in souls.

Though the main draw for me is how the game juggles so much variety while keeping the combat fresh every single encounter even into repeat playthroughs. For example, by simply switching out a weapon will add well needed novelty to an encounter you've already beaten and the the various Legion Arms if correctly implemented during the fight will have you strategizing in a completely different light. The unforgiving difficulty, if you decide to not cheese through the game, is also cathartic to master. And this is exactly what I've been craving in a souls game for the longest time and to my surprise a completely random developer from Korea delivered whereas even Fromsoft failed with Elden Ring.

Even though there are a few hiccups here and there but observing the bigger picture makes it quite apparent that this game is a borderline masterpiece