I’ve got such mixed feelings about Fallout 4. Yes, the story isn’t great but tbh I was never expecting it to be very good. This game does come from the same company that in Fallout 3 wouldn’t let you send Fawkes into the water purifier because by doing so you would break the story (sorry for spoilers on a 15 year old game).
Obviously where the game really shines is in the gun play/ combat and the gameplay loop. Those two factors alone make me want to replay FO4 every so often, however whenever I do, I always find myself inexorably drawn to settlement building, each time I do a replay I try to do as little of it as I can but still end up taking ages setting it all up.
I remember when I first completed Fallout 4, feeling underwhelmed by the story, I comforted myself by thinking “They spend ages working on the creation engine for this release, I’m sure that on the next game there will be more focus on the story”. welp, 8 years since the last (single player) Fallout so it looks like that ain’t happening anytime soon.
Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn’t put any points into it. Later on there’s a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn’t even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.
My first experience with Dark Souls 1 was a real test of patience. I hadn’t realized how helpful the roll mechanic was. So there I was, from the start to the finish of the game, either blocking attacks with a shield, or just tanking them.
Once I got to Anor Londo, I remember kitting myself out in the Giants Armor, with a paired Giants Shield, and a Black Knight Sword that had been carrying me through the rest of the game. I was at something like 99.8% equip load, just enough that if I equipped a longbow, it put me in the over-encumbered slow walk.
And that’s how I beat the game. Just tanking everything that came my way. I got up to Quelaag in NG+ before I had to call it quits.
During the run, the rooftop Gargoyles gave me enough grief that I had to put the game down for a couple weeks. Had I decided to just give up then, I imagine my opinion of the Souls-like genre would be quite different today.
I managed to get through the starting area on keyboard and mouse before a friend told me, “What the hell is wrong with you, use a controller for chrissakes.”
In the original XCOM my brother and I didn’t realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother’s mind!
I had a similar thing in Xcom 2 (the only one I’ve played) where I kept getting alerts that I needed more relay stations to contact the resistance, or something like that. Assuming these relays were on the ground, I kept doing missions hoping to find some. Eventually I found out I needed to clear rooms in my spaceship and build them myself. By that time I was seriously behind however.
I couldn’t imagine storming the base on Mars with only the basic starter rifles in the MicroProse version. Though apart from the Hovertanks it might be actually doable.
That said I watched a friend play the fireaxis version of XCOM2 and he never put his troops into cover, just had them standing out in the open - yet somehow managed to beat the game using this “strategy”. He blew through troops like tissues during flu season though.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I got to this part in the game where I absolutely could not beat a boss. Consulted IGN and learned that the only way to defeat her was to have some ability that was only gained at some prior point. Unfortunately I didn’t have any save points prior to that, so the only way I would be able to defeat that boss would be to completely restart. I just kind of noped the game after that.
This game is WIDELY criticized for this and has since been patched (via a new Director’s Cut version of the game) to fix the oversight. Essentially, thr boss battles were outsourced to abother company, causing them to not line up with the implementation of the rest of the game.
You could make it through most of the game as a 100% stealth/hacking build, but a single boss towards the end REQUIRED some combat abilities in the vanilla version. They’ve since added environmental aids to keep you from this exact frustration.
Source: i too got EXTREMELY stuck here before they released the Director’s Cut…
It’s a first person shooter from a venerable studio in the genre, Raven Software.
Put out during their “golden age”, before Wolfenstein and Singularity flopped and uncle Bobby sent them to work in the Call of Duty mines.
Really cool selection of sci-fi guns, some of them pretty unique.
Campaign is essentially a prototype for Quake 4. It was built by the same internal team at Raven.
It has a more interesting story than Quake 4.
It’s an early example of a game that lets you choose your sex. NPC dialog changes to reflect this.
The whole cast of Star Trek: Voyager lends their voice talent to the game, including Jeri Ryan.
It also has a sequel, made by another studio. Elite Force II isn’t quite as good, but it is still worth playing if you like the original. It loses the female protagonist option, likely because it was 2003 and the story had a love triangle. It’s a visual powerhouse though, really pushing the limits of the Quake III engine far beyond what many people likely thought possible.
Ooh I forgot about this. Elite force is one of the few games that I’ve actually finished. I thought the graphics were gorgeous for the time with lots of believable alien worlds. The characters are engaging and the missions never felt repetitive.
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