Last Game You Finished and Your Thoughts MKII

I've been playing this on PS4 but sort like a mobile game where it started life. So if I watched something then in 10 minutes time waiting to play Overwatch, I put this on and do a puzzle or two then continue with what I'm waiting for.

The game is a fine puzzle experience and a easy platinum.

7/10

I like the premise of Kingdom Hearts and have played 1 and a bit of 2 on PS2 but nothing else. I may have picked up KHI.5 and KHII.5 on PS3, if the PS4 hadn't of came out. What really got me to buy Kingdom Hearts II.8 HD was the demo at EGX of KH0.2 Fragmentary Passage. It was one of the best games at the event and I learned it was to setup KHIII, which I thought was great as I hadn't played KH2 since 2006 and that wasn't much due now playing on Xbox 360 and Wii.

I asked in a KH facebook group about it all and the timeline which I ended up as the first game is the mobile one X then its X Back Cover a hour long cinematic, which I did watch and I've pretty much got no idea what's happening.


After that its meant to be Birth by Sleep when that game ends then its 0.2 Fragmentary Passage which takes place at the same time as the rest of the games and finishes at what should be the start of KHIII.

This group, I explained I'm basically new to the series and reason I bought KHII.8 was how it was at EGX and I hope it gets me into the series, the group basically told me not to play it without playing Birth by Sleep before 0.2 and the rest of the games before Dream Drop Distance but I could watch X Back Cover but did advise me on playing the mobile game.

I feel like I'm like a lot of people here that would have bought the game as a prologue to KHIII, that I continued on playing 0.2 which I will say I rather enjoyed the 2.5 hours it took to finish it, even though it has the weirdest jump I've ever seen and the control scheme to me which should be the same as FFXV.

I've not played Dream Drop Distance as I've got a lot to play and I know for sure this is at the end of the timeline.

Overall playing 0.2 is like playing Ground Zeroes and missing Birth by Sleep is like missing Peace Walker which a lot of people would have.

Score not as good as MGS2 Demo with Zone of the Enders out of 10.

You've done a good job of capturing the Kingdom Hearts experience in a review there.

I don't understand how they have made a JRPG with Disney characters such a convoluted mess of a series. What's with all the decimals? You'd think a series with Disney's involvement would be accessible to everyone, but as you say, it's hard to know where to start.

Yep I'm confused and I've played KH1, a bit of KH2, watched X Back Cover and played 0.2 Fragmentary Passage and soon will be able to play all off them on March 31st.

Now it was heavily rumoured that KH3 was canned on Xbox One but Square recently put out a statement saying that's not true, when you think about it that makes as Japanese games don't sell on the system and the Xbox fanbase would have no prior knowledge really of the series. That made think no wonder Japanese games don't do well on Xbox platforms as everyone must be confused as all hell.

I don't know if you would think about playing KH3, Drunka or not if it does still come to Xbox One. I'm hoping seeing its in Unreal Engine 4 it may come to Switch makes a lot more sense as a lot of the series was on Nintendo platforms.    

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Easiest thing is to do what the facebook group said and not play 2.8 and wait till 1.5 & 2.5 come to PS4 then you have all the games part from X on one system then you could play in either release order like how Drunka played Metal Gear or timeline, I think from what I gather timeline makes more sense.

Why the decimals, well 1.5 is a HD version of KH1 also includes Chain of Memoires and 358/2 Days (a cinematic) which are all set around the same time.

However 2.5 is slightly more confusing as it does come with a HD version of KH2 it also comes with another cinematic of Coded which takes place after KH2, but the other game you get is Birth by Sleep which is at the very start of the series but the secret ending ends after all the rest of the games so far in the series.

KH2.8 well they couldn't call it 3 has like the rest has two games Dream Drop Distance equal to KH1 or KH2, X Fragmentary equal even though its way shorter to Chain of Memories or Birth by Sleep, and you have the cinematic Back Cover is equal to 358/2 Days or Coded.  

My theory on why 0.2 is called 0.2 is apparently Birth by Sleep at one point was known as KH0 or Episode 0, since then we've had X which is at the start so that could be 0 and then Birth by Sleep is 0.1 then goes 0.2 but then it goes to KH1 so kinda doesn't work.

Timeline just in case anyone now wants it:
X alongside X Back Cover
Birth by Sleep,
(Blank Point ending starts here)
(0.2 Starts here)
0.2 Fragmentary Passage
Kingdom Hearts
(358/2 Days starts here)
358/2 Days
Chain of Memories
(358/2 Days ends here)
Kingdom Hearts 2
Coded
(Blank Point ending ends here)
Dream Drop Distance
(0.2 ends here)
Kingdom Hearts 3

As you can see with Blank Point there is a load of Secret Endings but all of them part from that one, end at the end of the game or setup the next game in order, where that doesn't come to a end for 6 games.

So, I just now completed Recore for the Xbox One. As I did so, I got the Achievment for completion and was told it was apparently a rare one, achieved by only 2% of people who play the game. That saddens me, as although it has some big faults that stop me giving it a blanket recommendation, this is a gem of a videogame. I really liked it.



In many ways, Recore feels like a forgotten Gamecube game. A likeable enough protagonist and her robot animal friends explores large-ish areas made of combat encounters and platforming arrangements. Play is old-school in a very enjoyable way. These smaller hubs are much more condensed than a lot of modern open worlds, full of interactivity, and the combat is all dodging and jumping rather than ducking behind cover.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, as Recore was developed by a team made up of ex Metroid Prime staffers, helmed by Mega Man veteran Keiji Inafune. Hearing that pedigree, and seeing the trailer, got me excited for this game. After Mighty Number 9, I was a little worried but this game does a much better job of capturing the spirit of its pedigree while being a good game in its own right.

The combat is straight out of Metroid Prime, with generous lock-on and a gun that switches between four colur-coded lasers. There are other nice wrinkles, with your robot companion helping out and following basic orders, and a mechanic for yanking the core from the middle of enemy robots.



The robots are all brilliantly designed, with a great mix of mechanical and animalistic animations filling them with character. The Mega Man influence is clear in these likeable designs, and the way enemy powers are slowly incorporated into your own team. The other big Mega Man influence appears in some of the trickier platforming sections. All the old gimmicks are here: disappearing platforms, laser beams, rolling balls of spikes, force fields. This feels the most like a tricky Mega Man stage a 3D game has ever felt.

Joule controls nicely, seguing almost unnoticeably from third-person shooter controls to a looser platforming style when the gun is away. She has the typical modern game assortment of exo-suit abilities: big jumps, a double jump and a boost. These, combined with the machine abilities, make the game world a treat to explore and allow the designers to make some devilish challenges in platforming dungeons.

All of this adds up to a game that feels like nothing else I've played in recent years. The visuals, are spot-on. Everything takes place on one planet, so although you never get the typical gaming thing of desert world, ice world, lava world you instead get to explore and colonise a very believable alien planet. The rocks, sand and machinery are twisted into great sections for the mechanics you have, and they look real in the way most modern HD games are quite good at. Away from the sands, the dungeons and towers of the game mix grungey machinery and tron surrealism to make a nice visual change of pace.

The game does a great job of conveying the heat of the desert; the sands glare in the sunlight and Joule's skin is sunburned. Joule, our hero, is nice enough. Her interactions with the robots are all pleasant enough, and she has enough generic soundbites they never get repetitive. Nobody's going to be dishing out any awards, but I'd be more than happy to spend another game with her. Similarly, the music doesn't do anything special but it's nice enough. It sounds like typical, hopeful and dramatic sci fi stuff. In places, the combination of the music, plot and world design really reminded me of Xenoblade Chronicles X. This is a good sign, as they were the only good things about that game.



If you think this sounds like a really nice, solid, 8/10 game, you'd be right. Unfortunately, there are two big floors which threaten to undo all the game's hard work. I had a day off, so I sat down, dialled up my patience and powered through but I could definitely see some people binning the game off.

The first of these problems is the loading times. Traversing the world, everything is as smooth as butter, but as soon as you try to fast travel or enter a dungeon, you're in for a minute of looking at Twitter on your phone. At first this isn't a problem, but when later sections are needing retires or making you go back to base and swap robots (you can only take two of a possible four), it becomes frustrating. This leads into the other big issue.

The game's plot and progression revolves around collecting Prismatic Cores. They act like the stars or shines in a Mario game, with key dungeons and that gated by the number of cores you've collected. This is all fine and dandy until you reach the final tower of the game, each floor of which requires an additional five cores. Suddenly, I realised the monsters, hidden capsules and challenge dungeons dotted around the world were not as optional as I'd assumed.

Figuring out how to reach alluring chests in hard-to-climb places, exploring every nook and cranny, or bashing through challenge arenas and platforming gauntlets are fun diversions. I'd been ploughing headlong towards the ending for the most part, however, meaning I had to spend a whole night yesterday just travelling around the world scooping up bits and bobs, teleporting or swapping robots every five minutes, then come back this morning and play through the finale. Had I been taking my time to explore a bit more in the first place I'd have avoided all this, but my instinct these days is to get through most of the story first so I can unlock all the power-ups and not mug myself off.

These problems aren't the worst things in the world. With a little patience, the loading times are bearable and for certain players, the pacing won't be an issue. On the other hand, they soured my experience in the finale somewhat, and I can't recommend the game without giving a little warning.



The game ends with a hook for a sequel I'm not sure we'll ever get. That said, just a little polish and Recore could have been an all time banger.

Somewhere between 6 and 10/10
Adjust for preference.

It always looked like a good 7 me, which wouldn't do very well on Xbox and with Spencer saying things like that they don't what to spend money on things like Recore anymore. Which is disappointing as we may never see that sequel you bring up.

Shame, Recore was the only game on the xbone that ever interested me (aside from the now-canned Scalebound of course), those issues sound killer though.

Athrun888 wrote:

Shame, Recore was the only game on the xbone that ever interested me (aside from the now-canned Scalebound of course), those issues sound killer though.  

Recore and Scalebound are two of the main games that tempted me towards Xbox. The only other reason was to play through the Halo and Gears series, which luckily has actually been brilliant.

Severed



Gem of a game, this. It's a first person dungeon crawler from the team behind the similarly excellent Guacamelee! with a broadly similar aesthetic. You attack vicious, other-worldly foes with your sword by swiping the stylus across the touch screen in a bid to find out what happened to your family. It might sound limited but no: as the game goes by more mechanics and opponent types are thrown your way but never in such a way that you get overwhelmed. It's also an elegant sufficiency of game, well-designed, with fine music and a moving but light touch story. As I've said elsewhere, it's an easy recommend - not least because it means I have to rewrite my Top Games Of 2016 piece on Gintendo.

18/20

I just finished the story mode in normal, fully upgraded my castle to get all the Google Play Achievements and 1/3 through a Hard Mode play. As you may have guessed form all that I've enjoyed FE:H and not put a penny into it also only span for some heroes one or two times as I just used what I got.

This is the first mobile game I've cared about, it sort of makes me excited for Super Mario Run on Droid but no way I'm getting that in March and the future of Nintendo's mobile offerings.

Would I have payed for it, maybe but depends on price and how things were set out like getting characters for instance.

Overall very good for a free to play mobile game 8/10.

A interesting one to review as I only played it twice and it took me 7hr 30mins to beat it. So you can tell, I enjoyed playing it to play for almost 4hrs in each seating but this is a Resident Evil game and I feel they should be a certain way.

As you may or may not know, I'm a big RE fan, so much so I could do a one man podcast about them all.

If we look back at the first RE, the game had this campiness to it even it was set around a survival horror with zombies etc due to a virus. Even RE5 which I'm not a fan of, still has that sort of campiness and silliness with Chris breaking boulders with his fists.

We come to RE7 which has none of that, this is far more serious and its less of a survival horror with Zombies but more of a Paranormal side of things and it reminds me a lot of FEAR.

The game plays more like the proper resident evils, go around a map find items, use them to open doors and get new items and continue. This is far more simple then what was in the proper resident evils.  

That this is still to me isn't Resident Evil, it is closer to what I want from Res Evil and I would be happy for Capcom to continue on like this far more then the Res 5 & 6 style.

8/10 just

As recommended to me by you guys! Good job team. This is definitely a Metroidvania alright, and that's alright with me.

PRO:

• Gear-gating fun
  
• Neat learning curve - I didn't cark it for the first half of the game, but found myself having to pay more and more attention
  
• Yer man Soma looks like a big girls' blouse but he moves like a smooth criminal
  
• The story's a lot better than Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate, which I've also jumped through - that game was limited by the fact its job of joining the plots of the other two Lords of Shaow games. Prequels and origin stories of good things often suck.
  

CON:

• The dialogue itself is ham-fisted
  
• There are spelling and grammar mistakes up the wazoo. One move allows you to do another jump in "lid-air". You can also NG+ it, starting from the beginning but with all the "sprits" you've obtained.
  

NOT REALLY A PRO OR A CON BUT IT'S IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO MENTION:
So many GBA titties! A good proportion of the monsters in this game are at least half a naked woman. Really weird for the GBA. I know Castlevania's had a history of this, but, dude.

Yeah, so I really enjoyed it. And I mostly worked out how to get the best ending.
8.5/10

The good thing is, that's another VC game on my WiiU. So now I've just got to finish the others before the Switch arrives. *looks at list* Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Xenoblade Chronicles. Oh.


This post was edited 4 times by Jimbob because he's a fucking klutz.

I do enjoy a good Castlevania, and it's been a while. Might look at firing one up- I'm sure I've got one somewhere!

Jimbob wrote:

CON:

• The dialogue itself is ham-fisted
  
  

That's common for Castlevania as far back as Symphony of the Night and its famous (infamous?) opening with Richter and Dracula. I wouldn't knock the game too much for that.

You could almost call it a deliberate homage to classic horror films, like Universal and Hammer.

Letter Quest Remastered (PS4)

I initially dismissed this as a forgettable piece of indie (and actually nominated it for Worst Game I Played in 2016) but it turns out that Letter Quest is an addictive combination of Countdown and Puzzle Quest. You face off against various monsters (wittily named with short backstories - the humour is brilliant) and must defeat them by making words from the 15 letter tiles you're presented with. The great thing is, you're often given restrictions such as "takes three times as much damage when using a word that ends with E" which pushes your brain - especially when poison tiles and upside down tiles are thrown in to the mix. It's not a particularly long game (30 levels each with 4 challenges) but I went and sunk 25 hours in to it, eventually 100%-ing the damn thing.

It was free on PS+ a few months ago, but I recommend picking this up. It's usually in the Steam sale.

8/10

I'm going to start off by saying that I think the first Dishonored is great and was part of that First Person Shooters which weren't First Person Shooters of the PS360 era with Bioshock and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. All had similar ideas where you could get new powers or abilities to take on missions in a way you feel fit, all have these cool settings and in Dishonored case a unique art-style, that I would still recommend it now.

Over the last two days, I finally got around to playing Dishonored 2 which I got for Christmas. The game now gives you choice to play as either Emily or Corvo, I choose Emily who has slightly different powers to Corvo but they are pretty similar.

You set out on your adventure to take back your Empire, this took me 8hrs to do that this is not a long game but before someone chimes in yes their is low and high chaos endings (I got high chaos) and of course the two characters along with side-quests meaning if you were to Platinum it, you're looking at more like 36hrs or so.

I'm not going to go back to it, as I found it just okay and unlike the first game which was new and a bit unique this seems to be just more of the same, which isn't a bad thing but also doesn't set the world on fire.

The game can be picked up cheap now like under £20 and if you have played the first it is worth a bash at that price but if you've not then I would recommend the first game which is on PS4 over this.

7/10

That's interesting given the high acclaim it has received. I'm put off by the fact it's a first-person stealth game - I struggled to enjoy Thief because it feels odd staying hidden in first-person. Maybe it's just me, but not knowing whether I'm actually out of sight in a stealth game is a deal breaker.

Interesting to hear that Mas, I also struggled to get into 2 and enjoyed the original, wasn't sure if I've just lost my patience with stealth.

@gJones if you've got a 360 which I think you do the fist is £3.50 for it in CEX that I think it is worth a bash as I don't think it is anything like Thief which is a true Stealth game or its £15 on PS4, if you're bothered about the DLC and it being True HD,

@Andy I got really frustrated hence why the high chaos ending and I don't remember having that with first game but looking back on Wiki, 2012 wasn't a great year and it had this huge space around it before Halo 4 arrived that I may have given it more time as it took me way longer then 8hrs.

It would have also been one of my last 360 games, I played.

gjones wrote:

That's interesting given the high acclaim it has received. I'm put off by the fact it's a first-person stealth game - I struggled to enjoy Thief because it feels odd staying hidden in first-person. Maybe it's just me, but not knowing whether I'm actually out of sight in a stealth game is a deal breaker.

It's a problem with first person stealth for sure, but Dishonored gets round it a lot by having a lot of verticality. You know you are out of sight, even though you can watch the enemies patrolling, because you're high up above them looking down.

Picross 3D Round 2



For probably the last game I'll finish before Switchmas, this seems oddly anticlimactic.  A standard-issue block-chiselling puzzler.  A good standard-issue block-chiselling puzzler, but a standard-issue block-chiselling puzzler nonetheless.

If there's one thing I'll say in its favour, it's that this game is long.  Massive in fact.  Hours of game right here.  My activity log reads 60:27, fourth-most time played on the machine behind Smash and the Bravelies.  (Although my 3DS clock tends to bugger up occasionally, so maybe Moon didn't get its due.)

It's got the naturally compelling gameplay of Picross, of course (with a slight colourful twist that you'll pick up soon enough).  More than compelling, in fact.  Addicting.  Even when the gameplay dragged a bit (mainly in the Micross-alike sections), I pressed on.  

Shame about the lack of animations, though.  I remember them fondly from Picross DS and Picross 3D.  Finishing a puzzle is usually rewarding, but never quite as fun as it was in those games.  The static wooden statues just aren't as good.  

Still comes recommended though, to basically everyone.  If nothing else, quick-save functionality makes it perfect for quickly dipping into and out of on the go.  Roll on Picross Switch.

7/10

After 3 days off went back to work and talking to the Ladz, it seems a few others feel the same about Dishonoured 2 as me and Andy feel. I wonder why, as like gJones says is highly acclaimed and a sequel to a really decent game.

I've still got to play it (I really liked the first game - completed it 3 times over plus DLC) but you're not helping sell it.

Came out at such a crowded time too