Recently finished L.A. Noire for the second time (the first time was 10 years or so ago) as I was in the mood for some 1940's atmosphere which the game does great.
The game could be described as a hiddem gem that fell into a pile of shit where it marinated for a long time.
The basic premise of being a cop/detective is good. Looking for clues, talking to people, catching criminals, that's great. But there's no space for actual deduction because you're being heavily railroaded throughout the game. Just head to the point on the map, and that's it.
The interrogations however is where the game stops making sense. It's less of interrogating a witness/suspect and more of trying to figure out "What did the developer want me to choose?". Story is meh. It feels like they made missions first, then shoehorned story into them but that wasn't good enough so they put a little bit more on top. There are key moments in the story that just happen.
Apparently, they didn't have time to develop/had to cut a lot of stuff out so it might be true.
Mixed feeling about that one. I still like the atmosphere of the game, tho.
After that, to play a proper detective game, I read many recommendations of Return of the Obra Dinn. You're an insurance investigator of East India Company and you've been sent to a ship from which the entire crew disappeared and you're given a compass capable of showing you corpse's last moment. You're given a list of the crew and you need to figure out who died how and by whose hand. It's essentially a game of Sudoku: Detective Edition.
This game really hooked me but it started to be a bit tedious at the end where it's impossible to know for sure who is who without guessing and waiting for the game to confirm your guess.
Also, I was hoping for some explanation or conclusion of what happened but nothing of the sort. You're just a bookkeeper. You're just an insurance investigator so do your job and fuck off.
Currently, with Dragon's Dogma 2 announcement, I realized that I never actually finished the first one, so I started a new playthough. I was playing as a sorcerer before and was enjoying it tremendously. My two gripes with the class (vocation) were that casting was very slow and stamina was very scarce so after two meteorites, I was useless. Now, I'm playing as a ranger, level 35 at the moment, to get more stamina and unless I pester my pawn all the time to give me weapon enchantment, the class feels kinda weak. I'll probably change class soon to something else.
In the meantime, I found my year old save of Shadow of Mordor about 70% in. As I never played the second game, I decided to finish the first one and try the second one.
The first one I really liked. The atmosphere was great, story (except the ending) was cool, and the combat was very satisfying. But none of those can be said about the second game.
The second game is much more open world, stuffed with fuckton of collectibles and shit to do on the map which is great if you enjoy it. I don't, really. Instead of runes, giving you great powers, that you put in your weapons, you get shitty loot with mediocre effects and sockets that give you +% healing, +% damage, +% XP and so on. You lose the powers you posessed in the first game (but you can regain them later, because fuck you) and skill tree has been greatly extended and stuffed with so much shit it's impossible to remember all you can do in the combat, and every skill received 2-3 augments between which you need to choose (or download one of the mods available on nexus mods and enable all of them).
The story can be described as the purest of garbage. It's so shitty I feel offended and ashamed by giving it my time. It's incredible. Talion and Celebrimbor have no chemistry whatsoever (which they most definitely had in the previous game) and instead, I get a feeling like they despise each other. Talion turned into a giant pussy and Celebrimbor keeps nagging him with "Don't do it, it's a bad idea." only to turn out it indeed was a bad idea. Right at the start you have a new ring of power which you lose immediately but get it back later and you wouldn't believe what you can do with the new, better ring. That's right, the same power of dominating orcs you had in the first game. To top it, all the story is now full of women and all of them are absolutely awful. Every scene with them is pure cringe. There's not other way to describe it. It's just so bad.
The game also doesn't really let you to roam and play it as you want. You first need to go through the slog of first two acts, in which you can't do shit, because you have no powers, that you got used to in the first game, so killing anyone is a total asspain.
But all of that could be forgiven if the actual gameplay was good. I don't know what happened but I remember enjoying the first game a lot. The controls were really tight, the character did exactly what I wanted him to do, and combat felt impactful. Here, Talion keeps grapping everything but what I want, jumping to where I don't want him, attacking other enemies than I want. It's fucking bullshit. What pissed me off the most was fighting with 10+ orcs and their captain, getting captain to low health so he can be dominated, press and hold the E key to dominate him at the right moment when I'm sure nobody is going to attack me and Talion keeps using the power on somebody else. The captain is right in front of me. The character is looking at him. My camera is pointed at him. I'm pressing W key to go forward, to the captain, I press the key and Talion fucking starts dominating some poor idiot behind the camera I can't even see. This happened multiple times. Another thing that drives me nuts during combat - I keep getting promts to press a key to avoid incoming attack but either I'm locked into an animation or stucked due to collision and it's not possible to actually avoid the attack. At first I played on the brutal difficulty and got raped because of this shit so I dropped it to easy, to learn and ramp it up later. But it wasn't the difficulty. The game is just trash.
It's a piece of shit and it does nothing but frustrate me. I did everything there is to do in the Act 2 map, recruited 15 orc captains, ready to conquer the fortress and finish the act 2. Then I realized there's no enjoyment at all and uninstalled the game.
Fuck this shit.
Now I'll go and play Claw or something to remember the good Monolith back in the day.
