Let’s get out of the way that this is not a proper review. If you want my review of Galak-Z, you can find it here. But as I wrote in that post, I planned to come back and give this another shot when season 5 came out as a patch, something set to coincide with the PC release. That came to pass finally and…folks, I am so, so angry.

The patch notes listed a new Arcade mode that claims to make the game less punishing, and a new endless mode with daily challenges and leaderboards. This sounded okay to me. Spelunky has daily challenges and leaderboards, and while I don’t play them every day, it has given me a reason to keep dusting it off every few weeks on my Vita and PS4. It adds life to a game I might have otherwise deleted long ago. It shows promise, in other words.

So I fired up Galak-Z after a lengthy 1.8 gigabyte patch downloaded, and I went to look at the story mode. Wait, where’s season 5? I thought maybe the problem was, I needed to play season 4 over again to unlock it, and because it’s been forever since I’d played, I thought it best to just start over on the new Arcade mode to get familiar with the controls again before taking on the tougher levels.

This reintroduction was a painful reminder of why I ended up disliking a game I wanted to love at release, and it’s actually much worse in several ways. The lag that plagued the game even in moments with no enemies on screen is now even worse, with the screen randomly freezing for upwards of two seconds. With nothing on screen, this is already enough to get me swearing. In the middle of a dogfight with multiple enemies, it’s a death sentence. And it happens CONSTANTLY. How can a game get a patch this large and still not address one of the biggest issues the core game had? No, better yet, how can a game get a patch this big and feel even more broken than it did on release day? Continue reading

“Wait, Zoe, how can you do a game review RIGHT AFTER you said the Watch Dogs review would be your last for a while?” you may ask. Well, silent commenter who may potentially live in my head, I took the rest of my old games up to ye olde game shoppe and traded them in for a pair of “new” games because with the change of seasons, my brain isn’t up to the tasks of reading or creative writing. The alternative was sitting on my couch all day blowing raspberries, and while I like raspberries as much as the next random non-offensive example person, I can only do that for an hour or so before it becomes tedious. “But you lied to me, Zoe!” you say. “How can I ever trust you again?” Well, helpful commenter who helps keep these things moving along, life is full of bitter disappointments. For example, there’s Far Cry 4.

There’s so much in this messy little package that left me groaning “this game sucks,” and I did so often enough that my long suffering hubby was asking “then why don’t you stop playing it?” And that’s a fair question, but once I’ve got a game, I’m honor bound to see it through…no, wait, honor bound isn’t the right term. I’m flat broke and can’t afford to drop a game right after I buy it, even if I hate it. On the plus side, it means you get more reviews out of me, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?

I started out by doing the so-called secret ending, which isn’t much of a secret and hasn’t been since the day after it came out. That more expedient ending provides some much needed context for everything else that happens in the proper game. You are Ajay Ghale, a young man tasked by your dead mother to return her ashes to Lakshmana in Kyrat. You’ve barely crossed the border into your home country when your bus is detained and you meet the king of Kyrat. And cue the secret ending. (To get said ending, just wait a few minutes when the king tells you to stay put. Yes, it’s boring, but it is quite enlightening, too.)

If you play the game right, you will spend almost the entire romp thinking Lakshmana is a location. Not so. For those who hate spoilers, let me stop you now. After the cut, I’m going to spoil this game like a spoiling thing left on the kitchen counter to spoil forever. Or something. Continue reading

This will likely be my last game review for a while, and not because I’m flat broke. I have a huge stack of old games I could trade in for something new. The problem is, I haven’t seen anything new or used that I want to play. This last review is for a game I was tepid on to begin with, but decided to get it because it was steeply discounted.

Watch Dogs got a bad rap right after release because Ubisoft gave it a graphical downgrade from the demo shown at E3. Personally, I feel like bullshotting is so common among the big publishers that it’s not worth my anger. HOWEVER, there is something that pissed me off about this game, and that was the fact that it doesn’t work with the rest mode on the PS4. On all my other games, I could put the console to sleep and come back the next day at the same spot I left. But no, this game would shut down and drop whatever mission I was in. More infuriating was the intrusive U-play sign up. I actually have a U-play account, but I didn’t want to use it. I had to skip the setup on every. Single. Startup. UGH.

So, with that out of the way, Watch Dogs is a wannabe Grand Theft Auto with some phone “hacking” puzzles thrown in. This is hacking in the same vein as that 90s movie was, but I actually liked the puzzles, even the ones on a timer, and you know how I feel about timed missions. (If you don’t know…I hate them with the burning passion of a thousand supernovas.) The driving is mostly decent with some caveats that I’ll get to later, and despite the graphical downgrade, the world looks pretty damned good.

It’s a pity I can’t praise the story, because the story is pure shite. A lot of the blame is on main character Aiden Pearce, who is a tool in many different ways. He’s a tool in the sense that it’s impossible to like him, and he’s a tool in that everybody uses him so easily. The writers want me to believe this guy is so smart and capable, but in the story he is so stupid that he deserves everything that’s happened to him. But he can’t take all the blame for this. The other characters around him all hail from the book of action movie cliches, and every time the story went, “Ah ha, here’s a twist,” I sighed and thought, “Yep, saw that coming from the intro.” This is a clumsy string of delaying tactics, and as the story progresses, they just get more and more stupid as they go along. Continue reading

I know, I’ve been away a long while, and in the last few weeks I dusted off the Xbox to play every Bethesda game from hubby’s collection to completion. (We’ll just skip those reviews, m’kay?) I’ve played Fallout 4 six times now, and I finished that last run with a melee build and took a stack of games to trade them in. I got Mad Max because I guess I’m not totally sick of post-apoc games, but I felt like maybe they were missing some driving quests. So, what would I define this game as? A real shit show, that’s what.

It’s hard to know where to begin in listing all the problems with this game. I feel like all the work went into making the game look as pretty as possible, but actually being fun or diverse wasn’t on the checklist. And to be sure, this is a game designed by checklist. It’s got an open world, (check) pointless side quests, (check) endless piles of collectible crap, (check) completely forgettable NPCs, (check) and copy pasta enemies and bosses. (check, check, checkity check.)

The story starts off with Max losing his car again, something consistent with every one of the movies. The big bad, Scrotus Scabrous, takes a chainsaw to the brain, but somehow survives. Max gets led by the boss’ cast off dog to a hunchback named Chumbucket, who has a plan for building the ultimate car, the Magnus Opus. Off to a good start, so how could this possibly go wrong? Every way possible. Continue reading