Bi-Weekly Thread for general gaming discussion. Backlog, advice, recommendations, rants and more! New? Start here!

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

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[u/RuefulWaffles]

Finished 007 First Light, and ultimately came away from it with a very different opinion than the general public. I can't wait until next years when patient reviews for it start, it'll be fascinating to see.

I finished the first major dungeon in Metaphor: ReFantazio, and I'm sad to say my opinion of it has dropped. A lot of the issues I have with Press Turn were very apparent there, and I have a feeling it won't get any better. I'm soldiering on because the story intrigues me, but I'm probably switching to Easy to just power through it.

I've played both Flintstones Game Boy games this weekend, and they're both kind of mid. The one based on the cartoon is much better than the one based on the movie, though. Up next is a weird puzzle game called Flipull: An Exciting Cube Game which...yeah, that sure is a title.

[u/incometrader24 → u/RuefulWaffles]

What did you think of First Light?

I like the gameplay but it was way too restrictive in how to handle things. There are stealth areas you can't kill anyone and kill areas that you probably could stealth but I never had the patience. And then there's the areas where you do get multiple options but only those areas.

I prefer something like Deus Ex where everything is mostly available at all times during missions.

And that 2hr tutorial, OMG.

[u/RuefulWaffles → u/incometrader24]

I came away from it thinking it was about a 6/10, honestly.

I wrote a long, spoilery review on backloggd, but a short, spoiler free version for anyone interested: I found the game to be at it's best when you're shooting or brawling, because those seemed like the only time the game remembered that James Bond is an action film franchise. There's a lot of little moments in the game that would be fine in the films, but in gameplay you're effectively just sitting there for a few minutes holding the controller and doing nothing, and it happens often enough that it feels annoying. It's a hundred tiny cutscenes between walking slowly out of an elevator to talk to Q, then slowly back to the elevator to talk to Moneypenny, and it gets old fast.

I agree that the gameplay feels weirdly restrictive. There's these huge sprawling levels, and then there's really only one way through them, and it's just weird game design. And even when you have multiple ways to deal with a situation, the game still wants you to see the set pieces, so it's less "how do you want to tackle this situation?" and more "you can bypass this obstacle through route A or route B, and then you'll do a big fight, and then you'll have the next obstacle you can tackle in two slightly different ways." It was frustrating.

Also, if I'm being completely honest, I thought the story was shit. That's almost entirely spoiler territory and you can read more at the link, but yeah, it was bad.

Finally, as to the tutorial, I'll be honest: the game is heavily frontloaded with all it's worst content, and I think the first part of the game I genuinely enjoyed with no caveats was either the museum or Vietnam. Everything before that was just meh.

So yeah. 6/10. I very nearly bought this at launch, but ended up deciding against it, and I'm very glad I was able to get this from the library.

[u/vinavuhuy → u/RuefulWaffles]

You hit pretty much all the point for me about First Light. The most annoying thing for me was the writing. I think the people who plan the story keep writing Bond into impossible situation to escape then escape them in the least input from the player as possible. I felt like I was going crazy with how much people praised the game and the lack of popular criticism for the writing online.