Now Playing: Ghostrunner

After sinking countless hours into Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, it was somewhat refreshing to jump into a short, punchy little game like Ghostrunner. I played it over two days and clocked about 8 hours – although I’d estimate 4 hours of that was me repeatedly dying. I can’t say Ghostrunner quite clicked with me at first. I was expecting Titanfall with a samurai sword in which I’d be bouncing off the walls of a cyberpunk city cutting hapless minions in half.

And whilst that is, essentially, what you’re doing in Ghostrunner, it’s not quite the action focused game I was expecting. It’s a platform puzzle action game in that specific order. The bulk of Ghostrunner is made up of first person platform segments as you wall run, jump, grapple and ride rails in order to progress from A to B.

There’s a large dose of trial and error at play in some of these sections – in fact, in the game in general – in the sense that you can’t always react first time to the challenge before you. Only by replaying it and memorising the positioning of walls, grapple points or rails is how you progress. There’s a generous checkpoint system in place so if you do fall and die, you won’t ever have to replay too much but, if you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know I’m not the biggest fan of games that require trial and error to proceed.

Fortunately, Ghostrunner isn’t too guilty of this – at least in terms of platforming where you can rely, on the most part, on your reflexes and skill. Combat though is a little more trial and error based. There are times when you really just have to replay a combat encounter multiple times in order to learn the placement of enemies in order to plan the best route to take them out because you won’t know where they all are the first time and it’s easy to get hit from an enemy you weren’t even aware of.

After platformer, Ghostrunner is very much a puzzle game and the action sequences and boss fights are all little puzzles in their own way. That’s something that took some time for me to get my head around and I did find Ghostrunner pretty frustrating at first because I was trying to play it more like a pure action game – like Titanfall with samurai swords.

But it’s really not. You can kill enemies in one hit but you also die in one hit, and in an area with multiple enemies, the key is to plan and memorise the perfect route to wipe them all out and unlock the next area. Once I did get the hang of it – and the game introduced a few fun little abilities to help mix things up – I really did start to enjoy it. The game does do a decent job of pacing out new enemy types and new skills to keep things feeling fresh. The environments don’t change much, but there are new platform elements introduced as you go.

 

The best boss fight is easily the first – it’s the perfect example of a challenge that initially feels impossible and yet, once you pull it off, it’s incredibly satisfying. It’s fantastic and I loved it. Unfortunately, the next two boss fights after this aren’t quite so good. The second is fun, but pretty easy once you get your parry timing down and the last feels a little like a ‘we didn’t know what to do with this’ kind of fight. In fact, a lot of the end of the game feels a little like that, especially the last level, but we’ll come back to that later.

At certain points in the game you’ll enter the ‘cyber-void’ or something like that. It really kind of sucks and although this is where you’ll unlock your new skills, for some reason they put in these tedious sections where you have to collect glowing balls and solve basic puzzles. It just feels like dull, pointless padding.

The story and characters are pretty terrible. You play as Jack The Robot Who Growls and there’s a guy called the Architect who gives you directions over the radio who is clearly evil and will betray you at the end of the game. That’s not a spoiler because it’s so f**king obvious. The ‘lore’ of the game world isn’t well presented through the environment which is designed to facilitate the gameplay – in other words, it don’t make no sense as an actual, living world unless everyone gets around by wall running and jumping from floating platforms. Maybe they do.

There are collectibles to find but they’re really not worth your time. And whilst I appreciate the game doesn’t bother with intrusive cut-scenes, it’s kind of hard to listen to the dull exposition over the radio when you’re repeatedly dying and reloading on a tricky platform section. So yeah, you won’t know or care about the story or characters at all. At least, I didn’t. But I didn’t need to. Ghostrunner is a game that’s at its best when it focuses purely on its gameplay.

The game runs nice and smooth but it’s not without a bug or two – such as all the times I jumped through scenery and got stuck. Annoying more than game breaking because checkpoints are so frequent, but worth mentioning.

I wish I could say the game goes out on a high but the last level is by far the worst thing in the game. It really does feel like the developers ran out of ideas before the end so they just throw you back into the cyber-void and make you run a gauntlet of tricky platform sections in which they throw waves of deadly red balls at you. To make matters worse, there’s a few ‘jump pad’ parts that sometimes toss you away from the next platform you need to hit, instead sending you hurtling into the void.

It’s f**king terrible. Whereas the first boss fight felt like the perfect balance of challenge and frustration and then elation when you beat it, this final stretch is a perfect example of how NOT to do difficulty – it’s simply designed to be as tedious and frustrating as possible for the player for the sake of it. Dodging walls of red balls isn’t a ‘test’ of the player’s skills – it’s just some random shit thrown in at the end of the game that’s unrelated to everything else.

I really wanted to come away from Ghostrunner wanting to play more or to pick up the sequel, but I’m not really convinced. The fact the developers couldn’t even keep this game, short as it is, from feeling repetitive and padded isn’t a great sign, nor is how the game pretty much just gives up at the end like they really did run out of ideas.

I do think there’s a really fantastic game within Ghostrunner – that first boss fight is tremendous – but it feels like that fantastic game is really struggling to escape from a lot of unnecessary padding, dull puzzles and a pointless story. It’s a shame, and maybe the sequel does address these issues. It’s something I’ll have to look into. But if it’s just more of the same, then I probably won’t bother.

Overall, despite me going on a bit of a rant about Ghostrunner, I still think it’s a pretty solid and fun game. It’s certainly not for everyone – not everyone will have the patience even for its best sections, let alone its worst. It’s not amazing, but it’s decent enough and I’m glad I played it for those few great moments.

6/10

Gallery: Starfield (Part 2)

Now Playing: Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is an excellent sequel that delivers exactly what I wanted – an engaging, thoughtful continuation and expansion of the Alan Wake story. The gameplay though . . . well, we’ll get into that later. Alan Wake 2 is the kind of game I could talk in-depth about the story and not really spoil anything because to someone who’s not played it, what I say probably won’t make a lick of sense.

And whilst Alan Wake 2 might – on occasion – feel like it’s being a little too weird for the sake of being weird, it does have a genuinely engaging and – by the end – gripping narrative that really draws you in and makes you want to keep playing. It’s the gaming equivalent of ‘just one more page’ which is pretty damn appropriate.

I’m not going to get too in-depth on the story though because I really think it is best experienced yourself. It’s what I’d call a slow-burn. It takes a little time to get going but once it does, you’ll be hooked right until the end.

In Alan Wake 2 you’ll be playing as two characters – Alan Wake and Saga Anderson – and the narrative will shift between the two as you progress. Between the two, I’d have to say I enjoyed the Wake sections the most. Whilst Saga ties nicely into the narrative, she’s not as interesting to actually play.

Because that’s the big weakness of Alan Wake 2 – for all its great visuals and lighting (although somewhat dated character models), great music, neat use of live action sequences, welcome tie-ins to Control and the previously mentioned engaging narrative – Alan Wake is a somewhat mixed experience in terms of gameplay.

The first really noticeable thing is how slow the combat feels compared to the original. I don’t see this as a bad change, however. A slower paced, more deliberate style of combat probably fits the style and atmosphere better than the more action orientated original. The problem is, there are moments when the game wants to ramp up the action and have Saga and Wake fighting hordes of Taken just like the original . . . and it just doesn’t quite work.

The environments can be small so there’s less room to manoeuvre, reloading or healing takes longer, and accessing your inventory doesn’t pause the action. It’s more like a survival horror in the sense that resources are limited and you to need to make every shot or item use count. Like I said, this slower, more deliberate style of combat does fit the game better and it does work very well when the action is appropriately tailored for it.

But, unfortunately, the game doesn’t always do that, and in those more hectic, heavy action scenes the combat can become more frustrating than fun because it’s not designed for that kind of fast-paced action. This is very telling during a big battle towards the end that’s clearly designed to evoke memories of the concert fight in Alan Wake 1. But in Alan Wake 2, the section just isn’t half as much fun to play because you’re so slow to move, shoot and reload, not to mention having to keep playing ring-around-the-rocks every time you want to heal.

The game also keeps dumping more and more supply boxes onto you like f**king loot boxes dropping out of the sky. It’s like they realised the entire combat system which is built on slow, deliberate play and resource management just doesn’t work in a section where you get waves and waves of Taken attacking you, so to ‘fix’ the issue they just drop more and more ammo onto your head.

No. Just no. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. So sadly, overall, I’d have to say the combat of Alan Wake 2 isn’t actually as good as in the original. It should be better because it does take a more appropriate approach in terms of style, but the game doesn’t play to the strength of that style often enough. And sometimes, it disregards it entirely forcing you to play through action sequences that really aren’t designed for it.

The game is by far at its best in terms of combat when you’re fighting smaller numbers of but more powerful enemies – or even a single, very powerful foe that requires smart use of the environment and your resources. That’s when the game plays to the strength of its own system and it creates some genuinely tense and engaging encounters.

I also think that combat animations – especially for the Taken – really aren’t that great. The combat in Alan Wake 1 was so clean and precise. Everything feels a little more messy in Alan Wake 2 – especially the ‘darkness shield’ that you have to break before you can damage the enemy its protecting. The visuals for it aren’t as clear as in the original leading to situations where you’re really not sure if you’re broken the shield or not.

But I don’t want to rant too much about the combat because it’s really not bad – it’s more how certain sections don’t really fit the style and it creates a kind of jarring clash that you just have to grind your way through. Also, the combat isn’t that significant a part of the experience and ultimately, doesn’t drag the game down by much.

In terms of the mechanics of Wake and Anderson, Wake is far more interesting thanks to his ‘Writers Board’ that lets him directly change a scene (local environment) within the game world. It’s a perfect and clever combination of narrative and gameplay. It’s also technically impressive as you flit back and forth between multiple scenes and plot points throughout a level to progress.

But Anderson? Her mechanics – the Case Board and Profiling – are perfectly fine from a narrative perspective but aren’t very engaging from a gameplay one. The Case Board is exactly how it sounds – a board where you piece together evidence. Or don’t because you can’t do it ‘wrong’ as such – Anderson just mutters at you until you put each piece in the right place. And profiling? Like I said – neat narratively speaking, but it’s really just you sitting back and listening to characters talk.

Wake’s mechanics work so much better because they directly impact how you progress. It just feels like they really weren’t sure what to do with Anderson in terms of actual gameplay mechanics so they have her collecting pointless ‘charms’ and solving stupid math puzzles to open supply boxes. No. Just no. The first few sections in which you play as Saga are so slow and dull in terms of gameplay. They’re good as far as narratives goes, and that’s what pushes you through.

All the Wake stuff is great though. And thankfully, the Saga stuff gets much better before the end. I do wish the game had found a clever way to combine narrative and gameplay together at the very end though – instead, it kind of fizzles out where the gameplay is concerned and you just run along a linear path and then watch a live action video ending.

It’s disappointing – not from a narrative point of view because I really liked the ending – but disappointing that the game couldn’t find a way to embrace the medium. To actually engage the player in the action. Instead, it resorts to just making us sit back and watch a video. I’m sorry, but I don’t play video games to just sit back and watch the dramatic moments.

It’s like the end of The Last of Us which I played recently – imagine if when Joel enters the operating theatre it’s all just a cutscene – it just wouldn’t have the same impact. Alan Wake 2 does such a great job blending narrative and gameplay – at least through the Wake sections – but then misses the most important part.

At this point you might be wondering why I said Alan Wake 2 is a fantastic sequel given how much I’ve dunked on the game throughout this review. But honestly, it really is a fantastic sequel. In fact, that’s the reason I’m dunking on it so hard – because it’s a great game that could have been even better. I’m so frustrated by it, despite really enjoying it.

Despite all the flaws I think the game is a worthy – if not superior – sequel to the original. It’s a game I thoroughly enjoyed and I’m really looking forward to the upcoming DLC. I’m also hoping we’ll get a Control 2 or Alan Wake 3 (or both!) to tie all of this together.

8/10

Suburban Killbot: Steam Replay 2023

In 2023 I played 35 games on Steam unlocking 747 achievements. 31% of these games were new releases, 66% were released in the last 1-7 years and 3% were released 8 or more years ago. This is very similar to last year – 34 games, 542 achievements, 26% new, 68% recent, and 6% old.

Only 2% of my total playtime was spent in VR games in 2023 compared to 9% last year, probably because I stopped playing Phasmophobia in VR. Last year it accounted for 68% of my VR time, this year was zero.

15% of my time was spent playing games with a controller. The top 3 were Forspoken (35%) Spider-Man Remastered (18%) and Hi-Fi Rush (17%). This was a drop from an overall of 26% last year.

My longest daily streak in 2023 was a ridiculous 107 days from Wed, August 30th to Fri, Dec 15th in which I played 16 different games. In 2022 it was only 45 days and 8 different games.

My overall top 3 most played games by % of playtime were Starfield (31%) Mass Effect Legendary Edition (11%) and Cyberpunk 2077 (9%).

September was the busiest month with 20% of my total playtime, and March was the slowest with only 4%.

Now Playing: Bladur’s Gate 3

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its release from Early Access, Baldur’s Gate 3 received overwhelmingly positive reviews and perfect scores. I’m not going to tell you that BG3 doesn’t deserve high praise – because it surely does. But when I see people speaking as if BG3 cannot be bettered, as if the bar has been raised to such a degree that no others can compete?

I’m sorry, but no. Just no. Because at its core, BG3 is a pretty standard CRPG. The key difference, I think, is that it possesses a degree of production value not typically seen within this genre – from visuals, to sound, to VA – BG3 is a CRPG with mainstream appeal. It’s designed to be more accessible, more appealing, more … well, casual.

But that’s not to say that BG3 has only succeeded by targeting a wider base – it still needed to be a damn fine game. And it really is. But is it the masterpiece I’ve seen so many proclaim? I don’t think so. I think it’s an excellent game that I thoroughly enjoyed and will continue to enjoy, but it’s also a very flawed game and those flaws become increasingly apparent the more you progress.

BG3 is a game that I’d describe as ‘front-loaded’ in the sense that all of the things that make it so damn impressive and compelling are there, front and centre, in the first Act. It’s an incredibly strong opening but sadly, BG3 can’t sustain the same level of quality from beginning to end. With each Act, the less impressive the game becomes – not to mention, the more buggy.

If I were to rate each individual Act out of ten, it would look something like this: Act 1 – 9/10, Act 2 – 8/10 and Act 3 – 7/10. It’s not a massive decline, but it’s a decline nonetheless. Although I do think Act 3 could be bumped back up to an 8 if they’d only fix all the damn bugs. It honestly still feels like Act 3 is in Early Access.

The first two Acts are by far the most substantial and polished, but the diminishing nature of BG3 is noticeable even early in Act 2. Then, at the end of Act 2 you are faced with a clumsy, poorly presented exposition dump before being thrust into the rough and ready Act 3 where the bugs really start to bite, the quests are less complex, the story progression begins to fracture and plot threads are poorly resolved – or not resolved at all.

Act 3 is just . . . messy. Not bad – messy. Despite the open nature of Acts 1 & 2 there was a clear focus to your progression. Act 3, on the other hand, feels incredibly scattered. New plot threads are introduced and then abruptly resolved, the game introduces a new companion far too late into the game for me to care or bother with, and it’s also the point the game begins to feel a little bloated. At this stage of the story I’d expect the pace to pick up, for the game to really hone in on what’s important. But BG3 can’t help but needlessly pad out its content in a way that’s detrimental to the overall experience.

Some of the combat encounters in Act 3 are also pretty poorly designed. They’re either far too easy and fast, or far too tedious. Some of the boss fights are also pretty bad. They’re not terrible, but they don’t feel as carefully planned or thought out as previous battles in earlier Acts. It kind of feels like the developers hastily tossed together some of these battles without really testing them properly.

Oddly, Act 3 is also probably the part of the game I found the most funny. I loved exploring the location and meeting all manner of quirky characters. It’s a shame such humour feels so tonally jarring. Considering the very serious nature of what’s occurring and the terrible things that are coming, it feels bizarre that nobody else in the location seems unduly concerned.

I can’t deny I still had a really good time with Act 3 though, and I do think it picks up after a pretty rough opening, but the dip in quality is noticeable in all areas. I do get the impression – and I could be very wrong about this – that Act 3 saw a lot of rewrites and changes and maybe that would explain why it feels so disjointed.

Overall, I did like the main story of BG3. There’s a twist, of sorts, that I wasn’t entirely won over by, probably because I didn’t feel the way it was presented to the player quite worked, but it did just enough to sell it to me. I did, however, find the ‘tadpole’ aspect to be incredibly disappointing from a narrative point of view. I can’t really say more without spoiling things, but it’s such a shame that plot (and gameplay) element proved ultimately meaningless.

As for the ending . . . well, it’s good. Not great, but good. Like a lot of Act 3, it can feel a little disjointed. There are some abrupt cut-scenes that try to wrap up and address everything related to your choices and it works . . . just about. I came away pretty satisfied with my ending. It’s not a perfect landing, but it doesn’t fall flat on its face, either.

Okay, onto the companion characters who I felt were a somewhat mixed bag. Obviously, this is more of a personal preference issue, but I cant deny I found some of the companions and their personal plots to be rather dull. It’s also a shame that some companions have far more content than others to explore.

Visually, as I’ve said the game is impressive – at least in terms of environments and effects. Character models are more mixed, and character animations and facial expressions in dialogue scenes look incredibly dated. They’re stiff and awkward and the expressions were sometimes so bad for my custom character they were funny when they weren’t supposed to be. I can live with it, but I’m not going to pretend it’s good.

If this review seems overly negative it’s just the kind of thing I do with games I really like – and I do think it’s important to highlight and criticise areas where a game falls short, particularly a game like BG3 where most other reviews just tell everyone how wonderful it is. Because it is pretty wonderful, but if we don’t also talk about its flaws, how can a game improve?

But before we get into that, I need to talk about the thing I wasn’t expecting to enjoy that much but ended up enjoying probably more than anything else – the combat. The game gives you so much variety in terms of classes, skills, spells, items and abilities and so many party combinations that you can clear each and every combat encounter is so many different ways. You can also utilise the environment to your advantage in some pretty neat ways.

Even though I’m not the biggest fan of turn based or dice roll based combat, I am big fan of combat systems that give me a lot of options to experiment and play with and that encourage and reward creativity. And that’s something I think BG3 does fantastically well. It’s a game that, even after clearing a tough battle or area, I’m always thinking of how I want to try replaying it in the future with different characters or using completely different tactics. That’s not to say that combat is perfect – oh no, the camera can be pretty damn terrible and I do have a few other issues to raise, but I’ll include those my big list of Annoying Things I’ll get to later.

It’s not just the variety of options in terms of classes, skills and combat that impresses me but in quest progression. BG3 has an impressive range of options for many quests that allow you to progress and complete them in several ways. It offers some of the most varied range of options available to the player as to how they want to experience and progress through its content that I’ve ever seen in an RPG.

However, like other aspects of BG3, this aspect is also somewhat front-loaded. The Goblin Camp is the key example of this. It’s the main quest location of Act 1 and offers an incredible degree of options for the player as to how they want to play and progress through its content. I’ve seen countless videos highlighting this fact and stressing that this is only one quest in the game, the implication being that all of the quests – or at least, all the core quests – offer a similar level of complexity.

But that’s not true at all. Whilst many other quests do offer several possible routes to completion, none offer such a varied range of experiences as the Goblin Camp. It’s the first major quest location in the game and it’s by far the most impressive in terms of options. This shouldn’t be a surprise considering this section of the game was developed, improved and expanded upon during two years of early access support.

The point that I’m making is that whilst it’s right to highlight how impressive this location and the quests tied to it are, the Goblin Camp is the exception, not the rule and it’s disingenuous to imply otherwise. And over the course of the game, the range of options available to you throughout your quests do begin to diminish.

What were once quests of elaborate, branching pathways now feel like quests of two linear lanes, only one of which leads to engaging content and the other leads to nothing but dead ends and no rewards – only a feeling that you made the ‘wrong’ choice. Don’t get me wrong, even Act 3 offers more options for progression than many other games would at all, but compared to what came before, it is clearly an aspect that has become increasingly streamlined.

Okay, time for an assortment of Annoying Things.

Let’s begin – the combat camera does, on occasion, focus on entirely the wrong thing or positions itself at an angle that makes it impossible to see what’s going on. Enemy pathfinding in battles can also prove annoying. I frequently saw enemies get stuck on their combat turn when trying to climb a ledge – up and down they’d go, over and over. They’d eventually decide what to do, but it was pretty tedious watching them try to figure it out.

Party pathfinding in the world can be terrible. Party members occasionally get stuck on scenery and you might not even notice until you get into a fight and realise your mage is half way across the map. This was a real problem in an area where the environment can kill you and I needed a character to hold an item to protect us. But then, in one location when I needed to use a lock-pick to open a door, said character inexplicably kept running to one corner of the room, taking our protection with him and slowly killing everyone else. I ended up having to tediously micromanage my movement, one character at a time.

Swapping companions in and out of your party is far too slow. You can’t just tell one member to depart and then select who you want to replace them with. No. You have to dismiss them first by talking to them, then go to your camp, then run to the member you want, then ask them to join and then return to the world. As you can imagine, I didn’t bother to swap out my party very often.

Managing inventory for your party – especially characters not in your party but at the camp – is also pretty tedious. But that’s not as bad as taking time to set up custom skill bars that don’t save your settings if say, you get disarmed in a fight, forcing you to set up the bar again once you’ve retrieved your weapon.

Even if you just unequip a weapon for a short spell and then re-equip it – you still lose all your custom settings. This is pretty damn infuriating in one section where you lose all your gear for 2 minutes or so, and then you have to re-do all your custom skill bars for every character – weapons, items, scrolls. Everything.

Sometimes the camera completely misses what’s supposed to be a ‘cinematic’ moment. There’s one involving a dragon that was totally off screen for me because the camera was pointing the wrong way.

The game economy feels like an afterthought. I always had thousands more gold than I knew what to do with and there doesn’t seem to be a balanced selection of quality gear for all classes or builds. Even in Act 3, where I thought I’d get access to a wider variety of items, there really wasn’t anything that exciting to spend my money on. In fact, gear in general in the game is pretty disappointing not just in stats, but visually speaking.

Why is the level cap 12 when it’s so easy to hit very early in Act 3? It means you no longer have any sense of progression for your character, no new skills to unlock, no new abilities to try. You get a lot of xp for quests and combat but it’s entirely useless. It feels like the game needed another 2-3 levels for characters to progress through before the end.

Bugs? I’ve had plenty of those.

Act 1 was easily the most polished but I still encountered one optional companion conversation that wouldn’t trigger, and I lost one of my best weapons to a bug that saw it vanish through the floor when I was disarmed in a fight. This is also where I discovered a persistent bug in that, if I swapped one party member out at camp for another, I would no longer to able to properly access that character’s spell book unless I saved and reloaded the game.

I didn’t encounter anything too serious in Act 2, although one phase of the final boss of this section was somewhat ruined for me when my party was hit by a permanent ‘frightened’ de-buff at the end of the fight meaning I couldn’t move any of my characters. Luckily, I found a save and reload solved the issue, but it did somewhat spoil a key moment when I had to drop out of the game and look for a fix.

In fact, I found a lot of people reporting the same problems I’d experienced but too often fans of the game were awfully keen to gloss over or downplay these issues. I’m sorry – but no. Trying to pretend the game is a perfect masterpiece does it no favours. Especially when the problems continue to mount as you progress.

Act 3 is where the bugs really start to bite and become more than a simple nuisance. One of the first conversations I had in Act 3 featured a character whose head was glitching wildly across the screen. Not a big deal I suppose, but a worrying sign of things to come.

I then experienced my first serious quest bug in which a key item wouldn’t spawn although fortunately, I was able to progress the quest through alternative means – once again thanks to a Google search. I also began to experience a common bug during dialogue in which I would select an option but nothing would happen – the option would simply vanish, and then take me back to the selection screen and I’d have to pick whatever was left.

I also had a few instances of a character talking to me about a specific situation long after the situation had actually occurred, as if we were still in that location and it was still occurring as we spoke. That was weird. I also had an ‘unconsciousness’ character speak to me after I’d beat them in a battle attempting to initiate the fight we’d already had.

I started getting a pretty persistent bug whereby an enemy in combat would do absolutely nothing on their turn. They’d just stand there for 20-30 seconds making me wait, before eventually it would skip to the next guy. Then there was the characters who would suddenly be silent in a conversation because their VA hadn’t triggered. Oh, and one time one of my party just randomly dropped dead out of combat, on full health, for no reason.

Thankfully, nothing I’ve encountered has been in any way game breaking – but I’ve seen plenty of others reporting far worse than me. The game clearly still needs a fair bit of care and attention.

Overall, you don’t need me to tell you that BG3 is a great game. Everyone is saying it – and they’re right. But I think it’s important to tell people that it’s also a game with flaws and shortcomings and you might experience bugs that spoil or even break your experience. No game is perfect, and pretending that BG3 has no flaws is only detrimental to the developer. I’ve seen that happen with other games and as a result, they don’t really learn from their mistakes and only end up repeating them.

Whilst it’s great to see a game like BG3 winning so many accolades I do think we need to tone down the ridiculous rhetoric about it ‘raising the bar’ or how it’s ‘scaring’ other developers because they’re worried they can’t compete. Come the f**k on. It’s good, but it’s not that good, and there’s lots of areas the game could have been done far better, even without the bugs. Act 3, I think, still needs a lot more work.

In a lot of ways, I found BG3 far more enjoyable and engaging for its systems and mechanics than I did for its characters or story and that’s not something I usually say about an RPG and certainly not something I was expecting to say about BG3. Hell it’s the last thing I thought I’d say. Nevertheless, it’s a game I had a real blast playing and want to play again solo and in co-op if I can find the time.

8/10

Homeworld 3 (DEMO)

Homeworld 3 was one of my most highly anticipated games this year – at least until I played this demo. The original Homeworld was one of the first PC games I played. I absolutely loved it, and I still have my big, bulky boxed copy on my shelf alongside the Cataclysm expansion and Homeworld 2. Although the Homeworld Remastered release in 2015 wasn’t perfect, it still made me hopeful for a possible Homeworld 3.

And then we had Deserts of Kharak in 2016 which I thought was a pretty good land-based prequel to Homeworld and something that also gave me hope for future games in the series. And when Homeworld 3 was announced, I thought we’d get a game that did the name justice. But now? Now I’m not so sure.

There was something that immediately felt ‘off’ when starting to play this demo. Everything about the controls just felt wrong and I just don’t get why they changed a system that worked perfectly in the originals. The ‘modern’ – and even the ‘classic’ – controls just didn’t feel right. The camera movement felt slow despite cranking the speeds up to max.

Everything just felt more convoluted and complicated than it needed to be. I felt like I spent most of my time struggling with the controls to get the camera focused where I wanted it to be, or to get my ships to fly exactly where I wanted them to go. Maybe I just needed more time to adjust? Maybe, but the controls weren’t the only problem.

The UI is too messy and intrusive. Building, ship costs, research, fleet population – nothing is easy to read at a glance. And not only does it look messy, but it feels messy to play. Maybe it’s just this game mode available in the demo but everything feels faster paced than the originals and I’d be okay with that if the controls and fleet mechanics were adjusted to compensate.

But when strike craft are once again individual units to be grouped and assigned – and adding even a single new craft to an existing group resets the group formation – you don’t feel like you can adequately respond as quickly as you need to when you have to continually micromanage every single unit, group and formation. It just doesn’t translate well to a faster paced style of play.

Combat engagements are typically chaotic (and not in a good way), formations quickly lose cohesion, and grouping multiple ship types is a mess in a larger scale battle because they don’t seem capable of individually prioritising the most suitable targets.

Which would be fine, in a slower paced game, but in this (demo) mode at least, everything moves so fast that you don’t feel like you can really focus on individual unit tactics – it’s just group up, select all enemies and watch the fireworks.

Ship AI is also pretty bad. All the maps I played in the demo were strewn with physical objects both large and small that my ships had trouble navigating around. They’d frequently get stuck, or bunch up, or take a long, convoluted path to their objective. It can be even worse in combat when enemy (or your) ships just fly into the middle of a group and sit there getting pounded. The larger space structures can also make seeing what the f**k is going on a real nightmare.

Overall, I just didn’t really enjoy it and I really do hate to feel that way. But it seems like I’m not alone with my disappointment because the game has now been delayed due to feedback. But will it be enough time to fix all of these issues? I hope so.