The world is beautiful — simply moving around the continent is a pleasurable experience and more than once I caught myself stopping to just look at the scenery — fights are challenging and satisfying; and with the characters’ unique playstyles, the Picto/Lumina system, and the various weapons available, I’m having a blast seeing what combinations I can put together to maximize my team’s strength.

I also found myself really caring about The Expedition itself — figuring out what happened 67 years ago; the backstories (and fates) of Lune, Gustave, Maelle and the rest of the team; and why The Paintress is painting death.

Story Introduction

I honestly often find the story as an afterthought when playing video games. Given the amount of time it takes to get through a game, and the varying games I play, it can be hard to keep track. Expedition 33, though, captivated me. And in order to preserve that for you, I’m going to make sure not to give away any major spoilers.

If you’re completely unaware of the story, though: in this world there’s a giant woman, known as The Paintress, who sits (seemingly weeping) at the base of a sheer face mountain known appropriately as The Monolith.

Annually The Paintress wakes up and writes the next number in a countdown from 100, and on that day everyone that age gets Thanos-snapped (though it appears to be more permanent), in an event they call The Gommage.

And, after The Gommage each year, a group of “Expeditioners” go on a, well, expedition to try to stop The Paintress. It’s been 67 years at this point, people are used to the loss, and have largely given up hope on the idea of any Expeditioners actually succeeding. You play as the 33rd, though, and believe you’re the one’s who will finally get it done.

Combat

Expedition 33 is an expansive RPG with turn-based combat. But you have to still pay attention when it’s not your turn, though — parrying and dodging play a very important role here. Nevrons (which are the primary enemy you encounter; though there’s a couple others) can hit pretty hard. But every attack can be avoided and/or blocked, if you time pressing the button just right.

If you parry all of the enemies strikes in an attack, you’ll do a pretty powerful counter (which can also be leveraged into various benefits, given the Pictos). And if you manage to not get hit in battle at all, you’ll get a 20% XP bonus.

Each enemy also has a Break bar, which when filled will cause a “Break” attack to stun the enemy. I didn’t do much optimizing around breaking, but there’s definitely weapons and Pictos that allow you to do so. It can be a great way to slow down some of the faster enemies and take down the stronger ones, though.

If the enemy does get the best of an Expeditioner, there are remedies. Some characters can heal themselves and/or other members of the party, and some attacks will heal as well. There are also potions that can be used to heal up if someone has taken too much damage, and even ones to revive fallen teammates. Using a potion does count as your turn, though, so use them wisely.

Attacking

Alright, enough about defense. There are 4 different types of attacks: Basic Attacks, Skills, Free Aim Shots, and Gradient Attacks. You’ll primarily be using your Skills in battles, and they do more than just damage your enemies. They can add buffs to your team, or status effects and debuffs to the enemies.

Each skill takes ‘AP’ to use — differing amounts depending on the skill — and free aim shots take 1 AP each time you want to take a shot. In order to replenish your AP, initially you’ll use basic attacks, but as you play though the game, you’ll unlock Pictos and other Skills that can increase the amount each character has each turn.

Gradient attacks unlock around mid-game, have their own separate bar that fills up as you play, and can be powerful ways to turn the battle’s tides back in your favor. On top of that, Gradient attacks don’t count for your turn, so you’re able to attack again after using them. Endgame, there are some awesome Gradient attacks, but I won’t spoil those here.

Skills

Each Expeditioner employs a unique skillset, with varying ways to improve your attacks as you play. Lune (pronounced Lu-Nay), as a mage for example, will create elemental “stains” when she attacks, which then get consumed by other attacks to increase their strength — with stronger attacks becoming available when all and/or all types of stains are available.

Maelle on the other hand, with moves seemingly based in fencing, has different stances she can take. Each stance has different passive effects (like increasing the amount of damage given or decreasing the amount of damage taken) along with more active effects given the skill/attack used (like increasing the amount of burn applied to an enemy if she’s in offensive stance).

Each character has their own skill trees, gaining skill points each time they level up; with the most powerful skills costing up to 10 skill points, and not being available until previous skills are unlocked. The characters’ skills build on each other, too, so you’ve got to pay attention to ensure your skills mesh together well if you want to be able to do the strongest attacks.

Like, it’s wise to use a couple skills in conjunction in order to get Maelle into her Virtuose Stance. That 200% damage increase is no joke. There are several characters you’ll meet along your journey, and each one has a new mechanic to explore, and I’ve been having a ton of fun doing so.

Weapons

On top of their individual moves and skills, there are a bunch of weapons that can be found for each Expiditioner that really enhances their abilities. Keeping with the examples above, Lune uses a floating weapon with 4 spots for her stains. Each weapon is named, but I don’t see anywhere that says what the weapon itself is called (if you know, let me know over on Threads!)

You may find one that will generate a random stain at the beginning of her turn, allowing her to enhance her attacks that much sooner. Or one that will decrease the amount of AP needed for certain skills, allowing her to cast them more frequently. Weapons level up as well, and each one has 3 benefits which unlock at levels 4, 10, and 20.

Along with Skills, The weapons themselves are also elemental, and the enemies have various reactions to different elements. There are certainly weaknesses — like a fire enemy taking extra damage from an ice attack — but that’s not all.

There’s also resistance, where the enemy takes less damage from the attack; nullified, where the enemy takes no damage from the attack; and absorb, where the enemy actually gains health from the attack. It’s definitely something you should pay attention to, it can be frustrating loading up one of your strongest attacks only for the enemy to gain health back when you execute it.

Pictos & Luminas

I’ve mentioned them a couple of times now, but haven’t really delved into them. Pictos are essentially items that grant passive effects to whichever expeditioner has them equipped — each one can only be equipped to one character at a time.

They may grant you more AP at the beginning of your turn, apply burn on free aim shots, make you resistant to certain debuffs, heal you when attacking, and lots lots more. There are tons of them to find, and each time I think I’ve found the highest level/most beneficial Picto, I end up finding another, better one. 60+ hours in and I’m still finding new exciting Pictos.

Luminas give the effects of the Pictos, but without having to be equipped. Luminas can be freely enabled on all characters with no regard as to whether or not another character has it. In order to get the effects of a Picto as a Lumina, you simply have to win 4 battles with the Picto equipped. The only caveat here is that they have to have enough Lumina Points.

Each character will naturally gain Lumina Points as you progress through the game; and you’ll also find “Colour of Lumina” out in the world, which you can use to manually increase a characters Lumina Points. Personally, I chose to evenly distribute my Lumnia Points across all Expeditioners, but I definitely can see a scenario where you put all of them into one character and make them, just, bananas strong. Maybe I’ll give that a shot in NG+.

No Armory Here, Unfortunately

A pretty gaping oversight with all of this is the fact that they don’t have a way to save builds or loadouts. It can be pretty disappointing to have a great setup, but want to try something else, and having no way to quickly change back. Or, given the elemental aspects, you may want to save a specific “fire” or “ice” build in order to target particular weaknesses. But alas, you’re not able to do that here. Hopefully, they fix that with an update.

Attributes

In addition to earning Skill Points when you level up, you also earn Attribute points. These are used to increase your base stats, of which there’s 5:

• Health – How large your health bar is
• Attack Power – How hard your attacks hit
• Speed – Chance to attack more often
• Defense – The game says this is a resistance to attacks, but I’m not 100% sure how it actually comes into play or how it differs from Health
• Luck – Crit chance

You’re able to apply your attribute points to these relatively freely, except they don’t always increase the the stat they’re coordinated with. Sometimes increasing Luck will increase your Speed instead of Crit chance, or increasing Defense will increase Attack Power.

You kind of get used to the pattern, but it was somewhat frustrating when I was specifically trying not to increase one characters speed and it would increase anyway.

All in all, though, between the Skills, Weapons, and Pictos/Luminas, I’ve been having a blast mix-and-matching different combinations; and trying to figure out how to make each Expeditioners’ skills work in tandem with one another in order to make the strongest team possible.

The Continent

This next part you don’t encounter until several hours into the game, and I was quite surprised when I found out. I wouldn’t call it a major spoiler, but it did give me a “holy shit” moment where I realized the game is a lot different than my original impression.

The world of Expedition 33 is beautiful, though I wish I could get 60fps in “Graphics” mode. The atmosphere is a lot more flat in “Performance” mode, but the frames are necessary for those smooth dodges and parries.

I went in with zero expectation, and as I played through it seemed like it would be a rather straight-forward, linear game; with some side areas to explore. But I was way off. After a while, though, you’ll leave the first area and you’ll find yourself on “The Continent”.

Here, the view is much more zoomed out (think Diablo), and you’re kind of moving across the world — between areas — rather than within it. There’s definitely still secrets to find “on” The Continent. And, while they don’t pursue you, there’s enemies here as well (in fact, some of the strongest ones).

But when you get to a new area you want to explore, you “enter” it, the perspective zooms back in, enemies pursue you, and you’re now “in” the area. It’s kind of hard to explain textually, check this out:

Side Areas

I played through the entire storyline, and realized I experienced only about half of the game. I did a decent amount of exploring, but kept coming across areas that were way too strong — I figured either I’d have a reason to revisit those areas later, or they were designed to be explored in New Game+.

Before I committed to NG+, though, I did some digging. It turns out that the enemies scale as well, so they likely are meant to be explored within a single playthrough. And a way to reveal hidden items and areas doesn’t carry over; which, again, gave me pause in restarting.

Going back and exploring the areas has been a blast, though. I’m loving the Gestral beaches, struggling to beat the minigames and complete the platforming sections. It’s been unreal unearthing unique universes (like the underwater world that’s not exactly under water). And finding hidden enemies has been great. I can almost predict where I’m going to see a mime now.

Powerful Enemies dot the continent

And a lot, as a level 60+ and having beat the story, I’m still struggling with. My initial plan was to do the story restart with all of my upgrades. But slowly it’s become to explore the world on this playthrough, get as strong as I can, and see if I can finally take down, hell, Sprong for starters.

The scale of the enemies can be incredible, too. With some of them being mountain-sized monsters towering over you. When the battle starts, though, the tend to shrink some to a more “manageable” size. It’s still pretty amazing sometimes feeling bug-sized when fighting these beasts.

While life on The Continent is bleak, not everything is out to kill you

There are several Gestrals around the world, largely acting as merchants, that you can interact with and buy powerful items from. They also love a good fight, so defeat them in a battle and you can unlock the ability to buy something even better.

They also offer welcome reprieves from nigh endless battles, with the aforementioned Gestral Beaches. Instead of a fight, these areas have challenges; like a parrying challenge to test your timing and reflexes, or even an obstacle course. One may even tag along.

That said…

Given the size of the world, and the various side areas, there’s very little in the way of a map. You really have to rely on your memory trying to explore an entire area. There’s not even a checklist to show whether or not you’ve completed/found everything in an area. It’s quite frustrating.

I spent a ton of time running around the [frozen area], backtracking a couple of times ensuring I found everything. One of the friendly Grandis in Monoco Station needed a [frozen flame?] to “increase my defense”, and I wanted that done. I couldn’t find anything new, so I figured I found the item; I just needed to go and talk to the big guy.

When I did, though, I hadn’t found the item yet. I looked it up an discovered an area I could access by taking the handholds in a different direction that what was obvious. Which is fine, but it might literally be the only place in the game where the handholds fork, so it’s not like it’s something I was looking out for. And without a checklist or anything, it felt like a waste of time having to go back and forth to figure it out.

Tomorrow Comes

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know these characters and figure out just what exactly is going on in the world. Even sitting around the campsite, chatting with the characters, and the stories and secrets that are revealed within, has been a pleasurable experience. Don’t sleep on it, you never know what you might be missing out on.

Overall, though, I can see why this won so many game of the year awards. I’m approaching my 70th hour, and have no plans of stopping soon. The Dark Matter grind can wait.

Thanks for reading! If there’s enough interest, maybe I’ll stream some NG+ gameplay or something in the future. Let me know over on Threads or on YouTube if that’s something you might be interested in. And don’t forget to check back often for more awesome gaming content!

The post Expedition 33 | No Frida Kahlo appeared first on I Talk Games.

I also enjoyed the free-drive events — like the “speed traps” where you have to drive past particular points on the map above a certain speed (each one is different) — that you can simply do while heading toward your next actual mission or challenge. And I remember really enjoying a dirt race where I had to bomb down a huge hill. It was a lot of fun.

I’ve mentioned it before, but my game backlog is incredible; so I never got into the second The Crew game. I even remember hearing a bit about it and not being super excited, so I didn’t go out of my way to play it. Recently, though, with the release of all those Ubisoft games on GamePass, it was at my fingertips.

I hadn’t played a street racing game or customized a car in a while (outside of Car Mechanic Simulator), so I decided to dive in and see what I was missing; and to get an idea of if Motorfest would be worth buying.

A Fast and Furious-ian Turn

Right off the bat this game is different. Instead of just a couple different racing types, and maybe going off the road sometimes — you’re able to go entirely offroad here. Planes, boats, and hovercraft make an appearance alongside the fastest road-legal cars in the world. On top of that, you’re driving open-wheel formula-style cars, dirt bikes, and even monster trucks. It’s kind of wild how much you can do.

And It’s not just racing, either. There’s a bunch of stunt challenges across the different vehicles — in planes you do loops, rolls, and fly low to the ground to earn a high score. With dirt bikes and monster trucks you can do flips, spins, and conquer obstacle courses to get points. Even your regular street car has stunt challenges where your goal is to hit high speeds, narrowly avoid other cars, and find some sweet lines over buildings and construction sites.

Literal skate parks with half-pipes, jumps, and even loops to drive around make an appearance here, too. Some of the monster truck and dirt bike challenges have you trying to rack up high scores X-Games style.

There’s also drift challenges and time trials (though those are essentially races), and the free mode events from the first game are brought back. In 2 though, these aren’t just for your car anymore. There’s speed traps for boats, low-flying challenges for planes, and even slalom challenges that earn you points for passing posts on the correct side.

My Favorite?

I’ve been especially enjoying plane races. I was a bit disappointed to see that I wasn’t actually racing against other planes; but those disappointments went away when I started playing it. You’ve got to fly around and in-between various gates, which act as the checkpoints. But if you’re not facing the correct direction, or you’re too high or too low, you’ll add seconds to your final time. Flying through with perfect orientation will remove seconds from your final time. It’s incredibly challenging and I’ve been loving it.

They’re usually lapped races, too, so at the end of one line, you have to do a half-loop and turn to up-right yourself quickly so that you’re flying in the opposite direction, and in the correct orientation to not get penalized. I’m definitely going to spend more time rocking those challenges. And others. When I inevitably get a bit bored (or frustrated) with the plane races, there’s a plethora of other options to keep me engaged.

The map, like the first game, is a “representation” of the whole United States. And while I definitely appreciate the effort, I have mixed feelings about the execution. On the one hand, it’s weird driving around and zooming in on areas that you know IRL, and having them be quite different. And the scale just makes everything feel off.

I can’t think of another time I flew inverted through the St. Louis arch, or sprinted a speedboat around the Statue of Liberty. Every once-in-a-while you’re able to interact with real locations in unique ways, and when that happens, I am glad they attempted to recreate a real place.

No More 510s

There isn’t a storyline, really, like in the previous game. There are people who talk to you before races a bit. And some challenges have some additional context attached (like winning a car for Latrell), but the focus is really just on becoming a great racer in all disciplines. Why? Well, because it’s fun and you’re an adrenaline junky.

That’s really it. You’ve been trying to get your name out there in the world of extreme racing and stunting with little success. But now you’ve joined this “Live Xtrem Series”, which is dedicated to showcasing the talents of “newcomers”; with the best given the opportunity to challenge the established drivers in the world. It’s your shot to become noticed, and to become the top dog across all disciplines.

The Challenges

The different challenge types — which they call “disciplines” — are categorized into what they call “Families”. The “Families” are Street, Freestyle, Pro, and Off-Road; with later Disciplines unlocking once you’ve reached certain levels of fame. For the very first Discipline in each Family, though, you’re simply given the vehicle needed. I mean, you have to win a race or challenge to get it, but still. It’s not like you only start with some old clunker you had since high school and you’re going to slowly build from there. It’s kind of like “Welp, here’s a plane”.

It wasn’t just that, though. Each new race type, for the most part, was fresh and really enjoyable. Drag racing wasn’t simply holding the “go” button. You’ve got to burn your engine beforehand, and then time your launch and shifts to maximize your speed. I was hesitant to go for the second type of boat race, because I didn’t know how it could be much different. But they don’t feel the same at all, and I already described how much I liked the plane races.

I also discovered some “Stories” that you can read with steps to retrace. There are a bunch of them with various numbers of steps, giving you pretty good rewards if you complete them all. The 12-step stories will get you a new vehicle with above-average base stats. And the 3-step ones will get you a pretty significant amount of “Bucks”. There’s are stories with steps in-between 3 and 12 as well that will get you something like apparel or a mystery item, too.

GeoGuessr Simulator

For each one, you’re shown an image of a starting spot somewhere on the map that you have to get to however you want/can. From there, you’ve got to travel to each next spot using the correct vehicle or type. I’ve done about 6, and so far, they’ve all required using land vehicles. The next spots, like the first, are images of locations that you have to find. Fortunately, though, the game tells you what city or area the location is in, so you don’t have to fully geo-locate every spot yourself.

The “story” aspect come in with the fact that along with each location’s picture, you’re told part of a, well, story; with the rewards corresponding to the tale. Sometimes, you’re following someone’s solo trek through the mountains. In others, you might recreate the steps of some car thieves. You might even learn how someone won the lottery. They’re pretty interesting, the rewards are worth it, and it gives you a reason to spend time cruising around this version of the US.

Also, don’t try to skimp on any of the steps. Once, I tried switching to a plane, flying to the next location, and switching back to a car. But when I got there, I wasn’t able to “validate the story step”, and “use valid vehicle” on the left was still grayed out. So, simply staying in your car and driving seems to be the best bet.

You are able to switch vehicles within the type, though, so that’s nice. I got tired of zig-zagging up a mountain, so I switched to my monster truck and just drove straight to the location. Both were land vehicles, so that worked with no problem.

On top of all that, there’s picture challenges (where you have to take a picture of a landmark or animal or something), community races (where other players have created events — some of these are several hours long…), “Drivers Wanted” (where you have to “deliver” something for someone — essentially just driving from point A to point B), Seasonal events, and more. Like I said earlier, there’s a ridiculous amount of stuff packed into this game. I’d be interested in seeing anybody who’s 100%-ed it.

Calling Chip Foose

Of course, no racing game would be complete without the ability to upgrade and customize your vehicles. With such a vast amount of vehicles, The Crew 2 seems to handle it pretty well.

Performance upgrades are largely acquired by winning races or challenges — You’ll get a random assortment each time you’re successful. As your fame increases you can get some parts at various milestones, and there’s also “Live Rewards”, which just spawn in the world (you have to find them by playing a game of “warmer-colder” with a ping on your radar that increases in frequency as you get closer to the box). But for the most part, you’ll be getting your performance parts from races and challenges.

That also means you don’t have to spend your “Bucks” purchasing parts, so the sole focus of those can be for buying new vehicles; which is nice.

The parts are type-specific, not car-specific, too. So all of the “Street Racing ” cars can interchange parts with each other, while all of the “Hypercars” also can. But you can’t swap parts between a “Street Racing” car and “Hypercar”. Same with stunt planes, racing planes, off road cars, dirt-track cars, etc. So there seems to be no reason, really, not to put the best parts on each of your favorite vehicles. And in case you want to quickly put the highest-rated part on your car without really thinking about it, each one has a big number indicating it’s level.

And if you want more

If you do want to dial in your tuning, though, you’re able to see specifically how each part will change various stats on your car. And some parts may perform differently depending on other parts you have equipped. And if you really want to fine-tune your engine, transmission, and suspension, there’s a detailed slider you can access so your car can drive exactly how you want it to.

On top of the tuning, some parts also come with affixes that give you different bonuses as you race. They may increase the recovery rate of your boost while you drift or jump, or maybe they’ll increase your drafting distance or speed when being drafted. Some of them increase the amount of Bucks you gain or increase the chances of getting better loot when you win races. And really powerful combinations can be made with set bonuses.

I’m going to be real. I haven’t played enough to gain a set bonus and I’m not sure I’m going to. I would love to get there, but the grind is just a bit too daunting with my backlog — and with this not being the most recent iteration of the game. Check out this video for more on legendary set bonuses.

Each vehicle has cosmetic upgrades, too, but you’re not necessarily able to change everything on all of them. Some will only allow you to change one or two parts, while others offer a lot more customization. For examples, a few of the cars will only let you change the spoiler and maybe the wheels; while others will let you change the hood, put on a whole body kit on the front back and sides, and more, along with changing the wheels and spoiler.

Some have interior customization too, which is pretty cool. If available, there’s a few preset options to choose from, and you can change the colors. It’s similar to the options you’d get in real life if you were to go to a manufacturers website and use their car builder. I realize I spend very little time looking at the inside of my cars, but I still like to know that they look nice.

Colors & Liveries

Even though sometimes the physical attributes can’t be changed, each vehicle’s color can be. And liveries can be applied as well. There are a few generic liveries that the game provides, but I’m not a huge fan of any of them. I’m more of a subtle guy, so the huge tiger or dragon on the side of my car is rarely my thing.

On top of the pre-set ones, though, you’re also able to create your own. If you’ve ever played Forza’s livery creator, this will feel familiar. You’re given a few different banks of shapes in various categories — like “primitive” shapes, patterns (including tire-tread patterns), company logos, and even numbers and letters — and you’re able to place them essentially however you’d like on the car. Each one placed creates It’s own layer, and you can manipulate each shape however you see fit. If you’re creative enough, you can probably make anything you want as a livery.

And if your creative juices aren’t flowing at the time, you can browse through community-made liveries as well. There’s an option to upload your liveries, and browse through the ones that other people have made to see if anything fits what you’re looking for. I often want to get straight to racing, and don’t always want to spend a ton of time creating the perfect livery; so I’ve used the community option several times.

What else could we possibly talk about?

Icon points, for one. There’s 4 fame levels you have to reach in order to unlock each race type, but once you become a “Star” it doesn’t stop there. If you continue to increase your fame, you’ll eventually become an “Icon” earning Icon Points, adding a bit of an RPG element to The Crew 2. These points are across three categories — Comfort, Vehicle, and Gameplay — and they’re essentially just more bonuses to help you drive faster and earn more.

• Comfort will allow you to increase the amount of Bucks or the quality of loot you receive from completing challenges; or improve the strength, length, and recovery time of your “Nitro”.
• The Vehicle category will increase your vehicles’ strength, so they can take (and give) more damage before breaking, increase the amount of drag you receive from being behind a car, or increase the distance away from a leading car that “drafting” will start for example.
• And under Gameplay, you’ll find abilities that will increase the amount of points you receive from drifting and stunting in planes, making those challenges easier. Some of the “world records” for drag races are like .3 seconds, and if that wasn’t achieved by a glitch, Icon Points are probably how.

Also, Every 10 subsequent levels of fame will get you a performance part for your car, based on whichever type you have equipped at the time, and each 100 will get you a brand new car. With the top level – 1000 (though you can earn performance parts beyond this) – getting you a Bugatti Chiron Carbon.

You’re also able to customize the appearance of your character, kind of, so you’re not just a generic body in a helmet. When you first start you choose your “rising star” — your character — and as you play you can unlock additional cosmetics to equip onto them. There are times where your character is outside of a vehicle walking around, so it’s not completely useless.

Unfortunately, you always have to go to your “home” to change, which can be inconvenient. I don’t feel like I should have to fast travel all the way there just to stand at one spot to change clothes — especially when I can do all of my car customizations simply from the pause menu.

On the other hand, though, the house is super dope, so I guess I don’t really mind spending time there. The wrap-around balcony is amazing and I’d spend a ton of time in that hangar playing pool and watching sports.

Anything Else?

Honestly, there’s still a couple more things that jumped out while finalizing this post that I didn’t get to. But I think it’ll be more fun to discover some of those things on your own. The Crew 2 is an absolute massive game chock-full of things to do.

Sometimes that makes it feel a bit hollow; but with the variety of vehicles and race/challenge types, the customization options, the stories that net you some great rewards, and the lure of upgrading to a new million-dollar hypercar, there are plenty of reasons to keep coming back.

But at the same time, once you’ve done everything once or twice, I can see those reasons being not quite enough to sustain you.

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you thought about The Crew 2, and send me pictures of your custom cars. Be sure to come back next week for more content, and in the meantime, I think I’m going to try to grind for that Bugatti!

The post The Crew 2 — Qantity With Some Quality appeared first on I Talk Games.

Pulling off crazier and crazier tricks, and stringing together impossible combos was insane amounts of fun. And being able to create your own skate park, making ridiculous structures to gap over — or more likely, slam in to (come on, pungee pits?!?) — was incredible. I devoured every one.

I was excited to find out that a new skate. was coming soon, and downloaded it as soon as I could. I was kind of getting tired of sweating in Silksong — so I decided to have a chill skate session and see how the new game felt. Read on to find out my thoughts.

Kick, Push, Coast

If you haven’t played SKATE, you may not know what I mean when I talk about the trick stick. In, say, THPS, in order to do your flip tricks — kickflips, heelflips, shuvits etc. — you’d press a direction on the D-Pad and press (on Xbox) ‘X’. For tricks that involve grabbing the board, it’s a direction and ‘B’. Grinds were ‘Y’ and Ollieing was a simple press of ‘A’.

In skate, though, you have to physically move the right stick in a specific way in order to pull off your tricks. Hold the right stick down and push it straight up to ollie; from down push it up and slightly right in order to kickflip, and slightly left to heelflip; or do a half rotation to do a shuvit, and so on and so forth.

There are hundreds of tricks, and they can get pretty complicated. But they’re all done with manipulating the right stick in various ways.

When doing grabs, each trigger corresponds to each one of your character’s arms. You can grab the board with either your right hand using the right trigger, left hand with the left trigger. You can also hold both triggers and hold on to the board with both hands (which isn’t a trick, really, and looks kind of silly in the air. If you do it on the ground, though, you can also hold ‘X’ + ‘A’ to luge around the city).

You can modify your grabs by pointing the stick in the direction you want to shift the board, too. And pull off various types of grinds, again, by pushing or rotating the right stick in different directions before you land on a rail.

There’s no grind button here, either. You simply approach the rail and time your jumps and tricks so that you land on whatever it is you’re trying to grind. And even though I appreciate the realism, this can be infuriating and make me miss the simple button press.

More often than not, it seems, you miss the grind. By not getting high enough, getting too high, jumping too early or too late, or coming in at just slightly the wrong angle you’ll either run into the thing you’re trying to grind, or miss it altogether. When one of the goals is to accomplish a certain number of grinds without falling — if you’re a bit of a completionist like me — you’ll be tearing your hair out trying to finish those challenges.

Skatin’ Ain’t Easy

The realism of using the stick to do your tricks can be a bit of a double-edged sword. It feels more “authentic”, but definitely makes things more difficult. There are fairly subtle differences between down, and down-right; so it takes a bit of practice to really dial it in. Also, by having one input correlate to multiple actions within the game, you often end up doing the wrong thing.

Since rotating the right stick is both flip tricks and grinds, you may do one when you want to do that other; frequently flinging flip tricks — or delayed flip tricks — in place of the grind you’re trying to do. This will usually cause you to fall, and depending on the challenge, to start all over again.

The different tricks — especially grinds — also need you to be oriented in the right direction for them to be pulled off properly. The controls shown are based on traveling straight in your natural stance. So if you’re trying to pull off a trick that’s required for the challenge, the input shown on the left* may not be correct given your position.

It’s not only ollying onto rails that seems somewhat spotty. Often, I feel like I’m landing tricks but my character will stumble off of his board. It’s not so much that it makes the game unplayable. But it can be pretty frustrating — especially in challenges with 4 or 5 goals that you have to get without falling. I’ve got to admit, though, that this seems to have gotten better with the last couple updates.

Missions, Challenges, & Goals

The gameplay is mixed between completing challenges (while trying to accomplish goals at the same time) and missions. The missions are essentially a glorified tutorial, but I’ll get to those later. Challenges are where you’ll spend the most time and they come in a few varieties.

There’s Line challenges, where you have to skate a line collecting bearings along the way. Own the Spot challenges require you to pull off a trick combo onto and over obstacles and various structures. Session challenges, where you have to pull off a several tricks within an area and certain amount of time. And Stunt challenges.

Within each challenge, there are also a number of goals that need to be completed in order to “shut down” the challenge. Goals will be things like: complete 6 grinds, manual for 10 meters, do 4 flip tricks, and more. Often, having to do all of them in one go without falling. So you’re tasked with doing those things, while at the same time following the line & collecting bearings, or tricking on an obstacle.

Each goal completed gives experience points and San Van Bucks, too, so you don’t have to complete every goal in order to get something for the challenge. but you’ve got to do them all to “Shut it Down”.

While the skating is more realistic, the opportunities for outrageousness are still plenty. You’re able to get off of your board and can parkour around the city to reach high places. There’s tons of ramps and drop-ins on top of buildings allowing you to still get some crazy air. You just have to work a bit harder for it.

And with the Stunt challenges, this feels a bit like a cross between the realism of the original Skate and the ridiculousness of THPS. Stunts typically don’t require you to use your board at all — you’re tasked with parachute-free skydiving around buildings and through small gaps, slamming into specific targets in order to complete the goals.

And adding even more craziness (and difficulty) sometimes they do require your board. You’ll have to abandon it in the air, “skydive” to another place, get back on your board, riding your ridiculous momentum off of another ramp, “skydive” to yet another location, and land in a dumpster or something. Fortunately, you’re always able to summon your board like Kratos’s Leviathan axe.

It can be incredibly frustrating with the game feeling a bit inconsistent with accurate landings. But it’s stupid fun and feels that much better when you finally pull the stunt off. These challenges, honestly, might be my favorite.

They remind me of past extreme sports games — I remember a Dave Mirra BMX game where there were modes where the goal was to inflict as much pain on your character as you could. You’d have to get a ton of speed and air, then run into something to send your body flying. It was absurd. While the challenges in skate. aren’t quite that, I still get those vibes. And I’ve been enjoying free-falling and gliding around the city pulling off insane stunts.

Oh, and don’t worry about your character getting hurt doing these challenges, or simply fumbling a trick. there’s a startup that makes a product called “ImpervaTEK”, that apparently makes you impervious to pain. It’s how you’re able to do these crazy stunts, slamming into the ground with abandon. Don’t worry how it works, though. “It’s science”.

Impressing “The Locs”

The invention of ImpervaTEK made skating more accessible than ever, and now a group of them are trying to bring the skating scene back to San Vansterdam — the city the game takes place in. The “San Van Locs” and DaK’s (Do a Kickflip’s) offer increased status and rewards for impressing them by completing challenges. This is mostly expressed through a couple people — and your AI assistant VEE — who talk to you when you start these challenges (and sometimes when just skating around… VEE is kind of annoying and condescending).

The “missions” though, just strike me as weird. They seem less about skate. and skating, and more about gameplay mechanics. And they’re awfully redundant. There’s an entire opening “training” island before you get to the main city that shows you how to move, ollie, trick, and grind. But then most of the missions are.. showing you how to ollie, trick, and grind.

But then, after having complete like 140 goals in order to unlock this mission, there’s an explainer on how to reach higher multipliers? Thanks!

IDK what the game expected here. Did they want you to go around only doing the first goal in each challenge, and only attempt harder ones once the “mission” was complete? I don’t even know if there’s enough challenges on the map for that to be possible.

It seems weird and arbitrary, and almost like the game was piecemealed together — like the people who made the challenges weren’t allowed to interact with the people who made the “story”. And like the people who designed the physics couldn’t interact with the people who designed the world.

Quick Restart

A welcome return is the session marker feature. This allows you to place a return spot that you can quickly get back to if you don’t quite do what you’re trying to do. You can hold ‘Up’ on the D-Pad wherever you’re standing to place the marker. Then by simply tapping ‘Up’, you’ll return to that spot.

Whenever you start a new challenge, the session marker sets itself to where the challenge starts automatically. You don’t actually have to do it.

Except sometimes. Every once-in-a-while, before you start a mission or challenge you are prompted to set a session marker. It’s not automatic in those scenarios. And I haven’t seen any real pattern as to when they do and when they don’t. It’s seemingly random, which is weird.

It is nice that the game largely sets the markers for you, though. Otherwise, you might hit ‘Up’ and get teleported to your previous spot, which would be annoying. Fortunately in this game, if you do find yourself at the wrong session marker, you can quickly tap ‘Up’ again and return to the spot you just were. It’s effectively an “undo”, and it’s very welcome.

But if you want to, just for shits and giggles outside of a challenge, pull off something ridiculous like that, the session markers definitely come in handy.

Lootboxes and Premium Passes

Character customization is rather lacking here. There’s a few different facial styles and skin tones, but there’s not a lot of dialing in. Seemingly, a lot of emphasis in this game is going to be on cosmetics. Which leads to my next point.

Yep, lootboxes. This is definitely on the “freemium” model. Your efforts of tricking around the city are rewarded with San Van Bucks, which can be spent on the various loot boxes in the game. Doing so also increases your rank in the various neighborhoods of the city; and as you increase your level in each neighborhood, you can unlock additional boxes to open.

And, naturally, if you want to spend your real world hard-earned actual dollars to open boxes faster, obviously the option is here. This is Ubisoft we’re talking about. I give it less than a year before we see Batman and Rumi throwing aerials and varials.

Each box contains around 10 – 15 items, and it’s random which item you’ll get when you open the box. So, yes, to acquire every item available, you have to grind (pun intended) for Bucks in order to open each box 10 – 15 times.

The items can be a sticker you can put on your board, a clothing item, and emote, a board design, grip-tape pattern and more. And, given the freemium model, there’s daily, weekly, and seasonal challenges that will give you yet another currency.

This on is Tix and there are tiers of rewards these can be spent on. The next tiers unlock as you earn more Tix and complete seasonal challenges. Unlike the lootboxes, you’re actually selecting the item you want to unlock here. Unfortunately, though, a lot of the more fun items are locked behind the battlepass skate.pass.

I’ve also got to mention that they’re doing holiday themed seasonal challenges, too. Just prior to posting this, there was a big update and the parks are Halloween themed, and there’s different challenges and Halloween-exclusive unlockables. I’m not mad at it, and am kind of looking forward to what they do in the future.

Despite the Lootboxes…

Fortunately if you like skating (and if they can clean up some of the inconsistencies with landing and grinding) there’s a lot of actual fun to be had here. Pulling off awesome trick combos and lines is extremely fun and satisfying.

I don’t love the freemium model, and the “story” isn’t actually much of one. But I’m going to continue shredding and gliding around San Vansterdam. I’m still hooked.

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you thought about skate, and if there’s any combos I should attempt. And stay tuned to my YouTube for clips — I could definitely see myself playing this for a while.

The post skate. | Office Building Lobbies Aren’t Safe Anymore appeared first on I Talk Games.

We happened upon Real Civil Engineer playing this game one day, though. And to my surprise, she actually seemed interested. We were both ready for something new, so we downloaded it and dove in.

Sometimes I don’t know why I do a spoiler disclaimer. Like, how could there not be spoilers about the game in a post about the game? Anyway, proceed with caution!

The storyline of Grounded 2 has you playing as one of four teens who have somehow been shrunken down to the size of a Nickel, a-la Honey I Shrunk the Kids, or Downsizing. Technically, this is the second time these kids have been shrunk down (this is Grounded 2).

A Quick Recap

Apparently in the first game, the kids were able to re-grow themselves with the help of a robot named BURG.L. At the beginning of this game (from what I can gather) the scientist who shrunk you down is having a meltdown over being thwarted, and is taking it out on said Robot. The kids want to save their friend, though, so they’ve come to the park to stop the scientist when an explosion happens. And once again, they’ve woken up small.

Since being shrunken the first time, a completely different group of people have taken over the corporation responsible for shrinking. You’re able to communicate with the new Director/CEO, who seems just as confused as you are about what happened and why you’re shrunk again.

There’s also a mysterious stranger who’s taunting you (and periodically sending bugs to attack you), and you need to figure out her role in all of this. So far, I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun exploring this park as a miniaturized person, climbing picnic tables like they’re mountains, and struggling to kill bugs I’d usually just smush with a shoe.

So, What are We Actually Doing?

Grounded 2 is an adventure survival game with resource-harvesting, crafting, inventory management, progressive unlocks etc. Dandelions and blades of grass are towering over you like trees, and you chop them down in order to obtain larger construction materials like planks and logs. Tiny “pebblets” (pieces of stone smaller than pebbles), sprigs (pre-grown grass), and acorns (acorns) act as smaller construction material. They’re also used for crafting your first weapons, pieces of armor, and spots needed to make more advanced items (like workbenches and cooking stations).

Food and water is important, too. There are weevils and aphids that you can cook to eat — and some mushrooms you can grab in a pinch. And since you’re so small, a simple dewdrop on the tip of a blade of grass is all that’s necessary to quench your thirst for the day. It’s honestly pretty adorable (initially).

Enemies, naturally, take the form of bugs; and at this size, they might as well be dinosaurs. Borderline-microscopic critters (like the aforementioned aphids) are the size of small kittens, and ants are the size of Big Cats. And those are just the first few foes you’ll encounter.

Ladybugs, butterflies, bees, and of course spiders, and roaches (and more) all make an appearance. There is an arachnophobia slider in the settings to make spiders less triggering. I’m not sure how it changes them, though, I left my slider at “maximum spider”.

Of course, as you progress through the game and create better items everything gets slightly easier to manage. Only slightly, though, because, frankly, this game is pretty tough. And I’m playing on the easiest difficulty. I thought this game was going to be a mild, casual game to play with my girlfriend; but it’s been giving me a real challenge so far.

Cache-Collecting, Controlling Character, & Combat

The controls are relatively simple, but they’ve still managed to provide quite a challenge. You’re given an “Omni-tool” that can turn into a hammer, axe, shovel, or repair tool as needed. Simply holding the “Omni-tool” button (‘X’ by default on Xbox) near the item you’re trying to gather will gather that item.

You don’t have to switch, say, from a hammer after destroying a rock to the axe in order to chop down a tree. You just hold the button and it works. And there’s no wear on the Omni-tool, so you don’t have to worry about it breaking or having to repair or create a new one later. So that’s nice.

Movement

Traversing the world is largely on foot, and unfortunately, there’s no double-jump. Within the “mutations” menu, there’s a hidden upgrade under “Exploration”, which suggests there will be another way to move around the world in the future; but so far, I haven’t found out what it is yet*.

That said, I found myself not using my ant all that often. Primarily because of the Mutations you can apply to your character (more on those later). One of the mutations will increase the rate that your stamina recovers; but in order to unlock it (and it’s subsequent levels which improve the mutation), you have to deplete your stamina a bunch of times. I wanted to make sure I got the top level of that, so I ran pretty much everywhere; and essentially just got used to it.

Also, the ants combat assistance continues after your character dies. While you’re respawning and figuring out how to get back to your stuff, your ant is still fighting the enemy that killed you; and will often die itself doing so. You can call your ant to you as soon as you respawn, but you have to actually think to do that — which you won’t know to do at first. At least we didn’t, assuming our ants would continue to follow us like it did everywhere else (to an almost annoying point).

When your ant dies, there is a cooldown, seemingly, until you can call your ant again. And I have seen them come back after dying. But more often than not, we’ve looked up and are missing our ant. It’s not following us like it usually does, it doesn’t come when called, and when we open the companion menu, there’s no ants to be found.

Granted there is an anthill that can be built that we haven’t used yet. And that may facilitate the respawning of ants. But if that were the case, I’d love to see some acknowledgement of that. Say, a pop-up or something after the ant dies that says “build an anthill to bring your ant back” or something.

It’s the most obvious after loading back in to the game — either starting up a new session, or simply because the game crashed (which it does fairly often). Maybe there’s an issue where your ant disappears if the game quits or is closed before the cooldown is up. I’m not sure what the culprit is, but we’re each on our third ant. Maybe there’s something we’re missing but it just seems buggy (pun intended).

Combat

I mentioned earlier that this game is surprisingly tough, and combat is one of the reasons why. Fighting consists of pressing the right trigger to attack, the left trigger to block, and ‘B’ (on Xbox) to dodge. You can also do a perfect block (parry) by hitting the trigger at the exact moment they hit you. It’s relatively simplistic, but it’s anything but easy.

The window of opportunity to perfect block is larger than a lot of games that I’ve played; and the enemies attack patterns aren’t incredibly complicated. But there’s still times where blocking feels muddy, and you end up getting hit when you were sure you timed the perfect block correctly.

Even the initial bugs you come across, like ants, provide a decent challenge — they take a lot of hits to kill, and they do a decent amount of damage. I ran an archer build for a while and oftentimes simply dodging just didn’t cut it.

The bigger-stronger bugs are even more bullet-spongey, and some even have status effects like Venom or Sizzle. That’s not to even mention the damn stink bugs that release a gas cloud that damages you. You can make a gas mask that negates the effect of the bug’s cloud — but you need to kill a stink bug in order to make it. Kind of a catch-22.

Enemies also pretty relentless. There were several occasions I accidentally came across an aforementioned stinkbug or something, but knew I didn’t want to fight it. So I ran. But despite running well outside of where I found them, and seemingly running for a while (though it’s not like I timed it), I’d turn around and they’d still be there. You can get away. It’s possible. But make sure to keep running, and hope your health isn’t already low in the initial encounter — they’ll probably hit you once or twice before you’re far enough away.

Health

Don’t expect to just sit behind a rock for a little while and get back to the action, either. Health doesn’t regenerate, not even outside of combat. And the easiest health item available — Fiber Bandages made out of Plant Fiber and Sap — doesn’t regenerate your health instantly. There’s a sub-bar that slowly increases, and you’ll only get the health if you don’t get hit before it fills up.

There are potions that can be made that will give you more health and have it increase instantly, and some food will also increase health. And with the cooking station you can create meals that gives quite a bit of health and will cause it to regenerate for a short while. But those, of course, take more resources which takes more time to go out and acquire.

Health items and other consumables also only stack to 5 (until you’ve leveled up your Axe and find a pretty rare item, which takes a while). So I’ve really been struggling to balance holding the right amount of health items, and figuring out the most efficient way to create more.

So far, just grabbing the sap and plant fiber and making a few bandages has been the most efficient solution — given that they can be created on the fly and those items are the most readily available — but there’s still a lot of complications.

If you’ve got any status effects on you, you won’t actually gain any health from the wrap because, remember, there’s a sub-bar that increases that stops as soon as you take damage. So if you’re affected, you take damage immediately, and the healing instantly stops. And given the limited stack sizes, you’re not really able to hoard the materials, either.

The carrying-capacity smoothie might be the most efficient drink that can be made. I’ve started using them more and more — they recover a decent amount of health, and do so instantly. They take resources that are slightly more difficult to gather, though, than the wraps. And you can’t simply make them from your crafting menu — you have to make them at a specific Smoothie Station.

Sleep does regenerate health, too, but you can’t sleep whenever you want. The kids have to be “tired enough”. And it doesn’t regenerate all of your health. So health management is definitely an important aspect of this game.

Truthfully, given such small stack sizes, the lack of fast travel, and the complicated nature of finding a lot of the materials needed for health, I have no idea what the developers of the game intend for you to do to survive on long treks through the park.

You essentially have to use half of your inventory slots simply being prepared — needing food, torches, enough health items to survive a few tough encounters, and potentially a backup weapon (so you can both see and fight when necessary) can leave you with very few slots for gathering resources in a hurry.

Maybe I was supposed to make more bases instead of constantly trekking back to the same one. But, man, a lot of times it felt like there were decisions made to simply extend the required playtime arbitrarily.

Getting Stronger

Of course, there are ways to improve your strength and defense, and a surprising amount of playstyles to choose from. It’s actually quite deep. Each type of armor (type being the kind of bug used to make it) corresponds to a different combat style. And there’s three armor slots, so you can equip one of each of the same type of armor; which will give you an additional bonus.

So for example, equipping the Bee Facemask, Bee Shoulder Pads, and Bee Shinguards — which all give the Ranger bonus for archery — you not only get a speed increase when drawing an arrow, but your arrows can also release a pollen cloud that slows enemies.

While I went into the game not expecting much, I was pleasantly (and frustratingly) surprised with the combat. There were times I wanted to throw my controller through the TV, but isn’t that the mark of a solid experience? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that since you play as teenagers, and the graphics are a little on the cartoony side, that this is a simple, casual game. Like I did.

Some Mild Complaints…

An ongoing gripe with this game is inventory management. Resources only stack to 10, and consumables to 5 — and that’s only non-expiring consumables. All food (raw and cooked) can spoil, so they’re each on an individual countdown… Which means they each take up their own slot. Again, there’s no real way to hoard the items you need for long treks.

Granted there are upgrades to increase these amounts, but not by much; and not until several several hours into the game. If you’re the type loot every enemy and hoard every item (like me), well:

And most of them aren’t. Almost all of the weapons use both hands, so, so far, I’ve been running a couple weapons simultaneously.

I wanted to primarily be an archer, but I made sure to keep my spear leveled up because I knew I’d have to use it anytime I needed light at the same time. Even Candy Staves are two-handed, so I’ve been having to keep it up. At this point, spears are essentially my primary playstyle (again).

Hopefully there’s some sort of hip-mounted light source that we can unlock so that I can main pretty much any weapon. But until then, I’m making due.

You Mentioned Planks and Logs Earlier?

Something I’ve always loved in video games is the building and creating aspect. I remember copy and pasting ROSEBUD a hundred times, so I could build a megamansion and furnish it with the most expensive items in The SIMS. I’ve also grown to appreciate earning the ability to build a massive home, too, which is why I was so proud of my Minecraft builds.

Build Mechanics

Rather than needing the items in your inventory (or in storage nearby) to begin the building process; you’re able to put a  “ghost” of the item in the spot you want to place it. Then you’re able to come back and add the materials as you acquire them. It’s nice, because you can get a feel for what you’re trying to do before actually committing. And you’ll be able to see if your idea is even viable before wasting resources.

That said, occasionally I did wish I could build the items instantly. Namely floors and stairs, so I could get higher more easily to build more levels and the roof. Ceilings and roofs need to be supported as well — and you can’t even place the outline if they aren’t (an outline can be supported by another outline, which is good). So shaping substantial structures takes a bit of additional creativity to even plan. And you may find yourself building section-by-section.

I also need to keep experimenting with the building mechanics. I decided to start with building the floor (obviously), but I started with the lowest elevation in the area. So, a lot of the floor pieces ended up, visually, underground. They clipped through in order to attach to the other floor pieces. The ground floor of my house looks like a crawlspace under a trailer. I don’t love it.

I want to try building a new house, this time starting at the highest elevation in the area. But I feel like the house would look like it was floating or cantilevered at that point; which I don’t think I want. The best-case scenario, which I need to figure out, would be Palworld-style where the bottom level creates a “foundation” to the ground, so it’s not just floating, and it makes sense visually. Again, it’s something I need to test. Again, maybe in creative mode.

Time to Buzz Off!

Overall, I’ve had a surprising amount of fun playing Grounded 2. It’s still in Game Preview mode, and it shows in a lot of ways. But running around as a three-inch person, and experiencing this perspective has been incredibly interesting. And despite it’s somewhat cartoonish appearance, it can really give you a challenge (and a scare if bugs already freak you out).

I’ve still got some work to do in order to re-grow myself, and I can’t wait to dive back in. Just don’t ask me to play in VR.

The post Grounded 2 | All The Small Things appeared first on I Talk Games.

So when I heard about a new game by the same creators, that was set in a futuristic world, I was extremely excited. I remember playing the original GTA (the top-down versions) which had multiple factions/gangs, and you had varying levels of reputation with each. If you had high enough reputation, you’d get more missions and other benefits from them.

Spoiler Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily try to spoil anything, but I do give my authentic experience. Sometimes that entails giving details about the story or late-game items you may want to discover for yourself. Proceed with caution

The initial hype had me hooked, hearing about the different backgrounds you can select and how the world was split into areas controlled by different factions — Voodoo Boys, Tyger Claws etc. When those first few bits of information started to come out, I thought back to those early GTA times and thought the relationships with the factions would be a big point.

Here’s to a Never-Ending Backlog!

Regardless of my excitement, I’m still a big proponent of not pre-ordering games. Especially in this day-and-age where we can simply download them. It’s not like you have to sit in line at a store so you can acquire your copy at midnight anymore.

So, I waited until the initial information about the actual game came out before buying it myself (and as we all know it was a doozy). Also, I’m perpetually behind on games, anyway. So I wasn’t exactly ready to play as soon as it came out. Fortunately for me, by the time I played, the vast majority of the kinks had been ironed out.

I will say that I was a bit disappointed in how the gangs and their territories ultimately came in to play. It doesn’t really seem like any of your choices are all that impactful. I think there are a couple specific quests where, if you go one way or the other, the way you’re treated later by some members might change. And I know choices are impactful for personal relationships. But there was definitely no reputation system and nothing seemed to be locked behind being to friendly with one clique over another.

Hell, in my first play-through, I was extremely hesitant to work with or for anyone who seemed like police. I kind of avoided Regina’s gigs and the Cyberpsychos, and didn’t really do of the Assault in Progresses. I was playing as a corpo-turned-criminal, and I didn’t want anyone getting the idea that I might work with cops.

That said, after playing a while, doing a couple, and seeing nothing change; I realized they were inconsequential. It doesn’t really matter. I can do a gig in a Tyger Claw bar, kill everyone in there, then walk through the front door to Clouds like it doesn’t matter.

I suppose there’s one quest — well, Side Job — where you’re somewhat recognized. There’s a food vendor who convinced his sister to leave her gang and take a job with a corp. A couple guys from the gang want to steal his bike in revenge, and if your rep is high enough, they might recognize you and run away.

If you’re becoming a “Night City Legend” though, it would seem that you’d get recognized like that more often, but you don’t. Combined with the lack of meaningful reputation, I don’t ever feel like I’m becoming a Legend. I see how I’m becoming more and more unbeatable; and am taking down groups of enemies without breaking a sweat — but without the recognition it doesn’t give legendary to me.

Enough Complaining

Having just played Watch_Dogs, I leaned into the Netrunner on my initial play-through. I really like the idea of sitting outside of a building, hacking into their cameras, and just taking care of whatever I need to take care of from afar. Makes me feel like the “guy in the chair” but more deadly.

Cyberpunk doesn’t fully let you do that — given a lot of the missions require physically stealing something, uploading software, or rescuing a person. But still, Doing recon and taking out anyone who might be in my way before I even set foot into the building was a lot of fun.

That said, I saw the other options open to someone who wants to vary their playstyle (or have multiple play-throughs) and very quickly had some ideas on what I wanted to do next. It’s taken a few years to get to that point. But with a few big updates (and, obviously, Phantom Liberty) behind us and the upcoming 0.23 release, I thought this was the perfect time to dive back in and try out something new (and see what I’ve been missing since those huge updates dropped).

Even while playing the first time a few years ago, I anticipated doing a female V for my second playthrough, using Sandy and the Mantis Blades. In hindsight, that character might be a bit cliché (I’ve been watching some Cyberpunk YouTube videos, and I realize I basically created Oda), but oh well it sounded fun.

While I see how you can still go through the game without really ever using the weaponized vehicles — and you wouldn’t miss out on much. It’s a nice addition, and they’ve certainly been fun to play around with.

I also don’t remember crafting being as robust as it is — being able to craft weapons and quickhacks & upgrade cyberware. I can’t say I touched the crafting menu once in my first playthrough, but now I often find myself looking through it to see if there’s anything new I can use.

Even after several hours in the new playthrough, I’m still finding new items and upgrades that I can craft (technically I’m kind of on my third playthrough, too, because I’m running a couple characters concurrently; so that helps with keeping crafting fresh)

Early Struggles with New Playstyle

When I started playing, I pretty immediately fell into old habits and wanted to play stealthily. I really like the idea of getting in-and-out of places without the people being any wiser. Nobody knows the thing is missing until they need it and check on it. Real Danny Ocean stuff.

I thought that one of the primary selling points of the Sandevistan was that you’d be too fast to be noticed. In the early-game, though, that wasn’t the case for me. Moving as fast as I’m able, I was still frequently getting seen by cameras and other enemies. And once I inevitably entered combat, my perks felt pointless.

I distinctly remember attempting to dodge a melee enemy, but they still hit me. Sometimes they were far away, but the hit still registered, and others they would just zoom up next to me by the time they were actually going to hit me. It was super frustrating; but in hindsight, I guess hadn’t upgraded anything yet, so it makes sense that higher-level enemies could still hurt me.

I also struggled in the early game with Sandy, given I had no real way to survey my environment or make enemies look away (so I thought, I figured out throwing knives later — oh and I did find the recon grenade as well, but those are ass…).

So in general, there was a lot of trial and error to figuring out this playstyle. Reddit told me to just be aggressive, go in and mess everyone up; but I didn’t want that. And now that she’s more established, I’m happy with the route I went.

Ghost in the Shell

A huge help in being stealthy was the perk that decreased detection as your mitigation chance increased (when crouched). Whenever I added more cyberware, I primarily focused on maximizing my mitigation chance; and now, my detection is at 12% [confirm this] when crouched. I am virtually invisible. I also got myself to a place where I could unlock crouch sprint pretty quickly, and that was a big help.

To leave nothing to chance, I also started using optical camo, too — it’s basically gotten to a point where I don’t feel like I fight enough sometimes. I find myself initiating combat when I don’t really need to, just to get the experience points. I’m basically a ghost, picking and choosing the times I bless the enemies with being able to see me.

Staying on the “Ninja” theme, I wanted to use blades whenever I engaged an enemy. Initially, I wasn’t sure how I’d defend myself from guns when I’m using a sword or arm-blades, and planned to rely on moving around quickly enough with the Sandy. I was pleasantly surprised, though, when I found the bullet deflect perk; and felt like Luke Skywalker returning bullets back to the shooters with prejudice.

When I first started out, I was watching Titans (the live-action show about Robin, Raven, Starfire, and Beast Boy); and saw this V having a similar skillset to Deathstroke — using a sniper to take care of enemies that were too far away to use blades. I soon realized, though:

1. That largely goes against the stealth aspect — I was found every time I shot (didn’t stick with it long enough to find out if there’s silenced snipers) and
2. There aren’t that many opportunities to snipe in the first place. Most encounters are relatively close quarters, being inside rooms and in alleys and hallways.

I decided to forego the sniper, my decision being a lot easier when I learned that I could throw knives. Honestly, I never knew throwing knives were in the game. And when I first found out, I thought they were their own separate weapon. I didn’t know that you could just throw knives. Once I found that out, though, those projectiles played perfectly with the blades theme I was going for.

With the Kerenzikov cyberware + Sandevistan cyberware + Juggler perk, you can run into an area and take out all the enemies before the guys crouching have a chance to stand up. I saw a clip of a guy who drove by some enemies, jumped out of his car with Sandy on, took out all of the guys and got back into his moving vehicle that stayed in the flow of traffic. I’m not quite that dialed in yet, but I want to try my hand at something similar soon.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same…

There are some things that are frustrating that are the same three years and several updates later. The primary beef I have with this game (and games like it) are the dialogue options. There’s no indication of what’s actually going to be said when an option is chosen, or the tone it’s going to come out in or anything.

I understand making choices, and seeing the outcomes and consequences of those choices; but it doesn’t feel like I’m actually making a choice. It all seems arbitrary. I’ll read an answer in one inflection, but when spoken, V uses a completely different tone. I may want to be nice, but instead that option has V say something mean and the person I’m talking to gets mad.

I distinctly remember a conversation between V and Judy on the roof, where I was trying to be supportive. My girlfriend was watching me play, and we talked through which one’s we thought would be the best/most comforting/”nicest” option given the scenario. I reloaded the save a couple of times so that we could see the outcome of each of the three options.

Turns out, the once that both of us agreed was the least likely to give the response we wanted to give was in fact the one to give the most positive, supportive response. It makes it feel less like a role-playing experience and more like a guess-and-hope experience. I’m just glad this game lets you freely save-scum. I have no qualms with it in this scenario.

At Least Cars Actually Have a Purpose Now

I think driving still leaves a little to be desired. The cars handle a bit weirdly — turning can be difficult and drifting is far too easy. And cars are too quick to get to their top speeds, causing the engine audio to sound like you’re constantly redlining.

That said, I’m a Night City legend, so of course I had to get myself a Rayfield (or two). And since there’s a target on my back, I got myself a Hellhound just to be safe. I’m still working toward that Trailbruiser, it looks sick.

Something else that’s new that I really enjoy, is the body check for stealing vehicles. It’s always felt a little too easy just klepping the coolest-looking car in GTA. So making sure you’re strong enough to actually steal the car is refreshing. I kind of wish it were based on more than just body. I should be able to, say, open the door remotely if I can literally take over the whole car. But I still definitely like that they implemented this feature.

And this isn’t new, but I really like that some of the cars have video screens showing the outside, instead of windows. It’s the best of both worlds — more protection as well as being hidden from prying eyes. On top of that it’s just cool. Maybe not all that practical (you’d be completely blind if the cameras go down) but incredibly cool nonetheless.

Also, and this is apropos of nothing, but I think there needs to be a steal or pickpocket mechanic. If I want to role play as a thief, I should be able to get access to rooms by lifting the key off of an enemy; and not having to incapacitate everyone.

Later Chooms

There’s a lot of potential still to be had in Night City, I think. More reasons to use weaponized vehicles, the ability to acquire a flying car, and actually being able to experience the BD’s you buy (though, that could push the game into a completely different territory it doesn’t want to be in) are all ways this world can be built upon.

I heard there aren’t any plans to release more content in this game, but I don’t believe that’s actually true. The last couple updates were unplanned (or, at least, unannounced) so hopefully, that’s simply the case.

In the meantime, though, I’m really enjoying my 2025 playthrough(s) of this game. I’m constantly finding new and unique ways to combine perks, cyberware, weapons, and more to most efficiently solve gigs, take out enemies, cripple the corpos, and ultimately leave my mark on Night City. Peace, I’m off to find Songbird.

The post Cyberpunk 2077 | A Fresh Experience in Night City appeared first on I Talk Games.

We even got some Redstone in there! I mean, I’m no Mumbo Jumbo or Pingu (by a long shot), but for a few hours of gameplay and a couple YouTube videos, I didn’t do too shabbily. These are just incredibly accessible, practical builds; that took my base area to new levels. Keep reading to check those out.

Everything around the treehouse (from the end of the last post) seemed, essentially, like more of the same — Just variations of wood. Not finding anything really new, we set off again. We tried to pay attention to landmark features and leave breadcrumbs for ourselves so we could make our way back at some point, but it didn’t really help.

Of course creepers and zombies were a problem, but now we’ve got ice archers? (“Stray’s” I guess) And they poison you?!? That’s annoying. We had to act fast, so we built a fence around this area to keep enemies out.

I had a vision pretty quickly for this base. I wanted the façade of the mountain to stay the same, with our living areas being within that space. And I wanted to add windows and lights so it looked like a home carved into the side of the mountain; which is exactly what it was.

On the ground level, when we first arrived, we built into the mountain to make our base. We simply carved out an area that looked big enough and dropped in beds, storage chests, and work benches. I wanted some “natural light” in this area, but we unfortunately didn’t have any glass or sand at the time, so I just made an opening in the wall. I figured we were protected by the fence we had already built.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think about spiders and the fact that some mobs have ranged attacks. We’d be minding our own business trying to get something done in the house, when all of a sudden we’re getting shot from behind. It got old fast, so we ended up filling in the gap pretty quickly. Actually, I still wanted the natural light, so I left the bottom row open. But then we were subject to spiders and baby zombies.

And the fence itself that we initially built failed quite a bit. Since we were in the snowy biome it, well, snowed. A lot. That snow would pile up (which is a cool game mechanic, I just didn’t know it existed), which would create a step for mobs to use to get over the fence. You just can’t win with this game.

After a couple nights I just high-tailed it over to the first beach I could find to gather some sand and head back, to create real windows that also protected us. It was necessary, too, because I had a few ideas for this base and they all involved windows. And I just tried to be cognizant about the snow, and clear it out whenever I noticed it piling up.

I wanted to expand the home and add a proper bedroom. Plus I wanted the outside to look more like there was a home built in there, so I started building up. There was a nice corner in the side of the mountain, so I carved out an opening to that. I put a wrap-around window in that corner, with a narrow hallway entrance, in order to make up the bedroom.

It was completed when gf added in the beds with the headboard and carpet; along with the seating area behind. Also on the second level (before the bedroom) was a bit of a library. I put windows looking out on the side of the mountain too — along with the aforementioned corner — to really make it look like a home from the outside. But otherwise, it was just the area you first got to when you went up the ladder to the second level.

Gf ran with it, though, and added some carpeting, bookshelves, and “seating” around the perimeter. We took a lot of it down when we moved (needed the bookshelves for enchanting, when we finally discovered that); but that’s what this looked like in it’s heyday — and I really liked it. Now, it mostly looks abandoned and ransacked.

Redstone

Also, around this time, I learned about Redstone. I had mined a ton of it, but I had no idea what it was or what it was used for. Thanks to YouTube, though, a whole new world was opened for me. I immediately started thinking about how I could apply these new principles.

My first thought was to have a machine that pushes mobs into a pool of lava at the push of a button. The main issue was actually getting the mobs in front of the pistons. My best thought was to have the tops of the pistons be on the same level that they walk on to get to me. Then, there’d be a small platform a block down in front of the pistons.

So, ideally, they’d walk across the piston, drop down onto that platform (where they’d stay because they A) wouldn’t willingly walk into lava and B) are still trying to get to me); at which point I’d press the button and have the pistons make the push.

I wanted to capture any items that the mobs dropped, too, so the plan was to put hoppers and chests under the lava. I needed a place to put the chests, with the hoppers above, with lava on top of those, not to mention the step for the mobs and the pistons that push them — so I built a huge structure off to the side that would accomplish just that.

And actually, for a first attempt, it worked pretty well. I had stairs going up to the top/platform, so I could lead the mobs up to the platform. I’d run around trying to got mobs to follow me; and when they did, I’d head up the stairs, jump across the gap, and head to the button hoping they’d follow.

It was a 2-block-long jump, so I could clear it and head to the back of the machine, while not worrying about mobs following me that far. And I built the entire structure relatively long because at this point I was thinking about the bow-and-arrow enemies and how they like to stay a bit further back.

In the back of the trap I had the aforementioned, button and I would wait for the mob to inevitably walk toward me and off the one-block ledge onto the block right in front of the pistons. At the push of a button, those pistons extended and pushed the enemies into fire. Easy peasy.

There were a few downsides. For one, I took a lot of hits trying to lure enemies — I couldn’t just stand there and wait for mobs to come to me at the back of the trap, I had to physically go out and get each one to follow me. Also, Spiders were largely immune due to how I had the Redstone laid out. And, not that this affected the trap’s performance, but it was rather unsightly.

I thought I could solve a lot of those problems by making the platform of the trap at the same level as the rest of the ground — digging down for the drop-off, chests, hoppers etc. I could enclose the Redstone more easily (I thought), and hopefully enemies would see me just standing there and come after me, instead of having to lure them.

One small issue

There was one small issue with this plan, though, and it was that I was in an ice biome. So there was just water under the ground level. I had to essentially build a box underwater, fighting off Drowneds and trying to avoid drowning myself in the process (which I failed at constantly). I eventually got the box built and drained, though, and was ready to make the trap.

At this point, my vision expanded and I no longer wanted the one-block drop for the mobs. I wanted them to walk to the edge of the lava pit on the ground level, and instead of mobs dropping in front of the pistons, the pistons would pop up behind the mobs to push them into the lava. I tried several variation of this before realizing/discovering that pistons don’t like to move other moving pistons. So, I never got it working.

Before I was able to put it back to the original design, we decided to move on again from this area. Haley wanted to actually take advantage of villagers and make a real farm; and I was ready for a change. I was tired of being cold.

I closed off the trap so no mobs could get in — thinking I’d maybe come back one day and tinker — packed up and headed out again.

One of our main goals for the next area was actually using villagers for farming etc., so we high-tailed it to the first set of occupied houses we found. Having already ruined several villages by letting them get overrun with zombies, we were very cautious this time.

We lit up the whole area pretty quickly, then looked around, and found a nice open area for us to put our house. We chose a spot looking over a crevice that had water, and thought it would be cool to build out over that. There was also a big waterfall off to one side, so we really like what it looked like.

I wanted a slightly bigger build here, and I envisioned a very modern-style home with rectangles staggered on top of each-other for each designated space. So that’s what I got to work on. I did an entrance area, a bedroom, and a space for work tables initially. I also wanted to shoot my shot at making a piston door — so I did that as well — and I thing it turned out great.

At first there was a switch, but I eventually wired it up to pressure plates so we could just run in and out. I felt pretty safe doing so — we built a full barrier around the house, so mobs shouldn’t have been able to get in. I did have a couple moments of panic where I thought some were getting through (I’d hear the door while I was crafting or something) but it turned out to be the traveling merchant.

I’m not sure how he’s able to get in and zombies aren’t, but I’m grateful. We also left the entire back of the house open, just because. It was gf’s idea and I think it looked great. I’m guessing that helped keep mobs on the back-side of the home rather than inside the fence. Path of least resistance.

Once we figured out enchanting and what bookshelves were for, I stacked another rectangle on top to house those; and to upgrade the look of the house a bit (inside and out) I replaced the wall of our bedroom with windows, and that’s the house itself!

The Fun Stuff

Around the house there are a lot of things we built, too. Like I mentioned, gf wanted a farm and villagers, so she followed a YT tutorial and built one off to the side. We ended up getting tons of villagers with this setup. We (Haley mostly) also painstakingly fenced in the entire village so all of our work wouldn’t be in vain.

I couldn’t go too long without messing with Redstone, so I made a trip-wire trap that opened the ground as mobs walked across it, dropping them into lava (the one from the top of this post). I loved the idea behind this, and mostly the execution but it required a lot of finagling of blocks that I didn’t love.

In order to hide the tripwire, I needed to build a little bit of a tunnel; and cats and pigs (and the occasional baby villager) kept getting stuck in there. And since that’s where the tripwire was, they’d be triggering it. This would leave the pit open, so they wouldn’t be able to get out. I’d have to break the trap to let them free, and then re-build it.

The villagers also weren’t smart enough to avoid the trap itself either, so I lost a few who fell in. Along with a couple iron golems. It was still worth it.

On the other side, in a corner, I built a much simpler version of my first trap. There was just a one-block hole just on the outside of the barrier of our property; connected to a button that removed the block for the drop in to lava. It was simple but it worked well — I even caught a few creepers with it.

Redstone wasn’t the only thing that YouTube taught me. I also learned how to quickly cultivate helpful items like kelp/bone meal, sugar cane, and wood. I built a basement to house the farms because I liked the idea of an underground “factory”. Also, the back-side of our base had water, and I liked the idea of having a glass lookout from the factory into the water. So I went deep enough to do that.

First, I built the kelp farm that automatically created the bone meal, and I used the bone meal to grow the oak trees (for wood) and sugar cane (for paper). I wired up a dispenser for each, so the bonemeal was automatic. When I wanted sugar cane, all I had to do was add bonemeal, turn on the farm and wait.

For wood, I simply had to place the sapling; a tree would eventually sprout for me to harvest. With this setup, I could grow 5 at a time. I even built some pistons at the top to get rid of the leaves so I could get more saplings and sticks — keeping the farm self-sustainable. I probably didn’t need that part though as I always ended up just climbing the machine to get all of the leaves anyway.

We started realizing our need for iron, so we built the classic iron farm that involved killing iron golems automatically. There were a few issues setting this up — there’s a lot of conflicting information out there, especially given the various versions ‘vailable. But eventually we got it working properly. And for shits and giggles, I built a rail line from the basement over to the iron farm.

To Do’s Going Forward…

I also attempted to make a couple mob farms in this area — one at bedrock and one like 300 blocks in the air, but I never got those to work for me. All the videos I watched made me think I did things right, but I couldn’t get mobs to spawn. Never did figure it out. Now that I think about it, I didn’t give them a ton of time, but I felt like I should have seen at least one or two if it was actually working. Now that the other farms are established, I might go back and try to work on one of these again and actually get them to work.

At this point, we felt established. And while we had some goals still, we also were itching for some new experiences. At various times while we had been playing, we glanced at the add-ons to see what was available. There were a couple that looked promising; and since we wanted to keep this world relatively vanilla, we decided to start a new world for that.

We ended up making a pretty cool homestead there, too, but that’s for another time. My pyramid that reveals a hidden enchanting room will have to wait for another post. Let me know in the comments if that’s something you want me to show.

Otherwise, thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought of this, and what your Minecraft builds look like, I love getting inspiration from other designs.

Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to check out one of my other ones! And be sure to check back soon to see what other games I talk about. Thanks again for reading, peace!

The post Minecraft Home Tours Part 2 | Farms & Redstone appeared first on I Talk Games.

I really loved Pokémon as a kid, so when I learned about PalWorld (bear with me, this is a Minecraft post), it was something I definitely wanted to try. My girlfriend and I gave it a shot, and we really got in to it. Going in, I didn’t know that I would have to chop down trees, craft my tools and weapons, and build shelters to survive nights. But given the overall idea behind the game (catching and battling Pokémon Pals), I was more than willing to do it.

Note: this is just a house tour post. I’m giving some background info and context for each build, but I’m not actually going to review or comment on the game itself much. I’m Just going to talk about the couple houses and bases and builds that we made, and why.

Also, as an Amazon Associate I may earn a small commission if you were to make a purchase using a link on this site. It’s at no cost to you, though, and can really help out the blog. I appreciate it!

As we played, I started enjoying the “survival” aspect of it more and more. And once I figured out the construction rules, I really loved bringing various build ideas to life (stay tuned for my PalWorld commentary and building tours). For a little while, I even got a bit of an itch for survival games and I branched out a bit giving Ark and Valheim a shot. I didn’t stick around long enough to give them a real chance, though (I may go back one day).

So, after taking a bit of a hiatus to play different games (like Split Fiction), we started itching to do some mining, resource gathering, crafting, and building again. Having just watched the Minecraft movie at a friends house with his kids, it seemed like the natural option.

The Beginnings

We wanted a relatively fresh playthrough, so we didn’t go in to the game with much information or any goals. We mostly planned to just explore and see what we could find, and I knew there were diamonds out there to be had. But otherwise, we decided to figure it out as we went.

I forgot how little information the game really gives you when you start. I did know that we had to sleep through the nights because there were enemies, but I didn’t remember just how dangerous they were. It was a pretty quick lesson.

I wanted to build a house, but between creepers, spiders, and helmet-wearing zombies, I didn’t feel safe just building out in the open, even during the day. I figured it would be a good idea to create ourselves a platform that we could build on top of that monsters couldn’t reach.

We found a good spot, kind of on a cliffside facing a village (something else that was new to us) and thought that would be great because we really only had to dig down 3 sides. Also, we found an area that already led pretty deep underground right below that spot, so it was a good place to start mining too. So I started digging three blocks down around the area that we decided would be our base’s plateau.

Digging out the space

Truth-be-told, I didn’t fully think the plan through. I thought the landscape would be largely unaffected, but there’d be one area just a little higher than the rest where our home stood. It was early in the game, so I didn’t have the blocks to build up, and in my mind, I’d easily achieve that vision by just clearing the blocks around where we chose our home to be.

I realized pretty quickly, though, that I wasn’t building a plateau, I was building a moat. I was just trenching out the area around my base, creating a pit. Oh well, it’ll still get the job done. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t think a one-block-wide pit was enough. It seemed like the enemies could make it across that gap with little issue. So, I decided to double-up my work and make the trench at least 3 wide.

It wasn’t my initial vision, and a bigger project than I anticipated. But after a couple in-game days and a few frustrating deaths, I got it dug out.

While finishing the bulk of the trench was relatively quick, it took several days of tinkering to finally get it to a place where I thought it actually looked decent. We had to fill in all of the creeper holes and block off any overhangs where skeletons could hide out during the day. It was a whole to-do, but I liked how it turned out.

I left an area off to the side as our “main entrance” to the plateau. It was an easy-enough jump for us, but one that mobs couldn’t make. I ended up making another easy way in — by climbing up and over the trap — but this space remained the main way we got on to the home area. There were various ladders within the trench, too, in case we missed the jump (which we did often. Frequently finding creepers waiting for us at the bottom).

Catching Mobs

Speaking of traps, I was thinking about ways to capture mobs to harvest their drops — especially the arrows from the skeletons. This was long before we watched any videos about what to do or how the game mechanics worked, so I was just trying different things.

I eventually got everything filled in properly, and actually buttoned-up, so there were no unknown/missing spots where mobs could sneak in. And on the outside — next to the doors that made up the “entrance” to the trap — I put ladders so I could climb over into the property while hopefully luring the mobs into the trap.

I say it was only moderately successful because I really only trapped zombies. I didn’t think about the skeletons’ mechanics and how they tended to stay a bit further away so that they could shoot. After the couple times zombies got in when I wrongly assumed I was safe, I ended up building walls around the trap to prevent that.

With those walls, though, I was out of the sight-lines for the skeletons, so they didn’t come into the trap that often. I tried luring them every once-in-a-while, but they usually lost interest after I got into the base. Or they’d kill me before I had a chance to make it back.

Spiders could obviously just climb over the trap, so I wasn’t really trapping them in the first place.

Instead of glass, I ended up trying a couple iterations of putting transparent blocks in different patterns in the opening between the trap and the home. I hoped that would lure more skeletons, while at the same time stopping them from shooting us. I kind of got close (and close to a traditional mob farm, accidentally) by putting blocks only on the top-half of the opening. But by the time I got to that plan, we decided to move on and explore another area.

Overall, I never got the base into a perfect place, or the trap as efficient as possible. But I did learn a lot and had fresh ideas for the next home-base we built.

What about the inside?

As for the house itself: When we first got to this plateau, I built a small hut to sleep for that initial night. But once we built the “main house”, it just became storage and extra crafting tables.

While I was digging the trench, my gf built the main house — complete with expanded storage and work tables. She even included a roof-top deck decorated with a bell from the nearby village (we didn’t know what the bell did yet).

I liked what she had done with it, and wanted to add something of my own. I decided on a basement, complete with a nice little fireplace; and I included a walk-out, so you could enjoy the water from that level. There was also a cleared out area under our house that we’d created by mining for stone and coal and getting blown up by creepers. I thought that area looked pretty cool, so I added a window looking in from the basement. I kind of made it up as I went, and I really liked how it turned out.

Haley also realized that she could potentially keep pets and wanted to see what that was about. Given the trench I made, it was difficult to actually get animals up to our homestead, but that persistent merchant was usually around.

Haley built 3/4 of a fence and waited until one of the merchant’s llamas were within it, and closed it off. Our first official pet. We were still learning at this point, and didn’t actually know about taming or breeding. So we just held on to the one llama until we moved on from that base.

Which leads me to house number 2

We were starting to get a little bored with our original home, and as I was out gathering resources one day, I came across a new biome and type of tree. It seemed like a good opportunity to explore and move on, so we packed up and did just that.

It turned out that the tree wasn’t much more than just a new variation of wood, so we moved past it. We had committed to moving on, so we didn’t want to simply go back. Eventually, we came across a huge chasm in the side of a mountain, and decided to explore that. It was pretty mob-infested, so we built a base pretty quickly right outside of it.

We, once again, gave ourselves a bit of elevation between the home and where the mobs spawn. But it was nowhere near as in-depth as the first spot. We basically just built a small platform in the side of the mountain to make a simple sleeping spot.

I wanted to give it some character, though, so I added a wall of windows to look out through. It turned out great, and it was very little work. Good thing, too, because we realized that this chasm didn’t have anything for us at the time, and we moved on pretty quickly.

Treehouses

When we left the base by the crevice, we immediately came across a swamp biome. And for the first time, we saw a Huge Brown Mushroom (I had to look that up, I thought they were just yet another variety of tree. I never chopped one down). We built a bit of a “treehouse” on top of that, but it was another quick one to just get through the night.

At one point, my gf and I got separated, so I built a base on the treetops so she could hopefully find it/me. In order to get into it, you had to navigate up and over using it’s leaves and the leaves of nearby trees.

Both of those interim houses gave us ideas for what would become our next main base. We wanted to create something up in a tree, with a more low-key hidden entrance up through the leaves.

We found a prime candidate for the treehouse and carved ourselves and entrance channel through the leaf-blocks. This still honestly might be my favorite entrance to a house we built.

We got to the top and cleared out a spot for the house. We had tons of stone at the time, so we built this grayscale monstrosity on top. While aesthetically the jury’s still out, I thought It was really cool disappearing through the leaves to secretly get inside this base.

We planned on staying here for a little while, so Haley built this wrap-around balcony and added a garden with some decorative plants. It wasn’t too substantial (and we didn’t really know the farming mechanics yet, so we weren’t trying to gain anything from it) but it was fun and we liked it.

I’ve also always like the idea of living furniture & decoration — like having a tree growing through the treehouse, so I tried to bring that to life here. We left the body of the tree, and just build around the trunk. At the time, we thought that leaves would continue to grow on trees, so I built a couple blocks off  the side of the top of the trunk, so there’d be more leaves above, too, which would have been incredible.

Turns out, leaves don’t grow like that, so it didn’t seem like my vision would be realized. But while creating the videos for this post, I added them in manually. I was in creative mode anyway, so I figured “why not?” It actually turned out pretty well, and I kind of wish I thought about it from the start.

Thanks for reading! This was actually just part one — It was getting pretty lengthy as is, so I felt like I should break it up. Be sure to check out Part 2 where I start to dabble in some Redstone and farming (and I don’t simply mean planting crops).

Let me know in the comments what you thought about my first builds after being away from the game for over 10 years. I think they’re pretty clever for having gone in with very little information. Hope to see you in part two, or if you enjoyed this, be sure to check out one of my other posts!

The post Minecraft Home Tour Part 1 | Plateaus & Treehouses appeared first on I Talk Games.

Truthfully, I’m not sure where I got that idea. It’s less an RPG and more of a Star Wars story about an outlaw that you get to play as. It’s relatively linear.

Given the misconception, there were a few moments, especially early on, that seemed strange. Like being forced to shoot my way out of a situation when I initially tried to do more of a stealth/stun playstyle. But otherwise, once I realized what I was actually getting myself in to, I really started enjoying this game.

Kay & Nix Beginnings

You play as Kay Vess a young woman who makes her living stealing and scheming with her adorable pet alien Nix (who’s like the Abu to her Aladdin). From what I can tell (and in doing a bit of research for this post) the Death Star has recently been destroyed, so The Empire is on it’s heels and criminals are working with relative impunity.

She is able to get away for now, though, and crash-lands the ship on a nearby planet. Now she has to find a way to avoid the dangerous people who are after her, clear her name (or at least pay them back), and still hope to get that big score that just might solve all of her problems.

The Underworld & Reputation

After crash-landing, you’re found by a mechanic named Waka (no Flaka) who recognizes the ship as a classic and says he can help you repair it. You need parts and, more importantly, money to buy those parts; so Waka directs you to talk to an underworld boss, Gorak, for work.

Gorak isn’t actually a big fan of Wakas, so when you drop his name Gorak has you thrown out of his base. It’s at this point that you meet Danka, a broker, who tells you how the underworld works. Brokers (like Danka) facilitate the relationship between people like Kay who need work, and the factions providing it. So you’ll have to talk to them to get jobs.

There are 5 factions in all, four of which you can work with. Danka introduces the Pikes, Hutts, and Crimson Dawn. And later, you’re able to work with the Ashiga. The last group is Zerek Besh, but they’re led by the guy you stole the ship from, and they’re hunting you.

The game also shows you that there’s a reputation system where your choices will affect how the different factions feel about you. It’ll increase and decrease throughout the game as you help or harm each faction. If your reputation is low enough, they’ll attack on-site; and if it’s high enough, you’ll be able to walk around their bases largely without being bothered.

There are additional benefits to having high reputations with the factions — like higher-paying jobs, and unlocking merchants with access to rare parts. And, like I mentioned earlier, this is where the consequences of a lot of your choices lie. A lot of the missions involve breaking into another faction’s facility; and with a high enough reputation with the faction you’re breaking in to you can walk through the proverbial front door.

It’s a pretty cool mechanic, and gives you stakes when completing missions. Instead of simply rewarding you with money and reputation, you’re often given a choice whether to help out one clan or another; or sometimes yourself. You can give the information to the people you’re initially stealing for, or you can cross them and tell the people you just stole from who hired you and why. Sometimes, you can even keep something for yourself; gaining something material but losing reputation.

It also gives you reasons to check in with brokers to see what’s available, in case you want to raise your reputation back up with a certain faction after betraying them.

Gameplay Variety

I had a great time exploring the worlds, sneaking through bases and imperial strongholds, and playing all sides so I could (hopefully) come out on top. Gameplay is quite varied, the puzzles are fun, and there were genuine moments of delight — like when Nix and I had a snack for the first time.

There’s also a lot to do outside of the main story line. There are some quick little arcade games you can play; and the one-off contracts that you can do for factions for credits and reputation. There’s treasure hunts which were a lot of fun — you can find datapads or eavesdrop on conversations that give clues to where valuables may be stashed. And you can go out and try to acquire them for yourself. I spent a lot of time just traveling around the worlds and around space trying to find some really cool items.

There’s also the Fathier races which is similar to a horse-race. In nearly every city you go, there are tables broadcasting these races holographically and you can test your luck. Or, if you’ve had your eye out, you might not have to rely on luck.

We also get to play Kessel Sabacc, which is kind of a card game, where you try to get better pairs than your opponents — using tricks and special cards to do so. This was right up my alley (I loved Gwent in The Witcher), and I loved testing my mettle against (and attempting to pull one over on) some of the Core Worlds’ slickest card sharks.

Movement and Exploration (& the speeder)

Traversing the world felt pretty familiar on foot. As a third-person game, running, jumping and climbing were straight-forward and intuitive. In fact, the climbing mechanics were similar to Jedi Survivor. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The worlds are relatively big, too, and in order to get between towns, there’s a Speeder you can use. Which is essentially a hover-cycle.

The speeder was a bit underwhelming, but still pretty fun. I will say that that I was disappointed in the races when I came across them. I thought they were a great idea, and thought it was a cool addition when someone flagged me down to race. But racing itself felt a little sluggish. There were upgrades to make the speeder faster, but it never blew me away.

Space Travel

In addition to the worlds you get to explore, once it’s repaired, you can also take your (stolen) ship into space. There are space stations based around the planets that you occasionally have to visit, cargo that can be discovered, and more.

There’s a cool animation after you board your ship and opt to launch, showing the takeoff and ascent into space. It’s not really interactive — you’re not leaving and landing on planets yourself. But it’s much better than simply having a loading screen.

Landing the ship is similar. You aim the ship toward the planet you want to land on, initiate the landing sequence, and select the landing pad/location you want to land on/at. From there, you watch the ship zoom toward the planet and the landing pad. Unfortunately, you don’t get any visuals of the scale of the planet as you approach.

The game kind of cheats it’s way through that part by having you descend through clouds. But you do get to see yourself come in over the city and ultimately make the landing. Again, it could be better, but it’s not as bad as having a loading screen each time you take off and land.

Since stealing the ship, you’ve essentially adopted it as your own. And so, you’re able to upgrade it throughout the game. Cosmetically, you largely can only change the color, but there are a few different weapon types and shield options that you can upgrade to.

Yes, enemies patrol space, too, so you’ll have to be prepared to fight. Dogfighting was pretty challenging, and it was quite satisfying taking out enemy ships. Especially the Imperial ships that were launching the TIE Fighters I was battling.

It was also really cool watching the scale change as you flew closer to those ships while fighting them and space stations as you approached them. And I had some genuine anxiety flying through the Kijimi Nebula knowing there were giant asteroids just out of sight.

You could also try to avoid fights, and there were upgrades that let you be a bit more stealthy in your ship; but I found it easier to just upgrade my weapons and take out any would-be interrupters.

It’s not as in-depth as, say, Starfield. And I was a bit disappointed that the ship reorients itself after a bit (there’s no “up” in space…). But it was a fun and satisfying experience that kept me looking forward to the next space missions.

Combat

Working with various criminal organizations (not to mention being hunted by one for stealing their leaders ship) naturally, Kay is going to come across some enemies. On top of that, our fearless femme frequently finds herself in places where she isn’t supposed to be. So she has to defend herself.

Your primary weapon is your blaster, which is the typical Han Solo style shooter that should be familiar to anyone with any knowledge of Star Wars. And throughout the game you’ll be able to modify it to perform differently or have new functionality altogether.

For example, you can upgrade the gun to burst fire instead of single-shot. And there’s also an alternative firing mode you have to unlock — the ion cannon — that works better against droids; and can power nodes to solve puzzles and open doors.

There are various weapons around the world, too, that Kay can pick up and use. There’s fully automatic blaster rifles, sniper rifles, and even the cool rotary cannons with the shields on the front. You can’t keep these weapons — you’ll drop them when they run out of ammo, or you need to climb or something. But they’re cool additions, and add a new element to combat. Also, you can have Nix grab a gun and bring it to you, so you don’t have to expose yourself to get one.

Kay also has an “Adrenaline Rush” ability I alluded to earlier. Time slows down, you select the enemies you want to take out; then she’ll do so one-by-one. This is also an entertaining addition, and kind of made me feel like a badass gun-slinging outlaw.

Stealth

While there are certainly instance where you’re forced to shoot, there’s also a pretty heavy emphasis on stealth in Star Wars Outlaws. You’re often tasked with sneaking through an area, usually failing the mission if you get caught.

The game provides pretty plentiful opportunities to conceal yourself, with things like vents that you can walk through undetected. But it’s not like they lead directly to your destination. You still need to figure out how to find what you’re looking for, and get around guards and through doors.

Guard presence is quite heavy, and maybe I’m just not good at sneaking around, but I had a hard time separating groups of guards so I could take them down quietly. I often found myself standing around trying to figure out movement patterns and find windows of opportunity to get to the next safe spot.

Your only take-down options while trying to remain stealth are a melee takedown if you’re hidden and a stun-gun option on your blaster. The stun option has an incredibly long cooldown, though. I never actually timed it, but it felt like a full minute˚. You can also use Nix to distract guards so you can run up and take them down, or run past them. But he couldn’t actually do any takedowns himself.

Puzzles and Hacking

Gaining access into new areas isn’t always as simple as interacting with a door. There were a few different puzzle mechanics that kept the game feeling fresh. Sometimes you had to figure out how to make yourself a makeshift bridge to cross a gap. Sometimes you had to use Nix to press a button, or open a panel so you can kill the power source. And the ion blaster I talked about earlier.

There are also minigames that I had a lot of fun playing and solving — and I don’t mean the arcade game. Theres a Data Spike, which is essentially this game’s lock pick; and with it there are audio cues you have to listen for to unlock the lock.

It’s a bit strange, to be sure, but definitely unique. Personally, I really enjoy music and rhythm, so I actually liked using the Data Spike.

My favorite, though, was the wordle-style puzzles that you occasionally come across. There’s a bank of a bunch of symbols, and you have to get them in the right order.

After selecting your initial symbols, you’re shown whether you have any correct and if so, if they’re in the right spot. From there, you deduce the correct order and symbols. Wordle is actually derived from a board game called Mastermind that I loved to play as a kid; and I loved Outlaws’ take on it.

There were also “tricks” you could use in order to make this puzzle easier, by, say, eliminating tiles in the bank or giving you more chances. I was initially confused, because I upgraded my energy levels a couple of times before I could use any of the “tricks”, though. For a long time, I wondered why I was told about them so early when they took so long to actually use.

I realize now that the ability to see which tiles are “connected” and when a group of them is eliminated is the initial trick. You don’t have to do anything, it’s always active. I didn’t realize they counted that as the first trick at first, though.

This was typically how you hacked in to various computers and terminals — and I had fun with that as well. Often you had to hack in to these to acquire the information you needed; but they also would sometimes control the cameras and automated weapons in the area. You can turn the tides swiftly in your favor by finding the right terminal.

Items and Cosmetics

Sliro’s old forgotten about jacket (which is somehow a perfectly fitting cropped jacket on Kay? Maybe an “ex” left it behind…?) isn’t the only thing that Kay is stuck wearing. There are different cosmetic pieces that can be bought from vendors or found in the world.

They’re not always just visual upgrades, either. Some items come with bonuses, such as increased focus generation or additional health vial slots. And there are also sets that you can try to complete for even more powerful upgrades.

You also have a few lucky charms that Kay likes to keep around that grant bonuses as well. You can have two minor and a major one equipped at any given time, and can swap them out at will. They my decrease your detection level from droids, increase the amount of adrenaline that you gain, or allow you to automatically recover a health vial or grenade when used. There are a decent amount out there, so keep your eyes peeled. They can be very helpful.

Star Wars Outlaws handles the skills that you can acquire in a different way than a lot of games. There’s no skill tree, and you don’t really gain experience points and level up in order to acquire an upgrade. As you meet influential and well-versed people in the world and accomplish tasks for them, they then become available to acquire skills from. You can upgrade your skills in the pause menu, though, you don’t have to physically travel between the experts.

Unlocking skills is as simple as spending a resources you were probably gathering anyway; that can only be spent on said upgrades. Occasionally you have to find a more-rare item in order to unlock the skill, but when that’s the case unlocking that technique is the only thing that item can be used for. There’s no sacrificing an item to select one skill over an other.

There were a few skills that you could only upgrade after completing tasks, too — such as having a certain amount of stealth takedowns or solving puzzles within the allotted tries. I loved this aspect of the game, it gives you reasons to vary your playstyle and made additional challenges more meaningful than simply giving an achievement.

Overall…

Despite my initial misunderstandings with what this game was, I had a ton of fun with Star Wars Outlaws. The gameplay is fun and varied, the puzzles were unique and challenging, space travel and combat is enjoyable, and all-in-all, I had a great time exploring Kay and Nix’s story.

I completed the main storyline, but there’s still a lot of treasure out there I can find. And I’m excited to do so.

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you thought of Star Wars Outlaws, if you’ve played it. And be sure to check back for more!

The post Star Wars Outlaws | An Exciting Underworld Adventure — No Force Necessary appeared first on I Talk Games.

A while back I was scrolling through GamePass, as I often do, and I came across this game Robin Hood: Sherwood Builders. At the time, I was playing a lot of PalWorld, and when I read the description, it sounded like it had some similar vibes — like a building and resource gathering-type game, but as Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, rather than hunting and catching Pals. It sounded dope.

I don’t know why, because now that I think about it I don’t really have any strong memories of watching Robin Hood content when I was a kit. Maybe that cartoon with the fox as Robin, but even with that I can’t say I remember many details. I never saw Men in Tights (forgive me, I’ll put it on the list).

Still, for some reason I thought it sounded dope to play as Robert of Loxleyª, so I installed the game. I didn’t play it right away — it sat for several months — but recently I had a few hours to kill and wanted to try something new. So I fired this up.

Why are We Gathering Resources & Building?

The area that will become the town, from what I can tell, looks pretty sizable. And there even seems to be the bones for other types of buildings that will come, possibly after I reach certain parts in the game. There’s a section near a river that I just know is going to be some sort of sawmill.

Maintaining food and water levels for yourself is important in this game, too. There’s meters you have to keep an eye on and the meat that you gather can be used for Robin as well. There’s a place at your camp where you can cook the meat, and there’s a well where you can fill up water bottles. Yes, you need to have empty water bottles. It’s all plentiful, though, and it takes a while for the levels to deplete. So far I haven’t been affected by them yet.

I even tried deliberately to go hungry and thirsty to see what would happen. I chopped down trees, took on enemies, and ran around with empty food and water levels, but nothing ever actually happened. Eventually I got impatient, and moved on to an actual mission, and replenished my levels, so I’m still unsure (with the way the game saves, I didn’t want to find out what happens in the middle of a mission, and find myself reloading to a point hours in the past).

There’s also a kitchen that can be built that will give better-quality foods with more helpful properties. And of course there’s the furnace where you refine your raw materials, the blacksmith for your weapons, and the tailor for your armor. As well as training grounds to improve your abilities and even taverns for your townsfolk to enjoy.

Creating a better society for people requires, well, infrastructure. And as Robin, you’re building better infrastructure for the people of Sherwood Forest and beyond.

Issues & Frustrations

Movement and Combat

Right off the bat, I want to say this is a strange experience because the mechanics are, frankly, dogshit. Movement is clunky and inconsistent, and the crosshairs might as well not exist. You often jump when trying to dodge, and you’ll never be in the correct spot on the first try when mining or chopping down trees — which is a pretty big part of the game. If you do happen to get it on the first try, you’ll inevitably end up moving anyway because you’ll assume you hadn’t.

I’ve got some qualms about fighting that I think might be fixed by upgrading my skills in the tree, but one thing that I can’t upgrade is how it’s super inconsistent with dodging. Dodge, on Xbox, is “A”, but so is jump. When I’m sword-fighting a group of baddies, sometimes when I try to dodge an attack, I’ll instead jump kind of in the direction I was trying to dodge and I’ll still get hit. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Stealth is also an option in Robin Hood. There’s armor that decreases your visibility and movement sounds, and there’s skills in the skill tree that can be unlocked to do the same. That said, I haven’t fount it very useful — at least not yet.

In the very early-game, before you can unlock upgraded armor sets, you get spotted pretty easily. There’s tall grass to hide in, but as soon as you pop out, you’re often seen. On top of that, the game has done a pretty good job of having guards within eyeshot of other guards, so they’re not often completely isolated. And on top of that, you can only stealth takedown enemies that are the same level or lower than you; which they often are not.

Some areas I’ve noticed have birds you can use to get a slightly better view of the area. They’re glowing and if you look at them you can look through them to see where enemies are. It’s better than nothing, I suppose, but it doesn’t help all that much. The view is kind of blurry and distorted and it’s tough to tell the enemies from the other people just walking around. And Robin has a “Hunter Vision” that allows you to highlight enemies through walls (among other things) which works way better. It’s a cool idea, but is pretty meh in execution.

Once you are able to craft your first new set of armor, you’ve got two options: one geared more toward stealth and one toward health. But by the time I was able to unlock them, the difference in stealth applied by the “stealth” armor wasn’t much more than what I had anyway. And with the other set’s ability to regenerate my health outside of battle, it was a no-brainer.

Building

The Build Mode’s only real redeeming factor is that buildings are pre-built and just need to be placed. You don’t place individual walls and floors at all like in some other games. But even simply placing them isn’t super straight-forward. When playing with a controller on Xbox, the left stick controls the mouse cursor, the right stick pans around the space, and the triggers zoom in and out. So, in order to move, you have to use a mix of the right stick for direction and triggers for motion. It’s extremely counter-intuitive. And that’s before you decide on which building you want to place.

When you select a building the left stick, as the mouse cursor, moves the building around. But now, the right stick rotates it — the stick no longer looks around the space. So if you’re not already looking at where you want to put a building before you select it, you can’t move to that spot. You have to back out, move to the space you want (using the weird controls), and try again. If you end up not liking the new placement, you have to deselect the building and do it again.

I’ve largely gotten used to it by now, and (for the most part) think about where I’m going to place a new building before I build it. But since I can’t see the size of the building beforehand, I kind of have to guess. Luckily, buildings aren’t too big and clearing space is easy. You simply have to select a tree to knock it down and make a clearing, and you get the wood from the tree as well.

Village Gathering

When you build your village and have workers mining and logging for you, gathering those resources is also kind of weird and inconsistent. There are some workers that show up in a menu on the left side of the screen in the build mode, and certain resources can be gathered from there.

Some resources, though, can only be gathered once you build a particular building. But once you do that, you have to go to, and select the building in order to gather the resource. And by that, I mean with your cursor within the build menu. Walking up to the buildings actually does nothing.

And the most confusing part? They’re the same types of materials that have to be gathered in different ways. If you want to gather ore — like copper, stone, or iron — you have to check different places. Copper, for example, can be found in the left-hand menu while in build mode; but Stone can only be gathered from the Quarry which you have to go to and select with your mouse cursor.

I understand needing different buildings and different upgrades in order to gather the various resources as I progress through the game, but make it make sense. Why do I need a quarry to get some of the ore, but I didn’t need a quarry to get the others? Why, once I do build the quarry, can’t I just select the Stones from the same menu as selecting the Copper? They’re the same type!

Other Strange Quirks

Ladders aren’t real/aren’t usable. They’re in places that makes sense for a ladder to be — In some cases seemingly required — but you can’t use it. If you have to get up on something, the ledge is low enough to climb, or it’s a small hop up. And for the most part, if you can climb on it, it’s got yellow markings. Sometimes you have to make longer jumps which can be frustrating with the previously-mentioned movement issues, but no climbing ladders.

Resource harvesting is just weird; but I guess it’s not horrible. You have to be in a pretty precise position for it to register what you’re trying to chop/mine, which can be very frustrating. It’s mostly fine once you’re lined up correctly, just make sure not to move again. It’s the worst with Copper, Stone, Iron etc. nodes because they break apart and you often have to reposition yourself in order to actually register hits again.

When you are in the right spot and are consistently hitting the thing you’re trying to harvest, you get a bit of a minigame, which is cool. There’s a little popup that happens at the point of impact, and if you press the trigger to hit again right as that popup happens, you’ll swing your tool faster, while using less stamina.

When you go to use any materials you’ve gathered/mined/logged etc. you just have to wait until whatever you’re crafting completes before you can do anything else. You go to the building where you’re able to make whatever it is your’e trying to craft (yes, these ones you actually walk up to and interact with), and once you select what you want to make, you just have to stay in that menu until it’s done.

I haven’t timed it, but some things feel like they take a couple of minutes, time where you can’t do anything else. There’s no way to have my Ingot’s being made while I run over and cook some Hare. I just have to wait.

Here’s the thing…

But the crazy thing is, I can’t stop playing! I don’t know if it’s the vague familiarity or maybe because of some weird parallels to today’s political climate, I’m really enjoying playing this game.

Reputation

In the beginning, as you see people walking around, when you’re prompted to talk to them, they’re largely dismissive. But as you build up the town and complete quests for the people in the world, you become more well-known. And when you go back and talk to people, they thank you for what you’ve done.

When you start missions, they say “you’re robin hood, I’ve heard what you’ve been doing around here” and I even had an enemy say he heard of me and wondered if it would’ve been different had I shown up earlier.

Other games will give you “reputation points” for completing missions, but rarely do I ever feel like the characters reputation actually improved. Or, it’s forced, like after a particular cutscene that didn’t actually change anything as far as the “public” is aware, but the NPC’s dialogue is different afterward. But so far, I haven’t felt either of those things, and it feels well-executed. It’s pretty obviously percentage-based (occasionally, cutscenes about the main story jut in in the middle of after-mission conversations as soon as the percentage is reached, but before the conversation is over), but I think that’s a very good thing.

As Robin gains more and more reputation, he also becomes more and more wanted by the King. Nearly everywhere there’s wanted posters calling for the capture of Hood, and a really cool detail is that the amount has been steadily increasing as I’ve been playing.

Something that takes me out of it a little is the fact that nobody seems to care about me being wanted, though. I’ll have conversations with people directly next to a Wanted sign with my name on it.

I mean, I understand that I’m helping them out and that they’re against the king, too; but you’d think there’d be a couple of opportunists that would try to turn me in for the reward money (it’s at a point where it’s more than I’ve ever had at any one time), or at the very least in fear of defying the king. But nobody seems to care, and that’s kind of weird.

Reactions, Other Than Dialogue

In some instances, you’re tasked with sneaking around an area that’s occupied by both enemies and regular people. I mentioned earlier that things can be done stealthily, but you can also just kill all the guards in the area and find what you need.

While you’re doing this, though — the “regular” people are simply going about their business around you. It’s strange. I understand not liking the rule that the one is under, but it’s weird that there’s literally no reaction to killing guards right in front of people. That would be a crazy thing to watch! Are the times that bad that they’re this desensitized to death?

Also, I do wish that your reputation instilled fear in lower-level enemies. Given that you’re supposed to be becoming well known, and it’s talked about how you’ve gained reputation frequently, you’d think that some enemies wouldn’t want the smoke.

Even something like having a lower-level enemy run away after you’ve taken out a couple of his comrades would be better than nothing. But so far, there’s none of that. Even if you’re 10+ levels ahead, and have a high percentage of reputation in the area, they still charge on.

Other than those couple of small things, it seems as though each character was deliberately made, and that’s refreshing. Instead of towns populated by randomly generated filler-people. Each person has a name, and with a couple of exceptions, I could talk to everyone. They’re talked about and referenced as though they’re real people, too. And you might see a person you helped pop up back at the homestead.

Overall, while there’s room for improvement, I think the choices that they made with the NPCs and how they react to you were great. I’m looking forward to continuing my adventure and meeting new people, and honestly a lot of the kinks could be ironed out with an update.

…Something Keeps Pulling Me Back

I mentioned earlier that some of the movement complications that I have could potentially be solved with unlocking skills in the skill tree, and I think that’s another thing that’s pulling me back. Eventually, I’ll be the ultimate assassin, invisible in the bushes, attacking from above, not missing any shots, and just feeling like an all-around badass with the people backing me up. Not quite being there yet, though, but seeing the path is keeping me locked in to the grind.

Speaking of, I’m also enjoying saving the townsfolk and fighting against the tyranny plaguing this land. I was awed when I found myself in a new town and found a woman about to be hanged. I had to save her by shooting the rope with my bow, and taking out the people trying to kill her. It was awesome, and I actually felt like I was making a difference in this world.

Funny side story — the first time I completed this mission was early-enough on that I hadn’t quite figured out when and how the game saved. I died shortly after and unfortunately it had saved at a point before I saved this woman. So I had to do it again. The second time, though, I missed and accidentally hit her and failed! I wasn’t sure if the game would allow that because the spot where you have to hit the rope is pretty tight; but it did, and I appreciated the realism. Of course, I reloaded the save, I couldn’t kill that poor woman.

Another pleasant surprise in this game was when I came across my first puzzle. Sprinkled throughout the world are various puzzles that you can solve for some pretty rare rewards. There’s not explanations for the puzzles, you just have to figure them out. Though, there’s often clues nearby to help you solve them.

There’s a few different types of puzzle types, too. From pressing buttons in a certain sequence, to finding which symbols go in the correct places. There’s even a music-based puzzle, which is pretty cool and unique. I never expected these types of puzzles when I first started the game, and it’s another thing that’s keeping this game fun, refreshing and keeping me playing.

Overall, despite the quite frustrating mechanics, I’m genuinely enjoying Robin Hood: Sherwood Builders. I really feel like I’m helping the people, and I can’t wait to see what else is in store. There’s posters about some sort of arena, and I came across a Blood Cairn where apparently I’ll be fighting for money. And who knows what else is out there that I haven’t come across yet!

Have any of you played it? Let me know in the comments what you think about it, and if you’re enjoying it as much as I am. Peace out, I’m about to go play right now.

The post Robin Hood: Sherwood Builders | A Frustrating Experience That I Can’t Put Down appeared first on I Talk Games.

Throwback Thursday! Enjoy this old clip of me playing some Sunset Overdrive. I remember that being a wild game

This is a remnant from the original Italkgames.com. Back in 2014, I originally started this site. But due to life circumstances, I left it on the back-burner. Unfortunately, it ended up getting bought when I accidentally let the domain renewal lapse.

Fortunately, I was able to recover the domain. But unfortunately, I wasn’t able to recover much of the content itself. I was able to get some of it, though, and clip is one of those. Hope you enjoy!

We’re back in full force now, too. So look forward to a lot of awesome (and new) gaming content!

The post Sunset Overdrive — Craziness appeared first on I Talk Games.