Single-player Video Games Thread

I finally have lots of free time and my hands and I’m going to play numerous single player games I intended to pass for years but never really had the time, so I’ll be posting my experiences and thoughts about games here.

I also encourage others to do the same and share their reviews, recommendations, favorite games and basically whatever related to single-player gaming.

After each games I pass I’ll give a review probably with some tips but I’ll try not to spoil anything.

First game, one I already passed is:


[size=150]Risen[/size]

GENRE: western action RPG

STORY: The story is set on a small island on which you are stranded after a shipwreck caused by a storm that rages upon the sea but avoids the island. Soon you’ll learn that numerous other strange things are happening, for one, ancient temples are rising from the ground, ridden with vicious traps and swarming with powerful monsters and 2 main factions are fighting for dominance.

On one hand you have the newly arrived Inquisition, led by Inquisitor Mendoza. They took over Harbor town and their headquarters are in Monastery, where they joined forces with mages. The inquisition are zealous about their cause and prefer preserving order and strict rules. On the other hand are Don and his bandits who have been driven away from Harbor town by the inquisition and now reside in the big swamp. Don’s men are classical mafia, not minding an occasional robbery or pickpocketing of those who they deem deserve it but are overall good towards the people as long as they pay “protection money”.

The choice of whom to join won’t be so easy as the Inquisitor and Don both have their pros and cons and also keep in mind that who you join with determines what kind of skills you can learn. The story is more or less linear, in that you have same main quests for every faction but of course there are differences in quests and dialogues depending on which faction you join. It should keep you interested, as the quests aren’t as generic as they are in most RPGs, the only part I found disappointing was the ending even though some players also complain about 2 last chapters cause of a lot of dungeon crawling but I found it fun, which could admittedly also be because I haven’t played an RPG in a long time.

GRAPHICS: Even though the game is couple of years older, I’d say the graphics are on par with Skyrim. They’re beautiful, it’s enjoyable to just walk around on a sunny day in a forest, especially near water. At least for a city boy like me :stuck_out_tongue: . Dungeons are alright also, although some of them are a little too monotonously colored but hey, they’re dungeons and aren’t supposed to be colorful like a cartoon.



ANIMATIONS:
Overall they’re decent, except downright RIDICULOUS hand animations while talking and the jump animation… if you could call that an animation.

AUDIO: Voice acting is all good except that they have like 1 female voice actor and 2 face models in the whole game? Besides, the main character can sometimes sound a little monotonous, but hey, at least I hear him speak (thinking of you, Elder Scrolls). The soundtrack isn’t anything special but it’s fitting, you’re rarely notice it’s there but when you do you’ll realize how much it contributes to the overall atmosphere.

GAMEPLAY: Now this is where this game shines the brightest. You are free to roam anywhere you want from the start of the game except very few limited areas reserved for the main quests. But you’ll most likely be too weak to go anywhere interesting just yet and will have to get some better weapons and armor. The sense of progress and the reward system in this game is just amazing, you don’t get weapons and armors easily and have to pay dearly, also you have to pay for NPCs to train you in a skill and you receive 10 Learning Points to spend each time you level up. Finally having a better armor or swinging an awesome looking sword you couldn’t have before is very satisfactory. But perhaps the best thing about this game that makes it stand out compared to many others is that the world is hand-crafted and the developers were paying attention to every little detail and every part of the world is filled beasts and useful items for you to pick up, from magical rings and amulets raising your stats to potions, plants and weapons. So even though the world is small compared to, f.e. Skyrim, it has a lot more content to offer on the same area.

How you raise your stats is completely your choice. You can be a pure fighter, a pure mage, a pure archer or a mix of two or even all three. But be careful how you spend your LP, there are only about 29 levels you can attain so it’s about 290 LP, spend them wisely and I recommend not trying to become a little bit of everything because if you spread out too wide you’ll end up being useless at everything and incapable of beating enemies.

For fighters the most important skills to learn are sword and/or axe fighting (Don) and strength OR staves and strength for warriors of the order (Inquisition). Joining Don will prevent you from getting the highest level in staff fighting, as will joining the Inquisition prevent you from getting the highest level in sword/axe fighting (though you can use rings and amulets to artificially raise your skill to maximum). You can f.e. sword to maximum and THEN join inquisition, but that would be a little impractical as you would do almost no damage cause of not training strength simultaneously. Generally, axes are stronger and swords are longer so it’s your choice, power vs range. I myself chose swords cause they look better :stuck_out_tongue: . And cause with swords you can use a shield from the very beginning, which is extremely useful as you’ll be very squishy and easy to kill at start.

Melee combat would be EXCELLENT if not for one little flaw. Auto-targeting. It’s fine in 1v1s, but against multiple enemies it can seriously fuck you up, locking on an enemy you aren’t even facing while the one in front of him or behind you bashes your skull in. But with some clever positioning that can be avoided and it didn’t really bother me as much as I expected it to. The mentioned flaw becomes even less relevant once you learn power striking… FUCK YEAH, THAT IS THE SHIT.

Ranged combat (bows, xbows) is great, definitely stronger than melee in the first few chapters, but later on you won’t have much space to shoot your enemies and it falls behind in terms of damage too.

I can’t say much about being a mage as I only played a warrior, but from what I’ve seen the magic system is interesting. There are 3 types magic crystals (which you can also use as a warrior of order): pure magic, fire, ice. Those are your primary damage spells. The rest of the spells are runes (which only mages can use) and focus on utility, such as light, heal, unlock, levitate, magic barrier, conjure skeleton etc. The runes have their versions for non-mage players, called spell scrolls, which are one-time-use.

Other skills include smithing, alchemy, sneaking, pickpocketing, opening locks… you know it.

Choice result in consequences and certain characters will even begin to grow on you. The most fun thing in the game is probably exploring the detailed world and taking down powerful monsters you couldn’t have killed before and acquiring the treasures they’re guarding.

The game, even though it has its flaws, has entertained me for a decent 50 hours, which I think is the maximum I could have gotten out of it. Greater quality than many other RPGs, but it lacks in quantity. If the ending and the final fight weren’t so disappointing and just LAME I would have given it 95/100, but this way, 90/100.


Next ones I’ll play are CoD Black Ops, Gothic 3 and Skyrim in that order.

I stopped playing games a long time ago, but have fun now ya hear :wink:

angry birds ftw

You played games before? Can you name a few at least?

Smartphone gaming is so hardcore :laughing:

So, I finally found the time to play Black Ops. The quality was as I expected when it comes to gameplay. The quantity, as with all CoD games when it comes to single player, lacks (5hr campaign). Game optimization was poor and I had to play with Playstation 2 graphics to avoid lag and I can run newer, prettier games at high without issues. That was frustrating, I’m not a graphics whore but the game looked horrible. Story was interesting at the start, though it gets somewhat predictable later on and depending on your experience with such plots you might even predict the main plot twist. The beginning is peculiar, I thought I was watching Saw because you start as a guy tied to a chair and speaking with the interrogator, remembering your past and giving him information. Characters are decent but not too interesting. There isn’t as much of variety in weapons as in MW3, though there are some new attachments (dual mag, extended mag).

Overall, just as I expected - another decent CoD but nothing new. Didn’t even touch MP.

Soviet Strike, Destruction Derby, Tekken, Alien, Mario Kart & Mario World, some beat em ups, some shoot em ups, some space invaders, pac man…

I watch my nephews play GTA… or more like crack up all the way through it, but I draw the line at picking up the controller [-(

Now it’s more bejewelled blitz and mahjong on Android :slight_smile:

You should only ride a bicycle everywhere, and start collecting stuff that will be worth something someday like in 40 Year Old Virgin. Also learn how to sing the Age of Aquarius song now too.

Some recommendations…

Dark Souls/Demon’s Souls (awesome on so many levels and there’s a real satisfaction in conquering theses games on your own)
Skyrim (pure open world/questing fun, incredible soundtrack; in retrospect,terrible combat mechanics)
Minecraft (i thought it was a pointless game before I tried it because no one could ever explain to me what the object of it was, but I love it now)
Bioshock Infinite (just a well-made game and a wonderfully envisioned world)
The Last of Us (only started it, but what I played was really promising both gameplay and story-wise. one of the best attempts at creating authentic main characters in a game ever.)

Also, the CoD single-player experience might still be mildly entertaining, but for FPS single-player games I’d go with something like Metro: Last Light (fucking beautiful game on a good PC) or Bioshock or even the Half-Life games if you never played them (especially the HL1 remake).

I finished Black Ops 2. They introduced some major changes, and they’re either awesome or just plain stupid.

I’ll start with awesome. First of all, you follow 2 stories at once, the 80s story in Vietnam of Alex Mason and the 2020 or so story of David Mason, his son. I found that pretty interesting. Another good thing is that you can finally pick your weapons and attachments and also even the skin of the weapon. Otherwise it’s not anything revolutionary, but for CoD it is :stuck_out_tongue: .

Now, for the stupid. STRIKE FORCE. Who the FUCK wants to play that? It’s some sort of RTS/Tower Defense/FPS mix, fucking bullshit. I wouldn’t even mind it if didn’t impact the storyline, but it does and if you don’t do the Strike Force missions you get a worse ending. Talking about endings, now you are sometimes given a choice in the game and the choices you make determine what kind of an ending you’ll have. Which would be completely fine if you could know that if you choose something it won’t backfire and you won’t get the opposite result of what you chose. Yes, I know it adds to realism and NO, I don’t like realism in games, there’s enough realism in reality and I play games to fucking ESCAPE from it. CoD storyline and gameplay isn’t believable anyway, so let’s be honest, if you’re looking for realistic games, CoD is among the last choices.

Also, they seemed to have tried to make the main villain sympathetic and IMO failed miserably. Basically, he is a criminal who tortured and killed the whole team and only one of the main characters survived. and then he is shown to have a soft side for his sister. Then the same main character who watched his teammates get tortured and killed by the criminal tries to kill the guy by throwing a grenade and he instead accidentally kills his sister ( he didn’t know she was in the room too). Of course, the villain tries to get his revenge by making the whole world pay and you have to save it.

All in all, just another decent CoD with a fun, short campaign.

MagsJ

Oh, a late 80s early 90s gamer? I used to play games like Crash Bandicoots and Spyros on PS1 while I was a kid, though I never owned a Nintendo.

Why do you draw the line there? If you want to play, just do it, you’re never too old if that’s what you mean :stuck_out_tongue: . Or you might be interested in more serious, “mature”, artistic sort of games.

Contra-Nietzsche

Not sure if I’m getting your point. I think you might be trying to make a joke because I play games and portray me as a typical geek. However, geeks usually have an aversion towards any kind of physical activity, so riding the bike doesn’t fit. Also, that song… just WTF :open_mouth:

fuse

Mmm, yeah, it lagged like hell on my old PC so I quit after about 5 minutes but on my new PC it shouldn’t. I may try it, I hear it’s hardcore.

I played it with a mage until level 7-8 or so. It was kind of fun at first but it got boring. Combat mechanics aren’t that horrible if you play a mage. It’s the best Bethesda game so far IMO, though it’s still a little too generic in terms of gameplay, world design and character design. It’s also very time consuming.

If you like RPGs like Skyrim and Dark Souls I recommend Kingdoms of Amalur (awesome melee and mage combat) and Gothic games. Also, Dragon Age Origins is great.

My brother is a huge fan of it, me not so much. I prefer games that I can finish :stuck_out_tongue:. If you like Minecraft you may also like Don’t Starve, it’s an interesting indie survival game quite similar to it.

People keep recommending me that game… I guess I really have to play it :laughing:

I only have a PC, and The Last of Us is a PS3 exclusive. I’d like to play it, but I don’t feel like buying a console for just one game :stuck_out_tongue:

I tried Metro 2033 and liked it… for the first couple of hours. Then I realized that there is only 1 model of mutants in the whole game (except the flying ones) and I got really pissed off at such laziness. Then the Nazi mission came and I was forced to sneak a lot. I hate sneaking in FPS games, so I quit and looked up the story, wasn’t impressed and never looked back.

I prefer S.T.A.L.K.E.R when it comes to FPS/RPG survival horrors.

I’ll definitely consider Half-Life tho, it’s one of many classics I have yet to play.

Seconding Dark Souls/Demon Souls/Dark Souls 2.

Atheris, just watch the movie “40 Year Old Virgin”, its about the videogame life of a guy who never has sex till 40… he had a really amazing video game set up, was in fantastic shape bicycling everywhere, had a million super collectable action figures worth alot, and got married… and sang the age of Aquarius song.

Am I the only learned, cultured person on this forum?

…from the late 80s to early 2,000s, and yes… the latter, although I have been known to pick up a joy pad every now and again :wink:

Please people, lets be grown up and not discuss masturbating on this forum.

Atheris,

If you try the first Dark Souls, which was a fan-requested port from PS3, there is an unofficial patch called “DSfix” or something like that makes the game much better to play in terms of frame rate and resolution. Set that up and it should be a decent experience. Also, it was made to be played with a controller and I hear it’s awkward with keyboard and mouse. Can’t promise you’ll like it, but if you do you’ll probably love it. Seems to be the way it goes with those games. I’ve played all three and loved them.

I had never played the Elder Scrolls series before Skyrim so I was impressed when in came out in 2011 and sunk a bunch of hours into it. I burnt out on it before the DLC was even released, but I had so much fun with it. I still listen to the music on occasion. I agree that the world and character design are generic, though.

Minecraft does actually have an ending of sorts. There is a main boss you can find and defeat and the credits will roll, but yes it is the type of game that is essentially creative and can go on forever. I think it’s best played on a personal server with a few friends to build cool stuff together, go adventuring, or just have wars with one another.

Yeah the original Half-Life is a classic and I have nostalgia from playing it late at night when I was a kid. Graphically even the remake is slightly dated now, but it’s still pretty unique and fun to play. If you’ve never played it you might want to start there for your next FPS.

Yes, Bioshock Infinite is good.

Also, the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot is a great 3rd person shooter.

I just picked up this game called “Outlast” and played it a little. If you’re a masochist and/or like horror games I recommend it, it’s really well made. But, since screaming like a little girl and shitting my pants isn’t exactly what I consider “fun”, I stopped playing. I’ll probably watch a walkthrough tho, as the game seems really interesting.

The movie sounds boring.

And if by learned and cultured you mean somebody who watches movies like “40 Year Old Virgin” then I guess you are :laughing:

Thanks for that. Likewise, if you ever decide to play a Gothic game, tell me because you really need to patch it up in order for it to be playable and look decent :stuck_out_tongue:

I can definitely see the quality in Skyrim and why some people like it, but I myself got a little bored and didn’t have much time to play then. I did have my fun with it.

Just picked up a fantastic single-player game. Mark of the Ninja. Side–scrolling stealth game… I’ve already put so many hours in… If you wish I can give more of a review.

Ha, yes, it’s true. You could be missing out though!

Also, anyone ever play The Witcher 2?

Rejection

Lowering the standards, one post at a time.

Finished Prototype 2 recently. It’s an improvement over the previous game in almost every relevant aspect. Combat is significantly more fluid and controlled now, with more options, better animations and all that. There’s dodging, blocking and counter strikes that also give you the option of dismembering stronger enemies etc. It’s the primary reason to play the game. Second is the incredible feeling of freedom, agility and power. You can run as fast as a racecar, jump as high as a building and throw cars around like they’re stuffed animals. You can slaughter enemies any way you like, barefisted, with one of your deadly 5 mutated melee weapons, with military weapons or with military vehicles, completely up to you (except in some missions). Oh, and the finisher attacks look just spectacular.

Story is one of the aspects of the game that was dumbed down, it was somewhat interesting in the first game, but now it’s completely uninteresting. The main character is James Heller, the stereotypical two dimensional, brainless action hero. Not nearly as interesting and complex as the main character of the first game, Alex Mercer who is, by the way, included in the 2nd game. Then again, this isn’t a game you play for the story in the first place.

As for the technical side, graphics and animations are improved compared to the first game. I’m not a graphics whore but in a game like this they are relevant because of immersion. More importantly however, animations are more polished. It’s kind of poorly optimized but should run decently if you lower settings.

Finished the game and having fun with Alex Mercer’s skin and other Radnet accessories, it’s really sweet :smiley:

I picked up The Last of Us again and finished it. It is definitely a unique take on crafting realistic characters who you come to know and care about. The Last of Us is an exceptionally pretty and immersive third-person shooter; however, since I have become recently spoiled by gorgeous open world games, its boundaries and linearity slightly dampen the affect.

For the fps players out there, Destiny has some really addictive firefight action. The combat controls and mechanics are excellent. It’s like a sleeker Halo, which makes sense because it was created by Bungie, the same company responsible for developing Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo Reach before Microsoft took over the series. What’s (even) worse this time around, however, is the story. It is super short and thin. And the Halo mythology was much more interesting than anything in Destiny. But, if you like challenging and competitive shooters, you will find a decent amount of fun here. It also seems like Bungie continues to update the game with new end game missions and multiplayer modes for free. One major downside for people with unreliable internet connection, though: this game requires an internet connection at all times because the story mode is designed so that you regularly cross paths with other players. I worried that seeing and working with other players during the campaign would be a major nuisance, but to my surprise it was instead fairly enjoyable to causally cross paths and interact with other people playing the same level. The internet requirement still blows.

This is the last great game I’ve played:

Vanquish

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRAAFCAq3pI[/youtube]

This one is quite a spoiler, so don’t watch it if you haven’t played the game.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgYXCKFc_ys[/youtube]

They call it “Gears of War on crack”. I played it before playing Gears of War and I have to say that compared to this, GoW is crap.

The other one which I liked quite a bit is Metal Gear Rising (from the same company) but I have yet to finish that one.