Mr.Duck on 24/8/2025 at 05:39
Finally beat Fallout 2 using the unofficial patch. Good times. <3
Now, on to Fallout: London, guv'nor.
Tomi on 24/8/2025 at 13:44
I've been playing Mafia: The Old Country on the Xbox.
Let's say that it's not as good as I hoped, but it's better than I feared. The game tells a fairly solid albeit predictable mafia story that is full of old mafia cliches. The mafia cliches work though and it wouldn't be a mafia game without those. I love the whole Sicilian setting of The Old Country, the game world looks gorgeous and feels surprisingly big. It's just a shame that you never really get a chance to explore it, which leads me to believe that The Old Country was originally going to be much more open-world than it ended up being. Now it's a totally linear experience that feels more like an interactive movie at times. But in a way, I like it that way - the story goes on at a good pace and you won't have time to get bored. I think I still would have preferred at least some "relaxing" moments in between the intense missions though.
The actual gameplay is all around decent, but never great. The gunplay is as basic as it gets, but it does its job. There's also half-decent stealth in the game, and while it's also perfectly adequate, I found it frustratingly easy. The enemies are pretty dumb (and almost deaf) with the most predictable patrol routes ever, and there's always a conveniently placed container nearby where you can hide bodies. I finished many missions in the game without firing a single shot, and that's NOT how I want to play my Mafia games thankyouverymuch. There are also bunch of different cars and horses in the game with different stats, and you can buy more... but you hardly ever get to use them because most of the time you ride whatever the story puts in front of you. So yeah, this game was probably supposed to have horse and car racing and all sorts of other activities in it, but they ended up cutting it all out. That's a shame, I guess.
The delivery of the story and the gorgeous Sicilian setting are the biggest strengths of The Old Country. It also has the most delicious looking tomatoes in any game, ever.
Thirith on 24/8/2025 at 15:15
Has anyone here been playing the Militsioner beta (available on Steam)? I love the originality and strangeness of what we've seen of the game, but I only played it briefly, rather waiting until the full game is out. Since it's being described by some as an immersive sim, I thought that this might be of interest of the TTLG crowd.
henke on 24/8/2025 at 16:06
Thanks for the Mafia write-up Tomi. I'd imagine that shooting/stealth/driving systems pretty much are the same as in Mafia 3/DE? Also sounds like the campaign structure is that same as in DE where it just cuts between missions instead of being connected by open world bits. Surely there'll be a Free Roam mode unlocked once the story is done tho?
I played the first few hours of Resident Evil 2 (OG). It's good, and feels a lot like a 90's point n click adventure, but with zombies everywhere.
Played a bit of Sword of the Sea, and as someone who thought Journey and Abzu were kinda meh, this one is ALSO kinda meh.
Got started on Indika today. Very promising so far!
demagogue on 25/8/2025 at 00:13
Yes that start of Indika is a banger. I now wish a lot more games had such creative interactive opening credits as it had, and mixing pixel art with hyperreal gameplay is also pretty inspired.
vurt on 25/8/2025 at 20:51
Quote Posted by Malf
I can get where you're coming from with BG3.
Unfortunately, I think it's a victim of Larian's development process, as was DOS2 before it; a strong first chapter due to intensive testing by the community, followed by chapters that progressively decrease in qualiy, eventually reaching a last chapter that is broken in all sorts of ways.
Yea, DOS2 was a similar experience for me. i liked it at the start then i just got increasingly less interested in it and just dropped it. The start of that game was great too! Divine Divinity was also like that haha, Larian never changed, that game is a fucking blast in the start.
Currently been playing:
Tainted Grail. Very, uh, formulaic, man do they want to appeal to people who played Skyrim and Dark Souls/Elden Ring haha, kind of cringe, but i am only 4-5h in, maybe it does have its own personality eventually.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3, latest TC's (whatever people call it for Heroes3), seems like Horn of the Abyss is the latest and greatest so that's what i'm using. I remember Heroes3 being more fun and addictive than this, but sure, its pretty decent still, fun for 40 mins here and there. I still suck at it though, so might get more fun once i've learned the mechanics again, been some 20 years since i played it.
I'm feeling like fucking Gandalf when i talk about games these days. "yes i played it, aeons ago when the world was still young.":cheeky:
demagogue on 26/8/2025 at 01:56
I've started Herdling this week. I saw Malygris give it an interesting review on Steam. It's from the team that made the FAR series, which was about operating & maintaining a kind of travelling machine on a cross country journey in a very stylized surreal alien world. The blurb I saw about it (Herdling) looked so fascinating I skipped over FAR 2 to go directly to this, and it's worth it.
In this game you're herding these Totoro-with-ram-horns looking sheep-like creatures through the countryside into the mountains. It's a really inspired concept... It has a number of light puzzles, like FAR had, but the whole world and aesthetics and vibe of it is fantastic. You get to know your flock, which grows as you meet new guys, you get the pet them and have to take care of them, and it has all that heart-warming business. And the gameplay of directing them actually works pretty well.
Quick funny story, I worked on a farm once, and one time I left the person-sized gate open and a cow got out of it, and we had to spend the next hour or so trying to get that cow back through that gate. Basically it works exactly like the game. Farm animals know one thing, or at least in my limited experience, to go the opposite direction from someone clanging at them. I had to actually drag in my dad to help me so we could come at them from the front and back to triangulate the cow through the gate, otherwise I couldn't get around fast enough & he'd just walk right by it. All of this is just to say it actually does a respectable job at handling how you'd actually herd a group of animals around. Great game, I recommend.
Briareos H on 26/8/2025 at 05:54
I love the game, the technical art, the way it threads emotional themes like compassion and fairness into actual gameplay mechanics but I'm having trouble getting the controls to click. It's a lot of work to maintain a stampede going into the right direction or to navigate a dangerous bend and it still feels like I'm fighting the game at every step. Which I guess is the point but it feels a bit... contrived?
EvaUnit02 on 26/8/2025 at 22:40
Gears of War: Reloaded, the Xbox on PC/UWP version, works fine for me. People seem to be having issues with the Steam version, so buyer beware, I guess. It really is an obviously tarted up re-release of the 2015/2016 Gears 1 Ultimate Edition remaster, which I'm very familiar with from heavy play within the last year.
My main complaint is that there's no FOV slider.
This has full crossplay MP across all platforms, so people are already asking for Skill-based Matchmaking (SBMM), so that PS5 + PC noobs don't get stomped by sweaties who've been playing the game for 19 years. Aren't CoD players always complaining about SBMM though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thirith on 27/8/2025 at 14:14
I may just have to replay Hollow Knight before I play Silksong. I reinstalled it just to replay the beginning, and the game immediately pulled me in again with its aesthetic and vibe. Since I'll be away for most of October, I might not want to get started on Silksong as soon as it's out anyway, so a replay might be just the thing.
I also got started on Dying Light 2, but that one feels pretty meh from the start. Having said that: I get the impression that a couple of the parkour upgrades would make traversal more fun than it is at the beginning. But there's little in DL2 that makes me want to boot up the game and play some more. I enjoyed the first game a fair bit, but even that one lost me after a while, and so far it seems that DL2 doesn't really have much that it does better or even as well as the first game.
Edit: One thing I'm not 100% sure of yet, but it's bothering me: am I right in thinking that you can change direction mid-jump by looking elsewhere? There've been a few occasions where I thought I missed a jump (e.g. trying to land on the cables between some buildings), and when I turn more mid-jump it seems to affect the direction in which I move - which feels massively arcadey, like I'm suddenly playing a platformer Super Mario-style. Or does the game have some kind of auto-aim built into its parkour system? As I said: I'm not 100% sure yet that this is what is happening, but there are certain moves that definitely feel like they use somewhat magic physics, more so than just being able to jump very far and from great hights.
