[Kukuk]

Started playing the Crisis Core remake. It's sort of an odd remake to me, because there was a great deal of effort put into remaking all the graphics, but they mostly kept all the gameplay elements intact. The game even loads at all the same places it did on PSP, and has all the same ways of avoiding battles and whatnot. But then, like, they redid all the voice acting, and it sounds worse? I really don't know what's going on with the game, but on the whole I like it. I played the original endlessly back in the day, so it's been nice going back and replaying this with proper controls (PSP didn't have a second analog stick, remember!)

And while it's not quite as nice looking as FF7 remake, it's pretty good looking, especially with how easy it is to run.

A lot of the dialogue in the game is coming off as really awkward to me, and it's sapping some of the love I had for the game. Overall it's probably a 7/10 for me.

 

[SilverEars]

Got into Monster Hunter World since I'm pretty much done with Wild Hearts. Interesting circle of kill monster -> upgrade weapon/armor, and repeat. It's kinda fun once you undersand how things works in the game. I get a feeling the game will get more challenging from high level onwards.

There's so much to the game that it can get overwhelming, but once you get an understanding, and play as intended, the experience gets much better.

 

[henryroberts]

I play GTA 5 for the first time.
It took me a while to finally get it, and I'd rate it 9/10

 

[carb0mb]

Counterstrike 2. It's trash, but I love it anyways.

 

[SweetCans928]

Drums Rock on PSVR2. It's a lot of fun. I haven't played it a ton, but I'm thinking a 7/10 would be pretty deserving.

 

[rennyprowess]

Counterstrike 2. It's trash, but I love it anyways.

I love that game! It gives me a daily dose of brain damage!

 

[averydonovan]

I've started out the year playing I Was a Teenage Exocolonist which the developer describes as a "narrative RPG," though I've been thinking of it as more like a visual novel with stats-raising and a deck-building component. Regardless of labels, it's a rather unique game and the "narrative" part of the description is no joke as it's text-heavy and has a huge story.

The game is about being growing up as a member of Earth's first colony on an exoplanet and how they relate to their fellow colonists, interact with the planet, and deal with situations that occur as the protagonist goes from childhood to very early-adulthood. There's a variety of different relationships they can form with various colonists that are close in age to them. This can be indifference, friendship, or dating. All of the characters you can potentially befriend or romance are complex in various ways, and even the most seemingly shallow characters have layers.

A major part of the game is replayability. You actually have to replay it multiple times to complete the story, and there are references in places in-game when you do this. And replay it I have. I've spent over 70 hours so far on 7 different full runs and some partial runs on top of that and am not finished yet with the game.

I've found the story quite moving at times and found myself getting surprisingly attached to some characters. The content warnings at the beginning of the game are there for a reason and the endings can hit kind of hard emotionally. Actually there's many parts in the game that can be surprisingly emotionally intense. While not particularly dark, I would not consider this a feel-good game. I think the emotional intensity is a major asset to the game and shows how good the writing is.

The soundtrack is simply great. It's a compilation of both original and existing mostly ambient tracks and fits in very well with the game.

I'm playing the PC version from Steam and mostly using a game controller in combination with a mouse. It runs smoothly-enough in 4K with multisampling turned off on my AMD Ryzen 5 2400GE integrated graphics and looks absolutely gorgeous.

9.5/10

 

[Kukuk]

Currently playing The Last of Us remake. I sorta have mixed feeling about it, but on the whole I'm enjoying it.

When the game first released way back on PS3 I was absolutely obsessed with it. I think I played it through 7 or 8 times, even beating it on the hardest difficulty (which is rare for me! One of only a handful of games I've beat at max difficulty). I absorbed every piece of TLoU content on the internet, and ate, slept, and breathed the game. For whatever reason that fact completely skipped my mind until I started playing this again.

Playing it now, however, it doesn't resonate with my like it once did. I think part of the problem is I see a lot of the irksome tropes that linger today in it, likely originating from it. Most notably the whole "games as movies" thing, a trend that Sony has really leaned into. The original game didn't invent that, but it really legitimized it. I feel like trying to use games to tell stories exactly like movies do is kind of a waste of the medium. I think the Telltale games did a better job of utilizing the strength of games (choice) to tell a story in a way that movies can't, even if the choices ultimately never mattered.

All that being said, it's still a pretty compelling story. Some of the acting is laid on a little heavy, but I can mostly forgive that.

The PC version of the game, for the most part, is good. Lots of graphical options (though I'm running a 4090, so there's really not much I need to tweak), and some nice PC-specific features like DLSS/FSR, and my personal favorite feature: the ability to remove pillar boxing from cut scenes on ultrawide screen. One thing that really annoys me is the DLSS implementation is trash. The game ends up looking super upscale-y, even with DLAA; I suspect there's some other temporal weirdness going on. I've been running without DLSS, just native res, and all my screenshots look like crap, with weird pixelation.

Squished down the screenshots look fine, but when zoomed in, especially with the second screenshot, they're really messy looking. Thankfully it doesn't look like that in game!

 

[DenverW]

I'm not going to rate it, because I honestly can't say how much fun it is...but Vampire Survivor is horrifically addicting. On the 'one more game' scale it's a 9.5 out of 10.

 

[SweetCans928]

I'm not going to rate it, because I honestly can't say how much fun it is...but Vampire Survivor is horrifically addicting. On the 'one more game' scale it's a 9.5 out of 10.

It's a great game for co-op with the girlfriend as well. Mine was convinced she wouldn't like it, but it didn't take long for the One More Game syndrome to set in lol.

Currently playing The Last of Us remake. I sorta have mixed feeling about it, but on the whole I'm enjoying it.

When the game first released way back on PS3 I was absolutely obsessed with it. I think I played it through 7 or 8 times, even beating it on the hardest difficulty (which is rare for me! One of only a handful of games I've beat at max difficulty). I absorbed every piece of TLoU content on the internet, and ate, slept, and breathed the game. For whatever reason that fact completely skipped my mind until I started playing this again.

Playing it now, however, it doesn't resonate with my like it once did. I think part of the problem is I see a lot of the irksome tropes that linger today in it, likely originating from it. Most notably the whole "games as movies" thing, a trend that Sony has really leaned into. The original game didn't invent that, but it really legitimized it. I feel like trying to use games to tell stories exactly like movies do is kind of a waste of the medium. I think the Telltale games did a better job of utilizing the strength of games (choice) to tell a story in a way that movies can't, even if the choices ultimately never mattered.

All that being said, it's still a pretty compelling story. Some of the acting is laid on a little heavy, but I can mostly forgive that.

The PC version of the game, for the most part, is good. Lots of graphical options (though I'm running a 4090, so there's really not much I need to tweak), and some nice PC-specific features like DLSS/FSR, and my personal favorite feature: the ability to remove pillar boxing from cut scenes on ultrawide screen. One thing that really annoys me is the DLSS implementation is trash. The game ends up looking super upscale-y, even with DLAA; I suspect there's some other temporal weirdness going on. I've been running without DLSS, just native res, and all my screenshots look like crap, with weird pixelation.

Here's a screenshot of mine from the same spot, except in 32:9!
Link because the image is too big for headfi

Did you see the Last of Us tv show? It was really interesting how closely it followed the game.

 

[SilverEars]

Max Dood has good opinions

 

[whirlwind]

I am way late to the game as far as playing RDR2.

It is easily the most fun that I have had playing a pc game

 

[Kukuk]

Been playing Dragon's Dogma 2. Having waited over a decade for it, my hopes were sky-high. I played through the original on PS3, then Dark Arisen on PS3, then played it through endlessly on PC. Even put a good amount of time on the Switch version. I had pretty much squeezed every bit of entertainment out of that game, so a new game was long overdue.

DD2 has faced a fair bit of criticism, some deservedly, and some largely overblown. I think arguably the biggest criticism it's faced is the microtransactions, and to me, this has been making mountains out of molehills. The in-game purchases amount to nothing more than "boosters", yet people are acting like they are somehow game breaking. It's literally just stupid stuff like wake stones, port crystals, and character transformation items; all of which are plentiful in game.

The bigger issue with the game is performance, particularly on PC. In city areas it runs very poorly, and it's straight-up not leveraging any of your hardware. Even on my 5600X3D, a 6-core CPU, I'm only getting about 70% usage, with my GPU being at about 50%. Utterly unacceptable. Thankfully, outside of towns the game runs pretty decently. Things like DLSS are broken, but FSR looks good if you need the upscale, and running natively isn't super demanding.

So with that out of the way, I'm absolutely loving the game. The world is huge and sprawling, with things to do at every fork in the road. There are deep reworks to the combat system that changes the way it feels, and I don't think I can ever go back to the first game. I'm slightly annoyed with traversal, as the physics-based movement gets a little weird with steps and small cliffs, but I can largely overlook that.

There's mostly the same creatures from the previous game, but they've got some tweaks to them, opening up new strategies for downing them. It really makes experimenting in combat a lot of fun.

Not super far in yet, about 16 hours or so, but so far I'm really enjoying my time with the game. If they can hammer out the technical issues, this will likely be my game of the year.

 

[Svperstar]

I'm finally playing the Final Fantasy 7 Remake on PC. It only uses like 50-60% of my GPU in most places but will shoot up to 99% in some places, I'm using a mod to remove the framerate cap.

Its very good, iconic game. The AI of the companions is disappointing tho, there is no way to make them use their own skills outside of like one materia.

I liked the original Dragons Dogma but I'm happy to wait for 6 months - 1 year of patches before I pick up part 2.

 

[Amish]

@Kukuk I'm playing DD2 as well. About 12-13 hours in. I also played the original on PS3 and then later on PC. I got exactly what I was expecting and I love it.

I'm not having any performance issues. I'd love to be running stable at 120fps but I'm playing at 4K, all settings on and maxed, including RT and using FSR3, quality with upscale sharpness maxed out. In the city, my FPS swings from 51 to 102 fps depending on where I am in the city at any given time. In the wilderness, things are much better. This is with a 7900 XTX and 7800x3d.

They know how to pan fry a steak.