What are you playing this weekend/these days?


Played through Rift Apart again in challenge mode, a new game plus basically. Levelled up all the gadgets' omega versions to 10 and also got them fully upgraded. Two different sources of crowd control, 3 different minions to distract and attack enemies and of course devastating weapons on top of that. You become insanely powerful and can just melt bosses, very satisfying.
 
Just finished Journey to the Savage Planet. 1st person metroidvania. Not a lot of combat. Humorous.
 
Played through the first volume of EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER. (that is often part of itch's charity bundles). "A serial visual novel/mech brawler about four gay disasters beating up neonazis in giant robots made of meat." as the game maker says. For once, a *punk thing totally earns that suffix. It's not only punk in the themes and general tone, but even in the execution. It really feels like something put together by someone/a team that's far from professional but has something to say and won't let the lack of polish stand in their way.
On the paper, it's nothing exceptional: a decently written visual novel coupled with a shoddy top-down mech-fighting game. But there's a kind of rawness about it that left a deep impression on me. I'll probably buy the second volume to both see where it goes and support the developer.
 
Just finished The Gunk. More of a chore than a fun game. Vacuuming up the eponymous gunk while slow-walking is what you do half of the game, which gets old like 20 minutes into it. There is no skill involved and it's just not fun. The little combat that's there is a joke as well as the very meager puzzling. It suffers from huge performance problems in the end part of the game. The story is basic, predictable and the dialogues get annoying pretty quickly. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it has nice environmental design, that's it.
 
Just finished The Gunk. More of a chore than a fun game. Vacuuming up the eponymous gunk while slow-walking is what you do half of the game, which gets old like 20 minutes into it. There is no skill involved and it's just not fun. The little combat that's there is a joke as well as the very meager puzzling. It suffers from huge performance problems in the end part of the game. The story is basic, predictable and the dialogues get annoying pretty quickly. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it has nice environmental design, that's it.
It does look okay. But it didn't look like I would enjoy it.
 
At least it was cheap ;)

Finished Rusty Lake Hotel. A stimulating point and click puzzler with a macabre theme. Very much recommended for the price. It's also available on mobile.
 
Just finished Steamworld Dig 2. Played through it in two long sittings. Between the Boulderdash-style gameplay, collecting riches, unlocking and buying upgrades, finding secrets, fighting enemies, doing puzzle rooms and platforming challenges this was a lot of fun. It's beautifully drawn and has great music. Highly recommended!
 
^- Reminds me of kkrieger

Just finished SKALD: Against the Black Priory, a turn- and party-based retro RPG. It has great writing with a lovecraftian/alien theme, good music and "for the time" great graphics with optional CRT filters. I love and highly recommend it!
Judging by the GOG achievements only 14.8 % of owners finished the game, shame!
2026-02-22_1626_1.png
 
Last edited:
While true, if you check any game on Steam you'll see that many games have very low rates for achievements.
For example, for the game Brutal John 2 (which is still early access, so mostly 'fans' bought the game already) you can see the following achievements:
Complete level 1: 94.2%
Complete level 2: 74.4%
Complete level 3: 61.2%
Complete level 4: 52.4%
Complete level 5: 43.2%
Complete level 6: 38.0%

You can see you already lose a lot of people after level 1. And this I see with many games.
If I would guess 33% completion rate of a game is already high. GTA 5 "complete the final mission" hits 23.9%.
 
Assassin's Creed

This game is very similar to WB games like Batman Arkham / Middle-Earth: Shadow / MAD MAX

Open world with towers to reveal subquests on the maps.

But maybe I waited too long to play this game, I'm pretty much disappointed.
The open world is there, but there's nothing to do outside of the main quests.
Actually there's the possibility to find and collect flags scattered around, but them are really too many ... like more than 500 ... not pointed on the map and not even highlighted in some way ...

The combat system is somehow ok, but starts to feel repetitive after the fifth time you are involved in a battle.
It's obviously the previous step before a free-flow combat system, so it's not so fun or good to watch like in the games I listed before.

The control over the character is not perfect, and many times I died because of falls I didn't expected, sometimes when near a corner the character changes direction just before the jump ...
In Batman Arkham the falls were harmless, and should have been like than even in this game, instead you "die" (but in the game it's a simulation so you can't die) and respawn in the last checkpoint.

The story is cool, but really slow because of the very repetitive gameplay.
I'm at 1/3rd of the game, but just playing the first chapter shows you everything the game has to offer, the rest is just a constant repetition of the same.

I'm trying to find the will to finish it, but it's really hard this time... and even as a "wannabe" completionist I will never search for all the flags.

So, in the end luckily it wasn't so long and the story had some cool twists.
There were A LOT of unavoidable boring combat sessions one after another in the last mission, I was trying every single time to run away from the boringness just to stop against invisible walls that wanted me to stay there and fight till the last opponent ...

After the ending credits the game can be continued to finish secondary missions (I will never do the find the flags stuff), but also it reveal some strange information that I'm curious to investigate ... I'm not sure if them are just eye candies for the sequel or there is actually some secrets in the room ...


Anyway, I found something about the game that somehow shocked me a bit ...

Assassin's Creed development started as a Prince of Persia open world game, but then they decided to create a new franchise.
 
The original Prince of Persia is a beautiful game. Linus Torvalds agrees. And I remember my mate back in the day loving Sands of Time. I've only ever played Alladdin on SNES which is clearly inspired. I've got AC2 on PS3 but I'm a bit turned off by Unisoft due to their treatment of developers. What do you guys think of Unisoft? Were they once great? I missed them almost completely because I quit gaming from '95 to '20.
 
Ubisoft made some great games. They have (had?) talented teams and some great ideas. The problem (besides a "boys club" internal culture and their increasingly shitty treatment of their teams) is, just like Activision/Raven Software, that the market rewarded them for repeating the same formula over and over in their best-selling franchises. Even then, they managed to release some great games when they let their teams have fun and work on smaller-budget passion-led projects. They also miserably failed when they decided to try to follow the market and do what everyone else was doing.
 
After Ubisoft made lots of money they probably hired more management/sales/marketing, people who don't directly work on the games themselves. The corporate structure probably switched from game and technology focused to making money. And when money becomes the main driver, away goes the fun. A shell stays without the engineers, and only the sales/marketing/management/etc 'make' money.
 
They recently restructured into 'creative houses' with centralised technology for improved efficiency iiuc.

What are your favourite Unisoft games? I recently gave up on Chaos Theory and regret it, it was ok.
 
Zombii (the 1986 game) had some great concepts for the time.
Beyond Good and Evil : is quite similar to the N64 Zelda games with great world-building, varied gameplay (exploration, platforming, combat, stealth, photo taking, driving...) without any really "weak" part. The story is nice, sometimes goofy, sometimes serious.
I've played one or two Splinter Cells they were good stealth games back then but I'm not sure how they aged.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a great puzzle-platformer with great environments, a good dynamic between the prince and the princess and a great gameplay. I bounced on Warrior Within that had a "gritty and edgy" aesthetic with dull grey and brown environments and didn't play the others until Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown which is an excellent metroidvania with challenging platforming and combat.
The Raving Rabbids party games on Wii were fun with friends and family.
I've played Assassin's Creed 1, 2 and Brotherhood. To be honest, I've enjoyed them more as virtual sightseeing games than as actual video games. The gameplay isn't too bad and some parts were even great but there's a lot of filler content.
Similarly, Far Cry 2 was very fun at first but I got tired of the game at some point and stopped playing. Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon was awesome, though. Completely over-the-top "80 VHS vision of the future" and short enough to not outstay its welcome.
Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends are fun platformers especially with two players.
I Am Alive was a pretty good action/adventure game with a focus on climbing and an interesting combat approach: for most part of the game you rarely have many (if any) bullets for your gun but most enemies will back down if you point your gun at them and some will surrender if intimidated (either by pointing the gun or by killing their leader). Sadly, it was mostly used in a "puzzle" way and got repetitive at some point.
 
Back
Top