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| Praey for the Gods - my second refund by Rafiki 12/20/2021, 2:46pm PST | ||||
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| (The name is not a typo, I guess Bethesda were being shitheads and threatened to sue them)
This game is like if you combined Shadow of the Colossus with Breath of the Wild for no reason whatsoever. The core game is giant-slaying with the following features lifted from Zelda:
In addition to a stamina meter that wears down as you climb around, there's also a warmth meter, a hunger meter, and sleep meter in case you were like, "those other two games weren't tedious enough, I wish I had more meters to juggle." If they make a sequel, maybe they can add a thirst meter, bathing meter, and a blood-sugar meter for gaming's first (?) diabetic lead to make gaming more inclusive. To be fair, changing the difficulty enables/disables those extra meters having any effect on you, but still why bother? I killed two giants and Youtubed the rest to find that every single one of them can be beaten without weapons. The giants are all killed by pulling on big metal rods attached to them like vacuum wine stoppers. They did this because all of your weapons can break, which would force you to abandon boss fights, which they wisely predicted no one would find any fun. But without the central point of the game requiring weapons, or any kind of item upgrades, they effectively designed away any reason for those things existing. Bosses are marked on the map one after another as you defeat them, and while there's enemies across the landscape, you can ignore them or take routes to bosses where you just plain don't encounter them. All of the other crap seems added to create some false sense of exploration, but there's nothing motivating you to do so. In BotW, you could technically run straight to the final boss once you got off the starting plateau, but the game was difficult enough that you would be at a huge disadvantage unless you were already very knowledgeable and proficient at it. In this game, once you beat the first boss you know everything you need to kill the others and there's no real need to gather weapons or upgrade items. Also, exploration in BotW was fun, with a million puzzles and interactions that were possible. In this game, you slowly trudge through snow, fight bad enemies, and gather wood so you can idle at campfires until your cold meter refills. Then there's all kinds of little nuisances that add up to be incredibly annoying. Several options in the menus have icons but no captions so you have to guess what their purpose is. The game tells you collecting three idols will allow you to upgrade your health, but when you collect three a flashing icon appears on the main screen with no explanation of what the game wants from you. I thought maybe I had to return to the central shrine to access some interactive object to trigger an upgrade, but then later I noticed some + symbol in the character menu off to the side you had to highlight to bring up the health/stamina upgrade menu. I killed some worms and picked up what looked like a pile of ash with no notification about what it was. When I checked my inventory, I couldn't find it until I noticed it was in an unselectable "crafting items" list with still no explanation or even name of what it was. Swimming is just awful and the game is way WAY too finnicky about transition out of water onto land. I died once when I missed a jump, landed in a river, and then froze to death because I couldn't grab onto a wall to climb out and there was no spot of land low enough to walk out on. |
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Praey for the Gods - my second refund by 12/20/2021, 2:46pm PST  |
