Saints Row IV

As I mentioned in the last post, its basically a low guilt murder simulator.  That said, it is a lot of fun.  A quick break down first though.

Saints Row – apparently a cheap GTA knock off

Saints Row II – they realized they were a cheap GTA knock off and started having fun with it, not taking them selves seriously, making in jokes and what have you.  Haven’t played it, but its on the list (a little older and the graphics are a bit dated, I’m taking a step away from higher end graphic games before going back to it).  This one apparently is more the game I wanted to play – leveling up stats, climbing the ladder and building a crime empire while being able to interact (and kill) the NPCs.

Saints Row the third – haven’t played it but will after II, just because the game has its own history that I want to experience.  They’re really far from being a GTA clone by this point, giving you skills like blowing your hands to enormous sizes to better beat people to death with.

Saints Row IV – funny as hell.  You go from fighting rival gangs in the first two to fighting rival crime syndicates in the third to, finally, fighting evil aliens in a Matrix style computer simulation.  It doesn’t take itself seriously and you’re basically a fast running, high jumping, nearly flying, over powered superhero in this one (or, closer to the truth, a supervillian killing random strangers for the fun of it).

If you ever wanted to steal a cop car and plow it into a crowd of hookers, use a tank to plow over every car in the street, or just rank up a kill count in the tens of thousands, this is the game for you.  As far as mindless destruction and killing stander byers by the dozens goes, no game touches it.  I literally racked up a kill count in the tens of thousands with this game.

Its not completely open world, you don’t really interact with anyone (outside of killing them) that aren’t part of the main story line.  Its got a slew of nintendo style running/jumping/throwing mini games that aren’t my cup of tea.  Its fairly short, if I just stuck to the quest, I could have finished it in probably 20 hours.  I ended up putting about 50 hours of game time just killing and blowing things up.  I’m keeping it on my machine just to have something easy and fun to go to just to blow off steam.

If you’re interested though, you probably do want to start off at at least Saints Row the third, if not going back to the second one first.

Mafia II

Ok, this is so not an open world game and I’d like to smack the hell out of the numerous sources that list it as one.  Its no more open world than the first 3 Silent Hills were.  Yeah, it has a large map you can explore some but that’s where the similarities between an open world game begins and ends.  No real side missions, no real interaction with the NPCs and one story line that you have to follow that’s very linier.  Worst of all, you can’t save any time you want – or even on exiting.  Basically you have to complete a quest to get a save, so if you just want to dick around and jack cars or what have you, it only saves your progress if complete a mission afterwards.  That was the deal breaker for me.  I don’t always know how much time I’m going to have to play and sometimes just like to explore or whatever.  I gave up after the first days worth of play because of that.

So its not an open world game, its more like a movie that you’re creating the extended directors cut.  The game itself seemed interesting (overlooking the horrible driving – which you spend half the game doing).  Plot seemed good and I was happy with the voice acting.  It comes highly recommended by many people and from what I played, it probably lives up to the hype.  But it wasn’t an open world game, which is what I was in the mood for, so I moved on.

State of Decay

OMG, this is the most unforgiving game I’ve ever played.  It’s a zombie apocalypse game where you play a group of survivors.  Right out of the gate that makes it different.  You’re not playing and leveling a single character, you’re playing a full group that you put together and train. 

The graphics are solid but low frill, not great and very lightweight, but they get the job done (once you get adjusted to the some times very odd choices of colors).  And there’s a very step learning curve.  The games fairly detailed and really doesn’t give you an adjustment period.  It throws you in the game and just swamps you with decisions when you have no idea what’s going on – which is fairly intentional – pretty much exactly how you’d feel in an actual zombie apocalypse.

Every decision you make counts.  You can use guns, but you have to find ammo first and ammo is limited, plus guns make noise and draw more zombies to you.  You can play melee (and the melee actually unlocks some pretty sweet special moves – its not just a single button click fest of spamming the same move over and over) but you have a stamina bar that drains the more you fight.

You meet neighbors who can help you, but if you don’t help them when they need it, they die in the middle of the night.  You can fortify and upgrade a base, but this requires different resources you have to track down and live long enough to bring back.  Plus you need to find fellow survivors with special skill sets for some upgrades before the zombies find them first.

But two thing stick out making it like no other games out there (now).  First, it keeps ‘playing’ when you log off.  You log off without making sure your group is stocked up and with high moral, when you log back in you might find yourself missing half your group.

The second part is what makes it so unforgiving though.  You can’t keep multiple saves.  The game saves for you (auto and when you log off).  So if you make a mistake and get one of the characters you’ve been leveling up killed, they’re basically gone.  No carrying their soul stone to a shrine, no reloading a previous save file, no anything.  Once they’re ripped to pieces by zombies, they’re gone.  Single zombies are fairly easy to kill, but hordes, large groups, or some of the special zombies will tear a character literally to pieces (or in half in some cases) in seconds.  Once you’ve seen a few characters torn to pieces with no way of getting them back, it really raises the bar of the threat level like no other game I’ve played.  It forces you to be more cautious and think things through and gives a heightened sense of suspense when you’re low on stamina, trying to make it back to your home base and you run into one of the special zombies.  This game has really kept me on the edge of my seat at times.

Its kind of lacking in plot, story and interaction with the NPCs but it turns out that’s also pretty realistic.  When you pick up new survivors, you find yourself not really caring about their back story as much as you are if they have special skills and positive traits – or are they junkie alcoholics that you’re just going to have to throw out for being dead weight.

If you can handle the learning curve, its well worth checking out.

yeah

Selee wrote on Jan 24^th, 2015 at 1:02pm:

She's probably cheating on you with Solas