Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of January 21st
Hey y'all, what have you been playing?
I have been playing quite a bit of lies of p, and I started cocoon as well. Both super solid games. I'm getting my PC back tomorrow so I think I'm going to finally start Alan wake 2 as well!
Just finished Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time. I had it since release but it grew on me very slowly. Focused more on it after the release of 2.0 and it quickly became one of my favorite games ever made. Highly recommend.
I wanted something more linear so I finally started playing God of War (2018) with the intention to finish it. I started it back in 2018 a few months after it came out but it was hard to get into since the combat didn’t feel as free or open-ended as the games I was used to like Spider-man, the Arkham games, or Dark Souls but it’s okay imo. I’m hoping the story has better payoff than the combat does.
I had the same reaction to God of War, with reverence for the combat in those other games you listed as well. Do you typically enjoy character action games? They all kind of felt the same to me, and I couldn't really get into the combat in them even though I ought to be into it on paper. Then Hi-Fi Rush came along and made that genre make sense to me. Now I've gone back through most of the Devil May Cry series and plan on giving God of War another shot when I find the time.
I’m not sure I know what a character action game is. God of War feels a little grating to me because there are enough enemies who feel like they’re programmed to be challenging and aren’t naturally challenging. I know some enemies from the Spider-man and Arkham games are technically the same, but they ride the other side of the line that defines immersion. DOOM 2016 and DOOM: Eternal are better examples of games with combat mechanics which encourage you (sometimes very strongly) to play the game a specific way, but lets you try to play it your way if you want, or can’t play the way it encourages.
A character action game is something like God of War, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or Hi-Fi Rush. Combo-based, juggle-based, score chasers, but different than the rhythm-based combat in Batman: Arkham or Spider-Man.
Oooh gotcha. Yeah, when I was a kid I enjoyed that sort of game, like The Force Unleashed was one of my favorites. But as I’ve gotten older they just haven’t been fun. I tried Darksiders when I was in college and it was mind-numbingly boring.
If God of War (2018) didn’t grant me the flexibility to chuck Kratos’ axe whenever I want and switch up styles between axed and hands/shield on the fly I would probably get too bored of this game to continue. But I do get a lot of enjoyment out of hucking that axe into someone’s noggin then bum-rushing them and beating the shit out of them with godlike aggression. That’s pretty cool.