Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN MAY 2025?

On Mon, 2 Jun 2025 07:43:19 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 6/1/2025 7:10 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

* Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017)
 
But I now see the chinks in the armor too. The weird AI that moves
around quite artificially, for instance. It gets stuck on terrain, or
bounces back and forth between two pieces of cover, or --in at least
two instances-- phases directly through an object as it charges
towards me. Or the array of player weapons, none of which really feel
distinctive from one another. The too-close viewpoint, with your
weapon weirdly dominant in the center of the screen. The almost
complete lack of interactibility with the game-world; everything feels
static. It's a world that is made up of unbreakable and immovable
items. And --especially after shows like "Andor" raised the bar-- the
in-game narrative and characters feel shallow and unrealistic. The
setting can offer up better stories.

>
Isn't this mostly multiplayer?  The AI doesn't need to be any good when
you're just battling other players.  Or am I thinking of another game?

That was the 2016 version of "Battlefront 1". It was an almost
entirely multiplayer-focused game, with its single-player being little
more than combat against bots. But the 2017 "Battlefront 2" featured a
full single-player campaign (and an expansion DLC). That's the bit I
played. And the AI was terrible.

>

* Senua's Saga: Hellblade II

>

In the first "Hellblade",
protagonist Senua fought with her own inner demons (a product of her
broken mental state and her harsh upbringing) and wrestled them into
submission.

>
This doesn't sound appealing, I don't want to play through someone
else's inner demons and psychosis.  Yes I've heard how great it is, but
I haven't been able to bring myself to play it because of that.

The first game was... interesting but, I admit, it wasn't really that
good of a game. It's not the sort of title I'd rush out and recommend.
The character Senua suffers from psychosis, represented in-game by
hearing voices in her head and having reality shift around her, so you
-as the player- are never entirely sure that what you are looking at
in game is really there or just a figment of her broken mind. In her
first game, she travelled to Hel and back to reclaim the soul of lost
love... but the game works very hard to make it so you're never sure
if this is a work of fantasy or just all in Senua's head. It was
conceptually interesting and the gameplay worked well with the idea,
even if it was limited in scope and a bit slow.

Where Hellblade II breaks down is that other people start seeing the
same fantastic elements as does Senua, with the implication that Senua
is not living in our ordinary world, and that robs the game of some of
its mystery. The doubt as to the reality of Senua's world was really
what carried the first game.