Discussion
PHCorvette said:
Just blown away a good few hour's and whilst repetitive its so entertaining, no frame drop issues, massive open world, stunning graphics and for the first time i a long time good use of surround sound
On the subject of surround sound, I was playing JC3 through my 5.1 system and none of the character dialogue was playing. I set my Xbox to output stereo instead and hey presto it worked! 24lemons said:
PHCorvette said:
Just blown away a good few hour's and whilst repetitive its so entertaining, no frame drop issues, massive open world, stunning graphics and for the first time i a long time good use of surround sound
On the subject of surround sound, I was playing JC3 through my 5.1 system and none of the character dialogue was playing. I set my Xbox to output stereo instead and hey presto it worked! Petrol Only said:
Why do people feel the need to play games they don't like... Weird
I'd paid for it, I might as well get my monies worth before I slam it! Of course, it also serves a timely reminder of what good games feel like and why we shouldn't take them for granted. A little time to reflect. Anyway, what a load of utter dreck. That might be the worst game of 2015. It's definitely due a Golden Raspberry award because it was dreadful. A few thoughts below, with mild spoilers. But there isn't much to spoil:
- If ever there was a game you couldn't care less about by the time you finished it, it's this one. The story is utter crap. The cast is moronic and irritating. You form an almost instant dislike to everyone you're introduced to. I know story isn't supposed to be the strong suit of this game, but it's half hearted pretence of narrative is what makes it so bad. It tries to give you some story, in a terribly half-heated fashion, and it ends up being worse for it.
- The voice acting is utter s
t and whoever voiced General Di Ravello should never be allowed near a microphone again. That boorish, talentless voice is smeared all over the game. What sort of fking accent is that meant to be, anyway?
- The game itself is too long. The story is short, and some reviewers reckon there is about 6 hours of pure story content. I think that's a generous guess, as it feels like there is less than that. Some of the story missions try to use the game mechanics in interesting new ways, but they're mostly just filler. A chase early mission early in the game which sees you defending a moving truck whilst standing on it's roof limits your ammo and forces you to get creative with your tether weapon, which seems neat the first time but the whole sequence goes on too long. The game is like that; it introduces a mechanic which seems mildly amusing and then forces you to repeat it for the next fifty hours until it's so well worn you can't ever remember finding it fun.
- The map is utterly massive, but it feels big for the sake of being big. The biggest island in particular is just devoid of anything interesting, visually and in terms of gameplay. So much of it is just endless mountain and forest, clearly because there wasn't enough time or memory to put anything worth seeing there. I noticed in quite a few bases on the northern island that various elements were left unfinished or poorly slotted together by the developers (particularly chain link fencing running through the air and not following the curvature of the ground beneath it). Sloppy stuff that just goes to show it was a rush job. Despite being much smaller, the southern islands are much more interesting to navigate, but then the game seems fresher then and the Mediterranean aesthetic is much stronger and more pleasing to the eye than the grey mess of the top two thirds of the map. There are something like 69 bases in total to capture - and by capture, I mean destroy. This takes an age.
- As mentioned, bases are captured by blowing up all the destructible elements in them. This gets tiring quickly, especially as blowing stuff up is just part of the larger mediocre combat and movement system. The guns feel weak for the most part, especially once armoured enemies become commonplace and you'll end up reeling past most of them to get to what needs to be blown up so you can take the base. The physics are poor and the basic run speed is slow, forcing you to tether and glide everywhere. Aiming feels sloppy, and most of the guns are st. The placed explosives are useful (and you get an infinite supply) but they take too long to deploy, making them useless when you're under fire. For what should be the entertaining bread and butter of the game, it quickly becomes like eating a bucket of st with a fork; slow and painful. The ragdoll physics are excessive and getting suck in a ragdoll loop between enemy attacks is a fking chore.
- The extra activities you're forced to play to upgrade your equipment are all uniquely awful. The worst of the lot are the plane races, because the plane handling is so bad (but seems to have been made a bit less twitchy, post-patch). None of them are fun though, and you begrudge wasting time on them because they're so bad. Aside from racing cars for upgrades, you'll never use the cars in the game either. They're too slow compared to grapple travel!
- The technical state of the game is poor. It's been patched to speed up reload times, but it's still really slow. Even just starting a race at an icon on the map, in a loaded game world, can force a loading section of 30 seconds, for instance. Frame rate also dips and bobs, and it looks fairly ugly in places too.
There is loads more wrong with this absolute turd of a game. It's not that open world games suck, you only have to look at last year's Sunset Overdrive to see how fantastic they can still be when given some proper care and imagination. This one, however, is absolutely f
king crap. Jobbo said:
Baryonyx said:
the basic run speed is slow, forcing you to tether and glide everywhere
I know I've taken one small snippet so there's no context, but that statement sort of misses the entire point of the game.Jobbo said:
I know I've taken one small snippet so there's no context, but that statement sort of misses the entire point of the game.
Are you fking daft? The game is designed with grappling everywhere in mind, but that doesn't always work, particularly indoors and on the oil rigs where there is loads of clutter that gets in the way of grappling. Mind you, a slow and lazy run speed is the least of this fire game's problems.
.Baryonyx said:
Jobbo said:
I know I've taken one small snippet so there's no context, but that statement sort of misses the entire point of the game.
Are you fking daft? The game is designed with grappling everywhere in mind, but that doesn't always work, particularly indoors and on the oil rigs where there is loads of clutter that gets in the way of grappling. Mind you, a slow and lazy run speed is the least of this fire game's problems.king daft one for playing a game you don't like. 'Getting your money's worth' doesn't make sense if you hate it. That's just fking idiotic. The thing that's put me off playing it is the controls. I'm on a PC, and I'm left handed. This means I use my left hand for my mouse, and my right hand for most of the keyboard controls. So for left, right, forward and backward, I use the arrow keys. With this game it looks like I need to change the keys from their default setting for EVERY MODE of the game, meaning about six or seven config screens. Why I can't just set them in one mode and the game work out that it needs to change every use of the W key to the Up-Arrow. It's not rocket science.
The online system didn't work particularly well either. I didn't mind seeing the feat leaderboards scoring on the screen but over the last couple of days the Square Enix servers have been struggling (Christmas demand, perhaps). There was no way to stop the game from trying to connect to the servers which meant the game would frequently pause itself trying to establish connection. Another sloppily implemented bit of rubbish.
I had wondered if at some point they had hoped to have the game playable as a co-op experience and realised they couldn't pull it off. It seems like it would have suited a sort of Crackdown-lite setup. Perhaps the second player was supposed to be that irritating berk, Mario Frigo? There is nothing really to listen to for most of the game, just a dull soundtrack and very sparse one-liners from Rico Rodriguez (surely due a Razzie as the worst protagonist), which could indicate that party chat was intended. Again, many of the vehicles having pintle mounted guns that aren't much use on your own suggests that someone more than the occasional AI controlled rebel was supposed to take charge.
I had wondered if at some point they had hoped to have the game playable as a co-op experience and realised they couldn't pull it off. It seems like it would have suited a sort of Crackdown-lite setup. Perhaps the second player was supposed to be that irritating berk, Mario Frigo? There is nothing really to listen to for most of the game, just a dull soundtrack and very sparse one-liners from Rico Rodriguez (surely due a Razzie as the worst protagonist), which could indicate that party chat was intended. Again, many of the vehicles having pintle mounted guns that aren't much use on your own suggests that someone more than the occasional AI controlled rebel was supposed to take charge.
Baryonyx said:
I'd paid for it, I might as well get my monies worth before I slam it! Of course, it also serves a timely reminder of what good games feel like and why we shouldn't take them for granted. A little time to reflect.
Anyway, what a load of utter dreck. That might be the worst game of 2015. It's definitely due a Golden Raspberry award because it was dreadful. A few thoughts below, with mild spoilers. But there isn't much to spoil:
There is loads more wrong with this absolute turd of a game. It's not that open world games suck, you only have to look at last year's Sunset Overdrive to see how fantastic they can still be when given some proper care and imagination. This one, however, is absolutely fking crap.
So what's your game of choice?Anyway, what a load of utter dreck. That might be the worst game of 2015. It's definitely due a Golden Raspberry award because it was dreadful. A few thoughts below, with mild spoilers. But there isn't much to spoil:
- If ever there was a game you couldn't care less about by the time you finished it, it's this one. The story is utter crap. The cast is moronic and irritating. You form an almost instant dislike to everyone you're introduced to. I know story isn't supposed to be the strong suit of this game, but it's half hearted pretence of narrative is what makes it so bad. It tries to give you some story, in a terribly half-heated fashion, and it ends up being worse for it.
- The voice acting is utter st and whoever voiced General Di Ravello should never be allowed near a microphone again. That boorish, talentless voice is smeared all over the game. What sort of fking accent is that meant to be, anyway?
- The game itself is too long. The story is short, and some reviewers reckon there is about 6 hours of pure story content. I think that's a generous guess, as it feels like there is less than that. Some of the story missions try to use the game mechanics in interesting new ways, but they're mostly just filler. A chase early mission early in the game which sees you defending a moving truck whilst standing on it's roof limits your ammo and forces you to get creative with your tether weapon, which seems neat the first time but the whole sequence goes on too long. The game is like that; it introduces a mechanic which seems mildly amusing and then forces you to repeat it for the next fifty hours until it's so well worn you can't ever remember finding it fun.
- The map is utterly massive, but it feels big for the sake of being big. The biggest island in particular is just devoid of anything interesting, visually and in terms of gameplay. So much of it is just endless mountain and forest, clearly because there wasn't enough time or memory to put anything worth seeing there. I noticed in quite a few bases on the northern island that various elements were left unfinished or poorly slotted together by the developers (particularly chain link fencing running through the air and not following the curvature of the ground beneath it). Sloppy stuff that just goes to show it was a rush job. Despite being much smaller, the southern islands are much more interesting to navigate, but then the game seems fresher then and the Mediterranean aesthetic is much stronger and more pleasing to the eye than the grey mess of the top two thirds of the map. There are something like 69 bases in total to capture - and by capture, I mean destroy. This takes an age.
- As mentioned, bases are captured by blowing up all the destructible elements in them. This gets tiring quickly, especially as blowing stuff up is just part of the larger mediocre combat and movement system. The guns feel weak for the most part, especially once armoured enemies become commonplace and you'll end up reeling past most of them to get to what needs to be blown up so you can take the base. The physics are poor and the basic run speed is slow, forcing you to tether and glide everywhere. Aiming feels sloppy, and most of the guns are st. The placed explosives are useful (and you get an infinite supply) but they take too long to deploy, making them useless when you're under fire. For what should be the entertaining bread and butter of the game, it quickly becomes like eating a bucket of st with a fork; slow and painful. The ragdoll physics are excessive and getting suck in a ragdoll loop between enemy attacks is a fking chore.
- The extra activities you're forced to play to upgrade your equipment are all uniquely awful. The worst of the lot are the plane races, because the plane handling is so bad (but seems to have been made a bit less twitchy, post-patch). None of them are fun though, and you begrudge wasting time on them because they're so bad. Aside from racing cars for upgrades, you'll never use the cars in the game either. They're too slow compared to grapple travel!
- The technical state of the game is poor. It's been patched to speed up reload times, but it's still really slow. Even just starting a race at an icon on the map, in a loaded game world, can force a loading section of 30 seconds, for instance. Frame rate also dips and bobs, and it looks fairly ugly in places too.
There is loads more wrong with this absolute turd of a game. It's not that open world games suck, you only have to look at last year's Sunset Overdrive to see how fantastic they can still be when given some proper care and imagination. This one, however, is absolutely f
king crap. Baryonyx said:
Are you fking daft? The game is designed with grappling everywhere in mind, but that doesn't always work, particularly indoors and on the oil rigs where there is loads of clutter that gets in the way of grappling. Mind you, a slow and lazy run speed is the least of this fire game's problems.
You played it through to the end, and you swearily accuse me of being daft. king daft? The game is designed with grappling everywhere in mind, but that doesn't always work, particularly indoors and on the oil rigs where there is loads of clutter that gets in the way of grappling. Mind you, a slow and lazy run speed is the least of this fire game's problems.
myvision said:
So what's your game of choice?
You could close your eyes and throw a dart in a game shop and you'd probably hit something better than this but recently, I've been enjoying The Old Hunters DLC on Bloodborne and Halo 5. I've also got a copy of Divinity: Original Sin that I'm about to go back to as well. I adored JC2. It is one of the few games that I bothered to finish. I counted down the days to the release of JC3. Frankly, it's a huge disappointment. I believe that many Baryonyx's points to be totally valid. Even Mad Max (another game I finished) had me hooked far more than this.
I'm going to try to get to the end without the tiresome upgrade challenges. Though, having said that, I've recently imstalled Witcher 3 and that game is creeping into my affections.
I'll hold a candle for JC4 though. Roll on 2018 !
I'm going to try to get to the end without the tiresome upgrade challenges. Though, having said that, I've recently imstalled Witcher 3 and that game is creeping into my affections.
I'll hold a candle for JC4 though. Roll on 2018 !
MissChief said:
I hardly played any of the challenges or races and still got to the end of the game. I may go back and do some.
You should! You unlock upgrades, some are pretty naff but the ones like smart grenades and improvements to the grapple strength / numbers are worth going for. 
the traversal mods in particular make it a lot more fun to get around!Gassing Station | Video Games | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff