To each their own. The story, to me, was an absurd river of pretentious boresludge with annoying, annoying, ANNOYING, whiny hipster characters and a choice-consuming ending that put Mass Effect 3 to a crying shame, (and not in the good way) but at least in Mass Effect Shepard would've just shut up and banged the blue-haired chick already.
GTA V has more/better ragequit levels, and also more than one fucking mode of gameplay.
The car customization was just a bi-linear upgrade-fest of fast things vs. slow things. There have been countless car games before this with better vehicle customization. If you're going to make a game about Mad Max, you'd better make for damn sure that you have more options than just a basic upgrade tree. You should have thousands of options from every corner of the junkyard. When a superpower sim that parodies everything Max is about has better car customization than Mad Max, then something is very wrong. When the only thing making my car different from another car w/ the same body is one of only 6 paint jobs and a couple of rebars, in a universe with the most creative cars in history... Well, never before have I said "Something is very wrong here" and meant it more than I did when I landed in the alternate universe where Hitler won. Was the worldbuilding interesting? Yes. Was it a good game? Not really. It's literally a sandbox, with all the common trappings of a sandbox, it adds nothing new. It's just GTA with less car thievery and wanton civilian murder, with some of the less interesting parts of the Tomb Raider reboot hashed in for good measure.
It's just Mirror's Edge with zombies in it, except Faith is a dude, worse at parkour, and nothing is helpfully color coded so you don't know what the fuck you're allowed to jump on and what the fuck's going make you slide off an invisible wall to a sidewalk-splattery instant death. Dead Island sticks to what it does best, even if it's not really the best at it, and it keeps you both grounded and working as a team more effectively, which is the best part of a multiplayer zombie FPS. Because really, when you have Deadrising, the only thing you need is a good multiplayer zombie game, because everything else after that is just an attempt to recapture the single-player glory that Deadrising pretty much owns.
The first game was a basic MMORPG, except with no other players whose faces you can rub your bigger numbers in, socialize with, or really do anything interesting in. It was a Fantasy-based EVE Online with the occassional sex postcard. The second game was a horribly long, boring encounter wherein Geralt controlled like a limousine with a tank cannon on top which they used to swing a sword in the general direction of the enemy. The alchemy system was incoherent, overcomplicated rubbish, and in order to get into either of those games you'd have to spend days reading their 300-pound manuals trying to comprehend the absurd, tedious, irl-week-long adventure you are now obliged to complete at some point and the ten million mini-tasks that come with it. The Witcher 3 was great, and especially surprising because of how simple it was. You no longer have to read three paragraphs in the manual in order to know how to activate the right walking speed and know which walk speed is the correct one to use at dinner parties, for one thing. It was a surprise, and it was wonderful. It was like finally reading a good Warrior Cats game if the previous WC games all spent 10 pages describing each hair on the cat's bodies in photo-realistic detail before finally engaging in a book-long dialogue about the Pythagorean Theorem, the exact meaning behind Monet's individual paintbrush hairs, and the mean, median, and mode of the evening's survey numbers regarding the treatment of animals in a small town in Sangri La.
Exactly. You felt like it was worth it. Say what you will about the story and music, it's true. It deserves a goddamn video game oscar in that regard. The game itself, though, plays like shit. I honestly felt like Firewatch was better because it had a very good, touching story, but I didn't feel like I was enduring something shitty whenever I had to go around playing the game rather than engaging in dialogue. Sure, every enemy was its own character and it was just the darlingest thing and all that rot, but when I was walking around the open world and getting attacked by random beasts, I couldn't help but notice the distinct lack of fun I was having. "Combat" (and some of the puzzles, tbh) was a tedious, frustrating chore, I felt like I was being forced to endure something in order to get to the next part of the story. The guy has the same sense of humor and similarly fun stories in his webcomics, but this time around I was forced to push a specific sequence of buttons in order to read it. The story and game do not blend well. His other "Game", Problem Sleuth, was hilarious and goddamn glorious, but if I actually had to play a text adventure like that, I would hardly have been able to get to the elevator and dirty tuba without wanting to strangle something.He can make stories that are worth it, but if this mechanic were added to any other game, it would be hell. It would be the kind of shit you play for a laugh on youtube, like Cat Mario.
