There is something deeply ridiculous about Gamers™ complaining endlessly about games that are not action-orientated ("walking simulators" etc etc), whilst a game like this gets away with pushing all the most exciting and intense moments of action into cutscenes whilst the fighting you get to actually engage in is largely the repetitive, in between grunt-work. The game thinks having a bunch of quick-time events included will make up for this but being forced to constantly be alert for button symbols appearing on the screen rather than getting to enjoy the show is somehow even less immersive.

This kind of style-over-substance approach echoes throughout the whole game. The myriad climbing sequences feel oddly emblematic for this; nothing can actually go wrong in them meaning that despite the perilous context for them (clinging to the side of mountains and buildings by just your hands, leaping great distances from one to the next) there's never any reason to feel any actual tension or danger, it's just meant to look flashy and plays out closer to an interactive cutscene than actual gameplay. The single-shot gimmick is another great example, there's no narrative or thematic reason for it, it leads to the camera feeling needlessly claustrophobic a large amount of the time, but it looks impressive and that's apparently all that matters.

The combat is largely tedious. The occasional moments of excitement from the first few hours largely dissipated as the game made me fight the same collection of enemies, and the same troll and ogre mini-bosses, over and over right up until the end of the game. This overuse of the same enemy designs starts to feel even more grating considering the game's habit of cramming in additional fights wherever it possibly can, even when it doesn't make narrative or tonal sense, out of fear that if you go more than five minutes without attacking something you might get bored. The two modes for most of your fighting, beyond special attacks that leave you invulnerable or near-invulnerable for their duration thus draining tension from what's happening, are either keeping your distance and using projectiles whilst your son Atreus keeps the enemies distracted (which is both painfully slow at times, whilst also just feeling bizarre because Atreus is with seldom exceptions actually invulnerable to damage in combat), or getting in close and mindlessly button mashing until the enemies roll over and die (which is just boring). There are lots of fancy additional close-combat moves you can use but the game never really gives you the motivation to learn them, so it largely ends up being just this for the entire playthrough, as you fight the exact same enemies fifteen hours deep that you were fighting at the start of the game.

There are many ways to make the combat not get quite so tedious by the end, but the simplest one is to just have the game be more compact and streamlined, yet all throughout the game instead pushes to be larger, more expansive, with as many features as it can fit in. People like rpg systems, so why not cram in gear crafting and upgrading and all sorts of different enchantment systems? Never mind that it never makes the combat feel like it plays any differently, or that the best approach to these needless sprawling menus is to just use the things that have the biggest numbers. People like open world games, so why not do that too? But God of War's notion of exploration is mostly just wandering around the lake in a circle, ticking off locations one by one. The game also just features countless collectables, all kept track of in the map screen, as if you can't include anything within a game without it making some resultant number go up.

God of War had a surprising amount of narrative focus, and there's some genuinely cool moments. I enjoyed a bunch of the early-game content surrounding Freya, Baldur is compelling right until the game just forgets he exists for the vast majority of its story, and there's some potentially really interesting stuff in here about familial trauma, abuse and neglect that the game doesn't come close to having anything impactful or coherent to say about in the end. This is its whole own problem as hinting at Kratos's abuse and neglect towards his son (and never even confronting that in any sort of meaningful fashion) clashes pretty harshly with framing him as someone whose every punch should be thrilling to us, in the same way that his talk towards the end of the game of stopping the cycles of violence clashes with the fact that all game long the finishing moves zoom in on every gorey detail, trying its best to make the tearing of flesh and sinew seem salacious. Even the framing for the story is off here, and downright enraging; every single time you're sent to one corner of the world to see a character who can supposedly help you on your quest you can bet they'll be ready to retort that sure they can help you but first you need some obscure item from some other corner of the world. The story is never allowed to flow, always nestled between countless fetch quests, and sometimes fetch quests within fetch quests.

By the half-way point I was extremely ready for this game to be over, but I kept persevering due to some combination of sunk-cost fallacy, a curiosity to see where the story would head, and irritation that the game seems near universally acclaimed. God of War is certainly very pretty, but there's so little of worth here beyond that.

The failing of Telltale's adventure games is that once you look behind the magicians curtain the illusion is broken, but god they are a fun ride while the curtain is still there.

The Walking Dead was Telltale's breakout game. Based on a zombie comic book series (which was then turned into a fairly high budget TV series.) I have no experience with either, doubt I ever will. This has, however not stopped my enjoyment of the Telltale game series in which anyone can play with no previous knowledge as it's a separate adventure all on it's own.

The Walking Dead is a story based adventure game about a group of survivors during a zombie apocalypse. You play Lee, a man on his way to jail in a police car when the outbreak hits. Escaping a car crash, Lee teams up with a resourceful young girl named Clementine hiding in a treehouse from her zombie baby sitter. From there the two characters try to find out what's happening. It's a surprisingly emotional ride.

The game plays out in five episodes. It's a story adventure game though the gameplay is pretty basic, looking at items, making dialogue decisions to progress the story. To be honest the gameplay for lack of a better term is either clunky or quick time events and choices. Some of these choices are not easy, occasionally resulting in surprising results, several times circumstances shocked me.

This is largely because the cast of characters are so well performed both by talented voice actors as well as the animators bringing them to life. The graphics use a cell shaded look almost like a comic book but allow for a surprising amount of facial depth. There are occasional issues though with slight lag between scenes and occasional glitches but nothing that hampers the overall experience.

More often than not I have no interest in games like this but TellTale managed to craft interesting characters and stories. It however, massively looses it's impact on multiple playthroughs when you realize the choices weren't choices at all.

+ Surprisingly emotional.
+ Some tough and often gritty decisions to make.
+ Superb characters.
+ Great voice acting and art design.
+ Clementine.

- Gameplay is limited and clunky.
- Decisions don't really effect the outcome in the end.

I gave it a good fifteen hours but was bored. It's not terrible or anything, there's just nothing that feels new or interesting for me.

Feels like another game that's a variation on the same open-world "narrative epic" I've played a thousand times before. Picking shit up and crafting. Pinging my radar thing to find items, climbing big shit to unlock map stuff. Repeat.

No thank you.

Strong architecture and unique cold-war-era atmosphere, the best things it has going for.

The rest gets in this AAA structure that feels weird to me. The building itself being an entity that transforms and morphs, and the game follows the conventions of refined, unified and constricted systems from other games.

One thing I can't stand is the conflict between platforming sections and the realistic movement physics that are not 100% right. You have to navigate this spaces with ledges and falls and speed and the character clipping from one place to another is not very helpful.

The combat is rapid, fluid and dynamic, but you are not in CONTROL (hah, terrible pun) of how you end up using your powers, you just grab anything that might be very close or very far and throw it without having to aim.

Infiltrating the intricacies of the control apparatus and changing it from the inside? i don't know about that...

Ôh joguinho que não me pegou (e gosto demais do universo de Star Wars). Tava pensando em jogar forçado, mas com o tanto de outros jogos que queria jogar saindo não rolou não. Não achei divertido de explorar, é só negócio de escalar parede pegar poderzinho e tal. Acho que a parte busca-ação (metroidvania) dele se perde por não ser um mundo conectado, aí perde um pouco do propósito de sair caminhando, explorando e de querer revisitar as partes que agora você consegue alcançar (e que mapa tenebroso também)

In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret,

For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met,

Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed,

A world you gave to bug and beast as they never dreamed.
-From 'Elegy for Hallownest' by Mormon the teacher

a tragédia desse poema, pós contexto, sumariza perfeitamente o por que desse jogo ser tão bom.

This game is noticeably weaker to me than the previous two. This game is just more of Rise of Tomb Raider, but worse in a lot of small ways for some reason?
-This is the biggest downgrade in that they made combat just worse to try and encourage more stealth gameplay. The stealth is fine I guess, but not as good as many other games by 2018. Melee is effectively useless in this game, feels so much weaker than the last 2 games. You barely get to execute enemies anymore, it was fun shooting enemies in the knees, then going for a execute.
-They brought back the A/D button mashing quick time event from 2013. This quick time event just fucking sucks.
-You used to be able to hold E when Lara had to smash open minerals/doors in Rise, but in Shadow you can't do that anymore and have to mash E, why?
-Can no longer see your maximum item count from the menus, have to go to a store to see if you are close on capping.
Besides these things the story also just feels super "Ehhh." Like I just did not vibe with it, the general premise is cool, but the moment to moment and characters felt wrong.
There is also an insane bug for a sidequest where you can talk to someone you aren't supposed to before you talk to the initial quest giver, you will not be able to turn in the quest (You will still get the reward since it doesnt rely on turning it, but its still fucks over 100%). The dev's know about this too and have done nothing.
I have no idea why the Tomb Raider series got traded from Crystal Dynamics to Eidos Montreal, but its obvious to me that all these weird changes are because of the studio swap. Like Eidos got it pretty close, but just flopped hard in weird places.