My son got me this for Christmas, and I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it. Very atmospheric, lots of rewards for leveling your character and equipment, deeply satisfying and fun fighting system, great story. I’ve played all the way through a couple of times; if you do all the side quests it takes close to 200 hours, though I’ve seen a 7+ hour speed run on YouTube.
Which one ( Ghost of Tsushima or Nier Automata)?
Sorry: Tsushima
I wish Ghost of Tsushima was out on Windows.
Was it like a Dark Souls game, as in being super difficult?
I haven’t played Dark Souls, but no, it’s not crazy hard like some games. I couldn’t finish the latest God of War for example, too crazy hard for me. Tsushima was more like an RPG where you start out pretty weak and frustrated but gradually become crazy hulked out, though the enemies level with you somewhat. I played through it on Medium difficulty, then on Hard, and for me Hard was damn near impossible when you had to do a samurai dual with someone. There’s an unexpected dual about 1/3 of the way through that you must pass to continue the story, and on Hard it took me forever of throwing my controller to get through. I think now that I know more about the fighting system tricks I could have aced that one pretty quick, but it was tough.
It seems they have gotten quite a bit faster than seven hours:
That’s a replay-through. Tsushima has a mode when you beat the game called “New Game+”, where you can replay and keep all the upgrades/health you earned on the first go-around. If you look in the video at that player’s health and and other stuff, he’s fully upgraded, which must have taken a very long time on the first play-through. (Also note the tag “Lethal+” on the video: a New Game+ game at Lethal difficulty.) So, yeah, if you don’t need to level your fully upgraded character you can finish the game pretty quick.
Agreed with all of this. Tsushima is just such a fun game. The only thing I wish for is more diversity in the smaller side quests (the liberate town ones). A lot of them seemed very similar. Maybe in the next one 
. But atmosphere, different armor/weapons, main story (and the two major side stories), and fighting style were fantastic.
Epic Games gives away a free game every week, usually older titles. But games you will recognize. I think the new one posts on Thursdays.
DOOM (2016)
I just played through DOOM from 2016 for the first time and honestly, it was an amazing game. Very much like the original games, but a in many ways quite a bit better.
Pros:
- You move really fast like the old games
- You have a HUGE arsenal of weapons
- Nice growth of weapons, suit, and so forth
- Huge monsters, lots of fun to kill them
- Great environments
- Level design was top notch
Cons:
- Uses platforming a bit. Nothing too terrible, but I missed a few jumps and they had no reason to be in the game
- Waves of enemies got tiring eventually. I sighed a few times when another wave hit
Really recommended. It looked gorgeous, absolutely stunning. A great game and lots of fun.
I just finished replaying Middle-earth: Shadow of War (from 2017). I really like that game and I don’t hold any religious reverence towards the Lord of the Rings books so the liberties they took with the Tolkien-verse don’t bother me at all.
The parkour/assassination/melee combo combat system (along the lines of Assassin’s Creed or Batman: Arkham Whatever) feels really smooth to me, and the Nemesis system (where you get a never-ending series of quasi-randomly generated minibosses to fight based on your previous actions) does a pretty good job of adding some personality to what would otherwise be repetitive gameplay. (I purchased the game after they had already abolished microtransactions and tweaked the gameplay, so that controversy didn’t affect me at all.)
If Monolith made another similar game using their Nemesis system, I’d definitely consider buying it.
You should probably skip Doom Eternal then. I enjoyed it, but they leaned hard into the platform aspects of the previous game, to a genuinely Mario level. Like, there’s more than one place where you’re jumping from floating platform to floating platform, while timing your jump to avoid giant chains of fireballs.
Did you play the previous one, Shadow of Mordor? I really liked it, but didn’t get on so well with the sequel.
That’s pretty much hilarious. Why did they do that? DOOM(2016) was a great game, you could just make a sequel with more campaign and some new twists without introducing literally Mario stuff.
I liked the first one, but the one time I tried replaying it I found it was pretty short and kind of dull. Half the fun comes from dying and then having the orc that killed you turning into your arch-enemy, but I found it was too easy the second time around; I don’t think I died once. Was there a difficulty setting that I missed?
The sequel I’ve played from beginning to end a number of times on various difficulty levels. Plus it just has more “stuff” (more skills, more items, more nemesis personalities, etc.).
I should add that I was not planning to continue on, anyway. I think that Doom is just about the right length and I need a couple years before it would even occur to me that I need that kind of old-school FPS game again.
Does Doom Eternal help with better map markers? I did not ever have to look anything up in Doom, but I did have a few moments of “uh…where do I go?”.
I loved the first one! And the second is better in every way except somehow it’s not as fun. It’s weird.
On top of the platforming, DOOM Eternal changed up game play so you have very limited ammo and have to continually juggle a loop of melee/chainsawing monsters to get some ammo, firing the ammo then back to melee/chainsaw, back to shooting, etc. To be fair, it was very well received by most people but it didn’t feel very “DOOM” to me and I didn’t enjoy it much.
I think that was almost a joke insertion with the fireballs.
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There is a lot more jumping and scooting along to stickable walls in Doom Eternal.
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They ramped up the speed and craziness in Doom Eternal so the platformy bits are a bit of welcome relief from an unending cascade of chaos and mayhem and blood.
So it actually works.
The DLC ramps it up even more so you pretty much need to learn the weapon switching technique to maximise your kills as you get about five boss fights in one.
Almost a joke, yeah.
Like I said, I did really enjoy Eternal - it’s a first rate FPS with strong platform elements. But between the platform elements and the attempt to graft a Jack Kirby-esque cosmic space opera story onto the plot, I felt it lost some of the Doom aesthetic/.