Redwolf's Journal (continued)

 Kind of what it says on the tin. I quite like the ideas behind it, blending song and fame in as elements of fending off invasion from a demon world. There's a good energy to the movie and characters. The music is solid - I say this as someone who appreciates K-Pop beat, but is a long way from a connoisseur. The overall story works pretty well, touching on (if only lightly) themes of friendship, acceptance, fandom, and redemption. The demonic tiger and magpie duo are cute and fun as hell for all their fairly brief appearances.  My only criticisms are generally about missed potential - things that weren't bad, but left me feeling like they could have been much better. Overall, the movie felt rushed, with an intro that has visuals but is still telling more than showing and an ending that wraps everything up neatly only if you don't think much about implications. The animation and cartoony vibe sort of go with that, making the movie feel like "just a kids' show" ...

 Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon was in early access for a while and full-released just recently. Many people have called it some sort of new inheritor of the Bethesda-style open world crown or something. I'm less than convinced of that, though it's pretty good. It's got the first-person (with third available) gameplay in a large sandbox down well. I found combat and movement felt better to me than Avowed. Like Avowed, the map is made up of large zones (3 in this case) rather than fully open like the most known Bethesda games. Interiors/dungeons are still loaded separately. Spells being largely treated as weapons is fine, though feels a bit less magical. There's weapon/armor/potion/food crafting. There's weapon/armor upgrading (though not spells apparently). There's fishing. There's even in-game sketching. A lot of those systems aren't required or used as much as they could be. In fact, my biggest complaint about the game is that everything feels like it t...

I haven't watched an MCU movie in a while. I missed... let's see... Quantumania, Eternals, Marvels, and Falcon & Winter Soldier at least. I suppose I've just been a bit burned out on them or something. But, I decided to catch Thunderbolts*.  I worked pretty well. I wasn't taken out of it. I don't find anything that bothers me about it. I liked some of the characters and the interplay. But there wasn't anything that quite pushed it over to great either. The group had a sort of Guardians of the Galaxy vibe with anti-heroes coming together to support one another in a quasi-family. But they also kind of copied the "losers" speech from the original GotG movie, which feels a little cheap. The team being made up of a bunch of people who "shoot and punch things" is a little lackluster for a superhero movie. They're not terribly super or heroic. We have three peak-human supersoldiers, a hyper-trained assassin (and Yelena carries the movie and ...

 I cannot be the only one that finds things so predictable, can I? With the leaving of our captain character in Stars Without Number, the rest of us are much less decisive/proactive. Predictable if you've seen us in action. And the only one who really wants to be in charge claims to not - and, I'd say, isn't terribly qualified given the way they regularly don't think things through. Natural fallout and that's fine, I don't blame anyone in particular. But then we get a situation that, while I might not have explicitly predicted, was one I've seen before. Summarized: Other PC: "Well, I'm not taking charge..." My Character: "Okay, fine. Here are some directions. Get on the ship. PC2 do this. PC3 do that." Other PC a few poses later: *takes charge by repeating what my character just said.* If that were just IC, it wouldn't be a big deal - annoying on a character level, but no biggie. But, of course, it wasn't. I could even brush i...

I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 . It's a recent darling among reviewers, and not without reason. The game is good to play. Mind you, I do struggle on and off with the QTE mechanics that are mixed in with the turn-based combat. It's engaging, though. There's a lot of heart and emotion in the story that is well-delivered. I have seen clips of DA: Veilguard scenes (but haven't played the whole game, so those are just snippets) that are embarrassingly stilted and clearly scripted. Clair Obscur's dialog has pretty much never hit me that way. Most of it feels so very natural, especially the shock and loss experienced in the first act of the game - and there's plenty of it given the sort of bleak premise of the game. I don't want to say anything to spoil it for someone who may play, but the wrap of Act 2 and beginning of Act 3 really takes a turn. There are so many reveals there that answer most of the lingering questions (and raise a few more) th...

So I was looking for something new to play around the holidays and one thing on my radar was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I was not quite interested enough to fork over $70, though. This brought me back to a short visit with Game Pass. $1 for a couple weeks? Sure, that I'm more than willing to do. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle proved to be a pretty good game. There's more focus on stealth through sections than punching fascist/Nazis, but there's some of both. I quite liked the open Giza segment with the lived-in feel and side activities, but it was immediately followed by a couple more linear levels that kind of deflated the game a bit. The final open area didn't quite feel like it properly opened back out. I feel like that might be because it's a map of taking a boat between smaller areas. The ending feels appropriately Indiana Jones, though it does leave one wondering "did all this effort really accomplish anything?" So the latter half of the...

 My thoughts about Once Human run a gamut of reactions. At the moment-to-moment gameplay level, I think it's pretty great. The movement and shooting  feel good, enemies have some variety to them, and the areas are generally interesting. Zooming out a little bit, the survival mechanics add some depth without feeling burdensome (though the temperature management added in the Way of Winter scenario may tip over that line a bit) as do the building mechanics. And yet, I also hit these plateaus where there doesn't feel like anything compelling to do. There is a series of story missions, though with some level gaps. The crafting progression is gated by the scenario phase, so I've played fairly heavily over a weekend and ended up having to wait several days for the next phase to be able to craft the next levels of workbenches and gear. Also, the way everything is wiped at the end of a scenario (which runs several weeks) means not getting attached to much other than gear blueprint ...