Holiday Gaming

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 game did not feel as good as the first half. But overall, it was still solid. There was decent gameplay and a story that felt better than the last movie I watched with some excellent voice acting throughout. I'm not sure I'd say it's worth full price, but it's certainly a good ride.

While having Game Pass active, I poked around for anything else that caught my interest and ending up running through the campaign for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. I certainly wouldn't want to pay full price for the single-player version of a CoD game, but I guess punching Nazis left me craving some virtual gunplay. This certainly satisfied that. It's a bit of a shame the campaign is such a small focus for CoD games, because this one was actually pretty good. The story was a bit heavy-handed with its "evil organization with all sorts of resources out to secure chemical weapons for nefarious purposes." Still, the missions were generally pretty good, with some flexibility in approach. They slipped in a sort of zombies mode in a mission where the main character is exposed to stuff and hallucinating - an approach I find novel enough, though I find spawning hordes of enemies to be less interesting than finite opponents. All-in-all, I actually quite liked it. Beef it up with more missions and some more direct weapon selection/modding, and I might actually consider a game like this work paying near-full price for even without any interest in the multiplayer (which is the real focus currently). Having to launch a launcher from the Game Pass app that then restarts into another launcher for the campaign is obnoxious, though.

I also played some of the campaign in CoD: Modern Warfare 3 too. Similar gameplay, but different mission design, that's for sure. If anything MW3 missions kind of deviated to the extremes - either fully linear combat gauntlet or open area with patrols, gear crates, and objectives. The latter felt like half-hearted training for multiplayer more than serious mission sandboxes and the former, at least to me, felt too confined. The BO6 linear missions had more branching paths and approaches in most cases and the one wide-open map felt like a more interesting/satisfying sandbox to me. I think that mission design difference is why I flamed out on MW3 before completing the campaign and just said "eh, I've played enough."