Currently Playing

[Raid]

I played War of the Lion on the PSP years ago. Absolutely cracking game.

The biggest criticism I've seen of this new version is that it doesn't include the content created for War of the Lions. That's largely irrelevant to me as I wouldn't know what was created for that version anyway, but it does seem a bit strange to actually remove content for a later edition.

[Hatredsheart]

If it ever came to pc I'd definitely give it a go.

It was released for PC (and everything else) yesterday.

To Steam!

[Lenny Solidus]

Sniper Elite: Resistance

After not doing much gaming of late due to other commitments, I decided to finally pull the trigger on Rebellion/Wushu's latest SE outing last night and yes...after just entering halfway through the second mission I instantly wished I had bought it earlier. Sniper Elite titles are very much in a league of their own with how they play, how they look and especially how they feel. Whenever you find yourself crouching around looking for the best targets to shoot while anticipating a masking sound at the exact right time - then to watch that singular poor bastard of an enemy explode in a wonderful array of slow motion cartilage blood muscle and bone instantly soaring and spinning through the air...is there anything truly more satisfying? How about a sudden random return to a hidden explosive you planted on a downed enemy some six minutes ago that now just took out two other overly curious enemies in one go?

Every. Single. Kill. Brings. Pure. Satisfaction. No matter how you set it up, regardless of how long ago you set it up, even. The game is purely intent on delivering, upon you, endless glorified OOF BET THAT HURT satisfaction...like a drug to your veins. I just can't get enough of it.

There's just something about being involved in the gaming spaces Rebellion provide us with that no other game of its type really matches, although I will immediately stress that they have a serious problem with injecting a decent looking antialiasing method into their games for some reason. You either get shimmer or stepping all over the fucking show and so as great as the rest of it can look (with RTX lighting now included) the overwhelming amount of jaggies really makes the game look kinda dated while with up-to-date lighting at the very same time. The thing is that it doesn't much matter that this particular outing looks a little less polished or a little cheaper made because the circular gameplay pattern of set it up knock it down is just oh so superb. Hell, just looking out across the mission area through the old binocs while the music plays as I work out my points of entry and execution strategies piece by tiny piece is enough to make me swell up a little, if you know what I mean.

Death by design in gaming is always fun, no complaints there. There's just something much more intense when it comes to SE kills, a silenced pistol to the cranium, a snapped neck, a knife to the gut, a grenade that triggers countless other demises all in the same vicinity. Not trying to make it sound completely unique to the series or anything, it just feels better to pull off, that's all. What we engage in moment to moment that draws us ever closer to those final few enemy stragglers last to kill at some irrelevant section of the map prior to extraction, feels good. Concerning that new Bond game, as much as I'd like it to play like the Hitman series I'd love it far more if it somehow surprisingly turns out that it can too be played like Sniper Elite - that would be tremendous.

Before I decided to purchase, I did take in several Steam reviews with talk of oh it's all just reused this and it feels like Temu SE that in comparison to SE5 etc etc, perhaps. But the gameplay and the intricacy of the map design, the enemy placements and the uh drug to your system thing - all these things combine beautifully to making it a worthy experience as well as they ever did in my opinion, and I'm only mid-way through the secondary mission Dead Drop - I'm hooked, that's it. I could easily spend 6-8 bloody hours on a map messing about with the enemies or setting myself set goals of how to proceed, and I'm already rewarded enough challenge aspects to complete as it is.

The most impressive thing has to be that the game shipped with no upscaling techniques at all, neither does it need it. And when considering just how far you are able to zoom into the distance as you can in these types of games they always have to be commended that the game engine allows you to do that with zero performance drops, none whastosever. And that's a refreshing change - great job Asura engine. Not so much on the AA side but hey nobody's perfect. I'm sure I will come across some issues here and there that might dampen my obvious enthusiasm but as of right now I don't really have many negatives to speak of.

Edit: I neglected to add that if you don't particularly like the look of the new main protagonist and wish to play as Fairburne Rebellion made the weapon and skins pack free...



You can also bet your arse I'll be picking up every new DLC mission there is for the game, when I find them at a reasonable price, of course. More new maps for a game such as Sniper Elite (any Sniper Elite release) is just a complete given as a direct extension of what you know you will already enjoy.

[eny]

I am so close to getting this myself, SE5 was pure joy, and I know this continues that vein.

[Sly Boots]

I played War of the Lion on the PSP years ago. Absolutely cracking game.

The biggest criticism I've seen of this new version is that it doesn't include the content created for War of the Lions. That's largely irrelevant to me as I wouldn't know what was created for that version anyway, but it does seem a bit strange to actually remove content for a later edition.

By the way, a mod came out yesterday to remove the 'burlap sack' filter they've put over everything, tested and it works, actually makes quite a nice difference to the graphics imo:

https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasyt ... escription

[Raid]

I actually don't hate the filter, but then I've largely been playing on a Steam Deck where it's less obvious.

I've mostly spent the last day or so levelling my party up a bit; I did the first Sand Sietch battle and got my arse handed to me, so went through some guides to learn more about party building and did some battles without Ramza in the party to get everyone to a vague parity. There's stuff that's buried in the codex that isn't remotely obvious (like the thing where all party members of the same class get a small amount of JP every time any one of them uses an ability, so it's beneficial to keep your party as squires and chemists for a little while before moving on to other classes). I was also struggling with my archer, who felt borderline useless because he's not able to shoot *over* anything unless he's up a height himself - I'm not sure if that's a limitation of crossbows (which are the only ranged weapon I have at the moment), and an actual bow won't have the same problem, but I've switched him over to a Thief for now.

Incidentally I have played a little on my desktop, and noticed that the game had been running at maybe 75% speed on the Steam Deck - the fix for which was disabling the system-wide max framerate limiter (a feature I'd long forgotten about, as I've not used my 'Deck for over a year). The framerate itself and all of the sound and music were fine, so I didn't twig there was an issue. It explained why I thought certain parts of the game ran inexplicably slowly.

[Sly Boots]

I think you're doing the right thing for now in levelling squire and chemist - something I returned to after ditching squire as soon as other jobs opened up. In particular, make sure to give everyone the JP Boost support ability, as it doubles the job points for every action and makes it so much quicker to learn new abilities etc.

My advice once you've done that is to check the job level requirements for unlocking each of the currently greyed-out roles and mentally plan out who you'll use to get them and which jobs they'll need to level a bit to do so. To unlock a really cool sounding class for Ramza I'm going to have to level thief to 4, which I'm not looking forward to as I tried the class a bit with another unit and disliked it intensely lol.

Monk seems like an insanely powerful class btw, my Ramza is maining it at the moment and it's just wrecking everything.

[Raid]

Oh I kept them as Squires only until they got the JP boost passive, they've all moved on now (though I might bring some back to get the Speed+1 boost too). My MVP at the moment tends to be my Black Mage, just for being able to hit multiple targets at once at range, and I enjoy working around the delay in a spell going off and the area of effect (same with white magic) like some sort of violent Tetris.

The Job System in this is far more detailed than in Final Fantasy 5, which is my only other experience with it. In FF5 you had to level a job to maximum before you could assign the active command from it to a character using a different job, but in this I feel like I'm constantly changing things around, which does slow it down a bit. In FF5 there some truly broken combinations, I'm only early in FFT but I'm hoping it gives you the same near-game-breaking power level by game-end.

[Sly Boots]

Oh I kept them as Squires only until they got the JP boost passive, they've all moved on now (though I might bring some back to get the Speed+1 boost too). My MVP at the moment tends to be my Black Mage, just for being able to hit multiple targets at once at range, and I enjoy working around the delay in a spell going off and the area of effect (same with white magic) like some sort of violent Tetris.

The Job System in this is far more detailed than in Final Fantasy 5, which is my only other experience with it. In FF5 you had to level a job to maximum before you could assign the active command from it to a character using a different job, but in this I feel like I'm constantly changing things around, which does slow it down a bit. In FF5 there some truly broken combinations, I'm only early in FFT but I'm hoping it gives you the same near-game-breaking power level by game-end.

You may have already done this, but it's worth keeping Ramza in his squire class a bit longer as his unique mettle ability tree has some really nice stuff, like self and ally buffs, debuffs cleanse etc, which are pretty cheap to grab too.