First hour of the game I googled “Aloy Talks too much”
I just finished the Elden Ring DLC and the Tomb Raider remastered trilogy. These games are 30 years apart but share the same mostly quiet protagonists.
Lara is alone, doesn’t try to solve the puzzle for the player in the first 5 seconds, let’s the player explore and figure things out and soak in the atmosphere. Aloy is as chatty as Nathan Drake but she’s just muttering to herself in the wild, she even narrates her actions like an audiobook
The constant hud and text over every in world item also ruins the immersion. Yes I get that you don’t see items in Fromsoft games, you get that streak of light. But Horizon firstly hides the item in their busy environment design then forces you to press a button to prompt that streak of light, for immersion!
Zelda and ER open world does feel like a separate genre from the Ubisoft style open world we see even in non Ubisoft games like Horizon. That said, I enjoyed my time in Days Gone even if it’s similar to the formula. Facing your first horde in the game was truly spectacular. Also it being connected to Syphon Filter helps too lol.
They made Aloy worse in the sequel. She literally gives away puzzles and ruins things and won’t shut up. I swear she wasn’t as bad in the first game. I lost interest quickly in the sequel.
Just bought Forza Horizons 4 on Steam, which meant none of my 100+ hours of progress on the Windows Store version carried over. Apparently in those many hours I forgot how absolutely grueling the beginning of the game is.
I’m two hours in, and after basically everything I do, down to even opening the menu, I get the controls yanked away from me, and a plucky zoomer talks at me for 30 seconds about shit I absolutely don’t need explained. One of those was literally, not even joking, to explain to me how to buy items, and that adding multiple items to my cart would equal a higher total price.
It’s like they expect their players to have absolutely no agency or intuition. All I want is to boot a game up, customize a car, and chuck it around. At most I’d be fine with a quick blurb saying “here are the different types of events, here’s your home base. Now go explore.”
If you thought Forza Horizon 4 was bad, don’t even bother with NFS Unbound.
The gameplay is literally:
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Be subjected to the worst soundtrack imaginable, with so much cursing even I, who is an auto mechanic in real life, was looking for a way to turn it off
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Click “Play” in a safehouse, and click an item on the map
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Suffer as your character makes the most cringe inducing, horrible attempts at dialogue readoffs imagineable (seriously, I hate literally every character in the game, cept the old black mechanic guy, he’s alright)
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Get trapped in your car the entire drive to whatever you clicked on with the other characters in your car so they can virtue signal and talk about how evil tech corps and evil politicians are ruining the city (which is hilarious because all these characters are illegal street racers that regularly cause millions of damage in the city and multiple fatalities each race)
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Then when you finally get to actually race, the physics feel like they were designed for touchscreen controls, same feeling of every NFS game since NFS 2015
All of this in the first hour.
The game is really not enjoyable. Whoever is at EA that keeps approving that physics model and forcing their virtue signalling into the game, stop it. Please. Its tone deaf, and nobody cares because it is a racing game. Racing has nothing to do with all that garbage.
The customization options aren’t even good. The only good thing about the game is the graphics and the fidelity of the sound effects. Thats it.
Yeah I only got into NFS since the 2015 entry. I have some nostalgia for that game even though it was pretty bad, but every game since has just been painful in every way except for car customization.
That’s why I love Forza Horizons. It’s got everything I want in a racing game, it just doesn’t subscribe to the idea of “show don’t tell”.
I may be in the minority, but I kinda enjoy hearing Aloy muttering to herself throughout the game. Partly because I catch myself doing it all the time, so I don’t feel alone in the practice.
But also because I know the voice actress for Aloy (Ashly Burch) as Ash in the YouTube series, Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? and to this day, it’s still amazing to me to hear her speaking so deadpan seriously. I’m used to her Ash character basically being an animated, loudmouthed wildcard, not this dramatic, serious character. And I kind of enjoy knowing that Ashly has a bit of range to her acting; she’s not some kid who repeats the same YouTube personality she became famous for; she can actually act.
I recommend checking out Dread Delusion. It’s an indie open world game inspired by Morrowind.
