Though I didn’t really like Star Wars: The Old Republicand felt that the story for the Jedi Knight class was lacklustre, I still went back to it for quite a while. Obviously I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment and there’s something about standard MMO gameplay that makes it low-hanging fruit. It’s just so easy and convenient to boot it up for just one more session of mindless playing. But it’s also because I looked what most people consider to be the best class story in the game and it’s pretty much unanimously the Imperial Agent. I decided that I needed to check it out for myself.
So I was just randomly browsing Broken Forum one day when I read a comment about how everyone who loved Portal should play this. My first reaction was naturally: wait? There’s a Portal game that I somehow missed? How could this be possible! This turned out to be a fan-made mod, albeit one that is so well made that it’s even featured as a free game on Steam. It has original art assets, voice acting, a storyline, the works.
Obviously I haven’t been around for a while. Due to the Chinese New Year holidays, a trip overseas and most significantly a family crisis, I’ve been busy. Hopefully I’ll slowly be able to settle back into my usual routines from now on. Before all this, I’d been spending a lot of time with Star Wars: The Old Republic so as I’ve just finished one of the class-based story arcs, I’m writing about it now.
When I wrote about Season One a couple of years ago, I ended by noting that it seems almost inevitable that Clementine would be the main character for Season Two and expressed disappointment that she must then either have plot armor or be killed like any other character in this franchise. So when this came out and it was revealed that Clementine really would be the protagonist after all, I managed to stay away from it for a long time, not wanting it to ruin the amazing experience I had with the first game.
I wasn’t a big fan of Cities in Motion, so I prety much just ignored its sequel. But this fully-fledged city building game from the same developers was so well received that I always knew I would have to play it. As it turned out, I liked it so much that about a dozen hours in I went and bought its DLC even though most of its changes have already been patched into the main game just to reward the development team.
This one was originally launched as a KickStarter project. I didn’t back it but I did read up on it since many commented that it’s like playing a character in an episode of Star Trek. It’s billed as a sci-fi RPG set entirely within the confines of a ship but really since there is no character development system and the combat is so bad you should really avoid it as much as possible, I like to think of it as more of an adventure game.
Yeah, this is a weird pick, given my usual gaming preferences. Thing is, multiple people whose opinions I generally respect listed this as their best game of 2014. Plus I haven’t played a straight shooter for a while now, so here we are. This one plays it so straight that it’s downright anachronistic, without even a multiplayer component. That’s unheard of in this day and age!
