bring me my exosuit

Thursday, April 18th, 2019 08:32 pm
amovingtarget: comic book text saying 'krack' (Default)
[personal profile] amovingtarget

The Surge played 08 - 16 April
I should preface this by saying that Conan Exiles is the other PSPlus title this month, and I tried to play that first. And because the most I have heard about this game is the 'endowment' toggle and I was sad about the finishing FF15 again, I thought, as you do, that the game takes nearly 80gb of hard disk space so I'm gonna put half of that into giving my character a big, monster dick and see if there's jiggle physics for it, because why not? There's your unique selling point right there. Anyway, turns out you need a free DLC pack for it, but I can't find it on the PS store and I kept dying of thirst in five minutes so I decided it wasn't a game that I really wanted to play after all.

When I looked up this game -- I'd never heard of it before -- almost everything was comparing it to Dark Souls, and commenting on the similar mechanics. Now, I haven't played that, but I'm given to understand that Bloodborne is very similar, and I tried to play that...around this time last year when it was on PSPlus, but I couldn't get further than half an hour in (not counting character creation) because it didn't grip me with a story straightaway, I wasn't fond of the mechanics, and it was just too...dark and creepy.

The good news is The Surge is definitely not dark (unless you're in an area with no lights, and I don't know how many of those there are yet) and I like the setting, and I'm intrigued by the world so far. There was a very cool opening prologue. Slick future focused company wants to help people and save the earth? Must be shady, and the couple of audiologs I've found so far confirms it. It's not a surprise, but I'm still looking forward to finding out what the hell is going on.

Combat is pretty straightforward too, easy enough for me, except there's no manual save and all the enemies always respawn if you go all the way back to the medbay which is the only place to heal up when you run out of healing injectables and I'm all like, why would you do this to me?.

I ended up doing a ton of grinding for tech scraps because it seemed like the thing to do, and I was using a walkthrough so I can try and get through it efficiently and it told me about the smelter bot miniboss and I was like, I'll just peek at it and see how it goes once? but then I just had to defeat the thing, therefore grinding and levelling up a little and dying a million times, and then suddenly I just managed to beat it. I am still wondering how the fuck I managed.

Then I got finally pushed forward to the next boss and died almost immediately and, what do you know, I went right back to the medbay and even though as you progress you can open shortcuts to get back so you don't have to plow through all the enemies again, there are still some between the medbay and the P.A.X. which, I don't want to have to fight my way to the boss I already don't want to face. Needless to say, I died a bunch more times and decided I had had enough for one day.

When I picked it up again the next day, I somehow managed to kill it on the second try, and I still don't quite know how I did that. I got lucky I guess. I had fun for a little while, wandering around, collecting scraps and getting to the next area of the game -- Central Production B -- but then I started getting stuck again. You're given a drone but I can't ever use it because I never have enough charge, and you can only get charge by hitting things, and if I'm hitting things mostly I am too busy trying not to die. I ended up in a section where there were five robots all on one walkway and I kept dying at the first one, and then I went in an entirely opposite location -- and there's no map so I hardly ever know where I'm going -- and I kept dying over there.

That was kind of the last straw for me. I really like this game, I really, really like the setting, but I just can't play it. Dying and then fighting your way back to where you died again, is just not my idea of a good time.

I am trying not to feel like I'm not smart enough or enough of a gamer for this game.

(no subject)

Date: 2019-04-18 07:49 pm (UTC)
enemyofperfect: a spray of orange leaves against a muted background (Default)
From: [personal profile] enemyofperfect
Sympathy on the game not working for you in the end! Aren't Dark Souls and Bloodborne the ones that are notorious for being incredibly, grindingly difficult to play? I guess some people enjoy the experience of proving their endurance in the form of a game, but... I don't think I would be one of those people, either.

(Sympathy also on not getting to check out those jiggle physics. Dying of thirst, indeed.)