Last game that pleasantly surprised you? (Or not)

[EDcase]

Duno if this counts but I recently got one of these which brings back so many memories from the arcades and old game systems.

It was only £130 when I got mine so not sure if its worth £200 as many of the games are repeated with different names and quite a few are in Chinese/Japanese

I went through all 6800 over several days and now have about 520 that I think are worth keeping.  LOTS of fighting games of course.

My favourite is Gauntlet but there's all the classics (several versions) like Asteroids, Asteroids 2, Galaga, Defender, Joust, Pacman, R-Type, Centipede... so many

The best part is its two player for when friends are over ?

(If you do want one, do some research before buying as there are many versions)

 

[Adolf Hamster]

I smells a roobit.....

Edit: roobit gone

edit edit:

to get back to the spirit of the thread: Strange brigade

think left4dead done by the mummy franchise and you're not too far off. very arcadey shoot through hoards of the undead kind of deal for 1-4 players co-op.

the narration is incredibly cheesy, but to the point it's somewhat amusing and whilst the plot is shallow, short (although not quite cod short) and predictable, the actual gameplay is surprisingly fun.

be warned however to be incredibly triggered by the guns, for example what looks like a mosin nagant being a 10-shot semiauto because reasons.

my general rule of thumb is "is it worth it at steam sale price?" and the answer is yes.

 

[Daymond]

Detroit: become human - I was amazed how  presenting multiple interpretations of the same story can make you play the game with bated breath and all that without much action

 

[MAX DICKER]

Gran Turismo 7, came in my PS5 bundle.

Utterly awful. I'm sure the racing mechanics are great but after an 8 minute into that is unskippable, passing around in a poxy bloody demio, annoying pop up characters who talk you through the convoluted progression system, using Google to try and figure out how I can actually do some proper racing and being told I have to go to the cafe and collect shit cars or something, I deleted it and threw it in the bin.

Bloated smug self indulgent piece of shit of a game.

 

[Cannonfodder]

I gave up on the gran turismo franchise at about 4

 

[Jan Pawlowski]

Warframe with it's quest "The Sacrifice". I've just finished it and it was unexpected from an online game to have a such a good story and cutscenes.

 

[BigBell1987]

Alien Isolation is brilliant, I'm late to the party on it, it's very nerve racking and very true to the movies with a good story where you play as Ripley's daughter searching for her and it's actually quite long and meaty. It's more survival horror than a shooter, lots of hiding/cowering, you get guns but using them attracts the Alien and flame thrower ammo is rare so your best sneaking around obstacles. Humans for pretty easy with a wrench to the head, Android and Aliens not so much.

My preferred online shooter at the minute (don't have a pc) is Hell Let Loose. WW2 FPS. Really fun game. A team is made up of one Commander who pretty much orchestrates the plan as a whole, he has various command abilities such as drop in supplies, tanks, order airstrikes and more. Supplies are needed to build resources which increase his points to spend on such things as well as for engineers to build defences such as sandbags, barb wire, bunkers and more.

Commander has radio Comms to speak to squad leaders aka officers.

Squads are made up of an officer who has direct Comms with the commander and relays information between his squad and command, they have binoculars to scout around and mark objectives and the ability to build outposts and garrisons.

Outposts are spawn points for a particular squad, garrisons are spawn points for every squad but need supplies to be built.

The rest of a squad is made up of 5 other players who can choose between infantry, Anti tank, engineer, machine gunner, assault as far as I can remember, each has their own set of skills and most are restricted to one per squad.

You also have armoured squads for tanks which are made up of an officer and two drivers or is it 3 drivers, basically a spotter, driver and gunner.

Recon squads are made up of a spotter/officer and a sniper, I think there's 2 per team.

The game is generally a capture a sector game, sometimes both teams are fighting to own all sectors and others you are either defending or attacking.

This is a very basic summary, if you like the sound of it watch some YouTube and invest it's great, especially you PC guys who can run servers and such, can be hit and miss on console as it's matchmaking and all depends on the quality of commander and Comms between squads but the pc communities have some well organised teams.

I'm currently playing a story driven game, almost an interactive movie called "As Dusk Falls" which is also very good, it's a gritty story whereby two families lives entangle through a robbery gone wrong, you make choices for both families which continue to have effects across a couple of generations as the children grow up to live with their parents choices and make some of their own. You can play it multiple ways lots of repeatability, characters are deep and the choices can be quite gnarly sometimes.

Hope you try them and enjoy them!