PixlBit

                      

                          Healing is a rhythm game apparently. I did not know that.

     Saturday I played Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Got the last collectible but got frustrated with the last achievement for doing the final rhythm game perfectly and left it one short of complete. Maybe if I feel confident one day, I'll give it another shot. 

                         

                                                                Gotcha!

     I decided not to do any more in Enemy Front. I don't like doing stealth missions and the game doesn't have a good enough control scheme for me to beat my head against the wall trying to beat it on higher difficulty levels. 

                    

                           No hud really does make you feel more in the game.

    On Sunday, I dug into Wolfenstein: New Order again to try and beat it on Uber difficulty. I tried to use nothing but the LaserKraftWerk on a bunch of soldiers in the helicopter hanger, but that strategy didn't work. There's just too many of them and they do a lot of damage to you from far off. So I bailed on that and started the special modes. I played 999 mode all the way to where you get to drive a mech and escape the prison. This mode is on Uber difficulty but you get 999 health every time you respawn or start a level and you get unlimited ammo. So I dual weilded assault rifles with the rocket setting on both and painted the walls with gory chunks. At one point I made the game slow down cause there was so many chunks flying. Ha! That was fun. I got stuck in the mech though in the final part of that battle. There's just too many of them and you take a lot of damage with little room to maneuver. I got kinda frustrated and bailed. 

   Then I tried "Walk in the Park" mode. In this mode you have no hud at all, so you can't tell what your health is, how much ammo you have left, or anything. It's on the difficulty level just below Uber. I really liked having no hud. You can see a lot of the environment, and I noticed new details I hadn't seen before like people flying out of a bomber just ahead of you in the first level as it falls apart and scatters debri on the front of your plane. After a while at that, I grew tired of it and looked through the last two special modes. Both are super harcore challenges. Both are Uber difficulty. One eliminates all health and armor pickups and the other gives you only one life before it's game over. I thought the one-life mode was kinda neat because it makes the game like an arcade game where you only have one quarter to play it. I didn't try these two modes though. I was pretty done with Wolfenstein. What a great game! It was super fun and will stick in my memory for a long time. 

                              

                                          These things really pissed me off.

   Then I started Bound by Flame, an action RPG that takes some inspiration from Dark Souls. I really liked the crafting and skill upgrade system, but I couldn't get in a rhythm with the fighting. It seemed really hard to predict accurately when to block to get a counter-attack. It seemed more like luck. I slowed down my fighting and then turned the difficulty down, but I still couldn't keep from getting killed every time I had more than a couple enemies around me. I ran out of health potions quickly and didn't know how to get more. There aren't any towns or shops around in the first areas of the game. Maybe you craft them? I didn't think to do that. I did craft traps though and place them. I even used them strategically and got an achievement for doing that. The controls are pretty well laid out. When I started getting spells, I easily asigned them a button combo and used them right away. I was learning to be a Ranger and using stealth and dual wielded daggers. I kept getting seen however. There was just something about the basic parry and attack that just didn't jive with me. It seemed hard to keep multiple enemies off your back. You can jump back or perform an attack that sweeps the area, and I even learned a flame based defence that would throw enemies away from you, but none of those tricks were working well enough, and I kept dying. You know, after a dozen deaths or so. You don't feel too powerful anymore and the game stops being fun. That's how I felt and finally quit. 

                    

                                         This was the puzzle I did today.

     So I shelved that one and returned to Child of Light which I left unfinished. I jumped right back in and had to get the hang of the battle system again, but it came back to me without too much trouble. I had some close battles though. I think I'm approaching one of the last three bosses in the game. Maybe tomorrow I'll finish it and then go back to find the remaining collectibles. I think I'll trade some games and pick up LEGO: The Hobbit tomorrow too in case I finish with Child of Light early. That's the next most recent game I want to play.