Still working through my PS4 games, and the latest one to join the completed list is Guardians Of The Galaxy from a couple of years back.

The game sees Quill and the rest of the gang out to stop a powerful and malevolent entity that has been released from the soul stone.

Overall my experience with this game was very mixed. For probably two thirds of the game I was very frustrated with the gameplay, until my ancient brain finally started to catch up with the sheer amount of buttons and button combos that were required and I finally started to get into it a bit more.

Of course, it didn't help my anger levels by being a shooter game that I was having to use a controller for. Yes, I've had that whinge a million times, but it's never going to change. And what was worse in this game was the weird acceleration curve on the analogue sticks. The turn rate of the camera didn't seem to speed up while pushing the stick further, until getting nearly to maximum, when the turn speed would rocket right up. Irritating.

And the load times. Sheesh, the load times. What was all that about? I know I've not got an SSD in my PS4, but I don't think I've ever had to wait so long for a game to load since I used to play on my old ZX Spectrum back in the 80s. Even dying and restarting a fight, which should be fresh in the console's memory, would take just as long. I almost had time to go and make a coffee on each reload.

The QTEs also boggled my brain at times. When I've played a game with QTEs in the past, the idea is usually to hit that button as fast as possible when you see the prompt appear. But here, that would often see you fail the task. Instead, you have to wait until the exact moment. It just flew in the face of QTE mechanics I was used to.

The combat in the game can quickly get chaotic. I didn't find it too bad when fighting against one tough enemy like a boss, but when there were loads of weak to medium enemies all over the screen my brain and fingers really did struggle to keep up. Only later in the game when muscle memory had started to form did I begin to find it easier and more enjoyable.

I think my main issue was with my team mates, who don't really do anything unless you tell them what to do. It was also annoying that, whenever one of them is knocked down, the others will expect you to go and help them out rather than doing it themselves. And then when you get knocked down it's game over, with your team given no option to come and help you at all.
Definitely needed to be more like the Ghostbusters 2009 game, where the other Ghostbusters did their part helping out if someone got taken down.

As a last kick in the teeth, the penultimate boss fight against a guy called Raker even bugged out and wouldn't continue, so I had to do the whole thing all over again.

So what about the story? This is a game based on Marvel comics after all. Could the game excel in this area?

Well, unfortunately, I found it very middling here as well. While I really liked the characters, especially how they got better at working together as the game went on, I found the plot kind of "meh" and the villains very very weak indeed. I was not aware of the game's main villain, Magus, before this game, and hopefully I'll never encounter him again. He was just an angry mass of black swirling weirdness, who was using some dumb religious nutjobs to try and bring about an end to the universe.
Simply not that entertaining.

As to whether I would play this again, or recommend it to anyone else: probably not, unless you're a huge Marvel fan, or enjoy 3rd person shooters.

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Over the passed few months, a game we have attempted is ToeJam & Earl: Back In The Groove. I have very vague memories of playing an old game in this series on Scoob's Mega Drive way back in the day, and we were both up for re-visiting these weird characters.

In this game, which is essentially a remake of that old original one, you play as aliens who have crashed on Earth. You must then traverse floating islands to find all the pieces of your damaged space ship, so that you can get the hell off this weird rock.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to do this, but often I remember old things being better than they were. Unfortunately, this game turned out to be much the same.

It didn't help that the tutorial world kept bugging out on us, so we were forced to go into the full game without really knowing what we were doing. Sure, I could have scoured the internet for the manual (which I later ended up doing, not that it helped), but I didn't fancy doing that at first.

Our adventures into the main game's "fixed" world started much brighter. Though we still didn't know what we were doing, we got to level 17 of 25 without actually losing any lives. However, somewhere around here, the game's difficulty spiked like crazy, and we were both dead by the time we got to level 19. As neither of us particularly fancied giving it another go, our adventures stopped there.

I can't speak for Scoob, but I got super frustrated by the end, just by how fast the enemies moved compared to the player characters. And by the later stages of the game, if any enemy touched you, they would take off a good 90% of your life bar.

The thing that definitely annoyed us both was the way the split-screen was implemented. Even when I switched the option to fixed, it would still work in this weird dynamic way where player 1 would sometimes be on top of the screen, and sometimes at the bottom, depending on where the two characters were in the level.

So this might not be a game that I ever finish, but that doesn't matter. It was just a freebie from Epic Games after all, and we used it solely to re-visit our childhoods for a few hours.

The 2017 game Nier: Automata was next on my list of PS4 games to clear. I didn't really know much about this game other than it was about androids, there were multiple endings, and a few years back everyone online was obsessed with 2B's ass.

Well, fair play I guess. I mean, it's certainly not one of the game's downsides.

But what about the actual game? Mostly, it's a hack'n'slash-style 3D fighter, though interestingly, the game also includes sections from plenty of other genres. At any point, you might find the camera switching to a different position, which is the signal that the game is about to switch to a side scrolling platformer, or top down shooter, for example. Some of these sections were pretty cool, but mostly I thought they would have been far better just sticking with an over-the-shoulder, 3D fighter-style camera.

When it comes to setting, the game takes place in the very distant future. You play as one of several different androids, who were made by the last few surviving humans who now reside in a secret base on the moon. Your job is to retake planet Earth from the machine army that was created by aliens who invaded many years prior.

Starting out, there was very little help from the game's tutorials. Because I wanted to hit the ground running, I had to get acquainted with the wikis to figure out what I was doing.

I knew going in that multiple playthroughs were going to be needed, which I was not looking forward to. Still, I went in with good intentions at first, aiming to do everything I could in the initial run, where I was playing as the game's poster-girl, 2B.
However, this desire soon faded as I got further into the game. Unfortunately, the game started to feel like a bit of a slog, and so I ended up doing far less that I probably should have done.

It wasn't until the end of the game when I unlocked the chapter select that I saw how many side missions I had missed. And I tell you now, I was nowhere near done. You could easily spend weeks polishing up this game.
After my experience though, I doubt I'll be going back to clear any of the others. The game just outstayed its welcome for me.

There were a number of reasons for this. Up first was having to replay large chunks of the game as another character, 9S, who I didn't like using as much. This was primarily because his speciality is hacking, upon where you have to play a weird little mini-game that I really wasn't into. As a character, I also found he became a little insufferable by the end of the game.
You don't really spend a great deal of time with the third character, A2, but some of her later fights are also annoying as the game constantly switches you between characters during the battles. It can just take you right out of the moment and really break your focus. At least it did with my aging brain.

I was also very disappointed that there was no photo mode. In the middle of so much chaos, I found it really difficult to get cool action shots, so it would have been preferable to have a way of getting much better images. Oh well.

The biggest faux pas the developers made while making this game was right at the end, which left me quite pissed off. You see, to get the final cut scene, you have to get all the way through the end credits. Not a problem, you may think?
But think again.

In this game, the end credit section is another stupid mini-game, and by far the hardest one in the whole game. I didn't know at first, as I keep my consoles disconnected from the internet by default, but this end section is made far harder when not connected. This is because help can come to you on behalf of other players, as long as they have offered up their save data to the nerd gods.

Absolutely pathetic and stupid decision by the devs to implement this idea in a single player game, and proves what I had read about the devs in that they are just massive trolls.

In conclusion, the game had some real potential, with its characters, setting and story. But its far too many frustrating sections and elements turned it into a game I didn't really enjoy playing. So while I did get some enjoyment out of it, I highly doubt I will ever want to play it again.

So much for this being a year of completing games, as it's been nearly 3 months since I finished The Somnium Files. This is partly to blame on me getting back into painting again, and partly down to me being in DIY hell these last few weeks.

Still, even though the DIY is not finished yet, a game really needed to be played. So played one I did.

I chose a fairly short PS4 game, in the form of Stray. This game came out last year and was quite well received.

In it, you play as a cat in the far future, long after humanity has become extinct. After you fall into an underground city populated by robots, you gain their assistance and start your journey back to the surface.

There's some light puzzle elements, and some light action sections where you have to avoid or fight some strange little bacteria creatures that want to eat you. Other than that, the game is mainly exploration as you try and find your way back to your other cat friends.

Your main companion in the game is B-12, a little floating drone who hitches a ride on your back. This little dude comes in handy for all kinds of little tasks, like hacking and using a UV light on the bugs. He's pretty cool.

Other than that, it's a pretty straight forward little game, that is harmless and quite charming. It was quite expensive for what it is though, even buying it several months after launch as I did.

But overall, I'm glad I played it.