Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
This game has 1) an engaging story 2) interesting characters and most of all 3) a beautiful world. I’m not someone who plays this game for the gameplay (while being remarkably good for it’s time, especially the combat system), I play this for the gorgeous version of Hong Kong displayed here. It’s not photorealistic, and it’s nothing like a 1:1 remake of the city. Instead it captures some of the aspects that make a city feel like HK and lay them out over multiple districts. All that being said, this game most definitely shows it’s age in [CURRENT YEAR] and can be a pain to work with on occasion. There will be bugs, and it’ll probably make you restart certain missions. Despite that though, I think everyone should try this game at least once. It won’t be for everyone, but there isn’t another game like it. At the time of writing this, the game is on sale for $3, which I think i a totally fair price. It’s not worth its full $20 price tag, but if it’s on sale it’s definitely worth a shot.
– Real player with 162.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Martial Arts Action Games.
“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.”
~Mario Puzo, The Godfather
Ah, the good ol' True Crime series… Back in 2003, when Californian studio called Luxoflux (the guys behind Star Wars: Demolition) released their Streets of LA (the first game in the series), I was a pretty big fan. See, I always loved what Rockstar did in GTA III. They took Reflections Interactive’s Driver (the game, in which nobody made it past the tutorial) and put it into an open world environment. Awesome stuff. The problem is – I never liked the actual gameplay. The clunky controls, the missions that very often didn’t give you a fair chance to win in your first try, the fact that very often the game wanted you to re-play the entire sequence since very beginning after you failed… I know there’s heck of a lot of GTA fans out there, but personally, I never liked how those games felt. Still don’t, and even though the series evolved quite a lot since then, it still feels like a torture to me. Now, Streets of LA? It was a different story. It was a pure fun. It was extremely user-friendly (heck, the game even allowed you to skip the missions you didn’t like), the controls were tricky but comfortable, the open world was there, but the most importantly? The game had its own unique face. It was non-linear, it had the advanced melee combat, it had stealth elements (the worst part of the game, but still) and it did the “police simulator” thing surprisingly well. Up to this day, I love Streets of LA very much, especially that juicy Japanese version by CAPCOM that came with a cool Japanese dub. And yes, it was like Streets of LA was a Ryū ga Gotoku before the actual Ryū ga Gotoku. Especially thanks to its cocky storytelling.
– Real player with 71.7 hrs in game
Sleeping Dogs
NOTE: I did not play 400+ hours of this game, it’s a Steam bug that multiplied my playtime. I inquired about it but got not response from support.
INTRODUCTION:
Wei Shen a police officer trained in the USA, now working with the Hong Kong Police Department has been sent on a dangerous mission. To infiltrate and gather information on one of the largest and most dangerous Triad Organization in Hong Kong. Will he break under pressure or will he do his duty as one of Hong Kong’s finest?
PROS:
- Nice Graphics: -I like the visuals but you can clearly tell it was developed with consoles in mind. The only redeeming factor on this area is that a free high-texture DLC pack is available for download. The world is adequately populated by NPCs though at times some parts of the City does look empty. It has a day and night system as well as a weather system which adds to the game’s atmosphere.
– Real player with 443.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Martial Arts Action Games.
Overview
Sleeping Dogs is a third-person, open world action game following the base concepts of GTA, meaning a large city divided into sectors (all unlocked from the start), filled with main and side activities to take on and complete, each for different types of rewards. Unlike its bigger cousin, Sleeping Dogs focuses more on melee combat rather than firearms, featuring a decently complex, satisfying, and really spectacular system that delivers the “martial arts action movie” feel almost flawlessly in each fight. Players will impersonate undercover agent Wei Shun, and perform missions for both the Hong Kong police and Triads, while trying to maintain their cover story.
– Real player with 49.9 hrs in game
Disgraced
Good Quality and Content for a RPGMaker game.
Very responsive developer always around to answer queries.
Oriental story, audio and settings.
Character building, satisfiers system similar to a survival game.
System unlike those others that have Hitpoints of several thousands, or deals thousands of damages per hit, characters and damage dealings stay at minimal hitpoint and deals reasonable low damages.
Plot, drama and gameplay is fine, alittle dull once the first capital is taken.
But,
Unable to customize much of the controls bind key with F1 console, unlike most other rpgmaker game.
– Real player with 55.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Martial Arts Party-Based RPG Games.
This game is worth your time and hard-earned cash. Essentially, the game is a jrpg about Japan in the late sengoku jidai. You get to pick your starting class and skills and sex which can really make the game interesting.
The best part about this game, is that it really does all it can to make you feel like you are taking on the role of someone’s life. A lot of role-playing games these days sort of play like a power fantasy as the player does his or her best to reach a point of apotheosis, or Ultimate Warrior. However, this game’s goal isn’t to make a God out of the main player or the character, as the main character is more or less known as a great warrior for being one of the first in the region to rebell against the unjust nature of the current Empire. The biggest rewards come from taking part in the story and completing side quests, rather than grinding repetitively.
– Real player with 24.5 hrs in game
Shenmue I & II
[SHENMUE I]
Shenmue is a strange, gently plodding beast of a game that we’ll never see the likes of again. Even when Shenmue 3 comes out, it will likely focus on different things, different aspects of gameplay. Shenmue is currently gaming’s one and only kung-fu small town life simulator, and that’s commendable.
This makes the fourth time in my life I’ve finished Shenmue 1 and every time I’ve played it I’ve seen different scenes, talked to people and discovered what to do next in different ways. I’ve gotten different toys out of the capsule machines and won different prizes in the lucky-dip draws in the stores. The plot of Shenmue is the same every time, the way you work through that plot is different and organic.
– Real player with 89.2 hrs in game
Shenmue. It was a great game that preceded many other open-world titles. It is still the game with that much immersion from the open-world as you can get in 2021, if we’re not talking about visual details. Every person there, every single NPC has a unique appearance, behavior pattern, and biography defining his/her actions. Additionally, every person involved in fights has his own set of moves. How’s that for starters? For a game released in 2001? Even more, Shenmue is still the great tale of adventures and martial arts.
– Real player with 73.3 hrs in game
Shenmue III
Ah, Shenmue 3, how I have longed for the light of your presence to shine upon thee…
Heads up to those who peruse this review: I’m a HUGE shenmue fan. I backed this game on kickstarter and have played the game twice on Sony PlayStation 4.
Let’s forget all of the nonsense associated with Deep Silver and the Epic Game Store exclusivity. How is THE GAME?
A mixed bag.
Let’s start with the graphical presentation. Shenmue 1&2 were AAA games back in the day; the most expensive games every produced up until that time. Shenmue 3 is a AA game; as such you cannot go into this expecting the latest cutting edge graphics.
– Real player with 110.8 hrs in game
Before starting my review, I’d like to point out that we really need a mixed review option on Steam. I hope Gaben will hear our prayers one day. Anyway, as most of you know, Shenmue III is the highest funded Kickstarter game and it is definitely one of the longest awaited one. How long was it… 20 years? I’m not a loyal Shenmue fan, I didn’t wait 20 years for it, in fact, first time I’ve played Shenmue was a few months ago but I was aware of its significance and contributions to the video game culture of course. I also didn’t contributed anything to its Kickstarter campaign but putting myself in one of the loyal fans' place, I’d be extremely disappointed by this game. Especially after waiting nearly 20 years for it. Although I have no doubt that Yu Suzuki and YS Net did their best to bring a solid title to the fans, they’ve made a grave mistake by striking a deal with Deep Silver. 1 year Epic Store exclusivity was straight up disrespectful towards the people who contributed to Kickstarter campaign. Hopefully, they will learn from their mistakes with Shenmue IV. Anyway, let’s take a look at the redeeming qualities first…
– Real player with 108.7 hrs in game
Absolver
There’s something about it. the fighting style and technique is well done. I like the soundtracks the most. Looking at the ruins you feel like a part of it.
– Real player with 379.4 hrs in game
Its not always about victory.
Its about the mets baby, cmon baby love the mets. Lets get a home run, love the mets.
– Real player with 52.7 hrs in game
古剑奇谭三(Gujian3)
After series of disappointments to find a decent story-driven RPG among modern games and tired of replaying classics I’ve decided to give a chance to a Chinese RPG. So I’ve bought Gujian3 and… put it aside after the first mission considering it to be some mediocre slasher. Last year I gave a go to another Chinese RPG - Xuan-Yuan Sword VII and was relatively satisfied by its story ang gameplay. After that I checked my Steam library and found long-forgotten Gujian3. Struggling to drop it during the first mission I’ve reached Skyelk and finally found what I seek in games - a decent RPG with involving story and interesting characters. And it appeared to be so involving that became my “second reality” for two weeks. Thorough gameplay took 100+ hours and almost none was boring.
– Real player with 188.4 hrs in game
This review has no spoilers and is very long.
Before you buy it, you should know this game is heavily story-driven and exploration-based. If you are a gamer that like exploration, collecting rewards, and/or storytelling, you are in for a treat!
This single-player game does require internet connection to run. This very inconvenient function might have something to do with IP protection during its initial release in China to prevent pirated copies. Unfortunately, the IP protection was carried over to the Steam version, likely because the developer wasn’t planning to release the game in English during its initial release in 2018.
– Real player with 184.1 hrs in game
Hiking Simulator 2018
Kind of pretty in spaces. You can play either seeing your character or with a first person view. At it’s dark heart this is a hiking sim filled with mountains to climb, trees to see, and cute little bunnies. Aw. Too bad the bears hate you. So do the wolves and boars. Most of the animals are dangerous, but it’s more that type of game.
I didn’t like that at first, but amazingly you can outrun charging bears and wolves. Ditto the boars, though those suckers will chase you. I hit the statue that shall hereafter be called Freyr’s temple and got chased.
– Real player with 4.0 hrs in game
AMAZING GAME……. 10/10 would buy. The wildlife blew my mind, the attention to detail is remarkable. the birds are kind of dicks tho, no need to ever go outside again this game has it all from giant brids to demonic burnt bacon like creatures. WISH I COULD HAVE PAID FULL PRICE! im buying it for my aunt as her dying wish…. its that good (sound track is top notch) the Aurora Borealis is worth the search it only took me 81 minutes. my girlfriend said she was going to leave me if i dont stop playing this game….. I CANT STOP SEND HELP… the snow crunch is supper realistic. overall a great time.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
MIR4
This game has a lot of potential but it is overrun with bots and there is nothing being done about it. Bots have been an issue from the start of the game and all it would take is a few minutes of active attention on each server per day to identify them and ban them. Even if you dont get them all the first day the numbers will dwindle quickly. Normally you could just play around the bots but these bots are actually taking up the most valuable resource in the game. This resource can either be mined, received as a quest reward, or purchased. The resource is used in over 90% of all crafting, enchanting, upgrading your character in anyway, etc. The bots are able to teleport, and knock you off of the resource without actually damaging you. This wouldn’t even be ok if they did damge you so that you can kill them and get your resource back, because there are so many bots they are programed to have one knock you off and another take the resource that way you cant kill the one who got your resource. Even if you do kill them, they can resurrect and teleport back to the node in seconds where it should take them several minutes to get back on auto run. Another issue is that pvp is so heavily punished in this game that if you kill a bot that was there just to take your resource and not damage you, then you end up suffering more because you can no longer gain xp at full value. Thats right, the pvp penalty effects your growth as a player which is another thing the bots dont care about as they are just after the resource. Once you gain negative propensity because of killing a non hostile bot you are then freely targeted by other players while you try to get rid of the negative propensity. The penalty for killing one none hostile bot is -999 propensity which means you need to kill 400 monsters within 5 levels of you to get back to getting full xp again.
– Real player with 2036.5 hrs in game
Typical auto-quest game with tedious quests to repeat over. Traps to pay at level 30 - 40.
So many hackers ruining game-play across all servers.
I’m few days into the game and here’s my take on the above.
At level 30+, you will face the problems of having no slot to keep all the important items.
I think this is deliberately designed so people would have to pay some bucks to buy more slots to keep all the items. It becomes very annoying to progress if you don’t pay for extra slots.
At level 40, if you are free-to-pay, you will experience super slow down in quest completion as your starting gears (with free-to-pay upgrade along the way) and stats improvement started to hit the bottleneck. The time to complete each quest becomes 2x-3x and the story quest also become much harder. Yet another trap for you to either go back to auto farming materials for a long time to get a rare item or pay to buy “blue rare starting sets” at the cost of $29.99.
– Real player with 990.0 hrs in game
Sands of Salzaar
It was another 51/49 close call. The game is really fun and full of potential, so why do I not recommend it after spending so much time with it? Well, precisely because I spent so much time with it… let me elaborate…
ENGLISH LOCALISATION:
Most the narration goes through text. Translation are quite uneven, some of it is really bad while other parts are more competently translated. There is no english voice-acting, though I personally find the original quite charming and would not mind if it was not translated at all ever.
– Real player with 388.4 hrs in game
As someone who played this game in the last weeks I’m going to answer some questions you might are interested, if you don’t own the game yet and want to know if it’s good or bad.
What is this game about?
I would describe this game as a mix of:
M&B + Diablo/PoE + own unique asian artstyle
If you know games like Battle Brothers or Kenshi, they might can be compared as well.
Why M&B?
-
walk through the land with your Squad,
-
kill bandit groups or raid caravans,
– Real player with 181.2 hrs in game