Mass Effect: Andromeda

I found the music choice for Mass Effect: Andromeda's launch trailer -- Human by Rag'n'Bone Man -- to be highly amusing. With early access and review copies having already been around awhile to showcase the game's lack of quality, to me the trailer felt like BioWare Montreal saying they had tried their best and apologizing the state Andromeda would come out.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Game of the Year Edition) was 50% off in February on GOG.com and I decided it was finally time to finish the series. The game and its two expansions turned out to be as good as people had praised them to be, and I truly enjoyed the 175 hours (!) it took me to beat the full package. Witcher 3 has some flaws, but it is, without a doubt, a strong contender for the title of the best game ever made.

Mass Effect: Andromeda -- Multiplayer

I am skipping a bit ahead of my backlog of unwritten blogposts to record my thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda's multiplayer. It was the reason I bought the game on release, even pre-ordered since it was 10% off with the Origin Access trial. I wanted to be there right from the beginning to not miss community events and such. However, MEAMP has not exactly turned out to be a continuation of the greatness what Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was (or still is).

Shadowrun: Hong Kong

Shadowrun: Hong Kong was included in a Humble Bundle and I thought might as well buy it and play the third game too. It pretty much matched my expectations -- it is very much just more of the same.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst

Origin Access can be really great value for money at its low price of 4€ / month or 30€ / year. You get to play many big EA titles for a nominal fee, although I would not quite call the current total of 64 games "tons of titles". Some of them are also not the full experience. The Mass Effect series for instance does not have its infamous BioWare points requiring DLC included and you still need to buy them even with Access.

Ember

I suppose Ember made its way onto my wishlist by appearing to be an isometric RPG with real-time combat with active pause. And I suppose its journey continued into my game library because of a heavy discount. The reason why I played it till the end, I do not know. I probably should have requested a refund but it did not occur to me to do so until many hours into the game.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Wolfenstein: The New Order is set in alternative history where Nazi Germany has won the Second World War thanks to technological superiority gained from finding a forgotten stash of some secret order of inventors. It is the seventh game in the Wolfenstein franchise, a series of first person shooters that mostly follow the adventures of Captain William "B.J." Blazkowicz. It is also a soft reboot of the series and not having played the earlier titles is not critical to understanding what is going on.

Life Is Strange

The reason I bought Life Is Strange was me being interested in how Dontnod Entertainment's second game had turned out. The overwhelmingly positive user review consensus on Steam suggested that Square Enix had done wisely for deciding to save Dontnod from bankruptcy. Not many titles have so positive a reception among players.

Shadwen

A stealth game that is also essentially one huge escort quest feels like a concept set to fail. It is certainly something I would never buy at full price (not that I do so generally anyway) but I did put it on my wishlist to wait for a better deal. I reckon the game has not sold too well because pretty soon after its release it was almost constantly discounted in some store. During Steam's winter sale, the discount got to 75% and I finally bought Shadwen.

Tyranny

I recall the announcement of Tyranny being a slight surprise in last year's March. Promising the game's release still within the passing year when Pillars of Eternity's last expansion had come out only a month earlier seemed to leave very little time for development. I guess having the tech already worked out in PoE allowed Obsidian Entertainment to finish the project faster. Picking the same date for release as Dishonored 2 (Nov 11th) was an odd choice, though.

I also got to play Tyranny unusually soon after release for a patient gamer as it was gifted to me by a certain Frenchman. (Thanks, Kane!)