Anybody have any games they really liked on a first play through and then fell out of love with it later on? I’m going through it right now with the city builder game Workers and Resources. I’ve got 26 hours in it on Steam. Most of those hours came years ago when I first tried the game. I had a good grasp of it then naturally hopped off it when something else caught my eye. Every time I try it now I just can’t get past how janky it is. It truly is Eurojank the city builder game.
My biggest issue is relearning the build order. Set up a village, import some power, setup water, build a bus depot. I think I’ve got all the boxes checked off for what I’m supposed to do but nothing happens. Busses take no workers to the coal plant. Everything is still on warning that I’m missing resources. Then I get into the weeds and can’t find what’s wrong. I give up. This is the last few times I tried the game. I’m prone to jumping off a game if it’s too complex but knowing I used to have this one down and it’s all different now has me really souring on it.
That’s the shame of it. I know I liked the game at one point but there’s been too much time between first seriously getting to know the game and it’s systems and now. It’s the probably the only city builder I’ve ever played that’s not a pick up and play type game. This is my genre of choice going back to SC2000. This one stings.
Anybody else have anything like this happen to them?
BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.
On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.
The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.
Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.
Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.
There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.
The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.