Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin

 Rating: 8/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

Ages: 10+ (combat is on the complicated side, but if your younger one just likes riding a monster around, it might work for them)

My son bought Stories 2 and played it quite a bit after playing through Monster Hunter Rise. I saw the combat in Rise and thought, "Nope, too much coordination needed for that." But then I got bored and was looking for something new and he suggested I try playing Stories. "It has turn-based combat. You get to ride monsters around. It's mostly exploring things." Yeah, he knows what I want in a game.

So, I've spent many hours playing this game. It's like Pokemon meets Dragonwarrior. Beat up monsters, steal their eggs so you can hatch your own monster, then ride that monster around to beat up new monsters so you can steal their eggs so you can hatch your own so you can ride that monster around...

There is a story underlying the monster-collecting. It's an okay story. Sometimes it feels like the game and story were meant for the 5-8yo crowd but the game mechanics feel more like a 10-15yo audience. Either way, I found most of it enjoyable. There is a lot of space to explore and a lot of monsters to collect and level up. You can play dress-up with your character's armor and weapons. And who can't resist beating up big mean dragons with a giant teddy bear that puts them to sleep half the time?

It's a quirky mix of serious RPG and silliness that somehow works for me. I've made it through the main storyline and most of the side quests but still have a long way to go before I can even get close to 100% on this one. There is so much content!

This is mostly why I bought myself a switch and another copy of the game. There are a few quests and things you can only get with partner missions, which require a second switch and a separate copy of the game. My son and I had fun playing through a couple of them already and I'm looking forward to doing more.

Overall, it's a little complicated with the combat and everyone I've talked to who's played the game wants to squish Navirou the companion cat who is beyond annoying, the story is a little pretentious and cliché, but there is so much to do in this game and so many ways of doing it that I can overlook those issues. It's an expensive cartridge game, but I've definitely gotten my money's worth of entertainment out of it.

Excuse me while I go steal more monster eggs because, you know, Gotta catch 'em all! Monster-mon!

LEGO Jurassic World

 Rating: 8/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

All Ages

LEGO Jurassic World was a lot more fun than I expected. It's a mashup of three of the dinosaur movies, done with Legos, of course. I really only watched the first movie, so I'm not a huge fan of the franchise. I've also been burned with a lot of the more recent Lego games - buggy, not fun to play, confusing, overwhelming visually, and just not a good experience for me. I'd also heard that you didn't get to play as a dinosaur in this game so I was going to give it a pass.

Until I found it on sale.

Cheap.

So I took a chance on it. And I'm glad I did.

You DO get to play as a dinosaur. As a whole lot of different ones in fact. They're a bit clunky to control, especially the bigger ones, but still - you get to be a LEGO DINOSAUR AND TRASH EVERYTHING!!! Because that's really the point of Lego games - destroy everything you possibly can.

The overworld on this one takes a little getting used to but I really like the way they have it laid out. You are on different islands that unlock as you finish story levels. There are loads of puzzles and challenges to tackle in the overworld, most of them can be cheesed as a raptor, as my daughter figured out. It was so frustrating for me to do all the legwork to get one of the puzzles solved only to get to the final jump point and she'd already cleaned out the gold brick.

Overall, this was a fun game. Not too difficult but not too easy, either, with plenty of Lego smashing to go around. Some of the story levels were painful to play through. I hated the stuff falling through the truck scene where you had to dodge it while hanging on a rope. At least Lego gives you infinite lives even if they steal all your gold coins when you die. But when you have to play through a level two or three times so you can collect everything (sometimes more but we won't talk about those levels or my need to 100% Lego games), bits like this one just get painful to the point where I paid one of my sons to do that part of the level for me. Multiple times. After once or twice, I had to start raising the price. 

This is my way to get around parts of video games that require too much coordination or skills. I bribe my kids to do it for me. Since they are all adults now with years of video game experience, they can usually beat the boss or challenge with no trouble. Me? I struggle with games that require me to be coordinated or jump or process lots of visual input. I still enjoy the stories so I keep struggling. And no, practice isn't going to improve my skills much at this point. It's a losing race with bad eyesight and arthritis. Getting old isn't for wimps.

Back to the game.

I wouldn't pay full price ($30-60 depending on if you like cartridges or not), but I'm glad I picked it up on sale. I definitely got my money's worth of fun out of running around as a raptor destroying things and terrorizing the tourists.