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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Picked up APICO on a whim yesterday (https://apico.buzz/) and lost most of the day to it. It's a new indie beekeeping sim game with a really good "just one more turn" feel to it. The music is also really nice, have it on the background for some chill coding today (spotify). They're also donating a portion of the sales to bee conservation, which is a nice touch.
My partner played that during the beta and she really seemed to enjoy it
Been reading a lot of indie TTRPGs partly for fun, partly to widen my knowledge base and partly as research for the board game store I'm opening.
Business Wizards is a rules light RPG about wizarding in a corporate hellscape. It's tongue in cheek and really cathartic for anyone who works for a soulless corporation. I had a chance to play with the Devs a year or so ago and we played the actual game via an online PowerPoint-style presentation. It's absolutely hilarious and I'm prepping to run it for a group of friends
Thirsty Sword Lesbians the name says it all, it's a medium weight explicitly LGBT-inclusive, explicitly anti-fascist RPG about lesbians with swords fighting against tyrany and their own personal baggage. The book even opens with a bunch of safety tools to make sure that everyone is comfortable around the table, which can be a big issue with TTRPGs. I haven't played it but I really want to.
Finally Monster Care Squad is a game where you play as elite fantasy veterinarians trying to help monsters and magical creatures who are in distress. It explicitly doesn't have rules for intentionally cause harm to anyone else and seems like a really cool way of approaching conflict resolution. It really feels like it has abolitionist and restorative justice undertones instead of the traditional stab-bad-guy-with-a-pointy-stick method that is common in many other games. I'll probably cue up a game of this next once I've run Business Wizards
Cities Skylines
I've been playing off and on since release (2015 wow), and SimCity 4 before that.
I'm doing it with heavy use of mods (realistic population, lifecycle rebalanced, TM:PE, real time, RICO, etc.) to make it seem and look more realistic.
I still love the game, even after all these years and all of its many many negatives. Hell it barely runs on my computer at this point in my save with about 450k people, just chugging along and freezing every once in a while. I just like making a virtual zen garden of a city, and seeing it grow as it gets bigger, and refining little parts of it, and just watching it exist as a living thing.
I recently bought the Campus DLC since it was on sale, plopped one of those down in the middle of my city in a former industrial park. Airports is the last DLC -- both that I think they should make, and the last one I still have a desire to buy (when it goes on sale).
I still think they did an awesome job making the game, and it should be on the same pantheon as the Sim Cities (no not that one!). At the same time, I can't wait for a sequel that will clean up and modernize it, and hopefully go father in city planning theory.
Saw Drawing Dead's first look video for Tile Cities on his channel the other day.
I love an inexpensive (€2 on Steam currently) puzzler, so I grabbed it. Twelve hours logged and I love it. Might even have cured me of my current Mini Motorway addiction...
Finally finished Desparados 3 last week. I started it during the pandemic, but then put it down for over a year when I got stuck on a mission. Picked it up again the week before when I got bored and breezed through that mission and the rest of it! Just needed a "little bit" of time to think about my plan of action ;)
Anyway, it's a great game. It's basically Hitman as an RTS of sorts. The characters and their stories are well put together, as is the overall story. As the name suggests, it's a Western that takes place in the US southwest but it goes east to Louisiana like Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I didn't play the first and second installations, so I'm not sure if the games' stories are related, but I didn't feel like I missed anything, either.
Just like most stealth games, it's up to the player to determine how to complete the missions. I could go in guns blazing and knives flying, but I don't think I'd have enough ammo for that. Some of these missions have 100+ baddies on them. So stealth is definitely key. I could try to go in totally undetected...or I could stealth kill everyone. I chose the latter. Some missions took me 4-5hrs to sneakily kill everyone in a mission. Thank god for the game's built-in savescumming quicksave and quickload system.
As someone who loves stealth action like the Hitman, Splinter Cell, and Deus Ex series, Desperados 3 was a perfect match. Would love to play a fourth installment some day.
Other stuff I'm playing:
If you liked Desperados 3, you should check out Mimimi's previous game Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun if you haven't yet. It's the exact same genre, also awesome, and I personally enjoyed the setting and story even more than D3.
p.s. Ever played the old Commandos series games? They're absolute classics in the same genre, which I have incredibly fond memories of playing when I was a kid, and have played them countless times since. They're available on GOG if you ever want to play them yourself.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/commandos_ammo_pack
https://www.gog.com/en/game/commandos_2_3
p.p.s. Another classic:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/robin_hood
And of course, the previous Desperados games too:
https://www.gog.com/game/desperados_wanted_dead_or_alive
https://www.gog.com/game/desperados_2
(Squad based, isometric, tactical/stealth games is one of my favorite genres) :)
I loved Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics, but haven't played the recent expansion for Shadow Tactics. Have you tried it, and if you have, is it worth giving a play?
I actually didn't even know there was an expansion pack. But now that I do, I also know what my next purchase will be. Thanks for the heads up! :P
p.s. LFTL - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1579380/Shadow_Tactics_Aikos_Choice/
Let me know what you think of it! It looks like more of the same, which isn't a bad thing by any means, but I might wait for it to go on sale in future (after I've cleared out some of my backlog).
Shadow Tactics is definitely next on my list. I've seen a lot of recommendations for it!
And yeah, I hadn't heard of the Commandos series. I'll check those out, too. Thanks!
Classic Minesweeper... (you can find one browser-based implementation here https://minesweeperonline.com/) Basically the only game I can still be bothered to play when I'm listening to something in the background. I also got into https://agar.io a few years ago. It's fun and mildly addictive, but I'm not playing it any more.
I've been playing a heavily modified Valheim, and I love the aesthetic a great deal. I love survival games, after I mod them to resemble single-player MMOs, and this is fitting the bill nicely.
Another game I've been playing is The Planet Crafters. It's a survival game where you're terraforming a planet, and it's been a very engrossing game so far. The aesthetic is very Astroneer, and the crafting is satisfying.