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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.
Raft
This game is seriously impressing me.
When I hear “open-world survival crafting” especially paired with “early access” (the game only recently fully released), it sets my expectations low. Raft has handily exceeded them.
It does have some of the jankiness I expected, of course, but I was really caught off guard by how the game plays out. At first it’s just a floating-on-the-sea sandbox where you sail from island to island, but eventually you unlock the ability to navigate to “story islands” which are very different from the regular islands you’ll encounter in your standard sailing.
I won’t spoil anything about them, but I will say that I’ve been charmed, impressed, and thoroughly surprised by them.
I started playing on the Warhammer: Age of Reckoning emulator, Return of Reckoning about a month ago and have been having lots of fun. If you never played W:AR, it was a PVP mmo from the creators of DaoC. There is some leveling PvE content which for the most part should be avoided as well as end game dungeon instances which actually have decent gear but for the most part it's a PvP game with both instanced PvP and realm vs realm open world PvP.
I hit rank 40 on a tank class, and wow I forgot how fun tanking is in this game. You’re basically trying to keep your group alive through the use of a guard ability, which as long as you’re within 30’ of them allows you to redirect 50% of their damage taken to yourself, where all your mitigation and block/parry etc chance applies. This lets your healers keep up when a softer class gets focused. You also have either a directed or AoE knock back which “punts” targets backwards that you can use to swat melee DPS off your healers or knock back opposing tanks off their guard targets so your group can focus them down. Combined with all of your snare/knockdown/interrupt utility, it’s a really fun and novel role to play. Evenly matched fights between competent players become all about your team target switching at the right moment and saving cooldowns or powerful morale abilities for the right moment to break the opposing teams' defenses.
The game itself isn’t hugely active, but there’s a solid contingent of 300-500 people playing every night in NA, and 600-1000 during EU, which is more than enough for the game to feel active. It takes about 3-4 weeks to hit max level (40) and another couple weeks to rank up enough renown and crests to get into competitive gear, but you’re able to participate and meaningfully contribute in most end game PvP from rank 16+ so the grind isn’t that bad at all. I would recommend checking it out if you like the genre and haven’t played it before.
I recently played through Mother Russia Bleeds, a great beat-em-up in a pixel-art aesthetic set in a supremely fucked up Russia. Gameplay is deceptively simple, but soon forces you to deepen your understanding based on the enemies you're facing.
At the same time, the simplicty hides some minor mechanics which show great attention to detail, e.g. when you carry a weapon and drop it, you let it fall to the ground by default, which hurts the durability, but pressing down and the drop key at the same time you instead put it on the ground, which doesn't cause damage.
This game is definitely 18+, at one point you wander into a an extreme fetish club and the boss of the level is a big fucking guy who whips people and chops them up, while you gain a temporary ally in some guy who is so much into puppy play that he'll try to actually just beat anyone up with his teeth, considering his hands are tied behind his back.
On Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/361300/Mother_Russia_Bleeds/ for 15€. It was on a deep discount on the recent summer sale for like 2€, so if the base price is too much, it'll probably go on sale soon again.
It's a great, fairly short experience. You'll be done in about 4-5 hours on your first run-through.
Mothmen 1966. It's a pretty neat interactive fiction game with visuals heavily inspired by early '90s computer games. Here's the trailer if anyone's curious. It's short, taking just 2 or 3 hours to complete, but I thought it was fun. If you like cryptids and those sorts of spooky campfire tales I'd say it's worth the nine bucks. It's available on steam and all consoles.
Star Munchkin (tabletop)
Basically a reskin of Munchkin.
For those not familiar with it, Munchkin is a parody of fantasy tabletop roleplaying games, mocking all the tropes that are common in such games. The gameplay itself isn't much to write home about, and the game instead leans heavily on humour for its entertainment value, with each card featuring at least one joke or funny reference, and an amusing illustration.
Star Munchkin swaps the fantasy theme for sci-fi, riffing on franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. One immediate issue with this is that we now have a game where the gameplay parodies tabletop RPGs, while the content mostly parodies film and TV franchises. (It's worth noting that there does of course exist sci-fi tabletop RPGs, but they've never been even remotely as popular as their fantasy counterparts. If your primary TTRPG experience is with Star Wars d20, then you may find that the gameplay and content compliment each other as well as they do in Munchkin.)
After playing a few games, I've found Star Munchkin to be a kinder game than its fantasy original. There are a lot fewer ways to screw over your competitors, and the consequences of being defeated by a monster are usually less harsh. One of the few new mechanics in the game are weapons that can be combined into single weapons (anything that rhymes with "laser"), and there are fewer items with class and race restrictions, which together means it's rarer to sit with cards in your hand that you can't equip. I'm guessing they did these changes to avoid games of Star Munchkin turning into the four-hour slogs that Munchkin games sometimes devolve into, but by removing most opportunities to screw over your competitors, I feel like the game has lost part of its soul.
Overall; it's fine. You'll like it if you like Munchkin, and you may even like it more than the original if you are really into sci-fi.
I always just threw the Star Munchkin cards in with the regular ones, and then took a chunk of the overall deck so that we weren't dealing with 800 card draw piles. It led to weird pop culture mashups, but half the time that's what role playing devolves into anyway. :D
I've been playing The Last of Us and The Last of Us: Part 2. Naughty Dog is truly the only game studio that "gets" the movie-game. It's essentially a string of cut scenes held together by light stealth and action sequences but very smoothly so. Honestly, it's not terribly much of a game. It's a technological graphics art piece and it's really, really impressive. For example, there's a kind of global illumination going on with the flashlight in Part 2 so the light gets reflected on nearby surfaces in the color of the illuminates surface (like shining it on a green wall makes the whole room glow green). That rope physics is something else, too. Never seen that implemented so perfect in a game. The story (I'm not through)... is okay, I guess? Standard zombie tropes, some hints of subtle, dry humor which I appreciate, you get the character's motivations for the most part... I wonder how this would be rated as a movie (because it basically is a movie), though. It's somewhere up there with maybe something like A Quiet Place, which is respectable for game standards. I guess I'd like something more "game-y" next, though.
At some point when I went back and played Uncharted 4 and TLOU Remastered on the harder difficulties, I realized something rather odd and yet important about Naughty Dog's game's: the Normal difficulty is the cinematic difficulty.
On Hard or Very Hard, the games actually become games again, where all the mechanics are important and players have to master them to get by. It's no longer easy light stealth sequences or quick bursts of action to break the monotony. Uncharted 4 started feeling more in the vein of DOOM 2016 where every encounter was its own fight room with a unique layout, and required the player to be constantly moving and choosing their next move both on-the-fly and wisely. TLOU turned into a true survival challenge where sneaking around stopped being light stealth and started being your only option, and you had to choose when and where to apply your very few supplies most effectively.
I haven't quite seen another developer have this effect with their difficulty levels. I think it's worth trying to a lot of players once they complete the games on Normal but were hoping for more of a game out of the experience they otherwise enjoyed. I found myself liking their games a lot more after I noticed this. Uncharted 4 has (to my very great surprise) become one of my favourite fast-paced action games after I cleared the game on Crushing (though some of the fights are definitely bullshit on that difficulty, so Very Hard is probably the sweet spot).
“Naughty Dog is truly the only game studio that "gets" the movie-game. It's essentially a string of cut scenes held together by light stealth and action sequences but very smoothly so.”
Some other titles I would throw in for consideration: Bioshock Infinite, uncharted, metal gear solid (the good ones), RE4, prince of Persia (also the good ones). I’m sure there’s more I just can’t think of them right now.
Yea, the newer Resident Evil games are up there as well. Had a great time with 7 and 8.
Paragon Pioneers. It's a city-building idle game. If you like factorio/mindustry, you'll enjoy this. They also have a demo version that you can test before purchasing.
Deathloop - This game has surprised the crap out of me. It looked great based on trailers and gameplay I watched but I was not expecting such a fun experience. For those on the fence because of the multiplayer pvp, you can play the single player game without invasions all the way through, and it’s just a phenomenal game. Also I bought it in ps5, the adaptive trigger implementation is perfect, every gun just feels different to use, it’s great!
Ryse: Son of Rome
I got this because of my interest in history. The setting seems to be historical fiction -- lots of artistic liberty taken with historical (in)accuracy. If such inaccuracy triggers you, you'll be disappointed, but I had level-set my expectations with this in mind before playing, from having read some Steam reviews first, so I'm not bothered.
Unfortunately, I find this game too arcadey for my tastes. The combat system is not per se "mindless" (button mashing), but it's a far cry from the intricacy of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, or even Skyrim. It's a lot more about timing button presses than actually aiming for anything (whether when attacking or defending).
The graphics are above average, though my hardware struggles to render it at an acceptable frame rate in 4k. I have to downscale to plain HD, in which case the frame rate is quite satisfactory.
That all said, I paid very little for this. It's already fairly low-priced, but I also got it on sale, for less than a cheap coffee. If it turned out to be a total dud, I wouldn't have been upset. I'll power through and finish the story line, and leave it at that.