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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.
Here's a pile of tips: Don't be too stingy in ordering supply drops, though try to avoid taking the ammo before you're at less than half ammo on all weapons because there will be some ammo missed out on if you do. There's no bonus to having leftover nitra at the end of the mission. Make sure you're making use of your secondary weapon and grenades. Take advantage of attacks that can damage multiple bugs whenever they're grouped up. Consider swapping some weapon mods to increase your ammo count. (Make sure you're not mixing up mag size with max ammo.)
You do get XP for mining the Nitra (1 per unit) but if you finish with 100 left or 0 left makes no difference.
I haven't tried the matchmaking system, but it's also very fun if you can convince a few friends to play.
What class and gun do you typically use? Some guns end up using a lot more ammo than others, so you may want to try unlocking the other guns to try them out. Also, there are a lot of options in the gun upgrades that either directly or indirectly affect ammo usage - I typically avoid increasing fire-rate for that reason.
As for actually using those weapons: the secondary guns are all reasonably effective, so using them can help conserve the ammo of your main gun; your pickaxe is an effective weapon against smaller bugs; and try to shoot the less armored parts of the bugs to use ammo more effectively.
On the last point — the best places to shoot are any glowing spots or the bug's mouths. Also, the largest bugs can have indestructible armor pieces that you can't do damage though.
Others have already mentioned some ammo things, so I'll only add what I think is relevant: pick your targets carefully. Certain weapons/builds are much better at picking off certain enemies than others (check out the Miner's Manual Bestiary for enemy weaknesses and other stats).
Don't worry about specifics too much now as you'll figure it out with experience, but for example most of the robots are weak to fire and will explode if you fully flame them (aka: Driller + Flamethrower = robits ded), stuff like that. This is especially useful when playing in teams, every class has its purpose so knowing what you should focus becomes important when you start getting to Hazard 5.
As for fall damage I would say pay attention next time if you're taking health damage or only shield damage. Since your shield regenerates it shouldn't be too much of an issue. This will also come with experience though, there's a lot of finesse in the movement of DRG and being able to estimate heights and fall damage is certainly one part of that.
If you have any other questions about the game let me know, DRG is my favorite game. :D
Ok, I haven’t been playing it personally, but Crisis Core is the absolute worst video game to spectate. My husband is playing it and it drives me up the wall.
I am frankly amazed that this is a Square Enix game because the music is so incredibly bad.
The original tracks aren’t that terrible… they’re just very very mid. They are repetitive and are based on phrases that just repeat themselves constantly. And it’s all a bit of a shame when you get those performances from real guitars because the performance is so much better than the compositions. But then there are some tracks that are remixes from Final Fantasy 7 that have some really questionable choices made. Honestly the really bad “MIDI” sound of the original is preferable.
The thing that makes it extra excrutiating to watch is the DMW system. Someone thought it was a good idea to put leveling up your character behind this stupid slot machine. And it doesn’t move fast; just like real world slot machines it slows down to increase the sense of tension if you have two matching numbers or portraits. As a result it feels like most of this game consists of starting a battle with a super weak enemy so that you can drop the controller and let it eventually decide to grace you with a level up.
I would also complain about how the English voice acting is occasionally horribly bad, but this is par for most Japanese games these days. On the other hand, Zack is just not a deep or endearing character and the story doesn’t seem to really do anything interesting either.
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To be completely fair, actually playing the game isn’t this bad. It’s not really an RPG, it’s a battle game that sometimes plays bad movies. And the actual combat fantastic and fairly deep as well. And the visuals are pretty fantastic - at least if you focus on the characters and effects and mostly ignore the backgrounds.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion: I beat this game yesterday and may go back to 100% it. It's a fun game worth the price it's at on sale right now, and not even bad for its $15 sticker price.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl: I had weird issues starting this one, with it crashing a lot, and tapped out, but I came back and am playing it a bit at a time. I just got through Cordon, the first map, and it's interesting. I expected more of a pure FPS experience, but am grateful I got something with the sort of storytelling this game has, and am having fun with it. The whole series (as well as Metro) is currently on sale for dirt-cheap.
Timberborn: I'm digging this game. It's a more laid-back city builder/colony sim with little risk, and maximum responsibility. I lost some beavers on my first major project, and need to get that district running, but I'm enjoying how the game is fairly complicated, but not stressful at all. There's no combat, only floods, and no point in rushing things.
One of the devs of the original STALKER was unfortunately killed in action near Bakhmut, Ukraine recently. :(
It didn't influence me in playing STALKER at all, but it did suck to hear about that, and reinforced that people who would otherwise have never gone to war have to defend their country.
I've been playing Vampire Survivors (and its recent expansion).
It's a game in the bullet hell genre. I like that by default, it tries to keep your game sessions limited to ~30 minutes for a run (though it can be addicting). There are many things to unlock, though, and it has a nice way of letting you feel progression. It can be difficult, but it's not overly punishing. There are a lot of ways to synergistically combine the characters, weapons, items, and "arcanas" that leads to a fair amount of depth. It also doesn't take itself too seriously and has colorful pixel art (though the screen can get overly busy sometimes). I also like that the controls don't require a mouse (all you need are arrow keys, WASD, or a controller stick/D-pad). There are ports to several platforms and mobile now in addition to PC. It's not that well optimized, however, so you may experience frame rate drops which doesn't seem like it should happen for a 2D game that's not too complex running on modern hardware.
Spoke about Pokémon Violet in the last thread two weeks ago. I finally finished the main story today and all I have left to do are the postgame items: namely the Academy Tournament and Gym rematches. Everything else will have spoilers.
Pokémon League Spoilers
Scarlet/Violet are the only Pokémon games where you cannot repeat the league once it's completed, meaning no rematch battles for the Elite Four. As for what I thought of the Elite Four?Team Star Spoilers
The Team Star quests were repetitive and pretty shit. All you did was 'fight' 30 Pokémon through a bastardized version of the Let's Go feature by throwing your top 3 roster members out of their Pokéballs to one-shot grunt's creatures. This will call out the kingpin for a pretty short fight which ends in you fighting a Revavroom mounted on top of a vehicle. Rinse and repeat until Cassiopeia reveals that they are the head of Team Star and ask to battle you.The false reveal that Director Clavell was Cassiopeia leads to a (rather easy) preliminary battle where he tests your fighting ability. And then you meet Cassiopea in the schoolyard at dark and find out it's none other than Penny. The battle with her Eeveelutions was much harder than the Geeta fight, but not quite as tough as the Elite Four.
Herba Mystica Spoilers
The hardest part of this quest was the Arven fight at the very end. You went from fighting relatively easy Titan Pokémon that were more about type-matching, to fighting a full team of level 60+ Pokémon. Absolutely loved the plot twist where you find out he's gathering the Herba Mystica to heal his Mabosstiff. But it's also never really revealed what brought his Pokémon to near-death.Area Zero spoilers
Paldea's final zone was... tedious to say the least. The place is utterly infested with level 55 to 60 Pokémon to the point where you will need to use the Let's Go feature, bring out your Pokémon and have them auto-battle everything around just to get by. Thankfully, my overlevelled squad gained a good few levels from this to the point where I had a full team approaching the early to mid 70's by the time I reached the final laboratory. It was a very confusing maze of mesas, cliffs and plateaus that you couldn't ride Miraidon through (understandable from a gameplay POV, cause otherwise it would have trivialized this part of the game.)Another thing I didn't like was how the place was declared strictly off-limits by academy staff from the moment you attended Uva Academy, yet you neither get permission to go there nor have a tough job convincing Nemona or Penny to come along with you.
I did like the dynamic between your fellow pupils as you explored, but not how dialogue was awkwardly spliced between your journey in a way that somehow disabled encounters.
The final plot twist that Professor Turo is actually dead, had built a time machine and had put the world in danger came out of left field. His AI meticulously safeguarding the time machine in a very big act of selfishness was also very surprisingly, if not also the most challenging fight in the game. It wasn't the level of AI Turo's Pokémon that made this fight difficult, but rather how all his team were future Pokémon with typing you wouldn't be able to figure out in a million years. I almost wiped with a team of 70 to 75 Pokémon and his team was around level 66 - 67, and all out-sped my pretty fast Pokémon.
My team after finishing the main game was:
As Dusk Falls is a game I've had on my list since their showcase at.... "E3"??? (I don't actually keep track of when I add games to my list.) It's a branching narrative type of game a la Life Is Strange or certain Telltale games. Over the course of six chapters you follow a cast of characters who are involved in a robbery gone wrong in a small town in Arizona. Family father Vince is the POV for the story of his family - his wife who no longer loves him, their young daughter (later POV) Zoe and his pathological liar of a
grandfather. Their car breaks down and they walk to a motel, where shortly after three armed robbers arrive and take everyone hostage. These are POV Jay, who is only 18 but about to become the target of a country-wide manhunt, and his violent elder brothers. Multiple flashbacks and asides tell the story of their past and cover other characters, such as motel worker Paul and the owner's son Ash. A crooked sheriff is also instrumental to all that takes place.Choices do matter in this game. You can get several characters killed through bad choices (or save them through good ones), and the story can go differently if you do. After each chapter the game will show you how often players got a certain outcome that you got or made certain decisions that you made, and evaluate you on three criteria. There's a nice map/diagram showing all the branching narratives that you can further explore after the game. It's nice that they let you go back and replay from the beginning of each branch so you can make different decisions and unlock the parts of the diagram that are "dark". What I really disliked, though, is that when you're replaying a branch there doesn't seem to be a way to skip scenes that are the same ones you've already watched. This makes it a bit of a chore to replay a branch, and I ended up not doing that a lot, so I don't know what all of the (five!) possible endings for Jay are, for instance. But maybe that's for the best - I constructed "my" story for these characters, and I don't need to see everyone else's.
Warning: There is a cliffhanger at the end. I believe the developers left room for a prequel/sequel game which further fleshes out the story.
(EDIT: For all that it's worth, this game won the Games for Impact award at TGA this year.)
Hyper Light Drifter is not a new game. It's one of those games I was fully aware existed and that it was good, but I never got around to playing it until @brews_hairy_cats kindly gave it to me in their giveaway! I'm 16 hours in and have found all 8 modules in the west, north and east areas at this point. In the south area I'm missing two. I have 12 keycards and I think I'm down to... 5 remaining monoliths? I own several costumes. I'm mostly upgraded too. Ahem. Anyway. I'm enjoying this game, it's right up my alley as an obssessive explorer and completionist.
I've seen some criticism of various aspects of the game. First, there's a notion by some that the game feels empty or gloomy. I believe the world's actually quite lively for a post-apocalyptic ruined robotland. Some sets are just plain gorgeous. This is "modern indie" pixel art at its best. Honestly, some artsy indie games are trying to be what this game is, and failing miserably. The soundtrack is deliberately gloomy and heavy, and it suits the game very well. I don't know to what degree the game has been improved since release though (they still seem to be patching it every month!) It's possible that it got better since others have played it.
I am not finding the waves of enemies too tiresome, and yes, they are challenging, but not unsurmountably difficult. I read a review that asserted you had to keep trying rooms until the RNG was kind to you, but I don't think so. You just have to git gud ;) Only thing giving me real trouble so far is the arena complex under the city. I filled up all squares for the mountain arena but not the others (yet).
It feels good that on a second pass through each area I seem to be finding all the secrets I missed (such as extra modules) without any online spoilers. You just have to really keep an eye out for the "there's a secret here!" symbol hint. After some time you get a good feel for what paths might lead to a secret, or what areas look like there's something else there that you haven't found yet.
I recently started playing Hades, since I've had some free time over the holidays; it's been fun so far, and rather rewarding after I stopped ignoring anything that the tutorial told me to do...
(I managed to beat Meg without any of the buffs from the mirror, though)
I like the roguelite style more than the "lose an ability every time you die" style of Transistor, though I'm still not sure about the difficulty scaling of Hades.
Curious about the difficulty scaling. Did you find it harder than Transistor?
So far I haven't gotten stuck anywhere for too long, but that's been my issue in other rogue-likes and rogue-lites (Dead Cells, Noita, The Binding of Isaac). In Transistor you could always make forward progress, even if it was slow -- and you couldn't lose that progress once you reach a checkpoint. In Hades and other rogue-lites, the only persistent progress is your unlocks and buffs, which makes getting stuck a more likely possibility.
On difficulty scaling specifically: near the end, Transistor got much more challenging, but still not impossible due to checkpoints; my concern with Hades is that it might end up being similar, but instead of restarting from the last checkpoint I'll be restarting a whole run. If it isn't done well, I would end up having to spend a lot more time replaying the same sections just to die to the same boss each time without making progress, or having to grind to unlock more buffs.
So far, Hades seems well designed to me, but I haven't gotten to the areas where this would start to matter significantly. It seems a lot better about balancing and keeping the earlier areas interesting that Dead Cells does, and the persistent progress seems more influential than in other rogue-lites that I've played, so it probably handles the endgame well, but I'll see when I get there.
My experience was that even when I was dying at the final boss a bunch, the narrative that slowly grew through those runs still made it enjoyable even if I lost at the end. You're still moving forward even if you don't quite make it.
I've finished my first successful escape attempt (got lucky with boon combos on my third time reaching the surface); I see what you mean about the narrative, though I haven't spent enough time talking to people / gifting stuff to people when I'm back at the starting area. And yeah, your power also grows significantly between runs.
Edit: clarified final boss -> escape attempt
I don't want to spoil anything major... but you haven't technically beaten the final "final" boss if you've only successfully completed an escape run once. And the Hearts and Heat systems also come into play if you want to keep unlocking more main story, and reach the epilogue. So you've probably still got a looooooong way to go yet. ;)
Yeah, I got that impression from the narrative and from others who've played it; I've clarified my wording a bit. I'm not sure how far I'll end up getting in the story though, since there seems to be a ton of content there that'll take a lot of time to get through.
I hear ya. I never even made it to the epilogue myself before I finally got sick of playing it after 50 hours. But in my defense, back then (shortly after it was first released) nobody even knew the conditions you needed to meet to actually get to to the epilogue. Now you can just google the conditions if you really want to see it for yourself, without having to stumble around blindly doing things like I was. Which I might go back and do if I ever play it again in the future.
I did manage to complete the "main story", fulfill all the prophecies but one, and get 40/49 achievements though, so I don't think I missed all that much, story-wise... but even so, it would probably still have taken another 40-50 hours for me to 100% it (based on the HLTB 'Completionist' times).
True, there were ample checkpoints in Transistor but as you note it did get much more difficult towards the end. Your concern with Hades is exactly what I hold about the game. Please do report back once you get further through, as I'd be curious to know how it turns out!
I've now beat the final boss, at about 20 hours of playtime and ~40 runs. It scales quite well, since the persistent buffs can add up significantly once you have enough invested — and beating bosses that you've already beaten in previous runs gives you a lot of the resource you need to get those buffs, so each run will make you more powerful, even if you don't make it that far.
The earlier areas also don't get boring either — as you get further in the game, there are some changes to the earlier areas to mix things up, which I found interesting. I didn't end up getting stuck anywhere, though I did have to try out a few different weapons before finding a style that I liked.
If you're considering trying it, I'd really recommend it. I'm playing it on a controller, so I'm not sure how well it does with keyboard and mouse, but it should be fine. The only cases where I wouldn't recommend it are if you don't like fast-paced games, or if you have a hard time tracking lots of things moving on the screen. (Though if you liked Transistor, you'll be fine — the combat is quite similar to the realtime phase of combat in Transistor.)
Overall, it's a very good game, though I'm not sure how much time I'll have to play it once the holidays are over.
Thanks for the report!! So useful to know about the scaling, will have to give it a go myself.
Ato: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096180/Ato/
Really enjoying this game. It's a metroidvania with a peaceful atmosphere, lots of platformer puzzles, plenty of exploration, and minimal combat with almost no fighting between the bosses (it might be none at lower difficulties, I'm not sure). I've been drawn to boss-only games ever since playing Shadow of the Colossus, so it's nice to see a metroidvania given the same treatment.
I also really like how short it is for a metroidvania. I've played 13 hours in 3 days, beat the game, and am just spending a bit more time exploring the rest of the map and grabbing whatever achievements I can without starting over from a new save. Compared to Hollow Knight where I have 86 hours total logged and had to take a break halfway through due to burnout. Don't get me wrong, I love Hollow Knight as it's a great game, but I also really appreciate the simplicity and approachability of Ato.
Darkest Dungeon
A few months ago, I would probably say that's an interesting game lacking an action element. The art and animations add flavor and lore, but that game could be made entirely of text without sacrificing any mechanics.
Playing a bunch of MUDs added great perspective. Suddenly, Darkest Dungeon feels like a walk in the park (but a challenging one). It's so great not having to take a bunch of notes, fight the game to compel it to function, and simply go on with my life without help files, external maps, or chatting with a bunch of people to get anything done. I'm grateful to MUDs for removing my fear of complexity, but I needed a break, and it'll probably be a long one.
My gamer computer is not ready yet, but the monitor arrived, so I plugged it into my
Intel HD 4400laptop for the time being. I don't think I would have the same experience on the Xbox. This game is very immersive on a 32" curved monitor. I'm not sure if I'll be playing anything else once I have a machine capable of running WoW Classic, but, for the equivalent of 1.5 US dollars, I think it was a good purchase even if only for experimentation.On PC I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XV lately, I'm enjoying it, and despite doing all the side missions and seemingly being OP before getting to the next major chapter in the story, the game does well to scale enemies so that I'm not one-shotting everything, but also not struggling to kill the most basic mobs either.
It's not all roses though (but most complaints are very minor so far), there are a lot of mandatory animations that get annoying (getting in/out of a car, getting in a car after dark until Ignis decides you're strong enough to drive at night, the game making me come to a stop after a battle so it can tally the exp instead of just doing so while I'm running) and other things like the teammates saying the same "watch out" statement every time I change weapons too close to them, having to look at just the right spot to interact with a new quest at a vendor or other character that has other dialog options (for example if a vendor also has a quest, looking at the vendor and pushing a button will open the buy/sell menu, but you have to look at a specific item on the vendor's table that is usually very close to the vendor who moves and may interrupt trying to interact with the quest icon and therefore open the buy/sell menu instead), and an unnecessarily long sequence to turn in the hunting bounties. While it's nice that you can turn in the bounties at any diner, the fact that they take 15 seconds to turn in each one, you have to manually confirm the rewards for each, and you can turn in up to 10 at a time makes turning them in a real drag.
My biggest gripe is the inability to abandon a quest. Yes, I can have an unlimited number of quests, but I really don't care to go on the hide-and-seek missions of trying to find the injured guy that happened to call out to me when I was passing by and since it stays in the list, it takes up space when I'm trying to find the missions I actually want to do in the area I'm in.
On SteamDeck I've been playing Valkyria Chronicles on the Windows side and Jack Move on the Steam side, need to get around to playing more emulators, but at present I'm hoping for more attention/optimization to the Armored Core games now that AC6 has gained a lot of attention.