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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.
I just started Immortals:Fenyx Rising on the switch because it was on sale for like 12 bucks. It is basically a copy of breath of the wild but I mean that in the best possible way. It's everything fun about BOTW, navigation is fun, the puzzles are actually entertaining, the combat is fluid. The story so far is pretty good and it's actually really funny. I'm not finished yet but I would definitely recommend it.
I think I ignored it when it came out party because of the name, but I just looked up the IGN review, and that actually looks really fun! How well does it run on the Switch?
It runs great on the switch, no frame rate drops from what I can tell. Load times aren't great, but not terrible either.
I dusted off Cyberpunk 2077. I'm having a blast going through it, it has a good story, and the world feels good enough to interact with. I struggle with levelling (sooo many points to append, it isn't obvious when you level up), and I need to engage more of its systems like the weapon and body mods, but it's a good way to spend a few hours on a weeknight.
I'm in the same boat honestly. There's points where you can see the devs wanted to do more (the Peralez missions, for example) but I have yet to find anything else that hits the same.
Very excited for the DLC!
Brotato
I hung out with some friends this weekend and we ended up playing hotseat Brotato -- sometimes swapping out people between runs, and sometimes swapping people out in between individual waves. I was the only one who had played it before, and we pretty much started playing it because everybody was wondering what it was that I wouldn't shut up about.
I'm happy to report that it was a ton of fun! The group is full of very D&D, tabletoppy, numbers-minded individuals, so the game's manage-your-stats-through-random-loot loop strongly appealed to them. Plus, making it a communal experience made for some great discussions. We would lobby for different items, argue over build directions, and ultimately collaborate to try to win. It made a simple single-player game a great group experience.
Also, four of the five others that were there have since bought the game and started playing it on their own, so I don't think they were pretending to enjoy it on my behalf. It is seriously addictive.
I recently got back into Dead Cells with the Castlevania update. I'd repurchased it for the Steam Deck after spending about 100 hours on the Switch. It's a great game for either platforms' "play for a few, suspend, come back later and pick up where you left off" capability.
I love dead cells but I legit have been stuck on BC2 for about 2 years. I cannot beat it to save my life.
Same here. It's super interesting seeing youtube videos of people doing 5 BC runs.
Deadlands (tabletop)
Finished our first campaign. The rules are very lightweight and quick to get into, but the game is very swingy, with a thin line between being in control of the situation and being bleeding out on the ground. A careful playstyle is rewarded, something my group never really took to heart. We still had lots of fun though.
Ability scores and skills equate to dice size (minimum d4 to maximum d20). If you roll the maximum number, you roll again and add it to the total. In general, any roll 4 or higher is a success, and every increment of 4 above the target number is a raise, giving you some sort of bonus effect (in combat; typically more damage).
The setting of the game is The Weird West, basically The Wild West, but with steampunk machinery, magic, and monsters. Right up my alley. Though we played the second edition of the game, and to me the first edition setting sounds even cooler, taking place during the Railroad Wars between different transportation companies competing to complete the trans-continental railroad.
We had lots of fun. Me and another player played Mexican mariachi cousins with intelligence as our dump stat and limited understanding of English. It was that type of campaign.
This week we're building characters for a new Scum and Villainy campaign, which will probably be about the same level of whackiness. Should be good!
edit:
I forgot to mention one of the coolest things about the game: The bennies (benefits).
Many of you are familiar with Inspiration in D&D 5e. The GM will occasionally give it to you as a reward for doing something cool in game. You can have a single Inspiration, represented by a checked box on your character sheet. It has a single use (spend it before a d20 roll to roll an extra die and keep the highest), and you always forget to use it when you really need to.
Bennies are different in important ways. There's no hard limit to how many you can have, and you start every play session with three of them. They have more uses (reroll a failed roll, remove a status effect, resist damage, redraw initiative). And there's no place for it on your character sheet, incentivizing the use of physical tokens as reminders. The GM in my group bought the deluxe edition, which came with poker chips to use as bennies, so whenever things were going south and we needed to change the course of the game, we would hand him one of these large heavy tokens, and it felt great.