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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've put about 20 hours into Helldivers 2 despite the server instability and it's some of the most fun I've had in a co-op shooter in a long time. It doesn't take itself seriously at all (that is, unless you are serious about protecting the liberty of all citizens of SUPER EARTH), it feels mechanically great, it runs really well (aside from server issues of course) and isn't very demanding on hardware, it's pretty accessible and doesn't require you to have great reflexes or tons of game knowledge to have a good time, and the presentation and little details are just chef's kiss. There isn't a ton of variety right at launch when it comes to different enemy or mission types, but the utter chaos that can ensue during a mission and the tightness of the core gameplay should keep it fresh and fun for a long time regardless. Plus, this game's theme is somehow more Starship Troopers than Starship Troopers is. It might be just corny over the top military propaganda, but it absolutely works. Cannot wait to get off work and spread some more democracy.
Right there with you. I've been spreading a lot of freedom.
Can easily recommend Helldivers II
I have finished System Shorck remake. Good game, worth 20€ I paid for it. It took me back to times when you had to really play the game and be mindful.of what you do to know what is going on. No quest markers, sometimes even not many hints on what to do next. Great times. Other games from those times (even though they are more.recent then OG System Shock) would be Fallout 1 and 2 and Morrowind. Thinking about it they are all open world games...
I'm here to speak about other games though. I have bough American truck simulator. I watched movie Convoy countless times and Rubber Duck is my childhood hero. When I learned I can have his truck in this game (through mods), I had to buy it! I know how the game is played as I already own ETS2. I may eventually put more hours in ATS than I did with ETS2 simply of this roleplaying thing. I may get some.knowledge about USA's geography too, as I'm European and I know around... 5 states and their locations (exluding Hawaii and Alaska, everyone must where those are). I do know there is Washington and Washington, D. C., though and they are two very different places!
I'm not here to speak about ATS either, though. The game I want others to.know about is Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2. It is the best (RPG) game from Star Wars universe ever made in my opinion. Putting togetjer D&D and Star Wars, there can't be anything better. I have played it back in... 2006? Two times. First time I built such a bad character that I got to final boss and couldn't beat it! Tens of hours wasted! I went into it again right away and I did it that time. It is strange to boot up the game after almost 20 years and still remember so many things. This says that the game was really something special. And it still is even today. I really recommend it to everyone who likes Star Wars. Buy it in budnle with first one and play them one after the other as the stories are related (can be played alone though). Each one will last you for around 50 hours. And yes, you can bethe bad guy! I never am, though. I have to try it at least once!
All three games are running on (OG) Steam Deck well. System Shock needs quite some power to run fine (30fps with dips here and there would do probably around 2-2,5 hours on battery), ATS not that much, although it still needs some power (3+ hours) but has bad habit of eating memory and swapping (framerate goes under 1fps) after longer play (say 2-3 hours?), you have to restart it, SW KotOR is great (7 hours on 3W TDP setting still doing 30fps).
I love KOTOR 1/2. I think it's my favorite piece of Star Wars media overall.
Just as a quality of life pointer for anyone reading, I believe for both games there are console commands available. As a kid I would use God Mode (makes you invincible), because I didn't understand the combat system that well and just wanted to do cool things without worrying about the numbers. And I would use super speed (makes your run speed like 5 times faster), because (especially if you aren't following a guide, which you shouldn't IMO) the games can have a lot of backtracking that gets frustrating after a while. I wouldn't necessarily recommend running those commands all the time, because especially the super speed breaks immersion a lot. But for certain situations I'm sure they could help.
There are a bunch of other console commands that can give you specific items and other stuff. But I didn't find those particularly useful and they seem kinda immersion-breaking too.
Running through Taris without super speed is such a slog lol so many long unnecessary corridors
So much worse if you have played the game like four times in last two years. I could complete Taris blindfolded!
KOTOR 1 and 2 are probably two of my favorite games of all time. And like you I had built a character, so bad for the final boss, I had just spammed mines that I had long my inventory. So, yeah. And for my recent play through a couple of months ago, I went full bad, and it was glorious. What I had mean is that I had a really well built consular, with Sith Lord as the prestige class. The boss went down really easy.
KOTOR 1/2, Battlefront 1/2, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, Republic Commandos -- that was such a perfect golden era of star wars games that just hasn't even come close to being matched since.
Once in a while, I would replay Commandos. It is such a great game. It is such a shame that we never got that sequel that was planned.
It's one of my biggest what ifs. Love love love that game. That was one of the first multiplayer shooters I sunk significant time into.
Congrats on finishing System Shock. I'm still in the same place and need to go back to it yet! But it's funny, I've also been thinking recently that I need to jump back into KOTOR 2. I've played the original several times and gotten quite a ways into 2 like 15+ years ago, but never finished it and don't remember much of it. But it's just sitting there and waiting for me to try again...
I think you will have to restart System Shock if you put it down for longer time. It is the kind of game that should be played and finished in one (multi-day) session to be fully enjoyed.
KotOR 1&2 are still great games worth playing! And they will be great even after another 5 years, you can let them wait for you and you will still enjoy them later.
I definitely intend to restart System Shock when I do eventually go back, though I do remember a lot of it, if only because I loved the original so much and that really sticks with me, which is exceptionally rare for a game I've played as an adult.
And definitely KOTOR2 will be played at some point. Definitely don't have the push to really start it right now and at any rate, my next RPG is going to be Planescape: Torment. Owned it for like 15 years now, but recently picked-up the Enhanced Edition on GoG for $4, so I intend to start that when I finally have some bandwidth available.
Planescape: Torment... Yeah, I own it, too. I haven't played it yet. I don't have it on my roadmap either. Too many games, not that much time to play them all :-)
Just this weekend it got moved-up my list quite a lot, as I ended-up talking to some people I know but hadn't realized they were as into gaming as I am. They started recommending Planescape pretty hard, so I'm hoping to get a good amount of time with it before I come back to talk to them again.
You are just second person speaking about the game to me. I boight it to play it, yet I still have so.much other games I really want to play. Including Balur's Gate 1&2, I may play P:T with them once I go to them.
I still have that mage that I managed to dice roll 95 to dostribute t attributes in character creation. And I played it for a while and then exported and managed to get some really good equipmet, so I'm starting BG1 with fully equipped level 3 mage and some spare equipment for future party members, the game will be a breeze! And I will export thiss 100+ atrribute points character to BG2 and play it there, it will be great game!
I finally started Persona 3 Reload after finishing my first BG3 run! I really loved Persona 5 Royal and Strikers, along with their characters and plot, and P3R is a bit more of that, though I do feel like the Tartarus missions are a bit less engaging and personal so far. I'm only 12ish hours in though.
It's kinda hard for me to pinpoint why I love the games for me though. I'm not a big anime fan in general, and turn off shows because of the tropes most of the time. But the flair and style of Persona games (at least in the modern engine, still having a hard time getting into P4G), are so good that I feel like its okay to overlook them. Plus maybe I actually do like JRPG's? I always thought I didn't, but I like Pokemon.
Yea this is one point where I wish they didn't stay so loyal to the original. I didn't play any original incarnation of P3, but I did play P4 so I can surmise what the og Tartarus experience was probably like. Unfortunately, due to the story of P3, I think it would have been hard to make the levels of Tartarus have that personal touch that the P5 palaces or even the P4 dungeons had.
That was one of the main things I bumped on when initially starting P3R. They really don't ease you into the setting at all lol. You're a transfer student and on like day one you've got your squadmates telling you, "yea, we fight Shadows with our Personas in Tartatus during the Dark Hour, welcome to the team."
P3 is my favorite of the trio because of the story, but I can concede that Tartarus isn't one of the game's strong suits.
Dissecting why Tartarus is such a turn off for quite a few players is an interesting game dev thought experiment. Functionally it isn't massively different than P4 or P5 dungeons: You take a time session to dive into another realm where you try to get as far as you can. Optimally, you should go as far as the game lets you every time you go in. In P5, for example, you would hit either the Treasure room or the midpoint block as fast as possible. Why? This way you have all the time in the world to play the visual novel half of the game and reap all the bonuses, benefits and fun narrative elements. You run into enemies, have a JRPG battle against them and then move on to the next ones. At the end of it all, there's really only one massive difference between the Tartarus and the P4/P5 dungeons: In-dungeon narratives.
P3R has barely any in-dungeon narrative exposure. It's effectively a persona roguelite: Maps are random, buffs and rewards are randomly offered at the end of combat, there are random doors with bigger challenges that pop up, but you have to do them right then and there or else they disappear forever. But inherent in that random display, there are no real avenues for narrative exploration. We're here in Tartarus to climb the tower and beat up all the shadows along the way. Conversely, however, this forces all the dungeon narrative (that gets spread out over the course of the dungeon period in P4/P5) into the events on the full moon. Those days are jam packed with all the narrative, but they only show up periodically.
I still love the game though, and honestly? I'm glad they only shaved off the rough edges. Changing Tartarus too much could have easily ruined the game experience since the game is so solidly built around the tower as it's core pillar.
Tartarus isn't fun for a few reasons off the top of my head:
There's really no exploration. If I explore an entire level, I don't get to see anything interesting or cool and the rewards are mediocre and unexciting at the very best. I'm not going to find an amazing weapon that will change how I play. Following on that...
There's a ton of combat, which you must do and do multiple times at that if you want to keep your team and your personas level appropriate. This also means going back and grinding levels on your under leveled team mates. To top this off, combat isn't fun or engaging in any way. I'm simply changing my Persona based on the enemy weakness and triggering an All-Out Attack so I can get passed this combat as quickly as possible. If I fail to do so, combat drags on with the enemy doing the same thing to me, possibly causing a wipe and game over, forcing me to redo sections and experience more tedium. At best, the enemy getting one over on me only slightly drains my resources from healing my party.
The mini games aren't a fun reward after combat. You absolutely want to get an exp card, because again it lessens the tedious grind and it is absolutely trivally easy to get that. Might as well dump the mini game entirely, randomly award Personas instead and dramatically increase exp gain.
I do really like P3P, it's the only Persona game I've played and I've been doing so for about 10 years now on the same save file. I usually fire it up once or twice a year, make a little bit of progress and then peter out when I'm forced to grind Tartarus. I absolutely love the VN aspect and it's the game that showed my I actually really enjoy the genre, but damn does the combat absolutely suck.
Firstly, your individual persona levels don't really matter as long as they're vaguely close. Fuse a new one you want and your social link EXP boost will do the rest. Recently I've fused a new persona that came out the gate 5 levels above me.
As for your team levels? P3R fixes this problem and I really like how they did it. Sometimes a new door that looks like a giant clock face appears on the wall near the exit stairs. If you enter (which you should) it will give you the option to boost up the level of two teammates. The boost is bigger the farther back in level those teammates are. So, randomly, they will gain like, 5-7 levels and catch up with the rest of the party.
Also, concerning the combat system itself, that's just Persona combat in general. It's an aggressive game of Rock-Paper-Scissors and sometimes the game punches you in the face. P3 in particular is a bit harsher than the other two games about it as well, as I've had several times in my playthrough where items just didn't roll in my favor and it died out.
Good news! No shuffle minigame in P3R at all. They decided to just give you a choice between 3-4 cards that all give you some sort of buff. Significantly less frustrating to keep track of.
yeah it's definitely a very rushed story initially, but then it feels like it slows down a lot? the pacing definitely feels a bit strange. Overall though, I do like the little interactions between the characters though, and the mechanics are obviously strong enough to keep me playing.
Lately, I have been playing Chants of Sennaar on the Steam Deck, which is a language puzzle game. Your character tries to decipher the languages in order to solve puzzle and learn the greater world around you. So far, I played 4 hrs into this game, and I found the game rewarding and challenging. Would recommend if you like learning languages or puzzle game. Definitely found this game unique in terms of gameplay. I'm not a huge fan of some of the mechanics such as sneaking, but I like exploration and how each conversation is a puzzle .
I picked up Enshrouded in early access and have been absolutely loving it. The level of polish exceeds what I normally expect in a pre-release game. The world is vibrant and gorgeous and destructible and very fun to explore. The combat is great and the enemies are tough. I have finished the content, which took about 60 hours for me and I have started building. The building system is impressive with a nice array of materials for building in a voxel style. But the results look anything but blocky!
Enshrouded is already one of my favorite games of all time. I am really looking forward to the full release in the future. The developers are planning to add a lot more world to explore and I can't wait to see it!
A friend and I have also been playing Enshrouded, and also really enjoying it.
I totally agree that the scenery really is absolutely gorgeous, especially with raytracing and volumetric fog enabled. And yeah, good lord the enemies hit like trucks!!! It's the first open-world survival crafting game that I've actually struggled to stay alive in, in quite a while (unlike Palworld which got super boring super quick because there was absolutely no challenge to it).
And yeah, exploration has also been super fun for us too, especially inside the various ruins, caverns, and abandoned towns. We spent about 30 min in the last ruin we found, constantly getting lost, hunting for the secrets, almost dying (and actually dying) a bunch of times, and we had a blast doing it. The only disappointing thing in the game so far has been the world bosses, but that's just because the AI still needs some work so they don't keep bugging out and getting stuck on stuff, but I'm sure that will be fixed eventually.
p.s. The "glider" AKA flying squirrel suit is so much damn fun. I love porting to top of the towers to leap off them, as well as off all the cliffs in the game, and just flying around the world getting into areas I'm not really supposed to be able to go to. :P
I finally got my hands on a VR headset (borrowed a quest 2 from a friend) and have been having fun with it. Somewhat hampered by also spraining my ankle recently and only being able to do sit down games.
So far I really did like "I expect you to do die" which is an escape room sort of game where you play a parody version of james bond.
I also bought Half-Life: Alyx and started playing it yesterday evening. So far I am amazed by the environment and am liking it. I do think it would benefit from me being able to stand, although generally it works pretty well for me sitting down with one leg propped up.
I've kind of slowed down on Breath of the Wild, still very much enjoying it, especially once I get into it and then I want to keep playing. But I haven't really had much time to sit and game this weekend and this week will be even less than I have had, as I have many obligations this week and next, as well as a very involved project I need to focus all my attention on as the due date is coming up quick.
While I was taking a break from that project over the weekend, I did have some time to jump back into Elden Ring which I'm starting to find myself enjoying again, but I do think it'll be going on the back burner again here while I refocus on what needs to be done.
That said, I've been spending a lot of time with Advance Wars 2. It's really a great fit for me right now, because I can fire up whatever device I'm currently attached to (been using nearly half a dozen different devices to play it, cause I haven't been able to decide which form factor I like the best) and take a couple of turns, then suspend it and move on to other things. It helps that everything I'm playing it on fits in my pocket, so it's always nearby.
So far, I've finished the initial Orange Star missions, as well as Blue Moon and just moved on to...Yellow something or other and I'm very much enjoying myself. Prior to playing it, I would have told you I never had before, but actually now that I'm deep into it, I remember a lot of the characters and a mission here or there. I'm pretty sure I finished this game at some point in the past, but I just couldn't remember it at all.
The other nice thing about playing AW2 right now is that it's helping me deal with a personality flaw I have, which is getting really negative or dispirited when things turn against me. I've only failed one mission so far, but I constantly find myself feeling down and like I'm never going to complete a mission early on in each stage when I start getting pounded and need to weather the storm and persist. It's a good reminder to me to just keep looking at what options I have and what I can do to push forward and keep persisting, because as long as I do, I usually overcome.
Genshin Impact:
I started the game with fears of falling into content drought because I had no money to throw at but despite being a gacha game it proved itself to be very enjoyable and engaging.
Its exploration is vast and its characters are colorful. Story content has its ups and downs but overall quality increases as you progress further into.
I am only about 130 hours in ( Sumeru ) so my experience might drastically change in the next 100 hours , especially after I wrap up the story content and side missions.
One complaint I would have is that it feels like game mechanics and graphics are purposely dumbed down to be playable in mobile platforms as well, which I understand why but pains me to see that this game could be a lot more.
Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: I got all the way to the end, the last progression to the dungeon where you fight Gannon and had to do a Windows reinstall, lost my save. I re-set up my emulator, got a 100% save, and plan to do the boss fight as that was basically when I was going to hang up the game, and I just want that experience to tie it off.
Cyberpunk 2077: I had meant to play this when 2.0 came out and we're at 2.1 now. I just finished Act I and it is a radically different game with more mechanical depth that I feel I can actually tweak to my super-aggressive playstyle, such as +60% recovery while dashing to shoot somebody with a double-barrel shotgun and switching to a sword to get the next guy. It's amazing. I had been skeptical that there was that much left to retool, but it definitely feels better, and I don't think 1.x needed any fixes in this department.
Turnip Boy Robs a Bank: It's a sequel to Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, but more of a randomized dungeon shooter than anything with a linear overworld-based story. I've done a few runs, and it was fun, but haven't spent too much time with it. It's worth the $15, I think.
Played the highly influential Tales of Maj'Eyal this week for our roguelike podcast.
Reviews were generally positive with me really liking it, two other co-hosts being a light recommend, and one with a light not-recommend. Different strokes for folks, as we have a pretty wide diversity of preferred play styles among the group.
Overall: the graphics are bad, but can be modded to be more palatable. There's a lot of fun experimentation and good design decisions to be had in a genre that's notorious for tedium and overt complexity. TOME is much easier to get into than, say, NetHack, ADOM, CDDA, or others of its time and type. It's much closer to Diablo than it is any of those games and all for the better IMO.
That being said, I think there's a fundamental clash between run-based permadeath games and long time-investment RPGs. It feels really bad to lose a character you've invested a lot in, particularly if you have to re-tread the same campaign all over again. TOME is fun, but I could totally see more casual roguelite players getting tired of doing the same quests over and over again. I think a game like Path of Achra (or other, coffeebreak-length traditional roguelikes) does this in better in a more straightforward fashion, but our coverage of that is still sitting in the production pipeline.
Guild Wars 2
I am doing a casual playthrough. I've had the game for over a decade and only ever leveled up to the 30s (out of 80), and popped a few level up scrolls so that my first character is in the 50s. I don't like that the character just jumped some levels, so I had to restart. I'm having a good time at level 25 on my new character. The game is executed really well. I've been put off from getting back into the game before because of the inventory system and not really understanding the ability system fully. At level 25, I can say it's been very easy steamrolling through the starter zone. The Lunar New Year event has some fun activities to take part in. I have zero ideas what to expect at end game, and I doubt I will even play much of end game. WoW Classic has really taught me how to enjoy the leveling process and for someone with limited time for an mmo, the leveling is the game for me. As I'm leveling in GW2 I am just focusing in completing each zone as I go through it and getting all the missions done, and reaching all the exploration points. I'm a thief, dualwielding two pistols and absolutely mowing down mobs. It's so satisfying. And the mounts feel really good in the game. Hard to explain, but the movement is more satisfying than other MMO mounts.
me, hundreds of times while doing normal quests: "Oh a vista, lets see if I can reach that one without cheating".
I'm in the endgame for Granblue Fantasy Relink. I love it. Tons of fun. The end game is really where the game opens up but it still has a pretty good story, too. Tons of different characters to play around with and build out to your play style. Supports both co-op and single player.
I'm also about 10 hours into Persona 3 Reload. I'm a huge Persona fan but never played 3. I felt like by having to choose either P3P or FES, I was having to compromise in some way. P3 Reload doesn't give you everything, but it's the closest to a definitive version the game has. And I really like the QoL improvements, new themes for Tartarus, and some of the features brought over from P5.
I bought Helldivers 2 on PC the other day. Pretty fun online shooter. Do not recommend solo though. The game is clearly designed for co-op. It has pretty good matchmaking, but is obviously more fun with friends.
PC:
Spellforce Conquest of Eo:
They just dropped their first DLC (demonologist) and i'm having a blast with it again. Easily one of the best TBS games i've ever played and love the unique ways it approaches the genre. Making sure you only have one city and can only fight battles with one stack can feel limiting if you're looking for a civ/AoW style game, but the combat and process of playing is so much cleaner, and deep in many cases, for it.
Rift Wizard:
Pretty much my go to time killer at home. Simple gameplay, lots of wacky depth. Excited for the sequel.
Mobile(ios):
Zen Pinball Party:
I'll never get why pinball didn't take off more when mobile started being a thing. It's really quite perfect for it. I don't love apple arcade, but this is the one thing i'll break that rule for as I've already got Zen Pinball and this feels like a nice upgrade (even if i'm sad they couldn't port all the old tables). They've got my favorite real table (theater of magic) and have an ok selection of their unique ones. I like zen because it's actually a video game and does some neat stuff with it rather than trying to ape real tables. I'd still kill for a mobile version of the littlewings games though.
Vampire Survivors: 100%ed this and, thankfully, what was a pretty intense addiction immediately evaporated. I hadn't played a bullet heaven before, and it turns out that's way more my thing than bullet hell. The gameplay in this is fantastic, smooth, great meta-progression, appealing graphics. I very much appreciated both the short game loop and the ability to make it even shorter with the Hurry toggle. High amusement factor in an Endless Sammy run that finally bogged the system down to the point of refreshing the screen full of explosions about every ten seconds (and this is a new, gaming-oriented rig, the game itself just ran out of oomph). Total time played, just under a hundred hours.
Journey to the Savage Planet: Picked this up in a Humble Bundle a while ago and just finished it. The parkour and gameplay were pretty great, with a nice ramp-up of abilities and not particularly punishing deaths, and a good combat feel that had me swearing at certain enemies just often enough. Difficulty level wasn't especially challenging - out of the boss monsters, only the final one even managed to kill me (once), though a couple others got close. Not a deep plot, but enough of one that even after some early dubiousness (the humor is silly and wasn't much to my taste), I pushed through because I wanted to see the rest of the plot points. Wound up close to 100%ing it, just didn't feel like chasing down the last few un-scanned collectibles. Overall quite a good experience but I doubt I'll ever want to replay it. Total time: Just a smidge over 17 hours.
The Entropy Centre: Finding myself full of mixed feelings and frustrations with this, and I'm not really sure why. It's in the Portal style, different mechanics but similar gameplay and humor, and yet it's failing to grab me. (Also, it keeps crashing.) Basic principle is you can wind back time on various items to effectively allow completing puzzles in reverse order, which I like as an idea, but something about it is just not working for me in practice. I want to know what's happening with the overarching plot, and yet I'm struggling to complete one puzzle per session, less because they're difficult (I love Baba is You, difficult puzzles requiring multiple sessions to figure out is not normally a sticking point, and so far it's never taken more than one go-away-and-come-back on any puzzle) than because... I don't know. I think it just doesn't feel like there's something novel to figure out? I'm going to push on a bit further and hope it finally snags me. Time so far: About four hours.
I continued with Monster Hunter, but took a break from World to play Frontier. I never got to try that one before, and turns out the private servers are phenomenally easy to get into, so I found Rain server and started playing there.
The word that keeps coming to me is "liminal". Frontier is based primarily on Monster Hunter 2, but existed for so long that it got a lot of quality of life and feature updates that bring it weirdly close to something like mh4/generations. It's gen 2 dressed up about as nice as you could do it, with all the good and bad that entails. Compared to World it feels stiff and clumsy, and man do I miss chaining my moves with sword and shield, but it's still MH, same basic fun.
There are tons, and tons, and tons of monsters that just never showed up elsewhere. So far my favorites have been Rukodiora - the magnet dragon, poborubarumu - a hunting horn themed killer whale, and Forokururu - some sort of multielement quetzal thing. The designs are way cool, as are their mechanics, and they all tend to push the combat system to its limits.
The server is about as chill as I think it could be. You get given a set of decent gear, a bunch of resources, and as you go you're given just piles of stuff for the GCP exchange, where you can trade points for monster parts, even monsters you haven't seen yet. They've relaxed a lot of the old rules and the moneymaking aspects have been either disabled or changed into something free. You're basically free to jump in, check everything out, and are given enough to go as far as you want with it. They also do stuff like holiday gift packs and server contests. Probably close to 200 folks at the peak times, maybe a few dozen during the day.
On PC it's nearly a plug and play experience, just launch the thing after getting a copy from the Rain server itself or somewhere else, but I got it working too on my steam deck and even ps Vita. There is a difference in progression between PC and vita, with vita being a whole lot easier with respect to upgrade requirements and key quest lists, but the difference won't mean anything for your status in the game. The server has rebalanced a lot to make it easier and more solo-able, though by g rank it's gonna be the hardest gen 2 mh you've ever played by a mile.
Overall I've had a great time with it. Cool to see just how much was done in that game, because the main series went on in some pretty different directions not long after Frontier began. Neat to see how some concepts evolved in parallel, and it's neat to see the very old maps done up in pretty graphics.
Helldivers 2: Great fun in co-op, more fun than I expected solo and in random matchmaking. I think this might fill the hole Destiny 2 left when I got tired of how Bungie was evolving it. Had some performance issues (more heat and noise from my tower than stutter), but some combination of limiting FPS via the Nvidia control panel and fiddling with render resolution setting seemed to fix that.
X4: Foundations: Abandoned a long running save—the furthest I've got in the game so far!—as I'd got myelf into an unwinnable war against one of the pirate factions. Started again with a different scenario and followed some different plotlines, and finding it quite nice to go back to the small scale of the early game where flying around and doing tiny jobs matters.
No Man's Sky: Returned for the expedition, instead ended up with a new save and didn't touch the expedition at all. It's so easy for my time to disappear while playing this game. Found out save editors can very easily add items you missed from previous expeditions and now I have far less fear of missing out on them, and don't feel the need to open some muted streams in the background for twich drops.
Enshrouded: I think the best implementation of the survial+base building genre I've come across, but I'm starting to realise that genre doesn't do that much for me. They quickly start to feel like a job, even more so in something like Enshrouded where building something very pretty is possible but limited by material collecting. I'll give it another try once it leaves early access, I think, though it's absolutely in a fully playable state right now.
I just finished playing through Cobalt Core.
I'm not very familiar with deckbuilding games, so I was probably playing suboptimal, but it's a lot of fun. The short duration of fights makes it easy to play through is small chunks, but the streamlined game flow makes it easy to keep playing for a long stretch if you have time.
I like how the different characters have their own unique playstyle that aren't quite effective on its own but combo together well.
I feel like the ships could have used similar diversity though. It seems like there are 2 of the 5 ships that have good properties but the other 3 don't have much reason to pick them.