What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

I bought Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic.
It's a weird game so far.
It's got a few hours worth of dedicated tutorials which in hind sight I'm not sure are meant to be played back to back, but used more as a reference? They are very specific and kinda hard to understand what they are trying to achieve in the vaccum of the tutorial without context of the rest of the game.
So I started a new campaign game and it's got a kinda light set of goals and progress, which I'm not sure I like.
I'm temped to just jump into the sandbox mode and play that, I think that's where the meat of the game is anyway.
It seems to really appeal to be as a concept, but the UI/UX seems a little nutty, I'll probably be back in a future thread to report back my throughts in it with some more hours.

Started playing Ghost of Tsushima for the last few days. It’s a great game, looks beautiful and runs smoothly on the Steam Deck, which I can’t believe.

Love experiencing the world of medieval period Japan and playing in Japanese with the English subtitles is a huge pleasure. The swordplay is fun as are the ninja style tactics, and the stealth is some of the best executed I’ve seen.

Feels like there’s a few missed opportunities to make it a really 10/10 game, namely in a little more variety in the enemies and a lack of an honour system, in a game that centres on honour.

Overall loving it and looking forward to playing more.

About 5 hours into Demon's Souls (2019 remake). I missed the vendors initially and when I found them and swapped my halberd to a long sword it got much better. I've been exploring different levels and pumping up my stats.

I also spent a couple hours in Kunitsu-Gami Path of the Goddess (included with game pass). It's a wonderful game. It's a hybird character action/tower defence game.

Levels come in pairs. The first type has a day/night cycle. During the day you are preparing for the evening (freeing villagers, giving them roles, and setting them in position) and moving the priestess along her path to the next corrupted tori gate. In the evening demons spawn out of the gate. Your job is to kill the waves of demons with your character using light/heavy attacks and your villagers. It has a fairly simple progression scheme. Once you've purged the last tori gate this area becomes a village that you improve by assigning villagers to tasks. These tasks have time to complete in terms of other levels that you clear.

The second type of level is a boss fight. Your villagers are provided and you are given enough currency to grant them roles, the you position them and fight a boss. I've beat the first two bosses and so far they've been pretty simple. Both relied on using an things I unlocked by progressing the game.

It's nice and to the point. Cutscenes are brief, what is required of you is clear. It's pretty great. It remind me of a mobile game without all the mobile crap and also quite well executed. So far my only concern is that the "base improvement" will get repetitive. It is necessary but feels vestigial.

Also played a bit of The Finals. Tried it out because a couple podcasters have had good things to say about it in comparison with the Concord betas. I don't currently have a shooter in my rotation. I'm pleasantly surprised. It is very much a free-to-play affair but any real money transactions are cosmetic. It's more class based than hero based. You have light, medium, and heavy characters which you equip with a loadout consisting of an ability, weapons, and gadgets. The classes align with your expectations but the loudouts dramatically impact play style. TTK is high and team coordination is pretty important. The game consists of several different modes which are pretty unique but clear iterations on the type of stuff you may have seen elsewhere. Generally its 3v3v3, 3v3v3v3, or 5v5. I'll probably play it a bit more.

And I also ordered a Steam Deck. I've been considered a handheld for a while. WHat tipped me over the edge was seeing the ability to remote play PS5 games. Excited to have access to both my steam library, emulators, and PS5 while the TV is being used.

No Man's Sky: Got through the current Liquidators expedition, it was kinda fun, but the bosses were super easy, and I though I generally sucked at combat in the game. It was fun, thematically, and I still have to log on and contribute to the kill counts.

Fallout: London: I am running it using Bottles in Linux to containerize my FO4: GOTY install specifically to drop Fallout London on from GoG. I used lgogdownloader to pull FO4 and Fallout: London's installers and just combined them in the same bottle. It runs a bit less well because of some intensive graphics mods they've done, but it at least looks more updated than vanilla FO4.

To me the game feels closer to FNV in gameplay, but I've only gotten to the first major city, and not done any major quests. The combat is slower due to a lack of guns, at least early on, the spaces are claustrophobic like FO3, and the characters so far are really solid (except this one Sikh soldier, his VA just kinda doesn't land with me).

I dusted off Descenders, wanting my favorite downhill mountainbiking game back in my life. I've talked about it here a lot, and saw some other people playing it, and will say it's definitely a great game, especially if you like games where you see continuous improvement, and with randomly generated maps.

I played Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 since it was on Gamepass. It is genuinely the worst COD campaign yet but not because it is simply bad quality, but because it is actually just a big push for their Warzone gamemode. It eschews everything that made COD campaigns good in order to do this and ends up being a misbegotten, failed initiative.

I haven't been in the position where I felt compelled to write how badly a game missed the mark before but this is something special. It's so... nothing. It's not cynical, it's not disrespectful, it's not horribly made, it's not super low quality. Strong, superlative language feels inappropriate to describe this campaign because it's not even dislikable enough for that. It ultimately is a consequence of fundamentally bad ideas that should have never gone past the initial pitch. I came out of it feeling like there was an absence of a campaign despite playing through it.

My least favourite COD campaign until this point was Ghosts and that was simply because I did not like the story in it at all, and the campaign was otherwise largely forgettable. That's simply a matter of preference and quality. Other people liked it, and suggested other entries to have the worst campaign. After MW3's, I can't imagine there will be any disagreement on the matter. I don't see how there could be. This is missing everything that makes a COD campaign entertaining to play.

The primary problem is that most of the missions are not the scripted, linear COD missions we've come to expect. They're just the Warzone mode, with all those mechanics. You get dropped into a small subsection of the Warzone map, there are enemies littered about, and you have to go press F four times around the map. Sometimes that's defusing bombs, other times that's picking up intel. It doesn't matter. All you do for most of this campaign is run around, shooting extremely dumb AI enemies, and open boxes.

That's it. That's 80% of the campaign. What few remaining missions that do follow the traditional bombastic COD campaign mission design are much shorter and unremarkable than ever before. No big setpieces, not even ambitious story moments or gameplay scenarios. They're just standard shoot and move up missions that finish much quicker than you'd expect.

There's just nothing here. There's not even something attempted with this campaign. Sure, there's a story that frames these missions and it's supposed to be a continuation of what was built in the past two MW games since 2019. It doesn't even do this well as it leaves aside most of the story approaches from before and instead acts more like a lot of dressing to justify why the next Warzone mission is happening. It doesn't even finish the story of the Modern Warfare world, it largely just spins its wheels and does nothing except for one major plot point the whole time. That's not an exaggeration. This COD campaign contains one single significant plot point in its entire story. And of course it feels shoehorned in and very undeserved. This plot point has universal dislike from COD fans who genuinely believed these latest MW games had a quality story so far.

It's not like I expected much from a COD campaign. I have played almost all of them. They give me a certain sense of entertainment and satisfaction, kind of like Fast & Furious or Michael Bay movies do because the tight gameplay, high quality production, and interesting campaign missions keep it a worthwhile experience for me. They have always been good as a "turn your brain off" FPS games, no matter if I come out liking or disliking it in the end.

But this one left me empty and confused about why they even bothered.

I've gotten sucked into Satisfactory. Holy crap, I'm really enjoying it. I've rebuilt my main factory center a handful of times and now that the basic theory has been making a lot more sense I've been able to better optimize certain aspects of my machines. The dopamine feedback is strong in this one. Also, the basic thing of being able to customize colors in your builds gives everything a huge visual boost.

I just finished Crow Country and it was awesome. I had a great time with it, love how short it is. Like a delicious, tightly packed experience. The backtracking across the map is fun because its not super difficult, great decisions were made like killing enemies in certain spots leaves you able to freely access those areas. Secrets were fun, all puzzles were simple but enjoyable. A comfy horror game. Loved it. Considering trying for an S rank now.

Starting MudRunners: Expeditions, really love the other games. This one has low reviews but i know how pitchforky people can get when changes are made to a formula. Really looking forward to it being a bit more arcadey and forgiving as i like to feel progress as I listen to podcasts.

Had been playing Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales (posted about it in the last two threads) and finally finished it this past week. 9.99/10 game. Literally the only gripe I had with the game was the artificially inflated difficulty of the final boss.

I played the game on the hardest difficulty setting, since I was pretty experienced with Gwent, and had no major issues until the last battle. Sure I failed a couple of battles throughout the game and had to try them again, but that was part of the fun of the game: going back to the drawing board and coming up with a new deck that could defeat this thing that was stumping me.

But the final boss is that times 100. Holy crap it basically takes like ten different overpowered bonuses and just gives them all to the enemy. So no matter how much I tweaked my deck, or what strategy or archetype I used, it didn't matter. I came close a couple of times. But after like twenty failed attempts, I lowered the difficulty to medium or normal or whatever the middle one is, and beat it first try after that because it was a cakewalk. I feel like that final boss on the highest difficulty could be tweaked down just a smidge and it would be more in line with the rest of the game, which was tough at times, but never felt unfair up until that point.

Regardless though, the story was incredible, the choices you make during the game really weigh on you, and you can play the game one-handed. Highly recommend it to anyone who has ever liked anything fantasy or card-game related. I was way more invested in the characters of this game than those in the Netflix Witcher show. I even recommended it to my wife, who doesn't like card games in the slightest, but enjoys the Witcher show and played the Witcher 3, because the story is seriously that engrossing.

Next up on the list to try is Gwent: Rogue Mage. I played a few minutes this past weekend and it didn't really click with me as much as Thronebreaker (which hooked me from the very first super-polished cinematic cutscene). When I got both of them on sale, I really thought I would like Rogue Mage a lot more than Thronebreaker, since I'm a big fan of roguelike card games like Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and Balatro. But Rogue Mage seems so sluggish in comparison, and Thronebreaker is a masterpiece. Really needs some options to speed up the gameplay, but I only have like 2 or 3 hours so I'll reserve judgement for now.

I've started dumping more and more money into my Flesh and Blood decks recently, it's such an interesting system and I've been really enjoying going to my LGS more often because of it! I've been enjoying the system more than MTG even, to the point where I thought I'd be spending more money on Bloomburrow, but I think that I'd rather dump money in FaB now!

I bought "American Truck Simulator" for a bit of a laugh when it was on sale for a couple of bucks but I've been playing it more than I expected and I'm kind of grinding away to buy a better truck and stuff. Also, parking the trailers is the best part. I really need to work on it though.

Islands of the Caliph

I picked this up in the summer sale after @V17 put it on my radar (thanks!). I'd been wanting a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, and this is scratching that itch very well.

The game honestly feels like something out of the 90s in appearance, interaction, and design. The graphics look old and chunky and the game is full of 2D sprites in a 3D world. There is no mouse input -- everything is done through your keyboard. There aren't a lot of modern quality of life features (e.g. you have to sort your inventory manually, item by item). It's not an exact match by any means, but when I started playing it, I got fond flashbacks to Betrayal at Krondor.

That said, I'm loving it. The game world is made up of different islands that you can sail between, each one having its own nature area, town, and dungeon(s). You fight things, explore, and interact with NPCs. As you explore you come across areas you can't access yet, so you'll have to find items or tools and then return. My one regret so far is that I didn't take any notes on the game as I was playing, and by the time I realized I probably should be marking important things down on actual paper, I was already well into the game.

While the game was designed for keyboard only, I've been playing it on my Deck. I custom-configured a control scheme I sort of like. The game wasn't designed with controller in mind at all, so no matter how you set it up, there are just going to be some unintuitive choices that you have to get used to. That said, the fact that I can do that sort of thing at all is a testament to how awesome Steam Input is -- this keyboard-only Windows-only game shouldn't technically be playable on my little handheld Linux controller, but it is!

I'm several hours in and probably a third of the way through the game at this point. Some of it is admittedly tedious, but that's also the nature of it being lovingly old-school. I am going to stick with it.

Re-Volt through RVGL via Luxtorpeda

RVGL is a modern engine port of the original game that makes it run well, and Luxtorpeda is a really easy way to get that set up on a Steam Deck. I spent untold hours playing this RC kart racing game back on the Dreamcast, and ever since then the menu music has lived rent-free in my head. I traveled this past week and spent a lot of time in airports and on flights, so this game was my companion for that time.

I have really mixed feelings about it. There is absolutely, 100%, an excellent game in there. Getting to replay what I loved as a kid has been really fun as an adult.

The problem is that, as an adult, I can't take off my experience hat, so I'm able to see the flaws in the game that I simply didn't have a frame of reference for at the time.

As a kid, I knew the game was hard. I just assumed that was because I was bad at it. Turns out that's not the case! It's hard regardless. It's a design issue.

A big one is the game's powerups. You and the AI cars get them, and you fire them at each other, and it's fun and exciting.

Unfortunately, there's no catch-up or blue-shell mechanic in the game, which means that races quickly become a "rich get richer" situation. If you are in the middle of the pack, you are trading blows with a bunch of other cars, all of you fumbling around in a torrent of chaos. If you're out in front of the pack, however, you are relatively safe. Furthermore, the longer time you spend there, the safer your position becomes as you move further away from the other cars that are still in the fray.

Races tend to be won by blowouts, rather than narrow victories. This feels great when you're the one winning, but it feels awful when you're the one who knows that there's no way on earth you'll catch up to first, even with two whole laps left.

The other problem with the game is its very touchy handling. You will spin out. A lot. Even when you don't expect it.

It will frustrate you. A lot.

After probably 10 hours of play and completing nearly everything besides the last championship in the game, I'm still not entirely sure why I spin out sometimes. I've learned to avoid most of them, but I think there might be a genuine physics issue with the game. I've learned that, if your car gets air, and if you're steering at all when you land, you'll almost certainly spin out. As such, it's best to take your thumb off the joystick while in the air and only steer once you're certain the car is back on the ground.

There are times, however, where your car shouldn't be leaving the ground at all, like when it's gently sloped. From the player's perspective, all four tires appear to remain on the ground at all times. However, from a game perspective, it feels like the game thinks one or more of the wheels loses contact for a split-second, which causes you to spin out completely. This feels unexpected and outright unfair. There were entire sections on levels where I had to very carefully learn how to not steer through them, at the risk of losing control entirely. I even think some of the lighter cars in the game are outright unusable, because they seem to be more affected by this issue than the heavier ones.

Nevertheless, despite my complaints, I do still love this game. I wouldn't have stuck with the annoyances through hours of play had it not also been compelling to me. I think it's a great game to enjoy, but ultimately I think it would be outright awful to try to 100%.

I had Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic on my wishlist, it went on sale so I picked it up, and holy shit. I don't think I've seen a more complex city-building sim. It's more like a "state-builder", there's so much to it.

It's a simple premise - you're part of the USSR in the second half of the 20th century, and your goal is to build a successful planned economy/state between the USSR and NATO. There's not a military component, so it's very "SimCity" in how it presents that - you're focused on making your settlement efficient, your citizens happy, and balancing your money situation. It's in the details where it gets unique and honestly kind of nuts. You are in charge of everything and must account for everything when you're building stuff out, if you have all of the systems enabled. A cool aspect is that you can disable just about all of the major systems, so you can play it in a much more casual way if you like, very nearly as simplified as something like Cities: Skylines if you turn everything down/off. At its maximum, "realistic mode", it feels like you are having to manage a state in about as full a sense as I could imagine.

I'll give a small example: Water. If you enable water management, then you're going to need to provide water by way of a network of buildings. First you need a source, either a well or a collector near a natural body, and it will be limited depending how big that building is. That needs to be connected to a treatment plant, and if you're running a pipe uphill you'll need a pumping station to accomplish that. From the treatment plant, it needs to go to a substation for actual distribution, which again depending on elevation might require a pump, and you might need a tower for storage/later expansion of the settlement. The size of your pipes determines capacity/flow, and you can choose instead of substations to distribute via a loading platform (as in, trucks gather up water and take it places). If you do that, people use less water versus having pressurized water, and you can export your surplus to earn some money, but it will take more time to get water distributed. Capacity matters because you need greater capacity to support larger populations, and different levels of water quality are relevant for different parts of the settlement (industry can use lower quality, residential demands higher quality). This is just one thing. There's systems of equivalent/greater complexity for damn near everything, like electricity, waste management, citizens' health and education, so on and so forth. And then there's a variety of industrial projects, transportation methods, etc with their own sets of concerns/details.

"Realistic mode" is beyond anything I have ever seen. In that, it's on you to manage just about every single aspect of what you're trying to do. Wanna build something? You'll need a construction office. You'll need to import/stock resources for that, buy up some vehicles, staff the place, and assign them the project. Resources like concrete, steel, bricks, etc. are available in markets where prices fluctuate depending what's going on in the world, as well as whether you acquire the goods from the USSR or NATO. NATO has different stuff available, but you need Dollars to do those transactions, and if you're not exporting to NATO countries you don't have a way of earning dollars. It's easier to get Rubles and trade with the USSR, but that means not being able to buy, say, better vehicles because NATO countries make better vehicles. You need to manage stuff like individual vehicles transporting goods around the settlement, and manage those vehicles by way of stuff like fuel depots and maintenance bays as well as plan their routes. There's trains, cars, planes, ships, and they all can work like this. Buildings wear over time, so occasionally you'll use that construction office again to have folks go do renovations. It's just nuts how much detail there is, I haven't scratched the surface at all even with all of this.

The customization is super good too. With everything simplified, it's very much like a city-painter, just build what you like and maintain the basic links between things. You can enable/disable systems in real time, so if you want to dip your toes into something more complicated mid-game, you're welcome to do it and turn them back off if it's overwhelming. it provides a huge variety of analytical tools for understanding stuff like where resources are, how systems are operating, what's being produced and imported/exported, etc. One gripe is that it's not very good at showing you all of the details/relating exactly what everything does, but for that there is a whole world of folks making tutorials/guides/videos. It reminds me a lot of A-Train, but with way more detail available and much more direct control over what develops.

If anything it's a game that earns a title of "state sim" rather than "city-builder", because the scale is such that you'll build multiple towns for different purposes and you're free to manage your broad goals in a variety of ways. You can build near existing villages and integrate those populations into your setup. There's no military aspect, but there is domestic politics, and screwing up folks' well being will mean people trying to leave/escape. You can import a bunch of what you need and build an export market to balance it out. You can try to go for self-sufficiency at the cost of time and growth. You have options for conducting scientific research to build new stuff, which introduces even more granular shit to account for. I obviously lack the credentials to say whether it's an "accurate" simulation but I can say it's unlike any city-building experience I've ever played. From what I've seen of folks playing realistic mode, you really do need to have something like a "five year plan" in your head to succeed, because it's that big and that complex. You probably won't bankrupt yourself, but it's very easy to end up in a sort of unsalvageable situation where the work it would take to make things efficient is too much for your state's economy to handle.

This one goes into the Forever Games collection, I know for sure it's something I'll hop into and out of practically forever and probably never fully understand the thing. Really impressive, I'd love something this granular/flexible in a different context. There's also a building and map editor, and a workshop full of stuff people have made. If you're someone who likes city builders for the management aspects, this one is just on a whole other level.

Got back into Yu-Gi-Oh! and today the last cards I needed for my first physical deck ever arrived (previously I just played online). I'm planning to go to my first IRL tournament in August, but I was playtesting online this afternoon and lost all my matches, so I'm feeling a little discouraged.

I intentionally chose to build a weaker deck (Fire Kings, if anyone is interested) because of budget constraints and also because I really like the deck's playstyle and artwork, but I didn't expect it to just get steamrolled by anything remotely competitive. I just hope my local game shop doesn't have too many meta players or that maybe I can find a group that plays more casual decks so I can stand a chance.

At least the cards are shiny. It's the first time I ever owned physical Yu-Gi-Oh cards (excluding bootlegs, proxies and fakes I had as a child) and I was so happy when I first unboxed them.

The private Vanilla World of Warcraft server I play on went down over the weekend and I found myself feeling pretty listless. Tried several different games, but now that it's back up, I'll probably just go back to playing WoW and the few other games I've been playing.

I put Yakuza: Like a Dragon down for the time being. I really love the game and I've put in over 20-hours, but my mood has changed and I don't feel like watching the cutscenes right now. I really want to get back to it, as I'm enjoying the gameplay and the sense of humor, but it's just on hiatus for right now.

I have been putting in a good amount of time to System Shock remake. I've had many starts and restarts in this game since it released last year, feeling pretty unsatisfied with it each time, in spite of my adoring the original game. But finally I've come around and I'm really enjoying my playthrough this time; I just picked-up X-22 and have been exploring the Reactor and getting my ass handed to me, but I'm still having a great time. I'm glad I finally broke through whatever I had been feeling about the game.

During that lull in WoW, I did pick up Diablo 2 Resurrected in spite of telling myself 5-years ago I would never again give Blizzard any money. But, I had several beers and was looking for something to play on a Friday night with my buddies, so here we are. Diablo and ARPGs have never been a favorite genre of mine, but I'm enjoying myself well enough with the little bit of time I've put into it so far. I just got it installed on Steam Deck and am eager to try it out there, but I need to figure out where my Proton folder for it is so I can transfer my Offline character saves over.

I actually decided to give Street Fighter 6 another shot. I said a few weeks ago that I didn't really like it. After trying it again this weekend, I think I must have been in a sour mood when I first started playing it, because I had a lot more fun this time around. I think part of it is I changed a bit what I was focusing on. When I first got the game, I had heard that combo trials were a good place to learn. I think what happened is that I got overwhelmed thinking I had to memorize 30 combos on top of leaning how the drive gauge and supers work.

Last week I watched some more videos on fighting games and I found a video that had some different recommendations, which basically boiled down to "just learn a couple simple combos and learn to use your overdrive in corners and to counter theirs, otherwise juts focus on spacing and enhancing your specials" and that pretty much worked. I started playing Ken and had a lot more fun than when I was trying Ryu, Juri, or Honda. The game feels a lot more natural to me now that I have some time with learning overdrive, enhanced specials, etc. I'm still not going to put a thousand hours into it or anything like that, but at least I'm now having fun with it!

I started Once Human last week and it's gotten far more of my attention than I expected it to. It's a third person free to play survival MMO with lots of RPG elements, though the survival aspect is definitely more dominant. The theme and monster design is pretty solid, and it feels like it's taken inspiration from a million different supernatural-themed IPs - SCP, Control, Death Stranding, Nier/Drakengard, Remnant, Destiny, internet horror in general like the Backrooms, just tons of things from all over but it does a decent job of somehow combining it all into one package. The story and characters are entirely forgettable and not at all worth playing the game for. The combat is solid enough, with a good amount of build variety and a decent spread of weapons.

The crafting, base building, and other survival aspects are top-notch though, maybe with the exception of the snapping being inconsistent. You can claim a territory almost anywhere on the map that isn't a town, road, or enemy encampment, as long as it's not already claimed. Any storage within your territory is automatically drawn from when building, crafting, cooking, etc., which is hugely convenient. You can MOVE CHESTS AROUND WITH ALL THEIR ITEMS IN THEM. I cannot understate how great that is. There's a fair bit of things that can be automated once you reach the later tech tiers, the power system is relatively simple, the water system is relatively simple, you can literally relocate your entire territory to another zone at no cost with a 10 minute cooldown as long as it doesn't break any of the territory rules stated above and it will preserve the whole base as is, easily one of the best base building systems I've seen in any survival game, if not the best.

But, BUT, the game does have some big issues. For one, there is a HUGE amount of things it will not tell you how to do, and you will either need to learn by trying it out yourself or looking it up. Tons of intricate interactions that aren't explained, and you'll likely still be learning new things even a few hundred hours in. Also, there is a frankly ridiculous number of menus. You'll be going through menus to get to other menus to collect rewards for seasonal events or character milestones or important progression unlocks and it's horribly confusing early on, and still cumbersome later even after you remember where they all are.

And the biggest turn off for most, is that each "season", or at least the current and next season, only lasts 6 weeks. After 6 weeks, the next season starts and you will be prompted to move to that one, which will preserve some valuable resources, unlocks, and currencies, but for the most part your levels and gear will be reset. There's a separate, creative-mode instance that never resets and you can use a currency you can earn there (not paid for) to transfer a certain amount of gear over to the next season, but it's still limited. The upside is that it shouldn't take you much time at all to get back to max level, and you keep your blueprints so you can craft any gear you have blueprints for, including legendary gear, as soon as you have the requisite material. You can even create a blueprint for your base to do the same, which again is another huge point of praise for the building system. But a wipe is a wipe, so for those who don't like to lose progress and rebuild regularly this will be a huge breaking point for them. I'm approaching this more as a survival game so I'm alright with it, especially since they do get to change the map and scenario with the reset, but the devs have heard peoples' complaints about the reset, specifically how short the seasons are, and they've been very receptive to feedback so far so we might see improvements to this as well.

I haven't even mentioned the deviations yet, which are a core part of the game as paranormal entities you can capture to assist you in combat or help you out in your base by providing materials or improving efficiency of various activities. It's less involved than Palworld in that they're much more passive and thus easier to manage while still being very helpful, though the process of getting some of the more valuable ones can be frustrating due to RNG. I won't spoil any details on them since they're fun to discover, but I like them.

I'm in search for an MMORPG, again. I'm trying Black Desert, again. I'm playing a Guardian, and this time I could get to level 58. I haven't decided if I'll continue. Here are things I like and dislike based on my experience so far.

Positives

• Character creation screen. The best variety and in-depth options in any game I've seen. Definitely a big point of attraction for me.
• Combo-esque action combat feels pretty nice.
• The graphics are pretty nice, especially for an MMORPG.
• The detail of the world is quite high. There are many NPCs, the towns are crowded, there are many visually appealing details, like beautiful vases or even charming potion bottles.
• The world is vast, and it's truly an open world.

Negatives

• There are too many mechanics for everything, making the game unnecessarily complicated. I still don't know how upgrading items work, and I'm not sure if even want to.
• Too many weird daily or non-daily things that pop up and take your focus away. Challenges, daily die games, knowledge gains, title gains, various "rewards" that I don't even know how I get. There's just too many thing going on.
• The UI is horrible. By far the worst UI I've seen in an MMORPG. The screen is just extremely cluttered. I've spent a good deal of my time researching how to make it simpler. The font used scales awful and looks pixelated. You can't adjust the size of the fonts without also scaling up UI in general, which is a big problem considering how much space it takes. You can go around it by using a custom font you can drop in the game folder, but it leads to clipping in UI. Oh, also you change the UI size to make it bigger, but even basic UI elements like the settings menu or character sheet don't fit your screen. I really don't know how any designer could look at this and call it a job well done, or a job done at all. It's very incompetent, and it's weird they haven't fixed this in years. This shouldn't have passed any quality control.
• A related issue that I think deserves a separate entry. You can't turn off a lot of notifications, like pvp event notifications, knowledge gain, skill point gain, etc. They constantly happen, and the notifications take a big space right in center of the screen. It's very offputting.
• You can't use addons.
• Everything seems to be extremely grindy.
• Story and world are very, very weak, which makes the visually appealing world feel soulless.
• A very big portion of getting stronger seems to depend on very unfair RNG mechanics.
• Mobs so far don't have any personality. I've only run into one mob type that had a unique mechanic, and it was staggering you once in a while. All the others just simply attacked, and I didn't have to do anything other than continously hit them. If I had powerful enough gear I succeeded, if I didn't I failed. Combined with the endless grind, combat feels very static and same-y, which is a letdown, because I think the basics of combat are pretty fun. It's just that encounter and monster designs are... barely a thing. Again, too bad, because the visual variety of the monsters is pretty great.
• My experience with other players was by far the worst I've had in an MMORPG. People say wildly reactionary stuff about anything, but especially about women and minorities. There doesn't seem to be any regulation. I've had to turn off the chat window completely, which is a first for me in an MMORPG. This is the first game I really didn't want anything to do with other people playing the game, because the community seems to be horrid. There's constantly horny talk too, and it's offputting too, but it's a minor issue compared to the reactionarism.

Notes

Taken together, the game's visual designers seem to have done a great job. Combat designers have done a good job on the basics of combat too. But the rest of the game pulls it down massively. I wonder what the game director was doing, because the features of the game are very uneven.

I haven't gotten any gaming gear in years so when my gaming laptop arrived I first caught up on Doom 2016 (which was fantastic) and am now playing Doom Eternal, which to me is way more difficult (or maybe I'm still getting used to it).

I finished Little Kitty Big City over two nights. It's not a masterpiece of game design, but it was adorable and fun, and sometimes that's all one wants. Before that, I had a brief Magic Arena hyperfocus phase.

I've been rapidly going through unplayed games in my library since then, trying to find one that pokes my brain in the right way, without really knowing what I'm looking for. So far I've bounced off of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (for being too old and janky in a way I don't have the nostalgia to back up), Hammerting (I think I want something more story-driven at the moment), and Lenna's Inception (for having mostly broken controls on the Steam Deck that I'd have to sit down and remap into submission).

I'm replaying Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age Inquisition for the *mumbles* 5th or 6th time.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with a 15 and 10 year old game respectively, DAO is a RPG where you save the work along with your plucky band of misfits, and DAI is an RPG where you....save .the world....with your plucky band of misfits.

Look, Thedas is in danger a lot ok? First there was the 5th blight, a terrible event, thousands of people died to the darkspawn threat before the Hero of Ferelden managed to stop the blight by gathering allies from all across Ferelden, all while being hunted by the Queen's Regent for crimes they didnt even commit. Along the way, they have the dubious pleasure of doing things like....dealing with werewolves, inserting themselves into dwarven politics, escaping the grip of demons and trying not to get killed by Templars, oh and possibly participating in suspicious rituals. Whats a little blood magic amongst friends?

And then, as if dealing with the blight wasn't enough, a scant few years (like 7 i think???) theres now a hole in the sky, demons are pouring out of it, actually demons are pouring out of a bunch of little holes in the sky, all across both ferelden and orlais, and some poor schmuck has weird magic in their hand that can fix those little holes. Oh and by the way, the poor schmuck is also a religious figure for the chantry, the main organization that controls both the templars and the mages, except the chantry uhh. Isnt real happy about this little organization called the "inquisition" considering a bunch of people in the chantry still think poor schmuck killed their lady pope (the schmuch didnt, but its a reasonable assumption). Anyway, the schmuck has a lot to do, and very little time to do it, and due to their position as "glowing figurehead of the frighteningly named human church organization", they have to, in no particular order, stop the mages and Templars from killing each other and anyone in their way, lay a bunch of dead to rest and also kill some demons about it, save a queen, prevent a terrible future from occuring, play politics with the aforementioned queen (and also gloss over the unhinged murders that the queen committed), explore ancient elven temples and possibly have their entire worldview upended by a betrayal, you know, normal stuff. Oh, and possibly they get to meet some historical and/or mythological people/beings.

Anyway, i pretty much always play a dalish elf in both of these games, and since im playing them simultaneously, i realized i created basically the same character both times 🤦

Also, the only reason im not doing a DA2 run as well is bc i dont have it already modded on my laptop and i didnt want to deal with that whole process lol. I wholeheartedly love DA2, its so fukin depressing for hawke and im actually still recovering from my last playthrough. I have. So many headcanons about the Qun specifically because of this game, and eventually in gonna Do Something With Them and put it on AO3 along with my artempt at making Qunlat a functional conlang (well. Cipher?? idk. unless veilguard gives us more qunlat, theres not much to work with lol)

Anyway, side tangent over, i love these games a normal amount and would definitely recommend them to anyone. Origins is still my absolute favorite DA game, and i would pay an obscene amount of money for a remake but i doubt that'll ever happen. :/

Ive recently finished Harold Halibut and it's was a valuable experience. The art style is great and the world is interesting. There's a lot of meaning in it. But the gameplay itself is pretty basic, traveling takes way too long, and overall I think the story is too long. I was getting a bit sick of it by the end simply because the gameplay wasn't engaging.

All that being said I would still recommend it.

Shapez (shapez.io)

I've been trying a few factory games recently without finding the right one to scratch that itch. I find Factorio too ugly to be enjoyable, and Satisfactory is okay-ish but I found the early game to be really tedious and not satisfying (pun intended) in regard of the invested time. I bought Shapez 2 days ago, on a whim, because it was like €2.5 with its DLC.

At first sight, it looks more like a prototype of a factory game, with bland art and an abstract theme. Extract shapes, cut them, paint them, glue them, and put them on conveyor belts. I played for more than 20 hours in a day and a half, something which never happens. Now I know why people call Factorio "cracktorio".

If you've ever played Zachtronics' SpaceChem (or Opus Magnum, to a lesser extent), Shapez is is like the open world version of this. All resources are infinite, and there is no cost to place anything on the game. The only currency is the "blueprint", a special shape you have to make and that you need to spend to copy-paste your own layouts.

At any given time, you have to produce x thousands of a specific shape (or sometimes reach a production of x per second) to unlock the next level and a new feature. Most of your previous factories are also still useful to fill quotas that will raise the production speed of your tools. Like I said, the game is very much like SpaceChem: making the required shape is not hard, but if you don't want to wait 5 days to complete your objective, you'll have to optimize your factory to produce quickly and efficiently. You'll also have to plan your conveyor belts to avoid bottling because everything you produce on the infinite map goes to a single warehouse.

The fact that all resources are infinite also make this game half-idle if you want to. Alt-tab to do something else or leave your PC, the game will still run as it is and nothing bad will happen as long as you didn't mess up.

Excellent game, even at full price. And Shapez 2 comes out in a few weeks too 💀

My husband Just bought Toakaido, a board game that simulates a road trip on a historic route between Edo and Kyoto. It's kind of a breath of fresh air. You go through the road and gain points by doing relaxing things like shopping for presents, painting landscapes, meeting travellers, enjoying hot springs, and staying at inns. There's not a set turn order because the last person always goes first, and you can choose how many steps you take. It's weirdly freeing to not need to be told where to go by a random chance.

He also got Parks, which has a lot of similarities in how it plays except it has a bit more complex resource management and a randomized playing board that gets reshuffled three more times throughout the game. The art is also really good. It was kind of lucky, too because he bought it on clearance for $12.

I got a copy of The Outer Wilds a while back, since it was highly recommended by some of the people here, but I haven't quite found myself as enraptured in it as I have been with these board games. I should probably try to make some more friends to play them with. I really want to get some people to play Kingdom Builder with, because my Husband doesn't like it anymore from all the times he has lost to me. :P

I went back to Last Epoch for the new cycle. Rolled a Torment Warlock and crushing everything. Taking care of my empowered blessings currently although I'm thinking about rolling another character for variety. The new nemesis system adds some variety. I rolled a super lucky unique from my first nemesis which made my leveling trivial. Only just started interacting with the Harbingers. I want to at least get full empowered blessings before pushing corruption to interact with it more.

I don't know how much longer I will last. I burn out pretty fast grinding monos over and over.

This week we played Slice & Dice for our podcast on roguelike games.

Overall: we liked it, but there were some nitpicks. There actual gameplay itself is very straightforward: you roll dice and use the abilities to attack monsters. But the synergies between heroes and items you get is where the real complexity is at. There's over 100 heroes and over 400 items, so understanding the interplay between all of that can be pretty overwhelming.

There's a big number of different styled game modes that, while all having the same core gameplay, really mix it up in terms of how you approach that gameplay. Simply adding one global debuff curse to your run completely changes your strategy and how you plan around it. Let alone other game modes adding additional curses after each boss or after each fight!

I think we were all relatively bad at the game, but could still appreciate its design. At our skill level the runs go for around 60-90 minutes, but talented streamers can finish Classic Hard mode in about 30, which completely blows my mind. There's a very high skill ceiling to this game that will be extremely rewarding for those that take the time to invest into the symbology and synergies of everything it has to offer.

I've been knocking out the Like a Dragon/Yakuza series. I've finished 0, 1, 2 and I'm playing 3 now, pretty much back to back. I'd actually played and dropped Yakuza 0 first, but then the RPG entries 7 and 8 got me more into the series (8 especially, as it was a sendoff to the first protagonist, Kiryu.)

The games are just comfort food. The stories are usually at worst serviceable and at best legitimately engaging, and the combat is at just the right level of difficulty. Music is fantastic.

I also finally caved and picked up Elden Ring. I think that game requires more time dedicated than I can muster at the moment... Not that Yakuza doesn't, just that Elden Ring is pretty much required to be played in 4-hour blocks so you can get over boss fights and tough sections. I definitely see the appeal though.

Last week I played Twilight Struggle for the first time. I'd heard that it was a 2 player board game, where the USA(me) and USSR(friend) struggled for influence over regions of the world. It reminded me of Risk in that it is a game of global competition for dominance. Unlike Risk, it's only two player, actions are taken from a set of cards in hand, victory points swing the game back and forth, and there are extra tracks to represent power and nuclear threat.

I went for a strategy of gaining influence in the regions and keeping nuclear threat high, as nuclear threat prevents military power actions. My friend went for higher VP scoring cards, and tried to end the game early with the war games card. War games gives 6 VP to your opponent and then ends the game without end game scoring. He would have won if I hadn't played a regional score card just before.

The game is very flavourful, cards are named after historical events. My favourite was Kitchen Debates, where the USA player, if winning the influence metric, can poke the USSR player in the chest.

As the game was made over 15 years ago, I'm surprised by how modern the mechanics seem. Action cards can either be played for their text or their value or discarded in the space race. Discarding cards is important, as more than a 3rd of cards have text that specifically benefit your opponents. If you play an opponent's card for its value, your opponent then plays the text part of the card. Winning definitely felt as much creating a strategy as being given opportunities by your opponent.

My review is that I like the game, but I don't like how it took 5.5 hours to get through. I think I would only really want to play for myself one more time as the USSR. Otherwise this game would become one of those educational games that I reckon people should try at least once.

I recently came into a bit of unexpected disposable income, so splurged on one of the ridiculously overpriced aluminum Analogue Pockets (and a couple not-quite-as-ridiculously overpriced Everdrive carts). So for the past little while I've played through some Pokemon ROM hacks that make some QoL improvements.

• Shin Pokemon Red is a Gen 1 hack that lets you catch and evolve all Gen 1 pokemon without needing to trade, lets you use HM moves in the overworld (cut, surf, etc.) without needing to use up an ability slot on one of your pokemon, adds running by holding B, and a few other changes. I'd tried to get into Gen 1 before (Pokemon Yellow) but ended up abandoning it because it felt too dated, but this hack makes it way more playable. I like it a lot.

• Pokemon Sour Crystal is a Gen 2 hack that adds some improved art, makes Bill's PC nicer to use, also lets you catch and evolve all Gen 2 pokemon without needing to trade, adds a "pager" system to use HM moves without needing to teach it to your pokemon, and some other stuff. I liked this one a lot too (though I missed the hold-B-to-run that Shin Pokemon Red spoiled me with).

• Currently giving Pokemon Emerald Double Plus a go and enjoying it quite a bit (although Gen 3 is pretty modern feeling and playable even without a QoL hack). The main thing I notice and like from this hack so far is the ultra-fast text speed.

I left a lukewarm comment about it a few weeks ago, so I wanted to come back and say: Armored Core VI improved drastically with more play. The game is intended to play through new game+ and ++, and introduces new content, story, and twists within. It also uses every system and side game to add to the experience which I really enjoyed. And playing the same missions and seeing your skills and equipment improved is massively gratifying. I'm glad I kept giving it a proper go, it takes some time to liftoff but it's an incredibly fun and fast-paced mech game with so much experimentation and mastery to be had!

I started 7 Days To Die on PS5. I'm only on my 4th day, but I'm enjoying it. I was always a sucker for challenging survival games. A lot of thought was put into the console UI & controls, which I appreciate. While the game isn't the prettiest or most polished, I enjoy the tense atmosphere.

However, I feel like I have a deja-vu while playing it, as if I had played something else that's extremely similar. I don't think it's The Long Dark or Project Zomboid, but I can't put my finger on it.

I got into the Marvel Rivals beta, so I've been trying that out. I'm kind of indifferent to the Marvel universe, but I'm very interested in the gameplay. I've been playing Overwatch 2 and enjoying it for the past year or so, and I'd like to have another game to play that scratches the same itch.

There's been a few games in the subgenre that have been announced or are releasing soon, and I've seen a lot of people echo the sentiment of "why is everyone making hero shooters, they're a dime a dozen." But I very much disagree. They really aren't. At least not games that fit into the same niche as Overwatch. There's basically the OG, Team Fortress 2, which still exists but is pretty much a dead game, and then there's Paladins, which to me feels like a much less fun and less polished version of Overwatch (I know the game released around the same time and isn't a literal clone of OW, it just feels like budget Overwatch). Other games like Apex Legends (Battle Royale) or Valorant (Counter-Strike but with magic) really don't provide the same kind of gameplay experience, even if they're shooter games where you select characters that have distinctive abilities that impact gameplay.

Rivals, on the other hand, very much fits into the same niche. Thoughts after playing it for a few hours:

• Performance needs to improve. It's really quite bad for a competitive shooter, i.e. I get twice the framerate in Valorant and 3x in Overwatch. Even with the fps counter off it's noticeably less responsive.
• Core gameplay is fun, but very chaotic, and not at all balanced. This is by far the most important part of a game though, so that's a positive sign.
• There's a decent amount of jank in the game, which I hope they clean up for release. For example, Spider-Man is a highly mobile character, as you might expect. The problem is his hitbox appears to teleport across the screen in a very jarring way. This character's M.O. is to sneak up on you and perform a combo that can kill you very quickly if performed correctly. It's very frustrating when this sneak assassin fails his assassination, and once he's low HP and web-swinging away, you can't hit him, not because you suck, but because the game sucks.
• The game needs a role queue. If you want to win, you need at least one Strategist (support/healer role), ideally two. But everyone wants to play damage heroes, and so you end up having to choose between having fun playing the role you want and losing, or filling the role that nobody else wants to play. The worst of it is that playing support in this game can actually be fun, as long as it's by choice, and as long as you're not a solo support with 5 other people constantly screaming for heals but refusing to swap to a character that can heal.

Maybe this sounds a bit negative, but the most important part is that the core gameplay is genuinely fun. Maybe not grind for 1000 hours fun, but definitely "will play casually on the weekend" fun.

I've been playing the racing game ExoCross. It's a custom game engine and the physics are a bit different than anything else I've played. It feels a bit floaty but not impossible to recover from mistakes and the tracks can be pretty challenging. I'm having fun with it single player but multiplayer looks extremely limited, I hope they improve it.