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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.
Only a few hours into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 so far (at least one of which has been spent exclusively on loading and fiddling with graphics and performance settings) and it is definitely STALKER, both in the atmosphere and the bugs and the punishingly poor enemy and economy tuning. Having put 200+ hours into the original trilogy including dabbling a bit in the higher difficulty mods (MISERY mod to this day is still the most masochistic mod I've ever had the displeasure of playing), I was expecting combat that was stressful and somewhat punishing but ultimately rewarding to survive through. The game does the first two well enough and currently falls on its face on the third. Looting other humans after a firefight will rarely yield anything of good value and typically just partially replenishes your food, med and ammo supplies. As a silver lining, they go down easily enough, especially with headshots. Looting mutants just isn't a thing now, and they're fairly common and also bullet sponges, so they're not rewarding at all and only serve to annoy you and burn up your supplies. Note that this is only less than 10 hours in the game and I haven't left the beginning area yet so my experience might change as I get further in, but I have a feeling it'll be more of the same but with more expensive gear.
Of course, the bugs and performance also deserve mentioning. All the old STALKER players came in expecting a fair amount of eurojank, as all the previous STALKER games were also buggy messes on launch. STALKER 2 has met our expectations in that regard, and even gone above and beyond in others. Memory leaks after a short while of playing? Oh you know it. Weird physics interactions causing big frame drops? Got that too. Huge losses in FPS if you have the audacity to alt+tab? That's a given. But compiling shaders EVERY SINGLE TIME you start the game up, and it takes at least several minutes each time? You have outdone yourselves, GSC. The fact that the game is still mostly positive on Steam despite all this is a testament to how badly people wanted a new STALKER and how only GSC has managed to deliver that. There's fixes and such in the works of course, but it puts a damper on the experience nonetheless. Won't stop me from playing it though.
This is just turning into a Steam review at this point but what the heck. I would still recommend it in its current state to diehard STALKER fans who are willing to put up with the bugs so they can get back into the Zone. For everyone else, give it a month and the worst of the bugs and balance issues should probably sorted out by then.
I've picked up every STALKER game at release and this is the first one I think I'll sit out and wait for. I was really hoping it would run on Deck and I'm still hoping so once they get the performance stuff worked out, but until then I may just go back to CoP and install some basic mods to get my fix that way. I haven't played CoP since I finished it years and years ago when it first came out.
This sounds a bit better than I expected honestly. I think a lot of people are going to be shocked because they've heard how great the game is after YEARS of mods and patches, much like skyrim/new vegas, and now we're back at a square one launch.
Does this allow the modding that helped take the first series from "interesting mess" to "cult classic"?
Yes, the same modders have already put out mods that make the mutants not as spongy. If the name Grok means anything to you, he's rebalanced a couple of things already to make it play nicer. And to @Flashfall, make sure to have a look at the mods. The one rebalancing mutants is almost essential.
I'm not too worried that GSC will fix some of the more egregious performance issues and bugs, and I'm rather optimistic about the modders.
GSC has already confirmed their A-Life 2.0 (their ai director scripting) is not at all working as intended and they've published a list of things they're working on to fix.
I'm a little more sympathetic to them considering they're in a country at war, but even so.. there are a lot of high impact bugs at the moment.
At its core we can still see the game is STALKER and that's why it's selling like hotcakes and the reviews are still positive. The game will find its legs.
I mean....I swear the exact same thing happened on the original launch. Not a criticism, just how designing these kinds of complex systems goes and also not exactly where their priorities on launch lie.
I think that's the important part. The pieces are there, and the trust is there that it'll get cleaner.
There's all kinds of things in the map that give away how much the developers were into it. I found one, a spot you can sit in that comes together into the original game's title screen when you look straight ahead. I noticed too, when you're in the redesigned locations you can sometimes hear flourishes of the old games' OST's in the music. The sense of place is off the charts, if folks get to the point of having stuff like a warfare mode it's going to be crazy good.
Thanks for the review!
I am a complete STALKER virgin and I wanted to try one of the games as they seem totally up my alley. I love hard core, gritty post apocalyptic stuff especially if its euro jank.
I wanted to try out the premium STALKER experience, got any advice on what to play? I am not afraid of modding either.
Been awhile since I've played any of them, but I did play them all on release, completing Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat. Honestly, I'd recommend the vanilla experience; people (myself included) came to love them all on their own merits.
I know there's some decent mods out there, but by and large in my experience, most of them are just designed to be frustrating more than anything. The few most popular mods I dabbled with just made the game an exercise in repeated save scumming, because everything was over the top difficult. The game is challenging enough on it's own, especially early on, no need to make it moreso.
Call of Pripyat is the best one
Good review! I'm currently playing through GAMMA. Holding off on Stalker 2 until they fix the glaring "anomalies". But wow, from what I've seen so far the game looks GORGEOUS. Can't wait to get on it!
And while I'm here maybe I'll give my 2 cents on GAMMA, since it's my first time playing this modpack. I'm half enjoying and half hating the extreme difficulty - each encounter is immensely rewarding to survive through, but given the TERRIBLE economy of the game if I feel like I've used too much resources I'd reload the encounter. Also the dogs end me every single time. Hate them.
A bunch of things seem arbitrarily annoying to do. Artifacts are basically worthless unless you can get them up to a good condition.... by finding more artifacts. A good amount of them are radioactive, so if you want more artifacts you've got to either tank that radiation or buy expensive and heavy lead containers.
I'm actually okay with the guns from looted enemies being basically worthless, and I somewhat like the scavenging-for-parts system. However, I HATE that I could have all the parts I need to make a nice AK-47 but I can't make it because I'm lacking the toolkit.
I need a type C weapon repair kit to swap out the barrel on my AK-47 (what?). For that I need an advanced toolkit. I don't even have a basic toolkit, and I've been searching stashes as much as I can.
The crafting system is a mess. I thought I'd like it, but it's the hands-down worst thing about the mod.
Other than that, what Grok and the modding community was able to do with Stalker is downright amazing. But the patchwork nature of the mods definitely show.
I'm still going to continue playing because I'm a sucker for pain.
I've been playing... chess.
Maybe not the answer you were expecting in this thread, haha. This all started after I had watched LoL Worlds after not having played for a while, maybe since 2015. I started watching some "macro basics" videos to catch up on the game, which led me down a long path of being interested in RTS/MOBA macro as a whole.
At the same time, I watch a lot of Wirtual, a Trackmania streamer, while I'm working. He is dating and frequently collabs with Anna Cramling, a chess WFM and also streamer. Me being recently into studying video game strategy but also having no time/interest in really playing a competitive video game, I figured I'd get back into chess.
I've known how to play since I was a kid, but have never been good. I've tried on and off to get into it, especially over the pandemic, but a combination of ladder anxiety + overthinking each and every tactic made it more stressful than fun back then, and I never made decent progress. But, this time around, I discovered this video series, which is Yet Another Chess Guide for Beginners™️; only the idea isn't to memorize like 4 openings, or to play
1.e4just because, or whatever other rote beginner advice is floating out there (none of that really helped me understand what to do); the idea is to build good habits, play very simply, and stop overthinking. Which turned out to be exactly what I needed.Now all of a sudden chess is really fun. I'm just playing a really simple game and doing puzzles most days, purposely not thinking too hard. Over the past few weeks I've noticed I actually am building an intuition for tactics and can actually formulate a plan in the middle game, whereas before the idea of finding the perfect move every time stressed me out. I've recently realized I'm a positional player who prefers a slow opening and breaking open the middle game with tempo.
My Chess.com rating is still only like 500, though I've climbed from 300 in like 2 weeks. I'm still blundering pieces randomly, but I'm having a hell of a lot more fun.
I need to get back into Chess. It's been a long time since I played, but I do like the part of my brain that it tickles when I'm focusing on it. I stopped because I was playing a lot without paying much attention and making silly mistakes that annoyed me. But I think I've given it enough distance now to dive back in.
I've been watching videos about chess for a few years now. A lot of the time I struggle to actually understand/remember the theory. I also have a bit of ladder anxiety. I've played a few games against bots. Made stupid mistakes that made it worse. I haven't committed to learning and playing a certain openings. Not applying what I learned from the videos, so it just exits my brain. I do puzzles on Lichess (because there's no limit on the free tier like chess.com). I have improved a lot at tactics and calculation.
I think my favourite type of chess video are personal tournament game recaps. Anna does a lot of these, IM Eric Rosen is another player I'd recommend for them. I like hearing how they prepare for certain opponents, whether or not their prep paid off in the game, what were the key positions and interesting lines that come out of them...where did they make mistakes, where did their opponent, how did they punish it?
Yeah totally understandable, that's how most of my attempts to learn chess have gone. Puzzles are definitely one thing, but the idea of not focusing too hard on "winning" moves for now, in games and instead just trying to play a solid foundational style is what helped for me to break past that mindset. It's indeed pretty depressing when the engine calls half of your moves inaccuracies, lol.
Ultimately, what I realize is yes, they're misses/inaccuracies, but they still developed the piece/controlled the center/whatever at the cost of missing material or letting the opponent play a tactic; and they weren't blunders. The engine is rated at like 3600, which we are not; it's basically perfect. But "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" is how I'd summarize the mindset that helped me.
I've been playing Tunic.
This is one I had meant to play when it first came out, but just never got around to it. But the premise alone was enough to hook it into my mind.
I suspect I'm around three quarters of the way through it, although I can't be certain as I've avoided spoilers entirely. So far it has felt like a masterful blend of Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda. The puzzles are cleverly designed, the secrets and dotted around with just enough clues to lead you to them (at least the ones I haven't missed!) and interesting enough to keep you coming back to areas to explore.
There is more I'd like to say about this game, but I really don't want to give anything away to a prospective player, and so I'll leave at this. Wonderful game.
Tunic was one of the hardest games I ever played lol I enjoyed it but I was also really relieved when I beat it
This is very high on my list of games I wish I could play again for the first time. Amazing experience. I think I got about 95% of everything in the game, the only puzzles I skipped where the too obscure ones that just didn't seem fun to solve. At the end, I had like 10 pages of scrawled notes scattered around me.
Did you find the golden path?
Yes I did! Was just the most amazing feeling, finally figuring that out.
After several years of being the "I'm playing it as soon as I finish ________" game, and after two years of sitting in my Steam library, I finally started MASS EFFECT.
So far.... I'm whelmed. The universe seems rich and detailed and I've enjoyed digging in to the Codex entries as I've found them. But I'm a big gameplay > story guy (it took me 3 tries to get through RDR2) and hoo boy this is a game from 2007 alright. Movement is clunky, aiming is fucked (I had to dial look sensitivity down to 10%), and I feel like I've just been cheesing every combat encounter so far. I hope the gameplay gets better as I unlock more skills/companions.
I played through the whole trilogy a couple years ago (the legendary edition). I loved it but ME1's gameplay feels especially dated. 2's is a step up, and 3's was a blast. It's actually kinda cool seeing how they improved and built upon their gameplay systems with each sequel. The whole trilogy was released within a 5 year span which is pretty unheard of nowadays.
Yeah the first ME has some awkward gameplay, the second is a pretty big jump, with the third refining the formula. Biotics are goofy good in the first game especially, plus you'll want at least one person that can peel shields with overload. You'll mostly want to queue up your party member's abilities for max effect, this becomes more streamlined in later entries versus feeling like you're managing 3 full characters.
Hope you're playing the legendary edition, it has some QoL additions that help with like inventory management. However, if you are playing the legendary edition, you should download a mod to fix the lighting. They botched the lighting in ME1, making some scenes look worse than the original even with the other upgrades.
I also tend to be a gameplay > story guy but when I played it I preferred the story bits, which I think is just an indictment of how clunky the combat was. Halo and Gears also existed in that era and made it really hard to accept the step down. The AI companions were...about as useless as they were in Gears 😄. I never ended up finishing it.
The gameplay gets much better in the second game, just FYI.
Honestly, if you don't care about the story, you should just skip to the sequels. The first is one of my favourite games of all time and I certainly consider it the best of the trilogy, but I'm also very much in the story > gameplay camp. The story gets very engaging, but the actual gameplay is pretty much the same throughout. The sequels got a massive redesign, however, and they play a lot better.
It's been a while, but I don't think you'd miss out on much either, since the first game was exclusive to Xbox and the sequels were designed to be accessible for PlayStation owners.
I've been playing a lot of TFT recently! I've never played any other sets besides right at the beginning, so there's a LOT to learn. It's pretty fun as a zone out and and roll type of game, and I've been enjoying that.
Been getting dragged into a lot of League games recently too, I like it for what it is mostly because the group I play with isn't that serious about the game, so we kinda run around like headless chickens most of the time.
On the board game front, I was at a wedding recently and was playing Kelp with my friend that invited me, it's a great game with an asymmetrical goal in the 1v1, where one player is trying to hide and playing a deckbuilder, while the other is hunting them in a dicebuilder. I really like the mechanics and it makes it feel really tense and really thematic, I definitely recommend picking it up if you have a chance.
Prepping for (American) Thanksgiving this year with a bunch of party games, namely Jackbox 1-10, Mario Party/Smash Bros, and maybe a board game or two! I'm usually the one in charge of Thanksgiving games, and I need to figure out a good list for what to bring every year, it's a nice challenge.
Nice I think you're the first person on tildes I've seen that plays TFT! I've been playing consistently since set 4, and my favorites so far have been set 4 and set 10!
Playing at the beginning of a set is my favorite since there is a lot more room for experimentation before a meta develops.
I really wasn't into set 12 and it was the first time I didn't hit at least diamond because I didn't play it enough, but set 13 is looking really promising!
To be perfectly fair, "playing TFT" is definitely not what you'd describe what I do haha. I'm mostly just experimenting because this is the first set I've played since the very beginning. I really am enjoying it though, it's just kinda fun to watch the units fighting and rolling down for gambling. I'll probably try grinding it again though!
It definitely feels like some units are a bit too strong though. I think I've only won with Kogmaw games only because I really like the champion in general.
You're standing on a path that leads to a cabin. In that cabin there's a princess. You must Slay the Princess in order to save the world, or so does the snarky, semi-antagonistic narrator - like the one from The Stanley Parable and other games since - tell you. Don't believe her lies!
Slay the Princess is a visual novel featuring three locations, three characters, several dialogue trees, limited irreversible choices, voice acting and hand-drawn, largely monochrome art. I believe most people can play through it in roughly 6 to 8 hours. I thought the central gimmick was pretty good/creative; the implementation left a little to be desired. My main gripe was with how it wasn't always clear from the many dialogue choices how the story would progress as a consequence, or whether you were just repeating a dialogue tree you'd already gone through before or actually sending the story down a new path. It's worse when there are like 10 possible answers but the game moves on after you explore 3 or 4; I'd prefer if the character and I were on the same page!
As is common with this type of game, it can also be a little frustrating when you figure out what's going on before the character does, so none of the dialogue options seems satisfying, which happened to me a couple times. But it was still pretty entertaining and I can see why so many people like it.
I and a couple friends started playing Windblown, a 3rd person "isometric" roguelite in early access that largely plays much like a more colorful Hades, although a few of the mechanics clearly owe more to Dead Cells - unsurprising, as this game was developed by the same studio!
Because the game is still in active development, it won't surprise you to learn that it's not uncommon to run into some kind of glitch (patches are released frequently!) Fortunately, glitches don't get in the way of a really fun, snappy roguelite experience. The co-op online multiplayer for 3 people really adds another dimension to the experience. You have to balance the added firepower with a busier screen, your friends accidentally triggering mines that hurt you or the fact that if anyone is currently dead, it's one-hit sudden death for the others.
This game is not super easy either way. You should expect to have to make strategic upgrade choices and fight carefully, avoiding the enemies' very strong attacks and leveraging combos and effect synergies. With each run, you can unlock more items that will appear in future runs (like Dead Cells) and other upgrades. I'm looking forward to playing it a lot more!
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Metaphor: Re Fantazio
If you ever wanted to play Persona without the trappings of modern-day Japanese high school, this is your game. It's 98% Persona, but considering the fantasy setting, this might reach a wider (or at least less familiar) audience, so I'll expand more than I normally would. I hope it's a success, because it's pretty good so far.
The story is complicated, but generally about the struggles of democracy, public unrest/anxiety, tyranny, and escaping into a fantasy world. A little ham-handed at times given the last decade of politics, but the smaller stories your party members (aka social links) are involved in range from good to amazing. As a relatively recent parent, many heartstrings were effectively tugged in more than one storyline.
The voice acting is great across the board, with one of your later companions absolutely stealing the show. It's a shame that more than half of the lines aren't spoken, and are replaced by small snippets conveying the idea of the text, which you just have to read (i.e. "What are you talking about?!" in text is spoken as "Huh?"). Standard fare for Persona, but disappointing. The main antagonist is similarly well written and voiced.
As in Persona, you'll be a social butterfly and will pursue plenty of self-growth between missions. How you develop as a character and as a party directly effects other elements of the game, most notably combat. The turn-based battles hearken back to simpler RPG combat, but with plenty of nuance (weaknesses triggering additional turns, combo-attacks at the expense of extra turns, any character can be anything ala FF5). I'm about 80 hours in and just started what's presumably the final dungeon. None of the dungeons have felt particularly laborious, but I'm always itching to complete them so I can get back to the interstitial stories and character development between major set-pieces.
One of my favorite aspects of the Persona series is getting to live vicariously in (a heavily fictionalized) Japan, so I have mixed feelings on the setting. The story’s alright and the setting’s alright but they feel quite cliché fantasy, which is a bit less interesting to me than modern-day Japan. Not a knock, I’m glad to play Persona in another skin, but it seems like they chose something pretty generic this time around.
I’m sure there are a handful more twists and turns to come, even being in the final dungeon. I’m eager to level up my party and use their most broken skills, the combat is a highlight for sure. I’m also excited to see how individual story-lines wrap up, less-so the overarching narrative.
Do you like Persona or old-school RPG turn-based combat? Play this game!
Finished Outer Wilds a couple of weeks ago, now I’m starting Echoes of the Eye DLC stuff, definitely not as good as the base game so far, but I don’t really have much time to play.
Alan Wake 2 DLC - Just finished this weekend. The first DLC set were cute vignettes, and the second DLC was very much more interesting to me from a world / universe building perspective.
Lords of the Fallen (2023) - Grabbed this a while ago but couldn’t beat the first boss for some reason and just couldn’t get into it. Started again after seeing its PS5 Pro Enhanced, and it feels much better, enemy placement feels better (though maybe a little too few now), and I beat the first boss second try. Doing a STR build and I’m several bosses deep now and really enjoying it.
Inscryption - My current Steam Deck game. I just got to Act 3 on my second playthrough, and enjoying the mechanics, but not really vibing with the setting. Willing to give it more time as it is slowly unraveling an interwoven story.
Inscryption is really amazing! Played it on my ROG Ally. No spoilers, but I loved act 1 the most. The sound design of the prospector boss fight is genuinely so good. Act 3 was difficult for me to get through, though.
The narrative was really interesting, and I think it's worth seeing to the end.
I've been "playing" X4, this time with the amazing Star Wars: Interworlds mod.
I say "playing" because there are large spans of time, as with Dwarf Fortress, where I walk away and let the simulation run unattended for hours.
A great game and a great mod. I haven't played SW:I in almost two years, are they still making good progress?
I've been meaning to pick up X4 again but it'll probably be a bit before I can.
It still continues along. No story but a lot more ships and factions, I suspect. I only got into the game a few months ago after having had a hard time getting past the awful UX. Once I did, great game!
Taking me a few tries and restarts to comprehend X4's impenetrable UI. I've played Microprose classics in my time with utterly dense and information-rich UIs, but man this is something else. But I can definitely see there's a game in there.
I think I finally figured out how the trade overlay works as well as setting ship RoE. And don't tell me I have new messages while burying the actual mailbox at least 3 screens deep.
kuertee's whole set of AI mods is an oasis of sanity especially the Sector Explorer one as the default AI is so bad at uncovering the fog of war. Now I can have a proper scout that I don't have to micromanage.
Which kuertee mod are you referring to? I've used Sector Explorer.
Sadly, the trading AI and combat AIs are pretty bad. And the mods for these make them little better. For instance, I'm often amazed and frustrated how often my capital ships fail to present their most powerful firing arcs to their intended target. Instead, they'll just seemingly meander in a Brownian motion sort of way, firing whatever weapons happen to be pointed the right way.
Trading? Ugh. I still can't entirely understand how to get this to work right—particularly when trying to set up a network of dependencies between factories: gas and ore refining sending materials to intermediate factories sending to finishing factories sending to wharfs and shipyards. Do I put the traders on the receiving factory so they pull what they need? On the sending factory so they push? Pulling makes more sense as I can then control what sector and faction I pull from. But, sure I could do similar with pushing by restricting sector travel as well.
Oh, and you want to limit who you're trading with? Well, aren't you in luck! You can go to ANOTHER menu under that little person icon, and set up Blacklists for... god damn near everything. And then you have to give yourself repetitive stress injuries clicking through all of the ships that you have to reconfigure (maybe at least 4 button clicks per ship nevermind finding where in the UI to click!) their sector travel blacklist.
Oh, and all of this doesn't let you designate a single #$%@#%!@%ing station, or group of stations, that you want to forward materials to. Would that really be so hard? A UI where you set shipping targets? And break your output into percentages of which station gets how much? And then let the AI determine how to route trade ships to ensure that the distribution bears up in real time as much as possible?
Of course, more menus! LOLOLOLOLOLSOB
While there's the Deadtater trade mod, nope. That's still pretty opaque. There are a few more trading mods but, nope, also still pretty opaque. Oh, and apart form Deadtater, they'll bring your game utterly to its knees. At least Deadtater optimized his code for performance.
All I want is the game to have some #%@^#@ing UX so that I can automate away systems in the game once I've established them. There's a blueprint system already for stations. GREAT! Now can we have that for basically everything else please????
Or maybe they'll just do it (slightly) better in X5. Though they haven't started on X5 yet, with X4 being on version 7.0 and climbing.
It's ok though. When X5 comes out, it will likely be completely unplayable for at least a couple of years as the modders need to once again fill in all of the gaps that the developers, in their infinite cruelty, will decide to leave. Again.
PS I feel like I just did my own version of Yahtzee from the now defunct Zero Punctuation review series.
Argh I was confusing mod authors. kuertee's mod is KUDA AI tweaks. Has fixes like making capital ships inch forward until they're in optimal range so they don't melee the Xenon K that just popped up at the jump gate with a raiding party, ready to delete my miners while I scramble because I forgot to set all my frigate's flak turrets to "fire at fighters first"
Agree on fronts and I haven't delved deep into stations and full supply lines yet.
Friend and I have been playing Turtle WoW the last few days and while it's interesting what they've done and expanded on, it also feels amateurish at times but I guess that was to be expected. I've leveled through the High Elf area and am already level 15 when it ought to be about 10 for the first area. Apparently there's a 2x XP gain on our server, and the other server has 1x as default - not very easy to have known but it's alright.
This new area feels really fresh though, and it's definitely keeping my interest for longer than if it was real vanilla. To be fair I played that for a month or two in 2019, then ~2021, then SoD for like 3-4 months over last winter. So even though I've had more than my fill of classic, Turtle WoW still grabbed me a bit! Will see how it goes now that I'm out of this new leveling area, but it seems promising even though my expectations were definitely too high. I guess people praised it a bit too much for what I feel it actually is.
What is Turtle WoW?
I'm envisioning vanilla WoW, but every character looks like Franklin.
It's a fanmade overhaul of vanilla with a sprinkle of new things which are close to the lore. Goblins (old models) and High Elves (Dire Maul elves alliance race) as additional races and a few extra classes available for other races but sticking close to the spirit of vanilla, which is nice.
You might have seen the post about the Unreal 5 overhaul they're working on recently:
https://tildes.net/~games/1jz9/vanilla_world_of_warcraft_will_soon_be_available_in_unreal_5_on_a_private_server
Honest the High Elf area is a bit shit and amateurish is definitely the word for it. I started a Dwarf Priest some time ago and ran him over there to try it out as a new area, but enemies were packed to tightly, spawned to quickly and it was just an overall annoying experience, so I went back to Dun Morogh and did that for what must be the 100th time.
That said, my Priest is at 35 now and all the other new stuff has felt pretty good; seems that they've just overtuned the starting areas (haven't tried the Goblins). But I don't play super often anyway, usually only when I get the itch, which is usually when I'm sick; nothing satisfies me quite the same way as sitting in bed on my laptop and playing WoW when I'm sick.
Hah, well thanks for the validation! Also, that there is only one graveyard at the one end of the zone is insane.
Would you happen to know what level range the other added areas are?
Can't answer that directly, as I haven't been to any other new, new zones. Everything else I've encountered so far between my two characters (30 and 35 respectively) have both been stuff integrated into old zones and it's all been pretty great.
By pretty great I mean that it's integrated into the rest of Vanilla WoW perfectly in that they're the style of quests that generally have you running all over the zone to complete tasks, just like the original game. So far the stuff that sticks out in my mind is the new Alliance stuff in Stonetalon and Ashenvale, as well as a really cool new town/questing area in Wetlands, way up in the hills. All that stuff felt perfect.
That sounds good and will definitely check out that Wetlands stuff. Have a lot of nostalgia for the zone
Cc @X08
I've been looking at trying out Turtle WoW with my brother. He offered to pay for a sub for me to play Classic with him, but I just don't have the time to play enough that I would feel his money was well spent.
I'm interested in the content additions they've added, but honestly I'd be fine having a nostalgia trip for a bit, playing through Mulgore or Durotar again.
Last week I restarted Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for the third time, after abandoning it in the first act twice before because the game seemed incomprehensible and crazy difficult to me.
This time I have almost 300 hours of Baldur's Gate 3 under my belt, and I am loving this game now. When I played it before I didn't really bother with turn-based mode, because the RTWP (real-time with pause) mode was so much faster. This was a huge mistake -- it's incredibly difficult to learn how the combat system works in real-time mode because it's so damn complex, but turn-based mode makes it much more obvious how rounds, combat rolls, and the action economy work. (And I never even realized opportunity attacks were a thing before lol)
I'm in act 2 now, level 6, playing on normal and the game actually feels pretty easy now -- I'm thinking about cranking the difficulty up a bit.
The writing isn't the best, but the characters and plot are growing on me the deeper into the game I get. It's a crazy amount of reading though -- if nothing else I wish they broke up more of the text into incrementally displayed paragraphs, because the game really likes to just dump massive walls of text on you constantly.
I also played a couple rounds of Deadlock last night. I'm terrible at MOBAs, including this one, but I really like the in-game community build system in this one, that was a great idea. I'm going to try to stick with it and see if I get better, feels like now's a good opportunity to get into it while the hero roster is still reasonably small.
Word of advice - Act 2 has some parts coming up where you probably don't want the difficulty cranked up. I would recommend that you keep it on Normal until you hit Act 3. Decide then, but probably not before then.
Oh thanks for the heads up! I'll leave it as-is for now then and enjoy the power trip while it lasts, haha.
My spouse and I just started a 2-player campaign in BG3 last night. Both of us have played solo plenty but this is our first time trying local co-op.
First impressions are mixed. We generally like the split screen which joins into one when we are nearby. It’s fun to strategize our item use and combat aloud together. But this mode really does feel tacked on, at least as far as the narrative is concerned. We basically have two separate parties. She has “her” NPC follower and I have “mine,” and neither of us can even converse with the others’ NPCs. Sure, we can reassign control of each character to different players but it’s a real pain to juggle them like that. And there doesn’t seem to be any way for my spouse’s character to interact with mine… we just feel weirdly disconnected. It’s like we’re playing two separate stories in parallel.
We’re still quite early in Act I so maybe we’ll figure out some rhythms or tricks to make things cohere better moving forward.
I finally got around to buying Cyberpunk 2077, so have been playing that a lot over the last few weeks. After playing the Witcher 3 and watching the teaser for Cyberpunk, I couldn't wait for it to be released. Then there was a really long and agonizing wait. And then they announced it would be first-person only, and my enthusiasm died a little. It was a bit of a disappointing decision for me because I like my RPGs to be 3rd person, or at least having a choice, like Skyrim/Fallout. And then the game released, and it was a shitshow and we all know how mired in controversy it was for a while.
But, the reviews eventually got to a stage where I thought I'd jump in and finally play it. And I have to say, it's an amazing game. The world of Night City, the quests, the acting, the graphics, the mature themes... it's all top notch, and I think CDPR are still an amazing studio. I have fast travelled once just to see what it was like, but I haven't since. It's just so fun to drive around or walk around Night City and see what happens.
Of course, there are flaws, and maybe it could never live up to the hype it had generated. But I personally think it's a towering achievement, and I can't wait for a sequel.
If CDPR is listening, which I'm sure they're not, one disappointment I have is the lack of romance options. Unless you play as a bi-character, you only have one option. That's just not enough choice. This kind of power-fantasy RPG game needs romance options in my opinion. And the one romantic storyline I have done so far is really well done. So, I would just urge them to add more next time.
A+ Recommended
What platform are you running it on? I have an Xbox One S, and while it technically runs on that machine, I'm a little apprehensive to spend the money until I get some kind of confirmation that it runs smoothly enough to play.
I'm on PC. It runs really well for me, but I can't vouch for what it's like on console.
For what it's worth, I played it on an original xbox one to start and while the graphics were ok and there were some bugs and lower frame rates, I still enjoyed it. That said, I replayed it after getting an xbox series x a year ago and the experience was much better. Sometimes, you don't realize what you're missing until you have it. I would still recommend it on an xbox one as I still enjoyed it then, but the newer systems are a big upgrade. I wouldn't be able to go back and enjoy it.
I’m back in FFXIV, after a year long lull. The vibes are so cozy, I truly love that game. It helps that I’m playing on a brand new ps5 and oled tv!
Currently in the beginning of the Stormblood expansion and taking it slow. Doing a couple of side quests when unlocking new environments to get to know the local people and the conditions they’re living in.
Still a bit stressed when going into a dungeon party, but thank god for MTQcapture and her awesome guides.
If there’s anyone here also playing: I’m on twintania. Always open to do a dungeon run with friendly faces!
(Forgot to add: originally played as a monk to
Lvl 75, now back as a dancer also lvl 75 because it’s a little easier. )
I opened an account about a year ago and started playing on the free trial. I enjoyed it, though I suspect the beginning parts aren't what people are talking about when they rave about the game. The quests seemed kind of bland and boring on the whole–at least where i was playing–but the crafting and jobs was great. I choose a kind of bad time to jump in, because they were set to expand the free trial a couple of months after I started it, so I decided to put it down and wait for the expansion.
I reinstalled it the other day and jumped in, and discovered I had completely lost the plot on controls. I could summon my mount, but despite wracking my brains, couldn't figure out how to actually ride the thing. A player was near the crystal I had set as home months ago, and kind of hovered around me, probably bemused at my bizarre flailing. Oddly for me, this made me embarrassed, so I logged out and haven't gone back.
I wonder if this has something to do with age or something. I will often put long games like RPGs down when I lose my initial enthusiasm, and then feel utterly lost in control schemes when I come back, and feel the need to start over so I can be tutorialized again. I think I'm going to start calling this the White Orchard Syndrome, because I've probably played through the tutorial map of Witcher 3 six or seven times now, and still haven't completed the main story.
I’ve always loved the vibes of the game, so I’ve been into it practically from the beginning. It was only because I read about the game on Reddit that I started seeing the flaws in the story. Or that I started playing faster because the expansions after a realm reborn were said to be so much better.
I’ve played through ARR and Heavensward and I’m currently in stormblood. The story is definitely better. More fleshed out. More mature. A realm reborn now feels like a long series of ‘now kill this primal!’ loops. Loops I enjoyed very much!
When I came back to the game after a year of not playing I was anxious to start my first dungeon. Insecure about my control mastery. Not knowing how AOE attacks are telegraphed anymore. But the community is so welcoming. As a newbie, I feel like I receive more player commendations than when I was more fluent in the game.
If you enjoy the vibes of the game as much as I did, I would say: just hang around. It doesn’t matter what you do (there is so much to do) or how good you are (being bad might get you player commendations like it got me!). And there is so much content out there for new players to learn the game. Especially on YouTube.
I feel very, very seen right now.
I got fed up trying to get ePSXe working on linux, so I threw in the towel and got the android version. Been playing random PS1 games for about a day now.
Duckstation is the PSX emulator that emudeck installs. Maybe it will work better for you.
I'm going to give this a try, thank you for the suggestion.
MY DUDE. You have relieved me of so much stress, duckstation works FLAWLESSLY on my linux pc.
Thank you, thank you!
Glad I could help! Happy gaming!
For another alternative check your distro's software repo for PCSXR (or PCSX-Redux for the currently maintained fork). Have been using it for years without issue.
I wasn't enthused by the game trailers, but after seeing someone play, I grabbed Dragon Age Veilguard and finished it over a couple of weeks. 50 out of 52 achievements, some 70 hours played. It was really fun!
I've played all the DA games so far, though some more than others. I'm probably in the minority that hated Solas in Inquisition so I never touched the later DLC... Though I loved the Descent one.
All the game systems are different in Veilguard, and I found some parts of the combat to be frustrating, though with careful planning and synergy, you could still punch up quite a few levels.
The rest of it was really fun!
I have a 75% finished playthrough of Inquisition I need to finish before I move on to Veilguard. I wanted to play the Trespasser DLC before Veilguard, so started a new game of Inquisition a long time ago. But I ran out of steam and have moved on to other games. I'll get back to it at some point!
I got lost in the sea of Anbernic portable retro gaming devices this week. It all started with some Steam Link research and a sale advertisement (I think), and it led me to a myriad of youtube channels, including the excellent Retro Game Corps, and Tech Dweeb. I was originally looking for stocking stuffers, but the realization that modern devices are now capable of playing Gamecube and Wii set me on a quest to find my perfect device. My goal became finding the perfect little device to stream light PC games (Slay the Spire) while also being able to play my favorite GC game of all time (Wind Waker).
I was concerned about the screen size for streaming, so I decided to try hooking one of my Xbox BT controllers to my phone and try streaming via Steam Link. I played Slay the Spire for a few sessions this way, and it wasn't too bad. I then tried No Man's Sky to see how that was. It was definitely playable, but the screen was way too small to see all of the text on screen. So I had confirmation that I could reliably stream some simpler games via Steam Link. I also tested Moonlight during this time and found it pretty good too.
So I started thinking about the Gamecube angle. What would be the perfect set of specs to split the difference between the 4:3 aspect needed for GC, while still enabling some Steam game streaming? I pored over reviews for days, and had settled on a device (Anbernic 406h), and was in the final stages of justifying the stretch from stocking stuffer to "actually this is a bit expensive".
But as I was thinking over the final device specs, I came to the realization that my phone specs are actually not far off from a lot of the android handhelds offered by Anbernic. 🤔 So I fired up the Dolphin emulator on my phone, and about 20 min of tweaking later I was playing Wind Waker at full native resolution with no slowdown!
After confirming that I basically already had the gaming device that could do all the things I wanted, I now circled back to YouTube to find the perfect controller to complete the experience. The separate Xbox controller was more than fine, but having to prop up my phone was not great. As it happens, Retro Game Corps had me covered there as well with a review of the GameSir G8 Plus.
So, after many days of research and a lot of twists and turns, I finally had my stocking stuffer. In the meantime, I've been enjoying some Wind Waker on my janky propped phone setup. 😂
You might consider something less powerful, if only as a compliment to stuff you already have. I have had a Steam Deck since June 2022 and picked-up a Miyoo Mini in August 2022, which made it an awesome compliment to the bigger, more powerful system. The Mini could come with me everywhere because it's hugely pocketable, which means I could pull it out while my kids play at the park, while I'm waiting at the Dentist, etc.
Although I've actually replaced my Mini recently with a 405m, because I wanted something a bit more powerful, but still pocketable. Mine does some Gamecube (can run Paper Mario and WW) and some PS2 (been playing Dragon Quest 5 on it recently), but those are just bonuses for me.
Oh for sure I can see the benefits of having a dedicated device. I'm just glad I realized that it wasn't as revolutionary as I first thought, and avoided paying top price for something I basically already had in my pocket. I think I will still keep an eye out for sales on the 406H. Anbernic puts out a ton of handhelds, so I probably won't have to wait too long. :)
Definitely not. I waited over a year after release on the 405m because $200+ was way too much for it. Eventually got it around August/September of this year for $138 off AliExpress.
I definitely did similar with my phone for a good long time, even have had a controller for I don't know how long.
Super Meat Boy: It doesnt play like a 14 year old game. I realized I never beat it and picked it back up. I got all A+ for completing World 1 under par, and I believe got all the band-aids. I'll go back to World 2 to further de-rust. It's also making me want to go back to 100% Celeste, and then Shovel Knight's earlier base game.
Balatro: I have enough Jokers unlocked that I can start doing proper builds and winning. I blew one game yesterday by selling a joker. The thing with losing this game is it happens incredibly slowly once you realize you wont make this blind, but have to play the hand out and hope you ar least get some goodies, then try again. I did beat my first blind after a few obsessive days, and seem to be able to stack things well enough togl get near the end. I like to think about it like Vampire Survivors where it's as much about what you unlock as it is about what you select allowing you to really beat the game.
Rogue Legacy/Rogue Legacy 2: I never played these apparently, and bought them. They're fun platformers, but I missed them despite my brothers having played the first one.
I've been deprogramming myself from my neckbeardy adhesion to a strict definition of "roguelike." I felt it was really diluted as a genre name, but the above two titles have helped me see that many games have the spirit of the genre preserved in different form factors. Jumping into Balatro or Vampire Survivors fills me with the same sense of trepidation and curiosity as TOME4 or DCSS or Jupiter Hell (need to dust that one off too), which I feel are closer to "traditional" roguelikes. Basically I'm finding a whole new section of the buffet to eat at.
Ooh my partner and I have been playing quite a bit of Balatro. Love how you can really blow up the score. I got to my first game in the Es last week and that was a rush. I just unlocked a game changing joker a few days ago so I'm pretty excited to see it pop up one of these next plays. Lately I've been restarting the game until I see decent starting double tags and decide in the first 3-4 antes if I want to restart.
Still Black Ops 6 lol. Besides that, I said last week that I was excited for Stalker 2 and Flight Sim 2024.... welp.... Both have had pretty disastrous launches. I decided I'm holding on Stalker 2 until some more patches come out and the game is in a better place, but I'm really excited by the bones of the game and do want to play it. It seems to be in a Cyberpunk 2077 situation, where the base of what's there could make for quite a good game, but it needed more time in the oven. As for flight sim, I did get a chance to play a bit. There are some definite improvements over 2020. The UI is so much better, the streaming data (vs having hundreds of gigabytes on your SSD) is working well for me, though it isn't for everyone, having jobs and purpose in the sim now instead of just making your own flight paths is nice, the flight model is improved, the sim is gorgeous, etc. It's a nice product, but it also needs a little more time to bake. Unless you're obsessed with flying, you can probably wait a few weeks or months to see what gets ironed out here. That said, I'm off work all week, so I'll likely be sinking some time in here. I was hoping that would be Stalker 2, but oh well...
I have my sights on playing The Black Parade for Thief, having installed it on my Steam Deck, but simply have not had any time in the last week or so and really lacking the patience for such a slow burn. I do intend to start it sooner than later (hopefully this week?), but we'll see as my week is already as busy as last week and weekend was for me, so...
I have been playing Dragon Quest V PS2 when time allows. Playing it via emulation on a pocket sized handheld just makes it very easy to pick up and play for 30 minutes here and there, so that's what I've mostly been doing. I think I'm around 6-hours in so far, having just completed the opening of the game where you're a child; Dragon Quest is a very chill, cozy game that is just damn easy to play. I dislike random battles, but I'm approaching it on its own terms, so it's not bad and it makes it easy to just mindlessly grind when I need to.
I've also been putting in 30-minutes here and there on Daggerfall Unity. I've been playing off and on since earlier this year and I do very much enjoy it, though I'm "bad" at it for lack of a better term. The game is very heavily skewed toward those who are capable of roleplaying and figuring out who their character is; I suffer from a lack of imagination, so I often feel pretty directionless and don't really ever have a sense of who my character actually is, so I think the game tends to be a little less fun for me. I like having some direction and letting a game help define who I am, so when I need to think of it all my own, I just struggle. I am hoping to fix that about myself though, so I do keep playing, as I enjoy existing in this world that is indifferent to me.
If you're struggling with roleplaying, here's something to try.
Pick a character you love from another piece of media, then literally dump then into the game you are playing and ask the question "what would they do?"
Example, let's take Scrooge McDuck. He'd take every cent of money from every person and every corner of the planet and make a huge pile of cash at his hideout, to the detriment of everyone else. Huge evil guy, but man that'd be a cool pile of money.
Or take Ned Flanders from the Simpsons, he'd be such a nice and naive guy, he'd let every quest giver take advantage of him, but he'd always do the "right thing". He'd also obviously take the religious path where possible and defend God to the best of his abilities.
Roleplaying is easier when you've got a touchstone to ask yourself these questions. It might feel like "cheating" but don't worry, its not. Its just a method to give you a springboard and if you're feeling confident you can start to define your own unique character from that touchstone.
You can also somewhat randomly create a character using something like the personality rules and tables from DnD. You can dice roll for each characteristic if you don't want to choose. I've done this to whip up some quick outlines and have brought some fun characters to the table.
I'll second kaffo's suggestion, it is fun and good for building out those RP skills.
Edit: I also like the text accompanying the tables in my 5e book for inspiring what these should mean, the text under Personal Characteristics here is similar enough.
Been playing Shadow Generations since it released a month ago honestly. It's one of the best Sonic games in years and I've been having an absolute blast with it, especially when it comes to time trialing some of the levels. Other than that, I've mostly been playing Black Ops 6, which is mostly just a slightly-more-refined CoD game than the last ones. The new movement is a lot of fun, but it is still mostly just a junk-food game for me.
Someone talked me into finally playing a Fire Emblem game so I've started Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. It's my first ever tactical RPG and it's quite fun, although every one of the first four or five chapters introduces a new mechanic to the point I felt overwhelmed. Mechanics such as putting two characters who have a good relationship next to each other, you can break walls and shoot over them, certain types of terrain offer certain advantages, you can sometimes talk to an enemy and have them join your side, the weapon triangle, the magic triangle, etc.
I'm having a blast playing it, although I've noticed weapons can break and that has been making the battles more difficult. That said, the story in this game is a bit on the light side as the majority of the time you are on the screen moving people around to fight each other. The story is mainly told between missions and it's kind of "meh" to me. That said, the animations of characters fighting are very smooth, especially for a Game Boy Advance title from 2004.
I'm also getting back into Sea of Stars on Game Pass. This game is truly special. It's an homage to Chrono Trigger with how it plays, how it looks, how the score was composed, etc. It's a wonderful game that takes you back to a simpler time of gaming, of your life, of the world itself. I honestly want to buy a physical copy to support the developers, but money is tight right now so I can't. But to anyone reading this who liked Chrono Trigger, you will love this game.
On my backburner is The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Red Dead Redemption. More like on hold, but whatever.
I've been playing The Last Plague: Blight. It's a brutal crafting survival game with a lot of attention to detail.
The combat is minimal, just some wild animals you can scare away or hunt but the resource gathering and management takes a lot of planning. Just cutting firewood requires chopping the tree down, cutting it into logs, picking up the logs and setting them upright, and then chopping those into firewood. Then since you can only hold on to about 4 at a time you have to make several trips back to your camp. Eventually you can get better tools and carts to speed it up but doing that while managing food, water, shelter from rain and the ever growing blight makes for quite a challenge!
Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers
I gave it a shot because it was on sale 30% off. It has a lot of the type of nonsense that Balatro has, buuuut in the hour or so I played I couldn't get into it. The core Blackjack part is a lot less fun to me. A lot of the effects seemed to just make things more random...and your opponents could throw out all kinds of random stuff at you too. Not into it. Refunded it.
BRUTAL KATANA
Short & sweet parkour with a sword game. $5CAD. You can run on walls, and floating statue heads appear along your path that you need to clear to finish the level. Get 0-3 stars depending how fast you finish the level. There's almost no story. I completed the 24 levels in about 2.5 hours. Most of them I got 0-1 star on. 3 stars on none of them, not even the first level. There are probably some shortcuts you need to figure out, like in Neon White (except without the hints). The wall running can be finnicky at times, as can slicing through the heads. You've got to have really good timing and try hard not to lose momentum because it's hard to hit things with how quickly you accelerate and decelerate. The default first song on the soundtrack got annoying kind of fast but thankfully you can switch between a few playlists of difference electronic subgenres (dance, house, drum & bass, something else).
420BLAZEIT 2: GAME OF THE YEAR -=Dank Dreams and Goated Memes=- [#wow/11 Like and Subscribe] Poggerz Edition
It's montageparodies: The Game (FPS). Whenever you kill an enemy,
annoyingdank memeshitpops up on your screen. You can unlock guns by completing a bunch of extra objectives in a level. Doesn't run thaaat well on Steam Deck, had to turn graphics down. There's a bunch of silly jokes about the Illuminati, aliens, and conspiracies (the earth is flat, Australia don't real). I am enjoying it thus far.Celeste
I finally came back to try the (mod content) D-sides again, after having a particularly smooth run of the last screen of Farewell gave me a confidence boost. Whatever mojo I had carried through and I was able to finally get past the screen on 1D I was stuck on for a loooong time. I found 2D and 3D were actually much easier...not that they were cakewalks, but I didn't get totally stuck on them. I still have had no luck getting the 3B golden berry. I've gotten to the 'boss' section a couple of times.
Balatro
I'm partway through Golden Stake on mobile...nearly caught up to my Steam save. My goal was to do it before the big update in the new year and it looks like I will handily get there...but man, I thought it was going to go a lot faster after I had blitzed collecting all the jokers. I got stuck on Black Deck Orange stake for a while. Of all the decks that one feels the most like you need a lucky free joker tag early on to get you going.
I've been playing Balatro on mobile too. At first I thought $10 was too much for a phone game but it turns out I prefer it on mobile and don't play it on PC anymore. It's strange because I've never been into mobile or handheld gaming before.
I didn't know about the big update! I'm looking forward to that now.
I'm mainly driving casually around the new island in The Crew Motorfest and enjoying the custom mode races. I always felt as though there just wasnt enough unique sp racing content for me to burn through while listening to podcasts or whatever. Custom mode clears that up and i just finished the Made in Japan 2 playlist which then opens up a new Rivals mode that looks like a neat activity. Darn shame it can't be more akin to Shadow of Mordor with dynamic characters but its still pretty sweet and inventive compared to Horizon's constant churn of ideas from three games ago.
Ive actually really enjoyed a lot of novel aspects of TC:M, i think it does an awesome job of differentiating itself from the competition with fun, albeit sometimes frustrating handling model while being visually impressive at the same time. It even bucks the Ubisoft game model trend. And now theyve taken the time and effort to bolt an entirely new island onto the main map, which means you can actually use the dlc! No segmenting the population or anything. Wow, ive dreamed of this day since i stopped playing Burnout Paradise, crazy how jts taken this long. Real shame on Horizon, especially since that was one of their talking points for the latest one.
Non-racing wise i demolished Night Springs dlc for Alan Wake 2 and am gearing up for The Lake House. Night springs was awesome, i couldnt stop grinning during the waitress's episode, it was just so funny and charming. Cant believe I didn't know this was out for so long.
Been playing all the Castlevania Metroidvania post-Symphony titles the last few months, the worst i can say for any of them, Circle of the Moon in particular, is that it was OK, all have been at the very least OK to fantastic, with my favorite being Portrait of Ruin which is by far my favorite, closely followed by Order of Ecclesia, but have loved them all.
Now, after finishing Dawn of Sorrow like a week ago, went into Bloodstained, which is the non-Castlevania Castlevania, and which i started but never finished due to distractions and computer issues followed by procrastination after it was Kickstarter delivered. It's 3D but that's very much not an obstacle, playability is very good. And man, i think this might be IGA's biggest game, the castle is bigger than those in all the other games. Heard they're already working on a sequel, hope it comes soon.
I have recently wished to play a dungeon crawler, so I gave Operencia a try and I have loved the first level. It was super good and felt way better than both installments of Grimrock. Sadly it went downhill from there. Forest area was passable and if I returned to another dungeon, it would have been refreshing, but the authors decided to instead make levels increasingly more open air and less and less dungeon-like. I kinda lost interest as the levels started to expand in size and instead of exploring I found myself hauling quest items.
I still think the first area is super fresh and I highly recommend giving the game a try, if only to get a feeling of what can be done and for inspiration in your own game-making efforts.
I have been playing Turtle WoW, which is the most popular Vanilla+ World of Warcraft private server. I am enjoying my time there. I noticed that the lack of of a subscription makes me play in a more relaxed fashion, and the whole vibe of the server is very much "stop and smell the roses". Turtle WoW seems very focused on making leveling itself an event and I really like that. I added it to my Steam and configured everything to play with my Xbox controller. I have a large monitor and playing WoW in my bed with a gamepad is so relaxing it may prove to be addicting.
I’ve been playing PUBG for about a month now, and I honestly wish I’d tried it sooner. Coming from Fortnite, I was skeptical—the graphics seemed outdated, and I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy the slower pace. But that pace is exactly what I’ve come to love. Every match feels intense, and it’s rewarding to outsmart opponents rather than relying on just fast reflexes.
The variety of strategies you can use is great, and even when I don’t win, I often come away with some great moments. The game offers an experience that feels more grounded and tactical compared to Fortnite. It’s less forgiving, but that challenge makes it all the more satisfying when you do well.
The game isn’t perfect, but I'm enjoying it.