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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.
Much like @smiles134, I too went dumpster diving through my Humble Bundle entitlements the other day. I came up with Gas Station Simulator.
My first job was as a fuel attendant at a gas station. My first job out of college was as a price book database administrator for a small gas station/c-store chain. I unfortunately know the gas station business quite well. I get the impression that at least some of the developers of Gas Station Simulator do as well.
GSS is a quintessential eurojank small business simulator a la Power Wash Simulator, TCG Card Shop Simulator, Lawn Mower Simulator (which is also aging in my Humble Bundle cellar), and a million others. I wouldn't call it the best entry in the genre–Power Wash Sim or the Euro/American Truck Sims probably take that spot–but I've been having fun with it.
Progression is straightforward: you start with a single fuel dispenser and a laughably tiny tank, and space for a couple of shelves in your c-store. You can then take your profits from fuel and invest them in shelves from which to sell snacks and soft drinks. You need to restock the shelves periodically, and you do so by ordering product through a PC next to the register (this is also where you order fuel from the distributor).
The game gives you progression goals such as "serve 30 customers at the cash register and 50 cars at the pump," which eventually direct you to "level up" your gas station by making a one-time infrastructure investment. These level ups give you more space for shelves and fuel dispensers, as well as open up the opportunity for smaller infrastructure investments to start providing other services and products such as a repair garage and car wash.
Each service has several associated minigames you must perform to complete sales, and often the gameplay of these minigames imitates other more successful sims. The garage games are stripped-down versions of the gameplay of the Car Mechanic Simulators, and the car wash is a simplified Power Wash Simulator minigame. At endgame, your goal is to buy expensive roadside attractions such as the World's Largest Rocking Chair, to turn your gas station in the desert into a tourist trap. That's as far as I've gotten, but I think that's the jist of it.
These types of games are usually made with off-the-shelf game engines like Unity or older Unreal versions, and are usually developed by tiny European developers little more than bedroom developers. Physics jank is not only to be expected, it's a core component of their appeal, and GSS follows proudly in this tradition.
The cash register minigame is lousy with physics bugs that throw products all over the place and cause you to miss out on accuracy bonuses. The fuel customers have to perform a little superstitious pigeon dance before you are allowed to fuel up their cars, and often their hair assets are on sideways until they complete the dance. Sometimes customers leaving your parking lots will collide with customers driving through to the garage or car wash at just the right angle that neither are able to move forward on their paths, causing them to sit there spinning wheels and honking like NYC taxi drivers with severe anger management problems.
All perfectly normal and expected bugs in a game like this, but the solution to this last one is where my opinion of the game shifted from "forgettable" to "amusing little time-waster." In order to clear traffic snarls or right cars that've been flipped by one of the numerous physics bugs, you need to push a button marked with a UFO. At that point a short cinematic plays of a stereotypical pulp fiction UFO flying up and shooting a beam that "abducts" everyone on the station, resetting your customers and delivery vehicles. It's really much more charming and amusing than it has any right to be.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is about time management. Later station levels allow you to hire helpers that will handle one or two of the regular duties of operation, but at first, it's just you pumping gas, scanning product, stocking shelves and ordering products and fuel. I don't know if people will eventually get so impatient as to leave without being served–I'm just that good–but at the very least, poor time management will cost you profit. This is where the sim most resembles actually running a gas station, as the gameplay is eerily reminiscent of some of my busiest experiences working in such a store.
I have a few gripes, but none are really game-breaking issues. Inventory space is oddly balanced, so that you often have to choose between buying two products of which you're out of stock just because you don't have the warehouse space to receive them both. There might be an inventory bug that hides product on the shelves, as I currently have scores of alcohol products listed in my inventory, but the shelves appear to be only 1/3 full and there's nothing sitting in the warehouse. There's also a minigame of sorts where you need to remove piles of sand left behind by sandstorms using a small backhoe or else the idiot customer AI will get hung up on them and demolish your customer churn. This minigame is just awful. The dirt mover handles like an obese drunken hog, and sand piles are so hard to spot that you'll most likely only notice them after a customer has high-centered and your traffic situation needs a little extraterrestrial assistance.
In all though, I recommend it for people who have a fondness for eurojank simulators. You can probably expect about 10 hours of main story progression if you go slow and steady, and maybe another 5 if you want to see absolutely everything. They do offer expansion DLCs, some of them free, but mostly these seem badly overpriced. I'd say look for the base game at about the $10-$15 USD price point, then pick up DLCs at about $5 apiece when they go on sale.
I enjoyed the base game, but once I got to the "end" I felt no reason to go further. And that's not a bad thing - the grind was enjoyable enough to keep my attention until it was over.
That was precisely my experience as well. I didn't even really feel the need to buy the dachshund mountain statue or the World's Largest Rocking Chair or any of that.
Been playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Holy shit.
This game is everything I have wanted from an indy game. Everything about the gameplay perfectly encapsulates Indiana Jones. The scrappiness and the comedy of the action is just kinda built into the system in the way the enemies ragdoll over railings or when a big guy catches the hammer you through at him.
Not to mention the story is pretty good. I just watched Last Crusade so in comparison the writing is a little bit off but it's still good and Troy Baker does a great job as Indy.
Also the graphics are amazing and it finally forced me to upgrade my GPU to be able to run it a bit better.
I hope it sold well enough for a sequel because I would love to be able to drive vehicles (other then a boat) and get into car chases in the big open maps that the game puts you in.
I'm a little surprised you're the only one commenting here talking about it. I was expecting a lot more people in this thread to be playing it. I'm planning to pick it up this week and start this weekend. Have heard nothing but good things about it and I'm so excited!
I think it's probably cause Tildes attracts the more patient gamer types and it's a brand new game but somebody was talking about the new dragon age so idk. But yes highly recommend even at full price you get your money's worth
I think there are a few of us who hop onto new games pretty quick. I usually do, but it feels like a weird release time.
The...taint? Does that make New Year's Eve the year's butthole? Or is it Christmas? Bah humbug.
I also loved the Indy movies and have been disappointed with the IP. I picked up the game after positive reviews came in. I'm only an hour in but I'm really enjoying it so far.
Running on a 4070ti at 1440P and it's running great on ultra, after turning RT back off. It's my first RT capable card so I was excited to try it but it couldn't keep up, hovering around 40fps even with frame generation and dlss. With RT off it runs like a dream.
Idk I feel like I usually see several people in these threads talking about brand new games. It definitely skews more towards older games/patient gamers, but I feel like it's a healthy mix of new and old usually.
I posted about it last week when it came out! It's not quite "holy shit" for me but it is very good. It's neat how many different elements it manages to pull together into a package that just works.
Interesting. Media reviews have not been kind to it at all. I wonder about the gap here. Perhaps those reviewers trend younger and/or arenot Indy fans: perhaps mismatched expectations between the gamer and what they expect from that particular developer.
What do you mean? It's gotten a downright effusive critical reception! A mighty 87 average on Openctitic, with 100% recommending, seems pretty high especially given how skeptical people were of the trailers
I must've found the 13% unknowingly. I saw the "Very Positive" on Steam this evening.
It's almost universally acclaimed but I would be interested to see the reviewers you see not like it.
Also I think Indy has a healthy amount of Gen Z fans from their Gen X parents showing them it.
I just beat a run in Balatro for the first time. It's a very nice, small but simple and addicting game that deserves the attention it got. When you get a run with a set of jokers that synergize very well, it's magical.
I've been really enjoying the path of exile 2 early access!
There are plenty of issues that need to be ironed out, and I had a couple occasions where I might have yelled at the game... But then I got right back to it after I cooled off, lol
The game is gorgeous, they did an absolutely amazing job with the environments. I also really liked the story and can't wait to see what going to happen in the next acts once they're released
I suppose one has to be into the conventional Diablo ARPG style. I was quickly bored.
Yeah if you're not a fan of that style Path of Exile 2 doesn't really do much new to pull you in. Although I think the addition of a dodge roll really spices up combat and makes positioning a bit more important which I enjoy.
It's quite different from Diablo, but it is definitely a... Traditional? Typical? ARPG. They've done a lot of new things, but it's an ARPG
Same, here! I can't put it down.
It's all I have been doing recently besides going to work.
I've never played an ARPG besides like an hour of PoE 10 years ago. But the way I heard other people talking about PoE always piqued my interest a bit. And after hearing how much more accessible it was and just having an easier entry point, I'm getting into PoE2 and definitely enjoying it. Although I haven't had too much time to play and am only level 15, so we'll see.
A great thing about the community of content creators for path of exile is that they're all in a bit of a race to provide content, so if you get stuck you can usually find a good guide to help out or just explain the mechanics.
Of course there's also a lot of criticism and comparison to poe1, which can be quite strident
I had been waiting for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to come down in price to $30 or so before buying it. Even though I thought I would like the game, the divisive impressions it left had me questioning whether I'd like it or think it was worth my time at $70 or even $40 (not to mention I have a hard time spending that much on games in general when something like Balatro gives me more play time for much less money). It went on sale on steam for $38.99 and I was contemplating it, but then I helped my neighbor replace an axle last week and he graciously gave me a $25 gift card, so that essentially made the game around $20 after tax for me, so I did pick it up.
My first impressions in the first 5 hours or so were not great. As with most RPGs, I expected a slower first hour or even second hour, but it turned into 5 or 6 and I was fearing that's what the rest of the game would be like. The dialogue was repetitive, the story had some interesting beats, but was relatively bland, I didn't like the half linear, half open exploration they were giving me, the characters didn't have much personality yet, but the setting, scenes, and combat were saving it a bit for me.
Well... I stuck with the game a few more hours and was thoroughly rewarded for it. The game started picking up steam during and after the recruitment mission for
Character Name spoilers?
LucanisAs you can tell, my opinions of the game are now quite high after a dozen hours and I'm going to keep rolling with it, I'm in love at this point and glad I picked it up. I can easily see now why the reviews were so divisive. The quality gap between the first five hours and what I've played since then has been massive, and not to say that the game after the first 5 hours might not have issues for some players, but I feel the game doesn't leave a great first impression and that understandably soured a bunch of opinions on the game. I'm not trying to say anything like "oh the people who love it are just enlightened" but rather that it now makes sense to me how this game can have so many 10/10's as well as 6/10's. The first few hours has just terrible dialogue in some places (I think in the span of 20 minutes multiple characters said the same line about 5 times about the mcguffin or something and it's like "YEAH, BOTH ME AND MY CHARACTER KNOW, WE WERE THERE 10 MINUTES AGO"), but it got so, so much better.
I'm only a dozen hours in and I know one other complaint the game would get is how repetitive it felt towards the end. I obviously don't have feedback on that yet, but thus far, this game seems like a good recommendation on sale for fans of character driven RPGs. I do think the combat is currently fun enough to hold its own if you're here for the gameplay, though the exploration outside of combat doesn't have much in the way of difficult puzzles, just some easier ones, but some pretty scenes.
I was kinda turned away by Skill Ups not recommend review but it still sounds kinda fun I might give it a try on a deep sale too
That was a very entertaining review in its own right. I ended up watching it randomly (well the algorithm put it in front of me and I happened to click it), as someone who has never played a Dragon Age game and was unfamiliar with Skill Up.
Thanks for this review, I've had my eye on it but been hesitant due to the negative coverage. Will be trying it on sale eventually!
This was my experience as well! The first act felt like it really dragged on. In retrospect, a lot of the exploration and side stuff I did could have been done later... But I'm in the "do all possible side quests before progressing the main quest" camp, lol
I had some other small complaints, but I played for almost 60 hours, got to 50 out of 52 achievements, and had lots of fun, so definitely worth the money, imo
This was my experience. If you're really diligent with collecting echoes, you have so many by even halfway thought the game, and some are straight overpowered and render many puzzles completely meaningless.
I personally stopped playing about halfway through, because there was simply zero challenge.
I put it down when Metaphor came out and haven't picked it back up yet. Had maybe 2 dungeons left. I also felt like the game had the same problem as BotW where you stumble across puzzles in the overworld and then it's like, cool here's your reward, it's a banana that you can mix into a smoothie that you don't even need to use because the game isn't hard. Or here's 20 rupees... that you can use to buy bananas to mix into your smoothies lol.
I did appreciate the hard mode right out of the gate tho.
I'm jumping back into Dishonored 2 and restarting the game. It's been several years since I played about 30- hours and never completed it, but I'm finally feeling ready to go back, I just hope my mood holds and I can see it through this time.
One disappointing issue is that it refuses to launch on systems with AMD switchable graphics. I have a 6650 XT eGPU for my laptop and the game just flatout refuses to launch; this is apparently a Bethesda issue and with the death of Arkane, will probably never be fixed. It's pretty unfortunate, as I don't particularly want to play it on my Steam Deck.
I've also been playing Shadow of the Colossus for the first time on PS3, having known nothing about it other than it's a good game. So far I've felled three Colossi and I must say, this game has a very strong, "Are we the baddies?" vibe to it. Being commanded by a booming disembodied voice to go kill these rather (aside from their size) unthreatening looking things and then absorbing dark energy and passing out afterwards; yeah, I'm definite the villain in this story.
And, I also feel guilty. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has gone into Early Access on Steam; or maybe I should say been dumped into Early Access, having run their Kickstarters into the ground over the past ten years they've been asking for funding. My friends, who I introduced to Everquest back in 1999 are all about it, having bought it (for $40!!!) and been playing it since its release three days ago. I watched them Stream on Discord on Saturday and immediately started making fun of them for both still playing Everquest and now playing this game which is a carbon-copy rehash with no (apparent) new ideas to add to the genre; it even uses the same level-up noise from Everquest. Anyway, I continued to make fun of them via Text on Sunday, saying if they bought me the game, I'd play it for at least 5 minutes and well, now they've purchased the game for me.
True to my word, I put at least 5 minutes in, having now played 71 minutes and I must say, it's mediocre and buggy as hell. Performance is absolutely pitiful. It runs like dog doo-doo on both my laptop and my Deck because it's hitting the processor so hard that it causes overheating and throttling, barely maintaining 20FPS with graphics that look barely better than Everquest in 1999 and certainly worse than Everquest 2 from 2004. And, as I mentioned, the gameplay is the same from EQ back in 1999. Kill a few creatures, rest for several minutes to get your health and mana back, rinse, repeat. They even have the grouping requirement where you'll spend hours just looking for a group and then sitting in the same spot for several more hours, killing the same mobs over and over again.
I get the charm. I was once 15 and loving Everquest for how new and novel it felt at the time, but that time has passed and I have better things to do with my time now. I feel bad that my friends bought me this game and want me to play with them because it's just such utter trash; good for them for liking it, but I was content to just make fun of them and not participate. At any rate, I know what this game is and how it plays and at this point, I put my 71 minutes in and I'm all done. Silly game.
Shadow of the Colossus is in the running for my favorite game ever. If you haven't yet, poke around the save shrines. Also, did you know you can leap from Agro and grab onto the birds that fly along side sometimes? (And take breaks to explore. Following the light isn't going to take you to every bit of the land, and the quiet stretches in between can be beautiful.)
I have been hitting all the shrines I've found, as I'm guessing they're teleport points later in the game (no idea, I've managed to avoid any knowledge of the game), but I had no idea about the birds! I had seen them following me while I was exploring the plains and thought it was a nice bit of detail, but had no idea they're useful.
"Useful" might be a strong word.
And no there's something about the shrines that is available immediately and will be of great assistance. Look at the large trees too.
I hope you enjoy Dishonored 2! It's not without its faults, but I think some of the later levels have some of the most incredible game design and level design that's come along. If you think you'll have a hard time finding motivation to play through it a second time, then I highly recommend you save at the start of some of the later levels/buildings and give yourself an opportunity to play low chaos and high chaos right from that point just so you can enjoy the different dynamics that those specific levels allow. There is some really cool stuff that will be missed if you play solely one or the other (a tedious part of the replayability of the Dishonored games, I know).
As far as the iGPU vs eGPU situation, you may be able to find a power/performance mode on your laptop that emphasizes the eGPU as the primary video source, so there's no switching between desktop and game. Otherwise, it should be safe to disable/deprioritize the iGPU via the laptop's BIOS.
Oh, I do like it. As mentioned, I've played 30-hours of it in the past and being me, that's definitely not something I'd do if I hated it! I played Thief back on release (and been meaning to play The Black Parade) and the first Dishonored felt like a revelation at the time.
I think honestly, I'm just going to play it as I played the original Dishonored, which was kind of a "fuck it" mentality. I actually restarted D2 a couple of months ago, but got annoyed in the first level, escaping the palace when I kept getting caught and forcing myself to reload over and over to do it "right." That burned me right the hell out, so this time on my escape, I'm trying to be stealthy, but in the parts where I've been found out, I'm saying fuck it and killing the guards chasing me. I'll usually give it one or two tries, but after that if the game becomes me waiting in a dark corner for 5 minutes, I'm not interested in playing that way.
As for the GPU stuff, it's actually a known issue with AMD cards. I may try and disable the integrated graphics in the BIOS, if that's possible, but at the same time, I'm not interested in compromising the core functionality of my laptop and eGPU combination, which is why I haven't tried yet. The beauty of the eGPU solution is that I can simply unplug my laptop and move around the house with it; if I need to shut it down and go into the BIOS every time to reenable the onboard graphics (if that's even possible on my machine) if I want to unplug the machine and move it, it's too much of a compromise, especially when I have other options for playing the game.
FWIW your initial post says just 3 hours, not 30!
Thanks, didn't notice that!
I just got Creeper World IXE
It’s sort of a tower defense with fluid dynamics (the main adversary is a fluid that you have to push back).
I’m enjoying it so far. If you have played any Creeper World game you know what to expect. The previous one was 3D polygons. This one is back to 2d which I prefer. The game has a level editor and historically the community makes many levels and mods which extend the life of the games for months or years.
The game is relatively small and starts up quickly which I appreciate.
Technical note: I’m playing on Linux Mint. This is a windows game that (mostly) works on proton. There is an issue with the tutorial videos. I can’t get them to play. I’ve played around with different proton versions but haven’t been able to get it working. The tutorials are pretty important so until this is resolved you may need help from discord or steam community.
There is a new creeper world game‽ How have I not heard of it yet? Creeper world 3 is one of my more favorite games ever. I would love for it to get a remake to improve it slightly for modern sensibilities. You can still feel the flash game roots. CW3 implemented in something similar to the Factorio engine is my dream.
Yes it just came out a few days ago. I like it.
It has a lot of similarities with Creeper World 3. Also some similarities with Particle Fleet Emergence. In case you don't know what that one is, it's a Creeper World game but you don't have a fixed base. Instead you have ships that fight the creeper and the ships can reposition themselves.
I installed Old World and played a game over the weekend. It's a civ-like 4x. Imagine taking the early era of civ and stretching it out into an entire game, and adding a dose of Crusader Kings personnel/family management. One of the top steam reviews calls it civ for geniuses and that's not far off the mark. It's super fiddly and micromanagey, way moreso than the latest civ games, but I enjoy that sort of stuff.
I bought it a year ago, and never got into it because of the micromanaging. Is it worth the micromanaging?
I've only played one game on the default settings to learn the mechanics. I enjoyed it. The mechanic whereby workers build improvements to city tiles, which can then be staffed by citizens is great.
I gave balatro a go this week because I'm off work minding my newborn and needed something I can follow easily while I have to randomly pick it up and put it down.
It's a catchy well-designed game, and I can see how people wind up playing hundreds of hours of it. There's very little in it to trigger a stoppage in the player, the only candidate really is losing a run in a frustrating way. Makes me happy that a relatively low-tech game can still go mega-big on the back of solid game design and unique art style.
I personally haven't found myself want to play it for very long, so it either isn't addictive for me or I haven't given it long enough to take root yet. We shall see.
For me, the game very quickly went from "super addicting" to "alright I'm done" after my first win.
I played for ~20 hours and only have like 3 wins, but I feel like I've seen everything it has to offer. It's objectively a good game, but there is only so much depth and variety to it.
I enjoy playing the different decks, and the additional challenge of the higher stakes. There's still one deck and one stake I haven't even unlocked yet!
I actually feel the same way about it. All the reviews and opinions I've seen about it seem to suggest they can't stop playing but for some reason I'm a bit mentally worn out after one or two runs. Maybe it's me overthinking about what the best possible plays for every single round would be, but I need to take breaks and I'm wondering if if should have just waited for it to come out for mobile instead.
Good news is that it's been out on mobile for the last month or so!
I was the opposite! I was only barely paying attention to the numbers, and when I kept losing at around the same point the last thing I wanted to do was start crunching numbers to evaluate strategies.
It's funny, when I started playing Balatro I found it reasonably entertaining but there was just something about it that felt... I don't know how to describe it except that it was just okay? I found it fun enough but very easy to put down and wasn't really feeling the hype.
I don't know what changed or when but at some point along the way I realized I'd become consumed by it. The more you play, the more you begin to understand all the different synergies. Each new game throws different cards your way and instead of holding out for the "perfect" combo (which, at this point, you realize wasn't as good as you thought) you get better at adapting to what gets thrown your way. Then somewhere around ante 4 you get a joker that completely changes the deck you thought you were building and you switch strats mid-game to adapt.
The game is infinitely replayable. It's incredibly easy to just start one more quick game. Then there's the challenge runs, different starter decks with their own quirks, the "ascention" mode of collecting the different color challenge chips for each deck, the achievements, and of course just trying to get the highest scoring hand you possibly can. Finally cracked a 1 billion chip hand for the first time last week and felt like hot shit...until I looked up how high you can really go.
Anyway, yeah, it's definitely a game that sneaks up on you with a simplistic appearance that belies how deep it goes.
Edit: According to Google, I've played 167 hours on mobile over the past 3 months. Steam says I've got 155 hours in PC.
What put me off a bit was the balance. It seemed to me that the best strategy was to just level up and get jokers for the high card or pair easy hands. Wasn't really worth it to go for the more complex hands, which would have been fun. Maybe that's a balance issue that has been fixed a bit, but I saw similar complaints even among reddit and hardcore players.
Building a deck revolving around pairs is the safest path to victory. And that unfortunately makes the game quite dull once you understand that.
Edit: unless you want / are able to set your own goals, obviously. But that's not how I play :/
I haven't tracked balance patches so I can't comment on that, though it does feel more balanced insofar as it feels harder to consistently build an OP high card deck these days. My progression with learning the game started by leaning into flush decks and using the checkered deck to unlock most of the jokers. I realize now that that is a bit of a trap that new players fall into and it was difficult to crack the million hand mark that way.
Eventually I hit my first million hand with a high card setup built around Baron, Mime, and a deck full of steel, red-sealed kings. I'd say that still a solid winning strategy though in what feels like a hundred games since then it's been difficult to replicate.
My highest scoring deck was fairly recent though and was largely a lucky deck. Duplicated a bunch of cards with the lucky enhancement (with several having red seals), then had the Lucky Cat joker that scales mult every time a lucky card activates plus Hanging Chad joker which replays the first played card multiple times. Buy the end, Lucky Cat was doing something like 15x mult. Somewhere in the 13 or 14th ante I played a hand that was four-of-a-kind lucky Aces with a couple steel cards in hand and crossed the one billion threshold for the first (and since only) time.
I don't know what the highest possible hand setup is. It may very well be a high card deck; it would make sense for that to be the case. That said, it's entirely possible to beat gold chip on any starting deck with builds focused on flushes, runs, or sets. You aren't pigeon holed into high card if you don't want to be.
I just wrapped up Broken Age over the weekend. I hadn't heard of it before but owned a copy from some humble bundle offering years ago and installed it on a whim after scrolling through my library. I was pretty excited when I booted it up and realized it was from Double Fine, because I loved the Psychonauts games when I played through them last year.
Overall, my impressions are mixed, which I gather is the prevailing sentiment about the game. The writing is clever and funny and the two protagonists are charming characters, but wow the ending sequence was obtuse to say the least. I have no idea how you were supposed to piece together several parts of the solutions when the two collide in the end. There's basically no context clues to use for deduction whatsoever. Without looking up solutions, a lot of it is brute forcing objects when you have no reason to suspect it'll have any impact.
Broken Age was released in two halves. The first half was very casual with its puzzles, but a lot of the funders of the game got angry because they thought it was too easy and wanted more difficulty.
So, for part two, the devs made the game a bit more like an old-school point-and-click adventure and made things much more obtuse.
I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, but I loved the first half and disliked the second half.
Recently, I picked up Zero-K: a FOSS Supreme Annihilation clone but with faaaaaaar more depth and complexity. If you liked any of the Annihilation family Chris Taylor games, try it. It's free on Steam.
It's a great game and if you like a turtle base defense the Chicken mod it comes with is really fun to play co-op!
Chicken mod...?
https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Chicken_Defense
If you're just doing single player I think they call it Survival on the guided menu now.
There are some maps made specifically for it but I also like FolsomDam or a more open map like CometCatcher.
(moving my comment here because I accidentally commented on the last week megathread)
It feels weird to share a World of Warcraft private server announcing a new server on its own post, I really don't know what would be deimos piracy policy on that.
So... Turtle WoW is coming to South America!. I have been playing Turtle WoW and I think it's a blast! Yes I'm a Turtle fanboy now, 100%. It's Vanilla+ done right and I love the leveling Glyphs/challenges. It's the best part for me. There's even a boar challenge inspired by South Park!
Also, unlike Blizzard, they got real GMs and chat is actually moderated. So there's no bots, no politics, no casual Nazism, and no homophobia, etc.
Now Turtle WoW announced South American severs and I think it will a bast to play with my fellow Brazilians with a decent ping! An official WoW subscription is a significant expense to a lot of people over here, so that could be a game changer.
Blizzard has a official presence in Brazil so I don't think they'll be very happy about this.
Edit: and of course, it's all in Spanish only... Lol
I don't wanna jynx it, but I'm gonna run the risk: Turtle gets it so freaking right, and with the Unreal client on the way, I fear like they're flying too close to the Sun. People say they're safe cause they're in Europe, but IDK, there's probably some Turtle people in a US friendly jurisdiction Blizzard can sue.
Factorio has been a blast. I'm taking my time through Space Age as my first playthrough and it has been very fun. This is my first factory builder game and I'm hooked so far. 300 hours in or so.
300 hours? You're almost done with the tutorial!
Exactly. I love the depth of this game. I am able to micro optimize my solutions as much as I want and it still has layers I have not gone through. Just got to my third planet and getting a hang of interstellar logistics.
I've been playing Project Wingman Frontline 59, which is a DLC for Project Wingman. It was released one year ago as PSVR2 exclusive, but now it's available on PC.
For those who don't know PW, it's a love letter to the Ace Combat series, and it punches far far above its weight (it was made by 3 peoples !).
And for those who don't know Ace Combat, it's a combat flight sim that accurately reflects the mind of a 10 year old fighter jet nerd, i.e. cool planes, big drama, lots of foxes, and a total disregard. As one retrospective I like put it, it "[does] not capture the reality of aerial combat, but to understand the fantasy of it." Rule of cool galore, and I love it precisely because of that.
And so this DLC is really a condensed version of the Project Wingman experience (it was, after all, a mission back meant to be played in VR). There's your usual staples (lots of dogfight!) but also some sorely missed fan favorite (namely, a tunnel run, with a yet unseen twist that much more awesome). The scenario offers an interesting perspective, as you play the opposing force of what you play on the campaign (you don't meet your alter-ego pilot though), and there's a grimmer facet of war that's not quite explored the the main campaign.
One distinct characteristic of the series is the high quality of the soundtrack. José Pavli (one of the aforementionned 3 guys) already made an oustanding work with the original game, and I'm happy to report this continues with the DLC. There's some certified bangers in there. Of note is the first mission music which has echoes of one of the most bombastic and joyful track of the original, the tunnel run music which is this version of "flying is awesome", and the final boss music. Pavli is usually quite restrained with vocal, but here having a soprano(?) makes you feel like a valkyrie is personnaly coming for you.
I played the whole thing in VR on my old setup (agin i4670K, 1660ti, Quest 1) and it was remarkably ok in terms of performance. Only during the last boss the performance really dropped (it's an interesting exercise in not looking at your target).
Overall a great experience, and a perfect dog to chew while waiting for Ace Combat 8.
My brain has been taken over with Bombe lately. It's like minesweeper except instead of solving each puzzle individually you create a rule for a situation and then that rule will be automatically applied to all future puzzles. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoyed no-guessing minesweeper games like HexCells or Tametsi (which are both good and you should play those first).
I've finished Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order like ten days ago. I have written a lot about it here in this thread two weeks ago and I followed with writing a Steam review. For me this game is exceptionally bad. There are so much better games than Fallen Order. Even I, Star Wars fan, would pick game from another franchise rather than Fallen Order again. Actually this game has nothing more to offer once I finished it, no desire to play again and only very little desire to come back and search for hidden chests (as they contain cosmetics, so no actual reason). I'm old school player, I don't care about cosmetics, I'd rather have more story choices that actually change something or more depth into the game/story/characters. Graphics of the game looks really good, but it can't save the lack of story/content in the game.
EDIT: Me not liking the game doesn't mean somebody else won't love it. I'm sure there are people out there who love the game. I'm just not one of them. END EDIT
As I wrote in Steam review - if you want kinda similar style of game, buy Horizon Zero Dawn. It comes at the same price (when both on sale) and there is so much more content in the HZD and there also is some replayability there. With DLC it has like 60-100 hours of gameplay and I have played the game two times actually the last year - something unheard of me; play and finish the same game twice in one year.
Now on a positive note - I'm playing Jagged Alliance 3 now. As a JA2 veteran player I consider JA3 true successor, it seems to me it can and will continue this series that was flawed by various wannabe remakes of JA 2 for the last 25 years. There are differences of course, but I'm glad it isn't just a clone of modern XCOM. I will definitely write a review on JA3 once I finish it. For now all I can say is that I keep clocking hours into it, I don't even know where I got so much time to play it - it is so good I just have to!
I felt exactly opposite. I loved Fallen Order, despite not really being a big Star Wars fan. The story was serviceable, but the characters and their relationships were absolutely electric. I especially loved the relationship between Cal and
Spoilers
Merrin. I loved their relationship, and despite being very subtle in the first game, the romance and chemistry was the best I've seen in a game in a long while.I also finished the game twice, despite not being a fan of Souls-like combat in general. In this case, it really worked well, and while the backtracking was kinda annoying, it gave me a lot of chances to kill foot soldiers and feel like a badass Jedi.
On the other hand, I bounced off Horizon: Zero Dawn pretty hard, despite really liking the premise of the mechanical dinosaurs, and thinking that it had a lot of potential.
That's not to say that any of your opinions are not valid, we clearly look for different things in games, I'm just putting the opinion out there.
Yes, I should have said in the first comment that me not liking the game doesn't mean someone else can't love it.
It got recommended to me, maybe even by you :-) I'm glad I played it, as I haven't played anything newer than Knight of the Old Republic 2 for last 15 years. I tried new Star Wars game, didn't like it, will returnto old classics if I want to play Star Wars game again. Glad I tried as without trying there wouldn't be knowledge about it.
And I'm.glad there are people like you who defend the game, or rather say their (different) opinion. This way anybody who reads it here have take from both sides.
Actually I didn't mind combat in FO. I'm not huge fan of Slous games, but I have played Witcher 3 on hardest this year amd cmpared to that FO is a piece of cake (well, on standard difficulty, that is). I found my style and went for it rather quickly. And it lasted to the end. Yes, I had to replay bosses here and there, but nothing that hard. I like to explore so I had quite high level (lots of points spent) and I think 8 healing things from BD-1.
I didn't really develop any feeling for anyone. The character you mention is by far the most enjoyable from the bunch, but comes too late in the game and I didn't interact with it that much. By that time I was already too much let down by the game to try and find something good. I didn't have such feeling about the game in a loooong time. Doesn't matter now. Jagged Alliamce 3 gives me quite the opposite feeling - it just makes me come back to it.
I picked up Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop after seeing it in a YouTube video.
At first the style totally turned me off, it looks very Rick and Morty or Adventure Time and I just don't like that kind of humour. But the gameplay is actually not much like what I was expecting from the style.
Its essentially a RTFM game. If you've played "Keep talking and nobody explodes" you'll know exactly what I mean.
Except this is a rougelite. Its got two modes which I appreciate, the default mode is timed and expects you to do as many jobs as possible in a set time. The other gives you 3 jobs a day but they are harder and you get a larger penalty for making mistakes.
So far so good.
So you get the usual "your rent is due in 3 days" spiel and off you go. I picked the non-timed mode because I like being a perfectionist.
Much of the game (so far! I'm only like 5 hours in) has been really great. The visuals, the humor, the mechanics. There seems to be plenty to do and see.
However I've run into some annoyances. First its reasonably clear timed mode is the intended way to play. A lot of the roguelite elements refer to timed mode and aren't useful at all for non-timed. Likewise a lot of customer bonuses seem to be tied to timed mode. It really makes me want to switch!
Theres also some insane spike in difficulty (at least I've seen) where you're doing some easy pease fuel/oil changes then maybe one or two jobs of medium level, interesting debugging and problem solving then suddenly HOLY SHIT MAN YOUR NEXT JOB YOU HAVE YOU PICK IT AND ITS FATAL AND THE REACTOR IS GONNA EXPLODE IN 36 SECOND AND I HOPE YOU MEMORIZED THAT BIT OF THE MANUAL, OH ALSO METEORS.
Happened to me twice and just nuked my run from orbit as I was trying to read the manual. Like I'm sure I'll learn but it came from nowhere on day 3 I think.
Theres also some teeny things it didn't reallt explain well, like how your placeables cannot be placed when you are clocked in but can otherwise.
I like a lot of things about the game, like its so far looking good. Maybe a swap to timed mode will give me the intended experience!
Picked up the Omens of Destruction DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3 at launch because apparently I'm a sucker for what they are doing. Started a Skulltaker campaign and having a blast. He is so broken and so much fun. You can gain experience so fast. At one point I gained 8 levels from one battle and 11 levels in total from that turn and him getting exp from other lords. He can get movement back when you kill some lords and from razing, so I've had fun putting together huge chains of destruction. It brings back memories of Taurox before they nerfed his momentum. I usually find Khorne pretty boring since they don't really have ranged or magic but glad I get to enjoy them in their current state before CA nerfs them into the ground.
I'm almost done Skulltakers campaign and then I'm excited to check out the changes to Ogres. I always liked their units but their campaign mechanics were boring garbage. It sounds like most people like the changes CA made to some extent so that should be fun.
I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077. I finished the DLC a while ago (absolutely fantastic, can't wait to replay it one day) and am just doing clean up on the map with the police scanner jobs that are left.
I also fully completed the Spyro Reignited Trilogy (got all achievements,.I think the first time I've ever done that). I felt really motivated to do so for some reason, maybe because it was a childhood game of mine.
I'm also in the process of playing through Half Life 2 for the first time, but this is sort of on pause until I finish Cyberpunk 2077.
On the steam deck I'm mostly playing Balatro and Binding of Isaac, and maybe one or two other indie titles.
The latest update to Warhammer 40000: Darktide finally convinced me to boot it back up after a yearlong hiatus, and there's a few things I've noticed immediately:
The combat in this game really is just so much more refined and engaging than that of Space Marine 2's. Don't get me wrong, I love tearing through tyranids and thousand sons with over the top execution animations, but the combat really is rather basic when the only real mechanic is parrying. It lacks that, how do I put it, manic crackhead energy that high difficulty Darktide demands when the AI director decides it'd be really funny to throw a mixed horde of 20 specials and elites and maybe even a monstrosity on top of 200+ poxwalkers at you in the span of 30 seconds, only to do it again a couple minutes later.
The weapon mastery system is fantastic. It's still a significant plasteel sink and takes a bit of grinding with your weapon of choice to get the right stats, perks, and blessings, but the fact that you can 100% guarantee what you get on your weapon now is huge. They still haven't come up with a good way to spend all this diamantine on though. Why can't I convert diamantine to plasteel yet Fatshark?
The new weapons are pretty awesome. The force greatsword on psyker lets me fully embrace my melee psyker build, the relic sword on zealot lets me complete my Radzig Kobyla cosplay, and the bolt pistol is just so damn punchy, like something firing a miniature rocket should be.
Once I've shaken off the rust and gotten comfortable with my new builds, I suppose I'll clear a Maelstrom mission so I can get started on Havoc difficulties. Some people have already cleared Havoc 40 with only ogryns and no guns, so the only excuse I have is a skill issue and I am totally ok with that.
I've been playing Persona 5 Royal on my Steam Deck. I've been wanting to play this game for a looong time because of all it's praise online and because of the great music and animations I had seen/heard in it's trailers.
My expectations were quite high, and the game still lives up to that expectations. The story is great and really takes me in, the gameplay loop is fun and I really like it's pacing. And the music. Man, the music is so good that I can't sit still half the time.
This is my first Persona game, but it won't be my last. The only "downside" is that it takes so long to finish. I'm the kind of player that takes their time in games, and I've currently put 140-150 hours into this game with at least 10 more to go. I don't mind as I love this game so much, but I do have many more games in my backlog that I've been wanting to play and have been putting on a hold for now.
Before I started playing P5R I was 40-50 hours into Dragon Age Inquisition, but I really couldn't finish it. The story and the choices you could make were good, but the game was filled to the brim with many variations of quests that were nothing more than "go to point A and press X". That wouldn't be so bad if the open world of the game was actually interesting, but that wasn't the case either. The world was filled with corridors and nothing interesting happened along the way.
It got stale quickly and often I had to play up to 10 hours of boring gameplay for a few hours of fun gameplay at most. Another thing that I hated was the inventory management. My inventory would fill up all the time and I would be spending way too much time organizing it. It's a shame because I know there is a good game hidden under all those bad design elements. My girlfriend loves the series (although she was disappointed in The Veilguard), so I've often been bombarded with the cool stuff.
I might try finishing the game later, with some mods installed that negate the issues that I have with the game a bit, less care for proper inventory management and a complete focus on doing just the mainstory quests. But it might be too late for me now. Especially after playing P5R.
Because I was playing DAI right before I started playing P5R, P5R was a huge breath of fresh air in that aspect as well: No forced inventory management and a contant, nice pacing. The in-game days just keep going and you don't have to waste time getting somewhere all the time. Much of the management is also hidden in gameplay. It feels as a much better designed and more polished game for sure!
I hadn't planned on it, but I've been playing Path of Exile 2...
background
I've played (and put hundreds of hours into) every Diablo game and enjoy the ARPG genre as probably a Top 3 genres for me.
I played POE long enough to buy stash tabs, but not long enough to say I was a fan of the game. By the time I'd played, the game was well established and I was not interested in learning the myriad of currencies as they're no different than forced crafting games (which I dislike), I also prefer to play a game, not be told how I should be playing a game. POE1 generally lacked any way for a new player to get into the game without spending dozens of hours reading guides on how to do so because the mechanics at this point (and when I played) were already so numerous and convoluted you'd just die a few hours in as everything one shots you once you're passed the initial few levels. There are many fan made sites that support many games out there, most are extraneous and largely unnecessary. For POE they're a requirement and I find that if a game requires a myriad of sites in order to be able to play even the mid-game then the game/developers are at fault for failing to do the basic task of making their game playable.
Not to say I don't enjoy min-maxing and making a build that can farm/grind endgame, but it should be something that's maybe required for endgame and endgame alone, not barely-out-of-the-first-area-game. I don't read guides until endgame, while playing normally I don't follow builds, I don't try to optimize every single thing, I like to build around a theme or an effect that I like.
You can do this in every Diablo game and nearly every other ARPG worth playing
You cannot in POE.
...hadn't planned on it as I don't buy pre-releases and I sure as hell don't pay for early access as I don't see the point in paying someone to test their game for them, especially paying to test a free-to-play game.
However, the friend of mine that I got into ARPGs way back in the day, insisted I play by way of buying me early access, it would be unkind to refuse.
At the moment the game is good/above average and I hope that GGG addresses some, in my mind, major shortcomings to gameplay, time will tell as they are pretty quickly releasing patches, but most of that seems to be bugfixes and balance adjustments. The former is obviously needed, the latter I think should take less precedence. I do like that they're being conservative with changes and not trying to turn it into another zoom-zoom POE1-with-better-graphics game like many diehards are complaining about (it's much slower, thankfully), but they have made a few pretty terrible design decisions that need addressing.
For example: Attacking. There's a "skill" to attack. Fine, the game needs to know that you are pushing a button/clicking to attack something I guess even though the generic attack isn't used by any class by the time they're a few levels in. Issue is there's a "skill" for every. single. weapon. type. to. attack. Got two handed mace in Slot 1 and a one handed mace in Slot 2? Two different skills that need to be mapped and on your skill bar (not to mention a third skill if you're using a shield).
There's a weapon swap key, you can assign your individual skills/attacks to individual weapons. Why is there not a generic "Attack with held weapon" skill?
Now those of you that have played may say something along the lines of "Well when you assign the skill to a specific weapon and use that skill it switches to the weapon assigned and no one uses the basic attack after a few levels."
And sure, that's true, unless you're a Mercenary. A mercenary has to "load" arrows into their crossbow as their skills aren't skills but instead are "ammo", then use the "Crossbow Attack" button to fire them. The only class I'm aware of that requires two commands to perform a single attack. Assigning a specific ammo to a specific crossbow will load it into that crossbow, but you have to then use the specific attack command for that specific crossbow. So you load an ammo into a crossbow, which takes time, you have to swap to the assigned crossbow for that skill, which takes time, then you have to fire it, which takes time. Is there any other class that has three time calculations into using a single skill?
You can bind 13 skills in POE2, drops to 11 because of the apparent need for two different "Crossbow Shot" skills for the Merc.
Can you honestly say you could assign 5-6 different ammo skills to one crossbow, the remaining 5-6 ammo skills to the other crossbow, and remember in the heat of a boss battle which ammo you've got loaded into which crossbow and which "Crossbow Shot" attack you should be using at that particular second? I highly doubt it.
Another example: Melee classes. Seemingly every mob in this game has an on-death effect or an AoE that surrounds them making up close attacks always draining life with little to no way to recover it outside of waiting for life-per-second to refill you or using a flask. I've spent more time waiting for a damaging AoE after a mob has died to clear so I can go through a narrow passage without needing to use my life flask than I care to recall. Wouldn't be so bad if the melee classes weren't so squishy and maybe hit harder to balance the need to constantly be in the danger zone, but nope. They're just as fragile as any other class, but have to constantly be replenishing life without any benefit for the risk.
Doesn't help that when you die you lose experience, all the mobs respawn/refresh, and any gear that might have dropped from the mob you killed that then killed you with its on-death effect is also lost.
I'm going to keep playing and try other classes, there are some greatly appreciated improvements in the game (tooltips mostly), and, based on GGG's history, early access should last several months, but unless some basic gameplay issues are addressed I don't know if I'll be playing for too much longer. POE does a lot of things their own way and I applaud them for not making another clone, but it's also not a bad thing to use the good gameplay aspects that others have already ironed out over the decades.
Won't expect anything for the next couple of weeks as their patch notes mentioned they're taking some much needed time off for the holidays and I do not blame them one bit for doing so.
Overwhelmingly, Hexcells Infinite. It generates a kind of puzzle that's somewhat like Minesweeper on a hex grid, but makes sure that you can arrive at the solution to each puzzle without guessing. Good DOS attack on the mind (as I heard someone describe Sudoku once).
I also played through all the official Half-Life series. Neither of them have aged particularly well IMO, but I also binged on them so that probably colors my perception a bit.
Other than that, I finished Overload, played a lot of Desecrators and Mechwarrior 5. I can't recommend both Desecrators and Overload highly enough (and I think I already mentioned them in an earlier thread like this). It's hard to contend with FPS games where you are basically stuck walking along a plane now. Once you've felt spherestrafing, circlestrafing just doesn't cut it :D
I actually have the opposite opinion of Half Life and how well the games have aged. I only played through Half Life 1 somewhat recently and I go back to Half Life 2 every few years and I’m usually surprised at how playable they are to modern standards, but I’m also a shooter fan and have nostalgia for half life, so my opinion might be colored by that. Just goes to show how subjective games can be!
I'm pretty hard into Black Ops 6 and Nine Sols right now. They both scratch the itch of quick recover from mistakes. I'm very much digging COD multiplayer right now. I haven't prestiged yet but it's fun and easy to listen to podcasts and run some games.
I got into Sekiro a couple weeks ago. It's the only Fromsoft game that I've really enjoyed playing, which makes sense with it being the odd one out. It solves everything I don't like about soulslikes. Posture is my favorite mechanic—instead of just poking at my opponent for half an hour and praying that I don't run out of stamina while evading attacks, this game rewards staying right in my opponent's face and actively engaging in combat. Both attacking and deflecting build up your opponent's posture bar, so fights are much more energetic than other Fromsoft games.
Also, you don't pick attributes to upgrade when you level up. Some people don't like the lower level of customization, but I love it. Fights are about mutable equipment loadouts instead of immutable stat increases, and you'll never find yourself stuck because you levelled up Endurance too much.
Genichiro is one of my favorite bosses I've ever fought. There's no gimmick, there's no cheese strat, it's pure combat. Get in his face, attack, and deflect. Almost a nonstop clanging of swords. It's beautiful. His long combos are extremely satisfying to perfectly parry. Plus, when he kills you (and he will kill you, a lot), you respawn just down the hall. There's no enemies between you and him, you just attack, die, revive, repeat. It probably took me three dozen attempts, and I never got upset about dying at all.
Right now I'm working on Guardian Ape. He's... A little bit frustrating. Update: I killed the stupid monkey!
Spoilers for Guardian Ape
Much like Lady Butterfly, it's a unique sense of "oh God please no" when you get the deathblow, and find out that there's a secret second health bar. His second phase is so weird. This is not how an ape should be moving!
Sekiro gets me so tired after a boss fight because after locking in so much it just drains me entirely when the adrenaline fades. I was knackered after Guardian Ape so I figured I'd do some exploratory backtracking.
You probably don't want to read this spoiler unless you played the game before.
Cue the double Guardian Ape fight. No joke, ran into them straight away and if anything that was a *good* thing. I was still so in tune with the Ape's moves from literally the previous fight that I one-shot that fight. I immediately shut down the game for the day though. That was a lot.That anecdote aside, lovely game, but not my personal favourite in the FromSoft lineup for the same aforementioned reason: I was just drained having to learn boss fight after boss fight. Sekiro is a little too much about near faultlessly repeating the same rhythm. That said, it had some stellar boss fights that stick with me.
Sekiro was the only fromsoft game I actually enjoyed (that includes Elden Ring, which im playing right now) because parrying and posture were awesome feeling mechanics and fights felt really deliberate rather than a mad rush to land hits while an enemy recovers. Darn shame i got stuck on a minor boss after Genichiro for two days and other things came up.
I was "playing" the visual novel The House of Fata Morgana - Requiem until I learned that it was actually a prequel that spoiled the original. That was a shame because I was really enjoying it -- it was somewhat action-packed, at least in the beginning.
I am now reading The House of Fata Morgana. It is a highly rated visual novel. I have finished what I believe was the first chapter.
The atmosphere is very gothic. The music is stupendous, although I am bothered because one of the themes starts with the same notes of Clair de Lune only to diverge from the classic by Debussy. Although I have little experience with visual novels, I feel like this one is unique because it feels very personal and genuine. The story is not exactly original. It is tragic and ultra-romantic like The Sorrows of Young Werther. It is tragic not because it is surprising, but rather because it is inevitable.
To say that I am playing a game is a stretch. I am only posting this here instead of ~books because, due to an accident in history, the visual novel is often lumped with gaming.
In my many hours with Fata Morgana, I have only once "played" anything, and it was a brief, irrelevant click where I only had one possible choice. I am very much reading an enhanced novel, and thinking of it as literature instead of a game is the right way to go about it. That is because if a novel allows for occasional interaction that is a novelty and a plus, but if a game only requires my input every 2 or 3 hours, then it is a very bad game. My take on the concept of genre is pragmatic: it serves to moderate expectations in a way that improves artistic experiences. If I think of this as a game, I will be dissatisfied. If I think of this as literature, then I am delighted. So literature it is.
I finally finished Tears of the Kingdom two hours ago!
Rewind to launch day. I’d had a Switch lite during covid, but got rid of it for some reason I forget after I finished Breath of the Wild. I was excited about TotK, and watched a compilation of the cutscenes someone had recorded on that PC leak starting the night before the game came out.
I was in the last cutscene after the final boss the next morning. My awesome wife walks in with a new OLED Switch for my birthday! We hadn’t been talking about it or anything - she didn’t even know it was TotK day.
Anyway, since I’d watched the cutscenes, I took a couple months to even buy TotK, then took my sweet time playing. Dropped out a couple times because I wasn’t feeling it, but finally picked up momentum last month. Lost to the final boss on Monday night, stocked up on more sundelion and extra heart meals on Tuesday night, and cut it close, but good enough, to finally finish tonight!
Stalker 2 has exceeded my expectations, which were admittedly low to begin with. It's the first game in a while that reaches Fallout: New Vegas -levels of immersion and jankiness. Really great so far, but I have to say that the game mechanics are starting to wear out on me. The game story is pretty big, which means that you get to meet the same random encounters a lot of times.
The first 20 firefights or mutant encounters were pretty exciting, but after that it gets a bit boring. This is made slightly worse by the fact that the enemies are bit spongy and that sponginess gets worse when the game progresses. In the beginning, I could drop most human enemies with a single handgun headshot, but most current enemies take two sniper shots to the head to drop.
A huge 1.1 patch just dropped, which might bring change to some of this.
Also finished Mouthwashing, which was an interesting experience, good retro/PS1 art and fine storytelling but not the sort of transcedental thing for me that other people have apparently been getting from it.
I just played through Half Life 2 after getting it for free on the 20th anniversary. I found the vehicle sections very engaging, and never once got annoyed with the balance of the game (rare for me in FPS games), however I thought that overall the game wasn’t as enjoyable as the first, probably due to the increased focus on story when I just want to shotgun some aliens.
Other than that, as it’s Christmas and my whole family is together, I’ve been able to play some local multiplayer games with my brother. I’ve had the most fun playing Stick Fight, although aiming with a controller is practically impossible, the absurd nature of the game just always keeps me grinning like an idiot
I've been playing Arcade Paradise - I watched some videos of it a long time ago, and got it free on epic games store at some point.
It's got a really satisfying gameplay loop. The individual days are quite long (especially with an upgrade you can eventually buy), but that gives you more time to play your arcade games instead of just managing them.
I highly recommend it to almost anyone. The progression of expanding your arcade is really enjoyable. And some of the arcade games are good enough that they could stand on their own - I really like Racer Chaser (Pac-Man meets top-down early GTA games) and Stack Overflow (puzzle-y game where you have to stack matching boxes, easier to play than to explain). A lot of people (including the dev) really like Blockchain, which I can't fully figure out for the life of me, even after reading multiple explanations. I might watch a video on it later.