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

Gears of War: Reloaded. Been having a blast reliving the glory days.

I’ll acknowledge there’s a lot of contention in the community into this game’s implementation. A lot of the same complaints and counterpoints as always (net coding, gnasher tuning) that have always plagued the series.

I do want to call out that it’s always disappointing to me that the series largely abandoned the horror and design styling that made the first game seem grim and personal. The washed out color palette draws a lot of criticism, but other elements are missing: atmospheric distortion (foggy haze on distance objects), high contrast and intense shadows, motion blur, rain and weather effects. Sound design isn’t as bassy and full and lack of screen splatter makes the chainsaw feel like a loony toons weapon—which is made worse as multiplayer tuning causes the player to get staggered if a bullet so much as grazes the air around them.

Overall it’s still a positive pvp experience that plays much better than the original in terms of minimizing host advantage and gaps in ping. There’s still a lot to gripe about, but when gameplay focuses on intense CQC battles that come down to milliseconds reactions, there’s probably not much more that can be done to solve that problem.

I finally got Hollow Knight to be properly prepared for Silksong, and I understand why people were so hyped for Silksong now. This is a really, really good metroidvania. Controls and movement are tight and responsive, combat and enemy design/variety is great, not too complex but still very rewarding of mastery. The art design for the different areas is great, as well as the usually subtle but impactful OST, which I will now use as bgm for work. Exploration and discovery of secrets and new paths is very rewarding and usually not a slog (backtracking to the nearest stag station can be dull sometimes). Characters are surprisingly expressive despite not having vocal dialogue past their unique sound effects. Difficulty wise it's pretty fair, though you can make things notably easier by collecting upgrades to health/soul and certain charm combos. Note that this is from the perspective of someone that's done all the bosses except the pantheon, knight/radiance, and nk grimm, so I'm sure I'll struggle more with those. Going for 100% completion right now, not including doing the Path of Pain because it's entirely optional and jump quests have been inflicting pain on me since I started playing Maplestory in 2005 so I'd rather not.

Also got Jump Space, which released on Friday in Early Access, to play co-op with my brother. This is a FPS that also has space ship combat, with procedurally generated series of missions to complete. Overall the gameplay's pretty simple and there's various features like the item shops that are still in development, but there are a couple things that have impressed me so far.

The biggest of these would be the seamlessness of on-foot to ship mobility and combat. This isn't some awkward clunky business where you have to fully land or stop to exit your ship or completely annihilate your performance like in Star Citizen, the ship can be going at full speed and you can just launch yourself out of it with a launch tube or just walk out the airlocks too. There's walkways on the outside of the ship where you can be walking around on it, and even on the sides or under it, and you'll be travelling with the ship. At any point, you can also just jump and jetpack off it, then just use your absurdly long grappling hook to latch back onto a grapple point on the walkway and re-magnetize onto it. The jetpacks themselves also move absurdly fast so it's not like you're just left drifting in the void if you do detach from the ship, so that really gives players a ton of freedom of mobility. Ground combat itself is very straightforward, you have gun, there are enemy robots, you shoot them, you try not to get shot too much. The grappling hook and jetpack (which can't be used in indoor environments) give you some more verticality options there.

The ship combat has more going for it, with the pilot having frontal ship cannons, and the gunner having potentially multiple different turret weapons. Ships have shields (that don't regenerate) and health, both of which can be restored by crafting shield/ship repair kits and then manually bringing them over to corresponding installation points. Your ship can also catch fire both inside and outside (not sure how that happens in the vacuum of space), but fortunately there's a couple extinguishers placed around the ship. Ammo is also not unlimited and additional ammo bins have to be found/crafted then loaded. You can tell this game was definitely made with co-op in mind, since they expect somebody to go around effectively doing logistics in the middle of a fight if things get messy. Ships are also customizable, with different options for the engine, aux generators, thrusters, and weapons. Unlocking more of these ship components is one of the main draws for the missions currently, as well as unlocking different ships altogether.

Overall, it shows a lot of promise. Only played a few hours so far but I've liked what I've seen, looking forward to seeing this game grow in features and content.

Got into a bike accident so I've been curled up at home chipping away at The Outer Wilds.

I'm loving it.

Like if No Man's Sky were designed to be a beautiful ship in a bottle.

Baldurs Gate 3

I've put close on a thousand hours on this game since it came out, but I recently finished a run in Honour Mode (took about 80 hours), to get my achievement and my golden dice. It's one of the most challenging things I've done in gaming, and I'm very pleased with myself for having managed it. I know it's no longer a particularly exclusive club but by golly it was tense at times.

Having a bit of a rest. Going on a business trip soon so will be taking my steam deck with Tetris Effect and Wylde Flowers.

I have been incredibly, incredibly sick for like three weeks now, so I haven’t been playing much of anything, but I’m starting to feel better and hoping I’ll have some gaming time at the end of this week since both Hades 2 and Tokyo Xtreme Racer hit 1.0 on the 25th! I’ve been playing TXR in early access already, but not Hades 2, so I’m excited! And then the week after that is Ghost of Yotei, which I will be no-lifing.

I also booted up and played Destiny Rising for a bit through emulator on PC. I’m completely fed up with the state of Destiny 2. I tried to give it a fair chance after the expansion and system reworks to see if a few updates got the game into a better state and it really hasn’t. Rising has been surprising to me in the 2 hours I’ve played. They managed to make the moment to moment gameplay of a mobile version of Destiny almost just as fun as Destiny 2, it’s pretty neat. I’m not far enough yet to judge the story, endgame, or gacha mechanics, but I’m actually enjoying it so far. It’s also showing me how much room this franchise has to thrive if there’s actually some investment into making more and better games. D2 feels like it’s on life support right now with how bad the grind had gotten, and it’s still such a jarring change from the near perfect sandbox we had at the end of Final Shape.

After three and a half years, I finally went back to Elden Ring and finished the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.

I bought the DLC when it first released, but found I was still too burnt out to actually play. Since then, I've been trying to dodge DLC spoilers while telling myself I'd definitely get back to it soon.

Elden Ring is a big game. On my first playthrough, I spent some 250 hours just exploring every nook and cranny, and testing out different weapons and builds. I also spent an inordinate amount of time piecing together the story. This was before wikis and "loretubers" had it all figured out, so I read every item description myself to put together a timeline of events. This was rewarding, but also exhausting.

My original goal was to collect every item. Doing so required a NG+ run to collect all boss weapons, and to also redo the quest lines I messed up the first time. Quests in Souls games can be quite cryptic, so this is expected. I had started the NG+ run, but quickly found I just didn't have the energy to play through the game again. So I put it down, and didn't pick it up again for over three years.

The impetus for finally doing so was the recent release of Nightreign. The game plays a lot like Elden Ring, but faster and in a roguelike format. I picked it up with some friends, and it rekindled my interest enough to dust off the normal Elden Ring again.

Thankfully, I found the game considerably faster the second time around. You can really move in NG+. Though even overleveled, there's still an absurd amount of content. It doesn't help that I completed every cave and side dungeon again.

At this point, I was finally ready to jump into the DLC. And let me say, it completely exceeded my expectations. The overworld map is so layered and deceptively large. The dungeons each feel unique and interesting to explore. The bosses are also a high point. There was far less boss reuse than in the base game, and they're each brilliant in their own way. The new musical themes were also very good. This is a true and proper expansion pack.

I did find I was quite overleveled at the start, unfortunately, so I abstained from using the scadutree blessings for most of the game. I finished the final boss fight at blessing level 3, which was fun but challenging.

Being that this was a blind playthrough of the DLC, I of course messed up a quest line. So one day I might need to revisit with a NG+2 playthrough to fix those mistakes. That day can wait. For now, I'm happy to close the book on Elden Ring and call it finished.

My son and I played Lego Voyagers over the weekend. It was a really fun little co-op puzzler! It probably took us 4ish hours to complete the story, but we have more achievements to get. He was very upset by the ending though, so if you have young kids maybe be ready for that.

The other game I have been playing a lot the last week or two is Deadzone: Rogue which is a really fun FPS/roguelike mash up. It really needs to be played with others to get the most out of it, but I've had good luck just joining random games. Once you get a handle on the builds, you can get very OP which is fun. The shooting mechanics are good - they remind me of Destiny quite a bit. I linked to the Steam store for it, but it's available on consoles and is cross-platform. I play on PS5.

I've been playing the RallySimFans mod for Richard Burns Rally. I wish the graphics were better and some of the damage seems a little unfair (hitting small wooden poles on the side of the rode or even bike lane separators can total the car) but the physics in general feel the best of any rally sim I've played. I also like the variation in cars a lot.