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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
I've been playing The Outer Worlds 2 and it is almost as fun as the first game. If you aren't familiar with the series it feels and plays very similar to both the Borderlands series and the Fallout 3+ series. That is, there's a bit more of a continuous storyline with more meat and dialogue than Borderlands, while not quite being as well-written as the Fallout series, but the game engine doesn't feel as buggy as the modern Fallout games.
The choices that you can make in the game don't have much breadth but the game still posits situations with political and philosophical concerns that one can chew on often enough. I've played through 15 hours and there's still a few more places that I haven't explored on the first world but the game is starting to feel a little bit repetitive but I haven't lost interest completely yet.
Borderlands 4. Man, I hate how into this game I am. It's basically the same game as before which is frustrating as the new stuff is basically just obvious quality of life changes (and I guess one open world is also new).
Borderlands has always lacked depth, the world feels very static and lifeless. You're basically just walking up to interactive card board cutouts and pressing play.
Still, it's fun to mow down enemies and craft your op build. But this isn't a game one plays forever as you run out of things to do.
After trying my best to limit gaming time, I went down a call of duty rabbit hole for the last two weeks. I haven’t played in the last 3-4 years if not longer. It started with “I kinda miss warzone even if I suck at it”, and went to “oh they now have a casual mode with players and bots mixed together.” So I sucked less (thanks, bots!) which made me want to play more, which became a big time sink. Yesterday I unplugged the the PS5 and put it away. Back to reality for me. Might still play Balatro on my iPad, but no more call of duty. Too addictive!
Europa Universalis V has basically consumed my life. I already have 71 hours played since its release on the 4th.
Click to see my review
Much like every other Paradox game at release, it still has its fair share of issues and bugs, including a few serious, run-ending bugs. E.g. It's since been resolved in the last hotfix, but I had to quit my first Ottoman playthrough after encountering the Claim Throne Casus Belli bug, whereby you could not actually claim the throne in the subsequent peace deal. And another super super annoying bug that is still happening is my current ruler can't ever seem to stay assigned as a General or Admiral. I can't tell exactly what is causing it (it's not the "Replace Generals/Admirals" automation setting since I have that disabled), but I suspect it's because my ruler is in a Marriage Union where he is also the Consort of another nation. So I think his court location keeps switching back and forth between them, and every time it does that it removes him as a General/Admiral and makes him temporarily unavailable to be reassigned until he returns to my nation's court. This really sucks since having your ruler leading your Army or Navy increases your Crown Power, which is super super important.
The other issue I'm currently struggling with is the super complicated Trade and Economy side of the game. I'm finally staring to get a solid handle on it, but it's still a pretty tedious and fucking annoying system, IMO. And the biggest annoyance about it is that commodity availability and prices, especially for food, fluctuate way way way too damn much right now, and so you can go from earning +20 ducats one month to -20 ducats the next without anything else about your nation changing (no events, same stability, same legitimacy, etc). And it certainly doesn't help that the Trade automation setting seems really really really bad at handling those regular price and availability fluctuations, especially when your country has a smaller economy. Once you start producing enough resources in your own nation to take care of your basic needs, and start earning enough money through taxes to weather those trade good fluctuations, it's gets less annoying and you can just switch it over to being automated. But if you want a decent start you have to constantly pay attention to Trade, and manually tweak your imports/exports every month for the first decade or so of play.
cc: @Aerrol, since you wanted to see my review when I posted it. ;)
But despite all the issues, IMO this is still the best Paradox game release in a long long time, and I'm having a ton of fun playing it. And speaking of fun, my latest run has turned into the most Crusader Kings like game of Europa Universalis I've ever experienced, so I decided to write up an 'After Action Report' for it. For anyone interested in reading it:
Click to see my Castile AAR (with pics)
I'm currently playing as King Alfonso XI of Castile. In the first few years I managed to oust both the Granadans and Moroccans from Iberia in two super quick Religious wars. I then released two Vassals (Malaga + Almeria) to Integrate their lands and slowly Convert their population to Christianity for me, after which I plan on Annexing them. Pic
With that sorted out, I turned my attention to my obnoxious rival neighbors, the Aragonese. I managed to slice them in half in our first war against each other, cutting off the French from Iberia by taking all the northern Iberian Provinces, and also cutting their Capital off from the rest of their territory by forcing them to release Catalonia. Similar to Granada, I also released two Vassals (Huesca + Rosella) to Integrate and Culture Convert the land for me before I Annex them. And shortly afterwards, I finally managed to Diplomatically Vassalize Navarre as well, who I had been courting since the start of the game. Aragon also eventually moved their capital from the now surrounded and isolated Barcelona to Montpellier, their only holding in France, which should make our next war even easier for me since it has no fort, and France is my ally now too. ;) Pic
Pretty standard stuff so far... but then things suddenly got waaaay more interesting, and this run turned into the most Crusader Kings like game of Europa Universalis I've ever experienced!
The Portuguese King's only male heir suddenly died, and then he died a few months later, leaving his eldest daughter (my ruler's wife) Maria as Queen of Portugal. Which also meant that my own heir, Pedro, was now the heir to Portugal as well. Eventually, as my heir grew nearer to coming of age, I started to wonder what kind of shenanigans I could get up to with a Royal Marriage for him. So I immediately went hunting for any large nations with an heiress who also had older parents, so that they wouldn't have any male children to usurp the heiress' position. After a lot of fruitless searching all over Western Europe, I finally started looking further afield and discovered that the Byzantine Empire had a 51 year old Basilissa (Queen) with a 14 year old heiress, Helene, who also happened to be only a few months younger than my own son. Seeing this, I immediately sprung my diplomats into action, repeatedly sending them to Konstantinoupolis (Constantinople) to improve relations with Byzantium and increase their trust with us in every way I could, so that when both children came of age I could arrange the marriage between them despite us being different denominations (Byzantium is Orthodox).
Everything was going smoothly until the Black Death finally struck, and a few months before they both came of age Helene's 53 year old mother died. I was still planning to just patiently wait it out and propose to Helene directly as soon as she came of age, but before I could do that a Pretender Rebellion backing Helene's 12 year old cousin popped up. Byzantium is always in a very precarious spot at the beginning of Europa Universalis games, and it's no different in EU5 either. I couldn't see exactly what was going on in the war between them, but unlike in most other wars where a successful siege results in temporarily occupied territory (which you can't see through fog of war), when pretender's armies siege down a territory it immediately flips to owned territory, and vice versa. So even through the fog of war, I could tell that things were looking grim for Byzantium as more and more territory flipped to the pretender's control, and there was nothing I could do about it... directly, anyways. But I didn't want to give up on the Europe spanning power marriage idea, so in my desperation to make that happen I cranked down all my Expenses to nothing, to the point where I rapidly started losing stability and legitimacy. And this allowed me to start funneling as much money as I could to Byzantium, which had me sending 100+ ducats per month to them and losing ~50 ducats a month from my own coffers, in the desperate hope that would encourage them to hire mercenaries they could use to win the war against the pretender. Not the best situation to be in for either of us, but I figured I could survive doing that for at least a year, and if I ran out of money I could always start taking out loans to keep supporting them until they won the war. No matter the temporary hardships, I knew it would all be worth it if I could just keep Byzantium alive, and secure the marriage in order to ensure that my heir took over Castile when I died, took over Portugal when his mother died, and his own heir can also take over Byzantium too once my future daughter-in-law died eventually as well.
A few nail-biting months later, anxiously waiting to see if my master plan would actually come to fruition after all these years, I started seeing the first signs that the tide was beginning to turn against the pretender. First one county flipped back to Byzantium, then another, then another. And in the midst of this, Helene finally came of age too. I genuinely had no idea if she would actually accept the marriage proposal even though the diplomatic screen had previously been showing more positive than negative points towards the idea (only not allowing it yet since neither was of age yet). Even still, I was extremely worried that might have been misleading, and it would still not allow it despite her coming of age due to her being the actual ruler of Byzantium now, and Orthodox on top of that. But lo and behold, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Pedro de Borgona, son of King Alfonso XI the Avenger, and Queen Maria, heir to Castile and Portugal, and consort to the ruler of the Byzantine Empire, Basilissa Helene Komnenos. :)
It's time for the "mature adult played Pokémon Legends Z-A for 80 hours" post.
Pokémon is weird because on an objective level, this game is repetitive, ugly, a sequel to my least favorite Pokémon games, and I really shouldn't be playing it.
But here's the thing: the game is actually just Pokémon layered on top a kind of a lite version of two of my favorite series in a blender, Xenoblade and Like a Dragon/Yakuza. The gameplay is pretty fun - I've been playing without items in battle (which I've been doing recently for Pokémon games,) the game is actually pretty challenging. The city is full of zany sidestories, some are fun, some really aren't. Another thing really trending well for this series is the characters. I really love the cast for this, like a lot.
The lack of voice acting and the bland textures make Lumiose City a bit soulless however and dings everything I said about the side stories and characters. Nonetheless, it's still a fun mindless romp just trying to catch them all, which again, like Arceus, is possible to do in one game without interacting with other people which is appreciated.
I agree with everything you said. The battling mechanic is pretty fun. I just finished the post game content. A bit tedious, but at least enjoyable in a mindless kind of way. I also like checking off the rest of the missions/side missions. You also get closure to one piece of a side character's story.
Legends Z-A is probably my favorite of the recent releases. Although I never played Arceus
I just finished Lost Dimension for the Vita, a game I'd barely heard about. I had a surprisingly good time. It's kinda like a combination of Valkyria Chronicles and Danganronpa. It doesn't go as deep into each side as those two titles, but I still really enjoyed it. It's kind of the opposite of most JRPGs, where you start with your maximum party (11), and as the game goes on, you whittle them down to 6 as you identify the traitors as you ascend the tower. The traitors are truly random, so you can end up with a unique party comp by the end of the game.
But the game really screwed me over in that apparently Yoko is the second best character, and the game decided to make her a traitor in both of my playthroughs.
After shortly trying and refunding ARC Raiders, I had a change of heart, convinced a friend to buy it (honestly, I think he was looking for the same excuse), and also bought the game back.
I'm glad I did, because even though it's a PvPvE extraction shooter, this one actually works for casual players. You can easily read/watch about the game now, but here are some notable points for me:
I'm absolutely terrible at PvP, and yet I can extract safely most of the time. That doesn't mean I don't get camped or shot in the back, but in solo play, PvP is just a component of the game, and not the focus.
When playing in duo (or trio), we gear to fight and don't take chances. If you start a game with the mindset that you're going to die, it's still all fun, and most encounters are fair play with non-toxic proximity chat.
Honestly, I've been playing a lot of Archero 2 on my phone lately.
I have less and less time to devote to gaming these days, so playing on my phone is a good alternative. I love that game because, while there are microtransactions (a lot of it). There is actual skill to the game, you can easily level up and get stronger every time you play. It doesn't translate that much into the game play (the monsters get stronger as you do), but I'm at the point where I can tweak my build to maximize a certain playstyle and it's fun when you get the combat upgrades that fit that playstyle.
It's a ton of fun! I must say I'm a little addicted... which I feel is great because I haven't found that in a game in at least 6 months.
Long time ago I was paying Xcom 2/Chimera Squad, never finished what I wrote, but I quickly added something to conclude it and here it is.
nuXCOM and Turtling.
I've been playing XCOM2 (and Chimera Squad a little).
Squad tactics games with a strategic element. The interesting part to me is the evolution of anti-turtle measure.
Basically, the way the game works makes it so directly attacking is often... not the best option to take.
So, you put most of your units on overwatch and let the ayys do your job of flushing them out.
Needless to say, it's not a fun strat. It can be fun as part of, say, a tense situation where you're on a almost holdout-esque situation, but those are rare in XCOM.
So, they need a way to force you to move fast.
In the first game of the reboot (Enemy Unknown), they used Terror Missions, where you're running after civvies before the aliens could kill them.
Works well, but it's an uncommon mission type. So, most mission could be turtled.
Since it was such an issue, in the DLC (Enemy Within) they added Meld, a currency used for most DLC stuff.
To get it, you need to rush to Meld canisters in regular missions before they destroyed the Meld inside them. One close and one far (with a bit more time before it broke).
...But the close one could be reached with only a bit of hurrying which only partially helped the problem.
Then comes XCOM2 with... timers everywhere. 8 turns to do the job, plus a "stealth" mechanic that gave you an alpha strike.
It was controversial (Meld got a pass by being optional, this isn't), and still had an issue with stealth lasting too long.
So in it's DLC (War of the Chosen) they added missions that pushed you to break concealment early and rush anyway (rushing for supplies, or destroy a thing but you have to make up time by shooting small things along the way, etc).
And then comes Chimera Squad with an encounter system.
First is the Breach phase, where you pick who goes where and in what order (diffrent spots have diffrent traits, like having more enemies that shoot during Breach or give the last agent 100% chance to hit, on top of a different number of slots and even requirements).
Then comes the Combat phase, which is mostly regular XCOM combat, but there's a timeline system like most RPGs rather than each side moving all at once, and the arenas are... well, arenas.
Everyone can see where everyone else is at all time, with no chance of triggering another group of enemies, and each group of enemies being completely cut from each other.
While Chimera Squad isn't a mainline title, it is the last released title with a mainline-adjacent gameplay. It's still interesting to see how we went from something they mostly didn't expect, to solutions that were too lenient, too getting more and more aggresssive in how hard they pushed you riiight up to the point they said NO MORE.
That was something I wrote months ago, so now in more recent news (more than a week after it's over), I'm writing a... summary? for Red Sun over Paradise's Season of Screams V: Blood Moon (Blood Counter 4) event.
Feel free to call it Blood Moon, or Blood Counter, we do that.
SoS4 BC5- no wait, other way around, whatever, BLOOD COUNTER!
Compared to the Metrolands at the start of the year, this was a simpler event: do stuff, get blood, enough blood = rewards. As for what stuff? Well, to quote Mikusch (our second-in-command):
While you're doing... all that (especially the last one in the early days, got bad enough to add a command to ignore sprays), you'll get to experience the stuff they added for the event.
Most common is the gifts (stolen straight from 2012, I'm not the one saying it!) they spawn every few minutes, get them for Battle Points (currency), a voodoo-cursed item (collect them all for a free crate!) and maybe a key for one of the other crate types- if you're lucky.
At the same time, a new map was added to Player versus Map:
Spoilers for Deltarune.
The Roaring Knight, who takes surprisingly well to going from the Fun Gang to roughly 40 crazed mercenaries.
Most bosses have a gimmick of some sort, like constantly teleporting. The Roaring Knight has a simple (NOT easy) pattern of hard hitting attacks.
And long respawns. Jevil in the highest preset power (it has a custom mode) gives you 30 seconds to wait (custom goes up to 45). Normal RK goes for 30.
It's a difficult enough boss that it has only 2 difficulty level, Mantleless turn most attacks into 1-Hit kills, mix up the pattern a little (still is completely set), and doubles the respawn time, 1 minute respawns baby!
That boss is hard enough for only one group to beat Mantleless. I, somehow, was in that group.
About halfway into the event, someone hit 100k litres of blood (out of the max required of 50k). Their reward was a new, secret one. One that lets you use GabeN's voice to terrify your enemies.
Naturally, we expected some kind of boost sometime in the last week to help people out. We got to beta-test a new gamemode instead.
Dice Warfare! It's Class Warfare, but with rtd! Become frozen! A tank! An invisible Heavy! Someone with 3 times the HP of said Heavy! A sentry buster! A Saxton Hale that gets killed by a cardboard cutout screaming "MeeM"!
It's some good dumb fun with a good variety of effects to push the chaos. Like it.
By last week, the giant pile of blood we're getting for the admins was getting big enough to hit twice the amount we needed for the last reward. We knew it was coming, a secret community-wide reward. We were in a frenzy, waiting to finally get Jackenstein voicelines. Someone even changed their spray to the Blood Counter showing Jack, even kept updating it as we got closer! Come on, you know it's gonna be-
We can now play as Ellis, from Left 4 Dead 2. We already had a couple L4D items, but they were for a single voiceline each. This is a whole skin, with a whole bunch of voicelines, including what might be the longest Battle Cries on the server. Why, the quote's one (and also the description).
As this was happening, it became more likely to see Ocelot (the Surf-only server) become the only populated one when the server was mostly empty thanks to the Admins enabling blood earlier than other servers (to make up the player slots being lowered to 16 instead of 40). Most were players farming the event. A few new faces only here to play a bit of surf.
Then, there was Shturman.
Registered October 24, a week later had Surf Mastery MAX, received for completing 500 surf courses. Less than 2 weeks in, had unlocked all Surf achievements. By the time the event ended (27 days later), they had over 2500 surf courses completed. Little under 100 courses a day, probalby over 100 in truth.
They became a small sensation on the Discord with their exceptional rise on Ocelot, despite not being on it. For a couple days.
All in all, a good, simple event (for us, in the back end it was quite complex as said in that forum post I linked earlier), but now that we're out of it we've kinda crashed out.
I mean, it still gets players and all, but it's still a smaller playerbase on for a smaller time window. Still not the worst, an earlier Blood Counter left the servers empty for 3 months afterwards!
To go back earlier, and then jump to the end of the Blood Counter event, I bring Yomi 2.
Now, I got into this a bit weirdly, see there was a kickstarter for the physical game, decided to go for everything + the big box (to get everything extra), which costed me over 300$.
Now, go on Steam. You will find the whole game for under 30 bucks. This form comes with the bonus of handling all bookeeping (like changing HP values), easily showing both player's discard and known cards, a log, and even async games so you can play over timezones!
I spent a good month with the physical game before buying it on Steam.
Review/"explanation".
Questionable financial decisions aside, this card game aims to recreate the feeling of fighting games. At high levels.
As such, the goal is to defeat your opponent. To do this, you'll have win the Opener (where both players play a combat card in a double blind), which is a RPS deal: Attacks beats Throws, Throws beats Defenses, and Defenses beats Attacks. Same strikes means the faster one wins, if they tie the active player wins.
It's not that simple, though, in just the basic cards:
Keep in mind, this is the Opener at it's most basic, just the basic cards with (mostly) no special effects. Specials and Supers can make things even more interesting.
To help you getting one over your opponent, during your turns you get to draw 2 cards and do a few Actions:
As you can tell by now, it's the kind of game where you'll second guess yourself all the way to the end, making you feel like a genius as you hard read your opponent, and also like a moron as you walk into what now looks into the most obvious 50-damage super the game has on offer.
Like, genuinely, I once blocked against a full Super Rook. The moment I saw that full super meter I knew what was waiting for me.
...I may need to write a little less next time.