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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 have finished Planet of Lana. It's absolute marvel, the game is beautiful, has awesome soundtrack and has soul. It somehow spoke to me and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. The puzzles are not exactly easy but also not hard.
Now I'm playing Borderlands 2. I finished it many years ago on PS Vita and now I play on Steam Deck. This game is over the top, it went off the cliff with it's humor. I love it! And it's very unusual FPS and RPG crossover where you play from it as a standard first person shooter but the mechanics are completely RPG based (damage, elemental damage and chance, skills, shields, more health on level up, level requirements for guns, inventory...).
Borderlands 2 is awesome!
25 hours and 4 "episodes" deep into Death Stranding 2 on PC so far. I made a post a bit earlier with my in-depth thoughts here, but the general gist of it is that Kojima's an awful scriptwriter and the narrative's rather contrived but the gameplay's excellent and it feels good to share structures and items with other players and see the "likes" pop up when they use them. It's still more or less the same gameplay as the first one, so either you're already into the whole delivery game thing or you're not.
Tried to get back into Overwatch recently after it had its soft relaunch.
Sadly basically everything that was wrong with it when people quit in 2019 is still wrong with it, the balance team are clueless and 5v5 has only made it feel worse.
On the bright side though, its made TF2 look a lot more appealing to fall in love with again!
Have you tried Team Fortress 2 Classified?
Not yet, I've not been keeping up with many of the new stuff that's being developed since the release of the SDK, but good to see this is coming along so well!
Been trying to find another action roguelike to scratch that Megabonk itch, so I've bought three this week.
Grind Survivors is like the lovechild of Vampire Survivors and Diablo, and it was good, until I got to Burned Forest on Dark 2, the second available difficulty of the first stage in the game. Then I found enemy spawn rates were heavily increased and they became a lot tankier to the point where I could barely survive 2 to 3 minutes in a run. It turns out that weapon tiers dropped in later stages effectively add a x10 stat multiplier compared to the previous tier, making the game's gearing system effectively zone-locked around a ridiculous grind to get a decent epic/legendary weapon for your tier with the right affixes. The game also runs like shit on the Steam Deck (only has playable status) and was making my device roar like a jet engine.
If they work out the glaring balance and performance issues, then I can see this game doing very, very well.
NIMRODS is only slightly better. I am greatly struggling with the almost complete lack of ability to regenerate health, and I don't know if this is down to me playing a bugged build of the game, or the developers being complete and utter morons.
Sometimes I can go entire minutes in a run without an apple (restores 5HP) or medkit (restores ~30HP) spawning. For perspective, you start with 100 HP baseline before weapon upgrades and gene mutations apply, so having an item that can only restore 5% of your base HP barely spawn is already bad enough.
The only weapon part I've seen which has anything even approaching lifesteal is Piercing Ammo. For every enemy penetrated by a bullet, except for the first and last one, you recover 0.003 health. This means that you'd have to land about 33,000 penetrations just to recover 99 hitpoints. And that upgrade is basically worthless unless you're running a slow fire rate weapon like a shotgun or 50. Cal that can penetrate multiple enemies baseline.
Passive health regen on weapon upgrades is somehow ever-so-slightly worse. Minor upgrades seem to offer 0.026 regen per second, whilst one of the tropies which drops from a boss lowers your max health by 50 but regens at a rate of 0.25 per second.
Apparently there are health regeneration genes and lifesteal upgrades which can be unlocked which do greatly boost survivability, but I have not been able to find these at all. And if I venture beyond the Chaos Grove into another area, I basically die either because I get swarmed with enemies (Hive Warrens is really bad because the moment you disturb a hive, your screen gets swarmed by bees) or have to deal with zones designed around narrow corridors and chokepoints.
What doesn't help is how woefully outdated the game's wiki and any other online resources of it are. And the subreddit is basically dead, with only two posts.
Risk of Rain 2 is the one I've played least, only putting about 33 minutes into. The jellyfish boss from the first zone kinda pisses me off because of how devastating its ultimate AoE attack is, but other than that I like the design.
The Artisan of Glimmith -- if you like puzzles like in The Witness you'll like this (I think they are called Logic Grid Puzzles). The world is pretty but is just there to find new puzzles, I don't think it does anything. Has a demo.
(And StS2 co-op. It's fun)
The time of Bloodborne PC emulation is FINALLY at hand!!!
I have been replaying Bloodborne for the last week - I still have a PS4 sitting around, mainly in case i feel the need to play Bloodborne. If you haven't played this one before, I would highly recommend trying out emulation if you have a high end GPU. Upon revisiting, I honestly think I prefer it to Elden Ring, mainly due to the fact that the world design is less sprawling and more purposeful. Also the whole cosmic/eldritch horror theme is superb.
Besides Bloodborne I have also been trying to finally beat GTA 4, which is honestly darker than I remember. It lacks the comedic relief of GTA 5, which makes Niko Bellic come across as a bit of a sociopath. Still a great game though.
Still playing Mewgenics! Got about 80 hours in it now, save screen says I'm 67% complete. I've got all the classes now, and am working on getting Act 3 finished and the last few house bosses, while also trying to polish up my post-its and other unlocks.
The game is fantastic, there is so much content and while the game is legitimately an unfair bastard (Surprise! Your cat is dead!), it can also be an unfair bastard in the other direction (had a random environment effect one-shot a difficult boss for me, so that was awesome), so it still feels engaging especially if you can roll with the punches.
There are a few balance issues imo, which makes sense as the game hasn't had its first balance patch yet (the second part of the second branch of act 3 is an insane difficulty wall, way harder than even the step beyond it somehow). But I'm really loving the game, and plan to 100% it at the very least.
Also playing Slay the Spire 2, I wanted to save it until it was a little more cooked, and when I wasn't in another rogue like, but my best friend got it and I didn't want to miss the zeitgeist, so I got it but exclusively to play in co-op atm. It really is an amazing followup to the original, and the creativity in the card designs, and also the pretty new visuals, is wonderful. The co-op is super well made too!
I started Borderlands 4 over the weekend. Still very early into it. Only got the vehicle last night. I'm taking it slow. Chose Vex an my character. The minion reminds me a bit of Moredecai's skill in Borderlands 1, which was the first character I ever played in this universe back on the PS3. I also liked the siren (Maya) in B2, so this felt fitting. It's a siren with minions. I pulled the trigger on this game because it's on sale on the PS store. I didn't want to pay full price. B3 was my least favorite so I was not sure what to expect from B4. SI was worried about one thing I kept seeing in reviews, and that's the absence of a minimap. But I do see it in the option now, so I guess the developers added it? Either way, I figured I would give it a shot without the minimap (to see how they had envisioned it initially). I gotta say, it's kind of nice. A more relaxed feel where I don't keep looking in the bottom corner half the time. The compass is so-so, I can see how people dislike it, especially if you start having many things on there. Anyway, yeah, so far so good overall in terms of gameplay and characters. Pretty much what you'd expect from Borderlands. The worst thing for me is the menu. The inventory and character used to "pop" more in past games. This has a very sterile "MENU" feel. But there are some cool shortcuts compared to past games too, that basically keep me OUT of the menus: picking up something as "junk" and selling all junk at a vending machine without going into the menu even once, for example. The vehicle spawning is just like Destiny. Miss the catch-a-riiiiide fun, and it was kind of a core thing to the universe, but I'm counting it as a quality of life upgrade overall. What else... hmm... the guns look bad in the menu. I guess that's more menu dislike. In B1 you could see the guns clearly. In this one some just look too similar to one another in the menu, while in the game they do look very distinctive. These are all early impressions so take them with a grain of salt.
I think B1 holds a special nostalgic place for me. B2 was my favorite for sure: long, good story, more of what was good in B1, but a lot of new stuff too. In a comment above, @Pavouk106 mentioned B2. Nice! Have fun! I think it's an awesome game. I replayed that one a few times to try different characters. It also has so many expansions.
Then the pre-sequel (the one on the moon) was pretty fun. I had a blast with that one, the low gravity mechanics and all that. More B2, basically. Felt like a huge add-on. B3 was the one I did not like very much. The improved graphics were nice, but the story and especially the villains just didn't resonate with me. There were some cool levels, but also some annoying parts and characters. Will see how B4 plays out for me as a long time fan of the series!
I'm still playing a ton of Warhammer 40k: Kill Team. This game has very much become my main hobby for the time being. I'm enjoying meeting some new friends, rolling some dice, painting miniatures, etc. It feels good to be back in the miniature gaming space after a few years gone and I'm looking forward to the Starcraft miniatures game releasing soon! I'm pretty sure I'll be maining Zerg to start.
For vidya, I played and beat Outer Wilds. Thoughts below:
Outer Wilds Spoilers
I thought the game was fun and the puzzles were very satisfying, but this didn't strike me as "one of the best games" or "one of the best indie games" of all time, like many people say it is. Obviously, it's just opinions, both mine and others, so it doesn't really matter, but it did not live up to the impossible hype for me. I vastly enjoyed the game and figuring out certain puzzles, like waiting outside the tower of knowledge to get sucked into the black hole with it so that you could float in from space is *super* satisfying. The puzzles were overall excellent and the time looping just added to the game and was never an annoyance. I enjoyed the world building and while the art style rubbed me wrong at first (I didn't like the tiny planets), it's clearly the better choice from a gameplay perspective and I came to love it. The most interesting parts to me were the Nomai texts for you to follow the story. I did love the gradual unraveling of the mystery and it did genuinely make me gasp in a couple of places. The first was when I found the living Nomai on the quantum moon and the other is when I found the display showing that the purpose of the time loop is so they can shoot the probe in every conceivable direction and that they've shot it over 9 million times now or whatever.I did vastly enjoy the game and the story and puzzles absolutely hit for me, but I thought the ending was extremely predictable and didn't really stick with me as much as it does for other people. I think it's a great game, but it doesn't crack my top 10 or anything like that.
I'm also on the last act of Warhammer 40k: Boltgun and this game is amazing. I love bloody boomer shooters and it's just great :)
I also got back into Overwatch recently and play exclusively casually. I'm having a great time with it. Most matches are fun and most heroes I try are fun! I hadn't played much since around when Ashe was added to the game, so I've been away for a while, but it's fun to have a casual shooter in my rotation again. I don't play ranked or anything, but for casual play, I'm actually loving 5v5, so the opposite of @MagnaLynx21, ha. I've mostly been tanking, but I've been trying a number of the damage and support heroes that I haven't played before, as well.
Marathon - Still love it. I'm bad, but it's fun ,and the feeling when things go right is glorious. Helps that I don't stress too much about gear loss, and they've done a good job of that not totally hobbling you.
Slay the Spire 2 - Going through and getting everyone to ASC 10. Going one by one, on a pretty long streak at this point as it looks like it's all clicked. Love the new classes but they're going to need some tweaking because WOW are they strong.
Sol Cesto - Really interesting "dungeon crawler?" style game. Art style is a huge part of the draw while the rest of it is sorta building a charter and adjusting your odds of what you'll hit when you go to a row. For a sub $10 game i'm happy.
Hades 2 on the Switch 2. It's just like Hades and that's a good thing. An excellent game all around.
Dave the Diver on the Switch 2. I really, really liked this game at first. The diving and restaurant management is fun as hell. Later the game tries to do far too many things, which is fun at first but quickly becomes pretty obnoxious. Forcing me to play a shitty version of balatro in-game when I already own actual-balatro on multiple platforms was the straw that broke the camels back. I'm still playing the game here and there but the wind has been taken from my sails.
Pokemon Fire Red on the Switch 2. I'm old, but I've never owned a gameboy and never played a Pokemon game until 2020, so there is zero nostalgia associated with this game for me. This game is insanely frustrating to play without the QoL additions of modern pokemon. I just spent 4 hours in a single building. I don't know if I'll finish it.
Starsand Island on Xbox SX. This is a super generic life-sim/farming game. It's pretty much exactly the same as all the other ones that you're familiar with, and if you're into the genre, that's probably enough. But it does do a few things that I really like.
First, there are craftable vehicles. Some can be held in your inventory like a skateboard or rollerblades. Some can be rented or owned and called to you with the press of a button, like motorcycles or ostriches. This helps make running the endless amount of errands that these style games are rife with go faster and be a little more fun.
Second is just quality of life things. Items you deposit in chests can be utilized at the various crafting stations. Items deposited in chests at your house outside of town can even be accessed in town for townspeople requests and whatnot. Pressing x on a chest will quickly deposit all items from your inventory that already have a stack in the chest. Inventory screens have an auto-sort button. You know, super basic shit that games like Minecraft desperately need but apparently are just too difficult even after 15+ years of active development and a budget in the multi-millions.
I also have Pokemon Legends A-Z just waiting for me to finish up some of this other stuff before I get into it.
This is funny to me since I haven't played a mainline Pokemon game since generation 3 (Ruby/Sapphire and Fire Red/Leaf Green), so I have no idea what QoL additions are in the modern Pokemon games, and I can't remember anything being particularly frustrating when I played them on my GBA but it has been 20 years, so...
Every time you catch a pokemon, the game asks if you would like to name it. I don't. Ever. Later games have an option to turn this off.
There are no skill descriptions in the battle menu. I'm not a pokemon fanboy that has hundreds of skills memorized. I don't always remember that "tail whip", for example, is a status effect and not a damaging move, because it certainly sounds like it should be a damaging move. This means I have to stop and open up the pokedex during battle all the time. Later games have skill descriptions in the battle menu.
Box management. There are separate menus for "deposit" and "withdraw" pokemon via the PC. Just to look at the pokemon in your box you have to select "deposit". If you want to swap one out you first have to deposit one, then back out of the box (and be asked if you're done every time) and then select withdraw and choose the pokemon and then be asked again if you're done. Later games streamline this.
No shared exp. I understand this one is still controversial to this day and quite frankly I don't see why. With no shared exp if you want to level up your Magikarp what do you do? Put it first in the party and switch it out as soon as the battle starts. Even though it did nothing it still gets exp. This is literally exp sharing with extra steps. It also makes no sense in-universe and is just a way for the devs to pad playtime with mindless grinding. Later games added items that induce exp share and some modern games even just have a toggle in the options, which I think is the best solution.
These are minor inconveniences mostly, but added together can be pretty big wastes of time and just extremely annoying, especially from my perspective where I played the newer games first.
I took a long break from Pokemon games after RSE, and I just can't get into the new games. They drive me crazy with how much dialogue and hand-holding there is. I never get more than a couple hours into them. It feels like the game plays itself, and I just push A.
Trine 5, what a beautiful game, every scene is completely gorgeous, and the puzzles are all entertaining without being too hard.
I've been playing some Slay the Spire 2. I've really enjoyed it so far. Silent and Defect were my favorite characters in the original, and they're still my favorite characters now. I'm still needing to play more with the other characters to get used to them. Co-op has also been great. I've done a few runs with my friends, and we've not yet won due to being greedy and getting used to actually discussing our turns and playing with another person.
I'm excited to see how the game ends up at the 1.0 phase after balancing and additional content is added in.
I've been re-visiting Civilization V and VI, trying to decide if I want to buy VII. I'd be interested if anyone has thoughts on VII, I'd be interested to hear them. I know it was controversial when it came out.
All new Civs are controversial when they come out. 5 was, 6 was. I usually like to wait for several years and then when the fervor calms down, I'll go give them a go and I'm generally happy with them.
I've been playing Civ 6 on my Android tablet lately when I just want something easy late in the evening.
I saw some streamers I like playing Warhammer 40k Dawn of War recently and I remembered "Hey, I liked that game ages ago!" So I got the new definitive edition so I could play around with it. Primarily around the Dark Crusade campaign, as it had a good number of relatively balanced factions.
I'll start with the praise: This game is a good RTS. Innovative for it's time, but a bit dated now. Still holds up relatively well, and I would recommend it if you just want a generally fun RTS experience. All the races (except the two added in Soulstorm: Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar) are somewhat balanced and reward good game play. Those other two? They're weak and they clearly play in the back while everyone else hogs the spotlight.
But I wasn't here for multiplayer. I was here for the campaign and Dark Crusade has a pretty decent idea for one. You have seven factions fighting over territories for a map (Kinda like the old Westwood Dune games) and if you manage to take out the core stronghold of a faction, you remove their leader and their ability to take more territory on the map. As you take territories, your leader gains an honor guard that accompanies them into battle where the leader starts present (Either an attack you initiate, or a defense you're present or adjacent to) and allows you to have a good "head start" should you amass a strong honor guard.
The problem I have with this comes with the balancing and the whiplash if you play on the harder difficulties. I decided to play on Hard mode, because I knew normal gave a bit of a generous "buff" to your troops to make them a bit more survivable. This made my first campaign as the Imperial Guard quite challenging as the standard issue Guardsman is rather squishy. For me, this made for a fun experience... up until the point where I could just not, for the life of me, break any high defense territories. No matter how well I tried to build everything, I just got overrun by the enemy before I could take out the first of their two bases. Then, I said "Fuck it" and just went to get rid of the enemy strongholds and.... it was calm? Well, after the initial onslaught of whatever bullshit the enemy was throwing at you subsided it was a rather calm, methodical crawl across the map to destroy the last of the enemy forces. Frantic normal missions, calm stronghold assaults. Playing IG in the Eldar stronghold at the end though felt a bit like playing Creeper World and just holding back the tide of enemies while I figured out how to win the game and finish my campaign.
But sometimes you can get attacked. You do have to defend and this is where I have the biggest gripe with the systems. You can't trust auto battle. It estimates based on "strength" on the field but does not realize my strength is the fact that I build up a mass manufacturing base that I get a full strength army in minutes and steamroll my enemies. I can't allow them to have it, it means I lose my valuable honor guard. In my Eldar play through, which I'm about to finish, I have to go through the motions every time just so I do not lose my seer council, which is the strongest unit in the faction when paired up with the leader unit. Whelp, Chaos threw more forces into the meat grinder so I guess I'll spend the next ten minutes watching my team run across the map and blow up their two bases. I even got it down to a science, get a critical mass and "Attack move to A, and then queue up attack move to B" and then go read stuff on my phone (because the game pauses when I alt-tab out)
My conclusion is: It's a solid representation of the world, a good RTS for it's era and a fun playthrough if you want a generally strong RTS, just don't expect it to hold long if you want to do every faction, because it will get repetitive by the time you finish the second one. Maybe Dawn of War 4, developed by a completely new studio, will fix some of these issues? It appears to be trying to build off of the DoW1 formula more than 2 or 3. One can hope, right?
I’ve never played a Dawn of War game, but considering I just got into Warhammer recently and I also played some StarCraft 2, I was thinking of picking it up!
Edit: Ope, it looks like the steam sale is over now.
Shame you missed the sale, but it'll be back someday like all steam sales. You have two choices for Dawn of War:
Dawn of War 1 is a large-ish scale RTS that seeks to replicate the feeling of tabletop 40k but in real time. You frequently are smashing large armies against one another over the course of a game.
Dawn of War 2, on the other hand, focuses more on the tactical layer. It seeks to make every unit feel more "to scale" than DoW1 did. For example, they try to make Space Marines feel like super strong killing machines, individually strong and Orks/Tyranids lean more on their numbers. It's a more micro heavy game but IMO still a good one.
...we don't talk about DoW3. They tried to make it closer to a MOBA and the less said about that disaster of a game the better.
Dawn of War is getting a new installment with a new dev though and they appear to be leaning back on the gameplay of DoW1, which is intriguing. I'm cautiously optimistic but we don't know ow a release date yet.
I finished The Legend of Zelda: Four Sword Adventures on the Gamecube, and now I'm playing The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes, to finally completing all mainline Zelda games.
Surprisingly Four Sword Adventures had the hardest puzzles from all the other Zelda games, maybe they were designed to be resolved in group, but since I played the game by myself it took me more than I expected to solve some of them, the game was good overall and I enjoyed it a lot even by playing it alone, too bad it's a game we'll never see remastered or ported to the virtual console since we know Nintendo hates us.
With Triforce Heroes, I don't know why is it considered a mainline game, the story and settings are too derivative of the classic Zelda games even though the gameplay is almost the same as the two Four Sword games, so far is not as good as FSA, but I appreciate the graphics being similar to ALBW since that was one of my most replayed game on the 3ds.
I'll definitely not play any of the spin-offs, I tried to play the first Hyrule Warriors when it came out on the Wii U and it bored me by the third stage. Maybe I'll play some of the Tingle games out of curiosity but personally I don't consider them to be Zelda games, like I don't consider Yoshi Island to be a Mario game.
Paused Kirby to start Pokemon Pokopia
Man I was sure I wouldn't like this from the trailers. Even after seeing reviews and the screenshot, I wasn't sold. I had my time in Minecraft and loved the base building in Fallout 4, but I don't want to play that kind of thing regularly.
I decided to give it a shot after seeing a meme of someone dressing up like Team Rocket, visiting other players, and using Voltorb to wreck their builds 🤣.
I am hooked. The building and using Pokemon abilities to do so is fun. But the quests and challenges really hook me in. (What can I say, I love checklists 😆). Having achievable tasks and being able to cleanup/rebuild cities is super fun for me.
For once it's nice being part of the zeitgeist. Even with tips online, I unlocked an ability my friend hadn't gotten yet. And he's farther along than me. So it's cool to be able to share that experience. Usually I just play games whenever I get to them. Which is long after people have stopped talking about it.
Fans say it's satire. They say that it's just make-believe, and that the full-on fascism of the Warhammer 40,000 universe is only to serve the purpose of telling this particular story of all-out, total war AKA cool backdrop for wargaming. Cool beans. But when you have a player become acquainted with Warhammer 40,000 fascist ideology through rote learning, that's a fascism simulator.
And that's what Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun - Words of Vengeance is. It's a free promo for its sequel and takes inspiration from the sublime Typing of the Dead. But where the latter is not afraid to subvert its genre with absurd takes and self-inflicted satiric wounds, Words of Vengeance leans into the dark themes of its origin. Because it fails to overcome the dour and repressiveness of the original first-person shooter, Words of Vengeance achieves its calling as a pitcher of tainted Kool-Aid bursting through the fourth wall to deliver delicious refreshment to incel-adjacent enablers.
It was funny when you could spam Malum Caedo's zealotry with a button in between shots and reloads, but not funny you realize the significance of what he actually saying.
The Magical Land of Canada is required playing for all patriotic Canadians. That's because as a patriotic Canadian, you are always interested in anything that takes the piss out of our home and native land. The game is short, free, and amateurishly done, but holy tolody does this visual novel kick the piss out of Canada for 10 straight minutes, going so far as to make references to John A. Macdonald, moose, and Saskatchewan. I mean, come on, not even Saskatchewanians/Saskies reference Saskatchewan.
I've been catching up on a few of thecatamites' early work: 50 Short Games, 10 Beautiful Postcards, Magic Wand... Most of them are pretty simple but often thought-provoking or perhaps feel-provoking?
I don't like horror as a genre. I don't get the appeal. But horror-comedy! Something about it touches a funny bone in my skeleton. I think there could be more of it