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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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...).