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

I've been playing Project Zomboid with a ton of mods, and having a mostly good time. But looking for new mods has become a slog. AI has come for game modding in a terrible way. People turn cool ideas into mods, and then put them out for the public to use seemingly without ever having actually booted up the game with their own mod installed or doing the smallest bit of QA on the output. It used to be that a big mod was one that someone had been carefully growing and tending for months or years, showing a commensurate care about and cohesive vision for the game. But now the quality signal between size and effort has been broken and I'm wading through dozens of vibe coded cool ideas to find anything that comes from a person with something interesting and cohesive to say.

Like, a mod with a whole additional level of quests and scavenging, searching for arcane relics and strange beasts? That sounds amazing, if a tonal shift from the base game. But when the 3d models are thirty times larger than anything else, the equipment cannot actually be equipped, and the five new skills are entirely unbalanced... why did you put this out in this state? It feels like the person who asked AI to create it in the first place now wants other people to do their basic testing to ensure the mod is usable. Sure, being the idea guy is fun, but that's only the first 5%. It's unreasonable to outsource all of the rest of the process to AI and other people.

Elden Ring - it was my first souls game experience and has remained my go to. I've completed it several times, then several more times with the seamless coop and randomizer mods. You must think I'm pretty good? No. But my daughter is almost 3mo old and gaming time is not as much as it used to be so it's nice to have something familiar. They just released DLC and a switch port, too!

I saw my phone progress for Luck be Landlord was reset during my data transfer, so I spent ~5 hours over the last couple of weeks going through and beating floors 1-20. It was fun, and I definitely have got my money's worth after having beaten the game twice. It doesn't have the appeal that other roguelike games do for me to play additional runs at the highest difficulty, and that's alright. I'd recommend it to people looking for a casual "deckbuilder" style game.

Probably Stolen - Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim has continued to be fun. The Devs announced they are releasing a demo that will be separate from the current playtest with more stuff, so that will be fun, but I'm planning to play this game less so it is still fresh down the road when I pick it up.

There's so many fun games out, and I've got a short list of video games I hope to pick up sometime in the next few years.

Combolands - think Balatro but a tile placement/ city builder. You can't really talk about this game without comparing it to Balatro - so much of the style of Combolands is lifted straight from Balatro. It's a style I enjoy to be sure and so do a lot of other people based on Balatro's popularity but they certainly colored inside the lines using most of the same font/UI from that game. So it's impossible not to compare Combolands to Balatro - and for most "roguelites" that comparison would be hard to come off as favorable but Combolands somehow pulls it off.

You get the same feeling of "creative adrenaline" without quite as much "RNG anger" as Balatro tends to induce, in my experience. You are still subject to randomness every turn in terms of what tiles come up with critical structures you may (or may not) need, but scores compound over time based on how you build your map from "tiny settlement" to "metropolis" in a way that makes it much less anxiety-inducing than not getting the Jack of Spades you need to make it past the next blind. The game puts a lot of interesting choices in front of you that balance the needs of getting a quick score with building structures and complexes that generate renewable scores every 3-4 rounds.

So far, I'm having a blast playing this game. I don't know if it will stay on my list of "always go back to / never gets old" the way it's obvious inspiration Balatro has but it feels like it will.

I'm about half way through my first playthrough of Look Outside, and wow, I wasn't initially convinced, but this is one of the best games I've ever played.

Mainly due to the story - the apocalypse has arrived and everyone in your apartment complex is trapped inside and slowly mutating into monsters... but mainly this means that they now have new accessibility requirements in life and are scared and confused, so you all need to shelter together and protect each other from the people who have lost it entirely. It's about community, caring, and sacrifice, and it's billed as a horror game. And like, it is, it's both. I adore that.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide:
I bought this near where it came out and had a lot of fun playing with my friends, but as happens so often with games like this, they got distracted by the next shiny thing before barely scratching the surface of the game. I recently started playing it again, and I really like it, with a few caveats.

1. Class differentiation: this is an issue I had with both vermintide games too. Every class has a primary weapon (Melee weapon) and a secondary weapon (ranged weapon, almost always a gun). There are differences in the classes, they have different talents, an active ability that they can use, and they're different sizes, but they all basically play the same. The differences don't become hugely apparent until you have a lot of hours in the game. The talents are subtle, and there are just so many of them that it's hard to tell wtf is going on and why you're doing so much or so little damage. A lot of these talents are auras that you have a very tough time telling where they're coming from.

The classes all pretty much look the same too, except for the ogryn. They're just... Guys, and there are so many cosmetics that it's hard to tell what class is what.

2. Systems/currency/etc: This is a problem with basically every live service game, so I'm not singling out this one. There are just so many currencies in the game. There are "ordo dockets" which is the basic currency, there are "aquilas" which are the real money currency, there are "ingots", which are a special challenge currency. There's plasteel, which is used for upgrading weapons in some way, there's diamondite, which is also used for upgrading weapons. There's probably others I'm forgetting, but engaging with this kind of stuff is just exhausting to me. It reminds me of credit card churning where people spend all this time researching transfer deals and stuff, and that kind of thing really just turns me off and feels like work. I know that they do this because these types of games are intended to be fueled by cosmetic purchases on an ongoing basis, but to me, at this point, its to the detriment of the actual game. I wish devs just had one currency if the game needs it, and then they had cosmetic items available to purchase with dollars/euros/whatever your local currency is outright. Its to the point that when I hear the newest games made up currencies it makes me feel second hand embarrassment. "Collect more Eldritch Shards to get this cloak" or whatever just makes me groan now.

That said, the gunplay feels really good with most guns. The melee combat feels satisfying, and I'm bad at it, but I know there's a lot of hidden depth with it, and good god there's a lot of stats to look at if you really want to min/max your character (I don't).

The voice acting is incredible and the writing is generally very good, although I will admit to not actually paying attention to any of the overall story. The dynamic inter character banter has always been the best part of the writing of left 4 dead-like games anyway, and I've never really cared to engage with the overall stories much anyway.

Okay, Wreckfest and Snowrunner are such a treat I'm playing them every day. The last time I was so into a game was 9 years ago with Minecraft.

Cities Skylines 2

Ohhhh boy. I dunno how Paradox managed to mess up the sequel to a SimCity killer so badly, but here we are.

My problem isn't necessarily that the game is a mess, it's that the game is not even remotely an upgrade to the first one. Paradox have some cheek releasing paid DLC expansions to effectively bring back features that were in the first game.

Age of Empires II Definitive Edition

Vs CPU matches on Arabia have made me realise how rusty I've become mechanically with RTS games. I used to be Master in SC2 and id probably get stomped on ranked ladder in this game.

It's bad when in 4 games out of 3 I managed to get supply blocked after making my very first villager.

I picked up Magical Princess because it was highly reviewed and the top review said to go in blind. I'm a sucker for something interesting or unexpected will take place. This game is a perfectly fine princess maker, its live2d puppets give it top-notch presentation. It's initially a deep time management game, but the optimal path will become apparent very quickly, I think. The optimal path is so far ahead of any other that all guides agree to get skill X first, Y second, etc. When that happens, it doesn't matter how deep or complex the mechanics of the game are, the balance just isn't there. It was fun, competent and worth the ~12 hours I put in.

I've been slogging through Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew by the guys who made Shadow Tactics and the (excellent) Desperados 3. I love that Mimimi did the trifecta: ninjas, then cowboys, and now pirates. But, for some reason that I haven't fully grasped, this latest game failed to hook me the same way the first games did. I loved Shadow Tactics and Desperados. Amazing games. I'm going to keep pushing through Shadow Gambit until I can figure out what it is lacking, why it doesn't have the same soul that the others do.

Prior to that I played Until Then which is a VN with a great kinetic pixel art aesthetic. The presentation is solid, and the initial mystery certainly served to draw me in and get me wondering what's going on. Unfortunately, after about 18 hours to get through it, I can say that I felt the payoff was severely lacking. Also, the designers made some very questionable choices. If you're making a VN, please do not introduce an entirely new mechanic as part of the Act 1 denouement. The story was that the character had been practicing and training for months, making slow, incremental progress towards the goal. Then, during the actual event, a new (quite difficult) minigame mechanic is introduced and not only am I not able to enjoy the majesty of that character's achievements to get to the point, I'm instead being made to feel like a failure because I am unskilled at a never-before-seen minigame that takes place during the event. What is worst of all is that the whole thing is pointless. Failing the minigame has no bearing on the outcome at all. It's pure stupid. And it's not the only instance of this type of thing in the game. I do not recommend the game.

Lastly, I picked up Sandustry which is a 2d pixel-world factory builder. Imagine Satisfactory in a Noita-like environment. It's currently in EA so I only got about 17 hours before running out of content. I enjoyed my time with it. It's super cozy. It's focused on conveyors and converting materials to different forms. It has the same relaxed vibe that Satisfactory does.

I've been grinding Combolands, only have 1 achievement left! It's surprisingly addicting, 10/10 would recommend if you liked Balatro.

Also finished Big Walk this week (at least all the initial puzzles, I've heard about post game that we're doing right now) I think it's probably one of my favorite co-op games in recent memory, though IT2 and Split Fiction were very good too.

The new expansion for Grim Dawn came out last month and... Well it pulled me back in.

For those who don't know, Grim Dawn is a Diablo clone, ARPG. It's made by a bunch of extremely talented people who made Titan Quest, left the studio, started a Kickstarter back in like 2012 and used the money to buy the Titan Quest engine rights. Then made an absolute beast of a game.
I checked and I got some achievements I remember well back in October 2016. That was almost 10 years ago to the month! And here I am again.

Anyway, last time I played only 2 major expansions were out and I'd completed both on Normal, but only half arsed Epic.
I immediately got the new expansion and started it up this time with a brand new character to experience the game right from fresh. So I'm mid way through Forgotten God's (expansion 2) on normal now. I plan to finish normal then take a break and come back for ultimate sometime.

The game is glorious, it's so tight, satisfying. There's so many skills, classes, items, quests... Just stuff and the world feels great.
The new expansions add loads of stuff to the base game areas to do and see.
My biggest gripe is the first two acts are so boring in enemy variety, level design and style. Like I know it's the start of the game and they probably wanted to keep it chill for new players. But the first two bosses are "dude stands in a room". An experienced player can and will speed run through this in a few hours. A newbie could see this sad content for like 10 hours.
After that is just up and up though. Amazing monster and level design.

If you like ARPGs play it. Just do it.

I've been playing High on Life! It's technically a first person shooter, which is very much not my usual thing, by Squanch Games (their last game before they cut ties with Justin Roiland). I never bought it because I found the price too high for an indie game, but a friend not from Tildes generously gifted me a code for it that they didn't want.

I played Trover in VR back in the day and in some ways this is a very similar vibe. You play as a silent protagonist teenager who gets their hands on a Gatlian, basically a sentient gun, after Earth is invaded by aliens hell-bent on turning all the humans into drugs. The gun, Kenny, sounds exactly like Morty, and never shuts up (you can tone down the banter in the settings if you want). Throughout the game you acquire more Gatlians with different abilities voiced by other famous voice actors (all of them speak for you and at you) as well as other upgrades, and visit various planets to hunt down the alien leaders of the criminal organization that's behind Earth's invasion, the G3 cartel.

Like in Trover, the worlds are very colorful, the aliens are blobby and cartoonish and everybody other than you talks a lot and swears a lot. The sets (so far) look great, better than Trover and certainly better than I was expecting; the asking price was not unfair after all. The gameplay as you might imagine involves a lot of shooting, dashing and taking cover. There's a melee weapon you can use for close quarters stabbing and for swinging off... wasps (don't ask), adding a platforming dimension to the game. Everything feels quite polished, balanced and is generally fun to play, although I can't be sure if the combat would be to the liking of a regular FPS enjoyer.

There is a prevasive element of humour in the design of the various worlds of High on Life. Some of it is very Rick and Morty, which might or might not be your thing. I'd say this game can probably surprise and elicit a chuckle or two out of most people. I haven't finished yet but I'd estimate it contains some 20 hours of gameplay.

Voice actors from Solar Opposites are in this game and it's very off-putting!

Previous

Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division

Shockingly fun game about using SQL queries to solve mysteries. I had tried a couple of similar games/puzzles in the past, but none of them hooked me. The humor in this one and the mixture of SQL and other more standard puzzle-solving challenges kept it fun. I didn't have any real background with SQL, so no prior experience necessary, though I think you kind of know if this game is for you or not. Strong recommendation for anyone who thinks this sounds up their alley.

Started playing Icarus again with my friend, we grabbed the latest expansion and as per usual with almost every survival crafting game we play I've focused a ton on just building up the base as fast as possible while keeping things neat and aesthetic. It really is one of the best survival crafting games currently out and still getting updates, with a somehow minimal amount of jank and clunkiness. The one thing it doesn't do is have a shared inventory across workbenches and storage, which is an incredible quality-of-life feature that most other survival crafting games nowadays either have by default or let you upgrade towards. As such, I've just got materials stashed in every workbench and it's a bit messy but still pretty functional.

ReStory

Man I got hooked on this. Took a three day weekend and spent the first two playing this game and listening to an audiobook.

So the game takes place in 2000's Tokyo. You run an electronic repair shop. You basically clean and repair electronics. There is a bit of a story.

The story itself is fine. I only vaguely paid attention, but I got the gist of it. There's a bunch of interesting characters that drive things forward. Surprisingly there's multiple endings. I got the good ending just by my natural choices haha. There's also one or two Easter eggs to anime which I thought was really fun.

The gameplay is where it shines. Taking items apart and cleaning them is an enjoyable task that doesn't require a ton of thought and concentration. Tools can be upgraded or purchased to become more efficient. Also you can buy licenses that unlock other electronics to repair. You can either buy parts direct or buy used items to take apart and salvage parts. There's even a time trial contest at one point.

Oh! I also played this with the new steam controller. I used steam to map the right track pad as the mouse movement and the L4 & R4 as the mouse clicks. L5 as the space bar. It worked really well.

This is a good cozy game and I had a great time with it. Next game up for me is Star Wars: Zero Company!

Untitled Goose Game

Nice little break from bigger games, not much to say but a very fun and silly game.

Trails of Cold Steel II

I've been feeling nostalgic for older games and fired up the old fat PS3 last week to finally wrap this one up.

The sticks and D-pad on my controller had gone sticky (no pun intended) from the plasticiser oozing out over the years, but a good scrub with some medical alcohol wipes had them as good as new in no time. The hardware otherwise still works perfectly and the controller even still holds a decent charge, which is a pleasant surprise.

On the game itself:

• There was a time in the 00s when I was really into the Trails series and religiously imported the games from Japan as they came out, in some cases directly from Falcom through a shipping agent so I could get the extras. Coming back to this game 11 years after the date on my 2015 save file... I had a pretty good time!

  I'd forgotten a lot of the lore (and there's so much lore), but it came back to me slowly as I played and I could usually work out from context who was on what side and what their agenda was even when I'd forgotten exactly who they are. The writing is squarely juvenile shounen anime with plenty of dudes powering up and winning through the power of friendship and determination, but there's an earnestness and self-knowing confidence to it all that I still find pretty charming.

• Coming back to all of the systems was also a bit of a jump into a cold pool, but the game features a great notes system which not only has the entire manual but also the story to date and profiles for every character down to the minor NPCs, so looking stuff up was simple.

• I'd originally stopped playing in part 3 of act 2, which at the time I had assumed was just before the ending. It turns out there were about 25+ more hours to go! Most of this passed pretty quickly and pleasantly. The controls and QOL features (quick travel, quest logs, objective icons, etc are all there) are all consistent with modern games and the visuals look quite nice on an OLED TV, with a sharp and colourful image and an, uh, acceptable framerate other than whenever the NPC count exceeds around 12 or in any level with fog. Even the loading times off the HDD aren't too bad - maybe a few seconds for each area / battle transition.

• 2015 me had already put in the work to build some busted characters (100% evasion Fi...), so the back end of the game was pretty breezy even with a decade of rust to shake off... until I got to the last 3 bosses:

  • The first two of these bosses have an undodgeable (in one case completely unguardable) super attack which may or may not wipe a full health party in one shot depending on RNG. There are ways to counter this if you know it's coming, but this is bad game design in my book. The boss fights take a long time and it's a drag to just suddenly lose without any opportunity to respond.

  • The last boss, to its credit, does not have a party wiping special, but does demand that for half the fight, you use the characters outside your regular party who you've probably been neglecting. You do get a heads up about this and it is possible, with a little juggling, to use characters who are at least decently levelled and stuff everyone who is truly garbage into the support unit slots, but once you reach this boss, you're locked out of further levelling or accessing any shops, so it's entirely possible to be stuck with badly equipped characters that make either the first or second phase of this fight a nightmare.

  Still, you can just drop the difficulty for any of these fights if they're too much bother, so there's nothing show stopping here.

This game is the 7th out of 13 in the series. I would like to complete the remainder at some point given they're now all easily accessible digitally with Japanese voice and text intact, but first I'll need to find a spare 420 hours.

Dragon Quest VII Reminagined

Only a little ways into this one, but I really have nothing but positive things to say. It's great!

• The tilt-shift diorama art style works really well with the content of the game, which is essentially about rebuilding the world one little island at a time. Each island is essentially a little toybox with a handful of locations and its own adventure to resolve. It feels very cosy.

• The godforsaken individual inventory from 1-3 and 11 is finally gone. You can equip stuff and use items straight from the party inventory like in every other JRPG. I'm in Nirvana due to this change alone.

• You can see the monsters on the map now (and even dispatch them directly if you're a lot stronger than them, Trails style!), so there's no longer any need to constantly keep Toheros up if you just want to explore and pick up missed items without wading through endless trashmob fights. Similarly, items on the ground are now marked with glimmers by default, so Remirama spam on every single screen is no longer mandatory. You can even use Ruura to fast travel right from the get-go. It's wall to wall QOL.

• Characters and monsters alike are fun and animated with the usual DQ charm. I expect the engine is UE, but it performs quite well and comfortably hits 90fps at 1440p on my unspectacular PC.

Out of all the modern DQs I've played this year, this is probably the one I'd recommend for anyone looking to dip a toe into the series.

iRacing and Le Mans Ultimate. Ever since my son reached the age that he sleeps through the night, I've started sim racing a few nights a week again. Just got some new pedals which I'm very excited to try out this week.

I’ve been emulating Rayman 2: The Great Escape (the Dreamcast version, natch).

If you compare it to Super Mario 64, it falls short (that game did so much right on the first try it’s genuinely incredible). But if you think of it as exactly what it is--Rayman’s first foray into the third dimension--then it comes out looking and playing excellent. Even the camera isn’t terrible, which is genuinely high praise for an early 3D game.

Also, while walking on my treadmill I’ve been playing Yet Another Zombie Survivors. It’s a polished bullet heaven that just hit 1.0 and has the exact kind of metaprogression dripped that I like in the genre. Unfortunately though, it’s admittedly kind of bland and samey from run to run.

I’m not wowed by it, but it’s solid enough that I’ll get dozens of walking hours out of it, which is the real win.

Hollow Knight

Since I did a second playthrough of Silksong, I figured it was worth going back to the original and doing some of the post-game stuff I didn't get around to. First off: the Pantheon of the Gods. Typically each pantheon has 10 bosses that you fight in a row, with a rest halfway. I got through the first 3 OK. They're each topped off with a boss that's new to you, but after fighting it once there's a place you can practice against it specifically without having to slog through the other 9 first. The 4th was a real doozy, with a harder version of the penultimate boss at the top. It took me a looot of practice, but I finally beat it. The 5th and final remaining pantheon is all 42 bosses (harder versions) with 7 rests sprinkled throughout. At this point not sure how much effort I'll be willing to put into it, if at all.

Decided to also do a second playthrough to get some achievements that cannot be obtained in the first play (there are a few binary choices to make and they have separate achievements for each choice). Looks like most people make the same choices cause Steam says only about 7-10% of players get these ones (for reference about 18-28% for the other choices, not sure how many got both like I did via another playthrough).

@turbografx16 you're a legend for being able to play without a compass/quill. I get lost so much and couldn't even remember how to get to the map merchant a lot of the time (edit: additional context: my first play was only last year).

Still on Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Send help. Lord knows if I'll ever find myself finished

I've been mostly playing Elden Ring, the same playthrough I've been at for about 70-hours and 2+ years now.

It's fine? I like Elden Ring, but I definitely don't feel about it like I do Dark Souls 3, which I think was absolute peak. I get a little bored seeing the same Hero's Grave repeatedly, but I still feel compelled to complete them, even if they're pretty punishing. I've made it to the...Capital something or other; seems like a large city with an Erdtree in the middle of it. I've been slowly exploring that, but have only made it to the second bonfire there so far.

Taking a break from it, I jumped back into Halo: CE from the Master Chief Collection and this is another "fine" game. The shooting is interesting and I think they've done a good job keeping things tactical with only allowing the player two weapons and often setting enemies up to flank and the like; I feel like I have to consistently think when I'm playing the game so I'm not constantly dying. I've never played a Halo game before, as I was already deep, deep into the PC and PC FPS games by the time it arrived on the scene.

That said and I totally understand the reason this is, but the environments are very bland and boring. I just finished The Flood and I feel like there's not really been any super memorable set pieces, but mostly slogging through samey looking jungle and samey looking SciFi bases and all if it feels very long to me. I still would like to complete the game, as it seems to be pretty short and I may or may not try the second game when I'm finished; I do own it, so there's no real loss to just giving it a try.

Finished my Personal 4 spinoff journey by finally beating Persona 4 Dancing All Night. Surprisingly fun! The story wasn't Persona tier, but much better than I was expecting. And that final dance sequence was amazing. I got giddy when it started just with Naoto and Kanji, because I knew it meant it was goung to involve everyone.

Trying to finish Act 5 of Rogue Trader. I like the game, but I'm a bit burnt out, so just want to drag myself to the finish. There's a lot more combat and a lot less dialogue so far, which is the opposite of what I want. It's probably my favourite portrayal of the 40k world, and I still can't believe they let you romance an Eldar!

Have also started Xenosaga. I know I'm signing up for 3 games of massive cutscenes and talking, but it's a game I've always thought about but never played. I grew up in the PS2 era, so the graphics seem fine to me. Hoping the gameplay is fun.

I dived into a KeeperRL binge, playing it long enough that I essentially solved the game again. Takes about 5 hours. It's a great GPL-licensed Dungeon Keeper clone with graphical and music assets available from Steam.

Then checked out Bodycam because their September 2 release (holy crap tomorrow) was starting to look very exciting. In its current form, it's all about presentation with not a lot of content beyond that. But it looks and sounds amazing, and apparently will be even better tomorrow.

Also looking at Wardogs with some interest, but that's still a few weeks away and I didn't get to be a betatester.

edit Wardogs added some new anti-cheating tool which of course doesn't work on Proton :-(

My nephew has recently discovered mods in Stardew Valley and so we're diving back into the game before the coming 1.7 update. We've kept it pretty light to start with an existing save and no new content mods. He's enjoying CBJ Cheat mod, Tractor mod and some of the QOL picks we made together. I think he had as much fun shopping for mods as he did playing the altered game. Our approach is going to be to try out a whole host of mods on his old save game, see which ones he likes, then choose one of the content expansion mods and start a new game in tandem with his selected improvements.

My only non negotiable point is that our next playthrough must include Jorts and Jean

I've been playing a good amount of Descenders (and Next the sequel), they're roguelikes in which you go down a bunch of downhill trails (or ignore them and go off road) until you face the boss jump across multiple biomes.

The game's sense of speed is really good, the rumble when playing with a controller may be the most present thing, but the sense of "uncontrolled control" is unmatched (I mean, I never felt truly completely out of control until parts of the last biome in the first game, but the fact is, at really high speed really small bumps can throw you into the air even if only for a moment, and actual jumps can become impossible to land past certain speeds).
This goes very well with the career (roguelike) mode's focus on risk management: remember, you just need to reach the finish, everything else is a bonus, but those are powerful bonuses, since bailing is very easy (you're either on a bike, or a board of some kind), health is very easy to lose (matter of fact, I often bail multiple time or/and bail at high speed which costs more health at multiple points on the same node in later biomes) which makes bonus objectives very appealing- even if they often put you in those very same dangerous situations (finish without letting go of the accelerator is a particularly mean bonus objective), meanwhile stunts gives REP, which is how you get perks (and if you care about cosmetics, higher rarities are locked behind having a lot of rep when ending a run), further pushing you into taking risks you shouldn't and losing health you almost certainly will need in the later biomes.

Regarding changes between the games, the original game is only about bikes and is feature complete, while Next is in early access is almost at feature-parity by now (the obvious one is the Team system, right now we can only join a team, and Team progression is in the backlog right now; technically it's also missing some node types from the original game too), and in some ways is bigger (2 vehicles instead of just bikes, and those will eventually come back too; bike parks have better integration into the career, now there's also race track and stunt track, both managed by one of the team, leaving Arboreal as the odd one out since their node is still procgenned).

Beside them, I also got First Light, which I liked to the point that I caught myself multiple times going "I stop after this chapter", only to keep going for a while after.
Otherwise I'm fairly sure my thoughts have already been written down by others, more linear than Hitman WoA, but feels like someone took a James Bond movie script and retooled it into a video game really well.

Lastly I got Screamer, a twin stick racer with a fighting game bend. Twin stick means you drift with the right stick, and the fighting game bit comes from how you're managing 2 resources to attack, defend yourself, and also to use your boost.

While it has less cars than in ID, those cars act more as fighting game characters (complete with similar max speed and handling scheme compared to ID), with the main differences between them being Sync (speed and defense), Entropy (attack and a very high risk/reward super), and their special skill.
Meanwhile it has at least 40 tracks (I think), and more than 3 gamemodes (including actual racing rather than various race-themed time trials).

Then there's the tournament, which honestly is more entertaining than I expected (I genuinely expected to skip pretty much every cutscenes, basically didn't, and I'm about 3/4 of the way through) and its willing to play with it's objective a fair amount (for example, in one race, to really hammer in how badly a team has broken down, you're thrown into a Team Race... where your goals are to KO both of your teammates... and get a personal podium), most of it still is just to get a podium or to straight up win the race (or are tutorials which you often can't lose).

Star Wars Zero Company

I just finished it up, about 40 hours of gameplay. It was honestly fantastic, and everything I wanted out of the game. I'm not a HUGE clone wars fan, but I do like it enough and have watched it enough to know most of the characters. They did not go hard on cameos, but there are still some good ones in the game.

There is a part of me that wonders if they lifted the code straight from xcom and midnight suns. The dialog/walking parts felt like midnight suns, and gameplay had so many xcom 'quirks' it was comical. I can't 100% place them but things like the way the camera will adjust to follow the action on enemy turns, or that weird kind of 'grind' when it is resolving buffs and/or damage is exactly like xcom. It's strange to me it would move the camera and everything exactly the same, though it is a bunch of left over xcom devs I believe.

There was a part of me hoping they would change the game feel and try to speed up buff animations, but they didn't seem to consider that. It's a nitpick I have with tactic and RPG games, buffs are fun the first few times you use them, but over time they become such a chore to do each time. For example, i was using a medic who can apply a combat stim to everyone. Now, the animation is fantastic, the character will take out and throw the stim to the character they are buffing, who catches it, then sticks themselves with the thing. It's super cool to watch, i just wish that I could use the stim, click, then immediately queue up and throw the next one while the other char is catching an stimming themselves. I realize programmatically that i challenging, but would like to see the genera move forward with someone figuring that out.

Another pet peeve was there was one enemy type that every time you either shoot them or kill them a buff happens. It became increasingly frustrating to shoot, then have to wait 30 sec while the game pauses, animation plays, pauses, effect comes up, pause etc. Every. Time. And if you AOE 4 of them, you are waiting quite a while as everything resolves. I'd love if they could find a way to sort of work it out in the background and just resolve the animations all at once.

But small nit picks aside, the game is great. They give you a set of characters that are almost all very interesting, each with one fun, unique skill. When you recruit from the random pool, they each get 1 unique trait from a unique pool for the randos that your main chars wont have access to. After that the skills come off the class picked for the character, which you are free to change at an point for zero cost through the game.

You can only use 4 characters per mission, which I think is a good size, just, I wanted to use more of my characters, I ended up not touching any randoms at all as I wanted to make use of the cast they gave us. The campaign is ok, there are choices, but really is on rails most of the time.

I played through on hard and it felt like a good balance, by the end once I had figured out how to play and my characters were leveled up, it did get quite easy, but early on I had some memorable hard missions where I was a bit low on the power curve (and game knowledge) so was struggling.

The injury system is great, though didn't seem to present a lot of pressure, nor do the job of forcing you to cycle through your team like xcom does with fatigue. If you lose your health bar the char goes down, they can be revived, and take one injury. If they go down again, they get a second, and the third time they go down, they die permanently. However I almost never felt this pressure, and once I had the game systems down, I never came close to any of the characters getting knocked out once, which freed up a lot of cost/healing pressure you might have other wise.

Speaking of pressure, the game works on a reinforcement system. You will often see 1 turn warning on doors and corridors where on the next turn, a group will rush in. I think the difficulty is in not managing this, if you aren't prepared to wipe out the next wave, and get behind cleaning up what is currently on screen, is where you can get in trouble. But this design is consistently predictable throughout the game, so it doesn't become too challenging to manage your grenades and other resources for just the right time when you need to push and get ahead of the waves.

I don't know that I am going to do a replay, but I certainly had a great 40 hours with this, and it really met my expectations. If you love xcom and/or star wars, it's a great game.

Oh and from some drama seems like the devs all got furloughed after the successful launch, which caused some review bombing. Downside of it being an EA game unfortunately.

Erenshor. It's a single player mmo where all of the other players are simulated. This is perfect because I give not one fuck all about talking to anyone or really even communicating in online games (but online only, I wouldn't be that way in a pickup game of basketball or a board game obviously).