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

Played Age of Empires 4 since it came out and have been thoroughly impressed. AoE 2 was my favorite in the series and AoE 3 was a bit strange for my taste. 4 brought back a lot of what I liked about 2 with some more modern improvements.

It's only got 8 civs at launch, which doesn't feel like a lot. But they feel much more distinct than in previous iterations. I was playing the Mongols yesterday and you don't get any walls, but you can pack up your entire base and move it pretty much whenever you want. This creates a bunch of interesting offensive and defensive strategies that I feel like I've just scratched the surface of.

Custom maps aren't out yet for some reason, neither is mod support. But both have dedicated spots in menus, so I expect they'll be added soon enough.

There are a bunch of small quality of life improvements too, like I don't think there's a limit to how many units you can select at once and you no longer need to reseed farms. But there are also some weaknesses too, like the pathfinding being um... not great... Same with the target prioritization that your units use. Hopefully those will seem some updates in future patches.

Overall it feels like a really solid foundation that they're planning to build on top of. I'm excited, it's been a long time since I've really gotten in to an AoE game. 9/10 would WOLOLO again.

Edit:
I also played Moonglow Bay as well. It's a charming fishing game set in the 80's where after a sad start you begin to rebuild your life and the town you live in. It's made by a small team and that definitely shows in both positive and negative ways. It feels like it has a lot of heart and personality, but it's also noticably buggy. It was definitely designed for a controller, the keyboard controls are kinda half-assed, if you're interested you DEFINITELY want a controller for now. But the devs have been listening to feedback and responding and mentioned that patches are on the way, so I feel hopeful. IMO it probably would have benefitted from like 2-3 months of early access to work out some of the wrinkles. But personally I'm more than happy to grade on a curve when it comes to indie passion projects and I've been enjoying it so far. I recently got my boat and have started driving around in it. If that sounds like your jam, give it a look, but it's definitely not for everyone.

With New World on pause for me -- all my friends quit playing after 2 weeks; there are way too many bugs, including "fixes" that have created more bugs; and it's kinda a boring game all around -- I've gone back to other games.

I started a new Space Haven run, after abandoning my first attempt back in the summer. For those unfamiliar, Space Haven is a survival, ship building, management game. I guess it's a Roguelike, too. While it can be relaxing at times, once you start running out of resources like water, food, and fuel, it can get stressful. I'm constantly having to watch resource levels to ensure my crew will survive and my ship will make it to the next system. So far, armed with my knowledge of my first attempt, things seem to be going smoothly. Already, I have a crew of 8. I'm managing power resources better and have started making money, but food security is still an issue. I've also been more lucky this time around, with few/no negative random events. Let's hope that lasts for a while *knock on wood*.

On the multiplayer front, some of our group have decided to give Barotrauma another go. There was some big update recently, so we're trying to see what's new. Our group loves this game and this is probably our 8th or 9th run. Barotrauma is a survival submarine adventure game that takes place in the future (obviously) in the seas underneath the icy surface of Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Like Space Haven, management of resources is very important. Can't run out of fuel or the sub will drop to the bottom of the seas and be crushed by water pressure. We need to have ammo to take out the local aliens that all want to kill us. And when we do get injured, we need to have enough medicines to heal. There's a whole crafting system so there are way more resources than just those I listed (though it seems they simplified the crafting a bit since our last playthrough).

There are a variety of missions we take on from NPCs at various stations we come across. Some are easy delivery missions, while others require us to explore strange and dangerous alien ruins. We're rewarded with money so we can keep buying supplies. Or we steal the supplies from the station.

In the past, we've used a sub we've designed. But that's sorta easy mode for us since it has everything we wanted/needed, within reason. For this run, we instead went with one of the default subs. That's been an additional challenge since we have to learn how to use it and upgrade it accordingly, but it's been good so far.

We usually play a few hours every evening, for a week or two. Since we just started over the weekend, we're only in the 2nd biome (stage) of 5 biomes. We're hoping to get to the 5th biome this time, having only ever gotten to the starting sections of the 4th.

The difficulty has notched up, but nothing too crazy for our experienced crew. The great part of Barotrauma is that people can come and go. When we started on Saturday, we had like 7 of us on crew. On Sunday, we had 10. During the week, we've been down to our "hardcore" group of 4 or 5 (we think 4 is the minimum for us). We'll continue underway.

Got back into Animal Crossing in advance of the update! I know a lot of people have restarted their islands, but honestly I'm such a slow player I still have a lot left to do and I remember not liking the very early game anyway, so I decided to stick with mine. I managed to pick up Erik and Coco, two of my favourite villagers, since I started again last week.

I also still pop into Valheim now and then. A friend and I had been playing pretty regularly on the weekends, so most of what I do if I play for a half-hour or so is gather up materials so we can focus more on actual adventure viking stuff when we have time together. It's nice!

And finally after seeing my brother putting hours into it on the Switch, I picked up Monster Sanctuary. Honestly I love it! The battle mechanics are awesome, I find working out team compositions to be really engaging because of the way the skills system works - the same monster can actually serve slightly different roles depending on the skills you invest into. So it's really fun to find synergies and it's only opening up more as I progress. There's also a system in place which actively encourages battling carefully, where you get extra points for combo execution, weakness exploitation, buffs/debuffs, and DoT and those points translate directly into better rewards even for unimportant battles.

The platforming/exploration/puzzle stuff is also pretty good, nothing too fancy, but in combination with the monster-collection and how the monsters you collect allow you to interact with the map in different ways it still feels kind of novel. I would buy a sequel in an instant for sure, the only thing that would make this game even more suited to my exact tastes is if there were monster breeding mechanics.

Pillars of Eternity: I got it on sale on Steam, with PoE 2 for like $25, and have wanted it for a few months. It's a great entry to the genre having a lot of what I understand to be great RPG designs, while still being modern enough to have things like a tutorial, and ways to help you better understand the game. It's not hand-holdy, but the tutorial mode is really helping me make sense of the game as I go. I tried getting into some of the Infinity/D&D games a few months back and could never make sense of it. You also don't start off with a party, so you get to make sense of things as your group grows.

Fallout 4: It has a steep difficulty curve, but I'm getting over it. There is a lot of sneaking and even strategic fast travel required to get anywhere. I made the mistake of fast-travelling to the Dartmouth Professional Building, for example, and getting different arrangements of baddies: A handful of super mutants, a bunch of named ghouls, factions fighting for control, so I had to find a place to travel to that put me on a good path to my destination. However, once I started getting perks that let you modify weapons and armor, and increase damage outputs, it gets much easier.

Shapez.io: I've touched this game periodically but it's sunk it's teeth into me, especially with the new puzzle DLC. I honestly like the puzzles more than the main mode, but they're both fun and challenging for different reasons.

The Long Dark: Episode 4: I love TLD's survival mode. More so than pretty much any other survival game, it's truly the cold environment that's the enemy. The starving wolves or a grumpy bear or getting lost in a blizzard may be the thing that ends your life, but the slow failure to eke out another day's food and water and warmth is what led you to that point. I'm not an expert at it yet, but I'm doing well under non-extreme situations. It's really up to you where you go and what you do within the world, and you can survive in a number of ways, fishing, trapping, or hunting for food, searching for firewood after high winds or blizzards, beachcombing for scraps of metal, whatever you need to carry on for another day while slowly collecting the tools and clothing you need to survive.

Which makes the story mode (especially Episode 4) so much more dissonant with the core gameplay. It gives you an endless bounty of gear, and then sets things up so you don't use most of it. (Literally. A giant pile of loot right before a place where you're forced to dump almost all of it.) You're sent to faraway locations and then given special story shortcuts to return to the questgiver. Essentially, in being given a direction, and in being in an environment built for quests in particular, so much of the player agency is stripped away. Don't craft; you'll be given gear. Don't navigate; there's roads or unforking paths leading to each destination. Don't be stingy with supplies, there's always more than you could possibly use.

Maybe it's fine, but it makes the world a very different place, much more out of touch with the core game mechanics of cold and starvation and threatening animals. And it turns out that's what I like about the world.

I've sort of been getting into Farming Simulator '19. On a whim I started watching one of Daggerwin's challenge playthroughs and the game really appeals to me. I started playing it last night on the same map he was (figured the familiarity and a rough outline of what to do would help) and I had fun. Only got about an hour into it before I had to call it a night, but I'm definitely staring at the clock waiting for 5pm so I can play again.

I know those slow-paced sims aren't for everyone, and for all I know I'll end up enjoying watching it being played more than playing it myself, but I need a relaxing time sink for the evenings now that I'm burnt out on Stardew Valley.

King of Tokyo (tabletop)

I got to play with expansions for the first time. The one that gives unique powers to each monster really did a lot to make the game more interesting. It was also the first time I played with more than 4 players, using both Tokyo slots, and that felt more like how the game is meant to be played. Definitely a party game at heart.

Scum and Villainy (tabletop)

We're nearing the end of our campaign, recently opening the mysterious Hanto Gate and flying through. It's been a great campaign. This game plays more smoothly and cinematically than any other tabletop RPG I've played.

Snowrunner (PS4)

A strangely addictive time sink, even if it's often deeply frustrating. I recently brought my truck from Michigan to Taymyr in Siberia, which feels like a much better designed map. The roads feel more real, and there are service stations in logical places. And the forests aren't as dense, so I don't get hopelessly stuck in the trees as often.

Star Realms (tabletop)

Played this for the first time on Wednesday's board game night. It reminds me a lot of Dominion. In some ways I like it better, though I'm not sure it will have the same depth and diversity over time. I like that there are no completely useless cards, so the game will never be as dull as a Dominion game with witches and no trashing. We played three versus three (three-headed hydra), and I'd like to try the other game modes.