Category: Reviews

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Games Reviews

Games of 2025

Legend
🌟 A personal favorite. (Not necessarily for everyone.)
✔️ Beat the game. (🏆 if I got all the achievements)
👍 Recommended if you haven’t played it.
👎 Avoid it. It’s terrible.

Game of the Year

This year, I decided I’d pick out my favorite game I played in the year, and for 2025, it’s…

The Alters 👍🌟🏆
This game just clicked with me. I played with all the settings on easy (because I find the survival grind kinda boring), but the story is just phenomenal; there are some real-life lessons that can be learned here, and I appreciate that in my games. In typical 11 bit fashion, there are some hard choices to make where none of the options are pleasant; though there’s often a path you can take to minimize the penalties or eventually resolve any new problems. Each act introduces a new area to explore, with new obstacles and hazards, slowly unraveling the mysteries of the planet you find yourself stranded on. The base building is also a lot of fun, and the “wheel” base is visually striking and a good landmark as you’re out exploring.

PC

The Outer Worlds presents a fictional corporate dystopia that is rapidly becoming non-fiction.

The Outer Worlds
Picked this back up in December since I never finished it. I think I started playing on Game Pass but recently got it via Humble Choice for Steam and decided to work on finishing it (along with the DLCs). Looking forward to the sequel.

Survivors of the Dawn
A bullet heaven game in early access that’s a little on the easy side after unlocking a few things.

Avorion
An older game that I haven’t played in a long time. Picked up partially for achievements and partially because I wanted to fly a spaceship.

Cookie Clicker
OK, hear me out. I played Cookie Clicker back when it first game out on the web, so I had a bit of nostalgia and it was on sale during Steam’s Idle Fest. It’s been expanded significantly from the original web game, but it’s still mostly the idle game I remember.

Exogate Initiative 🌟
I picked up Exogate Initiative in early access because I loved the idea of playing Stargate Command. The full release came at the end of January, and while there are a handful of odd bugs, the game plays great and it’s everything I wanted.

Mind Over Magic 🌟
It’s like a fantasy-themed Oxygen Not Included.

Boxes: Lost Fragments 🏆
Apes The Room series pretty heavily, but is significantly easier. The game starts with a tutorial puzzle box followed by five “floors” where each has four puzzle boxes to solve and one additional puzzle using parts recovered from the puzzle boxes. Each puzzle box is self-contained and relatively small; solving one can take 10-20 minutes. Aside from a few points where I got stuck because I just didn’t notice something, the puzzles are mostly just clicking through a lot of locks and switches. But they’re all well themed and interesting to click through, at least.

Nova Lands 🏆
Got Nova Lands in April’s Humble Choice. It’s a fun little exploration and automation game, like a small-scale 2D Satisfactory.

Diplomacy is Not an Option
I want so badly to love this game, but it feels like it’s built to be crushingly difficult, even at the easiest setting.

Distant Worlds 2
I never played the original Distant Worlds, but this one never really clicked with me. I never really understood what was going on with my ships. A lot of the game is automated – which I love – but it often left me wondering why things weren’t working as well as I wanted. These types of games are often somewhat opaque, but I feel like Distant Worlds 2 was a little too opaque.

Unlock the King 🏆
A fun little puzzle game where you shift chess pieces around to allow a king to move to its destination. Easy to play, only 100 levels. Beat it in two days.

Starfield
I come back to Starfield occasionally to make some more progress toward unlocking all the abilities. Still need to finish the DLC.

Pacific Drive

Homeworld: Remastered Collection🌟
Been wanting to replay this for a while, and started it this year.

Death Must Die 👍
A bullet-heaven that grew on me throughout the year.

The Thaumaturge
An interesting RPG where you use your abilities to read the emotions and thoughts of various characters and hunt down demons that you capture to use in battle Pokemon-style.

Doom: The Dark Ages 👍
Feels like a God of War game, but as a first-person shooter. Doom Eternal died out pretty quick for me (ran out of ammo and was just kinda stuck), so I like the change of pace in The Dark Ages.

Lightyear Frontier👍
There was a big update to this mech farming game this year, so I gave it another spin. Still fun, though I’m not sure I like the new fuel mechanic. Luckily there’s a toggle in the settings to turn it off.

X4 Foundations👍🌟
Came back to X4 after a long hiatus, and realized this is one of my favorite spaceflight games. Started playing into several of the expansion storylines I’ve been ignoring and having a great time building my empire.

No Man’s Sky👍🌟
Still a great game, and the Voyagers expansion added corvettes which added shipbuilding similar to Starfield, which are really fun to build.

The Riftbreaker 👍🏆
The Riftbreaker‘s 2.0 update released this year, adding co-op and endgame features. It came with a few new achievements to complete, making it the fifth time I’ve 100%’d the game. The final battle was pretty tough; I had to upgrade my defenses and retry it a half-dozen times before I finally won. Still a fantastic game.

Robocop “smiling” was the creepiest part of the entire game.

Robocop: Rogue City 👍🏆
I started this one with no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. It’s a fun first-person shooter with a story that feels like it would’ve made a better movie than Robocop 2 or Robocop 3.

Star Birds 👍
I love Kurzgesagt’s videos on YouTube, and this is their first game, from the developers of Dorfromantik. A fun, puzzly factory-building game.

Mars First Logistics
A physics-based pick-up-and-deliver game where you design vehicles to carry parts from point A to B, slowly building infrastructure across Mars. Fun to tinker with.

Age of Mythology: Retold
I remember loving Age of Mythology, and after trying to play some skirmish matches, I found out I suck at it.

PhaigeX: Hyperspace Survivors
A Vampire Survivors-like with spaceships. It’s fair; I like the gameplay but there are some really terrible combinations and sometimes the movement feels off.

Chorus
Chorus wants to be Everspace. It’s not as good, but it’s not too bad. My biggest complaint is the inability to strafe.

V Rising
I remember this being very popular a while back, but I was initially unimpressed. (I told my wife it was a boring Diablo clone.) It eventually grew on me, though some of the boss fights were extremely annoying. Switched the combat difficulty down to easy to finish the game, but gave up on getting the “Brutal” difficulty achievements.

Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master
A dungeon-building game, very loosely inspired by stuff like Dungeon Keeper. Tries too hard at humor, so it comes off as grating. Late-game gameplay is incredibly annoying, where you have to constantly send your forces out on raids just to make enough money to keep running, while constantly losing your guard forces to enemy invasions that are absurdly powerful.

Satisfactory
Played FICSMAS again this year, just to unlock the items on the advent calendar. There’s some fun new base-building parts, but not much beyond that. I’m still eagerly awaiting some DLC.

Cryptmaster
A first-person dungeon-crawler – a bit like Legend of Grimrock – but you search for loot and fight enemies by typing words; like typing “kick” to have your fighter kick or “zap” to have your sea witch fire a lightning bolt. When you find new gear, you type words to have the titular Cryptmaster describe aspects of the item, like “look” to describe the look of the item or “taste” to have them taste it. A unique take on the genre.

Fumes
An open-world vehicular combat game that is styled like old-school Twisted Metal or Vigilante 8. Feels great to play, but still needs some more content.

Caravan SandWitch
A chill adventure game focused on exploration.

Paleo Pines
A cute farming game with dinosaurs.

Synergy
A city-builder with a very unique style.

Pioneers of Pagonia
A spiritual successor to The Settlers, and it feels just like those old games. It expands on the old games well, adding a lot of new specializations for your units. Loved it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Got this a while back with Humble Choice, and only played it for an hour or two; mostly just to decide if I wanted to pick up Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 during the Steam Winter Sale.

BALL x PIT
A roguelike Breakout game. I’ve only played a bit, but I’ve really enjoyed it so far.

Emberward
A roguelike tower defense game where maze-building is a big part, using Tetris-like blocks to build the maze. Really solid tower defense.

Instruments of Destruction
A physics-based destruction game, much like Besiege, a game I thoroughly enjoyed in the past. Haven’t played much, but it’s been pretty easy so far; though I haven’t had a chance to build my own vehicles yet.

Badlands Crew
Picked up during the Steam Winter Sale and played hard for the last week of the year. I’ve enjoyed all the Crew games, but I think Badlands is the best: the grind feels less grindy, and the truck-building is a lot of fun.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
I liked Deliverance, so I picked up Deliverance 2 and played the intro section. The combat is definitely better than the first game, and I’m looking forward to playing more of both next year.

Mech Havoc 👍
Played a demo way back in February and loved it. Picked it up on sale and played through all the current levels. Looking forward to more content as the development progresses.

MechWarrior 5: Clans
A lot like Mercenaries, but more campaign-focused and cinematic, like the MechWarrior games of old. They’ve added scanning on missions, where you can manipulate the environment (like disabling mines, opening doors, or hacking turrets), and significantly simpler mech maintenance. Need to play a lot longer before I can access the Timber Wolf, which is one of the main reasons I bought the game.

Achievement Hunting

Same as last year, I wanted to try getting 100% of the achievements in a game each month in 2025, which led me to playing a bunch of older games.

Parkasaurus 🏆
Started this one last year, and continued in January. It’s an adorable dinosaur theme park game where you can make them wear hats.

Planetbase 🏆
Another one I started last year and continued playing into January. Despite being almost a decade old, it’s pretty solid; there are just a handful of quality-of-life improvements that would make it great.

Bomber Crew
An older game that I was inspired to play while watching Masters of the Air. Great show. Still a fun game, too.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker 🏆
Finally finished this one. Still a great game, and I’m glad they added the “Free Shift” mode after Early Access that let me play it more as a puzzle game with less frantic cutting and fewer explosions.

Hypnospace: Outlaw
A bit of a deduction game, where you’re hunting for things through what is basically a 90’s internet. Neat idea, but it wore out its charm pretty quickly for me.

Borderlands 3
It’s not bad, but the loot grind started to annoy me faster than I expected.

Tails Noir

Exo One

Board Games

King’s Forge 👍
Been a while since I’ve played this, and I don’t think I’ve ever played with the expansions (despite owning all of them). We played with the Glassworks, Gold, and Masterworks expansions. As much as I like the glass material added by Glassworks, I don’t think it fits well with the rest of the game since there’s so much content created that doesn’t use the material. That said, the other expansions felt like they added extra variety to the game. And I still love all the little dice.

Earth 👍🌟

Perch

Finspan 👍🌟
The third of the Wingspan games, and I think I like it the best. Gameplay ramps up much faster, and you get to mostly fill the board. Plus, I like fishies.

Square One 👍
Like Project L, but more combo-focused.

Race for the Galaxy 👍🌟
An old favorite of mine, I finally had a chance to introduce it to my wife.

Azul: Summer Pavilion

Tiny Epic Cthulhu
I’ve always enjoyed the Tiny Epic games, and Cthulhu is a pretty good co-op game.

Galactic Cruise 👍
My wife and I like to call this Avenue 5: The Board Game. It’s just about running a space cruise agency (it’s not as crazy as Avenue 5), but it’s a lot of fun building your cruise ships and sending them out on voyages. We played it twice this year, and both times we managed to forget a rule and affect the scores… There’s a decent amount of complexity.

Sky Team 👍🌟
A fantastic, nail-biting two-player game. Easy to set up and play, but things can easily go off the rails, which makes it pretty exciting.

Kronologic: Paris 1920
A deduction game that’s essentially a better version of Clue.

Chrononauts
An old game that my wife owned but I’ve never played. Not bad, but dated.

Star Fluxx
Another old one, this time mine. I like Fluxx, but Star Fluxx was always my favorite because of the sci-fi references.

The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth 👍🌟
A great two-player game where you compete across three different areas to achieve one of three possible victory conditions: in the Quest for the Ring, the Fellowship player has to get Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, while the Sauron player has to have the Nazgul catch them; either player can conquer Middle-Earth on the battlefield; or either player can gain the support of all the races of Middle-Earth. The challenge comes in trying to keep the other player from getting too far ahead in any of the three areas, while completing one of them yourself.

Havoc and Hijinks
Another old-ish game that I’ve owned a while but never played. Cute art, but the gameplay is pretty basic.

Dead Man’s Draw
Another older game. Quick and easy to play, but pretty random.

Space Base
One of my wife’s favorites because she can routinely crush me in it. Managed my first win this year, though.

Core Worlds
A card game a bit like Star Realms, but less refined.

A Message From The Stars 👍🌟
My favorite word game. Got several plays this year.

Cascadia

Photosynthesis
An interesting game, but a little too basic for the amount of physical space it required. Looks great when played, though, with the forest springing up through the course of the game.

Robo Rally
An older favorite of mine that I tend to be pretty good at, it being a programming game. Not as chaotic at two players, though.

Dorfromantik 👍🌟
A great co-op version of the PC game. My wife and I always have a lot of fun playing it.

Arcs 👍🌟
A 4X game that plays pretty fast and never feels tedious. Even my wife enjoyed it, and it’s not her sort of game.

Twinkle Twinkle 👍
Draft tiles to build out your view of space and score points based on the content of your board at the end. Easy to play, looks good, and very puzzly.

Waddle
A small game about creating waddles of penguins on a randomized map.

Sea Salt and Paper
Card collection game with great origami artwork.

The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine 👍

Project L 👍🌟

Planetarium
It had been a long time since we’ve played Planetarium, so we wanted to give it a try to determine if we wanted to keep it. Had a lot of fun with it, playing with some of the expansions I hadn’t tried before.

Tiny Epic Game of Thrones
I like this better than the big Game of Thrones game because it’s simpler and faster to play. I want to play the co-op mode (fighting against the White Walkers) at some point.

Ra 👍
Ra is an old game, but I had never played it, so I picked up a special edition through Kickstarter. It’s a fun auction game, and the special edition has great components.

Patchwork 👍
My wife and I always play our Halloween Patchwork on our anniversary.

Ra and Write
A card-based draw-and-write version of Ra. Feels similar, but may be overly simplified.

Philharmonix 👍
Manage a space orchestra full of alien musicians and tour the galaxy. The theme is really just set dressing; the game could be identical with globe map and just be about boring human orchestras. But the artwork is fun and the gameplay is just complex enough to not be overwhelming.

Knitting Circle 👍
A sequel to Calico, where you’re knitting items instead of making a quilt. Fun to play, with multiple smaller puzzles instead of Calico‘s big puzzle.

Fromage 👍
A cheese-making game with a rotating board, which is an interesting mechanic that works really well.

Formaggio 👍
A stand-alone expansion to Fromage that plays as well as the original.

Harmonies 👍
Make tiny habitats for various animals. Very easy to play. Feels a bit like a mix of Cascadia and Azul.

Point Galaxy
The third in the Point series (after Salad and City), this one takes the same gameplay and adds some additional complexity with adjacency requirements and managing multiple star systems.

Propolis
Build the best colony for your bees. Another simple one.

Flamecraft Duals
Manipulate tokens to create patterns on the board you can use to fulfill orders. Easy to play, but there’s a decent amount of strategy in it.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal 👍
A racing game. Plays better with more cars, but you can use bots to fill out a race. Easy to learn, hard to master, which is a rare combination.

Pandora’s Legacy
A jigsaw puzzle adventure where you solve puzzles within the puzzle to unlock new puzzles. Some of the puzzle solutions can be pretty obtuse, but there’s a generous hint system to help you solve things.

Dated
A guess-the-date trivia game that I played with my family. My brother was really good at narrowing date ranges down and guessing correctly.

Super Big Boggle
A Christmas gift from my wife. We both love Boggle, and she’s really good at it. The Super version expands the grid from 5×5 to 6×6.

Categories
Games Reviews

Games of 2024

Legend
🌟 A personal favorite. (Not necessarily for everyone.)
✔️ Beat the game. (🏆 if I got all the achievements)
👍 Recommended if you haven’t played it.
👎 Avoid it. It’s terrible.

PC

Baldur’s Gate 3 🌟
Finally got around to playing this in January. Really enjoying it.

Destiny 2
Continued Season of the Wish into 2024, and I started winding down on my playtime.
Played Final Shape and the first “Episode”, Echoes through the middle of the year. Final Shape was a great conclusion to the “Light and Dark Saga”, and Echoes was a good kickoff for the next big story arc.
The second episode, Revenant, also had some fun new mechanics and some good gear, but Bungie decided not to make the new weapons craftable. Once I heard they were doing the same for the next episode, I pretty much stopped playing. I might stop in from time to time to play the story, but I’m done with the grind.

Star Citizen 👎
I tried playing this toward the end of 2023, and was able to play a bit more in January. I want to be interested, but so far I’ve found the game extremely boring. It wants to be an MMO where you wander around cities and interact with various shopkeepers, but I just want to fly my ship. In about 2-3 hours of play time, I only managed to fly a ship for maybe 10-20 minutes. To make matters worse, performance is terrible and it’s plagued with bugs. Hopefully it turns around at some point and turns into a real game.

The Universim 👍
Universim had it’s 1.0 release this year and I hopped back in. If you enjoyed the early god games that established the genre like Populous and Black and White, then The Universim is a great game in that vein. It has a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and spans from the stone-age to a multi-planet civilization with terraforming and trade between planets. It’s expansive but works incredibly well.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor 👍
I’ve found that I love the “bullet heaven” genre, and Survivor is a great entry into the genre. I’ve played a little of Deep Rock Galactic and like what’s there, but it’s multiplayer-focused and I’m mainly a solo gamer. Survivor gives me a fun single-player experience in that world, with some unique additions to the genre, like maps you can alter by digging through the rock. Other than that, it follows all the typical parts of the formula: meta-progression, different classes, weapon upgrades, etc.

Forever Skies 👍
A survival game where the world is covered in toxic dust and your home is an airship you use to explore abandoned towers. I like the exploration focus and lack of combat; there are things that attack you and you can kill, but they’re just territorial critters and not hunting you or anything. It’s a little bare-bones right now, but it’s still in Early Access, so I hope it gets nicely fleshed out as it grows.

Lightyear Frontier 👍
A chill farming and exploration game whose hook is that all your farming is done in a mech. I love everything about this game: the “pop-pop-pop” sounds when rapid-fire planting seeds; how the animals react to your mech stomping around; the way your mech moves and operates; and just the general art style. It’s a lovely world and the theme is generally about restoring nature, which is a pleasant change from many other games. There’s little I don’t like here.

Balatro 👍
A poker roguelike deckbuilder that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Laysara Summit Kingdom

Underspace
Spiritual successor to Freelancer and checks all the boxes.

Manor Lords

Pioneers of Pagonia

The Invincible 👍🏆
Picked this one up on sale since I enjoyed the Next Fest demo. It’s ultimately a walking simulator (a genre I don’t think I’ve ever seriously played), but I love the story and presentation.

Stardeus
Another one I enjoyed during a Next Fest, picked up on sale.

The Riftbreaker 👍🏆
Played the new “Heart of the Swamp” expansion and collected the new set of achievements. Still love this game.

Spring Falls👍🏆
A lovely little puzzle game about managing water and making flowers bloom. Picked up during the Steam Summer Sale. It’s short (about an hour), but has some really tough puzzles.

Bloons TD 6
I don’t think I’ve ever played the Bloons tower defense series, but judging from the “6” at the end, it must be popular. It’s monkeys popping balloons, which sounds like a euphemism, so I’m sure it’s some sort of inside joke. It’s obviously designed as a free-to-play mobile game, with a variety of things you can pay real-world cash to unlock early or just to acquire in-game currency. It’s a solid tower defense game, but I don’t like the “freemium” feel.

Dungeon Warfare 2
Started playing this for the first time after finishing all the achievements in Dungeon Warfare. It’s a lot of the same gameplay (which is great), with some new randomization elements thrown in that I’m not sure I completely enjoy. Still a great game, but I wish it was a little more straightforward like the first game.

The Room Series 👍🏆🏆🏆🏆
I’ve played The Room in the past (I think on mobile) and I loved it. During Steam’s summer sale, the entire series was available cheap and I decided to pick it up and play through them all. They’re all fantastic games, providing a few hours of puzzle solving each. There’s a spooky story running through them that adds to the atmosphere.

Satisfactory 👍🌟🏆
Satisfactory is one of my all-time favorite games. I had a blast playing it in Early Access, and it finally released version 1.0 this year. I beat the game and unlocked all the achievements in about a month, spending most of my free time playing. I’m hoping for some DLC at some point, but even after finishing the game and completing all the achievements, I was still building factories and optimizing things. Fantastic game.

Starcom: Unknown Space 👍🌟🏆
A great space adventure game with shipbuilding and combat. It’s essentially a retelling of Starcom: Nexus, but with a lot of improvements. Looks great, fun to play, and an interesting world to explore.

InfraSpace 🏆
A decent city/factory-building game that essentially boils down to a better version of SimCity. Featuers some excellent road management tools, but it’s poorly optimized. And I find cars hold up traffic so they can cross three lanes on a superhighway to take an exit disturbingly realistic.

Parkasaurus
Ultimately a very lightweight dinosaur theme park game, like a casual version of Jurassic World Evolution. Very easy to play.

Star Trucker
Played during a Next Fest and decided to buy it at release. It’s just a trucking simulator in space, but I love all the details.

Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster 🏆
I loved the Dark Forces series, so when I saw the remaster in a Humble Bundle, I picked it up and immediately played through the whole thing. There are some minor issues with the graphics and some of the levels have some annoying design, but it’s a fun classic from the Doom clone era.

Cyberpunk 2077👍🌟🏆
I came back to Cyberpunk after picking up the Phantom Liberty DLC on sale. I never finished the game years ago when I first bought it; got sidetracked by side quests and other games. After finishing the DLC, I decided I’d work on seeing all the different endings and finishing the achievements so I could call the game “done”. Love the game and I’m glad I pushed myself to see all the endings.

Medieval Dynasty
At the end of the year, I picked up Medieval Dynasty and started playing them again. I’d played both on Game Pass but I’ve been waiting for a sale to pick them up on Steam. Still enjoying them both.

Caves of Qud

Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord
Like with Medieval Dynasty, I had played this on Game Pass and picked it up on sale on Steam. I still really enjoy spearing enemies with a couched lance in combat.

Achievement Hunting

I continued my habit from last year of trying to 100% games in my backlog, and did pretty well again this year. I’ve listed these games separately, since they’re mostly older games. I didn’t manage to finish all of them, since some had some really grindy achievements that I gave up on.

100% Achievement Count: 24
My goal is typically to 100% finish one game a month, but starting the year with that goal, along with finding some short-ish games that were easy to complete let me double that objective this year. I probably won’t be able to manage this again next year.

Settlement Survival 🏆
Started the year off with a city-builder, surprising no one. Tried to get all the achievements by the end of January, but several were based on random events and took forever to finish. (Took an extra 80 hours of mostly idling to get the last two or three achievements.)
Achievements aside, it’s a fun survival city-builder with some great mechanics.

Rise of Industry 🏆
After Settlement Survivor, this was my next “100%” target. It’s a great little industry-building game that’s pretty easy to play with tweakable difficulty. Achievements were pretty easy to accomplish, aside from a few that were a little buggy and took some grinding.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker 👍
I hadn’t played this since the Early Access phase, but it’s still as fun as it used to be. I especially like the “Open Shift” mode that lets me disassemble spaceships without worrying about oxygen depletion or time limits; I can play the game as the puzzle game I love without the pressure to get things done quickly. Though I’ve still killed myself plenty of times by burning myself to death or smacking objects into my helmet.

Planet: TD 👎🏆
I think I acquired this through a Humble Bundle a while back. I love tower defense games, but this one is a bit basic. There are also some design problems; choices were made that directly oppose the tower defense design. For instance, it’s often more viable to sell and rebuild a tower for a better chance at a higher-level tower instead of just upgrading (“I could spend $1000 to upgrade this tower to level 2, or I could sell and rebuild it for $500 for a chance at a level 4 tower!”).

Defense Grid: The Awakening
Playing Planet TD had me itching to play a better tower defense game, so I decided to go back to an oldie; the original Defense Grid from way back in 2008. I’ve owned it for a while but hadn’t played very far, and getting back into it reminded me why: it has a very odd control scheme that I do not like. Your cursor is locked to the center of the screen and movements move your entire view (probably meant to be played with a controller). Regardless, it’s actually a solid tower defense game.

Snowtopia 👎🏆
Got Snowtopia in February’s Humble Choice and decided to give it a try. It was on my wishlist at one point, but I removed it because of bad reviews. After playing it, I’ve found the reviews are justified: it’s buggy and has a lot of performance issues. It’s actually disappointing, though… There’s an awesome game in here that just feels unfinished.

Sentinel
An “interactive audio” tower defense game where you’re a program defending against viruses. There are various audio effects as your towers fire and enemies die that play into the soundtrack. The graphics are clean, the soundtrack is decent (if you’re in to electronic music), and it’s relatively easy to play. I don’t like some of the gameplay elements and the levels are pretty unforgiving (especially the bonus levels). I gave up before hitting 100% completion because some of the bonus levels are ridiculous unless you learn their trick and execute near-perfectly.

The Turing Test 👍🏆
A solid first-person puzzle game with an interesting story and well-designed puzzles.

The Talos Principle 🏆
A decent puzzle game that has a few terribly-designed mechanics and late-game puzzles that cause frustration. The “playback” mechanic literally requires you to sit and wait for 20-30 seconds (sometimes longer) to give yourself time to work with it; late-game puzzles often rely on just-barely-line-of-sight. It’d be an easy recommend if a third of the game was cut. As it stands, it outlives its welcome and becomes frustrating instead of fun.

Orbitalis 🏆
A puzzle game about gravitational forces. It’s pretty but doesn’t run very well (30FPS max), and I prefer my puzzle games to be more deterministic.

10000000 🏆
A match-3 game with some roguelike progression. The achievements aren’t too bad, though the endgame ones are very luck-based.

Megaquarium 👍🏆
A pleasant little aquarium building game. Not too difficult, and the graphics are pretty simple, but it’s very easy to play and a lot of fun. Plus I love all the fishies.

Lumencraft
A fun action tower defense game where you mine resources and defend against waves of bugs. I played this way back in Early Access, but hadn’t touched it since release. It hasn’t changed much, and it’s still a solid game. Some achievements are really grindy, though (“Defeat 1,000,000 bugs”).

Strike Suit Zero
A game I’ve owned for a long time. Decided to play the “Director’s Cut” to get all the achievements. Still a great game, though the very last mission is a bit of a pain.

Automachef 👎
A factory game about using machines to make food. It starts out interesting but gets tedious fast, and once they introduce their programming language, I completely lost interest. I’m a software developer, but I don’t want to deal with assembly-style bullshit in my games.

When Ski Lifts Go Wrong
It’s like Bridge Constructor, but you’re typically building ski lifts. Though also sometimes ramps and bridges. It’s a fine physics puzzle game, but not really anything special. (If you’ve played one physics puzzle game, you’ve pretty much played them all…)

Artificial Defense
A tower defense game with a lot of manual shooting. I don’t mind player-activated abilities in tower defense games, but I feel like they should be an emergency option – proper use of towers should be the priority. Artificial Defense is the opposite, where your player abilities are the primary way to deal with creeps.

Puzzle Agent 2 🏆
One I played and finished a while back, but missed 2 achievements. I’ve always wanted to come back and finish it, and finally took the time to do so. It’s a little dated at this point, but still a solid puzzle game.

Sheltered 👍🏆
Another old one that I was only one achievement from completing. Had to spend a few more hours in it to get that last achievement. Still a great game. The reviews seem to indicate the sequel was unfinished, which is a shame.

Dungeon Warfare👍🏆
I think I played this on iPad a long time ago. It’s a fantastic tower defense game focused on building traps to kill waves of adventurers entering your dungeon. You can build fun combos and the physics-based unit movement can lead to some hilarious outcomes.

Demos

Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure (Demo)
It’s essentially Pikmin with factory-building. An odd combination, but it’s adorable.

Stellar Settlers (Demo)
It’s a bit of a puzzly outpost-builder. Interested to see how it turns out.

Stormgate (Beta)
Looks and feels a lot like StarCraft, and that’s a good thing. But it feels off in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

Gods Against Machines (Demo)
A kind of “reverse city-builder” where you’re a god of nature attempting to destroy the cities of an invading robotic force. It’s basically Spirit Island if it was an RTS-style video game. I enjoyed the demo, even though it’s pretty simple and involves a lot of clicking. Would make an excellent mobile game on a touch interface.

Next Fests
I always love trying out new things during Steam’s Next Fest events, and this year was no different:
February
June

Board Games

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game
A fun two-player deckbuilder. I played Empire and managed to kill off a lot of Rebel heroes (Millenium Falcon, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca), while the Empire heroes came out late in the game and I managed to get enough to secure a win. Poor Chewie.

War Chest
A tactical strategy game played with some hefty poker chips. Lots of variation to this, but I think the suggested starting teams are lopsided.

Picky Pixie
A wallet game that plays like a very lightweight Mysterium.

Space Base
One of my wife’s favorites because she routinely crushes me. We’ve played a half-dozen times and I have yet to win.

Dorfromantik👍
Plays just like the digital game, but faster and at a smaller scale. Great co-op.

League of the Lexicon👍
A trivia game all about etymology. If you enjoy learning about words, this is the game for you.

Among the Stars: Revival

Thunder Road: Vendetta
Like playing Mad Max in board game form.

Canvas: Finishing Touches
The final expansion for Canvas. All the expansions do a good job of adding to the base game with optional complexity.

Evolution: Another World

Picky Eaters👍

Patchwork Doodle

Flamecraft👍
First played Flamecraft when visiting my brother in San Francisco in April. My wife and I enjoyed it so much, we bought it for ourselves.

Drop Drive
A pick-up-and-deliver game where the game map is created by literally dropping a bunch of components on a hemispherical sun, sending them flying out in random directions. Pretty easy to play, with a lot of options to shake things up every game.

Apiary👍
A worker placement game about space bees. Very well themed and fun to play.

A Message From the Stars👍
A cooperative word deduction game, and one of my favorite new games. One player plays an alien that has sent a message to Earth, and the other players play a team of scientists attempting to decipher the alien message.

Wyrmspan👍
Wingspan with dragons. There are a handful of additions that make the game a little more challenging and interactive.

Through the Desert

Rialto

Scoville

New Dawn

Switchbacks

Onitama👍
A chess-like martial arts strategy game. You’re only able to choose from two moves on your turn, which change over the course of the game. Feels a lot like chess on a smaller, more tactical scale. Also easier to play, with essentially four pawns and a king.

Cosmic Run: Rapid Fire

Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure

Small World

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Spirit Island👍
I love the theming of this game, and on our second game, my wife and I managed a win by terrorizing the invaders enough to leave the island.

CATAN Starfarers
Found community-created rules for a two-player variant to play with my wife (the game only supports 3-4 players), and they worked out really well. The little spaceship used to determine your “rolls” and capabilities is a little gimmicky but fun.

Earth👍

Ark Nova

Great Western Trail: New Zealand
We got the New Zealand version of Great Western Trail because it has sheepies.

Marvel Champions

Splendor Duel👍

Perspectives
A deduction game where each player gets a set of photos and have to describe what they see to everyone else.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars
A Pandemic-system game where you play a hero from the Clone Wars era of Star Wars and face a villain. Obviously plays a lot like Pandemic, but you have various cards you can use to help.

Ticket to Ride (10th Anniversary)

Gravwell

Marvel Dice Masters: Age of Ultron 👎
I expected this to be Marvel Quarriors (it’s designed by the same people), but it’s somehow worse.

Chai

Galactic Strike Force

Azul👍

Teotihuacan: City of Gods
Got the “deluxe master set” on Kickstarter and played for the first time. Being a euro game, there are a lot of different things to do that keep things fun and interesting.

Darkrock Ventures

Project L👍
Tetris as a board game is still fantastic.

Android: Netrunner

Cosmic Run: Regeneration

Chronicles of Crime

Don’t Go In There

Potion Explosion

Patchwork

Votes for Women👍
My wife and I love “non-fiction” board games; stuff like Wingspan and Cascadia that are firmly based in science or history. Votes for Women plays out the Suffrage movement like a game of Risk, with the Suffragist and Opposition players vying for support in the 48 states to pass the 19th Amendment.
The Opposition player can win by making sure the amendment never comes to the Senate, or by winning 13 states in the voting. The Suffragist player can only win by bringing the amendment to the Senate and winning 36 states. The game plays out over three eras, with the Opposition entrenched at the start but the Suffragist movement gaining steam as time passes. Once voting starts, any state with 4 “support” is immediately won by that player. For all the remaining states, there’s a roll-off to determine who wins.
When my wife and I played, I played the Opposition and she played the Suffragists. She felt she had a responsibility to win, and the game came down to the roll-off, which felt very intense (like watching election results). In the end, she won: 38 to 10.

The Quacks of Quedlinburg
I’ve had my eye on Quacks for a while, and it turned out to be a great purchase. There’s bag-building and a lot of chance involved, but it never feels like you’re overly penalized for pressing your luck and busting.

Star Realms: Rise of Empire
A legacy version of Star Realms, with a few new factions that work with the base game.

Xtronaut: The Game of Solar System Exploration

The Castles of Burgundy👍
Bought the “Special Edition” on Gamefound on their second print run. This edition has some great upgrades, and the gameplay is a lot of fun.

Rebirth👍
Easy-to-play tile-laying game. At two players, it’s generally friendly but there can be some heavy competition for certain areas of the map. Has some interesting tie-breaking rules, which worked in my wife’s favor on our first play.

Decorum👍
My wife and I love Decorum, and we took some time to play a few more of the two-player campaign this year.

Azul Mini
Picked this up as a “travel” version of the “full” game, which we still have. Plays just like the big version, but with smaller components that hold the tiles securely. I could definitely see playing this on a plane or train.

Converge

Mysticana

Categories
Games Reviews

Steam Next Fest – 10/24

Space Drilling Station

Build a multi-level drilling station on an alien planet to harvest an exotic new energy source. You have daily export quotas to meet that increase as you perform better. Overall not a bad game, though some of the logistics handling is a little annoying. Workers need to travel from place to place, but you can’t control where they sleep, so someone may be sleeping a long way from where they work. (And it doesn’t appear to sort itself out on its own.) With a few quality-of-life updates, this could be a fun little management game, though the ever-increasing quotas could put a damper on some of the management aspects if they don’t cap out.

Tower Factory

As I started playing this demo, I realized I had played it before. (Apparently before I started blogging about these demos, since I can’t find a previous mention of it.) It’s a tower defense game where you have to harvest and process resources to build your towers. It’s a little slow starting out, but as you unlock upgrades, you can do more. It’s built a bit too heavily on that meta-progression (the demo level is basically impossible to complete until you’ve unlocked several upgrades), but it’s a decent little tower defense game.

Microtopia

A management game where you manage a colony of microscopic robotic “ants”. You set up trails and assign ants to them to perform certain tasks, which is a little annoying until you get the hang of it. There are some rough edges, but I love the theming.

Beyond Astra

A strategy game where you build structures on planets and command ground and space forces. Looks good and seems interesting, though the controls felt a little unwieldy; moving from space to ground could cause some weird camera shifts. Ground combat was largely pretty boring, but space combat is pretty good.

Wild Planet

A pretty basic survival game with a minimal aesthetic. Pretty rough in its current state.

Space Tales

It’s essentially StarCraft, except with a retro-futuristic style. The design aesthetic is all over the place, and the interface is so huge it makes it difficult to play (though that may just be a scaling issue with my widescreen monitor). What’s here seems pretty good, but it needs some polish and maybe a little restraint when it comes to the various styles they’re mashing together.

Knights in Tight Spaces

A sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces, Knights swaps the spy thriller style for a fantasy setting. Plays about the same, but with a significantly expanded set of abilities, as well as giving you a party to control.

refarm

Essentially a clicker game with farming.

Planet Scanner

Scan planets for your corporate overlord, earning a fraction of their value, which you can use to pay for rent, food, water, and upgrades. A lot like Hardspace: Shipbreaker but more laid back.

Stellar Outpost Commander

A base building game where you construct base facilities and provide weapons and equipment for pilots that are autonomous. You don’t directly control the pilot ships, but provide attack and scout orders with bounties to entice the pilots to complete them. In return, the pilots spend their credits at your station, which you can use to hire new pilots and issue new bounties. It’s an interesting approach and something I was tinkering with in one of my game projects in the past. It’s not a terrible game, but needs a lot of polish.

Warspace 2

I didn’t play this one long because I didn’t like the control style, and the tutorial seemed to bug out at a certain point where I couldn’t progress. Looks like it could be fun with some updates.

Owl Force

Like Star Fox and Everspace had a cute little owl baby. What I played in the demo seems pretty basic, but it was a fun little space shooter. Controls are pretty good, and the graphics look great.

Categories
Games Reviews

Steam Next Fest 02/24

Another Next Fest is underway, so here’s my latest set of demo impressions. I’m adding a 👍 next to my favorites. I’ve found a lot of demos I plan to try this time around.

Lightyear Frontier

I’ve been looking forward to this mech farming game for a while. It’s a peaceful open-world farming game with a focus on harmonizing with the environment. It’s very pretty but overall a little more basic than I was expecting. I also love that you can trip your mech; it’ll just roll around on the ground and you have to exit to flip it upright.

Star Trucker 👍

I was honestly a little surprised with how much I enjoyed this one. It’s essentially a trucker game like Euro Truck Simulator, but with power management and EVAs for repairs. The docking reminds me of Kerbal Space Program. I honestly wish Star Citizen was more like this.

Summer House

A peaceful little game where you build houses. A lot like Townscaper.

Dystopika

A dystopian city-builder toy that’s even more like Townscaper. Could make some nice wallpapers.

Breachway 👍

A roguelike deckbuilding adventure game. Solid mechanics and looks good. I’m looking forward to trying the full game.

Synergy

An interesting city-builder with a focus on finding balance with the environment. I love the aesthetic, but find some of the controls a little annoying. I was struggling with figuring out how to “prune” plants (maybe it’s a mechanic that unlocks later?) when the demo crashed on me.

Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown

There’s the core of a good city-builder here, but there are several mechanics that make things annoying to manage. For instance, wood is used for construction, firewood, and planks, but you can only have one logging camp, which limits the rate you can produce this vital resource. I also had a building burn down because it was outside the radius of a well, so my villagers just decided to let it burn. If things like that get cleaned up, this could be a pretty solid game.

Final Factory

A space factory and defense game.

Underspace 👍

Freelancer with some cosmic horror thrown in. I loved what little I played of the demo. I love the aesthetic, the atmosphere, and the gameplay. Some of the voice work could be cleaned up a bit, but I’ll definitely pick this up once it releases into early access.

Solar Expanse

A solar system exploration game. Seems pretty chill; I might try out the full game on release.

Shapez 2 👍

I loved the original Shapez, and the sequel brings the same gameplay into 3D. Looks great and plays great, at a scale that surprised me.

Ouros

Basically a puzzle game about Bézier curves. Pretty chill and easy to play.

Orc Warchief: Strategy City Builder

Seems like a pretty basic city builder at the moment. There’s apparently some sort of combat mechanic where you send your orcs to fight other armies (there’s a combat demo after finishing the demo), but it came down to numbers, which was a bit disappointing.

News Tower 👍

I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect with this one, but I really enjoyed it. From building and managing the tower where all my employees work to managing which stories my reporters were working on, the entire experience is great. Well polished and a lot of fun. I think naming my newspaper “Print Is Dead” added to my enjoyment a bit.

Pacific Drive

A survival game where your car is the focus. There’s an interesting world that’s been built for the game, and the upgrade trees for the car look really deep. There are a lot of survival games that I hate, but I’m cautiously optimistic about this one.

Millenia

A Civilization-style game. The demo only lasts 60 turns, which only gets through the early eras in the game. Some of the concepts seem interesting, like special ages that have specific requirements and special effects. The “Age of Blood” requires killing 6 enemy armies and leads to an age where all nations are at war. I’ve always enjoyed the various Civ games, so I’d like to dig into this one at some point.

Reus 2

A planet-building god game. Similar to the first game. Cute and pretty easy to play.

Balatro 👍

A roguelike deckbuilding poker game. Empower your deck with jokers that provide special abilities, tarot cards that alter your deck, planet cards that improve hand values, and vouchers that provide passive bonuses. A really unique blend that works really well and is a lot of fun to play.

MULLET MAD JACK

This game looks amazing in motion, with a retro-cyberpunk anime style. A lot of fun to just run through levels killing everything as fast as possible. There’s also a lot of social commentary in here, too, from the robot billionaires that control the world to the livestream of your runs pumping dopamine into your system and extending your life. It’s not all that subtle.

Children of the Sun

Telekinetically bend your single rifle bullet to take out cult members. It’s a stylistic shooting puzzle game.

Harold Halibut 👍

An adventure game where you play as the titular Harold, unraveling a mystery aboard the Fedora 1, a spaceship crash-landed at the bottom of the ocean on an alien world. The art is amazing; the characters and environments are all hand-built and animated with stop motion. I might have to buy this one just to support the art.

TerraTech Worlds

I loved the original TerraTech, but based on the demo, I’m not sure how I feel about Worlds. It’s slower to start and some of the environmental effects are overly powerful early-game, like trees that shoot lightning and can instantly destroy your tech.

Tribes 3: Ascend

I want to like it, but the skiing feels too floaty and I find it practically impossible to hit anything that’s moving. Maybe it’s just latency, but with players (and the flag) jumping around so much, it’s difficult to have much fun.

Categories
Games Reviews

Review: Starfield

I’ve been playing Starfield practically non-stop since the early release on September 1st. After 200 hours, I feel like I’ve seen most of what Starfield offers, so it’s probably time for a review.

Here’s the short version: I love it.

Preparing for Launch

Let’s start with some assumptions and expectations I had going into the game:

First off, this is a Bethesda RPG. While Starfield is a new IP with its own style, there are definitely parts that feel like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout. Like those other games, there’s a big open world, plenty of places to explore, people to talk to, quests to complete. For me, those are all selling points. I also expected to spend most of the game over-encumbered.

The game Starfield keeps getting compared to is No Man’s Sky. I also love No Man’s Sky, but there are some valid criticisms that apply to both games. Those criticisms generally boil down to: space is big and boring. But if you find the journey itself exciting, then you’ll enjoy this type of game.

The live action teaser for Starfield did a great job of setting up my expectations: this is a game about exploration and discovery. If you’re expecting high action and excitement at every turn, this is not your game.

Into The Starfield

While I tried to keep my hope and excitement to a minimum before release, I found it difficult. I pre-ordered the premium edition so I could start playing early. I had the entire week off (by coincidence – I had to use up some vacation time), so I was ready to dig in. And what I got largely met my expectations.

Starfield drops you into the story right away, and like all Bethesda RPGs, you’re left to your own devices after a few short objectives. After arriving at the Lodge and officially joining Constellation, I explored New Atlantis and ended up joining the Vanguard, which was the first major questline that I spent time completing. I highly recommend joining the Vanguard early, as there’s a museum of sorts that details the background of the game (though biased from the United Colony’s perspective).

Breaking Ground

After spending some time in the Vanguard questline, I decided to work on building an outpost. I spent several hours exploring a few planets for a good area to start in, and eventually settled on an area with a decent mix of starting resources; I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, but I had spent hours trying to find a good spot and decided it was time to move on. The initial outpost building is pretty basic; I’ve only recently unlocked the skills needed to start expanding on my outposts, so it’ll be some time before I’ve learned what’s possible. For now, it’s at least handy to gather some of the rarer resources.

The time I spent exploring wasn’t wasted, however. The generated surfaces in Starfield vary from barren to lush, with various landmarks scattered around. Sometimes this makes planets appear overly populated, with abandoned outposts scattered around every planet and moon you land on. However, these landmarks provide a little fun while exploring random areas – you get the chance to fight off pirates, scour abandoned bases, or find unique planetary features. (You also get a little XP for every one you find.)

Grand Theft Spaceship

While exploring one area, I saw a ship land in the distance and approached to find a group of colonists. Out of curiosity, I approached the landing bay of their ship, picked the lock, then headed to the bridge and took off. I immediately felt guilty and reloaded, but I had a new goal: find a ship full of baddies and take it.

After another hour or two of exploring, a Va’ruun Zealot ship landed nearby; after killing the landing party, picking the lock on the landing bay, and fighting my way to the bridge, I had a fancy new ship to fly. I spent some time sprucing it up and giving it a new paint job, and this became my ship for the majority of the game. (I spent hundreds of thousands of credits on it, upgrading and customizing it as I leveled.)

My ship through the majority of my first playthrough.

I’ve boarded and taken several other ships this way, sometimes with the pilot taking off after I’ve boarded. One time, I boarded a ship, the pilot launched, and the ship was destroyed in space by security forces and I instantly died. I was amazed that whole sequence was even possible.

Finding a new ship relatively early is important in Starfield. The Frontier, while being a decent starter ship, is terrible at everything: it can’t carry much cargo, it’s weapons aren’t very good, and it has a starter grav drive and fuel tank. Luckily, there are several questlines that award ships. (Though by the time I got those rewards, I had already upgraded my stolen ship into exactly what I wanted.)

All Systems Go

Speaking of picking locks, I think some of the minigames in Starfield are the best they’ve ever been. The lockpicking minigame is more of a puzzle, where you’re given a set of picks and have to line them up with the gaps in the lock. The persuasion minigame gives you a set of statements you can make to the target to influence them, and you only succeed if you accumulate enough “points” with your statements. Other social skills can factor into the statements you have available, like you can use your “Manipulation” skills for easy points. It’s far better than the simple numeric checks in past games.

All Aboard

Aside from all the systems, the gameplay, and the quests, there are a lot of characters in Starfield that you interact with. I was enamored with the Constellation group and their joy of exploration. It’s one of the major reasons I love Starfield: it’s not always about action and excitement; sometimes it’s about the simple joy of discovery. This was true of No Man’s Sky, but in Starfield, you’ve got a crew with you that’s just as excited about it as you are.

My personal favorite member of Constellation is Vladimir Sall, who spends his time stargazing from The Eye. His piratey turns of phrase make me smile every time I hear them (even after hearing them over and over).

There are also plenty of random encounters throughout the game that are a joy to experience, from a pilot who sings sea shanties over comms to the Starfield equivalent of robocalls.

I’m also lucky enough to have my name be one that Vasco can greet, so I get to hear “Captain Shawn” occasionally as I return to my ship.

And since I’m a giant nerd, I love that several actors in the voice cast are from Star Trek. Armin Shimerman (Quark from DS9) as Water Stroud is great, but I especially love that Nana Visitor (Kira from DS9) and Tim Russ (Tuvok from Voyager) are my mom and dad.

Space Bugs

I hit this poor guy’s boost pack indoors.

There was a lot of talk of Starfield being Bethesda’s “most stable” and “most bug-free” game, and I can only think of a handful of bugs I’ve encountered in my entire time with the game. Maybe I’m just lucky, but aside from the odd physics hilarity (like bodies launching into the air), I haven’t experienced many problems. The one annoying bug I’m encountering now is an elevator in The Well in New Atlantis that has stopped working for me.

There are a handful of skill rank objectives that are poorly worded or misguiding, but once you figure out exactly what you need to do (or look it up online), they’re relatively easy to understand.

I think my only other complaint is with shipbuilding. I love how well it works, but I wish I had control over where doors were connected. While I love my ships, I hate that I have to design them a certain way to keep them navigable. If I try to add walkways to make things easily accessible, the game turns my ship into a maze of corridors.

Summary

Overall, I’ve been really happy with Starfield. Sure, there are some annoyances and minor bugs. But overall, it’s a great game. The main questlines are a lot of fun with some great stories. Some of the random side quests feel like they’re straight out of an episode of Star Trek. I can role play as Malcolm Reynolds or become a pirate.

There are really only a few things that I’d really like to see added to the game, and most of those things are ship parts: I’d like to see components that give us stairs to move between levels and ways to better control my internal ship layout. I also wish the player housing had something to make it worthwhile (like unlimited storage), and I wish I could fast-travel directly to my homes.

I also wish there was some way to re-spec my character. The end of the main questline lets you essentially “reset” the game and play again, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to change your character background. I wish there was a way to change my background and traits just to get access to some of the different dialog options.

But all my issues are relatively minor, so I’m hoping to see things expanded in patches and DLC. I’m excited to see how Starfield grows with both official and unofficial content, and if it’s anything like Skyrim, Starfield should have a long life ahead of it.

Categories
Games Reviews

Steam Next Fest – 10/23

This Next Fest includes some demos for games I’ve eager to play, so without further ado…

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

A Vampire Survivors-like in the Deep Rock Galactic universe. These games are all pretty similar, but I like the shorter levels in this one; makes it easier to pick up and play for a few minutes. Being able to mine through the level to create new paths keeps things interesting.

Foundry

A voxel factory-building game. Starts off pretty slow, and the demo doesn’t get very far. It’s got potential.

Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance

A fairly standard tactical RTS in the Terminator universe. It’s not bad, but it didn’t really hook me.

Pioneers of Pagonia

It’s basically classic Settlers, down to the little border stones that your guards place to extend your borders. Settlers III is one of my favorite games, so I’m definitely looking forward to this one.

Sentry

It’s basically sci-fi themed Orcs Must Die! The demo is pretty basic, with only two levels and a handful of weapons and items to use. This is another one that has some potential.

The Crust

The Crust looks interesting; a mix of Surviving Mars, Factorio, and a little Frostpunk. There are surface and underground layers for construction, and a layer with points of interest around the moon that you can send expeditions to investigate. It’s a little clunky at the moment, but if it gets cleaned up a bit, I could see myself enjoying it.

Ascent of Ashes

A colony sim like RimWorld. It looks OK, but the demo performance was really bad… Once my colony got raided, the game turned to a slideshow.

Poems and Codes

I played a demo for Prose and Codes a while back and thoroughly enjoyed it. (I really need to buy that game…) Both Poems and Prose use public works, and 10% of sales go to support Project Gutenberg. Poems is a little nicer than Prose, with some extra information about the poets and links to Project Gutenberg to download works.

Last Train Home

An interesting historical strategy survival game where you lead your soldiers across war-torn Russia during World War I. There’s an overworld map where you maintain and upgrade your train, and send your troops out on missions to gather resources. The tactical combat is pretty good. I enjoyed it.

Celestial Empire

An Ancient Chinese city builder. It looks nice, but some things during the tutorial are unexplained and I had to figure out what I was supposed to do on my own.

Europa

A pleasant little adventure game. Controls are a little weird on mouse and keyboard; it’s probably better with a controller.

Gunhead

A fun shooter that reminds me a lot of MOTHERGUNSHIP.

Summary

I always find a few games I enjoy in the Next Fest events, and this one is no different. I’m really looking forward to Pioneers of Pagonia, and I’ll likely own Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor at some point because I love that type of game. I’m hoping The Crust improves because it’s certainly something I’d be into if they can improve some of the basics.

Categories
Games Reviews

Destiny 2: Lightfall First Impressions

We’re a few weeks into Destiny’s latest expansion, Lightfall, and like I did with Witch Queen, I wanted to write down some thoughts. There may be some minor spoilers here.

Story

There are some interesting notes in the story for Lightfall, but it mostly feels a bit random and the tone is off. Lightfall takes us to the city of Neomuna on Neptune in pursuit of “The Veil”, an object of immense paracausal power that’s somehow related to the Traveler. After beating the campaign, you learn… Basically nothing. All I know is that it’s called “The Veil”, it’s immensely powerful, and it’s related to the Traveler in some way. The campaign mostly revolves around trying to stop Calus, now a Disciple of The Witness, from getting to it.

Well… That and Strand, the new subclass introduced with the expansion. Strand was shoehorned into the story pretty hard, to the point where some levels were entirely designed around it. When playing the legendary campaign, this was a huge annoyance, since you’re forced to give up your custom build for an underpowered Strand preset. There was one level that I chose to cheese instead of playing as intended because I felt so hamstrung by Strand. But more on Strand later.

Osiris and my Ghost

During the campaign, we mostly interact with Osiris, a former Warlock who lost his Light when his ghost, Sagira, was killed. Osiris has an interesting arc through the Lightfall campaign, where he learns to cope with his new powerlessness, and honestly this is the best part of the Lightfall story. There’s a uniquely moving moment with his character and I enjoyed his character growth.

On the other side of things, we have Rohan and Nimbus, the Cloud Striders who protect Neomuna. Cloud Striders are heavily-augmented humans who act as the Guardians of Neomuna. However, this augmentation process limits them to about a decade of life before their bodies reject the augmentations (or something like that). They’re meant to be noble heroes, I think. Rohan is the near-retirement “I’m too old for this shit” protector, and Nimbus is the young new guy who’s always cracking wise. Rohan predictably sacrifices himself during the story, which is portrayed as an emotional moment, but as a player, we’ve only had about ten minutes of interaction time with him at that point, so it falls flat. (Which is distinctly different from Osiris, who we’ve known about since Destiny 1 and worked with in-game since the Curse of Osiris expansion in 2017.)

We also need to talk about Nimbus. Their character has been somewhat controversial in the community, but as for me… I hate them. I think the character designs for the Cloud Striders are weird in general, but it’s Nimbus’ attitude that really peeves me. They’re just constantly making jokes and trying to sound “cool”. There’s an in-world event where you’re trying to stop the Shadow Legion and Vex from damaging the city, and during the event, they’ll send you messages as if it’s some competition, “This has been a real give-and-take race, folks! Every party is in it to win it!”. The city they are sworn to protect is under siege. Seriously? Even after their mentor dies, nothing changes. No growth. It’s annoying. That said, Nimbus is a non-binary character voiced by a non-binary actor, and I can at least give Bungie credit for that. I just wish they didn’t make the character so annoying.

Neomuna

The city of Neomuna

The new destination in Lightfall is Neonuma, a hidden city on Neptune that has grown on its own since just before the Collapse with little outside interaction. Unlike the Last City and the dilapidated human outposts throughout the rest of Destiny, Neomuna is a shining high-tech city. Recent events in the story have revealed its location, which leads Calus and the Guardians to the city.

The city itself is pretty interesting. There are storefronts, highways, and some really unique architecture. You can climb some of the buildings or use Strand’s grapple ability to navigate (there are grapple nodes scattered throughout the city). As the city is under siege by the Shadow Legion, the enemies are pretty dense.

Neomuna also has two world events that rotate throughout the city: Vex Incursions, and Terminal Overload. The Vex Incursion Zone is just an area with increased Vex spawns and some Vex architecture, as well as the entrance to the weekly “Partition” mission. Terminal Overload is the real draw.

Terminal Overload is a multi-step world event with decent rewards and several boss fights. It goes back-and-forth between fighting Shadow Legion and Vex, with a few different objectives like killing a certain amount of enemies or holding a point. I enjoy playing it, though it’s pretty difficult between the number and level of enemies.

New Mod System

Before I get into Strand, I want to talk about the new mod system that was introduced with Lightfall. I was interested in the changes since they seemed to simplify the disparate systems that existed before, and while I’ve seen some people upset by the changes, I think it’s an excellent change and a solid foundation for future work.

While the old system had multiple “orb” types that could drop (Orbs of Power and Elemental Wells) and certain mods effects that only worked with some equipment (Warmind Cell mods), the new system is built around two resources: Orbs of Power and Armor Charge.

Orbs of Power are generated by your super and with weapons or abilities if the appropriate mod is equipped. Armor Charge is gained by picking up an Orb of Power, but only if an Armor Charge mod is equipped.

There are also plenty of passive mods to improve stats or ability cooldowns.

So, for example, the start of a simple solar damage build may use “Solar Siphon” to generate orbs on solar weapon kills, “Solar Surge” to grant bonus solar weapon damage when you have Armor Charge, and “Time Dilation” to make that surge buff last longer.

Overall, I think the new system is easier to understand than the old (it even color-codes the mod types), and has a lot of potential for great builds.

Strand

Strand is the new subclass introduced with Lightfall, and it’s definitely a different way to play. On the whole, Strand is about what the community predicted: new, powerful, and the Titan Berserker is a bit boring.

I’ll go into detail in another post, but like other classes, there are a bunch of new keywords for the class. The buffs consist of: Woven Mail, a 60% damage reduction to body shots for a short time; Tangles, created by defeating targets with Strand abilities and can be thrown like grenades or grappled to; and Threadlings, creatures created from Strand that travel along the ground, jump at enemies, and detonate. On the debuff side: Suspend, which does what it sounds like; Sever, which lowers target damage output; and Unraveled, which works like Arc Jolt effects and causes further damage to create Strand projectiles that seek other targets (or the same target if no one else is around). And finally, there are three grenade types: the Shackle grenade suspends targets, the Threadling grenade creates Threadlings, and the Grapple is Destiny’s version of a grappling hook.

Classes

Now on to the specifics each class gets with Strand. (Warlocks definitely won here.)

Titan Berserker

I’m going to start with Titan since that’s what I play. The prediction beforehand was that it would be plenty powerful, but it’s yet another boring roaming super. After playing, I’ve found that’s exactly the case. On the one hand, Bungie has finally built a melee-focused subclass for Titans that’s actually somewhat viable in tougher content. On the other hand, basically all our classes are melee-focused, so when do the others get fixed? Also, the focus on crowd control makes it almost exactly like the Titan’s Stasis subclass, though at least it’s better and more cohesive.

Titans get a good mix of buffs and debuffs, being able to easily acquire Woven Mail and apply Suspend and Sever. When managed properly, these effects are very powerful together. The new “Bladefury” super is surprisingly effective against single targets (like bosses) due to a very fast attack speed. The ranged heavy attack deals good damage but can’t suspend bosses (though it does slow them). The “Frenzied Blade” melee has three charges and severs on hit (which helps keep you alive when you’re in melee range); it also works a bit like an instant shoulder charge and can be used when a jump comes up just a little short.

The aspects Titans start with are “Into the Fray” and “Drengr’s Lash”. Into The Fray grants Woven Mail when destroying a Tangle or casting a super. Drengr’s Lash causes the Titan’s barricade to send out a wave that travels along the ground and suspends and damages enemies it hits.

The Titan exotic, Abeyant Leap, causes Drengr’s Lash to send out two additional waves (for a total of three), which travel further and track more aggressively. It also grants Woven Mail whenever a target is Suspended. It’s a fantastic Strand exotic, providing a reliable way to gain Woven Mail and the ability to Suspend entire waves of enemies.

Overall, Strand Titan is pretty strong. It’s not terrible, but it’s basically just “Green Behemoth” (the Stasis subclass). Suspend is just a different freeze, Woven Mail is a different form of the Stasis crystal damage resistance (via a fragment). Like the Stasis class, however, I’m not a fan of the melee. It’s not strong enough, and it’s been really buggy when I try to trigger it. Sometimes it triggers immediately, sometimes I have to hit the button twice; which sometimes causes it to attack twice after a delay. If it was more reliable, I’d probably use it more often. As it stands I’m mostly using it for mobility or in emergencies, and I’m focused more on suspending enemies with my barricade and grenade.

Hunter Threadrunner

The Hunter’s Strand kit focuses on the new Grapple ability and mobility.

The Hunter’s “Silkstrike” super lets them use their grapple more frequently and gives them a rope dart to attack enemies at close-to-mid range. The melee is “Threaded Spike”, which throws a dart that bounces between targets before returning, refunding energy for each enemy hit. Catching the spike with perfect timing (when it returns) grants additional energy.

Hunters get the “Ensnaring Slam” and “Widow’s Silk” aspects. Ensnaring Slam allows Hunters to use their class ability in mid-air to dive to the ground and suspend nearby enemies. Widow’s Silk lets Hunters grapple more often; they get an additional grenade charge (which applies to Grapple), and their grapples create a “Grapple Tangle” which can be used by players to grapple freely.

The Hunter’s Strand exotic, “Cyrtarachne’s Facade”, grants them Woven Mail whenever they use their Grapple ability, and gives them increased flinch resistance while Woven Mail is active. It further builds into the mobility aspect, but seems PvP-focused.

Thoughts

From what I’ve heard, the Hunter kit is a bit underwhelming, with the long grapple cooldown hindering some of their mobility. The super is also difficult to keep at the proper range to ensure frequent crits (each attack steps forward).

A few of the builds I’ve seen revolve around using the grapple melee to repeatedly hit targets suspended by Ensnaring Slam. It seems like it could work, but I think the Titan’s version (using their Barricade) is better.

Warlock Broodweaver

I think the Broodweaver is the most impressive of the new subclasses. It’s a minion master style class, where you get to keep a small army of Threadlings to attack enemies. All classes can use Threadlings, but for Warlocks, any Threadlings they create that don’t detonate (because they can’t find an enemy) will return to the Warlock and “perch” – turning into a little green ball orbiting the Warlock. The next time the Warlock attacks an enemy, these perched Threadlings will jump down and attack the target.

The Warlock super is “Needlestorm”, which summons a barrage of needles and launches them forward. The needles stick into enemies or the environment, then detonate and transform into Threadlings that seek out nearby enemies. Their melee is “Arcane Needle”, which summons a projectile that tracks targets and unravels enemies. There’s a fancy animation to fling the three charges.

The Warlock’s aspects are “Mindspun Invocation” and “Weaver’s Call”. Mindspun Invocation improves the Warlock’s grenade ability: Grapple weaves three Threadlings when using a grapple melee; Threadling grenades can be consumed to generate a full complement of five perched Threadlings; Shackle grenades can be consumed to gain a buff that creates a suspending detonation on every kill. Weaver’s Call has the Warlock summon three Threadling eggs when they cast their Rift.

The Warlock’s Strand exotic is “Swarmers”, which spawns a Threadling whenever they destroy a Tangle, and also makes Threadlings unravel targets that they damage. Since Warlocks can keep Threadlings ready nearly constantly, this seems like it could be really powerful.

Thoughts

I haven’t heard anything negative about the Warlock kit. Threadlings seem pretty strong, and being able to essentially “bank” five seeking grenades at all times is pretty powerful. It does seem like that’s it’s one trick, however, so if you’re not interested in the Threadlings, it may end up under-performing.

Season of Defiance

The season story focuses on what’s going on back on Earth. The Black Fleet has arrived and Earth is under siege, just like Neptune. The Shadow Legion is rounding up prisoners and locking them away in prison ships for some unknown purpose, and Queen Mara is helping you navigate the Ascendant Plane to infiltrate their ships and free them.

We’re only a few weeks in, but there’s already been some backstory with Amanda Holliday, and there’s a side story about her relationship with Crow. It’s honestly a bit more engaging than Lightfall’s story.

The seasonal activity is “Defiant Battlegrounds”, where you’re infiltrating the prison ships and freeing prisoners. It’s similar to past “battlegrounds”, with a little extra difficulty. They’re well designed and fun to play. Bungie knows their formula here.

They’ve also improved the rewards from the activity, so it’s worth running and re-running to unlock weapons for crafting and get better rewards.

Exotic Quests

There are a number of new exotic weapons with special quests. I won’t go too much into them to avoid spoilers, but the weapons are great and some of the quests are simply fantastic. The new exotic mission is great, with a lot of secrets to unravel.

Quality of Life

Along with the big changes, there were also a lot of quality-of-life and social updates.

Weapon Crafting

Weapon crafting has been simplified, with the removal of “Deepsight Resonance” as a resource. Now, weapons are crafted with Glimmer, Legendary Shards, and Legendary Cores; resources that have existed for a long time. Resonant Alloys and Ascendant Alloys are still around for the more advanced crafting, though. This is what I expected way back when weapon crafting was first announced.

I haven’t had a chance to craft any new weapons this season, so I’m not sure if the new costs are absurdly expensive. I’ve seen some complaints, but the one old weapon I crafted (to replace an old roll) was pretty cheap.

On a side note, Bungie stated that they were making fewer weapons craftable this season, which really bums me out. I prefer crafting weapons to grinding, so this seems like a step backward in general. There are a few Terminal Overload weapons I would love to craft, but they’re not in the set of craftable weapons.

Loadouts

The new loadout system is pretty good, if a bit restrictive. A loadout stores your armor, weapons, mods, and ornaments for quick swapping; and the swapping is extremely quick, which is nice. However, you’re limited to only 10 at max, which is pretty limiting. (I have about 30 in DIM for my Titan.) We’ll see if it changes over time.

Commendations

I like the new commendations system, but I think it’s a little off the mark. For one, there are Guardian Rank requirements to earn a number of commendations (750 to get to level 7!), which encourages players to hand them out all the time to help others reach the next rank (instead of only giving commendations when earned). Also, you’re limited in which commendations you can give out. If you play a Vanguard Ops mission and your two fireteam members were both fun to play with, you can’t give them both a “Joy Bringer” commendation; you’re limited to one “Joy Bringer” and one “Thoughtful” commendation. Not sure why I can’t just give what’s appropriate, even if it’s limited to one per player.

Adding them to Guardian Ranks to grind was a really bad idea, though. Commendations should be a completely separate system, encouraging players to be selective in the commendations they give out and letting them be a metric of how a particular player plays the game, not something to be given out randomly.

Guardian Ranks

Howdy.

Speaking of Guardian Ranks, this system is a bit rough, as well. Basically anyone who has ever played Destiny before started at rank 6. If you’ve played every Raid and completed every Dungeon on Master difficulty, you’re still the same rank as the player who’s around once in a blue moon. It doesn’t truly speak to a player’s level of experience.

In addition, Guardian Ranks will reset every season. So instead of being something that should indicate how experienced a player is, it’s just a different way of showing how much someone has been grinding a season. Which is exactly what we had before with the seasonal ranks being displayed.

So I’m level 6 and until I’ve finished a bunch more random objectives, I’ll still be level 6. And next season, I’ll start at level 6 all over again, which doesn’t give any feeling of progression. It feels off, even if that was the point.

Overall

I think Witch Queen was a better expansion overall. Like a lot of people, I’m disappointed by Lightfall’s story; there’s been communication from Bungie that indicates there will be Lightfall-specific story beats throughout the year in other seasons, but Witch Queen‘s story felt complete without needing a year to finish telling it. The campaign itself feels padded with the Strand stuff, which would have been better handled as a set of side quests.

The season itself is fine and follows Bungie’s typical formula. The new Commendation and Guardian Rank systems also seem to follow the typical Bungie pattern: they’re really rough or broken at start and get fixed over time. Already, they’ve lowered the number of commendations needed to advance Guardian Ranks. (Though the correct answer here would have been to reduce the necessary amount to zero.)

I’m still invested in the story, but Bungie has definitely made a few missteps with Lightfall. Hopefully the coming year smooths things out.

Categories
Games Reviews

Destiny 2 – Witch Queen Final Thoughts

Back in February 2022, I wrote about my first impressions on The Witch Queen expansion. Over the past year, there have been a lot of changes, and I’m looking forward to the changes coming in Lightfall, so I thought I’d put down my thoughts about where Destiny’s at now and what I’m looking forward to in the future.

Campaign

The legendary campaign was a great addition, which was difficult but rewarding. The campaign itself was a great journey, leading you through Savathûn’s Throne World and into a final confrontation with the Queen herself. There was a bit of mystery woven into the narrative, appropriate for the queen of deception and lies. I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign, though it only took me about three days to complete. I played most of the campaign solo, and it took about 30 minutes to an hour for each mission (which, compared to single-player games, seems about right).

After the campaign, a number of other missions open up that can be repeated and reveal a little more narrative. There’s the “Altar of Reflection” missions where Savathûn has basically left recorded messages for you. These messages are typically “two truths, two lies” and provide more background narrative. Then there’s the “Preservation” mission that leads you into one of the Witness’ pyramid ships where several interactive objects provide a lot of narration from Rhulk, a disciple of the Witness with information about where their people came from and how they started on the path of Darkness.

Overall, the campaign was very fun and had several memorable moments.

Seasons

The seasons over the past year have been pretty good, with some that push the narrative and some that serve more as placeholders, which has become the norm.

Season of the Risen

Season of the Risen aligned with the campaign, providing more content around the Lucent Hive, and the investigation into how they got their power and how to fight them.

The new seasonal weapons were a great way to launch weapon crafting, with several I still use like the Syncopation-53 stasis pulse rifle, Piece of Mind kinetic pulse rifle, and Explosive Personality solar grenade launcher. The seasonal exotic, Dead Messenger, is still a powerful weapon that I see most often used in PvP (though it’s great in PvE as well). A few of the random drop weapons are so good I wish I could craft them, like the Krait and Herod-C stasis auto rifles and Perses-D stasis scout rifle.

Season of the Haunted

Nicknamed “Season of Therapy”, this season had narratives centered on the personal demons of Crow, Zavala, and Caital. The Derelict Leviathan, Calus’ ship, returned to the moon and was a fantastic patrol zone, with an open-world event and great enemy density.

Weapons from the Season of Opulence returned, with some favorites like the Calus Mini-Tool SMG, Beloved sniper rifle, and Drang (Baroque) sidearm. The new seasonal weapons were kind of a flop, though I still enjoy my Without Remorse shotgun.

Season of Plunder

Season of Plunder felt like a filler season, with Guardians chasing “Artifacts of Nezarec”. Nezarec was a Guardian in the lore who was tempted by Darkness and became a Disciple of the Witness. (Warlocks have an exotic helm called “Nezarec’s Sin”.) Eramis has been awoken from her icy prison (she was frozen at the end of the Beyond Light campaign) and has been collecting these artifacts. You “borrow” a ship from Spider and venture out to steal these artifacts back from Eramis’ lackeys.

Though narratively it felt like filler, the seasonal activity was fantastic. Everything was appropriately pirate themed, from the weapons and armor down to the soundtrack. You set out from your ship and launch yourself to an enemy ship, then storm through several encounters on the ship before facing an enemy captain.

Season of the Seraph

As with Season of the Lost at the end of Beyond Light, Season of the Seraph seems to mostly serve to set up Lightfall, though I loved the narrative. We start off retrieving Clovis Bray to help us revive Rasputin, the AI Warmind built to serve as humanity’s protector. The seasonal activity has us performing “heists”, delving into Warmind bunkers to retrieve parts of Rasputin’s code to reassemble him. Meanwhile, the Hive and Scorn are in the bunkers attempting to take control of the warsats to attack Earth and the Traveler. When Rasputin regains control of the warsats, we learn that using them to wipe out our enemies would play right into Xivu Arath’s plans, serving as a massive sacrifice to empower her. Rasputin starts searching for an alternative, but in the end determines that the only option is to destroy himself and the warsat network. In an epic finale, we infiltrate the control facility for the warsats, inject Rasputin’s code, and just barely manage to stop Eramis from turning the warsats on the Traveler.

Like Season of Plunder, the activity this season was great. It was at a set difficulty, five levels above your current level, ensuring it provided a good amount of difficulty. Bungie has said that it’s the model they plan to use in the future.

Light 3.0

The Witch Queen expansion brought the “Light 3.0” class reworks over the course of the year, and I think they were very successful, at least from the perspective of a Titan main. I know there are several classes that are still very weak (all roaming supers) or overly powerful in particular modes (void overshields in PvP), but I feel like the changes have helped breathe new life into the classes.

Void 3.0

I think the Void rework for Titans was near-perfect. In Destiny 1, Void was meant to be the “immovable object” aspect of Titans, and Void 3.0 gave us the ability to create Void overshields with our barrier, making Titans (and allies) very tanky. I didn’t play Void much before the rework, but it’s become my go-to when I need durability for high-level content. I used Void during the final boss fight during my solo Seraph’s Shield exotic mission runs.

While I’m not a Hunter or Warlock expert, I think the Void rework turned out well for these classes as well. For Hunters, Void epitomizes their stealth aspect, with plenty of options to gain invisibility (which is still a nightmare in PvP, even after nerfs). For Warlocks, their Child of the Old Gods pet and easy access to the Devour buff is very powerful.

Solar 3.0

I think Titans “won” the Solar rework. Solar was my preferred subclass before the reworks, and I mostly ran the aspect with sunspots (since the sunspots were powerful and it had my preferred super). However, I loved the throwing hammer melee, which could be retrieved to instantly restore my melee energy, but it was part of a different aspect. The 3.0 rework for Solar now lets me use the throwing hammer, create sunspots, and use my preferred super. The addition of the Loreley’s Splendor exotic helmet also lets me create sunspots with my barricade ability, allowing me to create a healing and ability regenerating sunspot whenever I like. I haven’t used Solar much since the Arc rework, but it’s probably still my favorite subclass.

Hunters got a much more powerful Blade Barrage super and a new dodge ability to instantly apply Radiance, which provides a weapon damage buff. Warlocks got a grenade upgrade aspect, which gives them some of the most powerful grenades in the game.

Arc 3.0

The Arc rework has been a lot of fun. Titans got a new “thruster” dodge ability that replaces our barricade and a new “thunderclap” charged melee (the first such melee in the game). Between the thruster ability, the Arc “speed booster” buff, and the standard Arc shoulder charge melee, Arc Titans are extremely mobile. Arc is also the Titan’s grenade class, so we have some overcharged grenade abilities. During Season of Plunder, when the Arc rework was introduced, there were some modes where I could use grenades as my primary weapon. Things have been nerfed since then, but I can still spam grenades in most content, and the extra speed and mobility has kept me playing the class throughout the past season.

Hunters got a new super that allows them to throw their Arc Staff at a location, where it sticks and creates an AoE damage field. It’s hilarious when a Hunter with good aim impales it in a boss’ face. Some players have also found out you can impale it in a sparrow and get a roaming damage field. Warlocks got aspects to enhance the Ionic Traces generated from most Arc abilities, giving them better ability uptime; as well as a new “ball lightning” melee and an aspect that changes their melee into a lightning dash with a small AoE (which, with minor buffing, can get one-hit-kills in PvP).

Looking Back

Looking back, I think this has been a great year for Destiny. One of the main draws for me has always been the story, and the narrative has been progressing steadily throughout the seasons. Weapon crafting has eased the weapon grind a bit, with some really great crafted options, and the process was simplified quickly after its initial rocky release. The Light 3.0 reworks have made buildcrafting a lot more fun and opened up a lot of possibilities.

Overall, the changes over the past year have kept me excited about what’s coming next.

Looking Ahead

Bungie has been pretty open over the last few weeks about what’s coming in Lightfall, and while I’m mostly excited for what’s ahead, some of what they’ve shown hasn’t had the best reception.

I’ll start with the things I’m most excited about, though.

Quality of Life

Lightfall is bringing a number of quality-of-life changes, like a new loadout system, fewer currencies, and some streamlining to several systems they’ve used in the past. I’m most interested in the loadouts, since that should help with buildcrafting and loadout swapping without needing to use an external app.

The buildcrafting itself is getting a big change, with armor elemental affinities going away (good riddance), and a completely new “armor charge” system with mods built around it. It sounds like buildcrafting will be easier but also allow more variety.

There are also some improvements coming around weapon crafting and random drops. Random drops will gain the ability to have the enhanced perks on crafted weapons, which should make a good roll of a weapon valuable (rather than random rolls of craftable weapons being trash since you can’t enhance them). Weapons that cannot be crafted will no longer drop with Deepsight Resonance (the way you unlock crafting recipes), which should make things a bit clearer for new players. And there’s been a little talk that the economy around crafting weapons will change as well, though I haven’t seen many details around that.

Guardian Ranks

Guardian Ranks should be a great way to determine where a player is in their Destiny career and provide guidance to new players for things to do. I’d like to think that I’ll be near the top when the ranks are introduced (having played since launch), but I haven’t run most of the raids so I’m sure I’ll be behind on things. Regardless, I think it’ll be a great way to understand how experienced players are.

More Social

Bungie have said they’re switching to opt-out for text chat, which should let players communicate more easily. (There are probably some players who don’t even know there’s text chat in Destiny.) They’re also adding a new “commendation” system after matches, which should let players reward each other for friendly play. The LFG functionality that’s currently in the Destiny app unfortunately isn’t coming with Lightfall’s release, but hopefully isn’t far behind.

Strand

The Titan even looks bored in this promotional image.

The unveiling of the new “Berserker” Strand subclass for Titans has landed pretty poorly, and Bungie’s damage control since then hasn’t done much to inspire confidence. Hunters look great, and Warlocks look amazing, but Titans have been presented with another melee-heavy class with a roaming melee super (making the vast majority of our supers roaming melees, something like 5 or 6 of the 8 total). Comments from Bungie after only made it worse, with one of the lead designers saying “…at the end of the day, you’re holding the fist on the cover”, which, aside from being poorly worded, is a position that Bungie themselves have put Titans in, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. During the ViDoc with the development team, they were obviously excited to talk about Hunters and Warlocks, then had little to say about Titans. It’s to the point where I’ve spent the last week building up my Warlock so I can enjoy the new subclass.

All that said, I think the Berserker Titan will be plenty strong, and will likely be one of the most powerful melee subclasses in the game (it had damn well better be, since that’s it’s one trick). The reception from the community isn’t really based around the strength of the class but rather about its originality, which basically seems to pick parts from other subclasses and combine them. In the case of the super, it’s basically the same as the Stasis super with some different flavoring. I’m hoping it’s fun, but I’m hoping more that they come up with something better for The Final Shape.

Closing Thoughts

The Witch Queen has been a great expansion for Destiny, adding some much-needed changes with weapon crafting and the Light 3.0 rework. It pushed the narrative, both revealing The Witness and moving toward our final confrontation.

While the unveiling of Lightfall has been a bit of a flop for Titans, I’m still excited about the future of Destiny. I’m just disappointed with how the Titan class is shaping up overall. I think the design team at Bungie has largely forgotten what it means to be a Titan; devolving us into the punching class which, while certainly part of the identity, is boring and completely ignores a large part of our class identity. Hopefully they can course-correct before The Final Shape.

Beyond that, I’m very excited about what’s coming to Destiny. The new social aspects should make it easier to reward players and identify those worth playing with. When the LFG functionality is introduced, it should be easier to find groups for higher-level content. Combined with Guardian ranks, it may even prove a better way to restrict who can join you (i.e., an alternative to the “know what to do” groups in the app).

There are some great things coming, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things shape up.

Categories
Games Reviews

Steam Next Fest – 02/23

Another Steam Fest, another set of rapid-fire demo reviews.

Space Reign

I’ve actually played this demo a few times to see how things are coming along. I love the idea behind the game, but the combat is frustrating to me. I think it’s mostly due to some controls (which I have to relearn every time I play), but also because of very limited ammunition. You’re dropped into an area to patrol and dogfight, outnumbered and outgunned. In all my experiences with the demo, I typically die from attrition; I have a hard time actually hitting targets (despite lining up my lead indicator), and I eventually run out of ammo or get slowly whittled down by random hits. Maybe games like Everspace have just spoiled me when it comes to accessible space combat. That said, I really like the style and what they’re working toward, so it’ll stay on my wishlist for now.

Sons of Valhalla

A Viking-themed Kingdom-style side-scrolling building, exploration, and combat game. The start felt really grindy to me, having to go get a few hits in, then retreat to heal (during which the enemy had fully restored their forces). Felt like I was hitting a wall and going nowhere, despite building up my forces. I assume something’s just not clicking with me. Has that same pixel art style as Kingdom, too.

Oxygen

Survival city builder in the vein of Frostpunk. Magma bubbling up through fissures has caused Earth’s atmosphere to become toxic. Instead of a generator producing heat to fight the cold, you have an “oxygen center” producing oxygen to provide oxygen for your population. There didn’t seem to be anything that really made Oxygen stand out, but it’s not bad.

Super Adventure Hand

I first saw this on Reddit (the Unity subreddit), and thought the idea of a hand walking around looked interesting (also bizarre). When I saw it in the Fest with this fantastic title, I decided to give it a try. It’s a physics-based puzzle platformer with some quirky humor (you get chased by feet with eyes in some levels). Fun to play, pretty easy to get into.

Urbo

Basically 2048 as a city builder. It’s nice and serene, but I was expecting more.

Mars First Logistics

I’m sure it’s fine if I just drag this delicate telescope mirror around on top of my rover.

I enjoy the occasional open-world vehicle-building puzzler, like Main Assembly or Trailmakers, and this one is more of that type. Mars First Logistics has an art style like Sable (which is beautiful), and tasks you with modifying your rover to deliver goods from point to point. The goods you deliver help build up infrastructure on the red planet, like a telescope in the demo.

Cybertown

A cyberpunk city builder. They have the bright neon lights vibe down, but the interface is really rough, and it doesn’t work on widescreens.

Voidtrain

Basically Raft with some Subnautica flavor and interesting theming. There’s some Norse styling which is hopefully tied into the story somehow and not just something to look cool. Hopefully there’s something you can build to automatically collect scrap in the full version because boy does that get boring fast. Looks great, and maybe they’ll throw in a peaceful mode so I can just build my train.

Darfall

A voxel survival city-builder with some RPG elements. You get a hero that levels up and is your main defender while building a city to harvest resources and fulfill the needs of your workers. It looks like you can recruit soldiers but I could never figure out how. At night, the undead rise and attack your city, which you have to fend off with your hero (and, presumably, soldiers). During the day, you’re free to explore the surrounding area, killing off roaming enemies and destroying small outposts. The UI can be a little obscure sometimes, but the game as a whole is pretty decent.

Meet Your Maker

An FPS where you raid player-built bases to steal resources, which you use to level up your equipment and build your own bases. The bases are basically small mazes you fill with traps and guards. Has a post-apocalyptic cybernetic body-horror aesthetic. I’m not sure what happens when your base gets raided (do I lose resources?) as I didn’t play long enough to be able to build my own (it requires a decent amount of resources). The first levels feel really grindy, getting only a trickle of resources from each raid. And it all just feels too much like a desktop version of one of those mobile games where every player is attacking each other asynchronously.

Capes

Weathervane’s chain lightning connected with several explosive barrels.

When I saw Capes, I immediately thought of Freedom Force, and it doesn’t disappoint. I loved Freedom Force, a tactical turn-based strategy game where you control a team of superheroes. Capes is just what I wanted, with a roster of heroes with fun abilities and “team-ups” that boost their powers when certain teammates are near. A lot of fun. Definitely recommend.

Infection Free Zone

I’ve played the demo for this one a few times as well, and I’m still excited about it even though there’s still a lot of work needed. You’re in charge of defending an area from zombies, building defenses, farms, etc. But the draw for me is that it uses orbital maps to allow you to play in any real-world location. Unfortunately the demo is locked to only a few areas, but the idea of turning my neighborhood into a zombie-free compound keeps me interested in this one.

Exogate Initiative

Still one of the games I’m most excited about. There’s been some good progress on this one since the last demo I played. There’s a bit of a tutorial now (there’s at least specific objectives to guide you through the start), and the interface is a bit cleaner now. Build your base, hire Gaters, send your teams to alien worlds for exploration and profit. It’s the best Stargate game I’ve ever played. Can’t wait for this one to release.

Fabledom

A cute city-builder with a very storybook style. You can interact with other kingdoms and unite the lands through “love or war”. You can find yourself a king/queen, and it looks like the full game will have some combat as well. Looks decent. The male and female characters remind me of the mom and dad from Luca.

Phantom Brigade

I had completely forgotten about Phantom Brigade, but after playing the demo, I’m hooked. The timeline system is a great way to orchestrate attacks, and being able to see what everyone will do allows you to play very aggressively, which is refreshing since most tactical games (like XCOM) encourage playing very slow and defensively. I will definitely be picking this one up when it releases (in two weeks).

HumanitZ

I’ve been searching for some sort of survival defense game where you can build a base, set up defenses, scavenge for resources, etc. This isn’t it. The interface and controls are really clunky and it’s in desperate need of a tutorial. It needs a lot of polish. Also, that title is just terrible.

Dust and Neon

A slick and stylish isometric action looter shooter. The reload animations are fantastic. A lot of fun. The demo starts you off with a good set of upgrades, so you get a feel for the mid-game (I assume).

Perseus

Isometric action roguelike. Seems like it wants to be the next Hades, mixed with a bit of Diablo, but the combat is a little annoying and uninspired.

Galaxy Pass Station

It’s basically Papers, Please with some space station building mechanics. It’s not bad, but I don’t think I’m really into the “catch all the mistakes” gameplay. You can at least build “bureaucrat desks” for robot bureaucrats to check documents for you in this one, though.

Planet of Lana

An absolutely gorgeous puzzle platformer. You have a little cat-like creature that follows you around and helps you solve puzzles. There looks to be an interesting story going on in the world as well, which I won’t comment on to avoid spoilers.

1000xRESIST

A narrative game where you flip between time periods to experience the story and figure out the mystery around the game. It’s a weird one, but I enjoyed how the story was told in the demo.

System Shock

It’s System Shock. I love how the graphics are a semi-pixelated retro style but still look clean and modern. Interface is really clean, too.

Broken Arrow

Looks like a solid tactical strategy game. Not really my thing, and I couldn’t play too much because it runs terribly without my new video card…

Roots of Yggdrasil

A roguelike city builder, similar to Against The Storm, but more puzzle-like. Building is turn-based, with income each turn based on the buildings you’ve placed. There’s a different objective on each map, and if you take too long, a dark cloud starts covering the map and if it gets to the portal, you lose. I prefer Against The Storm, but this one isn’t bad if you want something more puzzley.

Builders of Greece

A fairly standard city builder with a Greek theme.

Lakeburg Legacies

A charming little village management game where you manage the lives of your villagers. A big focus of the game is pairing your villagers into couples, which isn’t something I expected to enjoy as much as I did. You don’t get to build your village directly (building order is predetermined), and you just build houses as you need them in a separate view. Instead, you manage who works where, assign apprenticeships for children (to determine their affinities for jobs as adults), make sure everyone’s needs are filled, and handle villager’s dates (awkward moments and all). It’s like part village management sim and part dating sim, with a lovely art style.

Shadows of Doubt

A detective game with a procedural world and a voxel art style. Needs some optimization, and I’m not sure if I missed something or if the tutorial didn’t guide me to everything I needed for the first case; it led me to a murder reporting form that wanted the killer and I hadn’t figured out that information yet. I did enjoy organizing the case board, though. Has potential if it’s able to procedurally generate cases for you to solve.

My Dream Setup

A very rough approximation of the home office I share with my wife. I got lazy with the details.

Definitely more a toy than a game, but it’s a nice way to visualize furniture and layouts. It’s basically what I typically use The Sims for, without job or artificial social interaction.

Mr. Saitou

A game about a llamaworm that works a boring job. Basically a cute little adventure game. According to the Steam page, meant to be a short story about finding meaning in life.

Radio The Universe

A 2D action game with a interesting style. Dying resets the room you’re in. Not really my sort of thing, but I like the style.

Afterimage

A beautiful 2D Metroidvania. Gameplay is pretty solid, though in the short time I played the demo, I’m still a little confused about what’s going on.

SUPER 56

A game composed of 56 minigames and the whole thing (menus and all) is controlled with a single button. Some of the minigames are pretty difficult when you’re limited to a single key (racing and minigolf). Others are pretty simple (type “A” 100 times). Very wacky.

The Pale Beyond

A narrative survival game where you have to make some very tough choices. It’s based on historical polar expeditions, and you’re constantly fighting to manage your food, fuel, and “decorum” – basically a measure of the civility of your crew. The demo was a lot of fun; I’m looking forward to trying the full game.

Mail Time

A cute little game where you deliver mail and fetch items for various creatures. It’s adorable.

Tape to Tape

A roguelike hockey game. I’m not typically into sports games, but I like the style of this one. You earn powerups after each match and can unlock new “stars” to bring with you for each run. What little I played was a lot of fun, though the menus don’t work well on a wide screen.

Next Fest Complete

I obviously played a lot of demos during this Fest (and a few of these after it ended). I found a handful that I’m definitely looking forward to, like Phantom Brigade and Capes; and there were several that I’m not really interested in but were fun to dip into. Some of these were suggestions from articles I read and wouldn’t have tried on my own (like Tape to Tape and Mr. Saitou), which was a good diversion from the sort of games I typically play.

I think my favorites this time around were Phantom Brigade, Capes, Dust and Neon, and Exogate Initiative. They’ll definitely be in my library at some point.

Categories
Games Reviews

Steam Base Building Fest 2023

I feel like this Steam Fest is targeting me. A good chunk of my wishlist went on sale and while I’ve already played most of the demos here that I’m interested in, I found a few to give a try. (Like last time, I’ll be updating this post as I try new demos.)

SteamWorld Build

While this wasn’t exactly in the fest, it’s related so I’m putting it here. SteamWorld Build combines a city-builder with a Dungeon Keeper-style mining and tower defense underground. While the demo doesn’t contain any of the combat shown in the trailer, I enjoyed what was available. It’s a little on the easier side, as far as city-builders go, but there was still plenty to do. The style is great, too, with little steampunk robots wandering around everywhere.

Empires of the Undergrowth

I’ve been interested in this game for a while, thinking it might be a modern re-imagining of SimAnt. Turns out that’s not what it is. It’s more of a simple RTS where you collect food, build an army, and attack other insects.

Kubifaktorium

A cute voxel city builder and factory game. The logistics system is pretty easy to use. Demo only covers the tutorials, but they explain things pretty well.

Roboplant

A cute game where you have robots grow and sell plants. Couldn’t beat the tutorial level, and I’m not sure why… My worker just stopped working and just spent all their time playing games and eating from the snack machine. Probably needs some more time to work some bugs out.

Citizens: Far Lands

More a puzzle game than a city-builder. Buildings can be placed freely, which is nice, but they have a zone around them that they work with, meaning being a few pixels off can mean the difference between maximizing production and missing out on resources. It’s pleasant and minimalist, though.

WW2 Rebuilder

I’ve played this sort of building game before (House Flipper, Gas Station Simulator), but I typically find them incredibly boring. This one looked more interesting, like it had some more depth. Turns out it’s just a well-themed building game. The atmosphere is nice and the theme is actually very interesting, but it’s just as boring as other games in the same genre.

Facteroids

An asteroid-mining factory building game. A neat idea, but the controls and interface are really awkward.

Plan B: Terraform

Extract resources, transport them to factories, build stuff, grow cities, terraform planet. I like the art style – simple and clean – but I’m not sure if I like this style of factory-building game where you just build bigger and bigger with long stretches of highway to bring things from one place to another.

New Cycle

Feels a lot like Frostpunk, from the tone to the UI, which isn’t a bad thing. A solar flare sent human civilization back to its tribal roots, and you’re in charge of building a settlement to restore society. Plays great; I’ll definitely be picking this one up when it releases.

Havendock

A pleasant little city builder with some very light survival elements. You can attract survivors to your little dock and have them help out with the chores. Like Raft, but third person and without that asshole shark.

Desynced

Seems to be an interesting mix of Factorio and your typical RTS, with units you modify with different components (mining lasers, defense lasers, assemblers, etc.) and can order around. Seems interesting, but the first steps were really slow, to the point of just waiting around most of the time. I’m sure it’s more interesting later, but I couldn’t take all the idle time. I think I’d love it if things moved a bit faster.

The Last Starship

I’m still trying to decide if I’m interested in this one. I like Introversion’s stuff, but I couldn’t tell from what I played of the demo if it’s like FTL, where you have to constantly keep moving from system to system, or if you can just do whatever missions you want wherever you go. The shipbuilding is interesting, and the separation of the main deck from the “habitation” deck opens it up for some interesting options – you can make a transport liner, a warship, or a little of both. There’s a survival aspect to it as well, with limited fuel, FTL jumps, oxygen, water, and ammunition, which could be interesting or a chore. I think I just need to play this one a bit more to find out.

Final Thoughts

I think that’s it for this Steam Fest. I had a hard time finding games that clicked with me here. I’ll definitely be picking up SteamWorld Build and New Cycle, and I might get Havendock on a sale at some point. I think when it comes to logistics games, I have Satisfactory and I love the pacing, style, and humor of that game. Some of these games that annoyed me are likely in the vein of Factorio, which has been on my wishlist a while but I’ve now removed (partly because I don’t think I’d like it, and partly because of the price change; and I could write a whole post about how annoyed I am about that price change). I have enough games in my backlog though, so maybe being unable to find new ones is a good thing.