I played the demo for Mars Horizon a while back and it had me interested. It’s definitely not Kerbal Space Program or Simple Rockets; it’s more of a space program management game than a rocket building game, with some interesting mechanics during space missions. Because of that, there’s some tedium in managing certain aspects, but nothing I’ve found to be too boring.
Mars Horizon puts you in charge of a space program. There are several real-world programs you can choose from (NASA, ESA, JAXA, etc.) or you can create your own with custom perks. Each has slightly different bonuses, but none have a custom campaign: you’re simply participating in the space race. There’s also diplomacy, where you get bonuses for good relations and a funding increase for poor relations. You can also participate in joint missions, where you both get a bonus afterwards. Though for most of the game, the other agencies are opponents you’re trying to beat to each milestone.
Like the space programs, the tech tree unlocks real-world rocket parts and missions. Your first milestone mission tasks you with launching an artificial satellite. Beyond that, there are many options, and you can either attempt to beat everyone to major milestones (first person in space, first person on the moon) or attempt everything available. Playing NASA, I launched my “Laika” rocket putting an animal in space instead of pursuing the first lunar orbit. There’s no need to follow historical events here, though it’s often important to be the first to reach an objective, since there are bonuses for the first three to complete a new mission.
Alongside the rockets, you get to build up your space center, researching new buildings and constructing them to improve your capabilities. There’s a bit of a puzzle to the base building, as buildings can have adjacency bonuses, encouraging you to keep certain buildings touching and others apart from each other. I’m sure there’s a guide somewhere that details the optimal space center layout, but the bonuses aren’t so dramatic as to require perfect placement.
When you decide on a mission to pursue, you have to build the payload and rocket, selecting from the parts you’ve unlocked. You can also select parts you haven’t researched, and the game will indicate those in the research tree to keep track of which you need for the mission. Each part you select has various stats, the most important of which is its reliability: the more reliable a part is, the less likely it is to fail during a mission. Your parts will level up as you use them, becoming more reliable with each launch, but the most reliable parts are also the most expensive to build.
Once you’ve got your rocket constructed, it’s time to prepare the launch. You get to select the crew (for crewed missions), a launch bonus that increases the longer you wait before launching (like bonus reliability), and a launch date. While you can select any launch date you’d like, there are certain months where the conditions are more favorable; selecting an unfavorable launch window penalizes your reliability.
When it comes to the actual mission launches, there’s a lot of RNG. There’s a roll to determine how the launch goes (failure, negative, normal, or positive) with a penalty or bonus depending on the value. A higher reliability makes it easier to get normal or positive results. I haven’t had a launch failure yet, but I’m sure it’s accompanied by a large explosion.
Once the mission is off the ground, there may be a number of phases where you manage resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. Each phase will have different resources you’re managing, and you only have a handful of turns to achieve the results. It’s a fun little minigame, but it can get boring after a while; though there’s an “auto-resolve” option that will determine the outcome based on the payload reliability. Like the launch, each command gets a roll to determine if it’s successful, with a bonus on a high roll and a penalty on a low roll (though you can use power to negate a penalty).
In other reviews I’ve read, the RNG of the missions is the biggest annoyance people seem to have with the game, but it doesn’t bother me. Even the most well-prepared mission can go awry, and at least the RNG is well-communicated rather than hidden as it is in most games.
Mars Horizons is very easy to play, and has some great visuals. You can skip a lot of the cinematics and UI animations to speed things up (some of the animations take their time). Everything is kept pretty simple – there’s no photorealism here – but is still attractive. While I’m not sure how re-playable it is, I love how accurate it is to real life (with several achievements for beating the real-world dates of several missions), and I know I’ll get plenty of playtime managing my space agency.
I really want to love this game. The realism and strategy are top-notch. Unfortunately, I find the controls very frustrating, resulting in accidental missile launches (forgot to hold ALT) and ships that won’t go where I want them to go (can’t get the right heading on the sphere). The lack of any sort of pause makes control issues worse because I can’t sacrifice extra time to correct mistakes (or cancel a missile launch).
Using the targeting sphere to set missile waypoints.
The core interaction mechanism used for navigation is a targeting sphere, projected onto a 2D plane. It’s probably the best way to handle maneuvering in this sort of game (I’m fairly certain Homeworld does something similar), but I spend half my time swinging the view around to try to get things on the side of the sphere I need. Since maneuvering and positioning is such a core mechanic in the game, you interact with this sphere a lot, and I find it infuriating to work with. If the developers can find some way to make it a little more intuitive, I might be able to really enjoy the game.
Aside from the controls, there’s currently very little to the game. Eight tutorial missions, a skirmish mode, and multiplayer. There appear to be plans for a full campaign and a strategy mode where you vie for control of a solar system. There’s also the promise of modding support, which can add a lot to the game.
The damage control map, showing all the bits of the ship that can be damaged.
There’s a lot of depth to what’s here, though. Your ship’s mounts and internals can be damaged or destroyed, with repair teams travelling through the ship to make repairs (and those teams can be killed if the component they’re in is attacked). There’s electronic warfare and stealth mechanics. There’s a variety of weapons like missiles, cannons, rail guns, and lasers. You can customize ships to fulfill specialized roles and construct fleets for combat.
So while I can’t recommend the game as it currently stands, it’s a great foundation and I’m sure it can become something I’d really enjoy playing. The current price ($20) is a little high for what’s currently offered, but with the additions I mentioned above, it could definitely be worth it.
I love survival city builders and I’m an avid board gamer, so you’d think Dice Legacy would be a perfect match, but even at a steep discount, I can’t recommend Dice Legacy.
The concept is definitely interesting. I could see this as a great physical board game. However, the pure RNG nature of the dice makes it difficult to plan or recover. Dice have a “durability” that decreases with each roll, and if you employ them at 0 durability, you lose them. Alternatively, you can send them to the cookhouse to eat and recover their durability. If a die doesn’t have the face you want or need, you have to keep rolling. I found myself often rolling multiple times in an attempt to get what I needed, but ended up just draining the durability of my dice. In the best dice-rolling board games, there’s some way to mitigate the randomness of a roll, but Dice Legacy lacks any way to alleviate a bad roll. At least at the start; there’s a broad tech tree and there appear to be some roguelite systems to permanently improve dice between plays, but I’m not really interested in suffering to get to that point.
This is how I lost my first game – buildings burning with no one to put out the fires.
The game is also extremely tedious, with lots of clicking to move dice around and place resources. The first time I placed a die in the cookhouse to restore its durability, I was confused because nothing happened. It turns out I have to click the “food” resource and click on the cookhouse to supply it with food. (I’m not sure why that couldn’t have just happened when I dropped the die.)
On a positive note, the graphics are lovely and the soundtrack is pleasant. The controls are easy enough to understand even though the interface can be a bit cryptic at times (there’s not really any tutorial). There looks to be a good amount of depth as well, for those who want to suffer through the initial hours.
I’ve been really excited about IXION since I heard about it a few months back. A survival city builder where you build up a space station and jump from system to system collecting the resources you need to survive? Sign me up! Unfortunately, IXION feels like an Early Access release, and with the number of bugs and balance issues, the asking price is far too high. Recently, I was unable to load several recent saves; I had to go back a few hours to find a save that would load. That sort of lost progress is unacceptable in a full release.
Travelling through subspace. Or hyperspace. Or whatever it’s called in IXION.
IXION is in the vein of Frostpunk, Surviving Mars, and other survival city builders and gets compared to those a lot. It’s extremely difficult early on and forces you to make some hard choices at times, but the difficulty feels artificially inflated by seemingly arbitrary penalties. The go-to example is in the first chapter of the game: you get a permanent -1 stability penalty due to story events, and if you linger in the starting system too long, you get another -1 stability penalty for remaining there. Once you leave, the penalty for staying is removed, but it’s replaced with a new permanent -1 stability for leaving that system behind. I understand that the penalty for lingering is to encourage the player to keep progressing instead of depleting a system and being over-prepared, but it seems arbitrary when you’re just guaranteed a different penalty for progressing. That said, starting in chapter 2 you’re able to counter the stability penalty with a number of stability-enhancing buildings, at which point you can linger as long as you like.
However, there are some penalties that just don’t make sense. There’s a -1 stability penalty for having a lot of colonists in cryo-pods, which encourages the player to simply leave people behind instead of rescuing them. In this case, the penalty is again to prevent the player from being over-prepared by having people available to replace any lost by random accidents, but just as before, seems backwards when applied to the game. (And an objective in the first system requires you to recover 500 pods.) Once you’ve unlocked waste recycling (which seems to come later in the tech tree than it should for an advanced mobile space station), there’s a penalty for storing waste rather than purging it into space. Here, the penalty seems to balance the power of recycling, since it essentially makes you self-sufficient.
Aside from the arbitrary penalties, this space station capable of travelling through space and time seems to be held together with duct tape and chewing gum. In Frostpunk, you have to keep a stockpile of coal to keep the generator burning. In IXION, your space station is constantly deteriorating and requires constant repair; and those repairs require the same resource used to build structures; sometimes you get to choose between housing your population or repairing the station. (Though if you have to make that choice, you’re already losing.) The speed of the deterioration increases as you progress (with each jump both lowering your maximum hull integrity and permanently increasing the deterioration rate), and each sector you open permanently increases the deterioration rate. I think a better (and more logical) choice would be to have jumps damage your hull (requiring repairs at the start of each system) without causing constant deterioration. Opening new sectors should have no effect on deterioration (I just don’t get that at all). Moving your station should and does deteriorate your hull, as positioning is a powerful mechanic and makes a good trade-off.
Making things worse is the number of non-workers you end up with. These are essentially worthless population. You can train them as colonists, but you don’t really need that many of them. As you thaw people, you’ll end up with more and more people that require housing and food but provide no benefit. I think the non-workers are meant to represent those that stay at home while others in the family work (like children), but there should be some way to train non-workers into workers. There’s an option later in the game so you only thaw workers, but it comes with a hefty -3 penalty. (With a special tech later to reduce it to -1.)
Certain actions like moving your station or activating the jump drive drain all power from your station, requiring it to run on batteries. To prevent batteries from draining quickly, you typically need to disable a bunch of buildings, which is annoying micromanagement – it’d be nice to simply have an option on each building to toggle whether it runs on battery power or not (with certain buildings like housing lacking that option). Alternatively, the station could just use the batteries themselves to power the jump – if you’re not generating enough power, you won’t be able to move or jump, or will have to wait a long time to charge the batteries.
On a positive note, I really enjoy the fleet management and sending ships around the system. Sending probes to discover new resources or points of interest is a resource sink but works really well; cargo and mining ships are automated and tend to do what I want; and sending science ships around to investigate anomalies is fun. Ships gain experience as they do their thing, making them more capable over time. I’ve read about bugs with the ships but I’ve been fortunate enough not to run into any. To balance this, however, there are space hazards that all your ships will happily fly straight through instead of navigating around. There should be some option to simply say “avoid hazards” with the penalty of having those ships take longer to make their trips.
Construction and building design is good, with lots of different shapes and sizes requiring some sector-planning Tetris to get everything to fit. Sectors are isolated and can specialize, which is nice, but the amount of space you have to sacrifice to things like stability-improving buildings (which are large) makes it difficult to truly specialize sectors. Workers can’t travel from one sector to another, so you can’t, say, have a food-and-housing sector and an industrial sector – the housing, food, and medical facilities have to be present in every sector. (Though food production can be located in a different sector and exported where needed.)
My favorite choice in the entire game.
The research you can do at planets along the way is also a lot of fun. You send a science ship out to a planet to investigate and respond to the events in a choose-your-own-adventure style branching dialog tree. Not every event has a positive outcome – sometimes it’s better to just leave things alone. However, it’s typically worthwhile to explore every planet, if just for the science income.
Later in the game, after you’ve unlocked enough technology, you’ll be swimming in resources and have a new problem: not enough storage space. It’s a weird predicament to be in, where you can’t even deconstruct a building because you have no place to put the resources. I don’t need to use my mining or cargo ships anymore (unless I want to), because I can use recycling to get any resource I need. I have an entire sector dedicated to housing most of my 4000-strong population (and all those non-workers), which generates enough waste to keep all my recyclers running non-stop. (Though I had to turn them off because I had too many resources.)
I’m far enough into the story now that I can say I actually like it. It’s not designed to be entirely clear – there’s a lot of mystery around what’s been going on in your absence. But each new system introduces a new obstacle to deal with: chapter 2 introduces space hazards, chapter 3 has a moving hazard, and chapter 4 introduces an enemy that pursues and attacks you.
All that said, the game is gorgeous. The space maps, the external station views, the interiors; everything looks great.
For a game I was extremely excited about, this has been pretty disappointing (being unable to load a save was particularly defeating). I’m sure all these problems will be fixed through patches, but skipping an Early Access release was a poor choice – I’d reserve my judgement if this was an early release. However, for a full release at this price, there are simply too many issues to recommend IXION at this point. I definitely enjoy the game, however, so maybe in a few months I can enthusiastically recommend the game.
Also, random side note: the main menu gives me some extreme motion sickness. The background video is views of the station spinning through space, and when you pop up a static settings menu over that with a not-quite-opaque background, it’s vomit time.
Luckily the space station can’t rotate in a screenshot.
I play a lot of survival city builders, but there’s always a certain point where you’ve solved all the puzzles, balanced your resources and population, and the “survival” part fades away as you just keep building.
Against the Storm solves that issue by making each city short-lived. You’re constantly starting from scratch and working to balance your population and resources, with the added difficulty of the forest getting angrier the longer you’re around. Each level also has a loose time limit represented by the “Queen’s Impatience”, and if you haven’t achieved your goals quickly enough, you lose. (Which really just means you don’t get as many resources for the meta-progression.)
The city building is kept fresh by randomization of the buildings you can choose from; you can’t follow the same pattern every time because you may not have the same buildings available. In addition, each city has random modifiers that provide bonuses and penalties, and often affect how you approach your expansion.
The meta-progression between cities adds new starting bonuses, new buildings and features, ways to mitigate the randomness (by providing re-rolls or expanding the number of choices you have), and other smaller bonuses (like slowing the queen’s impatience or increasing production speed). Like most roguelite systems, it simply makes the game a little easier the longer you play.
Aside from the gameplay itself, Against the Storm is extremely well-polished for an Early Access game – the visuals are great, everything feels “complete”, and I have yet to run into any bugs. The team updates the game every two weeks, and recent updates have added a lot of new content and adjusted several aspects of the game.
Against the Storm has quickly become one of my newest addictions, being pretty easy to play but also having a lot of depth and difficulty (if you want to push into higher difficulty levels). I’ll definitely be playing it for a long time to come.
October 2022 marks Fallout’s 25th anniversary, and Game Pass gave me a free month of Fallout 1st, so I decided to reinstall the game and see how it’s progressed since I last played (nearly two years ago), especially with the new Pitt area to explore.
I think I like the game even less now than I did before, even with the various improvements that have been made. Even with a month of Fallout 1st membership, Fallout 76 couldn’t hold my attention for a week.
Quality of Life
There have been a few great quality of life improvements since I last played. Some of these have been around a while, but it’s been long enough since I played that this is my first time interacting with the new features.
There’s the punch card machine that lets you have multiple builds and easily switch between them. You can build one at your camp and there are several in the world (at the train stations and major hubs). I saved my stealthy rifleman build and added a power armor build. Unfortunately, that’s all you get for free; each additional slot (up to 13) costs 500 atom points – Fallout 76’s premium currency.
Legendary cores were added as a resource used to re-roll legendary weapons (or make non-legendary weapons legendary), which is a great way to work toward making your perfect gun. I don’t like that re-rolls change all legendary affixes on a weapon (instead of just targeting particular ones), but at least it’s something.
Storage was increased to 1200 back when I was still playing, but hasn’t increased since. The magic scrapbox is still a Fallout 1st exclusive.
The Pitt
The Pitt is a new instanced zone that you travel to for missions. It’s basically just a bigger, more quest-oriented Daily Ops map. Unlike Daily Ops, stealth builds are actually usable in The Pitt, which is nice. I’ve run it a few times, and it’s not bad, but the last part (with a heavy radstorm) is just annoying. The first time I played, I was unprepared and just kept dying over and over. I eventually gave up and just ran as far as I could before my next death.
There’s unfortunately not much more to say about it. It’s just a big quest map.
Unchanged
Most of the game seems like it’s basically the same, for better or worse.
Seasons are unchanged. Daily and Weekly objectives are still annoying chores, and leveling up on the scoreboard is still annoyingly slow. This hasn’t changed at all and it’s still terrible.
Gameplay still favors power armor in the late game, which is disappointing because there’s so much more you can do besides power armor. I guess it makes sense for a “live service” game, though, since you have to keep grinding for power cores to continue using your armor.
The seasonal world events are still around, and while they’re not bad, they’re just a chaotic horde mode (kill waves of enemies until you win). The alien invasion for the anniversary was fun.
The interface is still extremely clunky and difficult, thanks to having everything revolve around the Pip-Boy. I get that it’s a common Fallout thing, but this game is more complex, so it starts to get in the way. I guess it’s better for controller players than a virtual cursor, though.
And it’s still lacking that Fallout feel that made the older games so enjoyable.
Boring
Like I said above, Fallout 76 couldn’t even keep my attention for a week this time around. I was off playing other things I enjoy more. I used to enjoy the base building, but coming back to it, I found it very unintuitive and restrictive. I enjoy the weapon crafting, but I wasn’t really interested in pushing to re-roll “perfect” weapons with legendary cores. I had already finished most of the main storyline quests, so I was left with the boring repeatable “daily” quests.
Unless something big changes, I don’t think I’ll be coming back to Fallout 76. It’s a shame because they could do so much with it, but the foundation just isn’t there; they’d need to completely rethink the game to fix its numerous problems. And with so many better options available, it’s hard to recommend.
Sable was a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass back in September 2021, but I was late to the game and only started a few months ago. When I saw it’d be leaving on 10/16, I decided to get back into it and finish it up. Luckily, Sable isn’t a very long game, so I was able to complete it in a few days once I got back into it; and I’m very glad I did.
The Gliding
Sable is about a young girls’ “Gliding”, where she leaves her clan to explore the world and choose a mask. (It’s basically her rumspringa.) Your journey ends when you choose a mask, and most of the game is spent exploring the world and earning badges to claim each of the various masks. There’s no “right” choice in the end – you’re free to choose whatever you like and there’s no consequence for the choice.
Sable is a game that’s about the journey rather than the destination. You can trigger the ending pretty quickly (within a few hours), but even the message in the game that starts the final quest tells you there’s no rush. If you’re a completionist (like me), it’ll take a little longer – earning all the achievements took me around 11 hours (mostly because I only found out about fast traveling very late in the game). It’s relatively easy to earn all the achievements as well – they’re mostly focused around earning the different masks in the game and collecting a variety of clothes and bike parts. The only things I needed to “grind” for were finding enough of the chum eggs to finish the “Building a Queendom” quest for the chum queen. The achievements are really the only “push” toward completing everything.
The Masks
The mask crafter is a little creepy.
Masks in Sable indicate a person’s profession or focus. You start with the child mask and earn the Ibexii mask as you leave your clan. The other masks are all earned by completing quests or performing actions specific to the profession; each requires you to earn three badges. If you want the merchant mask, you can simply buy three badges from merchants and trade them in for the mask. You’ll have to perform favors for guards, mechanists, innkeepers, or entertainers to earn their badges. The climbing and cartographer masks both require some climbing. You earn scrapper badges by exploring wrecks and selling salvage. The remaining few masks are earned from special quests. Whenever you’ve earned a set of badges, you can visit a “Mask Crafter” to earn the specific mask.
Getting Around
Most of Sable’s exploration involves climbing, and the climbing mechanic is very similar to Shadow of the Colossus – your stamina depletes as you climb, and you drop if you run out. You can earn additional stamina through a special side quest which makes the climbing a lot easier. Generally, however, you don’t need the extra stamina to find everything you need.
You also have “The Perpetual” a magic stone that puts you in a bubble to slow your descent. You can cross large areas with it without losing too much altitude, and it also saves you if you fall from heights.
Before you leave your tribe, you spend some time collecting parts to build your hoverbike, which is the only companion you’ll have for most of the game. You can even call for it and it’ll find its way to you, like a faithful steed. As you play, you can unlock new parts for your bike to enhance its capabilities, along with new paints to change its look. Once I bought the speeder bike parts, I was cruising around the map with ease.
The hoverbike was also one of the buggiest parts of the game for me. It eventually stopped coming to me when I called, and when riding, it’d occasionally spaz out, flip, and start spinning on its nose. It was only a minor distraction, though; I loved my bike the whole game.
The background
Sable’s art style stands out, and I personally think it looks amazing. Each area in the game has a slightly different atmosphere and features to distinguish it from others. There are a few times when the art style hides some geometry that makes traversal a little more annoying (the vertebrae on the giant skeletons in a few areas will blend together and look like a flat surface), but in general the art style is really attractive.
Sable also has a great backstory that you learn by solving special puzzles in shipwrecks. It doesn’t have much bearing on the gameplay itself, but I’d love to see more games in the same world that Sable builds.
The End
Each player’s journey through Sable will be slightly different, and the choice each player makes in the end is personal, and I love that aspect of the game. It’s a great game to play when you just need some time to relax and explore, and I’m glad I took the time to see it through to the end.
Your basic survival city builder boiled down to its most essential parts. You create a flow chart where each node is a building (woodcutter, well, storage), and link things together to transport resources from one to another (the woodcutter produces wood, which you link to the sawmill, which requires wood and produces planks for building). The sound effects and little building effects (“thwack” appears as the woodcutter operates) are a nice touch. Very simple and clean. Another one I might pick up cheap.
Create potions, sell them in your store. The haggling in this game is done through a card game and you expand your deck by forming relationships with various townspeople. I love the art style and the characters are very expressive (the animation is phenomenal). Definitely looking forward to playing this one more.
First-person factory building and exploration, similar to Satisfactory. It’s interesting, but the controls seem a little clunky, and the visual style is a bit bland for my taste.
A story-driven survival game where you customize your blimp and travel between ruined skyscrapers above a green death-cloud. Feels a lot like Raft with a more sci-fi style. I’ve been looking forward to this one, and while it definitely needs some optimization, I like the survival and building mechanics. Demo is time-limited (20 minutes) after the initial tutorial.
Survival city-builder set on the sea floor. Didn’t play this one too long – just enough to get a feel for it, but I’m looking forward to playing more once it releases. Could probably use some UI improvements (some things are a bit crowded), but otherwise it seems like it ticks all the usual survival city-builder boxes.
A first-person puzzle game like Portal. Instead of a handheld portal device, you get an “entropy” device, which rewinds time. I enjoyed the puzzles in the demo – they were pretty simple but require you to think four-dimensionally: you have to move things around in a particular order so when you rewind them, they end up where you want. The backstory to the game sounds interesting, too (with what little you get through devices in the demo), and the trailer makes it look like there might be some action-y sequences as well. Looking forward to the release.
A survival city-builder that appears to have some emphasis on story (hard to tell if it’s just the opener or the tutorial). Looks good and has a deep research tree, so there might be some nice complexity to it. I could see it being as good as Frostpunk. I’ll definitely pick it up once it’s released.
A roguelite city-builder. You choose an area from an overworld map, then build a settlement there while attempting to complete a number of objectives before the queen becomes too impatient with you. If you complete all the objectives before the queen’s impatience maxes out, you win and gain materials to use to improve the Smoldering City and future settlements. If you fail, you return to the overworld map with little to show for it. After a few settlements, the Blightstorm comes, destroying all your towns and reshaping the world. Looks great and it’s fun to play. I’ll definitely be picking this one up.
A management game with cute animal workers. Fun, but I lost my woodcutter to a storm relatively early and could never get enough wood to keep the lighthouse lit and ended up losing. Needs an easier way to recover from that sort of thing, but otherwise it’s a pretty easygoing game.
An old-school adventure game where you explore and upgrade your ship with an objective to rebuild your space station. It’s pretty simple to play, and I like the retro aesthetic, but there were some bugs with graphics rotating too far when turning which got really disorienting.
It’s like Vampire Survivors, but you control a spaceship. Designed for twin sticks, so it’s a little rough to control on a keyboard (WASD movement, arrow key rotation). I might pick it up after it launches.
The demo’s a little rough (missing text, no saving), and the tutorial isn’t very helpful, but I can tell the foundations of an amazing city builder are here. Very organic building (no grids), with some RTS-style army battles as well. This is another one for my wishlist.
A tactical starship command sim. There’s a lot of depth and complexity, but it’s relatively manageable thanks to auto-pilot. Some people might be turned off by the blocky interface, but I like it – presents a lot of controls and information without blocking too much of the action. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
A city-builder with streaming resources, terraforming, and some light combat. Pretty easy to play but with a decent amount of depth. Also, everyone is birds. I don’t know why.
The End
That’s the end of this Next Fest. There were a few demos I downloaded but didn’t have a chance to play. Several of the demos above are still available and I’ve noted them (with a little joystick: 🕹️) in case you’d like to try any of them out yourself.
The first week of Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Witch Queen, is nearly complete and I wanted to share my impressions of the new content and changes that came along with it.
There may be some minor spoilers in here, but nothing that hasn’t been revealed in trailers or introduced almost immediately upon starting the campaign.
Also, I’m going over a lot in here – practically everything that I’ve noticed in my first week – and a lot has changed, so brace yourself.
Story
I’m a longtime fan of Bungie’s ability to craft a world. I loved Halo’s lore to the point of reading several of the novels to learn more about it. There was a dark time in Destiny 2’s history (*cough*Activision*cough*) where there was little story progression each year in Destiny, but the past year changed all that: we saw humanity create allies from former enemies and fight several threats that were all building up to this new expansion. While the end of the last season, Season of the Lost, was a little underwhelming (though the final mission was a lot of fun), so far The Witch Queen campaign and Season of the Risen has been fantastic.
I’ve recently been reading the Destiny grimoires to learn more of the lore, and the grimoire starts with The Book of Sorrow, which details the beginnings of the Hive as we know them in the game. It turns out The Witch Queen delves pretty deeply into this lore as well – during one of the initial cinematics, there were several details that were straight from the lore I’ve been reading. We’re likely to learn a lot about the history of the Hive this year, so if you’re interested in Destiny lore, I think is is going to be a great year.
There are a few main themes in The Witch Queen: memory, mystery, deception. They all revolve around the titular character, Savathûn, the Witch Queen herself, and her Throne World – a world of her own creation on another plane. The Throne World destination is pretty large and labyrinthine – while on the surface it may seem about the same size as past destinations in Destiny, there are hidden paths and passages scattered throughout, reflecting Savathûn’s character. As Savathûn has been chasing the light for some time, there are areas that reflect her Hive background (and desire to distance herself from it) next to areas of odd beauty – her chase of the Light.
Within these areas, you use a new “Deepsight” ability to find hidden paths, which are “echos” – memories – of the past state of the world. Below Savathûn’s Throne World, Mars has areas where you can see its past – echos of humanity’s Golden Age. Much of the Witch Queen campaign involves revealing these memories to learn more about how Savathûn now possesses the Light.
And that is the core mystery of the expansion: how did Savathûn steal the Light? The Traveler gifted humanity the Light (and the Eliksni before that); why would it give the Light to the Hive? Did they trick the Traveler somehow? Did she steal the Light from Guardians? In order to find out, you have to chase Ghosts and capture new Hive Lightbearers to extract information with the help of our new Cabal allies. The campaign itself has some great twists and some pretty stunning reveals.
Check out this crater I made.
On a side note, I love Savathûn’s character, and the voice actress does an amazing job bringing her to life.
The Legendary Campaign
I’ve beaten the Witch Queen campaign on Legendary difficulty (took about three days, playing one or two missions a day), both to extend the life a bit and for the rewards granted for completing it at that difficulty. It was tough – there were three bosses I had to use the Destiny app to pull a fireteam together for – but it was still a lot of fun and made the missions feel more dire.
The levels themselves are extremely well designed, with plenty of cover in the respawn-restricted areas. I had to cheese a few encounters or exploit geometry and sightlines to stay safe and get my damage in, but completing these levels mostly solo felt very rewarding and I was able to approach them at my own pace.
Playing the campaign on legendary left me wanting to play past campaigns at a higher difficulty (with appropriate rewards), just because of how harrowing they feel at certain times. It’d be nice to allow matchmaking as well (which might be available when replaying the missions; I haven’t tried).
The Legendary Campaign launch screens show the new Hive Lightbearers looking particularly terrifying.
Hive Lightbearers
One of the big changes with The Witch Queen are new Hive Lightbearers, one matching each of the three player classes: Titan, Hunter, and Warlock. The first time you encounter one of these in the campaign, it’s a big deal, and on legendary difficulty is appropriately scary (coming in at the minimum light level for the new content).
Hive Lightbearers tend to be mini-bosses, but I’ve found they’re not too difficult to deal with. Fighting them can be a bit like playing PvP – you can handle them the same way you handle players that use their supers: you can retreat and hide to run out their super timer, or you can try to fight while dodging their attacks. Fortunately, the AI is pretty bad for these guys: Hive Knight Lightbearers – the Titan equivalent – will sometimes stand behind obstacles and hurl their shields at walls right in front of them, to the point where they’re not even a threat. None of the them are as strong as a player Guardian, but they can still be deadly if you don’t keep moving.
Each of the “subclasses” use abilities similar to player classes, with a few exotic variants tossed in. The Titan equivalent for the Hive uses the Void subclass: summoning barricades, throwing suppression grenades, and throwing shields during their super. The Warlock equivalent uses Arc abilities and can summon a rift to heal (and maybe empower?) themselves. Finally, the Hunter equivalent uses Solar abilities, throwing knives during their super and sometimes becoming invisible.
Overall, the Hive Lightbearers are really just new bosses with attack styles that mimic players. They can be difficult at times, but more often you just fight them like any other boss – with ample use of cover and frequent movement.
Void 3.0
Another big change with this expansion is the introduction of a Void subclass rework, dubbed “Void 3.0”. As a Titan main, Void was my least-used subclass; it generally felt less powerful than other subclasses, though the Ward of Dawn was useful for high-level content. The Void 3.0 updates have changed that – it’s now one of my favorite subclasses for survivability. I wouldn’t have made it through the legendary campaign without the new overshield mechanics for Titans.
As they did with the Stasis subclass, Bungie focused the Void changes around a handful of keywords: Overshield, Invisibility, Devour, Volatile, Weaken, and Suppress. Each class has a buff and debuff it specializes in, though all classes have some access to the entire set. Along with the ability changes are the aspect and fragments like the Stasis subclass.
I’m most familiar with the changes for Titan, but I’m going try to give a brief update for each class:
Titans
I love the changes to Titans. Void Titans now specialize in overshields and making enemies volatile, which causes them to explode when killed. What I love best about the changes is that it clearly turns Void Titans into a “protector” class – they deploy shields and barriers to give their teams extra durability.
While the other classes get three super options (matching the old Void trees), Titans only get two: Sentinel Shield and Ward of Dawn. The Sentinel Shield basically works like the previous Code of the Commander shield, where guarding creates a barrier that allies can shoot through for increased damage. Ward of Dawn has a significantly decreased cooldown, so you can use it more often now, which is great for moments when you need some breathing room or need to control an area. (I played the campaign with Sentinel Shield and really wish I had used Ward of Dawn.)
While the Titan Barricade and Jump abilities didn’t change, the melee abilities did, and Bungie included something that seems like a no-brainer in hindsight: a shield throw melee ability. Along with the old shoulder charge melee, Titans have an option where they throw their shield, which will bounce off terrain and enemies. It takes some practice, but you can hurl it across large areas and deal some damage with the ricochet. It doesn’t seek as much as the super shields, but if you’ve got a line of enemies coming at you, it can typically plow through them. And while the Barricade abilities themselves didn’t change, their animation did: instead a shoulder-bash style deployment, Void Titans summon their shield and slam it into the ground to create their Barricade.
The Titan aspects allow builds to focus on overshields granted from barricades and supers, or making enemies volatile to create chain explosions. I ran the campaign with Bastion and Offensive Bulwark, granting me regenerating overshields behind my barricade and increased grenade recharge. It was a heavy-defense build, but that’s what was most important during the campaign.
Warlocks
From what I’ve read, Warlocks arguably got the best upgrades with Void 3.0. Warlocks specialize in Devour (increased grenade recharge and heal on kill) and Suppression (blinds enemies and prevents ability use). Their super options remain the same as before, as well as their class and jump abilities. They have an aspect called “Child of the Old Gods”, which lets their Rift summon a Void Soul that can weaken nearby targets and deal damage, as well as recharging abilities or healing (based on the type of Rift used).
Hunters
That leaves Invisibility and Weaken for Hunters. I’ve seen a lot of complaining from players online about the changes, but the changes seem in line with the way Void Hunters operate. I had a few Hunters in my team during the campaign, and they’re still plenty strong; they just don’t have the survivability options Titans and Warlocks have (though being able to become invisible is pretty powerful). I can admit the changes seem less drastic for Hunters, however.
Like Warlocks, Hunters keep their previous three super options, as well as jump and class abilities. Their Aspects generally cater to staying invisible and granting invisibility to allies.
Fragments
Fragments are the same for all classes, and I won’t go into each, but I used three throughout my entire campaign run: Echo of Exchange, which grants grenade energy on melee kills; Echo of Resistance, which causes Void buffs to have increased duration (longer-lasting overshields); and Echo of Expulsion, which causes enemies killed by Void abilities to explode. There are a few other I’d like to try out, like Echo of Remnants (increased duration for grenade effects) and Echo of Provision (melee energy on grenade damage), but I was pretty happy with the ones I chose.
PsiOps Seasonal Activity
Each season comes with a new seasonal activity, and this season’s “PsiOps Battleground” is a fine addition. I feel like Bungie has a solid formula for creating these activities, with a clear structure that consists of several “stages” to complete. While PsiOps probably isn’t the best they’ve produced, it’s still pretty simple and straightforward. I imagine it’ll evolve over the course of the season.
New Weapons and Perks
The big new weapon this season is the glaive, which feels great. When wielding it, your melee ability is replaced with glaive strikes, which have a strong three-hit combo. They can also fire a ranged blast that uses special ammo. And finally, they can deploy a short-duration shield to block incoming fire (which recharges a bit on projectile kills). My only complaint on the glaive is the difficulty in recharging the shield, but that might be a balance consideration; I could see them being annoying in PvP if everyone could just charge into melee range with a shield up constantly. There are also several seasonal mods this season to buff glaives, making them very useful.
The new “origin” traits for weapons are nice, subtle effects. They don’t make a huge difference most of the time, but they can be handy. Most new weapons have an origin trait based on the “make” of the weapon, and activities like Strikes, Crucible, and Gambit give an additional origin trait option based on where you found the weapon. I’m most excited about the Vanguard trait, which causes final blows to heal.
There are also a lot of fun new perks, like “Compulsive Reloader”, which gives you faster reload speed when close to a full magazine (basically the opposite of the existing “Alloy Magazine”, which reloads an empty clip faster).
Weapon Crafting
Finally, the thing I’ve been most excited about with this expansion: weapon crafting. I’ll say what’s here is a decent start, but it’s far from what the game needs.
Crafting a weapon requires a “pattern” and a variety of resources. You can obtain weapon patterns from quests or by extracting materials from weapons that have “Deepsight Resonance”, which drop randomly in the world. Once you have a weapon with resonance, you need to use it (getting kills or completing activities) before you can extract the materials from them. It’s basically a mini-quest on random weapons that encourages you to try them out, and you can typically complete them in about 10-20 minutes using them at a destination (or with a single run of an activity like a strike). Extracting materials from some of these weapons will progress you toward unlocking the pattern (some patterns require extraction from multiple copies), at which point you can craft your own version with whatever perks you want. Requiring use of the weapon can help you get a feel for which perks you like best, but it also means that sometimes you have to use a poorly-rolled weapon just to get the resources.
I guess it works like Play-Doh.
Once you have a pattern and the necessary resources, you just head to the Enclave on Mars (a new area) and use the “Relic”, which is basically a big table with molds for different weapons. You get to select the weapon you want to shape, the frame and perks you want, and finally create the new weapon. Most of the options for perks on the weapon are locked until you level it, which comes through extensive use.
I know one of the goals Bungie had for the system was creating a connection between the player and their weapons. In that regard, the system largely works – because of the effort you put into obtaining the pattern, gathering materials, and finally levelling the weapon, it creates an affinity for the weapon. Crafted weapons even show the date they were crafted, so you can celebrate their birthday if you like. I know I’ll always keep the glaive I crafted on release day, just as a memento, even if better options come along.
My concerns with the system are around the variety of materials needed (and acquiring those materials) for crafting and the cost of reshaping a weapon. Different perks use different materials (which you can choose when extracting the material from resonant weapons), which means you have to stockpile different types of materials to match, but you can only store 250 of each type so your ability to stockpile is limited. If you select the materials based on the perks you like when you used the weapon, you should be able to keep plenty on hand, but a single resource (with a large storage limit) would streamline the system. This is in addition to a basic material that you get every time you extract (a few hundred each time), but is consumed in large amounts during the shaping/reshaping process (advanced perks can use 2000 each).
Reshaping also has a large cost involved, especially for higher-level perks, and even after a perk has been used before, you have to pay a cost to select them again. I was hoping that as you unlocked perks, they’d permanently be available at no cost (similar to how mods work, just for a particular weapon). This would help to balance the shifting meta, where a god-roll weapon one season may be supplanted the next; being able to add the best perks and swap on-the-fly would help players adapt to the changes without stockpiling weapons. Without this, players will just need to stockpile different versions of crafted weapons with different perk sets since it costs a fortune to reshape a weapon to try out something new. You’re also limited by the RNG nature of acquiring weapons to extract resources from (drop rates are apparently very low), and limitations on acquiring Ascendant Alloys – a costly resource required for high-level perks.
This has happened before – the launch of the transmog system had a lot of issues at first, and they were quickly resolved by the next season. (I was just hoping Bungie had figured out that time-gating and reliance on random drops was a bad thing; apparently not.) I enjoy the ability to craft weapons, and I think this change is definitely a step in the right direction, but there’s some work still to be done to improve things. I know more weapons are coming to the crafting system, but I’d like to see weapon crafting become a more integral part of the game, replacing random drops with a directed system for players to obtain weapons built exactly as they like.
Miscellaneous
Along with all the changes above, there have been a bunch of UI tweaks (tightening up a few things so the new weapon perks can all fit on the screen), some welcome masterwork changes to armor (vastly reducing the cost to change the element on masterwork armor), and changes to Banshee’s reputation (doesn’t require inventory materials). They’re little changes that add up.
Unrelated: my space minivan that I acquired during the 30th Anniversary event.
Summary
So far I’m really happy with the new expansion. Although weapon crafting needs some work, I already have a few weapons I’m growing attached to (my glaive isn’t even a week old and already level 14! they grow up so fast), and I’m really enjoying the new story arcs.
I found Vampire Survivors while looking through my Steam discovery queue. With 99% positive reviews and priced at $3, I figured I’d give it a try.
I’m not typically into rogue-lites or bullet hell shooters, but a while back I picked up Nova Drift and had a great time with it – runs may only last a few minutes, but you always get to try something new. Vampire Survivors is similar, but you don’t control when you fire (your abilities just constantly fire without input), so you’re only focused on dodging enemies and picking up experience and various power-ups. Your abilities don’t combine quite like Nova Drift, but there are a few weapon and passive combinations that allow you to “evolve” the weapon into a significantly more powerful version.
You earn coins during each run that you can use to buy permanent buffs and unlock new characters. Each character starts with a different weapon and has a custom buff that improves as they level. My favorite is Mortaccio, who has a custom bone weapon they toss out that bounces around between enemies. (And his buff is a max +3 projectiles, which is really powerful.)
If you last 30 minutes, all the enemies disappear and Death appears, darts to your location, and instantly kills you, ending your run and granting you bonus coins. Along the way, swarms of enemies fill the screen and you mow them down.
Overall a lot of fun for a small price. It’s still in early access, so I’m hoping they continue to add new characters, levels, and abilities to keep mixing things up. It’s a lot of fun, though definitely an easier and “lighter” game than Nova Drift. (Which I recommend if you like Vampire Survivors.)
