Tag: Games

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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

Games of 2023

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

I played a lot of older games this year in an attempt to earn all their achievements. I think I did pretty well; I finished all achievements in 14 games.

Against the Storm👍🌟

The Riftbreaker👍✔️🏆
Bought the DLC toward the end of Steam’s winter sale. I still love Riftbreaker’s gameplay. Came back to the latest DLC after the Autumn sale and my opinion hasn’t changed: great action gameplay with base building.

Oxygen Not Included

Destiny 2
Season of the Seraph was a great end to The Witch Queen expansion that bid farewell to an old friend and set things up nicely for Lightfall.
Lightfall was… Not great. Strand was a bit rough at the outset and the story revolved too much around the new power. The story left a lot of gaps open which was unsatisfying. The Season of Defiance was fine (nothing special), but the new exotic quest was fun and reintroduced a long-lost character.
Season of the Deep helped with a lot of the story gaps Lightfall left open. The seasonal “Deep Dive” event was fantastic, introducing some “roguelike” features to make runs more interesting.
Season of the Witch was another solid season, with an interesting story and fun activities. The roguelike features were used in the “Altars of Summoning” activity via the “Deck Of Whispers”, a set of cards with special effects that you could set up ahead of time and was drawn from for each encounter.
Season of the Wish has an interesting story involving the Ahamkara, but thus far, the activities aren’t as interesting as those in Deep and Witch. This season is going to be stretching until June 2024, so hopefully it picks up some steam.

High on Life

Clanfolk

Arcade Paradise

Marvel’s Midnight Suns
I like the card-battling combat, but hate most of the “RPG” stuff. Especially the “relationship” thing. Just makes the game take longer than it needs.

Patron ✔️🏆
Patron’s not bad, it’s just not that great.

GridMiner✔️🏆
A little space station building puzzle game I got at the end of last year. Good for a few hours of puzzle solving.

Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal
I’ve always enjoyed the Creeper World series; each entry has been a solid tower defense game. I finished Creeper World 4 at the end of 2022 and decided to finish Creeper World 3 (which I had barely started). I’ve been working to finish out the achievements, but some of them are very grindy (build 10000 of something or collect 500 things).

Juno: New Origins
I already owned Simple Rockets 2 in Early Access, and the name changed to Juno at launch. It’s an expansive game that’s as creative as Kerbal Space Program but more flexible and runs a lot better.

Siege Survival: Gloria Victis
An interesting survival game where you take on the role of survivors during a medieval city siege. Manage food, water, and defenses for yourself and the bastion during the day, sneak into the city to scavenge by night. Pretty difficult.

Surviving the Aftermath 🏆
Came back to this one to finish out some new achievements. Picked up the DLCs on sale to get it back to 100%. Still a solid survival city builder.

Endzone: A World Apart 🏆
Like Surviving the Aftermath, I came back to this game to finish out achievements.

Nebuchadnezzar
A old-school 2D city builder centered around the history of Mesopotamia. There’s historical context given before every campaign mission which I really enjoy. The campaign itself slowly introduces new mechanics over time.

Star Survivor
A Vampire Survivors-like where you control a starship and slowly upgrade it over time. There’s a deck-building mechanic where your upgrades are drawn from a deck that you can upgrade over time. There’s also a campaign where you move across a map and finish with a boss fight. Your weapons are slotted in different quadrants on your ship which encourages some planning and requires positioning and aiming to hit targets. Plays OK on Steam Deck after some tinkering with controls, but I’m hoping for an update that gives it better controller support.

Phantom Brigade 👍
A tactical mech combat game. The “prediction engine” that shows you enemy movements and attacks allows you to play much more aggressively than similar games like XCOM or Battletech. There were many battles where careful planning let me finish off missions without a scratch, having my team dart in and out of cover just in time to dodge shots. After each round and after the battle, you can watch a replay of the action.

Mount & Blade II: Warband
Been wanting to play this since I heard it was coming to Game Pass. I always loved Mount & Blade, and this one is more of the same. I had a slow start since I wasn’t entirely sure what to do early on. Once I became a mercenary for my preferred faction, things started getting interesting.

Strange Horticulture
Bought during the Steam Puzzle Fest. It’s a weird one, but a lot of fun.

Jurassic World: Evolution 👍✔️🏆🌟
I’ve owned Jurassic World for a while, and with Jurassic World: Evolution 2 just released, I decided it was time to go back and finish the first one. It’s a solid dinosaur theme park game, with an actual campaign and objectives to complete. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Jurassic World: Evolution 2 👍✔️🏆🌟
As soon as I finished Jurassic World: Evolution, I went straight into playing Evolution 2. It’s much improved over the original, with some more detailed mechanics that make more sense. It’s much easier to have dinosaurs cohabitate now, and the addition of lagoons for sea dinos is great. I bought the big expansions (Biosyn and Malta) during a sale to finish out the achievements, and they both add some interesting new mechanics for the few missions they add.

Cliff Empire✔️🏆

Daemon X Machina
Been watching it for a while, and it finally went on sale with a deep enough discount for me to bite. It’s like Armored Core Lite, with some decent customization and buildcrafting. Weird story that I didn’t care about, but the combat was fun. There’s a combat mechanic in the game I never really used because I didn’t feel I needed to. Getting the achievements is really grindy, but I enjoy the gameplay enough that it’s kept me hooked.

Superliminal
A puzzle game in the vein of Portal, but is based around perception instead of portals. If you like Portal, you’d probably enjoy this one. It’s not a very difficult game, but it does require some out-of-the-box thinking in some areas.

Honey, I Joined A Cult ✔️🏆
Got this through May’s Humble Choice. Similar to Prison Architect, but it tends to work more like building a shopping mall: you have a bunch of rooms that “followers” come to and your cult members run, which produces income and influence, which you use to buy and research things. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure it’s as fleshed out as it could be. There’s also a bunch of minor but annoying little bugs.

Banished ✔️🏆
Another oldie that I returned to in a quest for achievements. Still a great game, though the rough edges are a little more obvious since the genre has evolved so much. When things are going wrong, it’s often impossible to figure out why, and things can go wrong very quickly.

Before We Leave 👍✔️🌟🏆
Yet another game I came back to for achievements. I had forgotten how much I loved this game. While I had forgotten practically all the nuances of how to squeeze the most out of my towns, a lot of it came back pretty quickly. It’s also a relatively forgiving game, and the updates since the last time I played have smoothed out a few of the rough edges (for instance, it’s possible to remove Astrobaleenium now instead of having it permanently ruin an island). Great game, and it’s renewed my excitement for the sequel, Beyond These Stars.

Beyond Sol ✔️🏆
Another for achievements. I like a lot of what Beyond Sol tries to do, but unfortunately it gets boring pretty quickly.

Framed Collection 👍✔️🏆
I’ve played Framed on my iPad in the past but had never played Framed 2. It’s a unique puzzle game where you rearrange comic book-like frames to alter the story and allow the protagonist to escape.

Per Aspera 👍✔️🏆
Per Aspera has had several expansions since the last time I played, expanding the options available once Mars has oceans and adding new objectives for housing colonists. The DLCs also nicely close out some side storylines, which is nice.

Satisfactory
Came back after Christmas to open the advent calendar. I need to rebuild a few factories due to updated recipes…

Death Must Die
A bullet heaven game with some inspiration from Hades.

Dorf Romantik
A cozy puzzle city-builder.

Dwarf Fortress
The great granddaddy of survival city builders. I’ve wanted to play for a long time, but was turned off by the ASCII graphics and keyboard-only interface. The Steam version is much improved, but I’ve got a lot of learning to do before I really understand what I’m doing…

Songs of Conquest
Picked up during the Steam Winter Sale. A great turn-based strategy game in the vein of Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

Solar Settlers
A space exploration card game I’ve had my eye on for a while. A solid card game with very simple graphics.

A Little To The Left
An organization puzzle game.

The Entropy Centre
A puzzly FPS like Portal, just with a time-rewinding gun instead of a portal gun.

Trombone Champ
Toot!

Board Games

Calico
A cute game about making quilts and having cats curl up on them.

Habitats
Build habitats for animals in your preserve while competing with other players for animals, environments, and amenities. Pretty easy to play.

Gaia Project

Point Salad

Canvas

Theomachy: The Warrior Gods
I’ve owned this for a while and finally got around to playing it. It’s essentially Texas Hold’em where you play gods and bet your worshippers, with some deckbuilding and combat mechanics. We enjoyed it, but the god abilities can be extremely unbalanced.

Evolution
I’ve owned this for a while; bought it after playing the digital version and enjoying it. Some of the rule adjustments for two players seemed to make things pretty unbalanced, though. I had an intelligent carnivore early on and was able to pretty easily pick off other creatures by disabling their abilities. Since the two-player rules limit you to two traits per creature, there was little to be done to stop that sort of attack.

Maglev Metro 👍
Great little engine builder where you build rail lines and transport passengers.

Earth 👍🌟
My board game of the year. An easy to understand tableau building game. There are lots of ways to score, and despite my wife and I playing very differently and striving for different objectives, our scores were only three points apart: she won 199-196.

Exploration 👎
I got Exploration a few years ago from a Kickstarter. I had heard it wasn’t very good, but rulebook updates improved it a bit. After playing, I can say that the initial rulebook is terrible: there are icons everywhere and the rulebook doesn’t even explain what they mean. The newer rulebooks available online were better, but still don’t fix what seems to be a broken game. The components are great, but the gameplay is sorely lacking.

Galaxy Trucker
I’ve owned Galaxy Trucker for a long time, and after seeing the opportunity to get Fit to Print from a Kickstarter for a different game (Point City), my wife wanted to try the game before I purchased Fit to Print. We played further than I think I ever have in Galaxy Trucker: two rounds. It’s still a lot of fun, I just always feel satisfied after a single round. Anyway, great game.

City Hall
Played for a final time before deciding to sell. It’s not a bad game, just not for me.

Cowboy Bebop: Space Serenade
I’m always skeptical of games based on a popular IP, but this one had good reviews and I’ve always enjoyed Cowboy Bebop. It’s a deck-builder with character powers and “coop-etition” gameplay: you work together to take out bounties but want the most fame to win at the end. The game ends with a “boss fight” of sorts against Vicious. Quick, easy to play, and great art (mostly straight from the show).

Assembly
A cooperative puzzle game with limited communication. A lot of fun. My wife and I barely managed to make it out alive.

Hero Realms
Another game I’ve owned for a while. It’s basically a fantasy Star Realms with optional character classes. It’s fun, but it also plays almost exactly like Star Realms.

Tiny Epic Vikings
I’ve heard this is basically a small version of Blood Rage. I haven’t played Blood Rage, but I enjoyed moving my tiny Viking ships and meeples around.

Tiny Epic Galaxies
I’ve owned Tiny Epic Galaxies for a long time and never had the opportunity to play it. Finally played with my wife and it was a lot of fun. Very easy to play with a very light 4X style.

Fences: The Ranch
My wife loves Fences; it’s basically a lighter version of Carcassonne with cute little farm animals. The Ranch adds a series of small expansions that can be combined to add some more depth to the game, and it definitely accomplishes that goal: the game is significantly improved with the extra options. I also liked that it came in a big box to contain the entire original game and organize things neatly.

Healing Blade: Defenders of Soma👍
Another game I’ve owned for years and never played. I think I held off for so long because I was worried I wouldn’t enjoy it, but it turns out it’s a pretty good asymmetrical card battler. One player plays “The Pestilence”, attacking villagers with diseases; the other player takes the role of “The Apothecary Healers”, defending the villagers from those diseases. There’s an educational aspect to the game: all the diseases and defenders are personified versions of actual diseases and medications. There are only a certain number of rounds, and early on, the defenders have an advantage because they can easily defeat any disease. But as defenders are used, they unlock resistances for the Pestilence player, which can be used to limit the Apothecary’s options. There’s a decent amount of depth and strategy, and it feels like the game accurately portrays the real-world battle against bacteria and drug resistance. I played Pestilence and ended up winning in the final round with a tetracycline-, cephalosporin-, and penicillin-resistant strain of syphilis.

Globetrotting
A game about planning trips around the globe, with miniature globes you get to write on. It’s pretty fun and the components make it unique. There’s some competition for goals, but otherwise there’s little player interaction.

The Fox in The Forest

Hadrian’s Wall👍

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Tiny Epic Dungeons

Fit To Print 👍
It’s like the spaceship-building part at the start of Galaxy Trucker, but that’s the entire game. It’s easy to play with some great artwork and funny headlines and ads. Played well at 2 and 4 players.

Deep Dive

Point City 👍
Backed this one on Kickstarter because I enjoyed Point Salad so much. Just like Salad, it’s a quick and easy-to-play city builder. Fun and colorful.

Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition
My wife bought me the original Compounded for my birthday (and crushed me when we played), and we always enjoyed it. You collect elements like Carbon and Oxygen to create compounds like water or carbon dioxide to score points. The Peer-Reviewed Edition cleans up a lot of the artwork and makes things a lot clearer. Unfortunately, it also uses some slightly altered rules so I need to play them back-to-back to determine which version I like better…

Moon 👍
A city-builder on the moon with wacky buildings (your city can have a taco truck). Great artwork. Another one that’s easy to play.

Roll For The Galaxy
I love this one but my wife hadn’t played it, so we finally managed to get it to the table between all the new games. Still doesn’t disappoint.

Sanssouci 👍
From the designer of Azul (one of my wife’s favorite games), where you’re a designer planning the garden around the titular Sanssouci Palace. You select and lay tiles on your garden board and try to create a path for nobles at the top of each column to travel down.

Tiny Epic Pirates

Cascadia 👍

Patchwork (Halloween Edition)
This is a tradition on our anniversary: we play the Patchwork Halloween Edition and my wife crushes me.

The Search for Planet X👍
An app-based deduction game. A lot of fun and pretty easy to play.

Jaipur
A very fast-playing set-collection game where you’re competing to be invited to the maharaja’s court. It’s a great small-box two-player game.

Takenoko
That little panda is adorable.

Magic Maze
A hectic real-time heist game with no communication. Took us a few tries to get the hang of it.

Roll Player 👍
I’ve wanted this game for a while and picked it up on sale. A fun dice-rolling game where you’re building a tabletop RPG character. The randomness leads to some characters I’d never actually create or play, like my Orc Wizard craftsman, who lost to my wife’s Dragonkin Ranger hunter.

Great Western Trail👍
Another one I picked up on sale. I’d heard good things about this game years ago, but I’m not typically into the western theme. The gameplay is really solid, though, and I had a great time delivering my cows.

Tiny Epic Crimes
Can be played competitively or cooperatively. Played cooperatively with my wife, and we won on a coin flip, having narrowed the murderer down to two options. The game felt slightly too short; another turn or two would have given us the evidence we needed to know for sure.

Lords of Waterdeep 👍
Been a long time since I’ve played this, but it was my wife’s first time. I remembered enjoying it, and a replay confirmed my recollection. Still a great game.

Project L 👍🌟
A board game where you get to play a lot of little games of Tetris. A lot of fun and very easy to play.

The Fox Experiment👍
Another great game from Elizabeth Hargrave. Breeding fox pups to create the friendliest pups. Naming the pups you create is a nice touch; I was always upset when the artificial third player blocked one of my pups so I couldn’t pick them.

Ceres
A worker-placement game about mining the asteroid belt. There are a lot of different ways to earn points, which sometimes makes it difficult to know what to do next.

Space Base
A game I’ve been interested in for a while. The first play annoyed me a bit; it was a little too random; unlucky rolls early in the game gave my wife an early lead which kind of snowballed. I want to try it again before I give up on it, but I wish there was some better roll mitigation.

Railroad Ink
Played with my brother and his wife to make sure they enjoyed it before gifting it to them.

Categories
Games

Destiny 2: Lightfall – Mods and Strand

I started to include this as part of my first impressions, but it was getting long and I didn’t want to just throw all this away, so I chose to split it out here for anyone interested.

Mods

The new mod system does a good job of replacing the disparate seasonal systems with a unified system that can be easily built upon. There are two key concepts with the new mod system: Orbs of Power and Armor Charge.

Orbs of Power

Orbs of Power have always existed in Destiny, created by certain abilities as a way to charge your super. Now, there are many more ways to generate them, and they still recharge your super but can also grant Armor Charge, which can be used to power a variety of effects.

There are three main ways to generate Orbs of Power: your super ability, “siphon” mods, and ability mods.

Your super ability has always generated orbs and it works basically the same way as it always has: killing enemies with your super generates orbs. For some supers like Well of Radiance or Ward of Dawn, the orbs are generated as soon as the super is cast (since they don’t directly kill enemies).

Siphon mods allow you to create orbs with weapon kills. There’s a mod for each damage type: kinetic, arc, solar, void, stasis, and strand. There’s also a “harmonic” siphon that matches your subclass.

Finally, there are mods to generate orbs from your abilities: “Firepower” to create orbs from grenade kills, “Heavy Handed” to create orbs from melee kills, and “Reaper” to create orbs from weapon kills after using your class ability. There’s also a mod that can create orbs from finishers, but requires Armor Charge to do so.

Armor Charge

The new part of the mod system is “Armor Charge”. There are several mods that operate on Armor Charge, and as soon as one is slotted, picking up an Orb of Power will grant a stack of Armor Charge. There are two main ways Armor Charge is used: fully consumed to grant a bonus, or consumed over time for a passive bonus. Aside from that, there are a variety of mods that enhance Armor Charge in some way. Each of these is distinguished by a color in the UI.

Instant Bonuses (Yellow)

Yellow mods consume all your Armor Charge at once, granting an instant bonus. There’s “Grenade Kickstart”, “Melee Kickstart”, and “Utility Kickstart”, which trigger when your ability energy is fully expended and immediately recharge that ability (with more energy being refunded based on the number of mods and amount of Armor Charge). There’s “Emergency Reinforcement”, which triggers when your shield is broken and grants damage reduction.

Finally, there are several mods that trigger on Finishers to generate orbs, restore abilities, grant buffs (overshield or heal), generate ammo (special or heavy), or reload weapons. Unlike the “kickstart” mods, which consume all your Armor Charge stacks, the Finisher mods require a certain amount to trigger. For instance, the “Explosive Finisher” mod recharges your grenades, but only triggers if you have three or more stacks of Armor Charge.

Passive Bonuses (Blue)

Blue mods drain your Armor Charge over time and provide a passive bonus. There are two types of passive bonuses: stat bonuses that add +30 to a primary stat (mobility, resilience, recovery, discipline, intelligence, or strength), and damage bonuses for a specific weapon element (kinetic, arc, solar, void, stasis, or strand).

You can use additional copies of mods to increase the bonus with a decreasing benefit. For instance, one “Font of Restoration” mod will increase your Recovery by +30, two by +50, and three by +60. You can have as many passive bonuses as you like and they don’t cause Armor Charge to drain any faster. I’ve seen a few people that essentially have “perfect” stats (100 in all stats) via the stat bonuses.

Armor Charge Enhancements (Green)

Green mods typically alter how you collect Armor Charge. These are all different:
“Charged Up” allows you to have one more stack of Armor Charge.
“Stacks on Stacks” grants you an additional stack of Armor Charge each time you pick up an Orb of Power.
“Time Dilation” makes Armor Charge decay more slowly when using passive (blue) mods.
“Powerful Friends” grants Armor Charge to allies when picking up an Orb of Power.
“Radiant Light” grants Armor Charge to allies when using your Super. (One stack for allies with the same subclass, two for different subclasses.)
“Shield Break Charge” grants a stack of Armor Charge when breaking an enemy shield with a matching damage type.
“Empowered Finish” lets Finishers grant a stack of Armor Charge if you have none.

Passive Mods

There are also a number of passive mods that don’t use the Armor Charge system. Most of these existed before the new mod system changes. There are stat mods for +5 or +10 to a primary stat; weapon mods to improve reserves, flinch, targeting, handling, reload them while holstered, or grant extra ammo when picking up ammo; super-related mods to generate additional orbs or grant additional super energy from abilities; ammo finder mods (special or heavy) to generate ammo on kills (and new “scout” mods to grant that same ammo to allies); resistance mods to increase damage resistance against specific damage types; cooldown mods that affect your ability cooldowns; and a few buff mods that provide a heal or overshield when picking up orbs or using Finishers.

Strand

Buffs

Woven Mail

Woven Mail is a buff that provides 60% damage reduction for everything but precision damage (i.e., headshots). It’s the main Titan buff, and makes you very tanky. There’s also a nice audio effect whenever you’re hit while it’s active, letting you know it’s still up since it’s difficult to tell otherwise; a full-screen effect would have been nice.

Tangles

Tangles can be created after defeating targets with Strand abilities. The enemy dissolves into a “tangle” that hovers in the air and can be used in a variety of ways. You can shoot a tangle to detonate it, causing damage to nearby enemies; you can pick up and throw a tangle like a grenade; or you can grapple to a tangle for free. You can also combine these effects; for instance by picking up and throwing a tangle, then grappling to it and letting it pull you along.

Threadlings

Threadlings are the Warlock specialty, but any class can create them. They’re little worm-like creatures that will seek out enemies and explode. Warlocks can keep up to five threadlings ready to deploy at any time.

Debuffs

Suspend

Suspend does what it sounds like: it suspends targets in the air, preventing them from attacking and exposing their weak points. Suspend won’t work on bosses, but it does slow them a bit. When used against other Guardians in PvP, Suspend will slow them but still allow them to move and attack.

Sever

Sever is a debuff that reduces the amount of damage enemies cause.

Unraveled

Enemies that are “unraveled” will emit small Strand projectiles when they’re hit, which seek out nearby enemies (or the same enemy if there’s no one around). This works like the Jolt effect from the Arc subclass.

Grenades

Shackle Grenade

The Shackle grenade, also known as the “bola grenade”, will damage and suspend the target it hits, and also splits into multiple sub-grenades that will suspend nearby enemies. It’s my personal favorite.

Threadling Grenade

The Threadling grenade splits into Threadlings mid-flight.

Grapple

Grapple replaces your grenade ability with a grappling hook. You can grapple to objects in the world or onto a point in mid-air. During and shortly after the grapple, you can use your melee to create an area-of-effect explosion and unravel enemies (“you are the grenade”). There are a lot of fun examples of the grapple being used in the world due to interactions with various enemies or environments.

Fragments

Fragments are also shared between all classes. There are several, so I’m just going to do a quick run-down:

Thread of Mind

Defeating suspended targets grants class ability energy.

Thread of Fury

Damaging targets with a Tangle grants melee energy.

Thread of Ascent

Activating your grenade ability reloads your equipped weapon and grants bonus airborne effectiveness.

Thread of Finality

Finisher final blows create Threadlings.

Thread of Warding

Picking up an Orb of Power grants Woven Mail.

Thread of Wisdom

Defeating Suspended targets with precision final blows creates an Orb of Power.

Thread of Rebirth

Strand weapon final blows have a chance to create a Threadling.

Thread of Transmutation

While you have Woven Mail, weapon final blows create a Tangle.

Thread of Propagation

Powered melee final blows grant your Strand weapons Unraveling Rounds.

Thread of Evolution

Threadlings travel further and deal additional damage.

Thread of Isolation

Landing rapid precision hits emits a Severing burst from the target.

Thread of Binding

Super final blows emit a Suspending burst from the target.

Thread of Generation

Dealing damage grants grenade energy.

Thread of Continuity

Suspend, Unravel, and Sever effects applied to targets have increased duration.

Classes

Titan Berserker

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.

Super

The Berserker’s super is “Bladefury”, summoning a pair of blades with two attacks: a light attack to leap at a target and slash, severing it and increasing your attack speed and granting heavy attack energy; and a heavy attack that creates two projectiles that seek targets and suspend on hit. Despite being a roaming melee super, which typically under-performs against bosses, Bladefury can put out a surprising amount of single-target damage thanks to the attack speed increases and projectile attack.

Melee

The Titan melee ability is “Frenzied Blade”, which has three charges and performs a quick dash and slash that Severs targets (similar to the super). It works a bit like shoulder charge melees, but is instant like the Stasis melee. I’ve used it to save myself when a jump comes up just a little too short.

Aspects
Into The Fray

Into The Fray grants Woven Mail to the Titan and nearby allies when destroying a Tangle (either by shooting it or throwing it) or casting their super. It works great, though I’ve found that you have to be in range of the Tangle detonation to actually get the buff; you can’t just fire at a Tangle a mile away.

Drengr’s Lash

Drengr’s Lash causes the Titan’s Barricade to create a ripple that runs along the ground that suspends and damages any enemy it hits.

Exotic Armor

The new Titan exotic armor piece for Strand, Abeyant Leap, causes Drengr’s Lash to spawn two additional projectiles (for a total of three), which track more aggressively and travel further, and also grants Woven Mail when suspending a target. With the exotic, you can suspend large groups of enemies, and it provides an on-demand source of Woven Mail.

Titan Build

My current Titan build focuses on Suspend and Woven Mail, using the Abeyant Leap exotic and Shackle grenade to keep enemies almost perpetually held:

Class Ability: Rally Barricade
Grenade: Shackle
Aspects: Into The Fray, Drengr’s Lash (the only two options)
Fragments: Thread of Mind, Thread of Generation, Thread of Continuity, Thread of Isolation
Key Mods: Font of Restoration, Font of Endurance, Font of Vigor, Font of Focus, Time Dilation

I’m still experimenting with my Strand build, which seems a little weak at times. Previously I used Thread of Fury, to gain melee energy from Tangle damage, but since I can’t use the melee consistently (it doesn’t always activate when I press my attack key), I avoid it entirely, which means that’s usually a waste. I’ve swapped it for Thread of Isolation here, to give me more opportunity to Sever targets. I’ve been using Font of Restoration for a while to max out my Recovery stat (so I regain health more quickly), and the recent removal of all the melee-focused mods freed up a lot of room, so I put in the other Font mods to give me four maxed stats (Resilience, Recovery, Discipline, Strength) whenever I have armor charge. Time Dilation just makes those charges last longer.

Hunter Threadrunner

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

Super

The Threadrunner super is Silkstrike, which lets the Hunter use their Grapple more frequently, and also gives them a rope dart to attack enemies at close-to-mid range. The rope dart deals crit damage when it hits near the end of its range.

Melee

The Hunter melee Threaded Spike, which throws a dart that bounces between targets before returning, refunding energy for each enemy hit. Catching the spike with perfect timing rewards additional energy.

Aspects
Ensnaring Slam

Ensnaring Slam allows Hunters to use their class ability in mid-air to dive to the ground, suspending all nearby targets.

Widow’s Silk

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” at the grapple point, which can be used by players freely.

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). Though I’ve seen that using a different debuff (like a Tractor Cannon shot, which weakens enemies) allows the super to put out significant damage without needing to worry about positioning.

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 an army of Threadlings to attack enemies. All classes can use Threadlings, but for Warlocks, and 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 and orbiting the Warlock. The next time the Warlock attack an enemy, these perched Threadlings will jump down and attack the target.

Super

The Warlock super is Needlestorm, which summons a barrage of needles. The needles stick into enemies or the environment, then detonate and transform into Threadlings that seek out nearby enemies.

Melee

The Warlock melee is Arcane Needle, which summons a projectile that tracks targets and unravels enemies. There’s a fancy animation to fling the three charges.

Unravel is a very powerful effect, and when used with certain exotics, the Warlock melee can even kill bosses.

Aspects
Mindspun Invocation

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

Weaver’s Call has the Warlock summon three Threadling eggs when they cast their Rift.

Thoughts

I need to find some time to get my Warlock through the Lightfall campaign to unlock Strand and try out these Threadlings. There are a lot of different ways to create Threadlings (even using weapons with the new Hatchling perk), so Warlocks can use the Shackle grenade with Mindspun Invocation to suspend enemies.

I’ve also seen some crazy builds with the Arcane Needle melee combined with Necrotic Grips, an exotic that makes powered melee attacks poison enemies. The poison tick damage triggers the unravel effect, which will propagate the poison to other enemies (or re-apply it to the same enemy); it can even take out bosses. (It was so bad that Bungie disabled Necrotic Grips for the raid race.)

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

Review: Patron

I picked up Patron during Steam’s winter sale because it was cheap ($8), had decent reviews (75% positive), and it sounded like it’d be my sort of thing. After playing long enough to earn all the achievements, I’ve found that while it’s not bad, it’s lacking a lot of things that could make it great.

I’ll start off with the positives: Patron looks good, has a nice ambient soundtrack, and the UI serves to get the job done. There’s plenty of stuff to build, from a handful of houses to a few dozen town and production buildings; most with some purpose in your town. Many of those buildings can be upgraded to either increase their production, lower their upkeep, or increase their workforce, allowing you to spend resources to improve existing buildings instead of building new ones. At your town hall, you can set various decrees that have global effects like increasing production or reducing upkeep, which is a nice touch.

Surviving the first winter took me a few tries just to get the balance right. You really just need shelter, food, and firewood, but the hardest part is getting that done with the handful of peasants you start with. However, once you’re past the first winter, the game becomes pretty easy; the most difficult part is keeping up with housing as more and more people come to your town. After building out my first town with a few hundred houses, I decided to just quit and let the homeless leave once they were fed up.

And before I get to the negatives (which are going to be plentiful mostly because they’re easier to talk about), I want to reiterate that Patron is a decent survival city-builder in the vein of Banished. However, I think Patron ends up closer to the bottom when compared to similar games like Banished and Farthest Frontier.

This guy was always complaining about coal.

Most of what’s wrong with Patron comes down to annoyances due to a lack of information in the UI. Survival city builders, by their nature, involve a lot of resource management – you need to know what you’re producing, how much you’re producing, where it’s going, etc. While Patron’s UI exposes a lot of this information, sometimes it’s lacking in ways that completely shut down production chains.

Let’s take something as simple as breadmaking. To make bread, you need a windmill to turn the wheat to flour and a bakery to turn the flour to bread. The UI says my fully-upgraded windmill will take 1750 wheat and turn that into 3950 flour per year. Likewise, the UI informs me that the bakery will take 750 flour and 750 firewood to produce 1881 bread per year. However, despite sitting on tens of thousands of wheat, my bakeries are sitting idle, unable to get their resources. Beyond an exclamation point telling me that there’s a problem getting the resources, I’m left bewildered as to what the problem may be. The mill and bakery are literally next to each other, with a depot a short walk away for deliveries from the stockpile. I ended up solving the problem by just importing flour when I was below a certain amount.

There’s likely a very logical reason why things aren’t running as smoothly as they could be, but there’s nothing to tell me what’s wrong. Maybe the workers need to live nearby? But I have no control over where people live, and they don’t shuffle around to live closer to their jobs, so that seems like an odd requirement.

Fine, leave! I didn’t want you here anyway!

Another problem I faced was with people who were upset about something in my town, typically safety, but the town had high satisfaction in that area. My assumption is that while my citizens were happy on average, there were one or two people who were completely unhappy. But again, there’s no way to tell that – all you ever see are averages unless you click on every individual house to see the satisfaction for the family there, and I’m definitely not doing that.

Concerns like safety can be raised by building certain structures – guardhouses or watchtowers for safety – and while they work just fine, there’s no way to see an overlay of what areas are covered by a structure. When building a new one, I can see its effective radius, but I can’t see if there are any other buildings covering the same area. This has led to me placing redundant buildings near each other.

The tech tree is pretty chaotic as well. There are some things that have nonsensical requirements (not sure why I need a university before I can unlock the last crops), and other things have requirements in separate branches (so you can unlock them before being able to produce the resources to build them). I think this is just a limitation of how the tree is arranged, being very short and wide, so things were shuffled around to put them later on the tree even though they require things from earlier on the tree. There’s also no easy way to search for anything, so while the deep research tree could be a great way to keep things interesting, it ends up being another annoyance.

Get used to the job board. You’ll be looking at it a lot.

And finally, my biggest annoyance: the job board. I’m going to compare this to Banished since it’s the easiest comparison. In both Patron and Banished, the job board serves to set how many people you want working in each profession, with any leftovers in a general “worker” category that transport resources and build structures. Where they differ, however, is what happens when you lose a worker. In Banished, if you had 5 workers assigned to woodcutting and one died, a worker would fill their place (unless you had no workers remaining, in which case the job would be left unfilled). In Patron, when a worker dies, nothing happens. You just have one fewer worker in that profession. Your production dips, and if you’re not careful, wreck a nicely-balanced system. So you’re left micromanaging a UI just to keep things all the jobs filled.

Making sure all my houses are insulated…

Also, while being able to upgrade buildings is interesting, having to upgrade every single house with insulation became very tedious late-game.

Though even with the UI being a pretty frequent annoyance, I still found the game to be pretty easy (on normal difficulty). Beyond the first winter, things were simple, and I just kept building new things whenever I was low. Like a lot of these games, the key is just stockpiling huge amounts of every resource. Even if you’re having a hard time producing something in sufficient quantities, you can just import it from the harbor, since you’ll have plenty of coin to burn anyway.

So unfortunately, while Patron does have some things going for it, it’s hampered by its poor UI and some odd systems. The annoyances are relatively minor but frequent and numerous; death by a thousand cuts. In the end, I’d only recommend Patron to someone desperate for a Banished-style city builder, but there are numerous other games that fill the space better: Banished itself and Farthest Frontier immediately come to mind.

Categories
Games Reviews

Review: Mars Horizon

Rocket launch in Mars Horizons

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.

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Games Reviews

Review: Nebulous Fleet Command (Early Access)

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 just can’t get that damn sphere to cooperate.

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Games Reviews

Review: Dice Legacy

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.