Since I’ve gotten a driving wheel, I’ve been trying out all kinds of driving games. Yet I’m still at heart a computer nerd who knows nothing about cars at all and drives an automatic in real life. So when this popped up as a free game on Epic, I immediately picked it up, thinking I might learn a thing or two. As you might expect, no, you can’t learn how to be a mechanic from a video game but it does at least give you some idea of the mechanical components that make up a car and how they all fit together, plus the tools and equipment that are found in a garage. Unfortunately it is also a simulator in another, less pleasant way. After a while playing this becomes repetitive and grindy enough that it feels almost like a real job.

My Steam Replay tells me that by far my most played game of 2022 has continued to be Dirt Rally 2.0 as I’ve made a more determined effort to go through just about every bit of content in it. But of course all sim rally racers will tell you that the greatest ever sim rally game ever made continues to be Richard Burns Rally, a game that was first released in 2004. Its makers having long gone out of business, the game is today maintained by a community of fans and modders, and is effectively free to download. I elected to download the version from rallysimfans.hu, the so-called Hungarian plugin as everyone says it is the most developed and has the largest community.

As I promised a while back, I enjoyed Shadow Tactics so much that I decided then and there that I would play the Western-themed but similar genre game by the same developer. It took a while but here we are. This title pretty much offers the exact same type of gameplay and I unfortunately discovered that I don’t really like the Western-theme much after this being the second such game I’ve played this month. The guns do indeed make this more action-oriented if you want but it still feels more satisfying to be stealthy so this felt like more of the same for me. Eventually I warmed up to it enough to be just as engrossed by the more complex levels but I still prefer the earlier game more and I had no desire to replay levels for the sake of grinding stars and achievements.

This was a free game that I decided to try for a bit because it’s been a while since I last played a shooter and I actually liked an earlier game in the series. I did finish it as the game seems rather easy to me even at hard difficulty and it’s quite short but I didn’t really like it at all. I thought it felt extremely linear and the story is just a tour of the most famous names of the Wild West with a classic revenge plot as the connective tissue.

So finally I get around to play something that is relatively recent. This was a virtually unknown game when it was released by a brand new studio. It quickly gained attention due to its beautiful cyberpunk visuals and due to the bugginess of Cyberpunk 2077 on release, was even hailed as the superior game. To me, the isometric view and gun-based reminded me of Crusader: No Remorse, an old game I have fond memories of, so I bought it not long afterwards. Unfortunately while its visuals are indeed fantastic, I’d judge its gameplay to be only average while its story and characters are downright forgettable.

This is one game I always knew I had to play even back when it was first released. Yet putting it off was the right decision because all the additions made to the final edition of the game including most importantly fully voiced dialogue for all characters makes it so much better. The voice acting is so critical and of such high quality in this game that I couldn’t imagine experiencing this game without it. There are some flaws in this game, such as how the plot is railroaded to go through some key bottlenecks no matter what you decide to do. But I love this type of dialogue-heavy, skill check-based RPG and I really want developers to make more games like this.

This is a meme game that was mostly popular on consoles and took a while to come to the PC. Even though it looks and sounds like a joke, it really is a game, with the gameplay being mostly puzzle solving with some light stealth elements. Finishing it takes only a few hours and the graphics are simple. But there’s so much charm and personality in it that I think it should win over just about anybody. As I understand it, this has been a real hit for children. Even if they’re too young to play it themselves, they seem delighted to watch their parents do so.