I bought this a while back after hearing about it being one of the better clones of Dark Souls while also featuring some unique mechanics of its own. I thought that the anime aesthetics might be appealing too. Unfortunately while it’s decent enough as an action game, it copies Dark Souls so apishly without consideration for why the legendary games did things that way that its very existence offends me. Plus I realized that the anime aesthetics come with anime story sensibilities that are so rote and full of the usual tropes.

Anyone who knows anything about videogaming doesn’t have to be told how popular this was a while back. It turned out to be highly influential as well as many other games have since copied its simple yet highly addictive design. I never picked it up back then because I hate rogue-likes and the art it uses looked basic to me. But I always knew that I would probably enjoy this somewhat due to my love for deckbuilding mechanics and this is too important of a cultural touchstone to ignore forever. Having put some time into this now, I can say that it really is absolutely brilliant and I was an idiot for putting it off so long.

So finishing up the DLC content as I’ve mentioned earlier ended up not taking very long at all. By my count, the DLC content includes two full maps with their associated missions, two Sniper Assassin maps and four Special Assignments set on the existing maps. However as I omitted writing about the Sniper Assassin mode at all in my previous post, I’ll include the first map of the set here as well.

This was distributed for free a while ago on Steam, providing the perfect opportunity to experience what is now hailed as the forerunner of the walking simulator genre. Most people can probably complete this game in about an hour so I was never willing to pay anything like its normal asking price even though I was curious about it. I’ve played enough of the games that came later to already know what to expect and overall this title is pretty much what I thought it would be.

I always knew I would play this after enjoying the previous game so much, only that was four years ago! It simply took this long for me to get around to it after waiting for all episodes to be released. I have to confess that I haven’t actually finished everything yet before writing this. There’s just too much content so I’ll leave the DLC content for a later date. Even with the base content trying to be truly completionist is too much. I’d had to settle for doing all of the mission stories and achieving level 20 mastery on each map but I gave up on the really exotic and tedious challenges.

I’ve had my eye on this game pretty much as soon as I heard of it. The premise of playing as a delivery driver in a cyberpunk city sounded awesome to me and the visuals in this game certainly looks the part. Superficially one might describe it as a kind of sci-fi Grand Theft Auto but there’s no combat in this game at all and without the DLC, no racing either, so the comparison doesn’t really work. Instead it feels more like an adventure game as you explore and experience the story of the city and the people in it.

I’m still feeling a bit burned out on Warhammer 40,000 due to overexposure but so many people have been raving about this take on the traditional 4X genre that I felt like giving a spin. This isn’t really a 4X game in that in line with the Warhammer theme there is only war, so there’s no diplomacy or trade between factions. But you do still get to found cities, build an economy and most importantly raise armies with which to wipe out the map.