This was popular for a while when it was in Early Access but I usually wait until a game is finished before even considering buying it. Unfortunately this seems to be one of those cases when the finished game is worse than the work in progress version as the campaign is a real slog to get through and they even took out some ease-of-life features. The scenarios are quite difficult and they made an iron man style mandatory. It’s quite impressive how they’re not afraid of throwing absolutely massive hordes at zombies at you, but in the end it’s not worth the aggravation and I didn’t finish the game.
This is probably the most popular mod for Assetto Corsa and I’ve wanted to play around with it for some time now. The system requirements are quite significant however so I put it off until I’d upgraded my PC. Now that I’ve done so, I thought I’d also put in the work to make this 10-year old game look as good as it possibly can. This means finally getting around to buying Pure, installing a new pp filter and even getting the right custom shaders patch settings. I can’t honestly say that it looks like a brand new game but it does make for a drastic graphical improvement.
The investigative genre is notoriously hard to implement as a video game. Any detective story must necessarily be written by the designers in advance, so how to meaningfully use deduction as a gameplay mechanic? One way is to constrain the scope of the investigation in a specific way so that the game can easily verify if the player is correct. This is how the excellent Return of the Obra Dinn does it. I thought I’d see how this game about a murder investigation set in a very strange world did it. Unfortunately while the story is well-written, with multiple suspects and lines of investigation, the mechanics are nothing special. It’s all about thoroughly exploring every nook and cranny of the island to collect all the clues. I enjoyed the world and the storyline but it doesn’t feel like a true investigative game to me.
I held off on playing this for some time because it was an Epic Games exclusive for a while and after that it was confusing how they folded everything under the World of Assassination umbrella. Even figuring out what to actually buy on Steam if I only wanted to play the Hitman 3 campaign was something of a chore. I love the series so much I was also going to play it of course but it was probably a good idea to give it a bit of time because I can still get burned out by playing too much of something I enjoy. This final installment of the trilogy got off to a rocky start for me as the Dubai map was underwhelming but the rest are so very good with some interesting variations of the existing formula. I am however upset by the unreliable availability of the servers as it has an online requirement even though I’m only interested in the single-player experience.
This reminded me of the old Descent video game from back in the day, the earliest game that offered true 3D combat in a spaceship. It was incredibly easy to get lost in the labyrinthine corridors and could be a nauseating experience. Chorus is much more forgiving as it mostly takes place in wide, open areas and has a very simplified control system that even occasionally corrects your rotation by itself. I’ve found that an old-fashioned mouse and keyboard system works better than a gamepad and there’s no question of trying to use a joystick. While it doesn’t have a realistic flight model, it excels in making you feel like an awesome starfighter pilot standing alone against an entire enemy fleet. It’s very lore-heavy but the story isn’t too bad at all and I’d say the game is just about the right length.
As usual, I’m way late to the party on this one, so late that I bought this a while back on Steam and still hadn’t played it when Epic offered it for free. I did read up on opinions about it when it was first released and now that I’ve finished it, my thoughts are largely the same. It’s a fantastically original take on the turn-based tactics type of game that are now sometimes called the XCOM alike. But it has a staggering amount of out-of-combat story and exploration content that is way out of whack compared to the tactical gameplay. This ended up being a commercial failure which is why it was offered for free on Epic so quickly and that’s a real shame because the gameplay is really good and this is an excellent use of the Marvel license.
This was another free game on Epic that I picked up some time ago and would never have bought on my own. It’s amusing because gamers have been talking up the potential of post-apocalyptic builder games for ages and now we have a whole bunch of them coming out. Unfortunately this one is as bland as you can get, with mechanics similar to any other city building game and very few elements that are in-theme. I spent some time getting to know how it works but the whole time I was thinking how much better Frostpunk was in every way and so dropped it pretty quick.
