Despite my gripes, I did like the first game enough that I would eventually play this so now I have. There are so many things that are similar and so many that are different that it’s hard to decide where to start. I will note that like the first game this was quite a high-profile release but it’s still noticeably not an AAA-quality. It actually feels a little short for the epic scale that it is going for and there are all kinds of shortcuts in the writing and mechanics. Still it’s a solid party-based RPG and I suppose some compromises have to be accepted for it to even exist.

It’s been months since I first posted about this game but I’ve since decided to keep this permanently installed on my PC so that I can periodically return to it. It’s the only game that gets such treatment on my PC. I fear that my driving skills will deteriorate too much between games if I don’t keep practicing and I do want to get good at rally games in particular. Even though I’m only playing this once in a while, it still takes up some of my gaming time and reduces my ability to try new stuff and write about them here.

This was a free game on Epic and these days I choose to not even accept them if I know I’ll never play a title. This one attracted me due to it being set in 14th century France and ostensibly being about the black plague. I also believed that it would be a narrative-heavy, relatively short game with light gameplay mechanics. As it turned out these impressions were all incorrect. Instead this is a full-on stealth game with significant combat mechanics, is fairly substantial in length and the plague is represented only as the endless horde of rats that is your primary antagonist. I was miffed for a long while for not getting the game I expected but honestly the game is solid enough that it eventually managed to win me around anyway.

I tend to shy away from any first person shooters now especially ones that aren’t open-world games. They’re just not my thing now that I’m older and they all mostly cater to the multiplayer crowd nowadays anyway. But enough people have called the single-player campaign in Titanfall 2 best-in-class, that is the best entry in the shooter genre for years, that I feel that I have to check it out especially since it’s so cheap now. Honestly this is a 2016 game but I’m so far behind the curve and so ignorant of graphics in general I suppose, that this looks like the prettiest game I’ve played in a while.

Farming games were popular for a while and I don’t mean the silly ones like Farmville but the more substantial ones like the Harvest Moon series. But the latter was mostly confined to console platforms for a long time so I never had a chance to try them. Eventually Stardew Valley appeared for the PC which I understand is a pretty typical clone of this style of game and so I bought it. But it still took me this long to get around to actually play it and by now of course no one cares about this genre any longer.

I haven’t played basketball, either in real life or as a video game, since high school and even then it’s not I fully understood the sport anyway. But as most will know, this title was a giveaway on the Epic platform a while back and I was curious about what a modern sports game is like these days. Basketball at least isn’t totally cryptic to me like American football is but do note that I’m only taking a brief look at this game so this isn’t a real review or anything like that as this is all too unfamiliar to me. I don’t even know what most of the terms used in this game means.

This is another game that has been sitting unplayed in my library for way too long even though I was quite enthusiastic about it when it was first released. It’s just a matter of it being known for being a very difficult game that would require considerable investment and too many titles competing for my time. The difficult part is certainly right. A couple of days after starting to play, my band of mercenaries was wiped out to the last man. I had to experiment with a few more restarts at lowered difficulty levels in order to understand how it works before committing to it for real at normal difficulty.