What are you playing? (2022 Edition)

[nicked]

Kingdom of the Dead It's got a great visual style that reminds me of Harry Clarke's illustrations of Poe short stories, a great soundtrack that is almost John Carpenter-esque, and a cool (if a bit cliched) premise. The shooting is fine but not particularly challenging. The level design is repetitive and doesn't break the mould until the last couple of missions. It's over quickly but doesn't outstay its welcome. Style over substance, but an enjoyable diversion for a couple of hours.

[Nameless Voice]

I was exploring my enormous backlog and finally gave Robin Hood a try (I think I bought it in 2014). I'm hooked so far. It's in the style of the old Commandos games and has a lovely cutaway style for building interiors.

I tried playing this a while back, but it was too buggy for me, so I didn't get anywhere with it.
I can't remember the exact problems I had now, but they were bad enough that I decided not to bother with it at the time.

Desperados: Dead or Alive is great. I bounced off Cooper's Revenge hard. It tried to do the 3D thing and failed at it, and also seemed to have a lot less charm than the first game. The voice actors didn't reprise their roles, and the new Doc especially just sounded really Wrong.

I think Commandos has a similar problem. The first game + expansion was great, the second was okay but lacked a bit of the charm, and the third also tried to do the 3D thing, badly, and just didn't click with me (so I never finished it.)

The modern tactical-stealth games from Mimimi are great. Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics. Strong recommendation for both.
They manage the switch to 3D and do it well, taking what was great about the old games and innovating on them.
I recently played the new standalone DLC for Shadow Tactics, Aiko's Choice, and it was nice to get back into that world for a few extra levels, even if the DLC was sadly fairly short.

[thhunter]

I am currently playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla. I love the Assassin's Creed series and I think Valhalla is the best of them all. The graphics in this game are great.

[Harvester]

Impostor Factory is the third game in a series by Freebird Games, the brainchild of Kan Gao (three major releases, a few minor games notwithstanding). At first it seems to be unrelated to the other games, but to speak about how it ties into the series would be a spoiler. Again, this game features lovely pixel art with good animations, beautiful music, and touching and also sometimes goofy writing. What I liked a little less about this game compared to To The Moon and Finding Paradise is that while the overall plot is clear, some of the specifics concerning simulations within simulations remain a little muddy. But what I really play these games for - aside from the lovely retro aesthetic - are the emotional moments. The whole second act of the game is basically a long version of the first 15 minutes of the movie Up with similar themes, and the game ends on another such sequence. These sequences, where you see a whole life play out, were done well enough to make me have to struggle to hold back tears. It's safe to say that if you liked the previous game, this game is also easily worth the $8.something dollars for the 4 or 5 hours it takes to play through its poignant story. There's no challenge to its gameplay, it's just the story, but that was more than enough for me.

[EvaUnit02]

Giving GTA 4 a whirl again, since modders finally fixed the the outstanding performance issues that affected the PC port since its inception (see DXVK, a DirectX to Vulkan wrapper). Just as dull early game as I remember. IIRC, this had a 30-40 hr campaign? It was definitely a slog when I played it on Xbox 360 in the late 2000's. Now? Chill busy work that keeps me engaged while I listen to podcasts, like how I treat most open world games. I still consider it to be a low point for the series since transitioning to 3D.

Played through the expansions 2 or 3 years ago (The Lost and the Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony). They were genuinely great and didn't outstay their welcome.

[Yakoob]

I tried giving I am Setsuna a try and, after and hour, decided to just refund it. The art style and piano music is beautiful and moody, but the whole game is just so..... boring. The characters are boring. The story is boring. The world is boring. The combat is boring. There just wasn't a single thing in the first hour that made me motivated to keep going (and the whole story feels like a rehash - "FFX but sad")



On the upside. I recently beat Nobody Saves the World and enjoyed it a whole ton. It's basically "grind the game" but they made the grind feel pretty fun and rewarding, and it was over right before it started getting boring. Plus, the music absolutely SLAPS

[Malf]

Surprised there's not a thread about it, but Weird West came out today, and is a grand old thing.
A realtime-tactical cowpoke RPG with light group mechanics and a decent RPG power system, it's made by ex-Arkane staff and has a heavy focus on freeform gameplay, with touches reminiscent of the original Fallout.
It also has a really cool, creepy occult thing going for it too, as well as a dash of Divinity: Original Sin's "surface" stuff.
I'm having to tear myself away from it to go to bed, but I can't wait to get back to it.

[G_ManX]

I'm loving Horizon Zero Dawn on PC at the moment. I love open world games and still play Skyrim regularly (all vanilla, no mods). HZD is a stunning game visually and though there are no quick-saves (only checkpoints) which would usually be a turn off for me, the save points are easy enough to reach.

I'm loving the mix of tribal tech - spears and bows - against mechanical beasts. And who can resist robot dinosaurs?

Did I mention it looks spectacular?

[samIamsad]

Surprised there's not a thread about it, but Weird West came out today.

Was surprised about this as well. When it was announced I was a bit sceptical/hesistant about the unusual perspective (as in: it's not what you immediately expected from the people who previously worked on Arx Fatalis, Dishonored or Prey).

But this thing has kept me up all night. The camera, AI and balancing needs a bit of luvin though, I've raised one imo pretty obvious oversight in their official feature request already. Upvote if you agree (and if you don't try this for yourself).

https://weirdwest.featureupvote.com/...-action-points

Finished playing the first character (the bounty hunter) yesterday night. Now I'm playing the Pigman, and that's really fascinating if they really roll with it, like the nearby town to the Pigmen hideout being that hostile that the sheriff tells you right upon entry to leave ... or get shot.

Up to that point settlements were... settlements. A place to make friends, er companions, shop up and rest (if you're not one of those killing innocents, that is). This turns things slightly on its head. However, it doesn't seem to be every settlement affected, most of the time, you seem to receive absuse, mistrust and hatred in the form of dialogue.

Really looking forward also to what they plan post-release, too.

[henke]

Seeing a lot of people surprised by the absence of a Weird West thread but not a lot of people making a Weird West thread.

Yeah btw I wanna play this too at some point. Might pick it up this week.

[nicked]

I just finished Sable, and really enjoyed it.

The art style is gorgeous and deceptively simple. The story and overarching lore of the world is engaging and well-told, if somewhat derivative - in a lot of ways it feels like a mash-up of every Studio Ghibli film - it's a sort of Kiki's Delivery Service set in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

On paper, the gameplay is extremely derivative - it's basically Assassin's Creed or any similar open world game, just without any combat.

It's occasionally buggy and most of the quests are simplistic and trivial.

And yet... and yet... somehow, despite sounding a bit generic and forgettable when you try to describe it, I found the whole to be greater than the sum of it's parts, and had a really good time with it.

It's super chill and low stakes, and I wouldn't blame anyone for getting bored with it, but if the thought of zoning out and doing lots of "side quest" stuff in an intriguing sci-fi setting appeals, then it's worth your time in my opinion.

[EvaUnit02]

and though there are no quick-saves (only checkpoints) which would usually be a turn off for me, the save points are easy enough to reach.

A lack of save anywhere has been a rare commodity for something like 15 years now, so you must not have had many games to play then? Save anywhere seemingly disappeared as consoles became the platform for large publisher games from around 2006 onward.

Checkpoints and save points are a design constraint because of console hardware limitations prior to 7th gen - they didn't have permanent storage solutions. There's no real excuse NOT to have save anywhere in games made for consoles from the 2010's onward, yet here we are. Some game design decisions seem to persist just due it being "tradition" now.

[nicked]

Eh? Most open world games just save on the fly every time you do anything of note.

[Cipheron]

Been playing AI Dungeon recently, which is a totally freeform text adventure that uses deep learning / GPT style AI. I put one of the stories from it in a new thread. Imagine an old text adventure, but you can type virtually anything in, and the game will try and accommodate it.

[Thirith]

I'm almost done with replaying Horizon Zero Dawn, and I honestly think I enjoyed it better the second time around - though perhaps also because I focused on the game and fast-forwarded through many of the conversations. It's been just the right kind of shallow but moreish that kept me reasonably distracted over the last few weeks. Mind you, I'm looking forward to moving on to something else, something smaller. Tunic, perhaps?

[nicked]

Picked up https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...ive_Me_Father/ and got exactly what I asked for - a really great retro FPS. It's basically a Cthulhu-themed Doom clone with a great comic-book art style and really satisfying shooting. I had a few gripes with it, some of which have already been patched since I finished it, but on the whole, highly recommended if you like this kinda thing.

[Thirith]

Just finished Horizon Zero Dawn - fun, even if underneath the world building, it's pretty conventional open world fare - and got started on Tunic, which I've been looking for ever since reading the reviews. I immediately like how, in spite of its cutesy graphics, it creates a genuine sense of mystery that reminds me of Fez, of all things.

[henke]

Been playing a lot of Insurmountable this weekend. I played this roguelite mountaineering game last year when it came out, but I was kinda so-so on it. The random events got repetetive fast and the whole campaign-structure was very barebones, luckily a big 2.0 Update just got released which improves both those things. The storytelling is much stronger now (it's kinda a Lost-ish tale of a mysterious mountain with anomalies and time-loops and whatnot) and it has a new in-between-missions hub where you can upgrade your characters and pick equipment for the next mission or sidemission. There's more variety in the mountains and events now as well.



I was kinda lukewarm on this after the initial release, but with this update I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to anyone who likes exploration and adventure and trying not to freeze to death or go insane on a great big mountain. It's fun!

oh yeah and it's free right now on the Epic Store

[Tomi]

I've been playing Rebel Galaxy (thanks faetal!), a fun space arcade game from 2015.

In theory this should be my dream game - a grand space adventure where you can do whatever you want to do, and go wherever you want to go. There's exploration, bounty hunting, trading, mining, big space battles. There's quite a lot going on, but it's still very repetitive, even boring at times. There are like five different types of missions, and you grind those until you're rich enough to upgrade your ship so that you can get on with the story missions. Trading might be a good way to get rich too, but I haven't figured out yet how to get good at it. Mining is even more boring than it sounds, thanks to the wonky camera, the awkward UI, and the annoyingly impractical targeting system. Those three affect many other things in this game as well.

But damn, Rebel Galaxy is addictive as hell. I just can't stop playing those repetitive missions, the game somehow manages to pull off that good old "one more turn/mission" thing. There are some massive space battles, and even though you spend most of the time just circling around and watching the automated turrets do their job as things blow up, they're still plenty of fun. I wouldn't mind a bit more micro-management though, more control over my ship. I'm also a bit disappointed by the lack of random encounters and events in the game - the predictable "ambushes" at cargo drop points or whatever aren't particularly random or even exciting.

I've already played this game for quite a few hours, and I've only just left the first galaxy behind. The ship upgrade loop seems to start all over again in galaxy #2, so I wonder if I've already seen pretty much everything that Rebel Galaxy has to offer. There are still at least ten more galaxies to visit, so I doubt that I'll ever get to see the end of this game. It's been a fun ride though, and it has satisfied my thirst for a fun space adventure at least a bit.

Has anyone played Rebel Galaxy Outlaw?

[Thirith]

I'm probably about halfway through Tunic, and while I'm enjoying it a lot, I would definitely say that it frontloads its best bits. It's a solid, immensely charming (and at times hard-as-nails) game, but the things that are most surprising and intriguing come early, and then the game doesn't necessarily build on those so much as just keep delivering the same things. It's all crafted very well, but it doesn't have the sustained sense of discovery that Fez had.

[henke]

This weekend I’m playing through Thief 2014.

For the third time.

For some reason.

[Aja]

I played through it twice myself back in the day. Even though it was deficient in so many ways, I enjoyed the atmosphere and core gameplay.

[nicked]

I have been playing Teardown, which just came out of early access. It's something special, this game.
It somehow manages to look visually highly realistic, despite the chunky voxels that the world is made from. It's more like a photo that's had a mosaic filter applied rather than the 3D pixel art look I would normally associate with voxels.
The destruction, physics and effects are as close to real simulation as you can get with voxels, meaning some of the dynamic situations that can occur are incredible.
So it would have been impressive enough as a straightforward destruction sandbox, but that wouldn't have appealed to me particularly. I like my games to have some purpose or narrative thread to keep me engaged. But Teardown succeeds here as well, with its series of increasingly challenging heist missions where you take jobs from various GTA-style reprobates.
Some of the tougher missions are like a chaotic, destruction-based Hitman game - you'll need to carefully plan a route and set up everything you need in advance so that you can race round the map grabbing everything you need once the alarm goes off.
It's hard to compare this game to anything else, it feels really quite unique in what it's achieved.

[WingedKagouti]

I've been playing some Insurmountable (recent EGS freebie) these last days and from what I've read it got major overhaul recently where you now have an actual campaign instead of a bunch of "not really connected climbs". It's been quite engrossing so far and I spent 6 hours on my "I should at least try this game out" session. Having to plan the equipment for each climb depending on the specific factors and tasks as well as the character you take makes for some different climbs. And even if you start seeing the same events over and over, you aren't guaranteed the same outcome for each option, which can have an impact on the rest of the climb.

I also like that there's a choice in how you climb, do you take a faster but more energy heavy route or do you go for the energy efficient path that takes longer. Take a "small" detour to grab an encounter and spend some extra energy for a potential benefit. Or ignore all distractions and focus on the goal alone and hope you have the resources required. This is a game where the resource management feels good instead of just being a bunch of bars you have to keep up.

[EvaUnit02]

I finished replaying Quake 4 the other day. Really little sci-fi campaign which echoes both James Cameron's Aliens and early Call of Duty cinematic war campaigns. The infamous Stroggification sequence still has the impact it had back in the day.

Currently following it up a cool little Q4 campaign mod called "False Dawn", it's short but the level design is very good. The modder went on to design levels for AAA games Watch Dogs 2 and Watch Dogs: Legion.