I have three games on the go at the moment. Gotta enjoy those few weeks off from university, when I actually have some time.
Empyrion: playing this with my partner. This really feels like a game that could be amazing if the devs gave it a bit of polish, cleaned up the bugs, and updated the in-game information with the current game mechanics. There’s something deeply frustrating about not knowing how to do something, and every post on Steam community and Reddit has a different answer, and very few of those answers are correct in the current version of the game. It’s a shame, because I’m really loving the actual gameplay. I spent most of today rebuilding my ship: suffice to say, the NPC faction that blasted holes in the previous version of the ship are going to rue the day they blasted holes in my ship. I have shields and a lot more guns. 😈
Earthlock: still enjoying this. Delightful RPG in the style of 90s Final Fantasy games. The storyline isn’t wowing me. It’s fine, very standard fantasy, but it doesn’t stand out as anything really amazing. But it’s a nice, easy-playing game with a lot of nice elements. It’s cute, the gameplay mechanics are interesting, and the puzzles are just the right balance between too easy and too hard. And I can plant trees that, for some reason, spawn frogs around them. I have no idea why, but I’m not complaining. 🐸
Maneater: I really had no idea how much I needed this game in my life until I started playing it. It’s been a rough couple of months, and something about being a shark on a quest for vengeance is incredibly cathartic. Those people in that fancy yacht totally had it coming. My glee definitely did escalate once I moved into an area with lots of rich people. More golf courses should have electric sharks sliding through them, chomping on the golfers. 🦈
As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there’s a sale or something. It doesn’t really affect me that much.
But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don’t let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.
I finally picked up Subnautica Below Zero. For some reason I had it in my head that it was an expansion or 1.5 type release rather than a full sequel, so I had put it off longer than I would have otherwise.
I’ve played a handful of survival/crafting games since completing the first Subnautica a couple years ago, and nothing I’ve seen or played does what Subnautica does so well: the progression path is perfectly tuned and focused to keep you obtaining new things at just the right pace while enabling further and further exploration. There’s a really addictive feeling of empowerment that comes with each accomplishment, going from bare swimming to zooming with the seaglide, to building a better tank to stay underwater longer, to eventually having massive vehicles and scanning equipment and defensive weapons. Mix it all together with the excitement from finally reaching and exploring new spaces you could only glimpse before, finding new supplies and equipment, and it’s just an incredibly fun and rewarding time.
I think a common complaint with Below Zero was that it didn’t do enough differently, but that doesn’t bother me at all. I think the biggest problem I have with other survival/crafting games is that they all seem designed for perpetual play (e.g., No Man’s Sky). Both Subnautica games are single-player at their core, with the attendant intentional elegance, and Below Zero strikes that near-perfect balance as well as its predecessor (so far).
Only buy a couple or so games a year these days, been really enjoying an arena fighting game I came across a little while ago. Only just started putting a few hours into it but always appreciate a game that makes you have to work on skill to progress.
I wouldn’t say there’s much in the way of management, its short fights mostly. Something I like about it are the fairly strong modifiers for each character type and how it pushes you into using them all so you get forced into different types of play.
I’m also trying to mainly support small dev team games these days and I think this made by one person which I find super impressive. You die and restart a lot, which I also enjoy
Probably not much this time. I don’t think Dredge really falls under lesser known, but I might pick that up. I’ll probably get House Flipper 2 - the first one was one of my go-tos for destressing, so I’m hoping the sequel will fill the same niche. Otherwise, I’ve either bought most of what I’ve been looking at in previous sales or played it on gamepass/ea play.
I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I’ve been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.
My dad got me that game on his old laptop when I was a kid. It barely ran, but boy was it exciting ❤️.
The Plasma gun was my favourite 🫡. Especially in that space level… The one where you could jump outside the windows.
I have a bone to pick with Epic regarding Unreal Engine as well. Terrible optimisation. Any game I play, if made using UE, is terrible.
I’ve played the first two of the Tomb Raider trilogy on medium on my 4GB GTX 1650, i7 9th Gen, 16GB RAM laptop. This device has pushed me through my engineering and still continues to run most of my work. It also runs Forza Horizon 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 good enough.
Yet I install Deliver Us Mars, a game with a much smaller scale, and my beautiful beast starts to stutter. 🫠🫠🫠
Yeah. They had an alpha out for a while and just deserted it after fortnite took off. I really enjoyed playing it, too.
The optimization is kind of up to the devs. It’s fairly accessible to all sorts of people with varying levels of skill, but you still have to identify bottlenecks and move to c++ sometimes. Making it easy to implement in the editor means some people will make shit they can’t optimize or support.
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