The ability to pick something up easily, make some progress, pause it, and resume quickly at the next available window appears the best way to go.
Then you want the steam deck. This thing is powerful enough to run elden ring at a pretty stable 30 FPS, sometimes even up to 60, while being portable enough to fit in a backpack. I take it with me on business trips and it’s perfect for flying, bussing, wherever, with the caveat that you want it plugged in more often than not - the battery life is a little on the low side for those high-impact games.
If you have never played Civ before it would be a good time to start with Civ 5 or maybe even Civ 3. They are cheap and quite polished.
In my opinion (having played Civ since the first game, yes I’m old), Civ 7 is quite ok in it’s foundations, but it’s clearly released too early and like the other parts before it’s mainly a game about optimizing numbers, not so much about strategy.
Biggest turn off for me is the introduction of “rogue like” mechanics that give you to play certain characters and nations in a certain way to access others. Why would I want to have that crap in a strategy game?
They stole that and some other mechanics from Humankind, a game by the same studio as Endless Legend. It wasn’t received that well in Humankind either, so I’m kinda surprised that they stole it anyway, but I guess line must go up and they didn’t have a lot of inspiration themselves?
4 is the best “old” civ in that it still has square tiles and doomstacks. Also the modding scene is insane for 4, massive total makeovers that make it a completely different game, far more interesting mods than any other civ game.
Year and average review score across all available platforms in brackets. I played all of these on PC.
Trespasser (1998, 57): First person shooter based on Jurassic Park. Noteworthy for huge open areas, detailed dinosaurs with procedural animations and a physics engine that would only be surpassed by Half-Life 2 six years later. It is clunky, difficult to control and buggy, a challenge to get running both on contemporary and current PCs, but the atmosphere, the level design and the sheer awe at what they were able to pull off in the '90s is just unbelievable. I first played it many years after its release and it still blew me away.
Elex (2017, 62): Open World RPG from the creators of Gothic and Risen. It’s the definition of ‘Eurojank’, with controls that a bit of time getting used to, high difficulty and dated animations. I really enjoyed my time with it though, because it has a gorgeous, well-designed post-apocalyptic open world, clever quests that frequently allow for multiple approaches, factions that are truly different from one another, rewarding combat and interesting progression with tons of player choice. Just like previous games from this developer, it follows the formula of placing strong gatekeeper enemies at choke points, which serve to guide progression - but there’s nothing stopping a skilled and/or determined player from circumventing or outsmarting them. The inclusion of a jet pack makes this more fun than in any other game I’ve played. This device isn’t easy to use, but very early on, at the first location the first companion takes the player to, there’s a transmission tower with a reward at the top. Figure out how to climb it with the jet pack - which may take a few attempts - and you’ll have learned how to use this jet pack. This is a bit frustrating and can take 20 minutes to half an hour, but once you’ve done this, you’ll notice that the entire game was designed with this mode of transportation in mind. Watching other people play this game is incredibly frustrating to me, because they rarely if ever look up, rarely if ever use it to climb structures and natural obstacles to get to items or gain an advantage in combat. Maybe the developers should have created a more in-depth tutorial on this thing, but I think this is one of the main reasons why people aren’t getting this game.
Homefront: The Revolution (2016, 50): Semi-open world first person shooter. Set in a USA that was somehow defeated and is occupied by a hyper-advanced North Korea that is certainly not a clumsy stand-in for China, you’re playing a brave American resistance fighter against the occupation. Spec Ops: The Line, this ain’t - don’t expect any subtlety or finesse to the narration here, but it works as a scenario. The gameplay is where it’s truly interesting. It’s kind of like the opening hours of Far Cry 3, except that you’re not fighting against a few pirates, but a vastly technologically and numerically superior enemy that will hunt you down mercilessly in a half-destroyed American city. The feeling of powerlessness, yet determination, the thrill of pulling off a successful ambush and then scrambling away as the enemy throws everything they have at you is quite something. It’s not without its flaws, mind you. More linear story missions are hit and miss, even after many patches there are still bugs and glitches, it is slightly generic in terms of gameplay, but when everything comes together, it’s a really solid experience.
AquaNox 2: Revelation (2003, 59): Underwater first-person shooter masquerading as a submarine game. This is actually the third game in the series, after Archimedean Dynasty (also known under its original German title of Schleichfahrt) and AquaNox 1. The setting is a post-apocalyptic irradiated Earth where the remnants of humanity have fled to the bottom of the oceans to survive. Naturally, the fight for power and resources continue there. I’ve never actually played the predecessors, but this game is one of my favorites from the early 2000s. It looks stunning for the time (no wonder they created a benchmark, AquaMark, using engine and assets from the game) and gameplay is a really interesting 3dof that blends stealth and action in bleak, but varied enough underwater environments. Story and characters are charming, the universe is interesting and it’s just a blast from start to finish. It did receive really high review scores in Europe and especially Germany (lots of 85), so perhaps it’s just a case of international audiences/reviewers not getting it, similar to how Gothic and Risen were far more popular there.
Damnation (2009, 38): Probably the worst game on this list. Damnation is a third person shooter set in an alternate-history US Civil War with advanced steampunk technology. The story is extremely poorly presented, controls are clunky, enemy AI is braindead, there are glitches galore, but somehow, I still had fun with it. While the graphics are nothing to write home about and perhaps the epitome of the brownness of this era of gaming, there is a sense of scale that is rare in games like these, with huge levels and impressive vistas. It’s not truly open world, but the sense of scale, the feeling of traversing large environments (an aspect that Elex also nails, but with a true open worlds) is something to behold. As poor as the narration is, the setting is also interesting enough to deal with the below-average cover shooting gameplay. If screenshots and videos appeal to you, then it might be worth checking out.
Velvet Assassin (2009, 59): Dreamy third person stealth game set in WW2. It’s a Splinter Cell clone at heart, but far more challenging. This is an unusually bleak and dark take on WW2 that, unlike most other games with this setting, doesn’t shy away from topics like mass murder and trauma - but it’s also willing to experiment: Most of the game is essentially the protagonist suffering through a fever dream, recalling her exploits as a British commando in her hospital bed. This leads to the surreal gameplay elements: The protagonist is heavily wounded, but if she injects morphine on her hospital bed, she can prance around the levels in a white nightgown, murdering Nazis in slow motion.The difficult, slightly unpolished gameplay is the main reason for the relatively low review scores, but fans of stealth games who want to explore a more unusual WW2 setting might want to give it a go.
Legend Hand of God (2007, 57): A Diablo-clone with a constantly talking and rather snarky fairy as your mouse pointer. German voice acting is good, English localization not so much. There’s nothing exceptional about it, except for its presentation: Instead of disconnected animations, there are custom ones for each weapon and enemy type, a unique feature in this genre. It just looks so much more immersive. The dynamic lighting and, for the time, very detailed environments are also quite a visual treat. The world is relatively compact, making it a nice hack and slash snack.
I truly need to give this game another go, can’t really say why I stopped playing it. But it is EuroJank all the way.
Funny tho, I noticed most of the character animations I saw in Elex are straight up the exact same they were in Gothic 3, possibly from even earlier games’ of theirs. Nothing wrong with reusing assets, but damn they’ve gotten some mileage out of them :D
I started Elex but probably stopped around the 3 horu mark, went to play something else. The character you control is a fucking unlikable asshole during those initial hours.
Because that is part of the cycle of collapse and shock doctrine these corporations rely on to keep from being clowned on by moderately competent smaller game studios who actually are excited by the challenge to convince people to buy their art instead of shoving derivative slop down their customer’s throat as the cinematic monochoice for entertainment product category no. 1254…
If you mow the grass, the longterm benefit of preserving a strict monoculture is well worth the temporary mass destruction (from the perspective of the person driving the mower, it smells quite pleasant actually).
To be clear, the blades of grass are the smaller game studios on Microsoft’s lawn.
This is much older than 2023. I remember Fallout 4, the console version was apparently almost unplayable at launch, so Giant Bomb actually lowered the score, compared to the PC version. And even that example isn’t when this started.
Similarly, what if the reviewers don’t get a specific version, that runs like shit? Like what happened with Cyberpunk, where nobody was able to play the XBONE or PS4 versions.
The thing is, as always, a review is subjective. If the game has problems, but the reviewer can look past them or doesn’t care, why should they change the score.
Someone mentioned it already, but review copies might also run outdated code, and reviewers are in contact with the publisher or devs, and they might say some problem is fixed on release. If the reviewer believes them, it probably won’t affect the score.
I’ve been toying with the idea. So many good memories from New Colossus. It might be linear, it’s such a great story. Not Shakespeare great, but honest b-movie great.
I can just see the NSA nerds now, “Sir, we have seen a severe uptick in downloads and installations of the video game ‘Woflenstein’… We must do something to stop the propaganda!”
How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?
Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.
Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.
Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.
It’s kinda supported - if you have your phone in your pocket you do get some steps, but it’s not as efficient as walking.
I’m Finnish myself and my German skills aren’t that great :D The translations for the game are made by the community, you can help correcting errors at translate.walkscape.app (the tool is currently hosted on a very underspecced server so it’s laggy, we’ll be moving it to a beefier one soon)
Edit: Well this was sooner than I thought, I’ve moved it to another server and should be very usable now.
When it comes to tracking, smart watch support is the most frequently asked addition and biking is the second. We will definitely add biking after smart watch support, as long as we find a viable way to do that. Biking relies quite heavily on GPS data which we don’t want to deal with, so we would likely be using Apple Health and on Android some specific apps to pull that data from.
Hey! I almost forgot about this when I left Reddit. I was so excited to see it come to fruition some day. I’d love to beta test but I’ve moved to an office job since then so I probably won’t be able to help much.
Eric from the community (and a bunch of others) have been making some videos on how to get started. One I’d recommend for beginners is the Ultimate Beginners Guide video.
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