Oooh, I got you OP. If you liked the dense micro-maps of Into the Breach, check out Bad North. Defend small islands from waves of invaders with limited troops. Not an overly long game, but very satisfying for what it is.
I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.
I have to recommend Ascent DX - it is free, quite short, but it condenses everything I enjoy about the metroidvania genre I to a bite sized play session.
Tunic is one of the best games ever made, nevermind just in the metroidvania genre. It is good for reasons I can’t tell you without spoiling some of the magic. Trust me!
Phoenotopia Awakening was stupendous fun and way bigger than I thought it would be. Strongly recommended. Typical side scrolling platforming gameplay, with emphasis on exploration and puzzles as well as the combat and platforming.
Death’s Door was so damn fun, and it felt quite fresh in a way I can’t describe. Its an isometric hack n slash game with some puzzle elements. Tells a cool story, and is a sequel/successor to Titan Souls, from the same devs.
AAAAXY was a lot of fun, and free and open source. Sort of like antichamber meets metroidvania. Short and sweet but also challenging!
Otherwise, as others mentioned, I can’t recommend these enough!:
I’m currently playing Betrayal At Krondor on my old Celeron PC. I played a couple of chapters a few years ago but I left it there, so I’ve started again and I’m on chapter 2. Since the game is slow and mostly text based, I think its gameplay has aged quite well. I’m playing it with MT-32 sound and music thanks to my MT32-Pi.
I’m also replaying Undertale on my PS Vita, it looks great on its OLED screen.
Been playing Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. Finished it last week and I am blown away. Game of the year for me. There is no challenge here. I read that there is a lot more of it after the story so I am going to continue.
I did like Control, and I do like coop-shooters… but I would prefer some story campaign instead of few repeatable/grindable mission-types with minor run-to-run variance.
Overall, I’m definitely wanting to play through this to completion.
So, this game does have some story arc? Genuinely do want to know.
Not really. It’s something I meant to touch on yesterday (and knowing me I probably forgot to bring up) but there’s very little story outside of the basics.
Generally you’re just told what’s wrong and how to fix it. I’ve been hearing Sam Lake had not much to do with it and it was a way smaller team than usual, which yeah. I can see that for sure.
It’s solid, I can find a full team in quick match in under a second. Lots of Hot Fixes on clearance 1 until people unlock the other jobs though. There’s no text or voice chat for communication in game which is something I would’ve liked.
The lack of text or voice chat seems like an odd choice. I kind of get the feeling that they meant for this to be played more with friends over random people, and they only added matchmaking because it’s standard, i’m not sure about that though
I'm going to throw a shout out to Environmental Station Alpha because I think it's an excellent game that flew under the radar of a lot of people when it launched. It makes some bold decisions with the story that some people might not enjoy but the gameplay is solid and the backtracking problem (which most metroidvanias have) is solved by having the level get harder as you progress.
It's cheap, it's not at all hardware demanding and it's very heavily inspired by Metroid. If you enjoy metroidvanias and you haven't played Environmental Station Alpha you definitely should.
And a secret shoutout to Noita. The dev of Environmental Station Alpha worked on Noita. It's been pushed into the roguelite category but I would argue it's the worlds first open world(s) roguelite metroidvania. If that sounds stupid but interesting, prepare to suffer because Noita is not at all easy and that's deliberate because the central theme of Noita is the pursuit of knowledge (the more you know about Noita the easier it gets).
PC Gamer has given it 60/100 (which some take to mean a terrible, terrible, scathing review but to me, idk, 60/100 seems like a fun time?)
This has been a thing for ages, and I suspect it’s got some psychological explanation in how our brains are wired. But 5/10 is not an “average game”, it’s a quite bad one. In fact, anything below 5 is usually literally unplayable, despite 4/10 really being just below average. 7/10 is typically the score for “a fun time if it aligns with your interests, but by no means a great game”. Everything below 7 tends to be actively bad.
I see most of my faves have already been covered by others, so I’m going to add the Metroid Prime games. Unlike the mainline Metroid games, which are awesome in their own right, the Metroid Prime games are played from a first person perspective.
You still get to explore, you still get power-ups, but because you can scan almost anything with Samus’ visor, there’s some actual worldbuilding, which the mainline Metroid games didn’t really start doing until Metroid Fusion (which was alright, but Metroid Dread did a better job at worldbuilding, I feel). As for the platform, I played the GameCube versions on the Wii.
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