got a chance to try lethal company on steam - it’s a really fun online co-op horror roguelike where you scavenge for parts on moons that may or may not be inhabited. corporate doesn’t care what’s in these caves as long as it makes them money. great with friends or randoms, the proximity chat makes for a fun and scary experience with a drg / viscera cleanup style corporate setting.
also played through most of greener grass awaits, which is a unique and fun horror golf game - also free. i recommend at least trying it out, the horror gameplay elements mesh with the golf in a novel way that makes for a rare horror game with engaging moment to moment gameplay.
Cocoon - Big puzzle game fan but this one has me underwhelmed so far. It feels disappointingly linear, and I haven’t needed to think very hard to solve anything yet. The design and atmosphere is fantastic, but I hope it gets a little more confident in its mechanics soon (just 2hrs in).
Curse of the Golden Idol - Played the first DLC. Great stuff, still has all the weirdo charm of the main game with some new logic puzzles to figure out. I thought the last chapter here felt a little too straightforward to solve for how complex it seemed at first glance, but overall it was a good expansion. On to the next one!
Factorio - 70 hours into Space Exploration and currently trying to plan a transition of my base from a main bus design to city blocks. I started SE immediately after my first vanilla Factorio victory, so it’s been a bit of an uphill climb but very fun. I really enjoy reaching a new science tier and then pausing for a while as I automate and upgrade everything that I unlocked. No rush in space!
Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update have brought a lot of life back to this game. I’m having a blast running through the city doing jobs here and there. The PL missions so far (only really played the opening one) have been awesome and very well put together. Despite the hate the game got for bugs at launch, it really is one of my favorite FPS RPGs.
iRacing - The continuous one. I’m not terribly fast at Simracing, but damn do I enjoy it. I have a league race at Bathurst in a Radical SR8 on Friday that I’m looking forward to.
CS2 - Been dabbling in CS again with the new releases. I’m absolute trash at the game now, and that impacts the enjoyment sometimes, but as long as I’m playing in a duo it’s bearable.
Apex Legends - Probably the game I have the most hours in outside of minecraft. I’ve played well over 10k games of BR, and thousands of mixtape. The new season just dropped yesterday and I’m thinking it’s time to get back on the ranked grind.
I really wanted to like this one. On paper it sounds like exactly my jam, but it just didn’t grab me. The whole game felt tedious. Mediocre combat, very little weapon variety (just different tiers of the same kind of gun). Finicky and overcomplicated skill system that still somehow didn’t feel like it made any impact on core gameplay, and I found the humour kind of simultaneously weak and overdone. The satire is heavy-handed, and the wackiness falls flat. I haven’t enjoyed a fallout game since 3 either though, so maybe my taste has changed without me realising.
You hit the nail on the head for me. I tried to like this game, but it felt lackluster time and again. And I enjoyed Fallout NV and to a lesser degree 4. Outer Worlds just did not do it for me.
The issue I think is that every single thing is setup for some punchline. The world isn’t taken seriously. It’s all a basis for a joke. Fallout NV was taken seriously. It had humor, but the world felt consistent and well thought out. That’s why it works, and it’s also why the humor hits better. If everything is a joke then almost nothing is funny.
I tried playing Outer Worlds but my main complaint was that I was constantly being overwhelmed by just how garish and visually busy the game was. The area that I was exploring was a bit too colourful, a bit too cluttered, and enemies didn't stand out well enough for me to differentiate them from the background visual elements. I got frustrated with the number of times I wouldn't notice an enemy until I was right on top of them.
Another issue I faced was a classic dissonance seen in most RPG/FPS blends - it's where you can equip a high powered rifle and shoot an enemy in their unprotected head only to watch them shrug the shot off with ease as their HP bar drops by a measly 10%. It ruins immersion for me, just reminds me that I am not actually an adventurer exploring a strange new universe, I'm just a guy playing a video game.
Apart from that, there was a lot to like! I liked the story that I got to experience, the characters seemed cool, the quests were interesting. I just couldn't push past the things that bothered me to see more of the stuff I liked.
The combat was a low point. I spent most of the game up through the finale with a MK2 light machinegun. It was tinkered with and upgraded. My character had no points at all put into gun skills and I still chewed through enemies with ease. Whenever ammo ran low I switched to a MK2 heavy assault rifle.
Even the finale sub-boss robot was pathetically easy to kill.
I think they underdeveloped the science weapons! I started using some too late in the game but some encounters definitley felt “different” to the normal gunplay.
I’ve always loved this game and been surprised by the negativity most users have towards it. The writing is excellent, the world is well realized, and it’s the only game I’ve played in a long time that actually lets me kill whoever I want, and continues the story around those decisions. New Vegas did it, and Baldurs Gate 3 recently, but it’s sadly an exceedingly rare thing.
I also loved how all skills could impact dialogue, again similarly to New Vegas. It made every skill worthwhile, and made exchanges with npc’s feel more unique to your character. It’s once again one of the only games where skills like speech or barter actually feel worth it, and is the only game I’ve ever played, outside of New Vegas, where you can simply talk your way through the final boss fight.
I get that it’s not for everyone, especially not if you’re looking for a Bethesda open world game, but it’s a great linear RPG that imo is very underrated.
I also chat my way through the Outer Worlds. You could easily beat the game with just high speech checks. Although with the final boss, my speech check wasn’t high enough.
I struggled with The Outer Worlds’ really ham fisted centrism. While it’s been awhile, I remember the best result on every major planet was to find compromise between the two factions. It’s done so clumsily that it makes none of the factions feel authentic in any way.
I agree with this, and it contributed to my losing interest. I also found the gameplay way too stale and stopped playing when I was almost done with the 3rd world.
I didn’t feel invested in or care about any of the companions or their story arcs either. They didn’t feel relatable or like real people.
I had high hopes for the Outer Worlds, but it just felt generic and boring to me. It felt like a cross between Fallout New Vegas and Borderlands, but without the charm of either franchise.
I found the corporate greed jokes overdone and the humor and commentary very shallow. The skill progression was boring (just numerical stat increases mostly), itemization basically nonexistent (just one overall outfit armor slot, also with minor stat increases?) and the combat was tedious. Maybe the story gets better later but I wasn't a fan of the overall lore or the way dialogue choices were written either.
I really wanted to like it since usually I'm a sucker for "own a spaceship and explore the world with your crew" stories and games but I bounced off OW so hard. Glad to hear other people had more fun with it but it's definitely not for everyone.
I was so immensely bored playing OW, I just remember something about space gorillas on a moon being my walking away point. I also could be misremembering, that game didn't stick very well.
Heard the same from my partner. She loves Mass Effect, Starfield, liked Elite:Dangerous and No Man’s Sky for a while and, ironically, Outer Wilds is her favourite game now. Outer Worlds didn’t click.
The anti capitalism jokes are just as relevant and funny today as they were back than
I agree they are just as relevant today, probably even more so, however I didn't find them that funny since they are just making the same "joke" all the time. They don't really say anything or go deeper into the situation beyond "haha corpos are cartoonishly evil", over and over and over again, there was no nuance and I expected more out of an obsidian game. It's all just a themepark with throwaway jokes.
Again, maybe it gets better later and I didn't get there, I only visited one or 2 planets after the first one and I couldn't stand it anymore so I never finished it.
lemmy.world
Aktywne