Crosscode is one of my favourite games of all time. It’s an immensely charming action RPG heavily inspired by the 2D Zelda games. It has some absolutely insane combat and surprisingly challenging puzzles. The story is also very good and really touching at times. The devs spent 7 years making this game and I feel like it never got anywhere near the attention it deserved.
It’s just $20 on steam AND it has a free demo, so there’s no reason not to check it out!
I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven’t looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.
I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.
I think if I have one criticism of the plot is that it takes a while to get going. If I may, I’d recommend you to play thorough it at your own pace, possible also at the lowest difficulty just to experience the story. It’s well worth it just for that.
I can’t even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can’t even recall.
If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I’ve seen in a long time.
If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.
Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don’t worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It’s purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there’s 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it’s something special.
I haven't played Honkai: Star Rail, but there are plenty of great mobile games and plenty of great free to play games. You sound like you just have an extremely narrow mind.
Beacon Pines – a charming mystery story with anthropomorphic animals. Has an interesting take on the visual novel formula by having you unlock new dialogue choices as you progress through the story; that way, you naturally explore different paths the story might take. Night in the Woods and (possibly) OneShot fans might like this one.
Oolite – a solid FOSS remake of 1984’s Elite. Has a bunch of mods for it; some expand the gameplay quite substantially.
Orbiter Space Flight Simulator – imagine a Microsoft Flight Simulator game, but you’re going to space instead. Or Kerbal Space Program, but without the rocket building mechanic. That being said, KSP fans (and fans of space in general) should enjoy it.
Transcendence – Star Control II meets Rogue. A cult classic in the space sim genre that’s been in development since 1995. Space dogfighting, trading, mining, smuggling etc, but also traditional roguelike stuff like unlabeled barrels and containers (= undiscovered potions) and permadeath (optional). Highly moddable, uses XML as the modding language. Has a free version (see link) and a Steam release, which includes the paid expansions.
I was playing Orbiter long before KSP came along. It taught me all I know about orbital mechanics. It helped ease the learning curve in KSP a lot. But after KSP came along I completely lost interest. KSP is a lot more fun and there’s a lot more to do.
Still had a laugh when my friend who made fun of me for playing orbiter ended up buying KSP, getting frustrated, rage quit and asked for a refund.
For some time, I considered Orbiter to be better at providing an arcade experience of “choose ship/scenario and fly away”. But now that KSP also has scenarios, maybe this argument doesn’t really stand now. But I still think that Orbiter’s MFDs are better than KSP’s manoeuvre planner (at least for precise manoeuvres)
Dude, I dislike games that prey on addictive behavior as much as.the next guy, but holy cow are you a toxic piece of work. You waffle on about how we all left Reddit for some ulterior motives and whatnot. Most people left Reddit because it has become the very headbutting contest you try to pull off here.
If you cannot understand why this game has appeal (and that's a sentiment many of us would share I think), don't fucking play it. But don't walz around constructing some weird superiority story out of that. That's just immature and petty.
Oh, and don't assume that every Lemmy user has the same reason for being here than you or shares your values.
Huh, I'm starting to guess we're dealing with a teenager here.
Like Genshin Impact, Star Rail has a decent base game that does well with its characters and combat. Notice I didn’t say “great”.
However, after you get through the intro and the first world, they start adding on to the game. There’s a whole bunch of 1-off mini-games that are fun in their own right and have nothing to do with the Gacha.
The first one is a museum administration mini game where you’re responsible for “hiring” people that have 3 stats, and then balancing those stats to make money for the museum, then using the money to upgrade the museum, run mini-quests to restore the museum, and hire more staff. And expand the museum.
Each of these little mini-games is a few days of fun, and I think I’ve found 4 so far IIRC in Star Rail. Genshin Impact has had similar things, but tend to not be permanent, and to be less involved than Star Rail’s.
The gacha is generous enough that you can generally play without paying anything. I don’t think I’ve given any money to Star Rail, though I have paid the monthly $5 to Genshin Impact for a few months now. And I’ll admit, I started thinking about paying it to Star Rail, too. It’s definitely a gacha game, but on the actually-playable side if you’re playing free.
That said, if gacha games are something that just stick in your craw, it’s unlikely that any game will change that, and I’d argue that you’re better off never finding out.
In the end, I’d say you’re best just accepting that for what it is, it’s one of the best, and letting it go. There’s no point in being upset that people enjoy a game that you can’t. Let them have their fun, and go have your own instead.
if gacha games are something that just stick in your craw, it’s unlikely that any game will change that
Like I said to the other guy, I find it FASCINATING that we’re having this discussion on Lemmy.
The people in this community left Reddit for reasons of principle. We didn’t like the way they treated the moderators. We also didn’t like the way some moderators treated the users. We didn’t like the way Reddit’s corporate masters were placing advertising dollars above the user experience, and cutting off third-party tools and methods of using the site.
/r/Gaming has 39 MILLION users. This community, the one we’re posting in right now, has A MERE 27 THOUSAND USERS.
Here you are, willing to go out here to the fringes of the internet, cut off from the larger community, made an outcast by your own principles. Buuuuuuut you’ll also give money to fucking F2P GACHA GAME GHOULS.
Make. That. Make. Sense.
Really, don’t even bother. That cannot make sense. At the very least, please go back to Reddit. Stop torturing yourself with exile. If you’ll support the massive, ludicrous, unbounded evil that mobile pay-to-pay-more games represent, there is NOTHING Reddit has ever done that should really make you stay away.
I’d just throw out that my recollection is that it was really more of a mid-to-late 2000’s thing for the oversaturation of WW2 games, if you’re willing to move your window forward a bit. That and there weren’t nearly as many games being released at that time period, so it didn’t take much to saturate the market; there were roughly 1/50th the number of releases in 2008 as today (www.statista.com/…/number-games-released-steam/ using steam releases as a rough approximation of total).
In terms of specific games, I don’t have any that aren’t already mentioned elsewhere. The Battlefield, Band of Brothers, and Call of Duty recurring releases are really the big ones. …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_World_War_II_video_games has a good list if you want to browse more.
The inherent appeal of gacha games is always cute anime girls/pretty anime boys. I doubt anyone will find any of these games appealing to them if they don’t like the art style in the first place.
I haven’t played Honkai or Genshin Impact, so my understanding and knowledge of both games is fairly limited (mostly hearsay from people who actually played them), so take the rest of the message with a healthy dose of salt.
I’ve heard the production value is excellent compared to most other mobile games: for the low price of $0 (gacha microtransactions excluded, of course) you get a full open world game with nice graphics and animations and a fully fledged story (I’m unsure how good that actually is and from what I’ve seen I’m inclined to think “not much”, but it probably appeals to anime fans).
I’ve also heard that you can play Genshin Impact for free and still get the characters you want if you’re patient enough, which is not something that can be said of most gacha games. The PvE nature of the game means that you don’t necessarily need the best lv999 S-rank character to compete with other players, and can enjoy (most of?) what the game has to offer for free, which means that you don’t need to engage with the gacha aspect of the game if you don’t want to. I don’t know if that applies to Honkai as well, but considering it’s a very similar game from the same software house, I’d say it’s possible.
In conclusion, I don’t think the game is worth checking out if you don’t like anime and/or mobile games, but if you like any of those and are a young person without a stable income, a f2p open world game with bells and whistles such as nice graphics and animations could be appealing. Although, as I said, my opinion is mostly derived from hearsay and a quick glance at YT to check what the deal was about, I won’t pretend I really know what I’m talking about here.
Playing gacha games for free, without spending money is still supporting them. Just like continuing to use Reddit is supporting their shitty policies, even if you don’t pay for Reddit Gold every month.
Sure is, and I never said otherwise. I doubt that people playing those games care. If they are playing those games they probably like them and are okay with the idea of supporting them.
Cloudpunk - A cyberpunk driving/walking simulator with a good story, great voice acting, LEGO-inspired graphics, and a Blade Runner inspired soundtrack. It’s dripping with atmosphere and I wish I could play it again for the first time.
I’ll toss 2 mobile games on the list. Desert Golf and Golf on Mars. No ads. No stupid paid trinket nonsense. Just a couple bucks for the game and a very chill and casual 2D golf game.
After Hades, I hope some folks went back and played Supergiant’s other titles. I love them all. But even amongst them, Pyre is the underdog, unknown, shunned. And I think it’s fantastic. The music and writing is top notch. You can really see the bones of Hades in all their games, but they polished their world building and story telling to perfection in this one.
Tales of Maj’Eyal: An incredible rogue-like with 30+ classes and God knows how many achievements.
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead: Apocalyptic rogue-like. Zombies, bandits, aliens and Lovecraft shit. Want to raid a dojo? Learn Judo from a book and proceed to race around town on a pair of rollerblades practicing on the undead? Feel free.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne