Just released 1.0 a month ago. Simple enough gameplay loop. Throw orbs at pegs on board to fight enemies. Go down different paths on a map until you reach the boss fight at the bottom, upgrading and getting new orbs and relics along the way to help. Repeat 2 more times and you win. Has 20 levels of increasing difficulty after beating your first run, but locked behind standard progression.
Dungoens and Degenerate Gamblers (Steam)
Released beginning of last month. Play Blackjack against opponents, but you each have a life bar. Score higher than opponent to deal damage equal to the difference in your scores to them. Various non-playing cards and other nonsensical cards will appear as playable cards. Things like a get well soon card, SD card, a flat out 21 card, a birthday card, and many more can be found. Go until you either lose all your health or beat the final boss on one of two different routes to be taken.
I do. It’s on my wishlist because I have so many new games that I didn’t play yet that it wouldn’t make sense to buy it now I just wondered, in regard to the gameplay, if some people eventually feel bored after some days :) so thanks for the feedback
I tried darkwood this weekend, and it’s left me torn. I really enjoy certain aspects about it, but I feel like the pacing is weird.
I finished Still wakes the deep the other day and I thought it was ok. It was an interesting environment to explore, but I didn’t think it was all too scary.
I’m off to find a different horror game to play now.
What’s up with Darkwood’s popularity recently? I know Pyrocynical made a video about a week ago, but I started it before that, because of a friend recommended it to me like a month ago. And I think I saw it mentioned elsewhere somehere inbetween too.
I generally don’t play horror games, so Darkwood scares me enough that I only play for maybe half an hour during daytime. Might take a month to get through.
My guess is that people are getting into the Halloween Spooky vibes already! But otherwise, I don’t know. Darkwood was free on Xbox games with gold a long time ago, and I snagged it then, but I just never got around to it until now
LOOOOVED darkwood! It took me a bit to get a feeling for the game, but after I got my daily rhythm I found the gameplay satisfying, tense, and occasionally scary.
Pretty sure, historically, they were also pretty powerful. I remember at one point reading about several nations that had serious issues with horse archers. A ranged unit of constant mobility, of course they’d be difficult to deal with.
How effective they are does depend on what kind of game you’re playing, however.
In Age of Empires II horse archers are only really good in those civilisations that have adequate research for them. And then it requires a good deal of player skill to micro the units to make use of their enhanced mobility.
In Mount and Blade Bannerlord it all depends on terrain. Horse archers are deadly on any sort of open terrain, but introduce trees or even a mild amount of rockiness and those horse archers are in a serious disadvantage.
They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.
So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).
So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.
What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.
*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.
Yeah, in Age of Empires II they’re more expensive than Skirmishers, who are archer-countering units. They’re also more expensive than regular archers, and that’s not going into the research that a good cavalry archer needs, as they’re also subject to some of the most expensive research options.
In Bannerlord you can get good horse archers only be recruiting young nobles. Then you have to spend time on levelling them up, because at the lower tiers they’re just not that good, and you risk a number of the dying before they reach a high enough level.
So between the two games I play that prominently feature horse archers, I’d say they’re managed pretty well, with the increased costs, slower training times, player skill, or levelling requirements.
Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.
I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?
So the skirmisher is a spear-throwing foot soldier with a shield. Historically a foot soldier would have a shield, a few throwing spears, and then a melee weapon. But in Age of Empires II the spear throwing and the melee are divided into two separate units.
Age of Empires II does have a light cavelry line, though, and they’re pretty quick. But only civs historically known for their good cavelry have bonuses towards them that make the viable (i.e. There are various steppe-civs in AoEII, as well as Mongols and Huns, and I’m sure Turks and Saracens have some benefit to light cav as well).
In this regard Age of Empires IV is more historically accurate, as that game can have completely unsymmetrical civs, whereas Age of Empires II has far more symmetrical gameplay.
Cult of the Lamb - Got this for my birthday from my buddy and it's been very solid. I see why the reviews hype this game up; it's a weird rpg with base building elements and that's right up my alley. I've been playing it on the steam deck with a conservative power profile and it's been a lot of fun.
Tactics Ogre Reborn - I'm a FF Tactics fan and I was told this game would scratch the itch. So far I can say it's at got a captivating story. It's great that my choices matter in this game and that character development is based on those choices. The gameplay is familiar and fluid. The AI also seems to scale well with the difficulty setting. I'd say fans of FF Tactics should definitely pick this up.
Much like in real life, see them off with large groups of light cavalry. Meet them on their own terms with something that can chase them down and mob them.
Edit: but yeah, I find them to be largely ineffective or game breaking and nothing in-between.
The age old conundrum of the unit that may or may not be strong in real combat situations, but becomes absolutely gamebreakingly busted when added to videogames, because it’s strenghts translate into overwhelming advantages with none of the real life drawbacks it had to endure, usually via game design, bad balancing or games putting said units in unrealistic situations.
Take for example anti-aircraft guns since WW2. Other than the obvious real example of the FlaK88 being turned into an AT gun by the Germans, several others of these become anti-infantry or even anti-armor rapid firing nightmares in war games, because they’re put well inside their optimal range and within threatening range of infantry and tanks. Which would usually destroy them from afar. The OTO Melara gun is a good modern example. Italian radar guided 110mm naval gun, was never mounted onto a proper line vehicle that was adopted by any country. But the prototypes, like the OTOMatic, absolutely terrorize every game where they appear, as a hyper accurate, rapid firing, high damage anti-everything gun.
Horse archers are just the ancient ages example of that.
Um…archers on chariots were almost certainly extremely effective in any era they appeared. The main reason they stopped being popular in combat was because horses became big enough to ride after thousands of years of breeding.
Also because they were absurdly expensive for the civilizations that were using them. The loss of their chariots to Sea People invasions and the cost of replacing them is sometimes listed among the reasons for the Bronze Age collapse of the Hittites and the decline of Egypt despite their battlefield victories.
And it takes a lot of time to train soldiers to effectively ride horses, shoot bows and especially to ride horses while shooting bows while also making sure there’s enough money/logistics to take care of those troops. Much easier to give tons of people a simple bow and tell them to have at it. Or spears. Just… spears for everyone.
I think playing with them can be fun. And done right they usually have some counter. For example, foot archers being able to fire further than the horse archers so ample enough of foot archers should be able to cause them problems.
Finished Limbo after it was sitting in my library for years and it was really emjoyable. I did not expect to like it as much as I did but the puzzles were all completely doable (
Tap for spoilerexcept that one with the minecart and the electric rail grr)
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Also played through Mouthwashing and was pleasantly disturbed. The lasst 20 minutes get a bit long in the teeth but overall a great experience.
The Forever Winter. Released in early access due to popular demand. It’s rough, divisive, and difficult as hell. It’s also incredibly grim and hauntingly beautiful. It’s a PvE-only, stealth-based, extraction (non-)shooter where you scavenge resources to survive in the shadow of a military-industrial complex run absolutely amok. You are incredibly underpowered, outnumbered and outgunned, to the point where if you need to start shooting, you’re probably already dead. Gameplay is tense, frightening, and really drives home the overwhelming feeling of being a small fish in a really fucking big pond. It’s the opposite of a power fantasy and I’m really glad someone is doing something that different.
I’m not sure I’d recommend it in the state it’s in, if at all, but it’s definitely making me feel some kind of way. I don’t normally enjoy extraction shooters, but I find myself coming back to this one. Not that it’s really a shooter. Maybe that’s what’s doing it for me. The most divisive part is the water mechanic. It’s a key resource for your settlement; If you run out of water you lose all your stuff. But, it drains in real time not game time so it’s kind of a big commitment at the moment. Personally I understand both sides of the argument and I haven’t decided where I fall yet. It’s definitely worked on me because I find myself thinking about the game when I’m not playing, but if I end up taking a break I’m not sure I’ll have the commitment to build back up from scratch again.
Late to the party, but I finally picked up Helldivers 2. My friends have had it since it came out, but I was being the “hipster gamer” and didn’t get the popular game. Plus, our group has a tendency to do “flavor of the week”/FOMO gaming, where 1 or 2 people buy a new game, convince/guilt trip others into buying the game, we all spend $30-50 on it, play it for like 2 days, then never touch it again. So I was hesitant to get it, lest I get burned again (a la Starfield). Lastly, I’m also not a huge shooter player.
But I wanted to played with the boys, and they were playing it again recently, so I picked it up. And I’m glad I did. Because it’s fun. Stupid fun even. Which is right up our alley. Already put 20hrs in over the last week.
The mechanics are simple. The missions are straightforward. And I like that it’s a pickup/putdown game. Play a 20-40min round, then come back later or tomorrow. It’s not like we’re playing hours on end, which is great. We’ll play a match or two, then maybe do another before we start signing-off for the night.
If you like the random irrelevant conversations of Metal Gear, you might like Tales of Berseria. It’s basically a band of pirates, lead by an edgelord but with many people that are very world-traveled, so you get a lot of encyclopedic explanations of why the world is the way it is, or what kind of pet they’d prefer. Certainly much less happy-go-lucky conversation than the rest of the Tales games.
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Aktywne