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.
Another good one that’s more recent is Triangle Strategy. Positioning is important. Great story. Very similar to FFT but FFT is better overall. Still a great game and more modern.
By memory this means we’ve only got Rise of and Shadow of - alongside the IV-VI Remastered still to come via Amazon, they’ve given the rest out themselves (though Epic has given others)
I’m playing Last Spell right now, isometric base defense game. Lots of viable ways to play, but later missions become a slog if you don’t plan out hero builds. A run takes 5-10 hours, but rounds take 20 minutes. Emphasis on crowd control and positioning.
Darkest Dungeon is nice if you want a break from isometric stuff, dungeon crawler, emphasis on team combat and resource management.
Creeper World III if you want to try RTS style, lots of community maps.
Tactical Breach Wizards, Come in through a window, throw everyone else out the window. Silly, but fun.
20 screens down this page, and barely over the halfway point with that - this made me chuckle. I think I have a thing or two to learn before I can aspire to “lengthy”. ;)
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