Mostly I’ve used the Deck to continue playing my primary games on the couch or on the go. Elden Ring and RDR2 look and play fantastically once you tweak them a bit.
Smaller games usually run perfectly out of the box. The only ones I’ve played exclusively on Deck so far are Super Pilot (indie F-Zero), Ultimate Chicken Horse (Mario Maker-ish), and Mark of the Ninja.
Yo, you like story-based 3rd person action brawlers with strong characters and unlockable abilities? Well here try this top-down turn-based strategy series where you can micro-manage a randomized set of city-states in a campaign that spans millennia.
Islanders is only a few bucks and very serene. You get a random island and a small palette of buildings at a time. The buildings can only go certain places (farm on a plain, quarry near stone, hunting lodge near forest). You get points for putting certain buildings together, or certain ones further apart (mostly in ways that make sense). And that’s about it. When you use up the buildings on your palette you get a new set. There’s no timer, just try to get points. When you reach the goal you can start over on a new island.
It’s very simple. You can’t move or demolish buildings, you don’t worry about roads or infrastructure of any kind, there’s no citizen happiness or disasters or money or anything. Just relax and place little buildings on islands.
I guess I should finally finish the first one, huh? Good game, but I guess I got bogged down 3/4 through it trying to figure out the story and some of the harder secrets. Probably should have just pushed through because I enjoyed the main puzzles way more.
How could they even enforce this? Couldn’t devs just include a wrapper or small firewall (or settings for Windows firewall) with their games to block Unity’s analytics?
I keep trying NMS hoping to find a good game in there somewhere. I’m over 100 hours now, mostly because I’m a dork who likes collecting spaceships.
But all the mechanics – the crafting and movement and languages and even the terrain generation – are frankly pretty terrible. It’s like Hello Games intentionally hired people who don’t know how to design these things.
Why do all the space stations look identical inside? Why do I have to learn one single alien word at a time, including “a” and “the”? Why are there no rivers or waterfalls or glaciers or swamp basins? And why can’t I customize my ship appearance when the game itself can clearly generate one from a dozen random parts?
You’re saying that doesn’t describe the current state of No Man’s Sky? The only notable buildings I’ve found are the same 3 tiny cookie-cutter outposts dotted randomly all across most planets. Oh sorry, 4 now if you count the camps from the Interceptor update and happen to be on a dissonant planet.
I feel like it wouldn’t take much effort to do better so that’s sad if Starfield hasn’t.
It’s been many years and I’ve found very few outlets that consistently resonate with me.
In terms of review quality, I think the best one is Easy Allies (formed by folks who used to work at GameTrailers). They match video clips with a well-written script and professional narration so perfectly. You can tell they haven’t just thoroughly played the game under review, but they know its history among the genre. But IMO they focus too much on console, where I’m PC-only.
I was actually being facetious. Maybe it seems like a throwback or whatever now, but back when DNF finally released, the “tiny player, big world” idea was rather played out. Duke Burger felt very dated and out-of-place in a game where you’re supposed to be this big macho badass because suddenly you can get stomped on or crushed by small kitchen objects. The level itself is a maze of almost entirely platform jumping puzzles and totally overstays its welcome. But I guess it looks kinda cool and does sort of break the monotony of a bad game.
Other games (and especially player-made maps) in the late 90’s did it much better. I especially remember custom levels for its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, that had a lot of fun with the shrunken player concept. HL and Quake too like you mention. Folks here also said de_rats in Counter Strike which might’ve been the pinnacle.