Path of Exile has “evolved”, and not in a way I like, in the most recent years.
It’s a very fast, clear-speed focused game, now, more so than ever. Even inside it’s genre, it’s exceptionally build focused and not very interactive during play, which is impressive, considering these are things the genre is known for.
I play a lot of genres of games and as a result like weird genre mashups, so Helskate really stuck out to me. Hades meets Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater isn’t a game I would have thought up myself, but it seems hella cool.
I just messed around with the demo a bit. There are some rough edges and no meta progression yet, but the core concept feels good. Landing a trick on an enemies head to proc stone effects and then following with a couple attacks to put them down is a super fun concept when you hit everything just right. A little bit of tactile feedback when you get hit and land things would really push the gameplay into the amazing territory.
They honestly could not have picked a worse release window.
In a lot of ways, Enshrouded appeals to me. Valheim with more action RPG/MMO elements is an obvious hit to my interests, but I can’t justify dropping $40 CAD so closely to paying roughly the same price for PalWorld, which admittedly had a much more different and interesting concept.
I’m sure I’ll hop on board at some point, but this just wasn’t the time.
I tried to pick up Rayman Legends when it was I’d cheap over Christmas. I ran the game from Steam was greeted with the UPlay launcher asking me to make an account to access my game, and immediately closed and refunded the title.
Including Jeopardy in a list of games like this is the kind of awkward “technically correct” dissonance I’ve come to expect from AI. What a weird inclusion.
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t come across any. The “challenging moral decisions” werenot hard choices, no matter how many of my party members took them out of context and got pissy.
Unpopular opinion, but for a game with such immaculate writing for two Acts, Act 3 is such a fucking shit show of mediocre writing and forgotten story threads.
I just bought a series of 8bitdo controllers, and they are fantastic. The off green/purple USB Xbox controllers are literally $20 USD a pop and imo feel better than the Series S controller. And that’s their cheapest option; if you are willing to spend money for more features, they keep getting better.
OP said he wants motion control though? I feel like his options for motion control controllers are EXTREMELY limited. Like Nintendo proprietary limited.
Apparently the 8Bitdo Ultimate DOES have motion control. I’d dare say it’s just hands down the correct option, unless you want to just flat buy a Switch Pro controller. That said, if off-colours don’t bother you, the Switch targeted Ultimate C Bluetooth is cheap af, has motion controls and actually has ABXY in the correct format.
Unpopular opinion: I fucking hate noise-canceling headsets. It creates something of a booming, echo-y sound, and I just cannot stand it. Open ear acoustic headsets are an absolute godsend.
I use the Sennheiser Game Zero, because if you want a combined headphones/microphone headset, and you want an open ear acoustics, your options are extremely limited. That said, it is awesome. The “flip up to mute” feature broke extremely fast, but beyond that the quality of both incoming and outgoing audio is fantastic. And I drag the thing around with me quite a bit, so, despite one feature breaking, it has survived quite a bit of abuse.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.