Played a little bit of few games recently. And one particular game a lot.
Alien Shooter: Vengeance
"So what do you do for a living?"
"Alien shooter. I shoot aliens."
What a silly name for a game. Particularly one that wants to take itself seriously, as this one seems to. It's a sort of sci-fi action RPG, I guess. I picked the regenerating health perk at character creation and put all my points into it when I levelled up and I regenerated health faster than the aliens (that I was shooting) could take it down. It also prevented me from being completely fucked both the times I stood too close to an explosion.
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| TBH they seem to be doing fairly well without me. |
I'm not sure if this game is just super easy or if that's only the first couple of levels, but I found absolutely no challenge in it. The enemies come in seemingly (but not actually) endless waves, meaning that each individual one is about as threatening (and sturdy) as a tissue. At first I just had to click on the aliens as they got in range until I got the machine-gun and then I just had to hold down the mouse button and let them walk into the kill zone. I picked up way more bullets than I used, and there seems to be a shop you can access between levels where I could have got even more bullets or replaced my armour (whenever it eventually wore out) or whatever. Probably buy other stuff if you can be bothered finding out what it all is and does.
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| There were 1480 enemies in this level. |
The plot and characters barely seem to exist - some generic defending the earth from a sudden alien threat kind of deal that you've seen a million times - and the dialogue has weird pauses that make you think the NPC is done talking just long enough to start walking away just as they begin their next sentence. Gameplay-wise it seems to be one of those RPGs that gives you way too many options right from the start so it's hard to know what to pick and you'll most likely
screw yourself over for the late game where your bad choices (that you had no way of knowing were bad) combine to make winning virtually impossible. But I won't be playing any more of it to find out.
AVSEQ
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| I doubt I'll remember ever having played this one. |
A sort of arcadey quick-reflex game. Click matching objects to link them then explode them before they hit the ground. More objects linked, more points. Got difficult very fast.
Baldur's Gate 3
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| My first character: halfing warlock. |
I finished this game twice.
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| My second character: Dark Urge half-orc barbarian. |
It's massively overcomplicated (because it's based on D&D 5E), buggy as hell, and the best game I've played in a long time.
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| If you don't romance Karlach you're playing the game wrong. |
It certainly helps that I know D&D so well, but unlike a lot of complicated RPGs it doesn't offer you a million small decisions right up front but introduces stuff to you gradually, so I think it's actually more approachable than Larian's earlier games. It's also got an insane amount of stuff to do. So many things to find and so many choices to make. And the choices matter! There's very little "be nice and do the quest, or don't do the quest" type decisions. You can be evil and the game gives you not just different outcomes but entire alternative quest lines! I saw so many things on my second (evil) playthrough that I hadn't seen on the first.
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| Nothing worrying going on here. |
There's so much more I could say about this game but probably not much that hasn't been said elsewhere so I'll leave it at this: if you don't like turn-based tactical RPGs, give it a miss because the combat is the vast majority of the game's playtime. If you do though, definitely play this game because that is only the beginning. There's a lot more and most of it is extremely good.
Bilkins' Folly
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| The red nose really bothers me. |
Basically an adventure game but a really shit one that looks like complete arse. And It should be "Bilkins's Folly".
Blazing Beaks
A topdown shooter roguelike. Is it good? I don't know. I don't like the genre. I can tell you that it looks like garbage to me though.
Element4l
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| Pictured: ice |
A puzzle platformer that I didn't mind but probably won't play any more of because it's one of those ones where you can't really stop to plan out your next move. You can stop in places, and it is fairly generous with checkpoints, so I didn't hate it. But it's not my style. I like to take things slowly and carefully, and this game relies on you keeping your momentum up.
I have enjoyed some games like this; LIMBO comes to mind immediately. But this one was just a little too complex for me. I kept switching to the wrong element - knowing what I was supposed to do but pressing the wrong button. There's a chance I might enjoy it more on another day or if I tried playing it from the couch with a controller, but with so many games available I'm not sure I'll bother.
The Looker
This game is free, short and hilarious. You should play it. It's supposed to be a parody of The Witness but I've never played The Witness and I don't feel I was missing much. It stands on its own as a fun little puzzle game with some extremely funny writing. I'd say more, but I don't want to spoil any of the jokes. Just go play it.
Noita
This game seems really cool, if you're into this kind of thing. But I'm not. I get the appeal, it's just not for me. It's one of those games where there are a bunch of extremely complex interactions between different items, substances and systems such that you can learn to do all kinds of crazy stuff, but I don't have the patience for it.
I will say in its favour, however, that it didn't feel like it was asking me to learn a whole bunch of stuff just to get started, and you can play it quite successfully by just mashing your face into things and seeing what happens. No doubt you'll never do very well at it that way, but it's playable. It's not off-putting to the casual player as a lot of these games are. But it's not for me.
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