I would put Kingdom Battle also above XCOM
2 Likes
just dipped into my seemingly infinite stack of game pass free trial codes to re-up on this testimony, damn you
1 Like
yeah genuinely good-feeling game, I like how a prequel in this property is just starship troopers, the weapons in a 2000s cover shooter already felt expressly modal, it looks great and moves well, and I like how itās all distances rather than grids like company of heroes
4 Likes
word of warning about ironman mode, apparently if one of your heroes dies (or if your whole party is wiped) then your save file is deleted, so itās pretty hardcore. Iām playing on āexperiencedā and itās probably the best way to go if youāre an xcom veteran.
1 Like
I played a few hours of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and oy vey, this thing seems worse in every regard compared to the previous game.
Maybe Iām remembering the other one more fondly than I should but everything about this one is unappealing to me. Bailing out.
4 Likes
Yeah like, it should be better but something about it was justā¦it just stuck in my craw. It was hard to articulate what was wrong with it.
3 Likes
Itās shocking how much of a decline it was; I thought after a better-than-any-right-to-be first crack theyād be ready for something actually good but they seemed to bleed all their talent in between. Just carried over bits like Eliza have no life left in them.
If you had stuck to it you would see the most blatant example of a disaster schedule and half the content snipped that generation.
3 Likes
āAug lives matterā comes to mind but I donāt remember if that was just in marketing material
3 Likes
Itās in the game and itās not handled well but tin-ear politics is maybe the least of that gameās concerns. It would be more offensive if they were composed at all
4 Likes
Just as an aside this is a great idiom I just learned
4 Likes
BOTW DLC2: that last boss was cool but this motorcycle is underwhelming
1 Like
Dusk is pretty good so far. Great halfway point between Doom and Quake IMO. Nothing like, mind-blowing but the level design is more solid than I would have expected.
4 Likes
i want to play duskworld so badly can we play duskworld
2 Likes
absolutely. i checked the servers and there were 3 people playing on 3 different servers lol
4 Likes
maybe controversial opinion but: i like Dusk as an experience better than Quake i think. even though it is kind of a ridiculous re-digested pastiche of 90ās shooter tropes/so heavily indebted to Quake obvs. iām not sure how or why it makes that work, but it seems to.
4 Likes
played donpachi tonight in lieu of exploring dodonpachi farther and whatās immediately apparent to me is how much less dense the bullet patterns are. ddp stage 1 has a few enemies that will fling literal curtains at the ship, whereas nothing in dp stage 1 can even dream of getting close to that density. in light of the reduced pressure to dodge, i am being drawn pretty naturally towards figuring out how the scoring works and iām enjoying how surprisingly free-form and full of decisions the game feels for me at this point. i feel like my curiosity is being anticipated and rewarded; at one point i was lamenting how easy the stage 1 boss was and figured iād hang around in the fight to see what would happen. imagine my surprise when a new bullet pattern killed me out of nowhere!
the push-pull of survival/score is really engaging me as iām in these early phases of learning the game. like yeah, i can try to kill everything the moment it comes on screen, but there are situations where if i wait and dodge for a moment there will be more enemies around and i can get a heftier chain! iād imagine at the upper echelons the game is a lot more rote but itās nothing like that for me right now.
iām really pleasantly surprised by how much depth iām finding in what initially appeared to be a pretty static and straightforward game. i could look up all the minutiae of the scoring system (like, whatās with all the hidden bees?) and i will in a few days but this sense of novelty and discovery is something really enjoyable for me right now. setting a new high score feels so well-earned and tangible in a way that reminds me of rhythm games.
thereās this trio of enemies that were killing me every time towards the second half of stage 2 so i resolved to figure them out another day and bomb my way through them for now. i died to the stage 2 boss plenty of times as well and figured that, at least once, iād brute force my way through it with the bomb-laser and see what stage 3 had to offer. didnāt take long for me to die there! it took two hours to even touch stage 3 and iām calling it there for the night but iām already looking forward to seeing if i can dig a little deeper the next time i sit down with it.
21 Likes
It does a few things better than HR. The bank and opera house are satisfying spaces in a way that nothing in HR is, mostly because of how theyāre embedded in the surrounding city. The concept of Prague changing over time was delivered on pretty well: your knowledge of the layout of the city is exercised in new ways as the story advances.
The entire bottom half of Prague and every expedition outside of Prague are totally meh though (and a few areas like the Alps are actively trash-tier) so Iām praising like 20% of the game here. Still, I personally donāt regret having played it (although I also would never recommend anyone suffer through āuntil they get to the good partā if they canāt stand it)
3 Likes
your setup is really cosy, love it
9 Likes
Tbh Iām not a huge fan of quake single player at all. Doom is transcendent and quake is pretty meh, dusk feels right in the middle.
Kristallijn is a virtual gallery housing a series of vignettes exploring strobing and flickering light and the movement in the space between what can be seen; the constant throughline is a snarling popping flourescent always threatening to break time into tiny frozen fragments. Scenes vary between dancers expressing motion in different-sized gaps of light, incredibly intense full-frame flashing and sensory disorientation (needless to say, this is absolutely not photosensitive-safe), and control and a lack of control when visually enabled or disabled.
As a virtual space it is an essentially solitary thing and with headphones and a face up against a monitor it can hit an intensity live exhibits are hard-pressed to match.
A phenomenal āsparse sensory spaceā.
9 Likes