trying out tactics ogre
does this game ever get any good, or is it a game where i’m forced to watch all my units get one-shot by archers while i can only do measly amounts of damage?
5 Likes
which version are you playing?
I found the newest one infinitely more playable than the previous versions i’d tried
1 Like
I Hate Running Backwards
A vertical shmup with rogueluite elements based n the Serious Sam universe. If anyone remembers the shmup development blog the2bears, this plays like the sort of prototype that would appear there from time to time albeit withut the charm
3 Likes
I’m playing Pyre, and I like the characters and the world building, and I can see the interesting decisions they’re going to present me with looming. This is all pretty good.
The Rites, i.e., the quasi-sport your characters participate in, is barely tolerable. It’s a nuisance to be dealt with in between the good stuff. Some reviews act like it’s brilliant and I want to know what game they’re playing because it’s not the one I’m slogging through
6 Likes
Yakuza 0 - I’ve been playing it again on Steam deck after playing some of it on PS4 at launch. Just got to chapter 6 and started the real estate mini game and I think this is where I got distracted and fell off the game last time. Will power through and actually try to finish a game for once.
3 Likes
GRANDAD II: IN SEARCH OF SANDWICHES
SHORT VERSION: An edgy (but not excessively edgy) shareware adventure game where you play as an old git, this actually has some fun puzzles and situations but is basically ruined by excessive, terrible pixel hunts. In search of sandwiches? More like in search of pixels!
LONG VERSION: A shareware adventure game made by one dude on the Atari ST, you play as a jackass grandad riding around a motortrike in his underwear… out to look for sandwiches he misplaced.
There is an odd charm to this game, in an early 90s edge lord kinda way. Some things have indeed aged badly such as racism, and things that are a bit too mean-spirited, but it surprisingly doesn’t cross many lines… despite having characters like a leather daddy hanging out in public toilets, finding a couple banging in the woods, or meeting a triple breasted bearded rat woman (oh yeah, there is some nudity in here). Grandad is a jackass but is never THAT much of a jackass (unless I missed stuff).
The first half of the game takes place in a park, and then the second half takes place in a theme park. These sandwiches sure get around! There is no real plot, as you may have guessed, but just a series of wacky situations and oddball characters… the second half in the theme park is less interesting due to fewer characters to interact with.
Also, I love the game’s art.
The inventory based puzzles MOSTLY have a good sense of logic, and if you die the game just rewinds time which is nice… but how howdy, this game is sure brought all the way down with terrible pixel hunts. So much of the game is spent going over every pixel using “look” to find invisible items or pathways… it turns it into such a slog and is obvious padding.
I would have said this game was a fun time (if you could deal with some 90s edginess), but yeah, can’t recommend it based on all the pixel hunting.
THE SWINDLE
SHORT VERSION: Yet another game I wanted to like more than I do, I was excited about this one until it came out and got middling reviews… I finally tried it for myself, and it’s worse than middling. Basically stealth Spelunky, it suffers from terrible controls and frustrating systems. I felt swindled after buying this!
LONG VERSION: A 2D proc-gen stealth RogueLite, this takes place in a steampunk world where you have to pull off as many heists as you can to eventually get enough money to access the final area, and steal the new security system out to ruin your career. Oh, and you only have 100 days (100 heists) to do it.
Money stolen can also be used to buy new abilities and tools (which are required to bypass obstacles in later areas). The bulk of the game is avoiding line of sight/smacking enemies from behind, finding cash, but mostly finding computers to hack as that’s where the most money is.
As you access more affluent areas, the security gets tighter and more systems are put in place to stop you.
Anyway, this game kinda sucks.
The worst part of this game is the absolutely abysmal controls. Clunky, awkward, unreponsive, and unclear. You stick to things you don’t want to constantly (or DON’T stick when you DO want to), your attack doesn’t hit things that you feel it should (and DOES hit things when you think it shouldn’t), and your jump physics are inconsistent.
Enemies are also effected by this physics issue… sometimes hitting them will knock them forward, other times they’ll stay in place. This is a big issue because some enemies will damage you if you land on them after defeated, for example, so you kinda need to know where they’ll go so you can plan accordingly.
Enemy behavior can also be very tedious… some just wander back and forth on patrol, but there are hovering ones which are an absolute nuisance because their movement is random, and sometimes they just wont move their ass (or their line of sight) out of the way… very annoying when they are blocking your only viable point of entry.
All these (and more) added together make for a frustrating, sometimes even infuriating experience.
Then there is the level design… this game is basically just stealth Spelunky. The systems and design feel so heavily based on it. But while having random spike pits around the place, rooms that you can only access via explosives, or rooms only accessible via long otherwise pointless shafts makes sense for an ancient dungeon, it doesn’t for factories or casinos or whatever here. All the levels have no sense of place… they just feel like steampunk dungeons.
And, at least for me, part of the fun of stealth games is the feeling of being in places you’re not supposed to be… sneaking around and staying out of sight of enemies is only part of the appeal. And none of these levels feel like an actual place.
Then there is the usual problem I have with proc gen games in that it doesn’t take long to see all the jigsaw pieces being stuck together and every level eventually feeling the same.
Finally, the systems here just aren’t as fun to play with as in, say, Spelunky. A lot of abilities just feel like they are there to deal with annoyances rather than giving you more fun ways to approach situations.
I’m being harsh… look, there IS fun to be had here, and it is satisfying (at least for a while) to clear a building out entirely and make it out without being spotted… it can even be exciting getting spotted, grabbing as much as you can before the cops arrive, and getting out of there.
But way too many times I died for reasons that didn’t feel like my fault, it just didn’t feel good to play most of the time, it started to feel repetitive, and basically it just ended up feeling like a chore.
There is definitely a good game here, but it’s locked inside a safe inside a safe inside a safe inside a vault… and I don’t see it getting busted out.
10 Likes
talking to a guy who sounds like this
5 Likes
What are you talking about I just recruited four dragons then auctioned them off for $$$ so I can buy the latest swag, this game is impeccable.
In seriousness, it can be quite slow paced, very much a ‘make a choice, observe, adapt’ approach, at least in the original (I have no experience with the remakes). It sounds like the game is telling you that archers rule?
2 Likes
the introductory chapter has nothing to spend money on tho. everyone already has the only tier of equipment that exists and all that matters buying is weapons for class changes, assuming you even get to that point
i stopped at the map where there’s a river and one axe guy supported by archers/mages because no matter what i end up in a situation where someone gets killed waiting for their turn and fuck if im going through that entire map a fifth time. i think it’s probably ok to bail on a tactics game for any reason
3 Likes
I wasn’t throwing that out as a strategy, equipment is not really that important. More just a fun anecdote to encourage perseverance.
I think leaning in to units dying and not constantly restarting is more fun. Adapting to what you see you see working (if archers seem good, recruit some) is the key.
If a unit is killed, hammer the opponents health down then walk up and recruit them instead, they’re clearly stronger.
2 Likes
finished a slew of games recently
Immortals of Aveum
The most aggressively 3/5, 60% on Metacritic game I’ve played recently. Essentially just a shooter, but all the guns and abilities are magic themed; blue magic is precision stuff like DMRs, green is machine guns and heatseekers, and red is rockets and shotguns. Story is a mixed bag. The character dialogue (written by the project lead) is atrocious, but the background lore (written by Michael Kirkbride, yes that one) is actually pretty interesting. What would a society that is continuously undergoing a Dragon Break look like? According to Immortals of Aveum, they would say stuff like “He’s right behind me, isn’t he” and [sPoNgEbOb mOcKiNg] and “need more gun”. Cringe and has a too-long, unengaging exposition-dump opening, but it grew on me by the end. Shades of Singularity or TimeShift.
Berry Bury Berry
Incremental game + mascot horror + Donut County. Throw berries down a big hole to make it larger and earn money. Move the hole around to slurp up props for stars to upgrade your berry-producing operation. Solve a few different funny puzzles. The physics comedy and puzzle solving here elevates this above most incremental games for me, I quite liked it.
Space Rock Breaker
Another incremental game, in the classic “ship flying around breaking asteroids” mold that like 90% of these games are made in. The catch is the rocks you collect go into a plinko machine. There’s a skill tree and lootboxes (keys earned by completing sectors) and such. Doesn’t outstay its welcome. Shows some promise by doing what so few of these games do, which is meaningfully changing up what you’re paying attention to periodically. But there’s not enough interactivity with the plinko board.
Feed The Reactor
ANOTHER incremental game. This one is about feeding fuel into a starship reactor. You have to prime the reactor with various elements - namely, igniters and passive buff materials - and then feed it different kinds of fuel to maximize output. Like Berry Bury Berry, it’s significantly elevated by the physics aspect of it; you have to time when you put fuel in (in the early game, anyway) to guarantee coverage of your igniters, since they only have a small radius where they actually consume the fuel. Adds a Flappy Bird minigame later on, as well as a few other complications. Pretty good!
Graveyard Keeper
Came back to this one after having played it to almost-the-end like 6 years ago. Finished it and all DLC. Tends to wear on long near the end. I do like that it’s “Stardew Valley but with more systems variety”. The isekai into the post-Roman, pre-Dark Ages interregnum world hits a little better now that I’m more familiar with that era of history, even as the characters make annoying quips. Decent diversion, glad to finally finish it.
Wall World 2
More wall-mining stuff, basically the same as the first game but with a slightly different meta-structure. Instead of every run being one big rogue-like wall, you pick areas to go to and chase specific objectives. It’s decent enough, but the fact that you almost always want to fully buy the first two upgrade trees on every single mission makes it kinda boring in the long run. Lots of useless abilities you’ll never use. Really feels like they should’ve thought more about how to make the mining more interesting instead of just making the solution always “max out your mining beam every single mission”
6 Likes
I love a zone in an RPG with urban locations just full of mob activity and NPCs called like “Thug”. Great vibes.
7 Likes
95 hours and/or 25 years later, I have now finally completed Dragon Warrior VII and holy shit what a great game.
21 Likes
Samurai Gunn 2 got a pretty big update. It looks/sounds/UIs nicer, but also rollback netcode and ranked netplay. Very fun.
4 Likes
I’ve been playing Silent Hill 3 the last few days.
I don’t think it’s as good as I remember 1 and 2 being; so far it’s all just dark dirty hallways, with none of the iconic foggy daytime areas breaking up the dark.
I’ve also been noticing places where they “cut costs” by having very simple animations or even still images instead of cutscenes. For example, there’s a part where you turn on a winch, and instead of animating the winch working, or what the winch is pulling, they just show a close-up of a rope going from one side of the screen to the other. Maybe the first 2 Silent Hills had these sorts of things, too, and I just don’t remember them.
I do like that you can adjust the difficulty of the puzzles, separately from the combat difficulty. I’ve been playing on normal puzzle difficulty, but I’ve read about some of the puzzles on hard and they sound pretty cool and some require outside knowledge.
I’m more interested in playing 4, because the core concept sounds really cool, but I feel like I need to get through 3 first for completionism.
7 Likes
Dantooine has two of the creepiest NPCs I’ve encountered in KotOR 2 yet.
5 Likes
is one of them the droid that calls people meatsacks? or is that KOTOR 1?
1 Like
not who I am talking about, but that is HK-47 and he is actually in both!
3 Likes
Shipping my ass from Dxun to civil war torn Iziz at the request of Mandalorian and Republic generals because there are some Pazaak cards I forgot to buy last time I was in town.
6 Likes
Giving Maniac Mansion another go. I never had much patience for this one out of all the lucasarts point n clicks, I guess cuz of it being full of dead ends. This time around I’ve been getting a lot further though. Partially because being able to run scummvm on my phone makes popping in and out of it less of a hassle, but mostly it’s out of a sense of duty to help green tentacle get their punk band off the ground. Hang in there, buddy…
13 Likes