Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: Denshattack! · 6 days ago
I can't get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I…
I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and…
The thin storyline around it is entirely superfluous, I'll admit to tiring of the spaceship looking identical every single time I play and it's fair to say there's less motivation to keep on going back once you finally beat it, but even if you only get a few days out of it, right now the price is right.
That Dragon, Cancer is an important game because it tries, but not because it succeeds.
It'll keep you busy for a long damn time too, even if you only play it once – though, of course, for many there'll be later playthroughs in co-op or at at unlockable higher difficulties. I think it's the (admittedly presumed) desire to be the spiritual sequel to Diablo II which holds me back from heaping breathless praise on Grim Dawn, though.
[T]rust me, pick this one up.
It feels like a game which knows exactly what it wants to be. And like a game which someone really, really wanted to make.
What's such a shame about the puzzles, beyond those which are simply bad (not very many, but gosh, they're bad), is that what it doesn't do is let you move around the world. And that's even more strange when the transitions between puzzles are the camera swooping down streets and through doors between one and the next, so there was definitely a world built in which one could have moved about.
It's a step forward for the series and a step toward Total War: Medieval III. I hope the improvements here will inform that game, should it be on the drawing board. These gloriously attractive strategic sandboxes may be about the journey rather than the destination, but without a clear destination in sight, and without a shared objective to tie their factions together, they can become unwieldy. As a template for Total Warhammer, Charlemagne seems like a snug fit.
It doesn't have the cleanness or the slow-burn escalation of your old-school C&Cs or the first Warcrafts and StarCraft, so certainly don't approach it as a return to the old ways, but if you want a giant sci-fi army bashing buildings and monsters to death while a crazy lightshow rages, Legacy of the Void is hard to argue with on that basis.
When I started playing Thea: The Awakening, I was excited for its possibilities. I'd love to play the game that I thought, in those early hours, that I was playing. If the card battle system were better and less predictable, if there was more stuff to do with your village and a greater tension between exploration and protecting your home, if failure weren't quite so punishing or random at times… Thea breaks the mold by doing a lot of different things at once. It just needs to do all of them better.
But if you were hoping for a new squad-based game with the finesse of XCOM, or the many tactical choices of Jagged Alliance 2, this is not it. Mordheim is dumb. Mordheim is flawed. Mordheim tries hard and doesn't succeed. This is not a happy Christmas, everyone, but the misshapen horror of Faschnat. It's your present from Krampus.
If you're the sort who shies away from bullet hell twin-stick shooters, or finds the permadeath of roguelikes to be too punishing, I think Nuclear Throne might be the game to try. It might well ease you into those troubling waters. I tend toward those instincts too, but this is so immediately accessible, so ridiculously replayable, and so satisfying to get better at, that it transcends. And if those sorts of games are your thing and you've not already delved in during development, then flipping crikey, get this immediately. And blimey, I'm tired.
Put simply, I'm looking forward to more.
Twenty minutes. No cost. You'll laugh. Bargain.
It's a triumph of a game despite some flaws, and certainly one of my peak gaming moments of 2015. Bright, cheerful, ridiculous, and most of all, absolutely determined to ensure you have fun.
The lack of improvements in areas that have stagnated, most notably dealings with the media and team talks, is frustrating though. There are seeds of good ideas in the drift toward an RPG-like system of relationships and stats, but they're slim and seem half-conceived in some areas. In fact, where the game is improved it may well benefit in Touch (formerly Classic) mode more than in the full-fat simulation. And for the first time, I'm considering spending my time there, and in the entertaining new multiplayer draft mode. I probably won't stick with the multiplayer until Christmas, let alone next season, but at least it's something new to sink my teeth into before settling into the usual decades of toil.