Game of the Month - February 2024

Games
1

I know, I know - traditionally, lordkosc posts these…
What has been your primary game this past month? It could have been a recent title, a new discovery, or something from your backlog. Or perhaps an old favorite you returned to years later? Honorable mentions are also welcome, these would be other games that you enjoyed this past month, but not the one you spent the most time enjoying.

For February 2024 my game of the month is:

  • Astral Ascent - Metroidvania Hades is a pretty apt comparison. While most of the Month for me was spent on sifting through my backlog, this one stuck out - the premise is somewhat similar to Furi, and the presentation and the voice acting did win me over. Has that certain “okay, one more run” appeal.

Honorable mentions:

  • Stable Diffusion - After setting up a local copy for nefarious research purposes, I’m considering this the worlds most frustrating (and GPU-intensive) puzzle game.
    What will your input render? Will your keywords produce something you envisioned, or will it be barely related garbage? How many fingers am I holding up? And, does the model even know what feet are outside of close-ups of the same?

(It started with wanting some RPG character portraits on the fly. It ended up with 100 gigs of models and LoRas, and it’s still mostly incapable of rendering a recognizable sword or any armour that is not “somewhat plate”. It does put out cute goblin gals, though…)

So…
What game defined February 2024 for you? What was your Game of the Month?

2

Played a bit of Yakuza: Like a Dragon this month. Definitely clicked with me more than previous Yakuza games. Will probably pick up its sequel once I’ve finished with it.

Dipped back into Forza Motorsport recently. Still pretty happy with the racing gameplay, though the main reason I don’t play it much is because its single player options are a bit slim. Wish it had an actual career mode.

Still playing EA Sports WRC, though not quite as much as the past few months. Still enjoying it though.

There are a couple other games that I picked up last week that I haven’t had as much of a time to play yet but seem really good, like Helldivers and Le Mans Ultimate.

3

Solium Infernum without a doubt. Most of the month was playtesting it then the last week was release. It’s good to be diving back into hell. Speaking of which…

The runner-up is Helldivers 2. You wait over a decade for another multiplayer hell game with strategems, and two come along at once.

4

Gotta say it’s a tie between Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor and Last Epoch. Man, ARPG fans are eating well right now.

5

I would have to say it was a tie for me also this month between Dominions 6 and Enshrouded.

Dominions 6 I am still working on my first two games against the AI. I played a fairly large game with Pyrene and probably control 70 of the 200+ provinces, but still have a lot to accomplish including some fairly big power enemies left around. It is up to turn 68 or so. The increase in income has actually made the end game longer to me, including more to do each turn because the extra gold is fueling many more forts and mages to manage mid to late game, but I am still enjoying it a lot because it is Dominions!

Enshrouded, my wife and I are finally getting to the end of the current content. We hit level 25 and have all of the main quests completed and have all of the end game gear we were working on. I must admit it had at least one more region/tier than I was expecting and I got a ton of mileage out of the game even as it currently sits. Looking forward to running through it again on main release.

6

My game of the February is, without a doubt, Granblue Fantasy: Relink. What a fantastic game.

Honorable mentions go to Final Fantasy XIV Online (as usual), Tekken 8, Last Epoch, and the late-comers Balatro and Pacific Drive.

7

Must be Cobalt Core this month - exactly my kind of jam, very similar to Slay the Spire, but easier and more classes to choose from and combine. Also there’s actually some story!

8

alan-rickman-flip-table

:)

Too busy playing Helldivers 2 to realize February is over, I even had an extra day! HD2 is my GOTM for sure.

Also playing Solium Infernum, I am playing the tutorial, but I think I am losing… D:

9

Whilst waiting on new PC I’m replaying Witcher 3. Wrapped up game, Heart of Stone DLC and have now discovered I didn’t play Blood and Wine DLC (wasn’t out yet at the time). Geralt never looked finer than in sunglasses and Viper armor!

10

Most played game in February was Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Still got a ways to go to finish it up, I think, now about 60 hours into it.

Wylde Flowers picked up some daily hours in February with the release of the newest free DLC. Hairdos! Woohoo!

Last Epoch and Regency Solitaire II chewed up some of the remaining time, interspersed with the occasional Gran Turismo 7 on the PS5.

March is coming together as another one for Rogue Trader and Last Epoch as the former runs into end-game and the latter ramps up to regular play.

11

Last Epoch
Enjoying the game quite a bit more than I thought I would.

12

Thief II on a new OLED gaming monitor. It took 20 years, but I can finally play Thief II the way I could on CRT’s. Pure bliss.

13

New DLC for Spellforce: Conquest of EO pulled me away temporarily from playing Old World. It was good fun to dive back into Spellforce.

I am still of course playing Old World. I’m in the midst of my 2nd MP campaign with two friends and find myself boxed in between enemies and allies with no ability to expand beyond 3 cities. Guess I may have to go tall.

And last but certainly not least I’m doing an AAR here of the new DLC for Imperiums: Greek Wars, Rise of Caesar. The Gauls are proving a challenge on their home turf.

14

Serious play:

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: This is so AAA it hurts, it is beautiful on a Series X, but there are so many collectibles, mechanics, cutscenes, crafting elements, flower-picking minigames . . . it’s exhausting. The buzz that it was basically a Far Cry game got me to buy it, but the mechanics and gearing are more MMO than shooter. Boy would it be nice to be able to mark enemies like a Far Cry game, though, stealth as a 9-foot tall blue kittylady is hard.

Ghostwire Tokyo: The combat is only ok, but the atmosphere in the abandoned sections of Tokyo gave me an irresistible sense of place. Collecting lost souls scratched the same itch as collecting agility orbs in Crackdown. Amazing how often FPS games I like turn out to be published by Bethesda.

Brotato: Lacks the simplicity of Vampire Survivors but has the same see-what-happens-this-time appeal. I keep trying again and again, but I suspect I don’t really understand the impact of all of the different stats I am supposed to be balancing. Maybe some research is in order.

Undead Horde: I generally like 10cent games, they keep the mechanics simple and the gameplay relatively engaging. This one has you managing a horde of risen undead (thus the title), and just like working in sales, you give yourself a raise! Kill more, get more killers. Unfortunately, this one demands a lot of repetition – fast travel back to base, stock up, fast travel back, try again. I understand the need to avoid an easy fail-state, but it’s fun when you are mowing the living down, but endless do-overs when you need to level up enough to win are kind of blah.

PowerWash Simulator: Replayed this on PS5 when it hit PS+ Extra. Same oddly relaxing gameplay but the buggiest console game I have played in years. Crashes galore on the PS5 native version.

Toe dipping:

Saints Row: free on PS+, might as well try. It’s as lacking as everyone was saying it was. Damn.

Tin Hearts: It’s like Lemmings except artsy and glacially slow.

15

Yakuza Like a Dragon was a surprise. About 35 hours into this one and still having a blast. I’m also played a lot of Yakuza 0 on my Steam Deck.

16

It was a backlog month.

Finally finished Rise of the Tomb Raider after getting stuck about 8 years ago, and then restarting on easy.

Then spun back to Hogwarts Legacy.

Both games partly because of my issues with bouncing off of Open World games after a bit.

17

My buddy Trip and I came to the end of content as well, minus a quest or two. But it was a very fun ride. I can’t wait to see what they do with the game.

So, I still have Palworld to get through, a bit later than others here. I’m also awaiting the final Survival: Fountain of Youth push from the devs to exit EA. Holding full comments until then.

So, for now it’s back to Ark: Survival Ascended for my friend and I. I have a million games in my backlog and yet can’t get away from a small handful of them.

18

Is that because Thief II is a dark game and an OLED display can present black levels close to how a CRT did?

Marvel’s Midnight Suns ruled February. The short description of it that I recall hearing misses key pieces of the presentation, so I would style it as Fire Emblem Three Houses with superheroes and deck-building. I miss old games that just did the thing once I told it what my choice was. I get tired of watching animations: executing cards; reactions; enemies splitting into two, one after the other. Does anything reduce its animations the more they play? I want to try such a scheme.

After beating it, I saw I was seven or so achievements short of a complete set. I wanted to collect the rest, but at least two of them are very annoying. Have every character do a training thing that’s meaningless because I’m at the end game, and rebuild the main character to the other affinity. I should look up what’s in New Game+. Maybe there’s something interesting there.

But why do I even care? It’s the same thing I ask myself about end-of-mission scoring. The game has a bunch of difficulty levels that unlocked over time. They don’t affect anything about story or achievements, I think. I found them useful for keeping the fights interesting. But! There’s an end of mission rating, one to three stars. That rating is based solely on rounds to complete and number of heroes KO’ed. Raising the difficulty means rounds and KOs both go up. I kept getting one- and two-star ratings by taking on the bigger challenges. Those stars are meaningless, yet they kept aggravating me. Why do I want the game to lavish praise, in addition to bonus XP and blue currency, on me? At least don’t admonish me.

Ended the month getting mostly through Steelrising. One letter the character discovers was signed “P”. Official link to the world of Lies of P? Because I am lazy and change attack with a halberd does everything I ever wanted, I don’t know how to play the game. Everything falls to the charge attack. The stats are accompanied by a hexagon drawing that is opening like an iris (is there a succinct word for that?), pointing to their eventual maximum. May the game not scale anything beyond that difficulty.

Steelrising has a lot of tropes from Dark Souls and feels like a carbon copy—so much the same but not an original. Where they add things, it only evokes more feelings of inconsistency for me. Now the character can jump and grab a ledge. But, the character can’t grab all ledges or even most. Jumping above a thing frequently hits an invisible wall preventing movement beyond it. This extra bit of freedom more often shows me the constraints. (How did I feel about the jump in Elden Ring then? I forget, so I’ll tell you in July.) It’s like cooking for myself. The food’s fine, I’ll keep eating, but it’s not deeply satisfying.

19

My games of February were:

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration – After The Making of Karateka, I had this Digital Eclipse historical collection on my wishlist and ended up grabbing it on sale and exploring the whole thing. I think what DE does is so much more successful than a lot of simple compilations because you don’t feel like you’re shortchanging a game–or that you’ve been shortchanged by it–when you play it for five or ten minutes and move on IF you have other context and content related to it that help you understand what it meant in its time. Most of these Atari games are pretty simple arcade games; you can appreciate their game mechanics in a matter of seconds, and see basically all their artwork just as quickly. Why they’re interesting to us now is more about their place in a larger story of innovation and development, and the historical timeline and supplementary images and interviews that are in Atari 50 (and Karateka) provide that.

Also, there was an Atari 7800 game called Ninja Golf??

Fairway Golf and Regency Solitaire II – I was desperate for something new to play on iOS while listening to podcasts, so I returned to Fairway Golf, from Big Fish. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that Regency Solitaire II was only days from release, and it used the same Golf solitaire mechanics. So I’ve been playing a lot of that kind of solitaire (probably the only solitaire I can tolerate), on two different platforms, each with their own set of elaborating mechanics laid on top of the core “match one higher or lower” gameplay.

Less to say about Fairway Golf–it has a ton of very well-done content at this point, lots of special events and challenges, and also a free-to-play business model (a fairly generous one).

Regency Solitaire II is practically the same game as the first (from my memory of it). I’m just cruising my way through the chapters, playing each hand until I get it perfect. The wild cards and special abilities make success inevitable, effectively.

The story and dialogue are pretty piss-poor in this one, which surprised me. I feel like the first much more capably captured that Jane Austin vibe, but maybe I’m remembering it through rose-colored glasses. This has the shallowest of characters and some bizarre attempts at period-sounding language. Overall, it feels like a slight improvement in the gameplay experience and a big let-down on the narrative side.

20

Helldivers 2 - Democracy always needs defending and it has pulled me off my Snowrunner playthrough.

Honourable mentions to Enshrouded and Last Epoch. Also probably would have spent more time with Palworld, but I was reserving that for time with my son and he’s been completely obsessed with another I guess I should honourably mention (if you are 10-14 years old) - Toilet Tower Defence. If you are not familiar with that, it’s a Roblox tower defence game based in Skibidi Toilet and it’s kind of bonkers.