Game of the Month - July 2018

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?

For me it is Cities Skylines, with all the major DLC packs added now.
It’s the relaxing game I need at the end of a busy day/week. In all truth it is more of a traffic management game than a city builder, maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it every year for a few hours.

Honorable mentions: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and The Darkside Detective.

What game defined July 2018 for you? What was your Game of the Month?

Project Wingman: The Alpha. Played a round of the conquest prototype every couple of days on average for the whole month.

Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe

http://www.matrixgames.com/products/504/details/Strategic.Command.WWII:.War.in.Europe

What has really impressed me are the Advanced Third Reich and 653H Variant Modules, available as Free DLC.

@Panzeh And I have been whipping though turns. The multiplayer is really rewarding.

No Man’s Sky NEXT, with a vengeance!

It’s been a very MMO-y month for me.
Secret World Legends had a month long anniversary event, so I was regularly logging in, beating on giant raid golems and then wandering off to quest and hunt down lore bits. I also scored kills on three of the four public raid lair bosses and finally got some signets. The writing and worldbuilding are so damn good in this game and the events have nice cosmetic rewards. But man, I wish they hadn’t nerfed the combat mechanics or loaded it up with F2P. Sigh.

Elder Scrolls Online. Finally dove back into this in the wake of Summerset coming out and…it turns out that it’s really quite awesome and I’m hooked, sinking 40-odd hours into it this month, which would be more if I wasn’t also trying to avoid straining my hands and wrist too much. In my view, the things it loses by going MMO are more than made up for by the much more interesting skill system and combat over the offline ES games and the ability to check out lands never visited in them to boot. Some pretty great quests, too.

Honorable mention: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Downloaders - yes, it’s a F2P mobile title with everything that entails, and it’s entirely possible I’ll run into some way that it fucks non-monetized players over and I’ll quit. But for now it’s got all the demon-recruiting-and-fusing goodness of a proper SMT, complete with goofy characters, sinister plots and very solid turn-based combat. And an Auto-Quest feature that lets you automate the grinding, too!

I got this one for some time directly from Matrix and I had completely forgot about it. I am kind of looking for a “lighter” war game for PBEM, and this one well may fit the bill.

I’m pretty sure I was playing something earlier in the month, and even put a bunch of hours into it. Unfortunately I can’t remember what it was because No Man’s Sky butted in and pushed the other game out the emergency exit.

So my game of the month for July is No Man’s Sky on Xbox One.

I think you’ll be satisfied with it for that. I recommend the scenarios Navarone mentioned, with a preference for 653H, as they tend toward a more consistent scale than the vanilla scenarios do(e.g., corps and armies, no anti-air units or anti-tank units or divisions, no destroyers, etc.).

Agree with Panzeh. The consistent scale of 653H Mod means its light…but not really? If that makes sense? It abjures a lot of busywork chrome (ala Paradox, or whatever…the vogue today) like Brigade sized or Divisional sized units (and no…stacking?) in favor of a sleek Corps/Squadron/Fleet model. More thinking, decisions and chess. Less “Should I upgrade my SP AA Brigades this turn from wheeled to tracked”?

A couple of games I picked up in steam sale:

Offworld Trading Company - amazingly clever RTS economics
Space Tyrant - not sure what to call this, rogue-like sort of 4x

No Man’s Sky NEXT - sunk about 10 hours into this right after release, having picked it up on sale. The grinding and inventory could be much less onerous and does wear thin, but overall this game feels like it will have a long life of me dropping in for 10 hours every few weeks to poke around and enjoy the new scenery and loot. Slightly more polish, better balance on grinding, and a tighter narrative and this would effectively be a Subnautica in space - it’s almost that good. This would have been top game of July if not for…

Star Ruler 2 - I bought this a few years ago and found it interesting but bounced off too many new mechanics at once. With the open source announcement my attention was drawn back to it, and intrigued by how much some of the mods change the game after a few years of development. I never got any good when first playing it, nor have I this time, but I’ve sunk around 30 hours in the past week and am really loving everything about it.

It feels like a 4X with fresh mechanics that are not cumbersome/micro intensive/“clicker”-like, addressing my biggest criticism of the genre. Most decisions feel very strategic, rather than rote. And I’m still getting my ass kicked 30 hours in (on vanilla!), which is a good sign.

I haven’t heard it described as such, but it feels like the spiritual successor to Sins of a Solar Empire. Yes, that good. Hopefully it has an even brighter future now that it is open source.

Thanks to you and @Panzeh for the additional commentary. I do remember that one of the reasons for shelving SC back in the day was the lack of consistency in the scale. I think many of the old timers love that, but I was never really able to wrap my head around it.

Chrome in a war game of this scale is problematic: essentially everything is a big massive what if and playing usually an exercise in hindsight. So you end up seeing the Red Army rolling into Berlin in May 1945 on a phalanx of T-62’s with a swarm of Hinds behind in support… therefore, you definitely want to upgrade those SP AA Brigades :-)

For me… No Man’s Sky without a doubt. I really liked it in the original launch, warts and all, but the NEXT update takes it to a whole new level.

Honorable mentions go to Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Enter the Gungeon.

Surprisingly, I spent the most time with The Division last month. It’s open-world missions are just too fun for me. I guess second was Steep followed by Far Cry: Primal. Ubisoft must be doing something right of late.

Still Factorio.

Started playing XCOM Enemy Uninown, the first Firaxis one. Went for ironman and classic difficulty with random stats, because masochist. Took several starts to learn the mechanics without fatal failures, and then several abandoned economic or personnel death spirals.

Then playthru #19 was the charmed one. Pushed economics first and only had 4 nations leave XCOM. It was slow researching, but finally got through all the techs by the time I was ready to assault Temple. This mission was full of surprises too, including the final fight. By the climax I had 2 deaths, and had 2 team members mind controlled by the 2 remaining Ethereals. On my snipers last shot, she crit the leader and killed him… and I lost the mission. Because when he dies, the other enemies die, and the other ethereal had mind controlled the Volunteer, who apparently then died. That was some cheap BS I must say.

At least it let me restart the last mission, so it wasn’t a total fail, and the second time it went flawlessly … RIP Heroic Volunteer ‘TecPsionic’, the hero we needed.

So, now I’m restarting with most of the second wave options, and then Enemy Within, and then I guess XCOM2…

I’d like to say Six Ages was mine… But I spent more time reading the Glorantha cyclopedia than playing it.
I would have loved to put Star Traders: Frontiers in there… but the crippled fonts of the Macintosh version prevented me to play it.
I am really enjoying Enter the Gungeon, but I have nothing much to say about it. Just a cool little game.
So, errm… It’s Slay the Spire again for me. If they put the lore depths I hope for into the final version of this game, that thing is gonna climb its way into the best games of all time realms of my memories.

It makes me curious to try it out, although I confess the Panzergeneralesque meticulosity of troop attendance was one of the aspects that seduced me in the base game. I’m PC-less again though — best excuse to not play wargames.

It’s a toss up between NMS Next and Kingdom Come Deliverance for me this month. I can see myself spending many many more hours in both games so I’m a happy chap.

Honorable mention to Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, which I still love!

Can’t decide between Smolensk: Barbarossa Derailed and Skies Above the Reich.

Nioh by a mile for me.