Sol Trader : I still cannot recommend it to anyone who is interested in production values or tutorials etc however I am REALLY enjoying this auteur work, I love the strange vision and the way he models the agents in the world he has created. I am very surprised at how much I like this game.
Mafia III : I love open world games and this is the best of the year by a long shot, maybe better than GTA V, thats how much I love it., Love the length, the gunplay and the story, I also love the extra mini game elements that add up over time. Surprising because although I thought “yeah I will check it out” it was not something I was particularly interested in. Very pleasantly surprised.
Empyrion Galactic Survival : One of those “Sure I will try it out… Oh i just played it non stop for two weeks” kind of games.
Atlantic Fleet : Frankly a masterpiece of wargame design which I am very grateful for the recommendations here for. I am still blown away with just how good this game is. It feels like a classic Microprose design. We have needed someone to fill that space for sometime and at last we have a developer who does. I would have disreagrded this as a cheap mobile port or action arcade game if it wasn’t for wiser heads telling me to try it. Thank you and what a wonderful surprise.
Uh, okay. Did it occur to you that might be why I didn’t write “the game doesn’t have any issues”? :)
I have no idea how that’s relevant. I honestly couldn’t care less whether some reviewer had a hard time getting a game to run and decided to write about it.
You wrote that the PC version didn’t have the technical issues the PS4 version did. But while it may or may not have had the same technical issues, it certainly had technical issues.
I can’t tell whether I’d like Seraph from gameplay videos or skimming the explanations on the QT3 stream. The maneuvering sounds kind of interesting, but the visual design is throwing me off.
The visuals also get easier. There aren’t many monsters and their behaviors are distinct. What varies is their special abilities, as indicated by the icons over their health bars. For starters, this doesn’t come into play until you’ve been playing for a while. And all the icons are explained in the documentation. You’ll eventually get a solid handle on what special abilities are in play. In fact, now that I think of it, it’s a bit like Shadow Warrior 2 in that regard. It might look like a crazy splash of incoherent action, but there’s a lot of information in there.
Yeah, this. Not because it was good - I expected a good game from Soren - but because it’s way better than I thought it would be. I’m not really into RTS games anymore, but OTC reminded me of all the things there is to love about (well done) RTS games.
For me, Grim Dawn (#10 on the list) was the biggest surprise of the year. As someone who never enjoyed Titan Quest despite trying several times over the last decade to get into it, I was not expecting to get into Grim Dawn either. But boy was I wrong about that. I have 225 hours in it now and counting. It’s astounding how good it is, and that it’s from the developers of Titan Quest, which was nothing like this game in terms of how that game felt. Titan Quest was always kind of a mild-mannered gentleman. And Grim Dawn is a ravenous barbarian. That’s how different it felt to me.
Okay, whatever. I think it’s plainly obvious that what you wrote, in the context of the discussion that was going on, reads exactly like dismissing the idea that it had bugs on PC because you didn’t hit them. But apparently that wasn’t what you meant, so arguing about it further would be pointless.
Gremlins is great fun in MP too. I really enjoy it, but the one thing that might drive some true board game folks nuts is the amount of change in it… after all, there’s a lot of dice rolling but it’s fun SP or MP.
This is true, but one of the important design decisions is that there isn’t dice rolling for movement! You have control over where and how far you move, and those decisions are an integral part of gameplay. Someone might think from looking at the board that it’s another dopey “roll the dice and move your mice” kind of Monopoly. It’s definitely not.
But you’re right that die rolls for stuff like, I dunno, insurance and random events can be a huge windfall or setback.
I suppose I could have been clearer. I just wanted to make the point that I’ve played both the PC version and the PS4 version of Homefront, and the PS4 version was in way worse shape. I didn’t mean to imply the PC version was super polished or anything, and I said as much in the review. Anyway, sorry to be argumentative.
