Jul 2023: This Month's Games
a public journal of everything i've played this month
any notes should be treated as "first impressions"
had a week off from work in the middle of this one and used it to knock out some of the backlog. lotta gaming going on
any notes should be treated as "first impressions"
had a week off from work in the middle of this one and used it to knock out some of the backlog. lotta gaming going on
46 Games
yeah this is actually a great management sim and feels very much like a school instead of a spreadsheet with graphics. i think this is really, really good, and anyone who is a fan of management sims will probably find something to enjoy here
nice little game about being a corpo hacker wizard but has SO many references to internet memes. still worth trying out the demo if you want an interesting top-down hacking RPG
i can see why so many of my steam friends were hooked on this at some point, but it's just not a format that's capable of holding me for very long. nothing wrong with the game, this is just a "me thing"!
"Broken build sandbox" is correct - on my second run I found myself with a build that cleared entire levels by not moving. ludicrous power spikes easily and frequently, although piloting these builds still requires some know-how
probably one of the most accessible examples of a traditional roguelike despite its bloat
second attempt at this and i just don't really get anything out of assigning workers to buildings. probably the game for anyone who likes just the first 15 minutes of playing anno
probably the upper end of how fun an aim trainer can be
probably the nail in the coffin for me as far as battle royales go. my fourth time trying to get into this game and it's an okay time, but i'm playing it because it feels like titanfall, not because i actually like any of the BR elements or the strategies they encourage
i know this is one of the big daddies of the genre but i just can't bring myself to play this over some of the others that are out there. don't have a good reason for it either - probably a sign i should come back to this one later
short and sweet if you just want the achievements, albeit a bit too easy, but i understand that youre meant to chase leaderboard spots. i wont be doing that!
they've attempted to improve GTA Online by removing the part where you have to interact with strangers and... i kinda like it? it's not good in its current state - there's zero nutritional value to anything you find here - but its a single-player MMO about being a criminal and i knocked out everything there was to do in about 3 hrs
LOTS of little details that I really love: gardens producing usable crops, desire paths, crop rotation, and people actually constructing buildings one component at a time. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, but truthfully this could benefit from some QOL options. Job openings are only available to certain genders but you don't know what those openings will be until you've fully built the building, for example
has attempted to ramp up the tension and difficulty by leaning further into the shooter aspect, where every room has enemies with assault rifles that react instantaneously to you entering the same postal code as them. it's good that it's trying to be its own thing (instead of just being SWAT 5), but i liked the moodier, slower pace of SWAT 4 compared to "i'm going to get jumpscared by 3 different enemies who will instantly headshot me as i open a booby-trapped door"
had a much clearer concept for my city-state this time around and i think i'm really seeing the appeal. still fairly tough but i'm too hooked on manually creating little plazas and parks to put it down
Certainly feels a lot like playing old SimCity, and the individual assets are gorgeous, but the cities themselves start to look horrendous as they grow and trying to get roads to connect properly is a nightmare, especially at different elevations. where this game goes really hard is in the decorations - if you want to go back and sprinkle little details all over your city (construction signs, backyards, crosswalks, etc.) then this might be your thing
maybe i'm too anti-landlord to continue breathing but i feel like this is a weird title for something that's more about interior design, decorating and renovating apartments, than it is about tenant management or business simulation
love 2 build vertically! unfortunately each new game is a massive pain in the ass in ways that even outright cheating couldn't really alleviate. i've also found that it's really easy to hit these bottlenecks where - because of the district system and the heavy reliance on wood - you get stuck in a situation where you can't do anything for 25 real-life minutes because you need one particular building to un-jam your colony but have burned through all your resources
good for people who want every part of their cities to snap onto a grid, but my least favorite parts of city builders are building new power and water utilities and this entire game is just "I guess I need to place one new power plant for every building I place"
genuinely very good racing mechanics but my eyes glaze over the second i look at these menus
old school diablo aesthetics with survivors-style gameplay. good sound effects, but that's about it!
kinda neat to have all these systems and use them to improve the world around you - the main thing i like in these games - but this has to be one of the worst skill trees of all time. if your skill tree means i spend 45 IRL minutes to get 2 separate skills adding up to 15% bonus damage to trees, i'm coming to your house
It's Kingdom Come: Deliverance if the entire game was that DLC where you build up a medieval town from scratch
the systems it uses to supply power, water, and road access limit how interesting your cities can be, effectively forcing them into a grid. probably still the best city builder on your phone? if i'm wrong about this i would genuinely love to hear about anything better
For my money, the premier idle game on the market. The different factions significantly change how you play and you can use the order in which you pick them (after each reset) to hit some really silly numbers quickly. There's some actual strategy here that allows you to plan out your resets without needing to look at graphs on some subreddit. the terminology, though, feels very confusing until you're pretty far into the game - i was completely mistaken on thinking that the "current reincarnation" was a shorter length of time than "current game", for example
Maybe I'm just too dumb for this one, but I have a hard time figuring out how each placed tile will affect the demand without monitoring the meters as I whip it around the screen. Creative mode could be nice but the tram lines can make things look really bad.
damn this shit got a LOT harder since the demo
I just cannot get a handle on the recoil in this game. I can see why people like it but the Battlefield series was never really my jam to begin with and this amps the chaos up bigtime, where I feel like there are always enemies in every direction. I'll still play a few more hours of this - still having a good time - but every time i'm doing so, just know that I'm thinking about reinstalling MW2 (2022) instead.
it's got good graphics, the shooting feels good, but it feels like an attempt at making a crysis or a titanfall game instead of making something new. diagnosis: swagless
one big fat joke. i've heard it gets better later but the first few hours are so fucking grating with how they need to squeeze a joke about Dave's appearance into EVERY conversation
has a very obvious dominant strategy with the number of "on-hit" effects but I did get $5 worth of fun out of it, I just can't recommend it to anyone
reviewed terrascape earlier this year, which is this same concept - get points for placing semi-random buildings near resources - in a tile-based format. i think the tiles work a little better, but i'm not taking points off for that
way too much work getting this thing going for me to bother with it over a proper RPG or proper idle game
deathly afraid of giving any power or interesting effects to the player, severely hindering its replay value as a result. you can play each class once and comfortably feel like you've seen it all. it's early access, but if this is "ready for public consumption" as it is, then i worry about what "finished" will look like.
developers of remnant played returnal and decided to make their entire game look like that
i'd like to call it "barely a game" but the truth is that it would receive a serious glow-up with more news stories or an outright news ticker function - something to pay attention to so i can feel like there's some actual strategy to my investing rather than picking my lucky roulette number. i also think investing this much time in the assistant was a mistake
no real reason to play this over the many other games trying to be animal crossing, unfortunately
genuinely one of the worst player onboarding experiences i've seen in a minute, with a tutorial that tells you right off the bat it'll be 72 steps long, between 3-8 tasks per "step", and tells you what to do without really letting you grasp for yourself why
how the hell are these so highly rated on steam??? this is just a personality test that assigns you an arbitrary word. this could've been a website
unsurprising that one of the first things i see upon visiting the dev's twitter account is a post by jordan peterson. just kinda fundamentally broken as an economic simulator, and even more broken as a political one
......okay then!
Ratonhnhaké:ton is a fascinating choice for a protagonist and I suspect I'll have a lot more to say about him once I knock this out - hoping to put out a full review once I finish this
VERY cute, i love the style, and appropriately for a school sim, it places a little more emphasis on caring for people instead of finances. as a result the individual students feel like they're living real lives and you feel responsible for the wellbeing of the teachers as well. I'm eating this shit right up when it gets its full release at the end of the month
not doing anything revolutionary but will be a great podcast game, if that's your thing. will be keeping an eye on this around the time of its release
jobosno
10 months ago