BloodGate (89¢ - 90% off) bills itself as an “Action Puzzle RPG”; basically an RPG wth Match-3 combat elements. Rated Positive
Blood & Bacon (89¢ - 10% off) is just ridiculous gun porn involving shooting and lots and lots of lots of pigs. Looks like it should be horrible but is rated Overwhelmingly Positive. Only 10% off but still under a buck.
Melody’s Escape ($4.99 - 50% off) isn’t on a super deep discount but I’ve been playing it since I bought it on the first day of the sale. It’s a “Play to your music” rhythm game, set as a side scrolling runner. Levels are generated by the beat/tempo/energy of your tracks and ranges from “really good” to “pretty good” depending on how nontraditional the structure is. Even the weakest levels (“Energy peaks”) are pretty fun if not as whiz-bang cool as when it finds a strong 4/4 beat. Rated Very Positive.
Picked up Fallout 4 and some other stuff off my wishlist.
Never noticed any bugs myself and I’ve finished the game plus all DLC released thus far. 'Course, I didn’t start playing until a month or so after release.
$2.49 is a pretty good price for the Ghostbusters game. The controls are awkward, the game often leaves me unsure what I’m supposed to be doing next, but it’s got the original voices and is a fun romp around that world. Mostly, though, my 4-year-old currently lacks controller skills loves to watch me play, and we have conversations about what’s going on.
One good new Steam feature is now you can block tags from your queue, plus things like early access. Oddly, I long wished for the ability to block early access games but now that I have it I don’t want it.
I am actually tempted to get a few of these early access games while they’re on sale - Space Engineers, Subnautica, Caves of Qud. By the time I’m ready to play all those, maybe they’ll be out of development.
Space engineers is a game that works fine and gets weekly updates. If they said “fine, we’re not updating it anymore”, you’d be happy to have it, but if they say “hey, we’re going to keep improving the game”, then it’s still in development and you should stay away.
Games should be evaluated on a case by case basis.
I asked for the feature a few months ago, so I’m glad they added it. Goodbye Walking Simulators, goodbye Clickers, goodbye Episodic games, you will not be missed.
Anyone played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games? The reviews are very positive, I’ve already got a crazy backlog but at less than $10 it’s getting hard to resist.
Think of it as a piece of Lovecraft in-between slices of Fallout with a Russian sauce. Harsh, bleak, unforgiving, spooky, rough around the edges. Worth a try.
I picked up the Assassin’s Creed games I haven’t played yet, as well as South Park: The Stick of Truth, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, and a few of the classic Final Fantasy games which I’ve played countless times before but haven’t been available on PC until now.
Big fan of them here. Well, Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat. Clear Sky was a different studio I believe and not as well received.
Rather unforgiving shooter with a heavy, bleak Soviet/E. Europe pastiche. A few very minor RPG elements such as inventory management and people offering you missions. Well worth playing.
There’s a bunch of mods available for the game. I like the Complete mod which has numerous minor bug fixes and a few Quality of Life additions but you might want to just play Vanilla first. Other people swear by other mods (StalkerSoup is popular) but most of them seem to be “Extreme Realism” style ones that affect game play more than Complete does.
Edit: Those mods are for Shadow of Chernobyl. There’s also Call of Pripyat mods but CoP mainly “fixed” some of SoC’s minor issues and added the QoL enhancements like item repair.
If you like the atmosphere of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, you may also like the Metro series, of which you can get both for $7.49 right now. It’s also a Russian apocalyptic science fiction, albeit with more stealth elements and the possibility of non-lethal takedowns.
Yeah, I also recommend those. Get the Redux versions (that’s the $7.49 bundle) since the Redux version of 2033 is supposed to improve upon the original game considerably.
Great shooters with stealth elements. The Metro games are more linear and plot-heavy shooters whereas the Stalker games are more “open world” and, while there’s a story, you sort of have to pay attention to really follow along with it. Both are good franchises though from both a technical standpoint and in terms of atmosphere.
Have they fixed their framerate issues? It was already a little iffy for me in 2014 and I never got that big, larger/multiplayer people were reporting just terrible lag and framerate that only got worse as they added more features. I know sometime last year it got so bad that the company CEO was livestreaming the game and lost his shit as his own dev team because the game was completely unplayable. He then promised that they’d work on optimization, but I haven’t heard how well that’s gone.
That I’m not sure about. I didn’t have any framerate issues but I haven’t really played it in 9-12 months. The steam forums would probably tell you if it has widespread problems.
Not really a fan of TotalBiscuit, but a reasonable guide to some good deals in the sale. I like that when several packages are on available, he talks about why he picked what he did. For example, he went with the vanilla version of Saints Row IV because of the price point and his opinion of the DLC.
