Planetary Annihilation looks good, I like the cartoony style, mechs, and weaponized asteroids. It’s just that I haven’t paid $40 for a game in over a year, let alone a beta.
Anybody looking to upgrade Civ V with the latest DLC (Gods and Kings) might want Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Gold Edition Upgrade. It’s $10 in my region, compared to $25 for G&K, and includes G&K (according to this thread on the Steam forum) plus some other stuff. Which kind of doesn’t make sense, but I believe it’s the case.
I’d wait for some polish. The UI and mechanic explanations need a bit of work. Some of it is rather unintuitive too. The techning in the game is a bit opaque, for instance. Rather than just having a straight up tech tree where what you can build is based on research and prerequisites, each individual type of builder has its own individual set of buildings.
These mostly overlap, but if you want to build an advanced air factory, you need a basic air constructor, same for robot and vehicles. Then there are advanced air, robot, and vehicle constructors that also have mostly overlapping but still slightly unique building sets. So you have to keep track of a bunch of different types of construction units, and what they each do.
The streaming economy is interesting, but this game embodies “always be building something”. Every single one of your factories should literally always be producing, and yes, this creates insane amounts of units.
My primary complaint about the game is that it’s a bit lifeless. Despite the nice cartoony graphics, the animations have no real charm and units don’t have any flavor noises or responses when they do anything (granted they’re all robots). It all feels very cold and lifeless, and not in the stylistic way where it embodies the feeling of being a soulless automaton commanding a robot army or anything. Just in the sense that it feels like they didn’t care about presentation.
I’m sure a lot of this (especially the front-end presentation) will be ironed out by launch, but I’d be a bit tentative on buying it if I were you, just to be sure.
The same issue gets in the way of my enjoyment of games like Supreme Commander. I think a better option would be something like the undead faction in Warcraft 3, where you at least have some hero units to add character even if the robomooks are the ones doing all the dying.
Cities in Motion 2, which is nice and cheap, but I can’t say I have much interest in a public transport simulator by Paradox.
Desktop Dungeons, which is quite a good game, but one I played back when it was free. Looks like it’s been polished. The game itself looks pretty much the same.
Sniper Elite V2, with a sub 70 score on Metacritic. And…
7 Days to Die, which looks to me to be more of a lifestyle than a game.
Apparently Deadpool was pulled from the Steam store. You can still buy a Steam-activated copy from Amazon, Gamefly, GMG or Nuuvem. Gamefly still has it for $8 after coupon code GFDJAN20.
Supposedly, Activision lost their license to publish it on Jan 1, 2014. Since Steam doesn’t actually generate keys for itself, they no longer have licensed copies to sell. The 3rd party vendors still have licensed, pre-generated keys.
Note that Steam will allow you to still play it even though it’s gone from their store. A good number of games have been removed from Steam’s catalog over the years but people who own them will always be allowed access.
Damned is one of the candidates for a community choice sale, and it looks really interesting. It’s basically L4D versus meets Amnesia - a cooperative horror game with one player being the threat. I voted for it, and if it ends up winning, I’ll buy it and suggest a few other people buy it. Early access, but it’d only be 3 bucks.
It won’t win, though. Orcs must die will win. Because that’s what people have heard of, so they’ll vote for it, even though it’s already been on sale 200 times, because they’re idiots.
Natural Selection 2 is $2.50. Hybrid RTS/FPS game with asymmetrical teams and old school mechanics, not dumbed down at all. Highly recommended if that sounds interesting to you. We’ve been playing it again in the SDMB group.
Yeah I’ve been wondering about this. The things that win are things I would have assumed everybody already has. It seems like they’re voting for what they like the best, rather than what they would like to buy the most.
But that’s so blatantly irrational, I thought I must be wrong, that it must just be that people don’t already have these games and are voting for them for that reason.
But maybe not. Maybe I have too much faith in my fellow person.
Which happened because Square Enix required always-on DRM and yanked the servers for the multiplayer portion; the single-player version was still available. It’s like losing access to the MMORPG City of Heroes after the servers got shut down by NCSoft.
Yeah, it looks as though the original article was a little incorrect and they appended it. The single player portion is still live and accessible through Steam.
I assume the removal of the online-only portion was at the request of SE since Steam still has City of Heroes in my library despite it being completely useless with the servers long since shuttered.
By the way, I can not review Fallout 3 for some reason. It says I did not put in more then 5 minutes time. I played it for an eternity this summer.
What might cause this? I played it offline for about a week because I was going on vacation and didn’t know if I would have internet access. Anyway, I played it online more than enough.
