Titan Quest is a fun game and I’d recommend it as well to anyone who likes hacking through (or shooting fireballs/arrows at) piles of mythological creatures.
I’ve been trying to play some of my Summer Sale purchases and put them all in a separate Steam category rather than letting them get lost in the weeds of my library. The one or two “major” titles like Hellblade I already know I’ll like but I’ve been testing my cheaper indie purchases:
Zomborg - Top down style, mission-based, zombie shooter. Maps have an objective as you go through the story (“Search three cars, collect intel bag”) and you have at it. Only did the first two maps but it was pretty fun.
Swarmlake - Endless shooter style game that puts you on an infinite map to collect points and shoot the blobs trying to kill you. Try to beat your own high score and hit the leaderboards. Games only last a few minutes at most. I liked it.
Pan-Pan - Indie puzzle/exploration game. Cute but the puzzles aren’t really well done (mainly “move stuff until something happens”) and I understand that it’s pretty short. You can wait on this one.
Haydee - Unfortunate modeling of the character between the giant boobs and wedgie-butt but there’s Workshop mods to change that. Playing as (clothed) Max from Life is Strange or Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite is amusing. Third person puzzle shooter with a lot of “Press button in Room 2, go to Room 6 where gate opened, climb in to Room 8 to find key card, return to Room 2 to open locked door and find hidden grate to Room 9…” plus robots who want to kill you. Seems well done if you like that sort of thing but I’ll probably need a walk through to ever finish it.
50 Years - A minimalist empire sim where you need to survive for fifty years, building your town and hiring armies. Plays sort of like the old DOS game “Hamurabi” but with pictures. Different starting nations have different modifiers and you can sell your soul to the Chicken Devil. Games last under an hour. I had fun.
Diluvion - Not sure what to think about this one yet. You’re piloting a submarine around a submerged civilization and doing crew management. Controls are a little annoying and it could use more direction getting you started. Might be good but I suspect there’s a strong learning curve and hump right at the beginning.
This Strange Realm of Mine - I really liked this one. The story is full of Philosophy 101 textbook cribbing, emo song lyrics and bad high school poetry but the level designs are innovative and interesting and pacing is good. You’re dead, but not dead and are seeking the truths about life, God, yadda yadda. Low-rent indie pixel sprites in a first player shooter. Game is maybe three hours long though it has a little replayability in getting a different judgement at the end based on your actions. Was easy going on default difficulty.
Valley - It’s a first person exploration game with some platforming and shooter elements. You play as someone looking for the fabled “Lifeseed” and wind up in the Colorado Rockies, stumbling across both the ancient ruins of a lost civilization and the more recent ruins of the 1941 military program that tried to exploit it. Piece the together the story in the usual way via audio tapes and letters laying around.
The main gimmick here is the LEAF suit, a mechanical exoskeleton that allows you to make great leaps, protect you from falls and gives you the power to drain life from the environment around you or to restore the dead. Leaping around is a lot of fun and reminds me a little of Prototype or Saints Row IV. When you die, the suit drains life from the valley around you to regenerate your own life so you’ll see trees turned to dead trunks or the corpse of a deer that unwittingly gave its life for you. Enough to guilt you into zapping it back to realm of the living. Game play felt fairly casual; I think I’m probably halfway or more through it and only died a handful of times from ill-placed jumps. Nice world, nice game play, nice music.
