I’ve been going through the Xbox game pass library lately.
Young Souls: a pretty fun side scrolling fighting type game. Finished it in about 20hrs. Kinda was sad when it was over. I tried starting it again on a higher difficulty, but I just couldn’t get into it again like I did the first time. I may try again at some later point though.
Grounded: An excellent survival type game wherein you play as a teen who got shrunk down to the size of an ant. You have explore the backyard and fight various bugs and harvest resources to keep yourself fed, watered, armed and armored. It’s still in pre-release though, so the story isn’t all there yet and there are huge chunks of unfinished yard. I put a few hundred hours into it with my friends, but we accomplished all there is to do currently. I’ll probably go back to it once it’s fully released.
Sea of Thieves: A fun pirate game where you and up to 3 of your buddies command a ship and look for treasure, or battle other crews and take their treasure. I had a lot of fun for like 150 hours, but my crew had different opinions on what was fun to them. One just wanted to go PvE and solve puzzles and dig up treasure and kill skeletons. The other just wanted to PvP and take on other crews. Eventually they both have up and playing by yourself, while doable, isn’t nearly as fun. Also, the only thing you can do with treasure is buy cosmetic stuff like clothes or fancy looking weapons or ship accessories that do absolutely nothing. I get why they did that, but after a while it’s kinda pointless.
Trek to Yomi: a very pretty black and white fighting game. It looks great and definitely feels like an old samurai movie. Unfortunately, the fighting system seemed real thin and I got bored with it after 5ish hrs. I really wanted to like it though.
Spelunky 2: like an off brand Mario brothers with rogue like levels. It’s really really tough. You can, and will, die in just a few seconds over and over again. But I found it pretty entertaining for a good 50 or so hours despite not making too much progress. Probably because I hate myself.
Dead Space: yes, it’s an old xbox360 game. But I found that it holds up well graphically. It held my attention long enough to finish it in just a few days. And I’ll probably try the sequels.
7 days to die: zombies meets Minecraft, what’s not to like? Well, for one, the graphics are pretty shite. Also the console version is like 3 or 4 yrs behind developmentally than the PC version. Also, it crashes like every 90 minutes like clockwork. And if you don’t delete your local save data before relaunching, you can find that everything you build is gone when you get back in. Anyway, me and my buddy still a decent amount of fun with it for a good 100 hours or so. But then we just sort of ran out of things to do. There’s no real goal other than to not die. But even if you do die, you just respawn. Maybe you might lose what you had in your pack, but that is often recoverable.
Generation Zero: An 80s swedish robot uprising apocalypse survival-lite game. Great atmosphere, complete with burned out 80s volvos and saabs littering the swedish wasteland. You have to find out what happened to society after you return from a camping trip (or some such,I forget the very beginning) and find that there are murderous robots patrolling the land. I really liked this game. The robots are scary and combat is satisfying. The story kinda ends meh, but it was still interesting. Spent a good 60ish hours playing it. I want to go back and finish up some new stuff I think they just added. I finished the story and I have yet to unlock the highest tier weapons.
Monster Train: A weird deck building game that is oddly addicting. I have about 24 hours in it and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. But I did get distracted by other stuff, so I haven’t played in a while.
A Way Out: More of multiplayer interactive movie than a game. And a real cheesy and predictable movie at that. My buddy and I got it done in just over 6 hours. And it was probably 2 hours too long. But still, it was different and interesting enough for those 4 hours. The last 2 were a bit of a chore though.
Citizen Sleeper: an interesting, dice/turned based rpg. A pretty decent sci fi story with interesting mechanics. Got it done in 10 hrs, which I think was the perfect amount for this game.
Escape Academy: escape room puzzles in video game form. Except for a few puzzles, it was pretty damn easy and obvious. My buddy and got it all done in 7ish hours.
Sniper Elite 5: I’m spending a lot of time on this. Up near 300 hrs so far. There’s something really satisfying about shooting Nazis in the nuts. There’s only 8 real maps. But they are really beautiful. Going through the missions is fun in itself, especially if you coop with your buddy, but the invasion mechanic makes it all the more interesting. When you get invaded, some internet rando joins your game as a Nazi counter sniper and tries to hunt you down. It’s fun to both invade and be invaded. Then there is straight up multiplayer with death match style games. I’ve barely played that yet tho.
I’ve played numerous other games too, but this post is long enough for now.
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