Maybe a 7 or 8? It does have performance issues, although I’ve apparently dodged the worst of them, and it’s a remaster of an old game which shows. Still, I’m having fun. And I do like the Elder Scrolls setting/games, which inclines me to rate them higher.
I haven’t played BG3, but Oblivion has certainly taken up the last 100+ hrs or so of my game time. It’s absolutely worth it on game pass.
New Cycle (steam link) – a blatant Frostpunk ripoff still in early access – is currently available for historical low sale price. We don’t really have a thread for historical low sales so I’m posting this here. Would anyone be interested in such a thread?
I just bought and downloaded it (8 GB), but Timberborn has its hooks in me way too deep to bother looking at it now. So fair warning that I have no idea if it’s any good. But if you find the steam page piques your interest like it did mine, now’s not a bad time to grab it. In addition to the sale price, there’s apparently a significant update coming soon.
Sale is here at GamersGate. Enter coupon code ITAD at checkout to knock another dollar fifty off for a sale price of $13.49 plus tax.
NBA 2K25 (PS4 edition)
Fun game. I’ve been playing on Semi-Pro difficulty with the Pacers. Not finding much of a challenge so far; might raise the level later, I don’t know.
I picked up Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 (with all the DLC) for less than $20, so I have started with Watch Dogs. I’m really enjoying it so far (sort of like Assassin’s Creed meets Cyberpunk, two games I really like), except for the driving segments where I have a hard time escaping from the police. Hopefully there won’t be too many of those.
Moderating:
Please note roughly ten posts were pulled from this thread and merged into a dedicated Timberborn Thread for ongoing discussion. If you’re looking for them, find them here:
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Started it. The company, Bethesda, made the game Steam Deck verified and you know what? They really did. The wide expanses are not greatly rendered, but the majority of the game looks pretty good and has played totally fine.
It’s OK so far. There are RAVE reviews, but I’m only doing OK. I am in the Vatican, the first main section of the game. It’s neat. I don’t know if I’ll love it the way others do, but it is fun.
I think in the first one theres this cheesy way to escape the police, drive to coast, leave the car and swim out some distance and wait.
I’ve returned to The Planet Crafter, to play with the new moons and planet. Turns out it’s just as fun on this, my third playthrough: I’ve terraformed the Humble Planet, and I’m a couple hours away from terraforming the water moon Aquilis. I’ll bop over to the second moon in a bit and see how quickly I can bootstrap it, then try out the original planet with all the tech intact, and that’ll do me for a few dozen more hours of terraforming goodness.
I’ve improved a bit in my police evasion skills. If I’m close to the L train, I run along the tracks until I can use the hack to stop it and climb on board.
I’m still not great at driving, though.
Just finished putting about 60 hours into a pretty fun action RPG called Lies of P, in which you play as, uh, Pinocchio, fighting rogue puppets and monsters in a weird steampunk Italy-ish city. It’s an unrepentant Dark Souls / Bloodborne clone, albeit markedly easier, shorter, and more linear than any of the FromSoft titles. That said, I’m surprised it hasn’t gained a bigger following - it was actually really well crafted and balanced and the combat felt really good.
Has anyone else played this game?
I just saw they are adding an easier difficulty soon and it made me wonder if it might be for me.
I love it, played enough to get the platinum trophy (strangely, the only games I’ve completed all achievements for are soulslikes), and I’m excited about the DLC coming soon. Beating the final boss was one of the best finished-game feelings I’ve ever had.
I also got a platinum, which I think is only the second or third time I’ve ever done that. I think it’s definitely got a few weak spots (any of the platforming sections can just go straight to hell, but especially the one in the cathedral), but on the whole it was a great game and it’s odd to me that I don’t hear more about it.
@Mahaloth - the difficulty is super weird. A lot of the game, like 90%, is really very easy if you’re using all the tools that are available to you. But then there are two or three deeply Soulslike moments where I was banging my head against the wall - the aforementioned cathedral platforming section, and two particular minibosses that killed me probably 40 times each before I realized that they were both totally optional.
Dune: Awakening is coming out soon. It’s a desert survival MMO-lite set in an alternate-history Arrakis where Paul Atreides was never born, but other Dune-isms are still there. It goes into advanced access tomorrow morning (June 5) and the regular full launch on June 10.
Seems like a potentially interesting game reminiscent of Once Human, except with spice and sand worms, of course.
Feedback from the beta seem mixed; it’s a pretty game with interesting but seemingly barebones systems, and melee combat (knifefighting) seems especially simplistic.
The MMO-lite aspect is that the PvE part of the game will only support 40 players at a time — that’s how many people you can see in game alongside you in the main area. The PvP area and social hubs are separately instanced. It’s a somewhat novel hybrid system detailed in a blog post: Dune: Awakening - Server Structure and Large-Scale Multiplayer Mechanics Explained - Steam News
I’m half-tempted to pre-order it, but with the way Funcom has been managing expectations and having to explain a bunch of things, I feel like they’re not fully confident about how it’ll be received by the playerbase (I mean, who ever is at launch).
I’m hopeful but also cautious. The survival genre is so overflowing with mediocre copycat games, and MMOs haven’t done well in quite a long time. Funcom’s own track record is somewhat mixed too. I’m guessing the game will launch to Mixed reviews with a lot of ifs and buts… guess we’ll find out tomorrow morning!
I watched a play through of Lies of P which was both enjoyable and also made me think I was glad that I didn’t own it myself because I would have rage quit pretty shortly into it. I guess now I could play it if they’re releasing an “easy mode” but I’ve already seen the whole game so, eh.
I started playing Stray tonight. It’s the most cat game to have cats in a game. Enough so that I keep getting asked by robots to do things and think to myself “You know I’m just a cat, right? I’m gonna knock shit off your shelf, scratch up your rug, meow and take a nap on that shelf.” It’s sort of a weird dissonance that it makes you feel so much like “a cat” but then expects you to be solving puzzles and stuff. This doesn’t make it bad – wouldn’t be much of a game if you just slept in a sunny patch all day – but still feels a little weird. On the other hand, I guess that just goes to show how well it does at being cat.
I need easy mode to be as easy as a standard action-adventure game, which I hope it is. Otherwise, I’ll skip it.
I wish Elden Ring, a pretty good game, would release a easier mode. I made it to the snowy area and the big fire giant, but quit due to constant frustration.
I made it through Elden Ring but that has the advantage of an open world to go level up in if you hit a roadblock and tons of potential cheese between overpowered builds and environmental tricks such as luring a boss off a cliff or making yourself unreachable as you pelt it with poison arrows. Lies of P is more straight forward and expects you to be able to take the fights solely on the merits of your skill so I don’t think I would last as long (especially without an easy mode).
Oof. It’s even worse than I thought. Started out at Mixed a few minutes after launch and then went down to Mostly Negative after an hour. There’s not really enough reviews yet to cast any sort of final judgment, but it’s not off to a good start…
Kinda sad, because it’s such a high-profile, high-risk, high-expectations project at a time when the gaming industry is quite precarious. It’s brave of Funcom to even attempt this. Hopefully some of the issues (melee, performance) can be fixed.
I’m almost finished with Elden Ring, only have the final boss fight of the game remaining (lost about 4 times, and am now just revisiting the rest of the world to discover stuff I may have missed). The latter half after the Fire Giant and in the snowfields is very much a turn in tone to the frustrating. Weapons/spell damage becomes starkly anemic, and areas are generally more claustrophobic and linear. It is less open world from that point and more a case of tailoring your build or cheese method to incrementally chip through the rest of the difficulty gates.
That said, it has still been worth it. But as far as fun factor and enjoyment, The prior two thirds of the game are the best, and I’m having more fun putting on my explorer hat going back and hunting the missed corners of the early game.