I’ve been playing Planet Coaster 2. I held off for a while due to lack of content, a steep price, and a continued love for its predecessor, then finally bit the bullet when it went on sale. It really is a fantastic game so far, with enough content after a few updates to keep me thoroughly entertained. A few annoyances from the original game were fixed in the sequel, and it makes it far more enjoyable. I see this eating away hours of time.
I’m playing Fallout: New Vegas again, indirectly because of Remastered Oblivion, which got me to play Skyrim again. Which in turn gave me the urge to replay F: NV. I’ll likely play some Fallout III as well soon…
There’s a really good (if pricey) table-top version of the game. Fully co-op for up to four players, really captures the feel of the video game, only slightly stripped down to make it easier to track stuff without a computer.
It’s not really as good as Slay the Spire I don’t think, but Monster Train is pretty decent I’ve found. You have one card deck per ‘clan’ (monster type) and choose a major and minor clan for each run. Cards represent both playable monsters and spells, the latter equating roughly to StS’s cards, and the game takes place on a three-storey Snowpiercer-style train hurtling through a hellish dimension.
It has a good sense of humour, but does seem over-complicated compared to StS. I do expect it could be equally as addictive if one put the time in though.
I’m wondering if anyone has played Shapez 2. It’s a factory type game where you ship specific shapes that you have to manufacture from resources into a central vortex. It’s on sale on Steam at the moment and I’m tempted … I just know I tend to lose focus on these type of games get too complicated.
I think I watched a Let’s Play video of the demo. I’m not a factory game guy, though.
I played the heck out of the first Shapez. I’ve played enough of the second to recommend it, but haven’t got really into it, since it released around the same time as Satisfactory 1.0 and Factorio: Space Age, and those sucked up all my bandwidth for factory games.
I finished a second complete playthrough of Satisfactory, and when Dyson Sphere Program went on sale I snapped it up.
I’ve got a couple dozen hours into it, and I’m not sure whether I like it. More than Factorio, less than Satisfactory, I think.
For starters, it’s nowhere near as beautiful as Satisfactory, and that’s a big part of why I play games. The bespoke map of Satisfactory is just gorgeous, and it’s so fun to travel through it using successfully cooler modes of transportation. It also has almost no vertical dimension compared to Satisfactory–even though it has more than Factorio.
That said, it’s definitely prettier than Factorio, and it does have a better vertical dimension. And I’m just barely getting into the solar-system element of play, and the lure of that keeps drawing me forward: I’m on the cusp of interplanetary logistics, which means I’ll start venturing beyond just the starting moon and the nearby moon of the gas giant I orbit. The increase in scale is really intriguing.
Recently started Stellar Blade. It’s, uh, something else. At least so far, a very polished souls-like, but very designed for the male gaze, or whatever it’s called. The protagonist is running around in a skintight costume (that you can change for no gameplay related effect), high heels, and a ponytail. Not exactly my main concern in a game, but the gameplay itself is very good, at least so far. Very focused on parrying/dodging/quick-time events, and you’re expected to die. In that situation, it’s not nearly as punishing as most Fromsoft titles - you just go back to the previous saved location (usually a camp) and try again.
I bounced off Dyson Sphere Program for possibly the dumbest reason: I didn’t like the scale of my little robot dude versus the planets he was on. I felt like I was strip mining the Little Prince’s moon.
Naw–he’s just a Kaiju.
…on a planet with trees that are fifty miles tall.
I see your point, and I hope that doesn’t start bothering me now.
Edit: on reflection, I love the idea of strip-mining the Little Prince’s planet. That’s gonna be my head canon, and I’ll like the game more for it.
I’ve been playing this damn game for years on my phone. I eventually made it to Ascension 7 (each Ascension makes the game harder, and there are 20 levels) before realizing I didn’t WANT it to be harder, and jumping back to Ascension 0, which is plenty hard enough for me.
My favorite two are the two that you haven’t beat. Silent is delightful with a poison build; I just did 2900+ damage to an enemy by throwing four “triple the poison on your enemy” cards in a row, using the Nightmare “put three copies of a card in your hand next turn” power. Super satisfying. And the Broken is tricky, but if you can get a static “summon two lightning spheres every time you take damage” coupled with the one that gives each Sphere +4 damage, it’s tremendous fun against enemies that hit you twelve times in a row for one point of damage each.
I can’t stand the Watcher, for some reason.
I’ve since Slayed the Spire with her, although less impressively than you. It was close. I did it with a lot of shivs and a thingy that adds +4 to shivs and a lot of poison.
Thanks for the tips. The Broken is all I’ve got left.
It’s essentially the same complaint, but I didn’t like that the sphericity broke my nicely aligned layouts. Satiafactory was mostly ok, though nothing beats Factorio if part of the joy is in making a nice, even, symmetrical layout.
I found that to be one of the most novel & intriguing (if annoying…) parts of the game. There actually is a spherical lat/lng-style grid you can align your constructions to, and part of the challenge for me was how to lay out a planetary factory such that launchers are neatly along the equator (or within the “tropics”), with factories and other things fanning out from there along the latitudinal grid, all connected by drone swarms (were they taking great circle routes, I wonder?).
Anyway, it was a novel and fun thing to consider for a few hours, but it sure was annoying to deal with… eventually I just stopped worrying, especially as I expanded from a single planet to many of them. The sheer scale of that game is insane, going from “part of a tiny planet” to “oh, I now have a couple in this solar system” to FTL jumps across many and building entire Dyson spheres to capture whole stars’ worth of power.
To be honest, the last time I played was in 2021, so it’s probably improved a lot since then. I was almost going to say “the last time I played it was in Early Access”, but I see it’s still in Early Access! So, uh, earlier access! Anyway, I should probably give it another shot.
It’s really quite good — surprisingly so. At first it just seemed like Ye Old Factorio Ripoff, but the more I played, the more depth I uncovered. It does a pretty good job of gradually ramping up the complexity, and I find that it has a lot more quality-of-life than Factorio does (at least unmodded).
The game changes a lot from the first hour to the fifth or so, and then again from the fifth to the tenth, and again, and again… every different scale you reach unlocks a whole new level of automation and logistics management. Each of those levels can really be a game of its own, but somehow DSP manages to merge them all seamlessly into one cohesive game.
On the other hand, I also thoroughly enjoyed the much “purified” factory experience of Shapez 2, which distills the genre down to the bare essentials so you’re not wasting time traveling, collecting resources, etc., just automating and scaling and automating and scaling, turning small factories into reusable components in bigger ones, one layer at a time.
I did like that aspect of the game as promised, but in 2021 I don’t think it was really there. Scaling up just felt like more busywork. But if they’ve addressed and improved that, I’m certainly interested. Like LHoD, I don’t mind the idea of strip mining the Little Prince’s planet 
.
Well, it still certainly is that. The game does get tedious after a while, juggling multiple chicken-and-egg situations (you need more X to make more Y, more Z to make more X, more Y to make more Z)… I don’t think that part fundamentally changes very much, from scale to scale. You go from conveyor belts to drones to spaceships to microwave beams but the fundamental gameplay is still the same “collect, route, consume, expand, repeat” as before. It’s ALL busywork
After the 30th hour or so, I restarted the game with the built-in cheats enabled (basically a sandbox mode) and had a lot more fun planning out my perfect factory without having resource constraints. It felt a lot more like a “intergalactic factory architect” that way than the “space construction peon” of the normal game, shifting the focus to “optimal planning” instead of “tile by tile drudgery”.
That’s what I liked about Shapez so much… it focused on the best parts of the genre’s core gameplay, minus the time wasters.
Oh yeah, that too. I spend way to much time in Satisfactory making sure all my conveyor belts are compact and neatly arranged, and I just can’t do that on a sphere, at least not the way I want to.