I picked up Star Trucker while it’s half-price (sale ends on 15 September) and checked it out between rounds of tweaking my RimWorld mod list. Did the tutorial delivery and my first delivery from the mission board. There’s a bit of a learning curve and I had to set the docking difficulty at the bottom but it’s worth $12.49.
I’m at the point in the game where I need to scale up my blueprints–which means I also need to start automatic building of buildings instead of handcrafting them. Definitely there’s a Zeno’s paradox feeling, where I need to get to point A, but before I can get there I need to accomplish task B, but before I can accomplish B I need to accomplish C and D, but before I do C there’s E and F and G and D also requires E but also H and I….
My brain might need better organization before I can make real progress.
I did it (though he’s called “The Defect.")
I’ve now Slayed the Spire with all four characters.
I played my first daily challenge today and have died on the final boss three times. It’s those giant shapes with the wiggly arms. They are so hard to kill.
100%-ed all 5 prisons in Police Life. There were supposed to be two other regions, but nothing became accessible. As I suspected, it’s another incomplete version. There are actually a few worker upgrades I haven’t bought yet in the last prison, but they’re so expensive that I’m not going to bother. (Because this requires continually holding down the left mouse button, it’s pretty hard on my index finger.)
Now getting into Epic Plane Evolution. Typical incremental travel game where you have to buy upgrades to improve both your plane and launch mechanism. Very pretty 3D graphics, and it’s always clear when trouble’s coming up. The important thing (which I didn’t realize for a long time) was to nose down a little immediately after takeoff so you preserve your speed. This not only extends your flight but makes it easer to avoid obstacles. The game as a whole seems to be heavily luck based; sometimes I’ll catch a friendly wind (no idea how; no visual indicators whatsoever) and soar, sometimes I’ll get hung up and dropped quickly (often right after adding an upgrade). It starts getting a bit sloggy around the third area, where I’m at right now. Like a lot of Playables, it’s good to wind down and relax with for a few minutes a day, which I intend to keep doing.
Just finished Abiotic Factor and it was great! 7 thumbs up!
Actually, there is a hidden story in Slay the Spire. It sounds like you’re were about to unlock it. Such a deep game with so much thought put into it.
Slay the Spire: Right now I’m just trying to beat the final (phase 4) boss with the Watcher. I got to the final boss for the first time yesterday and died pretty much immediately. I’m really not that good at this game. Gotta give me points for perseverance, though.
First, quick mention that it’s the Steam Autumn Sale now: Autumn Sale Featured Deep Discounts
There are significant discounts on older games and smaller discounts on more recent ones.
Other than that, I’ve been playing Borderlands 4 with some buddies. It’s… all right. The Mixed reviews on Steam is fair. Performance is abysmal even on a RTX 5080 with DLSS 4 and 4x frame gen. I currently play on Very Low graphics just to get a decent frame rate. They keep patching it but it’s just… really unoptimized, and doesn’t even look very good.
Gameplay wise, the classes are better than before, with interesting skill trees. The weapons and items are better, with more slots and interesting grenade and shield and weapon effects.
After a few hours, though, it gets pretty same-y. The story is as forgettable as ever (thank god they got rid of Claptrap, though). Many of the enemies and bosses are total bullet sponges; they’re not hard, just tedious. One boss nearly made me fall asleep… he wasn’t dangerous just had a ton of health, and it was a really drawn-out fight.
“Tedious” is how I would describe most of the game, from the long and frequent load times, to the general gameplay, to the open-world travel, to the unskippable and looooong dialogue lines. There’s a lot of waiting around between various gunfights, and then the gunfights themselves tend to be a lot of skill-less bullet-dumping.
I was really looking forward to the game, but it’s honestly just kinda meh. My friends got it for free and bought me a copy, or I probably wouldn’t have bothered… I am tempted to just edit my save game and skip to the end.
But my buddies, who have never played Borderlands games before, are having a blast. Looter-shooters as a genre are new to them… lucky bastards who aren’t so jaded yet 
I would not recommend this game right now. Maybe in a few years when the issues are patched and the ultimate edition is like $20.
On the other hand, I’ve been having a ton of fun with Mars First Logistics, a Overwhelmingly Positive $12 robot rover builder! Separate thread about that here: Mars First Logistics: Rover builder & simulator with physics modeling
I have been playing Wartales, a game where you manage and direct a growing group of mercenaries in a no-magic, gritty, fantasy world.
It is a lot of fun: leveling up your people, gaining skills and making tricky decisions concerning who to side with and how moral or amoral you want to be.
I do unashamedly cheat though, so I am not getting the real experience: where you have to carefully manage your resources and pick your battles (run away brave Sir Robin!).
The developers keep coming out with new DLCs, so that is cool. Another neat thing is that you can mostly play it the way you want to and ignore a lot of what you do not care about. So far, I have completely ignored the main plot lines and just wandered around, exploring, recruiting and fighting. I have also ignored the side game DLC of running a tavern. I prefer my mercenaries to be kicking ass, not serving beer!
Wartales 60% off until October 6 on Steam.
I was bored the other day and decided to look through my backlog of Steam games that I have not played. I opened up and started to play Spider-Man: Miles Morales. A week and a half later, and 18 hours of game time, I finished the game with 100% of the quests and items found. It was a nice break from the realities of the real world. Now I just need to wait for Spider-Man 2 to drop below $30.
Wow, a lot better than me then, never beaten the 3 bosses in the game with the watcher, never mind 4th boss, and I went back and did well (for me ) to die on boss 3. Then I tried again, and died like a dog in first elite on first map.
The rest of the characters are much less random reliant, you can mostly take cards and work from a heavy deck, done huge strength hits and huge poison hits, lots of orbs working across multiple enemies and beaten the 4th boss with the defect. Sometimes I go on the daily ones and won those when their modifiers were decent and beat the 3rd boss with watcher on that.
I understand that the strategy is to stance-dance and have a very light deck, but you end up facing an elite like the 3 diamonds early on and you see the things which kill that character: flooding the deck with crap cards. A real run seems to pretty much rely on knocking down the costs of wraths and calms, and getting the 3 cards on a stance change rare card. Otherwise you won’t get anywhere. Or have I missed something?
It might even work better if it wasn’t so expensive to remove those damn blocks from the deck getting down to raw attacks. But nope.
I understand that a lot of people have experience with card games from things like Magic the gathering, but not me, so maybe I just don’t get it…
Oh I fucking hate those diamonds. Almost as much as the wiggly shapes bosses. It’s because of those I think you need a couple good cards that hit every enemy.
It really seems to come down to luck of the draw. I’ve had very good runs where I got close to winning, followed immediately with a run that didn’t last past the first stage. I also play really risky in the beginning just to see if I can learn anything new.
Maybe I should try with another character first. But my Aunt did it with the Watcher so I feel like the gauntlet has been thrown.
For me any character is better than the watcher. Defect go with focus loading, try and get hit generating 2 balls of lighting, and lightning hits all enemies.
How does one finish Abiotic Factor? I know its got a general story but games like that, from my experience, don’t typically end. So much so as entering the end game content.
That being said, I just got to the Wildlife area and I’m loving every minute of it so far.
You might not notice it yet, but there becomes a much clearer picture of what’s going on. Which eventually comes to a fun conclusion. You can still play afterwards though, if you want.
Oh good, I read that and thought did I miss something of the end? 287 hours later and it felt like a reallly long game. But it appears not.
Persona 5, which I’ve been wanting for some time, is currently on sale on PS4 for $7.99, so I picked it up. I’m liking it so far as we try to figure out the mystery of why the strange app turns the prep school into a castle.
Is it the Royal version of Persona 5?
Um, I don’t think so. It just says Persona 5. Persona 5 Tactics was a PlayStation Plus free game this month, and the original P5 is on sale right now.