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55 minutes ago, Cordeos said:

Its on sale right now on Steam

 

There's also rumors/hints that an expansion is coming very soon.  The devs have talked in the past that they are working on one, and have started dropping teasers on their Facebook page about something. 

 

Edited to add: Apparently at one point they were talking about doing a Motorhead themed expansion, as in Motorhead the band.  Although I can't tell if that was a joke, serious or if that's what they ended up making. 

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Picked up Westerado: Double Barreled from a current humble bundle and I think it's one of those games that gave me a lot to think about but I don't think I had that much fun with. I never really got the hang of the combat, which was my main issue with it, but I really like how it worked around a lot of the problems with open world games like it. The way it's set up it's possible to trigger the final mission from the very beginning so completing quests doesn't open gates to the final quest but instead provides you with additional information to get to it. You can kill literally every NPC and it won't break the game which I think is super neat way to design this type of game. Like I ended completing a quest that ended up locking off nearly all of my active quests but it didn't matter because I had enough information to find my family's killer and found him after just a few minutes. It was really satisfying to complete a quest that I found appealing in terms of narrative and not be punished for it just because it required murdering the entirety of the central town.   

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I finished Steamworld Heist on 3DS yesterday. It turned out to be a perfect game for my commute on the tube, given that most missions can be completed in around 30 minutes (plus it saves almost constantly). I liked it a lot! The turn-based squad combat mechanics are extremely satisfying and tense in a way that rivals the likes of Fire Emblem and X-COM. The plot feels kind of disposable, but the art and characterisation are enough to bring a smile. The whole thing is just a really solid and compelling experience from start to finish. Apparently the developer are already working on something for the Nintendo Switch, and I'm keen to see what they come up with - this is exactly the kind of high quality mid-tier experience that I can imagine playing at home and while out and about.


For the most part I was actually surprised how easy I found it. I'm not especially good at strategy games, but it took me just under 20 hours to finish the game on the first difficulty level above 'Normal'. (That's with 100% completion of every mission, and most of my roster at the highest level.) Aside from the old problem that many procedural games have of sometimes screwing you with a 'bad roll' (remember FTL?), for the most part I didn't find it an especially challenging experience. Perhaps I should have picked a higher difficulty level - and I know there is a NG+ - but I'm not entirely sure the mechanics would change up enough to offer anything different. And I really should get on with finishing the second part of Fire Emblem: Fates... 

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Finished Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse with my boy (4yo). He certainly enjoyed it, he could play some of the early levels himself but we didn't progress far until he was handing me the controller almost immediately. He enjoyed watching me play and walking around the 'overworld' castle himself. It's an alright platformer, nice art and characters. End boss was tougher than that game had any right to have. 

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Battlefield 1

 

I finished the campaign, just on normal and I hardly got any collectibles or secrets. I thought it was very average. I was hearing stuff like the opening was "incredible", "best thing since MW1". The first 10 minutes were neat, but after that its back to generic balls to the wall shooter.

 

Repetitive objectives and gameplay - Capture this area, collect these items, clear this area. I didn't really expect anything great so I guess I am not that disappointed.

Its also a big shame that

 

The black character has been all over the marketing building up to release, he's on cover art but you play him for literally one minute at the start... why wasn't there a proper Hellfighter campaign??

 

Costume Quest 2

 

Coming just off finishing CQ1 for the first time. I really wanted to beat it before Halloween but I literally just finished it. 

Not too much to say.. really fun game like the original with more costumes, abilities, levelling up characters, more in-depth combat system.

I think I prefer the first game mostly because of the setting but I did enjoy this alot.

 

Hope we get a Costume Quest 3 soon!

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49 minutes ago, thenexus6 said:

Costume Quest 2

 

Coming just off finishing CQ1 for the first time. I really wanted to beat it before Halloween but I literally just finished it. 

Not too much to say.. really fun game like the original with more costumes, abilities, levelling up characters, more in-depth combat system.

I think I prefer the first game mostly because of the setting but I did enjoy this alot.

 

Hope we get a Costume Quest 3 soon!

 

Are the battles more engaging or reengineered in CQ2? I LOVED the world of CQ1, but ultimately got bored of the battles. Same animations over and over again. Also the art in the battles was a sharp contrast to the playful overworld. The imaginative battle space felt less imaginative and rote compared to the overworld. Any chance CQ2 addressed this?

 

My personal preference would be to turn the battle system into a Chrono Trigger insta-battle. They can still have the character models "transform" (since that feels like the intention of their design choices), but keep me in the awesome world you created!

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CQ2 didn't add anything new, mechanics wise... I think. I just finished it too but it's been a while since I played the first. Tbh I didn't like it as much heh.

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There is actually alot more to the combat, its kinda like Paper Mario where you time your button press and do more damage. You also have to time your blocks, have a chance to do a follow up attack, you collect / buy cards which you can in battle too.

 

The animations are super repetitive to no change there..

 

 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

 

So I originally played this back on the Xbox 360 in 2012 and had an interesting time with the game. It was my first Deus Ex game, and idiot me decided to try and play it pacifist on my first playthrough - which was fine, but whenever I got to those whack ass Bosses I found it very difficult.. I was completely underpowered.

 

So much so I took months off playing it. That final boss took me so long I had to backtrack, hack a turret carry it all the way back to the Boss room and place it in the corner. I didn’t even get the pacifist achievement either!!

 

However I absolutely loved the art style, atmosphere, music, cyperpunkness and the various ways of approaching missions.

 

Jump ahead many years, I decided to play it again, this time the Director’s Cut on PC leading up to the Mankind Divided release. I made it about 10 hours before MD then I moved onto that because I was too excited.

 

I beat MD and now moved back to finish off HR again. Man the Director’s Cut is so much better. All of those BS boss fights are gone, the Missing Link DLC is seamlessly integrated into the game. I completely recommend it.

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Lumino City :tmeh:

It's a really wonderful little puzzle game. Except that you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you can interact with. There is no indication and sometimes it's only a few pixels large.

But the world is gorgeous, great music, and interesting puzzles.

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On 03/11/2016 at 7:26 AM, Twig said:

CQ2 didn't add anything new, mechanics wise... I think. I just finished it too but it's been a while since I played the first. Tbh I didn't like it as much heh.

 

I bounced off of CQ2 and never went back, it felt like more of the same to me. However, my partner couldn't get into CQ but loved the sequel. We talked about it and it seems that they made CQ2 even more accessible for someone who doesn't play a lot of games. She found it easier to understand the game mechanics (she had never played an RPG before CQ) and the general level design made way more sense to her.

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Finished Mafia III :tdown:

It looks like the only thing they did work out well was the background story, the documentary like movies which they show after major events. The rest all feels like they simply stopped working on halfway. It has a large world, but there isn't actually anything to do. The map shows all kinds of points of interest, but there's nothing there.

The overall gameplay is just constantly repeating and doing the same thing over and over again until you unlock a boss mission which adds some variety. Another sign that the game is quite unfinished is the huge airport/casino part of the map you only visit once for the final showdown. And even then you only go to the casino for a 10 minute mission. I'm not even sure if you can get to the airport.

You spend most of the time doing small "missions" to take over a territory, which you can assign to one of your under bosses. The only effect that this has is that it will unlock a "perk" from the under bosses' perk list. Perks like: being able to steal a car unnoticed, health upgrades, weapon skill upgrades. But other than those perks those under bosses will not do anything. They aren't helping you at all while taking down the bad guy, it's all just you.

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Unbox

 

I hadn't heard of this one until it was in the last Humble Bundle, but it turned out to be a nice surprise. It's a collectathon-style 3D platformer where you play as a rolling cube. The main mechanic is that you can sacrifice one of your six health points to "unbox" and get an extra jump, which lets you reach some impressive heights, but you have to be careful managing your health since it doesn't refill automatically.

 

Some of the side missions are vehicle segments with kludgy controls, and it spends too much time on its goofy story, but the platforming is rock-solid.

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I replayed Dishonored in preparation for Dishonored 2. That game is still just as great as I remember it. It really does feel like a great, more violent followup to Thief, especially since this time I went high chaos/lots of combat: the oppressive atmosphere, the well-conceived fantasy world that's new and fresh and exciting, the great touches of characterization scattered all around the world, the sneaking... plus Dishonored has tremendous graphics (I just love the painterly style, the design, and the awesome faces everyone has) and some really fun movement mechanics.

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1 hour ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I replayed Dishonored in preparation for Dishonored 2. That game is still just as great as I remember it. It really does feel like a great, more violent followup to Thief, especially since this time I went high chaos/lots of combat: the oppressive atmosphere, the well-conceived fantasy world that's new and fresh and exciting, the great touches of characterization scattered all around the world, the sneaking... plus Dishonored has tremendous graphics (I just love the painterly style, the design, and the awesome faces everyone has) and some really fun movement mechanics.

 

I really enjoyed Dishonored until the end, when the developers tried multiple times to make me feel bad about my high-chaos playthrough. It was some rough ludonarrative dissonance to be told at the beginning, "We have to defeat the usurper and restore the crown at any cost," and then in the last few missions, "Wait, that's too much violence, we're not prepared to pay that cost." Come on, at most I killed a couple hundred people, many of them open supporters of the usurper who aren't exactly going to go unmolested when Emily's got her butt back on that throne. It's practically a bloodless coup for quasi-Victorian England.

 

The new Deus Ex games did this, too. I've honestly had my fill of games pretending that violence and nonviolence are two equally legitimate avenues for player expression, but then browbeat you if you don't engage to their satisfaction with the nonviolent systems. The disincentive should be that I find killing people, even virtual people, distasteful, not that I get tongue-lashings from a bunch of NPCs too lazy and incompetent to accomplish the things I do.

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7 hours ago, Gormongous said:

 

I really enjoyed Dishonored until the end, when the developers tried multiple times to make me feel bad about my high-chaos playthrough. It was some rough ludonarrative dissonance to be told at the beginning, "We have to defeat the usurper and restore the crown at any cost," and then in the last few missions, "Wait, that's too much violence, we're not prepared to pay that cost." Come on, at most I killed a couple hundred people, many of them open supporters of the usurper who aren't exactly going to go unmolested when Emily's got her butt back on that throne. It's practically a bloodless coup for quasi-Victorian England.

 

The new Deus Ex games did this, too. I've honestly had my fill of games pretending that violence and nonviolence are two equally legitimate avenues for player expression, but then browbeat you if you don't engage to their satisfaction with the nonviolent systems. The disincentive should be that I find killing people, even virtual people, distasteful, not that I get tongue-lashings from a bunch of NPCs too lazy and incompetent to accomplish the things I do.

Yeah I mean it mostly made no sense, but I'm not sure I agree that most of the people were open supporters of the usurper, right? Nobody knew the Lord Regent was a usurper - you were framed for the murder and as far as anyone could tell, Corvo murdered the Empress and then started murdering lots of other important people too.

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I recently beat Stories of Bethem: Fool Moon Edition, a Zelda-like game that's more puzzle focused and used magic spells instead of swords.

 

Some of the puzzles are slightly devious, putting a box you need to push behind a tree, but the puzzles were enjoyable all the way to the end. I enjoyed collecting every secret, opening every chest. This probably the only Zelda like game I've 100%ed ever, which shows how much I liked it.

 

The flaws are mostly in the combat, since the enemy AI is bare bones, boring, yet frustrating at some times.

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3 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Yeah I mean it mostly made no sense, but I'm not sure I agree that most of the people were open supporters of the usurper, right? Nobody knew the Lord Regent was a usurper - you were framed for the murder and as far as anyone could tell, Corvo murdered the Empress and then started murdering lots of other important people too.

 

I swear that some of the guards I killed were talking about how things are better now that the Empress was dead. Maybe it wasn't all guards, I don't know. I'm a mute mask-wearing warlock, I can't make all the hard calls.

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I 'completed' Hitman 2016 Season 1 recently. Mechanically this is without question the best Hitman game so far. Storywise its just as bad as the rest of them. While I am not ready to say it is overall better than Blood Money, partially due to the smaller level count, it is close if not tied for the best game in the series in my mind.

I was definitely worried about the episodic release schedule, but I think for a game like Hitman it works perfectly. In previous games I would burn through levels doing well enough to finish it until I beat the game, then I would return to previous levels to play around with them more. With the episodic releases I would play individual levels to death, or at least until Mastery 20 and got super excited whenever the next one released.

I am not a huge fan of the escalation missions, partially because I am bad at them, but the Elusive Targets concept is really fun. I have also appreciated how good of a game for streaming Hitman is. I wish my internet was better so I could join in.

I am very happy with the game overall and hope that season 2 keeps up the momentum.

 

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I also recently completed the main quest in The Witcher 3, although I'm playing the GOTY edition so I still have Blood & Wine to get through. I've definitely been enjoying the game, although the main plot kind of fell apart in a couple places for me and the ending seemed somewhat anticlimactic.

 

Funnily enough I think I sort of miss a feature that was heavier in the first two Witcher games, which was how the games tried really really hard to pound the whole "this is a morally ambiguous world, there's not always one right choice, sometimes things turn out bad, look how horrible everything is, etc." and although there's still some of that in TW3, it seems like it has been both pushed to the margins and also drowned in the massive sea that is the rest of the game. For every "hey look someone's being racist at an elf" there are like ten quests about a wyvern that's eating cows or something,and the whole Geralt + Ciri vs. the Wild Hunt has literally zero moral ambiguity there, it's just the two good guys versus a cartoonishly evil cadre of dipshits. I started this paragraph with the phrase "funnily enough," and that's because even though the Witcher series is pretty well written as RPGs go, it's not exactly sophisticated stuff, so you might think the whole moral ambiguity thing would only work with a defter hand, but I guess I don't mind my narratives broad and obvious sometimes because again, like I said, it turns out I'm sort of missing all that.

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I finished Broforce earlier today and thought it was alright. I really like all the different characters and the random nature of who you play as kept me on feet and was fun expect for the few moments I felt a little screwed over. The main thing that really kept me from loving it was that I felt like it never seemed to pick up a good flow. There were just some points where I would die a lot and felt like the game didn't put me back in the action fast enough. I also felt this sometimes after completing some of the really short levels. Didn't love it but a good humble monthly pick that I wouldn't have played otherwise. 

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I finished up Recore today. It really seems like a game that should be more popular with the Idle Thumbs community, to be honest. As a group, we seem to be drawn to the interesting but flawed games, and boy is this ever one of those. So much about it is so close to incredible, but always falls just a bit short. It's also completely unfinished. There is art on the cover and the disc of an entire type of robot buddy that didn't make it into the game, for example. This buddy has question-marked-out spots on 3 different menu screens, you can still collect parts for it, and there are entire "cut" dungeons that you can make your way to by Skyrim-ing around the environment that rely on using it. Seriously. It's such an obvious vacancy in the game that googling "Recore T8-NK" turns up conspiracy theories about its absence. Factor in that the critical path was less than 1/4th of my playtime (and I still felt like I didn't take that much time with the game) and that the final mission is about as long as everything else in the game up to that point (despite being mostly filler), and you have a decidedly "What the fuck why wasn't this given another year to become amazing?" game.

 

It's extra tragic because what is here and complete is really good. The combat is dynamic and fun, the buddies and their different styles and upgrade paths are varied and cool, the traversal is really fun (yay jetboots!). All of the fundamentals that make the game a game are great. Technical hiccoughs aside, it's fantastic to play. I just wish they'd actually got to make a full game.

 

I love it and hate it at the same time. It's super fun, but VERY flawed. If your tolerance for these things is high in the pursuit of interesting experiences, please try it. The more people do, the better chance they'll have a chance to make the game that this could have been in Recore 2. And yeah, there is of course a post-credits stinger that leaves room for one, so I'm going to hold out hope for at least a while.

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I finally, after two years-ish, beat the Witcher 2. So much good there, with so much mechanical BS layered on top. My ending was absolutely horrible, but I suppose they're all bad endings in their own way. I'm looking forward to the next steam sale so I can pick up Witcher 3.

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Just finished Pool of Radiance, one of the game of the so called AD&D/SSI Golden Box (it is on pack 2 or 3 on GoG). For a game, I think from 1988, is really amazing on what tries to do, there is a lot of quests, many of them which kind allow different solutions to it, but never feel too long, because each quest is kind short. While might take a while to get used with just playing with keys and hotkeys and consulting some books (or in case pdf), since lot of the text could be inside of the game itself, due technological limitations of the period, still a very good game. I recommend using a application called "golden box companion" it is a exe which add a few extra functions to the game.

 

Ah, I almost forget! you see, Pool of Radiance, while is AD&D, it is the first edition, not the second one, which everybody is more likely to be familiar, so one strange thing to get used is some older mechanics, like non-humans having ridiculous level limitations, no paladins or rangers, and some easy exploit stuff, such sleep and hold person spell, which left the person hit helpless and any hit will instant kill the target.

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Dishonored 2

 

Huge fan of the first game on Xbox 360. I completed it low chaos, high chaos, no powers, all the DLC. Dishonored 2 was / is easily one of my most anticipated games of 2016. I completed it a few days ago as Emily on low chaos (though not 100% stealth / non-lethal). Took me 17 hours on normal. I had a total blast playing it! I think I still prefer the first game, because back then it just came out of nowhere and blew me away. I played on OG PS4 and didn't really have any performance issues, however I did have constant graphical bugs like textures not loading on peoples faces, or weird white jaggy lines on walls.

 

I feel like Emily's powers lean more towards lethal compared to Corvo, and I prefer non-lethal. I immediately started the game again as Corvo I think I will run through high chaos with him, then again on total low chaos no kills. I am totally going to get my moneys worth, similar to Deus Ex there is so much to explore, figure out which I love.

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