This game gives Slay The Spire a run for it's money. It is wonderfully developed and superbly intricate. The deck building roguelike genre is crowded with talent. We are truly spoiled.
It's not that there's no love here. But god damn, what a broken unfinished beta test of a game. This DLC? It fixes nothing.
Look at that trailer vid. That dude is unironically rhyming it up, having a great time. How can you look at that and think this is anything other than a wonderful game? Conceptually Ring of Pain is a roguelite dungeon crawl with card game elements. Collect items, optimize for various challenges and try not to die. Presentation is superb, customization is deep and victories are fulfilling. Recommended.
But definitely for me. Action, strategy, upgrades, exploration, resource collection, plasma weapons, spaceships, I like all of these words. I like inspecting a ship I built up from scratch and checking every corner for aliens. I like shooting those aliens when I find them. I like cloning new crew based on the DNA of those aliens. I like finding artifacts and research and resources on planets. Yes, this is an indie game. The production values are lower, the sandbox isn't as infinite as some modern sandboxes, the away missions only have small 2x2 maps in Mass Effect 2 style. If any of those is an objection for you, you should pass or wait for a sale.
I had a good time with Per Aspera, but I can definitely see where the criticism comes from. The conveyor belts and resource management might conjure up comparisons with Factorio or Surviving Mars or a Sim City type game. It really isn't like any of them. The 'threats' and challenges in Per Aspera barely gave me pause at any stage of the game. Meanwhile, the construction and terraforming goals were such that even at 16x multiplied speed, much of my time was spent waiting for the next progress meter to fill, almost giving it the feel of a walking simulator. That sounds like a bad thing, maybe? But I'm dualboxing and I rather enjoyed that I could do other stuff in between. It fits with the titanic task of rendering Mars habitable. The lack of complexity does kind of grate, however. Resource production only has two tiers. Colonists require only two resources. Trees, lichen and cyanobacteria look pretty as they spread across Mars, but there's very little practical management required, nor possible. The rising water levels and oxygen levels pose either a small or huge obstacle. But either way, they won't affect your game after you solve the immediate issue. All in all, at any given point in the game, most of your problems can be solved just by waiting. The narrative parts of Per Aspera stuck with me after playing. The narrative is quite engaging, not to mention pertinent to the future of the human race. We have to consider these matters that the game raises, if we're ever going to consider colonizing the red planet. Billionaires and governments going into space is a horrible, neverending curse that will destroy us. We have to build ethical space programs, with sustainable environmental and psychological oversight, while any AI guidance at that time must be carefully cultivated.
...But that is kind of why you buy Warhammer games. The more they polish, the more they'll end up removing the fun. In that sense, the jank is good. It's good that jumps, obstacles and line of sight break the AI. It's good that poison globadiers are OP, ranged combat is cheese, magic can have practically any positive or negative result and rolls are rigged. It's good that sometimes an impressive enemy spawns next to your weakest henchman and kills him before you can take a turn. I was surprised to find that I enjoy the campaign missions. They come with their own separate category of additional jank, but if you can get past that, there's a lot of fun to be had. All in all, recommended.
Is there anything so suspicious as gamers suddenly growing a conscience? We, the gaming community, have notoriously bad takes. From harassing people under the banner of 'ethics in games journalism' to cheering for companies so toxic their employees commit suicide, we are consistently awful in how we voice our conscience. Be honest: Most of you thought the Covid-19 Pandemic was just a flu until mid 2020, when you had to cancel your vacation, at which point you suddenly decided it was a tragedy and the worst thing to have ever happened to mankind. Bad taste? Your credentials in this field are less than zero. You just don't know what you're talking about. As to the game, is Covid: the outbreak any good? It's allright, functional, comparable to other games where you watch a world map and juggle stats and modifiers. Panic goes up, easier to implement quarantine measures. Panic goes too high, you lose.
And only 10 bucks, no DLC, no microtransactions. The full thing, 300+ hours of gameplay in my case, just sitting there available to anyone. In my imagination, these devs regularly have to fend off hitmen sent by Epic Games and Microsoft to kill them in epic rooftop duels with dramatic lightning strikes in the background. Terraria might be considered 'for kids', it might not have an adult storyline about a grizzled legendary monster hunter and his two hot girlfriends, but in terms of price to value, it easily stands as the best game of all time. The combat is satisfying, the enemies and weapons are varied, the bosses are manifold, the progression path is well thought out. The basic gameplay is that of 2D minecraft, but the attention to detail and options for customization are immense. The environments are varied, the hazards are intuitive, the mini-biomes and set pieces are fun and traversal is full of interesting organic moments and discoveries. And it supports LAN, on top of regular multiplayer. The games industry seems to have moved away from LAN connections? Screw that, and screw the games industry with a ten foot pole. Buy Terraria.
The mechanics are workable, there's just not enough variety or depth to fill even a single run. The skilltrees are too limited for the level/difficulty/skillpoint distribution. By that I mean, cap out your important skilltrees about halfway through, get all the most powerful upgrades, and then you still have to sit through another ten to fifteen floors that have very little variety or difficulty while being absolutely showered in extra skillpoints. Last run, I was a necromancer. I had like 50 necromancer skillpoints left over (after maxing out all trees!) and ended up using melee more often than actual spells, because I was so overleveled and overequipped that I didn't need warrior skills to hit and besides most monsters are immune to stat drain/necromancy anyway. Summons are even more janky and unreliable. Strangely, the bloody level 1 poison spell is a better skillpoint investment than most necromancy or summon spells. On any character, just get some points into the poison and healing trees and you've basically already won. Overall, I can recommend the game well enough, but it's sitting in a weird place atm.
It really gets me that they looked at XCOM and figured they'd steal the worst parts. They even stole the timers from XCOM 2. I guess they just feel obliged to make games more tedious? Take too long on a battle? That's a loss.
