This game was designed for people who know and love the "BattleTech" name; in particular, those who long for the old days when there were 5 factions and no double heat sinks. The gameplay is decent for a turn-based squad tactical game. You control a handful of 'Mechs, usually taking on 2-5 times your number of enemies, in smaller groups. Though there's a bit of variety, and a handful of special missions, most of your missions come from one of a few types, and it fairly rapidly gets pretty samey. The combat itself is fun enough, with several different ways that you can configure your 'Mechs and tactics to employ. The maps are quite large by the standards of the genre and the weapons relatively long-ranged, which is nice - though melee attacks are devastating, should you choose to go that way. The "campaign" gameplay is pretty meh, managing equipment and pilots while choosing upgrades for your ship that aren't enormously influential. I didn't much like the storyline, which interweaves a few interesting story missions with a bunch of missions where you are inexplicably a mercenary (in order to allow you to work for whichever faction you most like, but honestly just because old BattleTech grognards like mercenaries). If you're a huge fan of squad-based tactics or a huge fan of old-school Battletech who's a decent fan of the genre, I'd recommend this game. Otherwise, I'd probably pass it up.
I love Terraforming Mars the board game, and I love this computer realization. First a few words on the game, then a few words on the computer version I hesitate to call TM a "Catan" style game, but it seemed like a good tag-line. I say that because trading resources, that core Catan mechanic, is absent. Still, you generate resources, random cards, you build cities... These cards are much more important, and take the form of single-use cards, cards that enable some new active or passive special activity, or cards that let you place an object on the board (a city, ocean, or forest...or something more exotic!). Meanwhile, you're trying to fill 3 "terraforming meters". The game ends when they're all full, and you get victory points and income for filling them. Graphics are crisp and pleasant, though I'll admit sometimes I get a little impatient, and you can't look at your own cards during other peoples' turns, which is annoying. It has hotseat, which is great, and uses Asmodee's client for multi-player, which is decent and unremarkable. The only thing missing is the ability to combine local hotseat with remote multi-player to allow 4 friends in 3 locations to play.
Outpost 2 is a great game, and an example of a rare game: an RTS not centered around combat. And make no mistake: this is an RTS, not a city builder. The building and population management isn't particularly complex, though you do have to keep people happy and healthy - enough. The setting and gameplay make it difficult to set up a utopia. Instead, the constant time pressure and the specific mission goals, and the gameplay in general make it far more a traditional RPG. The conflict here is not against some enemy force, but against nature itself. You manage a human colony on an alien world, well-established but quite young; a few colonists remain who came to the planet as children, and are now respected elders. A calamity leads to a natural disaster that drives you from your home, and the entire game is spent in a long retreat, establishing a series of temporary bases just long enough to build up your reserves again, making what technological and material progress you can manage before the ever-following doom. Mediocre gameplay and graphics that were pretty great in 1997 but have aged a little poorly temper the original premise and compelling story. There's even an accompanying novella which unfolds at a rate of one chapter per mission, and which I highly recommend. This game isn't perfect, and I'd probably give in a 9/10, but I chose to round up because I really do think that this is an amazing game that every scifi strategy fan should pick up.
I've only played like 6 hours so far, but there's lots of people maybe buying around now, so I thought I'd throw in my two cents. Outer Worlds plays like the FO:NV "spiritual successor" it was clearly meant to be. The bullet-time mechanic is kind of fun, a decent compromise between V.A.T.S. and "normal" play. Character stats and mechanics are a nice, fairly straightforward system. I liked that each skill had 2 attributes associated with it, even if some don't necessarily make a lot of sense (intelligence and long guns?) So far, the story is decent and the characters are okay. Obsidian certainly did their best to make most of the characters "flawed", and that goes throughout the writing as well, which goes a little over the top, in terms of how evil the corporation is. Art is nice. Setting the game on an alien planet gave them a very wide color palette, and you see bright pinks and lurid greens, which is a nice change from many games; even the ones that aren't all brown seldom have such bright and varied colors. So far, I have 2 big problems with the game: the first is that they're very over-leveled enemies positively swarming the start area, and you have to spend a lot of time and attention not suddenly getting killed for straying a little too far from the road, and the second is that the interface design commits all of the worst sins of console ports. The worst is when you level up - you need to press E to confirm (and there's no button to click), and then pressing E brings up a dialog that you have to click, with no key you can strike! I'm not sure that I would buy this game at full price, especially because I understand that the second half of the game loses quality. But right now it's on sale for 50% off...I think it's worth it.
Offworld Trading Company is an interesting game. It is, fundamentally, a competitive basebuilder, but the competitive is very important. The limited number of hexes you're allowed to "own" requires strategic thinking and not a small amount of micro. The automatic market mechanism helps prevent you from entering a death spiral from forgetting some crucial element of your economy (by comparison, consider the similar Surviving Mars, where you can easily say run out of Machine Parts, and now your Machine Parts factory can't function anymore, and your drones can't function anyway, and you're out of money, and...). Games are relatively short and somewhat streamlined. What sets it apart from most base-builders is that it's competitive. While your assaults on other factions are limited to a small number of espionage-style dirty tricks, you're always trying to outcompete the other faction(s) to the goal of buying them out. I found the AI decent (but then I'm the kind of guy who plays games on Normal), but the game is clearly meant to shine in multiplayer, and it does - though I suspect you'll have poor luck finding anyone to play with that isn't your friend. There is a reasonably-well executed single-player campaign including a Risk-style map, but it's clearly secondary. All in all, Offworld Trading Company provides an interesting spin on the basebuilder genre, and executes it well. I also like that each individual game is fairly short, so I don't lose hours and hours to it like many games of this type. I'm not sure what could raise it to 5 stars for me. It's a great game, but somehow just lacks that bit of vital spark that keeps me coming back to it over and over. I do think it's criminally underplayed, though. And don't be put off by all the DLC; absolutely none of it is necessary to have a fun, complete game.
Beast of Winter is the first of 3 planned DLCs for Deadfire. The most amazing thing to me is how fast they're coming out, to be honest, but Beast of Winter doesn't feel rushed or anything, so I'm not complaining. The DLC itself is good-not-great. I'd give it 7/10. It's a fairly short, completely self-contained little adventure that explores some of the game's lore a little with some nice backgrounds and some okay combat. The Good: - The art is gorgeous! - We get a better look at one of the more mysterious cultures of Eora, the Pale Elves - though not a close enough look to remove all their mystery. Plus, what new things we see are in-line with what we've seen before, which is always nice (or, rather, it's really annoying when it doesn't happen). - A better look at a few other past events, including some of the motivations behind St Waidwen and the invasion of the Dyrwood. - You get to fight a dragon! (or not fight it, as you prefer) - The new sidekick, Vatnir, is mildly amusing - We get more Ydwin, the fan-favorite character (who was specifically designed to be a fan favorite - vampire snow elf atheist scientist? C'mon, people)! The new depth is welcome and makes me regret all the more that she's not a full companion ;_; - New items, including a pretty neat soulbound armor. The Bad: - It's pretty short (I'd say maybe 5 hours, which is disappointing for $10) - A couple cool "puzzle"-type mechanics are make a grating chore by long load times (the one I'm thinking of mostly lets you change the time you're at and see an event at multiple points, but it reloads the map every time, leading to jarring pauses, especially since the level involves hunting items). - The combat encounters are meh (hard, but I didn't find them super interesting). Verdict: buy it on sale.
Let's get this out of the way: this was an amazing game. The story was fraught, the choices extra ambiguous, the graphics were amazing. The combat was easily my favorite of the three games, probably in part because the higher level characters give you more options, but I also enjoyed the new characters and foes. The art remains gorgeous, and the world inside of the Darkness is just breathtaking. Also, we finally start to get a few answers out of Juno, so that's fun. The only thing that prevents this from being one of the best games in recent memory is how short it is. I finished the game in well under 10 hours, and as far as I'm aware I didn't skip any battles or take any shortcuts. I get that this is a $25 game and not a $60 one, but this is still much shorter than the first two games, and I found it quite disappointing.
