My Week in Games [2/20/2015 – 2/26/2015] Two Worlds, AirMech, Don’t Starve Together, Risk of Rain and More

I’ve gone through more of my extremely reviews and posted them first from 2009. Then I went all the way back to 2001 and posted the reviews. In fact, I think the 2001 reviews are older than that, because of how I talk about they’re new games and they only came out in 1999. These reviews are very short and well lazy with only a real paragraph about each spanning 100 – 200 words each. I assume it was the limitation of whatever site they were on, but they’re here now. With them here, I’ve slowly gone through and padded some of them to flesh them out without actually replaying the games. I’m up to 400+ blogs / reviews here on WordPress. I still have around 100 Steam reviews to post.

A developer was kind enough to link a review of mine in his Twitter with 1,400 followers. Normally that would mean a giant bump in hits. Not int his case. At the most it got six views, which is painful to see with so many followers vs other developers that have less followers and I get more hits. It was worth a shot!

STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT 2

I made an attempt to play this game after someone was kind enough to give me a copy. I didn’t make it too far. By didn’t make it too far, I mean the game starts, but doesn’t play. It shows a tutorial video, there is some scrolling text int he Star Wars style, but other than that, the game crashes when the game part of Battlefront 2 starts. One day it’ll get fixed, but I’m not holding my breath. According to reviews on Steam, the game is broken with no dedicated servers.

SPACE ENGINEERS

Steam had a free weekend for Space Engineers to hype up Midieval Engineers. I know one of the developers and I know they’ve made a lot of money on this game, but my first time playing it was awful. I spent half an hour doing nothing. It just feels so cumbersome to play and while some say its Minecraft in space, it controls nothing like Minecraft. I couldn’t get into any ships that were parked in the tutorial level. The only thing I could do was jet pack so fast straight into solid objects that I’d die. Then after figuring out how to do that constantly, I flew myself out to where I thought you were supposed to go by space ship. After five minutes of jet packing there, the ship immediately killed me, because I’m not a ship.

M.I.N.E.

After giving this a try for maybe 30 minutes, I’ve determined that I’ll need to go back to it. I like the idea of a colony builder, I just feel like every other game has done it better with more frills. Of course I can’t take away anything from the developer, it feels like a deep game, it just doesn’t have the graphics or the frills to make me want to play it longer than I did.

GNOMORIA

I played it for the second time this week and got more in depth with it, but it just feels lacking in some magic. I sank 60 hours into Towns and got nothing in return, but I feel like I knew it instantly. Gnomoria might just be a Towns clone, an isometric Dwarf Fortress, but it just feels so alien. I spent an hour in it, got no where and well here I am now. Not much to say about it. I want to like it, I want it to be the time sink for me that Towns was, but its just not.

TEAM FORTRESS 2

TF2 is always a highlight of my week. Playing with the gang and avoiding public servers. This week I put in two full tours of expert Mann vs Machine and it was simply joyous. I wish there was more to say, but its like the news, when everything goes good there is no news. I was stuck as Engineer for 5 of the 6 + missions. Not that I have a problem with that, its started to be my thing. I’m just the engineer. Maybe no one else wants to play Engineer since all the action is up front, but I think of the engineer as the fail safe to ensure that the team doesn’t get rolled by defending the heavies. Since I was with such a pro team for 6 missions, the heavies were reckless and difficult to defend, but that’s not a bad thing, because for the most part they managed to hold their own and decimate enemies.

A DATE IN THE PARK

I was shocked how much I enjoyed this. I’m not into point and click games, I’m not into games that look as if they came through a portal from the 90s and I’m not into story games. This however was a lot of fun and pretty easy. Most Sierra point and click adventures were completely backward, but luckily this developer is a human and knows how to make the game that humans will know how to complete. There’s a good twist at the end. I even forced a friend to play the game, but he managed to find a game breaking glitch and sadly couldn’t see why I felt the game is so good.

RISK OF RAIN

I sank 7 hours into this game, it was a giant pain to set up online multi player. I was thankful to play it with my friend and he’s the one that went through all the work really. I was just on the sidelines doing everything. Then when we finally played, it was just as dull and slow as ever. I like the idea of the game, but playing it just seems like a dull grind. Even a friend couldn’t make it better. After we had our play through, I kept at it for a few more hours, all the time wondering why. Holding down the gun button, not moving to clear out five enemies at a time. Seemingly always dying on the second boss. It just ate up a lot of time with each play through just to end up back at the start with every death. The game also claims to be procedurally generated, but I kept recognizing the same levels with minor tweaks.

ROBOCOP vs TERMINATOR

Playing grander games, I’ve fallen behind in my review schedule. Not that this is a paid job or anything, I just like the feeling that I’m able to churn out one review per day. Well knowing that my daily deadline was coming up, I took one look at Netflix to see Robocop is now on there. Well why not review Robocop vs Terminator. People love both franchises. So I played through it in four hours. The only problem is that no one read the review. One person liked it. My playing games shouldn’t be about the review. That just makes it unpaid work.

DON’T STARVE TOGETHER BETA

My friend gave me this game. I’m grateful that he gifted it to me, I just don’t think this game is for me. We didn’t so much play it this week for four hours as he guided me through it for four hours and I did what he said. There’s nothing wrong with that, I’m a new player, I need to learn and there’s so much to learn, its just that it feels like its more time and work than fun. For a game that has so much content, it feels like there’s no point to it. Just a time waster. Make an axe to chop down trees to build this and that to survive. Its all about survival. Its not about creative beautiful things like Minecraft, its not about killing people. Its just you and someone else surviving. Boy isn’t that fun. Surviving. Even after four hours with him and an hour by myself two months ago, I still feel incapable, like I need a baby sitter.

AIRMECH

Well I sure had fun playing this game. That was until I played player vs player and it turned into an awful tug of war that I hate with every MOBA. Normally I’d just keep talking about the negatives, but instead I’ll switch it up and talk about the positives. Its a fun, engaging RTS / dual stick shooter. Beautiful, elegant and simple. Its just a good addictive time on your own or in cooperative with a random stranger. Picking up troops, taking over bases, converting to and from giant robots and air vehicles.

TWO WORLDS: EPIC EDITION

I just want to point out how much I hated this game when it started, the first 3 hours were a struggle that I didn’t know why I was enduring. Now that I’m past that point, I’m 10 hours into the game and enjoying it far more than I ever though I would after the first hour. Everything has grown on me, I am at one with everything in the game. its beautiful to explore and really, that’s all I seem to be doing, because there are either no quests anymore, or the few quests that I can do are impossible at my level.