First Impression – Page 10 – Please Insert CD

Project Zomboid (First Impression)

There’s a lot of unneeded negativity surrounding this game, which I’d like to avoid. Instead of pointing fingers and saying “it’s the devs fault” or “it’s the player’s fault” I’d like to instead express my experience with the game at face value.

As it stands, there’s not really anything *wrong* with Project Zomboid. It’s a game with plenty of little pieces for you to dive into, explore and master. If you’re Jonesin’ for an inventory management base-building survival zombie game that plods along at a bit of a slow pace, then this game’s definitely for you. For me though, most of the game feels hollow.

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Living Card Games

by LepcisMagna

I dislike Collectible/Trading Card Games (CCGs/TCGs), and in particular Magic: The Gathering (MtG). CCGs feel like the microtransactions of the board game world, and all too often are quite expensive to keep up with. Yes, there’s Pauper format, but simply removing all the more powerful cards to preserve rarity feels cheap, in more ways than one. Admittedly, some of my distaste for CCGs comes from a desire to have complete collections, which is pretty incompatible with the roughly 19307 cards (x4 copies of non-lands) printed for MtG. However, the artificial rarity is what really turns me off of CCGs. MtG is one of the worst, with “white border”, “black border”, and of course the “holographic” or foil cards (not counted in the above count). The rarity is there to preserve the secondary market, which forces WotC to ban proxies at official events. There are arguments for banning realistic proxies anyway (counterfeit cards), but I tend to disagree.

What luck, then, that Living Card Games (LCGs) exist! A way to have a fun, extendable card game without the hassle of a secondary market or being unable to purchase a specific card you want from the manufacturer. But there’s a lot of card games out there, and most are terrible. In this article, I hope to catalogue the ones I’ve either played or heard good things about and review them as I get to play them more. I’m going to try and focus on mechanics over flavor, since I’m pretty setting-agnostic when it comes to my preference in games.

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

by LepcisMagna

What’s this? A review that’s almost topical? If this keeps up, I might play Sekiro before it goes on sale. Probably not. Well, remarkably, I started playing this game before I had even a clue they were going to announce a sequel, and happened to finish my playthrough the day they announced it. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (hereafter just Vampire, for the sake of my own sanity) is a very special game, to the point that I’m having difficulty putting my thoughts into words. All at once, it is almost perfect and completely terrible.

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Dishonored 2

by LepcisMagna

Dishonored was the first game I ever pre-ordered, going against my usually standard rule about such things. It promised wide-open areas with multiple paths to victory. It promised fantastic magical powers to make even more options available. I was hyped, then I was let down. But despite my disappointment with the first, the sequel seems to have promise.

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Postal 2

by Chezni

Ohhh, yes. A new kid on the block just moved to Duke Nukem’s neighborhood.

Fair warning; this review looks at a game that is extremely juvenile, violent, cruel, humorous and unethical. That also means it’s kind of awesome.

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Miasmata

by Chezni

Hey, turns out cartography is hard.

Miasmata is a unique game. You begin, shipwrecked on an island, with nothing but your empty hands and a case of the plague. Apparently, you’ve been exiled, and it’s up to you to use whatever you can find on the island to cure yourself from your inevitable disease-ridden death.

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Dragon Fin Soup

by Chezni

Tourniquet, tourniquet! Cut the bleeding!

There comes a time (1 and a half days for me apparently) when you simply have to cut off something that’s dead. Dragon Fin Soup is sadly such a game. The quintessential example of “when indie game companies go bad,” flipping through the forum posts of DFS is like reading perfectly preserved chapter book of poor management, over-hyped and undelivered promises, and disappointment in a game that is just *so* close to being good… but just doesn’t quite get there.

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Nioh

by LepcisMagna

Nioh is in an interesting spot and in a difficult position. It’s very much a Souls-like (it even uses practically the same door opening animation) with missions instead of an open world. The mechanics seem solid and I very much anticipate finishing it at some point. During my hour, my biggest issue was learning the slightly different controls (it was ported from PS4 instead of XBox) and getting in to the weirdly different flow of combat. My only real complaints were the very dark levels (as above) and a few badly placed enemies.

The real trouble is that Nioh is very much under the shadow of its older brother, Dark Souls. At least so far, there isn’t much motivation for me to play Nioh until I’ve squeezed every last drop of enjoyment out of all the Dark Souls. Even once I’m done with them, I’ll probably drop in to Sekiro before heading to Nioh. On its own, I’m sure it would be a Tier One game – but with Dark Souls in the mix, it’ll have to go in to Tier Two until further notice.

Steam link

Spintires: Mudrunner

by LepcisMagna

Back when I reviewed Euro Truck Simulator 2, Chezni commented that people “pay money to participate in a simulated experience of a profession that others describe as living in a ‘prison on wheels.'” What better way to improve on the contemplative experience of Euro Truck Simulator than to drive enormous, ancient trucks in the middle of a Russian spring through roads which are 90% mud (and 10% river). Welcome to Spintires: Mudrunner.

To be perfectly clear: if the above didn’t sound fun to you, you will not enjoy this game. Even if it did sound like fun, you may not enjoy this game. There is no plot and there is no real motivation for you to continue playing. It’s just a sandbox filled with “bring this from point A to point B.” And yet, it’s so exquisitely detailed and challenging that it’s fun. Maybe I’m going soft now that I’ve trimmed my library so much, but this is just one of those games that’s fun to zone out to with podcasts in the background. One amusing perk of this sort of game is learning how to control a truck trailer. That doesn’t sound like it would be immediately useful, but I was helping my parents move a car the other weekend and was the only person in my family that knew how to back the trailer up to unload the car. I may have looked at this game just so I could tell that story. That being said, I don’t think I can recommend paying full price – wait for a Steam sale to get this Tier One game.

Steam link

Overload

by LepcisMagna

For those of you who have been playing video games for a while, you may remember a trilogy from the mid-1990s called Descent. If you don’t, Chezni did a first impression of them a while back which I recommend you read – though I am a sci-fi fan, so they are definite Tier One entries for me. They have also been re-listed on Steam for your enjoyment! Even better, there was a Kickstarter for a reboot of the series a few years ago, and Descent: Underground should be out next year. This is not an impression of that game.

Now, you may ask yourself: why did I just talk about Descent for an entire paragraph if this isn’t about Descent: Underground? Well, a year after the Descent Kickstarter, there was a Kickstarter for Overload. Also a 6DOF shooter. Also in the same style as Descent. With similar assets (down to the reticles, weapons, and enemy light placement) and gameplay. To the point that its difficult to understand how both of these were allowed to exist from an copyright standpoint. It’s as if the publisher got all the names, the developers got all the assets, and they shared all the mechanics.

In any event, Overload is a fun game (with VR support, no less) for those of you who enjoyed Descent but wished there was a modern version. A solid Tier One entry in my book, and I look forward to Descent: Underground next year.

Steam link