Category: First Impression

Zach-Likes
by LepcisMagna

Or: Opus Magnum, TIS-100, and Shenzen I/O

I’m putting the Zachtronics studio and all their games into Tier 1, alongside Obsidian Entertainment (makers of Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and the only good Fallout). I can confidently say that any game made by those studios will be at least entertaining, if not extremely good. Zach-likes tend to be puzzle games with very similar concepts, but with just enough theming and execution differences to make each one feel unique. Perhaps the best part of these games is the moment when you discover a unique solution that gives you the same feeling as if you’d just solved an interesting math problem or figured out a clever programming solution at work. If neither of those sound fun, I would highly recommend running away from these games.

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Windward
by LepcisMagna

Windward is a fun little game that I really can’t recommend. You command a sailing ship while you explore a waterway, trade between towns, and fight off the pirates controlling most of the land. If you play multiplayer, your friends can either join you or start a rival faction. While this is fun for an hour or two, there just isn’t enough to keep you going.

As far as I can tell, I’ve just described everything that happens in the game. Sadly, there are no sea monsters, no fleet building, no marvels. It’s a relaxing game, to a point, but the combat is boring and there’s really not much to pursue after upgrading your ship. Sadly, I must put it into Tier 3.

Steam link

Project Zomboid (First Impression)
by Chezni

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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