I’m not a huge survival fan either and I thought Subnautica was simply amazing.
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And if anyone hasn’t done Outer Wilds…do it.
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I immediately bought the DLC to Outer Wilds but I forgot how to pilot the spaceship and gave up pretty quickly. Need to carve out some time to relearn the control scheme.
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I am currently appreciating the extra control granularity Phoenix Point offers, over the likes of XCOM. I get the feeling the enemies are actually trying to beat me, as opposed to offering a carefully focus-tested challenge. What PP lacks in gloss, it more than makes up for in terms of letting you customise loadouts for each soldier, including items and spare magazines, their armour sets, cross-training classes, and an enemy that constantly updates their strengths based on what weaponry you use. It also has that original X-Com feel, where it seems like an uphill struggle the entire way, and you’re not artificially limited to selecting one mission of three that come up. If you have six teams and six aircraft, you can respond to six missions. The logistics are less challenging than the original game, with all items pooled and accessible by any team in any base, and resupply notifications occur after every mission, but you still have to produce weapons and items regularly, and it’s important to manage your resources properly. Being able to set fields of fire in overwatch is wet-dream-worthy, and the free aim mode for taking shots is also choice.
Ultimately the game can be quite merciless and you get to watch inexorable defeat literally spread on the map, staining it red.
I responded to what I thought was a standard mission to defend a town, and found a building-sized enemy waiting for me.
After taking some potshots at it, I worked out that even if I fired every single round into it that my team brought, ignoring other enemies, I literally did not have enough ammunition to kill it. Never mind my poor second-tier team was dead within three turns, that’s besides the point. The game makes you fight a war, and sometimes you can’t get there in time, sometimes when you turn up you lose, and casualties are inevitable.
I think the geoscape system needs to be a little better, as does the aircraft tracking, but the game offers a level of tactical minutiae I’ve been looking for since the likes of Jagged Alliance 2 and the original X-Com, and it has that great strategy/tactical mixture I can’t put down.
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Original XCom feel? Works on MacOS? On sale for $15?
ngl, you had me at original xcom feel
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I should try it again, I did not give it a proper go after I bought it last year. On the Mac, there was some issues with the camera, hopefully they are fixed now.
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It’s a great game that’s come a very long way since making its debut on EGS. In particular, XCOM 2’s firing mechanics seem so restrictive compared to PP’s, but I love the XCOM 2 games, as well. So I’m having my cakes and eating them all, too!
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Couldn’t help but feel offended for about 25 nanoseconds there 
Need to check out Phoenix Point one of these days for real…
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In XCOM 2 I think I lost less than half a dozen troops. In Phoenix Point I lost more than that in the first month. There are longer sight lines, weapons are more deadly, medikits don’t heal as much (but you can carry lots of them, which is nice), and there are more default wound effects (e.g. if you get badly wounded you will be stuck with a Bleed). Standing off and shooting the enemy to pieces is too vulnerable to the environment, and the enemies obliging you by walking into your fields of fire, when they tend to maximise use of cover just like you do. The game also limits your overwatch range to much less than your volitional shooting range, so you can cover the terrain near you, but not the whole map. The game is also happy to give you ‘difficult’ shots of the kind you would actually expect to see, like so:
There’s an enemy there, but it’s on the other side of a building, so you can only see part of it, and it’s blurry. Similar for smoke and fire.
Disabling particular enemy limbs and body parts is a nice touch and it goes both ways. I had a sniper turn up to a battle and take a bullet in the arm: no more two-handed weapons for them for the rest of that battle. It’s also fundamental to circumventing enemy strengths; fast enemies need their legs shot out, shield enemies need to be flanked and shot anywhere but their shield, psionic enemies need headshots to damage their brains and cancel psi abilities, and so on. Shotguns are an immensely practical weapon for once, with decent range, good overwatch capability, great damage, and their only counterintuitive factor being their ammo count is typically 50, but that means five shots of ten pellets, which is a bizarre way of measuring it. That aside, they’re great for overwatch because not only do you need to set a sector of fire for each person on overwatch, you also get to decide how wide that cone of fire is, and shotguns let you cover wide swathes of ground, which is perfect against the many little sneaky enemies or the big melee rushers.
From the off, the game features enemies that rush your troops, facehug/headcrab them, and then control them. It is a recipe for a squad wipe. Don’t let it happen to you or those you care about. I won’t discuss the enemies evolving armour to counter head shots or thicker skin to negate fire damage, because it’s disgusting.
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Stop, stop! I can only get so erect!
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LOL I bought this too the other day and man am I enjoying it.
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I got pathfinder:kingmaker free from epic games, but I had a question for anyone familiar with pathfinder (or a similar version of d&d I suppose).
Is there any reason to not camp all the time? I’ll do an encounter and preserve my spells, then do another encounter slightly weakened, then do a skin of my teeth encounter then camp. Why not camp between each encounter and go into each fight all guns blazing?
At this point it seems more like a push your luck mechanic, except there’s no reward for pushing your luck, and no punishment for playing it safe
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In Kingmaker there are some quest and other content/events that trigger if too much time passes.
Plus rebuffing is kind meh
I think I’ve asked about deckbuildikg RPGs quite a bit around here, and probably not all in the same thread, but I have another question:
Has anyone played Dawncaster?
I like the sub-genre a lot as it caters to a couple of my gaming lives (RPGs and card games) so I’m always interested when I stumble across any, though I usually ignore any that have any sort of premium currencies (like Pirates Outlaws).
I’m pathetic in that there are many classic games that I never really got into when they first came out. Maybe I played a scenario or started it off but then my ADHD tackled me to the floor and beat me senseless. One of those was X-Com, though I have all the games in my library. Maybe I’d better push through–I hear XCOM 2 is excellent–so I can enjoy PP when it goes on sale again.
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XCOM and XCOM 2 are much of a muchness. XCOM 2’s War of the Chosen was much better, but there again, there is a lot of scripting in the stuff that elevates it past XCOM 2, and I really don’t enjoy that as much as straightforward battles. Terror missions on XCOM 2 were more of a fun challenge, a kind of see how fast you could move and what you would dare to do, whereas in PP they quickly escalated into “Now do I actually try and fight, or do I kill a few and make a sharp exit?” Badly wounded, panicked, or otherwise dispirited enemies will literally flee the battlefield. In the XCOMs this never happens, they stick around in badly-placed spawn points to give you a momentary difficulty spike.
I love the original X-Com to death, and still play it. Despite the limitations of the technology, it’s an incredible game, and it blends tactics, strategy, and logistics in a way few games ever have.
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Did you all have a go at Chimera Squad?
I super enjoyed that, way more than I expected!
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Speaking of things that are way better than expected, I am having a blast playing Lego Star Wars Castaways on Apple Arcade. Very light, typical Lego fare, but I’m addicted.
I bought it but haven’t played it yet. May have to do that!
I just wanted to spout off that I hate hidden achievements/trophies in games. It is fine if it is tied to the story and they are hidden to avoid spoilers, but what is the point of hiding and achievement that is tied to some highly unlikely series of events? At least tell me what I’m supposed to be doing…
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