I finished Ruiner today and I loved it.

It's not a very long game and clearly doesn't have the largest budget (very little voice acting for example) but it's so damn slick and cool. It's basically an ultraviolent rampage through a cyberpunk city. Combat is tight and rewarding, with many different weapons and abilities. Definitely worth picking up if it sounds like your jam. And oh yeah, the helmet display is a stroke of artistic genius.

Looks kind of interesting, actually. I might check that out.

I think you just missed a sale. Oh well, will be another one soon.

Started playing Wolfenstein: The New Order. Surprisingly thight shooting so far, and is there anyone who doesn't love plowing his way through nazis and fucked up nazi experiments through old castles and occult locations? Hard to see how it could go spectacularly wrong from here.

Ah, ok. I enjoyed it for the most part. Not perfect, but definitely decent. Sorry I spoiled some one of the insane parts already.

Mm, are you sure you're talking about The New Order? Not the next part of the saga, The New Colossus?

I mean, it's clearly pretty insane since it's set in alternate universe where the nazis took over the world, but other than that it was not too crazy I think. Apart from the massive suspension of disbelief required to fill the gaping plotholes of course. But that goes for every AAA shooter.

Finished it tonight. Really enjoyed the ride! Can't tell if all the overblown pathos is meant to be taken seriously or a sort of pastiche of the genre, but I'm gonna go with the latter. It's a game about giant nazi robot soldiers and robot dogs and ancient Jewish weaponry for crying out loud.

Blah, you're probably right, I'm confusing things. Not sure I played the New Order. *shrug* not sure I care. It's all pretty decent, but also not incredible or unmissable.

Yeah, pretty much your average mainstream AAA shooter stuff right. Always good enough to be worth playing, but always making sure to stick to the winning formula and not confuse/offend anyone.

Playing Darkest Dungeon now....it's really got a hold of me. Pretty grindy and brutal but so far I'm still on board. I think I might fail one of the later quests and lose a lot of my progress and give up. We'll see.

Was kinda the same for me. I enjoyed the game very much and at some point I walked away because the reward was not worth the effort anymore. Currently playing State of Decay 2. I did 2 towns on normal difficulty and now doing the 3rd one on dread. Soon i'll be done with it and not sure whats next.

On other news, i saw men of war AS2 got a new game. Reviews are totally negative. Not a proper game as it turns out.

Shiny and i picked up Borderlands 3 with some friends and have been playing that. Not much new besides that. Borderlands 3 is fine... more of the same. I didn't find the previous ones super-awesome, though some of the story stuff was pretty good in the second one. This one's also got some mildly interesting story elements. The looting and shooting is mostly just ok.

Yeah man, I actually was fully ready to walk away from the game when I lost my first attempt at the darkest dungeon...for a number of reasons. 1) unlike the other dungeons, you don't see the layout the moment you walk in but discover rooms 1 at a time. This may not seem like a huge problem but it is, since you need to know when to camp to prepare for the second part of the dungeon. 2) there was no indication of what kind of enemies I could expect in the darkest dungeon (as opposed to the regular ones), making the first attempt with any party you assemble a crapshoot. Some parties might work really well, others might be completely ineffectual. 3) you can only retreat from the darkest dungeon by leaving one living party member behind (random pick). In combination with 2) this is a right pain in the ass. You'd need to explore first with a disposable test party, but you don't know that either when you first go in. 4) if you beat a level in the darkest dungeon, even if you do so comfortably, those characters can never enter the darkest dungeon again. This is not communicated to you at all, so the natural instinct is to take the best party in for the first run. Which then become worthless for the final battle. Your roster is a maximum of 30 characters, but you need to do 3 dungeons before you get to the final one. So that's 12 characters out of commission + 4 new ones you need to have ready for the final dungeon. Jesus christ. You can switch around some classes/characters but it's not that easy when it comes to pure support classes like the vestals. It basically forces you to grind up a new party to level 6 for the final battle, unless you somehow have prior knowledge of the way the system works.

All of this make it that it's a very good game with some very shitty design decisions. After I failed my first attempt at the darkest dungeon and pretty much gave up I just used a wiki to get a general idea of what to expect of the dungeon ahead and pretty much steamrolled it from that point on. Didn't lose any characters until then final battle, didn't even have one reach 100 stress. I did have to train up the characters for the final battle as my roster wasn't deep enough for that, but that was the biggest inconvenience. Happy I beat the game in the end, but I really hope they fix some of these issues for Darkest Dungeon 2!

And yeah I heard that the new Men of War game was terrible. It's basically just a milking of the franchise by different people apparently. They even reuse a lot of the assets from the original game. For shame. I fucking loved the MoW series.

@ Satis, should have checked with me for Borderlands 3 brah! Although realistically the time zones would have made it hard for me to sync up for regular games.

It's all good on Borderlands 3... I'm playing with Shiny and 2 other friends, so we have a full party. I'm really only playing it because of them, but they're following us around to Division 2 and Ghost Recon, so it's only fair I play a game they like (and they like it a lot).

Still working on Assassin's Creed: Origins. Also playing a bit more Kerbal Space Program again. They recently announced Kerbal Space Program 2. Considering the game was bought out by a bigger studio, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Saw you were playing while in Europe, did you bring a (gaming) laptop?

I decided to give Company of Heroes 2 a try afer it had been in my backlog for aaaaages (and I had a bit of a MoW itch). It's good so far but there's something about it that feels off, especially compared to the original. It's hard to really put my finger on it but it all feels more hectic but with less control. The lack of zooming out is probably my main gripe. You're given these long battle lines but you can't even see 1/4th of it in one screen and have to dash back and forth all the time. If you lose control over one flank it's most likely not because you played badly but because it was impossible to keep track of what was happening on that side while also working the other ones.

Also the general gameplay seems much more chaotic. In CoH1 you could build a base and gain points and then try strategic assaults with small groups of units. Here you're usually thrown in the middle of a battle and there isn't much to do in terms of production and resource management. You're mostly barely staying alive. I guess that's in keeping with the soviet storyline (scorched earth, defence against a superior enemy etc) but it seems like a pretty poor decision to let this dominate the gameplay. Let's see if it picks up later in the game.

Ox, you already own BL3? Maybe we can schedule a game? I haven't bought it yet, was going to wait for the Goty but I'm lacking interest towards most games available now.

I don't own it, sorry. So maybe we should both hang on until the GOTY version is out haha.

Yea, I was gaming some in Europe. I brought my Razer Blade I bought last December.



I had a Razer Blade from like 2015 or 2014 and I really like it, but it was getting a bit old. That one is now owned by Shiny.