I love the game, but i think it's a pretty bad Roguelike.

In terms of rng, it leans too far into the 'too much' column while any sense of progression on each run entirely depends on your weapon drops.

It wouldn't take much to make it a 10 for me. Allowing you to spend Ether at the start of each run to permanently upgrade wpn dmg or protection. Making items not consumable, but CD based etc.

A more controversial opinion/ change (that I'm not sure about), pick your gun at the start of the run and have the perks drop and be slottable.

 

A few games to recommend real quick.

Children of Morta, Katana Zero, For the King. Go buy them, in order of importance.

Morta is a very strong game for the price -- just a hell of a lot of fun. 2D rogue-Zelda-like with hoards of enemies and some pretty ill mechanics one you start collecting powerups. The way the main story unfolds is great and there is a family trial mode that is similar to a survival or endless mode. Katana; there's nothing I've ever played that's like it. You button mash like hell through dozens of enemies in ninja-style combat, praying like hell you don't get one-shotted. You die often but restart the level instantly and it is very rewarding when you beat a level. Also a crazy-fucked up story if you like those. For the King is a procedurally generated board game style RPG; the dice rolls to determine how many moves you make each turn, then its turn-based combat as well, also with dice rolls, which can be frustrating but makes for some interesting battles.

Note - none of these games are easy and you will die often. I also picked them up on sale recently.

 

I just started X-Com 2 War of the Chosen and have never played the first game. I have to say, I'm pretty overwhelmed by the Chosen missions and I'm not even that far into the game. Might need to read up a bit if I have no clue what's going on. I like the combat, but the RNG with hits can really fuck you over :0 if someone has any tips for a beginner, I'd be grateful, thanks.

 

Always plan redundancies, because you will miss. As such, be very careful about leaving the last soldier of your turn out of cover (cover is your desperate lover) in an attempt to try and secure a kill. If they miss that 90%+ flanking shot, then get headshot in return, you're sure to feel bad.
To that end, investing in area of effect abilities which can't miss(although that's not entirely true, due to evasion) can make things easier.
Oh, and I may just be thinking of the Long War Mod, but be mindful of getting killing blows by destroying bodies with explosives, due to lost research, equipment and income opportunities, though.

Mmm, never actually played War of the Chosen, but I've played a lot of XCOM, both the first and second iterations, albeit mostly while modded by Long War (which was never made War of the Chosen compatible, but is its own massive beast of a mod in and of itself).

 

Nah, that's in the base game too. Explosive kills means you get no loot from the kill, giving you only the corpse instead of the weapons/whatever else.

The big tips for beginners are:
1) Cover is your friend. You almost always want to end your turn with all of your soldiers in at least half-cover (and preferably full-cover) in the direction of enemies.

2) Flank, flank, flank. Just as you get to sit in cover, so too do the enemies. You don't want to be sitting there taking potshots at an enemy in full cover; move around and get as close to behind/side of their cover as you can before attacking. Even just shifting from dead on to a 60 degree angle toward the edge of the enemy's cover will dramatically increase your chance to hit, and you'll want to get as far to the side as you can.

3) Don't be afraid of Overwatch. When there's no enemies in range/sight, moving soldiers within the blue radius into cover and then setting them on Overwatch (e.g., they will reaction shot at the first enemy to move in their line of sight) is almost always better than sprinting all the way to the edge of the yellow radius and being unable to do anything.

4) Blow shit up. You'll lose a bit of loot if you kill an enemy with a grenade or whatever, but that's vastly preferable to losing one of your soldiers. Do not hesitate to lob a grenade at a sectoid or whatever if it's likely to get a kill. In addition, explosives will destroy walls and cover, opening up new lines of fire that can swing a whole battle. For example, if you've got one soldier out front of a building trading fire through a window with an ADVENT soldier inside and another soldier around the corner, the second soldier can chuck a grenade at the wall between them and the ADVENT and just unload into the x-ray's back.

5) Having a specialist with a medic drone can be a huge advantage. Just being able to heal/stabilize/revive any of your soldiers from anywhere in the map is huge, and I always make sure to bring at least one with the squad.

 

@Nerox High level snipers with squad sight and high ground trivialize most encounters, so make sure to level a few up as early as possible.

Personal favorite is also the run and gun crit assaulter build.

Also, play the first X-Com. I personally prefer it quite a bit over the sequel.

 

There's nothing quite like landing to deal with a mission and having an alien drop a grenade in your transport before your first turn starts, killing your entire squad.

 

Aloy still be lookin like a podperson with her weird egg-shaped head, but other than that, holy shit Horizon 2 is making me salivate.



Too bad I still can't buy a PS5. Scalpers can fuck right off.

 

It did look pretty good, but I'm really really getting over grappling (and climbing) points. This is shit that's stuck around and been passed along amongst the Sony first party for years. It feels dated and boring.

I'm at the point now if you're only going to give me a grappling hook to hook on to specific grapple points in an environment, I no longer want one.

I appreciate that melee combat looks a lot more engaging now. And it's gorgeous, obviously.

 

I really enjoyed the first one, so I'm all on board for this one. Gonna have to start caring about the PS5 and putting real effort into getting one.

 

I'm curious as to your thoughts a few months in. I've been playing since release and am pretty close to dropping it until the DLC come out just because of the various issues. Gameplay has been fun, but the grind has started to wear and with no live service the end game gets dull pretty fast. If they had more than one end game activity besides timed missions maybe it would be more fun.

 

I stopped playing like 3-4 weeks ago, because I had done all the builds I wanted to and had gotten gold on every expedition save the very final mission. And even then, the only reason I haven't beaten that is because one of the mechanics for the boss of it requires a gun build (the boss spawns a bunch of orbs that shoot at you and need to be killed, but abilities cannot target them) and I just had/have no interest in making one. I could do so fairly easily, but I just have no interest in playing a decent cover shooter when I could be playing space wizard explodey bang-bang.

I really like the game, and would still recommend it (though still with the caveat that you've gotta be able to put up with technical jank to really enjoy it), but it's not the kind of game that you can play forever, nor was it really intended to be as far as I can tell. You pick it up and play until you've got the loot needed for the builds you want to try and then play with those until you get bored and either pick a new build to try or move on to different games.

If/when they release DLC content for it, I'll almost certainly go back and play through it, and likely have a very good time with it still, but I feel no need to keep at it now.

 

Well said. I've pretty much reached the same point. I've mostly been helping friends level at this point.

 

Yesterday, I picked up the new 40k game, Necromunda: Hired Gun, and then managed to get in about 3 hours before heading to bed.



It's a story-mode shooter, with 13 chapters, following a bounty hunter going on a murder spree through the undergangers with his pet dog. It's too early for a full review, but have some initial thoughts.

Gameplay is pretty fast and frenetic, with enemies spawning semi-randomly around you, normally coming through doors, but I'm sure one or two have ported in out of nowhere. From the two chapters, and two sidequests, I've taken so far, the game is pretty much on the rails - you have to follow the trail, murdering the majority of people along the way, as you move from objective to objective. There's not been much in the way of alternate ways through the levels, and some of the objectives require you mulch everyone else into salsa before moving on.

Movement is easy from the outset, picking up a doublejump and grappling hook before the end of C2, with wallrunning, climbing, and dashing part of the basic kit. There's upgrades to all of this, but you start off pretty unconstrained by gravity, and gain more as you go.

Enemies come in different flavours for the different gangs, but can be boiled down to human/ogryn/dog, and un/armoured. The weapons they use don't tend to matter much, because you won't get to loot them, and the damage doesn't seem to differ much between similar foes.

You can take up to five weapons with you into a mission, and can pick up (to wield) one more, with others stored in your inventory. Unsurprisingly, the inventory is absolutely shit - you can store five small guns, five long guns, five heavy guns, and three 'special' guns. But you have no way in the field of checking the stats of the weapon in front of you, just have to hope it's more worth wielding than the other one that pops out of a random crate.

All the weapons are moddable, in a similar vein to Fallout:4, in that you can swap in sights, stocks, totems, muzzles, and the like. Unlike F4, you don't need to craft these, just spend money; but they're also not re-usable. You buy them for that gun. When you find the upgraded version (which comes in a very simple '+1' upwards), you'll need to upgrade them again.

This isn't a problem, because gold is plentiful. Doing a single side-quest netted me about 10k in credsticks, which I burned on fully upgrading a machine pistol to mow down everyone... And then next quest dropped an upgraded version. This is a problem - there's not much in the way of width for weapons and armour - I have found 'Light Armour' at 0, +1, +2, and +4.... But not any 'heavy armour' or anything like that. Based on a quick dive into youtube... Nobody has (even those who finished the game). Not sure why it needs specifying as 'light' when there's no other option.

Likewise with the guns, it looks like there's maybe one model of each sort of gun (revolver, machine pistol, shotgun, sawn-off, etc), which can then be upgraded. This could just be because I'm in the early game though.

Upgrading the weapons is also pretty bad - there's five stats, no numbers on them, and then there's upgrades which all have qualititive bonuses, rather than quantitive. The UI for shops and checking out the weapons there (which are randomly upgraded) is terrible, as you can't compare them side-by-side against your current loadout, and the small inventory means you don't want to buy useless junk.

You also carry a knife, and can instantly kill any small foes with a single takedown. This is a short(ish) animation, for which time you're invulnerable. But you can do it to a foe at any point from 100% health to nearly dead.


Personal Upgrades and Skill Trees are also a bit annoying - you buy cyborg implants, and level up skills that way. However, you don't have to worry about balancing them out. Buying 'body cyborg' at level 1 means you can buy all 'body cyborg implants' at level 1. You have to get it to level 2 before upgrading any of the individual skills to level 2.

Maybe I'm used to playing more personalisable RPG systems, but there's literally no reason to NOT buy the upgrades in this instance. They all have their own timers that go down independently, so specialization is a bit rubbish.

Overall, I like it, but there's numerous areas that are a bit naff. One that sticks in my head, and it's such a stupid design choice, is using A and E to navigate in menus. Not Q and E, or A and D. It looks like this is a French Keyboard layout thing, that nobody picked up on in testing for some reason. Despite WASD working as normal for movement.

Animations aren't great, and the cut-scene voice-acting is like someone in another room. Which is weird, because in-mission it's fine.

Visibly, this fits in perfectly for 40k. Grungey, dark, and hellish, with cyberpunk foes slaughtering their way through a religious-powered auto-forge; and all the over-the-top engineering the Imperium is known for.



Also, there's no Space Marines. Or, if they are, they're hidden and nobody's blabbed about it. Which makes a nice change.

If you like 40k, then consider it, but definitely check out some gameplay vids, and other reviews, because it's FUN. Sliding around and gunning down ogryns with a radioactive heavy stubber is brilliant. But if you're not a fan, then other games have probably done it better.

 

Seems a lot like Doom, gameplay wise. I'm giving it a pass atm, mostly cause too many other games I want more

 

Yeah, I've put 4-5 hours into Necromunda so far, and it's a decent enough shooter, but there's a lot of technical and design jank to it. It nails the vibe of 40k pretty much perfectly, so for fans it's a big win, but if you're not a fan of the universe already, you'll probably struggle to like it.

 

Star Wars Squadrons is free on PS plus. I'm glad I didn't pay for this one. It's a super fun flight game for about 10 hours, but then yeah, stops being interesting unless you love dogfights. Basically Rogue Squadron 2.0.

 

It's astounding how much prices of games became such an issue for me this gen.

Atm digital games in Australia cost $125 AUD per (25 higher than last gen), that's roughly $100 USD for you normies out there.

I don't understand the strategy. I just won't buy games anymore until they go on sale (unless I think they're worth it). Spiderman Miles Morales wasn't a full priced game, but it was still 100 AUD. I can wait. Now with Ratchet coming up? I dunno if I wanna spend 125 on it either.

I hear a lot of gamedev types bemoaning how length of games is a determining factor for their value - well, this is the opposite direction to go if you didn't want that to be the case.

I wouldn't be so butthurt if our prices were exchange rate equiv to the US, but we're just getting fleeced. It makes it all the more important that the PS+ games are of such high quality. Might give Squadrons a go, playing through FF14 again now with the news of an Australian data center coming next year. Kena is also much more reasonably priced at 60 AUD (which makes me a little worried weirdly, but I'd be ecstatic with a 10-15 hour adventure there).

 

From games have always been about art style over sheer fidelity... but man it shows a lot more coming off the heels of Demon's Souls...

Good that there's finally a release date though.