After browsing Steam for some RTS of sufficient complexity that is not set in Middle Ages or earlier: that genre is fucking dead. It looks like there are a grand total of three games that fit my requirements, only all three are worse than what was available a decade ago.

OTOH a friend recommended a fun base-builder Oxygen Not Included, which is somewhat similar to Rimworld or DF only the threat comes from lack of vital resources rather than enemies (AFAIK - I've only played ~8h or so). It's early access, but from Klei Entertainment (Don't Starve dev) and there is enough content that it seems plausible it'll leave said early access in time. I've had a surprising amount of fun with it so far, and the graphics and animations are excellent.

 

Yeah RTS is a dead genre according to major publishers at this point. Every now and then they'll trot out its corpse with some necromancy but most companies are okay leaving it dead.

On a less depressing note, 1 day until I can finally start playing dead cells and scratch my ever present roguelike metroidvania itch.

 

@Rehio Ni No Kuni 2 finally finished downloading and I popped out into the overworld for the first time.

The overworld bobble sprites are so darn cute.

 

Ni No Kuni 2 is a fun game, can easily put in a good 80 hours if you want to do everything. I do feel like the story fell a little flat near the end, but I still enjoyed it. It's incredibly easy to get over leveled and just steamroll everything however, and when i played the game there weren't any difficulty settings - not sure if that ever changed - so if you want any of the field bosses or story bosses to be a challenge, you're going to want to fight them at least a few levels under the recomended. Dodging a sure kill move and using your higgledey army to recover or nuke the field is great.

 

Anyone picked up that Seran Kagura watergun game?

 

It seems to be a mechanically fun game that's actually better than the main series in that franchise. Like an anime-splatoon or something.
Friends of mine that have played it seem to enjoy it for a while.

 

Look fun to play against other players. Any idea how dead is the online?

 

It exists, but I don't know how active it currently is. I would wager that the PC version would have more players, though.

EDIT: Assuming it doesn't let you play with Japanese players, in which case the community is probably more active on console.

 

Is anything more tilting than losing a level 6 hero in Darkest Dungeon that you've had since the start of your game? I've never hit alt-f4 so fast in my life, and now all I can do is stew on the terrible choices I made.

 

Azur Lane is now available in the EU Playstore (well, not on the UK one, but I remotely downloaded, which worked?).

You play an admiral - building, upgrading, and equipping your shipgirls to do battle on the seas.

I've not sunk much time into it yet (came out on Thursday, and I was camping last couple of days), but it seems decent enough. Lots of modes locked behind level requirements, but you should be able to blast through the low level stuff in a few hours. There's also stuff to do in the background - training skills, or sending your fleets out on sorties for semi-random loot.

PvE seems alright, and is pretty intuitive. PvP is all on automatic, and it has a slightly different tier listing at the low end.

Ships are built with the gacha, and there IS a mercy system - scrapping ships gives you 'Medals of Honour', which can be traded in for your choice from a small selection.

I've seen favourable comparisons to KanColle, which I never got into because it involved fiddling with my computer more than I wanted shipfus, so if you have any interest in naval warfare, it might be worth a try.

The Chinese server has ~15 month headstart, and it looks like events typically run for ~2 weeks, although downtime between events changes wildly for CN, JP, and KR servers.

 

So one game worth being aware of, and another that I'm enjoying immensely, based heavily on games gone by.

First, Universim.



I've been following this for like four years, but Godus cut me deep. Like, so deep. One of the most seminal games in my life/early childhood was Black and White, the Molyneux god game and this is inspired in part by that.

It's just come out on Steam so I bought it and I've been having a ton of fun, although managing the little nuggets has proven slightly challenging. It's not feature complete, but what's there has left me optimistic in a way Godus never did. They've a lot of the core features down and now it's progressing the ages.

Firstly, it's gorgeous. The attraction of a game like this is watching them do their thing and how the world moves and simulates around them. It's nailed that.

The research tree appears good but relatively quick to complete. You can see there's various reskins and unlockables from quests that arent in, but the fundamental mechanics of nugget management appear strong. Assigning nuggets to roles and managing them is intuitive, although you mostly figure things out by looking for where you've fucked up: Hmm, my population's dropping, oh shit, they need to drink from wells not reservoirs. That sort of thing. There's not much in the way of a tutorial at this point.

It's a promising opportunity. If you like God games, they're a rare breed nowadays and few have really captured what Black and White did for me. This might.

Two:

Two Point Hospital, is a modern remake and polish off of Theme Hospital. It's made by old Bullfrog developers (Molyneux again, that man fell so far).



I've not gotten too far yet, as I've not had much time to sink into it. And, there's regrettably no surgery yet, that I've seen. Still, it's exactly what made theme hospital great and I enjoy their stupid little diseases, and the janitor ghostbusters.


In fact, both of these together, what with the childhood flavours thread. Would there be any room for a childhood games thread? Those one or two special experiences that were the best games at the right age to have made an impact on you that games nowadays just can't? Has it been done before?

City of Heroes, Theme park world and Black and White would be right in there for me.

 

Anyone heard anything about an actual Harry Potter video game currently in development? A friend linked me this video and I have no idea if it's real or not:

 

@Odran
Thread here discussing it.

 

After watching some GTA V, I was in the mood for a PC racing game. After a bit of research, I picked up Forza Horizon 4 for the PC. When the game isn't crashing, it's a blast to race with.

If you're looking for a straight up racer, I'd give it a shot.

 

Erm. I wouldn't recommend it to people looking for a 'racer.' You want the other Forza game for that. Horizon is arcadey, open world fun.

 

Yeah, Forza Horizon is the PUBG of racers - arcadey, casual, fun, and open for anyone.

Whereas Forza Motorsport is like Escape from Tarkov - realistic, hardcore, detail oriented, and likely to make you miserable in the end...

Both are good games, they just appeal to different types of people.

 

While the Forza Motorsport series is considerably less arcade-y than Horizon, I would not call it hardcore. It is still made to be played with a controller, and from my – admittedly, very limited – experience with the series consisting of short encounters at a friend‘s house, playing with a wheel grants little to no performance advantages. I think "simcade" would be a far better category here, together with something like GT Sport for PS4 or the Formula One series, which has improved by leaps and bounds over the last two years.

The hardcore bracket can filled with games such as Assetto Corsa (esp. the upcoming Blancpain Endurance variant), iRacing on PC & the Project Cars series, although the latter has its own share of issues I won‘t get into now for the sake of brevity.

That being said, Forza Motorsport is still gorgeous, challenging and a very good choice for a somewhat serious racing game on XBox, especially when one lacks a proper wheel rig.

Lastly, Horizon 4 looks like a lot of fun, and I would definitely give it a shot but for my lack of an XBox (I‘m a PS4 guy myself) or a well-equipped PC.

EDIT: Minor grammatical issue fixed.

Also, I forgot to mention the DiRT series, which covers the off-road racing experience like nothing else imo. Neither DiRT Rally (the first one) nor DiRT 4 are hugely expensive right now, so they‘re definitely bargains in terms of quality. For fans of fast and hard racing around short, but difficult tracks, I can definitely recommend the Rallycross category, especially the supercars. It‘s what has brought me back to these games more than once, trying to extract the last few thousands of a second.

 

car racing games would be a lot more fun if i could bash other cars off the road and they put some of their AAA budgets into realistic damage physics

like c'mon, that's half the fun!

 

Check out the Burnout games then, cuz that's basically what they are.

 

I thought that Cars game had a major hard-on for realistic damage physics?