Aug 2023: This Month's Games
i went kinda nuts on the city builders this month
any notes should be treated as "first impressions"
any notes should be treated as "first impressions"
21 Games
Its greatest similarity to From's more well-known games is in the strategic flow of boss fights, which have a fighting game-like quality in that Armored Core bosses are visibly playing with the same ruleset as you. the result are these freakish mechanical dances, maintaining spacing that suits your playstyle and watching for openings provided by their moves and breaking their posture. impossible to deny how good these fights feel even at their most punishing.
very obviously a cousin of Mini Motorways and i think i like it more? for one, i like the larger scale, and i like having more road features to place down - the choices between an overpass/interchange/roundabout are the obvious ways in which mastery is demonstrated. compared to Mini Motorways, destinations are much more patient and you get batches of road tiles in much greater numbers, meaning it's more relaxing as a result.
for my Mini Motorways-heads out there the biggest change will be the lack of driveways - every destination is a dot on the map (instead of a big square) and if you want to run a road straight through them, you can. there are some advanced tools here that are pretty much mandatory due to the game's tendency to aggressively snap roads into any nearby destination but that's my only real complaint aside from nitpicks about presentation
for my Mini Motorways-heads out there the biggest change will be the lack of driveways - every destination is a dot on the map (instead of a big square) and if you want to run a road straight through them, you can. there are some advanced tools here that are pretty much mandatory due to the game's tendency to aggressively snap roads into any nearby destination but that's my only real complaint aside from nitpicks about presentation
an act of quiet worship oriented towards the car and the world we've tamed on its behalf. devoted to differentiating parts of wyoming with a kind of care usually reserved for san francisco landmarks or new york neighborhoods
every bit as charming as i expected from its demo. short and sweet, gameplay that technically exists within an arkham style framework of three-button attack-parry-dodge but is elevated to a much higher level through its guard break mechanics. as you play around these you're encouraged to be a complete asshole, rolling across tables, kicking your enemies into things in the environment, kicking your environment into your enemies, etc. sometimes the placement of these objects is a little too obvious for you to really feel clever while using them but the pure kinesthetic joy of crushing a guy under a weapon rack (in a silly way 😋) remains strong from moment one to moment done.
hands-down the most impressive, "content-rich" Hololive fangame out there. i know vtubers are a little too uncanny/"cringe" for a lot of people to stomach but it's hard to deny how much care went into this project. a lot of work has been done to infuse each character and stage with personality and there are so many references and in-jokes for dedicated fans to pick up on. it hews a little too closely to the "core" Survivors gameplay format to really be impressive in that regard, but it does at least make attempts to differentiate characters and create items with interesting effects, which is more than can be said for Vampire Survivors.
it's also worth nothing that the difficulty for each stage ramps up so dramatically that the elements of meta-progression never feel like you're ruining the game. 0.6 also added an entire customizable house with cooking/fishing/gardening/decorating systems, which feels absolutely wild to add in a single update to a free product that's already been playable for this long.
main downside is that there's no denying that the culture of the whole thing can be off-putting since 1. any fandom can be fucking weird, 2. hololive deliberately tries to recreate the sensation of interacting with idols and the fan culture they create, meaning 3. some of the items in-game can reference particularly grating elements of hololive fan culture and uhhh boy that's fuckin embarrassing sometimes
it's also worth nothing that the difficulty for each stage ramps up so dramatically that the elements of meta-progression never feel like you're ruining the game. 0.6 also added an entire customizable house with cooking/fishing/gardening/decorating systems, which feels absolutely wild to add in a single update to a free product that's already been playable for this long.
main downside is that there's no denying that the culture of the whole thing can be off-putting since 1. any fandom can be fucking weird, 2. hololive deliberately tries to recreate the sensation of interacting with idols and the fan culture they create, meaning 3. some of the items in-game can reference particularly grating elements of hololive fan culture and uhhh boy that's fuckin embarrassing sometimes
an idle game that doubles as a proper tycoon game and a very light city builder. this can be played very simply by just building the supply chains needed to power your own trucks and selling unprocessed resources to other players (who have progressed so far into the game that gathering wood becomes a hindrance) or you can turn it into something like Anno/Factorio where you feed these raw resources into a supply chain to make increasingly advanced materials. It's probably the idle game that most suits my tastes and i suspect that's because it's the least "idle" idle game that I've played
absolutely dripping with style and i love it to death for that but it's a little too early in this game's development to recommend - there are core mechanics that you can't really interact with at all at this stage, and in the early game it's very hard to feel like you're doing much of anything - just balancing numbers as you wait for a bar to fill up so you can jump to the next planet.
Cute, tiny city builder that's more complex than you might expect based on the store screenshots. Nothing too difficult, but it's one of many games that places a lot of importance on balancing supply chains (like you might expect in a colony sim) without being too complex - raw resources only really feed into a handful of finished goods. You're not dealing with the intertwining supply chains like you might in something like Anno
love cleaning up my little slice of post-apocalyptic paradise but wish i could spend less time crafting intermediate ingredients for all the recipes in the game
a neat concept although not the first game to give you basically no land and ask that you build straight up.
what really hurts my enthusiasm here are the controls - they're functional but if you're trying to make the most of your available space (the point of the game!) by lining things up pixel perfect you're going to have an awful time as the camera is always too low and obscuring too much. i suppose the good news is that there's a key that allows you to get a birds-eye view, the bad news that you'll be pressing it constantly
what really hurts my enthusiasm here are the controls - they're functional but if you're trying to make the most of your available space (the point of the game!) by lining things up pixel perfect you're going to have an awful time as the camera is always too low and obscuring too much. i suppose the good news is that there's a key that allows you to get a birds-eye view, the bad news that you'll be pressing it constantly
disregard "city builders" - if you're looking for a "neighborhood builder," this is the thing. aside from unlocking buildings through an XP system, this is effectively a sandbox - you don't worry about utilities, you just place whatever buildings you have the money for and if you feel like it you can walk around in first person and look at everything you've built. it's not the best looking game but i know someone out there is going to see this and feel like they've found a game that's almost exactly what they're looking for.
the funniest city builder of all time. mostly a poorly balanced experience of building apartments, posting ads for vacant apartments, and collecting rent that gets suddenly interrupted late into the game by having all the characters walk up to each other and start asking what they're going to do after "the gentrification" happens. like theyre preparing for the rapture or something
a fine enough set of mechanics and quests paired together but i just do not like these character creation options. nothing terribly fun ability-wise and from the looks of it that doesn't change much as the game progresses, either. in something like this that's a pretty big dealbreaker for me.
confusingly my steam library now simply labels this as "call of duty" with no subtitle. i really wanted decent shooting mechanics paired with completely brain-off game modes and got exactly what i was asking for.
i can only assume all the time away really ruined my hidden matchmaking values or w/e because i was getting put in matches with people who had player levels in the THOUSANDS who play the game like a lab rat, running to the same spot and sitting there waiting to snipe anyone that runs past (it's never a very good vantage point, either). i say this less out of frustration and more out of bewilderment. do they know other games exist? i never turned chat on to ask
i can only assume all the time away really ruined my hidden matchmaking values or w/e because i was getting put in matches with people who had player levels in the THOUSANDS who play the game like a lab rat, running to the same spot and sitting there waiting to snipe anyone that runs past (it's never a very good vantage point, either). i say this less out of frustration and more out of bewilderment. do they know other games exist? i never turned chat on to ask
the store page for this is pretty clear that it's a puzzle, not a city builder, but i wasn't paying enough attention to notice that it's effectively a slide puzzle, which is my least favorite kind of puzzle. oh well!
Insanely punitive city building puzzle. All buildable objects are cards, most of your starting cards are basically worthless - I respect it but hoo boy I want something more chill than this
Currently in open beta: truly nothing mindblowing here but if you heard "combat-free MMO" and your ears perked up then this is probably exactly what you were hoping for. it's already very playable at this stage depending on your tolerance for bugs (they're common). i could nitpick this for days but i dont want to suggest that anything here is particularly off-putting. quite the opposite, actually: i'm very, VERY happy with how much effort goes into gardening and i love that this game is all "life skills" like you'd see in something like runescape or (shivers) new world. it's pretty lean at the moment but i'm eager to see what this develops into
have played very little of this as of this writing but my initial thoughts are that it feels a little too barebones to exist in early access atm. nothing here to distract you from the barren-ness of the world around you
large portions untranslated from its original chinese but i'll admit that i'm so hungry for a xianxia city builder that i'm powering through. i'd probably have better thoughts on this if the UI had more/better english
