Games (from any year) which I finished playing in 2018.
Showing 1-10 of 52 items
01/05 -- Super Mario 3D World features a curious mix of a handful of new ideas and lots of classic gameplay elements. It doesn't strike me as revolutionary, but it's a solid Mario game.
01/06 -- Clunky, dated and weird. Still, Phantom Dust grabbed me. The various powers, deck building and destructible levels probably had something to do with it.
01/08 (Seasons 1 and 2) -- Eh. I'll give Galak-Z a couple of style points, mainly for its humor and radio screens. Its gameplay is serviceable, with bland, overly long missions, arbitrary progression resets and long load times. Modern shooters (especially 2D ones) should at least be a joy to play, if not truly unique in some other way.
01/11 (Chaots, Kinects, Diamanda)
01/12 (131 missions co-op) -- I'm not sure why, but light strategy games like Door Kickers are a lot more fun co-op.
01/13 -- The more I played Outland, the less I liked it. I slogged through the back half because it seemed like a short game. Outland is well-polished, but it's a little hard to say what its gameplay strength is. Probably platforming, although it's not a pure-platformer. Combat is not great, with a slow basic attack combo, long recoveries, same-y enemies and wait-and-see fights. Outland's visual style may actually hurt its overall experience. The environments tended to be dark (and drab) to highlight the foreground lighting effects. I also had some issues with bullet hit-boxes, and occasionally losing the hero in various lighting effects.
01/15 -- Whew, talk about a game with "no right answers". Becoming royalty is surprisingly hard. Elodie, your young crown princess, must prepare for her upcoming coronation in one short year. You decide her classes and activities, which shape her skills and emotions. Frequent events and court decisions will test your choices -- and possibly end your game. At its core, Long Live the Queen is a classic (mostly text) resource management game, and its setting works well with its gameplay. Elodie begins the game Depressed (following her mother's death), an emotion which encourages self-expression (such as music). Various activities and events may see her Lonely, Angry, Willful or so on, encouraging various corresponding studies such as conversation, combat, military strategy or espionage. The gameplay loop is pretty tough. Even understanding the likely events (after multiple playthroughs), I often struggled to keep up. One time I had quelled local threats through intrigue, only to find myself overwhelmed by a powerful foreign invasion. Another time, I used powerful magic to secure my borders, only to find my population in revolution. Yet again, I had suppressed a number of threats to end up carelessly poisoned due to a lack of internal court skills. There's a tightrope balance, and you definitely can't do it all. The game's length is probably about right, although the pacing is pretty intense. An NG+ option might be fun for more easily exploring alternate event paths. Checkpoints or an auto-save system would also be nice to avoid replaying an unfortunate (or silly) decision outcome.
01/15 -- A free-to-play backlog item. Invisible Apartment has an OK visual aesthetic, but the gameplay and writing didn't really grab me.
01/16 -- I liked parts of Dex, although perhaps not enough to finish it. (The "Augmented Reality" hacking is kind of interesting, compared to the standard take on hacking gameplay.)
01/18 -- Sunless Sea is a game which requires (a lot of) patience. Give it a little time, and you might find the weird English humor and mix of trading, exploration and rogue-like events engrossing. I encountered a few weird combat encounters which seemed poorly designed or even buggy -- an unpleasant bump when you're walking a gameplay tightrope.