Games (from any year) which I finished playing in 2022.
Showing 1-10 of 23 items
01/07 (Keeper Master, all monsters) -- How much you enjoy Monster Sanctuary might depend on how much you enjoy the team building gameplay. The later story battles are challenging enough to require a decent team (and there are optional challenges for testing different builds and strategies). I also enjoyed collecting monsters and exploring the map, although Monster Sanctuary doesn't necessarily stand out as a Metroidvania.
01/13 (all endings)
01/23 (100% map) -- Astalon is a retro platformer with a "start over when you die" structure that turns its Metroidvania elements into checkpoints. Health is hard to come by, and a death before a new power or shortcut can be a pretty big setback. The mix didn't always work for me -- the timed traps, hidden threats and sponge-y enemies which fit a challenging platformer also made the backtracking or forced repetition tedious. (In one particularly long stretch, it felt like I had missed at least one major shortcut as I kept replaying a challenging series of rooms.) Astalon's pixel art might be Famicom-inspired? It's a little blocky, but I think it fits what LABS Works was going for.
01/30 (Moderate) -- I enjoyed Tales of Arise, although not as much as 2021's other ARPGs or JRPGs. (The fight choreography is impressive though, especially in Boost Strikes and cutscenes.)
02/04 (Hard) -- Fire Emblem Warriors is still a "Warriors" game at its core, but the Fire Emblem mechanics are a nice addition. Gameplay elements such as classes, the weapon triangle and even the "pair up" mechanic factor into its battlefield combat. I'm not sure if more "Warriors" games do this, but FEW has elements of a strategy game. During battle, you can pause to bring up a map screen and issue basic commands. Any hero you aren't controlling will carry out these orders. Weapon advantage makes a big difference in these AI actions (especially "slayer" weapons). Maneuvering heroes around these advantages and disadvantages (or even just positioning them for later player control) was a pretty fun strategy minigame in some of the tougher battles. FEW's story is pretty mediocre, although that's probably not surprising for this kind of crossover. (On the other hand, I did enjoy DQ Heroes' story.)
02/13 (Moon Lord, co-op) -- I've heard Terraria described as "2D Minecraft". That's... sort of right. Both games have randomly generated worlds with distinct biomes, block placement, crafting and (mostly) gear-based character progression. But Terraria's loot variety, combat mechanics and challenging boss fights give it more of an action-adventure feel than the comparison implies. Terraria is a game where a lot can happen. Often, I was stumbling onto a new item, biome, event trigger or something else. It also doesn't hold back on some strange and powerful item mechanics. This keeps things surprising, interesting and/or funny... most of the time. Anything requiring focus (like exploration, building or crafting) can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemies spawning, special events happening or other distractions. Similarly, the huge variety of items and recipes can make it tricky to sort out what's useful.
02/20 (Hard) -- I'm probably about 2/3 of the way through Ys: Memories of Celceta, though I don't plan to finish at this point. Memories of Celceta shares a lot of gameplay elements with Ys VIII and IX. Everything from the flash moves, damage types and skills to the party structure and exploration goals are present. The newer games smooth out some of the rough edges, but the common mechanics are otherwise basically the same.
03/12 (A New Day Dawns) -- I had fun playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus. There are new regional variants and pokémon battles with a few tweaks. Filling out the research objectives was also fun (often by sneaking up on pokémon to catch them). It isn't a particularly strong open-world game, though. (At least, I don't remember a lot of exciting finds or surprises while exploring.)
03/19 (High threat, co-op) -- Mindustry is my first "factory" game, and it has a cool combination of co-op, tower defense and RTS campaign gameplay. When it works, a Mindustry map has a lot going on. You need to set up basic resource lines, assess what's available, weave together resources into refineries or power production and start building and layering defenses. There's also a tech tree based on discovering, collecting and synthesizing more and more complex resources. Mindustry is not an easy game. A map might starve you of a critical resource, send enemy waves aggressively or send a ridiculously powerful last-wave superboss (or all three). The open-campaign's pacing started to break down for my brother and me in the High-threat maps. There was still a lot of the tech tree to unlock and learn, but navigating both it and the enemy pressure led to too many punishing outcomes.
03/26 (Mass Effect 1, Normal) -- I was a little surprised by how much I remembered from Mass Effect. In my first playthrough, I played a pure paragon Infiltrator/Commando on Hard and mostly relied on Ashley and Liara. My recent playthrough was a less strict Soldier/Commando with Wrex, Garrus and Tali as my go-to squadmates. Mass Effect's visual style holds up well, and its writing and dialogue are still interesting. Its gameplay isn't exactly bad... I wouldn't say that it holds up to the length of the game. The combat is a little stiff, although the progression and unlockable powers help keep things interesting. The rest of the gameplay doesn't really have that. The difficulty/loot scaling and copy/pasted design give the side quests and exploration sections a flat and repetitive. feel. There's also a lot of Mako combat with no progression (and some of the map terrain is downright frustrating to navigate).