I often describe the Borderlands games as "some of my favorite games that I have to meet waaaaaaay more than halfway" and yeah, BL3 fits the bill. It's got the good action and wacky builds, buuuuut...
- the writing fails to deliver on a promising premise
- there's way too much time spent turning in quests or waiting for Lilith to finish talking already
- it desperately needs 2 features from Reaper of Souls: an armory for quickly switching between loadouts and an "adventure mode" that allows me to play through alts in a way that isn't just going through the story again (and then again and again for each new difficulty level). Whatever problems the game's writing may have, they would be much easier to forgive if I didn't have to deal with them twelve times.
Soulstone Survivors: I think it's great until you get way up in the difficulty and it devolves into a bunch of dashing around attacking offscreen bosses.
Halls of Torment: Absolute garbage. Slow, repetitive, nothing in the way of interesting build choices.
Spellbook Demonslayers: Fantastic, if visually uninteresting. Lots of fun builds
One thing none of these games have: that amazing brain tingle you get in Vampire Survivors when you pick up a bunch of XP gems and get that rapid-fire bling sound.
This year seems a little less train-wrecky than last year (as long as we confine all Amico news to fiscal year 2022). None of the "this game was bad/buggy" stuff seems to be qualitatively special. So by default, I've got to hand it to Blizzard just completely own-goaling on Overwatch, even though my horse in that race retired to a nice glue factory upstate years ago. I would expect that sort of over-promising and inconsistency from an overambitious indie, not from one of the world's biggest developers that had to scramble after it saw its Overwatch business model challenged in European courts and has been suffering massive brain drain and OK I hear it now, I hear it.
Shoutout to Dying Light, which had a sequence in which I, unarmed, had to run through of gauntlet of gun-toting enemies shooting at me from windows and such. Of course, they spawned "just in time" so that they wouldn't get a bead on me -- it was all about the illusion of danger and the fast paced dash to freedom through a hail of bullets! The bad news is that I died anyways, so I respawn at the checkpoint and go at again. The problem here is that this isn't an old school hard reload -- the world doesn't reset at all, only I do. So this means those just in time shooters are already spawned and waiting for me, and they have no trouble sending me back to the starting line dozens of times. I don't bandy the phrase about lightly, but absolute dogshit.
I wasn't wild about the first 4 episodes of Andor, but the 5th episode rules (nothing happens, it's all character!), the 6th episode is the best thing I've ever seen on television (at least for a few weeks until it was supplanted by the 12 episode), and once it takes off it doesn't miss. Take it from someone who hasn't cared for any of the other contemporary Star Wars output but especially despised Rogue One: you gotta watch Andor.
I'm finding it a real mixed bag. City development is in a good place, the tactical combat is as good as ever, and different culture/tome combos feel sufficiently different, but I'm finding the whole thing completely charmless. It's an easy enough problem to ignore in the early game where the brisk pace can cover for it, but once things slow down a bit, I find myself remembering that this just isn't a nice place to be, which tires me out and pushes me away -- compare the sterile landscapes of AoW4 to the beautiful and properly fantastical visuals of AoW2 (this problem is a holdover from AoW3, which reminded me of the rough transition-to-3D suffered by the similar Heroes of Might and Magic series). The pantheon is a major regression from Planetfall's Galactic Empire mode, and the game is peppered with UI/UX shortcomings and minor bugs that pull me out of it. There's some solid meat and potatoes in there, but they're all tossed into a mushy, flavorless stew.
It was either somewhere around AoW3 or Planetfall where the series stopped being compared to HoMM in favor of being compared to Civilization, which I don't think is entirely fair, but right now AoW is maybe trying to have its cake and eat it too, with mixed results. There's a lot of fancy tinsel in the margins of a game that is ultimately about having a big enough army to win. At this point I think the series would benefit from picking a lane -- personally I wouldn't mind leaning more into a Stellaris-like direction, which would sacrifice mechanical purity and symmetric gameplay in favor of systems that help foster emergent narratives, and keep that early-game excitement active into the later turns, which presently tend to converge on throwing stacks of armies at each other while the victory countdown progresses.
I have very little patience for free EGS games -- they either make their case quickly or get dropped, unless I'm desperate and there's nothing else competing for my time.
Not only are those other games live service or live-service-adjacent, they all kind of have a hook to them. A modern MMO that leverages the Final Fantasy IP! A procedurally generated universe! Jet....packs? Something that has unique appeal but needs better execution. What's the hook with Redfall? What's the thing that only Redfall is doing, but that's obscured by all of its misfires? Honest question, as my only exposure so far has been a few minutes over at Nextlander. Ultimately though, that's probably the wrong question -- the decision to pour more resources into it has little to do with the game and more to do with where the lines intersect on the spreadsheet, combined with whatever market research has to say about whether or not the game-buying public tends to hold a grudge on the kind of timeline that would impact the next game with the Arkane name on it.
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