Since the Thanksgiving Steam sale I got more games, which I do not have time to play and should not have bought at all. And the funny thing is that, as usual, the only two I really, really like are free (one's a demo). As it goes, there were a few $10 or more ones but mostly $2, $3 90% off games.
BATTLE GROUNDS III
Brilliant... at least for one day. I loved Battle Cry of Freedom. It fucking sucked, it was janky ugly bullshit, but it was unique and interesting and demonstrated how you can design a good musketry game, which is to cast the player as an officer commanding from the officer's perspective. Well, Battle Grounds III shows that you don't even need that, if it's well designed musket COD works too.
Does it work well? Kind of. The combat style, as I've always said, revolves around thinking of it not as ranged vs melee but ranged and melee in which ranged is like a limited tool that you go into combat not expecting to reuse. Here the guns reload in about 8 seconds and are pieces of shit, and the game distinguishes between guns not just in their statistics but also in the aiming method itself. Shouldering arms is a dedicated button you have to press and it basically fixes you in place, and yet without it you will hit NOTHING but people directly in front of you. Light infantry can crouch to further zoom in. Reloading can't be canceled out, which means that if an enemy can see you you basically shouldn't do it. Because of this you can easily gauge when to close in for melee. The gunning actually feels really good. Only the light infantry/frontiersmen rifles are worth using at ranges you would normally want to engage at, but it's satisfying to snipe on a map where that's actually viable (the not-Rush game mode).
Where it gets kind of piss is in melee, because - if this makes any sense - i think the game is designed in such a way that you don't kill someone because you hit them with your sword, but because you pressed the button at the right range. That is, it's instantaneous, it's unconnected to the animation that plays. There's often delay in games, like a delay (very meaningful in games like Hunt Showdown and Isonzo and, indeed, here) in pressing the fire button and the character actually pulling the trigger. Here with the swords, you won't see the sword swing in, or the bayonet surge forth, you just up and die. It's also a very arcadey game, so bunny hopping type bullshit is kind of what you have to do. Reach is the most important thing. The bayonet can only hit if you have your cursor on them whereas swords and axes and clubs do arc, and there's no parrying - it's not like even a Mount and Blade melee system - so if you outreach somebody and know that you'll kill them.
Basically, it's Fistful of Frags (a game I want to get into, but it's so dead) for Revolutionary warfare instead of the Old West.
Overall, though, I quite like this (especially for it being free). There'll be just enough people for an active game at any given moment.
Your classes are things like regular infantry (Continentals, Redcoats), light infantry (usually have much longer-ranged rifles that can actually be used, but no bayonet, inferior at melee), grenadiers (more health, grenades, often stronger melee weapons in addition to stronger short-range guns), and special stuff. Continentals get frontiersmen that are worthless at anything but long-range sniping, for example, while British get Iroquois warriors that are specialized to melee (shitty short-range trade gun and an ax, but very fast/nimble). And you get classes representing French grenadiers, Hessian jagers, you hear a mixture of "American" English, British English, German, French and the world's worst "i had my twelve year old nephew do a recording" noble Injun in the world.
TLATOANI (FREE DEMO)
Had my eye on Nebuchadnezzar (as someone that didn't, aside from Tropico, play city-builders growing up) and then this came up as an Aztec ripoff of it. It's said to be quite good by people that know the genre and the free demo is said to feel (in the age of DLC) like a full game in and of itself. I haven't learned it enough to actually play yet, but what it's got is the typical gameplay based around production lines, service buildings, needing to plan out rational city infrastructure, stuff that, for me, is like a dumbed down Anno. There's diplomacy/warfare of some sort, but I think it's just "chuck a force of soldiers at the enemy, yes/no, here's the odds." You can sacrifice humans, religion plays a role (don't sacrifice to the rain god, get floods and droughts type thing). Mostly I'm just very pleased with the irrigation (canals, chinampas, aqueducts) and the attention to detail of the types of buildings and goods on sale. Feels very lovingly made for a fascinating city-state civilization that gets overlooked way too often (compared to the Greeks).
DAYS GONE
This one has really blown so far. I remembered, as a teenager, thinking it looked like the most generic hacky shit in the world, it made no stir in its time, and then eventually it got rehabilitated into some brilliant cinematic Western with a zombie game's skin. So far the presentation has been dreadful - like, the story has this sort of cold open where it doesn't bother to sell itself at all, it knows it's the most generic crap in the world and so it doesn't even try to establish any kind of lore or background - and the gameplay has felt like the typical Far Cry routine (I initially thought Red Dead Redemption with motorcycles instead of horses and zombies, but fighting a million wolves off and clearing bases, it's more of a Ubislop Far Cry world).
Well, does it have any upsides after one day of playing? I'm not sure yet. It's rather brutal, supplies - at least for where I'm at - are genuinely very limited and at night the hills are crawling with zombies. Too many zombies, I've gotten annoyed with rural zombie games treating counties like they have the population of New York. I figure you could argue that the hordes of the cities get lured into the countryside and then dissipate, but it's still ridiculous. At any rate, you're in a cold rainforest, epic mountain West country, heavily forested, often raining, harvesting flowers, shooting deer, knife-fighting wolves, killing zombies, shooting bandits, riding motorcycles as a a badass biker gangster over dirt paths. It has a lot of potential, I just don't see any of that potential so far.
SONIC MANIA
First Sonic game I've ever played besides Shadow as a kid. Shadow was a gold mine of humor, yes it was stupid, childish in its edginess, but that was kind of the point. This is indeed a Sonic game. Supposed to be the best Sonic game of all time. So if I don't like it, I guess that means I don't like Sonic.
DARKEST DUNGEON
I don't even like gay fantasy crap, but I had a friend in college that played a lot of this and for some reason it imprinted on me as a classic. So far it's okay. Of course the central "dungeon crawler with MENTAL HEALTH" thing is overdone and hokey, but I do see how it makes gameplay more interesting that the characters can misbehave and in doing so fuck over the whole party. It seems decent, overly hard but decent.
EMPIRES OF THE UNDERGROWTH
I have a huge interest in ants. While no one ant species combines all of these attributes, just about anything human societies do, ants do: agriculture (leafcutters fertilizing fungal gardens), animal husbandry (aphid ranching), division of labor, revolutions, burial rites (ants have graveyards in their colonies), epidemic disease, slavery (slaver ants), and so on.
This game is an ant RTS, pretty accurate and narrated like a nature documentary. Of course it takes liberties with how ants think and communicate for gameplay's sake: real ants operate off of naturally-ingrained algorithms, they don't "think" through any problem except in the sense of running a script. But it has different civilizations/species with entirely different mechanics pertaining to things like how they produce food. You fight big hero spiders and frogs and stuff like that.
I'd played much of the demo. Was told the full game is abandonware, but content complete enough to be worth getting heavily discounted. Empire of the Ants is getting a photorealistic video game adaptation, but it's not out yet.
TROPICO 3
Won't fucking start. I had Tropico 4 on CD and no computer I've owned in a long while has a CD player, and I haven't gotten one yet. I saw this and I decided to try Tropico 3 instead. Even though it has strictly less content, I never really liked the whimsy of Tropico (compared to the dark satire of it). Basically, I was the one miserable, overly serious person in its audience that wanted a serious dictator simulator with historical campaigns. Well, Tropico 3 won't start.
Haven't touched yet:
STEEL DIVISION
I simply could not wrap my head around Wargame. I specifically wanted to play Cold War or contemporary real time tactics matches against the Soviet Union or China, but Wargame requires a PhD in military vehicles, plays extremely fast and lacks basic functionality like fog of war. I got to where I could do things like hold a position (not win, just hold a specific position), but it was still an awful lot to take in. I was told that Steel Divsion, DLC whorey as it my be, is a lot easier to comprehend just by virtue of having a slower pace of warfare (there aren't millions of missiles and fighter jets in the air, vehicles are more familiar to a general audience of history buffs, etc).
LAYERS OF FEAR
Haven't touched yet. Another genre I don't normally touch with a ten foot pole, but it was very cheap.
