I rate Monster Train a bit higher that these guys, it's pretty great. A shade simpler than Slay the Spire but more accessible and better looking. Some nice innovations too, the modular upgrades for monsters and spells gives you a lot of specialisation, like powering up spells, making them stay in your hand until needed or come back to your hand when cast, and so on.

Best of all is the synchronous multiplayer. You can do custom and seeded runs in groups and see other people's progress on the world map and live scoreboard. The hellrush mode puts you against a timer as well, and making the right plays when under time pressure brings out a different dimension to the gameplay that hasn't been done before.

It's my favourite modern golf sim. The tone is a bit more serious than the Tiger Woods / PGA games I used to play back in 2000 or so, but it's a lot of fun. The main swing is interesting but quite punishing, with a tempo element on your gamepad down-up movement as well as testing the straightness. After about 20 rounds I still have good streaks without really knowing why, and bad streaks without really knowing how to fix it as well.

The putting system is amazing, with the power being set simply by the delay you put inbetween backswing and foreward swing which is consistent across all distances of putt. There's a real knack to getting a feel for it, and a constant battle to maintain consistency that works a bit like the real thing.

The features are pretty good too, there are loads of golf modes including some weird ones like alternate shot couples. You can join community rooms with friends or strangers and compete on a custom calendar. You can also play simulataneous multiplayer to keep rounds with your mates pretty quick. It's also frequently good looking with loads of courses and last time I saw, people were making modded courses as well. Easily worth trying out imo.

Yeah I used to blame the guitar controller... apparently it was always more precise than I ever was.

The problem I never really got over with the drums was foot pedal. The lack of feedback meant I couldn't help but use the bump of the pedal bottoming out to play by ear - but the trigger was somewhere halfway down the pedal's travel. The game would receive the hits a bit earlier than I intended which would be tolerated most of the time, but not in songs with continuous hihats like Crazy Train or Everlong where the game could receive the drums out of order. Plus that was the most I could cope with despite playing shit loads. Guitar Hero/Rock Band was an awesome craze back in the day.

I gave up on playing this game solo, the GUI isn't made for it, and just something like 'does this shop have an upgrade for my 3 guys' is so much clicking in and out of menu pages that it's torture. If you happen to have 3 players who know how to build and gear an RPG character then it's very good coop fun. The game is actually pretty unique in places, your party of 3 can move around the world map independently to get things done, and then come together for fights so there is some strategic planning your party has to talk through which is part of the fun. If you've got the group for it, it's an easy recommend especially for free.

Yeah the only Worms title that is even remotely close to Armageddon is WMD. The new engine restores some of the pixel accuracy that very early worms had, which gave you good information to make clever shots. Around the Reloaded/Revolution years, the variable zoom, blurry pixels and odd feel of the physics made it tricky enough to just make basic shots on target. With WMD you can at least get some trick shots with grenades again.

Some of the items in WMD are pretty good too, like the party balloon, gun turret, sheep on a rope, bunker buster, and that bolt that has proximity grenades hanging from it that I can't remember the name of. The crafting system was ambitious but needs streamlining imo. Picking up items gives a mix of 4 resources and you have to balance them all when spending. Also the crafting GUI keeps closing as phases of the game pass even though it's not your turn yet. Oh, and the vehicles are basically a disaster, they are well implemented but are so good that the game revolves around control of the vehicles while any are on the field. I turned them off in my games pretty quickly because the regular worms weapons are way more varied and fun.

Overall though WMD is the best worms in ages, has Steam matchmaking and a functioning ladder, but still didn't make a lot of momentum. I'm not sure the traditional worms recipe has the potential to blow up huge any more, it just seems like a side game that's great to pull out when you're with friends.

From the 'expect something new from Worms' they've been talking about, I wonder if they're cooking up a battle royale mode...

If there's a more enduring, evergreen meme than 'In space, no-one can hear you X' then I'd like to know what it is! 40 years strong and never really fell fully out of use.

I'll watch a YouTube series of this expansion, I'm interested in how the game has come along. After being a huge fan of AoW3, this game hasn't hooked me in yet.

We've come a long way since:

"All the content we ever put out for Fallout 76--all the DLC, all the post-launch stuff--is going to be free. That's important. And to say, the Atomic shop is cosmetic stuff. To make sure folks understand--look there's a line. There are people who have crossed it, but we're going to stay on the right side of it in terms of the things you can spend money on and how this stuff works and what you're getting for your $60. That you know, when they put out new content or features or whatever, I'm getting that stuff for free. That feels right."

From everything I've heard, even though the physics are pretty quirky and arcadey, they are decent enough to have fun racing. The main downside seems to be the mode for online racing with pubs, which is pretty much a Play Now button where you don't choose car or tracks, and get lumped in to a random race with a grid padded with AI cars.

Hopefully this game is a step up from Captain Planet and the Planeteers, which disappointed me in 1990 when it got bundled with my Amiga A500.

Man, who to trust when reviews vary so wildly?

IGN: "a high-point for the series – and the genre as a whole." - 9/10

PC Gamer: "Between the bugs, the extended non-jokes, the self-aggrandizing jabs at game design trends, and a few cameos I won't spoil but that made me audibly groan, Borderlands 3 has a lot in common with Gearbox fan events as of late. There's a lot of loud, extended posturing while holding what everyone really came for hostage. It's a shame, because Tales from the Borderlands found a delicate balance of absurdity, self-awareness, and genuine heart. A better Borderlands is possible, it's just not Borderlands 3." - 63%

Osc8r - coop is improved over before. You have general options for autoresolve all, watch all, control all fights like previously. You can also have a mode where it autoresolves by default, but players get limited points to spend on controlling battles, which slowly refresh over time as a compromise. Apparently you can also hot swap between play by web and full multiplayer, so you could conceivably have a turn a day during the week, then live sessions when you get together at the weekend. The multiplayer stuff got added/advertised after the preview weekend so we haven't seen it in action yet, but if it's at all like advertised it's gonna be about as convenient as you can get with this type of game.

Slashman - yeah I am hoping is stacks up like that. I liked 3 so much I was actually craving more DLC when that game wound down! I'm mostly hoping it doesn't turn out like Stellaris where imo the business/expansion/dlc model was detrimental to the game in some ways.

I'm buying in, I absolutely loved 3 and the preview weekend of this showed the game already in great shape a few weeks ago. The style of high accessibility with moderate depth underneath is my favourite these days. It seems to be made up of Triumph's game mechanics and sense of fun, along with Paradox's budget and world building which imo is the best of both worlds. The only worry is the availability of a DLC season pass which to me indicates that Paradox's DLC policy is definitely in effect going forwards.

Fantastic game, probably the most 4x fun I had outside of the Civ series, and definitely the best fantasy 4x I've played. A really good balance of accessibility with some depth underneath, and all the classes and units are fun to play with.

It does seem like too little too late now that social media and discord is so entrenched. I wish they'd spend their effort to improve the download manager, cloud save manager and mod manager, I mean those are maintaining everyone's games all the time!

The mod manager is especially bad, I hate those unexplained 'workshop updates' that leave you guessing what mod updated, and whether it's safe to continue your saved game. You have to open the steam library, click game, open its workshop, browse to my subscribed items, and finally click order by most recently updated. And each click needs a moment to load!

I must confess I left Stellaris behind too after the Megacorp release. It was a culmination of several issues. The game is still not feature complete 3 years after release (still no intelligence layer.) The diplomacy has plenty of features but the AI barely participates, other than to just set diplomatic status according to its like/dislike score. The gameplay systems seem overly restrictive (forced end war, can only declare on certain people, and so on) which leads to a gamey feel that I didn't expect from a sandpit style game with huge galaxies. There are too many abstract resources to balance that add to the gamey feeling. The DLC have added additional playstyles but in effect they have added multiple ways to do things with a lot of overlap, that seems to have bloated the feature list without really enriching the strategies you can get involved with.

The DLC policy has contributed to a feeling that Stellaris has been an ever-changing beast... the game is designed a certain way, it settles down, some nice mods appear on top and it feels pretty stable. Then a major update comes out, the mods don't work, some central game functions are completely reworked, many critical functions and gui items cease working, and everything feels like it's regressed for a few weeks while official patches and mods scramble to become stable again. It seemed ridiculous to me that for significant periods of time after release, major parts of the game were not working at all. Or like with the megacorp release, the AI was completely non-functional for weeks after release. You've gotta have a lot of faith in the game to overlook things like that and trust that it will eventually get there - for me though I just felt that this was unacceptable for a released game. There are definitely some positives to the Paradox/Stellaris business model... some of the reworked mechanics are clear improvements to original versions. But I have ended up disillusioned where things feel too much like they are engineered to keep customers in the pocket, paying for updates for the life of the game.

Much as that was a bit of a rant, there's a lot to like in the game. It clearly has the best space 4x flavour around imo, with nods to pretty much any sci-fi book/TV/film that you happen to love. If somehow you are into multiplayer then the Stellaris engine is great for that. I know the game makes a lot of people happy - I think you have to be the type of player that will happily accept the mechanics and the dev cycle the way they are, and be in it to enjoy the ride.

Edit: oh - check out the Starnet AI mod. It's a rework for the AI players that makes them a lot more like a multiplayer game (emphasis on military techs, maintain large fleets and swallow up weaker neighbours with no remorse.) Several people have said this AI is genuinely a big threat. No idea as to the status of the mod with regards to the latest DLC that came out, but the prospect of AI players that can actually kick your ass is pretty inviting.

Yep - under £10 for the Gold Edition and reportedly working on Proton as well as Windows... they finally got me.

Edit: they truly got me! The Gold Edition on Steam contains the Retribution DLC, and the Gold Edition for sale on Humble (which grants a Steam key) doesn't have it! And Retribution is £15.49!!

This comment was edited on May 15, 2019, 07:20.

I watch the sim racer Jimmy Broadbent sometimes, he's a mid size YouTube streamer. He got a note from YouTube this week that he needs to come up and offer a custom incentive for people to subscribe, otherwise they are going to take away his Join button. Surely he's doing alright for them, he's managed to whip up 250k subs?!?

This is the assessment of the microtransaction model as per social media:

I see a lot of threads saying that earning currency is "grindy", but I think this is a huge understatement. Just consider these points:

Completing the entire story will barely give you enough currency to clear one room in krypt. From this, I got 1 brutality, some common skins and few consumables. You can't so much as clear a single hard tower with all the stuff I got.

Clearing some of the latter towers without at least rare gear and a large number of single use consumables is near impossible. These towers are not just a pure test of fighting skills, they also feature: unblockable blood missiles which drain you life and gives it to the enemy, acid rain, enemy getting armour on low health and some absolutely ridiculous damage modifiers.

Earning said consumables and rare gear is extremely grindy, requiring you to complete event specific and daily towers, as well as clearing multiple easier towers. The krypt chests get progressively more expensive and the drop rate for rare or better items is very low. For context, I opened a total of 23 chests in the krypt and got only 2 rare gear across different characters.

I will definitely watch that GOT video today. I accidentally made the mistake of missing the first 7 seasons when they first came out, then 3 months ago I binged 10 minute YouTube videos wildly out of order. Really not ideal, but when it first came out the episode I saw made a bad impression... the sex/violence/dialogue seemed pretty gratuitous and I didn't realise back then how good the casting and scheming was.

I'm now onboard to watch 8 in real time at least. Did I hear right that the entire wrap up is 5 or 6 episodes? That barely seems like enough time to do more than just let the characters complete their respective arcs.