Old Man Mordaith
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I’ll tell ya kids, the list of new features that Holy Fury promises to bring in is so extensive that it would be several paragraphs all unto itself. We’ll cover the highlights section by section, but rest assured that the claims that it has a little something for everyone are true. With previous DLC there was a clear focus, and while one would say that the big ol’ Crusade shield would be the main meat of this outing, they would be wrong. This is so jam-packed with stuff that every style of play barely escapes unaffected. So, raise your levies, and lets march on through this prepared invasion of content. (Ugh, ok, arrest me, banish me, and seize my lands, that was terrible.)
Ancient Relics is the latest Story Pack for the space strategy game, Stellaris. Now, a lot of folks hear story pack and think something that is mighty high in fluff but low in crunch. Many times they’d be correct, and honestly, there isn’t a blessed thing wrong with high fluff content. But in this particular case, they would be very wrong. Like, “finding a sample of the Javorian Pox” wrong.
I’m going to tell you if you are a fan of the CRPG genre, with a heavy focus on storytelling, replayability, and roleplay – buy this game. You don’t need anything else, don’t watch videos, don’t read reviews, just go buy it. It’ll be the best 45.49 Cannuck bucks you ever spent.
Utopia is being released alongside the Banks update, which adds a great deal of free content to Stellaris. Banks makes the game feels very different, as it adds Traditions and Unity mechanics, changes the way Factions are handled, and provides a complete overhaul of the way governments and ethics are done. It also adds ways to monitor your populace’s ethics and Faction support.
Let’s imagine you have a stick. A stick from space. You’d be hard-pressed to take that stick and shake it at all the new anomalies that are added with distant stars. With the reworks of the Niven update in hunting and interacting with anomalies, I found that the cusp of the endgame was knocking on our door before we knew it. Among those exciting things lurking around to explore an analyze there is the L-Gate. A mysterious network of gates that apparently lead to a cluster of stars outside the known galaxy, sealed away for whatever reason. Ominous or profitable? While the Chairperson of the Compact of Shor ul Khal was absolutely confident that they would be rewarded for their curiosity, Old Man Mordaith was a bit skeptical and figured his first Distant Stars game was going to crash and burn in a flurry of space tears and megabucks.
Like many of the best strategy games, the complexity of the systems isn’t dumbed down. Instead, the player can customize their experience. You can alter the difficulty, disable some victory goals, alter resource distribution and much more. I love when games do this. It allows a person to ease into the game in a way that leads to mastery and comprehension without frustration. Options and playing your way seem to be a common theme in Planetfall. This customization allows one to sit back and enjoy the tropes presented in this wild game.
Developed by Swing Swing Submarine and published by Focus Interactive, Seasons is available on Xbox One, PS4 and PC at the price of 14.99 USD. The game has a fantastic design that sets a high bar for others in the same genre.
Battle Brothers is a single-player military strategy/rpg set in a low fantasy setting, developed by indie publisher Overhype Studios. When I read that this was a mercenary game with a character leveling system, I honestly expected something like Final Fantasy Tactics. What I got was something completely different than my expectations, however something that still felt very familiar. It also gave me the tale of No Nose.
Right off the bat, I started asking who the villain of this game was supposed to be. Was it the heavenly Daeva with their making morally questionable choices? Or was it the Rhaksasha-empowered Asura, controlled by me, laying seige to the heavenly realms as a one man army? Normally in a roguelike game I don’t get wrapped up in plot or backstory. But Asura is a different beast. Touching on a mythology that we hardly ever see represented in video games, Ogre Head Studio’s two man team takes us on a challenging journey through Indian lore.
Endless Space 2 is exactly what you would hope of a sequel to a beloved 4X game series. It takes what it learned not just from the previous incarnation, but also from community feedback via Games2gether and from other games as well.
When Renowned Explorers: International Society was first released I was unsure of what to make of its goofy but well-designed art style. I was quickly made a believer of the game. Put out by Abbey Games in 2015, two years after their other title Reus, RE:IS was a well received hit. Seeing the success of RE:IS, Abbey Games turned their focus to expanding the series and here we are now, at the next major DLC.
Simple in its implementation but opening the door to something both unique and complex, the team over at Cardboard Utopia has really done something impressive.
Well, gimmicky? Yeah, a bit. Needless? Oh no. Very needed. We aren’t going into all the details of the new games and challenges as part of the fun of the game is uncovering them. (And of course, in true Game Master fashion, listening to our NPC narrator gloat about his creations.) Everything is introduced gradually and, with the deck building aspects, you do have a hand in determining the types of challenges you will face.
Anyone familiar with my reviews knows my greatest fear for some sequels is messing up a perfectly fine system just because they can. Innovation for its own sake is not only dumb, but it’s also dangerous. It can be a series murderer. However, I am happy to report that Deadfire doesn’t fall prey to that scenario. It leans hard on its old mechanics, the CRPG roots that made it great and refines qualms about the previous iteration of the game.
Mechwarriors and the Battlemechs are separate beasts. You can swap them around, one can get messed up pretty bad and the other survive an engagement without a scratch. You need to watch everything. Facing, elevation, turn order, sensor range, and way more information that I could elegantly lay out in this review. Rest assured it is a tactical players dream come true.
Every game of Imperator: Rome may have you winning or suffering defeat in the Punic wars as the titular Rome. But how many of those games did you have your rival, the leader of Carthage, tossed into an arena, and forced him to duel his son to the death? Of course, when he won, you granted him full rights of a citizen and brought his surviving family members into the fold, and a generation later, they were your most staunch supporters.
And so it was in the middle of one of the hottest summers to record, that the Old Man felt a chill down his back. It gripped him, cracked his skin, and caused him to slump over his post for hours. His hands were shaking, his eyes bleary, he knew that the Beast of Winter had come for him. And he knew not how this would end.
It’s a very transparent system. I think too many games try to dazzle us with an overwhelmingly complicated system of upgrades. Not this one, and that’s a good thing. There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in Remnant, and an overly complicated game loop for upgrades and leveling would detract from it. The game wants you to be a rooting-shooting (or is that just root shooting?), hacking-slashing badass and doesn’t want you too hung up on learning how to build this character optimally or how to min-max.
This game really wants to take you back. So much so, that it seems new characters will even just start out in Morrowind if they skip the intro story. Fresh off a boat in Seyda Neen, you go through a lot of the motions of the original game. There are many shout-outs, call-backs, and Easter eggs for those familiar with the first Morrowind – so many, in fact, that you’ll nearly choke on them all. And that’s okay, really. It’s what we wanted.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 3 is the latest in a series of popular Real Time Strategy games put out by Relic Entertainment and published by Sega. Currently it sits at a modest price of 59.99 USD. So we’ll be digging out the old man glasses and taking a gander to see if it’s worth the cost of admission.