Patient Gamers

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/Bside/t/2024449

An open-source reimplementation of the most famous civilization-building game ever - fast, small, no ads, free forever!

Build your civilization, research technologies, expand your cities and defeat your foes!

Both Unciv and Freeciv are games inspired by the civilization series. Freeciv is basing it gameplay on older game of civilization series like civilization II and Unciv on the newer games like civilization VI.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28444430

Background

I've been a big fan of LucasArts games since the 90s, especially their adventure games with a run of back-to-back classics very reminiscent of Pixar's first decade in terms of creative output. Tim Schafer was one of the prominent developers involved in a number of these adventure games, particularly as project lead for memorable classics such as Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. As LucasArts shifted away from adventure games in the late 90s, Tim Schafer eventually left to found Double Fine Productions, whose first two games were Psychonauts and Brütal Legend.

While I didn't play any of these games on release, I appreciated Double Fine's remasters of classic LucasArts adventure games, which prompted me to eventually take a shot at some of their original releases.

Production

Brütal Legend is an open world action game with major set pieces that include elements of the real-time strategy (RTS) genre. It's also a love letter to the heavy metal music genre and has one of the strongest examples of art direction I’ve seen in a game. This starts from the game menu itself, which is a charming live action FMV showing Jack Black, best known as the Chicken Jockey guy from the Minecraft Movie, flicking through a vinyl album. The game world feels like you've stepped into the cover art of a heavy metal album: a fantasy realm filled with magic, demons, medieval weaponry, umlauts, and V8 hot rods. The locales and factions are inspired by various metal subgenres, from gleaming glam towers to spooky fog-swathed gothic swamps and hellish wastelands.

The soundtrack is a comprehensive library of licensed music across heavy metal’s many subgenres. Not being particularly well-versed in music, I personally discovered a number of songs and bands that are now part of my regular playlist. The music is so integral to the game’s feel and atmosphere that it would be a real shame if any tracks had to be removed in the future due to licensing issues.

The voice cast is stellar, from Jack Black and Tim Curry providing the star power to voice acting veterans like Jennifer Hale, along with cameos by heavy metal legends such as Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Gameplay

Brütal Legend’s gameplay is split between open world action and real-time strategy battles. Both modes have significant overlap, as you're always controlling the main character from a third-person perspective. The open world starts off as a basic hack-and-slash action game and gradually introduces new elements such as magic and a car for traversing the map. Magic is creatively implemented as heavy metal riffs, cast by playing a short rhythm minigame. Combat is serviceable but lacks the responsiveness of more polished melee-focused titles.

The world has a few settlements and outposts but isn’t very interactive. There’s some local wildlife, some of which can be tamed as temporary mounts, and enemy mobs, but nothing especially challenging. Sidequests and minigames are scattered throughout, but none are particularly memorable. You can spend currency, earned through story missions and side activities, at an upgrade merchant, but there’s no meaningful economy.

Early missions are mostly linear dungeon-like segments with boss fights, but the game later adds new mission types like races and the showpiece Stage Battles.

Stage Battles introduce the RTS elements. These take place in closed-off arenas with a stage at each end. Your stage acts as a base where units are spawned, and your goal is to destroy the enemy stage. The stage can be upgraded to unlock better units, with the full upgrade level tied to story advancement. Capturing resource nodes provides currency to spawn units and upgrade the stage.

A unique mechanic during Stage Battles is the main character’s ability to fly, letting you view the battlefield from above and quickly respond to threats. You can also fight directly and take control of specific units for unique abilities. Dying as the main character in this mode is a minor setback, as you will eventually respawn back at your stage. While you can issue basic commands, the lack of a traditional RTS top-down view makes micro-management clumsy. There is also an enemy commander that flies around with similar abilities to the player character, although the limited AI makes them mainly a nuisance in the single player.

Unfortunately, Stage Battles become tedious as most battles devolve into zerg rushing to the nearest flashpoint with your units and dropping a few spells to press the advantage. Some missions can take over an hour if you aren’t optimizing every step, made worse by the lack of mid-mission saves. There are only a handful of Stage Battle missions throughout the single player campaign, so when they occur there isn't much variety in how they play. The only other game I’ve played that tries this hybrid formula is Giants: Citizen Kabuto, a janky cult classic from 2000 which also struggled to balance such gameplay. Brütal Legend might have benefited from cutting down the RTS layer and focusing on third-person action, similar to MOBAs like League of Legends, which interestingly launched the same year.

The Stage Battles are also the core of the multiplayer mode, although I didn't spend much time here as it's not that enjoyable for me.

Technical Note

I played the PS3 version, which should be avoided at all cost. Besides the typical performance issues of PS3 games compared to the Xbox or PC versions, there’s a game-breaking bug that corrupts your save if you get too far into the 100% completion checklist. This remains unpatched in the PS3 version and effectively forces you to skip sidequests and exploration until after the main story. The game also includes DLC with trophies that is no longer accessible on the PS3. Despite these issues, I pushed through to complete the game because I appreciated the artistry behind it.

Conclusion

Brütal Legend’s artistry is second to none, and stands as a unique heartfelt tribute to heavy metal. However, its gameplay, especially the RTS elements, struggles to keep up. For me, this makes it a mid game overall, though one that's definitely worth experiencing for the world, the music, and the style.

7/10 Worth playing for any gamer, if you get the PC or Xbox version

or

3/10 for the PS3 version - avoid

Usually I’d be making this post from my main account, cod, but for some reason I’ve tried posting multiple times today and it hasn’t let me, it keeps giving me an error. So here we go! Weekly post from a different account this week. Hopefully next week I can go back to my main again.

Let's start by saying that while the game is still early access, it has been playable for years. It first released in 2021, and has been continuously updated since (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timberborn#Development). To be fair, with what is possible in the game now, I would consider it a complete game.

I'm not the best at game critics, so I'll just try to tell what's good, what can be improved, and whether I recommend it. Keep in mind I only started playing it this week-end, so I'm quite new, but hopefully this is still relevant.

For the context, I'm a very heavy Caesar III fan, and have been looking for a long time for a modern game that would give the same relaxing feeling of "solve one issue at a time" that C3 is (also, for C3 fans, check out Augustus, it's amazing)

The good

• Cool concept and theme: beavers and water are refreshing compared to the usual city builders. The general art style fits the theme as well
• Building can be stacked vertically, allowing for more creativity for city building
• No too many "risks" mechanics: food does not decay, buildings don't collapse. That's usually a thing that I was not that much of a fan of in C3, seemed like it was there just to add an unnecessary layer of management
• the Districts mechanics allows you to expand your bases in a nice way, you have quite a lot of control of what is sent between districts
• the easy mode allows for a quite chill experience. Not sure how challenging the other modes are.
• the devs listen to the community feedback, they recently made a "you were right, we were wrong" announcement: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1062090/eventcomments/830458962613745838

The potential improvements

• I got a few hiccups running it on Linux using Proton. Nothing too critical, got one crash at some point, I just reloaded the autosave. It was a one time occurrence.

Should you play it?

Definitely a solid game for people who like this type of city/base-builders

I was super bummed when it reached EOL. I wish they would let folks host their own servers for it.

I've got no association with the game, any developers, publishers, whatever, I just really like the game a lot.

Of the pokemon-likes I've ever played, it's easily my favorite, in part because it's one of the most creative. In fact it's barely a pokemon-like, just taking the basic formula and then really doing their own thing with it.

Great story, great gameplay, great vibes, and decent (but not stellar) post-game.

Recommended for anyone who likes monster collector games or quirky indie games.

Note: some story spoilers ahead.

I'm a big Final Fantasy fan, going back over 30 years, so it's a series I'm not usually patient on. However, I don't have a PS5 (and still don't plan to get one), and thus had to endure the wait for the PC port. When the demo finally arrived, I had a great time with it, but the DLSS implementation was a blurry mess. I decided to wait a bit longer, as I knew early on that spectacle was Final Fantasy XVI's key strength.

Waiting didn't do much for me in the end on the technical side (other than a small price drop), yet I loved this game. The cast--friends and villains alike--kept me entertained, the difficulty was right where I wanted it, and after a brief lull picking up where the demo left off, the game shuffled me along from one big, flashy scene to the next, grinning ear to ear.

XVI has been controversial in the JRPG community, to say the least. It's certainly light on RPG elements. There's been no shortage of grumbling over the further shift to action combat. The side quests are mostly filler and likely best skipped. I'm normally a more cerebral, methodical player of these types of games, but that wasn't the case this time. Forearmed with some of the common complaints, I stayed on the rails by concentrating on the main story and didn't spend a lot of time on item and skill upgrades. Turning my brain off and going with the flow, I felt rewarded, leaning into what this game does well: punching harpies, giants, dragons, and more in breathtaking set pieces.

What I didn't know was how much DNA from Yasumi Matsuno's games (Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics) could be found in Final Fantasy XVI. Like those games, the early setup is gritty, mature political intrigue in a high fantasy setting. But even the storytelling itself started to feel similar, especially through Vivian's "lectures" at her map. The cast browser at her table is also seriously impressive. It's state-of-the-art stuff I'd love to see in more high-budget games with big casts and lots of moving parts.

Amusingly, like Matsuno's games, in the end, XVI's story also descends into

However, while mature in tone, Tactics Ogre never went full-on adult, and it never stopped being jarring hearing "Fuck!" in a Final Fantasy game, among other colorful invective. Great Greagor's gash, indeed. All of the voice actors are outstanding, and I understand why, as Clive, Ben Starr's earned some buzz lately. My personal favorite was Ralph Ineson as Cid, in a role fully deserving of his namesake's lineage.

I had a blast with Final Fantasy XVI, and in a refreshingly compact 35 hours, too. I don't know if I'd want another Final Fantasy in this style, but with the series constantly changing, I'm sure the formula will be different in the next.

Background

I’ve always had a soft spot for adventure games, going all the way back to the DOS era. The depth of their stories and characters always resonated with me more than the often bare-bones narratives found in many contemporary games. The golden age of LucasArts adventures in the '90s produced a string of classics that still stick with me today. While the 2000s were something of a fallow period for the genre, the 2010s brought about a revival, largely driven by indie studios. This resurgence also marked a split in the genre between traditional puzzle-heavy games and more narrative-driven experiences, popularized by Telltale’s The Walking Dead.

Life is Strange 2 falls firmly into the latter camp, aligning more with the narrative style of Telltale’s work. I've played through most of the Life is Strange series up to True Colors, but I had put off playing Life is Strange 2 until recently. The premise never grabbed me as much as the others, and early online discourse suggested it wasn’t as strong as the rest of the series.

Production

As a narrative-driven adventure game, Life is Strange 2 lives or dies by its story and writing. Structurally, the game takes a road trip approach, a notable shift from the first Life is Strange, which was largely confined to a high school and its surrounding town. While this new format offers more variety in terms of settings, it comes at the cost of character depth. The transient nature of the story means most supporting characters appear in only one or two episodes, often reducing them to broad archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out individuals. This stands in contrast to the original game, where the static setting allowed you to grow familiar with a cast of well-developed personalities.

The heart of the narrative lies in the relationship between Sean Diaz, the player character, and his younger brother, Daniel. By centering the story on two Mexican-American protagonists traveling through a politically tense, Trump 1.0 America, the game directly engages with themes of racism and social justice. While these are bold and commendable narrative choices, the handling can feel a bit heavy-handed at times, likely due to the limitations of the episodic structure and limited runtime per chapter.

One of the game’s biggest weaknesses is its pacing, especially in the early episodes. The first episode, in particular, drags in places and struggles to find narrative momentum. Fortunately, this improves in later chapters as the writing team appears to find its rhythm and better balance character development with plot progression. The episodes also feel more self-contained and rarely end on cliffhangers like those in Life is Strange 1, which reduces the urgency to immediately jump into the next episode.

Where Life is Strange 2 truly shines is in how it handles player choices. While it also concludes with a major final decision, the game’s ending is much more responsive to the cumulative decisions made throughout the journey. This gives the story a more organic and emotionally satisfying denouement, especially compared to the binary choice that closed the first game. In fact, I’d argue that Life is Strange 2 sticks the landing much better whereas Life is Strange 1’s final episode felt rushed and tonally inconsistent, the sequel ends on a far stronger note.

On the production side, the art direction is excellent. It builds on the digital painting art style of the first game with a more refined look. Character models, especially for background NPCs, are noticeably improved, adding a level of polish that helps elevate the overall presentation.

Gameplay

Gameplay in this genre will always be somewhat limited, and Life is Strange 2 is no exception. Unlike the first game, which featured a time-rewinding mechanic that played a central role in both puzzles and narrative choices, the superpower in Life is Strange 2 has a much lighter touch in terms of gameplay. It's more of a narrative device than an interactive mechanic.

Traditional puzzles are virtually nonexistent. While there are moments where your decisions influence the story, these choices tend to shape character relationships or determine minor outcomes rather than create complex branching paths. The game follows a mostly linear structure, and it lacks the high degree of narrative divergence seen in titles like Detroit: Become Human.

Conclusion

While I had to push myself through the slower early episodes, the journey that Sean and Daniel go through gradually grew on me. Life is Strange 2 ultimately tells a stronger story than its predecessor, but the less engaging superpower mechanic and a cast of less memorable side characters hold it back. It lands as a solid, upper-tier “mid game” which is more emotionally resonant than mechanically compelling.

7/10 Worth playing for any gamer

I'm looking for action hidden gems, preferably scripted and linear—no open world or procuderal generation (roguelike, roguelike-like, or roguelite)

Some of my "usual suspects" favorites are Bayonetta, The Wonderful 101, Viewtiful Joe, God Hand, and Ninja Gaiden II. On the shmup/twin-stick shooter side: Crimzon Clover, Ketsui, and Assault Android Cactus+.

I also love Catherine, so I wouldn't mind some puzzle thrown in there.

As nonlinear as I can go: The Deadly Tower of Monsters.

Hello. The past few months Ive been almost exclusively playing fantasy and survival games, so much so that I need a break from them.

Looking for single player FPS recommendations with controller support from the last decade. A good story is preferred.

Games Ive played:

1. Warframe (dont ask. The lore is okay-ish. I stayed for friends).
2. Titanfall 2. (PEAK)
3. Apex Legends (Briefly. The sweatiness and timed lore turned me off).
4. Doom 2016 (Dropped this, sadly. Gunplay and parkour was AWESOME, but the whole devil worship thing really turned me off. Edit: The devil Worshippers themselves turned me off. You do not worship devils ingame. More details in comments).
5. Dying Light 1. (Okay Story. Awesome fighting. Never played 2 because of the whole controversy with the ~~story director~~. EDIT: Story writer, not director)
6. The Metro Series. 1, 2 and Exodus. (Slightly weak lore. Still alot of fun).

Any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: regarding Dying Light:

https://screenrant.com/dying-light-2-developer-techland-loses-another-writer/

https://screenrant.com/dying-light-2-developers-frustration-bad-management/

Edit: Thanks for the suggestions everyone! Currently gonna try:

• The Half Life Series.
• Halo
• Wolfenstein: New Order.

Something interesting to read on a Monday morning.

A wonderful story to start the day.

So I just finished Shadow Warrior (2013) and I wasn’t blown away by it but I had a decent time. I always like hearing about experiences that people had with the game when it first came out and whether or not a modern perspective paints it differently.

To summarize what I thought: The writing is humorous, but not outright funny to me. The graphics hold up very well and the gore is great. Combat is mostly pretty good. Some enemies are annoying or overly difficult on the hard difficulty but overall it’s pretty good.

I did think it was modeled to be kind of akin to a Serious Sam type game and it lives up to that but similar to that game, many of the weapons/enemies/levels overstay their welcome a bit. Other than that I had a pretty good time with it, thought it was an 8/10 fun time.

What’s everyone’s story with this game series? When did you first play it and what did you think about it?

Just finished this game. It was really something new and unique. I got it on the steam spring sale discount, and can heavily recommend you do so too, if you are into story and mystery in games.

Having played quite a share of games in my life, this one truly stands out due to its unique setting and high quality characters and art.

If you liked for example Disco Elysium or Detroit Become Human, I believe this game is also perfect for you.

I got a free month of Game Pass and am digging into whatever's interesting as a result, and man, I'm really glad I finally tried Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, even though it did not actually look like my kind of game; I just let myself be influenced by Steam's overwhelmingly positive reviews—and they're all correct!

~~What really threw me for a loop (since I only watched the trailer and didn't otherwise read much on it) is that you do not stay in the coliseum! Without spoiling much, it is just hilarious and unexpected how far the game actually goes beyond the trailer~~ (and the difficulty becomes as easy or as hard as you want it to be, in case skill is a concern among any readers here). Edit: Huh, apparently I entirely missed one of the trailers which already reveals this. Never mind, but the shock value was great, so if any of this interests you, try to not watch the first trailer lol.

But even in the arena, you truly feel like a sci-fi gladiator (bonus points if you watched Gladiator—the first one, of course), facing level after level of interesting different enemies with the commentators comedically going at it. You can upgrade your bot with different skills, weapons, or clones to keep going; if you pick cloning (buying extra lives, basically), they say things like, "Upgrade bot is not pleased" (since it would rather have spent that turn giving you an upgrade instead), or "This human fears death. Typical."

It is just so amusing and well-done as you hack and snipe enemies to bits, causing them to hop on one leg, or taking out an arm, or even having these situations happen to own robot body. The AI dodging of your bow's energy slices is also well-done and tricky, and it's crazy fighting giant spiders when they dynamically adjust their movement based on which legs they've lost. Giant alien spiders are no joke.

I actually didn't realize that it has a free demo on Steam, so go check it out!