Ogu and the Secret Forest and Sable

A pair of exploration games!

Ogu and the Secret Forest 

In this silly and happy cartoonish game you play as the baby platypus Ogu who armed with a hat and butterfly net sets out on an adventure on a strange island which has lots of puzzles to solve, friends to make (who you can call to help pass obstacles) and enemies to beat up...? Yeah this turned out to be a much bigger game than I first thought with plenty of places to go and things to do. There's a bit of a clash between the cutesy animal art style and activities such as dancing, fishing and drawing versus beating up the dangerous enemies (you can turn on god mode as an option because they can get pretty mean) but its all rather fun with very simple controls. Will especially be of interest to explorers, collectors and those that enjoy RPG Maker type games. 

Sable

The visuals are so different, its great!

This is an amazingly drawn exploration and puzzle jumping game with a very simple story that actually has no bad guy. Indeed I don't think you can even die in it which makes it quite relaxing. Good controls and the ability to climb, glide and ride your customizable hover bike across the large map make it fun to explore, with very hard to find collectable stuff for those who seek to do so. The many optional side missions are quite cute and are the actual "meat" of the game. Apart from the optional fishing mini-game (which as usual I don't have the patience for) I really enjoyed this one. 

Two Point Hospital and Legion TD2

Games about managing currency.

Two Point Hospital

In this game you are a hospital administrator who has to look after building each hospital room, hiring staff (obviously more expensive people are more skilled) and... decorating the place? Yep. The tutorial is really good for this one, explaining how your build will need a reception area followed by a GP room to determine people's sicknesses, then a room to cure whatever each sickness is. What killed it for me is that you need to also put every minutiae of detail in, like vending machines, benches, toilets. And you can just build a "toilet". You build the room, put the porcelain throne, need to find a spot for the sink, hand dryer, blah blah blah. Waaaay too detailed for me, but others who like being precise in their positioning of fire extinguishers and bins might enjoy this one.

Legion TD2

This tower defense game has you purchasing units from your specific race to defend your "lanes" to prevent enemies from reaching your king, and also purchasing mercenaries (global list not tied to what you chose) to help attack enemy lanes and kings (NPC raiding units will always spawn and attack per wave, its still tower defense). Last king standing wins! While the game play is decent some of the units look very odd and having the kings side by side is ... different? Not that I play many lane defense games. Alas the loading time for this one is... not quick. Some of the tutorial missions play shorter than the time it takes to load them. If that doesn't bother you and you like tower defense (and PvP) then you might want to try this one out.

Arcadegeddon and Gigapocalypse

Games that drop you into the grind immediately.

Arcadegeddon

The main threat in Super City is a corporate gaming entity that is infection the local indie arcade leader board so you (and the random city "gangs" that overuse their assigned lingo) have to go in the game and... shoot... things? The combat kind of reminds me of Borderlands. This quickly gets off to a bad start as the characters aren't very nice to look at and you are stuck with pink dreads or being bald. Yes, you can unlock more drip by farming currency, along with weapons, skills and the like but its... super upfront about being a mega-grind. You know how most games have an "endgame" grind with repeatable quests/challenges? This is basically that from the get go. I did not enjoy it. 

Gigapocalypse

This is a super strange combo of a tamagochi "pet" thing where you must take care of your baby kaiju, patting it, feeding it, decorating its den and cleaning its poop in between sending it out to rampage on cities to cause as much death and destruction as possible. Unlike that old game "Rampage", your kaiju only walks one direction (and you can't stop it), with the speed increasing as it builds more rage which is also used to power its other attacks. How its setup it is guaranteed you will not win on your first run, instead having to farm currency to unlock or improve things once you return to the tamagochi segment. The grind will make you feel like you're getting nowhere.

Deliver at all Costs

A mismatch of tone. 

Set on the small island of St. Monique in 1959 you play a young man looking for work at a delivery company to get enough money to pay the rent, but in reality you'll probably be spending it on gadgets or gadget parts to make your cars perform better. Primarily a driving / exploration game that is in bulk made up of fetch quests this has some decent graphics and cut scenes with a good dose of humor due to the nature of the things you end up transporting on your vehicle that include active fireworks, loose fruit, and hungry fish. 

The destructible environment is fun, especially since your car is easily repaired and it seems no one can actually die. The locals do get very violent if you annoy them though, which leads to them attacking your car and yourself until they feel vindicated. You can't game over on that but will experience a much more difficult drive once they start latching on. My issue here is they really make it feel like work, which I guess is fine - but if you just want to have a joyride and go fast there are more than a few things to dampen the mood and that just kills the game for me. The seemingly mismatched tone of the game also doesn't help...

Battlefield: Hardline

A different take on the usual formula. 

The Battlefield franchise usually has players in the shoes of soldiers anywhere from world war I to future battles with robots but in this title the battle is simply the modern day war on drugs. Unfortunately there seemed to be no servers I could join to experience the multiplayer aspect of this one but it does come with a very solid single player campaign with a decent story where you play a cop. 

How it feels waiting for the server search which then returns with no results...

While you can still shoot people dead (and that will happen a lot) you gain more XP to unlock gear by arresting baddies, increasing the focus on stealth and getting up close to flash your badge which can "stun" up to 3 enemies to arrest them (but need to be fast and aim down sights at others to keep their hands up). Your load out options increase quickly with some very gamey items like grapple hook launchers becoming available but you also get to try out some of the vehicles the game has to offer. I quite enjoyed it, but only will recommend buying it when its on sale.

This War of Mine

Fighting despair... 

This is a super cool survival game where you attempt to guide your group of civilians to have enough resources and survive a modern civil war. At night you can send one person to try scavenge or trade stuff but getting killed is pretty easy to do if you aren't careful. More dangerous than bullets and raiders is the winter though, and simply getting sick due to the cold and not having enough medicines to stave of death is a tough one. Your people also have moral compasses so while you can go steal and kill others it almost always ends up breaking your morale towards uselessness and or suicide.  

It's a grim and bleak game but one done so very well. The lack of a tutorial works here, and the difficulty levels come from the groups of people you unlock per play through. My starting trio was pretty good as they all could contribute some special thing (though I think 2 out of 3 were suicidal towards the end) while I had a much harder time when I only had an elderly couple or a group with a pregnant lady (who can't run or leave the base). This might be the only survival type game I've played multiple times. Highly recommended.

Touch Type Tale and Super Space Club

Games that combine strange things.

Touch Type Tale

Playing as a boy who happens to find a wizard's magical typewriter this game is a blend of both a typing game and a fantasy RTS like the original Warcraft games, but instead of having a mouse to select anything - you have to use the randomly generated word provided! This is for EVERYTHING: selecting the mine, harvesting from the mine, select the town hall, hire peasants to collect mined stuff, build new structure, farm fields, train units, move units across the map, split units, cast spells etc. 

There's a LOT of typing, but that's not even the hard part. Most of the difficulty comes from the RTS side in getting units out fast enough to defend! Definitely a challenging game and a strange combo one at that. As such its audience might be a pretty small set of people.

Super Space Club

This is simply "Asteroids" set to some rap music tracks and waves of endless enemies. Sure you can grind points to unlock new weapons and other pilots (rather, their special abilities) but that doesn't really do it for me - especially as the music isn't really my cup of tea. That said maybe the newer generation haven't ever played asteroids and enjoy rap? For everyone else, not recommended.