Steam Discovery Queue - Crusade of the Free

As I've been enjoying a number of free stuff each week from Epic, I figured I'd check on the games in Steam which surely has lots of free stuff too, just not as advertised. I'm mainly using the Discovery Queue for this, but with a few filters: I'm not interested in anything PvP, anything about Sports, anything requiring VR, anything without English translation/subtitles, etc.

Anyway, I've found quite a lot so expect some short and sweet review batches of 10 as I make my way through them... starting right now! The one in bold is the best of this set.

Big Klondike: Solitaire. For vision impaired? Bleh.

Bridge of Dawn: Poor loading. Fox chasing rainbows in a valley for "points". Bleh.

Deep Night Detective: Pixel platformer where you play as spirit detective Spooky. Awesome music. Lots of reading. Dying (to gazillion other ghosts and monsters) means you need to do corpse run to get clothes, otherwise people you need to talk to can't see you. Lol :P

Destined to Die: One of those WTF games where you play as someone who "needs" to waste time on the computer (literally run the clock), over and over until you... don't kill yourself? What?

Eternal Cave Escape: Pixel platformer - miner with pickaxe that can assist in climbing against dirt walls. Lousy controls. Bleh.

Fights in Tight Spaces Prologue: Turn based, deck builder. Nice art. Interesting idea but, odd combo since you expect it to be fast and fluid. Also baddies get much less moves than you do.

Flower Girl: Nice tunes in this flower grid popper to "attack" cute female fairy demons? OH. It's one of THOSE H-games! Only one girl available in this freebie. Need to get the DLCs for more fairy demons "popping".

Goblin Stone Demo: Made by a friend of mine, control a band of cute goblins to build a base and survive against the oppressive humans. I quite liked it even if not all the features are there yet. Try it out. :)

Slightly Darkest Dungeon combat wise too.

Recursive Hate: Single player shooter with two small maps where you must survive waves of giant spiders. Crawlers abound but as long as you can sprint and reload you might be fine. The tiny spider swarms are the worst/best. Very shallow but I kinda liked it.

Samurai Shampoo: Pixel roguelike dungeon crawler of repetitiveness. Bleh.

UFO Assault 101

Part of my XCOM: Defenders of the Earth series!

Dr. Shen completed this Hyperwave Relay device they wanted to build and upon scanning for UFO's we detected a large cloaked bastard lurking in South Africa. It wasn't the same one that shot McCool down unfortunately, but it didn't matter. I sent our local Firestorm in and it shot that bastard down.

Didn't seem big enough to be their leader's ship (I'd think that even for aliens, size matters) but I still sent "A" Team of Hitler, Gravedigger, Big Mike, Bald Witch, Bondi Vet and "new" Major Sledge. What followed can only be described as pure tactical genious! After eliminating a pair of elites patrolling outside, the team entered the craft itself where it sounded like everything was hiding in the central control chamber.

Breach, Bang and Clear!

Rather than walk around to the door, the squad took up a good firing position at their initial entry point and grenaded open the wall, revealing not only a frail alien commander but also 2 sectopod squads and four elites! Rained grenades and rockets into the room while Bondi Vet provided smoke gas cover to help survive return fire. In one round almost all enemies were dead, the two sectopods hobbling out and two remaining elites taking cover in an adjacent hallway. A second round of grenades cleared the ship of all enemies entirely, and the team returned without even taking a scratch. In addition, both Gravedigger and Hitler are now highest rank of Colonel! :D

As they brought back the wierd device they found a super large ship appeared on the map, even causing an earthquake at the base. Ahha, -that- must be the boss I thought to myself. Shen pointed out we have nothing to even damage that... yet, but I am confident whatever this device is holds the key in taking that thing down. The end is near, I can feel it.

Total Annihilation

Part of my XCOM: Defenders of the Earth series!

Soldiers Lost in the Seventh Month: 4
Campaign Total: 25

The end of a combat heavy month saw me with another grade of "A" and with funding from all but one country (since they didn't have a satellite yet). Soon after a giant alien craft was detected over South America, the one place I didn't yet have a Firestorm (it was in transit). Still, I had my last Raven interceptor and its ace pilot Vince McCool so I sent him out to sortie. He lasted 2 seconds before being annihilated by the heavy weapons on alien craft. With not much else I could do about that I turned my attention to a terror strike in Osaka where I decided to send out a freshly hired squaddie team of Clown Face, Rocket Man, Party Girl, Badass, Elvis and Hot Momma to earn their stripes. This time they had the best gear, all wielding plasma weaponry and in titan suits. What could go wrong?

They landed at a tank factory (wtf?) and annihilated the first group (cyberdisk) they saw while Clown Face busily saved civvies in the AO. Then came a zombie horde with crazy chrysallids and a sectopod. Things got very hairy as Party Girl handled the zombies while Clown Face was alloy-cannoning (turns out it's not that good) sectopods and the rest of the team focused fire on the mecha. It wasn't enough to take down the mechanical horror which then made Hot Momma live up to her name by disintegrating her with its special beam cannon. Her horrible death shriek spurred the team on to eliminate the robot in the next round. Luckily the surviving chrysallids decided to flee/eat other things and left combat only to be replaced by a muton berserker squad.

Why didn't I think of that?

With no more explosives and unlucky shooting the berserker pummeled Clown Face's skull into a fine mist and even punched Elvis (only the second man to survive such a hit - the first being Hitler in an earlier mission) before being taken down. With a few rounds to regroup and reload the remaining mutons and chrysallids were not an issue. 4 out of 18 civilians saved. Mission complete!

Raiders of the Downed UFOs

Part of my XCOM: Defenders of the Earth series!

Finalising a trade to Australia (who wanted to buy alien alloys) the UFO alert went off again, this time in Japan. A bigger ship than last time! Fortunately I had constructed an interceptor there and our ace pilot Vince McCool was visiting the region at the time. Looked like a nasty dogfight but Vince shot down that bastard in the end despite taking a ton of damage himself. Deployed Mister Mustachio and Panicman along with newbies Cosmos and David.

Seemed this ship contained Jetpack boys AND Thin men along with the little dudes. The first group was a non issue, eliminated by overwatch fire mainly while the thin men got to enjoy high explosives of the rocket and grenade variety. It's annoying then that as the team advanced on the ship Cosmos was downed by overwatch fire from the normal little dudes, because he didn't DODGE!

Even the aliens facepalmed.

After teaching those SOBs a lesson my remaining three men busted into that UFO, surrounded the alien pilot and summarily executed him (Dr. Vahlen: WHYYYYYY!?). At least it seems I'm improving with these UFO raids. The following one that landed (not shot down) was tactically cleaned out by David, Big Mike, the Italian and Mustachio with no casualties through liberal use of explosives and lure and kill tactics. As a celebratory gesture I let them explode the ship. (Dr Vahlen: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! MY RESEARCH!)

Missions Complete, and somehow Cosmos actually survived (guess I finished before he bled out)! Despite all these victories though it seems like most of the world is on the verge of panic. Oh well, I'm sure that's not important. Right?

Scrambled Eggs... from Space

Part of my XCOM: Defenders of the Earth series!

After being nagged by Bradford to launch another satellite somewhere (I picked Japan) I got to meet the other research staff in the base, Mr. Shen the elderly drug addled head of engineering and Dr. Vahlen who seemed intent about capturing an alien alive so that she could do what they did to her previously. She's a little crazy. Especially given that she's already putting on a plastic/latex glove whose sleeve goes up to her shoulder.

Thankfully a UFO alert ends the awkwardness and I scramble one of our jets (we only have two!) to intercept. Obviously it's piloted by Vince McCool since the little craft has no chance against his superior moves. As soon as it crashes I send a team out to contain the site right away but with Mister Mustachio still injured it is up to Panicman to lead the team, this time composed of the Jew, Bald Witch and Crazy Bastard who gets unceremoniously shot in the head almost immediately after landing.

With a combination of good grenade throws and lots of woody terrain to flank the little bastards they are all made to eat bullets in short order, especially since the engineering team hadn't finished researching the tazer tech to capture one yet (Mr. Shen was too high at the time). The UFO pilot was a little scary being half energy and all, managing to behead the Jew as he emerged from the crashed ship but even he couldn't withstand bullets in the face and a grenade in his ethereal genitals.

Tasty.

Mission complete! I'm getting good at this!