Waiting for Duviri: The Eigth Ebb

This time it's all ship and ocean themed games!

Call of the Sea

How can a Lovecraft inspired game not be horror? This first person puzzler certainly rocks that boat, and is pretty good to boot. Decent voice acting and gorgeous colored art helps usher you along from one puzzle to the next as the story takes you along for the ride. I have to say this has one of the strongest starting quest hooks I've come across in awhile but it lost me once I reached the trial and error puzzles.

Submerged: Hidden Depths

A pair of siblings work to "save" a flooded city being claimed by black tentacles, by making the tentacles ... not black? Despite the premise and the watery wasteland setting this is a very chillaxed exploration game with no chance of failure. Even the Assassin's Creed level of parkouring that takes place is all automatically handled by your regular controls which is a good change of pace. A little annoying that completing the main goal of an area returns you to the main hub though, meaning you might have to repeat it for any missed collectibles.

Maneater

In this game you are a shark out to eat stuff to get bigger and cause chaos in general. Nice graphics, decent controls and a cool mechanism that eating things both heals you and nets you a type of currency to evolve and become a stronger shark are quickly overshadowed by the annoyingly large grind present in this single player game. Since you start out small you need to be careful around the bigger carnivores in the water but gaining mass to challenge said enemies takes a long while. Quests can help, but when the quest is kill x catfish, but specifically catfish in this area and not the other catfish all over the place, that kinda pisses me off. Not recommended.

World of Warships

This popular multiplayer game is all about collecting and upgrading all manner of ships from around the world's history and then pitting them in missions against others which includes team elimination or area control. Small, fast maneuverable ships have less turrets and less hitpoints while the lumbering battleships bring lots of firepower and HP. There is no respawn when you die. You can either continue to watch as an observer or return to your dock and play another ship out to battle (as your destroyed one is locked for the duration of the match I think). Despite a mode of coop vs AI, the game quickly pushes you into the direction of PvP which is not something I'm interested in. The cash shop messages are also annoying.

Kerbal Space Program

On to ships of the space faring variety - this highly rated game failed immediately for me because as one can imagine, running a space program isn't all fun and games if you want to get anywhere. There's a heavy dose of reading, an unfriendly but functional interface (that might be by design) and my nemesis: math! The steep learning curve is to the moon! Blergh.

The Captain

This is the best old school point and click adventure game I've come across. In it, you must captain your space ship to find special macguffins and make it back to Earth in time to use said macguffins to win a war. Yes there is a timer, and you definitely start in a galaxy FAR FAR away with many potential stops on the way. And that is the beauty of it - everything is optional with each stop even having multiple potential outcomes. I basically sacrificed everything and everyone for the mission, and it let me. Best of all the puzzles are easy, even with the "future tech" terms. The weakest part of the game is the combat, but you don't need to fight a single thing to win the game. Highly recommended!

Waiting for Duviri: The Seventh Set

Thinking of post titles tired me out, so here's just a random set I've played.

Redout - Enhanced Edition

A futuristic racing game using hover cars with race tracks that resemble roller coaster rides. Yes, you can go fast, customize your rides and the groovy tunes will get your heart racing. There's also a health bar because crashing into things makes you take damage and ultimately EXPLODE! I'm not really into racing games, but purely because you can explode in this one makes it different for me. Not that you die mind you, explode and you respawn after wasting precious seconds.

Severed Steel

If you want to go faster than a hover car, play this FPS where you are a one armed girl who can't reload guns- so expect to throw those as soon as their clip empties - but she can double jump, slide in mid air, wall run and slow down time to evade bullets. In fact she goes so fast that most of the time you'll be wondering WTF is going on followed by the game over screen when you accidentally ran into those bullets. Sigh. Needs more save points.

Ancient Enemy

After being defeated by the bad guy, the main character awakes and... plays cards to try remember what happened. Plays cards to open chests. Plays cards to fight enemies. It is ridiculous. Worse, the card game is solitaire but you can put the next number up or down. The card color removed from the board helps power your abilities so... five red cards lets you swing your knife for example. Irritating system, more so in that a bad hand will kill you. Maybe that's the true Ancient Enemy?

Adios

You can't quit the mafia but you can certainly suicide by mafia. That's the main lesson in this interactive story which has good voice acting and a decent short story going for it. Unfortunately it feels like the designers opted to try make it a not-so-short story by adding too much fluff. Did we really need to meet the protege or have seven attempts at catching a fish before getting to the clearly lamp shaded conclusion? Nope. I think these fellas need to checkout Dead Horizon (renamed to Dead Horizon: Origins) which takes all of five minutes to play but is still a better example of a short story done right. It's free on Steam!

Unrailed

In this cooperative voxel game, there is a slow moving train and players must rush to lumber and mine to clear the path ahead of it AND to use those very resources to continue the rail road track the train is on by using the auto-production facilities aboard it. Since the train also overheats, catches fire and prevents you from using that - you must also constantly pour buckets of water (which you must refill) to keep it cooled down. If the train runs out of track: game over. An excellent idea for a game, but alas I could not find any one playing it - and its a bit sad when its just single player.

Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus

The Adeptus Mechanicus, the hardcore R&D branch of the Space Marines, have stumbled onto a Necron (robot people) tomb world and you are in charge of looting and cataloging as much tech as you can before the entire tomb wakes up. This portion of the game feels very poor, as you move room to room and basically do a choose your own adventure thing with art quality that even I can do and SO MUCH reading as the Adepti are very talkative yet SP3AK//HARD just to make it annoying. The XCOM style combat is the best bit, though there's a strange mechanic that you must gain cognition points (by scanning enemies, watching allies get attacked, or walking beside hieroglyphic pillars) to be able to take extra actions or indeed, fire particular weapons. All up it feels like clumsy (or hasty) design.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

It is the Edo period in Japan and you have an eagle eye view to control a small band of ninjas who each have unique abilities and are very deadly so long as no one is looking at them. There is no "pause" to the clock so you'll need to be quick and time your actions well which makes this a sort of strategy puzzler but it has two huge turn offs for me. One, your group is stupid. "Let's all reconvene at that roof top past all those bad guys to talk about what we heard, instead of the one we are on right now" is freaking poor writing and worse, these must be the NOISIEST ninjas who ever lived - saying a line or grunting loudly every time you click somewhere. So freaking annoying. The Aika's choice gives more of the same, but opens by spoiling the entire original game.

Waiting for Duviri: The Sixth Strategy

The best way to combat fear is with a plan, so here are games that make you think!

Rise of Industry

I'm not a fan of building games, and this one which features sharp geometric graphics that also demands you put roads to your dig sites, determine how much stuff goes into which warehouse, and makes sure you plant trees so that in future years you have trees to lumber is way too much micromanaging for me. It even has a 72+ step tutorial to micromanage the players!

City of Gangsters

While you aren't building structures in this game, you will be building connections along street corners with people you want to extort, trade things, get introductions to, and the like as you grow your illegal empire. A good example would be if you don't like the beat cop patrolling your turf you can track down his family (immediate and extended) and threaten them to coerce his allegiance. Crazy right? There's lots of that level of detail here, but boy they will make you work (and read, so much reading) for it. It's ultimately still a management game though, so not for me.

Hundred Days: Wine Making Simulator

Using tetris. Yes. You read that correctly. In fact you'll want to "upgrade" your field so that your tetris shaped "tasks" can all fit into it. While that part is nice and simple, there's a ton of reading for the other systems of bottling and selling the wine and since I'm not an alcohol drinker myself, this lost my interest quickly.

Shop Titans

With good graphics and simple systems this game about running and maintaining a fantasy shop is excellent - EXCEPT for all the timers and cash shop nag boxes to skip said timers. Selling stuff gets you gold that you can invest on your resource harvesters to deliver faster and for your heroes (who you are supplying gear to) to rest/get to the quest faster so that you can get the things you need to build the thing this customer is asking for! But you can only build two things at a time and each takes time to build! The pay to speed things up option is annoying and as most of the game is just waiting it really is just a waste of time.

Iratus: Lord of the Dead

This is Darkest Dungeon but in reverse. You are the titular Iratus, a wise cracking undead necromancer who sends his battle squads of up to four monstrous units against the humans who wronged him. While your namable units can make enemies go insane and/or flee, it's usually better to just kill them because from their parts you can make new units and so on as you follow a map (encounter choices) that inevitably leads upwards and out of your crypt. Fun but repetitive. Just like Darkest Dungeon.

Filament

The only way to access the deeper parts of this spacecraft is to power them up by sending a droid with a long power cable to loop around the generators! This puzzle game gets hard really fast as the droid can't cross back over the cable, the cable can't touch the "dark" generators and in some cases you must wrap around the generators in a specific order, only said generators are constantly rotating around the room. Even though its not one for me, this is an excellent game if you like challenging your mind.

Waiting for Duviri: The Frightening Fifth

After all that fighting it's horror time!

Slain - Back from Hell

This pixel platformer beat em up is basically the same plot of Altered Beast, but with a more metal backing track and less impressive graphics and game play. That's kinda sad as Altered Beast was released in 1988.

Rising Hell

Another pixel platformer with a very vertical slant as you need to escape from hell by going UP while taking souls on the way. Interestingly you get a power up shop to spend said souls almost every 30 seconds which is awesome and goes a long way in breaking the tedium of doing the same thing over and over. Now you get to do the same thing over and over... with breaks!

Darkwood

A top down horror survival where you must scavenge for gear and can only see active threats the direction your character is looking. This means checking your pack and crafting lets you see NOTHING. The lack of color is certainly a stylistic choice, but one that makes the game very bland to look at. That said if you like skulking around dangerous places and having to board up your doors and windows at night (because that's when they come for you) and don't mind a non-intuitive interface and clunky combat this might be for you.

Hell is Others

In this top down horror shooter (which has the same visibility constraint as Darkwood), you need to feed your bonsai with blood while doing a bunch of fetch quests in the horrifying city streets prowled by monsters and "others" (other people: because PvP is easier content to create). Luckily bullets grow on plants because you'll need them... if the matchmaking ever finishes loading. LOL. Should be renamed, Hell is Matchmaking.

Doom64

Ever miss the days in a FPS where you didn't need to reload guns that were smart enough to shoot up and down without you looking up or down, where pistol ammo was the same as chaingun ammo, and where pushing on every wall was the way to open secret passages? If so this nostalgia trip is for you. It's just Doom, with new maps.

Ring of Pain

This is a strange game that displays your encounters as a ring of cards and you can either deal with or try skip a card on the left, or a card on the right which rotates the entire ring. Finding the exit card brings you to the next ring and so forth, provided you are still alive by then as the monsters get very dangerous quickly - and you'll probably only be wielding a bent spoon and have rainbow socks for armor when you meet them. Props for a different idea and art style but not one that could hold my interest for long.

Amnesia: Rebirth

It's time to forget again! After Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs, this new protagonist suffers the same memory loss as the previous ones but her story has much better graphics, much better dynamic lighting and ... much more boring!? What? Yep, a stupid protagonist and way too much walking to make space for narrated exposition doesn't help - to the point that I lost interest in it entirely. If you are looking for short and sharp horror, this isn't it - instead go for the original game with the Justine DLC which remains my favorite, proving again that simple and elegant will always beat something fattened with filler.

Waiting for Duviri: The Fourth Fighters

After all that adventure, it's time for battle!

Multiversus

This side scrolling platform brawler sees characters from the Warner Brother's IP duking it out because kids love violence! There are a bunch of attacks per character and the idea is that as a fighter gets more damage accumulated, the worse the knock back is - because that's the only way to "kill" people - knocking them off the screen. Definitely a strange one as Shaggy can beat Superman. All but one fighter starts off locked but there's a rotation of free to play ones. My question is... why? When looking for a match I could only fight against an AI. 

Not all crossovers are a good idea.

 

Recent Update: This is now doing a surprise shut down until 2024.

Knockout City

This PvP game revolves around futuristic dodge ball on a 3D field, and you simply score a knockout by hitting someone twice. While there's other extra things like everyone has gliders, sometimes the balls explode with goo etc, the core mechanic is quite good and I got into a 3 vs 3 match really quickly. It's a bit weak on the character customization front which probably explains all the cross dressers in that match, but it was fun nonetheless. Sadly this will be closing on June 6th this year so you only have until then to try it out.

Divine Knockout

Operates exactly like Multiversus except the characters are various "gods" (and King Arthur for some reason), have less attack variety but gain some easy to use cool down abilities and the game play is 3D like Knockout City. This is a vast improvement from Multiversus - and again I quickly got into a 3 vs 3 player arena which means its quite active! While I personally prefer Knockout City to this (because it uses HP hearts instead of "ring out" KOs), if you like knock out games, this one should be on your radar.

First Class Trouble

Six players must find key cards to escape from a space station before the air runs out, but two of them are murderous androids! Unlike Among Us this plays in real time and the environment is beautiful. It's also highly recommended to have a mic so you can talk to people in your vicinity. While the androids can murder people by themselves, two players can also cooperatively murder anyone. It took a little while to find a match, but when I did I was victim number 1 (no mic man lol) to a pair of bunny suited giggling schoolgirls. Yeah, I can see that happening. When you die, you can continue to remain in the match as a flying vacuum cleaner who can collect stuff and run virtual race courses in the area which I thought was funny. Better have a player group for this one, because solo is a hard sell (you'll always be the odd one/s out).

Tannenberg

Taking place in WWI it's Russia versus Germany with soldiers who literally can't hold their Mosin-Nagant's steady, even when standing still so expect to die a lot in one shot while trying to take capture points from the AI hordes who fill in the slots of empty players. While I assume this FPS simulation was made for accuracy, I couldn't help but think the entire time: the old Battlefield series does this better, and that one has vehicles!

Eximius: Sieze the Frontline

This futuristic FPS has soldiers capturing a different variety of currency building points, which they then can spend on things like calling battle suits to drop in from space. :O No, their not mecha or Warframes, just armor (though there are vehicles). Somehow this is worse than Tannenberg, with floaty movement and enemies who can sprint strafe while shooting. Ergh.

Waiting for Duviri: The Third Trial

This third group is all adventure games, a genre I quite like! Let's see how these fared...

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

This 2D platform adventure game boasts some excellent art, nice music and absolutely terrible mechanics. Force player to repeat zone multiple times because they didn't exit the correct way? Check. Not have many save points? Check. Enforce back tracking? Check. This gets a big fat NOPE from me.

Evoland

This action adventure RPG starts out as an old RPG maker game but quickly evolves to slightly better standards as you play through it, which is the main draw and not the generic but appropriate fantasy plot. It's also surprisingly short as it's one of the few that I actually finished! I guess if it kept my interest right until the end, it did something right. :)

Alba - A Wildlife Adventure

This happy, bright and relaxing game is just about exploring and taking photos of wildlife while doing nice things for the environment like picking up litter, fixing bird houses and the like. A little too zen for my liking but a cute little game nonetheless.

Supraland

In this hack and slash FPS, you are a red toy man in a child's sandpit - tasked by the red king to find out why the town has no more water. This quickly spirals into a big quest of trudging across the dunes littered with rocks, lego bricks and other items in this surprisingly big game. While it's full of neat ideas, its problems stem from its jumping puzzles (thankfully there are jump pads that activate to help out if you stack it on more complex ones) and the notion that you MUST find the hidden barrels because they unlock the skills (like double/triple jump) for you to progress in the game. Not a great design idea, but still quite a fun game.

Spirit of the North

In this wordless but pretty game with nice music, you are a fox in some cold place who... frolics around with a ghost fox and gives staves to dead people so that their spirits can move on. You also get some fox powers later and that's around the part the annoying jumping puzzles come in. Most annoyingly of all though is this features my design pet peeve: huge spaces of traversal for no purpose other than traversal. The opening 30 seconds is probably you holding down the "forward" button. Just, no.

Toejam and Earl: Back in the Groove

This cooperative game has aliens searching for parts of their destroyed spaceship and the elevator to the next floor while avoiding enemies, shaking trees for money, and wondering what the hell the devs were smoking when they designing this. Not recommended.

GTFO: ALT R1B2 - The Officer

This mission is another HSU scan with the tiny difference that all sleepers here are shooters (alarms will still bring strikers though), and you WILL run into single scouts in rooms with them (no longer optional). Now's a good time to remind you that if you simply strafe around shooters (provided there's space to do so) they'll never hit you. Alternatively just duck at the last moment as their tracking shot always aims for your head. Our load outs were as follows:

Me: Pistol/Precision Rifle/Sniper Sentry/Spear
DL: DMR/Presicion Rifle/Mines/Hammer
Jim: DMR/Choke Mod Shotgun/Cfoam/Hammer
[Bot]: DMR/Hel Gun/Sniper Sentry/Hammer

The general flow of travel will is "go North" and you will have a shortage of closable doors so SAVE them (by keeping them open) until you reach your Class IV alarm later. Stealth bop away. You also have the option to snipe the scout and just deal with the room - that's better than letting it scream. Just for fun though, one of our scouts DID scream but it wasn't a problem ammo wise BECAUSE...

The lack of closable doors means the level has long sight lines especially to the South. Plonking down a sniper sentry facing the long bridge room (you can't miss it) and helping it was enough to handle the extra scout wave.  What will screw you up is if you don't use the terminals to QUERY your HSU, followed by the correct key card to access it. There are a number of keys on this level - don't open doors you don't need to!

The room with the first scout will also have a class II alarm - just put a sniper turret in that bridge room and leave the door open - then you'll find some fog and another big room with a class III alarm. The big room is only accessible via hole in the wall, so DL mined the opening and Jim iced a thick line before it. My sentry was beside the hole on a crate facing inwards to shoot them in the back, and I supported it from the bridge while they did circles. Both cases had fighting while doing circles. It's the games way of telling us to "get used to it".

Past that is another room with a scout and a bunch of key cards. Get yours and head back for the class IV scan. Ours was in the junction room where the first scout was, so this time we put the two sniper sentries facing down the ramp to the fog in the North, and Jim was on c-foam duty for the one door we saved to the South (which DL also mined). Scum will get through before finishing circles so just keep calm and carry on.

Beyond that door is the room with your HSU (unless you opened the wrong door). Clear it out, do the team scan and get moving back to the extraction point where you should quickly put down the sniper sentries to help you defend against the endless extraction alarm wave. As the scan isn't quick, you will need to defeat a number of strikers before you can GTFO!