Honkai: Star Rail and Godlike Burger

Two games I got on Epic for free.

Godlike Burger

This is another cook to order game where you are running a space traveling burger joint and are under time pressure to make the correct orders for the various aliens that wander in. Luckily you don't need to deliver it to them as they come to the counter when its ready, however expect to kick your equipment often as they break down and if you REALLY are efficient you can even murder your customers to get some free meat, just be careful not to be caught and who you feed that to as it might attract the space cops!

An interesting twist for sure but one that I couldn't really utilize because I hated the burger assembly interface (there is none). You can't remove wrong ingredients once placed and by default you put anything you are holding (up to 2 things) into a burger automatically so you can't get lettuce for one and tomato for another because both will go to the first one you interact with. Maybe I'd enjoy it more if I ignore the cooking component and just treat it as a murder simulator, but there are so many other games that already do that. Not recommended.

Honkai: Star Rail

After the feeling of incompleteness from my run of Genshin Impact followed by enjoyable exploration in Tower of Fantasy comes Honkai: Star Rail, another gacha game of collecting characters to help you fight battles, often with some elemental alignment that is stronger against some enemies and weaker to others. This time around it is turn based combat and features a train that travels through space! But I've got to say, this must be the WORST of these three.

What? But the graphics and music are nice! The characters are also pretty good and the story is... short, but they're working on it! Sure. My biggest gripe is unlike those ones, the grind in this is put right in your face early on. The main story is level locked and you can't unlock future chapters just by playing through the main chapters. And there aren't even enough side quests (some of which have built in delays of "come back tomorrow to do the next part") to get you to the required ranking to advance. Instead it asks you go through the same few map zones via "Virtual Simulation" (at least two different forms of this too) to grind your level up.

That is ridiculously BORING! Especially when they start adding HP sponge bosses just to draw out combats. Lastly the clearest way to know if the designers are making a grindy turn based battler is if they include an AUTO COMBAT feature, aka "we know its boring so, press this button to make it go faster". This game introduces it to you IN THE TUTORIAL. Strongly not recommended. Stay away from this garbage.

Decluttering Day 10: An old small, and now unused bin. Why the heck were we still hanging on to that one?