The Art Project

Stylish and colorful.

In this 1-5 player cooperative game you are trying to retrieve boxes stolen art across 6 different maps. Each round is pretty simple: everyone gets 2 cards and must play one which usually costs "something", puts bad guys in one or more cities, gains "something" and establishes a clue for one of the cities. Three matching clues spawns an art crate on the respective city (so 3 music clues makes it appear in "music" city) then going there (costs fuel currency), fighting the bad guys (dice roll supplemented by gun currency and radio currency). If the city has no baddies then you are free to collect the crate and get one step closer to victory (which in all maps is filling a line of crates)!

Of course its not that simple. There are only 6 of the fuel, gun and radio currency and you cannot gain more than there are available in the game. If you need to spend something you don't have it costs a heart, and if someone runs out of hearts its game over for everyone! Same if you run out of bad guy tokens or "lost city" tokens. The latter happens when 5 bad guys are in a city and survived the combat round. This seals off the city entirely and prevents movement through it which again can lose the game. 

That said its very simple once it gets going, and is fast to setup and take down and the artwork is pretty nifty too. Thumbs up!

Deathloop and 112 Operator

Games of repetition.

Deathloop

This stealth FPS (though not necessarily stealth later on) is set in a repeating day and your job is to break the loop while everyone else is out to kill you! Dying enough times or surviving the day simply resets it and with four locations to explore which change based on the four time slots, you'll be pretty familiar with the maps after a few go arounds as you slowly piece together the clues and knowledge to access "locked" zones, areas containers and shortcuts (a lot of which can be found just by exploration). Nice game play and an interesting story with an opt-in PvP mode of a slightly repetitive nature. Still worth checking out if you like first person stealthers though. 

112 Operator

In this emergency services management game you are given command of a number of units in a number of sectors on your map (based on the world map which is pretty cool so you can actually play in your own real life area) and must dictate which emergencies need attending to by the fire brigade, ambulance, police or any combination of the three. On top of this you are on the call center that needs to advise and assist people in trouble / or not so much trouble as there are some "waste of time" ones. This is in addition to managing the funds to maintain your emergency services staff and while the game is all about helping and saving people, the actual goal is to try get promoted to handle larger and large pieces of the map. Gets repetitive very fast. 

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim and Devil May Cry (2025)

Anime set in other franchises.

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

Set 200 years before Bilbo finds the one ring, this extremely well animated story focuses on Hera, the heroic daughter of Helm Hammerhand the King of Rohan. An altercation with one of his vassals eventually leads to a war and its up to Hera to save the day (sort of). While the art is awesome and the action scenes sufficiently violent, there are more than a few crazy plot holes in this tale which is a shame. We enjoyed it but were quite amused by some of the narrative choices taken. 

Devil May Cry (2025)

Based on the action adventure game franchise of the same name, this is actually the second attempt at an anime for it but unlike the original Dante is not yet a mature and experienced demon hunter. Instead this protagonist is youthful, funny and foolish but also regularly gets beaten by high level humans. Not sure if that's what happens in the later games as well but he is a bit too immature compared to the Dante I remember. Still, good fight scenes and animation are basically what hold this generic demons invading from hell plot together. Maybe it will improve in season two.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

Roll for initiative suckas!

This Borderlands off-shoot is all set in the in universe RPG world of Bunkers and Badasses, featuring Tiny Tina as your resident "Bunker Master" and all the humor and a few cameos from familiar faces from the original franchise. It's the most woke of the games (because its Tina's world after all) and got swords, magic and ... guns? Yep, looks like they kept that bit but added a touch of magic to them with my favorite firearms eventually being the ones that fired multiple enemy tracking magic missiles and "regained" ammo when not being fired.

While the voice acting and story is ok (don't expect it to advance any Borderlands related thing) it is certainly a smaller game. Major areas are still medium to large sized maps but everything else is set on the "Overworld" which is a much more convenient way to reach exploration sites (at which point you unlock the teleporters there and can fast"er" travel around). Getting ambushed or going into the mini dungeons there just puts you in a randomized map (maybe 12 variants at most) where you simply have to kill everything that spawns.

It feels a bit cheap but also very on brand. Other than the main quest there's lots of things to do on the side and things to collect for those with a knack for exploration. While it did get repetitive at times it was quite enjoyable. The ocean blessing song in particular was super effective!

Pathfinder: The Raiders of Sandpoint

[Part of the Party Time journal]    

Correspondence found on the defeated giant necromancer indicated a planned raid on Sandpoint sometime soon so the heroes send advance warning (via magical message) and sure enough giants attack the city before they arrive so this time DL has us playing the archers, guardsmen, and militia defending the town with new temporary roles of the resident sheriff and monk played by Juris, the berserker weapon smith lady played by Rose, local priest played by myself and bard Ameiko played by mom.

While the sheriff, monk, priest, and all guardsmen and militia were wiped out, they did kill six giant raiders, three giant bears and scared a red dragon away before the usual heroes arrive (Cleric Kyra [Rose], Wizard Ezren [Juris] and his owl familiar Stolas, Fighter Valeros [me], Ranger Shay [my NPC cohort - yay for leadership], and Elf Rogue Merisiel [mom] now mounted on a flying griffon [statuette pet we bought en route back]) to help take down the remaining three giant raiders and their boss who was after some rock at the possible ancient lighthouse called the "old light". 

We also manage to save a burning ships worth of badly timed reinforcements from five opportunistic reef claws and apart from a trio of spear men most are actually siege engineers that teach Kyra and Ezren siege machine building post-giant raid while Shay and Stolas track down the raiders that managed to kidnap people from the "noble" district which is quite out of town.

Said ballistas they create (and a celestial grizzly bear Kyra conjures) are super handy in gunning down a mercenary band of orcs and their undead fodder raised by the orc shamans who seemed to be paid to do a follow up attack. This time the heroes are aided by the halfling celestial (!?) "child" Daygrace who was kept hidden in the abbey and is functionally another cleric. When the coast is clear Valeros recruits her and the spear man trio into his service [because leadership is cool]. 

DL does a good job printing out all the maps and material that we all get to enjoy! :)

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.