Arknights: Endfield

Set in a universe of anime style characters who have spaceships but still use swords and spears, this free to play single player game features some nice graphics, decent voice acting and a click fest of combat that rewards timing.

Not only do you have to balance your team of four from a roster of operators (most of whom are possibly teenage girls) who will each individually require leveling, gearing, leveling the gear, and such - you also have to get lucky to recruit them from the gachapon style lucky draw that you earn every so often.

Base building is also a pretty big component of this game (which caught me by surprise). Sure, you can hit minerals and gather bushes to craft stuff. But you can also setup auto mining rigs, processing plants, fabricator factories, conveyor belts between said parts to move materials around and electrical generators and have to run electrical cables to each of these for them to activate. Cable not long enough? Build a relay to keep it going! 

You can easily spend sessions not fighting at all but just harvesting, expanding and such. Oh, and you also build outposts that you can assign one of your team to manage, that can then trade and grow on its own too. There's also a stock market where you can buy goods and hope that you can sell for higher, because this "single player" game still takes into consideration what other players are doing. And if that isn't enough you can then fix up and build out your space ship. :O

Yes, there's A LOT going on here with tutorials galore in the form of simulations, including the base building part. Cool game but ultimately just too much for me, and you can almost taste the grinding as you need loads of things to level up your people, build your base and the like.

Zootopia (1 and 2)

Disney doing something right!

These animated flicks where everyone is an anthropomorphic animal takes place in Zootopia, where predators and prey live in peace and "anyone can be anything". That doesn't mean it will be easy though as learned by protagonist bunny cop Judy Hopps who takes in on herself to take on a missing persons case and discover why some predators are going feral. 

Zootopia 2 continues the story of our heroes and does more world building with another case, and while its still a good watch it isn't as strong as the first one.

Regardless, both have good CGI, a well written plot, cute and likeable characters, and many funny moments to boot! Disney is doing very well with these. Highly recommended!

Cozy Grove and Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

Two games starting with C that get old quick.

Cozy Grove

This game has you play as a spirit scout sent alone to a small island that is haunted by spirits! But no, it's not a horror. The silly bear spirits all need help and its pretty cool that as you do help them remember who they are which adds more color to their section of the island, and expands the island to unlock more spirits to help. It's got easy controls and cute graphics but THE WORST collect and deliver quest system I've seen. You'll need to scrounge the place to find things that only SEQUENTIALLY SPAWN. Need three branches? You need to find the first one somewhere before the second one EVEN SPAWNS. That's just absolute shit and a complete waste of time. Not recommended.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

This voxel arena battler has you fighting robots using swords and bows with the main catch being that all weapons are vorpal - any piece hit of you or your enemies is easily chopped! You also get to upgrade after each match but one death and you get to start from the beginning again. The robot commentators are intentionally annoying and occasionally funny but the repetitiveness of the actual play isn't great.

Hyper Echelon and Haven Dock

Two games starting with "H" that aren't great. 

Hyper Echelon

Despite the name and the obvious attempt to show "hey, you can customize your space ship!" in the tutorial, this pixel game is just another top down, bullet hell space ship shooting the bad guys and/or obstacles while the background scrolls from the top of the screen to the bottom at a steady and fixed pace. Oh, then you can redo the same missions at harder difficulties to get medals. Yay? Hard pass.

Haven Dock

This base building game has you stranded on a small island but don't worry, by somehow collecting the absolute truck fulls of garbage that float by you can magically create (using stone tools according to the voice over) wooden platforms to establish a base, build equipment to pump and filter sea water, make farms, etc. What kills it for me is you often have to wait for materials you need to drift by close enough for collection. Not a lot you can do to mitigate that and "having to wait to have fun" is always garbage design. Not recommended. 

The Bluff and The Rip

Two decent movies!

The Bluff

In this swashbuckling tale, a band of pirates raid a small island village that happens to have a fishwife with a violent past (played by Priyanka Chopra). While the story is predictable and some of the younger actors aren't great, the action pieces are pretty good with Priyanka really getting into it. All up decent enough flick for those that like fighting and pirates.

The Rip

In this thriller, a police squad (whose leader is played by Matt Damon) suffering from loss of a team mate and low wages, raid a stash house where they find a huge amount of cash and start to turn on each other if they should keep some of the find for themselves. Good acting, a good story, and an excellent use of tension makes this an easy one to recommend. I really enjoyed it!

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank and TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Two repetitive games starting with "T".

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank

The follow up to "Turnip Boy commits Tax Evasion" continues the story of the cute veggie people, and Turnip Boy has now signed up with a band of crooks to rob a bank. Over and over (yes the same bank)! How it plays is that in the bank you've got to fight off the guards, shake down the civilians, collect loot and... help NPCs in the bank do mundane things? All in 3 minutes. After that the veggie cops show up and you need to get back to the getaway van and back to the hideout where you can spend your stolen cash on the dark web to upgrade things... and then go back into the bank to do it all again. It's very strange and you'll quickly get that feeling of doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result...

TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Do you like Tamagotchi games? The ones where you have to care for, feed and nourish your pet friend? This is just like that, except your friend is a female head growing out of a flower pot that you need to care for and you have a time limit to prove to the gods that love exists by doing so (or the Earth is destroyed). Sure, it's strange - but what lets it down is the usual repetitive boringness of Tamagotchi games. Not recommended.

Friday Night Survival

Has it really been a whole year since I posted about our Friday night game sessions? It's a case of out with the old and in with the new: we finished 40K: Martyr, got tired of the long loads of 40K: Space Marine 2 and got a bit tired out with Helldivers 2, which has a pretty good run!

We did try Elden Ring: Nightreign where and beat the first tri-wolf boss (and I soloed the sleepy flying ooze) but it runs too poorly on DL's machine so that's been put on the back burner for now. 

Mechwarrior 5: Clans has pulled majority of the time for us with good gameplay and an interesting story on top of the usual optional customization of everyone's mechs. We've won it now, including the Ghost Bear and Tukayid DLC expansions because it was that much fun! Definitely recommended for co-op sessions, but solo might feel a bit grindy and long.

We've also sailed on Void Crew which is a pretty neat "fly your customized spaceship through an array of roguelike challenges that include enemy ships and multiple space walks into space ruins for salvage". It's also a bit repetitive and I think there are only three bosses currently but we might go back into that in a bit. It's lack of story lets it down.

Green Hell is what we're hitting hard at the moment. Nice graphics, easy enough controls, and a story to boot have sucked us into this jungle survival game that includes hostile natives, deadly jaguars, and cool lessons on why not to drink untreated river water. It's not a style in our usual wheelhouse, but its very fun so far. Again though, seems it would be a drag in single player but three person co-op is just fun. For a tiny sized game it's got a pretty big map, so lets see how long it keeps us lost in the jungle!