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.

Arcadegeddon and Gigapocalypse

Games that drop you into the grind immediately.

Arcadegeddon

The main threat in Super City is a corporate gaming entity that is infection the local indie arcade leader board so you (and the random city "gangs" that overuse their assigned lingo) have to go in the game and... shoot... things? The combat kind of reminds me of Borderlands. This quickly gets off to a bad start as the characters aren't very nice to look at and you are stuck with pink dreads or being bald. Yes, you can unlock more drip by farming currency, along with weapons, skills and the like but its... super upfront about being a mega-grind. You know how most games have an "endgame" grind with repeatable quests/challenges? This is basically that from the get go. I did not enjoy it. 

Gigapocalypse

This is a super strange combo of a tamagochi "pet" thing where you must take care of your baby kaiju, patting it, feeding it, decorating its den and cleaning its poop in between sending it out to rampage on cities to cause as much death and destruction as possible. Unlike that old game "Rampage", your kaiju only walks one direction (and you can't stop it), with the speed increasing as it builds more rage which is also used to power its other attacks. How its setup it is guaranteed you will not win on your first run, instead having to farm currency to unlock or improve things once you return to the tamagochi segment. The grind will make you feel like you're getting nowhere.

Deliver at all Costs

A mismatch of tone. 

Set on the small island of St. Monique in 1959 you play a young man looking for work at a delivery company to get enough money to pay the rent, but in reality you'll probably be spending it on gadgets or gadget parts to make your cars perform better. Primarily a driving / exploration game that is in bulk made up of fetch quests this has some decent graphics and cut scenes with a good dose of humor due to the nature of the things you end up transporting on your vehicle that include active fireworks, loose fruit, and hungry fish. 

The destructible environment is fun, especially since your car is easily repaired and it seems no one can actually die. The locals do get very violent if you annoy them though, which leads to them attacking your car and yourself until they feel vindicated. You can't game over on that but will experience a much more difficult drive once they start latching on. My issue here is they really make it feel like work, which I guess is fine - but if you just want to have a joyride and go fast there are more than a few things to dampen the mood and that just kills the game for me. The seemingly mismatched tone of the game also doesn't help...

Battlefield: Hardline

A different take on the usual formula. 

The Battlefield franchise usually has players in the shoes of soldiers anywhere from world war I to future battles with robots but in this title the battle is simply the modern day war on drugs. Unfortunately there seemed to be no servers I could join to experience the multiplayer aspect of this one but it does come with a very solid single player campaign with a decent story where you play a cop. 

How it feels waiting for the server search which then returns with no results...

While you can still shoot people dead (and that will happen a lot) you gain more XP to unlock gear by arresting baddies, increasing the focus on stealth and getting up close to flash your badge which can "stun" up to 3 enemies to arrest them (but need to be fast and aim down sights at others to keep their hands up). Your load out options increase quickly with some very gamey items like grapple hook launchers becoming available but you also get to try out some of the vehicles the game has to offer. I quite enjoyed it, but only will recommend buying it when its on sale.