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!

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.

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.

Touch Type Tale and Super Space Club

Games that combine strange things.

Touch Type Tale

Playing as a boy who happens to find a wizard's magical typewriter this game is a blend of both a typing game and a fantasy RTS like the original Warcraft games, but instead of having a mouse to select anything - you have to use the randomly generated word provided! This is for EVERYTHING: selecting the mine, harvesting from the mine, select the town hall, hire peasants to collect mined stuff, build new structure, farm fields, train units, move units across the map, split units, cast spells etc. 

There's a LOT of typing, but that's not even the hard part. Most of the difficulty comes from the RTS side in getting units out fast enough to defend! Definitely a challenging game and a strange combo one at that. As such its audience might be a pretty small set of people.

Super Space Club

This is simply "Asteroids" set to some rap music tracks and waves of endless enemies. Sure you can grind points to unlock new weapons and other pilots (rather, their special abilities) but that doesn't really do it for me - especially as the music isn't really my cup of tea. That said maybe the newer generation haven't ever played asteroids and enjoy rap? For everyone else, not recommended. 

Deadtime Defenders and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Games with clichéd humor.

Deadtime Defenders

A crazy doctor has opened portals to hostile realms and its up to you to shoot your way through them in this 2D looter shooter to kill em all with your ever improving arsenal of weapons. The art style is very cartoony and they lean into the silly monsters a fair bit, especially since you can technically only shoot left and right making enemies "up and down" from your position safe from your attacks - but they're not super smart and won't exploit that fact. It's addictive enough to go through the very short story but has no real staying power there-after.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 

In this Diablo-esque action RPG you play a descendant of the famous hunter and you have a bound spirit to assist you in everything from telling jokes, carrying stuff, and eliminating the many baddies on the many maps. As the camera is fixed it is easier for range focused characters to start at the bottom of each map and make your way "upwards" as you can see more which is a bit annoying, but the rest of the game is quite solid with a big variety of foes to deal with and a surprise tower defense section in the middle which keeps it interesting. I did enjoy the humor in this one, especially on the various bulletin boards but the final bad guy is a bit over the top. 

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Where bullets solve everything!

In this game you play as one of the criminals recruited into the expendable Task Force X to retake Metropolis from Braniac's invasion - and he just so happens to be controlling the Justice League! While Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, Deadshot and King Shark have slightly varying modes of speedy and vertical transportation all of them heavily employ firearms to deal most of their damage: especially in boss fights where you don't want to or simply can't be next to your target.

The game play is quite fun and the animations are fantastic, but they really shot themselves in the foot by making the "after the main game chapters" which continues the story (albeit lacking cut scenes now - replaced instead with comic strips), adds new squad members, and pretty much makes you fight the same bosses with slight twists but in exchange for a huge amount of grinding. I only did the easier / faster half of those chapters before calling it quits. While I did enjoy this, I can't really recommend it because of that. 

Kardboard Kings and Outliver Tribulation

I did not last long in these.

Kardboard Kings

This shop attendant simulator sees you managing a playing card shop of all things, where everything is on a timer. It doesn't matter if you're listening to the tutorial cockatoo or trying to buy more product to sell on one of your very few spaces, if its opening time there'll be customers. With its odd art style and game loop of basically "managing fires" all the time I really didn't get into this one.

Outliver: Tribulation

In this horror game you play as a capable female soldier trapped in an otherworldly maze of trials with a distinctive African theme and somehow is both cool and very amateurish at the same time. For instance, the voice acting is poor and the maze is designed to force a lot of back tracking so that as you find or earn colored circles, you can unlock doorways to find more colored circles.

On the flip side when the lights go out and you start hearing footsteps chasing after you, that really gets your heart pumping. Especially since the enemy mooks pretty much cheat and teleport via lightning strike near you if you get too far. Then boss fights are ho hum (at least the first two I reached) but there's some major rendering issues with some graphics cards like the one I'm using that makes you lag. Yeah, in a single player game. Might still be worth a try if you can grab it for free.

Back 4 Blood

How to take a good idea and then make it garbage.

This four person coop first person zombie horde shooter tries to emulate Left 4 Dead and sort of does it... until they put all of their own (mostly bad) ideas over the top of it as well. Lets start of with the good bits: good choice of characters (even though some are innately "better" with their passives than others), good reusing of maps to fit the story, and good range of "special infected" - especially the big ones.

Onto the bits we didn't like: the graphic for one special critter might be slightly altered to mean its a different special critter. A spidery spitting thing might sometimes shoot fireballs and other times shoot a slow moving swarm of bugs. A big armed thing might just use it as a club (which means you need to shoot its arm) or use the big arm to grab people (which means you need to shoot its head).

These minor differences are spelled out in the oh so stupid "card system". Each character can assemble a deck of 15 cards to build their guy up. More stamina, more damage with shotguns, whatever. You can buy these cards as you find them at random while playing levels, using currency you also have to find. Grind inserted!

The enemy deck shows what special creep you will run into as well as how fast the regular mobs will moving but there are times where it just puts absolute BS cards on like "hunger" (you are all hungry and are constantly losing health) and the like where it forces you to play fast and loose. This removal of player agency in deciding if they want to move fast or slowly and strategically is ABSOLUTELY STUPID.

The only worse design decision beyond that is not letting players start on a mission they failed. So yeah, if you have a limited amount of game time you'd better win all the way to that next checkpoint maybe 3 or 4 missions away or you are going to be starting again. These made an otherwise fun game, absolute garbage. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

Synced Century: Age of Ashes Maid of Sker

Another trio of epic games.

Synced

This futuristic shooter that involves nanites reviving the dead and somehow using one zombie as your ally actually has no future any more. Outside of the tutorial I wasn't able to create a character as the servers are shutting down on September 9 2024. Just wasn't cool enough I suppose?

Century: Age of Ashes

Of the dragon flight simulators (or large avian flight simulators) that I've played this one certainly is up there in terms of graphics as well as having an easy control scheme. Of course, it also stands apart in being purely a team versus team arena albeit with various missions while killing each other, and dragon collection and customization on the side. A little slow to load up but pretty quick to find matches so thumbs up for that too. Alas, I'm not into PvP so its not for me but its definitely worth checking out.

Maid of Sker

In this first person horror sneaker you must make your way through a creepy hotel to save your girl, and while there are heavy Resident Evil vibes with the hotel's structure and map (but not enemies) it plays more like Thief in that you must sneak past everything (though there is an alternate "escape the hotel" mode where you get weapons and can just fight your way out like a horror shooter). Because all the enemies are blind and only work using their hearing, sneaking is super effective but your character happens to be a moron who has a penchant for ringing bells, answering telephones and coughing at the worst time which is a negative for me. Oddly there's a "safe mode" that removes all enemy threats but still can creep you out with many jump scares if you just want to enjoy the pretty decent story. Thumbs up!

The Division 2: Router Killer

Better known as Tom Clancy's The Division 2, this game had been in our Friday game nights for a few cycles having "replaced" Ghost Recon Wildlands as it is more RPG than the latter. In it you play agents of said Division trying to bring order back to a post-apocalyptic America - Washington DC specifically for starters with expansions to other cities.

There's lots of gear to collect, upgrade or sell and skills to learn that mostly relates to tech: drones, turrets, launchers, shields and the like. As it is an RPG you also get hilarious situations where a headshot from your level 7 sniper rifle isn't enough to kill a level 22 bad guy who randomly generated into existence because you wandered into a "higher level" area. For the most part it's ok though, until we discovered it is frying Jim's router.

That means not only is he losing connection from the game but also from the internet in general, for the entire household spanning a random duration which usually leans more towards hours of disconnect instead of minutes! It's pretty impressive that a game can do that, and based on google it's a pretty common problem experienced by people who play this! As such, we've uninstalled it now (no point in playing it if we can't play it together). Obviously with that turn of events I don't recommend this game.

While I'm on the topic of stuff that doesn't work, Surviving the Aftermath which was free from Epic a little bit back somehow has worse loading times than the Total War series. Given I could probably finish a light novel before the game even starts, I'm considering this one worthless too.

Jurassic World: Dominion, 65, and Second Extinction

All about the dinos!

Jurassic World: Dominion

Thanks to the events of the last movie, dinosaurs now co-inhabit the Earth with humans and somehow that's not a violent thing? I mean, can you imagine the size of the shits being left around? Somehow they manage to make this not about the dinos at all yet at the same time get all the protagonists of the franchise together. While I'm not super impressed with the plot the CGI is quite good and its enjoyable enough. Still not sure why people don't just shoot the dinos though - at least even in self defense!

65

Millions of years ago an alien space craft crashes on Earth and said alien (played by a very human looking Adam Driver), must survive the horrors of dinosaur-times but he isn't shy to absolutely annihilate those reptiles with future tech which is great! The only problem is that it makes for an incredibly light story. Not recommended. Maybe that's a clue why Dominion didn't go that way. Guns curb stomp dinos to the point that its boring.

Second Extincion (Early Access)

In this up to three player coop shooter, dinos have fully taken over the Earth and humanity had to flee to space. Now they send teams down to try retake the planet with missions like  "lets steal some T-Rex eggs for science (and breakfast)"? With tech that literally takes you in and out of space its a bit strange that you need to be boots on the ground to fight the endlessly spawning dinos (who never fight each other). It's also ridiculous to see giant monsters be so... acrobatic? That coupled with a class being tied to one of their six woke characters kinda kills it for me. They should have uncoupled that at least like how Aliens: Fireteam Elite did. Not recommended.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite and The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos

Game over man!

Aliens: Fireteam Elite

This three player co-op shooter has temporarily taken the spot of our GTFO game sessions. As colonial marines, you are sent to a derelict space station orbiting a remote planet and much like the title suggests there are aliens, just like in the movies and a few other specials, waiting there for you. Players can choose from around six classes, customize and level up weapons and most interestingly, have adjustable skill boosts in a tetris/backpack style where gaining level makes more of the "backpack" useful. While the normal difficulty is quite manageable, the "authentic experience" mode really puts you on the backfoot (almost as much as GTFO lol). The biggest downside is the small number of missions (4 campaigns broken into 3 missions) which means despite being able to add challenge cards to change the flow a tiny bit, we'll probably return to GTFO in the not too distant future.

The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos

This comedic take of a typical adventuring party questing in a dungeon is quite funny and well voice acted, but the tactical combats can be quite punishing if you aren't familiar with this X-COM like combat. 99% chance to hit from 10 meters away can still miss at crucial times, and critical fumbles can actually see your nameless yet endearing characters literally kill themselves! Still recommended for any D&D fan, but as usual the comedy can be hit or miss depending on the audience. For me, it was great and I completed the entire game.

RE:Verse / Midnight Ghost Hunt / Against all Odds

When players as content fails, because you don't have players.

RE:Verse

A multiplayer death match game using characters and creatures from the Resident Evil series might sound good, but in practice the slow, cumbersome movement that helps provide fear because your character isn't super agile makes it rather silly when put against other players. Then again I wouldn't know as there were no games I could match make with, as no one is playing it. Not recommended.

Midnight Ghost Hunt

In this team vs team action game, four ghosts attempt to hide by possessing regular items while four ghost busters hunters try to track them down and destroy them... in 5 minutes (because they are dumb and always arrive 5 minutes before midnight). When the clock strikes 12 the ghosts gain a lot of power to fight back and usually will slaughter the hunters. Basically a hide and seek game with weapons - but again no one was playing this. At least there's a bot mode if you want to try it out though.

Against all Odds

This party platforming race game has players traversing a deadly obstacle course (which is handy when you want to murder the competition) to see who can make it first to the finish line! Included is a map editor to make your own courses and there's silly commentary as you play... though most likely this will still be by yourself as again, there are no players. Not recommended.

Warhammer 40K: Darktide

Purge the heretics!

This horde shooter is very much in the same vein as the less futuristic Vermintide and Left 4 Dead with scores of Nurgle worshipers and their special units to dispatch (like one that pounces and then you need help from some one else to get up and another that you need to quietly avoid) while doing random tasks like bringing fuel cans power cells to designated spots, scanning for demon residue (shouldn't that just be everywhere) or hacking with very faulty equipment.  

The major difference with this one is almost 50% of your opponents now come with guns, and those really do hurt! Either you'll need to out snipe them as a veteran, block the damage as a mighty ogryn, cleverly draw them close (or just charge like a maniac) as a zealot, or pop their heads with your mind powers as a psyker - at the risk of popping your own head too - void powers are fun that way. Those are the current four classes available and you do missions in squads of four.

The most annoying parts though are the market, which sells you a random assortment of weapons every hour just to make sure the odds of you finding the one you want are low - and this is worsened by the ridiculous login time which Archer rightly quipped "takes three business days to get in". It's fun enough when you can get to play though its a bit repetitive, a bit grindy and a bit thin on content (though more is said to be on the way). Make sure to have a book or blog site open to read while waiting to actually get into the game.

In Sound Mind

Not everyone is crazy.

In this psychological horror, you play as a therapist who awakens in a strange, run down motel and while I initially thought this would just be your stock standard "wander around in the dark and find the things to go to the next dark place" I was pleasantly surprised that this was anything but that after the first few minutes. Especially after assembling a pistol.

Yep, it turns out this therapist is very combat savvy and "scary" critters aren't so bad as you can fight and kill them. The hotel serves as a hub to your patients nightmares though and each of those has an excellent boss type creature that chases you around in various degrees. The first one is simply territorial and easy to evade but later ones hunt you down relentlessly which is stressful but fun.

There is also a really cool cat.

The not overly complicated puzzles are good too and while I was questioning the heavy usage of pills in the game as well as the main villain who is almost a cartoon caricature, the well thought story actually covers that. This is one game that I've lost track of time playing as it is super immersive, and I highly recommend it if you like shooters in general. Yeah there are some jump scares, but that's what your gun is for. :P

Rogue Company Warface Dead by Daylight

Unfriendly competition.

Dead by Daylight

In this horror themed game, a team of four survivors are thrown into some sort of purgatory arena that is always filled with generators and meat hooks. Their objective is to stealthily power up the exit door and escape without letting the opposing "team", comprised of a single "killer" player, catch and sacrifice them to a hungry malevolent entity. There are many survivors and killers to choose from (especially if you open your wallet), and I'm always amazed at the mix of franchise characters they pull together. You can have Bill from Left for Dead and Leon from Resident Evil trying to flee from Jason Voorhes, Pyramid Head or the girl from the ring (each with their own special abilities once you level up enough)!

Game play wise this has an excellent basic tutorial for both roles, controls are easy, graphics are good and there are nice systems in place like survivors get an over the shoulder cam while the killer only has first person view. My main downside to this is frustration though. As a killer it will feel like those damned survivors can't die fast enough, especially if they are hard to find in the first place while as a survivor if you are caught its basically a "skip your turn" mode once they are meat hooked which not only drains their life but the actual fun from the game. Survivors also can die, so player elimination is a thing - a tell tale sign of a shit game.

Warface

A multiplayer shooter that has both PvP and, to my surprise, PvE missions. In it you play as one of five classes of soldier in small scale combats (if PvP) or many foes (if PvE). Gaining experience or using the cash shop helps you advance to unlock things but really, apart from a few nice touches like the assisted climb move, it could just be a nicer looking version of Counterstrike (the old one). Movement is clunky, weapons are weak, and it takes forever to find a match (at least in my region) in either PvP or PvE. Garbage.

Rogue Company

This is a mostly team vs team arena/bomb planting/king of the hill with fantastic graphics, easy controls, a strange amount of dance emotes and again a lot of characters and specials skills to pick from if you open your wallet. You do need to level up a bit for a few things to unlock but as you can do this against bots it's not much of an issue, especially since rounds are generally fast and decisive - where you win either by eliminating all enemy "tickets" (respawn) or holding an objective for a minute. I also like that weapons are deadly. A few bullets can down someone - not half a mag like in Warface.

It has the problem of taking longer to find online matches though, and since every player has the same amount of agency here (unlike Dead by Daylight where you basically have no threat as the killer and are useless if you are a hooked survivor) it really comes down to your team composition. An AFKer in Dead by Daylight might still be ok. An AFKer here will just rack up losses. Still, this is definitely more fun thanks to the very same player agency and once player elimination actually starts, it goes pretty quickly (and not another 10+ minutes of cat and mouse in Dead by Daylight) so in my book, this is easily the best game of this set - but as regular readers know, PvP is not my thing.

Centipede, Black Widow and Death Coming

Three silly pixel games.

Black Widow: Recharged and Centipede: Recharged

These two top down arcade shooters could almost be the same game. In Black Widow you play a spider on a web that shoots a machine gun against incoming mosquitoes and bees to get points, while in Centipede you play just as a gun that fires at a variety of bugs, but mostly decapitation resistant centipedes who moves akin to the space invaders, only this time they have cover - not you. Not great games by any means. I suppose they might be more fun in co-op but with so many better games to co-op the question remains... why?

Death Coming

Does it pay well?

As death's apprentice, you must kill as many people as you can in the time allotted using the many death traps lying around each isometric map - and you get a bonus for killing three specific people too. "Death traps" is used loosely, because these could be anything from changing traffic lights when they shouldn't to summoning alien invaders. It's morbidly fun but quickly repetitive and is only made worse when angels show up to make your job more difficult. Not a bad game, but there are certainly better ones.

Prey (2017)

Illusions everywhere.

In this gorgeous first person shooter you must pit your wits and skill against an alien threat, and the brilliant part you often can choose how you want to handle every situation. Stealth, fight or use the terrain to avoid / defeat your enemies. Crafting is a decent part of the game too as you can disassemble AND assemble so many things in the game (even corpses). Don't like that pacifist foam launcher? Recycle it into a shotgun. Shotgun too loud? Recycle it into a silenced pistol.

You need to be close with a shotgun, but maybe not that close.

You can also gain out of this world abilities if you so choose, or be like me and go for mundane things like hacking, engineering, and bonus to sneak attacks (you can tell how I played it). On top of this the maps are fun to explore with zero gravity areas being both scary and beautiful. Good voice acting and a solid story tie everything together to make a complete package. Very awesome game, highly recommended!

Titanfall 2

Awesome single player. Servers can't connect for multiplayer.

In this first person shooter you play a parkouring "pilot", a soldier with special abilities - the best of which is you get a hulking robot buddy to help you absolutely wreck the opposition soldiers and their hulking robots. Easy controls, nice graphics and cool environments make this a joy to play, but it can get challenging in later levels where there are just so many bad guys!

Some awesome scenery too.

A good working method I use is pilot the robot to kill infantry and be on foot to fighting multiple enemy robots (they usually target your robot buddy). The story is quite enjoyable too, but after its done the game expects you to go into multiplayer mode which simply just didn't work for me. Recommended if you are looking for a quick and enjoyable shooter that you can finish in a day or so but stay away if you were expecting anything more.

Free Action

Feel like dishing out some pain but are on a budget? Here are a few free action games on Steam that could cure that itch for you, starting with Roller Riot which is an excellent two button brawler much like One Finger Death Punch, but with better art. I quite like this one and still regularly hop in for five minute sessions!

If you prefer to blast your way through bad guys instead then Perdition might interest you - its a pretty cool little first person shooter where you must fight alien invaders. Should the blocky graphics there turn you off you might instead want to try the Russian made over the shoulder shooter Orange Cast which sports fantastic visuals as you Uber soldier your way through everything. There are some flaws in the English translation though.

My last recommendation is a super addictive, casual on the rails shooter called Cover Fire. While there is a cash shop presence, "energy" usage and grind I really liked this well made game so much that I've racked up more than 12 hours on it, without spending a cent. Highly recommended!

Sniping from a helicopter to a moving boat is... challenging.