Hearts of Iron IV or HOI4 for short is a grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive AB. Right now on Steam, I have 822.7 hours played of the game. The game is very fun and captivating as it was able to hold my attention for so long. I have found the gameplay to be very satisfying, but it can sometimes be annoying when the AI decides not to cooperate with you.
Gameplay is very complex, but also very enjoyable to master. You pick a nation during WW2 and have to naviage it through the war by managing the politics, military and economy of your nation. Countries have "National Focus" trees that let you pick a path for your nation to go down and improve yourself. Most are unique to each country. Factories can be used to build infrastructure, railways, other factories and an assortment of buildings like forts, airbases, anti-air towers and fuel silos to improve the capabilities of your nation during warfare. War is where the game really gets interesting. You move around individual units, but can assign frontlines. Warfare is dynamic and complicated as you can customize almost every aspect of your armies like your division composition and creating your own tanks. Visually, the game does not stand out, but is by no means bad. The graphics are detailed and pretty but aren't anything to be impressed by. Animations are smooth but not complicated and the map is clear so it's easy to see everything going on. The UI can be a bit challenging for new players as there are a lot of menus to naviage through, but once you learn where everything is, there isn't any issues with it. Controls are simple and the game can be played entirely with a mouse although keyboard shortcuts make things faster. Options for graphics and audio are on the more basic side but are perfectly servicable and fuctional. There is a tutorial but I suggest for players to jump straight into the game because learning from experience is more fun and fulfilling to me rather than using the tutorial. You can't play the game if you're blind but I don't think that video games are really on the agenda for blind people in general. People who struggle with hand movements might struggle with the mouse but most things are easy to click. Text is legible and the UI has a scaling slider to make it as big as you want. There were not any typing errors that I could see. The game is stable and does not crash often, but mods can be an issue sometimes because they are fanmade so quality cannot be verified. The base game though is very stable. There aren't any dead ends since the game can be saved and loaded at any times and no stalemate truly lasts forever. My rating for the game is Five stars because it is a quality game with infinite replayability. Also I sold my sould to be good at the game and cannot say otherwise.
0 Comments
Everybody knows Team Fortress 2. If not by name but at least by image. It's characters and design is a massive part of internet pop culture. It's gameplay is renouned for it's greatness. With that said, I might have a TF2 problem. According to Steam, I just crossed my 660th hour played which is a lot. So why is the game so loved? Why is it the top 10 most played games per day on all of Steam despite being from 2007? First we should discuss marketing. On YouTube is a series of videos called "Meet the Team." These are classics that really got a ton of people interested in this world. It gave people a perspective on these amazing mercenaries. TF2 also has amazing gameplay which is probably what's given it it's most success. The weapons all feel great to use and are carefully designed to coencide with distinct character movements. Another thing is customization. You can create any kind of loadout you want for the nine different characters. With different primaries, secondaries and melees to choose from, there are many distinct ways to create your own playstyle. Couple that with the over 1600 cosmetic items for your characters, there's so many ways to play how you want. The art style is a distinct cartoon style look that is blended with the 1960s spy aesthetic. The music is also classic and was performed by a real orchestra. Being a game created by the masterminds at Valve, it's very stable with a clean and functional UI, but updates are lacking. The last major update was in 2017 and it's felt like an eternity for me. Despite this, the community continues strong with nearly 150,000 players online at one time in November 2020. Quite impressive for a game of it's age! Oh and the best part? It's free. 100%. No ads, no premium subscribtions. Nothing. It's totally free for anyone to play. I've put my own money into it purely on my own volition and it's a great system. A discussion on the economics of TF2 is for another day though.
5 Stars - An amazing classic with infinite replayability and is 100% free. To say The Desolate Hope is a strange game is an understatement. It's free first off on Steam. Totally free, just a passion project and it's gotten little to no attention which is really sad to me because it's a really interesting game especially since it was made in 2012. The Desolate Hope is a game where you play as a repurposed piece of code from a simple game preinstalled on an unmanned space station's computer systems and you take control of a grumpy coffee pot robot who manages the station to enter simulations and root out viruses. The story is that humans put these robots on the station to simulate future human development. It was supposed to last 5 years but humanity abandoned them and they were left to rot. The game has a day and night cycle. During the day, you can enter the systems of the robots (they're called Darelicts) to root out the viruses, This is a standard platformer where you get to jump around platforms, go to shops and shoot bad guys. Once you find the darelict in the simulation, they tell you where the virus is. Once you find the virus, you enter an real time RPG battle which are really fun. During the night, you can explore outside the base to find items to gain the trust of the daralicts so they let you enter their simulations. The Desolate Hope is a very strange but stylish game and it's truly underrated.
I am not a Sonic fan. Since I only play on PC, I mainly play games like Team Fortress 2 and Hearts Of Iron IV so when I picked up Sonic Mania for 75% off, I didn't know what I was expecting. Sonic Mania is the 2017 love letter by Sega for 16-bit Sonic. Reliving the era of the Sega Genesis and 'Blast Processing', Sonic Mania tries to be the perfect sequel to where the 2D games left off. After the huge success of Super Mario 64, Sega tried to fight them with their iconic platforming icon Sonic. On the Sega Saturn (Sega's version of the Nintendo 64), Sonic saw a few outings with the racing game Sonic R and Sonic 3D Blast which was an isometric platformer akin to Super Mario RPG. Both of which and the Saturn itself were major failures for Sega. The Sega Dreamcast saw the first true 3D Sonic game, Sonic Adventure. The Dreamcast was not a failure per se, but it also failed, twisting Sega's hand into releasing on other consoles like the Playstations, X-Boxes and Nintendos. The 2000s saw Sonic failure after failure as Sega seemed to lack direction about where Sonic would go and also they kept making 3D games, not 2D. In 2017, it was the 25th anniversary of Sonic and people were curious about what Sega would do. They made Sonic Mania and here is what I think of it.
It's fantastic looking first off. The pixel art looks amazing and it's really cool what they could do with the graphics. Another thing is that the first act of every stage is a level from a previous Sonic game, mainly Sonic 2 but the game does start with Sonic 1s iconic Green Hill Zone. The game also runs at a perfect 60 FPS and it really is the true blast processing. There is also a boss at the end of every level which makes the levels all feel unique. Speaking of unique, the second act is a brand new level and a remixed theme of the classic music used in act one. It's a fantastic, fresh game that was a great experience. The game is worth the $20 and getting it for $5 felt like a steal. The game I selected is certainly a weird one, it's also Russian. 'Pathologic' is a Russian survival horror game where you play as one of three doctors trying to cure a small town in the Russian steppe in the early 1900s for your own personal reasons. The game is very clever and not fun. Not fun? Pathologic is NOT a fun game; but it is a great one. The game is not meant to be fun, it's meant to be tedious and requires your patience, in fact, there is a Steam achievement you earn when you finish the first day in the game. Only 11% of players did it. The game is spread across 12 days, with the plague getting worse earch day and more dangerous. The three characters are called the Bachelor, the Horuspex, and the Changeling. The Bachelor is a bachelor of medicine and came to the town because the Russian government is close to shutting down your lab, focused on researching immortality. A man named Isidor Burakh, the town surgeon, invites you to the town. The first day, you try to go meet one ot the town elite, he is over 150 years old, but he was murdered the night before. You go see the surgeon who invited you, who was also murdered. The game plays as you trying to survive the plague and the town as you solve the murders and find a vaccine. Oh also food prices multiply TEN FOLD on day 2 because of stockpiling since you alerted the town of the incoming plague. This is the easiest playthrough and the one I reccomend a lot. Oh, also there are muggers who throw knifes that deal 90% of your health. I would like to explain the other two characters but this is getting long, honestly, play Pathologic, but don't enjoy it. Yes! This is what the game actually looks like!
Worst. Monday. Ever. SCP: Secret Lab is a game that is a new multiplayer horror staple. SCP: Secret Lab is (Or SCP:SL for short) based on a web community named "The SCP Foundation" which is centered around a fictional organization called 'The SCP Foundation' (Same as the name). This organization's purpose is to collect anomalous objects and beings that range from a disproportionate 2m tall boney things that kill you if you look at it's face, to a ball that bounces at a 200% efficiency. Because it is a community project, the game has to be free and that makes it worth it easily. It's free, everything available (No microtransactions or premiums) and no ads. 100% is always worth a try. The game starts with giving you a random roll, sometimes you are a 'D-Class'. Prisoners who are guinea pigs and use the chaos to run away. Scientists who have keycards and odds. Guards with guns and the SCP's themselfs. (No you can't play as the ball but you can find it!) You can be the weird 2m tall person thing, a plague doctor, and even a giant dog lizard thing that can only see by sound. Gameplay is fairly simple, about 20-30 players are in a randomized, giant, underground facility. Important doors like an upgrade room, transition zones, and armories are guarded by keycards and you need to search around to find items while avoid enemies. There are four zones, light containment is farthest from the surface and where D-Class and scientists start. SCP's start in the next zone, Heavy Containment. The guards are in the entrance zone and there is the surface, where you can escape (If you are a d-class or scientist) and become better versions of yourself. Scientists become the MTF who have armour and rifles. D-Class become the insurgency who have armour and LMGs. Respawn waves happen a few times per game where all players come back as an insurgent or MTF and storm the facility through tight elevators choke-points for action. The game is fantastically paced and fun and all deaths feel like my fault. Unfortunately, performance is somewhat lacking. While a gaming PC can run it, my gaming laptop has to go on the minimum settings, but even they look pretty good so it's not a big deal for me, but I can see other people annoyed by this aspect.
Overall, this is a fantastic multiplayer horror game that can be pretty scary at points. It's 100% free on Steam and is worth a shot since there is nothing to lose. 9/10 for only slight performance issues on weaker devices. Crusader Kings II is the bread and butter of strategy games. Published by Paradox Interactive from Sweden, it's normally $40 USD, however, since the Paradox convention is happening, it's now free. I've played it for about 7 hours and this is my first take on the game: When the game is loaded up, you're presented with three start dates spanning from 940 to 1066 and the Mongol invasion. When selecting who to play as, you need to be very careful. All empires are split into many tiers you can play as. You can play as the king of the entire country, a king or duke of a smaller county. The game is also in real time (Sped up). Since the game is from 2012, the graphics are nothing special, but are nice to look at when there is absolutely nothing else to look at. Customization is high however, and it feels like most things, you can change. The music is generic and boring so I like to listen to my own. The game is 2d but textured and you look at a flat map. Armies do have 3d models of a single soldier that stands in the province where the army is. The game's depth really takes off in your court. The court is the menus wher you can do various actions that affect your kingdom. This includes the ruler's tab where you can see yourself, your spouse (If you have one), your family from grandparents to children, and possibly your Liege and heir. Right clicking on any of the portraits that represents your close family gives a bunch of options like a plot to kill someone or getting them married. Speaking of marriage, family is the most important thing in this game since if you get usurped by someone who is not a relative whatsoever, it's a game over. It's so complicated, I really could not describe it all. The court also extends to military, roles, laws, and technology. The game shines in this aspect. The complexity makes the game fun. If it were too easy, it would be boring. If it was too hard, it would be frustrating. The game would really benefit from a better tutorial. The one included is a bit thin. In conclusion, I give it two different scores. The gameplay itself is 4/5 stars but since it's free, has no ads, and no microtransactions, it's easily 5/5 for being litteraly risk free. |
AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
|