Zero Company is fantastic. I played about 10 hours yesterday, which I probably haven't done with a game since Xcom 2 came out. It runs well on my very mid computer. It does struggle a bit, but not in places where it matters (ie movies and qte stutter a bit, but gameplay is fine.) I only have 16gb of ram.

If you liked the Clone Wars series, this is basically the game for you. It really digs into the lore of the animated shows. It feels like Bad Batch. The characters in your crew are all pretty interesting and you have a lot of customization options. It is still very story-centric, so that hurts the replay value a bit, but I am pretty sure I will still get at least a couple playthroughs out of it. Just doing a male and female Hawk alone is different enough. You can recruit a bunch of randos and ignore the main companions as well.

It's probably still more Chimera Squad than Xcom 2, but it has more depth than the former. Combat is fun. I started on normal and it is a bit easy, but I can see it getting harder as I move away from fighting droids. Like the show, droids are comically bad.

7 Days to Die:

--loot bags only ... a few/several plays later. "Well, that cycle is played out/change of pace needed."
--back to "normal" gameplay ... "Dangit, it now feels super easy/dull. What else can I do re: attrition starts."

EMPTY MAP. No towns/cities/wilderness POI's, no Traders, no roads, etc. Just biome terrain, occasional trash bags around, trees/terrain, max zombies. GO!
---Several hours later ... "Well that was fun." Tough start, but eventually had a base, all workstations, etc. But a little dull long run with zero POI's to even redeco etc. Not even rubble POI's spawn.

EDIT THE map generator .xml !
---teeny teeny tiny towns, only one to a biome (this is mostly to make the game create some roads/spawn a few Traders), mostly empty space. Still severe self-rules. Go!

Edited August 29Aug 29 by LadyCrimson

22 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Zero Company is fantastic. I played about 10 hours yesterday, which I probably haven't done with a game since Xcom 2 came out. It runs well on my very mid computer. It does struggle a bit, but not in places where it matters (ie movies and qte stutter a bit, but gameplay is fine.) I only have 16gb of ram.

If you liked the Clone Wars series, this is basically the game for you. It really digs into the lore of the animated shows. It feels like Bad Batch. The characters in your crew are all pretty interesting and you have a lot of customization options. It is still very story-centric, so that hurts the replay value a bit, but I am pretty sure I will still get at least a couple playthroughs out of it. Just doing a male and female Hawk alone is different enough. You can recruit a bunch of randos and ignore the main companions as well.

It's probably still more Chimera Squad than Xcom 2, but it has more depth than the former. Combat is fun. I started on normal and it is a bit easy, but I can see it getting harder as I move away from fighting droids. Like the show, droids are comically bad.

I do not like that they picked the worst type of turned based, the one Larian uses. Why not use grid based movement, especially because there is nothing in the environment that would benefit from that style.

Controls need some polish as I find myself picking the wrong action 50% of the time, also sucks that the action selection is fixed around the character instead of being fixed to where the camera is.

I'm also fighting the camera often.

Apart from that I'm making progress, waiting for the game to open up a bit.

Turn-based is fine if you read a book while playing.

2 hours ago, HoonDing said:

Turn-based is fine if you read a book while playing.

Oh yeah, you reminded me. You can't fast forward the enemies turn... I think they are trying way to hard to be cinematic.

Edited Saturday at 04:33 PM5 days by Sarex

Stalker 2 is pretty good now with the expansion installed and the engine upgrade. I made it 2/3 through. It's a very long game so that's not really a detraction.

the DLC has much better traditional single player level design, and also a fair amount of shoehorning, as you would expect. It kinda looks and feels like a real game now as opposed to a weekend project or steam greenlight thing.

21 hours ago, Sarex said:

I do not like that they picked the worst type of turned based, the one Larian uses. Why not use grid based movement, especially because there is nothing in the environment that would benefit from that style.

Controls need some polish as I find myself picking the wrong action 50% of the time, also sucks that the action selection is fixed around the character instead of being fixed to where the camera is.

I'm also fighting the camera often.

Apart from that I'm making progress, waiting for the game to open up a bit.

I hear the performance is pretty terrible, how far off are we from something like xcom war of the chosen. Which is a highpoint for me. Is there a proper campaign and so on.

40 minutes ago, Gorgon said:

I hear the performance is pretty terrible, how far off are we from something like xcom war of the chosen. Which is a highpoint for me. Is there a proper campaign and so on.

Zero Company is much more cinematic, so the story should be better. Performance is palatable. It's not good, but it's playable, especially considering that I am using the highest settings and native resolution.

I'm still early on in the game (or at least I think I am) so I'm reserving judgment.

Oh and I found out you can change the action wheel in the game settings.

Edited Sunday at 01:58 PM4 days by Sarex

Drova. Kited 2 immortal and hostile NPCs to a mini-boss. They were getting repeatedly KO'd throughout the battle but overcame the boss by the virtue of their immortality, however slow it was, while I sat behind a rock and poked the occasional spawn (my hits were not even visible on the mini-boss' HP bar). Ironically, the mini-boss defeating them counted as my victory, so the side quest was completed as well.

Otherwise, it has been quite story-light - I've been exploring and not seeing many talking NPCs. I finished the session when I reached the Remnants' Camp and befriended a cat there.

I'm on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's final main DLC quest and really don't know how I feel about the DLC itself yet. Just to reiterate patch 2.0 was a very marked improvement to the game, but you do not need the DLC to experience those improvements so I consider them separately, this post will be about the DLC content specificallly.

The good: the DLC areas were neat, being able to finally explore the Iron Forest and the CNPP freely is fantastic. The new weapons are good (though "locking" some of the unique ARs to a red-dot is...a choice).

When it comes to the missions, there's the main mission, and then there's a bunch of new side missions.

The main DLC missions, at best I found them to be "eh", at worst I actively loathe them. They're really more of the same from the base game, but dialed up to 11, which is the problem, at least in my book. But if that was your cup of tea, well, there's more of it. If, on the other hand, you were hoping they'd go back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-style mission design where you are given an objective and then there's different ways to approach it...well, this does not appear to be that kind of game, unfortunately. Everything is on rails, even the labs in SoC arguably gave you more freedom to accomplish your goals than S2 does in its story missions.

The missions have tons of platforming, magically locking/unlocking doors to force head-on engagements, create boss arenas, and/or lock you into sections of the mission (and then usually making those permanently inaccessible after the mission). Then there's the usual nonsensical "action" cut-scenes (please just ditch those if there ever is a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 3), and finally they throw so much loot at you that inventory management becomes more of a problem than the actual enemies (in one of the missions I picked up over 100 bandages(!)). I swear they are just trying to make fun of us loot goblins by actively giving you gear at the start of missions.

The story forces a faction choice, as I feared. As a certified Loner I am absolutely not a fan of these choices, not in the least because the choices in this game tend to negatively impact exploration, my favourite part of the game, by making bases inaccessible (which is also why in this play-through I avoid the mission unlocking Pripyat, getting there through other means). So far it does not appear to have any negative consequences to my standings, though I have heard that picking the other side, does, or maybe it is bugged. Will probably dig more into the DLC storyline when I get through all of it.

The side missions, have been a bit of a mixed bag. A few were literally just going somewhere and then talking to someone, though I guess you could start a fight if you really wanted to. The one involving the new anomaly seems pretty cool so far, but it feels as if progress is gated by completion of the DLC's main story, so more on that one later.

Stability has been good for me in general, though I had a single CTD in the penultimate DLC mission.

Edited Wednesday at 01:59 PM1 day by marelooke

I played Plague Tale Innocence which is an action adventure game set in 14th century France, it also has several necessary stealth mechanics. Its basically about a brother and sister who travel plague ravaged France trying to escape the Inquisition, find a cure for the brother and then free there mother. Its fun and has some good moments. Every map has 2-3 ways you can progress around defeating soldiers or avoiding them and you always find enough resources to use a certain skill or weapon. Its short, 20 hours but worthwhile

It gets  a 63\100 on the  " BruceVC game rating system "

Now Im playing GTA5 again in anticipation of the eventual PC release of GTA6. But this time Im using about 20 mods that just improve the overall mechanics of the vanilla game and visuals. So for example I added a search mod  for dead bodies and car dealership so I can sell any stolen cars. I initially downloaded the enhanced version but realized it doesn't support many of the mods I wanted so I downloaded the legacy version and modding this game is extremely easy. You just have to drag an .ovI file into the mod manager called OpenVI and it configures everything for you or you copy a few files into install folder. Thats it

Its really fun, the humor and memes around US society and culture always make me laugh. The radio stations are the most hilarious and I like playing the different characters because they all have unique missions and NPCs they interact with. The missions, activities and NPC are varied and memorable so I always have lots I want to do

Its early days and Im 20 hours into it but having a blast