Gaming Gideon
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Gideons GamingLatest Reviews
I’d love to talk about and gush over all of the cool aspects of Wilds, but for a review, there’s largely no point because the overbearing streamlining, hand-holding, and dumbing down of the game completely ruins those cool aspects for me. Anything positive thing I could say would have a hundred caveats waiting in the wings. For the first time, I have a new entry in one of my favorite video game series, and I have absolutely no desire to play it.
Avowed is almost a good game. Its meaningful choices and excellent combat are held back by a trite gameplay loop of open but not-quite-open zones with poor scaling and a bafflingly bad tier system for your gear.
Regardless Oxygen Not Included has some of the most unique and clever gameplay designs I have ever seen. There are very few games where you could put a degree in various sciences to work, but fewer still, are the number of games that could use them and remain playable and fun for those without them. I’m pretty sure that Oxygen Not Included manages to be both, and that’s incredibly impressive.
Monkey sees numbers go up, monkey happy. That’s Balatro in a nutshell. It has an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that manages to activate the same neurons that predatory gambling games and mobile trash love to prey on. The thing is, there’s nothing remotely predatory about Balatro. It’s just a rogue-lite card game with absolutely no stakes. Well, except for the sleep you might lose by playing it well past bedtime.
Uncle Chops Rocket Shop is a game that will make you sweat. It applies a type of pressure I’ve rarely encountered in a video game. Other games will challenge your reflexes, your ability to adapt, and even your ability to think strategically. Uncle Chops Rocket Shop, however, challenges your ability to learn, and apply that learning in various scenarios under the threat of death.
These Doomed Isles identifies as a roguelike city-building deck builder, but I don’t quite agree with it. These Doomed Isles isn’t much of a city builder at all. The buildings you place and the lives of your little citizens mostly boil down to boosting or altering numbers that bear very little resemblance to running any kind of city or village. There’s no simulation going on under the hood.
What do you get when you pit 16 heavily armed strangers against hordes of alien bugs and teamwork-centric objectives? The complete and utter chaos of Starship Troopers: Extermination.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a sandbox-style mech game where you pilot huge hulks of twisted steel and sex appeal. If sex appeal took the form of cannons the size of a Greyhound bus and pods with enough rockets to blot out the sun. You pilot these beautiful machines in either first or third person, but you don’t simply play with a single mech.
Wild Bastards is a rogue-lite strategy shooter and that fact alone is going to make it a divisive experience, especially in today’s dopamine-hungry, power fantasy climate fueled by low attention spans that take offense at the mere mention of rubbing two brain cells together in order to play a game.
Orcs Must Die 3 is a third-person cooperative tower defense game without the towers. Instead, you have an arsenal of traps you can use to set up diabolical combinations of death-dealing hazards that would even make Jigsaw blush underneath his creepy mask.