Permadeath In Gaming Town

You might have already read something about this game somewhere and it was most likely written by someone who had played something along the lines of X-COM, UFO or XCOM before. Because what kind of gamer hasn't at least played one of those, right? ...ahem. Well, let's not linger on that! Xenonauts has been out of early access for a few weeks now and I played some hours of it. Here's my early impressions – written by someone who shamefully has to admit never to have played an X-com-like game before.

Here's a little anecdote. A few days had passed since the first aliens had appeared, some UFOs had been intercepted and some land battles had been fought. It was tough, but Sgt. Zaytseva had been under my command for a few missions already and had very much proven herself under my command. She had been wounded in action, received a few medals, recovered and was ready to go again. Everything was going well and I had finally gotten the funds and the research to get some better equipment for the men and women under my command. I knew all their faces and all their names and I felt responsible for them. I gave my front line soldiers better armor, making them a bit slower, but more durable to laser weaponry. I equipped one other soldier with a sniper rifle and one with a rocket launcher to have some more tactical options and sent them out to a newly intercepted alien vessel I had shot down somewhere above Mexico. Sgt. Zaytseva was equipped with assault equipment, she was meant to be up close and personal with our grey-faces enemies, wielding a shotgun and having been equipped to survive a shot or two.

The mission was going well and Sgt. Zaytseva had taken cover behind the ruin of a wall, while an enemy was right behind her. My rocket launcher guy, Cpl. Roth, was in the perfect spot to be the hero of the moment, as he locked on the target with a whopping 60% chance to hit him directly – and even if he would fail a direct hit, the area damage of the rocket would be enough to obliterate the alien.

He didn't hit him directly, not even with the area damage. He did hit a certain ruined wall though and neither the wall nor Sgt. Zaytseva were anymore. One risky choice, some bad luck and less then a second turned my well armored veteran into a bloody pile of flesh and bones. It took me a moment to process how much I had messed up just there.

This was a risk I took in the heat of the moment and probably shouldn't have taken, but the game is brutal even if you play safe. If you don't have vision of the enemy during its turn, you'll just have to wait and hope that there won't suddenly be a laser shot coming out of the dark and hitting one of your soldiers, because one shot is all that it takes. If you're well armored, you might survive it – depending on the type of armor you wear and the type of weapon they use. But especially in the first few missions before you can even get better armor, one shot hitting its target is all that it takes. Pvt. Miles never got around to seeing an actual alien on my first mission. He was behind cover, never expecting a shot from that angle and that was it.

This kind of fear for your team is something I haven't experienced in a game before. It's exciting and awesome, but it's also the reason why I'm not playing a lot of Xenonauts at the moment. I have a lot of other stuff going on and not a lot of concentration left when it comes to gaming and this game needs me to concentrate hard or it will kill everyone I hold dear, obliterate humanity and make me watch. It's a dick like that. But I also want to play it because of that. It will just have to wait until I have the concentration and time it demands of me.

This didn't cover a lot of the stuff that goes on in Xenonauts and I should write about its very well written lore, its focus on realism and authenticity, its aerial combat and base building, etc. but as far as first impressions go, this was the thing that impressed me the most and this is also the reason why I haven't touched the game in a few days. If you want to play something epic, brutal and demanding, you should absolutely get this game. I'm looking forward to a time, when I will have the nerve to play more of it.

It's been almost 2 years since orcs had to die last and they were almost ready to move on with their lives, when all of a sudden the killing promises to start again and every orc between here and Mordor sighs deeply and starts to write a testament in dreadful anticipation.

Wait ... that's "Unchained", not "3". Should we be worried? Well, yes. The franchise has fallen ill to the current common cold of gaming. It has caught the MOBA. Luckily, that usually isn't lethal, but it's still annoying. Don't get me wrong, I like League of Legends, DOTA 2, etc. as much as the next guy, but does everything need to be a MOBA these days? Don't we have enough by now? What's next? A Plants vs Zombies MOBA? Probably shouldn't have said that ... Look, a picture!

Anyway, it will be free to play, so might aswell give it a shot. Who knows, maybe it will actually be as much fun as OMD2 has been, or at least it won't be entirely dreadful. Not to get my hopes up though.

My head was spinning as I awoke on the cold floor outside a cryo-chamber. I could not remember my name or where I was, but after dodging the attack of a weird man-dog-thing by jumping out the window, a sudden realisation came over me. I had done this before. I had awoken in that room before, with the cryo-chambers, with the man-dog-thing ... I had fled and ... died. And then I had reawoken in that room and everything had been back to the way it had been before ...

I had no time to think more about the weirdness of that, as I was getting colder by the minute and I needed to find clothes, shelter, anthing that would help me to not freeze to death ... had that been how I had died before..?

After one or two hours of scavenging nearby lodges and small villages in this post-apocalyptic wasteland, I stumbled upon a stranger. At first I feared for my life. A flashback of how someone had beaten my head in with a rock ... in another life ... but then I saw that this man was unconscious. Slowly I walked toward him, fearing that he might awake any moment. I knelt beside him and looked through his stuff. Pants, a shoe, a backpack, a crowbar, a bow without arrows, a laptop without batteries ... I was shivering as I decided to loot him and just as I put on his pants and his one shoe, he opened his eyes and looked at me – first in cofusion, then in terror.

Him being naked, while I now had a crowbar, made him surrender in an instant. I accepted, a bad decision as I now know ... I scavenged some of the broken down buildings in the vicinity and found a red sled without a string attached to it. It wasn't the best vehicle, but it got me some much needed space to store my medicle supplies and general garbage that might later be useful. I had hoped for another shoe. Preferably a left one, but the sled was going to help me alot aswell.

It didn't take long for my mercy to come back with a vengeance. Naked guy was back and he had brought a friend – a friend with a monkey wrench and ... a left shoe! They wanted to fight and I wanted that shoe, so battle ensued.

I abandoned my sled and fought with everything I had, wielding my crowbar like a shining sword. For a moment I was the one-shoed knight ... and then I got a beating. Internal bleeding, fractured ribs, ...

As I was coughing up blood, the pain overwhelmed me and I passed out.

I awoke some time later, still in pain. The sled was gone, the crowbar ... but they had left me my shoe ... it was a bitter thought, but true – they were better men than me, honorable men.

I crawled inside a nearby building and rested, desperatly hoping I might survive this somehow. I slept and bled and slept some more ... and then everything went black.

But it was only black for a short time. Once again I found myself in the room with the cryo-chambers and the man-dog-thing and once again I jumped out into the unknown ...

It is a dangerous world out here and I'm still learning its rules ... but somehow I have a good feeling about this time.

TCGs/CCGs/other acronyms describing games where you beat people up with cards have started sprouting up all over the place in the younger past. I tried Scrolls and loved the way you actually summoned creatures and spells to a battlefield, waking fond memories of games like Etherlords 2, but grew bored rather quickly with the repetitive nature of it's PVP, I tried Hearthstone and enjoyed the joyful, immensly polished graphics (it is Blizzard after all) and the Arena mode, but grew bored of the limited amount of strategy usable due to RNG mechanics.

Just a few days back I stumbled upon another upcoming card-battler by the name of Infinity Wars and decided to give it a shot. It is free to play, so what's there to lose? Well, time. And boy oh boy, did it steal my time. Between 7 different factions (and factionless cards) with their own little campaigns (which unlock you the basic deck of each faction), normal PVP with quite a few play-options to keep you interested and ranked, as well as a draft mode equal to that of Hearthstone, Infinity Wars already kept me playing for a longer time than the other two ever managed.

It is still in beta though and I did find a bug or two, but nothing game-breaking. Would I spend money on it at this point? Not really. Maybe later? Yeah, I very well might. Would I need to spend money on it to stay competetive? Well ... Generally no. The business model seems quite fair. It's the usual deal. You get points by playing and can buy decks, booster packs or entrance into the draft mode through both points and real money. The only thing you can't buy without real money is purely cosmetic (pretty skins for your battlefield and nice art for the back of your cards). The amount of points you get seems fair enough, though I tend to only spend them on draft mode entrance fees anyway, which ends up giving you more bang for your back if you play well enough. Coupled with leaderboards (the weekly leaderboard for the draft mode has someone on first place right now who managed 58 wins before driving home his third defeat and finishing the run). You also get 15 card booster packs for leveling up and more cards for simply logging in once a day, playing three games a day, getting achievements, solving weekly quests, etc.

Oh yeah, why Hogwarts? Because the pictures move. It's still cards, but the way they animated them is nice to look at, aswell as the different battlefields (which change if you play „Location“ cards) and all in all the graphics are nice. It's not Hearthstone, but it's still great. Aside from having some quite grisly cyborg zombies the game also has a certain amount of humor, that made me chuckle more than once. It's mostly found in the flavor texts of the cards themselves and is always worth reading.

Quick update on the Kickstarter of Darkest Dungeon, about which I have written here. It only runs for 36 more hours and the devs have decided to create a new $285.000 goal for 6 new items and put the $400.000 stretch goal of mod support together with the $350.000 goal of cinematics.

Did you ever play a dungeon crawler or rpg of some description and feel that those guys you commanded about the place weren't human enough? They just didn't piss their pants when a skeleton jumped onto them, didn't fear the dark while actually being in a world where fear of the dark is a pretty sensical thing to have due to the fact that there actually are monsters in the shadows? You'd fear the dark, you'd get paranoid and start drinking to numb your senses, you'd piss your pants and run like hell when a Lovecration horror looked you straight into the eyes. That's just human and that's what Red Hook wants your heroes to be like in Darkest Dungeon (they can probably still control their bladders, but the other stuff is in the game!).

It's kickstarting right now and has less then 2 days left. After reaching it's goal in under 24 hours, it has already unlocked quite a few stretch goals, but there is more to grab. Color customization is the next one, followed by cutscenes done in the same fashion as their 2 goosebump inducing trailers.

The game certainly has a unique feel and mood to it, with incredible artwork, spooky music (unless you're watching the Tyler fights video) and seriously, you heard the narrator's voice. Think up your own adjective!

So, if you want to manage a roster of different heroes, send them into frightening dungeons and watch them develop mental illnesses in a turn-based fashion, only to run away in fear or die laughing hysterically during a mental breakdown, this is a game you should consider giving some money! Seriously, watch those trailers and tell me you don't want to have those in the game!

Let's continue with The Swapper. After having written my general thoughts on the game here, it's time to go a bit into detail. But before we do that, one more general thing: The Swapper was developed by Facepalm Games, which sounds - like the game's name itself - kind of funny ... until you actually see the palm itself.

Jesus, look at that creepy ass palm. It looks like something Eddard Stark would pray to ... if Winterfell was in California.

Anyway, back to the game and from here on out: SPOILER WARNING!

You really shouldn't read on, if you intend to play the game yourself or at least watch a playthrough of it! Ok. So, everything I mentioned in the review put aside, there is probably one big thing, I really liked about this game and that is the alien design. If you do aliens and they are pretty much just humans with green skin, kind of small-ish, bigger eyes than your normal person or a really really wrinkled forehead, then go into the corner and feel ashamed, sci-fi-writing person. Aliens should be different, they should actually be as different as inhumanely possible, because that is what they're for! They can be anything and in the process of creating an alien species, you should break your damn brain, trying to think something up, that is really really hard to think up, because it is so goddamn different from what we know! That is why I adore The Swapper and its watchers. They are basicly thinking rocks, but trying to understand them and go a mile in their shoes and see through their metaphorical eyes, is just so so satisfying! The way they try to understand concepts that matter to us, but not to them, like space or death is fuel for our thinking apparatus up top. Just to think about how they understand their broken great chain while not having a concept of space - how they understand us for that matter -, is brilliant.

Having released almost a year ago and having grabbed quite a few shiny awards in the meantime, you probably heard of The Swapper somewhere along the line. Just in case though you live in a place far away from civilisation, have no internet and read this in printed form, brought to you by a carrier pidgeon, here's the gist of it:

You find yourself on a deserted planet and for the most part of the game on an equally deserted space station, everything's pretty run down and the only way to keep going deeper into the unknown and hopefully finding answers - and probably more importantly a way out - is to solve puzzles with your own body and four more of those. "Wha-?" you may ask. Well, the main mechanic of the game is the eponymous device you find at the start of the game. It enables you to create clones of yourself that mimick your every move and enables you further to switch your consciousness to one of said clones. Why those orbs you need to get to up your security rating are hidden behind puzzles, who knows. The person, that designed the space station probably only wanted the smartest people running around dangerous and expensive equipment - that actually doesn't sound like the worst idea someone's ever had.

So, like, is it good? Hell yes. First of all, I'm not the biggest puzzle-game-fan. I enjoyed the Portal series and all, but it's not my main alley and quite a way from my gaming apartment. Still, with a bit of trial and error and quite a bit of brain curling I managed to get through all the puzzles without frustration and it felt damn good to crack some of the harder ones.

Still, even if you really don't like puzzle games, there's quite a few good reasons to play this thing. First of all it's fucking gorgeous. All the graphics are made using clay models and stuff - I don't know much about that, but damn, it looks interesting! The lighting is great, the atmosphere swallows you whole and the soundscape is perfect for the setting. The story is the other big selling point. Though short, it's one of the more interesting sci-fi-stories I've seen or read in the past few years, full of mystery, some interesting twists and a surprisingly satisfying ending. Speaking of the ending though - no spoilers, don't worry - that comes a bit quick. I finished the game in around 4.5 hours, some of my friends finished it in 6 or 7. For 14€ or your regional equivalent, that might not be enough for you. The good thing though, it's part of the current Humble Bundle, which I would easily recommend for every single game in there. Seriously, go buy that. Or if you read this to late, knowing GOG, Steam and the Humble store, it's probably on sale somewhere.

Just a quick introduction as to why the hell this blog exists: I love gaming. It's always been a big part of my life and for some reason I've had the urge to write some of my thoughts on it down - and hurray! I live in a time where people tend to do that not in a private diary, but in the endless corridors of the internet, where other people might - but due to oversaturation probably won't - read those thoughts. So, if you came to this place looking for some random persons thoughts on games old and new, triple-A and indie, then congratulations! You came to the wrong place since I really haven't played a lot of triple-A titles in these past few months. Quite a bit of good old games and quite a bit of indies though, since they tend to pique my interest more in this time and age.