cavalcade

Do you like Star Wars? (cries of NOT ANY MORE from the audience)
Do you like Xcom? (scattered whoops)

Well, you're going to be moderately satisfied with Star Wars Zero Company! I've been enjoying this a lot. It's essentially Xcom skinned with Star Wars (the era with the battle droids and gruff helmeted stormtrooper looking guys, rather than the better era) and a lot more American accents than anyone should be comfortable with. But, you really can't go wrong by jamming any skin over the Xcom tactical engine, and what is quite impressive about this is the plot, characters, script and design is actually surprisingly good. Even if it sometimes sounds like you're stuck inside a Costa coffee in downtown Chicago.

The gameplay is exactly as you'd expect. There's permadeath for squadmates, upgrade trees, and specalists across traditional RPG classes overlaid on Star Wars tropes. You have action points. You select actions. There's usually an objective - but it's usually a variant on kill all the baddies.

There's a "teamwork" mechanic where you can build relationships between people in the squad by getting them to support one another. But it combines a little more successfully than Xcom as I did feel quite attached to all the little blighters in the squad, a little more so than just naming a generic Xcom soldier "feltmonkey" and seeing him blown apart by a grenade launcher. It intermingles 3rd person action adventure bits(ish) back at your main base and also in weird traversal bits on the maps. I'm not sure these bits work better than a menu, but they're not too bad. It also has a stream of little moral dilemmas it throws at you back at base that are missions you can take but don't actually play, and read a result of your choice. Again, these work better than you might expect, and sometimes end up in an actual mission occurring, based on your earlier actions.

The plot is a bit Star Trek. It even has those ear gribblies from Wrath of Khan and some people with bad Star Trek head makeup in some sort of cult or other. So that's nice. I was glazing over for a lot of it, but it's well told and delivered.

Performance on PC is a war crime. I think it's UE5, so even though it looks like it should run on a potato it took me throwing my better kit at it to get decent performance. I can't see it running on the Steam Deck (it just runs on the Ally). I assume the PS5/Xbox versions are OK.

So yeah - I figured I'd drop 40 quid on it even though it'll be 15 quid in 3 weeks. If you like Xcom… then I'd say it's worth a go.

Anyone excited about Enhanced Witcher 3 next month? I'm sure it just looks as good as a modded Witcher 3, but even so… the fact it's free is nice.

MMO that isn't an MMO (Wayfinder) Interesting one this - it's about £2.50 on Steam at the moment, and is essentially a game where a publisher backed out and the devs decided to release it anyway. They retrofitted a single/3 player co-op game into what was going to be a microtransaction hell MMO (or maybe something more akin to Destiny/Anthem, with a hub world full of people and then raids with smaller groups into the world to collect items).

It's very much Videogame The Videogame - the plot looks AI generated and the graphics are the sort of pleasant cartoonish thing that runs well on a potato. It has action style RPG combat, a bit like the last Dragon Age. But…. I've been finding it quite fun to play. It feels a bit like a ghost world at times (there's a massive tavern in the hub world that I'm sure they expected to be filled with players, but now feels a bit like a Weatherspoons in Hull on a Tuesday morning). I even think they've stolen the font from another game. The combat though…. I like it. It's fast paced, 3rd person action adventure hack and slash, and each of the 3 characters is satisfying to play. It also doles out XP and upgrades at the same rate Splatoon Raiders does, which I enjoy.

For £2.50 it's sort of fun. And also, quite interesting spotting the seams, retooling and promise that might've been there (not a lot, but some, maybe).

I'm really enjoying Splatoon Raiders still. it's as if someone has distilled the bloat of Borderlands into a game you can play in tiny little blasts. I do find myself coming back to it a lot, as you can go through an entire level, grab some loot and then rebuild your character in about 15 minutes. It's incredibly respectful of your time.

Ahhh, that would be it.

I must admit, I'm now totally checked out on all things superhero, apart from the Robert Downy Jr not being Ironman or something in the new Avengers film. I think what broke me were the three Spiderman movies which all had a very similar name and the need to watch shows about the Hulk's third cousin on Disney Plus to have any idea what was going on. Oh, and Ant Man, which was shite.