It’s no secret that I’ve been a little uninspired by the whole Humble Choice thing lately. At this point I’ve probably racked up enough Steam Codes to let me happily play games until I die of old age, and it’s getting harder and harder to be inspired enough to get out a review. So imagine my surprise when the game I picked to take a quick look at for this month’s offering (just so that Krikket wasn’t left reviewing all the games herself) turned out not to result in an hour brushing the surface of a middle-of-the-road 4X game with a theme I’d seen dozens of times before, but to be the result of a dangerous number of late nights trapped in the ‘Just One More Turn’ battle with a classy puzzle-like experience that was exactly what I needed in my life right now.

Terraformers is a turn-based strategy game about starting a colony on an inhospitable red planet. I was drastically misinformed: it doesn’t play like a 4X at all (and doesn’t technically fit the definition either, since there’s no eXtermination), but more like a single player board-game experience, just you and your deck of tricks up against a planet that is trying to kill you. In each individual turn you can’t do all that much: you receive an income, the get a random choice of buildings you could build to add to your hand, decide whether to build any buildings or new settlements that you can afford or fit in your colony or to save your precious resources and adjacency bonuses for something else, and perform a leader-specific action that is usually exploration. There’s a few (ok, quite a few) extra bells and whistles bolted on, but that’s the core gameplay loop that occupies almost all of your time.

If this sounds like every colony-building game you’ve ever played, you’re not all that wrong, but the pieces here just come together with the satisfaction of a well-maintained, air-tight agri-dome. As I finished my first play-through I found myself thinking “well, that was great, but I think I’ve worked it out now, and I doubt it has much replay value”, but now, 13 hours of play time and five campaigns later, I am pleased to report that I has seriously underestimated this little title. Not only are there a number of different overarching targets to achieve on the different missions, there’s a rogue-like system of drip-fed unlocks of new leaders and buildings and a difficulty dial that goes ALL the way up, fueled by increasing demands for satisfaction from your population and an increasing number of out-of-the-blue challenges that will be a big distraction from your primary objectives. Yes, I could (and probably will) spend a lot of time with this one, and all with the satisfying ease of a turn-based strategy game that I can dip in and out of as child- and self-care demands require.

It won’t be a perfect experience for everyone the whole way through. The map is a little unclear at times (give me my Civ V strategy view!), the randomness of the ‘card-deck’ of colony improvements can be frustrating, not having save feature other than 'Save and Quit’ takes some getting used to, and there comes a time towards the end of most campaigns where you’re rolling in resources and it just becomes a drawn-out fight against the clock rather than a skin-of-your-teeth experience, but these weaknesses haven’t added up to enough to mark this one down for me yet.

All-in-all, Terraformers has a huge thumbs-up from me. If you’re at all interested in the theme or this style of game, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. Each turn has so few decisions to make that pressing the ‘End Turn’ button just feels like it takes no time at all. “Oooh, a spaceport, I’ve been looking for one of those! I’ll build it and that habitation block now, then use my exploration to grab a few more bits of titanium, and next turn I’ll finally be able to expand and build that nitrate mine that I’ve had my eye on, and maybe if I get lucky with my next leader I’ll have a chance to start working on that asteroid mining project…”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found poker to be a very interesting game. The bluff and the attempt to get inside your opponents heads as they try to do the same to you is what elevates it, but the game mechanics themselves, the hands you’re hoping to make and beat your opponent with, are a little uninspiring, don’t you agree?

As a player of Aces & Adventures you have a standard (but gorgeous) deck of cards, supplemented by your character’s ability cards, and you must make poker hands that defeat those of the various monsters you meet on your adventure. Combat ensues regularly, as one would expect for a game with an RPG theme, and when it does, you take turns attacking and defending, making the best poker hands you can (aided by your character ability cards) and hoping that your cards are bigger than theirs. If you have an ace, you’ll probably win and inflict one damage point. To do more damage, you can play a pair or a triple, if you’ve been lucky enough to draw the right cards. But between each of your turns they get a turn too, and you’ll have to play cards that beat their attacks too, so good luck being able to build up a high scoring straight or flush when you’re constantly being forced to play, even when it ruins your hand. Even if you do, there’s a good chance you’ll be forced to waste all that massive damage on something underwhelming. There’s just a lack of options available to you as a player.

It seems like a strange choice to me to base the mechanics of Aces & Adventures, this fantasy RPG themed deck-builder, on poker hands. It’s the sort of idea that sounds good when you say it out loud, “A deck-building game based on the most famous card game!”, but falls down when it comes to implementation. In a one player game against a computer, there’s no bluff, no headology, just the hands, missing even the questionable joy that could be gained from counting cards, as you and your opponent draw from different decks.

There’s all the standard rougelite deckbuilding elements here, increasing difficulty, different campaigns, diverse abilities, a bunch of different strategies, and it’s obviously been carved with love; the sound is really satisfying, the artwork is some of the most cohesive and enjoyable I’ve met in these sorts of games and what I’ve seen of the story in the couple of hours that I’ve played seems perfectly serviceable too. But personally I’ve found it hard to get over that glaring fundamental flaw in the gameplay, that poker just isn’t that good. I just didn’t find exploring the different card combinations or things your characters can do to be worth wading through this much darn poker, and that coupled with an occasionally clumsy UI experience has been enough to make me close in frustration every time I’ve picked it up.

If you’re a deck-building fanatic and have been looking to try something new, give Aces & Adventures a look; it’s got all the bells and whistles and a new spin on the genre, and all for a bundle price lower than the lowest steam price to date. But if, like me, you’re just a dabbler in the genre, I doubt you’ll stick around to find out how much this one has to give.

Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is a chess variant video game that I agreed to play for this month’s Blaugustine Humble Bundle review.

Now that we’ve got rid of 95% of the potential readership with that promising opening paragraph, I’m pleased to report to the other 5% of you that we really are going to talk about a game best described as ‘chess but the king has a gun’. In Shotgun King, the player acts as a single piece that moves on the 8x8 board as a king, but instead of capturing fires an arc of shrapnel at nearby enemy pieces, seeking to clear a way towards and destroy his opposite number, a more conventional chess king. Early levels are relatively trivial, but winning a ‘throne’ requires defeating the enemy king a dozen times, with a choice of new powers for both yourself and the enemy army that change the nature of the battle and increase the level of challenge between each successive board in a way that will be very familiar to anyone who has played any rougelite title lately.

In the fine tradition of those who are lovers but not very good players of chess, I did a lot of exploration of Chess Variants in a past life, thus I have played the 1921 game Rifle Chess, in which pieces have guns and can capture each other without moving into their square and putting themselves in danger, and which makes for a decidedly un-chesslike experience. You can thus imagine my surprise to find that the creatively named Shotgun King actually requires a lot of chess-like thinking to succeed. Each type of enemy unit moves on a timer, allowing numerous enemy pieces to attack at once, potentially producing volatile situations where your king is under attack from multiple pieces, requiring forward planning to ensure that you’ll be able to escape the ensuing checks in the next move. It took me a significant number of attempts to win my first throne, and once I’d worked out a plan that worked I was able to win a second one immediately afterwards using a similar strategy.

I’m not sure that bodes particularly well for the longevity of this one in my game rotation, as I doubt the small differences between runs caused by the varying capabilities of the different weapons in the game or even the more significant differences caused by the random selection of ability cards encountered will give enough variety to encourage replayability, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find this funky little puzzle-ish number down here in one of the bottom two spots in the monthly bundle, an area that isn’t traditionally all that promising. This one’s not worth the bundle price on its own, with a current cost of $12 AUD and an lowest cost since release last year of just over $7, but in a bundle that includes some more heavyweight titles it’s a nice little bonus, and I reckon it’s well worth trying out if you have any interest in chess games that you don’t have to take very seriously.

When I think about golf, I think about long sedate afternoons in the warm sun, careful tactics born out of long experience and familiarity with the course, and silly trousers. I don’t generally associate it with synth music, racing cars and explosions. I’m generally all up for subverting expectations, but I can’t say that Turbo Golf Racing, the latest game I offered to review for our ongoing monthly Humble Choice project, inspired much in me.

Rocket League, the world’s most popular arcade car-based sports game, works because soccer is a back-and-forth game of roaring crowds, adaptive tactics, two teams of players going at in hammer and tongs, and big heart-in-your-mouth moments. Golf doesn’t have the same tensions, and so no matter how smooth and slick the physics engine, a game based around hitting a ball towards a hole just lacks the tension and the euphoric heights of a game like Rocket League, even if you add some rockets and cool flip tricks. After an hour with this, learning the basics in the tutorial, trying some time trials and finally a half-dozen online games, I felt like I’d seen everything the game had to offer, from neon sand trap to novelty trick shot, and didn’t find anything worth keeping on playing for.

Another advantage that Rocket League has is an ideal price tag (free on Epic Games), compared to the $27 AUD you’d to shell out for this one if you didn’t get it in a bundle and decide to check it out just in case. It’s hard to compete with the big players, but if you’re going to try to make a game that’s so openly derivative, even if it looks great, you’re going to get comparisons, and they’re not going to be flattering.

Sadly, it seems that most players agree. Right now, there’s only 15 players online total, and the daily average is about 20, even after the bump from being included in this month’s Humble Choice. Thankfully the latest update added bots, so you can amaze a lobby of them with your car-racing skills instead of waiting endlessly for a match if you really want to, but unless any of the car customization unlocks include silly trousers, you’re gonna have to count me out.

We’re used to the last few items in a Monthly Bundle being niche titles with limited appeal, and this month is no exception. This is one early-access arcade car golfing title you can definitely afford to skip.

For this month’s Blaugustine Humble Monthly review, I elected to play and talk about Warhammer 40000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, a mouthful of a title that seems to allege that this is a sequel to 1998’s Warhammer 40000: Chaos Gate. I find this very funny, as the original was closely based on 1994 X-COM, while Daemonhunters is very closely based on the XCOM reboot games, so it definitely seems like someone working in the megalithic publishing giant that is the Warhammer mill has a sense of either irony or humour.

Now that I’m reminded of it, I do vaguely remember playing Chaos Gate back in the day, but I had to scour my memory to work out which of the 651 games and 16 turn-based tactical games released under the Warhammer 40000 label since 1992 it was. There are just so many 40K games that most of them blend together into to one big, chaotic mess. Games Workshop’s fire-bombing approach to games means that one has to live under a rock to remain ignorant of their big bad universe. I guess it’s working as an advertising campaign for their tabletop game, but very few of their games have an ongoing appeal and fanbase once the next game with space marines in it comes along, as it inevitably will in the next year or so.

It’s a pity that this one will inevitably suffer the same fate, as the creators of Daemonhunters have taken almost the exact model of XCOM, from the tactical maps with full and half-cover where a small squad of armoured badasses take on innumerable enemy hordes, to the Avenger/Baleful Edict mobile command platform complete with the geo-/starscape where your resources can be allocated to best counter the alien/chaos invasion, the science lab/librarium where you can develop improved tech, the workshop/manufactorum where you can put hait in the hands of your soldier, heck, even the disembodied player character referred to only as ‘Commander’, and adapted it in a compelling way that fits the grimdark 40K universe to a t, while making a range of changes to the XCOM system that make the combat feel more impactful. So far, it feels like a good game in it’s own right.

Instead of XCOM’s shooting-ends-the-turn model, your Grey Knights have a set of action points, each of which can be used for movement, combat, or abilities. This lets you focus on one target or destroy a larger number of lesser enemies, which makes your superhuman warriors feel strong and versatile. There’s also a greatly reduced impact of dice rolls, with my beloved XCOM roll-to-hit mechanics excised in favour of a set amount of damage, reduced by range and obstacles, but able to be increased by critical hits or by expending special psyker abilities once a turn. The ability to turtle up and wait for the enemy to rush you is also greatly reduced, with Overwatch only usable in a small arc, and small increases to the abilities of the enemy units every few turns encouraging quick and decisive play. While we’ve seen changes like these in turn based tactical games this this before, the combination feels appropriate for the Space Marines, and I think it gets the difficulty and the feel of an unrelenting, savage universe that you need to make a 40K game work spot on.

Daemonhunters does double down on the 40K aesthetic in the cutscenes and the setting, and the backgrounds and the character models, with all the fungus and tentacles everywhere like you’d expect from a game focusing of the forces of chaos too. I think it looks very cool, I really enjoyed letting the cutscenes play out just to get a few more seconds of spaceships and metal and eldritch horrors. It sets the atmosphere well, but for my money it’s sacrificed a little too much clarity and readability, particularly of the combat UI, on the altar of badassery, and could afford to dial it back just a little in favour of a little more XCOM simplicity.

I haven’t had a chance to play all that much of Daemonhunters just yet, but I will be returning to play through more of the storyline, and if you’re a tactical game fan like me and don’t mind a little gratuitous grimdark then I think it’d be well worth your time to check it out too. Especially given that this is a Warhammer game with the traditional Warhammer tax in the price, so getting it as part of the Humble Monthly bundle is saving you a big wodge of the hefty $64.95 AU price tag.

Hero’s Hour is one of a slew of modern homages to the Heroes of Might and Magic games, a series I spent a dangerously large amount of time playing as a child. If you went outside during your childhood at all or weren’t blessed enough to have long afternoons to waste in the late 90’s and early 00’s, you might not really remember the series, but I spent countless long day playing (and inevitably not finishing) Hotseat games of Heroes III,and to a lesser extent Heroes II, so each and every aspect of them are burned for all eternity into neurons that might otherwise be able to be devoted to hand-eye co-ordination or fashion sense. Yes, HoMM has a lot to answer for.

Hero’s Hour has taken the HoMM formula and stuck to the bare bones as closely as what appears to be largely a one-man passion project realistically could. The conceit and mechanics are the same: Build a diverse little gang of generals at your home town, use their daily turn-based movement points to explore the map, gain control of production buildings, fight monsters to purloin treasures, set up supply lines and collect experience to level up their abilities, all while you upgrade your towns to produce more and better soldiers on your way to world domination by squashing all enemies in your path.

The 8-bit sprites aren’t exactly 3DO’s cutting edge 3D graphics of H3, but they’re not all that pale a shadow of H2’s overall world map, though personally I have to say I think the spritework lacks a lot of the warmth and charm of that game’s art, which really was fantastic for a game released some 27 years ago.

But where HoMM was a streamlined product to the point that each game was much the same as another, something that (as I can say with the benefit of hindsight brought by no longer being ten years old) is probably not ideal, Hero’s Hour has invested heavily into an unhealthy level of complexity. There are twelve factions (H3 has 8), each with wildly different play styles and at least eight different units (H3 has 7), each with a host of different abilities and hidden stats and interactions, and the towns are bigger (and more confusing).

.And the combat. HoMM’s turn-base hex-grid combat between stacks of soldiers could be pretty silly at times, especially if you were facing off against another human, but it could also make you feel clever and instill a sense of awe when you finally manage to field your pinnacle unit and make a mess of the enemy’s battlelines. Hero’s Hour’s hundreds of sprites throwing themselves at each other over and over admidst flights of arrows pixellated fireballs and fountains of blood and eventually winking into nonexistence, while admittedly impressive, is just a mess.

So I haven’t played that much of Hero’s Hour. Maybe it’s a diamond in the rough, but it just couldn’t hold my attention long enough to find out. But it did make me re-download my old copy of HoMM 3 (currently $3.75 AUD on gog.com, less than a quarter of a month’s subscription to the Humble Monthly), so I’ve that to thank it for, and if you don’t hear from me for a few months you’ll know why. I wouldn’t recommend that you get this month’s bundle for Hero’s Hour, but if you’ve got it anyway and you’ve been aching for a little turn-based spritey 4X fun, well, it’s still basically Heroes of Might and Magic, and it’s not even made by Ubisoft, so maybe take it for a spin.

Hopefully you feel like less of an old man yelling at a cloud than I do these days.

Krikket has been helming the Blaugustine Humble Monthly reviews while I’ve been away, and I thought it would be nice to dip my toe back in the blogpool by contributing to that project again after a couple of months off. Though there wasn’t a big title that got me all that excited this time around, and I look forward to seeing everyone’s reviews to see if I’m sleeping on something that is secretly my jam, I felt for my own contribution this time around I thought I should pick something smaller and more manageable.

Thus, I put my hand up to talk about Shady Part of Me, which promised to be a pretty little jaunt that was only supposed to be five hours long. I’m only an hour or so in thus far, but I think I’ve gotten a good handle on it and have played as much as I’m interested in playing. It’s just not grabbing me. To explain exactly why, let’s nitpick away at the selling points from the Steam Page:

Play with light and shadows, switching between 2D and 3D gameplay at will

In Shady Part, you guide a girl and her curiously independent shadow through a dreamscape made of toys and books and strange hospital-like surroundings . The girl can only travel in the dark and the shadow can only travel in the light, and they must manipulate objects in the world to allow each other to progress. While you can choose which character to control at any time, the nature of the mechanics means that you don’t really have any free will about how to solve any of the puzzle if you want to progress. I’m also compelled to mention it’s merely switching between 2D and ‘other type of 2D’, as one girl can walk on a plane and the other can walk and jump on a different plane, but neither have 3D movement. This isn’t Mario 64.

Your ability to rewind time will help you get you through all situations

This ability isn’t a mechanic of the game or anything, it’s just the save mechanic. When you make a mistake you can wind back to get it just right. It does the job and it does it well, but I wouldn’t say it’s a feature. In a game where there’s lots of twitch movement this could be a life saver, but in this sedate, simple little game it’s just not really worth talking about.

Explore surreal environments envisioned in a unique watercolor style

Apart from the character model that is just a bunch of snaky hair in a dress and does absolutely nothing for me, Shady Part is a very pretty game. The use of light and shadows is excellent and the whole thing is visually appealing, even when it’s trying to do drab hospital corridors, and the shadow character flitting back and forth in the background is perfect. I wouldn’t say that it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before, but it is very nice.

Solve contemplative puzzles to break the dream

‘Contemplative’ seems to be code for ‘kinda boring’. I’ve only played out two of the five acts, but so far there haven’t been any puzzles that have taken more than a rudimentary examination to solve. The ability to manipulate light to allow the characters to pass through the world could be a real challenge, but so far, each interaction with an object in the world is too so controlled as to reduce each problem to trial and error, which removes any sense of accomplishment and makes all the different puzzles just blur into one vaguely unsatisfying blob.

Experience an introspective narrative journey like no other

I feel like the ‘sad girl with a strangely mature but high-pitched lilting voice with no friends retreats into a make believe world of books and toys and has to learn to discover her own self worth’ trope, while a worthwhile topic for a game, has been done in a more compelling way in games like Iris and the Giant, and Epistory. If that’s a theme that really speaks to you, then maybe check this one out, but I can’t help but think that there’s ways to spend five hours that I’ll get more out of than I will playing any more of Shady Part of Me.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun was an absolute revelation for me when I got it in the Humble Monthly back in 2017. Here was a game that I'd never heard of, and certainly would never have purchased, and it captivated me: I really played the heck out of it. It was very much the game that sold me on maintaining my Humble subscription: I might have come for a good price for Total Warhammer, but I stayed for the ‘undiscovered’ gems like Shadow Tactics.

It's a simple premise for the type of game I'm sure we've all seen plenty of times before. Infiltrate an enemy position by sneaking around without being spotted by the guards, or you'll alert the local garrison and be forced to fight against overwhelming numbers. There are three types of guards, Soldiers, who aren't very bright, Straw Hats, who won't abandon their posts, and Samurai, who can't be easily killed by conventional means. Between these in different combinations, both stationary and on regular patrol routes, the designers managed to craft a series of differing and challenging puzzles that managed to keep me interested throughout the campaign and more, as I went back and ;played many painstaking extra hours of save-scumming1 to try and complete the additional badges for completing extra challenges on each map.

The drip-feed of ever-growing complexity over the course of the 13-level campaign, in which you protect the Shogun from the mysterious Kagesama by sneaking and quitely murdering your way past hundreds of his underlings from the undergrowth, is the key to keeping the game engaging. You start out controlling Hayato the ninja, who can climb undetected on rooftops, momentarily distract guards by throwing stones, and kill from a distance with his shuriken; and Mugen the samurai, who is stuck on the ground but can lure guards with his trusty bottle of sake, overpower enemy samurai and carry great weights. As the game progresses, you gain control of Takuma the sniper, Yuki the thief and Aiko the kunoichi, who each have their own range of special skills that can get you out of (or into) a sticky situation. Breaking a map into a series of interconnected puzzles, carefully positioning your units and then executing four or five simultaneous …executions… to clear knot of guards that had previously felt impenetrable makes you feel very clever, and I had a ball with this game for something like 50 hours before I let it lie, satisfied with the experience once I felt like I’d seen everything the game had to offer, even if I hadn’t achieved total mastery2.

So when Aiko’s Choice came along at the end of last year, a stand-alone expansion to Shadow Tactics, I did something very unOwllike and purchased it, for actual money, at full price, on release. I didn’t have any time to play it right then, being a new father and all, so it sat quietly on the shelf of unloved games in the Steam Library until the news of it’s inclusion in the November 2022 Humble Bundle.

This was a good excuse so try it out, so I installed Aiko’s Choice, and while I enjoyed diving back into this one and spending a little time enjoying Shadow Tactics again, I’m disappointed to have to report that it was a slightly underwhelming experience. Maybe the five-year-old nostalgia goggles were doing their work, but I think the main issue is that while the original game had some excellent pacing and progression, this one just…doesn’t. There’s only three new missions (plus three very short story-missions that really don’t count) that took me only five hours or so to complete, and they introduce nothing new to the Shadow Tactics formula, with no new weapons, characters or enemies. Even the plotline (and the titular Choice) lack any meaningful dramatic tension, though I won’t get into that any further here for spoilerific reasons.

I suppose it was kind of fun to have a map3 in which you can use all five of the player characters together, something that was vanishingly rare in the original game, but that’s not enough of a draw to sell a title that costs $29. In fact, I can’t see a reason why this would be a standalone title at all, given that I think that it just adds the grand total of two enemy models to the game. It could and should have been DLC for the original game, and releasing it as a standalone title just makes me a little less fond of Daedalic as a publisher and Mimimi as a developer, companies that had previously earned themselves some goodwill in my book for their otherwise excellent offerings. I would have loved to see an expansion that offered either mod support or just some new game mechanics, and the sameness of this title left me feeling a little cheated. While I’m glad that I played it and I enjoyed the few hours spent clearing it, I can’t honestly recommend this one.

My verdict? Play the original Shadow Tactics (it’s had a few big sales lately and is free on Epic this week) but don’t bother with this one unless you’ve cleared most of the challenges in that and are desperate for some more. If you’re getting Humble Choice this month, it’s worth an install, but if you’re like me you likely think that the other games in the bundle are all very underwhelming prospects then you’re probably going to give the bundle a skip this time around, and I don’t think Aiko’s Choice should change your mind. Me, I’m pressing PAUSE on the bundle for the first time in six years of continuous subscription.

Many soldiers have fallen along the way, but the final battle of the succession game of XCOM 2 that we began back in April 2021 is finally nigh.

I knew that we must have been getting close, because we were reaching the end of the tech tree1 and we have a good complement of military demi-gods in our barracks, but I was still caught by surprise by the bevy of cutscenes that heralded the final sequence of missions when I stumbled across them in the course of what I thought was a normal turn.

I’d started the turn like usual, spending everyone’s hard-earned cash on a bunch of useless upgrades, and when the trigger came for the penultimate mission, I damned the consequences and leapt right in, equipping and deploying what I considered to be our best threesome of soldiers before I remembered that injuring them here would mean that we’d be forced to go into the final mission without them.

And injure them I did.

Thus began Operation Storm Hole (25:00-44:00)

It started poorly, with Naithin, our only cloaked soldier, taking a wrong turn while exploring the rooftops and leaving the others to face the first pod by themselves. Rakuno soon got a face full of laser baton from a Stun Trooper who had one health point remaining after Magi took out its legs with an overwatch shot, but exacted revenge on the Trooper and his Captain in quick order regardless.

Magi then triggered the next pod and Naithin took out the Archon with prejudice. The Viper soon followed it, but not before it had sprayed the ground with a liberal helping of acid. Magi then sprinted heedlessly headlong into a close range ambush by a Muton and Andromedon who had been hiding in the shadow of the nearby ADVENT transport, and on the way to rescue her by deploying the emergency mimic beacon, Naithin stepped in the Viper’s acid and managed to infect Rakuno with it as well. Good teamwork all around, squad.

That pod also eventually died in short order to the overwhelming firepower of XCOM, but not before a rather comical sequence of Naithin and the Andromedon both flailing wildly and missing their melee attacks. The fireteam then moved on to the final sequence of the battle and crushed the last three Archons with extreme prejudice and no small number of critical hits, clearing the way for Rakuno to complete the final hack and trigger the ending cutscene.

It was a dramatic victory, but it left Naithin and Rakuno in no fit state to contest the final battle, which takes place immediately after this one and doesn’t leave any opportunity for a visit to the medbay. As such, I called my permitted once-a-mission mulligan, rewound time back to the start of my turn, and played through the start of the round again so that I could send the B-team on this mission instead.

Thus began Operation Falling Gears (59:00-78:00)

The B-team consisting of Col. Sofia “Black Widow” Vasilyeva (Medic), Lt. Svetlana “Hound Dog” Sidorova (Assault), and Lt. Klaus “Mailman” Weiss "aka “UnwiseOwl III” dropped onto a differently configured but familiar-feeling rooftop shortly later. Initial progress was fast, with no alien pods sighted for the first three turns, which gave me a bit nasty feeling that everything was about to happen all at once.

That feeling turned out to be depressingly accurate, with Black Widow triggering two pods while Hound Dog was stuck in an advanced position. It might not have been too bad if either Hound Dog had an automatic melee attack or Mailman had the Killing Zone ability, but unfortunately as they’re only Lieutenants they were forced to stand aside while the combined Mech/Andromedon/Sectoid/Shieldbearer pod first destroyed Widow’s cover and then her health bar. If not for advanced armour, there’s no way that she’d still be with us.

Unfortunately, the big explosions in her vicinity caused the game to bug out and lock her in place, forcing me to use my most experienced soldier as a stationary turret for the rest of the mission. Not exactly what I’d had in mind, but it wouldn’t be an XCOM game without a potentially game-breaking bug every now and then. Weiss and Widow combined to kill off the Mech, then Hound got a much-needed crit to take out the Shieldbearer, bringing the enemy forces down to two. Those two were not very effective, however, with the Andromedon missing what must have been a very high-percentage shot to kill Widow, who was being forced to wait out of cover for her seemingly inevitable doom, and the Sectoid opting for a psionic wave instead of a plasma blast, which panicked the medic but resulted in giving her a free attack, which she used to dispatch her attacker. The RNG and the rocket launcher were really doing some work for the side of humanity in this turn.

Leaving Widow to clean up the Andromedon, Hound Dog pressed on, triggering the next pod, but the Mailman delivered a clean headshot to take out the Viper, and Hound’s overwatch shot dealt some serious damage to the Archon, which chose to retreat somewhere into the fog rather than charge into the fray. With the Widow licking her wounds on the bridge, the Mailman and the Hound Dog moved on and took out a defensive turret, but the remaining Archon and the last mob never showed their face, allowing Mailman to waltz up to the terminal, post his virus to the psionic network and end the mission right there. It hurt me a little to leave enemies alive on the map, but with nothing to gain from killing them off I opted to cut the video just that little bit shorter for your sake, dear long-suffering viewer.

I know it’s a little premature given that the final fight is yet to happen, but since this will be my last post it seems like the appropriate place to share my experiences of this blogger succession game in general.

Like the Civilisation VI game we played together, I’ve greatly enjoyed reading other people’s perspectives on our shared story and the different play styles and priorities that it exposed me to compared to how I'd play the game by myself, and while it’s been disappointing that so many of our players fell by the wayside, and having to re-learn how the game worked every time between turns that were often months apart2 was a bit rubbish, I’m glad we did it together and would definitely be up for another one. Even another XCOM 2 one, honestly, but if we were to do it I’d like to try out a more demanding difficulty level.

A huge vote of thanks goes out to Naithin for organising the project, which has been a good impetus to blog in quiet months and a welcome change of pace in busy ones, and I’ll look forward with bated breath to the next one.

I also look forward to sitting down and playing the War of the Chosen expansion that’s been sitting in my Steam Library unplayed for a couple of years, now that I no longer have to worry about it potentially corrupting any shared save files.

And then, Long War 2 beckons.

Being October, the October 2022 Humble Choice bundle had some spooky titles in it, so I was very glad to be able to ask some of my fellow Blaugustines to help me out reviewing them so that I didn’t have to.

This month’s games:

• Deathloop
  Naithin of Time to Loot got stuck in a slick, murdery time loop and had a pretty good time doing it.

• Monster Train
  Magi of Indiecator gave a rave review of this deckbuilder when it came out last year.

  UnwiseOwl of Leaflocker was less complementary on picking it up for the first time this month.

• Little Hope
  Kluwes of Many Welps explored a creepy town and then willingly chose to go back for more.

• Disciples: Liberation
  A few of us meant to give this one for a spin this month, but none of us got around to it. Take from that what you will.

• Maid of Sker
  Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts, horror game enthusiast, didn’t find much to be enthusiastic about in the bundle’s other horror offering.

• Epic Chef
  Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts, resident cooking game specialist, wasn’t all that enamoured with some aspects of this farming sim.

• Railroad Corporation
  Paeroka of Nerdy Bookahs found this chilled out train network management game to be a good way to spend some time.

• Golf Gang
  No-one wanted to talk about this zany multiplayer party game. Just not really our scene, I guess.

While the reviews in general were pretty mixed this time around, there is a few very positive ones amongst them, so I think we’re all in agreement that we’re pretty glad we got the bundle this month even if not everything is our cup of tea.

We didn’t quite get through all the titles this month, and would really appreciate some more fellow reviewers to help us cover all the bases next time around, so if you’d like to help out, please let us know over in the Blaugust Discord.

Welcome to the second installment of our monthly Humble Choice review series.

I asked my fellow Blaugustines to help me tackle the September 2022 Humble Choice bundle, with each blogger writing about their chosen game or games in their own way, some straight reviews, some retrospectives, some first impressions. Hopefully these glances into these games from your fellow gamers will be useful, either by helping you make up your mind about the bundle if you're on the fence this month, or just encouraging you to try out something that would normally fall by the wayside.

This month:

• Crusader Kings III

  Paeroka of Nerdy Bookahs has played more than 300 hours of CKIII, so she knows what she’s talking about.

  UnwiseOwl of Leaflocker has only played 100 years of CKIII, so he doesn’t really have any idea at all.

• Just Cause 4
  StalkingVengeance of Cubic Creativity lamented the decline of a once-great game franchise.

• The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk
  UnwiseOwl of Leaflocker didn’t know anything about this turn-based tactics title before being pleasantly surprised by it.

• Forgive Me Father
  Kluwes of Many Welps was intrigued by the art and atmosphere of this Lovecraftian shooter.

• Crown Trick
  UnwiseOwl of Leaflocker spent a few hours trying to find his way in this little rougelike.

• Descenders
  Naithin of Time to Loot cracked out the controller to become a mountain biker from the safety of his own couch.

• Industria
  Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts gave up on this shooter before she even got a chance to shoot anything.

• Shapez
  Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts returned to Shapez.
  

September 2022 was a strong month for the Humble Choice. Whatever type of gamer you are, you’re bound to find something right up your alley and also something slightly out of your wheelhouse to explore. It’s definitely a bundle worth getting.

Did we convince you to buy (or to pass on) the bundle? Did we miss anything that you think we should have covered? Are you a blogger interested in being involved in Blaugust or in reviewing a game with us next month? Let us know by sharing your thoughts in the comments below.

I can think of no better way to celebrate than to dive right in to my traditional favourite starting spot, the Duchy of Brittany, and see how different this game is to its predecessor, Crusader Kings II, which I have played the heck out over the years. So I loaded in to the 867AD start date as:

Count Alfrond mab Gestin of Cornouaille
The situation in the Kingdom of Brittany is tense. King Salomon is anxious to consolidate his personal power as a bulwark against the rising influence of the French King to the East, so he turns his greedy eyes upon the lands of his vassals. When he attempts to seize the territory of Prince Pascueten of Vannes, brother of his predecessor as King, his vassals Princes Pascueten, Prince Guruant of Rennes and Count Alfrond of Cornouallie rise up against him as one and narrowly defeat his forces in the field, forcing him to abdicate his throne in favour of his son, the new King Riwallon. Riwallon, being his father’s son, soon attempts something similar, and is eventually forced by the Princes to abdicate in favour of his own son Alan in turn, but Count Alfrond takes advantage of their depleted military forces by seizing Rennes in 871. When Alan also attempts to participate in the fine family tradition, he is also forced to abdicate by Princes Pascueten and Guruant to abdicate the throne, and Count Alfrond again takes advantage of the situation and seizes the County of Pentievre from the weakened royal family in 875. When he dies at age 79 in he now controls the largest military force in Brittany, even as Pascueten finally ascends to his brother’s throne.

At first glance, the games and their mechanics are almost identical. The county borders are the same, the colour palette is the same, the music features revamped versions of the same tracks. It's so similar that Mrs. Owl, not traditionally someone who notices much detail about a video game, walked by when I had it open and wondered why I was playing that old game again. There are definitely differences, but Paradox has definitely gone the “if it ain't broke don't fix it” route with this one. My question, though, is if it ain't broke, maybe it didn't need to be replaced, either?

King Ulfret mab Alfrond of Brittany
Ascending to two of his father’s three counties at the age of 39, Count Ulfret, a diplomatic genius, quickly moved to continue the good work that his father had begun, disposing of the last power base of House de Rennes and establishing himself as Duke and finally as King of Brittany by August 895. After his young wife Perienne died in a siege laid by the neighbouring Earl of Léon, he married Cnes, a woman of low birth who was acting as his physician, but some say that he never forgot his first love, and that he began the crusade that would last most of the rest of his life in her honour. He would live to see the capture of the county of Léon for Catholicism from the grasp of the Ásatrú pagans, finally uniting all of Brittany from Ushant to the Loire.

All the mechanics you know and love from CKII make an appearance, the council, claims and warfare, buildings, and the tweaks to all of these are solid and sensible without being groundbreaking. Each region has been broken down into subregions for each settlement, which provides an extra level of micromanagement for armies. I'm not completely convinced that this is a good change, as the army micro is still as uninspiring a part of the game as it has always been, but I can imagine that the additional tactical possibilities are interesting to someone out there. My main complaint about this sub-regional change to the map is that it means that it's harder to navigate and interact with settlements, particularly as the ruler UI gets in the way, so I find myself longing for the ability to use something akin to a Civilisation VI's strategy view rather than the more realistic map of the default game.

Queen Tandrec ‘the Kind’ of Brittany
With Brittany secured, the only daughter of King Ulfret, groomed from a young age to take over his throne, rules the Kingdom for 37 years, presiding over a period of great unity and expansion. After securing Brittany’s borders from the heathens by capturing Montaigu, she maintained good relations with the splintered French kingdoms to the east, and instead aimed her advances to the North, securing territory in Cornwall, eastern Ireland and southern Wales by exploiting alliances gained with the Petty Kings of Wessex and East Saexe by marrying them to her daughters.

In another change that I'm not sure I love, fleets have been removed from the game, so armies can just travel over water wherever and however they want to. I see the reason for this simplification, but it does mean that each region is much like any other for defensibility purposes, and that you're much more likely to be swamped by distant allies of your enemies called into your wars. Some of the other simplifications and demystifications of systems, like the progress bars for your schemes and council actions, are huge steps forward, so I guess I’ll just have to trust that this is a positive change too.

King Alfond ‘the Impaler’ of Brittany
With the nickname ‘impaler’ earned during his wars durign his long wait as heir to the throne, King Alfrond and his brother and right hand Duke Iudon of Cornwall ruled with an iron fist. Though his short reign saw the greatest extent of the borders of Brittany thus seen, pushing into parts of northern England and Ireland and southern Scotland, Alfrond’s political machinations, particularly his plotting to see his nephew by his youngest sister Anauhouguel crowned King of France and Lotharingia, caused him to be widely feared both inside and outside Brittany, and the stress involved may have eventually resulted in his early death at the age of just 55.

For me, the best new addition is the stress system, which penalises the characters for acting against their nature. In CKIII you can’t just try to develop a friendly and just character for the stat bonuses, as doing so will come with massive penalties if you ever want to do anything underhanded like murder or torture, and this is Crusader Kings that we’re talking about, so you generally want to do things like that on a regular basis. This forces you to play the game in different ways based on your player character’s predilections, which adds a lot of variety. I haven’t managed to have any truly terrible stress-related travesties happen to me just yet, but I look forward to experiencing them.

King Mortiern mab Alfrond of Brittany and Wales
In contrast to his father’s close partnership with his brother Duke Iudon of Cornwall, King Mortiern’s reign was marked by ongoing struggles for control with his vassals, particularly Duke Iudon’s son Pêr, whose holdings through his mother’s inheritance in northern England made him arguably the most powerful man in the country. Mortiern was on the back foot from the beginning, losing his father’s Duchy to his brother Prince Matuid, and the County of Vannes, seat of much of his military power, to the control of his younger brother Prince Gestin, and being forced to marry his aunt Condeleu to secure his position. Though Mortiern managed to stay above water through the careful application of influence and even managed to grow his control in Wales during his reign, his political weakness and some hasty appointments resulted in the Duchies of Ulster and Strathcylde passing out of the control of House de Cornouaille, and boded ill for the reign of his unpopular and crippled son Conogan when he ascended the throne.

The change that I find most frustrating is the gating of many mechanics behind cultural and historical innovations, meaning that any meaningful progression through the game is glacially slow, particularly with an early start date in a less developed place like, I dunno, Brittany. While it makes a lot of sense historically, locking different types of succession behind technology, something that is more or less out of the player’s control, greatly reduces the options in the game. For an example, by now in CKII I’d almost certainly have instituted Primogeniture, or at least Tanisty, but in CKIII I’m stuck with Gavelkind and a fracturing realm for the forseeable future, and with very little control over which titles will be inherited by which children, which sometimes has confusing and irritating effects. Overall, I like the concept of the meaningful tech and innovations development that they’ve got going on here as a grand strategy idea, but it does really slow things down, and I haven’t yet decided if that’s a positive or not.

King Conogan mab Condeleu of Brittany and Wales
No sooner had Prince Conogan become King than he had to contend with an invasion from the pagans of the Kingdom of Deira, aided by the Irish warlords that his father had failed to convert and pacify. Though this threat was neutralised, it cost Conogan political influence with his allies and a large portion of his armies to keep the realm united, and this weakness was seized upon by the vassals that had been circling in the water during his father’s reign. Though a challenge for the throne by his uncle Prince Maturid was seen off, the same could not be said for that of Duke Pêr, who successfully achieved Cornish independence from the Breton throne, leaving Conogan with only the County of Kent of all the Kingdom’s previous holdings in England. On Conogan’s inevitable early death due to his deformities, his dual crowns of Brittany and Wales will likely be split between his two young sons Mortiern and Caradoc, further splintering the once-fearsome de Cornouille power base.

I like Crusader Kings III a lot, and if I hadn’t already played CKII I’d definitely say that jumping on this bigger, flashier version of the staring at maps simulator was definitely worth it. Since I do have CKII and a number of the expansions, though, I have to say that I don’t think that CKIII is worth the $69.95 AUD, let alone the $40 or so you’ll have to shell out for each expansion if you want to play it close to the release date. For the $16.95 pricetag on the Humble Choice, however, this is an absolute gimme.

When I put out the call for reviewers for the Humble Choice games this month, a bundle that at first glance I felt was underwhelming apart from the headline act, I was pleased to see that my fellow Blaugustines have all gotten over their post-Blaugust blues and came to the party in a big way, signing up within a day or so to play and review all but one of the games on the list, except one.

I'm not surprised that The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos (DoN) is the one that was missed, because on the surface it doesn't have all that much to recommend it. It has a generic boring fantasy game name, generic boring fantasy game marketing material1, and no name recognition at all, coming from a studio that according to Steam has only four racing games and a point-and-click detective game in their back-catalogue. As I began to dig into it, though, I realised that this is not coincidental, as it's based on a French-language audio series satirising tabletop role-playing games, so the generical fantasy name goobledegook is part of the bit. And as far as I can see, this is both the first videogame and the first franchise-related thing in its twenty-year history that has been released in English, so it's little wonder that we've never heard of it.

In DoN you guide a party of genre-savvy but generic fantasy tropes through a dungeon run by a narrator-cum-GM who seems to not like his players very much, while they bicker and swear at each other2. Movement and exploration through the dungeon is simple point-and-click, although somewhat hampered by a very frustrating fixed isometric camera that means your vision is very limited and you have to rely heavily on your dungeon map to get around. While you can pick up a few bits and pieces with careful exploration, it's not such a big deal, just functioning largely as something to do between battles, and big flashing quest markers make the necessary bits of getting around straightforward. It also slightly grates on me that the game is called dungeon but it clearly takes place in a tower. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s set up for a joke later.

More annoyingly, the game betrays its origins as a humour audio series with many and varied cutscenes in which each and every one of the seven characters need to have something 'funny' to say. The Thief has to say something cowardly, the Elf has to mention that the Dwarf smells, the Barbarian has to say “Crom!”, the Ogre has to say something about food and be translated by the Sorceress, ad nauseum. No one individual moment has been all that bad in isolation, but over and over it all gets pretty grating. When the characters are walking stereotypes it's hard to find their interactions all that compelling, and I'm regularly finding myself wishing that the talking and the plot exposition would end so that the fighting can begin again.

When you do encounter an enemy, the game switches into an XCOM-style turn-based tactics game, complete with XCOM-style grid movement, XCOM-style cover, XCOM-style flanking and hit-chance mechanics3, and JRPG style per-character rather than XCOM style per-team turns4. I have my doubts about the usefulness of the movement and cover system in a game that is largely close-range and has attacks of opportunity, but it largely holds up, even if I do find myself skipping a lot of unnecessary movement turns in favour of just hitting the nearest enemy and then whacking the end turn button.

Though your party in each fight is limited to the seven main characters (and a choice of one addition a couple of acts in) so there's not that much variety, each hero having their own strengths, weaknesses and a range of special skills that grow as they level up makes for an engaging battle experience. Do I use my Sorceress’ area of effect attack now, or save it and use her to heal the Elf that I foolishly left in the open? Do I sacrifice some potential damage now to stun this enemy with my Dwarf so that my Barbarian won’t be flanked? Do I use my Ranger’s team-buffing ability or try to take out this spider before it poisons the Thief? I've only played for a few hours at this point, but the game has kept throwing interesting challenges that have required me to think about my choices, even at the default difficulty level. The battles are good.

I’m definitely finding DoN more engaging than Fort Triumph, a similar Turn Based Strategy game that we were thrown this time last year, and am looking forward to seeing how far through it I manage to get before I lose interest5. Sure, there’s nothing particularly new or innovative here, and you’ve heard most of the jokes after the first ten minutes or so, but it feels like a game that does everything that it is supposed to do made by people that cared about it. It’s games like this that keep me signed up to the Humble Choice6, games that I’d never have bought or likely even have heard of without the bundle, but that spark joy despite, or even maybe because, of that. I doubt there’s anyone outside of the Francosphere getting the bundle for this, if you like a TBS, it's one’s worth trying out.

The term Rougelike gets thrown around a whole lot these days. So much so that I’m not entirely sure what it means anymore, but in as much as a Rougelike is a turn-based procedurally-generated-dungeon-exploration game with an unwieldy control scheme, slightly off-beat sense of humour and an excuse instead of a plot, Crown Trick certainly meets the definition.

So, how isn’t it a Rougelike?1 Let me count the ways.

First and most importantly, Crown Trick is gorgeous. From the lovely opening cinematic and the crisp animations to the intriguing character designs, the whole thing is warm and funky and inviting, for all that it apparently takes place in the Nightmare Realm. Unfortunately, sometimes the cutesy art is a distraction from the actual gameplay, with the pretty effects making it hard to decode some of the necessary attack information. It’s nothing that a little patching couldn’t fix, and if all of the enemy moves were well telegraphed on the screen, this game would feel like so much more of a complete package.2 Rougelikes, even the ones with fancy tilesets instead of ascii art, tend to be pretty drab looking affairs and this very definitely isn’t that.

Secondly, in Crown Trick you have a single weapon - one of half a dozen or so basic types with random buffs attached, and must drop it if you want to use another that you find in the dungeon. You have four special attacks that you can gain from minibosses, these are are very powerful and versatile but consume MP. You have an unlimited stack of relics that grant passive buffs and seem to be wildly uneven in terms of usefulness. And you have a small grab-bag of up to four consumable doodads. Compared to the traditional full inventory of scavenged loot, this feels very limiting, and can make for a frustrating time if the randomiser doesn’t give you the tools that you want for upcoming encounters. Thankfully, each run is a lot less of a time commitment than a full dungeon dive in some games can be, so restarting isn’t such a big deal.

Thirdly, the combat is much more involved than the roguelike tradition of bumping your character into the enemy until one of you dies3, behaving more like a series of puzzles in which you try to work out how to combine your weapon, specials and limited teleports to successfully build combos and defeat the enemies in each encounter room. This is Crown Trick’s attempt at innovation, and it’s appealing in principle, promising to bring some much-needed depth to a genre that can be pretty stale, but even after just the three runs4 I’ve completed I am already finding the regular encounters to be very rote and the boss battles to be frustratingly opaque. Rather than inspiring me to try again straight away, like the repeated failures in a game like Hades, for example, these issues make me want to drop the game between runs, which is a bit of a death-knell for a game like this.

Finally, Crown Trick has a between-run section that allows you to apply ongoing powerups for future runs, akin to a game like Loop Hero. While this sort of meta-game is usually the thing that get a game firmly labelled as a rouge-lite, I really can’t stress enough how much more this feels like an old school Nethack experience than 95% of the games that fit into that category. Yes, unless you’re some kind of prodigy or speedrunning genius, you’ll have to play this through a few times to rank up your character enough to actually win, but it still scratches a lot of those Rouge-y itches, so I don’t think the label Rougelike, in as much as it still means anything, is all that out of line in this case.

It’s funny how just describing what a game isn’t can give you all you need to know, but I think that if you’ve gotten this far you’ve probably got a good idea of what to expect out of Crown Trick5. While it seems like a fresh take on an old favourite genre, I’m glad that I tried it out and I’d encourage anyone who has a copy to at least try it out for a couple of runs, I doubt I’ll be diving back into this one too many times, and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to pick up the Humble Choice bundle for it, either.

Blaugust is a month-long festival bringing together gaming bloggers from many diverse walks of life, but it’s also a community (currently based around a Discord server) where we read, encourage, and get inspired by each others’ blogs all year around.

As part of this year’s Blaugust I asked my fellows to help me tackle the August 2022 Humble Choice bundle, with each blogger writing about their chosen game or games in their own way, some straight reviews, some retrospectives, some first impressions. The hope was that we’d be able to bring together a bunch of people with different interests all playing and writing about the aspects of these games that stood out to them, and that we’d end up with a set of posts that could help someone considering whether or not to pick up the bundle this month or not.

Did we succeed or not? Is it worth doing again next month? Did we miss something important? You’ll have to read the blogs below to find out:

• The Ascent

  Naithin of Time to Loot spent two hours in a dystopian hellscape and felt great about it.

• Hot Wheels Unleashed™
  UnwiseOwl of Leaflocker forced himself to play a licensed property racing game and was pleasantly surprised. For a while.

• A Plague Tale: Innocence
  Naithin of Time to Loot completed, reviewed and took some great screenshots from this heartfelt stealth game back in 2020.

• Gas Station Simulator
  StalkingVengeance of Cubic Creativity impressed by showcasing with this simulator's standout depth and creativity.

• In Sound Mind
  Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts played this strange horror exploration game so that the rest of us scaredeycats didn’t have to.

• Mind Scanners
  Kluwes of Many Welps took a chance on a game they’d never heard of and ended up becoming a master of the technical sciencey devices.

• Emily is away <3
  Paeroka of Nerdy Bookahs took a quick ride on the nostalgia bus of a bygone age of the internet that is the third game in the Emily is Away series.

• Omno
  Meech of A Geek Girl’s Guide found the graphics lag made this puzzle platformer a frustrating experience.
  Kluwes of Many Welps wasn’t even on the roster to review this one for us, but couldn’t resist.

So is the Humble Choice bundle worth the money this month? The general tenor of these posts seems to suggest that while almost all of these games are pretty neat if you’re into that sort of thing, none (except for maybe A Plague Tale: Innocence if you’ve never tried it) are worth the ticket price all on their own unless you’re really into their particular genre or niche. If you’ve got a passing interest in a few of the titles, though, as I know that I do, then this month is definitely one that you don’t want to skip out on.

Did we convince you to buy (or to pass on) the bundle? Are there things that you’d like to see done differently? Are you a blogger interested in being involved in Blaugust or in reviewing a game with us next month? Let us know your thoughts on our little review project in the comments below.

(and yes, we’ll try to get it out earlier next time!)

I was just thinking that it had been a little while since our last foray into the communal XCOM 2 Blogger Succession game here at the Leaflocker, especially since there are only three of the original roster of seven players left in the rotation after the other four have had to drop out for various reasons. It turns out that I haven’t played a round since the beginning of May, and as the post below will detail, the rust in my play was on full display out there. As usual with these play-throughs, you can choose your own adventure and read along with the AAR or watch the recording1, but if you choose the latter I recommend that you bring a book or make liberal use of the skip button in the intro and outro sections, because my poor old laptop was really chugging.

XCOM’s scientific progression continues apace, with the development of Powered Armor just around the corner. Since I’m not a man to stand between a hard-working soldier and his mechsuit, even in the name of getting closer to the end of the game, and I know we’re going to need a big financial outlay to purchase the upgrade, there was little for me to do in the Avenger except order a couple of custom grenades and head out into the world.

I soon discovered that Advent was licking their wounds after Kluwes’ killed an Avatar during his last turn, but with nothing else pressing on the agenda I decided to send a team in to clear out the Alien Facility in Eastern Europe to see if we could drive a nail into the enemy coffin. Projections anticipated the presence of Gatekeepers, and after I killed off one of our anti-armour units in my last outing and the other one was in the medbay, I knew that this would prove to be a challenge even with our third-choice Grenadier in the squad. I also elected to bring along Klaus Weiss, our third- or fourth-tier Sniper who I designated as UnwiseOwl III last time, and who I wasn’t expecting to contribute a whole lot, but I outfitted him with some EXO armour and a rocketpack for a little extra firepower just in case.

We came across the first pod of an Archon, Shieldbearer and Lancer out in the open and set up the usual ambush, but in my haste to get maximum damage I forgot that the two Rangers that I’d set up to take Overwatch shots were going to skulk in the shadows instead, and that got both Magi and Bookahnerk stabbed by the Archon and Lancer respectively. Clearing up the group and the nearby turret after that wasn’t a big challenge, but it did mean that I went into the mission feeling more than a little foolish.

The next pod of a Gatekeeper and two Sectoids was triggered along with another turret, which left me with too many targets and an inability to deal enough damage to them. Vasily’s grenades weren’t high-powered enough to cut through the enemy armour, and I had apparently learned nothing from last time about what happens when I leave my squad within Gatekeeper range, so Hound Dog was left far too exposed instead of retreating, and not even Silentdeath’s flash grenade could distract the enemy long enough to hit prevent her from taking a laser beam to the face and being down for the count.

This thankfully wasn’t a fatality, but it did mean that Bookahs was more or less out of the commission for the rest of the fight stabilising and then physically manhandling Hound Dog around the map.

Now down to four, including a grenadier without grenades and a sniper with a very poor record of hitting shots, the rest of the team managed to clean up the pod anyway and progress towards the Alien Facility. Vasily managed to slip inside and plant the X4 charges while Klaus fired his rocket, Easha took to the roof, Magi lined up her Killing Zone ability and Bookahnerk threw out the emergency Mimic Beacon to act as a little insurance against the final pod of Gatekeeper, Shieldbearer and Lancer.

Despite my ongoing ineptitude with the mechanics, wasting a couple of turns with some dangerous misclicks and tactical mistakes, the team managed to take out the pod and make it to the evac point just as Advent flew in some reinforcements. Usually I’d want to stay and fight on regardless, but sometimes discretion is the better part of valour, and for once I decided it was time to get out while I still had three soldiers left uninjured to use in the future.

Following the mission we’ve been left with long recovery times for Bookah and Hound Dog, while Magi should be able to bounce back pretty quickly. Considering that for most of the campaign I’d been feeling like things were all far too easy, I was left feeling embarrassed that for the second mission in a row I’d come back with such a depleted lineup. Perhaps I’m not ready for Ironman difficulty mode just yet after all.

I don’t think there’s all that long left in this campaign and the difficulty is undoubedly ramping up, but at least next time I’ll have Powered Armour to get my soldiers a bit more protection when I leave them overexposed. Hopefully when we next revisit XCOM three month’s won’t have passed so I won’t be quite as rusty, either, but I guess that’s over to Commander Naithin todecide.

It’s time for me to have a sit and a nice cup of tea to calm my nerves.

Subset made FTL, in which your plucky little spaceship must repeatedly outrun, outwit and occasionally outfight an overwhelming enemy fleet in a universe full of nihilism, space pirates and goofy fun. One of the worst encouragers of just-one-more-turn-ism I've ever met, with endless possibilities and combinations, and one of only two games I've ever bought three times1.

Then they turned around and made Into the Breach, an ever-engaging and tight little micro-puzzle game about time-travelling mechs defending the remnants of the earth from a never-ending swarm of alien bugs with an endless assortment of doodads and gizmos, choosing the least worst options that they can while packed into chessboard-like battle grids.

Both games will run on a potato, have simple graphic styles, construct beautiful and engaging things out of basic building blocks, are endlessly replayable, and have the kind of effortless minimalism and simplicity that can only come from countless hours of polishing and refining and perfecting every single system. If you've never tried either, I heartily recommend them both, but I think that Into the Breach is undoubtedly an unmissable classic, whereas in my opinion FTL is merely damn good, even if sales figures want to suggest the opposite.

But perhaps more than the games themselves, I admire Subset for the way they go about their work. They're a small studio, with a core team of just two guys with additional art, music and QA support towards polishing end of a project , and I think that must give them the freedom to march to a different drum to most developers our there.

Here's a few of the things that I really appreciate about them:

• Ongoing DLC

• Don't Rush Things

• Mod Support

Racers aren't quite on that list. I'm not in any way a car guy - my car gets me places and if I'm asked about I normally say something along the lines of “it's red”, and while I don't think being an enthusiast in real life is a prerequisite to enjoying the glorification of the motorcar in digital form, I certainly think it helps.

But I’ve have good experiences with arcade racers over the years. I grew up on a steady diet of Need for Speed, I played the pants off of Re-Volt when I should have been studying for my matriculation exams, and I'm still not sick of MarioKart 8 despite the exhaustion of my mad scramble to unlock all the karts on four consoles in the short window between release and the tourney at AVCon 2014 . I also have many hundreds of hours and happy childhood memories invested in the making of real-life Hot Wheels™ tracks, races and demolition derbies. So playing this game should hold no fears for me.

Judging by price, clocking in at a substantial $70 AUD, a price in a similar range to that of pretty decent racers like Dirt 5, Hot Wheels Unleashed™ ought to be a highlight, one of the two flagship games of this month's bundle, along with A Plague Tale: Innocence. So why were my Blaugustine compatriots and I reluctant to touch this with a ten-foot pole?

Perhaps it's because we've all been trained by long experience that games from licensed properties that insist on the ™ in their title, especially ones based on child-focused brands, are so often underwhelming money grabs with uninspired game play, and since the dreaded rise of online play and the microtransaction, also tend to be rife with overpriced downloadable content. These are games that leave you feeling used and dirty when you play them, but honestly, who expects better from corporations who make their money hocking plastic junk?

So with those reservations in mind, I opened this game for the first time while I was on holidays last weekend, and apart from the very first introduction to the game being opening a loot box, which nearly caused me to quit then and there, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the loot boxes were annoying, and every landing screen wanted me to buy more matchbox cars, but it was all for in-game currency, not a microtransaction in sight.

I was surprised to find that there's actually a lot of stuff packed in here. Apart from the campaign mode where I could earn in-game currency rewards for winning races, there's time attack, local split-screen and online multiplayer, vehicle customisation and a racecourse editor. And of course, there's a huge range of toy cars from across the Hot Wheels™ range to be unlocked, from the DeLorean from Back to the Future, to classic race cars, to school busses, to giant hotdogs with wheels, all with their own strengths and weaknesses on the racetrack.

And the gameplay is… fine. Not one to appeal to the driving game aficionado, but perfectly respectable. The cars have a decent weight to them so the racing is pretty satisfying, and there are loops, jumps and sections where you leave the track and interact with the environments, various actual-size locations which warrant exploring in their own right. The racing revolves around a cycle of performing power slides on the turns to build up a boost meter that you can then fire, which is a little one-note for my taste, but the whole package all feels fast and cool and very Hot Wheels™, so there's a big tick there for all that.

But I do find myself wondering who this game is for. That main campaign? There's a lot of stuff, 90-odd races in all, but it only lets you progress to play 7 races on 6 different tracks before you're gated behind time trials. With the AI vehicles set to the default easy mode, winning these races to progress is very doable provided that you just stay on the track, and all together will net you about enough coins to buy just one of the basic cars you had your eye on from the store. But the time-trials don't scale with difficulty, and you have to be at least half-way competent at racing to unlock and progress past them to the rest of the campaign. I wouldn't flatter myself by saying I'm all that good at racing games, but I like to think that I could easily beat most of the ten-year old gamer set, and most of these trials took me a number of attempts to successfully pass. Lots of kids are never seeing past those few races. And if you never pass those races then you can never unlock more interesting tracks to race on than the basic starting out ones1. So if it's not for kids, and it's not for car guys, and it's not for the average gaming blogger, who is it for?

That finally became clear when I came home from holidays and booted the game again inside the loving embrace of a WiFi connection. Suddenly, there were ads everywhere. When I loaded the campaign, moving in 3 out the 4 directions from the starting point immediately tried to sell me different expansion packs. There are 3 ‘season passes’ that have a few cross-promotional cars, tracks and accessories (Batman, Looney Toons, etc) that will set you back $44.95 each2, and after every race the game shows you the rewards you would have been earning if you'd just shelled out for the current one. It’s unclear to me what happens if you buy the past ones, but reviews suggest that if you haven’t unlocked the content during the season it largely remains unavailable, so it’s hard to see what that $44.95 is buying. You can also buy individual cars for about three quarters of the cost of the actual physical matchbox car at your local toy store. If you wanted to buy all the DLC for this game that has only been out just over ten months, it will cost you a little over $320 AUD, and that’s after buying the full-priced base game. This game is for the suckers, for the whales, for those few people willing or ignorant to shell out hundreds of bucks to have all the cosmetic kit in a video game that no-one else cares about. And I hope some folks at Mattel and at developer Milestone S. r. l. feel bad sometimes for having the audacity to make a game like this dressed up as a children's game.

It's hard to work out the popularity of a game on steam, but even with the Humble Choice bump it’s only getting 100 concurrent players, which is not enough to sustain the online multiplayer, and the third season pass has been out since the start of June and still only has 5 steam reviews. Very few people are falling for this, and you have to wonder how long it's going to be supported and how long the servers are going to stay up. And when they go down, all the car and track customisation, flawed as they are already3, will go away completely and all that will be left is a lifeless husk of a game, if that.

It’s not all bad, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend playing Hot Wheels Unleashed™ even if you got it for free, and I certainly wouldn’t count it as a positive addition to the Humble Choice for the month. In fact, the fact that they included it at all makes me less likely to want the rest of the bundle, which is a shame because there’s actually some good looking stuff in there.

If you desperately want a video game that lets you race toy cars, just download Re-Volt, it’s free and it’s just as good as it was 20 years ago.

I’ve been playing Battle for Wesnoth, the free open-source high fantasy battle strategy game, on and off since I first encountered it in around 2008 and it was up to version 1.4. By that time, I was a kid just out of high-school and it was already five years old and the original creators were beginning to step away to work on other things. But thanks to the joy of FOSS software, others stepped into the gap and almost 15 years later we’re up to version 1.16 and development is still continuing, albeit at a dramatically slower rate than back in those halcyon days.

It seems like everyone who was on the internet back in those days had played Wesnoth, and while most of them didn’t enjoy the extreme amounts of chance management and fiddly nonsense that playing it entails, for me it’s always sat just about in the sweet spot just between a perfect strategy game where only skill matters, and a random roll of the dice where everything is up to chance. It’s basically the mahjong of strategy games, so it’s no surprise that it’s right up my alley. I enjoy the theme, I enjoy the mechanics, and I particularly enjoy how customisable it is, it always felt like there was a new user content (UMC) faction to play as or campaign to try out to keep the whole thing fresh.

So in 2011 , when I returned from a hiatus to a new version of the game and found that one of my favourite pieces of UMC hadn’t been ported yet because its original creators had stepped away, I learned to muddle my way through coding in the very simple Wesnoth Markup Language, updated the Imperial Era and its constituent campaigns, and have been trying to keep my head above water to keep them maintained and functional ever since.

There are creators out there doing wonderful things with the Wesnoth engine, pushing it further than it was ever intended to go in all sorts of directions, there are creators pumping out campaign after campaign of brain bending, novel stuff. I am decidedly not those guys. I work on it in fits and spurts for a few weeks every year when the mood takes me, and though I’ve written thousands of lines of code and dialogue, it takes quite a lot of effort just to keep things ticking over, and as such my campaigns still look an awful lot like they did a decade ago. They’ve improved here and there, of course, and they crash a lot less often than they once did, but I’ve been careful only to patch and to iterate, never to build something new that I thought was contrary to the original design, so I hope that if the original creators ever re-download the campaigns they’d be pleased to find a more complete version of something that they recognise as still fundamentally the same thing.

Just at the moment, though, we’re a little way away from the point where I can honestly say that I’m doing a good job at that self-appointed task. The multiplayer era is functional, yes, but some of the factions are still much stronger than others and my long-planned balancing project has been stalled out for ages. Two of the campaigns are up and working for the current version, but that still leaves three unplayable at this point, one because I’ve been theoretically working on an improved version for more than eight years (don’t ask), one because the balance changes to the Wesnoth AI have made it much harder and I’ve been unable to compensate without a wholesale redesign, and one that is just really long and that I’ve never liked very much, so I haven’t been able to summon the willpower to sift through it to fix it up.

Now I know that all sounds pretty dire, but it’s not all bad news. I’ve moved the project to a github repository so that it’s not just sitting on my computer and so that other contributors can help with the work, and one even has! We’ve had people translate the campaigns into Japanese and Chinese, and another express an interest in doing the same into Russian. And every now and then someone pops up on the forums (remember forums? I miss forums) submitting a bug report, or with a new piece of art of me to include. People are still playing, and people are still enjoying it enough to care. Things might be glacial, but they are moving, and when you’ve been staring at something for so long you absolutely notice (and cherish) the small changes.

And I feel this little tickle at the back of my brain that says that maybe the mood is creeping up on me once again…

Thus, my Crusader, the Brother's Barbarian and the Tenant's1 Wizard loaded into New Tristram, a very similar party to the one that we used to play together in Diablo II back when we played it together because it was one of very few games we owned, though my brother and I have swapped roles, because I used to be the shouty guy with the big axe.

We are definitely playing on too low a difficulty level, since I kept finding over and over that we would instantly obliterate each and every enemy just by walking near them and unloading all our skills. The Butcher, who I recall having so many fun running fights with as he hunted me throughout the catacombs in DII , was dead in seconds, and the witchy boss that the storyline had been working up to through the whole first act and the start of the second was paste in literally moments.

Playing the Crusader, a character seemingly designed to hold their ground against all odds, when you can carve through the forces of death like a knife through butter just doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, and combined with every character being perfectly in line with the ARPG genre’s traditional 'just click on stuff and it dies' mechanics only leads to a whole lot of nothing to do except to complain about the quality of loot that you're getting compared to your party mates.

All of which is just to say that apart from the nostalgia value, the Diablo series remain games that just aren't for me, because I've never been able to see where the fun is supposed to come from when you just click on anything that moves (and much of the scenery too) instead of having to use your brain to do something interesting. And when you search online even the game's greatest proponents seem to all be saying things like “I dunno bro it's just fun to feel powerful and squish demons and watch numbers go up as you get better gear”, it just doesn't fill me with confidence.

I'm not giving up yet, because we haven't explored whether turning up the difficulty dial will save the day, and because my party members are still enjoying themselves much more than they were when we kept getting shot as soon as we went round every corner in CounterStrike, but I suspect that this return to Tristram and surrounds will be short-lived.

.It's not all bad, though. I do like to ride the spectral horse.