Xenonauts 2 [Early Access] – Round Three

We are back at it boys! It’s time for round three of the Xenonauts 2 Early Access Beta. The game is now feature complete according to the developers. We have also entered milestone 2, which has extended Xenonauts 2 in several ways. I’m a bit unsure about the 180-day limit since I haven’t reached that far yet in my current playthrough. Hopefully, that block is now also gone.

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Star Trek: Infinite – Resistance Is Futile

In preparation for Star Trek: Infinite I played a couple of different civilizations in Stellaris with all the minor and major DLCs. While I think it’s a pretty good game, especially now that it has been expanded through countless patches and expansions, I always seem to run into the same issue: total statement and lack of a real purpose. After a while, the galaxy just seems to stop, and kinda “settles in” with nothing major going on, and with that stopping your own civilization’s purpose (this is with roleplaying in mind). The sandbox nature of the game can only take me so far, and I can’t say the silly randomly generated civilizations you meet help much with this. This is where Star Trek: Infinite comes in.

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Aliens: Dark Descent – The Lethe Bug Crisis

In space, nobody can fix your bugs. Besides the fairly buggy nature of Aliens: Dark Descent, it is somewhat of an unexpected sleeper hit of the year. The gameplay, and general mechanics work well, and are clearly thought-out, which together with the visuals and audio creates a very nice Aliens experience. It truly feels like the movie when you slowly skulk the poorly lit and narrow space colonial corridors – then for it to suddenly switch from tension to high-octane action when your badass Marines with their cool outfits and iconic weapons open up on the deadly and terrifying Xenomorphs. It actually resembles Aliens to a fault, as it becomes a little too much familiar in the narrative. Seemingly, there is only one way to write games based on the Alien franchise. 

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Warbanners – Welcome to Difficultville

This is a weird one. I do enjoy the basics of Warbanners, I find the graphics fine, and the mechanics for the most part intriguing, however, the difficulty is just out of this world. I can appreciate that fact to a certain degree, but the older I get, the less time I have to go full autismo mode like in my younger days. With this, I mean the time it takes for a game to go from challenging to tear-out-your-hair frustrating. This usually ends up with me banging my head against a wall, until the one and only perfect strategy forms. My tolerance for that kind of gameplay is almost gone nowadays. There is a subset of gamers that love this kind of Stalingrad -esque difficulty in their games, and I salute them. Crasleen Games surely has made something for them to dig into, but for the rest of us mere mortals…

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SpellForce: Conquest of Eo – First Impressions

Conquest of Eo is a 4X spinoff of the SpellForce series, and initially, my impression was great. But as it turns out, the game seems to have some serious problems in form of difficulty. The first few hours were awesome. It felt like a nice mix between Age of Wonders and Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. I was happily building up my heroes and doing some general adventuring when something foul and smelly revealed its head. As it turns out, the circle mages, which are powerful opponents, don’t play by the same rules.

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