Star Trek: Away Team – Vulcan nerve pinch to Victory

When I was younger I loved Star Trek: Away Team, but with age, my taste in games has changed – well, at least certain time-consuming mechanics, like games resting on endless save & reloading. It’s still somewhat of a charming experience playing it now, however, being a Commandos clone there is A LOT of trial and error involved. That is not all, as this title also has a bit of a quirky and archaic control system. It undeniably adds up when half of your attempts fail due to control issues. Yet, as mentioned, it’s still appealing since it’s set in the Star Trek: The Next Generation timeline (best timeline), has nice looking retro graphics, excellent voice acting and presentation, and a pretty good story to boot.

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Manor Lords – Super Early Quick Impressions

Manor Lords, one of the biggest indie titles this year has just been released… in early access. Oh boy. I was expecting a full 1.0 release all the way up to the so-called grand opening, but apparently, the developer got cold feet or just felt bad about releasing it at this stage, because it’s truly spartan in content. There was a warning, after all, something about us gamers maybe expecting a bit too much. Never a good sign. Nonetheless, I decided to give the man 30 euros to see what the fuss was all about, and well…

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Headquarters: World War II – Rumble in France

I’m not too into the boardgame style of wargames, so I can’t give any kind of expert opinion, but from what I have played so far, Headquarters: World War II is an entertaining title if you enjoy tactical games and turn-based action. I have not yet completed any of the campaign scenarios. However, I’m on my way to finishing the American one, which has given me enough experience to comment on the game. Let’s start with the story.

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Star Trek: Infinite is dead

In the final dev log for Star Trek: Infinite it is unfortunately explained that the game has now been officially abandoned and left for dead. In my review, I talked about how much I liked its approach to the Stellaris style of gameplay – how it was way more focused on a specific timeline and with a smaller scale. Not something the Star Trek mods do. Sadly, that dream of a stand-alone Star Trek 4X game is now dead, as I was hoping for a couple of healthy expansions. Even if I liked the game as it is, a couple of DLCs would not have hurt to expand on the gameplay (unless it’s the greedy bad kind, of course).

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Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance (still not a review)

As promised, I decided to give Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance another go, and right from the onset, I felt way more in tune with the gameplay and story. In other words, I was having fun, even on realistic, which is the hardest difficulty setting. On a side note, the reason I play on “realistic” is that I don’t enjoy it when games give me extra protection. In realistic mode, everyone takes the same amount of damage. It’s something of a pet peeve of mine. I even made a mod back in the day for Men of War: Assault Squad 2 since its difficulty slider was broken. In that game, your men are basically super soldiers from a Marvel movie, and if you increase the difficulty, which to be fair fixes the issue, the game starts to spam enemy tanks every ten seconds. Not so much fun. I fixed this in my mod by making equal and fair damage across the board for all units on lower difficulties. No bonuses and no spam! Anyway, back to Terminator.

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