The 365 Days 2022 Gaming Challenge - achievement unlocked.

[MartyG]

Port Royale 4 - PC - Day 62 Game 62

This is a trading / town building game where you are the master of ships. In order to win, the idea is to set up convoys of ships, buy low in one port and selling high to the next. Should those towns not produce the goods you want, you can setup your own production companies to make the products you want to trade, best placed in the towns that have the raw materials.

Things are not all fun on the high seas though, because those pesky Viceroys will only let you build construction sites if you have FAME (I'm gonna live for ever I'm gonna learn how to fly - high), which you can gain by starting an 80s tv series and singing. No, wait, by completing tasks or beating pirates. Or you can just become a pirate and not do the hard work.

Overall it's not too bad, but I only really got through the tutorials, the last one of which bugged out when I won the sea battle, yargh.

Anyway, I'm going to give this one 7 do you know where sailors hang out out of 10.

[MartyG]

Spacebase Startopia - PC - Day 63 Game 63

One thing I've discovered doing is this challenge is that games you think might be a bit pap actually turn out to be better than expected and games that you think might be fab turn out to be dreadful.

Spacebase Startopia is in camp dreadful. It's a shame, because the game on which this is based (Startopia) is well regarded as an interesting base building game, so how did this revision get things so wrong? It starts with a UI that is both unresponsive and inconsistent, unhelpful and obscure. You can click the mouse button on a icon multiple times and never be quite sure whether it's doing anything or not. Sometimes the left mouse is needed to complete and action, sometimes the right mouse button is need. Sometimes multiple button sequences are needed to confirm things, sometimes they'll confirm automatically.

Advisor messages will play without any seemingly relevance to what is going on in the game, sometimes multiple messages will play one after another that have no connections and are even contradictory. Then there is the terrible "humour" that is ever more grating due to the awful robot style voice which has an accident that would incite violence on all artificial intelligence.

So no, I didn't like it. I give this garbage game 2 what an incredible smell you've discovered out of 10.

[MartyG]

Gary Grigby's War in the East - PC - Day 64 Game 64

This one is a very complex strategy war game that I really had no clue at all what I was doing. It's basically a tutorial on how not to play it, yet the Soviets only managed a minor victory against me.

My troops ran away, my supplies slowly depleted, my troops got bogged down in the snow & ice and I randomly clicked on units to attack.

This is a game that you're going to need to do a lot of tutorial watching on if you expect to get anywhere with it because if you want to play the full Eastern campaign over more than 100 turns, there's no way you can do that without learning how the game actually works.

I think this could be excellent for those that want to understand the complexities of managing an entire war effort and I certainly wasn't bored, I'm just not sure it's worth the £60 asking price.

I give this one 8 frostbitten hungry and demoralised troops out of 10.

[MartyG]

Big Pharma - PC - Day 65 Game 65

Big Pharma. Sigh. This is a factory type game that could be good if it wasn't for the absolutely awful UI/UX and terribly implemented economy.

The idea is to build product lines converting raw materials into pills and sell them for a massive profit and exploiting the sick as real pharmaceutical companies do in real life to real people. The problem here is that this game is completely frustrating. You will tear your hair out trying to lay conveyor belts that go in the right direction as there is no apparent way to rotate the belts as there is with the machines. It's controlled by the game and game gets it wrong, stopping the lines from working.

There is no way to have additional input into the factory without buying more floor space (so 75% of the factory is empty floor), most of the system produce sugar pills that lose you money that you have no idea will be the outcome without lying the system on the factory floor. The cost of research and exploration will completely outstrip any profit margins which ultimately means the best way to "win" is to find one simple two-part profitable process and build multiples of that. Then just spend the time watching the clock.

Bad bad bad. I give this one 2 you need to arrest more Purdue people out of 10.

Also bots spamming buy followers links can FOAD. Getting more of these on my channel every day now.

[MartyG]

Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late - PC - Day 66 Game 66

At last, a fighter makes the list and a 2D one at that from Arc System. I have a load of these Arc System fighters because I tell myself I enjoy them and they then get lost in the pile of shame. The thing is I do like them and I really enjoyed this one.

With a good roster of characters that seem to play quite a bit differently from each other, you battle your way thru a series of fights getting progressively more difficult as things go on. Seems very fluid stringing the combos, some good air cancels and interesting specials. It almost feels like there are some air juggles to be had here, but I only seemed to get a couple of hit combos from those.

Plenty of different modes too, covering the usual arcade, time & score attacks and the survival mode where it's a single-round knockout. Solid frame rate, very smooth, not much in the way of lag and nice anime art work.

If you like your 2D fighters, I definitely recommend taking a look at this one. Only thing I'd say is that the default AI seemed a little bit too easy, I guess it will depend on your experience with this type of game.

I give this on 9 oozing placentas out of 10.

[MartyG]

Cultist Simulator The Physician - PC - Day 67 Game 67

This is a very peculiar card game. You start off with a couple of cards and the ability to work. By placing the cards in the actions, which then generates more cards and more actions. You can then use these cards and actions to create yet more stuff and eventually you'll have dozens of cards, half a dozen actions and no idea what you're doing.

There does seem to be a little bit of logic to it; by studying things you can learn about people and in turn, speak to them. You also have the ability to enhance certain actions by applying additional cards like passion or logic to those actions.

I think if you could work out the logic there'd be something interesting to discover here - but eventually, you'll either run out of health, or wealth or get destroyed by some other nasty affliction instead. Oh and it crashed, so that's not good.

I give this one 6 never speak to strangers out of 10.

[MartyG]

Ring of Pain - PC - Day 68 Game 68

This one is a random dungeon card crawler game, with lots of death. I think I may have briefly played this on Xbox via Game Pass, but definitely not of PC, so it counts as a pile of shame game.

It's a very basic premise. Click on the left or right card, that's it. Well, okay, it's not quite it as there is a little bit of strategy involved. You need to try and balance whether you can defeat an enemy with the stats you have or can you stealth past and make it to the next card, which may be an upgrade, or an item, or a potion to heal your flagging health - will you even make it past without being spotted?

It's fun enough, though it really is very, very, very RNG - you can fail spectacularly in seconds (I think my shortest run was just 16 seconds) or you could manage to make it past 7 or 8 floors. I'm not sure how many dungeon levels there are in total as I didn't manage to make it even halfway around, but I did manage to see nearly a third of the total cards in the deck the game throws at you. I think it's worth a look if you can pick it up on sale.

I give this one 7 very cheap random deaths out of 10.

[MartyG]

Sentinels of the Multiverse - PC - Day 69 Game69

Another card game in a comic book style - the presentation is very nice, but the actual gameplay isn't that interesting. The best powers are those that the enemy has whereas the hero powers are all a bit meh - you get throwing knives and Gatling guns, the evil boss gets things like Hasten Doom - why can't I hasten doom?

I didn't try the multiplayer, but perhaps that's where this works best; thing is it's from 2014, so I can't see there's much chance of many people still playing this.

So this one gets 4 Arm Fall Off Boys out of 10.

[MartyG]

Phoenix Point - PC - Day 70 Game 70

Phoenix Point is a tactical turn-based strategy game where you control the movement and actions of a squad whilst trying to achieve objects, either rescuing people, killing enemies or collecting resources. From the mind of Julian Gollop, this is basically XCOM with some very subtle changes.

If you didn't know better, playing this you'd think it was an XCOM game as Gollop has used his same old tropes with the GeoScape world as your overview, bases which can be upgraded with resources and the tactical missions found by exploring said GeoScape.

The biggest difference (and it's not particularly big) is that you can aim at different parts of enemy bodies, although in the little over an hour I played, I didn't really see any tactical reason for not just shooting at the head for maximum damage.

It's all pretty well done tho, but I don't doubt it'll suffer from the same mid-game issues XCOM does, an enemy closing in on your progress reducing gatherable resources and ultimately overwhelming you. If your main interest is in the turn-based combat, then this isn't such a worry, the tactical play is still fun.

Given you can pick this and XCOM2 up pretty cheaply these days, it's probably worth playing both and seeing which you prefer. I give this one 8 cyclic regenerations out of 10.

[MartyG]

Core Keeper - PC - Day 71 Game 71

This one is a cross between Terraria, Minecraft and Farmville. You're transported away to a mysterious world after touching a relic (never touch unknown relics) and from there you're left in a dark cave.

Build, mine and farm to stay alive whilst battling spike blobs. I was going to have a quick look and ended up playing it for 3 hours, it's one of those chill games you can spend ages playing. I'm sure eventually it'll get repetitive, but you're never idling so there's not time to get bored in the initial game at least.

The only thing I have found is progress is limited once you get to the point of needing tin ore as there's not a lot of it about to find, at least so far and that's required to get to the next stage of crafting.

It is an early access game, but a polished one, so there is some balancing still need - overall though I give this one 9 amorphous blobs out of 10.

Recommend, especially that the £10 it's selling for.

[MartyG]

Littlewood - PC - Day 72 Game 72

I wasn't expecting much from Littlewood given it's just another Farmville type game, but like Core Keeper yesterday, these fun little build-and-collect-em-ups are a lot of fun.

I had planned on only playing for an hour, but that evaporated into over two and the only reason to stop was to get more coffee and get up from the chair.

This is basically Animal Crossing on the PC with a really nicely though out UI which contributes to an excellent UX - more games need to look at this and take it as an example of how to do good menus and quick game actions - you don't need to be bogged down in dozens of menus and clicks just to perform a simple action, and in Littlewood, you don't have to.

Build houses, go on adventures, mine, fish and bug hunt - all nice and chill.

I give this one 9 enchanted forests out of 10.

[MartyG]

Rekindling - PC - Day 73 Game 73

It's Rimworld rip-off and not a very good one. It's early access and not sure it's getting updates anymore. UI is clunky and gameplay is pretty boring.

I did quite like the character setup, but that's about it.

I give this one 3 zims are not your friend out of 10.

[MartyG]

Craft the World - PC - Day 74 Game 74

Craft the World? More like craft disappointment. Your dwarfs are slow, it's boring, has a bad UI and an awful tutorial that didn't explain much. I'd had enough after 30 minutes and now it's uninstalled. It also looks more like a portal for selling DLC.

Avoid it, there are better sandbox games like Terraria.

I give this one 3 Peter Dinklages out of 10.

[gunrock]

Craft the World - PC - Day 74 Game 74
I give this one 3 Peter Dinklages out of 10.

Best rating yet!

[MartyG]

Mindustry - PC - Day 75 Game 75

This game has overwhelmingly positive reviews. I don't know how. It's one of the most frustrating tower defense games I've ever played because there are no towers and because of that, no defense. There are tech trees and eventually, it looks like you can research one, but you won't be able to mine resources quickly enough to get them before the waves overpower your base and destroy it.

Maybe I'm missing something ... missing a trick on building up the base more quickly, but it's certainly not obvious in the UI.

So no, it's not a good impression - edit, however, I went back for a second first look after a quick scout online and it turns out there are offensive turrets available, but they need a feeder to work (I must have missed where the game told me this), so after working that out, my second round was a bit more fun.

I think there is a bit of strategy to be had with this game after all, so I can now give this one 7 sin(x) out of 10.