The 365 Days 2022 Gaming Challenge - achievement unlocked.

[MartyG]

Pac-Man 99 - Switch - Day 37 Game 37

Pac-Man Battle Royale, but not as good as Tetris 99 and not as good as Pac-Man CE DX.

They're kind of trying to do the CE thing, but I'm not convinced that this works as well as Tetris (which has more strategy to it and thus more fun).

It's also not one of those games that really doesn't have that one more go factor to it. It's alright, but wouldn't go out of my way to play again.

I give this one 6 ghosts of CEDX out of 10.

[MartyG]

Vampire Survivors - PC Day 38 Game 38

A rogue-lite, twitch shooter horde-em-up.

Quite simply this is a brilliant little £2 indie game that you should buy right now. There's not much in the way of complexity here, your weapons all fire automatically and it's your job as the player just to avoid being touched by the enemies, which if that happens will sap away your limited health.

However, each time you kill an enemy there's a chance they'll drop a gem and if you collect enough gems to level up you can increase your arsenal of weapons from a random list. Eventually, you will die, but you can power up your starting character with the coins you've collected on your last run starting you out with a powered-up level 1 character to help you progress further.

There are a few different characters and levels to unlock, but it won't take too long - what you do get is an infinitely replayable addictive little indie title that I'd urge you to support.

I give this one 10 there's going to be a whooping out of 10. Total and utter recommendation.

Why haven't you bought it yet?

[briareos_kerensky]

Sorry, wrong thread.

[MartyG]

Phantom Doctrine - PC - Day 39 Game 39

Tactical strategy game with similar turn-based battles to XCOM. Nice thing here is that they're not so much based on RNG as ability and awareness attributes.

You're running a CIA like outfit, trying to work out who's behind a global conspiracy. Controlling a ring of spies, you must go out on missions, collect intel and do other spy-ee things. Some of it is a bit quirky like investigating intel (randomly clicking on text to find keywords seems a bit pointless), but the turn based stuff is the most interesting part and that's reasonably well done.

I give this one 6 James Bonds out of 10.

[MartyG]

Children of Morta - PC Day 40 Game 40

Think I possibly might have briefly played this on Xbox, but definitely not on PC - it's a Rogue Lite RPG, working out what in the world is going on with weird gooey purple slime monsters. I quite like the way the story unfolds, with different elements unlocking as you eventually die.

Another with the whole pixel art style, but if fits well here. It's quite well done, but definitely feels like one that needs quite a bit of time dedicated to it to get your character to a level where you can progress thru more than just a first couple of levels, as it doesn't take a lot of hits to kill you. Best strategy seems to be to run away backwards, getting hits in while keeping enough distance, rather than there being that much strategy to it.

I mostly enjoyed what I played tho, so I give this one 7 gooey blobs out of 10.

[MartyG]

Fantasy General II - PC - Day 41 Game 41

Turn based strategy game with a fantasy setting. Although you seem to be a viking. Didn't exactly grab me and the hex system seemed pretty limiting in this instance meaning the more units you had the more cluttered the maps got, especially where there were pinch points in the third scenario.

Lot of pointing and clicking and the game only seems to have two music tracks which endlessly repeat.

I give this one 5 are they really just trolling me out of 10.

[MartyG]

TroubleShooter: Abandoned Children - PC - Day 42 Game 42

Based in the world of TroubleShooter, this SRPG takes the turn-based elements of XCOM and adds in a flurish of RPG elements, mostly around character building. There's a story to go with it, you're a trouble shooter who cleans up the streets of gangs, but it's all a bit of fluff really.

On the default settings the combat is far easier than XCOM, but there is the same sort of RNG to hits connecting. There are a lot of stats that allow an element of min/maxing in this and there's a lot more to unpack, but the first impressions on this one were pretty good.

I give this one 8 Albuses out of 10.

[MartyG]

Gedonia - PC - Day 43 Game 43

This one is an open world indie RPG title built on Unity. Trying to do the Zelda thing on a budget.

It does show that it's the work of a small team, few bugs here and there, odd glitches, people clipping through mountains (so aping Bethesda's best). The map needs work, arrows fire particularly slowly and combat is a bit janky.

It's not a bad effort, but can't really recommend it. I give this one 4 the dogs prefer their meat cooked out of 10.

[fishbowlhead]

4/10 but they managed glitches that usually take hundreds of Bethesda staff with just a small team, so silver linings and all that.

[MartyG]

Frontline: World War II - PC - Day 44 Game 44

Turn based strategy which unsurprisingly is centered around World War II.

It's fairly simplified around supply lines and it totally lacks any real tutorial or even tooltips about the units and their abilities. You can sort of figure out the range abilities, but things like defensiveness against unit types or attack effectiveness against unit types you've either got to work out from historical knowledge or common sense (AT probably good against armoured tanks).

Despite this, it was quite fun bringing up the armoured tanks to the frontlines followed by troops with artillery support and air strikes backing things up.

Certainly not the best war based strategy game I've play, but no where near the worst and it kept me entertained for ninety minutes.

I give this one 7 minefields out of 10.

[MartyG]

Agarest Generations of War - PC - Day 45 Game 45

A tactics RPG from 2013/2014 with a bit of a nothingness story voices in Japanese with English subs.

It's a game of its time, with a flat 2D square grid that you battle on each and every time. Sometimes you start in a different area of the map grid if it's a suprise attack, it's then broken into movement and attack phases which share action points that can be used on various skills to take out all the enemies on the grid.

It's mostly static anime style artwork and it looks quite nice. The voice acting sounds reasonably nice (though not speaking the language it could be awful) but it at least sounds emotive, even if the story itself is a bit irrelevant. Basically is boils down to the main character having more morals than the people he commands and as such decides he won't kill a young elf, making him a traitor.

Then you kill all the things.

It's not a bad effort but it's not one I feel compelled to go back to (I guess Disgaea has spoilt me in the TRPG genre), but I give this one 5 pointy eared magical spells out of 10.

[MartyG]

Imagine Earth - PC - Day 46 Game 46

Pretty good city builder which is planet based - your job as the overseer is to build you colony up with housing, power stations, goods productions and food. Research better techs to get better buildings and efficiencies and encourage more and more people to live on your shiny new terraformed globe whilst keeping polution down so as not to cause a mass extinction event.

Seems to run pretty well on the PC, nice and smooth in 4K with a pretty intuative interface, didn't feel like throwing my mouse out of the window playing this one so it's going on the favs for a revisit later.

I give it 8 cheesey advisors out of 10.

[MartyG]

Between the Stars - PC - Day 47 Game 47

Ahoy, it's Captain Janky. Between the Stars is a third person space adventure. It is not Elite Dangerous. It's still in early access, so it's a little bit, well incomplete. There are missions and spaceships and space stations. So that's nice.

There are also problems tho - the third person perspective is a bit weird so the way the camera works makes working out where you are in relation to other objects a bit tricky (it desperately needs a radar depicting 3D space). Add to that the ship handle like a flying block of lard in non-Newtonian space.

It's not awful and I can forgive it a bit for the hillariously bad voice acting of the pirates (yargh).

I give this one 5 Space Cowboys out of 10.

[MartyG]

The Islander - Town Architect - PC - Day 48 Game 48

This one is a zen city builder. Well, town builder. Maybe even alchove builder. You're given a tiny square bit of land that you build houses and services on to get people onto to the island to give you more money so you can build more stuff.

That's about it really. There are no particular objectives or end game scenarios where everyone dies in a tidal wave, earthquake or godzilla attack. No, you just build stuff and make things look pretty.

I give this one 6 those lights don't shine very bright out of 10.

[MartyG]

Wordle - PC - Day 49 Game 49

After all the controvesy around the New York Times taking Wordle for themselves, I had a go at the PC version. I don't think this is quite the same as the newspaper version which is more like a cross between mastermind and hangman. The PC version is more like a Boggle Wordsearch, finding the words that match the theme/category.

It threw me a bit at first though as there were multiple words and I thought they'd make a sensible conjunction, but know they could just be multiple words in the grid that match the theme, some had me stumped and I couldn't spell Chihauhua. That was annoying. Overall I had an hour's worth of fun and thought it was worth the £1 I paid way back whenever I bought this. Don't watch the linked stream if you want to play the first game on Steam (there are five of them atm), as it'll spoil most of it.

I give it 7 Rachel Rileys out of 10.