Once again it’s time for a ramble on games I’ve been playing lately.

Age of Darkness: Final Stand

I bought this on sale during the Steam strategy fest a few weeks ago. Not gonna lie, I was a bit disappointed.

This is one of those cases where there’s no single glaring flaw with the game, but a lot of smaller issues piling up. My biggest complaint is that it just felt too slow. I always felt starved for resources, and there was nothing I could do but wait for them to slowly tick up.

The campaign also wasn’t quite there. I don’t expect a game called Age of Darkness to be a happy story, but it wasn’t the flavour of grimdark I was hoping for. I was expecting some desperate final stand against the forces of evil in the vein of Myth: The Fallen Lords, but it was more of a Game of Thrones style “everyone is horrible” story mostly about humans screwing each other over. The characters I found most sympathetic were the anarchists who just want to destroy everything.

There were also far too many “dungeon crawl” style missions and too few focused on the epic scale wave defense that’s supposed to be the game’s key selling feature. Maybe I should have tried the survival mode before I put it down.

World of Warcraft

Yeah, I’m back in WoW. I haven’t quite gotten fully sucked back into it the way I usually do, though.

Mostly it’s that there hasn’t been that much new stuff added since I last played. Siren’s Isle is another entry in WoW’s long tradition of tedious, overly grindy island zones, and I dropped it pretty fast once I’d unlocked the one or two cosmetics I wanted. If I cared about gearing up, I guess I could take more of my characters through it to unlock the fancy ring.

If.

I’ve been finding other diversions here and there. Surprisingly my demon hunter is rapidly becoming my main du jour. Despite it having almost no meaningful impact on how I play, I find the Fel-Scarred hero talent tree has done a lot to make Havoc more enjoyable to me. All those big explosions make demon form feel a lot more meaningful.

I got her geared up enough that I was able to take down the basic version of Zek’vir without too much difficulty. I’m debating whether I want to try to do the harder version of him as well. Be nice to have the bragging rights, but… eh…

I did have a surprising amount of fun playing Plunderstorm. Which is to say more than zero. It’s actually a pretty fun PvE mode until you run into another player. Looking for treasure chests, fighting elites. Good times.

The conversion to full action combat within WoW’s engine is an interesting experiment, if a bit janky. I doubt we’ll ever see tab target abandoned in the main game, but it did leave me wishing for more mobs with avoidable attacks that aren’t just patches of fire on the floor.

Ultimately my interest in Plunderstorm didn’t last past unlocking the cosmetics I wanted from it, but it wasn’t the chore I thought it’d be, so I’ll call that a win.

My next big project in the game is to finish catching up by begrudgingly dragging myself through the Battle for Azeroth story. I decided to do the most obvious thing possible by playing a Kul Tiran Outlaw rogue. I also have a Troll warlock lined up to do the Horde side at some point.

I’ve only just made it to Drustvar, and I’ll have more detailed thoughts on BfA once I finish it, but so far it’s… fine? It’s barely had anything to do with the faction war so far, which is weird since that’s supposed to the be the whole theme of the expansion, but I’m not complaining. Learning about Kul Tiran culture has been interesting, if not riveting, and the visual design of the zones is unsurprisingly excellent. It’s not a thrillride, but it could be worse.

The First Descendant

With WoW not grabbing me much as I expected, I’m still playing The First Descendant. I continue to feel as if I’m about to lose interest, as I have pretty much since I started.

I began maining Valby, then switched to Sharen once I unlocked her, and now I’m bouncing around. I was very excited to unlock Ines, and I do think her mechanics are great fun, but she’s so unbelievably broken it can be a boring playing her at times.

It’s hard to talk about balance in TFD because gamers are so prone to hyperbole when it comes to these things. I struggle to find the words to communicate that when I say broken, I really mean it. I have never played a game where the balance was even remotely close to as bad as it is here. Ines isn’t a character; she’s a cheat code.

So I do often find myself turning to slightly less godly characters. Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Hailey. It’s a bit surprising as she’s more focused on guns than abilities, which is the opposite of how I usually like to play, but I don’t know, big gun go brrr, and I like her style.

I also unlocked Kyle the other day, and he’s been surprisingly fun. Real great tanky brawler charging around smashing everything. Pretty underpowered as most male descendants are, but at least he’s not as bad as Blair (whom I also love but who just plain sucks). May have to put some more time into Kyle going forward. Wanna give Noise Surge Luna a try, too.

The First Descendant is such a weird game. It manages to be so fun while being so bad in almost every way. I never understood those “5,000 hours played, do not recommend” Steam reviews until I played this one. I get it now.

I’m particularly fascinated by the story. It’s not good; it’s atrociously bad in fact. But it does hold this sort of train wreck allure.

The thing is, it’s not half-assed. They very much whole-assed this story. It’s quite high effort, and some of the plot twists later are on genuinely interesting in theory, but still the end product is just… terrible. It’s just too laden with ridiculous techno-babble, poorly translated nonsense, and jarring tonal dissonance.

The weirdest thing about The First Descendant’s story is how desperately serious and utterly angsty it is, despite how ridiculous literally every other part of the game is. You can make a game that’s all about broken people fighting to overcome their trauma in a world torn apart by war, or you can make a game where one of the main characters is a giggly half-naked girl whose actual legal name is somehow “Bunny Voltia,” but you can’t do both. Not effectively.

The voice acting is equally all over the map. Some actors are playing it entirely straight and actually managing to do a pretty decent job considering. The Guide and Yujin come to mind.

Some of them recognize how ridiculous the material is and have leaned into the cheese. Luna is a good example of this, and I genuinely love her character because her actress seems to be having so much fun with it.

And some of them recognize how ridiculous the material is and clearly just gave up. Sharen and Freyna are the worst offenders here. Can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t bring my A-game either if I were asked to read some angsty diatribe about how even the trees despise me. I assume that made sense in the original Korean, but it sure doesn’t in English.

Anyway, I guess for now I’m still sucking down the brain rot.