Tag Archives: sci-fi

Gaming Round-Up: Wrapping up 2024

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My Sharen in The First Descendant.Time for another grab-bag on the games I’ve been playing lately, focused particularly on what I played over the holidays and into these first days of 2025.

This also marked my first few weeks playing with my very expensive and unnecessarily powerful new gaming computer, which I have dubbed the Thundercougarfalconbird.

New World

New World remains somewhat back-burnered as I remain unhappy with its sudden hard shift towards forcing everyone into raids and PvP in order to progress, but I did log in for my holiday event rewards, and I made some progress with crafting.

Originally I wanted crafting to be my main endgame activity, but the extreme grind involved put an end to that plan. Since then, however, I have occasionally undergone spurts of trying to level up my skills again, usually because my storage was full. In the past I had managed to max out furnishing and cooking, though the value of those skills is limited.

My new armoured bear mount in New World.As the holidays approached, though, I realized that a number of my skills were getting close to maxed, so I made the final push and got to 250 in armouring, weaponsmithing, and arcana.

I still can’t make any useful gear, of course. That would require yet more grinding to get all sorts of rare trophies and crafting gear, to say nothing of the high end materials I’d need (and of course the mats for 725 gear are only available from the raid).

But what I can do now is make my own weapon and armour matrices, and that will save me a lot of gold on upgrading artifacts in the future. There’s also a certain satisfaction in making them yourself instead of just buying them from the trading post.

Saints Row reboot

I’ve only played one or two short sessions in the past few weeks, having finished the game months ago, but GODS IT’S SO PRETTY ON THE NEW COMPUTER.

The Saints Row reboot looks gorgeous on my new computer.Diablo IV

Diablo IV recently ran yet another free trial recently, this one featuring the new spiritborn class.

I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for the spiritborn as a concept. It uses the same resource mechanic as the monk from D3, and while I did play a monk and even finished the base game campaign with it, I always found it a bit clunky, and I abandoned it for good once the crusader game along. I wasn’t in love with the idea of essentially the same class but with a new (and admittedly cool) Mesoamerican theming.

I think the spiritborn improves on the monk, but I’m not sure it entirely fixes the fundamental issues. The tuning is a lot better this time, so you don’t feel nearly as resource-starved as you did on the monk, but there’s still a certain clunkiness to a resource that doesn’t naturally regenerate but also requires an inconsistent number of builders per spender.

If you’re going to do a resource that’s not affected by time, I think it would make more sense to use more precise numbers. The spiritborn’s builders are all about three-hit combos, so I don’t know why they didn’t make it take precisely three builders per finisher. Instead it’s always just slightly off of that, and passive abilities add more uncertainty to your resource generation, so you just never quite get into a clean rhythm.

My spiritborn in Diablo IV.I think the spiritborn also suffers from the extreme homogenization of class design in D4. Almost every build of almost every class follows the same formula of a builder, a spender, and four cooldown abilities. It’s not the worst playstyle, but it shouldn’t be how every class plays, and it fits the spiritborn very poorly. Spiritborn clearly wants to be all about hit combos and resource-management, and baby-sitting all these little cooldown abilities doesn’t fit with that at all.

On the plus side, it’s a very aesthetically appealing class. The visual and auditory design of abilities is excellent, and I do think the mix of Mesoamerican spiritualism with martial arts makes for a very fresh-feeling aesthetic.

They also have much better character models than any of the other classes. I’m not one of those person who thinks all video game avatars need to be super hot, but all the classes in D4 pre-spiritborn just look… unhealthy. Every character looks like they have an eating disorder and/or the flu. The spiritborn actually look like healthy, normal humans.

Overall, I liked the spiritborn more than I expected to, but I don’t think it’s going to be the thing that convinces me to finally buy the game.

My spiritborn clearing a dungeon in Diablo IV.The First Descendant

The majority of my gaming time for the last few weeks has gone towards The First Descendant, despite or perhaps because of the fact it’s one of stupidest games I’ve ever played. I’ve put most of my thoughts on that into a column for Massively Overpowered, though, so I’m only briefly mentioning it here for the sake of thoroughness.

I’m not entirely sure right now when Bree plans to publish the column, but hopefully within the next week or so.

Heroes of the Storm

Not much to say about this other than I’m still playing, albeit sporadically. D.va remains my de facto main these days, insomuch as that term ever has any meaning for my indecisive self. She’s now my third most-played hero of all time, though it’ll still be a bit before she catches up to Tassadar and Jaina.

The recent buffs to D.va have only encouraged me to keep playing her. I don’t think she really needed buffs — I feel she’s simply difficult to play rather than underpowered — but I certainly won’t complain about some increased survivability. It’s good to see the game is still getting updates, even if they’re small.

Earning MVP as Li-Ming in Heroes of the Storm.I’ve also returned to playing Li-Ming on a semi-regular basis. Once a favourite, I struggled to relearn her after my long absence, at least in part due to balance changes since her early days. But I tweaked my talents on her (mostly swapping out some Magic Missiles talents for more Arcane Orb support), and I seem to have gotten back into the swing of things with her.

It soothes my disappointment over Diablo IV abandoning III’s story, somewhat. That’s one of the great things about Heroes: All my favourite characters are frozen in time at their moment of greatest coolness. WoW ruined Jaina’s character? She’s still a cool-headed badass in Heroes. D4 pretends Li-Ming never existed? She’s still kicking ass in the Nexus.

Epic Games freebies

Finally, I sampled several free games from the Epic Games Store, though unfortunately none of them quite stuck.

First there was Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. I loved hearing John Rhys-Davies as Gimli again, and it did seem to be made with some genuine love for the source material, but the gameplay didn’t particularly excite me. Is there some rule that survival games have to have the jankiest animations and combat imaginable? Once again it proves true that I enjoy survival mechanics, but not survival games.

It's naked Norman Reedus.Next up was Death Stranding, which I claimed a long time ago and never got around to playing until now. Based on its trailers and reputation, I was expecting it to be very strange, but it still managed to far more bizarre than I expected. At times I found the sheer surrealism coupled with the breathless seriousness with which it is delivered a bit unintentionally funny, but it’s so different I couldn’t help but be intrigued.

Again, though, the gameplay was the stumbling block. The vast majority of what I played was cutscenes, but when I actually controlled my character, the moment to moment mechanics were a bit dull. I wasn’t prepared to spend forty hours playing a mini-game to keep my backpack’s weight balanced.

I’m glad a game like this exists, though. It’s good to see developers taking chances. I might watch the rest of the story on YouTube at some point or something. Death Stranding may not be a game I enjoy playing, but I respect its originality.

Finally, there was Sifu. Like the original Mirror’s Edge, this is a game that I like, but which I simply suck too hard at to play. I’m pretty bad at this kind of combo-focused combat, and that coupled with an extremely punishing death mechanic was a deal-breaker. Definitely a skill issue on my part, but it is what it is.

Fighting my way down a hall in Sifu.The Secret Level episode based on it was quite cool, though.

Unknown 9: Awakening Review

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Unknown 9: Awakening first came to my attention when I saw the trailer at Summer Games Fest while waiting for the New World: Aeternum announcement. It looked interesting, but I would come to find the buzz around the game was very negative.

Performing a stealth takedown in Unknown 9: Awakening.Because we live in the worst timeline, the overwhelming majority of this was people having meltdowns over the fact the protagonist is an Indian woman. But in amongst all the weirdos wetting their pants in terror over being reminded that brown people exist, there were some legitimate concerns about what seemed to be some fairly janky gameplay.

Overall, it seemed like the sort of ambitious yet messy double-A title that usually proves a commercial failure but which I often end up enjoying, and in the end, that’s more or less what it was.

Unknown 9: Awakening is a highly linear action game set in the early 20th century. You play as Haroona. Haroona is a quaestor, a kind of supernatural investigator who can access an alternate dimension known as the Fold. This grants her a variety of psychic and telekinetic powers that are crucial to both the story and the gameplay. Haroona finds herself caught up in a civil war between different factions of a secret society, and looming over it all is the legacy of the Unknown 9, a group of immortal once-humans who seek to halt the cycles of destruction that have dogged the human race since long before the history that we know.

Definitely there are problems with this game. My biggest disappointment with U9A was the story, despite a promising start. The voice acting is pretty solid, and I think the underlying backstory around the Unknown 9 and the cycles of history is very compelling. Fans of The Secret World will find much familiar here, though the horror and Lovecraftian elements aren’t as prominent.

Ancient statues of the Unknown 9 in Unknown 9: Awakening.However, the meat and potatoes of U9A’s plot are very tropey and predictable, and I found the ending quite eye-roll worthy. There seems to be a real trend in our media these days of trying to force big character moments without doing anything to justify them. Whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”?

There’s some other, small issues with the game as well. For one thing, I regularly encountered a bug where Haroona half-fell through the floor in cutscenes, leaving close-ups to only show the top of her head. This definitely has that janky AA feel I know and have learned to live with.

However, despite how it looked in the previews I did find the core gameplay quite a strength, and that carries the game despite its other flaws.

I was concerned going that the game was going to be very stealth-heavy, and it is, but I found it didn’t bother me. The stealth mechanics are quite forgiving, and you have a lot of fun tools to let you stay one step ahead of your foes, from on-demand invisibility to the ability to see through walls by “peeking” into the Fold.

Turning enemies against each other with the stepping mechanic in Unknown 9: Awakening.What really makes this game special, though, is the stepping mechanic. Haroona has the ability to “step into” enemies, briefly possessing them. When you step into someone, the game’s action temporarily freezes, allowing you a moment to think through your next action. You can only make one attack before stepping out of an enemy, but with careful planning, that can still be devastating.

Early on, I found myself pinned down by two ranged enemies on a ledge. One was standing next to an explosive canister, but the other was a safe distance away from it. I stepped into the farther one, made him stand next to the canister, and had him fire his gun at it. When my step ended, the resulting explosion took both enemies out in an instant.

It was incredibly satisfying, and that barely scratches the surface of what you can do by stepping into enemies, especially later in the game when you can possess multiple enemies in a single stepping sequence.

It adds a very interesting new dynamic to the game because every new enemy type you encounter is not just a new challenge to overcome, but also potentially a new weapon in your arsenal. There’s nothing quite like walking into a room full of elite late game enemies and thinking, “All right, showtime!”

The aftermath of stepping into multiple enemies in Unknown 9: Awakening.There’s lots of other cool things you can do, too, like telekinetically shoving enemies off ledges to their deaths, but in the majority of cases stepping is the best choice, in terms of both power level and fun factor.

My only major criticism on the gameplay front is that the boss fights are a total letdown. They’re simple 1v1 encounters where the stealth and stepping mechanics aren’t available, so you’re playing without most of your toolkit, and there’s nothing to do but very slowly chew your way through their massive health bars between spamming the dodge and heal buttons.

The good news is that there’s very few of these encounters in the game, but it is quite the unforced error. Why not simply include some respawning waves of mooks for you to step into? Why remove all the mechanics that make your game fun and unique during its most climactic moments?

I will also note that it is a fairly short game. It took me about thirteen hours to finish it, and I’m usually slower than most people. This didn’t bother me; I rather appreciate when games don’t overstay their welcome. But I know for some people it might make them think twice about buying.

An Indian town in Unknown 9: Awakening.Taken together, Unknown 9: Awakening is a game I would recommend, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting until the next Steam sale to grab a copy. It’s got some very original and enjoyable game mechanics, but it also has some very significant stumbles.

Overall rating: 7/10 Worth the price of admission for the stepping mechanic alone.

I won’t factor it into my review, but one other thing I want to mention before I go is that the creators saw this game as helping to launch a vast multimedia franchise. Given its poor reception, that plan seems unlikely to continue, but there’s already a lot of tie-in material out there, including novels, comic books, an audio drama, and a web series.

I’m on the fence as to whether I want to check this stuff out. The premise of the setting is very good, so the potential is there, but the plot of the game itself was pretty weak, which doesn’t inspire optimism. The prospect of some actually good stories in this universe remains tempting, though.