Évaluations récentes de chicken007

An Assassins Creed game: Climb viewpoints, go to map markers, solve parkour puzzles.
This time with Greek names, ships, and costumes.

I call this one Assassins Creed: Wardrobe because its combat revolves around player character apparel.

A space exploration game with a bit of survival.
Fly many spaceships, discover deeply random planets and critters, build a hut, hire a chef.
There are plenty of checklists to follow for those unfamiliar with exploration. Scan, harvest, then build a hut.
Easy to fly space ships and surface traversing vehicles. Big economy now, diverse selection of activities. Hazards are few and avoidable unless higher PVE difficulty is chosen.

Interactions feature lengthy cinematic camera movements and slow-printing retro-style typewriter text.
But if you persevere, and stick with it...
Random context-free sentence fragment... onomatopoeia... ellipses...
ellipses...
ellipses...

May contain simulated driving.

GTA Online is a 7 year old online virtual world where one’s characters acquires weapons, vehicles, and criminal businesses. From Rockstar, whose core competence is modular mission-based gameplay. Missions, like projects, have a defined endpoint where completion is achieved and reward dispensed.

Cooperative Context. Each player must network and coordinate a team of other players against computer-controlled enemies. This technically makes the context of such ostensible crimes prosocial, in contrast to antisocial games where players blunder around shooting everything person-shaped in the face.

Age. This game being so old is hugely significant. Every aspect of the game has choices and alternatives and varieties. There are a dizzying profusion of vehicles, weapons, and properties to buy. Hundreds of standalone missions, entire story arcs of missions, and complex heists can be played to unlock features and discounts and then replayed to ‘grind’ in-game money and buy all that stuff. There are daily objectives and weekly specials to invigorate aging content.

Skills. Administrate businesses, manage a criminal empire, network with other players to run contraband, fly rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft, and learn to read maps so you don’t follow the GPS aroooound the shortcut. Research profitability and capabilities of toys before purchase and learn valuable lessons about checking the date on articles.

Abstraction within Missions. My favorite missions have specific conditions for completion but leave some flexibility of choice to the player about the precise technique and tools to be used, which encourages risk-taking experimentation. Other missions punish the entire team with a complete restart for any variation from expectations, which rewards compliant uniformity.

Meta-Play. Acquiring the in-game cash to buy and then upgrade everything in the game can become a job-like grind. People set meta-goals for themselves, such as completing elaborate collections or buying enough expensive stuff to stop those annoying advertisements from NPCs on the in-game phone. Others obsess with annoying other players or being annoyed by other players. Some prefer to cheat and get everything without effort, but they are a bit of a mystery to me since they don’t play very long.

Mission content! Oh Noes! Contains adult, violent, rude, and often quite literally criminal content. Expensive scientific research has consistently failed to link portrayals of such lurid content to changes in behavior over centuries in plays, romance novels, newspapers, music, movies, and TV... but I wish them luck this time. GG, politicians.

I found this game quite entertaining for a freebie. I appreciate that the dialog was spiced up with many humorous bits.
I enjoyed running the primordial soup simulation to see what randomly evolved and all of the related achievements popped before I got bored. Because the organisms are generated randomly, I found it oddly challenging to keep the larger life forms alive while single-celled organisms proliferated like crazy on their own. I did eventually get a useful larger organism with which I could mop up those little single-celled nuisances.

Some advice to achievement hunters struggling with Outbreak mode. Upgrades help a lot, collecting DNA increases weapon effectiveness against that organism, and each organism's behavior is completely different from the next. They do not all charge / attack the player's ship!
Getting the last achievement on the outbreak mode took me ten hours, and certainly not all in one sitting. This process became much more interesting when I read the author's store description and learned I was fighting other users' best organisms. Also, early survival is greatly aided by knowing that the ship's wake of bubbles pushes organisms away.
When I was really stuck, I just waited until most of the organisms starved because only a rare few organisms would actually eat nearby food. I am going to pretend this was an intentional strategy on my part, and not a consequence of trying to milk organisms for upgrades.

This is the first digital 'card' game that I have truly enjoyed. The various character / decks provide unmistakably different game-play.

Progression within each game allows one to add relevant and useful cards to the individual deck, and overall unlocking-stuff progression similarly adds cooler toys to each character build.

Astroneer is an exploration game with crafting, tech tree, and quite mild survival elements. A game simple enough for children, but with enough complexity to hold the attention of adults.

2024 Update: I have greatly enjoyed the new missions and additional vehicles, including quite useful trains and one which allow flight above a planet's surface.

Harvest and process resources to craft base parts, tools, rovers and buggies to drive, and shuttles with which to travel between planets. One will need to visit different planets to acquire specific resources to craft some useful objects.

My preferred ramp-style mine-shafts become level and I must change the descent angle to reach deeper parts of the planet.
Explanation: Any straight line through a spherical planet that doesn't hit its exact center becomes horizontal (level to gravity) at some point. A straight line which does hit the exact center of that sphere is more accurately deemed a vertical one-way plummet than a useful walking path. This is why I start a new ramp angle at each new level of caves, and (important!) actually walk on the new ramp to ensure it is not too steep to climb before continuing it downward very far.

A dense band of stars circles the equator of the planets, allowing one to find the equator by looking at those stars. If the band of stars is bending away from you, go towards that bend to bring it above you, which will be at the equator. The in-game compass is useful and tracks many things, but I still get a goofy little smile when I navigate by the stars.

Turn-based. Fun but short. Contains text.

An isometric view, turn-based strategy game. RPG-style player character customization and progression strongly influences combat strategy. The player also clicks on bits of text to progress the story.

Would have liked an additional top-tier run in which to play my end-game character. A little more space between 'everything is available' and rolling the credits.