What I Played This Week (10/4/2020)
I missed a week of this blog thing, but I was pretty busy moving all of my things across Seattle, and I only played Hades and mobile games last week so the list will mostly focus on things I played this week. I’m waiting for a mount to put the TV on the wall before I set up the consoles again, but I can play Hades in handheld mode on the Switch and Squadrons on my PC so what do I need them for anyways?
Hades: As I said in the intro Hades is the only other game I played the week that I moved. It’s excellent, the combat feels great, the upgrades feel important and stack in fun and interesting ways. Stacking a specific god’s powers until they become absurdly powerful seems like both the most fun and the most effective way to play. The system that encourages you to change which weapon you use by giving a different weapon a resource bonus is brilliant, it has gotten me to change weapons every run, even making it all the way to the final boss with the bow (a weapon I think isn’t very good). The way that the Daedalus hammer changes the core functionality of each weapon makes me want to get those upgrades every time. But the thing that Hades does better than any other run-based game (a better genre descriptor than rogue-lite) that I’ve played is how well integrated the narrative is. Other games like Rogue Legacy have a narrative excuse for why the player has to start over when they die, but it’s not much more than just an excuse. Hades, on the other hand, makes dieing and re-trying the core part of the story. Lots has been written about the narrative and writing in Hades, so this won’t be a revolutionary take, but the writing in Hades is excellent. The game acknowledges everything you do and the characters tell you about it. Who killed you last, what other gods’ boons you are currently using, how far you’ve made it, and lots more that I can’t think of. The voice acting is also quite good, giving the dialogue even more personality to all the characters. Also, there’s fishing.
Star Wars: Squadrons: I finished the campaign for Squadrons after ~6-7 hours, it was mostly unremarkable to me. All of the new characters were well realized. When I watched the story review from Star Wars Explained I realized that the little character details really did a good job of fleshing out the motivation of the 2 factions. But the true meat of this game is going to be the multiplayer, I’ve played a couple matches of Dogfight, and 1 Player vs Player game of Fleet Battle. Both modes seem really fun, the push and pull of fleet battles seems really well designed. I’ll hopefully have some more well defined thoughts about the multiplayer next week after I’ve played a few more hours.
Hearthstone: Elementals have been added to Battlegrounds, along with 4 new/re-added heroes. Elementals seem fun, with a similar play style to Pirates, lots of the new minions get or give stats when elementals are/were played. Of the new heroes Ragnaros is definitely too powerful, after a few turns it gives 2 minions of the players choosing +4/+4 each for free. Compare that to something like Edwin, which costs 1 and gives 1 minion +1/+1 for each minion bought that turn which on average is probably +3/+3 or +4/+4 and requires much more set-up than Ragnaros does. Of the brand new heroes, I’ve only played Chenvala who reduces the cost of moving to the next tier when 3 elementals are played, it was bad and I didn’t do well. New stuff makes the game more exciting, I’ll definitely be playing more battlegrounds this week.
Mini Metro: Mini metro continues to be excellent, today’s daily was my best of the week. I am currently sitting at 39th place. The difference between 39th and 1 is a lot, I got 1866 passengers today but the number 1 player got 3131. There are some people that are very good at this game.
Egg Inc: I think I may be approaching the end of the current run with Egg Inc. The accomplishments are small and coming slowly. This is the typical Egg Inc experience for me, I play for a few weeks and then leave it un-opened on my phone for months. We’ll see when this current run ends, and if the next one begins