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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2507 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread! What did you get over the holidays, what are you playing?

Having a blast playing Skyrim modded. Been playing a lot and also just looking through modlists. This is one area I've found AI to be extremely fun and useful to work with, which has been rare for me lately.

My crew has picked up SCP: 5K again after a long hiatus. If you like janky tactical shooters and survival horror, it might be worth your time.

Cyberpunk 2077. I bought it in 2022 but never completed it, so I've been working on getting to the endgame. I'm terrible at games but the gameplay is really fun, and I'm enjoying the story although I wish Keanu Reeves would shut up. I don't like that everything ends terribly, but apparently the developers were insistent that was supposed to be a cyberpunk element. I'm kind of reminded of Mass Effect; it's like game developers are better at starting stories than ending them satisfactorily.

Also a bit of WoW. They finally added player housing, and it's actually pretty good. Most MMO housing systems make me feel more constrained than creative but the housing system actually lets you do what you want.

I picked up MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries over the holidays, overall it's pretty fun. It's the first installment I have played in the series though so I can't really give a comparison to other iterations.

Pros:

  • It's just viscerally satisfying to pilot a giant robot around and blow stuff up.
  • They do a great job with the sound design and feedback from stepping on things, firing weapons, etc.
  • It's fun to customize mechs in various ways, the shotgun Kintaro build is great.
  • The career progression is overall pretty good, with missions unlocking new, bigger mechs in a somewhat random way.

Cons:

  • The AI teammates are a bit slow in the head, they make up 3/4 members of your squad but often do under half the damage.
  • The standard missions get a bit repetitive (although to be fair the story ones are decent).
  • Walking distances... Bigger, more powerful mechs are slower, but the mission maps stay the same size. This started getting pretty annoying later on in the campaign.

Not really a video game, but I got the new Twilight Imperium 4th Edition expansion played the new franken-draft game mode: Twilight's fall. Got super addicted to it and and couldn't wait for my group to organize another game so I've started playing it online via the online asynchronous community. It plays a lot like online diplomacy in that people take turns throughout the day politic/react. Very addicting, I got almost no work done this week...

Ahaha oh man. I played that game once and it took like 14 hours, and it was horrible. I always talk about it as my worst time playing a board game ever.

How long does it take you to play?

Yeah it's a long game, if we finish in 10hrs we were moving pretty quick. The expectation is that if you sit down to play its a 12-14 hour game at the minimum. We did the draft mode at 5-Players over break and it took 17.5 hrs. In hindsight we should have broken it up into two days, but that's the game.

Escaped from Duckov today. Cute game that makes for a good alternative to the strategy games I usually play. On that front, I keep getting sucked into Total Warhammer now that CA gave me the third game. It’s really the perfect set dressing for the series.

I got travellers rest. It's a top down game where you own and manage a little tavern.

You grow crops, make beer, wine, spirits, and food. You can build guest rooms for people to stay in.

It's got stardew valley vibes all over. It's a nice relaxing game while I'm trying to get through an awful string of sicknesses.

travellers rest

For whatever reason I've got Innkeep on my wishlist. I really enjoyed Graveyard Keeper so was looking for something in that style.

I enjoyed Graveyard keeper as well. I can't remember now if I finished it though.

Travellers Rest is still in early access, my gut was saying to wait for more updates and stories, but it fit my gaming needs at the time so I purchased anyways. I think waiting if you can would be a good idea.

Playing a bit more Project Silverfish. It's still staggeringly unforgiving and I have a hell of a time identifying factions by eyeball before they start shooting at me, but getting more familiar enough with the conventions and map to not start each run scrambling for a compass and/or a helmet with a HUD.

Took Stoneblock 4 off the back burner. Like most FTB Minecraft modpacks, it suffers a bit from having too many random themes thrown in willy-nilly, but it's definitely polished.

Put Star Citizen back for now. They've had a bit of a tradition of year-end patches with hilariously bad balance ramifications, and this time the year-end patch dropped a pretty deep system without too many problems (and VR, mostly working)... but the balance is impressively scuffed. Might look back at it again in a month or two.

Nioh 2! The third is coming out in just a few weeks, and I'm replaying the second in preparation. Having already beaten the game 1.5 times or so, playing "I constantly swap between the 10 different kinds of weapons based on what recently dropped well" is a ton of fun. So many of the move-sets and combos are basically muscle memory for me, especially the katana, since it barely changed since the first game. Sekiro is an honorary contender, but I really do think Nioh is the best 'combat focused' game I've ever played. At least for melee combat, the ranged is rather bolted on in comparison. But the stances, ki management, the way it encourages aggression without becoming a rhythm game like Sekiro, it's just all so peak. I really hope the third one lives up to the legacy. As much as I love onmyo being its own playstyle, I think doubling down on their melee focus was probably the right call.

Based. I have 700 hours in Nioh 1 and still haven't even started Nioh 2.

Finally got around to repairing and modding a japanese new 3ds ll! Took a little wrestling with google translate to get through the menus (I was too stupid to realize I could just... mirror most of the steps on my English one that I didn't want to mod) but overall pretty easy. Felt very nostalgic to crank up a new save of Pokemon Ultra Sun, but now with the ability to mod the save file directly and make my Rowlet shiny.

Also downloaded more games to it than i'll play in the next 10 years. After Sun, probably one of the Fire Emblem Games?

Also bought the Final Fantasy 1-6 (iirc?) collection cartridge for switch when it was on sale. Also on the "get around to it eventually" list.

Any favorite mod recommendations? Been thinking about getting a computer just powerful enough for modded Skyrim.

I’m using the immersive and pure mod list from nexus and enjoying it. Legacy of the Dragonborn is included which is a super awesome mod that lets you put unique weapons armor items etc in display in a museum, adds auto sorting stuff, and a lot of quests.

And that’s just one of like ~300 mods! It includes clockwork too. I like it.

It’s a blast so far.

adds auto sorting stuff

That's what I've been missing on console :( Godmode and a sorting mod!

Any favorite mod recommendations? Been thinking about getting a computer just powerful enough for modded Skyrim.

Clockwork.

Ooo that does look fun!

I have been playing Total War since Shogun and the Warhammer series since it released but I've been working through the Bordeleaux Errant campaign. It's now quite difficult in the early game. He has zero friends in the region and one of the strongest foes who's also agressive right below. If I can just get into tier 3 I think I can hold on.

That's Alberic's, right? Across the Sea from Louen and the Enchantress?

Yeah! It was one of the easiest Bretonnian runs in Vanilla then Skulltaker showed up and things got spicy, now I see a new Slaneshi legendary lord who seem similarly good, but who has been busy with Dark Elves and the Jade Dragon. I haven't even bordered a lizardman this run.

I’ve been listening to the Hallowfall OST for WoW, though I haven’t played in more than a decade. Really nice pieces esp for the Lorel’s Crossing, Armory, Church of the Sacred Flame areas. I am a sucker for airships (always loved treasure planet), Halloween-themed things, and fictional renditions of Christianity, so I love it. I think they fucked up by implementing widespread flying mounts though, doesn’t seem like you can connect to locations if you’re rushing through them so quickly.

I’m also paying attention to ARC Raiders because I’m interested in why it is so popular. It seems that “coalition-building” is a really big joy that people get out of it which you don’t find in alternative titles, and the designers have implement some cleve matchmaking algorithm that puts all the cheaters in the same lobbies. And how just three years into the nature of war changing with drones, we already have a drone-heavy war simulator, which is interesting.

Far Cry series. I realized that clearing outposts scratches the same itch for me as something like Power Washer simulator. Slow progression is the point. I will probably replay the whole series from #3 through New Dawn.

I won’t touch Far Cry 6, though. In a shooter, RPG should only stand for Rocket Propelled Grenade.

Picked up Planet Crafter to play with my sister. It's a mild first-person survival game built on the concept of surviving, exploring, and terraforming a planet. Nowhere near the depth of, say, Terraforming Mars, and sometimes too much running around from one place to another, but reasonably good-looking and low on system requirements.

Dead Space Remake. I'm a wuss so I play on easy - the scares are enough excitement for me already, I don't need to be constantly fretting about ammo or surviving by the skin of my teeth at the same time.

In general I've been re-discovering easy mode lately. I love Dark Souls and similar soulslikes, and got very into the 'if it weren't so hard to get to the next area, it wouldn't have nearly the same emotional weight' way of thinking about games. It's a good philosophy but especially for games that aren't as tight as Miyazaki-san's stuff, it can really suck the fun out of what's supposed to be an enjoyable experience.

For example I was regretting buying Pacific Drive until I bumped the difficulty way down. Once I was getting new upgrades and story almost every trip, I got much more immersed in the story and started really enjoying it. Of course it was over soon but 13h of fun is way better than 40h of pain.

I'm still convinced that the original Dead Space still holds up and the changes in the remake just makes it worse. I think they are really screwed up with repeating "make us whole" 100 times through the game and even mentioning it so early. There was no need for extended scenes with the wife or Mercer. And surprisingly they almost didn't touch the whole "hey we spaced 1 necromorph and he took over the entire battleship full of military in an hour".

All true, but I'm a simple man. I liked the original Dead Space and I wanted to see what they could do with modern lighting systems. And to be fair they made non-graphical improvements as well: Kendra's character is much improved, and the weapons feel better too. I preferred the old zero-grav sections though.

"hey we spaced 1 necromorph and he took over the entire battleship full of military in an hour"

I loved that bit! Very much 'we're saved!' and then the slow realisation that you've really, really fucked up. Plus it makes total sense to me that the military get slaughtered, they're not informed about what's going on and they don't have the right tools. It would be like expecting Fort Knox to withstand a sudden assault by Count Dracula.

It's also funny that USS Valor is where you get the pulse rifle which when upgraded is one of the best weapons in the first game (extremely ammo efficient).

I would like to see Count Dracula assault Fort Knox. How deep into Dracula powerscaling are we going? Does he get the gypsy servants?

Easy mode is great. I never got to play Dead Space! I really like Prey though, which I think is somewhat similar. I also used to be a stickler for the harder difficulties, but am chilling out as I get older.

Would you recommend it so far?

Fallout New Vegas (Modded with Viva New Vegas stack).

I'm doing it because season 2 of Fallout is halfway through and its trippy playing through areas and meeting groups that are showcased in the series.

Hah I love that show. How is the New Vegas modding scene? I looked at Fallout mods many years back and was not that impressed.

There are modding tools that will download a stack of mods almost automatically (need to click download for each if you dont have a nexusmods subscription) and load them in the correct order for you which makes things a lot easier these days. The base game sorely needed some QoL, Graphics and UI tweaks which Viva New Vegas does while leaving the story and experience intact. The modding scene seems alive and well.

I haven't looked at any larger story packs or anything, but I'm enjoying the current playthrough. The writing is great as are the branching pathways. You can really wreck things and do horrible things to people.

Yep I just used a mod collection for Skyrim. Having fun. And lol, going all murder hobo doesn't appeal to me much anymore, but I'm glad you're having fun. ;P

I always do the nasty option and reload. Things like selling your companions into slavery, or telling someone you are going to wear their head like they are wearing their hat.

Nothing at the moment. I put some hours into a Civ V game earlier in the week. Playing the Hittites (Lekmod). Found myself attacked by Morocco (!), Ethiopia and Arabia at the same time in the ideology era.

I keep putting hours into ARC Raiders. It's low commitment to just go do a run or two. I also keep playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which was phenomenal at start but later on in the game it starts piling up more frustrating enemies. I don't know how I feel about that.

ARC Raiders

I got a copy for free (for which I am grateful!), but found it falling far short of what the hype promised. Maybe I just don't get it.

Bad:

  • Rifling through trash and doing inventory management on the fly are not fun but merely annoying.
  • The randomized nature of the loot means that you have no way to reliably get a specific item that your progression requires. Blueprints are the worst offender.
  • The progression is extremely grindy and gamey, very anti-immersive.
  • Knowing what to keep and what to get rid off effectively requires using a guide; advance knowledge is key.
  • The out-of-run inventory management in the main menu is very repetitive and boring.
  • The third-person shooter combat is entirely underwhelming. Sorry, but Helldivers 2 spoiled me here.
  • Running through the same maps over and over and getting the same trash out of the same trash cans and then extracting at the same elevator...did I already say repetitive? It is repetitive. Repetitively.
  • The whole family-friendly nobody-ever-dies thing is just baffling. We shoot each other with guns, blow each other up with bombs, and somehow we only ever get "knocked out" and then magically reappear in the base.
  • The NPCs are a woke diversity cast.
  • Player customization offers no facial hair and only unisex clothing.

Good:

  • It's technically very competently made. File size, performance, graphics, sound, animations, stability are all top-notch.
  • One thing I'll give it is that the solo player experience is unusually good for a PvPvE game; most solo players are unexpectedly not out to kill you and you can cooperate with them and even exchange items sometimes. (The same is NOT true in team games.)
  • Being able to barricade doors and set up ziplines is a nice touch.

Overall I grant that it's well-made and well-marketed, but at the same time it's a soulless consumer product.

I don't think you're not getting it, we just have a different gaming profile. The progression is frustrating and randomised, but personally I just put out of my mind. All it does is inform which buildings I'm likely to target for looting in a run but other than that I'm happy just getting random stuff and shooting ARC. I don't hate the looking through trash aspect. And the shooting is satisfying to me.

I'll grant that the out of run inventory management is annoying and especially coupled with the slow progression. I'm filling up with materials to build stuff I just don't have the blueprints or levels to build; and there's little use in building a bunch of entry level equipment, you'll always be able to build them right before a run.

It's not game of the year, but it's the low time and mental commitment that makes it so I keep coming back for a handful of runs a day.

It seemed pretty boring and soulless to me too. I refunded it. Third person games (maybe especially in the woke era) tend to bore the piss out of me.

Hah I have a buddy who loves ARC Raiders, keeps trying to convince me to buy it. Idk, I put competitive shooters behind me almost a decade ago now, but I do hear good things.

It's not a competitive shooter, it's an extraction shooter, like Tarkov. That means sometimes you'll end up in a fight with other players, but in my experience the ARC Raiders playerbase is quite chill, at least when I play solo. 95% are not going to initiate PvP, most are happy just saving someone's ass for the fun of it. The PvE enemies are overwhelming but also previsible which makes them fun to plink at. The biggest issue I would say the game has is that it's repetitive and has a hard time keeping me occupied for more than an hour or so at a time.

FWIW, I second that assessment.

Supposedly non-PVP players are matched with non-PVP players and vice versa, which helps.

Whoa.

So that's...that makes a lot of sense. I had very peaceful solo games when I just started out, and after playing several rounds with my bro and his friend (who play a very aggressive PVP strategy), I had a sudden uptick of inexplicable psychos in my solo games. Guess that explains it. The game doesn't care about my peer pressure excuses; it knows what I did.

No Man's Sky. First time playing it. Pretty cool but the planets get a bit samey after a while. The base building and terrain manipulation feel like Minecraft for adults (in a good way). It does a good job of portraying scifi space travel. I can really get into flying around star systems and exploring planets and stations.

This game is really something to experience in VR. Unfortunately the "samey" vibe still kicks in pretty quick, and some of the combat updates made VR space combat a lot more difficult. But I find myself coming back to it every year or two just to "be there."

Didn't buy anything, none of the new releases or discounts seemed to offer anything new.

Terra Invicta recently had its 1.0 release, but I'm reluctant to start another run. They go on for very long (made by developers of The Long War, so no surprise), and I'm not sure the updates since the last time I played actually added enough to justify the investment.

Shokuho, a Warring-States-Era-Japan mod for Mount & Blade II Bannerlord recently had a minor update, and on a whim I picked it up again and slapped on whatever mods would fit. It ended up being a bit of an ordeal to get it to run, because I needed the exactly correct versions of each and every mod so they played nice together. It works now, and I play it on and off on an old campaign that miraculously still works. IMO Mount & Blade is peak singleplayer gaming; the single-best genre formula ever devised. Unfortunately the actual games are made in Turkey and the quality is accordingly somewhat lacking, but man did the Turks get the basic idea right. Anyways, now I can fiddle with Shokuho and try to do pike and shot tactics in medieval Japan. It mostly works fairly well, except for the part where I can't control the proportion of pike to shot that my NPCs recruit, so I end up with too little pike for how much cavalry is running around. Also, pikemen can't drop their pikes - if they have a secondary weapon, they'll just magnetically glue the pikes to their own backs to draw swords. Which looks extremely stupid. So I outfit my pikemen with no secondary weapons...which makes them significantly less capable in chaotic melee and sieges. So I need to keep specialized swordsmen around as well, which is some unwelcome micromanagement. Maybe there's a modding solution for that, but I haven't found it yet.

I was feeling an urge to play XCOM 2 over the Christmas break. When I opened it from Steam, I found that it gave me the option to play the War of the Chosen DLC, which I didn't remember buying. It adds so much new content to the base game that it's a bit overwhelming at first brush, but the base game is so addictive that I got into the swing of it pretty quickly, and I think I've logged a few dozen hours into it so far, having killed my first of the three Chosen assassins.

Any of you XCom fans tried Phoenix Point? It's a newer team shooter by Gallop, who did UFO Enemy Unknown which I loved so much but also XCom Apocalypse which I didn't.

Tried it, and found it a horrible mess. UX was bad, the free-aim gimmick didn't fit the grid-based movement at all, the campaign progression was very opaque, the troopers and items looked silly, the here-are-three-factions-with-one-unique-unit-each system seemed eerily similar to War of the Chosen, the DLCs varied from questionable to godawful...I didn't get far in it. I keep retrying it occasionally; there was a patch recently and a big old mod Terror From The Void ("The Long War of Phoenix Point!", they say), but every time I try it I just end up frustrated by the tactical layer and with no sense of direction in the strategic layer, and annoyed by the UX all throughout.

IIRC, @self_made_human enjoyed it, though?

@atelier I can't find a detailed review either, so it's up in the air if I've written one.

The TLDR is that Phoenix Point is incredibly mid. It's just teetering on the edge of worth playing.

The main issue is wasted potential. The ideas behind the mechanics are excellent, it's a simulationist approach, closer to the original XCOM than the new crop, but in 3D.

I particularly enjoy the ballistic simulation, since the RNG simplification of XCOM always slightly annoyed me.

But that's really all it has going for it. The gameplay was grindy, often unfun. The content didn't feel as diverse or interesting as XCOM. The story was so-so.

The balancing wasn't great, but don't listen to me on that now, because the devs implemented a community patch by a group of popular modders that redid the progression. I've seen people claim it's much better.

I'd say I like idea of Phoenix Point much more than actually playing it. I was an obsessive before release, but Julian over-promised and under delivered.

Thanks! I appreciate this review! I saw there was a demo so I'll give that a try. The other review makes it sound like something I'm looking for while this dampens my excitement so I'll give the demo a try and skip it or wait for a sale.

I think for some games the magic comes from learning it or the way it did something and once that's passed the magic is really hard to recreate. Tough position to try to rekindle.

Thanks that sounds like it has more of what I miss about the originals so I think I'd enjoy it. I'll poke around and see if I can find @self_made_human's review.

I've heard of it but I've never played it. The only XCOM games I've played are the reboot ones, I've never played any of the originals.

The original is probably my favorite game. It wasn't as polished as the new ones, but I loved the time unit system (you could take actions as long as you had time units so someone who didn't need to move could shoot multiple times and reloads varied with where you had to get the ammo from belt was just a fraction of a turn backpack meant a good chunk of a turn but you could carry more ammo and some ammo only fit there).

But what I loved was the story portential it unlocked in me. Having an early terror mission go bad against the floaters when all of the sudden the rookie picks up a heavy weapon of another troop's dead body and blows through all the remaining aliens like butter. She eventually became a colonel and led the fight all the way to Mars. Her mental fortitude was the highest I think I'd seen in thousands of hours.

Or the time I blew up half my psyonically strong team when I brought a rookie to get experience (mind control let you move the enemy for a turn) so I was grouping a huge ship of etherials up for the rookie to kill and I missed one who mind controlled the rookie with the bazooka and oh no as the realization set in and I dusted off with a much smaller elite cadre.

I played the new ones I think I've played all the tactical titles in the series, but I think I'd changed and they never had that same feel.

War of the Chosen is great. @Southkraut actually just mentioned The Long War, have you ever heard of that mod for XCOM? It's also awesome.

I've heard of it but never tried it, I'm curious. Reading the TV Tropes page for it now.

Hah. Allow my partial disagreement - War of the Chosen is a complete mess, and if XCOM2 hadn't already jumped the shark on its and with its other DLCs, WotC would have been the final nail in its coffin.

Mechanically XCOM2 tactical combat is pretty good - the stealth mechanics for example are a nice addition. But the whole theme, plot and writing are superhero-movie-tier trash, the strategy layer is a mess, the visual design of the entire game is godawful, the character building has gotten far out of hand with mutiple overlapping systems, and the DLCs make it all even worse by adding more systems that barely fit together.

If I want a cartoonish everything-and-the-kitchen-sink XCOM game, I'l play X-Piratez, thank you very much. At least that one knows what it is.

I used to think that Xenonauts was too boring compared to XCOM, but after XCOM2 I actually found myself appreciating Xenonauts 2 for being less messy and more grounded.

Ultimately, my favorite turn-based tactics game isn't XCOM at all but Battle Brothers. Maybe Menace, coincidentally by the same developers, will be the go-to in the future...but that one isn't out yet.

XCOM:EW with LW is very good though, IMO. Showing its age by now, and they couldn't fix some of the base game's issues (pod mechanics, stupid-looking weapons), and the mod isn't perfect itself (too many MEC classes), but at the time that one was pretty much non plus ultra.

I tried Battle Brothers and got murked hard in my 2nd battle. Maybe I had the difficulty too high? Haven't been back but should really dust it off again.

Perfectly fair to start with a lower difficulty. Battle Brothers has a bit of a learning curve early on, as you need to pick a few fights you shouldn't have, and make a bunch of mistakes you could've avoided, just to get your bearings. It's a game for risk assessments and pragmatism, and you need to have a minimum of painful experience to do that.

FWIW, ordering a retreat mid-battle is perfectly valid. Unlike in earlier versions of the game, ordering a retreat will even disable enemy Zones of Control and they will stop pursuing you. It will lower your company's morale and cost you some reputation, but that's generally preferable to getting Game Overed. So it's a very safe panic button.

If you like turn-based tactics, then I highly recommend giving it another few tries. Yes, multiples - as said, you absolutely cannot expect your first few runs and your first few battles to go your way.

Here's a few more tips to get you started:

  • As said, feel free to retreat when you feel a battle isn't going your way. Losing a bunch of brothers unnecessarily is worse for morale than running away and abandoning a contract, and you can regain the lost reputation more quickly when you don't need to spend weeks getting back up to strength.
  • Similarly, don't hesitate to abandon a contract when you notice that it's more than you bargained for.
  • If you ruin your rep with a given client, just go work somewhere else until they forget about it.
  • The rewards for a given job scale with your reputation and with your relationship with the client. Early on, contract payout won't even cover your expenses - your early sources of income are mostly in selling loot, and possibly in trading when you buy low and sell high.
  • When you hire a brother, you also pay for the equipment they bring with them. Early on, avoid recruits with expensive items.
  • The main source for equipment should be loot. Only buy equipment when you urgently need something and you have no luck with the looting.
  • Contract difficulty scales with the number and levels of your brothers, but not with their equipment or their actual stats. Upgrading equipment and getting brothers with better skills relative to their level is an important edge in the mid-game, while having lots of low-quality, possibly crippled, poorly-equipped but high-level brothers can be a bit of a trap.
  • You should absolutely attack and loot enemy camps that have nothing to do with contracts. Those always contain a good deal of loot. The difficulty of those camps scales with time, and with their distance from civilization.
  • Hiring cannon fodder is absolutely valid. Cheap brothers with cheap equipment are effectively ablative armor for your core brothers.
  • If possible, don't send your guys into battle naked. Even a straw hat is better than bare skin.
  • Swords get a bonus to hit chance. Spears even more so. Brothers with poor melee skill should use those.
  • Shields are mandatory for brothers with low melee defense. Only with decent melee defense and a good plan for what happens when you get hit (i.e., armor and the right perks) can a brother use two-handed weapons and expect to survive.
  • Sometimes the dice are against you and you're going to sufffer permanent injuries, deaths and failures that seem like they shouldn't have happened. That is of course a misconception - they are bound to happen sooner or later.

Anyways, I like Battle Brothers a lot. Even read the novelizations. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't know of any turn-based tactics game I'd rather play.

Ultimately, my favorite turn-based tactics game isn't XCOM at all but Battle Brothers.

I had a lot of fun with Battle Brothers. Have you had a look at Stoneshard yet? It hits a few of the same notes.

I have! I keep retrying it occasionally. But in the end, it feels to me like a game the dev really wanted to make, but not one that he really wanted other players to enjoy. The UX is terrible, the dungeons go on for far too long, far too much time is spent manually travelling and backtracking, the inventory management is onerous, and the combat is mostly a matter of stacking dozens of tiny 1% and 2% buffs to this or that stat in the hopes that it will tilt the odds just enough in your favor...

Yes it hits some of the same notes as Battle Brothers, but it has none of BB's streamlined elegance. Maybe I'll come around to it at some point, but so far I always found myself having decidedly too little fun for how much time it costs to play it.

Yeah I kind of agree. Its a lot of fun, but what isn't fun is having so many different stats (eg 'hands efficiency?') that you need to invest time in reading about to understand. Games are meant to be fun. If you need to go read a build guide outside of the game to make a decent build, something has gone wrong.

I am waiting until the final release before getting back to it as I hope it will have a lot of QoL polish by then.

Mechanically XCOM2 tactical combat is pretty good - the stealth mechanics for example are a nice addition.

I thought the stealth mechanics added to XCOM 2 were a bit half-baked and gimmicky. WotC goes some way towards addressing this specific criticism with the addition of missions in which the optimal strategy is to go the whole mission without being spotted.

But the whole theme, plot and writing are superhero-movie-tier trash

Agreed, although I can't really say this is a significant departure from the original XCOM: EU. I actually prefer the grizzled, bitter, shell-shocked Bradford over his flat, clean-cut characterisation in the first game, even if his new haircut looks preposterous. Shen is the archetypal Marvel girlboss Mary Sue, though, there's no denying that.

the character building has gotten far out of hand with mutiple overlapping systems

Agreed, almost everything in the tactical layer is far too cluttered compared to the more streamlined first game, and this is only exacerbated in WotC.

I thought the stealth mechanics added to XCOM 2 were a bit half-baked and gimmicky. WotC goes some way towards addressing this specific criticism with the addition of missions in which the optimal strategy is to go the whole mission without being spotted.

IMO the main thing stealth did for XCOM2 was offer an alternative to needing to overwatch-creep and just bumble into pods. Both are still in the game, of course, but with the stealth parts you get occasional relief from that.

Yes, I think the devs' main takeaway from the base first game was that the mechanics encourage an overly slow and cautious playstyle. Their attempts to address this both in Enemy Within (meld containers that self-destruct in three turns) and XCOM 2 were largely successful and mostly make sense in-universe. It's reasonable that XCOM, as a guerrilla paramilitary force, would have a limited window in which to extract its operatives before their transport gets overrun by enemy troops; it's not reasonable that ADVENT would attach explosives to a valuable asset and set them to blow up after a fixed period of time before they even know XCOM is in the vicinity.

If you just want to play it vanilla, the phone port is actually great btw. But otherwise I'd always recommend Long War at least anyway.

I've heard so much about Long War, and having logged more hours in the base game of XCOM 1 than anything else in my Steam library, perhaps I ought to check it out.

Fourth-ing (or whatever) the recommendation for Long War. Note that Long War: Rebalanced is made by different people and is pretty good but not the same experience.

The mods have mods? We need to go deeper.

Octopath Traveler 0. I gather that the game was originally an episodic installment on mobile platforms, and that shows through in a variety of ways--the "town building" is hollow, the writing is uneven. But the pixelated tilt-shift JRPG grind is pretty well untouched from the previous games. I'm about 80 hours in and closing on the endgame.

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