So, don't let the hour count intimidate you, Stardew Valley is the perfect game to play if you want all your efforts to be reflected in a meaningful way. The joy is seeing the progress you've made and slowly branching out to new projects, and the pacing keeps it just shy of monotonous. There are plenty of other games like Stardew Valley on Steam, but few of them manage to make their activities not feel like boring chores the way Stardew does. But at its heart, it's a game meant for you to luxuriate in and work through over the course of many, many hours. It's flexible in that you can choose to play it leisurely or go hard and whip through its challenges at a fast pace. Stardew Valley is a charming pixel-art game where you grow a farm, meet people, and help rebuild a town. And that's even before you get into modding. It's the ultimate life sim game that will consume your life. It's safe to call Stardew Valley a classic at this point. Elden Ring is an invitation to one of the greatest, most creative fantasy worlds in games. Elden Ring routinely rewards the effort you put into it with beautiful landscapes and items that can completely change how you interact with the game. The more time you spend in it, the more you start to run into the deep, forbidden parts of the world that genuinely feel like you shouldn't be allowed there. ![]() It has almost everything you'd want in a dark fantasy RPG.ĭepending on your desire to explore and your skill at its punishing combat, Elden Ring can take hundreds of hours to thoroughly complete. You explore dungeons and caves and cities and speak to a cast of wise and absurd characters. It takes the weighty combat of the Dark Souls series and has you face off against the sometimes beautiful and sometimes horrific beasts of the Lands Between. But I didn't react to that discovery with distress, I was thrilled to see what else was tucked away in this monumental open world action RPG.Įlden Ring was our 2022 game of the year for a reason. There might as well have been a late title card because I soon discovered that more than half of the game was still in front of me. The boss of the area took a number of tries, but when he fell, I was certain it was over. I was around 60 or so hours in and had reached an area that had been teased for most of the game. I remember playing Elden Ring for review before all the walkthroughs and guides were out there. But if you find it's not enough for your strategy-hungry brain, install The Long War 2 and start your campaign. That's right, they injected a little 4X into XCOM. And each mission requires you to build out a resistance camp in each area by gaining intel and defending it from aliens. There are far more dice rolls, but, as Tom Senior wrote in his piece on the mod, it retains the excitement of chance by flooding the game with smaller, but still impactful decisions. Missions come in various degrees of severity and you have to juggle your squads to survive them. But the tweaks it makes to units, enemies, and the overall structure of each mission, forces you to approach it with an all-new strategy. The mod doesn't go out of its way to explain itself, so you'll have to rely on existing knowledge of the base game. The single caveat to The Long War 2 mod is that it's primarily aimed at people who are already experienced with XCOM 2. It takes Firaxis' solid tactics game and folds in complexity to give it much more weight than the base game. The Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2 is a little bit of a cheat for a list like this, but this mod is absolutely unparalleled. Persona 5 is a long journey, but a journey that's worth it. And outside the combat, you get to explore both the mundane hallways of the main character's high school and the warped labyrinths in its dream-like dungeons. It also has surprisingly dynamic turn-based combat that tasks you with keeping momentum to clean out your enemies efficiently, which rewards clever tactics and sharp knowledge of your characters. "It might not be what you'd expect from quite possibly the longest JRPG you'll ever play, but each of those many hours is filled to the brim with inventiveness that-quite frankly-can make it hard to go back to other games in the genre," Oscar Taylor-Kent wrote in our review of Persona 5. But to see all of that, you have to commit over 100 hours of your life to it. It exudes style, has an outstanding soundtrack, and a weird, but charming cast of characters. Persona 5 is the quintessential JRPG, taking lessons learned from the genre's history and incorporating modernized tactics. The Persona series taunt JRPG-curious players with how ridiculously long each one takes to complete.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |