Vito

Report #73

The first half of 2024 isn’t over yet, but it’s time to look back at what I’ve played. I made some great progress at the beginning of the year, but for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively played the RogueTech Mod for BATTLETECH. It’s such an amazing mod and an absolute time-sinker. I played not that much else. Still, here is the first batch of my 2024 games so far:

Reviews

Tropico 2 (2003) takes a twist on the usual Tropico formula. You are still in the Caribbean, but now in the age of pirates. Apart from building up your island as usual, you also get to send your fleet of pirate vessels on raiding missions. Despite being a well-made game, it didn’t really catch my interest, as it takes forever to build up your island. Repeating the first few steps of each mission became incredibly frustrating over time. No real recommendation from me. Rating: 2/5.

The Deed (2015) is a small RPG Maker game about committing a murder without being caught. It has a very simple gameplay idea, but I enjoyed experimenting with different approaches to do ‘the deed’. It’s nothing special but a decent average game. Rating: 3/5

Neighboring Islands (2017)is an unfinished(!) visual novel about a pirate stranded on a strange island. There is some good in it, but overall it was a bit too silly for me. And it’s unfinished! No recommendation. Rating: 2/5

Tropico 3 (2009) takes you back to modern times. It is a classic building game, and I had plenty of fun with it. It does not overstay its welcome; about 30 hours to go through all missions once was the perfect amount of playtime for me. I can recommend the game. Rating: 4/5

Deltazone (2022) is a shooter that died in Early Access. I played it in case the servers shut down since development was halted. Well…it’s a +1 in completed games? Rating: 1/5

Yi and the Thousand Moons (2017) is a short musical walking simulator. It is a bit strange, but the music is lovely in my opinion, and I had a nice time with it. Rating: 4/5

All That Remains (2019) is a short walking simulator, now removed from the store. It slowly uncovers all the details of its story about a young child losing their father and growing up without him. I did like the text snippets that tell their journey through childhood, but I wasn’t a fan of the visual representation. Rating: 3/5

Ultimate Zombie Defense (2020) plays in a zombie apocalypse and combines a top-down shooter with some simple base building elements. I liked the gameplay for an hour, but there is no long term motivation for me to keep playing after I got all the achievements…so a Rating: 3/5

Space Crew (2020) was free on Steam in March. It’s from the developers of Bomber Crew and is basically the same game, just in space. While I enjoyed some of the gameplay, it gets repetitive pretty quickly, and I was bored after a couple of hours, just playing for the rest of the achievements. Rating: 2/5

Developed by one single person Slay Together (2019) is an Early Access attempt to create a classic MMORPG. Since it is/was free, I don’t want to be too critical…let’s just say, you can tell that there was only one person working on it. Not saying they did a bad job, but there is just not enough content and a lot of things are left a bit unpolished. But hey, at least I did not encounter any bugs, which is more than most AAA titles can claim nowadays! If you care about achievements, the servers are set to shut down at some point in the future, so better get to it if you’ve started it. Rating: 2/5

Demos are making a comeback it seems; Steam is recently flooded with them after they were out of style for a long time. Masterplan Tycoon: Foundations (2024) showcases the first hour of a simplistic economics management game. I enjoyed the simple yet elegant graphics of the game and I like the genre. However, I wasn’t really convinced by the demo, gameplay seems to get repetitive pretty quickly and is mostly about micromanaging your supply chains. All in all this demo did not motivate me to buy the main game. Rating: 3/5

I like to play some smaller older games from time to time and Megapolis (2010) is a city builder, where you have to place a variety of building on a 5x5 grid, to reach a certain mission goal. Each mission takes about 10-15 minutes, so it’s rather quick to finish the 24 missions. It was a nice small game for in between. Rating: 4/5

Achievement Cleanup

The developer of Crush Penguin removed the one broken achievement, so that game moved itself from beaten to completed. Nice! I also got my missing achievements from The Bureau, an XCOM game which, sadly, does not hold up to the rest of the brilliant games in the XCOM universe. I want to like it, but just like the first time I played it, I just can’t. Deluge got achievements years after its release. Since I already played the game in Report #67, I just skipped through the text to get the different endings.

That’s quite a few games, but on the other hand it’s basically everything I played in 2024 so far. Looking at my goals for the year, I managed to reduce my backlog to 180 games, ten to go. And I’m at a 95% completion rate for games added in 2024, well above my goal of 80%. Let’s see what the coming month bring with them. Since I’m already feeling my fascination for RogueTech waning a bit, I’ll probably start playing other games again :)

Happy backlog clearing,
Vito

2024 goals -> Backlog: 180/170, 2024 additions: 18/19.

5 months ago 4 comments
Mitsukuni

Congrats on your progress with the backlog. :3

Tropico 3 is one of my all time favourites. I also especially recommend Absolute Power, if you haven’t played those missions yet.

5 months ago
Vito

Thanks for the recommendation! I did indeed play Absolute Power several years ago, long before I touched the main game. Those missions had their only little twists, yeah. Definitely a great game :)

5 months ago
Mitsukuni

No problem. :)
To me, with Tropico 4 they are the best in the series.

5 months ago
Vito

Oh, I agree, Tropico 4 is a lot of fun as well. I haven’t played the newer ones yet.

5 months ago