April 2017 Monthly Challenge : Write Up

I really enjoyed the April monthly challenge, kindly provided to me by EvilBlackSheep.

SteamWorld Heist: SWH is effectively a single player team based, turn based 2D platformer. I really enjoyed SWH, so much so that I ended up leveling up all of the 9 characters to level 10 (the maximum level). My actual playtime (as reported by the game) was just over 30 hours and this was significantly more than I was expecting but was mainly due to the fact I liked the game so much and enjoyed experimenting with different team makeups to try and complete the levels. I liked the gentle humour and the Steampunk theme. The story line was entertaining, the abilities for each characters varied and interesting as were the weapons. If my backlog wasn't so huge I could easily have played through the game again on a slightly harder difficulty and both DLCs have gone onto my wish list. I only have one minor criticism (and it is nit picking) in that I found the actual difficulty of levels variable in that whilst you can set the difficulty level for each level the same difficulty for two levels could prove easy on one level and extremely difficult on another. I would heartily recommend this game to anyone who likes turn based tactical games.

Memoria: Memoria is a point & click adventure game. My first play of this didn't really grab me but I discovered (thanks to coments posted by BLEAO members) that it was the second game in a series, The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav being the first. I'd played tDECoS previously and got stuck so I decided to re-visit it and enlist my wife's help (as she plays a lot of P&C games). It was gratifying to find out she got stuck at the same place as I had but after leaving her to her own devices for half an hour she figured out the solution to the problem so I will continue with tDECoS and then play Memoria I think.

Hexcells Plus: HC+ is a hex based puzzle game based around logically figuring out whether to mark a hex as being a hex with information or no information about hexes around. I thought I was pretty good at logic games but around half a dozen levels in HC+ proved pretty challenging for me. I had to resort to the Steam forums twice for a hint on how to get past a point on two levels and I can recommend the forums as they are very helpful and people respond to any queries with a clue on which hex to look at so the complete solution is not spoiled. So my idea of using it like I did for Hexcells, i.e. just using it as a short time filler for 10-15 minutes to complete a level or two, fell apart as a few levels took me an hour or so to complete and because there is no save feature I often lost progress if real life intervened. The time of 23 hours includes some levels started half a dozen times and then abandoned if I got called away and I left it running over night once by mistake but I'd have thought I've put in between 10-12 hours actually playing it through. Having said all that it was a great game and for some of the month was my main game rather than the filler I had expected it to be. I highly recommend it if you like logic based puzzle games.

I didn't get chance to play any of Sniper Elite 3 or Sheltered this month, mainly because I enjoyed and played so much of SteamWorld Hesit!

Won On Steam Gifts

And a reminder about what my current status with SG wins is.

Progress Bar

So an increase of 6 wins & a reduction of 2 beaten games & 2 games I won’t play making an overall increase of 2 to my backlog.

TL;DR
I finished two of the fives games from the monthly challenge and played around an hour of the third. I’m more than happy with that :)