Deep Rock Galactic

Deep Rock Galactic is a 4 player co-op mining game created by Ghost Ship Games, and published by Coffee Stain Studios/Coffee Stain Publishing. In it, you play as one of four unnamed dwarves for the mining company Deep Rock Galactic, and your job is to diggy diggy holes.

And also fight an absolute pissload of monsters.

To start, as I said, there's 4 classes. Digger, who's class special is massive drills he can use to power through rock and dirt, or, if you're impatient, minerals for faster mining. The Scout, who gets a flare gun and grappling hook for proper Spider-Manning about the level to get at things the rest of your team can't reach. You also have the Gunner, who gets a massive fuck-off minigun along with a zip-line creator, to assist the team in moving about. Finally, you have the Engineer, who gets a Platform Gun, for further mobility help, along with LMG Turrets, because what self-respecting Engineer doesn't have turrets? Exactly. Turrets are a requirement for any Engineer class worth their salt.

So, the plot of the game is diggy diggy hole. That's most of it, as far as I've seen. You go to the assignment board, you get a job, you do the job. The jobs can range from Elimination(Kill big thing), to Mining Expedition(Get resources, bail), to Egg Hunt(FUCK EGG HUNT), along with Point Extraction(Left in hole till you get fancy rocks) and finally Salvage Operation(Someone fucked up, go fix it.) Throughout most of these, you'll have secondary objectives, usually acquiring some other form of mineral on the way down. Completing the secondary objective, as with pretty much every game, gives you extra money to buy upgrades with. You'll need upgrades to kill aliens, dig better, have more flares(It doesn't matter, you'll never have enough flares), and fancier armor. You can only have one upgrade per upgrade tier, however, so you'll have to decide which you want. In my case, did I want a flamethrower that had fuel for days, or had sticky flames to properly melt the Glyphids and in some cases, my teammates? 

I went sticky flames, if you were wondering. Anyway.

Of course, you don't need friends to play. There's a way to solo-play in that you get a robot buddy named Bosco who hangs out with you, shoots rockets and machine guns, and even revives you if you go down. So friends aren't required, but still very useful, as Bosco is just one friend, while friends are multiple.

The game's mining areas are procedurally generated, so no two are the same. I'd file that under "good things" because the game, while fun with friends, does get very samey after a while. However, that doesn't stop it from being fun. I've had a blast with it on my stream, and even off stream it's a solid time-killer. It's still in Early Access, and normally I don't like playing Early Access games because they're generally shitshows, but this one's pretty solid honestly. It's worth picking up.

In summation, Deep Rock Galactic gets an 8/10 from me. Worth a purchase, and you can try to blow your friends off cliffs with satchel charges.

Golf With Your Friends

Golf With Your Friends is a mini-golf game with varying courses, ball/game options, and hole types. It was made by Blacklight Interactive.

It's fun, I'll say that. It's easy to play and there's a decent amount of basic courses. The workshop is very well done, too, with lots of custom maps to pick from. There's also several options to mess with in order to improve or absolutely ruin someone's day during golf, such as everyone has to be a cone, or the gravity's at 50%.

Downside? I don't think it's actually being supported anymore. There's been very few updates in the last 6 months, if any. The only new maps being made are custom ones. It's only like $5 on Steam, but still, man. Support your fucking game.

Due it it being $5 and easy to play, I'll give it a 7/10. It'd be higher if they supported the damned thing, I'll say that.

Sorry this one's short, I haven't been playing many games recently.

Arcade Spirits

For full disclosure, I received a copy of this game for free to review it.

And now to the review.

Arcade Spirits is a Visual Novel developed by Fiction Factory Games and published by PQube. It's about an arcade, the Funplex, in the year 20XX where the Video Game Crash of 1983 never happened, so gaming's ubiquitous as all hell and arcades are pretty common-place. You're a poor bastard who has, quite possibly the worst luck in human history, and has just about given up. Juniper, your best friend, talks you into downloading a Life Coach app named IRIS, who decides you need major help. What follows may in fact be one of my favorite games of this year.

I'm going to be honest with you. I love VNs. Like, a lot. A story based entirely on narrative that I've got to put in effort to screw it up? Thank god. I usually just kinda pound through them and coo(in an incredibly manly way) over the characters and then that's it, I'm done.

This did not happen with Arcade Spirits. I was genuinely emotionally invested for most of the game. The writing in this game is deeply enjoyable, and the voice actors do an incredible job. Also, the most brutally delivered dad-joke in history is a conversation option and I took the hell out of that.

I got hooked by the first act. The owner of the arcade's a wonderfully amusing old lady, and the game does an amazing job of keeping track with how you're responding to situations and who you've been interacting the most, which is the most useful thing I've seen in a VN. 

The background audio and set designs are clearly created with love. There's not a single part of this game that feels neglected, if I'm being honest. The story kept me hooked and I kept having to tell myself I needed sleep, but the path I took, considering I read rather quickly, only took about 4-5ish hours. There's 6 "options," so to speak, so if you're a speed-reader, it'll grant you about 30 hours. Add in changing gender/who you're into each route, and that'll escalate. Which is pretty solid for a visual novel. And hey, it's longer than fucking Fable. 

The downsides of Arcade Spirits are really only in it's character creator, which VNs rarely have so I'm not quite sure why I'm bitching, but I held out hope I could be fat and bearded. Alas. There are a few slow parts where I wasn't completely drawn in, but I cleared those quickly enough and got back to enjoying it.

All in all, I'm giving Arcade Spirits a 9.5/10. I might actually start my second playthrough now, to be honest. 

By the by, if anyone was wondering? Naomi is best girl. END OF DISCUSSION.

Tom Clancy's EndWar

I've always been a fan of RTS games, despite being complete shit at them. So on a lark several years ago, I grabbed EndWar, which had a big thing saying you could play with your headset, and was like "Sure, it can't be any more of a shitshow than Lifeline, right?"

Well, I was right and wrong. The headset part's a little sensitive, which makes for a real fun calibration session. Highlights include my roommate asking why I was speaking to my computer "like a racist dad trying to argue with a busboy at a Mexican restaurant," giving up twice to play something else, and my friend MurderPlastic refusing to play it after his headset issues.

However, if I'm being fair, which I try to be, it's fun! Once you get into the rhythm of using the headset, this game is fucking crisp. It's got a pretty basic Rock-Paper-Scissors setup for tanks, transports, and helicopters, which can very quickly be thrown to shit when you play like me and use artillery for everything. God, I love artillery.

It's got cool little bits for infantry and engineers, too. If you send them to take a building, they'll be ducking in and out of different windows to take shots at enemies going by. You can clear a building of opposing infantry with them too, and see the gunfights from your aerial viewpoint.

Another thing I'll put on the plus side is the Capital battles. You have to take a capital, of which there are three, over three battles, one after another. They get increasingly more difficult, and I don't think I ever took one last time I played, instead taking as many areas as I could.

The major downsides of this game, however, lie majorly in its' replayability and multiplayer. The replay value is, quite honestly, low. Three factions(The United States, European Union, and Russia), and their traits differ only enough to have to somewhat adjust a battle plan depending on who you're facing. The story, what threadbare there is, isn't worth a second and third play. 

Multiplayer is an exercise in futility, if it's even still up. Last time I played, the only people still online were people at the max rank. I got destroyed very quickly each round. Which, normally I'd blame on my own lack of skill. I'm not good at RTS games. These guys put on fucking clinics of "shitting on a player" for EndWar. Shit was impressive.

All in all, I'd give it a 7/10. It's fun, and if you like RTS games, you'll enjoy it. If you like gimmicks, you'll probably find it interesting. If you don't like either? Pass. 

Pilot (2019 Season)

Uh, hi. I'm LowEndLem

I play games on Twitch. It's pretty great. I also work in a call center. That part kinda sucks so we won't talk about that.

What we will be discussing, or what I will be while you read this, is reviews of games. Gaming is one of the few things I enjoy, along with writing, so I figured why not combine them and finally do something with my life?

It's not just going to be new games, I'll probably review literally any game I own or can find in my apartment. Hell, my first game's either going to be a new release coming out soon,(which reminds me, I'm gonna need to play that.), or, knowing me, Tom Clancy's EndWar because I'm a sucker for a gimmick.

Occasionally I'll review a book. Possibly food. Or even my water bottle my work gave me. Speaking of, here's that review. It's a game day player. I've refilled this thing several hundred times, knocked it off my desk, kicked it, squeezed the holy hell out of it, and it keeps on trucking, despite being made of cheap plastic. No leaks and it's been over a year. Label's faded a bit, and I kind of wish it was metal so it held temperature better, but for a free water bottle? Solid choice. 8/10 would get from a supervisor again.

I'm gonna need more things to review. Luckily, I suffer from ADD and haven't been on medication in years, so I won't run out soon. Hooray!