#4 April 2024

• Borderlands 3
  

  48.1 hours playtime

  45 of 81 achievements

• Orbital Bullet
  

  12.1 hours playtime

  33 of 55 achievements

• Scorn
  

  6.2 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

• Lightmatter
  

  6.6 hours playtime

  23 of 23 achievements

• Project Wingman
  

  14.0 hours playtime

  32 of 40 achievements

• Paradise Lost
  

  4.5 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

• Grime
  

  10.6 hours playtime

  14 of 47 achievements

Borderlands 3
I felt like it lost some of its charisma compared to the previous titles. The story was plain bad, dialogues were boring, and some of the choices with the character arcs were highly questionable (referring to Maya in particular, without further spoilers). The few cutscenes present were rushed and awkwardly put together at times, especially the ones after the major bosses. The relationship between the antagonists ended up amounting for nothing and the final boss fight was really underwhelming. Just a huge let down as a whole.
Gameplay-wise the gun-play was ultimately passable, and there was a good variety of enemies/quests/activities to do. I didn’t feel the necessity to explore different builds/characters, though. The 1st one I picked worked just fine and I breezed through the game without any particular challenge (I remember the circles of slaughter being much much harder in BL2).
I actually 100%ed the base game, but I decided not to buy the DLCs. They’re too many and I presume─maybe I’m wrong─that they’d mostly be like the ones from BL2, i.e a waste of time, meaning they wouldn’t add anything to the story, they’d be repetitive and feel like a drag to the end. I regretted playing those at the time.
Let’s just say the game is okay if you’re looking for some brainless shooting (but there are better options out there). For everything else, it’s not worth it.

Orbital Bullet
I think it does most of the things properlyfor a rouge-lite. There’s a reasonable sense of progression after each death; there’s a good variety of enemies, classes, weapons and game modes; the 3D pixel graphic is really well made; there’s a sort of autosave feature that lets you quit during runs without losing much (that’s something not usually granted in this kind of games); and lastly, the 360°/”orbital” idea level design is really original, and unexpectedly worked for me (I was skeptical at first). Overall I can say that it’s addicting.
The letdowns are that I found the early bosses harder than the last ones and that some weapons are clearly OP compared to others, making certain builds strongly preferable. Probably the two things are related, meaning that once you have a good build, even supposedly hard bosses become trivial to beat.
Btw, I didn’t encounter any bugs (many people on steam complained about game-breaking bugs. I guess they fixed them?).

Scorn
You find yourself immersed in this morbid world right off the bat: not a text, not a dialogue, not a shed of any kind of explanation or tutorial, but in the end it works (btw it’s so paradoxical that it took me so long to just think to press “R” in order to reload my weapon just because there was no on-screen prompt telling me to do so; same goes for healing). Despite the sole presence of sound─there isn’t even a hint of music─the impacting visuals alone are able to make you feel like you’re really there: an insignificant creature like many others in a vast, unknown and cruel world, lucky enough to be sentient enough to be struggling towards a goal. What is that goal though? Escape? Ascend? Simply survive? It’s not clear and maybe not that important: you just need to keep moving forward. The ending is really sour. It took me a while to get over it.
The puzzles posed the right amount of challenge for my ability.
Overall I liked it.

Lightmatter
The game is not shy at hinting that it took inspiration from Portal. The vibe is similar at times. The puzzles are well thought and never repetitive. It’s clear that they put a lot of effort into their whole design. Even the difficulty scales well the more you progress, without ever being excessive or impossible to overcome with a bit of trial and error. The graphics are simple but pleasant. I liked the voice-acting. Less what the main plot ended out to be. Still, I recommend it.

Project Wingman
Man, it’s weird how much I feel like I suck at this game but still manage to have the time of my life with it. I beat the game on hard mode, but till the very end I kept on crashing into the ground or against airships all by myself like when I had just started playing. I never ever ever ever got the hang of the controls properly. I had to drop mouse and keyboard right away and use a controller. It seems like my brain is not able to process the plane and camera movements separately at the same time, so I had to forget completely about the camera ones and just always look in front of me, where the plane was pointing. Still, I managed to play and enjoy the game to the very end.
The gameplay is really engaging, the physics of the planes are well done, the shooting feels right. Furthermore, the graphics are really pleasing to the eye. I loved the dogfights. I liked much less engaging ground targets instead. Also, the story per se has no big pretenses but it is not half-hassed at all. I liked the soundtrack a lot too.It was a good match during the fights.
The only let down was a bug that made an enemy spawn under the map, which forced me to restart a mission (almost 30 mins in) because I couldn’t kill it in any way and couldn’t progress.
I saw that the game was recently updated (2.0 available in beta play) but I’m hoping they’ll work on a sequel too.
I’ll probably get back to it in the near future and try the hardest difficulty and conquest mode (that I didn’t touch).

Paradise Lost
The story was a bit rushed, most of all considering the relationship between the two protagonists, plus I found it a bit far-fetched (the whole Lucjan part, that is). On the other hand we have the gameplay that is really slow instead. Let’s say it’s not a good combination whatsoever. To make things worse, the story was predictable too. My first thought ended up spoiling the ending. So, I really couldn’t get involved with any part of the game.
Sole saving points: the setting is really well made and full of details, the voice acting was decent and… it’s short? Not enough to recommend the game.
Oh, a secondary thing that fortunately didn’t concern me, but that I found really nonsensical if not plain stupid: when you finish the game, your save file gets deleted for good. So you are supposed to replay the whole game another time (2 times actually) in order to get all the achievements related to the possible endings. The game has no replay value imo, despite the different choices you can make here and there. To me, this thing makes absolutely no sense: it’s like punishing the player for no reason at all. (I was lucky enough that I checked a 100% achievement guide before playing it, so I backed up my save file at the right moment).

Grime
So far, It’s my kind of game. Hard boss fights, learning their attack pattern, beating them while underleveled. I’ll keep playing it next month, but I can already tell I’ll like it.