Avernum 3 is not only the 3rd entry in the Avernum series, but the third version (or second remake) of Exile 3: Ruined World.

If you've played either of the last two Avernum games, you know how this one works, because it once again changes very little. There's of course a new story, new characters and for once you're not spending all your time underground. But being above ground is not really all that different from being in a cave, not with this game engine.

The story and writing is, as always, quite good, but somehow I felt that the exploration bit felt a bit less rewarding in this game, compared to the previous ones. I guess that might have been because the setting felt a bit less alien. It also felt a bit easier, although this might be because I've previously played 2 very very similar games.

I won this game on Steamgifts ages ago, played it for a bit, and then got bored. It really felt like a game built for co-op first and foremost, and I did not know anyone who had it and wanted to play it. Now with the Remote Play Together feature, the barrier to entry for a co-op match was a lot lower.

In co-op, Castle Crashers is pretty nice. It's a 2D brawler, similar to the likes of Golden Axe, Final Fight or Streets of Rage, but with a light RPG element (your character levels up and gets stronger). There's also the humor element, which was very hit or miss, leaning more on "miss" for me, particularly early on where there was a lot of poop jokes. But the gameplay was still very solid it least.

I wrote a review for this! This was actually a surprisingly hard game to review, because there's very little story (it's a basic cold war gone hot game), and most of what makes this game special lies in its game mechanics, which are great!

Star Wars Galactic battlegrounds is basically Age of Empires 2, but with a Star Wars skin. It really is incredibly similar, down to how most mechanics work. All the resources have direct equivalents, most of the buildings are the same, you've even got trebuchet counterparts that seems to work exactly the same.

The differences between Galactic Battlegrounds and AoE 2 are minor. You've got buildings that powers nearby buildings and make them work a bit faster, you've got flying units (which fly at very low altitude, can ignore terrain, and can only be hit with special anti-flyer weapons and there are shields, which adds a self-regenerating HP bar to buildings. And units are also shuffled around a bit, with more of a focus on ranged units than melee units. The other differences are really just details, like you can't put units in rams, and monks can actually fight in close combat (because they're Jedi) and so on.

One big issue is that the pathfinding seems to have taken a serious blow to the head. I don't know if they made the pathfinding better in the HD version, and that this one shares the same pathfinding AI with the original, or if they actually made it worse, but it can be really wonky. Units can also seemingly forget about orders, or do weird things, like I might tell 3 trebuchets to attack a castle, and then two will do that, and the third will unpack in some other weird place. That bit is kind of frustrating.

The campaigns are okay. Just okay. I would say that they're still marginally better than the ones in the base game for AoE 2, but worse than any of the expansions, but on the whole Galactic Battlegrounds just feels like a slightly worse AoE 2 with a Star Wars skin. It's still AoE 2 though, and AoE 2 is a good game.