sallachim

Report #1

Sector's Edge

68.5 hours, 13 of 13 achievements

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This game is free to play FPS. But it's not just that. Destructible voxel-based environment combined with ability to place your own structures or blocks made it more complex than I could have predicted before trying it out. Supposedly, the idea isn't new, having predecessors such as Block N Load and Ace of Spades - of which I've never heard before, showing me that checking out new things once in a while is a good thing. Which hopefully excuses my first impression of it being "FPS Fortnite".

Anyway, game feels good to play when treated simply as FPS. However, tactical thinking, clever structure placement or environmental destruction followed by dedicated offensive action will most definitely change the flow of a match. Teamwork also helps greatly, because numbers advantage is very effective in this game. Sneaking around enemy position only to break the wall and get the element of surprise is one of the tactics I enjoyed using, even if it wasn't always successful. I admit to be a bit lacking both in tactics and shooting skill department when compared to some amazing players that I was playing against, but I usually carried my weight and then some.

All in all, it's pure joy to play for action oriented players, and even despite 100%ing the game, the fact that it's still being developed, updated, patched and reworked will make me come back to it in the future, even if only to check out new maps and gamemodes.


Idle Monster TD

2707.3 hours, 24 of 24 achievements

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Evil. Pure evil.

Back when I was still in middle/high school, I remember cookie clicker being all the rage on mobile phones for a day or three. I laughed at people who played it, as it was just stupid. Turns out, I'm probably more stupid. Tempted by prospect of "easy 100%" I played this game, and now, a bit more than 5 months later I am free. And maybe equally as important, I am slightly wiser.

Idle games take a lot of time just to grind resources, I knew about it. But this game was initially released on mobile phones, so the fact that regularly engaging with it in short intervals brings extra in-game progress, (now obvious in hindsight) caught me off guard. And as student of university in online learning, I have a lot of time to burn, even during my classes. The result was that this game got more and more of my attention, all excused by my thinking that I'll be able to finish it sooner thanks to all my "work". True, I did, but the time cost was tremendous.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I did enjoy some aspects of optimizing my gameplay habits, increasing my efficiency purely by power of thought. There is a depth to this game, because it's a combination of tower defense, and idler. But when new progression gamemode was made available around April, it was one that required not couple seconds of attention, but almost 20 minutes wih merely 2 breaks to be most effective. When I tried it out, I realised the horrible truth - when actually played, this game is horrible. Gameplay is mostly sitting around waiting for perfect circumstances, so that player can spring the trap of powerups combination with proper tower placement and gain the greatest gain, in order to progress slightly faster, and slightly farther. And it's the same gameplay as normal gamemode, offering merely slight differences and new resource as a reward. At that moment, I realised I should have never started this game in the first place, for reasons of it being a time sink, and me not enjoying the type of gameplay. I can enjoy tower defense games, but not when they last months with so little to gain.

Anyway, I'm done with it now. The upside to this whole debacle, is that now I'll be more careful of what type of games I'll be playing in the future, being especially wary or idle games.
I know I have one more idler to finish (Idle Champions of Forgotten Realms), but it's not nearly as (actively) time consuming as this diabolical game, so when I play it by not playing it, I lose little.


I played more games between January and May, but these are the only ones I can condifendtly cross out of my backlog. I play more Rocket League nowadays, also finding myself to be very much into Hunt: Showdown (although grinding event tokens was a pain…). Still, university and studying comes first, so I’m not all that worried about my poor assassination performance.
For now, it’s 2 down, many more to go! :3

Vito

Damn, that’s a lot of time investment into Idle Monster (even though I know you did not actively play for 2.7k hours :D ). Yeah, sometimes we start games we regret later on. On the other hand, how can we know beforehand? Sometimes a game can turn out great although it might not look that way in the first place.

I hope university and studying leave you with enough time to play and good luck with the next games on your list :)