mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Jul 31, 2022 8:01:31 GMT
In the last 6 months a lot of my most enjoyable single player gaming time has come from this breed of indie games that are very similar in feel:
Vampire Survivors
Run lasts half an hour, unless you die before that. A lot of different characters, a lot of different weapons and interesting interactions. Gets a bit easy later because of the meta progression but I always do all the new achievements whenever a patch drops. It's just cathartic building up some nonsense that literally melts the wall of enemies.
20 Minutes till Dawn
As the name says it's a 20 minute run. Fewer characters and less builds but keeps it fresh with active aiming and some fun perk interactions. Unlike in Vampire Survivors you can't just sit in place for the last half of the game.
Necrosmith
Different take on similar idea. You protect a tower by building undead minions. You can take control of a single minion at time but otherwise they're just as dumb as you'd expect from a bunch of shambling corpses. You can get some bizarre and hilarious synergies by building your pick 'n mix monsters. Didn't have a set game length but the most recent patch introduced sort of a timer.
Now, my question to your FG collective, are there any good ones I've missed?
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hedben
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Post by hedben on Jul 31, 2022 8:28:35 GMT
I’m not sure if this is what you’re aiming for, but Void Bastards splits your “run” into different space stations on a map and lets you pick a route through them. So a full run is a few hours, but each encounter is done in minutes.
It’s not exactly casual but you can definitely get overpowered and melt enemies by the end.
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Aug 1, 2022 10:55:53 GMT
One more game in this style:
Just King
You're a king. You get to hire a party of 4 very DnDish classes to help you against waves of enemies. No set game length but each wave is just two or three minutes and a zone takes maybe half an hour on average. Depth comes from synergies of different classes in your party and the magic items you can equip them with.
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neems
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Post by neems on Aug 1, 2022 11:18:08 GMT
Spirit Hunters : Infinite Horde
Nova Drift (kinda)
Brotato (currently just a demo)
There are loads of these games now, a lot of them are pretty decent given the typically low price.
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Aug 5, 2022 9:25:02 GMT
New game in the vague genre, free demo on Steam:
Soulstone Survivors
This one just feels a bit bad. It's like Diablo1 mixed with Vampire Survivors. You've got your characters, you've got your meta progression. Then in the match you get active skills which activate on cooldown. Some skills target your cursor, some hit random enemies, some hit in a cone towards your cursor, it's just weird. You get stuck on enemies and terrain all the time and there's stunlocks. One Youtuber I watch really liked it though, so maybe just not my cup of tea.
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Post by dfunked on Aug 5, 2022 13:00:09 GMT
Just gave that a quick go and it seems ok I guess. Levelling up seems to do fuck all, it still takes a huge number of hits to kill basic enemies at level 6 with no extra powers gained. At least with vampire survivors even the weakest starting weapon can take out bats etc with one hit, which feels much better. Plus you normally get additional weapons within seconds.
I guess it's worth mentioning Magic Survival at least (think it's android/iOS only) which is what VS copied it's homework from originally. It's lacking a lot of features that VS introduced, but it's definitely worth a quick blast for curiousity's sake.
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Aug 6, 2022 8:19:32 GMT
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Post by dfunked on Aug 9, 2022 11:01:50 GMT
Seraph's last stand looks quite fun... 79p so why the hell not.
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Aug 9, 2022 12:53:34 GMT
I've been playing Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde, based on recommendation by neems and the Kotaku article. Silly title. It's weird how slightly nicer graphics can feel much worse than the fake retro pixel art style. It really threw me off the game, there's like no animations for anything but the sprites are so detailed. Anyway, the game itself is... Okay. There's loads of levels and enemies and huge Path of Exile style buff tree. But it just feels a bit wonky balance-wise. Most characters have an HP bar, but then you've got the Djinni character who gets 8 hits, no matter how tough the enemy, and he turns invulnerable and superfast for a bit when he's hit. Like, obviously he's the best character. Then you look at the post game weapon stats and you're doing 200k damage with one skill and 30k with another, so obviously you'll never pick that 30k skill ever again. Also there's this weird lack of feedback. When enemies die they just disappear. The chests have a nice loot explosion when you open them but they don't come close to the pure endorphin hit of Vampire Survivor's chest animation, especially when you get the fireworks and stuff. That mechanic is like so great. If anyone picks this up I think the winning early game weapon combo is: Arrow, Mines, Vines and whatever you like. Those three will carry you. |
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Aug 9, 2022 12:54:11 GMT
Seraph's last stand looks quite fun... 79p so why the hell not. That's the missile command style game where you shoot at stuff coming from the sky? |
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Post by dfunked on Aug 9, 2022 13:24:12 GMT
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Post by dfunked on Aug 9, 2022 13:32:19 GMT
I had a pretty mental run on VS the other day that certainly put the Steam Deck's fans through their paces. Picked up the flamethrower temp power up within the first couple of minutes on the dairy plant map and for some reason it never went away, so I decided to go for max curse for the lols (including the new items in the south and east)
Enemies absolutely everywhere!
Keep meaning to check if that flamethrower thing is a known feature, because I want that on every run now.
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Aug 9, 2022 14:09:55 GMT
It has that same kind of horde survival concept, so I think it fits just fine. I'd seen some gameplay and it looks to get pretty bonkers later on. |
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Sept 7, 2022 22:33:34 GMT
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crashV👀d👀
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not just a game anymore...
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Post by crashV👀d👀 on Oct 3, 2022 12:50:01 GMT
Anybody tried Dome Keeper?
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Post by dfunked on Oct 3, 2022 12:57:57 GMT
Boneraiser Minions is well worth a look too. No time limit, but quite similar to VS.
"20 minutes till dawn" looks pretty good too despite using till instead of 'til in the title.
£2 is well inside my impulse buy range.
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Frog
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Post by Frog on Oct 3, 2022 13:01:26 GMT
I really struggle with games with graphics like that Domekeeper, it's barely Amiga level. I know that's really snobby but I'm ok with that  |
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cubby
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doesn't get subtext
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Post by cubby on Oct 3, 2022 13:04:38 GMT
Only thing with Vampire Survivors is that I always feel like 30 minutes is too long. By the 20 minute mark you've pretty much maxed out what you can, and then it's just 10 minutes of grinding. And I get sore from grinding for more than 5 minutes.
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crashV👀d👀
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not just a game anymore...
Posts: 3,858
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Post by crashV👀d👀 on Oct 3, 2022 13:20:07 GMT
I really struggle with games with graphics like that Domekeeper, it's barely Amiga level. I know that's really snobby but I'm ok with that Bad frog, you definately mis-remebering just how old games looked. Sure as shit didn't run at FHD or 4k with the 'old graficks' |
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Frog
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Post by Frog on Oct 3, 2022 13:26:17 GMT
I can't cope with the graphics on VS either.
I know I'm a terrible person.
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deebs
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Post by deebs on Oct 10, 2022 19:57:03 GMT
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mrharvest
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Post by mrharvest on Oct 17, 2022 14:25:42 GMT
One more for the pile: Runic
Looks like the dog's dinner. They aren't even trying with their graphics. But it's showing a core of fairly deep customisation in the weapons department. You're a spellcaster and you have 20 minutes to defeat 3 guardians and the final boss. But each spell has customisation slots that can make them bigger or split or pierce or set enemies on fire or freeze. That's like pretty cool but then there's the real secret: linking rune, which allows your spell to fire off a new spell when it kills an enemy. So you can fire magic bolts, that when they kill someone summon ghosts. You can also get links for just damaging an enemy, or setting them on fire or whatever. And it seems you can even chain those chained spells into new spells. If anyone played Noita and is familiar with the trigger spells, then this is kinda where it's going.
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