A marked improvement over past Oregon Trail games? Certainly. It’s gorgeous, addictive to play, has a ton of content (and more on the way) and it’s worth it for those initial vibrant bursts. But once those bursts wear off and the honeymoon period is over, you’re left with a game that while interesting, fun, addictive, and great to look at, is also shallow and needlessly cruel. It’s a game that matches its legacy— fond memories of the good times you have while playing it, but a hesitation to start things up again once you finally make it down the Trail.
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Bounty Train is a curious game. It's a sandbox trading sim/adventure game/railway enthusiast entertainment piece that, while the positions are static and the routes are fixed, still manages to give the player a great deal of movement. It's a genre bending game with multiple story routes and an excellent way to generate micronarratives as you go. And it's also one of the few games where you can lose during the tutorial levels, thus causing the game to shrug and go "Well, the game's over, but here, keep playing after the game over screen." But unlike other genre-bending sandbox sims, Bounty Train keeps a focus on fixed points instead of free exploration of the map, allowing the player to focus on things like the complex economy, resource management, and the interplay between various factions and characters, opening up in a way few games of its type do, and creating an entirely unique experience.
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I will give the twisted minds behind the Warhammer 40,000 universe credit, they at least know what they're doing with atmosphere. The series, a reductio ad absurdam of pretty much all science fiction and a little fantasy, is known for its rich atmosphere and utterly insane character designs. (Well, and codex creep, but that's for another article) It's a huge, bombastic setting of spaceships the size of former Soviet republics and ten foot tall warriors with six lungs and specially made ribs.
Regicide, by comparison, is a tactical strategy game taking some of the elements of Chess and mixing them with XCOM and Warhammer 40,000. It's not nearly as expansive or as utterly batshit as the source material it takes from, but in its own weird, restrained way, it does manage to be a lot of fun.
More, as always, below.
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