Years / Decades:
70s , 80s , 90s , 00s , 10s , 8th Generation, 2020
Genres:
2D Platformers, 3D Platformers, 4X, Adventure, Board Games, Bullet Hell / 2D Shooters, Card, Casual, City/Attraction Builders, Dungeon Crawlers, Fighting, Flash, Handheld, Horror, Indie, Metroidvania, MMOs, MOBA, Point and Click , Puzzle, Racing, Real Time Strategy, Real Time Tactics, Rhythm, Roguelikes, RPGs (Action), RPGs (Turn Based), Shooters (1st Person), Shooters (3rd Person), Simulation, Souls-Bourne, Sports, Stealth, Survival, Tabletop RPGs, Tower Defense, Visual Novels, Walking Simulators
Welcome back. This part of the series will be primarily focusing on genres. So far I have [Arcade Game, Action, Text dungeon, Sandbox, Shoot/beat 'em up, Grand Strategy, and Miscellaneous] as available genres. Let me know if I missed something, and I will try to get it added.
This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other consoles and genres will come in sporadic subsequent threads. Please contribute to previous threads if you missed them. This is meant to be an exhaustive list.
I go back to the original Xcom regularly. Its geoscape design is waaaay better than the newer games. It doesn't feel like a board game, it feels like a sim, this is very important to the overall feel of defending the planet.
The new game's geoscape feels like a boardgame with clear bonuses and very clear mechanics rather than the unclear radar mechanics of the original and uncertainty of coverage of zones/areas. It makes it much much worse by comparison.
Xenonauts isn't bad but I still feel like the geoscape of the original just FEELS better. Xenonauts combat gameplay tends to get repetitive for me too, the enemies could really use some types that do insane stuff forcing the player into unusual combat problems they need to solve in ways that are different to their usual rinse repeat strategy of overlapping cover fire.
The issue with xenonauts imo is that it's made by fans of xcom who have come to almost fetishise the difficulty and grind. So you spend ages just slowly moving from one end of the map to another and occasionally getting murdered from off-screen, and by the time it starts to pick up and you've got new guns and shit you're too terminally bored to care.
I agree, I don't really mind very high difficulty though, what I do mind is a lack of intriguing problem solving within that difficulty. I find that the original Xcom's difficulty was more because of random map generation (and time of day) than the opponents. Getting landed directly in the middle of the map with an exit facing 5 enemies was "xcom".
That was fine, it was interesting and brutal. If you got a landing at the edge of the map in the day time you'd be able to do what you do in Xenonauts and carefully move across the map covering everyone safely.
Put players in the middle of the map, or create more interesting aliens who do interesting things that force the player to do some crazy strats from time to time. Let's see some sacrifices made by marines that pull the pin on a grenade and go down fighting, or landmine usage, or other weird things.
You can't get the really really interesting stuff to happen without truly random maps. Xcom's terror missions shined at that. Xenonauts doesn't. I'd argue newer xcom gets it a bit better, although it too suffers from chronic "play safe" mentality and only covers this up by giving the player time-based objectives to pressure them. A far better way to push the player would be to put more interesting aliens in the game that do things that are non-traditional in combat expectations.
I agree with everything you said. But I think the new xcom should get some credit for trying to shake up the formula for enemies with enemies that ignore light cover, enemies that are likely to dodge overwatch, melee enemies that destroy the environment and grenades. I do t think its entirely succesful, but it does make the effort.