Deep Rock Galactic

A 4-person coop exploration shooter.

Rock and Stone

In Deep Rock Galactic you play a future dwarf mining for a soulless mega corporation. It's best with four players but can be played with fewer and is plenty of fun solo. You have to accomplish the mission goal while being swarmed with alien bugs. There are moments of fun exploration and moments of the terror of being overrun. 

The Good

Combat is fun. Exploring is fun. Mining is fun. If you prefer one of those aspects, you can play a class that excels at it.

The atmosphere is great -- the uncaring corporate executives, the casual racism against elves, the love of mining.

The level system is pretty good. You gain levels and unlock things. It gives you a goal to focus on, if mining ore and killing bugs isn't enough on it's own.

The community is great. If your friends are lame you can get on Discord to find groups. Mostly, they are too good for my tastes -- they blaze through missions and are all high level. But they are friendly and don't mind helping out noobs.

The Bad

There is nothing bad, you pointy-eared leaf lover.

Should You Buy It?

Yes. If you liked Vermintide and Left for Dead and have three friends, Deep Rock Galactic is a no-brainer. I wouldn't get it for single-player, but playing with one or two friends is plenty of fun. 

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Tournament Edition

 Dungeon Crawl

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) is the best roguelike game out there. Once or twice a year they hold a tournament to coincide with a major version release.

Tournament Play

I'm still playing a lot of dcss. You can read more about it in my previous review of dcss. Recently I tried out one of the tournaments. You join a team and play for about two weeks. Your team gets points based on what it achieves during that time. 

The whole concept is a bit silly. An experienced team might be able to cover all of the achievements and try to figure out how to optimize score, but an intermediate team probably just wants to get as many wins as they can. 

Some of the points categories are wildly disparate. Like, "fastest real-time game" vs. "fewest turns taken". Those are quite different because to minimize turns taken requires more thought, while a fast game will be very inefficient. Other categories require exploration, getting runes, or arbitrary challenges, all of which conflict with being fast or efficient. 

Furthermore, DCSS is about the most solitary game I can think of. Most of the game is made of quick almost-obvious decisions where a different choice is only marginally better or worse. When you make 1000 decisions in six hours, there isn't much room for collaboration. 

Why Play Tournament?

Despite the silly and contradictory nature of the tournaments, they are great fun. The different achievements encourage new types of play, but since winning is important you don't want to flex too far from your comfort zone. Teams might seem silly, but they give some community and make it easier to ask for help in rough spots.

So, overall, the tournament was great and I plan to play more in the future.

Opus Magnum

A flexible puzzle game of automating machinery.

Overview

Since this was a well-reviewed game, it was a no-brainer for me to pick up. I typically like this sort of game where you build machines. This one has a story and crisp graphics and controls.

Unfortunately, while Opus Magnum seems to have potential, I didn't find it to be fun. 

Puzzles

Each puzzle consists of building a machine to turn raw materials into a finished product. You are given a wide sandbox to accomplish this. While this seems like a good thing, it means that all puzzles are pretty easy to solve in a brute-force kind of way. Once the puzzle is finished, you can see how well you did compared to the rest of the world. That's a great feature, but there are three metrics -- cost (how many pieces did you use), speed (how many turns does the machine require to finish), and efficiency (how many tiles did you cover). 

Having different metrics is great for the sandbox feel. You can choose to optimize for one metric or sort of balance efficiency among them all. However, the game never rises beyond the sandbox. It is possible to set arbitrary goals, but that's not how I want to play puzzle games.

Modes of Play

Three of my Steam friends had already played the game. When you complete a puzzle, it compares it to your Steam friends. That helped engage my competitive spirit.

Some puzzles weren't interesting and I would brute-force a solution. Others engaged my desire for elegance. I tried to "always optimize speed" but my designs were similar and repetitive.

Should You Buy It?

While Opus Magnum isn't for me, I think a lot of people can find value from it. I've done a lot of programming, and playing Opus Magnum is very much like refactoring code. Someone who find programming fun and isn't burned out by it might really love Opus Magnum. Also, someone who generally enjoys machine puzzles but isn't hardcore might find these puzzles challenging. 

Oculus VR

 Oculus Quest

VR gaming is pretty much there.

History

The first halfway decent 3D game I saw was Magic Carpet. It used stereogram dots, where you uncross your eyes to see 3D. It wasn't totally satisfying, but it showed what could be done. I am surprised that it has taken 25 years for good 3D games to be available.

Quest 2

The Oculus Quest 2 is a standalone wireless headset with two wireless controllers. It can run independently of any other device, or it can be used as a dumb headset to play PC games in 3D. There are a lot of mediocre games available, but there are some really amazing experiences out there. 

Games

I'm still pretty new to it, but here are the good games I've played.

Beatsaber: This is at least half of the reason I wanted an Oculus. It's a simple rhythm game, but you get to swing your controllers like lightsabers and occasionally dodge obstacles flying at you. Very satisfying. 

The Room: I liked the PC editions in this series, so getting it for Oculus was a no brainer. This was amazing, at least to me as a new Oculus owner. The puzzles are less intricate and perhaps easier than PC versions, but the immersion is fantastic.

Red Matter: Suggested to me because I liked The Room. Very immersive, simpler puzzles.

Bigscreen: A strangely satisfying social app to watch movies. For watching movies by yourself, this likely won't replace the convenience of a TV, although it gives you a large screen in a portable format. Someone else using the TV? Want a big screen while lying in bed? Put on the headset. Where Bigscreen really shines is for watching movies with other people. Want to see a movie with a friend in another city? Easy. You have avatars to see each other and the voice chat works well. Also, you can join a large theater with strangers to recreate the movie-going experience during quarantine.

PC Games

I've downloaded a few crappy PC games to try. After some annoying configuration, it all worked well. The only "good" game I've played is Star Wars Squadrons. If you are the kind of person to buy a $100 joystick to shoot down TIE fighters, you will love shooting down TIEs in 3D. 

I was hoping to play Skyrim and Fallout 4 in VR, but they are separate applications that command full price. I've played both of them to death so I doubt I'll buy the VR version.

Price

The price is reasonable for anyone thinking of purchasing a game system. I hope that Oculus will compete well with Playstation and Nintendo. 

Negatives

The biggest negative is that Oculus is owned by Facebook and they require you link your Facebook account. It might be possible to create a dummy Facebook account, but I have heard tales of dummy accounts being deleted and people losing all of their Oculus software. The Oculus has a camera and microphone, and I would not be surprised if Facebook used them for their own nefarious purposes.

The Oculus Quest 2 is mostly consumer friendly, but it still has quirks. The head strap, face plate, and lens holders aren't perfect although there are aftermarket solutions. The lenses are easy to scratch and they don't offer replacements. If you wear glasses, they don't do vision correction in software so you need your own lens. The provides solutions are annoying (wear contacts or use the headset extender to give more room for glasses). There are aftermarket solutions which work pretty well, but now you are getting into the realm of hobbyist. 

Should You Buy It?

I'm just gonna go ahead and say yes. The Quest 2 surprised me with how well it works. For value, think of it like a console with an upfront cost and $15-$30 games, most of which are pretty short.