I never thought I’d play… StarCraft

It’s like Pikmin, if you played it in a spreadsheet

Between all the members of the team at GLHF we play an awful lot of games. We’re talking hundreds, and each of us has our own specialties. No one likes every genre of game, and each of us tends to stick to our little comfortable bubble of genres. And that’s why we thought we’d ruin everyone’s month by mixing things up.

Every month we will recommend another member of the team a game we love, in the hopes of getting them into something a little bit different, or of torturing them for a month depending on our mood. It’s also a chance for us to broaden our horizons and perhaps even find a game to fall in love with. These are the results of this month’s experiment.

Mass Effect

I live my gaming life firmly in the world of 2D, so when I was told I had to play not only a 3D game but one with guns in it, every cell in my body wanted to reject it. Oli gifted me Mass Effect as it has a strong story and romance options to ease me into the world of triple-A gaming, but every part of my body screamed. I suppose that is the point of this.

Mass Effect has a casual mode, and so even as a shooting novice, I didn’t have many problems with the gun parts. I could even say I enjoyed myself as I sniped headshots on geth taking cover. The world is also incredible, with amazing scenery of a futuristic space that you just don’t get with indies – as charming as they are. What surprised me the most is just how good the characters are. The vast majority of the games I play live or die on the strength of the characters, and I felt as close to my crew as I would with any of the games in my typical library.

There were two points of contention for me. The first is that as femshep I had just two choices of romance; the generic white dude, or the alien girl. While Liara is a bit wet, I chose her just because she was different, but really my heart was with Wrex. He’s the toad I saved from that racist Ashley, and who I generally just got along best with. I also felt close to my other teammate Tali who I found out can be a romantic partner, just not for me, only for manshep.

Though the one glaring issue with Mass Effect is how user-unfriendly it is. The mini-map is a black circle, and in a game where it’s so hard to tell where you’re meant to be going, opening up the menu constantly gets tiring. I also had to Google things like “how to swap weapons” or “how to get more grenades” because it really doesn’t tell you basic controls. If it wasn’t for how egregious these UI issues are, I probably would have put it in the “recommend to everyone” pile.

Georgina Young – into books that also count as games

Stardew Valley

I know what you’re thinking: Farming? A man of my talents? Indeed. I usually conquer galaxies, build cities, and lead armies into battle, so Stardew Valley is nothing if not a change of pace and scale in comparison to my usual games. It’s an alluring idea, of course: Escape from the greedy clutches of capitalism and the stressful work life and just manage an idyllic little farm in a sleepy coastal town. I can see why people are into it: It’s nice to see your farm grow, it’s satisfying to bring order into the chaos around the property you’re facing at the beginning of the game, and it’s fun to figure out what you need to do to reach your next self-imposed goal. There is little in terms of pressure, which adds to the relaxing atmosphere. And yet the prices for everything are truly extravagant. A bowl of rice costs how many gold coins?! So much for escaping capitalism.

Managing and expanding your farm is the aspect of Stardew Valley I liked most, everything else I was not gripped by. What I could do without entirely is the whole ‘engaging with the town community’ thing – you really expect me to wait for a specific day and hour and show up at a certain place just to talk to some dude? In a game that’s specifically about not having to go to business meetings anymore? You even have to do it to turn in quests: There is this lumberjack lady, who lost her ax in the woods, so I went out of my way to find it and bring it to her, but guess what? If you talk to her in her shop she doesn’t let you bring up the fact that you have her beloved tool that she needs to do her job. Instead, you’ll have to wait for a full moon on the third day of the sixth month in the Julian calendar or whatever to find her in town to return the ax to her. Can’t be that important after all, then.

I get that the game is all about relaxation and chilling out, but if you’re making me check some calendar every few minutes to make sure I’m not missing this NPC or that event in town, that kind of goes against that idea for me. Running around town for fetch quests and such is just boring, and the farming all by itself isn’t really deep enough to keep me interested. I find a chill session of Crusader Kings 3 or Total War: Warhammer 3 a lot more relaxing than that.

Suffice to say, it’s going to be pretty hard to make a life sim fan out of me. I’ll stick to building human organ farms in Rimworld, thank you very much.

Marco Wutz – strategy, tactics, and management games fan

Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

I’ve never been the biggest fan of reading, and aside from Phoenix Wright, I don’t play visual novels – but hey, an escape room murder mystery sounds like a hoot. I’m big on JRPGs, and those are full of lovable misfit casts that slowly come to terms with their inner trauma, what could go wrong?

Well, I liked the escape room part of the game, at least. I got a real kick out of the puzzle segments. Jumping between locations, picking up items, and slowly drawing the strings together is just the right level of challenging for me. All the leaps in logic made sense to me, and solving each puzzle was very satisfying, to the point where I wish the game was more of that and less of the murder mystery stuff. Unfortunately, the writing in 999 just didn’t click with me. I found it very hard to like any of the characters, and while there were some fun twists as to their identities, there wasn’t much to latch onto that endeared me to them.

The plot is…not subtle either. Characters would leap into random tangents with almost no prompting and it was extremely jarring whenever it happened. I once looked at a bed only for one character to spend the next five minutes talking about Egyptian curses. Writing like that makes the foreshadowing painfully obvious and cuts out so much tension. Don’t get me wrong, Phoenix Wright isn’t subtle either – you usually know who the real killer is as soon as you meet them – but the way it plays out is so much fun it doesn’t matter. In 999, I just found it annoying, and I felt like I was just sitting around waiting for every scene to get to the point already.

Plus, I got an ending that really annoyed me. Without realizing, I had made all of the correct secret choices to get the true ending, but apparently I’m not allowed to get the true ending unless I get a different ending first. So instead I got hit with “to be continued”. Maybe if they’d been more meta about it, I would’ve appreciated the twist, but the game had already lost me by that point, so I had no desire to go back.

Still, at the very least I understand the appeal now, and there may be similar games out there that I enjoy. It was mainly the writing that put me off, so a different take or style might be right up my street. It’s got me looking at other games I never would’ve been interested in – like Danganronpa – with curiosity.

So, mission accomplished, I guess?

Ryan Woodrow – JRPG and indie game nerd

Apex Legends

EA / Respawn Entertainment

I very much do not like online multiplayer games. There’s been one exception, Splatoon 2, which I played competitively for a couple of years, but other than that, if I see “online competitive shooter” on a store page, I’m clicking off that store page. I do not want to see or interact with another player ever. As such, Apex Legends was about the last game I wanted to play, having a big focus on team-based competitive multiplayer. Imagine my surprise, then, that I actually enjoyed it.

There are two things, I think, that really stood out to me in Apex Legends: the movement, and the gunplay. The gunplay was less important of the two, but it’s incredible just how polished it all was. No matter which weapon I picked up, it worked exactly how it seemed it should have, did exactly as much damage as I thought it would, and felt fantastic to use.

The movement was another story altogether. I knew that Apex would probably feel good – it’s built on the back of Titanfall 2, which has immaculate movement – but it’s wild to see just how much better it is after years of iteration and perfection. Every step you take in Apex Legends feels carefully choreographed to feel good, and it gets even better when you’re moving at high speeds.

Sprinting into a firefight, sliding into an enemy, and nailing them with a shotgun to the belly is one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had in a game. I pretty much always felt like I was in control, and when I was in the wrong spot, I always knew that it was my fault, and not the game’s. Moment-to-moment gameplay was satisfying as heck, and I had an absolute blast on that front.

What I wasn’t so fond of, however, was the team-based nature of the game. Dropping in by myself was an anxiety-inducing experience, with the constant fear I would mess up and get berated by my teammates. That, thankfully, didn’t happen much, but it did happen once or twice, and that was enough for me to turn on it a little bit. I had barely played a half dozen matches, and yet there was still some toxicity there when I messed up.

Things changed when I squadded up with some friends. Instead of balancing my anxieties between my enemies and my teammates, I could focus on enemy teams and know that if I messed up, my friends would understand. That’s how a game like this should be played, so if you’re reading this and wondering if you should give it a go, I’d highly recommend you start with some people you know and trust.

Apex Legends was a lot of fun, but it was also very stressful. More than anything else, it makes me want for more single-player Titanfall, or at least a PVE mode for Apex. I don’t know if that will ever be on the cards, but I can hope.

Oliver Brandt – JRPG, puzzle, and metroidvania fan 

Guilty Gear Strive

Arc System Works

When Dave pitched Guilty Gear Strive as the game I should play this month, I wasn’t disappointed at all. It’s been on my list for a long time, but as with any other game on Game Pass, it didn’t carry the highest level of priority. Then I’d remember about it, only for Microsoft to remove it from the game catalog, and I’d regret my procrastination.

So Guilty Gear Strive. You might already know that it’s visually striking. I particularly enjoyed how cohesive it feels moving from cutscenes to the actual gameplay. You usually see anime games going for an anime vibe, but this really feels like you’re playing an actual anime, and I never got tired of that. Also, the music is as good as it gets.

I’m definitely not a fighting game pro player, and this is why I’m discussing Strive here, but it feels a bit more challenging than Street Fighter 6. When moving, kicking or punching, your character seems to cover a much smaller distance, so it isn’t the easiest thing to be in a good range to hit your opponent and have decent defensive opportunities. Also, in Arcade Mode, the AI is weirdly aggressive, something I ended up appreciating.

Guilty Gear’s roster has a lot of variety, with characters fully armed with multiple weapons, such as massive swords and katana, but they can also go into the battle with just their fists. Maybe they don’t have a huge special move pool, but I was often surprised to see how deep their movement options are - I especially found Giovanna to be one of a kind.

So, as someone who plays new fighting games when they’re out, this was a challenging and exciting experience, one I have to thank Dave for. But this won’t save him from FIFA 23 next month, my dear friend…

Paolo Sirio – I like games 

StarCraft II

What did I do to deserve this? What did I say that insulted someone so, what did I do that ruined someone’s being so thoroughly that I would get placed with StarCraft II? Life often feels like a string of painful events that I must weather, and this is yet another of those trials.

It’s a game where you control little dudes. Highlight the little dudes, tell them to go to a place, and then they can fight, harvest, or build. Build stuff that lets you build more stuff – including little dudes – make some of those little dudes harvest more materials, with which you create more buildings or little dudes. It’s like Pikmin if you decided to make it playable through Microsoft Excel.

I get it – I think. It’s pretty easy to see how rapid decision-making while managing an army of thousands is conducive to a thriving, decades-long competitive scene, and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in clearing each mission, wiping foes off the map like you’ve decided to go full world domination in Civilization, only it happens several times an hour while playing. I get it.

This is a game that makes sense to be controlled with a mouse. Highlight units by dragging a dropbox and pointing them to their destination, it’s a PC game through and through. A shame that for literal decades PC players have been convinced that gamified versions of Office applications are good fun for all. I understand why the ‘90s led us here, I really do, and I wish they didn’t. I would’ve adored StarCraft II if this were the ‘90s and it was one of the only games I had access to, but luckily it’s 2023, and I do enough dragging and dropping with my mouse during work hours.

Dave Aubrey – in distress … over his love for Nintendo and fighting games

Against the Storm

Eremite Games / Hooded Horse

Playing Against the Storm feels a bit like cheating, as I definitely used to enjoy city builders two decades ago, and 1998’s all-time classic Caesar III is always installed on my laptop. But staying out of touch with the latest titles in the genre meant I was in for a pleasant surprise with this one. Thank you, Marco!

Unlike most other city builders, which are set either in a historical context or are about futuristic hi-tech megapolises, Against the Storm opts for a post-apocalyptic fantasy world presented in gorgeous Warcraft-inspired art style.

You play as the Viceroy who is tasked by his Queen with rebuilding a civilization under the constant threat of apocalyptic storms that come in cycles. The game combines the usual city-building core loop with roguelike progression and a deck-building mechanic where completed objectives give you a choice for upgrades and new buildings to unlock.

I love games that value the time you put in and offer bite-sized missions with clear objectives that contribute to a bigger overall goal. Instead of having you spend hours upon hours growing the same huge city, which can easily become boring and overwhelming, Against the Storm focuses on the most exciting part of setting up and initially growing a settlement. You then move on to a next one, so one game rarely requires more than an hour of your time.

Progress made with every settlement carries over to the next and helps towards the ultimate goal of upgrading Smoldering City. The portion of the world map where you build each settlement is made up of glades separated by woods and each contains a different valuable resource. Your choice of which glades to reach with your woodcutters influences your progression and no two games are the same.

Gaining reputation is your main measure of success in each mission and, on the flip side, making your Queen impatient by not fulfilling her requests on time could quickly lose you a game.

There are many more mechanics that I won't go over, but they all contribute to a gameplay loop that stays fresh, with the roguelike elements adding infinite replayability, and an overall experience that makes Against the Storm one of the best city builders I've tried.

Stoyan Ovcharov - average open-world action-adventure and RPG enjoyer

Slay the Spire

Humble Bundle

Higher education gave me a strong distaste for roguelikes. I was finishing grad school during the genre’s big renaissance, which gave us the likes of Into the Breach and Slay the Spire, and natural impatience combined with a painful lack of spare time made me question the point of even playing. If I put time and effort into something, I wanted to see results. One graduation and a healthier outlook on appreciating good design later, and I have rather a different view, but still preferred story-driven games like Hades over mechanics-centric ones such as Slay the Spire.

That was a mistake.

Slay the Spire is such a brilliant game, partly because it does so much with so little. I never paid much thought to builds in Hades, but sunk hours into piecing together what I thought was the perfect deck in Slay the Spire, only to have it unravel after a stroke of bad luck or, more often the case, a poor decision on my part. A normal deck of cards and a hand of five drawn at random presents you with countless possible strategies and quickly points out the flaws in your planning without ever saying a word. That quiet approach to teaching makes you feel a greater sense of accomplishment when you finally do get it right, even if your brilliant coup was five percent good planning and 95 percent luck.

However it played out, starting again to feel like an opportunity instead of a punishment, and the chance to read more of Spire’s quirky, delightfully unorthodox characters helped keep things fresh and interesting as well.

I may have arrived far too late to this party, but I won’t be leaving any time soon.

Josh Broadwell – Nerd of all trades