Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, Grace and Bel start off the show talking about how good Destiny Rising has been now that they have arrived at the endgame. They also talk a bit about Helhest, the new banner character. Grace shares her initial thoughts about He is Coming a roguelike that they have been playing. Bel shares some of the early spoilers for Path of Exile 3.27 Keepers of the Flame, which we are getting a full reveal for on the 23rd and is starting on the 31st. It seems like we are maybe getting a Breach expansion league, with a bunch of quality of life changes. From there, we dive into the topic that got bumped from last week about how there are so many good games… that it makes it really hard to play less-than-excellent games anymore. We also talk about how players are seeing through pointless grinds, and how AA games are back with a vengeance, while AAA games are floundering.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was Labor Day here in the United States and since both myself and my friend Ace were off we hung out doing some multiplayer of a new rogue-like game. They had discovered this one and were having quite a bit of fun with it, and I opted to pick it up so we could test the multiplayer out. Essentially you are a diver and you are exploring underwater ruins filled with baddies. It is essentially a first person shooter with the ability to collect upgrades while in the ruins to tweak your weapon load-out. By default you start out with an auto cannon with two fire modes, one of which causes your weapon to overheat for short periods of time. You also have an ability slot which starts out by default with a bundle of explosives but can be upgraded over time to be other things. So far we have only unlocked the Turret as an option, but it seems like there are a few more that we have not unlocked yet.
Each level has a sequence of different monsters to fight, before moving through a gate to the next area which locks the door and spawns another set of baddies. As you delve further into the ruins you encounter different biomes. The first are essentially what looks to be an old temple filled with vaguely nautical themed robots. There are these dragonfly camera looking things that dive bomb you when they get low on health, and a fast moving robot that we lovingly refer to as the roomba that shoots towards you dealing damage if it hits you. There are more ape like creatures that jump on top of you and another that creates shock waves that you have to jump over. Essentially there are a bunch of different types of mobs that you have to deal with individually and it can get really hectic when it is all thrown at you at once. Occasionally there are group objectives like “stand on the plate” to fill a bar… which is massively challenging because it often puts you out in the open and you both have to be standing on it at the same time to get any progress.
Every few stages you encounter a mini-boss that has its own arena. This is the second boss that electrifies areas of the floor and also likes to hop directly on top of you. We faced him a few times but only beat him in a run where we both managed to get to the boss room with multiple stimpacks and also a bunch of complimentary power ups. The first boss got to the point where we could down it pretty easily, with the only real frustration being that we had to hide from a beam that shot out from the boss towards both of us at the same time. The only time things got really tricky is when we inadvertently ended up on the same side of the arena because so long as we could split the incoming mobs up between us it was pretty easy to deal with things. You have a double jump attack and a dash, which can be used to air dash… both of which make traversing the arenas interesting and are a godsend for avoiding attacks.
Killing a boss drops these things called Soul Fragments, which can then be spent on upgrades on a talent tree. The first points that I spent were on the ability to have more than one stimpack. After that I started pouring points into my basic weapon attack, because that seems to be the thing that I am using the most. When I got to the second tier of points they began costing two fragments per point. In theory you are building out your character and I do wonder how many points total you get to spend, or if this is just something that you can farm indefinitely. Like could you do runs of the first boss over and over and eventually chip away at improving your character? I essentially only played through the tutorial and then immediately started group play, so I will need to play some more of this solo to test out that theory.
At various places inside the ruins are static spawns for upgrades. For example the Engine Rifle is the default load out that you begin the game with but after beating the first boss you can find a shotgun. After being the second boss we found the turret to replace the grenades. Inside the ruins are various chests, both locked and unlocked, and I found a few weapon component upgrades in these. One of these for example changes my alt fire from a full auto minigun, to a single shot that knocks enemies back away from me… but deals a lot of damage with that single hit. I started using that as my secondary fire because it was super effective at dealing with the roombas, and was great for debuffing targets when you get certain upgrades.
One of the things that I really dig is that while there is a listing of all of the achievements that you have unlocked… there is also a physical room where you collect them all. It is like this museum of artifacts that you are bringing up from the depths and each one of them represents some objective that you completed. I figure this is going to look really cool once I have finished more than a handful of these. There were also bonus objectives that we found while completing some of the areas, like not getting hit for a certain number of arenas unlocked a bonus special chest. There are also keys that you can find that can unlock random chests and doors that lead to vendor rooms. Gold is a thing that you collect during your run and when you find a vendor you can buy additional upgrades.
We essentially made it to the second biome… but the bottom fell out at that point. We fought these giant frog like creatures and all of them were super annoying. There were frogs that were floating on a cloud of frog eggs… that flew around the arena healing things. There were grenadiers that would flood the area with bombs that you had to avoid, and others that fired off blow darts in a fan pattern that you essentially had to time a jump over. Given time we will probably get as used to these mechanics as we did the first biome, but it was around this point that Gracie demanded that I hold her… so we called the adventure. I had a heck of a lot of fun and honestly I want to see if I can wrangle two more players and see how the group mechanics feel with a full team. I am hoping that the stand on the plate mechanics are way less onerous when there are more than two players. Also resurrecting players would be easier if the mobs did not immediately swarm the one who was still alive.
The game is $25 on Steam and is a very competent shooter in its own right. If you are looking for something fun to play with friends, I highly suggest giving it a shot. The vibes are immaculate.
Good Morning Friends! It was in June of 2022 that I first saw the teaser trailer for a new Warhammer game called Boltgun, and I could already tell that I was probably on board with its particular brand of nonsense. Very rarely is a video game so directly targeted at my soul. In the mid-90s when I was obsessing over making levels for Doom 2, I was also obsessed with assembling plastic “beakie” Space Marines with my friend Jason and waging epic battles on his ping pong table semi-permanently converted into a battleground full of scratch-built terrain. That Proto-Bel would have been all over this game… in fact I kept trying to pretend that the EA-released Space Hulk PC game was actually a Doom clone at the time.
About a week ago the Boltgun trailers started to make their way into my feed and I remembered how much I wanted to play this game. Yesterday it officially released and I picked it up over on Steam, but it appears to pretty much be available for all platforms. Having spent part of my evening playing through the first half dozen levels or so… it very much feels like more of an actual spiritual successor to Doom and Doom 2 than the extremely excellent 2016 Doom release. As someone who cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem 3D… this FEELS like you remember those games feeling. Modern audiences probably won’t really appreciate this fact, but even the sprite work in this game FEELS like it is 2.5D in the way that the transition of the model animations is ever so slightly abrupt.
You start off with just your chain sword and a little way into the first level you pick up your holy Bolter seated on top of an altar… with the reverence one would expect a holy instrument of imperial might. The chain sword takes some getting used to because effectively it throws you into a sort of bullet time as you line up your attack. You charge your sword, which pauses the game and then your character leaps forward and attacks with the blade. Essentially low-level minions will be finished off in a single hit… for higher-level minions, you will need to wait until they only have a sliver of life before it becomes a really effective attack. Essentially it can also be used as a movement ability of a sort where you charge forward and can sort of do a mid-air charge if you time it just right.
While the game lovingly replicates the feel of “random doodads all over the place for you to pick up” that was common for this era of shooter, it also has a lot of modern messaging. For example, the Chaos Cultists have lovingly painted platforms with yellow paint so you can know where you should be leaping to in order to kill them more efficiently. The game also features a “ledge pull-up” parkour system so if you leap across a gap, you can catch on the lip and pull yourself over onto the next platform. This isn’t over the top but feels pretty natural even within the framework of a “retro-inspired” shooter. There will be no blinking arrow telling you where to go… but I feel like a game like this doesn’t really need it. In some of the larger maps, there will be a bit of fumbling around and looking for the exit, but that also comes with this era of the genre.
What is so pure about this game is the fact that you get an endgame summary screen just like you did in Doom. The only thing that I feel a little iffy about is what it seems to count as secrets are not what I would have called secrets back in the day. Generally speaking, so far it is finding your way to a hidden powerup or something that is just off the beaten path… and less opening up new chambers and finding new areas of the map. I guess gone are the days of “humping” the wall while spamming your open key looking for a hidden door… and instead, it is just efficiently clearing every corner of every level. I admittedly missed several secrets on each level so maybe there were hidden doors that I just didn’t find.
The story is a bit on the light side, but really… did we care about the story in Doom? The story was largely an excuse for us to kill more demons, and the story in Boltgun is the story of EVERY Space Marine game… PURGE! There is a lovingly crafted number of chaos mobs that you will end up fighting along the way from mere cultists to Chaos Marines… to Chaos Terminators… to even Chaos Daemons like the Great Unclean One. Basically don’t expect high art here… this is a game with just enough story to keep it from falling on its face… as it should be for any 90s-era shooter. If you are also of this era then you will probably love it. If you were NOT from this era… I have no clue what you will think about this game. It’s a relatively fast-paced retro shooter with weapons that feel powerful and combat that feels visceral. For me personally… it really hit the spot.
One of the things that I often do at the beginning of a year is to try and project out some of the things that I think I might be interested in on the upcoming release radar. I’ve not done that at all this year because I have been overwhelmingly obsessed with the current Path of Exile league. I thought it might be interesting to peer into the future and talk about some of the games I am interested in that have release dates for the common year, or at least look likely to release in one form or another. The further into the list, we get the more likely these things are to be bumped because they don’t have firm dates associated with them. There are going to be some big titles missing from the list that you might feel is important, because this is a deeply personal outing. For example the new Zelda game, I will likely ignore it until the emulators can run it and I can disable weapon durability because that construct ruined the first game for me.
Atomic Heart – February 21
Atomic Heart is one of those games that I have been amped for since I first saw it in a trailer presentation. It looks like a soviet block spin on the Fallout games, with weird robotics and psychic phenomena. I am largely on board for all of this. I fully expect it to have some jank but also I’ve played and loved Bethesda games so I am mostly used to that. I’ve played the Metro games and they were for the most part a giant mess, and I still enjoyed them. I have high hopes but also they have been tempered by past experience with games wanting to be the Russian Fallout.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor – March 17
Jedi Fallen Order was one of my favorite games when it came out. It proved to me the possibility of what a “soulslike” game could be if it had a difficulty slider. If you want the Dark Souls experience you play it on hard, and if you want just a fun narrative romp you play it on easy. I played the game happily on easy and enjoyed the hell out of the experience. I am looking forward to another outing as Cal Kestis, and I really hope that at some point this character is going to intersect with some of the Disney live shows because it seems too damned good not to use given that Cameron Monaghan is right there ready to go.
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores – April 19
I am throwing this out here because it has a fixed date, but I have to be honest… I am not sure if I will play this when it releases. I never actually finished Forbidden West, and in large part, it is because I don’t really play consoles that often. I would far rather do what I did with Zero Dawn, and play the expansion whenever the PC release comes out because playing this game with a mouse and keyboard is so much more enjoyable than playing it with a controller. We will see if I stick to my guns on this one, and while I enjoyed HFW it is nowhere near as compelling as the first game for me. Everything about how Aloy moved and controlled was so much better, but the story was just less interesting and didn’t really push me forward as fastly. Don’t get me wrong I loved all of the world-building and I look forward to playing this on PC whenever it releases there.
Redfall – May 2
We got new gameplay yesterday in the Microsoft presentation, and I have to say I am probably more interested now than I was before. It feels like this is going to be interesting as a completely single-player game, and also really interesting as more of a co-op Left 4 Dead type experience. I am going to have to sort out ways to be online at the same time as the rest of AggroChat folks to be able to experience this together. It honestly reminded me a bit of how State of Decay 2 feels, where you have bases that you operate out of and then go out into dangerous areas to collect resources and complete missions.
Diablo IV – June 6
I am throwing this on the list because I am very interested, but also very conflicted about it. Blizzard continues to not exactly be an exemplar for things that I want to engage with right now. I was hoping that by now we would be further along in the Microsoft acquisition and that Bobby Kotick would be on his way out the door. I want to play this, but I am not sure if I can play this. What is there looks interesting so far and I am very interested to see how a “post Path of Exile” Diablo game operates. I was burnt so heavily on Diablo Immortal as was pretty much everyone else, and my confidence levels are lower than they normally would be.
Final Fantasy XVI – June 22
I am exceptionally bummed that this is a PlayStation Exclusive. I would far rather play this on the PC full stop and it is dumb that I can’t. That said there is no way in hell that I am not going to play a mainline PC game that was crafted by the same team that gave me the FFXIV story experience. ARR to Endwalker was the best Final Fantasy experience I have ever had, and as a result, I am completely going to “day one” this game and probably “no life” it. I am in fact an acolyte of Yoshi P, and am willing to sign up for any nonsense that he is involved with. I mean it looks fucking gorgeous so there is also that. I am going to have to drag my PS5 back upstairs so that I can have undivided access to it.
Arc Raiders – TBA 2023
We’ve not seen a lot about this game since the Game Awards in 2021, but recently it has apparently been confirmed to be a 2023 release coming to Playstation, Xbox, and PC including Gamepass. I mean I love me some looter shooter action, so you know I am going to check this out regardless of how non sequitur using a Robyn song about masturbation is for the trailer. I loved the 1970s gritty science fiction vibe about it that a lot of games have been adopting. We still don’t know a ton about how the gameplay is going to unfold but this is firmly in my wheelhouse so I will be watching as a proper release date is assigned.
Hellboy Web of Wyrd – TBA 2023
I love Hellboy and I love the art style of Mike Mignola so I am completely onboard with a game that features a reasonable adaptation of both. We have no release date for this but it is supposedly coming during the calendar year. I kind of expect this to be a shorter very narrative-focused game. It has a Steam page that appears to be active, so here is hoping that it comes out on PC at the same time as everywhere else. This does not exactly seem like the sort of game that Sony would pay for exclusivity to.
Nightingale – TBA 2023 ???
We got an updated trailer for Nightingale at The Game Awards, and it gives me hope that maybe we will see it this year. This is probably the title that I consider to be the most likely to slide to 2024 however given that we’ve not really seen anything resembling public testing. If this was active, I figure by now someone would have broken NDA and leaked some footage of it. Because we have not seen that, it makes me think that it might still be “in progress” to a point of not really being ready to ship soon. I was deeply suspicious of this game until it was confirmed to be a purely PVE experience. I am going to play it when it comes out because I am here for the victorian gaslight-type setting.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – TBA 2023
This is another one that I question if we are actually going to see this year. CDPR has had a less-than-spotless record lately with being able to release things in the timeframe that they originally expect. We’ve heard that this is a bigger DLC than all of the DLC for Witcher 3 combined, and I know for certain when it lands I will be starting over Cyberpunk from scratch in order to be able to play my way through this seamlessly with the rest of the content. I love Cyberpunk 2077 and I cannot imagine that I won’t also love this expansion content.
Alan Wake 2 – TBA 2023
This game was announced at the 2021 Game Awards and so far we have not gotten much more information on it than this original trailer. At the end of this trailer, it shows a 2023 release date, but given the radio silence so far… I am not sure if that is going to be a realistic date given that everything takes slightly longer than anyone originally expects. When this game drops… I will stop whatever I am doing and play it. Last year’s journey into the “Remedyverse” has turned me into a dedicated fan of their particular style of narrative fiction. I am excited as hell to see what a Remedy game looks like post-Control which for me at least was their magnum opus. I am hoping to see even more blending of the settings and maybe have Jesse Faden play a role in this game.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn – TBA 2023
I am throwing this game on the list because it looks interesting, and I know for certain it will be a Game Pass title when it finally comes out. That lowers the bar of entry enough to make me want to give it a spin. It looks like a souls-like, and I don’t exactly have a great track record with those. I don’t go in for frustration gaming. If I am playing a game for the story, I want to see the story play out without a lot of false steps. If I am playing a game for the mechanics, then that is a totally different type of experience for me. I’ve never really managed to bridge the gap in a souls game to where I actually care about the mechanics and I mostly have played them because I am curious about the world. Flintlock looks really cool but I am also throwing it a bit of side-eye, but will check it out for free when it launches on GamePass.
There are a bunch of titles that I opted not to include. Destiny 2 for example has a brand-new expansion landing on February 28th for example. However, I’ve grown away from that game because I hated the content vaulting removing a bunch of things I loved, and have never really reached a point of forgiveness. I’m also deeply interested in Death Stranding 2, but somehow doubt we will see it released this year. These are the games that I am looking forward to the most, but given my track record, there are going to be a bunch of things that spring up along the way that catches my attention.
What games are you looking forward to the most this year?
