It is, as I write this, the first Tuesday of December. What’s in the box?
Expeditions: Rome is a turn-based tactics RPG with a historical setting. According to Bret Devereaux, official guy-who-would-know, its historical setting is pretty garbage once you get past the superficial elements. Bret’s standards for this kind of thing are very high, so failing to meet them isn’t really disqualifying, but it does mean that the game can’t justify its 50-hour time investment on those grounds. Its historical accuracy is good enough not to be marked against it, fine, but it’s not really a point in its favor, either – I already have plenty of games that get ancient Rome kinda right.
That key selling point stripped away, what’s left is a game constrained by its veneer of historical accuracy from having any rad wizards or dinosaurs in it, and while I love XCOM, much of what I love about it is that its turn-based tactical framework is linked together by strategic gameplay. Expeditions: Rome is also somewhere in the 40-50 hour length. For a time commitment like that, it needs a pretty strong selling point, and so far it seems to manage “eh, good enough” at best.
Midnight Fight Express is a third-person (pretty zoomed out camera, too, I want to call it isometric but I’m not sure that’s quite right) brawler game where you are a criminal and need to beat up like a million other criminals in order to save the city from crime. It takes itself more seriously than that, but the plot is still plainly a vehicle for the combat, which looks really good. By which I mean, it looks like it’s really fun to play. Actual graphics are kind of mediocre, but not so bad that they get in the way of the gameplay. How Long To Beat says it’s only six hours long, so this is an easy get.
Elex II is a post-apocalyptic science fantasy RPG, the sequel to a game that’s been on my wishlist for yonks. It got recommended to my by Steam and I wishlisted it so I wouldn’t lose track of it, but the state of my backlog being what it is, I never got around to buying and trying it. It was always a low priority, but not one that I want to totally give up on. I may as well pick up the sequel now, seeing as I’ve already paid for the Humble Choice. There’s decent odds that when I get around to this series, I won’t like it well enough to reach game two (and I don’t see any reason to believe I should skip the first game for this one), but there’s decent odds that I will.
Nobody Saves The World is an action RPG about a character named Nobody who saves the world by transforming into stuff. I’m really not feeling the gameplay hook, so I’m giving this one a pass.
The Gunk is a game about exploring a planet overtaken by the titular gunk. The only trace of gameplay I can find in the game’s Humble Choice pitch is that it involves using a power glove somehow. It’s less than 5 hours long, though, so I’ll grab it on the grounds that exploration is fun and that is real short, so I can take the chance.
The Pale Beyond is a game about a polar expedition that has to manage meager resources and political division to survive the harsh conditions of the South Pole. So apparently someone got so restless waiting for Frostpunk II that they decided they’d make it themselves. There’s no citybuilder gameplay or anything, but it’s got the same resource management core. This game doesn’t look bad, but I didn’t like Frostpunk so badly that I want to try out also-rans like the Pale Beyond.
Last Call BBS is, I guess, a nostalgia vehicle for 1995? I missed the BBS scene. The gameplay here is a collection of eight minigames, none of which look super compelling on their own.
From Space is a Boxhead game that’s put on a higher-graphics neon aesthetic in the hopes that no one will notice it’s a refugee from 2005. That’s probably unfair, the topdown horde shooter genre probably isn’t all knock-offs of a flash game I happened to play in eighth grade and which had already aged poorly by the time I was in tenth, and the Boxhead comparison is made pretty much purely because From Space is clearly in that genre, but that’s the only thing I can think of when seeing the game. The pink aliens don’t seem functionally different from the Boxhead zombies.
The bundle also comes with a 1-month trial of DC Universe Infinite, which looks to be one of those dealies where you pay a subscription fee for .pdf access to all of the comic books on record for a specific publisher. Maybe there are some specific exceptions, but broadly the idea is that the ravages of time have made catching up on comic book backlogs infeasible for anyone short of millionaire collectors, and sometimes not even then, so DC and Marvel now so digital access to a complete archive the same way companies sell streaming subscriptions. I’m not big into super hero comics, though. If something is going to be in comic book form, it should be visually stunning, and while super hero comics do sometimes have the kinds of characters and locations that are worth paying money to see, the vast majority of comic panels could be replaced with writing “Batman stood alone in the gloom of the Batcave” as prose and I would picture something basically identical to what the artist would’ve drawn. Certainly it is possible to draw something so evocatively that, even if it’s just a werewolf or something else where I have no trouble picturing it, the picture itself looks better than what I would’ve imagined just from the prose, but comic books are made on a tight schedule and the artists rarely have time to wring such work out of their canvas before they need to ship.
That’s three pickups, bringing my total up to 159. StarCraft games are long and so is Borderlands 3, and also I spent a lot of time in November watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Two of the games are short, though, and I’m through the Borderlands 3 main campaign and into the DLC, so I can probably get this back to 156 before the end of December easy.
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