What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year

[warty goblin]

I mostly agree, except for a couple bits. I found Chimera Squad to be a palatable little XCOM-redux, everything kind of neatly bundled up together -- the neighborhoods were a simplistic but cleaner outer layer, the team is smaller but quirkier, the missions likewise smaller and quicker to finish. Overall, I wouldn't put it on a pedestal, but it was nice for a 10-20 hours brief affair after a few years without XCOM 2.

In contrast, I really wanted to like Phoenix Point, but couldn't. The factions were done pretty well, and the manual circles of aim mechanic was obviously a winner, but because of how enemies are placed, the combat never really felt as fluid as XCOM 2 or Gears Tactics. It felt more like the original XCOMs in that regard -- you never knew if you'd face a whole map-worth of deadly aliens looking at you, or end up hunting down one straggler hidden in some corner somewhere. Also, again because of the weird enemy placements, you never felt the proper tactical "line of battle" feel you had in XCOM 2 or Gears Tactics.

I think Gears Tactics is my runaway favorite for the genre at the moment, though.

Admittedly, my very negative take on Chimera Squad might simply because I'm vaguely allergic to several forms of banter. Since I rather liked having randomized soldiers, replacing them with people who kept yammering on unpleasantly was a distinctly retrograde move in my opinion. Also I had just been playing a lot of XCOM 2, which means I was pretty much completely out of patience with the two action system at that point, so a very slight variation of it was just not appealing.


I can't say I've had any problems like that in PP so far. The enemies seem reasonably well placed, and the maps are small enough that I end up in contact with most of them pretty quickly. I haven't had any issues hunting around to find a straggler at all. Firefights generally feel pretty intense, although the game is definitely balanced more towards fewer, individually more dangerous enemies than XCOM or Gears.

Tactically Gears is really, really good. I wish they had fewer (or at least optional) side missions, and the gear system was less miserable to deal with. Not that any of these games has made micromanaging every single dude's guns and armor anything but an interface mess, but it's so granular in Gears that I really start to feel it.

Incidentally, if a game like this just replaced equipment micro with broad classes that subsume a lot of equipment options, and universal equipment upgrades as a replacement for equipment micro, I'd be right there for it. XCOM 2 got so close to this by having a universal upgrade method for the guns, but then every single one would be individually modified, and we're right back to square 1, figuring out whether Alice or Bob gets the good rifle today.

I enjoyed reading this, since I've spent a lot of time on 3 out of 4 of these (haven't looked at Chimaera Squad yet).

I think Phoenix Point's got the most potential out of the four games – I played a ton of it in the earlier part of this year. It's got some issues that need work, though, and the new Legacy of the Ancients expansion was a big disappointment. I'm hoping that they keep on improving it, because if they fix its issues it could be something really special.

Currently playing Gears Tactics, and it does some things really well – the action system is nice, and the skill and level system is amazing (I love the skill trees for the classes). But the micro-management and UI for equipment is awful, and in the long run I've got the feeling that the lack of a strategy layer will hurt replayability – I can't really see myself playing through the game again once I've seen all of the story.

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I was just realizing playing PP the other day that I've played quite a bit of this genre over last 12 months, so why not see how they all lined up?

I only got PP once it released on GoG, so I have no idea how it's shifted over its weird and tortured release schedule. All I can say is that, right now, it's basically what I wish XCOM was - like a bunch of very smart people sat down and went "yes, but how can we make this deeper and less frustrating?". There's some annoying bits - I think abstracting ammo is exactly the right call and I'm not overjoyed about buying individual magazines of bullets - but the entire thing feels extremely thoughtfully put together at this point.

I may be an outlier in this, but I generally don't care about replayability as usually defined in gaming, i.e. variance between runs. If a game is very good, I'm likely to play it again, even if it offers pretty much no major differences. Since I find extensive use of randomization often hurts first-time playability, I'm maybe more likely to replay something that has quite low between-games variance. And whether I replay it or not, my view on how good a game is comes pretty much from the first run.