I should be clear that, when I complimented 3030 Deathwar Redux for having a good start, that wasn't faint praise; it's sadly typical for the opening minutes of a space simulator to turn players away with impenetrable complexity and a stark lack of direction. Like Starpoint Gemini 2, for example.

I'm assuming that this game - and likely the franchise in general - is directed more toward fans of slow and methodical simulations than those who want an action or storytelling fix, because the story is impossibly bland (despite its introductory cutscene droning on for what feels like forever) and there is an intimidating volume of tutorial text. Starpoint Gemini 2's in-game UI and control documentation is comprehensive, and it asks you to read page after page of this before embarking on even the most basic gameplay task.

Which is to fly to a planet, directly in front of you. Simple, sure, but also agonizingly slow. At full speed there are literal minutes of absolutely nothing happening on your way to planetfall.

But then, oh, a pirate ship! Ready your guns and ... hold down the fire key for a minute or so, until it dies. Not exactly the fast and tense action of a Rebel Galaxy encounter, here.

Finally you reach the planet and are greeted by another several pages of tutorial pop-ups, for shipyard options and news tips; but none of it's necessary, as your only objective is to immediately leave the planet again. And then a guy on the radio says to set course for-- oh, christ, how long is this voyage through the void going to take?

Deathwar fell apart after the first star system, but it showed some impressive design chops by making docking stations feel "alive," and by walking you through its various mechanics in highly-scripted intro missions. Starpoint Gemini 2 does pretty much the opposite: gives you a book to read and tells you to keep flying until something happens.

Progress: Like, none.

Granted, it's been nearly a decade since I played Limbo, but I've got no reservations against saying that Inside is basically the same game.

Inside is prettier, sure, with a polychromatic palette; fully three-dimensional environments; and rich lighting and water effects. (Occasionally, its 3D-ness is a detriment, as there's a slight learning curve to interacting with objects versus walking "around" them.)

The goal is the same though: walk to the right while avoiding capture and/or gruesome death, solving basic environmental puzzles to open doors or otherwise un-block your way. Some scenes require precise timing to pass, but convenient checkpoints keep the frustration factor down. And ambient storytelling in the background is intriguing, but the full plot is never really explained.

Inside's chase sequences are tempered by requirements for well-timed interaction - stop and hide in cover, turn back to misdirect, hit a button to seal a door - so gameplay consistently feels more like a puzzle than like fast-paced action. However, the puzzles also never get very complex; they're less about figuring out how a system works, and more about placing objects or timing button-presses correctly to execute said system.

And while I admire the game's commitment against a visually-intrusive user interface, I would have appreciated some tutorial prompts -- the early game forces you to guess that an object can be pushed, and that the X button is how pushing works. Frankly, I think this strict anti-UI stance makes the game hostile to newcomers, in spite of its mechanical simplicity.

I don't regret the three hours I spent with Inside, since it did show off some cool environments, and its puzzles were just enough to keep me engaged. But it's a little disappointing that, narratively and mechanically, it feels so "simple" and similar to its predecessor. (Are all of Playdead's games going to be about brain-control slugs?)

Better than: Limbo, I guess.
Not as good as: Headlander
Longer than, but similar to: Burning Daylight, a free game in the same vein that was so brief I didn't bother glogging about it.

Progress: Got the "normal" ending.

It's definitely a more-enjoyable game than Dig, but SteamWorld Heist likewise comes across as though most of its polish was applied in the wrong places.

SteamWorld Heist takes the turn-based tactics of something like XCOM, flattens them into a side-scroller, and adds aiming controls. This feels like a meaningful improvement over "X percent to hit" dice-roll combat, since hits and misses aren't really random: the game is visually clear on how weapon-type, range, and cover affect your hit chance; and timing your shot with the swaying of a character's gun-hand is a learnable skill.

The mission-based campaign wrapped around this turn-based shooting is ... more mixed.

On the plus side, Heist's randomly-generated level layouts usually work, although I would accuse the tile palettes of feeling a bit same-y and repetitive. Weapon progression is pretty satisfying - at least up until attack strength plateaus, several missions before the game's end - and it's interesting to see each character's unique abilities as they level-up.

But antiquated and baffling design decisions get in the way of what the game does right. Those character-unique abilities, for example, end up mostly overlooked because characters outside your party don't gain any experience; therefore, the most-capable party is always the same one you took on the last mission, and the one before. (Which can get awkward when some missions suddenly ask you to include a fourth, inevitably under-leveled, party member.)

SteamWorld Heist is gracious enough to skip the "permadeath" bullshit, but still punishes a loss severely -- a dead party member doesn't get any experience points (sorry, Mr. Under-leveled) and a party wipe or abandoned mission incurs a currency penalty depending on the difficulty mode. Consequently, if you were saving up currency for better equipment, but then lose a fight due to having shitty equipment, you're now even farther away from the upgrade you need to improve.

This risk to your banked currency is a bizarre incentive to keep "savings" in inventory items, except there's also a relatively low limit on inventory size, leading to a tedious and stupid-feeling meta-game around inventory and cash management.

(Or, if you're like me and don't have the patience for this shit, you can just lower the game's difficulty and reduce the risk of dying as well as the penalty amount.)

As for the narrative theme, it's a fairly rote iteration of Firefly-style space outlaw tropes, except the people are robots (who drop bad puns about gears and circuits). The game barely has any backstory or characterization, and what little it offers is hidden in optional flavor text between missions. Ultimately I don't think Ivanski's ballet story was worth the effort it took to keep talking to him.

The UI is workable but inconvenient, the music gets grating over time, and the inordinate amount of shop space occupied by (and in-game physics for) cosmetic hats is ... well, like I said, it feels like SteamWorld Heist has applied effort and polish to inconsequential bullshit while neglecting persistent issues of difficulty balance and content variety.

I had fun with the core tactical gameplay, and I can't deny that overall I enjoyed playing through each mission -- after lowering the default difficulty to avoid death-spirals. But that fun was just enough to get me through an un-captivating campaign.

Better than: Frozen Synapse, SteamWorld Dig
Not as good as: Mega Man Battle Network, I guess? Wow, I really haven't played many tactical games recently.
Maybe you'll be more stoked about SteamWorld Heist: if you fucking love cosmetic hats.

Progress: Finished on Normal difficulty, all stars including the Outsider missions.

I recently plugged in a new graphics card (no, not this one) and needed some way to try out a few extra GBs of VRAM. A little ironic that the 2015 version of a 2013 game was the best I could do to exercise some 2019 hardware; but what started as a simple benchmark led me to a more-or-less full replay of Grand Theft Auto V.

Unlike my recent re-attempt at GTA IV - and more like The Ballad of Gay Tony - GTA V remains engaging, enjoyable, and not inconvenient. Only one or two missions felt like tedious bullshit, and this game's tow-truck and stevedore diversions were much less aggravating than IV's bowling or Red Dead Redemption's cattle-herding nonsense.

While a few awkward story moments (like Trevor and Michael's abrupt reunion) and ultimately unsatisfying character arcs keep GTA V from narrative greatness, its storytelling is still "good," and its snide silliness is still genuinely entertaining.

And while Los Santos isn't as dense with activities as some more modern sandbox games - nor are its side-objectives as easy to find - there's still no shortage of stuff to do, and the driving gameplay (and occasional random or emergent action) between points A and B is just fun.

I don't know if it'll last another five years; as with my old favorites Red Faction: Guerrilla and The Saboteur, I expect the industry will eventually make this game feel pretty obsolete. But for now, it's still one of the best open worlds we've got.

Better than: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Ehh, let's say, on-balance equitable to: Batman: Arkham Knight

Progress: Picked option "C," did most of the map-icon missions.

There are specific tastes, there are guilty pleasures, and then there are games like 3030 Deathwar Redux that - despite tapping into some of my most primal video game interests - I just can't recommend.

3030 Deathwar Redux is a top-down space-trading simulator, where you pick up missions at a spaceport, buy and sell space cargo, hunt space pirate bounties, buy ship upgrades, buy a bigger ship... et cetera. It's a familiar formula but a difficult one to get right. And while some of Deathwar's gameplay loops are total write-offs (asteroid mining is pointless, as is the barely-playable salvaging mechanic), enough of it does work to make space-truckin' around this galaxy feel pretty great.

At first.

Deathwar's main story is pretty stupid from the beginning, and its dialog is poorly-written, but it does the job of tutorializing and guiding you through the game's core concepts. Optional side-missions picked up from spaceport NPCs offer some opportunities to explore at your own pace, too. And then, once you upgrade to a "split drive" (hyperspace-capable) ship and leave the starter system... scripted side-missions are over.

Story missions steadily degrade in quality as the game marches on, and by the end it's clear that the developers really wanted to wrap it up: dialog cutscenes get replaced with text pop-ups, mission objectives fail to explain their relevancy, some story questions even resolve themselves with no player action. And some later missions make unfortunate use of a very-poorly-implemented on-foot mechanic, which is barely interactive and takes forever because the walking speed is so damn slow.

Meanwhile, you still need to make money for ship upgrades, by grinding through randomly-generated jobs like delivering packages or passengers; there isn't much variety to these job types, and many of them just aren't worth the trouble (requiring you to go to a distant system, then another, before you get paid... ugh).

There is a baffling limit on how many jobs you can accept at once (four), and even more bafflingly, you can't save the game while jobs are in-progress. Which, if you're playing this kind of game correctly, is almost all the time! That one smells more like a save-state bug than a design decision.

Inter-system travel is more frustrating than it needs to be due to dense nebulas, which zap your fuel and can even damage your ship. Initially I thought nebulas were going to be a progress gate, and I'd eventually find an upgrade to power through them - or at least some maps to show the secret routes between dense clouds - but... nope.

And the injury added to that space-travel insult is the in-game radio, which has some legitimately cool music, but shuffles multiple conflicting genres into one playlist and starts a new track every time you dock or un-dock. Like, one moment you'll be listening to a Japanese cover of Take On Me, and then that'll get interrupted by low-fi chiptunes, only for that to get interrupted by classical opera.

It ultimately feels like a mercy that there's no substantial endgame -- I guess you could keep grinding missions to get the money for a capital ship, but... why? Medium-sized ships have more than enough capacity and speed to keep up with late-game missions, and the most expensive weapons are no better than alternatives at a fraction of the price. And other than bigger ships, there aren't any new goals to aim for once the story is over.

I'm not even going to get into the game's control and UI bugs, except to note that they make the already-unhelpful autopilot upgrade pretty damn broken.

3030 Deathwar Redux starts strong, with a promising variety of activities and some fresh new ideas for the genre; props to the early game for giving me a good dose of space-trading action. But by the time the credits rolled, all I could see in Deathwar was disappointment.

Better than: Space Run
Not as good as: Rebel Galaxy
And...: I don't know that they're even playable, anymore, but also not as good as Escape Velocity or Escape Velocity Nova

Progress: Finished the story in a heavily-upgraded Lochu.

Iconoclasts feels like a significant leap forward from the developer's previous game, Noitu Love 2. This is way more than a Mega Man homage -- Iconoclasts tells an epic story using multiple protagonists as they explore an interconnected, Metroidvania-style world.

Well, the world isn't that interconnected; more like the separate-but-adjacent map regions of Dust: An Elysian Tail. (And like Indivisible, Iconoclasts frustratingly refuses to show you more than the current region's map.) The "multiple" protagonists point is also kind of a stretch; main character Robin is frequently rolling with a party of companions, but those characters are only playable for a few minutes of the game's running length. And that "epic" story ... is hard to understand.

The first half of Iconoclasts' campaign is pretty light on storytelling, and yet is still difficult to follow due to a crazy amount of factional jargon. The One Concern is an army fighting for the defense of City One which is ruled by Mother, and there are Agents with super-human abilities granted by Ivory which is also the planet's primary fuel source, while the One Concern General hates the Agents (and also... is one?) and they all enforce Penance upon religious criminals, especially the Pirates which are really a tribe called the Isi who also get Ivory from plants? but not upon the ChemiCo science group which works for the One Concern but also helps the Pirates and Settlers under the table by crafting your weapon upgrades.

In the second half, this narrative stew starts to come together in a meaningful way, and the game fleshes out its pseudo-religious backstory with cool sci-fi elements. ... but the story never completely makes sense, and ultimately I can only speculate regarding the true nature of Ivory and Planet Spines.

Iconoclasts spends more of its narrative focus on characters than on world-building, with uneven results. NPCs gush about Robin, and how strong and helpful you are, but Robin herself only communicates in emotes. Mina is a two-dimensional character whose down-to-earth plights are sympathetic, but she talks too much and her scenes drag on a bit long. And most other characters are just bad people. Especially Robin's brother Elro, who is set up like a stoic ally but is really just an abrasive, antagonistic asshole.

Alright. So how about the gameplay? Well, it's pretty good I guess.

Robin's got a wrench, which can be used as a close-range weapon, as well as a gun which acquires a few different modes over the course of the game. Most enemies have immunity to some forms of attack - like, wrench hits and stun gun shots may just bounce off - so combat tactics are shaped around learning and using the proper ability for each enemy. This gets more interesting in boss fights, where each phase or each weak point requires a new tactic.

That puzzle-like complexity is balanced, and arguably a little dulled, by how easy the fighting is (at least on Standard difficulty). Most enemy attacks don't do a whole lot of damage, and only a couple of boss fights really challenged my dodging or parrying abilities. This definitely kept the game at a low level of tension, but I'd rather that, than have to repeat those fights over and over again.

There are also non-combat puzzles, which can become rather devious as you accumulate more tools and techniques. And a few that are devious due to hidden bullshit, like I literally couldn't see the platform I was supposed to jump on, so inevitably I started popping open a walkthrough every time I got stuck. While most of the game's puzzles are just fine, plenty of them could have used a little more design polish.

The action and puzzle gameplay in Iconoclasts may not be mind-blowing, but it works, and the game's rich visuals and catchy soundtrack help make up for its confusing world map.

It's a shame that the story is so messy, but overall Iconoclasts is fun enough to be worthwhile from start to finish.

Better than: Pocket Kingdom
Not as good as: Indivisible
More exciting, but less puzzling, than: Toki Tori 2+

Progress: 100% on Standard mode.

7 Billion Humans isn't "just" a sequel to Human Resource Machine; it also expands the fake-programming domain to multi-threading. Your program runs on multiple agents/workers at once!

Unfortunately 7BH doesn't fix the biggest problems I had with its predecessor: dragging-and-dropping instructions is a chore, the instruction set is awkwardly limited, as is its concept of memory or variables... and this game's new complexities exacerbate a voodoo-polymorphism problem that the previous game merely hinted at.

Egotistical professional programmers (like myself) often look down on languages like PHP and JavaScript because their type systems, or lack thereof, inhibit strict definitions of a program's expected behavior -- encouraging unexpected behavior that's difficult to debug, or even to detect. 7 Billion Humans may keep its instructions "simple" by dodging the question of type-safety, but this leads to haphazard consequences like step sometimes not working depending on the state of another worker in the destination, or giveTo throwing your worker into a shredder if it isn't holding anything.

Personally I find this kind of unpredictable mechanic tiring and unsatisfying - in programming or in video games generally - and this eventually dulled my interest in solving the game's ongoing puzzles. I didn't even get far enough to unlock functional synchronization instructions; in most of the puzzles I completed, 7BH's multi-threading concept was more like a proxy for running the same program over multiple data sets.

7BH also doesn't address my most-superficial criticism of HRM, that it doesn't compare your solution's memory- or runtime-efficiency with other users. I kinda feel like this is a requirement for modern programming games.

7 Billion Humans was mostly fun as far as I played it, and it does boast significantly more puzzles than Human Resource Machine did. But I got bored of its programmer-unfriendly UI and "magic" behavior around the halfway point.

Better than: Opus Magnum, Silicon Zeroes
Not as good as: Exapunks, Human Resource Machine
Nerd alert: if the game supported modular code (functions), I might even have written some type-safe helper modules. Alas.

Progress: 34 "years" (puzzles completed).

Not much to say, here; I tried Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance again and stopped even sooner than the last time I played it.

As I was six years ago, I'm annoyed that the game doesn't do a very good job of explaining what it wants me to do. The difference this time around is that I have less patience to learn how to git gud properly exploit this combat system. How many die-and-retry loops, how many online references, will it take? More than I'm up for.

My more-recent attempt at Transformers: Devastation and replay of Vanquish have also tempered my expectations of Revengeance -- that is, I'm not looking forward to uncovering the rest of Raiden's story. Those other titles reinforced that, past a shiny presentation and bombastic-but-shallow narrative, the "point" of a Platinum game is its combat... and I'm just not that into it.

Progress: Gave up on the Blade Wolf fight in R-01.

Factorio isn't a perfect game -- not even "perfect for me," in the sense that some narrative elements and improvements to tech-tree pacing could make it "more perfect for me." But, well, it's a good thing that I had this past week off of work and could spend multiple full days (and two all-nighters!) building a spaceship factory.

Calling my 60-hour creation a spaceship factory is absurdly reductive, but that reduction is the key to Factorio's charm. To create rocket fuel, you need light oil; for that, you need a chemical plant; for that, you need steel plates... ad infinitum. The layers upon layers of manufacturing objectives, not to mention the required research to unlock them (and the science packs to perform research!), are wonderfully clear in defining "what" you need to do and delightfully vague in "how" to bring it all together.

At their best, discrete components feel like meaningful objectives all on their own, like the firearm magazine which is a necessary staple while also building toward upgraded ammunition. Some components aren't so satisfying, like the aforementioned light oil and its refining counterpart heavy oil. But even then, the fact that every manufacturing problem breaks down into individual parts lends Factorio an addictive "just one more step" quality, which is what kept me playing into the wee hours of the morning.

I called out the game's pacing earlier, and there's one very specifically frustrating part of the tech tree that I'd suggest changing: the full utility of a logistic network (specifically the requester chest) isn't unlocked soon enough. Until you can use drones to ferry material from factory to factory, everything has to be done with conveyor belts, and the complexity of belt layouts required for some multi-stage manufacturing is a damn nightmare.

To highlight this, look at the tree of inputs for the utility science pack, and how many materials are shared by multiple layers. This science pack is required to research the ability to build a logistic network -- so you can't use a logistic network to build it, at least not at first.

Consequently, once I had finally unlocked requester boxes, I spent the better part of a day replacing my byzantine belt networks with flying drones. And then I discovered that I'd exceeded my electricity production, and had to expand my reactor complex.

I'll admit that this manner of "and then..." effect is often torturous; but I also really enjoyed it. Hell, unknown-unknown problem solving is part of what I'm paid to do.

Toward the end, or at least toward where I ended the game (after launching a rocket, you can keep going and build even more insane shit), I would also complain that some building processes just take too long. The raw time involved in making a rocket control unit, of which you need one thousand to launch the rocket, made this part of the game feel like an idler where I spent quite a while sitting and waiting.

I haven't even mentioned Factorio's combat, which ultimately doesn't feel like an important element. At first, defending yourself and your assembly lines from hostile bugs can be downright harrowing, but once you've got the manufacturing capacity to keep up some gun turrets - and once you learn that destroying nearby hives will effectively stop the attacks - combat becomes a very low priority.

Well, and you'll need to keep up an arms race as your increasing pollution levels lead to bigger and badder bugs. But once you can build a tank and load it with explosive shells nothing really stands a chance anymore.

So, yeah, there are parts I was underwhelmed by and parts that I definitely think could have been done better. But none of that changes the fact that Factorio is the first game in years that kept me up literally all night playing.

Better than: Infinifactory
Not as good as: Exapunks
As for what's next: when will Satisfactory leave early access?

Progress: Launched a rocket.

I appreciate that Gotham Knights is being up-front about how it isn't a "Batman" game. Bruce is gone, Bats isn't even part of the title -- and whether or not Knights incorporates any stealth, the footage so far is clearly more focused on combat.

Arkham Asylum was an excellent Batman simulator, while its follow-ups City then Knight gradually added more open-world superheroism. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if Knights iterates specifically on the latter, especially since this dev studio has some relevant experience from the Arkham Origins spin-off.

That said, the dialog in the demo trailer... ugh. I would have hoped Batman & Robin was a low narrative bar to clear, but dramatic banter like "We'll see about that" has me nervous.