My Recent PC Gaming

I’ve played quite a few PC games in the past year or two, and I’d like to highlight a few of them that I particularly enjoyed.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey – I played and enjoyed all the Assassin’s Creed games up to Black Flag. My least favorite part of Assassin’s Creed III was the ship travel and combat, so finding that Black Flag had the ship as a main part of the whole game was a real turn off. After that I never played any of the new games in the series until Odyssey. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is based in ancient Greece, during the Peloponnesian War, which has been an interest of mine since I was a kid. One of the biggest draws for me to the Assassin’s Creed series is the level of detail and fidelity in recreating historical settings, and I really enjoyed just being able to travel to Athens, Sparta, Olympia, and so on. Even just admiring the landscapes in the middle of the wilderness was delightful. It helps that the gameplay of Odyssey is really good, the best I’ve played in the series! I also liked meeting various historical figures, such as Herodotus and Socrates. Overall this is one of the best games I’ve played in quite a while.

Battletech – I’ve been enjoying playing the Battletech tabletop game for quite a few years now, even backing the recent Battletech Kickstarter project, and when a PC version of the game was announced a few years ago, I was pretty excited. I think the developers did a good job of implementing the core of the Battletech experience to a digital format – they changes to the rules were mostly minor, and helped make the game more streamlined and exciting. I enjoyed the single player campaign, and I’ve played a few skirmishes against the AI, but I haven’t picked up any of the expansions for the game yet, mainly because reviews are saying that the amount of content in the expansions isn’t worth the price tag.

Crypt of the Necrodancer – Crypt of the Necrodancer is a mash-up of a rhythm game, such as Dance Dance Revolution, and a dungeon crawling game. It’s such a unique concept, and it could easily have been a failure, but it’s actually a fantastic game! You can move up, down, left, or right, and you attack enemies by moving towards them. The catch is that you can only move if you press the key on the beat of the background music. Enemies move in predictable patterns, also on the beat, so once you learn their movement patterns you can practice dodging them and counter attacking. Killed monsters drop gold that you can use to buy better weapons, armor, and other equipment. The game is hard, and has a steep learning curve, but I enjoyed the fantastic music and nostalgically cute pixel art so much that I kept playing until I got good at the game, and now that I’ve beaten it several times I’ll occasionally load it up to play for a while. Several of the songs are on one of my Spotify playlists, even! A Legend of Zelda themed sequel to Crypt of the Necrodancer came out recently for the Nintendo Switch, but that’s another post.

Kingdoms and Castles – Kingdoms and Castles is a cute little game where you build a tiny kingdom on an island in the ocean. The graphics are a very simple 3-D, reminiscent of a zoomed-out and simplified Minecraft, with adorable little houses, villagers, and other town buildings. You send your villagers to collect wood and stone, then use that to build more buildings like charcoal makers, markets, wells, and so on that will satisfy your villagers’ needs. It’s much simpler than other games of this type, which makes it nice for a relaxing game. But not all is well in the kingdom, because vikings and dragons will raid your kingdom, so you need to build city walls and archer towers, as well as train up soldiers, to defend your kingdom! I really like this game, but I’m not sure if I’ll still be playing it in a couple years.

Celeste – Celeste is a 2-D platforming game, where you move your character from screen to screen by a combination of perfectly-timed jumps, air dashes, and interactions with various environmental features. It’s hard, but satisfying when you finally get past a screen you just failed on the last 30 times you tried it. I like the pixel art aesthetic, and the story of the game is pretty interesting. It’s not a game for everyone, but I really liked it.

ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove – Back when I was a kid, my grandparents owned a Sega Genesis console, and my favorite game on that system was a weird game called ToeJam & Earl. It was about a couple of aliens that crash landed on Earth, busting their spaceship into parts scattered across the world. ToeJam and Earl need to move through the levels, avoiding unfriendly earthlings, until they collect all of their spaceship parts and can return home. I played ToeJam & Earl a ton, and even played the sequel a bit (which was for some reason changed into a side-scrolling action game). I didn’t own an XBox, so I never played ToeJam & Earl 3, but I don’t regret it because it was poorly reviewed. Anyway, a few years ago the original creators of TJ&E launched a Kickstarter project to make a new game in the series that was faithful to the original. I backed it, and the game was released a few years later. I am happy to say that it is a good, fun game! It definitely evokes the spirit of the original, while being updated and modernized in the gameplay aspect.

Towerfall Ascension – I really seem to have a thing for games with 2-D pixel art! Towerfall is a multiplayer game where each player is an archer with three arrows, trying to shoot the other players and be the last one standing. This is a fantastic, fun experience to play with your friends and family! We liked it so much that we bought it on our Switch even though I already owned it on PC.

Minecraft – I still play Minecraft every once in a while, which shows how much staying power the game has. The fact that it still gets updated with new (free) content keeps bringing me back, and I’ll play around in the game for a while again (either alone or with my kids) until another game pulls me away from it.

Terraria – Like Minecraft, Terraria is an older game that I occasionally load back up. The free-form building and exploring makes it new and interesting each time, though not quite as fresh as a new Minecraft world. Still, I highly recommend this game.

Total War: Rome II – Yet another fairly old game that I recently played through again. Despite some of the game’s flaws, I really like playing it. I find that the older I get, the less I’m interested in a challenging gameplay experience, and the more interested I am in the narrative of the game, so I tend to just play on easier difficulty levels. As a wargame, this doesn’t have a narrative in a plot sense, but it absolutely has a narrative in the sense of the emergent gameplay that evolves throughout a campaign. For example, which countries I end up allying with and which I conquer this time playing through the game. Watching my empire expand in a different way than the last time I played is interesting to me, and at the end of the game I like to retrace my steps and see how I got to where I ended up. It’s a lot like why I enjoy history as a hobby.

So those are some of the games I’ve been playing lately on my computer, though this year my son keeps taking over my computer to play Roblox while watching Netflix. I could kick him off, but the situation gives me an opportunity to get off the computer and spend more time on my other hobbies, so I allow it (most of the time).