March to War Month: XCom 2

The original X-Com, which I'll call X-Com OG to try to be easier to read, is permanently lodged in my brain. I've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of it, and through at least one successful campaign of its sequel, the highly derivative Terror from the Deep, or Lobster men from the Ocean rise from the depths to touch your no-no zone.

I couldn't get into the XCom reboot, as it felt too close to X-Com OG while not offering much, if anything, to really get over my subjective distaste for the game. It reminded me too much of the usual dumbing down of strategic games, but it sold really well and lots of people liked it, so I'm not saying I think it's bad. Just, you know, it didn't quite line up with it. It's still very cool that they made a triple A big budget strategy game, even if I'd somewhat pull away from calling this a strategy game.

As for X-Com 2, the reality is, I have a 12 month humble bundle sub rolling and I was getting this game whether I liked it or not. Having clearly put the money in, well, I wasn't going to be deterred on giving it a try and wasn't going to be deterred by the first hour being bad since damn it, they already had my money.

March to war month: The Last Federation

Some games are easy to introduce and discuss, and others are difficult. But Arcen, makers of Last Federation, is generally a well-spring of being difficult to discuss in and of themselves, and then their games take it to the next level. Admittedly the last Arcen game I reviewed was Starward Rogue, which was a very different game.

The Last Federation is a very, very strange game to talk about. It bends a lot of what you'd expect from the genre around trying to set up this one, rather perfect little scenario that the game takes place in. But I guess I should explain the genre before I go anywhere else. TLF is a space simulation game, likely to be compared to the lineage of Master of Orion. However, if MoO and its variety of descendant games are described as "4x" games (or x4, I can never remember) then TFL is more like an 2.5x game. Most of the elements are there, but not all of them.

For one thing, the basic story is you're the last Hydral, the first race to gain space travel in a planetary system with almost ten different races. And your race was wiped out, as they were cruel dictators of the system until that wiping out. It isn't well explained why a space-faring race would be wiped out as such, but hey, it worked for Dragonball Z!

As the Last Hydral, you don't really have an empire per se and you don't really have anything approaching imperial resources. Oddly enough, though, the elements you'd expect to be dropped from a 4x given those restraints aren't the ones TFL is missing.