Fall is Video Game Season

Time to shirk! I’ve been buried under a deluge of new games. Here’s what I, a late-to-the-party random person off the internet with no credentials, thinks of the following video games that have been eating all my free time:

Untitled Goose Game

Geese are assholes, and this is a good game about being a douchey goose. Fuck with quaint townsfolk in a low-stress, low-stakes puzzle game with amusing and dare I say gentle gameplay. Reminds me of Donut County and Katamari.

Borderlands 3

The last Borderlands game I played was Borderlands 2, which is funny because Borderlands 3 is by no means the actual third game in the franchise. It’s familiar and the guns are wacky fun, but I can see how if your last loot-shooter experience was more recent than The Division 1 it might wear on you quickly. This is my main “play it with online friends” game right now.

Wreckfest

After years in early access, Wreckfest managed to hit my sweet spot for driving games: Somewhere between GTA and Forza Horizon for handling, soft-body collision physics for visually spectacular vehicular mangling, buckets of dirty old muscle cars, and a focus on racing as sadistically as possible. I like this game so much I will play the online races with strangers.

Elite Dangerous

After playing through the wonderfully casual, space-western Freelancer-descendant Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, I needed more spaceships in my life. I bought Elite Dangerous. After a weekend fiddling with controls, I discovered that while there’s a lot to like about the now-venerable space sim sandbox, what Elite boiled down to for me was working a space mining job in order to pay for my expensive starfighter habit. I already have a second-job super-grindy video game, thanks. Which brings me to…

Red Dead Online

“But didn’t you learn anything from 5 years of GTA Online?” you’d ask, and of course the answer is “Nope!”

Rockstar’s new character classes (bounty hunter, trader, and collector) do add some much-needed activities to their horse simulator’s anemic free roam. Ever since I grew frustrated with Far Cry 5’s level editor, RDR’s been the place I go to inhabit a Bob Rossian landscape while indulging in casual nihilistic violence.

Bounty hunting is fun, although the canned missions grow old. They do refresh faster than the original free roam contact missions, however.

The trading stuff is basically GTA Online’s bunker arms dealing supply missions given a horse-and-wagon paintjob. Sometimes you want to give your dead animals to Cripps, sometimes it’s better to continue selling pieces of things to the butchers in town.

Collecting is just more random treasure map opportunities so far. Meh.

Oh No There’s More of Them

Ghost Recon is coming out in, like, a week. I’m all over that. Plus I missed Control’s release but I love the idea of psychedelic psionic brutalism. At least Watch Dogs Legion isn’t out till next year. Whew.