Donut County

Donut county was a game that was released in 2018 and it was made by Ben Esposito. From what I remember there was no big launch but after I heard from it from some smaller sources, it was only good things. 

The Game 

The game itself is a very simple concept, you play as a small hole and your goal is to grow by swallowing bigger and bigger things as you yourself get bigger as well. The game isn't very long but it includes several levels, the only disappointment in that is that I had to start as a very small each level, I would have loved to see the hole get bigger each level to the point where I could have just swallowed the entire planet. Other than that the game was pretty relaxing and I had a lot of fun playing it over the 2-3 hours that it lasted.

The World / The Story

There is also a story in this game. The story is pretty much half of the game on top of the swallowing items with a hole. The story is not anything special but t is something fun to follow as you play through the levels. The story also tells a lot about the world that the game is set in how that works, why the holes happen and how to deal with them.

Very short review for a very short game. For how short the game was I don't think there is any way that it would be worth the full price but for a couple of € or for playing through the xbox game pass it was a nice couple of hours long experience. No more and no less than 8/10

Tom Clancy's The division

Tom Clancy's The Division is a game that was released in 2016 by Ubisoft. As far as I know the reception for the game was a lot of confused faces when content of it was first shown at some E3 but when it was released a lot of people liked it. Some people even play it till this day, even after the second game in the series has already been released. 

The Game

The point of this game is that it is kind of an RPG tactical shooter. And the game does both quite well but personally I've never been a huge fan of shooters that get too tactical. To my surprise, most of the game wasn't too tactical. 

The RPG portion of the game is somewhat simple: you level up, get new skills, get better gear, upgrade your hideout and so on. It's a big part of the progression in the game, since all the different areas have their own level requirements but it's not very complicated and if you know what type of build you are trying to create, then this whole system becomes almost too simple. However, I don't think they should add any, or at least not too many, different systems on top of this one. It would be nice if it was slightly more expansive. 

The tactical shooting part of the game is  more or less just that but again in a very simple fashion. Tactical part of the shooter comes from the fact that you can't really just run and gun through hordes of enemies, unless you are on a low level zone, since they will kill you faster than you can kill them. For this reason, pretty much all of the combat is done from behind cover and if you get unlucky or are horribly outleveled, even the cover isn't enough and you die. The problem with this system is that that's all it is. Stand behind a cover, shoot the enemy, and hope you have enough ammo, or that you don't get swarmed. And that is the game, no matter if you are killing random brutes or killing a boss, that is all the game is. And the bosses are tough as well. One boss fight that I will always remember is where you just run around a buss, shoot the boss in the back, wait for him to turn towards you, run to the other side of the buss, and then shoot him in the back again. This was the whole boss fight since you always have to stay behind cover and there is no real other way to fight. 

As long as you could stay the same level as the are you went into and had good enough gear, the game wasn't all that difficult. But if you were even slightly under prepared, or faced a really strong boss, there is a good chance all you did was die in this game and even if you were prepared and just fighting purple or yellow enemies there was a good chance that they would just run up to you and one shot you. 

The Story

The story in this game feels very generic. I mean it's about a virus that has destroyed a lot of the world, or at least a lot of the Manhattan. Apparently life isn't as bad everywhere and a lot of the Manhattan has been evacuated elsewhere. So a virus that left Manhattan almost abandoned. The only cool thing about this is that the virus was originally transmitted via cash money. 

The player has been sent into Manhattan to, I'm not even anymore to do what, Stabilize the area? Help civilians? Gather more data on the virus? Well those are at least some of the things that the operative, that you are playing, is doing. Helping all of Manhattan by yourself, or possibly as a part of a small squad, if you are into that. I tried to play the game all by myself so I could try and enjoy the story but I really can't remember what it was even about in the end, I certainly didn't enjoy it all that much. The setup is nice, and so is the post apocalyptic Manhattan, but there is a quite a bit of lack on the backstory and even the general direction of the story overall. 

The World

The world is, as I mentioned earlier, Manhattan, or a part of it.  A post apocalyptic Manhattan very there is trash and cars everywhere on the streets and, oh wait that's just Manhattan today. On top of that there is very small amount of people, only a few civilians roam the street. Most of the people are either hiding or scavenging the buildings and most of those people left on Manhattan are different gang members trying to cause harm. The Manhattan is quite nicely built in the game, it's much more compact than it would be in real life but I guess it would need a huge team and a beefy computer for gamers to be able to run 1:1 scale Manhattan in a game like this. The main attractions are there however. At least the ones that are in this slice of Manhattan, as mentioned, it is only a certain part of Manhattan that is in this game. As I've never been to NYC and don't know everything that goes on there I don't really know which part is in this game, or why they decided to only include some of the Manhattan, but I did find times square. 

Anyway, the post apocalyptic Manhattan is very cool place to explore. I just find it very weird how only some of it is included and I would love it if a lot more buildings were open to explore, but I guess you can't have everything.

Overall this game is a fun enough shooter game, it's very grindy and feels more like a past time game more than something that you would heavily invested in, that is, if it wasn't so infuriatingly difficult/bullshit at times.  For this reason I don't think I can give it a higher score than 7/10

Train station renovation

Train Station Renovation is a game that was released in April of 2020, so this time it actually is a last years game. It has got a very good review on steam but AFAIK doesn't have much more on the way of reviews since it wasn't a major release. 

The Game

The game is quite simple, you collect trash, repair, replace and clean the different areas of different train stations. It's a very relaxing game, for the most part, and it was a fun past time for as long as it lasted. There is a somewhat of a progression system in the game that isn't just getting to the next level and for the most part is a lot of fun. The different tools work quite well, the decorating of the trains stations is quite fun, although I wish there was some sort of blueprint tool or autocomplete tool for that part as it can get a bit tedious. That's the good parts of the game, now to the bad part. 

In this game if you complete levels well enough you can get quite a few upgrade points to upgrade the different tools you have at your disposal to do the work needed at the train station. One of those upgradable tools is a scanner that tells you what items need to be fixed or removed around you in a small radius. Leveling up this tool allows you to increase the range of it and how often you can use it. This might seem like fair enough gameplay aspect but in early levels it is sometimes impossible to find those missing bits since the range of the scanner is so small and the cooldown of it is so big that it would take forever to comb the area. Another thing that didn't work that well in the game was recycling. Some trash you could recycle and some you could not, the non-recyclable trash you could put straight on to a larger container that could fit a lot of different items. For the recycling part you could only put the recyclable items into very small recycling containers. This would mean that you would either have to empty them all the time, which cost money, or for some larger items you simply couldn't fit them in and would have to put them with the trash instead. That's a lot of text for quite small problems but I thought they needed to be said.

The World

The levels in the game are well built and are a lot of fun to clean. Some stations are very different than other and include some different problems, almost puzzles, that you have to solve. The problem with those are that sometimes there is very little information on how to complete the problem. Some stations are also quite large and I wish I could ran faster in them since it can get a bit boring just walking around, but it's good that those are included so that not all stations are the same. 

That's about it for this game. It's simple, relaxing, a bit short one, but despite its few problems, didn't have a lot of bugs in it. So for this nice little game I would give an overall of 7/10