After playing through Fieldrunners 2 I was in the mood for a TD game that was more explicitly innovative. I guess my brain doesn’t appreciate the monotony of slowly building out vast mazes of very loud machineguns over and over. My mind jumped to Anomaly Defenders and Space Run Galaxy, both are fairly innovative yet I never gave them too much of a chance the first time around. After spending tens of hours in both, I have some thoughts on them that other people may or may not have had before. And you are going to be reading them because you clicked on this post and are therefore contractually obligated to listen to my ramblings.

On a recent trip, my brother and I were up late at night lying in bed and reminiscing on our childhood. We do it at an abnormal frequency when we somehow find ourselves in bed in the same room at night, probably due to a combination of undiagnosed ADHD/autism and ADHD/autism induced insomnia. This time, we were talking about our early gaming experiences and how it shaped our childhood. It was quite comprehensive, we went from 00s PC games to DS/Wii to Adobe Flash. Then my brother mentioned Fieldrunners and my brain got one of those flashback unlock moments. For some reason, my brain had hidden those memories away and I had not ever remembered it when thinking about my childhood games.

Can a painting generated by a machine be called art? I would argue no.

Not too long ago I was having a discussion on whether AI art should be labelled, and my thought was that labelling was a good thing because without the distinction it undermines the effort and investment that human artists makes. It is no different from labelling hand made textiles vs machined, or factory farmed chicken vs organic.

TLDR

Shinji got in the robot but it took 35 hours and we had to listen to his every stray thought. This VN is the epitome of tell don’t show. Buy only if you are 14 and think an hour long internal monologue about obeying orders is deep. tbf you’re getting a lot of decent animations and a typical but not bad mecha anime story here, but I wish I could have spent those 30 hours playing a better visual novel that respects my time (the other 10 hours is pretty good tho).

Over the past year or two I’ve been recommended by a lot of people to give FLoDT a try, and I recently finally found the time to. The story was pretty predictable for the most part, and the characters just aren’t really given the time to develop. Art and music was rather forgettable. I also hate the fake choices the game give you, there’s a hundred of them and only like 3 actually matter.

It’s Half Life, but in VR, expect linear corridors and physics puzzles. That wouldn’t be so bad on its own, except the game forces you to scavenge for ammo and supplies so a third of your playtime is just searching drawers and shelves which gets boring pretty quick. This also means you don’t really get to have fun with your guns until the final chapters, which is a shame since the guns are pretty fun to use.

TLDR

Chimera Squad is for you if you save scummed in the other XCOM games so that nobody dies.

Full Review

If XCOM 2 is a full three course meal, then Chimera Squad is drive thru burger and fries. It’s not as deep or as fleshed out as 2, but sometimes you just want the burger. Chimera Squad is what happens when you take XCOM 2 and repackage it to be played in short bursts. Also there’s a snek lady for you to choke bad guys into submission.