Tomi on 31/10/2019 at 19:14
So, is this just a convenient way to raise the prices for the monthly subscription? Existing subscriptions get converted to Humble Classic, so the price and the number of games that you get probably remains the same
as long as you remain a subscriber, but the deal gets worse for those people who only subscribe for the interesting games every now and then. I wasn't planning on cancelling my subscription any time soon, but I'm not sure if I like this change.
Then again, since you get to choose 10 games with the Classic subscription each month (3 with the basic subscription and 9 with premium), I assume that they'll actually be offering more games than they are right now. Of course most of them might be some obscure indie titles, but it's nice that we get to choose which obscure indie titles we get to play. :D
henke on 1/11/2019 at 17:47
The rest of November's montly games have been unlocked:
Synthetic
Evergarden
Shenmue 1 & 2
11-11 Memories Retold
Humble Original: Operator
If anyone's played any of these, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've only played Shenmue 2. I hear Shenmue 1 lets you drive a forklift truck, which sounds - and I can not stress this enough - very appealing.
Tomi on 2/11/2019 at 09:12
I played
11-11 Memories Retold as a part of my mystery game challenge thing not too long ago, and even wrote a little review of it, but it seems that I forgot to post it in here. I remember liking it quite a bit, the gameplay is very simple and it's almost a walking simulator, but the story is quite memorable. It's a very unique game in many ways and I think you should give it a try. :) Here's what I wrote about it a few months ago:
Quote:
11-11 Memories Retold is a World War 1 game, but thankfully not just another one where you shoot evil Germans and try to win the war on your own. In fact, it's not a very typical war game at all. 11-11 tells the story of a young Canadian photographer and an older German engineer who end up on the front line for their own reasons. The Canadian wants to impress a local girl, and the German fellow leaves his family and joins the army in a desperate attempt to find his lost son. I think it's a fantastic story with some exciting twists and genuinely sad and touching moments. You'll soon learn that the war isn't about heroes and glory, it really is mindless and just totally shit from an ordinary guy's point of view.
11-11's biggest standout feature is of course its visual look. The whole game looks like an oil painting! It felt like a bit of a gimmick at first, and it does take a while to get used to it, but I learned to love it. You don't get to see all the little details so you'll have to use your imagination to fill the blanks. I think it looks fantastic.
At its core 11-11 is an adventure game where you solve some easy puzzles and walk around a lot to find the right people and places, but there are some interesting gameplay mechanisms as well. There are a couple of very simple and short "action" parts, but apart from that it's quite a unique take on a war game. The Canadian guy for example has to take photos of key moments and important places on the front, and even after finishing the game, I still haven't figured out how things really work in the game. Does it even matter what kind of photos I take? I'm pretty sure that it does, at least a bit, but I don't know how. It's the same with some other little choices that you make in the game - do they affect the story somehow or is the outcome always the same? I might replay 11-11 one day, but the story progresses so slowly (but steadily) and it's quite heavy, so I think it's not going to be any time soon.
Inline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/779613284205236741/7C47873B09CC98FFBF11897BA096423244966596/I haven't heard of those other games in the bundle, apart from
Shenmue that is apparently some sort of a console classic. The remastered games here are pretty good according to a couple of reviews that I found, especially Shenmue 2, but I got the impression that all these reviews were like a nostalgia trip to 20 years ago. So I still wonder if the games are any good if you never played the originals.
Synthetik is an action roguelike that looks so much like
Crusader: No Remorse that I'm gonna have to check it out.
Evergarden is apparently "a charming casual puzzle-game about gardening", and that doesn't sound very tempting when you read it, but it does look nice and I usually don't care about puzzle games unless they're casual enough. :p
Operator looks like a game where you're some hacker and you write stuff on the command line to access people's emails or to look at security cams and just generally make things happen. I'm fairly sure that there's more to it, so anyone who likes to pretend to be a hacker should probably give it a try.
Tomi on 26/11/2019 at 18:47
No one's mentioned December's monthly games yet, so...
Soul Calibur VI: I haven't played a fighting game like this since the first Tekken game a quarter of a century ago, so it's not something that I'm particularly looking forward to, but I'll definitely give it a go. I wonder if it's even worth playing in single-player though?
Yakuza Kiwami: What's with all the Japanese games lately? I've never played a Yakuza game before, so I had to try Yakuza Zero (it was a monthly game earlier this year) at last when I saw that there's another Yakuza game here. And hey, even though I thought it was terrible for the first half an hour or so, it's not actually too bad! So I might play Kiwami one day too, unless I'm all Yakuza'd out after I'm done with Zero. I'm looking forward to some even more imaginative mini-games and extremely cheesy storylines.
My Time at Portia: Normally I might be a little put off by an overly cutesy RPG adventure like this, but to me this one's the most interesting game of the current crop. There seems to be a lot of exploration, some light RPG-like character development and interaction, and some crafting, and most of all it looks quite fun.
By the way, this is the last month before Humble Monthly changes into this new Humble Choice thing. So if you're interested in the Humble Classic plan (you get to choose 10 games each month for about the same price as the new Basic subscription that only has 3 games), you'll only have a couple more days to subscribe! Speaking of the different "plans", I think that being able to choose three games each month is still more than enough, as the other games on offer will probably be ones that you're not interested anyway. On the other hand you might miss out on some cool surprises though, so I think I'll stay subscribed for now...
WingedKagouti on 26/11/2019 at 19:03
Quote Posted by Tomi
Soul Calibur VI: I haven't played a fighting game like this since the first Tekken game a quarter of a century ago, so it's not something that I'm particularly looking forward to, but I'll definitely give it a go. I wonder if it's even worth playing in single-player though?
The single-player campaign "Libra of Souls" is 30+ hours (100+ if you go for all the optional stuff) and gives you both some hard challenges if you go look for them but there are also various ingame tools to make the main story easier (without messing with difficulty modes). I was able to button mash my way through a lot of the early game, with a few encounters taking more than one try.
And beyond that campaign there's Arcade, Survival, Character stories and other things to do for single player gaming.
Tomi on 7/12/2019 at 18:41
The monthly
Humble Choice thing is here at last, and the games for January are:
Inline Image:
https://images2.imgbox.com/0b/3b/kMQtg69P_o.jpgAnd just in case the image above doesn't work:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider / Blasphemous / Ancestors Legacy / Phantom Doctrine / Dead in Vinland / Horizon Chase Turbo / Dark Future: Blood Red States / Desert Child / Aegis Defenders / X-Morph Defense So that's ten games, and you get to choose 3-10 of them, depending on which subscription plan you have. I've got the Humble Classic plan so apparently I get all ten games, which kind of takes some of the fun away from all this. At a quick glance at this bunch of games, I think three games (that's what the Basic subscription gets you) would have been enough, but then again it's often the ones that you've never heard of before that turn out to be the most positive surprises.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the obvious choice, I guess, even though I haven't played a Tomb Raider game for more than 20 years. I've heard mostly positive things about it, and I've got Rise of the Tomb Raider in my collection too, so I'm looking forward to get reacquainted with Lara after all these years. :D
Blasphemous is the Dark Souls kind of a 2D platformer with funny hats that
icemann mentioned in another thread just a couple of days ago. It definitely caught my interest then, and now I unexpectedly get a chance to play it myself!
Dead in Vinland would be my third choice here - it's a survival RPG/adventure with a viking theme, and it's supposed to have emphasis on the storytelling.
Phantom Doctrine is yet another XCOM clone, but the Cold War espionage theme with stealth and stuff sounds like it might be fun.
As for the rest? Nothing that interests me right now, but I'm open for suggestions!
Starker on 8/12/2019 at 07:34
Hmm... tempted to skip this one. Blasphemous and Dark Future look interesting, though. I'm always up for some weird and disturbing soulslike action and I don't think I've seen an RTS done from the point of vehicular road combat before. Looks very Mad Max.
As for Tomb Raider, I didn't much care for the first instalment of the newest reboot and it doesn't look like the sequels do anything substantially different. I liked the series when it was more about about exploration and raiding tombs and less about stealth-action and shooting dudes in the face. Not that I have anything particularly against it, it just seems a bit... meh.
WingedKagouti on 8/12/2019 at 09:46
Quote Posted by Starker
As for Tomb Raider, I didn't much care for the first instalment of the newest reboot and it doesn't look like the sequels do anything substantially different. I liked the series when it was more about about exploration and raiding tombs and less about stealth-action and shooting dudes in the face. Not that I have anything particularly against it, it just seems a bit... meh.
Rise is a lot more about exploring tombs than the previous game and from what I hear Shadow is even more of that. While Rise does have some Clown Car Shooting Galleries, it didn't feel as prominent as in the first of the reboot to me.
Starker on 8/12/2019 at 10:43
Are these tombs short linear side areas where you try to solve a puzzle to get a prize while Lara tells you what you need to do, like it was in the 2013 reboot, or do you explore ancient ruins as whole levels while navigating traps and searching for pickups and secrets, like it was in the original game?
I do have Rise, there's just so many more games I want to play first when I get the time.
henke on 8/12/2019 at 11:08
Don't remember Rise, but Shadow had some pretty good tombs, as main courses as well as optional side tombs. If you set the Puzzle Difficulty to Hard you don't get any extra hints. Some of them were kinda tricky!
Quote Posted by Starker
Dark Future look interesting, though. ... I don't think I've seen an RTS done from the point of vehicular road combat before. Looks very Mad Max.
Realtime with pause. Convoy did basically this previously. I'm always interested in these kinds of things tho, so thanks for pointing it out!