I think you have to take it within the context of when it came out. CoD4 and Mass Effect came out 9 years later. There wasn’t anything like HL in 98. Enemies that talked to each other and flanked you? Unseen before. Does it stand up to games now? We’ve learned so much since then. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a modern shooter that didn’t trace its heritage back to HL.

When did you first play it and what other shooters had you played?

Brotato is amazing. One of the best.

I appreciate when a company chooses to not manipulate its customers with sales pricing and instead has a fixed price.

I can only speak to developers, but lots were let go including friends.

I don’t know that I would call Northgard a Warcraft clone. The mall is divided into tiles and each tile has its own resources and building limits. Units can only attack other units that are in their tile. There’s a much bigger emphasis on building up your tech tree and taking tiles.

Still, it’s one of the more interesting and fun evolutions of the RTS genre. If sci-fi is more to your taste, Dune the newer gameby the same studio is similar.

It is some of the things you’ve mentioned. But it is not nihilistic.

Story wise? I have no idea.

Dungeon of the Endless is a strange turn based, real time, tower defense, strategy, dungeon crawler. You control a party of units.

Endless Dungeon is essentially the same, but it’s a twin stick shooter where you control one unit.

They’ve made a number of strange decisions I think. The game has a lot more story with voice acting than Monster Train. But then it’s also co-op and has this lobby room you hang out in with random people and it doesn’t matter in any way that I can’t tell. The game itself is amazing though and none of the other stuff detracts from it in my opinion. If you’re at all still interested, you could watch a let’s play. I know there are some co-op sessions recorded.

I ignored all the mtx stuff, which was pretty easy, and have had a blast with co-op. I can’t think of anything else that comes close to this in terms of meaningful synergies with friends. And Shiny Shoe has proven they know how to use EA to turn out a good product with Monster Train so I wouldn’t give up on them quite yet.

I don’t think you’ll regret it. Shiny Shoe knows what they’re doing in terms of design and Inkbound is phenomenal. They’ve been making solid improvements throughout EA.

Did you play it? I’m not really sure how their monetization worked exactly as it never intruded on my experience. Still, it’s nice they’re dropping it. Early access is doing wonders for the game same as it did for Monster Train I hear, although I didn’t play that until release. They added offline play a while ago, completely redesigned movement to be simpler and more satisfying, and have been adding classes and taking things. The game is excellent, even more so in co-op in my opinion but my friend swears by 1p.

Good change, obviously. Monetizing cosmetics in this game has always struck me as odd. The game’s not ugly, but it’s not pretty enough to sell skins in my opinion.

If anyone’s curious about the gameplay, Monster Train is a favorite deck builder of mine and Inkbound topped my list of games I was excited about. It exceeded my hopes and expectations and I can’t think of anything else in the co-op space that comes close to the level of coordination and build variety found here. Great 1p as well and it’s progressing beautifully in early access with some excellent redesigns on various systems and new classes.

In Zachtronics Infinifactory, the setting is that aliens have kidnapped you and force you to build things for them, in return for kibble and other things humans like, such as a little league third place trophy. Always enjoyed that.