It’s another month and another weekend ahead of us, which means, once again, another weekend of pure, unbridled gaming joy. Annoyingly we’ve had a pretty slow start to the year, and then all of a sudden we have DOOM Eternal, Half-Life: Alyx, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and the Resident Evil 3 Remake all within a month of each other. So now it’s time to pop open that Steam library and sort through that backlog of games because we won’t get a chance to again anytime soon, even if it is just to tide us over till the next big releases.

Jon/Stu

I’ve taken my sweet time getting to it but my attention has finally turned to Nioh. I’m a dabbler in Souls-likes and, with Sekiro always around the corner, I put this one off. The wait’s been worth it though; at this early stage Nioh is a worthy competitor which feeds into my inner loot goblin. At the moment I’d have to say I don’t find it as challenging as Sekiro but that’s no problem - I get most of my kicks out of exploration in these types of games.

Other than that, I’ll be sure to put plenty more time into Hunt: Showdown as I continue my quest to form an army of level 50 hunters. It’s a butt-clenchingly tense game that I have to be in a specific mood for but when I want it, I really want it. It just so happens that I do suck at it but I’ve carved out a niche of my own - Insane Machete Man. All the guns in the world can’t save them.

Chad

With the excitement of Baldur's Gate 3 from PAX East, I finally got my hands on Divinity: Original Sin II. I have yet to get into the meat of the game itself but I’ve messed around with the character creation for a bit, so I’m ready to get truly stuck into it over the weekend. It looks like a lot of fun and I’ve heard many good things about it, and I hopefully won’t lose track of time and look out the window to see the sun rising (but who am I kidding, that will probably happen anyway won’t it?).

Every now and then, if I have time, I’ll go back to the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. I love those old-school style games back from the PS1/PS2 era, and it’s such an easy game to just pick up and play whenever I feel like it. I’m curious to see if others feel like this too? Old platformers and adventure games have that beautiful simplicity to them where you can hop in at any time and still remember how to play the game. On the other flip side of that, if I stopped playing The Witcher 3 halfway through I would feel like I’d have to restart the game just so I remember where I was/what I was doing/how to play. Anyone else feel like this?

Felix

I never played any of the Spyro games, but I certainly drop back in on classics like Deus Ex, Hitman, and sometimes revisit the original GTA, which really was a lot of simple fun.

This weekend? I saw Age of Wonders: Planetfall in the Steam library and felt it was time to knock off some of those titles that I wanted to play but not had a chance to. On the whole, Age of Wonders: Planetfall seems like a good balance between turn based 4x base building and character progression. You have a character on the map that levels up as you take out enemy units, where you can choose from a selection of skills as you do. Your commander is supported by a variety of flying and ground units in your stack, and you move it and other stacks around an alien world, uncovering territory that you can then occupy with your cities, like Civilization. There's a nice dose of sci-fi research and dinosaurs thrown in to spice it up as well. This game is basically Civ mushed together with XCOM, as when a battle takes place you are basically controlling a familiar XCOM style battle.