I should actually put some reviews of the stuff I played:

Capes
So, as I said in the article about it specifically, it's pretty much superheroes-themed XCOM 2 in tone, XCOM: Chimera Squad in mechanics (by which I mean, your units and the enemy units all get places in the turn order which can shift around, but you control one unit at a time rather than your entire team). I turned off the auto-advancing dialog boxes option, as it felt a bit weird to have auto-advancing text boxes, but it was workable after that. Combat seemed decent from the two missions I played, and there was an interesting system where characters could have some of their moves buffed in different ways by the nearby presence of a teammate (e.g., character A made one of character B's moves do more damage, while character C made another one of them have a short-range teleport effect, that sort of thing). Enemy goons sometimes had weapons which made them much more dangerous than their unarmed companions, and most characters had a dedicated way of disarming people, which made for an interesting additional level to combat. On a personal and subjective level, I wasn't sold on the art style, though it's hard to put my finger on why (something about the animations of the characters bugged me a bit; like everyone was sort of constantly hyper and fidgeting or something).

Plan B: Terraform
I'm something of a sucker for games about terraforming, it seems (I have Terraforming Mars, Surviving Mars [with the Green Mars terraforming expansion], Terraformers, and Per Aspera in my library), and this game seems like it'd be right up my alley. I like the fact that it randomly generates Mars-like planets rather than just being flat-out Mars again (I'd love to see terraforming games in future that focus on other types of planets, like Venus-like, but that's a digression for another time). I also like that it directly models the temperature based on the atmospheric composition and pressure, something the other games I have don't exactly do. The demo shows a peek at an expanding tech tree where you steadily extract raw resources and process them into increasingly-complicated products. It seems like a pretty solid game…and I'm just not sure I'll be able to handle it, given how I always run out of steam in games like Satisfactory as the complexity scales beyond what my brain is willing to spend computation time on in my relaxation periods. We'll see if I pick it up, but if you like terraforming and Factorio/Satisfactory/similar games, you should probably at least check it out.

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I used to love Sim Tower as a kid, I'll have to keep an eye on this.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NanobangKinda exciting. Is it voiced (a la Divinity Original Sin (Yay)? Or is it walls of text like Shadow Run games(which just exausts me)?

I'm fine with walls of text, and a big fan of the Shadowrun games. But the thing Philadelphus describes sounds kind of weird and maybe worst of both worlds.

The default is definitely not ideal to my mind. But I fired the demo up again to try the second of the included scripted missions just now, and found an "auto-advance conversations" checkbox in the menu (as well as a reading speed slider), so it's possible to turn that off.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFundamentally though I'm fairly up for a turn-based superhero game. Plus you're superhero revolutionaries? Sure, I'm in.

It's essentially XCOM 2 with superheroes and villains in tone, XCOM: Chimera Squad in mechanics. (The demo even opens with a text box saying "Twenty years ago the supervillains won.") And that's fine by me. :grin:

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Multi-track level crossings to keep road vehicles from stopping in the middle of the crossing.

:shock: Game-changer!

More natural rivers which get wider as they flow downstream.

Oh, that sounds cools. Obviously there's only so much you can do with a grid, but more natural-looking rivers would help with the immersion.

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I tried getting Plan B: Terraformer to work but the best I could get (with Proton 7.0-6) is an unresponsive black screen with music over it. Lower Proton versions I tried had the launcher claiming it couldn't find Steam and wouldn't even start the game, Proton Experimental showed a "Failed to initialize player" error box. Any tips on getting it to run? It looks like something right up my ally. I'm on Debian stable with NVidia.

Edit: adding "PROTON_USE_WINED3D=TRUE %command%" to the launch options got it running with Proton Experimental. Now to test it out!

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Quoting: NanobangKinda exciting. Is it voiced (a la Divinity Original Sin (Yay)? Or is it walls of text like Shadow Run games(which just exausts me)? Or something else? I like the art and cinematics and I can overlook grid or hex movement systems.

I tried out the demo yesterday, and it wasn't voiced. No idea if that plans to change in future. It kinda felt like it should be, since it uses a slightly odd system where dialog advances even if you don't do anything (though you can click to advance it faster), which feels like it should be voiced; I generally associate unvoiced dialog boxes with "advance at your own pace". I'm a fast reader, but I could see people missing stuff if they get distracted and turn back to find out the cutscene is over. (I haven't checked the settings to see if there's anything about this, to be fair.)

I was also a bit confused by the demo, as it starts with a tutorial-like scenario where you have two heroes go recruit a third. However, it starts off with pretty much no instruction on what to do, until you defeat the first wave of enemies and recruit the guy; then it suddenly feels like a proper tutorial, instructing you how to use his new abilities with specific instructions. I'm sure it'll be all fixed up in the full release, it was just an odd experience.

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On the wishlist it goes to follow it.

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Oh, this sounds cool. I've always enjoyed finding pre-FTL civilizations around (I tend to bring them up to spaceflight tech as protectorates), so more interactions sounds fun. It makes the game feel more alive to have new civilizations popping up as it goes along (and separates it from many other 4X games), rather than "everyone mostly all just happened to achieve spaceflight at the same time at the beginning of the game"*. (I'd love to see more stuff for primitives as well, since I love uplifting them, but we'll have to see if that's included with this or not.) The new origins sound interesting, especially Broken Shackles and Fear of the Dark (an origin for potentially rejecting spaceflight and doing a one-planet challenge, perhaps?).

*Good for game balance, but somewhat artificial-feeling; I like the Fallen Empires for the same reason, adding an element of "you weren't the first" into the game and making the galaxy feel like it has history.

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Quoting: EikeI wish for a sleep mode that might take a couple of seconds more to wake up into the game, but uses like a tenth of the energy. Whenever my Deck lays around for some days, the battery is empty for doing... nothing. And yes, I'm aware I can switch it off, but more often than not, I don't know if I'll be using it again next day or next week.

So like "hibernate" vs. "sleep"? I used to use hibernate on my Windows laptop before switching to Linux, where it's been an option in my shutdown menu since 2014 but has never worked for me on Linux (at least, when I tried it early on, I admittedly haven't tried it in years). It doesn't make much difference for a desktop that's always connected to electricity like I have now, but yeah, for a portable device it'd be nice to have.

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I feel like Coromon is kinda like the the Xenonauts of Pokémon: hewing pretty close to the original experience while adding some updated touches (that's not a quality judgment in any way, shape, or form, just an amusing observation that came to me). Good on them to report the bug, it sounds like the ball is in Valve's court to fix the underlying issue.

I just got Pokémon Infinite Fusion working on Steam Deck yesterday, though, so I'm gonna be busy fusing pocket monsters together for a while…only 176,000 left to see! :whistle:

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