Suburban Killbot: Steam Replay 2024

In 2024 I played 21 games on Steam unlocking 486 achievements. 38% of these games were new releases, 62% were released in the last 1-7 years and 0% were released 8 or more years ago. This is a slight change to last year – 35 games, 747 achievements, 31% new, 66% recent, and 3% old.

Only 4% of my total playtime was spent in VR games in 2024 compared to 2% last year, but with a new Quest 3 and several VR games I’m interested in playing releasing towards the end of 2024, I expect this percentage to increase by next year.

32% of my time was spent playing games with a controller. The top 3 were Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Forza Horizon 5 and Hellblade 2. This was an increase from 15% last year.

My longest daily streak in 2024 was 42 days from Sun, April 28th to Sun, June 9th in which I played 9 different games. In 2023 it was a ridiculous 107 days and 16 different games.

My overall top 3 most played games by % of playtime were Starfield (21%) Dragon Age: The Veilguard (15%) and Horizon: Forbidden West (13%).

November was the busiest month with 14% of my total playtime, and December was the slowest with only 2%.

Now Playing: Balatro

Balatro is a rogue-like deck building game and if you follow this blog you’ll know that’s not the kind of thing I usually play. But after seeing so much praise for the game online in ‘Best of 2024’ lists and GOTY nominations, I guess I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Even so, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it also wasn’t themed around another game I know and like to play – poker. So Balatro may not be my typical type of game – I’m not usually interested in either rogue-likes or deck builders – but the poker angle intrigued me.

You begin by choosing a deck of cards and are tasked with building poker hands to score chips. There are three ‘blinds’ (Small, Big & Boss) to each ‘ante’ of difficulty and each requires an increasing number of chips to progress. You can only play a set number of hands per blind, so the goal is to put together hands that offer the most chips per play.

Individual cards offer a base chip score, and the poker hands offer a base multiplication effect determined by the rarity of the hand. So far, so simple – and after a few failed attempts to progress beyond the third or fourth ante I must admit I was wondering if it just wasn’t a game for me . . . but then things began to click into place.

Because Balatro is all about multipliers (mults) and modifiers that allow you to massively and sometimes ridiculously increase your chip score per hand. You do this by purchasing items at a shop between blinds. Items that let you increase the base mult of specific poker hands, for example, or the mult of a specific card. You can also find and stack ‘Joker’ cards that offer a wide variety of chip boosting effects.

And everything stacks. It just keeps stacking! And you want to find ways to make it stack even higher so you can earn even more ridiculous multipliers. And this is where I went from feeling Balatro might not be for me, to playing Balatro for hours at a time.

There’s something very satisfying about embarking on a run and seeing a strategy pay off. About seeing all those mults align. Once you hit ante 8 you win the run, but you can continue on in an ‘endless’ mode if you choose. And once you do start a new run, everything resets.

So yes, it’s possible to ‘beat’ Balatro fairly easily if you go on a good run, but the game offers multiple decks with their own modifiers as well as harder difficulty options (stakes). And, being a rogue-like, there’s a heavy dose of randomisation to every run so you never know exactly what kind of cards, jokers or modifiers you might get access to as you progress. It’s very much a game of making the best of what you’ve got and what you’ve got changes every run.

Of course, the flip side to this is that some runs just suck balls. I’ve had some runs where I’ve struggled to get through the first couple of antes or even failed them because I’d had such a terrible initial selection of modifiers or jokers to work with. Other times I’ve had runs going super smooth, only to hit a randomised Boss blind that’s the complete antithesis of the strategy I’m relying on.

Because you do kind of have to find and stick to a single strategy each run to maximise your score. Runs aren’t really long enough to give you time to adjust your strategy or spread your mults too thin, especially not when you’re deep into the run. That – and the unavoidable repetition – is the frustrating side of Balatro, but I guess that’s the frustrating side of most rogue-likes.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time with Balatro. I can’t say I’ve found it as addictive as people online like to suggest, but considering it’s not the kind of game I typically play, I’d say it did a pretty great job of hooking me in. It’s fairly cheap too, so there’s no reason not to give it a spin.

8/10

X-Box Developer Direct 2025

Like last year, this Developer Direct was a nice way to showcase not only the games, but the studios and people responsible for creating them. So what got me excited? DOOM: The Dark Ages looks fantastic. As highly as I rated Eternal, I didn’t want TDA to play the same way so I’m glad they’ve taken the series in a new direction.

Or rather, an old direction, I suppose, as TDA is more reminiscent of the original DOOM games than Eternal was. It’s slower, more measured and appears to offer a more open hub-like map design – at least in certain areas. This is a game I’d like to pick up at release if I can find the time.

South of Midnight looks lovely from a visual point of view. I like the style and the animation. I also love the setting. In terms of gameplay, I’m not seeing anything here I can get very excited about. It reminds me a little of Kena: Bridge of Spirits which I reviewed back in March 2023.

That was also a charming and fun little adventure, but nothing particularly special in terms of gameplay. There’s also similarities when it comes to structure as in both Kena and Midnight you’re cleansing ‘corruption’ from the local environment in order to progress.

I don’t typically like turn-based combat systems, and if I’m going to like one it either has to be a really good one, or offer a fresh twist on an old formula. I’m hoping Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will do both because I really like the concept and the visual style. I feel this one has a lot of potential but we’ll see how it all comes together.

And finally we have Ninja Gaiden 4. I have no real history with the Ninja Gaiden series – I think I might have played one on the original X-Box back in the day but I’m not totally sure. So I wasn’t super excited about this announcement until I saw the Platinum Games logo pop up and then I was very, very interested.

It’s weird seeing people talk online about PG like they’re in some kind of creative ‘decline’ when they released Bayonetta 3 in 2022 and Bayonetta Origins in 2023 – two absolute bangers that followed on from those other absolute bangers NieR: Automata in 2017 and Astral Chain in 2019. In the time it takes a AAA Sony studio to produce a single game, PG knocked out four of the best games you’ll ever play.

And Ninja Gaiden 4 looks f**king great. I’m all in on this one. I might even give the Ninja Gaiden 2 Black remake a spin if they fix up some of those bugs and performance issues I’ve seen reported, but it’s the Platinum spin on the series that I really want to see.

Overall, this was another great show and it’s kind of nuts that all these games are releasing on Game Pass. The value is pretty insane and I really don’t know why I’m not yet subscribed. I guess I’m just an old man who still likes to ‘own’ my games, even though technically speaking, I kind of don’t anyway. But, whatever, Microsoft don’t care – they’re getting my money either way.

Now Playing: Indiana Jones & The Great Circle

So you’re making an Indiana Jones game? What do you do? What kind of game should it be? The obvious choice and what many – myself included – expected was a linear, third person, action-adventure game in the style of Uncharted or the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. But, thankfully, that’s not what we got. Indiana Jones & The Great Circle delivers something entirely different and unique – a first person adventure/puzzle/action game that successfully combines linear levels with open-world hubs.

So let’s start with all the good stuff – Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a fantastic Indiana Jones game. It really is like playing through an Indiana Jones film – one of the good ones, I mean. Troy Baker pulls off a near perfect (young) Harrison Ford, but the real credit should go to the writers because they absolutely nailed the character of Indiana Jones through both his dialogue and mannerisms.

They also nailed the tone of the (good) films – knowing when to keep things light, when to get a little more serious, and when to indulge in just a dash of slapstick comedy, even in the middle of a fight scene. They also nailed the supporting cast and most importantly – the villain – all of whom fit perfectly into this Indiana Jones adventure.

The story is also pretty good. There’s a nice sense of pace to the mystery as you and Indy put the pieces of the puzzle together but I do feel the ending is, sadly, a little rushed, and one major aspect of it isn’t as set-up to the degree that I would have liked. It’s a bit of a shame because I was fully invested in the mystery up until the very end, but the climax didn’t quite manage to stick the landing in the way that I’d hoped. I know I’m being annoyingly vague, but that’s because I don’t want to spoil anything – just trust me when I say the plot is better than any Indy film post Crusade.

The game opens with a recreation of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark that also serves as a short tutorial. It’s a clever way to immediately set the tone and establish that The Great Circle is very much influenced by and imitating the style of the original films. From here we travel to Marshall College and set up an adventure that will take Indy to several locations across the globe.

In addition to some smaller, linear levels, there are also three fairly large open-world hubs – locations full of side quests (Fieldwork) small mysteries to solve and collectibles to find. You can ignore all of the additional content if you wish and blast through the core story in (I would estimate) around 10-15 hours depending upon your style of play, but if you do everything – like I did – you’re looking at around 30-35 hours.

There’s a fantastic variety to the locations in terms of setting, visuals and design and they all reward your exploration with some genuinely engaging and fun side content. If you really want to skip it you can – but I’d recommend at least doing the Fieldwork as it ties more directly into the main quest.

How you approach this content is really up to you as the game gives you a lot of different tools at your disposal. You can try to brute force things by shooting and punching your way through. You can play sneaky and use stealth to slip in unseen. You can find disguises that let you blend in with your local surroundings. Or you can do all three.

And you probably will, because just like the action in a good Indiana Jones film, The Great Circle builds its gameplay all around Indy’s ability to improvise. No disguise is infallible, Indy can’t tank a dozen bullets or beatings, and stealth will usually only get you so far – just like in the (good) films you need to adapt, improvise and switch tack on the fly. You also need to know when, if things get out of hand, to make a daring escape.

It’s quite amazing how well the gameplay of The Great Circle captures the chaotic, improvisational nature of Indiana Jones film action. This is a very melee focused game, one in which nearly every item within reach can be turned into a weapon and because these weapons all break after a certain number of hits, you’re often using not what you’d want, but whatever you have at hand – just like Indiana Jones.

The first person perspective – with occasional perspective shifts to third-person when climbing or swinging – really does put you into Indy’s shoes. You feel the weight of every punch and the crack of your whip as you disarm an enemy. You feel more involved in every puzzle as you scrutinise the clues before you. The puzzles are neither too hard nor too easy and there’s a nice variety between locations. I do wish the game wasn’t as reliant on the ‘find the code for this lock box’ type of puzzles for its smaller mysteries though.

Disguises, whilst a welcome addition – particularly if you want to find every collectible – do make traversing some areas a little too easy. Avoiding the officers that can rumble you isn’t too hard – and you can always lure them away and knock them out. Even if you are rumbled, it’s easy to just run off for a bit and within minutes everyone forgets you were there. I don’t think the risk/reward balance of using a disguise is quite right here.

And I guess this is where I start to get into the few more negative aspects of The Great Circle. Whilst the first two open-world areas are incredibly polished, the third feels a little rough. There’s a noticeable number of lighting bugs, frequent pop-in, false map markers and some weird audio de-syncs.

This area is also not as well designed in terms of map layout. If you do want to find everything, be prepared for a bit of a slog back and forth throughout this location. It’s the one place in the game where The Great Circle started to feel like a real chore to play. This issue is made worse by the inability to track multiple collectibles at once – even if you’ve unlocked the map for them.

 

I suppose it’s done so you can’t clutter your screen with waypoints, but if I want to track say Notes and Relics in a single location, I don’t see why I can’t have the option to track both at once rather than have to continually go into my journal and set the active quest back and forth.

I’m also not sold on the Skill Book system. The idea is that you earn ‘adventure points’ by completing content and then use these points to unlock skills or upgrades via books you can find or purchase throughout the game. But at some point I just stopped caring about what these books did and unlocked them just because I could. Visually, The Great Circle looks fantastic. I was playing with path tracing enabled and the game makes great use of it – at least until that somewhat rough final open-world hub.

Overall, Indiana Jones & The Great Circle is a great Indiana Jones game and easily one of the best licensed games ever made. It really does capture the spirit of the original films. But I certainly think there’s room for improvement here. It feels like a great foundation to build upon, to refine and then improve in a potential sequel. I don’t know if we’ll get one, but if we do, I think the license is in very good hands.

8/10