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?

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

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.

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.