![]() The end result was very worth it since Valheim makes it comparatively easy to build awesome-looking things, and it’s a game I’ll definitely be revisiting once it’s had a few more content patches. But it’s the building system that really stands out Steam tells me I spent a hundred hours playing it, and at least thirty of those were spent quarrying stone and dragging it back to my island fort so that I could build proper docks and a sea wall. I will forever be a massive fan of the woodcutting physics, where you have to be really really careful that the huge 40ft pine tree you just chopped down doesn’t land on your head, and the food system is possibly the first food system I’ve ever liked in a survival game, since it’s based around eating different types of food for temporary buffs instead of just topping up a bar and punishing the player if they let it drop too low. It’s the best co-op building game since Minecraft just like Minecraft I would be a bit hesitant to play it if there was no-one else around to see the things that I had built, but if you have a few friends then it’s a tremendous time, with surprisingly thoughtful takes on standard survival game/crafting mechanics. Yes, it’s Early Access, but I was sucked into Valheim last February just like everyone else. About the only thing wrong with it is the failure to implement Steam friends leaderboards for the daily challenges otherwise Slipways is everything I could ever want from a space-themed puzzle game. Slipways looks great, sounds great, has had a hell of a lot of thought put into UI/UX, and has some very player-positive quality-of-life features like the ability to take back as many moves as you want up until the last move you made that uncovered a new planet. However, there’s also a nice set of technologies and buildings you can research that let you selectively break these rules in interesting ways that often define a playthrough. The initial rules around the placement of slipways are quite restrictive - they have a limited range, they can’t overlap one another, they can’t go through (or even near) planets unless they’re directly connecting to one, and goods will only travel one “jump” down the slipway network, meaning that you need to put a lot of thought into which colonies you build where and how you connect them together so that you’re not blocking future expansion. So at its core Slipways is about building up a network of planets that are connected by a web of interstellar trade routes (called slipways) that allow you to satisfy demand with supply. ![]() Each colony also demands one or more goods if you don’t provide it you get big unhappiness penalties that tank your score, but if you do provide it then you level up the planet, producing more goods for exports, more tax revenue, and a bigger score at the end of the game. Slipways has you sending probes into an unexplored sector of space to discover planets, and each planet can be colonised with a single settlement that produces (usually) a single type of good. ![]() The best game I played in 2021, and one which flew largely under the radar. And second is that, as ever with these things, the categories are extremely broad and not remotely objective, so do take them with a big pinch of salt.Īlso in this category: Desperados 3 Slipways First, this is a list of games that I played in 2021, not games that I played that were released in 2021, which is why there’s stuff like Monster Train and Hypnospace Outlaw in there. Two things to bear in mind before we get started, though. So this is the compromise: reluctant as I might be to jump on the end-of-year bandwagon of putting everything I played in a big list in the rough order of how much I enjoyed them, it does afford me the opportunity to say a little bit about each game that I didn’t do a proper review for. Since I review about a third as many games as I actually play, the blog is now decidedly not that - or at least not a comprehensive version of it, anyway. This is why my output has been rather more sporadic recently (at least compared to the first few years I was doing this), but that then runs directly into the second reason I write, which is that I like having a historical record of how I felt about a game at the time that I played it that I can refer to later when arguing with people on the internet. ![]() There’s two reasons I write, though, and one of them has been very important for my keeping this thing going for the last ten years: I write because I enjoy it, and over the years I’ve become less keen on “forcing” the words to come out of my brain because that’s not fun and is what leads to me periodically burning out and stopping for months at a time. It’s not for lack of trying, either I’d say I start writing twice as many reviews as I actually finish and publish. I write less on this blog these days than I’d really like.
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