 So, I had an 8 page script about why Fallout 4 is better than it gets credit for, all finished. I usually write them on a laptop and I decided to finally pull them all off and put them on my desktop PC. I transferred them over to an external hard drive and deleted them from the laptop only to discover that all the Word documents were corrupted and unusable. So I no longer have any of the scripts I've written for this channel. That kind of sucks but the bigger problem is I lost the new script and was so pissed off I couldn't bring myself to write it again. At least not yet. By next week I'll be playing and writing about my most anticipated game of the year in Deathloop and then after that we'll be Far Cry 6 and then the whole holiday season kicks into gear. But for now I wanted to quickly talk about a few games I played that were pleasant surprises on Steam and PS5. It was either that or a video about how Destiny 2 was currently fine and that sounds like a boring video. So let's hop to it. Steam surprises after the logo. Death Trash Death Trash is in Early Access and the game feels about a third complete so far in that the story feels like it's just finally getting started when the current build ends. Steam says I played the game for 8 and a half hours but it's probably more like 5 or 6 as I tend to keep games running even if I stop playing for a while. The game's still a bit rough around the edges but after I finished playing it the first thing that popped into my head was this is what I wanted to get out of the ascent. Now these aren't exactly similar games. Death Trash has guns but it isn't a twin stick shooter but there's something about Death Trash that made me think that. Death Trash is basically most similar to old time isometric RPGs but with an active real time combat system. Everything in Death Trash is simple and easy to understand but the game manages to be incredibly engaging despite a simple dialogue system, a very focused progression system and combat that actually doesn't really have a ton of depth. What it does have is what makes the first two Fallout games or the original Baldur Gate so memorable. Mystery and a world that has you looking up and wondering how the hell it's already been 3 hours. Combat in Death Loop is as simple as it gets. You can shoot, hit with melee weapons, dodge roll and occasionally use powers but that combat works really really well and it's challenging enough for it to be more than just an afterthought. The crafting, trading and looting is satisfying because it's balanced really well. ammo is scarce enough that finding 9 bullets or crafting 4 shotgun shells feels like a big deal but you'll also never find yourself without a viable way to kill enemies. There are some sections that require a few tries to get through and that's good because everything can be overcome by trying a different approach. It just feels really good to fight things in this game which is kind of crazy because again it's really simple. And that combat is probably the weakest thing about the game. Death Trash is so memorable because the worlds and characters are totally unique and consistently surprising. It has the same depressing dark humor as the original Fallout games and the same eerie post apocalyptic world but the setting itself is both absurd and insane. You're living in a world that's covered in flesh for some reason. You play as a person who's been kicked out of one of the robot run sanctuaries because you have the flesh infection. But everything going on is a total mystery. It keeps you playing just to see what's around the next corner. It could be a giant Cthulhu monster made out of bleeding flesh or a friendly android or a weird old nudist who's just loving life in the meat post apocalypse. It's one of the best times I've had playing a game in ages. Death Trash consistently surprised me. And it's a great example that balance and thoughtful design is more important than piling pointless complexity on top of a shallow combat system. If you liked the Ascent, you'll like Death Trash. And if you didn't like the Ascent, you'll probably love it. Project Warlock 2, the demo. I'm a huge fan of retro shooters, mainly because I love shooters of every variety. If I can shoot things in first person, I am going to like it. In fact, it is insanely rare for me to not like a first person shooter. What this means is I've played basically every single shooter that's released in the last 10 years, from all the Call of Duty's to games like Ultra Kill and Amid Evil, all the way down to deep cuts like D-Sync, Devil Daggers, and Get to the Orange Door. I've very much enjoyed what the original project Warlock was trying to do, though I stopped playing it shortly after buying it for a while because the game automatically resets your resolution after every loading screen. And in game with an old school level select system, this was basically a game breaking bug for me. I recently discovered you can actually stop this by unplugging your second monitor, but still that's pretty annoying. Although I did go back and play the game after finding that out. I had read about a sequel and was intrigued and saw there was now a demo available. Now it's only two levels, but the improvement from the first game to the sequel is significant. The game's sprites are now shaded in a way that makes them look almost like 3D models. And it manages to keep the old school look of the original while feeling way more modern to actually play. The graphics are brighter and more detailed and the levels themselves are easily four or five times as large and are multi-level labyrinths. Enemies take headshot damage now and have health bars which makes for a far more visceral and rewarding combat and arenas are designed just about perfectly. It's so surprisingly good I don't hesitate to say it's not just looking like it'll be a great retro shooter, but looking like it'll be just a great shooter period. And those big ass levels even come with a map that marks important places for you, which is huge because the two levels on offer here are downright maze-like. I've played through these levels three times already and loved it. And if you like shooters or pixel art, I am confident you will too. If you've got a love of shooters, $0 and a couple hours of spare, I could not recommend this enough. Skull the Hero Slayer. Already a few months old, Skull was a game I enjoyed, but wasn't quite good enough to justify its own video. A 2D side-scrolling roguelite that looks and plays like a super NES game, but has fully modern mechanics going on. It's an interesting blend that's pretty unique. It's very much a roguelite with inter-run progression. Early runs are difficult until you unlock the best classes. You play as this stupid little skeleton punk who takes the skulls of other hero skulls and uses them to unlock their powers. Combat boils down to stun-locking groups of 7,000 mobs and chipping away at their insane health bars, which feels cheap at first until you get to later levels and realize it's not all that easy, actually. Boss fights are challenging. Enemy variety is pretty good. Levels are beautiful. And build variety is more than enough to get 20 to 30 hours before you beat it or feel like you've seen it all. Give it a look. Wrath, Aeon of Ruin. The last game we'll look at is the annoying, repeatedly delayed old-school 3D shooter Wrath, Aeon of Ruin. It's got some real stupidity in how it saves states or handle and some oddly annoying difficulty spikes, but overall it's another good throwback from 3D Realms. Now set to supposedly release in the nebulous window of sometime 2022, Aeon of Ruin fits nicely into the dusk-amid-evil genre of Quake II homages. The game has some design choices that sometimes annoy me like it's confusing levels and a stingy ammo economy, but it is a lovingly crafted 3D shooter and well worth giving it a shot. It might be a bit overpriced for what's there right now, but the quality and offer has me pretty hopeful it'll deliver in the end. Bonus round. Finally, let's talk about a PS4 surprise. I recently saw a YouTube commercial for a game with one of the worst names I've ever heard, Ultra Age. Still, the combat looks flashy and I'm bored because there's just nothing fucking going on lately, so I bought it. It's story is awful. It's acting is so bad, it's hilarious, and it is severely Japanese in flavor, but its combat is surprisingly great, which is good because that's pretty much all you will be doing. Ultra Age is basically near-automata mixed with Devil May Cry's combo system and a pretty well-paced progression tree. Levels amount to a series of combat arenas that loop back to the starting area when you open the door and fight a boss. It's all very, very low budget and standard, but I tell you what, man, that combat is really fucking good. You can have four weapons equipped at a time and you switch between them the same way you switch between stances in Neo. Different enemies are weak to different swords and the game isn't shy about throwing a ton of enemies at you at once. It's so fluid and satisfying that I stopped playing to see who I developed it because it's pretty surprisingly good and I still don't know who made this game. One of the developers listed is actually a subcontractor that makes art assets for other studios and the main developer sounds like it's an architecture firm or something and it has no English website. There are no other games by these guys. This game is legitimately hilarious because the story, acting, and character designs are like a parody of terrible Japanese PS2 action games. If it's on purpose, it is brilliant, but I tend to think it's just legitimately stupid as hell. If the action was bad, the game would be unplayable but because the action is actually so good, it's hard to know if this is a winking kind of joke or if it's just a bunch of people who made a badass action game and then wrote a story in a few hours at the bar after work. They were drinking sake and scribbling in a notebook every time someone had an idea. Okay guys, here, how about this? There's a guy named Age and he only has seven days to live but other people are immortal and he's like stuck on this world and there are these crystals that he can use to make big swords and then, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why does he have seven days to live? I don't know, don't worry about that. We'll figure it out in the sequel. It probably sounded reasonable enough but then they realized they had 2,000 bucks for voice actors. I really can't stress enough that the story elements here made me laugh out loud several times because they are hilariously stupid and I mean that in the nicest, most sincere way. For a first time super low budget game, this shit is pretty impressive. I hope it sells well because whoever these guys are, they deserve to get the opportunity to make more games. I seriously can't recommend this enough as long as you understand what you're getting here. This is a game that does one thing and one thing only really well. Luckily, that thing is excellent. If you've been bored as hell like me and find yourself playing an unhealthy amount of Destiny 2, grab Ultra Age. It really is a diamond in the rough and a hidden gem that shouldn't disappear without you playing it. There looks like there will be a Steam release at some point but it's still listed as TBD. I played it on the PS5 but it's very much a low budget Japanese PS4 game. Wrapping up. I was gonna talk about the other game I've been playing which is a strange Chinese developed game called Fist which is a Metroidvania about a rabbit who uses a big ass mech fist to fight. But I'm gonna hold off because I might actually do a whole video about it. It's one of those games that has a ton going for it but still pisses me off half the time because its mistakes are so glaring. Yet it's getting very good reviews because I don't know it has a rabbit in it. I don't know actually. I'll probably do a very fast video about it once I finish it and after I do a Deathloop review. All right everyone, sorry about the wait but losing that fallout script took all the motivation right the fuck out of me. See you next time for Deathloop. Hey, if you're on my Steam friend list, invade me. If you haven't added me yet on Steam I am plenty the welder there. Include the spaces between the words, it's right here. There you go. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.