Saturday Morning Gaming: More Fights In Tight Spaces
I’ve played enough Fights in Tight Spaces to unlock four more decks and I can seriously tell you that this game is *AWESOME*.
The Balanced Deck is one that probably won’t take you to the end of the game but it’s a great tutorial deck to get the gist of the flow of the game.
Since then, I have unlocked the decks:
Counter Striker
Aggressive
Slasher
Grappler
Here’s the idea for Counter Striker: Get a lot of block and you can withstand a lot of hits. You get enough of the cards like “slip” and “step” to employ the old “best defense, no be there” tactic, but also has special cards that give you both block and counter-attack. Like, it’d be tough to get the just right cards to hit multiple enemies who are attacking you, but *EASY* to get a card that lets you hit everybody who tries to hit you. Get this, if you apply two counter-attack cards, you counter-attack twice for each time you’re attacked. It’s easy to get somewhere around 20-30 block with this method and easily deal with multiple mooks doing 6 points of damage each.
The problem, of course, comes when you encounter enemies with bladed weapons… bladed weapons ignore block. (But, sure, you can hit them back as hard as anybody.)
The Aggressive deck puts emphasis on building up lots of combo and doing *BIG* hits. Like, you get one point of combo for each aggressive act you take (essentially, anything not moving or defending). Build up enough combo and you can play a combo card for free. Most importantly, you get cards like “Steel Self” and make your next attack do double damage. An attack that does 18 damage is pretty good. An attack that does 36? That’ll finish off pretty much anybody but a boss. The downside is that you’re not so nimble and you don’t have much block. So you’ll be taking some of the damage they’re trying to dish out.
The slasher deck gives you a blade. This lets you play with cards that cause “bleed”. Give a person X bleed, they’ll take X damage at the start of next turn and X gets reduced by 1. As hinted at above, this ignores armor. So you do a great job against heavily armored people… but you don’t do a whole lot of damage otherwise. Not that many big finishers and not that much defense. To the point where they give you a special card in your deck: Free Move. Move up to two tiles. If this isn’t the first card you play, discard it. Even so, you’re going to find yourself frustrated that it takes so very many turns to whittle your opponents down (and if you get stuck where one is going to hit you, you’re going to take the hit).
Now, so far, my absolute *FAVORITE* deck is the grappler. This one has you doing shoulder throws (where you switch places with your opponent and put your opponent down on the ground), suplexes (where you move your opponent from in front of you to behind you and put your opponent on the ground), roll throws (where you move two spaces forward and put your opponent down on the ground), and the “stomp” maneuver where you do 20 points of damage to an opponent on the ground. You’d think that this would be the best deck! But there are opponents that cannot be thrown. So your various attack cards that involve dropping an opponent on the ground are useless (like, you don’t even do the damage and leave them standing up). While you have a handful of cards that allow you to do damage without throws, if it’s just you and your heavy opponent, you’re going to be doing a lot of dodging and weaving while waiting for your damage cards to roll around.
In playing, I’ve also encountered the various themed enemies for each mission. The first group of enemies is the generic motorcycle club. The second is prison themed: both inmates (some of whom have shivs) and guards (some of whom have riot shields or beanbag shotguns). The third is kung-fu themed. Some do kick/punch attacks, some have swords, some have initial dodge abilities… and they all have a lot of hit points. The fourth is mafia themed. Guns, counter-attacks, and dirty tricks.
I have not yet made it to the final mission.
All in all, I’d say that this is the most surprising game in the genre of “Slay the Spire” that I’ve encountered yet. Visually stunning, wonderful tactics, and it has the “just one more fight” thing going on. Check it out.
So… what are you playing?
Unfortunately, it’s Windows only. I’ll have to install it on my gaming PC and see if I can stream it to my Macbook.Report
I’ve been playing a lot of Hitman. I bought Hitman 2 when it was deeply discounted, and got all the Hitman 1 levels included, so it was only like $15 total.
It is _absurdly_ replayable, and a lot of fun. Mostly because the levels are incredibly well-designed.
Each level only has a few targets, usually either 2 or 3, but has an absurd amount of ways to get to them and kill them. From sneaking in without being seen at all, to knocking out and swapping clothes with people, to finding something tall and sniping them from it, to complicated gambits that get to them go somewhere without their people (Often to meet _with_ you), to complicated poisonings, to dropping chandeliers on them and pushing them off ledges, to literally just running up and shooting them point-blank and trying to flee, which is always hilarious and almost never works, because these are all extremely wealthy people with a bunch of bodyguards.
I really can’t express how much flexibility there is in this game, and it expects you to play each level _at least_ three times before you move on to the next. You can just power through if you want, beat each level once, and it’s not a super long game if you do…I managed each level in about an hour and half the first time (And I play levels slow when I first get to them!), and there are a grand total of 15 real levels (Not counting the tutorials.), so in theory it’s somewhere near ~30 hours, but Steam is already telling me I’ve played 164 hours…and I’m not even done with the _basic_ stuff, much less some of the advanced challenges.
And the levels really are amazing. They’re huge, they have multiple areas, they’re interconnected, and I keep finding neat things in them.
And on top of that, they keep coming out with new content. They set up different scenarios in the same level, where you have different targets or they even change the level in some major way. And they have ‘escalations’ where they present some simple target, then add more complicated rules or people, and they don’t let you save, you just have to keep going. They even have their own challenges and user-created setups, where you get challenged to pull off some rather odd things.
They do this even though there’s not any subscription service or DLCs or anything, it’s actually a little weird, like, they’re apparently still putting out content for a game that is actually fairly old. It’s Hitman _3_ that just came out last year.
Right now, Hitman 3 is exclusive on the Epic store, and won’t come to Steam until sometime in January. And I suspect, when it does, the previous games will be cheap again. If you have any interest in stealth-type games, I cannot recommend them more.
A warning: The game is actually less violent than it sounds, as you literally only have a couple of people to kill each level (And if you end up in a gunfight something has gone very wrong.), but there are a few specific ways to kill people that are fairly violent…drowning people is by holding them underwater is, uh, rather horrible as they struggle. As is feeding someone into a woodchipper. Although you could just not do those things, at no point are you really required to do things in any specific way, as I said, the entire thing is extremely flexible. The game is basically is the ‘murder simulator’ that various politicians have claimed video games are. It’s just, in actual fact, murdering people is not really as violent as you might imagine…at least, not if you are doing it in ways that don’t cause everyone to immediately start shooting at you.Report