I mentioned before that in early 2018, I really slowed down on finishing games, partially because I was nursing an addiction to an endless mobile game. Another reason for why this was happening is because I started playing a game called Orcs Must Die! Unchained for PS4. This is a pretty interesting case because I was a huge fan of the first two games in that series for PC and invested tons of hours into them. It's a series of games that can loosely be described as tower defense, but you take a much more active role in defense since traps are set on the fly and you can attack and use abilities on the enemies, which consist of fantasy creatures like orcs and ogres. There's a ton of personality and humor in the presentation, too.
Orcs Must Die! Unchained was a game I'd initially dismissed because it was a free-to-play entry that seemed to want to cash in on the MOBA trend started by DOTA and League of Legends. And that was tremendously disappointing because I had really been looking forward to a potential followup to Orcs Must Die! 2. I'd tried the game very briefly on PC during the beta and just wasn't sold on how they'd changed the series core gameplay. Fast-forward to a few years later and it turns out it's available for free on PS4 and multiple changes have been made to the game to put it more in line with what I loved so much about the first two games. The MOBA mode I hadn't cared for had been completely removed.
Unfortunately, it looked like the game's player base had dwindled to almost nothing. It doesn't help that unlocking new traps in the game is gated by a lootbox mechanic that heavily encourages spending currency to get ahead of the game. The gameplay itself was so engaging that I was able to overlook these pretty serious flaws, but when you consider that because Robot Entertainment squandered community goodwill by focusing on a mode no one really wanted in the first place and then adopted an arguably dishonest free-to-play business model, it's clear to see why the game failed. It's a shame, too, because the gameplay is just as good as the PC games and because there's something like 15 playable characters, there's a quite a bit of variety in exactly how you can defend your bases from goblins and orcs. As of April 2019, the game's shutting down for good. As far as I know, there won't ever be a version of the game that can be playable for the future.
Suffice to say, though, I spent a lot of time on Unchained. It's tempting to say it feels the time was wasted since the game won't be playable in the future, but I did enjoy the time I spent. I just don't like that feeling of never being able to revisit the game again. It's one of those things that makes me think about how games like World of Warcraft or League of Legends will eventually go dark for good too. Will there ever be a remnant of those games to return to? I don't have much urge to return to them now, but it'd be nice to know they're there, just in case.
Because I spent so much time on Orcs Must Die in April, I only finished two games and those were Kamiko and Mortal Kombat X. Kamiko was a game I chose to play because it was an inexpensive Switch eShop game. I wanted to have a Switch game under my belt since I wasn't making steady progress on anything else at the time and I was a little disappointed that nothing on the system was totally gelling with me yet. Kamiko is a very short but enjoyable top-down game in the vein of classic Zelda titles. It's not a game that left me with a lasting impression, but it was a pleasant diversion of the amount of time it took to finish it.
Mortal Kombat X was another game that I played totally on a whim because it was free on PlayStation Plus. I'm definitely no fighting game veteran and in general I don't spend a lot of time on them. I used to play Super Smash Bros. Melee religiously, but no fighter since then has really stuck with me to that extent. I still enjoy the genre, but I don't feel like devoting the amount of time to them they require to really become proficient at them. So, for me, Mortal Kombat X was enjoyable only so I could experience the game's absolutely ridiculous story. The gameplay is fine, but it was never a game I would play just for the multiplayer experience. I was on board for the B-movie storyline 100%, though.
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