What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Paul Farquhar]

Just played the demo for the upcoming Starfinder game. Very anime, and the mechanics feel like Solasta. Wish Owlcat had done this rather than 40K or the Expanse.

 

[Gradine]

I played it yesterday for a few hours and the early impressions are amazing. The writing feels much more balanced than in Three Houses - although I have the minority opinion that Three Houses writing is a bit overrated. I thought that Three Houses writing was often quite ... abrupt? Things just happened often out of nowhere. The beginning itself was always so clunky. Byleth stumbles upon the houses leaders and everybody just quickly agrees "oh yeah, Byleth is a genius and totally should become our professor". And just one of many examples.

In fairness, the church (and Rhea in particular) have very good reasons for wanting to keep Byleth around, which I thought was foreshadowed really well, but it is true that a lot of 3H's story is buried in insinuation and piecing together disconnected plot points from the different routes, so it can be really hard to tell exactly what is happening and why without having the full picture (which I can imagine can get annoying)

 

[MarkB]

Currently playing through Zero Company. It scratches that XCOM itch, but isn't quite as satisfying or polished. The whole Intel and Contacts system feels very nebulous, doesn't feel like the game provides enough feedback as to what you're getting in return for influence. Adding recruits feels a little superfluous, I've yet to have a character go into medbay, let alone die, and the roster you get by default is both numerous and varied enough to handle what's been thrown my way so far.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Currently playing through Zero Company. It scratches that XCOM itch, but isn't quite as satisfying or polished. The whole Intel and Contacts system feels very nebulous, doesn't feel like the game provides enough feedback as to what you're getting in return for influence. Adding recruits feels a little superfluous, I've yet to have a character go into medbay, let alone die, and the roster you get by default is both numerous and varied enough to handle what's been thrown my way so far.

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I’ve found pretty much the same, on normal difficulty I’ve had a couple of injuries but not enough to make it worth expanding the med bay, let alone replacing anyone. It feels about as deadly as D&D 5.5. I have noticed some of the operations care about the (first) class of who you assign to them, my lack of a scoundrel (not a class I like) having made a couple of them impossible to achieve a good result. The main thing you can get with influence is more gear slots.

 

[MarkB]

I’ve found pretty much the same, on normal difficulty I’ve had a couple of injuries but not enough to make it worth expanding the med bay, let alone replacing anyone. It feels about as deadly as D&D 5.5. I have noticed some of the operations care about the (first) class of who you assign to them, my lack of a scoundrel (not a class I like) having made a couple of them impossible to achieve a good result. The main thing you can get with influence is more gear slots.

Good to know. It's a shame that a lot of the upgrade slots are related to recruitment and medical facilities, I at least didn't fall into the trap of picking any of them. I did hire a couple of recruits, a medic and scout, but after trying them out in the field a couple of times I now almost exclusively use them on operations that require operators assigned to them.

Kind-of reminds me of XCOM 2 in that regard, I tended to have a couple of soldiers low down the roster who almost always got assigned to covert ops. Quite often they'd progress nearly as well as many of the regular soldiers without ever going out on a combat mission.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Good to know. It's a shame that a lot of the upgrade slots are related to recruitment and medical facilities, I at least didn't fall into the trap of picking any of them. I did hire a couple of recruits, a medic and scout, but after trying them out in the field a couple of times I now almost exclusively use them on operations that require operators assigned to them.

Kind-of reminds me of XCOM 2 in that regard, I tended to have a couple of soldiers low down the roster who almost always got assigned to covert ops. Quite often they'd progress nearly as well as many of the regular soldiers without ever going out on a combat mission.

I wouldn’t leave the Den without a medic, but you can respec at no cost so it’s easy to make the main characters whatever profession you want, apart from the Jedi and the Mandalorian (who is rubbish). So it’s really down to the uniques. Hawks, Jae and Trick have good ones, the others are quite bad (not including the Jedi or droids, since these work differently). I haven’t played with the NPC ones much, but it occurs to me that you could send a team with the “extra credits” or “extra intel” abilities off on low difficulty missions and be laughing all the way to the Banking Clan.

 

[MarkB]

I wouldn’t leave the Den without a medic

Fair, I've run into a couple of missions where it got a bit touch-and-go without one. So far I've been favouring a droid with a medpac in one of its utilities slots. Since it can keep itself repaired, having a couple of medpacs available for other team members has generally been sufficient.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Fair, I've run into a couple of missions where it got a bit touch-and-go without one. So far I've been favouring a droid with a medpac in one of its utilities slots. Since it can keep itself repaired, having a couple of medpacs available for other team members has generally been sufficient.

The droid can serve as an alternative to the medic, but it’s much more fun to load it up with more grenades! Did you know you can auto-kill bosses by blasting them out of the combat zone?

 

[MarkB]

The droid can serve as an alternative to the medic, but it’s much more fun to load it up with more grenades! Did you know you can auto-kill bosses by blasting them out of the combat zone?

Talking of which, this is fun. Might have to recruit some more droids.

 

[Parmandur]

Played some Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit last night, partially to see how it looks on the Switch 2, partially because it is fun to drive at 170 MPH without consequences.

For a PS3/Xbox 360 game, it looks amazing on a 4K TV.