I finally managed to drag myself away from Rust for abit, something I've been super addicted to for like 2 months and am actually playing other games!
First is I dabbled with some Crash Bandicoot 4, picked it up on a sale at the end of last year and it's nice so far. Very classic feeling, but with some new stuff to make it more interesting and can still be just as challenging as the original in regards to fully beating levels. Gonna play this one real casually, but it's good. It's a nice change of pace playing a Platformer.
And for something very different from Rust, the multiplayer online survival game...I'm playing Valheim, the singleplayer/co-op survival game lol It just recently came out in Early Access, but so far, this doesn't look like the usual EA slop, I had sorta stopped getting involved in those types of games at one point, but it was getting rave reviews and it might even have an ending at the moment. I might be wrong on that, I was trying to find out if this game had an "ending" and there is talk of a final boss, or maybe just the final boss currently, so I'm kinda wondering if they figured out the basic beats of the story, got that general content done, and the talk they have of adding new content like new biomes, enemies, and bosses, etc, is filling out the experience in the middle till they hit a released status, which would be an interesting way of handling this.
Visually it's a fun throwback to 90's 3D visuals, with polygonal characters and pixelated textures, but it works real well, it never feels cheap, the game actually can look really good at times, and it probably lets them keep the game playing incredibly smooth which is nice, though some stuff comes across very simple, like the combat. Building is pretty solid, it's just deep enough that people can build a variety of things within that general Viking design aesthetic, so I do look forward to unlocking stuff and seeing what I can add to my little encampment as I saw that you can build up to like stone castle stuff which will be cool when I get there as I'm pretty far off from that.
It seems slow and basic at first, but after a couple hours of sorta learning the basics, it starts to come together and you want to really start getting invested in the survival grind of farming items so you can do upgrades or hopefully unlock new items to craft or build, and then you are leveling up as you play, and you feel like you can take on some of the more intimidating enemies like the Troll, and that's just great when you finally take that down.