I appreciate when a company chooses to not manipulate its customers with sales pricing and instead has a fixed price.

I disagree about it being legitimate for games with hard currency. Games do it purely for psychological reasons. They could easily let you earn and spend hard currency in game and spend real money directly. But it’s more profitable to have you buy points.

I don’t know that I would call Northgard a Warcraft clone. The mall is divided into tiles and each tile has its own resources and building limits. Units can only attack other units that are in their tile. There’s a much bigger emphasis on building up your tech tree and taking tiles.

Still, it’s one of the more interesting and fun evolutions of the RTS genre. If sci-fi is more to your taste, Dune the newer gameby the same studio is similar.

It is some of the things you’ve mentioned. But it is not nihilistic.

Story wise? I have no idea.

Dungeon of the Endless is a strange turn based, real time, tower defense, strategy, dungeon crawler. You control a party of units.

Endless Dungeon is essentially the same, but it’s a twin stick shooter where you control one unit.

I ignored all the mtx stuff, which was pretty easy, and have had a blast with co-op. I can’t think of anything else that comes close to this in terms of meaningful synergies with friends. And Shiny Shoe has proven they know how to use EA to turn out a good product with Monster Train so I wouldn’t give up on them quite yet.

Good change, obviously. Monetizing cosmetics in this game has always struck me as odd. The game’s not ugly, but it’s not pretty enough to sell skins in my opinion.

If anyone’s curious about the gameplay, Monster Train is a favorite deck builder of mine and Inkbound topped my list of games I was excited about. It exceeded my hopes and expectations and I can’t think of anything else in the co-op space that comes close to the level of coordination and build variety found here. Great 1p as well and it’s progressing beautifully in early access with some excellent redesigns on various systems and new classes.