What We Played #599 – Advance Wars, Dead Island 2 & Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores

The weather has turned for the better, and with the sunshine comes the need to close the curtains to reduce the glare on your flatscreen. No, wait, it’s probably time to go outside, so it’s the perfect time to break out the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck or maybe a little yellow Playdate to accompany your outdoors excursions!

I’ve been playing a lot of handheld, and it was mostly Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot which is a lovely, shiny collection of two of my all-time favourite games. I’ve balanced that with some Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a heap of the Spellbreak alpha test and Disney Speedstorm too. Oh, and more Minecraft Legends with the smaller members of our house.

Tuffcub has played Horizon Zero Dawn: Burning Shores, with the advice “I recommend a tube of Canesten for that, ladies” and no Destiny 2 at all. Gamoc meanwhile is on a mission to play everything this week with Beat Saber, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Gorn, Swordsman VR, Tchia “which is great and strange and charming”, Haven which “had a glacial pace and awkward dialogue that bored me”, Slay the Spire “which is probably going to be addictive, might wait until I’ve got it on my phone”, Kena: Bridge of Spirits “also rather good and outrageously pretty”, and Doom Eternal.

“Doom is good but..I just wish there was way, way less platforming. The idea of the Doomslayer swinging off a pole to jump through a hole in a wall and stuff just seems…weird, and it isn’t what I want from my Doom. Has 60fps ray tracing though, which is very nice, combat is great once you’ve increased your ammo reserves a little and it basically tries to smother you with options and things to upgrade – seriously, even the weapon upgrades have their own upgrades that then have another upgrade. Also: it has a chainsaw button. That’s good stuff, more chainsaw buttons please.”

Miguel has been playing a bunch of Lunacid, some Fairy Fencer F Chord Refrain, and a buuunch of Mega Man Battle Network, while for Aran it’s been Midnight Suns. “Just two Heroes left to reach max friendship with so I can unlock their Midnight Sun suits and powers!”

The Pokémon EUICs have got Reuben absolutely hooked on Pokémon Unite, so he’s been obsessively plugging away at that all week. Ade has been doing his best with Returnal! He tells us, “Awesome game, but it’s probably pushed me to the limits of my gaming prowess, and I’m only on the 2nd region!! I’ll probably be looking at playing a new PS5 game for next week!”

Steve has been hard at work on his backlog this week, saying, “After getting the 1000gs on Fallen Order I’ve had a quieter past few days as marking and work has descended upon me. Started the emotional Sea of Solitude for daily achievement purposes and cleared a couple of cheap indie games from my Playstation backlog, Jack n Hat and The Story Tale.”

“The former was a pretty generic NES-style platformer but the latter was a surprisingly challenging Celeste-style affair – although it was frontloaded with the trophies so you can get the platinum in under an hour without even getting close to finishing the game. Toying with whether to start on Horizon: Forbidden West in the gap before Tears of the Kingdom but that might be a bit too much open world so will probably just carry on clearing some smaller games.”

Nick P has played something secret which you’ll hear about soon! Otherwise, more Marvel Snap!, Overwatch 2 and Dead by Daylight! Nic B meanwhile has picked up RE4 again, for the first time this month. He says, “It’s going to be my slow-burn Platinum for the next few months, I think. Life is far too busy right now!”

Rounding out this week’s gaming, Tef (and sometimes Nick alongside him) played the long in development Dead Island 2, and generally had a fun times smashing zombies in LA, even though it does feel like it’s playing it a bit safe with many of the story beats. Then again, you’re not really coming for the story, are you?

Now then, what have you played?