Hello all, it’s just after July Fourth, which means it’s time for the Humble Choice July 2023 Review  

First, thank you very much for all your well wishes last month, I am better and now I’m here to tell you about the new bundle. 

I did an eight-hour stream on Independence Day, and now I’m ready to talk about what I think of each game, how they are, and which games are worth your time in checking out.  

There are a lot of games so I’m going to just jump to the one already on screen. 

The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition.  Not Obsidian’s best.

The Outer Worlds came out four years ago and then released an improved edition earlier this year called the Spacer’s Choice that comes with all the DLC and improved graphics.  We have what should be an Obsidian-tier story, with combat and speech crafting that fans of the Fallout or Elder Scroll series should recognize and enjoy.  That’s the idea of the game.

But the result is weaker.  The Outer Worlds has a great first planet to explore, and then feels like it copies and pastes that conflict to a bunch of other levels that feel uninspired.  The environments are weaker, and the writing seems to fall off a cliff, and that’s while hammering a really weak message over and over for most of the game.  The locations are also tiny, and there’s nothing to discover or explore.  It’s a little depressing because this was Obsidian’s big chance and it stumbles.

Pick this up if you want an OK Bethesda-type game.  It doesn’t have the size of other titles, and most of Obsidian’s other titles are better written. This got a lot of credit when it came out because it wasn’t as big a mess as Fallout 76 was at the launch, which came out at the same time, but if we take away the comparison Outer Worlds is average.  Not bad, but not as good as people made it out to be. 

TemTem.  Massively Multiplayer Pokemon. 

TemTem doesn’t hide its influences, your neighbor who is a professor has you choose from three TemTems.  Your rival then challenges you with her TemTem.  You then go on a major journey, collecting new TemTem in the grass, capturing them by weakening them and then using Temcards, and so on.  

The thing is, everything TemTem does is almost exactly like Pokemon, which is a good thing.  There are a lot of attempts to imitate the formula, but TemTem comes the closest and adds the ability to do a Massive Multiplayer game as well. 

But the thing is… they shouldn’t have.  Online gameplay adds a lot of complexity to any game, and maybe I’m not far enough but I already spent an hour and I don’t see a reason for this to be online only.   Well now I kind of do, because of course, there’s a Battle Pass and a cosmetic store.  As much as I enjoy the game, I still have to call this out because there’s no reason for that, and it’s probably the only reason this game is forced to be online only.  It would have been nice to see an offline-only character for people who don’t care about the MMO aspects because there are none.

Pick this up if you want a Pokemon game but also to be able to play it online.  There is supposed to be co-op available here, and the MMO isn’t horrible, I just don’t understand why the game needs it.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to play more of this game.  There’s just something that works well with the Pokemon formula and works well with TemTem in the same way.

Yakuza 4 Remastered.  Four Playable Characters, same Yakuza Formula.

Yakuza 4 is a bit different from the Yakuza Franchise.  This time around you play as four characters, Shun Akiyama, a unique loan shark, Taiga Saejima, a prison escapee, Masayoshi Tanimura, a police officer, and of course Kiryu Kazuma, because no, Yakuza isn’t going to be that different. 

Yakuza 4 does play very similar to the previous titles in the franchise, however with four protagonists with four different fighting styles, four storylines, and four sets of sidequests, there’s a lot to do, and the game almost feels like it starts fresh when it changes to a new protagonist.  The story eventually connects all four journeys easily and creates another compelling narrative. 

However Yakuza 4 is really for fans of the series, it’s hard to start on this title.   I should know, I tried on the Playstation Plus a long time ago and didn’t get hooked back then.   In addition, there’s at least one plot point in this game that’s laughably bad to the point it’s brought up a lot by the fan community.  Also with four characters, there’s good development but none of them get a full game’s worth of that development. 

Pick this up if you enjoy the Yakuza franchise.  Similar to Yakuza Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 3, this is for people who have reached this point in the series, I still highly recommend newcomers start with Yakuza 0, or Yakuza Kiwami.  If you thought Yakuza 3 was a weaker title, don’t worry, Yakuza 4 delivers on all fronts.

Roadwarden.  A choose-your-own-adventure game.

Roadwarden feels like a classic choose-your-own-adventure book, where you’re just making choices, however, there’s a lot more.  Your character has stats, that can potentially affect which scenes you see and how characters will act to you.  The world is vastly hostile as well, meaning players will have to keep their wits about them.  At least that’s the assumption. 

I haven’t seen much of that yet, what I’ve played is pretty straightforward.  It’s a very passive game as well, where the player is mostly just reading paragraph after paragraph and making choices.  I don’t know how impactful those choices are yet.  Also, the music can be quite repetitive, and I almost feel like I need a pen and paper to take notes, even though the game offers a journal for the main quests. 

Pick this up if you love slow methodical stories, and exploring a dangerous wilderness.  I enjoyed the reading but it was pretty terrible streaming because it’s just reading page of information after page.  After playing it, I respect the game, but I just don’t see myself returning to this one due to how passive the experience was.

Kraken Academy.  Majora’s Mask the school days.

Kraken Academy takes the three days until Doom from Majora’s Mask and puts that danger into a school where the player has to resolve issues with four clubs and free four legendary spirits for a Kraken who lives at the Academy, thus the name.  It sounds strange but Kraken Academy is well-written enough that it’s able to pull off jokes that would be bad in almost any other game.  The experience is good, and the situations are funny. Even the scene on the screen had me laughing before having a great twist ending. 

Unfortunately, Kraken Academy is more a visual novel than an adventure game.  There’s a lot of QTE and puzzles but the focus of the game is the story, rather than combat or adventure.  This is not necessarily a terrible thing, but if players are looking for deep and meaningful combat, that’s not here.  

Pick this up if you want something a little more involved than a Visual Novel, but not much more involved.  Humor is subjective and Kraken Academy relies on that, if you don’t find the scene on screen funny, maybe check out a Let’s Play of it, or skip the title, but I enjoyed the writing here and I’m pretty hard to please with humor.  I will be back to play more of it after I finish this video. 

Merchant of the Skies.  An airship-based trading simulator.

In Merchant of the Skies, players fly an airship to different ports to buy goods, trying to buy low and sell high, to make a profit.  Along the way, there are a ton of requests, and missions that will help players to make even more money, and upgrade their ship, but ultimately this is a chill trading simulator. 

That’s also the problem, it’s a little too easy and passive.  There are a few systems that will challenge players like finding and remembering to recharge your batteries at every stop, but the prices for everything are low enough that players can just grind their way through the game, and I think the main quest was to just amass a ton of wealth so far. 

Pick this up if you like Excel spreadsheets and just min-maxing trading.  This isn’t a bad thing, but it will appeal to certain types of players, and most people probably aren’t going to be too excited about this. 

Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim.  An interesting Euro board game.

Ozymandias calls itself a 4x game, but it lacks the exploration part of 4x.  This is more of a tile-based game.  You’ll earn resources, pay for upgrades, new spaces and locations on the game board, eventually build armies, and try to vie for space between different civilizations.  It’s mostly about the expansion and building parts of the 4x genre, but feels more like a board game where the goal is to go for victory points, than a 4x simulator.

The maps in Ozymandias are static, so there’s no randomness.  Different civilizations are placed in different locations, and there are difficulty options, which are appreciated. There isn’t an offline multiplayer, which would be useful. Ozymandias is lacking a strategic depth that is important for this style of game.

Pick this up if you want a simple Euro board game, especially one you can play against other players.   It’s a good concept but just feels a bit too shallow. But I think the comparisons to Civilization miss a lot of what Civilization offers, and what Ozymandias lacks, which is a shame. 

Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate.  Chess and Rogue-lites.  I didn’t realize I wanted this. 

You are the black king, who has upset all his units until they joined the White King, armed with a shotgun, you’re off to stop that menace.  It’s a silly story, but it works and explains the game perfectly.  You can move your king as a Chess piece, blast away at enemies, and have to avoid checkmate.   It’s a concept so simple I’m shocked it’s taken this long to come out, but it’s also brilliant. 

The downside is this is Chess and a rogue-lite, not everyone is going to enjoy the turn-based nature or rule set of chess, and rogue-lites are a mixed bag.  Also, this game doesn’t teach any of the rules of chess, so if you don’t know how each chess piece moves, you’re going to have to learn that elsewhere, that’s not too hard, but this game expects players to already know those rules. 

Pick this up if you like chess, and rogue-lites, or just like chess.  I wasn’t sure, but I had such a blast playing this game for forty minutes and stopped after I beat the game for the first time, because I was going to play a lot more.  That also unlocked a harder difficulty as well as an endless mode.  It’s a clever concept and well worth checking out.

And that’s this month’s bundle. 8 games, and some I’m rather impressed with, but that also means it’s time to talk about the value of that bundle. 

As I pull these numbers, it’s the middle of the Steam sale… and I’m shocked but this is a pretty high valuation, over a hundred dollars, that’s mostly because Outer Worlds and TemTem have never been on a mega sale, even the original Outer Worlds is going for 20 bucks, and that’s without the DLC.  On the other side, Yakuza 4 there is five dollars and forty-three cents on Humble itself.  

The value though is there especially if you want either of those two headliners. 

I don’t have too much more to say about the bundle, so I’m just going to jump into the tier list. 

This is based on personal enjoyment or opinion not focused on specific value but on which games I enjoyed the most and would recommend.  The four tiers are games that are worth the Full Bundle price, the Strong Contenders, Average games, and Misses.  

We can just skip the misses month as I don’t think any game truly deserves the bottom tier. 

This brings us to the bottom of the Average tier, and that’s going to be Ozymandias.  I can see someone worked hard on this title and made an interesting board game, but after playing it for an hour, the quick gameplay is nice, but the experience lacked something deep enough to keep me playing.  I’d probably run through a few more games of this and move on quickly. 

The Middle of the Average Tier is Merchants of the Skies, which was an interesting enough trading simulator to hold my attention for an hour, but lacked a reason for me to start it up again.   As a concept it sounds fine, but it’s a bit too simple to get excited for. 

As for games that I just don’t feel like returning to, that’s also true for Roadwarden.   I get the choose-your-own-adventure style, I used to love those books as a kid, and there are some nice improvements here, but there’s also a lot of text, and having to take notes, even though the game is taking some notes feels like a strange situation. 

Here’s how the board looks after three games, and that’s ok, let’s start talking about the Strong Contenders. 

The bottom of the Strong Contenders is The Outer Worlds.  I struggle with this game, I know some people love it, but ugh… the writing feels so weak, especially coming from Obsidian of all companies. This should be better.  Personally I put below Fallout 4, which says a lot.

The middle of the Strong Contenders is Kraken Academy.  I am enjoying the writing here, and… That’s basically what the game has, strong writing, an interesting concept, and that’s it.  Still, I can recommend this based more on my time playing it as part of Game Pass than here, but this is clever enough for people to give it a shot. 

And the top of the Strong Contender is… Shotgun King.  I’m a huge fan of this concept and will be playing this again but it’s also a rogue-lite so at some point this will dip from interesting concept to absolute pain, and I think the only reason I won was because of some RNG luck. 

Here’s what the tier list looks after three tiers, leaving only the games worth the full bundle price… So let’s look at what those are. 

The Bottom of the Full Bundle Tier is TemTem.  This is a great idea, Pokemon but not Pokemon.  The fact it’s online-only might be an issue with some people, but for the most part, you can jump online and just see a world filled with other players.  Not a bad idea and a well-executed title. 

This leads us to the Strongest Contender… It’s Yakuza 4.  Am I biased? Maybe, but it’s also a game that I can say I put 50 hours into and am tempted to play again to experience the story a second time because I have just such a good time with that franchise. 

And this is how the tier list looks after this month.  So like I said at the beginning, thanks everyone for last month, it was an experiment, and I got a ton of feedback, probably won’t happen again, but you never can tell.   If you’re interested the video performed slightly above average, but not extremely so.  Good to know. 

I’ve been a bit lazy this month after recovering, I played God of War and didn’t work on a video I should have, I’ll try to do better this month. 

Like comment subscribe you know the drill. 

If you’re interested in more from me, wait, I can link two relevant videos.  I have my Yakuza retrospective here, and my video review on Outer Worlds as well, so if you want to hear more on why I didn’t enjoy that game as much as others, well there’s a 26-minute video there.  Yeah, It’s through

See you next time.