What Are You Playing This Weekend – November 2019 Edition

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Star Wars: Jedi – Fallen Order

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7.94

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And breathe. That’s pretty much it for another year in terms of AAA releases. There’s a few dribs and drabs to come in December (Halo Reach! Mechwarriors 5!) but, for the most part, all the big games are now out and we get down to the business of actually playing them. The last few weeks spoiled us, to be honest, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, Star Wars: Jedi – Fallen Order, Need For Speed Heat, Death Stranding, and Planet Zoo, to name but a few. Now it’s the tricky time to decide just which of these games we’re going to play next.

Jon: I’ve got a couple of gaming pies in the oven, so to speak. Chiefly, I’ll be playing a whole lot more Planet Zoo. It’s fairly unashamedly a zoological version of Planet Coaster, and one with a rampantly out of control online market that encapsulates late stage capitalism in a nutshell. Seriously, if I get offered one more inbred warthog with wonky teeth and a life expectancy of about six months I’m going to have to start playing a banjo out the front entrance with my sister/aunt. Seriously, all the good animals have been hoarded by a bunch of 1%-ers who are now slowly breeding and selling them off for obscene amounts of in-game CC (Conservation Credits). Planet Zoo went from a friendly game trying to espouse the benefits of conservation to a capitalist hellhole in which some users have quickly identified the quickest path to the most success and driven the planet to ecocide.

This aside, Planet Zoo’s a great little time. While the animals are an issue, it’s still awesome building a great zoo and ensuring it looks like a place you’d actually want to go. The Planet series is often more about aesthetics than deep management and the games certainly reward players to building something that’s easy on the eye.

Aside from this, I’ve got a handful of levels left in Luigi’s Mansion 3. It’s been a really charming time for the 10-15 hours I’ve put in so far and it accomplishes that rare treat of getting consistently better the further in you get. It’s set in a gigantic hotel, and while the early floors are fairly standard receptions, restaurants, and hotel rooms, but they’ve gradually gotten crazier to the point I’m exploring through Egyptian tombs, film sets, and pirate graveyards.

Felix: Zwooom. That’s the sound of my Star Wars Fallen Order lightsaber extending. I have been pushing through a chunk of Fallen Order over the past week, so it’s more of that for me. Its pretty good, certainly scratches a Star Wars itch. Is it worth the monstrous full game price over on Origin? I wouldn’t pay it. Is it worth the all access game Origin pass £15/$15 for a month to get the game and finish it? Yeah it is, I guess? Speaking of which, they’re clever in their Origin subscription pricing. If you pay $90/£90 you can get the year access to all their games. So the entire EA back Catalogue, like BF5 all the way through to this years Fallen Order, Need For Speed Heat and FIFA 2020. That could be a lot of game access if EA’s catalogue floats your boat. I can feel an Up For Debate coming on.

Anyway, Fallen Order is a fun 3rd person lightsaber-centric puzzle solver where you get to force push large balls of stone around to unlock the next area in a fairly linear story arc. I would describe it as safe. EA played it safe with this title and so there’s little really to get me properly excited. The force powers and character progression are lacklustre and it definitely doesn’t have the sort of gameplay depth that Knights of the Old Republic game had all those years back. But if you want to run around slashing up aliens and Storm troopers with a Jedi, like i do, then Fallen Order is definitely a good one to pick up at a cut price. I won’t care that I don’t own it once I stop the EA subscription because, had I bought the game in the first place, I would still have only given it one run through and then shelved it forever.

So that’s us, but what gaming delights are you up to this weekend? Let everyone know below!