The Steam sale is in “full swing” as they say at parties that involve swinging. Day two involves cheap Fez’s, cheap spaceships, and cheap apocalyptic horsemen. We’ve got a round up of the best deals from the daily selection below. Do let us know a) what you’d recommend and b) what you’re buying in the comments. We’ll add the best recommendations to the post.
FTL: Faster Than Light – $2.49 / £1.74
Rob: Wait, you seriously don’t own this by now? OK, consider this another chance to buy one of last year’s best takes on the roguelike with the spare change in your pocket. But be warned: this game features one of the most abrupt and brutal difficulty spikes I’ve ever seen. However prepared you think you are for the endgame, you need to be twice as tough as that.
Steve: There’s no reason not to buy FTL for £1.74. That’s basically free. I guarantee that, whatever room of the house you’re in, you’ve got that much money in change within five metres of where you’re sitting. Except if you’re on the toilet, because people tend not to leave money in bathrooms. Except for public bathrooms where they have attendants. And if you’re a bathroom attendant reading this, well, I’m not sure how much of the money in that little dish belongs to you, and how much belongs to the bar. And really, shouldn’t you be busy stealing all of the paper towels out of the dispenser so you can give them to people with wet hands? Stop playing with your phone.
Nick: A space-sim management adventure, filled with random events and tons of replayability. I’ve sunk tons of hours into this game and I’m still yet to complete the damn thing. Much like Binding of Isaac, it’s perfect for those times when you’re waiting 15-30 minutes for something and you’ve got time to kill. It’s my patch time killer.
Tim: I like this slightly less than everyone I know. I think making random events fun is a very hard problem for game developers to solve – and FTL – despite being beloved by practically everyone, doesn’t manage it. But hey, it was Kickstarted into the stratosphere and everyone loves it so I’m probably wrong. And it’s cheap.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 – $4.49 / £3.74
Rob: Wait, is this the game where you snipe Hitler? That’s a different game? Wait, that one’s called Sniper, too? How many scope-and-crosshair pornos do we need?
Tim: Nope, you’re thinking of Sniper: Elite. That’s the one with the slow-motion bullet time testicle explosions.
Nick: You should probably just go buy Sniper: Elite when it inevitably goes on sale. It will certainly be cheap and you can do cool things like this.
Steve: I’m going to scroll through the screenshots for this and if I don’t see a bollock being exploded by a high velocity round then I’m keeping my money in my wallet thank you very much.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare – $6.25 / £4.74
Tim: I love that on PC we’re practically lousy with medieval and historical first person war simulators. There’s this, the endless Mount and Blade games, and War of the Roses. I have a soft spot for Chivalry because a) it came out of modland and that usually says the devs know what their player base wants and b) I played on a low gravity server a bit ago and it was about as stupid as you could imagine. Don’t expect anything too polished. Do expect a bit of a giggle. Well worth it.
Nick: Charge at people with the long pointy end of various weapons and watch the heads roll. Fun fact: Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is Eve Online mega-corp Pandemic Legion’s favourite past time for when things go wrong.
Just Cause 2 – $2.99 / £1.99
Tim: I love Just Cause 2. It’s an open world tropical explosion simulator in which you play Anthony Banderas with a grappling hook. Buy it, because it’s brilliant and cheap, and because there isn’t anything quite like it around. Then download and install the infinite grapple mod which lets you infinitely connect one object with another to another until you’ve suddenly threaded a spiderweb between two lampposts and accidentally snagged the population of a small village. Then try the ludicrous multiplayer mod.
But do buy it. It’s ace.
Nick: When you’re done with the single player, really do heed Tim’s advice and check out the multiplayer mod whenever possible. I tried it out one weekend and it was a load of fun, pure blissful fun. If you want to see what you’re missing, check this video out.
Steve: Genuinely one of the best and most underrated PC games ever made. Grab a boatload of mods and trainers, find the special program that lets you slow time, and experience the greatest sandbox in gaming as it was meant to be played: in constant bullet time.
Darksiders 2 – $9.99 / £6.99
Tim: I really wanted to like this – it’s a third person action smash thing in which you play one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I thought it might be a bit like Zelda but in the mould of a heavy metal album cover. And it’s kind of okay, I guess. But, I never really fell for it. It just felt a bit forced.
Anno 2070 – $14.99 / £9.99
Rob: This is a good price for an interesting city-builder. Like the other Anno games, 2070 is about scaffolding your city’s population and industries higher and higher. Once the basic needs are taken care of you get more sophisticated citizens who need more advanced things and that creates new economic pressures. It can be a bit like Jenga, in that attempts to improve one aspect of your city suddenly cause unforeseen collapse.
However, this is noteworthy for its unusual setting: Anno 2070 takes place in an increasingly likely near-future where the planet has been ravaged by global warming, sea level rise, and resource depletion. Want to build a city on the edge of an abyss? Here you go.
Tim: Rob – if I do badly at this do we all drown under a tidal wave of angry penguins? More importantly, did they fix the DRM?
Rob: Not really, no. To both points. To the DRM and the penguins. You have to connect to Uplay in order to launch Anno 2070. After that, I don’t think it’s a constant connection game. But Uplay will have its due.
The Walking Dead – $6.25 / £5.24
Steve: I’ve praised this series to bits in the past, and I still stand by that sentiment. This offer gives you the full season, minus the just released 400 Days episode (which costs another £4), so if you’re looking to catch up on the zombie clicking, emotion tugging, humans are the real monsters adventure, this is your time to do just that.
Tim: Why are humans always the real monsters? Can’t the monsters be the real monsters for once?
Call of Duty: Black Ops II – $29.99 / £19.99
Tim: Sorry to sound like your mum, but goodness me aren’t the recent Call of Duty games violent? This one starts off with a bunch of men dying in a fire right before your very eyes and then gets exponentially more horrific. I know we’re all “fight the power” and all that, but there’s something about the cruelty in the CoD single player campaigns that rubs me the wrong way. Anyway, s’alright if you like shooting men in the face for diminishing returns, but I’d spend my money elsewhere.
Steve: I don’t know what sort of atoms shit is made of (carbon??), but however many of those atoms you need to put together to make something that a scientist would agree could be considered a shit and not just a collection of carbon shit atoms, that would be the smallest possible shit by definition, and that is the size of the shit I give about Call of Duty.
Fez – $4.99 / £3.49
Tim: Weird thing: Fez is, by all accounts, quite good. You play a tiny little man thing who can rotate reality in order to jump over gaps. It’s all 2D and has a neat chiptune soundtrack and everything. But I dunno. It kind of annoys me. It’s quite self-consciously indie in a way I find a little bit tiresome, and I don’t think it’s quite as impressive or as entertaining a game as, say, Bastion, Limbo or Braid.
Steve: This game features perhaps the only time a QR code has been used for something not inherently terrible.
Surgeon Simulator 2013 – $3.50 / £2.37
Steve: This is a joke about an incompetent surgeon performing life saving operations with individually controllable fingers and thumbs, but a really funny one that proves that the ancient and revered genre of slapstick comedy is not beyond the reach of games. And you /are/ actually supposed to pay for jokes, despite what years of reading the backs of Penguin bars without buying them might have taught you. Certainly worth two and a bit pounds, especially considering it’s had updates since my review.