I've had quite a few games on my plate lately..
First off is Hyrule Warriors. Yes, it basically is exactly what the title implies, which is a Dynasty Warrior game set in the Zelda universe. DW games are very polarizing because people either seem to view them as fun button mashing combo building kill fests, while others simply view them as mindless button mashing combo building kill grinds. While early on I have to say I felt more towards the former, after a few hours I've fallen quite a bit into the latter. The game just feels repetitive after a while with the same combos being mashed over and over, and constantly having to go back and recover your bases that are overtaken. It has taken a back seat to the other games I'm about to mention.
Alien:Isolation has finally come out and I have to say that yes, it is miles and away better than Aliens: Colonial Marines, although that really isn't saying much. They could have just released an emulated version of the
old Apple II Aliens game and it would have fared better than A:CM. You play as Ripley's daughter Amanda, who 15 years after the events of the first movie finds out that the data recorder of her mom's ship has been picked up and is in a space station. She goes to said space station only to see that stuff is majorly f-ed up and there's an Alien on the loose. As far as making a good survival horror experience, the game so far has done it's job very well. For full effect I highly recommend you use headphones while you play because then you hear EVERYTHING and it really freaks you out. The Alien itself is quite scary and terrifying. Yes, and I just wish so far that there was more of it. Don't think the whole game is just you vs the Alien. There are some other humans on board who just seem to want to shoot anything that is you looking, and then there's the dumb androids that just walk around and have nothing better to do than smash your skull in. Also, it took a good 2 hours or so of gameplay before I actually found myself playing "against" the Alien. Still, I am interested to continue through the game, if for no other reason than getting some rare trophies. Yeah apparently not a lot of people have even gotten past the first half of the game. I was shocked to see how rare the trophies were for game completion.
Then there's Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Another game from Ubisoft's "Indie" department, as the title implies it takes place during WWI with the perspective shifting between a small group of people directly affected by the war in various battles and such. Gameplay wise it's really solving simple puzzles and then doing random quicktime events. Other times it has you do things in sync with a music track, somewhat akin to the challenge courses at the end of Rayman: Legends. I realize from the description I just gave that this sounds like a bad game, but it's surprisingly immersive. I found myself going to that game more often than Hyrule Warriors or Alien: Isolation. The puzzles are simple but still require some thought, and even through the subtle storytelling you do end up caring about the characters portrayed. I do look forward to seeing how the whole conflict ends (between the characters I mean.. I know how the Great War Ends...)
Finally I've recently been playing Don't Starve. This game has been on and off of my sights for a while, but it always got denied because of the hard argument against if of, "Don't you have enough games in your backlog!?" However it was available to play for free this weekend so I tried it out and enjoyed it enough to actually pay for it. Basically you end up in a big field and the motive is to not die, or starve. The game gives you VERY little guidance as to what to do. There's no tutorials or anything like that. It's truly a flight or fight game, which is a nice change of pace and something that sucked me in early on. The most I've survived is 4 days which is really sad since I found out this game expects you to last MONTHS. I view this as a fun game that I can pick up in intermittent chunks, where you don't have to remember all the stuff of your past and instead just know what to do and continue for a bit then stop and then pick up like nothing big happened.