What we've been playing – action heroes, says, and old hunting grounds

12th April 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: action heroes, he says, and old haunting grounds.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Not a Hero, Switch

We don't think about genres the right way. I am sure of this. Shooters? Metroidvanias? Fine. All fine. But what happens if you spread your wings a bit. Here's a new genre: the best game to play for an hour. (Hulk: Ultimate Destruction belongs to this genre, incidentally.) Here's another: the most exciting game to play when you've forgotten the controls.

Top of my list for this one is Not a Hero. I love this game. Roll7 taking their skating line and applying it to action games. Not just action games but those wild cinematic shoot-outs where you're ducked behind something like your enemies fill it with bullets. I leapt in today for a half hour and it was as good as ever. Better maybe. Because for the first five minutes I had forgotten how to reload.

Sure I could easily find out how to do this, or just jab randomly at buttons, but why would I do that when the panic that set it was just deliriously harmonious with what I was playing. I was running, sliding, shooting, and then there'd get to a point where I was out of bullets and… and… argh!

So there's my new genre: the most exciting game to play when you've forgotten the controls. I'm going to go away and think up some other genres. And I'm going to play more Not a Hero – for as long as a single clip will last.

-Chris Donlan

Slice & Dice, Android

Look if you're a regular here, you will have seen me write about this before. I think, not so secretly, I am obsessed with this game.

So much about today's entry is similar to the last time I wrote about Slice & Dice: I was traveling and I reached for a game to pass the time with – something Slice & Dice is adept at. And when I did, I marveled at how much I still enjoyed it.

Quick recap: Slice & Dice is a dice-rolling game where your team of fantasy heroes each has a six-sided dice with their abilities mapped onto it. You roll to see what they do each round, and enemies do the same. As you progress, you level up and equip new items, and that's it, crudely.

More importantly, I saw the pulling power of Slice & Dice first-hand when I handed the game to my partner to distract her from flying anxiety. She'd never played before but within about five minutes, she was hooked, and she commandeered my phone for the rest of the flight home—then installed it on Steam when we got home. Last time, it was my son I introduced the game to on the train home, and who also proceeded to commandeer my phone.

It all makes me think that actually, there's something special about this game. Maybe it's not just me liking a quirky little Android game. Maybe Slice & Dice is the real deal.

-Bertie

World of Warcraft, PC

Allow me to take you on a journey back to the summer of 2005, when James Blunt's You're Beautiful loomed threateningly at the top of the UK singles charts. I'm pretty sure MMOs were an almost entirely alien concept to me at the time, but World of Warcraft was popping off and I'd allowed some friends to talk me into getting stuck in.

My earliest hours in World of Warcraft were ones of bafflement and confusion as I wandered the Night Elf starting zone, amassing a ceaselessly shopping list of bric-a-brac for insatiable NPCs and gingerly poking my keypad, watching an awkwardly stilted, entirely unfamiliar, combat dance of ticking timers and blinking squares unfold. And I probably would have left it there, if it wasn't for an unexpected chat message from my WoW pals.

“Let's take you for a walk!”, they said. And with not much else to do besides roam in bewildered circles, I was in – thus beginning one of the most memorable video gaming experiences of my life. When I arrived at the rendezvous point, there wasn't just one friend waiting, or two; they'd brought their entire guild. And we walked in unison – oh how we walked! – my puny-level Night Elf flanked on all sides by fearsome warriors, for what seemed like hours.

Our journey (as I recall) began at Darnassus, one boat ride turning into another until we eventually reached Menethil Harbour. And here the walking began in earnest, through the deadly swamps of the Wetlands to the comparative serenity of Loch Modan. Then onward we traveled, through the snow-covered peaks of Dun Morogh, and eventually down into the verdant sprawl of Elwynn Forest, with our final destination – the teeming, labyrinthine capital city of Stormwind – now just a short trek away. It felt like a genuine odyssey, an adventure through a world so incredibly vast in a way I'd only dreamed of before, and it's a gaming memory I treasure to this day.

Of course, life being what it is, I eventually drifted away to other corners. But this weekend, some 19 years later, I suddenly had an urgency to return to WoW, and it's been a genuine thrill discovering how much has changed – and how much has stayed the same – in all that time. Quite unexpectedly, I took a wrong turn the other day and realized I'd found my way to the Wetlands, essentially doing that early journey in reverse. And while these distantly familiar corners might look a little dated nearly two decades on, for this returning player at least, the wonder of WoW's world hasn't diminished – and I genuinely can't wait to explore more.

-Matt