Now that fall has begun, it’s time to reflect on the summer, on games specifically. I usually don’t play many games during the summer; it’s usually time to go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather and get some sun. Unfortunately this summer was an obnoxious mix of never-ending rain and hot, humid scorchers. As a result I spent a bit more time inside. These are the games I played.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I bought this in May on a random sale for $18 (70% off). It’s pretty recent (late 2021), but wasn’t a very successful game despite a highly positive rating on Steam. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 was coming out and I thought this would get me in the mood.

It’s set outside of the MCU, so the characters are more comic-like and aren’t voiced by MCU actors. That was no big deal, as the world was just as nuts as the movies are. You play as Star Lord but you can use the abilities of Gamora, Drax, Groot, and Rocket during battles and in the environment. One of my favorite moves was asking Groot to make a bridge and then walking over it.

Overall it was a really fun game, with interesting worlds, and some pretty funny banter between the characters. The boys enjoyed watching me play it and we all found it entertaining. It’s a bummer that it didn’t sell well; there’s no DLC available for it. It was worth more than the purchase price.

Atomic Heart

I read about Atomic Heart when it came out and have had it on my wishlist waiting for a sale. It’s set in a dystopian future where the USSR rules the world through advanced technology. If that sounds a lot like the Wolfenstien games, then I say “exactly”.

It’s very similar in terms of its overall look, the government propaganda, the retro-futuristic tech, and the gory details; but it differs in the overall plot. Whereas in Wolfenstein you fight Nazis and their technology, in Atomic Heart you fight society’s machines gone rogue. There is of course and evil person behind it all, but most of the game is fighting robots (and some creatures), not people.

I thoroughly enjoyed it all. It was challenging at first, even on easy mode, so much that I literally ran through the first story chapter without picking up any ammo, weapons, or materials. I slowly became comfortable fighting and evading the numerous robots that were everywhere, especially after discovering how much loot and upgrades I could find in Testing Grounds.

The game is kind of open world and includes a variety of areas both outdoors and in. The graphics are great and the weapons are varied and powerful. The enemies are a mix of robots and organic monsters. My favorite area was the Pavlov Complex with its zombies and other experiments from its labs.

I bought this right before Steam’s summer sale and, as an unusual bonus, it’s still an actively-developed game. I bought Premium Edition, which includes all of the promised DLC, the first of which was released mid-August. I paid $60 for it, which is the base price for the game without the $30 DLC.

Callisto Protocol

Made by some of the developers that made the famous Dead Space, Callisto Protocol is a similar idea, but set in an off-world prison instead of a ship. It’s a survival horror game with a really great atmosphere. There are lots of industrial machinery areas that are dark and very cool looking. It overuses jump scares, but otherwise the environments are unsettling in their use of darkness, tight spaces, and fog. The music is always tense and there are sections where the constant eerie music is the only thing keeping you on your toes.

The graphics are just phenomenal and the animations are the most gruesome I’ve ever seen, especially the main character’s numerous death sequences. Throughout the story I’ve been dismembered, smashed into things, cut up, crushed, disemboweled, and had my head sliced in half and my brains fall out. It’s nasty. And cool.

While the reviews were ok, the game itself apparently wasn’t successful enough for a sequel. I enjoyed it though. Ammo was scarce and saves were automatic, but I was able to get used to it. It used jump scares a bit too liberally, but had dark ominous environments, lots of science and machines, and a pervasive tension and sense of dread. I preferred playing it in the daytime.

I bought this one six days after Atomic Heart, as part of the Steam Summer Sale. It was half off, which is an amazing deal for such a recent game.

A Note About Performance

All of these games ran fine on my five year old GeForce 2070 GPU. Guardians of the Galaxy being the “oldest” (2021), it was the least demanding and ran at 45 – 60 fps at 1440p with vsync at max settings. DLSS support helped make everything smooth. Atomic Heart was the “most recent”, releasing in early 2023 and ran in a similar way, but at 4K using AMD Fidelity FX upscaling (no native DLSS for me) at the highest settings. Callisto Protocol is the “middle” (late 2022) and the most demanding, but still ran well on high (not max) settings at 4K using Fidelity FX. It did stutter more often than the other two, dropping to 20 fps during some of the really busy scenes on occasion. It wasn’t enough to ruin the experience though.

That’s not too bad for a 5 year old GPU with a 9 year old fourth generation i7 CPU. I think I could easily have run Callisto Protocol at max settings if I dropped to 1080p but the graphics would have been pretty blotchy on my 4K display. If want to keep 45+ fps at high/ultra settings I’ll need to upgrade my GPU. I’ll probably be upgrading the rest of my system as well since current hardware is nearly 5x faster and I think my CPU is becoming a bottleneck.