Steam can only, only be considered incredibly dangerous.
This shit started because Leviathan: Warships had a commercial so entertaining they made a sequel for the commercial. Is the game any good? Shit, I don't know. I think so. When I divide the amusement I received by ten dollars, the result is infinite.
We're creeping ever closer to an age where Andy Moore's Steambirds is a genre, where people bring more to the game than they borrow. That hasn't always been the case. Leviathan: Warships doesn't have an especially long campaign, and the "co-op campaign" referred to in the trailer is not a campaign of any kind but a few rejiggered single-player maps, which sort of makes me want to coin "Lie-viathan: Distort-ships" but I can't be too mad. A combination of cloud-saving and cross platform play means that, once the iPad version hits, there's an interesting little ecosystem in place. The main thing from a player perspective, the primary addition to the Steambirds ouvre, is that you're actually constructing the ships you use hull by hull and cannon by cannon via a point-buy mechanism familiar to any wargamer. That means that the limited "maps" on paper represent a fairly significant amount of gameplay permutations. If they bolster this with a couple free weapon packs - the catalyst for endless construction and strategy - there's no reason to believe it couldn't become a "thing."
But now you're going into Steam to play your boat game, and you see something called Prime World: Defenders, and you think maybe you might be on sabbatical from tower defense bullshit, but then you see it's from Nival, who is the world's foremost purveyor of games whose breathless enthusiasm makes up for their inexplicable localization. And it's not a TD game, straight-up: the towers are cards (!) which you earn, level, and evolve(!!!) in a limited hand. It comes out in a couple weeks, but you get the a very solid beta now. It's twelve dollars.
Then you see Jack Lumber, and you don't quite know what's up, but you notice that's by Owlchemy Labs who gave you all that great fun Snugglin' and Smugglin' them Trucks. You chop logs, and try not to chop beavers. Sometimes, there's maple syrup. It's like five fucking dollars. I've always got five bucks for that crew.
So, occasionally when you go into Steam you feel like your values are being overwritten by a malevolent alien intellect. And sometimes a cool toy pops out. I don't know if that's a wash.
(CW)TB out.
