Recent reviews by CalcProgrammer1

This is an incredible collection from Jackbox Games. Of all the packs, this is the one that we put the most hours into. There are no duds in this pack and some of our absolute favorites are here as well. If you're on the fence about which Jackbox pack to start with, this is a great choice.

* The Devils and the Details - This is probably my least favorite game in this pack, but it's still a fun time. Players all take the role of a family member in a family of devils and have to perform various tasks on their device within the time limit. Most of the tasks make progress towards the shared goal, which is the baseline score that all players receive at the end of the game and is required to continue to the next stage, but as you're evil you have the option to take on selfish tasks that contribute no progress towards the shared goal but rather just add to your personal score. The goal in the end is to have the highest score after all. Overall, it's a decent game we've played a handful of times, but it can get repetitive and there isn't much room to add your own creativity or comedy to the game.

* Talking Points - This is a game about giving a PowerPoint presentation. One player gives the speech while another player runs the slide deck and teleprompter, choosing 3 different pictures and prompts that appear for the speech giver to work into their presentation. Speech topics are all written by players at the start of the game and then given out randomly to each other to choose from. This game leads to some funny moments as the speakers have to come up with some way to tie some unrelated images and prompts into a speech. Great if you enjoy impromptu comedy. The scoring system isn't the best, but this game is more about making up funny speeches than it is about serious scorekeeping. This game does have a bit of complexity to the rules though and might take a few tries for new players to fully understand.

* Blather Round - This is one of my personal favorites. It's a guessing game where each player chooses a person, place, or thing prompt from a set of three, then has to get the other players to guess the prompt using only a very limited selection of words. You craft sentences in the form of "it blanks the blanky blank" where the game gives you two columns of maybe 10 words each to fill in the blanks with. You have to be creative with the limited options you get. This game is relatively easy to pick up for new players, but it also provides a solid challenge and really makes the guessers think.

* Champ'd Up - This is a drawing game where two drawings are put up against each other and players must vote on their favorite. In the first round, each player is given a text prompt in the form of "Draw the champion of blank" and must draw a picture that represents "the champion of blank". In the second round of drawing, each player is shown one of the other player's drawings and must draw a challenger without knowing what the original prompt was. Then, in the voting round, the players are asked to "choose the champion of blank", but as the second round drawings didn't know the original prompt, they can miss the mark entirely leading to some chaotic and hilarious moments. It's one of my group's favorite drawing games. The only downside is that in a small group, especially only 3 players, you have a single person's vote deciding the winner of each matchup. This isn't a problem with larger groups.

* Quiplash 3 - The third installment of Quiplash, this game asks players to type witty responses to various prompts and then players vote on their favorite quips. It's simple, it's funny, and the third round Thriplash lets you enter three line responses which allow a bit more creativity. One of the best games to play to get new people into Jackbox due to the simplicity, but again it's a game that is worse with a small group due to the voting mechanic. In a 3 person game, only one player decides the winner of each matchup. Protip - use emojis in your quips. A lot of players don't realize you can do that. This is one of Jackbox's best games and almost always gets played at some point during every one of our Jackbox sessions.

A solid pack overall, but it's heavily carried by Fibbage and Drawful. Of all the Jackbox packs, my family comes back to this one consistently for Drawful, which is still our favorite drawing game in Jackbox's entire collection.

* You Don't Know Jack 2015 - This is a pretty standard trivia game with a game show theme. It's OK, but we prefer Trivia Murder Party if we're playing a trivia game usually so I don't really play this one much.

* Word Spud - Players take turns typing words, continuing off of the words before them. It doesn't really have much in the way of score keeping and overall isn't something we come back to. Not one of Jackbox's best IMO.

* Lie Swatter - A true or false trivia game. The selling point of this game seems to be that it supports up to 100 players, but gameplay is very simplistic and for a smaller group, not one you're likely going to play often.

* Fibbage - It's a trivia game with a twist - it's multiple choice but each player gets to provide one of the wrong answers. You get points for picking the correct answer but you also get points if others pick your lie, so it becomes a game about coming up with plausible sounding lies to fool each other with. This one is a lot of fun, and even with Fibbage 2, 3, and 4 in my collection we still come back to this one occasionally. Each edition of the game has slightly different mechanics and different sets of questions so it's worth playing them all.

Drawful - This is by far the best game in this pack. Each player is given a prompt and must draw a picture representing that prompt. Then, all players get to see the drawing and enter in what they think the prompt was. Finally, everyone has to guess the correct prompt. It combines the fool-each-other gameplay of Fibbage with the drawing elements of Pictionary and is one of Jackbox's best games. Even with future editions of Drawful, we still find this one the best. The silly sound effects, simple prompts, and simplicity of drawing make this an easy game for everyone to pick up and play. This game accounts for the vast majority of our playtime in this pack, as we usually end up playing at least a few rounds of Drawful every time we sit down to play Jackbox games.

If you enjoy hero shooters such as Overwatch and want something new to try, give Marvel Rivals a try. I'm not much of a Marvel fan but I have over 1000 hours in OW. Gameplay is very reminiscent of OW but with some nice changes, including moves that are only available if you have certain character pairings on your team. I haven't gotten to try all the characters yet, but the ones I've tried had a nice variety of moves. Playing healer characters in this game is more fun than in other similar games I've tried. All of the heroes are unlocked immediately so there's no grind or pay-to-win mechanics around unlocking the best characters. All of the monetization is just for cosmetics, and honestly the default skins look great.

Best thing, Marvel Rivals works flawlessly on Linux using Proton Experimental. No issues with anti-cheat compatibility and everything plays well after tweaking graphics settings on my Arch Linux PC. I believe it should also work on the Steam Deck but I haven't tried yet.

EA insists on putting malicious levels of invasive, essentially spyware, anticheat into all their multiplayer games. This time around it's Apex Legends on the chopping block. EA has disabled the Linux and Steam Deck versions of the anticheat used because in their eyes, it isn't dystopian levels of malicious enough to "ensure competitive integrity" or whatever corporate nonsense they're spewing these days to justify putting literal spyware into the deepest, most vulnerable levels of your Windows operating system. The worst part about this is now we can't play on Linux or Steam Deck. I detest Windows 11, and Microsoft continues to make the Windows experience worse and worse. I hate having to keep a Windows installation around just for a handful of games that refuse to cooperate with Linux. Apex was a decent game, but it's not a decent enough game to make me boot the atrocity that is Windows to continue playing, so good riddance. I won't be touching this disaster of a game again.

If they really are so worried about cheaters and "competitive integrity" that they feel the need to permaban Linux users, why not just implement the extreme measures for ranked mode? That's the mode where people actually care about this nonsense. At least let Linux users continue to enjoy the unranked modes. Competitive integrity isn't the be-all end-all of gaming. Games can be fun without this overly-competitive mindset forced onto the playerbase. Let the tryhards play ranked if they want this invasive garbage taking away their privacy just so they can be overly serious about something that should exist for entertainment purposes.

No Tux, no bux. I won't be buying any EA games in the future, and I don't think I will even be playing free-to-play offerings. I'm not going to risk getting into a game that they'll just pull the Linux plug on yet again.

Rockstar just added BattlEye anti-cheat, breaking GTA Online on Steam Deck and Linux. I can no longer play GTA Online because of this disgusting, intrusive malware being added years after the game's release. I spent a ton of time on GTA Online over the past decade and now all that playtime is locked away, inaccessible because of some garbage anti-cheat. I can no longer recommend buying this game if Rockstar is willing to screw over existing customers with this bait and switch anti-consumer behavior.

Love Jackbox games and I have all 10 party packs, but the megapicker has been nothing but problematic for me. On the Steam Deck, which is my main means of playing Jackbox, the use of windowed mode means that it doesn't fit the screen properly all the time. I wish it could just launch in fullscreen like the rest of the games do. By all means, keep windowed mode as an option, but give us fullscreen mode for the Steam Deck. Also, the controls do not work well at all on the Deck. While all the party packs' menus are navigable just fine with a controller, the Megapicker seems to only be designed for a mouse, which again prevents it from working nicely on the Steam Deck.

Also, I tried to use it on my Linux desktop and it had trouble launching the games at all. I love the concept, but the execution is bad enough that it's been easier to just keep opening the packs as before.

I really want to like this game. When I have played it, it's a fun hero shooter with a variety of characters and movesets and interesting maps. However, this game employs Easy Anti Cheat and that prevents it from working on Linux or the Steam Deck. I tried it out with some friends during the whole Blizzard/Hong Kong protests debacle as a way to avoid Overwatch and generally enjoyed it, but these days I'm back on Overwatch which (despite now being owned by Microsoft) works perfectly on Linux and Steam Deck. As someone trying to get away from the anti-user changes Microsoft is making to Windows, that means the only viable route to play this game is to go to a console platform and suffer from the lack of graphical fidelity and framerate that those platforms are limited by.

Please, please turn on Linux support for EAC in this game. There's no reason not to and you're cutting out a growing playerbase who want to leave the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem. The support window for Windows 10 is closing and a lot of us do not want to deal with Windows 11.

While I hate what Blizzard did, cancelling Overwatch 1 and re-releasing it as Overwatch 2 with the only significant changes being to make the monetization much, much, much worse, I am revising my negative review to positive because in the time since OW2 launched, I think it has started to redeem itself. It is nowhere near as good as Overwatch 1 was, but the worst of the horrifically poisonous changes have been reverted. The biggest one being the gigantic slap to the face of fair competition that was having to buy or unlock new heroes in the battle pass. That pay-to-win garbage has thankfully been taken out, and everyone has full access to the entire roster as is necessary for everyone to be on equal footing. Overwatch revolves around picks and counter picks, hero swaps in the middle of games, so having the new (and often overpowered on release) heroes locked behind a paywall or a month of grinding is unacceptable. It also seems like the battle passes have been including at least some of the premium currency in the free tier, so that you can at least earn half the cost of the battle pass just by completing it, meaning you only have to pay half price to unlock it ($5 per season). Still absolutely greedy and scummy compared to being able to earn loot boxes just by playing the game, but at least there is now a way to earn SOMETHING by just playing.

However, the main reason I wanted to change my review to positive is that I just absolutely love playing Overwatch. While I think Overwatch 1 was better, Overwatch 2 is still the best hero shooter out there and with some of the worst OW2 decisions being reverted, I've come back to playing this game regularly.

Also, this is one of the few mainstream multiplayer shooters that works great on the Steam Deck and on Linux PCs because it doesn't use some horribly invasive anti-cheat system. Please Blizzard keep it that way. I am happy to support you by picking up a battle pass every once in a while if it means the game stays supported on my platform of choice. OW2 works well on the Steam Deck and once you get the gyro aim set up, it's quite playable on the go. I've passed time in quite a few airports, waiting rooms, etc. playing this game.

Also, still waiting for PvE. That was the whole publicly-stated point of OW2. Please release PvE!

It's like Pokemon but re-envisioned as an open world survival game. It's a fresh take on the monster capturing and battling genre, where now the monsters (pals) do not battle in turn-based gameplay but in real time alongside the player, who can now join the fray with a variety of weapons and pal abilities. Your slaves (pals) now perform labor for you at your base, creating resources, building bases, and doing other tasks. Beware though, it is a survival game and you need to eat, so you can also butcher your livestock (pals) for meat or hunt wild pals.

Works well on Linux and the Steam Deck. I have played it on my Arch Linux desktop and on my Steam Decks (LCD and OLED models) just fine. On the Deck it runs around 30fps with default settings, though I might recommend turning the settings down.

This game also has proper dedicated server support, so you can host your own world on a dedicated server and have your friends join in. The dedicated server is available on Steam as well and runs fine on my Arch Linux desktop. I'm glad to see a modern game with a proper dedicated server that doesn't rely on first-party hosted services. Local network co-op is also possible using a room code system.

There are a few minor bugs that I've run into being in early access though. The biggest issue is on the Steam Deck, where text prompts do not respond to the onscreen keyboard correctly. I've found that mapping the "Open Keyboard" action to one of the rear bumper buttons and then selecting the text box with the touchscreen before opening the keyboard with the rear button usually works. Unfortunately, some of the text boxes still get covered up by the keyboard, especially the one to enter the dedicated server address on the Join Multiplayer screen. Hopefully they will rework these text prompts with proper Steam Input handling in a future update.

It crashes immediately. I own the Battle.net version and could not get it running in Lutris or Bottles even though I've had it work in the past so I decided to buy the Steam version during the winter sale because it's listed as Steam Deck compatible. It does not start on my Linux gaming PC, same error as on the Battle.net version. Arch Linux, AMD R9 3950X, Intel Arc A770. This system runs all my other Steam Deck compatible games just fine. I've requested a refund. It's not worth it in its current broken state, especially not when they had the audacity to make you have to re-buy it to have it on Steam.