I traded in my XBox 360 catalogue for a Steam card at Game Stop.
Hellish Quart is... really engaging and also kind of mediocre. It's Slavjank and is one of those things that a single man has been working on, in Early Access, for half a decade now. Actively. The game is basically a fighting game (as in the genre) of 17th Century European HEMA, focus, the With FIre and Sword era of Ruthenian history. You get some tokens for Western Europe, but they're still framed as adventurers passing through. I had actually tried some of this shit in college. I never could quite connect with it. Fencing (epee, saber, foil) just didn't touch me either of the two times I picked it up, nor did the SCA, and all told I think I didn't have the drive to athleticism the former required or whimsy and engagement with crafts the latter did. But it means this feels strange and familiar to me at once because I don't do fighting games but I do understand the fundamentals of fencing, and that is basically what all this swordfighting is. At first - like real life - you can't even tell what the fuck is going on because real duels are very thin pieces of metal moving very fast, knicking people at weird angles on weird parts of the body in ways you might not even notice as the victim in the moment, and this game is physics-based. But after playing a lot of it in two days, I went from winning most fights button-mashing (never a good sign) to winning most fights understanding sort of what I did.
The game has no UI worth a damn, a money system perplexingly stapled on, explains little, and it has a story mode... that consists of a string of duels tied together until it ends, one fifth of the way through, without finishing that campaign, on a "work in progress" message. The story feels like watching a foreign soap opera where you have the vague sense of a plot, the acting doesn't really come through with the language barrier but you still are strangely engaged by the barest sketch of what's happening, like an animal watching people.
In all I like it. I'd like more Western European/American colonial content, but it was made by Slavs for Slavs. It's a toy that was made for and with the assistance of the HEMA community, down to noting each character's doctrine, and within that niche people love it. I mostly play the Western European women (because of their weapons and outfits, the Eastern stuff has little draw on me), the Scot, and the shepherd with his shepherd axe (fascinating weapon).
Grand Tactician: The Civil War I got despite its trajectory (from rough but excited launch to people panning it bitterly, like Terra Invicta got) and booted up to poke around in. I was a bit reluctant because of all the bitching about it and also that it frankly is ugly in battles; it, like Ultimate General, simply is not a spectacle battle simulator like Total War games are. But what it does try to do is basically simulate in extreme detail the War between the States on a logistical and OOB level (kind of like Hearts of Iron III, I suppose), it caught my eye that you can do a vaguely Twilight Struggle like "configure your alternate history background" thing (it unfortunately doesn't change the map, but you can at least know in your lore that Cuba was annexed), and it has a DLC (I did not get) that tapes on essentially a light Civil War officer RPG the point of which is to LARP as yourself becoming Grant. The UI is immaculate, and the reviews said a lot about that, everything has a great attention to detail where feeling like newspapers and telegraph reports and cartographic maps is concerned.
What kind of hardcore jank is it? Order delay exists. This alone changes everything, it's quite detailed - you can set things like signals to have a group of units all primed to move at once, or set them to move at a time, or order them to move at once - and that one change alone completely changes the feeling from what I already knew was very unrealistic, indulgent battlefield artistry in Total War - micromanaging forces to do insanely complicated maneuvers and figures to maximize outgoing lead - into something more like cat herding and watching disasters unfold slowly. Then you also can toggle on Feuds, which allows your prima donna officers to sometimes, when they're on the period, just flagrantly disobey you.
I have low expectations but am interested to see how this shapes up. Napoleon Total War had a Civil War mod but it was only battles and it was one of those autistic, half broken things that clutters your UI with literally thousands of units because every shitty variation of the same Massachusetts state militia regiment gets a distinct unit. Empire Total War had one but in addition to being Empire (broken without Darth Mod) it also had to suffer from being stuck with the hardcoded Creative Assembly map, which is barely servicable for doing a good job of Enlightenment North America, much less the Civil War. Ultimate General also only has battles and... it's decent? I've played a bit of it. I will say, I don't actually know much operational history of the War - I'm mostly interested in the political, social, economic history around it, really more of the Old South itself - and Ultimate General communicated really well how much dick it sucked to fight at Shiloh.
Speaking of which, it may not render the Southwest, California, Cuba or Nicaragua or Mexico on map, but Grand Tactician has Glorieta Pass as a battle. Finally recognition for Confederate Arizona.