Demiurge11

This game is a satire of computer RPGs. It's played from a birds-eye point of view and has two modes: (1) running around the dungeon talking to people, and (2) turn-based combat. THE GOOD: - Decently fun and funny original story, if you don't mind the writers breaking the 4th wall constantly. - The angry dwarf and airhead elf are quite funny - The designers thought of toilets, cleaning staff, and administrative offices! That's a first. THE BAD: - The problem with making a game that mocks bad games is you kind of have to make your own game bad to have something to make fun of. The game starts off quite awful, although it does get a lot better fairly quickly. - The camera angle is annoying and there's no way to fix it. You are unable to see things properly no matter which zoom level you pick. - In combat, the facing mechanic is *really* weird. Your character is basically frozen facing one direction until their next turn. It's bizarre. If they dodge or parry they will turn around to do so, and then turn back the way they were facing before! - The front-rank characters have a really hard time stopping enemies from destroying your back ranks. - Ranged weapons have improbably short range, putting your weak back-rank characters at high risk all the time. - Critical misses in combat are pretty frustrating. - It's hard to land abilities because NPCs often dodge or make their saving throw. - Late game damage effects like poison or fire scale with HPs, but healing doesn't, which is a bit annoying in the late game. THE UGLY: - In combat, I didn't know what buffs or debuffs characters had for most of the game. It took me forever to figure out that I needed to middle-click on the character to enable the feature. - The game froze up once in a shop screen, requiring a restart, but was otherwise quite stable with no major bugs.

Borderlands 3 is a 3D first-person-shooter-looter where you (and up to 3 friends) progress in a mostly linear science-fiction story, kill enemies with guns, and loot the bodies for better guns. THE GOOD: - This is probably the best installment in the series yet. It has an overall engaging story, fun characters, well-balanced fighting that stays fun throughout, and a good variety of enemies and weapons. - The story is pretty funny and ridiculous. It's a great parody of modern social media influencer culture. There is a decent plot twist at the end. - The mission featuring the real voices and likenesses of Penn & Teller, and lampooning the Burning Man festival, is particularly well done. - If you have a capable graphics card, Borderlands's signature cell-shading art style is still super gorgeous. The environments are prettier than ever. - Orange items, the best item type, which has some kind of unique special ability, are much more common, which is more fun to be honest. THE BAD: - The plot, while overall fun and funny, involves your opponents being omniscient and knowing everything you are doing and planning. It feels a bit frustrating at times to have the bad guys outplay you constantly with knowledge they couldn't possibly have. - The are several important cutscenes that involve the NPCs doing major things, but where your characters are apparently sitting around powerless with their thumbs occupied. - Make sure you have the subtitles on! It can be hard to follow the plot sometimes when people are talking while bullets and explosions are flying everywhere! THE UGLY: - We did encounter some annoying bugs three or four times. Mission objectives would fail to complete, usually after fighting our way through a really long level. It wasn't a show-stopper, but we had to reload the game and start the mission from the beginning again. - A lot of the macguffins you search for through the entire game lead up to building a magic bridge across a chasm... a chasm that you could have easily crossed using routinely available vehicles depicted many times in the story... I'm not sure if this was tongue-in-cheek or an oversight?

Aside from resource gathering and base-building, the main gameplay is JRPG-style ship-to-ship fighting, with a bit of ground-based individual fighting! I got 41 hours of mostly fun out of it, which is pretty impressive for an indie game. THE GOOD: - The fighting is tactically quite complex, with lots of consideration of precise timing, turn order, and combinations of abilities. - The overall strategy outside of fighting is initially quite interesting as well. There are very few resources available and many challenges to solve for which you need to unlock capabilities in the right order. - The character Bucky Rogers is too funny THE BAD: - The click-through tutorial at the beginning of the game is not helpful at all - The regular difficulty was too hard for me, so I had to go with Easy, which was a lot more reasonable. - By the late game the fighting started to feel repetitive. - By the late game there was little left to do strategically. THE UGLY: - There were a bunch of minor bugs but no show-stoppers. - The game crashed once and I lost an hour of play time - The handling of fleet membership when the fleets are away from your base is buggy and weird. I was able to empty out a fleet while it was traveling, although it was just a visual bug that had no gameplay effect. - There were numerous bugs that could be triggered if you sent a fleet to a location *before* the enemy arrived. Often, the pre-programmed event would fail to trigger and you would need to leave and come back, or the before-battle conversation would end up happening *after* the battle.

This is a satirical tactical RPG reminiscent of games like XCOM. It has two modes: (1) an overland view where you build up one or more fortresses and move your parties of adventurers around the map to fight enemies and gather resources, and (2) during a battle, you control a party of adventurers as they fight in turn-based combat. I played through the campaign, which was good for 20 hours of play, but didn't bother with the multiplayer or skirmish options. THE GOOD: - The graphics are cute and effective, reminiscent of Warcraft 3. - The physics open up a really fun dimension of gameplay, as it creates a kind of Chess match of trying to figure out how to execute stun combos and best use your characters' limited action points. - There is a lot to discover in the combat mechanics - Surprisingly great, funny dialogue. - The plot is ridiculous but funny and interesting, and reveals a bit more depth than you would expect from what is 90% satire. THE BAD: - For a beginner, the game is WAY too hard on Normal difficulty, but too easy on Easy difficulty - When your heroes level up you are presented with a limited set of options for new abilities. Many of the abilities are very bad and don't fit with your build (tank, damage, utility, etc.), but you're stuck either picking a bad ability or waiting until next level and praying for better options. - In-between Acts you lose a lot of your progress. This seems very arbitrary and doesn't have any in-story explanation. - Especially in the early Acts, there is little to buy in the overland map mode. Once you've bought everything, gathering more resources has little point--which invalidates a big part of the gameplay. - In the campaign, you are basically obligated to have a party of 4 with one character of each class. This clashes with the fact that the mechanics allow you to mix and match things, and feels a bit arbitrary. THE UGLY: - The game has a weird mechanic for story missions that is not at all clearly explained. They claim that when you start the mission your highest-level character of each class will join, but what they mean is that the highest-level character of each class *in that party* will join. Make sure you send your best party to handle story missions!

This is a tactical game with 3 major modes: 1. a star-system level map where you decide where to move, 2. a ship's bridge view where you interact with random events and move around within a star system, and 3. a battle mode between two battleships. You wander the galaxy, exploring a series of randomly generated star clusters, and experience an evolving story as you go along. THE GOOD: - The game's pixel graphics are the most impressive I've ever seen. The ships, planets, and stars are *really* cool-looking. The art makes amazing use of 3D, bright, and dark. Wow! - Really fantastic and unique music that is very atmospheric. - The story is captivating up until the ending. It's overall a good cyberpunk plot--high-tech, low-life--with a central theme of the human dependence on technology and how technological advances benefit the rich but not the poor. - The story has really good plot twists that keep moving the goal post in interesting ways. - The ship-to-ship battles are engaging and interesting for the most part. THE BAD: - Crying Suns is advertised as a Rogue-like game but it isn't really. In principle, a Rogue-like should be played over and over with you learning the environment, enemies, resources, abilities, etc. and making it further each play-through thanks to your increased skill, or unlocked abilities. Instead, the game has an evolving story split into chapters, and you have to restart a chapter if you die. This is just a standard linear storyline with save points. If you're looking for a Rogue-like, you will be sorely disappointed. - The star maps are randomly generated and offer very limited opportunity for navigation. There is little to learn about the lay of the land, so little opportunity to gain expertise or make meaningful strategic choices. - The random encounter events offer very little freedom of choice. They usually give you a tiny handful of pre-scripted options, and often randomly decide how things will turn out without any way for you to ensure success or mitigate losses. Basically, how the event goes is about the story-writer's choices and not about *your* choices. - For example, let's say you encounter a mysteriously abandoned ship. The story-writer decides you can only send 4 troops over, no more, no less. You send them, and the game decides it was an ambush and all 4 troops die. Why didn't you have the choice to do something else? Blow up the ship? Send a specialist to scout it out? Send more troops so you would win? Etc. etc. I feel this is a major lost opportunity to allow the player to learn from experience, marshal their resources, and apply effective tactics to maximize their gains. - The away missions to the planet have a similar lack of freedom. All you can do is decide which specialist to send. You can't decide to send more troops, fewer troops, more specialists, or anything else really. - There's a lack of strategic depth to the skirmishes. The fighting was difficult to understand at first, but once I found a dominating strategy the game never introduced any opponents that forced me to adopt a different strategy. - I never died and thus never restarted a chapter even once. In spite of that, the game ran out of new random events long before the ending. Some random events happened three or four times! There could have been more variety here. - I thought the ending was lame. More under MAJOR SPOILERS, below. THE UGLY: - Conversation bug: I asked a character where the sector boss was and they said at end of cluster... which was literally next door! - Conversation bug: several events had my character saying they'd come back to life again, but I had never died! - There seems to be a problem with the Neo-N rolls where they virtually never go above 1. - Graphics bug: when sending away missions to a planet or doing intra-stellar travel the ships frequently travel *through* solid objects. MAJOR SPOILERS: - I thought the ending, a forced machine singularity god-intelligence and the inevitable destruction of humankind was lame. All the suggested end choices were bad. I don't believe that human beings could ever be made so helpless. Where were the smart options, like creating a democracy, or freeing the machines and working alongside each other? Humans are really much more capable of survival, and dependence on technology makes us strong, not weak.

This is a science fiction city building game with a relaxed pace. It's birds-eye view, and mostly involves placing and configuring buildings in a city. You spend some time in a zoomed out view outside your colony exploring with expedition ships and placing additional satellite colonies. There is an evolving story in the Campaign mode. THE GOOD: - Overall, the game is an easy, fun, relaxing experience. There is only one really tense and difficult mission where you have a time limit. - The evolving story for the Campaign mode is mildly interesting, although the ending is a bit cheesy and not particularly profound. - Good tutorial design eases you into the game in a fun way. While it's not perfect, I had a few stumbling points and not everything was 100% clear, it was clear enough that I didn't have to look up anything online. - There are no giant domes! A win for science realism. THE BAD: - The tutorial missions are maybe *too* long, and I started getting bored by the middle of the game. Fortunately, the later missions started getting more challenging with less hand-holding. I enjoyed the later missions quite a lot. So it was worth hanging in there and continuing. - Referendums are very annoying. They are almost trivially easy to pass as I don't think my city *ever* had an approval rating of below 50%. Even with no effort you should stay above 60%. In spite of this, you get constantly harassed by pop-up messages over and over. I would have preferred if they notified me *once* and then just displayed an indicator thumbnail with the remaining time in the referendum and my approval rating. - Artifacts are a poorly done addition to the game. You must place them before you know what they do and you can't move them afterward even though the placement might make them useless. In any case, none of them actually do anything useful because the game is quite easy. - The outer colony exploration mode is really annoying. It leads to a ton of notifications and requires a lot of micromanagement that distracts you from the main game. There should be some kind of "attack move" you can use to have your ships automatically go to points of interest as they explore around. - I wish you could manage notifications and decide whether they interrupt you, appear as thumbnails, or don't appear at all. As your colony gets larger dealing with notifications becomes a real drag. - The colony is hermetically sealed... And yet when a geothermal fissure leaks poison gas outside the colony it somehow reduces the air quality *inside* the colony. How is that supposed to make sense? - I'm supposed to believe that we need FIVE people to run a *water pump* in a sci-fi setting where cancer has been defeated and we can colonize other worlds. Water pumps were automated devices in the 1900s. - The ideas on commuting are a bit weird in this game. People hate walking even short distances. Most strangely, people just hate to walk through a building to get to another building. I live in Montreal, where we have something called the Underground City where all you do is walk through buildings to get to other buildings and people love that here! It's a tourist attraction. - When using a Mill, the "Share for All Mills" button is not intuitive. It's not clear that you should click the checkbox on the template mill first and then for any other mills you want to use that template. THE UGLY: - I encountered a game-breaking bug in the final mission that prevented me from winning the game. This was very disappointing. You have a task to find and use 4 artifacts, and for no reason I understand the game started the objective 25% complete. It might be because a defender bot attacked my colony directly, but it didn't leave me an artifact. So after I found only 3 artifacts the game moved on to the next objective--but I was now stuck! I was able to watch the ending on YouTube, but that's not good enough, and so I give the game a failing grade of 4 when I would have otherwise given it an 8. - There was a mention of a "zorium bomb" in the last mission. I auto-completed the mission and it didn't end up installing on my expedition ships. - Buildings "ghost", becoming semi-transparent, when you place a new building. This is insane as it makes it really difficult to place new buildings. There is a game setting to remove this effect, but it *doesn't even work*. - The indicators for your change in food or water over time are typically wrong and not very helpful. - I once saw a construction drone takes off east forever in a straight line, eventually plowing into a mountain and disappearing. It was pretty funny. I had to re-load for it to reappear and start working again. - I've encountered several times a bug where deconstructing a passage tube fails. A drone sits there forever looking like it's deconstructing but doing nothing. Saving and reloading doesn't even fix this.

This is a 2D puzzle game where you drag-and-drop components and connect them together. I liked it enough to play through the entire game, but the game has many problems that drag it down. THE GOOD: - The pipe-and-filter style puzzles are a fresh take on the puzzle genre. They are generally fun, and it can be quite challenging to achieve a gold medal on each puzzle. - I like cats, cats are a major theme of the game, they are cute - Cute ending! THE BAD: - There is one song on loop for the whole game - The game's story is cute, but irrelevant. You get rewarded with tidbits of advancement as you solve puzzles, but the puzzles have nothing to do with your goal. - The game promises coding and machine learning, but delivers neither. What it *does* give you is pipes and filters. You can look up "pipe and filter architecture" if you don't know what I mean. - The supposed machine learning is not even simplified machine learning. For example, the machine learning components get trained by magic without needing to evaluate their outputs. It makes training them boring and pointless. - The text introductions to each puzzle are hard to understand *and* pointless. They very rarely have *anything* to do with the puzzle. - The English tutorials and explanations are *very* hard to understand. Since the puzzles have nothing to do with machine learning, there is no way to figure out how machine learning works through practical experience. - Startups are very poorly done. They are badly explained and provide very little useful feedback on what you've done right or wrong. The potential solution is so dumbed down from the text description of the problem that it's impossible to intuit solutions. See spoilers below for a bigger explanation. - The driving simulators are also extremely confusing. See spoilers below. - Doing puzzles can get repetitive since the pipes and filters are very consistent from one puzzle to the next. I usually didn't play for more than an hour or two at a time. - You can save your setup in the level, but there is no corresponding load button. It's not clear that you can only load a saved configuration in future levels as a sub-component. - This game seems to be marketing itself as a STEM game, encouraging children to do science, but really it does nothing to teach machine learning or programming, and so fails utterly in this. THE UGLY: - Some of the puzzle introductions cover military or spying applications that seem immoral, which is an odd thing to see in an otherwise very sweet and cute game. MINOR SPOILERS: - It took me a *long* time to understand the startups! I didn't even understand what the goal was. I believe you have two main goals: (1) To consume *all* of the inputs, and fill in *all* of the outputs, and (2) prevent any traffic jams, and thus allow a constant stream of input to flow through your solution. Hint: avoid using any load balancers as they cost money and make the startup unprofitable. After releasing your solution, if you've done things right, within a few days the startup should be making money! You've finished! The only number that matters is your daily profit. Once that goes into the negative you sell, and usually make a modest profit. - The driving simulations don't make a lot of sense. In the early ones you just succeed automatically. In the later ones the only thing you can do is fiddle with the settings, if you pick the wrong settings you fail. Just play with the initial settings until you succeed.

The Captain is a classic pixel-art point-and-click adventure game set in a Star Trek-like universe, which also features nail-biting turn-based ship-to-ship combat. Given the tiny development team, this game is a masterpiece! It has its flaws, but they are easily forgiven given how overall fun and well-designed the game is. THE GOOD: - I enjoyed the Star Trek style of a multi-cultural spacefaring civilization full of hope. The main character exemplifies this ideal nicely. Real world events are pretty grim nowadays, and it's nice to take part in a story with some hope for the future. Like the Doctor, the Captain doesn't even carry a weapon! - The away missions are generally very well done. The scenarios are creative, interesting, and original! There are several missions I was able to replay and get an ending that I thought was ideal. It's really fun how at specific inflection points you can go in a different direction and get a completely different ending! - The game is designed for (some) replayability, so you can try out different solutions to the problems presented. It is possible to skip missions if you're willing to take the same ending you've already achieved. You can also skip cut-scenes. - The combat is turn-based strategy with no random element at all. It is very tense for most of the game, quite challenging, and fun! THE BAD: - The idea that an entire war can be won by one person or technological item is absurd. I think the writer could have tried harder to come up with a plot that, while it might have been less epic, would have been more believable. - On the first away mission, I made a bad mistake that caused me to reload from a previous save point. The game is actually designed to allow for different endings to each away mission, something that I don't think the developers communicated very well to me before the first mission. I found this quite frustrating at first. - You can't save the game whenever you want, which leads to occasional times when you need to replay sections of the game for no good reason. - You have a ship and crew, and yet you must handle away missions alone. - Repeat after me game developers: it is *not* possible to transfer a person's mind (that away mission is pretty cool anyway)... - As is pretty much true of *all* point-and-click adventure games, it's good to have a walkthrough handy to avoid unnecessary frustration. While most missions are pretty straightforward, it's not always possible to guess what the designer was thinking. - When replaying the game, it is annoying that you cannot skip dialog or won battles! As a result, I recommend you do a non-violent playthrough your first time around, and do your serious run (including combat) on your second playthrough. Otherwise, you're going to have to do an awful lot of fighting twice... THE UGLY: - When viewing dialog and some cut-scenes, there is usually no visual indicator that you need to press a key to continue to the next frame. - You can build a special item called a Suppressor Beam Disruptor. Using this item causes the game to freeze in the combat screen. This happened to me twice (during two different playthroughs), and both times I had to re-load and try again. It always worked on the second try, at least.

A 3D birds-eye-view puzzle/platform game where you control 2 characters with one controller The Good: - The graphics are pretty - I got this game free on Epic and so didn't waste any money on it. The Bad: - Characters speak to each other in an off-putting non-language. I would have preferred simple text to whatever *that* is. - Maybe it's just the tutorial section at the beginning, but the puzzle interactions are not interesting. The only challenge is in figuring out the weird controls and what on Earth the developers want me to do without any actual instructions. Mind-reading is not fun. - Even though you have 2 characters, it is not possible to play with a friend The Ugly: - Wear a life jacket when boating! - When you are infected with a life-threatening disease, wear a face mask, or at least cover your mouth while coughing.

A pixel-art 2D side-scrolling action-strategy game where you accumulate and spend resources to try to beat a series of levels. It's kind of a strategy version of a Rogue-like, meaning that it's a strategy game rather than strictly a fighting game, as your character doesn't do any fighting directly. However, you're expected to replay a level many times as you discover the mechanics, the consequences of your actions, and unlock bonus features that you will need to win. THE GOOD: - There is some some genuine strategy in very simple mechanics. Basically, you choose where to go (it takes time to move from point A to point B and you can't be everywhere at once), and you choose where to spend your limited funds. - Some genuine surprises are in store (there was at least one moment where my jaw dropped and I nearly had a heart attack), although the surprises can be quite demoralizing at times. - The game does not allow save scumming, which leads to a much more exciting and tense game. - When I beat the final island and saw the credits roll, it felt good! It took me about 22 hours. I did not have the heart to try the bonus Skull Island DLC. THE BAD: - The game makers explain basically NOTHING, with the in-game tutorial offering only the most elementary information on the UI interaction. - Due to the low-resolution pixel graphics, it's not always obvious what a thing even is. Expect to spend money on things without having any idea of what they will do or what the implications are. And then expect to lose because your choices were bad. - The completely obscure mechanics require you to waste fruitless hours in experimentation and replaying levels when a simple, brief explanation would save you from all that pointless grind. - I ended up looking up answers on the Internet, but this has the risk of exposure to major spoilers. - Expect to feel frustrated during a very difficult learning curve. There can be a huge lag between making a strategic choice and discovering the consequence. The inevitable result is getting your ass handed to you (often only some hours later). - The levels are randomly generated, so you sometimes get a really good one and sometimes a really bad one. If you've got a bad level, it's not always obvious until you've wasted a few hours. THE UGLY: - The NPC AI is idiotic. It's fairly predictable in its stupidity, so it's largely possible to work around the stupidity of the NPCs. However, the game would really benefit from some basic behaviour management, such as being able to direct a percentage of NPC unit types (on a per-unit-type basis) to go in one direction or the other. Or telling units not to occupy a particular tower. - There is no ability to cancel a command. This is a deliberate design choice by the game makers. It means that a momentary lapse of reason can completely ruin hours of work.

This is a 2D birds-eye-view tower-defense game with a science-fiction spin. While there is a strategy element, the main focus of the game is storytelling. THE GOOD: - This is an intensely addictive and fun game. - Play virtually any kind of story you want, so long as it involves a handful of colonists trying to survive on an alien planet! I once tried a primitive start, with my bow-and-arrow wielding people living among dinosaurs. They survived, thrived, and eventually had omni-bots doing all their work for them. It was epic! - The game design is really great, where the controls allow you to do everything you want, but it's designed so it's easy to lose track of some details or forget something. There's plenty of opportunity for excitement and drama, whether it's created by the game's built-in storyteller (who throws events at you), from your own mistakes, your colonists' interactions, or just your imagination. - The game is backed by some really fun and thoughtful science-fiction. - The mod community is amazing and gives the game tons of staying power and replayability. Every player has their own list of must-have mods. Mod management through the Steam Workshop is pretty simple. - There is an incredible multiplayer mod available that smoothly enables co-op play. - I played through the Royalty expansion and it also adds a lot of really fun extra gameplay, as well as a cool new win condition, and is worth picking up. THE BAD: - After some hundred of hours of gameplay I started to see the pattern in the main storyteller (Cassandra)'s semi-random events. This was solved by switching to everyone's favourite storyteller: Randy Random. THE UGLY: - In 600+ hours of playing this game (some of it offline, so Steam didn't count it), I've had the game crash on me once or twice. Otherwise, it's really stable, even with lots of mods running. - The developer will update the game in the middle of your playthrough via Steam, and there's no way to stop this. Sometimes, this might break mods you are currently using and ruin a game in progress. There are workarounds, but they require some tech savvy.

A birds-eye-view real-time tower defense game. I spent an enjoyable 10 hours or so playing (poorly). THE GOOD: - Very intense, nail-biting gameplay! - Surprisingly deep strategy derived from very simple principles (like the line of sight of guns, or the enemy path-finding around towers) - There seem to be lots of special game modes, and extra non-story missions, for completionists (caveat: I didn't try any of them) THE BAD: - There's *technically* a story. I'm not sure it makes any sense (see MINOR SPOILERS for details). - I found it difficult to come up with winning strategies because there is a large lag between making a strategic choice and seeing the result. Although, I could usually muddle my way through after a few retries. THE UGLY: - Nothing! I found no bugs or glitches in this game. MINOR SPOILERS: - The plot is fluff that makes no sense. For some reason, aliens need to march across your indestructible walkways, and bear the fire of your indestructible guns, only to arrive at a convenient fueling station full of your precious power cores. Why didn't you cover the power cores with the same indestructible material you use for the guns and walkways?

A 3rd person birds-eye view game of walking around fetching materials so you can build stuff, so you can fetch more and better materials to build better stuff to fetch more and better materials... well, you get the idea. Sometimes you gather materials from static positions, and sometimes it's from monsters' cooling corpses. THE GOOD: - You can play co-op with a friend. - The dialog is pretty funny. - It was fun for a few hours! THE BAD: - This game got really tedious after a few hours. Uninstall! - The quests are very simple fetch quests. Get X of this or Y of that. Plant a sign there. They clearly go on forever as you receive a new quest the moment you finish the old one. - You have to hit monsters all day long to kill them, dodging their attacks the whole time. This is even more tedious that walking everywhere trying to find materials to harvest. - The boss monsters aren't more interesting to fight, they just take longer. Much longer... THE UGLY: - The quests are not always very clear. - E.g. you have to plant a flag in a very particular spot for it to achieve the mission objective, but when you return to the NPC they just refuse to accept that you succeeded and won't clarify what you you've done wrong. - E.g. you get told to go to a place but it doesn't appear on your map. You have to zoom out to be able to see the destination, but this is not obvious to a beginner.

This is a a 2D platformer, but it's got a strong story focus (a coming of age story) and most of the gameplay is walking around and talking to people. In addition, there are two major mini-games: playing music like in Rock Band, and a fairly simple, but extremely difficult old-school 2D isometric action platformer. I enjoyed the game enough to play through the whole story, but I can't say I loved it. THE GOOD: - The characters are interesting - The dialog is quite good - The story's themes are very topical and relevant to any ordinary working-age person alive nowadays - I like how areas changed subtly from day to day. There was always something different going on. - I enjoyed the mini-games for the most part, although Demontower and the last song were both too hard for me. - I enjoyed the art style. - Very woke THE BAD: - The game is very slow. You walk slowly. You have to walk back and forth over the same areas over and over. The areas evolve a bit each day, so it's not as terrible as it might sound, but it's not that great either. - I won't spoil it for you, but I found the overall plot to be kind of weird and not make a lot of sense... More below in the MINOR SPOILERS and MAJOR SPOILERS sections. - The story touches on some really interesting themes, but I can't say it grabs them in any really compelling way. It merely nods to the themes. "These things are important," it says. But the story doesn't give any juicy insights or takeaways to think about. - It's a coming of age story. There must be some people that believe these are High Art, but I'm not one of them. - The pacing was off. The story evolves very, very, slowly. You have to wait a very long time to sate your curiosity about what happened a week before the start of the story, and then WHAM! the answer is more confusing than satisfactory, and the game ends. The ending is too rushed to have any good debate or answer to the story's themes. THE UGLY: - I did not encounter any bugs or crashes, which is a good thing. - Depending on the exact moment you save your game and exit, you might have to re-play some of the story. However, this was never a major issue for me. MINOR SPOILERS: - I thought for a long time that the story was surely about the main character's descent into schizophrenia. It isn't... and that is extra weird. - Magic, psychic powers, angels, and demons, are an unsatisfying addition to a game that is set in an analogue of the real world. MAJOR SPOILERS: - Late at night, in the dark, someone can't recognize you instantly (I'm talking to you, masked bad guy!) - It doesn't make any sense that a secret cult of murderers can exist for a long time, in secret, in a small town. - If a mine collapses, and a dozen people are killed, it will be noticed! It causes an earthquake, you know. And when a dozen members of a small town disappear overnight, people will kind of be freaking out the next day. It will not be a regular day in town.

This is a birds-eye view, isometric game where you are stuck in prison and try to escape! There is some stuff to like in this game, and the game has a lot of potential, but I ended up uninstalling it out of frustration without finishing it, hence the low grade. THE GOOD: - The train robbery introductory mission is really fun! There is no event loop to keep you constantly off-balance. It's fun to sneak around the guards and figure where the components are so you can build what you need to escape. - There is a co-op mode where you can play with friends - The premise of planning an escape from prison is fresh and exciting THE BAD: - While the premise of planning an escape from prison is cool, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. - The fun of the train robbery quickly devolves into drudgery in the intermediate missions. You are stuck in a frenetic event loop of going from place to place. This makes it very difficult to ever rub two brain cells together and come up with some kind of plan. A pause feature so you could take a breath and plan something out would be really nice. Perhaps, at least the option to fast-forward to Lights Out so you can have some time to think. - It's not really possible to plan anything anyway. Most escaping involves building items from components. Components are spread around randomly and you have to search everywhere in a huge map for them. So really, it's not a game of planning at all, but a game of searching around for components. It would be nice to be able to select the finished item you want to build, and then see where the components you need are on your map overlay. - It's tough to traverse the list of items you can build, especially when one finished item requires another finished item to complete. It would be really nice to see a tree of components so you'd know at a glance what base components you need. - The map overlay shows you a lot of useful information, including multiple levels and where the ducts lead, but it's hard to read so it's really hard to figure out which duct leads where. In any event, you are stuck in a frenetic event loop and you don't have time to look at the map anyway! So even if you could plan something out, it wouldn't matter. THE UGLY: - Nothing! I did not encounter any bugs or crashes while playing this game! MINOR SPOILER: - It's not obvious at first, but to complete the requirement to go to a specific location you just need to show up. You get a green check mark, and then you can move on. This will give you a bit more time to take care of business, although it doesn't solve the game's fundamental frenetic event loop problem.

This is a fun, simple game where you automate a kitchen and in so doing somehow prevent the destruction of the Earth. I got this game as a free giveaway on Epic. There are different game options, but I only played the campaign. I completed every level and all optional conditions (except the ingredients condition on the last level) and it took me about 30 hours. THE GOOD: - It has a fun story as part of the campaign - 30 campaign levels allow you to learn how to play as you go along, and introduce new challenges in bite-sized pieces. - The overall game, where you lay out components and then organize them to work together, is quite fun! It can be very challenging at times to achieve all the optional objectives, but it almost always feels achievable. - The UI is well-designed and works smoothly for smaller levels - The Thanksgiving and Chinese New Year additions are fun. They introduce some new ingredients and machinery, and a few subtleties of the recipes create new challenges. THE BAD: - The goal to use fewer than X ingredients is sometimes quite arbitrary and annoying to accomplish. Since the meal orders in each level are semi-random, a build that succeeds in one run of the level can fail in the next run. A lot of fine-tuning, running, re-running, and luck is required. This is especially onerous on the later levels with longer run times. - Assembly-language programming is required to solve some of the levels (especially the optional conditions and the later levels). I am ok with this, but most players will probably find this very difficult or frustrating. - The graphics use an isometric projection, but when you try to select multiple machines with your mouse in a click-and-drag the selection square is a perfect square. It doesn't follow the angle of the isometric projection! This makes it quite difficult to select a large collection of machines. - It's onerous to upgrade or downgrade a large number of machines (especially in later levels, where you have many machines). When you want to switch strategy it requires a lot of repetitive labour. It would be nice to be able to place a machine on top of an existing machine to replace it and keep your settings--or select several machines and set them all at once to the same setting. THE UGLY: - There are still quite a few bugs in what is otherwise a mature game. The problem can usually be solved by removing the offending machinery and replacing it with an identical one. But it still causes you to waste time debugging your setup, only to discover that a game bug is causing the failure. - Order Reader bug: where it was only activating when the order was on top, even though only an Advanced Order Reader is supposed to have that ability. - Assembler bug: where ingredients placed inside one Assembler arrived in a different Assembler - Computer bug: where when you set an order and then connect a machine, the order you set gets erased. - A computer can't read the contents of a bin, even though the simpler Counting Machine can! - The computer documentation has mistakes. For example, it tells you that there's a TT register for time, but there isn't!

This sequel does justice to the original season. It continues where the original story left off. It's just as fun as Season One. I'm looking forward to Season Three!

A quite enjoyable game. It's basically a funny sitcom about a video game developer and its ridiculous staff. Sequences of animated buffoonery are interspersed with playable mini-games. Your goal as a player is to collect stars by either finding them or earning them through games. The Good: - I got it for free on Epic! - It's funny and entertaining - It's unique - Some of the mini-games are really amazing! The Bad: - Some of the mini-games are a bit too difficult. I just can't get all 5 stars in many cases. It's not a big deal, because you can keep going to the next story sequence if you get too frustrated - The mini-game of wandering the office is not super interesting. - This being essentially a TV show, there's certainly no opportunity for player agency The Ugly: - Nothing! It's lovely. I haven't spotted any bugs, glitches, or anything offensive.

This is a side-scroller point-and-click adventure game that rewards solving puzzles with a dystopian cyberpunk detective story. Note, this game is more about solving puzzles than collecting items. The most similar game I've played is Puzzle Agent. The Good: - Really fun, creative, interesting, and varied puzzles! - I enjoyed the story, finding it interesting and original - The story is a railroad--there is only one way to go with no branches at all. All clues must be found before you can continue to the next stage in the story. I am really bad at detective games, so this actually made the game playable and fun for me! However, you may hate this. YMMV - Incredibly cute cats The Bad: - Certain parts of the game (including the pseudo-tutorial at the very beginning) require quick reflexes. This can be fun, or it can be awful, depending on how fast you are. I find it somewhat out of place in a puzzle game. - It can be easy to miss the message that your game saved. I played the game 2 hours at a time, and when coming back later and reloading I frequently ended up having to redo stuff because the game didn't save when I had expected it to. The Ugly: - There are numerous sexist depictions of women, e.g. every female character has gigantic breasts, there are lots of posters of women in sexualized poses, and one of the NPCs literally says, "it's great to have a young wife" - The main character is 38 years old and is often referred to as an old man at the end of his life. Is this a bad joke? Are the developers confused? Middle age starts at 45, and old age at 65. - The English translation is pretty good overall, with only a strange turn of phrase here and there. However, toward the end of the game it seems that the translation got rushed and the text becomes somewhat incomprehensible. - The NPCs bounce up and down all the time. It's weird.

The Good: - Nothing. This game is terrible. - Actually, the only good thing is that I paid less than $10 for this garbage. Phew! The Bad: - The game didn't even run on Steam (on Windows 10) and I had to look up how to fix the install issue. It was something dumb the developer should have fixed (a missing **** file) - On PC using a keyboard, the controls were really spongy. The only result of any battle: being killed. I had to lower the difficulty, but on Easy the game is too easy. - The plot is a very American plot with a pseudo-Chinese pastiche stretched across it. It doesn't fit. It comes off as gross, racist, and offensive. - I looked at the credits, and spotted perhaps a Chinese name or two? A game about Chinese people with no Chinese people making decisions on the art direction and plot. How awful. The Ugly: - This game sits square in the middle of the Uncanny Valley. The 3D characters are really disturbing. e.g. you see your character constantly nodding in a conversation, even when the other character has finished speaking and you're thinking of what to say next. - The characters don't really look Asian. A lot of them don't really look human at all (although they're supposed to look human) - There is a fake Oriental-ish language that they invented, that sounds like an idiot trying to babble Chinese or Japanese. - There is a character that looks like the Boudha. This is more than a little offensive.

This is a really neat game that continues the tradition of Dungeon Keeper and brings it to the next level. You're an Evil entity that commands a dungeon and defends it against heroes. In this mode, the game is Tower Defense. When you bring your creatures to the surface, the game becomes Real Time Strategy as you attack heroes and fortifications. The Good: - Great hybrid of Tower Defense and Real-Time Strategy - The Easy mode is pretty relaxed and easy, with an occasional moment of adrenaline. Just the way I like it. - Great humour and dialogue that is actually fun to listen to (obviously, Your Mileage May Vary). They make fun of or reference pretty much every Fantasy trope imaginable, especially other video games. - The game controls are easy to understand, and it's pretty straightforward to figure out how to build a successful dungeon. - It was fun for me to figure out the traps and watch the dumb heroes fall into them and die. - I found the main plot surprisingly fun! It actually has a bit of hidden depth to it, with a theme of: Be Careful When You Fight Monsters Lest You Become One Yourself The Bad: - Like with that other Kalipso game Tropico, it does get repetitive after a while. The start of every level pretty much means doing the same thing again. They alleviate this somewhat by constantly introducing new things every new level, but it doesn't entirely solve this problem. - For combat, it was tough for me to figure out any kind of coherent strategy per se. I could tell that certain enemies should be attacked first (e.g. healers and area attackers), but otherwise didn't have enough information on the combat mechanics to possibly come up with a real strategy other than: build a big army. The Ugly: - I once encountered a bug where a dangerous tear in reality, which I was supposed to destroy, was inaccessible. This really ****. The bug fixed itself before it was too late, but for a little while there it looked like I was going to have to load from my save of 30 minutes ago. - There were a couple parts where I ended up having to load the game because the protagonist died. I wasn't paying attention for a few moments and she just died almost instantly. It was a bit frustrating to redo a whole previous sequence. A good tip would be to quick save with F5 fairly often to reduce the impact of this. - The UI for loading your game is a bit confusing. They seem to mix up the order. It can be hard to find the game you were last playing.

The Good: - It's a fun button-masher that is most fun played with friends (either couch co-op or online). It reminds me a lot of the original Double Dragon I played as a kid. It has interesting and varied boss fights. The Bad: - Can be frustrating at times against certain enemies, and can get repetitive. Perhaps best played in small doses. The Ugly: - It mocks saving-the-princess stereotypes by really pushing it to the most ridiculous limit. - There are poop jokes. - You might find it offensive or funny, YMMV

The Good: - The game is quite fun. - The tactical combat can be quite challenging, and interesting. - There are lots of places to see, characters to talk to, and moral dilemmas to consider. - The epilogue felt like a satisfying accumulation of my decisions along the way. - The story definitely fits well with the Pillars mythology and is a good sequel to the original game. - I got 80 hours of fun game play out of the game, and hadn't quite tapped all the game's potential. - Worth the money. I'd buy a sequel. The Bad: - Director Josh Sawyer said that sales of this game were low and he didn't know why. I can explain what the missing "je ne sais quoi" is from my perspective. While the game is fun (as stated above), the story is very fragmented. There are tons of side quests and factions to support, but the main storyline is pretty short and not well-developed at all. The game starts off well, with lots of richness in the story and characters, but that fragments into a ton of little side quests and things to keep you occupied. Don't get me wrong, those things are fun, but they don't add up to a story that feels really satisfying. There are plenty of hack & slash and MMO games that offer tons of diverting side quests. I think people play an Obsidian game for the story. Pillars of Eternity II did not deliver here. The ending is interesting, but getting there felt... meh. The Ugly: - two of the playable characters are cardboard cutouts--this is apparently due to the game having gotten insufficient funding from backers. Some of the characters are full of personality and have things to say at various points in the game, and have their own personal quest and epilogue, whereas there are a few that say virtually nothing and seem like ghosts. I would have preferred that the cardboard cutouts be removed entirely rather than haunting the game. - I didn't really like *any* of the factions presented. They were all unlikable in my opinion. At least, on the bright side, the game-makers gave me the option to go independently.

The Good: - it's a fun, and funny, simulator where you play the role of a tin-pot dictator. It gives you a bird's eye view of a tropical island, and you build buildings, one at a time, to create an economy, keep people happy, and manage the direction of your little island nation. - It was worth about 30 hours of fun play time. - I feel like the developers learned from Tropico 4, which was a bit repetitive, especially since you had to restart each mission from scratch. In Tropico 5, while you do restart from scratch occasionally, in general, the next mission starts again where you left off the time before last. The Bad: - you are continually shifting forward and backward in time, and from island to island. I was constantly getting confused (did I build building X? Where is it?). Fortunately, the game offers controls to answer those questions, you just have to root around all the options and you will find them eventually. - One big down side is that the budget information provided is nonsense. You only ever need to answer one question: how much surplus cash will I have per year? The game doesn't really provide this answer in a clear way, so you have to kind of intuit the answer. I think the developers could have done better on this point. - Also, I was constantly struggling to provide housing for the people. There were always homeless people no matter how much housing I built, and this felt a bit unsatisfying. The Ugly: - The scenarios are pretty zany, you may or may not like the sense of humour. - You might find the graphics and especially textures a bit low-resolution by 2020 standards. It can be hard to identify buildings sometimes due to poor texture quality (even when zoomed in).

This game is simply awful. The tutorials to learn how to play are super glitchy and fail constantly. The interface is unintuitive. It's really confusing. The first mission out is robbing the bank and 300 cops throwing themselves at you. You have to run past police snipers to throw your cash in a van and drive away while the cops sit around and wonder where you went. It's just AWFUL. Thank goodness I got this one as a freebie.

This game is a passable Diablo clone. It was fun to play with friends. The game is initially a bit off-putting because it seems like all you do is click on monsters. However, after putting a few hours into the game you gain a bit more variety in your abilities. This allows you to apply some tactics in the combat and it becomes more interesting.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The Good: - the best part of this game is the couch co-op. I was able to play this game with my casual gamer SO and we really enjoyed ourselves. - This game is like playing a really smooth, well-designed board game. - It has 3 main modes: an overland mode where you move across and discover an isometric map, JRPG-style battles, and linear dungeon crawls. The 3 modes nicely dovetail into each other, leading to interesting strategic choices and a surprisingly deep game in terms of mechanics, tactics, and strategy. - The game's difficulty is really well-balanced. Along with the fact that save-scumming is very difficult (you can go back at most 1 turn), it can make the game a real nail-biter to play! I found myself frequently yelling obscenities at the monsters because it was so intense! - The game's random mechanic (based on "slots" or 1d100 die rolls, basically) is very subtle, and it took me many hours of game play to fully realize its implications. The Bad: - if you're looking for fun story or whatnot, this game doesn't have anything but the most simplistic plot. This isn't a bad thing if you know to expect that, but obviously the game would be even better with an engaging story. - The character special abilities and the combat status effects are very poorly explained in the in-game documentation, and I had to refer to the Wiki a lot. The Ugly: - The character classes are really weird and it can take a while to grasp how to build items for them. - There's a Hobo class! ... !!!!