naroom

I wanted a new Advance Wars game. I got something better. I'll focus this review on just one of the changes that make Wargroove the best Advance Wars. Having the CO on the field is brilliant. In Advance Wars, you had to capture the HQ to win, which led to drawn-out fights where you had to kill every last unit that could stand on it. With Wargroove, if you're winning, you can finish the match right away by gunning for their CO. The CO is powerful enough to add a risk / reward aspect, too. You're not gonna bury your CO deep in the backlines like a king in chess. Your CO's unique power influences all your choices. Your units synergize with their CO - like Emeric's mages or Greenfinger's artillery. So each CO is going to do well with a different army composition. And that's just scratching the surface; the game's incredible in so many other ways.

This is the sequel that La-Mulana deserved. The puzzles and traps were just perfect. Played it blind, took 40+ pages of notes, finished in about 100 hours. There's an absurd amount of content here. And there's no grinding; it took that long because it's a big, deep game. It's a huge improvement over La-Mulana 1. When you solve a riddle here, the game gives good feedback about what happened where, so you know what to do. The puzzles are actually fair, and some of the harder ones have multiple clues. The music is excellent, the art is a lot better, the engine is vastly improved. There were some bugs at launch, but they got patched out in the first few weeks, along with difficulty tweaks.

This game is the best in the series, and a fantastic turn-based strategy game. And the soundtrack is incredible! This should have been the music to Lord of the Rings :)

This is a game I want to like the art's good, the sound's good, but nothing can help the horrible core mechanic. You click on things on the ground, and pick them up. For hours. It's incredibly dull. Once in a while, you'll run into a horrible monster that instakills you. Then you start all over. Because the core mechanic is so bad, you can't help but notice the other flaws that pop up all over the place. Why doesn't the game just pause while I read the crafting recipes? How come when I chop apart a gold vein, the gold sometimes gets hidden under a worthless flint? When I cut down a tree, why do the logs always land "behind" another tree, so I have to rotate the screen or cut down the other tree to get them? When I'm running away from a horrible monster, why does my character always try to stop and cut down trees instead? etc. etc. These minor frustrations bring down an already poor game to being a terrible game. Overhyped, overpriced.

I had a lot of fun with this one. Figuring out how the different mechanics in the game was neat, and the game mechanics themselves are very interesting. There are some interesting choices to be had here. And, there's a lot going on in every match. Still, there are a lot of small issues that add up to the game not realizing its full potential. The game really throws you in the deep end when you start out. I lost for four hours straight against the easiest AI while I learned to play, and I've played a whole lot of tower defense games before. So it's not very friendly to new players. As you get more experienced in the game, however, it's not your skill that starts to hold you back, it's the interface. Moving units around in the queue is awkward, and the queue itself is very unresponsive. To load up a Trojan horse, I typically have to click on the horse icon 4 or 5 times to get it to respond. This is inexcusable in a competitive game. I absolutely love the tower wars mechanics, and it's a lot of fun to play. But ultimately, there are too many flaws for this to be a good game.

This was a game experience that was unlike anything I've ever had. It has a very human story that haunted me afterwards. I couldn't stop thinking about the game when I'd finished it. This game is a work of art. I recommend you read as little as possible about this game before playing it. It's very easy to read something that would spoil the experience of the game. After playing it, though, I recommend reading some of the analyses of the game that various bloggers have posted. This game has an emotional depth that's just unheard of, and it's difficult to understand the whole thing on one play-through. So, save your reading about the game until after you've played it.

We've had a renaissance of amazing platformers in recent years: Spelunky, Terraria, Braid, Cave Story, and so on. Steamworld: Dig is nowhere near these games. While it borrows mechanics from many other platformers, the whole is far less than the sum of its parts. The game is cluttered with unnecessary abilities, a very repetitive environment (it's just one big mineshaft...), and frustrating inconsistent mechanics (TNT barrels!) As if the digging didn't feel repetitive enough, the game limits your supply of "light", a resource that serves no other purpose than to make you walk all the way back to town periodically. It's really unfair to compare this to the pantheon of top-notch platformers, as so many reviewers have. It's nowhere near that level. It's a passable game on its own, but man, there's way better games out there. If you're looking to waste a few hours, you could do worse than Steamworld: Dig. But you could do a lot better, too.

I love hard platformers with upgradey/RPG elements Zelda 2, the Castlevania series, Megaman, Terraria, and so on. And I love roguelikes. This game is a great synthesis of all those. It takes many of the best features of a wide spectrum of games, puts them together, and adds its own spin. Awesome. It's really fun... for a while. BUT. Once you get over the initial learning curve finding out what all the items and classes do, and how each enemy type moves and attacks there's nothing more to the game than a repetitive, infinite grind. I don't play MMOs. This started out as a roguelike platformer/RPG (yay!) and turned into a grindy Korean-style MMO. Blehhh.