Home Quest is an interesting idle game where you build up villages, assign jobs to your villagers, raise an army and fight invaders while discovering new technologies, upgrades and resources. That sense of discovery brought me all the way to the end of the game and while I sometimes felt that you just couldn’t do anything and needed to wait with the game closed for a while - especially in the early game - at the end I was fully enjoying all the different systems you could optimize to beat the challenges the game threw your way. So much so that I bought the gold edition to support it! You should check it out if you enjoy idle games.
Gunhouse is a very strange mix of tower defense and puzzle game about matching blocks and using special weapons and abilities to protect your house from wave after wave of strange and unique enemies. With a very interesting visual style, great music and solid mechanics, I had a good time with this game, even if the core of the puzzle system felt a bit hard to grapple with for a big chunk of my time with it and the variety of weapons and powers left me more perplexed than anything else. I finished this one, so you know it’s at least up there in my book!
Shattered Planet is a neat roguelike about exploring procedurally generated planets slowly succombing to a dark plague while fighting enemies, collecting loot and trying to survive while unlocking - and upgrading - new characters, discovering enemies, gear and events. I had a good time with it! I kinda wish it did more than what it does, but what is there is fun, addictive and still fun to play, even though it was released in 2014.
Iconoclasts is a delightful metroidvania that reminded me of a bunch of neat feelings plucked from other games combined together to create this stylish and interesting adventure platformer. Going around with your giant wrench, you fight enemies, solve puzzles and collect things while advancing a riveting story with pretty interesting characters and foes to defeat. I had a good time with it! I found some of the puzzles a bit fiddly and the upgrade system to be too thin, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Rebel Inc is the spiritual successor to Plague Inc, a game about infecting the whole world with a deadly virus. In this version of the strategy genre, you have to manage a region of the world in turmoil after a war and get to 100% stability in order to win. To do so, you have a wide range of upgrades you can buy and tactics to deploy, especially when insurgents decide to come into play and require you to act militarily as well. I had an okay time with this game but ultimately found it was too much of a numeric mess with so much data that I just couldn’t process it all and had to make uninformed decisions, which never feels great.
Knighthood is a mobile RPG with a great look, fairly simple but engaging mechanics and way too many layers of micro-transactions, currencies and other cruft layered on it. You play a ‘Rage Knight’ fighting your way through a land of monsters, collecting gear, leveling up, summoning powerful heroes and trying to keep track of all the activities you can do. I had a nice time with it (never hit a wall where I needed to spend currency) and would’ve played more, but ultimately lost interest.
Action RPGs are my favorite kind of games. I could play them forever if unstopped. I have over 3000 hours easily in ‘recent’ ARPGs and I’m always willing to try new ones. When I heard about Wolcen, I really wanted to dive in, but reports of bugs, weird balance issues and other wonkiness kept me at bay… for about a week. After 45 hours I can safely report that Wolcen needs some more work before it gets to a point where I could easily recommend it to everyone, but they clearly had a running start, being inspired by other ARPGs as it is while making interesting design decisions on their own, so they’ll probably get there. Regardless, I still had a good time with it!
Graveyard Keeper is a neat twist on the farming simulator genre where instead of a proper farm - although you can have a small one - you run a graveyard. Filled with way too many things to do as these games are, I had a really good time with it, up to the point where the volume of systems stacking on top of each other came crashing down on my impatience to complete the next tasks I would need to progress through the story. If you have infinite time and love slowly going through systems, I highly recommend Graveyard Keeper.
Moon Hunters is a neat story-focused roguelike action RPG where you investigate the mysterious disappearance of the moon, potentially with three of your friends, by battling monsters, buying upgrades and making decisions by talking to NPCs and increasing certain traits that allow you different actions later on. The core of the game is fairly short - I could finish most runs in an hour - but I kinda wish it could’ve went by quicker. The good bits were really everything related to NPC interactions - and the upgrades and RPG mechanics were quite nice as well - but the battle and exploration of the world was a bit tedious (and made up the bulk of the game, so it kinda became a problem after a while).
Pokemon Rumble Rush is a neat little action RPG where you explore different islands with different sets of Pokemon in order to meet the requirements to get to the next fight and win it in a set time. Your critter mostly moves on its own, but you can dodge and attack by tapping the screen and you get special moves and gear that you can upgrade after a while. I had a good time with it, although it was pretty grindy after a while and I didn’t have much time or patience for that. The upgrade system was a bit meaningless as well, but it’s probably because I couldn’t get too much of the grind.
I have to admit I’m a bit unsure about this review; Twilight Struggle is a board game released in 2005 based around the cold war, but I’ve never played that game. On the other hand, I found this computer version quite difficult to understand and even if after a while I kinda got into it, I’m a bit perplexed how to go about it. Would it be fair for me to review the board game part of this steam product? Should I only review the ‘videogame’ part? Is that even possible? If I were to review Monopoly on the Wii, do I only talk about wiimote actions or do I go about explaining what I like and don’t like about Monopoly itself? I think I’ll talk about the board game ‘Twilight Struggle’ but also the video game. It’s not bad! Not my cup of tea (I’m not a fan of competitive games) but a real neat one regardless!
Holedown is a neat little arcade game on iOS where you throw balls to break blocks and reach the core of various celestial bodies. Balls rebound on blocks and destroy them by progressively hitting them. You have a limited number of shots and you get more balls per shot - up to a maximum - by bouncing around. Each time you make a shot, the level shifts upwards and if it ever reaches the top, you lose. If you feel like if you’ve heard of games like this one before, you’re right, however, this one is solely premium and doesn’t have any microtransactions. I had a few frustrations with it, but otherwise enjoyed this one.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed reminds me much of Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing in many ways. You race against other colorful characters - of dubious origins, seriously this is a weird roster - in tracks inspired by a bunch of SEGA games using randomly shuffling power-ups to hinder your opponents or get ahead yourself. At specific points in tracks, your kart will transform into a boat or a plane, changing the controls and physics a bit. I enjoyed my time with this game even if I found it way too hard on ‘normal’ difficulty and that some of the stuff around the core gameplay was clunky.
Pathfinder Adventures is a card and dice based RPG where you control a party of adventurers going through a few quests in order to find loot and improve their stats and skills. To complete challenges you use cards and skills that give bonuses to your checks in order to match specific challenges. You lose if you run out of time and characters can die if their decks run out. I had fun with it even if the dice-based aspects of the game made it very random at times and I had some difficulties wrapping my brain around the concept of losing cards forever in a card game where your rewards are cards. Oh and there are also a bunch of free-to-play mechanics snuck in there that rubbed me the wrong way.
Despite it’s extremely generic name, Crafting Idle Clicker is an okay idle game that caught my attention for an okay time. At its base, CIC is an idle game where you build nodes that produce resources which are then used to craft other resources or end products. You sell these things to buy more expensive nodes, which are in turn worth more money. You keep doing that while resetting your workshop to gain more levels, money multipliers and blueprints. It’s a fine idea for an idle game but after the luster of trying to optimize profits and production went off, there wasn’t much more in there to keep my attention.
I was a big player of the original Maple Story, so when I learned that Maple Story 2 was coming to our shores, I thought I would take a break in my excellent Wolfenstein playthrough to take a look at this sequel long in the making. My verdict is that it’s a fine game released at the wrong time in my life. I don’t have the countless hours to sink into a MMO like this one, even if it seems real good for the time I’ve spent with it! I would ultimately like to spend more time with Maple Story 2 because it hits all the beats of a f2p game while having new ideas.
Cuphead is a neat little platformer featuring creative and colorful boss fights that reminds me of Contra and other run-and-gun games of old. You go through a world map - that looks like the one in Commander Keen 4: Keen Dreams - and fight through stages and bosses, getting coins and buying powerups, getting new weapons and uncovering special moves in order to save your soul from the devil. I've played through most of the game in co-op, and even if it became a bit frustrating because of the difficulty, I would still recommend it. Just know what you're getting into!
Dawn Of Crafting is an interesting game where you craft your way through a tech tree by using various tools and combining elements to create different recipes. You need energy to do pretty much everything, so you have to gather food and craft it into better food items. It's a neat little game that I would've played way more than I did if it had been a full paid product and not a free to play game with hooks to make you spend money into figuring out what you need to do to progress through the main quest. It's a bit grindy but otherwise it was really fun!
Taps To Riches is a neat little idle game where you buy businesses and tap on houses in order to generate money (in order to buy more businesses and upgrades in order to generate more money) filled with subsystems that make it interesting to come back to the game every day. Even without spending a single cent, I had fun with TTR and while all systems didn't work perfectly for me, I still wasted a few days tapping along.
Livelock is a neat Action RPG set in a destroyed world where you play one of three robots with a small range of skills and weapons in order to overthrow evil robots at the order of an AI overlord. I had fun with it, going through the whole thing almost with each class. I didn't try to go for high scores or find every collectible, but I still had a good time shooting tons of robots regardless.