The biggest part of the game is actually between the levels - buying items in the shop. During the gameplay you only aim the skills, while the tower keeps on shooting randomly. If more than one enemy gets to your tower, you start losing HP at a very fast rate - often this is unrecoverable. And you can't do much, if the cooldown on your skill still has a few seconds to go. You just watch the HP display go 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-GAME OVER! Graphics are very basic (something between Gravatar identicon and game-icons.net), and sound is nothing remarkable. The low variety of enemies is also a problem. It's just circles coming at you, so it's hard to prioritize. Every now and then there's an orange circle, so that's something to break the monotony, but it only happens once or twice per level. And coming back to the shop...many of the generated "items" feel samey. They will give you +5% to something and -2% to something else, or another combination that technically makes the numbers go up...in the most basic sense. Naming those "artifacts" is slightly insulting to game-altering effects of real roguelikes, like The Platinum Yendorian Express Card, or ring of the master cat.
Imagine you are in a parallel dimensions, where Earth is almost the same, but game developers made some different choices, leading to "FTL: Faster Than Light" utilizing a 3D engine underneath, and completely different approach to battles ;) BTW, this is a review for the "Last Orders" - which added a lot of content, which I greatly appreciated. OK, so let's get the obvious out of the way - it is a rogue-FTL-lite. So, what's different? What's good? Not great: * Exploring the planets is very random. Yes, there's a a minigame in there: you need to have multiple officers with different specializations, and then by analyzing their skills and contributions to the mission you can buy from the broker the skills you are missing to get awesome loot and acceptable survival rates. But, after you spend a minute figuring this out, it's just tapping space to go "next", "next". Honestly I almost never found it worthwile to bail early - maybe once I could, and I regretted that I didn't while my squad was unhurt. What could have helped would be splitting the expertise skill into two, "Broker contacts" and "Medevac" - then you could invest in one or the other. THEN AGAIN: FTL didn't even have this layer, so this is something extra. Up to you, or about the same: * The theme is a bit darker, more serious. * Cartoony graphics of FTL are replaced by "hint of 3D" futuristic blue glow. I like both. But It's true that the bright colors of FTL sometimes allowed for quicker differentiation of different races/techs. * The travelling part is totes ripped off, including: "quest marker added to next sector", "when sector alert overtakes you, you get an extra hard fight", and "gather fuel when you ran out". Nice: * Space battles! I liked the ship management of FTL. Here you also have active pause, but scale is bigger. I cringed about the rock/paper/scissors, but then, a sector or two in...I discovered synergies! Aurora + nano drone! Protector + "10 dmg per shield bubble popped" tech! It works!
It's cute and snappy enough - in adventure mode, you choose 1 of 3 slightly different (gameplay-wise) characters, then you land on a basic "overworld" list of levels to go through. In the level you need to be quick, put bombs in the right places, and sometimes push some blocks together to enable you to chain explosions or squeeze through when bombs are disabled. No big penalties for stepping on your own bomb or anything. The energy reminds me of arcade titles like Puzzled and similar from NeoGeo, but more forgiving (because it's not trying to extract coins from you). There are also other modes (time attack, infinite, versus), if you want more challenge. Hey, Developers! Test your game in more resolutions, including widescreen! In 3440x1440 fullscreen some UI elements are in the wrong place ("choose character" text obscures character name, the "Back" button is hidden under the bottom panel etc.). Nothing game-breaking, but definitely annoying.
...especially the ones that feature a lot of trading, deal-making, and role-playing. On the other hand, there's a lot of boardgames which you play to score clever combos, make brilliant plays and see your points go up, up, UP! Chambers of Devious Design is the latter - it's got interacting mechanics and it thrives on numbers, which would be slightly tedious to crunch in a pen-and-paper form. I don't like when a strategic board game slows down due to calculations required. I even use a tally counter for Kingdomino ;) Halfway into the campaign, it's been a pleasant romp, presenting multiple game modes and victory conditions. The characters are a bit silly, but that's OK. A game can last from a few minutes up to ~half an hour. The "Custom Game" format seems to let you play with up to 4 humans (or AIs added into the mix, your choice) - nice for an alternative to a physical boardgame, while still seating at the same table and talking. Solo mode is also present, and you can either set some conditions, or choose "Zen". I'd say it's not the most strategically-heavy game ever, and the luck of the draw can totes play into your options in a given turn. On the other hand, if you use the abilities and perks to your advantage, you can deal with the input randomness and rearrange the board quite a bit. Performance was fine on an integrated-graphics AMD CPU (on highest resolution available in settings - 25x16, if I recall correctly), no bugs encountered (neither game-crashing nor just pesky), the UI was readable. The music is inoffensive, there's no real voice acting (it definitely shows that this is a work of a single developer - but the few graphics are chosen well), and I wish there was an easier way to drag the map around with mouse (but the WASD is...fine, I guess I'm just spoiled). Overall: does what it's supposed to do, works fine, provides hours of entertainment for the price of a movie theather ticket. Good job, Redbeak - I support these kinds of indie games :)
It scratches the same itch as completing a puzzle - you look around, try to match against the pattern, move forward when you found the spot. The art style is pleasant, there are a few mysteries hidden around the castle, and interaction with cats is pleasant. This was my first "hidden-object" game - I avoided them before, being more into roguelikes and such, but I found this game to be very enjoyable - for the few hours it lasts. I was a bit afraid I'd be bored after the first couple of stages, but no. They kept changing dimensions, colors, and objects. The additional items, secrets, and hidden passages were all perfect. Especially with the quality-of-life unlockables, which meant you never got stuck for long. Great for playing with a cup of hot tea in the other hand.
The game has its own idea of how a character in an RPG should be defined. Two hours in, I still had no idea what "Cuteness' does. You will not find "Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Inteligence. Wisdom, Charisma" in here - nor SPECIAL. The combats are based on quick-time events. It's...less than great, especially since the game doesn't want to drop an info-dump on you - so the exact meanings of "block" or "overcast" are not clear in the beginning. There's a story, and the soundtrack is nice. But the mechanics will confuse you. Oh, and don't expect a grind to improve your stats. There are fixed events in the story. No tall grass to wander in.
This game is super annoying. Bump into anything, and you have to restart the level. Carmageddon and 1nsane let you right your car up - but Omnibus is too primitive for this. Hit something, lose all level progress, restart. That's the gameplay loop. No interesting challenges, no goals, just bump, flip your bus, fail, repeat. I don't like this game.
You are (slowly) building an army of monsters to fight wandering heroes, by catering to their needs as tenants of your apartment complex. Honestly, I didn't even thing of this game as "tower defense" before reading the reviews ;) It's a really nice look at Japanese reality of apartment rentals - with all the furnishings you might see in anime. There is definitely an unique style there, unlike your typical Western tycoon games. Kind of cute, kind of weird. My main issue is with controls during battle - it's always very confusing and hard to issue orders to your characters, even when trying to make use of the different selection modes. Maybe the game is lacking some additional keyboard shortcuts, or an active pause mode, or at least a 1/2 speed mode... In the battle, being a second late means your tenant dies, which - while not THAT serious - is annoying, as you might have invested quite some time and money into fulfilling their needs. Oh, and moving out children is a pain. I expected them to just decide to have their own apartment, but nooooo...
It's an OK game - everything works fine, and you can jump and shoot and unlock a few special abilities on the way. It's nice to collect additional health, as the bosses are fairly strong. After you upgrade main gun with all the options, you can just spam it at every enemy, except for the driller one (which needs to hit a wall to be vulnerable at all). It just doesn't shine in any aspect. The limited colors make the environment quite boring after a while (I found myself wishing for orange lava and green frogs), there aren't really any choices to make (you always go forward, only backtrack a few times to pick up hidden palettes or health), music is nothing special. And the ending was unsatisfying. Some rescuer you are, Kiki. From Devolver games, I think I much prefered Downwell.
Very enjoyable! It definitely has traits of XNA game, from the menus and looks, to how it loves XBox controller. Probably closer to Escape Goat than Spelunky. You help poor Shuggy clean up his castle, filled with spike traps, animated items, and inexplicably large insects. Classics, but done very well. Doesn't overwhelm you at any point, you always get no more than one special ability (mixed with special level style, it creates a few dozen combinations). You can choose your own path, don't have to complete everything to win the game. Boss fights are doable, and each one is different. It's not just memorizing a sequence and inserting attacks (as Shuggy doesn't really have an attack mode). Cute art style, and the comic strips were a great addition! Made me actually care for a fairly undefined protagonist ;) Music is...kinda weird? Mixes a lot of different styles? But in the end it doesn't get in the way. Plays GREAT in short bursts - each level is self-contained (typically screen-sized, sometimes larger) and saves progress afterwards. Perfect for a coffee break. There was one tiny bug - related to growth. It's sometimes possible to get stuck in tight geometry in a level featuring growing. It happened to me once, I lost about...15 seconds of progress ;), and after restarting level I was cautious not to do it again (easily avoidable). Game has some extras outside main "campaign". I had great time playing this!
