The game is quite similar to Desktop Dungeons. You click and uncover traps and monsters in a dungeon level. Click on monsters repeatedly to exchange blows. Gather XP to level up and get (slightly) stronger. Upon death you salvage the gold to buy some lasting upgrades. The good: 1. Pixel art graphics, if you like them. 2. Variety: there are many monsters, with multiple traits. The "[adjective] [equipment] of [noun]" random item generator is interesting and you can score some pretty sweet gear. The bad: 1. UI is inconsistent. In my case it was infuriating at times. Right clicking on stuff TYPICALLY shows you a description...BUT not in the shop window, where it just sells your gear without confirmation, for completely laughable price and with NO chance of recovery - the item vanishes into thin air, no chance of buying it back! More on the right-button-description: right click on a skill button, read a description, click OK - you are good...BUT! Right-click on the "worship" button...read the description...click OK...howl in anger as the game teleports you to another level of the dungeon, forfeiting your hearts and skipping all the other good stuff on the level...AND giving you some kind of drawback for using up the worship function. I got burned more than once :/ 2. What happens and why is pretty obscure. I don't ask for randomly generated Minesweeper levels to make any kind of sense, but even the text of choice encounters is puzzling. I met an elf, he had a fish, I cast a spell for the fish, I lost 100 gold. Wait, what? Why did this happen? Or: you find something weird and gruesome, pick one of the 6 colors. You picked yellow, that color doesn't do anything, bye. It's confusing and not satisfying at all. 3. For a "roguelike" that admittedly has some breadth it leaves you with no options but to die quite often. In real roguelikes you can run away, go back, close the door behind you. Even in rogue-lite Spelunky you have your bombs and ropes. Here you die. It was meh.
The game takes a tried & true basic tactical squad simulator and then enhances it by adding a dimension of "show" - you do flashy moves that bring more audience; worry about advertising and salaries; craft your team's suits and props from cardboard and duct tape :). They managed to do it well - the two worlds (tactical RPG and "tv series tycoon") blend nicely and the mechanics work as expected. There is some light humor about your squad talking in and out of character and some team dynamics - nothing that would leave you rolling on the floor, but it fits with the general theme. I had really good fun with it - the game is colorful, the music alternates between classic sentai soundtrack and peppy chiptunes, the episodes are about as varied as the classic TV shows they try to emulate - defend a science lab, rescue a hostage, smash some goons and defeat a boss. Oh, and sometimes the enemy GROOOOWS and you get to jump in a giant mecha! Worth the money definitely, for the entertainment I had :)
The other reviews say it loud enough - it's good, it's replayable, it's polished. The only beef I have with it is that all the HID gamepads I have are useless in it - it's either X360 or bust. Spelunky SD is better in that aspect.
You can jump around for a bit, but after a while it's not gonna get more entertaining. There are many unlocks, but they don't bring you as much joy as the ones in e.g. Crimsonland. To be honest, I had better fun with some of the Nerdook online flash games, so I consider this purchase a way of supporting the developer :)
This is great for LAN parties (yes, people still do them) or for after-the-work relax. You can just fire up the game, start the Instant Action bot mode and grab a couple of flags or conquer some alien obstacle course. The maps are plentiful and varied, the game modes are VERY entertaining (e.g. Invasion for a cooperative Left 4 Skaarj experience), the bots are competent and the graphics are crisp and colorful. Where UT99 was minimalistic and blocky, this one adds more details, more maps and more fun overall. Seven stars out of five.
I spent many hours on this one (in 2016). The races are diverse, the tech tree is interesting (if not very logical sometimes from a non-sci-fi point of view), there are many options for development. After you get fat in a couple of cities, you don't automatically get to flood everyone, because still you need to pay upkeeps and manage economy. I had fun :). Need to try the multi now :)
I really like the role you are assigned in NEO Scavenger: you are just an ordinary human in a dangerous place, with no posessions, no weapons, no magic to save your life. Sneaking through the game world puts you in alert mode, finding a plastic bag feels good and discovering a moderately worn backpack can really make your day. The setting is built more on mystery than hordes of zombies, and that's nice too. What I didn't like is that you don't really grow in power and there is always the treat of a single enemy appearing close, hitting you once or twice and killing you on the spot before you really get a chance to react, even run. Most roguelikes I enjoyed with their permadeath allowed me to equip up, gain skills and health points and cling ever longer to dear life as I progressed. Here you can only find some unreliable equipment, so it's very easy to get killed even after hours of play to the same enemies that you encounter in the first minutes. Then it's back to square one. Nice as an excercise in "it will be really hard to survive in the post-apocalyptic world", but less entertaining in a game.
I should probably mention the game is dark, both visually and thematically. Getting the "Light" spell helped a bit, but still - sometimes it's hard to see until an item was highlighted by cursor. The other problem I had with this game is the randomness of NPC shops - if you close and reopen them, every single item is re-rolled (for, like, a hundred items), so instead of getting a cool find every couple of quests it becomes a decision of how long are you going to stand there, closing the conversation screen and reopening it again, in hope of rolling something better than your current outfit. So that was the bad. And the good? A lot: the theme is nicely conveyed, you get long write-ups in every item and spell description, if you are inclined to read game lore. There is character progress (albeit kind of slow/grindy) and you are going to learn many new abilities - after gaining a couple of levels, you get an edge on those bats ;). There are many quests, where sometimes you get the choice of going the easy route or digging deeper and stepping on some toes. They tend to be long, too, and have some substance - definitely not the filler "pass a message here, kill 10 bears there" kind. The inventory management is OK (got two pages side-by-side if you are a sorting freak and spend a lot of time arranging your gemstones by color etc. ;)). To sum up, if you like dark, slashy and grindy, you will get a kick from it. If you look for a game where it's easy to see where the walls and the doors are, pick something brighter and more colorful :)
Firstly: the game is fun :). Other than that, there's only so much strategic depth. At one point the battles even seemed a bit alike - fortunately, the game started throwing more complicated challenges later on (the desert required a bit of thinking). It's good if you don't want to care about building your kingdom's economy or make too many hard choices about recruiting monsters (you have all your recruited troops at disposal, choosing up to a fixed "star value" total between battles as your line-up). In my opinion the pros are: works out of the box, looks cute, can be started and closed in a few minutes after one battle, is interesting enough to warrant to two play-throughs (with differents spell sets and units used). Buy it if you want quick fun for a couple of days, something to switch to at work or if you want to introduce a younger/less experienced gamer to turn-based strategy. Don't buy if you want multi-level tech trees, complicated unit interactions, long spellbooks and uncovering complexity over weeks of gameplay.
Got this game randomly at the Mutator promo; ended up playing this instead of the big titles I bought purposely ;). Imagine a simple zeldish 2D Sokoban++ puzzler, then add *really* cute characters and overworld, inane story and non sequitur comments about the enemies and some...identity issues of the protagonists. I spent two really fun evenings wandering around the world, solving the puzzles and looking into every nook and cranny for all the hidden cards and nonsense pop-up text (then two more frustrating evenings completing the optional Master Cave: trying, retrying, not understanding what I'm expected to do, failing to execute a sequence fast enough, muttering curses, caving in and looking for walkthrough...). I'm definitely keeping this one for the kids ;). Awesome for gamepad, couch and a big screen. So glad the GOG RNG selected this for my blind game - I could have missed a really fun experience! P.S.: This should go without saying, but the game just plain works: no bugs, no slowdowns (on a low-end Intel NUC with integrated gfx), resolution configurable, input configurable. Issues in these areas can suck a lot of joy from playing, so I'm glad there were none.
