There simply is nothing bad you can say about this game. It's a fantasy western point & click with lovable characters, a LOT of scenes and riddles and a lot of love put in. The game features multiple paths and endings, so if you want to see everything and get all achievements you have to play it way more than once. I wholeheartedly recommend this game for any adventure enthusiast.
The game starts with a nice premise but exploring the x-th big level just to deactivate some towers is really not very engaging. I think I will drop that game even though I already put 3,5 hrs into it. Cash in game also has almost no meaning as soon as you have the three weapons you want with the best accessoires. Would be nice if one could spend money on more than that.
The pictures looked quite promising, a minimalistic action game with some roguelike elements, unfortunately the resulting game is quite boring in its current state. During the waves you have only 3 buttons to press to fire the weapon/skill of your choice (only if you actually have 3 weapons/skills equipped). Each killed enemy blob gives you a little bit of money that you can spend for some upgrades between the waves. In the beginning the weapon timers are so long that it gets quite boring waiting 5 seconds just to have another shot, while the tower itself has some kind of automatic gun that fires with a faster rate. In later stages it's hard to identify where to actually shoot your weapons because everything is moving and everything looks (almost) the same. There's a lot of stats for the players tower that can be optimized by buying upgrades (that are sometimes partial downgrades) but the amount of different stats also makes it harder to actually understand the impact of each of them.
Even though the combat system is a bit clunky, the game itself is a hidden gem. Played it about 2 years ago in a halloween stream. The story telling and atmosphere is great and even the pixel graphics aged pretty well.
(Played the game via GamePass) No matter what other reviewers may say, this is not a myst-like. It's a shooter that makes you think it's a myst like for the first 2-3 hours. Unfortunately the shooting part is done so poorly that it destroys the whole atmosphere and fun with that game for me. If you like Giger-like settings and can stand that there is basically no story or any kind of explanation this may be a game for you.
Mars Horizon tells the story of your space agency from the very beginnings until man first lands a crewed mission on mars. It's a mixture of Space Agency management simulation and puzzle game. In the management part you have to chose what rocket parts, buildings or missions to research, what buildings to add to your space center and what missions to plan (by deciding on the composition of your rocket and payload, the contractor who may support building it and additional parts for your rocket - that have impact on the various stage of it's flight). You're always competing against the other space agencies that long to reach certain milestones (e.g. first animal in space, moon landing, deep space probes ...) as the first one. Being fast gives you more support and therefore more funding but also raises the risks of critical failures. In the puzzle part (during the missions) you have to create specific amounts of science and navigation points by chosing what operations to perform in a limited amount of turns, always keeping your payloads energy levels (and later in the game drift, radiation and heat) in mind. Unfortunately both of the games parts get repetitive very fast and therefore the game changes from an interesting race to mars to a tedious clicking through the same screens over and over. A big plus is the in game wiki that tells you the real life story behind the stages you're currently playing in game often with well presented pictures and sometimes other media (e.g. first signals of sputnik as audio). The missions are presented with short 3D sequences showing the current stage of your mission (in the milestone missions there are even some more sequences showing you the progress of your current mission). All in all it's a nice but flawed space game depicting a good amount of space flight history.
A typical point and click adventure game, you would think. But while the gameplay loops are actually pretty classic p&c with emphasis on dialogues and clever combining information and items you found to solve the different cases. The twist that comes into play is, that you actually can fail at solving your cases and still progress through the game. This may not lead you to the best possible ending, but you will still get your own story. The solutions aren't that hard to find, so that solving the crimes "the right way" shouldn't be a big problem as long as you listen to everyone and talk to everyone.
