Having had my eye on the original version for quite some time, I didn't waste any time in picking this up in picking this game up when it came to GOG, and I can say with certainty that this was the right choice. Ara Fell is a quality RPG; the games honestly looks gorgeous through and through, the writing is light-hearted but has more than enough depth to keep you interested, combat is fun and can be genuinely challenging while never getting grindy, and all around it's a well designed game. It does bare more resemblance to the JRPGs it is designed to homage rather than WRPGs, but for those of you who aren't bothered by this, this is well worth the asking price.
Don't let the fact that this is still in devlopment fool you at all; Low Magic Age is not only one of the best translations of D&D to a video game format that I've ever seen, but is also a tremendous amount of fun. The Arena mode in itself is worth getting the game for, offering new and interesting challenges as you improve and customize your party; the Adventure mode, in contrast, offers an experience much akin to Mount & Blade or Battle Brothers, taking on quests and exploring interesting locations. Highly, highly recommended.
An excellent example of how to make a sim game as minimalist as possible, Kingdom is a lovely little game with an amazing amount of polish and depth. Placing you in the role of a solitary monarch with a crown, a horse, and an empty bag of coin, you are tasked with constructing a, well, kingdom. You hire people, assign them to jobs (which is done by purchasing tools form in-game merchants), build walls and sentry towers and other buildings, collect coin from your subjects to further fund your efforts, and cower in fear as darkness falls and various unthinkable monstrosities hunt you down and try to kill you. A gorgeous game all around with really, really good pixel graphics and lovely music, the only significant flaw worth nothing is the rather nasty difficult curve, which starts off gentle and then just ramps up out of nowhere.
A title basically tailor-made for the criminal mastermind in us all, The Last Federation is an exceptionally good 4x game with a huge amount of potential, only hampered by a few unfortunate problems. Casting the player as the last member of an alien race known as the Hydrals, The Last Federation tasks the player with somehow forming a stable and long-lasting....well, Federation by any means, fair or foul. Gameplay is much as you would expect; you send your character from location to location and species to species, meet with the various species you come across, and either help them out in various ways, or do your absolute best to screw them over. What makes TLF shine in this regard is the sheer number of choices you have. Want to help defend this planet against invasion? You can do that! Want to give this species space-faring technology? You can do that! Want to sell prisoners as slaves on the black market, assassinate government officials, or trick species into declaring war against one another? You can do that! For all of that, there are still a number of areas where the game needs a bit of improvement. Combat can be somewhat repetitive, the main star map can experience significant lag at times, and the game takes a while to really get going and open up all options to you. For all of that, however, I highly recommend this game; it has an enormous amount to offer, and is a truly engaging experience.
Contrary to what you might expect from the retro graphical style and the description that refers to it as a "rogue-LITE", Rogue Legacy is, well, a damned fun game that holds genuine potential. The story, as you might expect, is a very barebones one, "Go into this spooky castle and find the cure for your father's ailment", and needless to say, is not really the focus of the game. Of course, that's probably not why you came to play this game. Gameplay, simply put, is superb; the controls are nice and fluid, there is a huge amount of variation from playthrough to playthrough thanks to the randomly-generated castles, and the challenge level is high enough that you genuinely have to work at it in order to succeed. The main gimmick of the game, that of a lineage of heroes going after one another in each playthrough, is actually well-done and adds genuine depth to the overall game. Because each new generation's heroes have their own distinct traits, advantages and disadvantages, all of which can seriously affect how said hero is played, it requires the player to not only pick their next character carefully, but also consider how best to modify their own methods to best use them. In the end, I wholeheartedly recommend this game, and implore anyone with some free time to try it out.
