In this game you are playing a waiter serving food. Key is to remember what the customers wanted and serve it in time. While you advance in the well-designed levels the game introduces some more mechanics. There is basically only one action button and when you are close to something, you can trigger the action. It takes a moment to perform. The action can be to pet the dog or to serve a meal or to pick up cash. Some mechanics are not really clear right away, e.g. that customers also get mad if they cannot pay in time. Or what effect it has when they sleep. But I have no problem with figuring that out. However I have a problem with the controls. I guess this is a smartphone port. You control the waiter with the mouse by pointing and clicking where it should go. There is pathfinding involved, so you automatically avoid obstacles. The problem is, this control stops to work if you are too far away from your character by pathfinding (so basically the pathfinding does only x meters, and if it cannot reach the target, your character stops). Additionally if you manage to get the cursor somewhere the character cannot go, then the cursor disappears and you really dont know where your mouse is. This is especially the case in the last level. It is also difficult to stop your character in the right place, e.g. close to the (moving) dog. Also it is rather slow to drag&drop the food on your plate. All that while time is ticking against you. As the levels are not too difficult, you can deal with it. After you play through all levels, you activate Hell Mode, which makes all levels much more difficult. As a major part of the difficulty is fighting the controls I didn't have the motivation to give it more than a few tries. Playing through a level in Robot Mode was lacking a marker for accomplishment as well. Considering the price I guess it's a fair deal (especially on discount) and it's a good opportunity to give those rusty memory cells some training.
I have played through Mashed: Fully Loaded multiple times and loved it. I was excited to see it here on GOG. However, this is not Fully Loaded, but an earlier version. It feels somewhat beta. There are two tracks missing, but that's not a big thing. The game modes and power-ups are complete if I recall correctly and also the AI behaves as I expected. However the physics engine is crazy. I mean, it is not a sim. But there are obviously crazy bugs in the physics engine. Once I parked in front of an opponent (on the map with the raft). The oppenent touched my slightly in a head on collision and we both got sucked into the water by a crazy force. Not sure how that can happen, as collision detection for cubic objects is no rocket science. They got it fixed in the update Fully Loaded apparently, so it's a pitty we cannot have that here on GOG.
BFL sends out quite some Anno vibes. You live on a planet with multiple islands of different spec, and there are people to keep happy. There are a multitude of things that improve or decrease happiness of your folk. Over time you develop new skills and will also be able to travel the stars, which is fun, as you can find more islands out there. You will also find some natural" and "supernatural"things going on, which you learn to cope with. Every time you think you have figured it out, the game comes up with something new. Some tasks obviously are a bit repetitive as it is the case in any city builder. But the bulkload of content really keeps you motivated to start a new settlement on yet another planet. At the same time the economy is very stable and you don't need to stress too much and can just watch your people or cows doing their job. If you are annoyed by the supernatural threads, you can also disable them. The game is very stable, I did not see any bugs except for one animation. The trade mode works well, you just say how much of what resource you want to have on which island and your trade vessels will make sure that all ports taking part have at least the given amount (even over multiple hops!). With the zero and infinite rule you can move all your stuff to a central hub, too. One minor flaw: the energy system could be better. Renewables do have a way too high storage capacity and production rate. It's like there is a nuclear plant and a huge battery array hidden in each solar cell. This makes them much too strong and the day/night cycle have no effect. I think the storage should be lowered by 90% at least. There also is a pollution system in place, messing up the once beatiful wilderness. When it gets too bad your buildings switch off. I want to send in my people with protective gear and turn the whole planet into a wasteland, while my main folk is thriving in a paradise somewhere else. But that's not an option...maybe I just haven't found it yet.
