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.
If you haven't played the Portal edition of Bridge Constructor, play that one first, it's way better. For The Walking Dead, the writing is actually quite bad. I dont know the TV series, but I guess if you do, it's even worse. Luckily you can skip the intros, there is a summary of the mission to accomplish in the end. The "bridge building" is decent and mostly works well. I managed to finish all but one mission with the gold badge, so there are no critical bugs. You can control the characters, which was new to me. However, it is not really well integrated and does not add much to the gameplay. It's not Frozen Synapse meets Bridge Constructor for sure. Based on the theme there are zombies or people to kill in some of the missions, which makes this probably the most brutal Bridge Constructor there is. However it's never crazy nor funny. Get the Portal edition.
Cardaclysm is a solid deck-builder game. It has a huge variety of cards and great visuals. However the concept is somewhat flawed, which is most apparent mid-game. 1. As you always have initiative, it's a winning strategy to go for maximum alpha damage. This way you get rid of most enemies before they even have their first turn. This is especially true after you defeated the last boss hunt. You get better and better cards, so nearly all of the early cards you won't use ever again. Etherlords was much more complex in that aspect. Only the final boss sequence is different and challenging, as you need to build completly different decks here, that are not optimized for alpha damage. 2. The deck building is also a bit annoying. While you can save mutliple deck configurations, they dont work well. You can merge cards to upgraded versions, but the decks contain identical cards. Merging a card in the current deck might destroy another deck. Because of 1. this isn't a big problem for gameplay. Also, when you die, your deck modifications are not saved, which is super annoying in the last boss fight sequence, as you need to reconfigure your deck several times (and start from scratch after each death). There are also a bunch of clumsy UI decisions, but they aren't critical. Overall it is a solid deck builder which provides plenty of content. It is not as complex nor difficult as it looks, only the very ending really shines for me.
When you never played this game before you will probably feel quite confused and lost, and you might give up before the beauty of this game unfolds in front of you. I think that's why this game isn't a classic. This game is a very fresh approach to the RTS genre. There are so many new ideas, from energy management (which allows you to take over large chunks of the enemy defence) to terraforming (digging trenches to stop the enemy advance) to underground combat, force fields and unit transformation. Oh, and you can (and have to) move your headquarter over the map, while you should make sure that your energy network is still working with the energy source moving. The problem is, that there is no tutorial or tooltips. You have something like 30 unit types, but you have no idea what's the difference between them. For example the "Unseen" unit can't attack, but it's also not invisible. I always use the same 3 units, and the underground ones are uber anyway when it comes to demolishing the enemy base. Often you see the AI doing something like digging a trench in your island, and then you figure out, that you can do that too. The missions are nice and address different aspects of the game mechanics. However the AI is stupid. I mean, I don't need the AI to throw units at me left right and center. But in this game the AI is just not using mobile units at all, or just in some very, very limited way. So in the end this game is not so much an RTS but more a base-building puzzle game. It could be a fantastic, hardcore RTS with a strong AI or in Multiplayer, however. By the way, spoiler alert, in that early mission where you have to protect the Mechanical Spirit until he is built: instead of rage quitting simply do nothing and wait for your builders to built him. The more you do, the less energy will be used to built him and the more you get bbq'ed by the super strong enemies.
I cannot understand the very negative reviews this game receives. The game itself is a solid building game with focus on transport, somewhat a mix of Wiggles/Diggles and The Settlers 2, with some new ideas, too. There is no proper tutorial, but the game mechanics are not too hard. Regarding some issues/reviews: - to move your soldiers you have to build an Army Post, then move that building. - dwellings are only used by the vikings that work in range. But they also enjoy to sleep outside. - the colors marking good/bad spots on the ground are not based on resource, but obviously on building costs! - I did not have any game breaking bugs, and just one minor bug (fisherman not catching anything) in several hours of gameplay Overall this game does many things right. Your folk do not annoy you all the time, for example. There often is enough food growing at bushes for the early game. They pick up tools and work, where there is a need. There are no skills your Vikings gain, so there is no micromanaging them. You can assign carriers to buildings to improve their productivity or building speed, which is neat. The economy is quite complex and intertwined, compared to The Settlers 2. Having just finished S2:DNG Vikings Addon I have to say this game also offers more gameplay variety. Where in S2 you search for gold and then bbq the enemy in Valhalla Hills you can also zerg the portal, try to improve weapons supply, build outposts with courier networks and so on. There are different types of enemies, that sometimes require some swift action. But overall this is a very relaxing game and controls not designed for fast paced action. The random maps add variety, too. This game would be much more popular with a good campaign, but the unlocks system isn't bad. Compared to Wiggles it lacks heart quite badly, your Vikings do not grow on you. The camera position is somewhere between fancy and annoying, especially when the portal is behind a mountain top. Not perfect, but pretty good!
