A Resident Evil clone that looks gorgeous, but the jank is apparent as soon as you start playing. Movement of yourself and enemies is jittery. An aiming system that's worse than even the original 1996 Resident Evil (I'd say on par with 1993's Alone in the Dark!) That would still make it an okay experience were it not for one game-ruining feature. It uses the same limited save item system as Resident Evil's ink ribbons, but it is HORRENDOUSLY stingy with them. You only get one in the entire first 90 minutes. Die at any point (thanks to the atrocious targeting), and you're replaying the last 30-90 minutes. The frequency of save items doesn't get better from there. Old school Resident Evil games were never THIS bad with limited saves. The one and only way this game is playable is using the console commands to cheat yourself unlimited save items. Bump it up to 3 stars in that case, but absolutely do not bother otherwise.
I've seen reviews call it "WH40k Panzer General". This is not the case. It's "WH40k Steel Panthers". Except this feels cobbled together by amateurs. Tons of stuff that either doesn't work as it should or is useless. Morale felt bugged even in 1997. A huge swath of unit choices are useless. Almost every battle can be won without a scratch by focusing entirely on artillery. I was constantly going, "Is this it?" as I won my 500th battle with nothing but artillery fire. Ork infantry, light vehicles, tanks, giant mechs? All die to artillery. And there's nothing else holding it together. No real systems of flanking or positioning. You're just spotting for the artillery. Play Steel Panthers if you absolutely have to have this kind of mid 90s turn based war game. Otherwise, there are WAY better more modern options, even WH40k ones like Sanctus Reach and Battle Sector.
Ridiculous adventure game logic mixed with platforming controls that make Pitfall seem like Prince of Persia. These would have been awful controls even for a Commodore 64 game. The only thing the game had to offer was good graphics for the time with weird visuals. The graphics are obviously not a selling point now, and any visuals can be had by watching a 5 minute playthrough video. This would be worth a max of $1 if you wanted to experience just how bad the controls are alongside the visuals.
I wanted to like this game so much that I played it through to the end despite never having fun along the way. It tries to be tactical Homeworld with a set number of ships each mission. I would say this makes every level a "puzzle", except the interface and info is so awful that it's often guesswork aside from telling all your ships to focus fire one target at a time. Like Homeworld, it tries to be true 3D, but the interface is SO bad that it's pointless to try any movement commands other than "move closer to" and "move away from". A 3D game where the UI is so bad that it essentially turns it into 1D. That's...something. Story is a Homeworld Cataclysm fanfic mess. Ships will seem like they're barely taking damage until suddenly their shields fail and hull collapses. There are long puzzle missions that send you back to the start if you hit a fail state, sometimes "stealth" levels in a game with the previously mentioned awful UI movement. Tactical capital ship combat is SO my jam, so you can imagine how awful this was if I still give it 1 star.
IF you are already a fan of the boardgame and are interested in only multiplayer with friends, bump this rating up to 5 stars and pick it up. It is technically fine for that. The singleplayer AI is clueless and any beginner can always beat the hardest difficulty after only a few games. So that portion of the game is useless for fans and newcomers. If you haven't played the boardgame and were curious, don't. $20 is way too much to find out about one of the most overrated board games of the 2010s. People got suckered in by the cool setting, mechs, and artwork. At its heart, Scythe is a really bland economic euro game that's so deterministic, every faction has an exact optimal scripted turn sequence for the entire first half of the game. It barely changes as you make contact with other players and conflict is only a tiny fraction that's mostly there just to check off an objective box. Players who know the optimal action path can take on the handicap of having to plan ahead in 3 turn chunks, and still win because the game has that little malleability I'm not the biggest fan of Terra Mystica, but it's nearly the same game and much better than this with a better AI in the digital version. If you want to invest in a physical game, Arcs is a MUCH better version of this. (this is going to get downvoted to hell by Scythe fans, and I refer them back to my opening sentence)
The makers of Bomber Crew tried to take that game and turn it into FTL, but failed to redesign ANYTHING about Bomber Crew to be able to do that. Space is now 3D, but did nothing to improve the camera system from 2D Bomber Crew. You now have big ships to move crew around like FTL, but they kept the incredibly slow and clunky crew movement from BC (and made it worse with zero G). You have to worry about boarding and hacking like FTL, but they kept the BC system of forcing you to switch to external view to manually lock on to every target or your gunners will just sit there. You have as many stations and boarding that FTL demanded, but they kept the BC cap of always being 1-2 crew short of manning everything. You CAN enable manually targeting and raise the crew cap in settings, but they designed all the difficulty around these arbitrary restrictions and it becomes TOO easy (and still not fun). Just a mess that tried to cash in on the FTL craze by grafting it onto their previous, totally incompatible game. Not one minute of thought was put into adapting anything to make it all work. I slogged through even the ridiculously hard B-17 dlc for Bomber Crew, but I quit Space Crew after just 5 missions.
This is an adventure game in the skin of a Cyberpunk hacking sim. Your hacker character is under house arrest, take on hacking jobs. This mainly consists of opening up surveillance maps of areas, then activating remote objects on the scene to complete your goal. Stuff like discovering the security camera that has the right angle you need, but access to it is blocked by door, so you hack into a cleaning bot and have it knock over a trashcan to cause a guard to investigate the noise by opening the door. Stuff like that. These puzzles aren't heady, but they flow fine as long as you're signing up for an adventure game and not hardcore hacking sim. You start off tracking down a lost dog. Missions escalate. The coolest is when a group of mercs pull a traditional Shadowrun style raid on a corporate HQ, and you're their remote hacker support, disabling security and giving directions as they fend off guards. The problem is the rest of the game. The protagonist is very unlikeable. She's not someone caught in a bad situation. She's just a selfish a-hole. It's hard to tell how much is her and how much is the writer's weird social views. One "mission" is trying to find the perfect birthday present for your girlfriend. This would be a cute mission, except you're hacking into all her personal info and violating her privacy to do so. The game presents this as romantic? Either you're supposed to be playing a complete sociopath, or the writer actually thought this was a precious moment. The puzzles that aren't locations are dialog trees. This is by far the worst part of the game. They highlight just how unlikeable the protagonist is. The dialog is a puzzle itself, usually in the form of convincing a hostile person to cooperate. Often there is little logic or clues on what responses work. You're just trying every combo of responses until one works, and usually there's no good reason why that one worked and the others didn't. An okay lite puzzle Cyberpunk sim, some drag writing.
I-War 1 was a take on the Freespace formula of linear, scripted missions to form a narrative space combat campaign. The difference being you were now controlling a corvette instead of a fighter, while (mostly) obeying the laws of Newtonian physics. It had some significant stumbling blocks (some horrendously unfair difficulty in parts, plus a near crippling lack of checkpoints when restarting long missions), but I overall enjoyed the experience. A good story and some well thought out mission design. I-War 2 takes that and turns it into an open world Elite/Privateer experience with a terrible story about cartoonishly evil corporations and rescuing the princess (no, really) before completely giving up at the end. The story is something to be suffered through and only be worth it if the gameplay was really, really good. It isn't. No thought was put into making the open world system work. Hostility triggers are broken. AI traffic is broken (your best option for pirating is to simply wait by warp gates until the AI of 2 cargo ships inevitably crash into each other to explode and spill their cargo everywhere, which you can scoop up without triggering the police). The economy is broken, to the point that there is no system of currency and all transactions in this far future interstellar society are done on the barter system. Each purchase requires specific items to be traded, and you have to luck out picking up exact items to trade. It's not commerce, it's a crafting system. And a terrible one. In essence, I-War 2 is all the bad of I-War 1 with none of the good. The story missions are padded out with broken open world grinding filler, and the story was written by a 12 year old. Avoid.
This game was an attempt to add a ton of depth and features to the classic game Archon with a D&D setting. While graphics and animation were nice for the time, all they really ended up doing was making Archon (a tight, simple boardgame) more of a slog. Everything new from the Archon formula usually ends up making the experience more drawn out and tedious. Most of the units (and ESPECIALLY the AI) are fatally prone to cheese that renders most options pointless. Archon has had half a dozen versions at this point. Go play any of those instead.
A turn based sort of X-COM strategy game where you're pulling off heists instead of fighting aliens. A solid premise, but it's ultimately undone by trying to be a roguelike with procedural levels. Once you get the mechanics down, 90% of your failures will come from getting screwed over by a ridiculous level layout. There seems to be zero thought put into generating any kind of fair or logical levels. It's just random rooms and junk slapped together, often with dead ends and twisting spaces that make no sense. You're given zero idea of each level layout beforehand and are totally blind. Zero idea if any path is a dead end. Zero idea if you're close to the objective or if you should abort. Like another review said, this would have been much better off as a pre-set campaign with thoughtfully designed levels. Then it wouldn't hurt as much going into each level blind. But they wanted to be an endlessly replayable roguelike and the gameplay just isn't deep enough for that. Because you're blind to the completely random layout, you're not planning a heist so much as simply reacting to every single new room you run into. No grand plan, just dealing with one tiny room at a time. It's a very simplistic, repetitive loop. Might be worth $5 and beating once in a few hours, but nothing beyond that.
