So it's a roguelike resource management game. Everyone can perform 2 tasks a day. You assign people to tasks to gather resources and build stuff while managing fatigue, hunger, and whatnot. Survive to the end to get strong enough to take on the oppressive warlord. It's a solid enough system. What makes it more interesting is it being heavier on story than your typical roguelike. Conversations between characters pop up every day, with an impressive number of custom conversations between specific characters depending on who is in your camp. So here's where it falls apart. The game is PLAGUED by both overly ridiculous randomness, and cheap scripted events. You can be screwed before the game even starts. Starting traits are random, and characters can start with a trait that carries a crippling XP penalty. You're all but forced to restart if that happens. So you go through ~10 rerolls just to not be hobbled at the start. Then you might get hit with endless drought an hour in. You're screwed, restart. Do everything right and work your party just enough to get resources, but within acceptable fatigue levels? Too bad, here's a scripted story event where the protagonist decides to skip sleep and chop fifty acres of forest, exploding his fatigue and killing him if you were anywhere above 50%. Too bad, restart, and file that away with a dozen other story events you HAVE to know are coming. And that's where the dialog heavy system falls apart. There is no way to effectively skip conversations. You're constantly forced to restart, and have to sit through the same conversations every time. They should have either toned down the story and made a pure roguelike, or toned down the RNG roguelike and made it more story heavy. It's also too punishing. It's nothing but negative effects, all feeding into each other and spread out over 4 screens worth of icons that the interface isn't set up to handle. Now do that for 8 characters. Lot of promise, lots of frustrating mess.
This game gives a FANTASTIC first impression; a gorgeous visual style FTL with an attempt at actually telling a compelling story. I'm guessing the universal 5 stars are all based on this early impression. The short of it is that it's FTL. The biggest difference is that in combat, your ship's weapons play a smaller role and most of combat is done by 2-4 squadrons of smaller ships you send out. You try to neutralize the enemy squadrons while clearing the way for yours to damage the enemy ship. Sort of like if ship to ship combat in FTL was mostly handled via an expanded crew to crew combat. And here's the problem: the squadrons feel clunky as hell to control. This is a big problem because 80% of the game is combat and 80% of the combat is controlling squadrons. They control clunky, and minimal effort was made to differentiate them all by their white silhouette icons, made even worse once you start getting specialized squadrons (which one was the suicide drone and which one was the stealth fighter again?). Strategy? You quickly figure out that neutralizing enemy squadrons is all that matters, so you stop bothering with capital ship weapons and just focus on the 2 types of anti-squadron guns. Then you just pick the rock to whatever scissors the enemy is deploying. That's basically it. Hope some random terrain effect or surprise hidden popup squadron doesn't screw you, and that the RNG drops better squadrons so you don't get outclassed (squadron strength is all that matters; everything else is a minor luxury). There are segments where you send landing parties down to scavenge planets. They are 40 seconds of watching the game roll dice before being told if you succeeded or failed. These get old FAST. Buy if money isn't an object and you want to be wowed for a couple hours, but I'm on the 3rd cluster right now and barely want to keep going. Needs some work to open up the combat and tighten up the squadron controls.
Wake up in a Silent Hill type nightmare world version of a high school. Wander around trying to escape. The atmosphere is decent. The trick is that there's a Clock Tower-ish killer wandering around. Listen for it, avoid it, hide from it. That part is where the game started to lose me. There are no consistent mechanics to it. Trying to hide will almost never work except in scripted spots (usually it will just stop in front of your spot until you run out of breath). You can listen for the killer, but some reason even though you can hear it through walls and down long corridors, you cannot hear its footsteps at all on stairs. 90% of the time you get discovered by the killer will be when it suddenly pops out of the stairwell in front of you. There's no way to plan for it and it feels cheap. The other gameplay fumble is the game never pauses, even when you're going through your inventory. This makes stamina regenerating items useless because you can't stop to use them during a chase, which is the only time you'd use them. Despite this, the game is fairly creepy and enjoyable, until the final act. The layout of the school suddenly changes and you're given no time to explore it. It's just one big chase sequence through a changed school with a now worthless map so you can't navigate. Die, and start the entire act over. I quit at that point and never finished the thing.
You set up towers to shoot Martian zombies. The paths are rigidly defined, the towers not very varied (a gun tower, a more powerful but more expensive gun tower, an AoE damage tower, and a slow tower is pretty much it), and the enemies not varied at all. The game's gimmick is that you have a limited number of crew members and each building requires one to man, but you don't have enough crew to man all possibly lanes at once so you're juggling them around to respond to waves. The problem is they base most of the game around this, but the controls for it are awful. It's hard to describe but it's just so imprecise an "floaty" ordering your crew around. It feels primitive controls from a 1995 RTS. Anyway, you work your way through a campaign or survival mode. There are perks to unlock but you can only ever equip one at a time so what's the point of collecting when you're just using the single best one all the time? The action and gameplay are passable but nothing very good. Special mention though for how AWFUL the final campaign mission is. Picture the disappointing final mission to XCOM Enemy Unknown times ten. All in all, if you're really hard up for a tower defense and have played everything else, it's worth around $10.
This game looked awesome from the previews. A motorcyle action game that's half Excite Bike and half Devil May Cry combos? With great graphics reminiscent of Deadlight? Sign me up! The frustration with the controls, camera, and save points eventually make it a chore. The camera is infuriating, constantly going from centering your character to zooming out and placing your character on the edge when you speed up, except the camera is always a second behind where you need it to be and you're constantly getting disoriented. Which is a problem because of your character's bumbling and control issues. You lose life and get sent back every time you flip your bike over, which is extremely easy to do: landing slightly off, or even just holding left or right half a second too long. You can even flip over from a stand still. Hit a wall or obstacle slightly too fast? Get sent back. It's a struggle just to keep your idiot character from rolling over onto his head at the slightest jump or turn. 2 things made me quit. First, once you unlock the spin attack, I lost the ability to turn around. They both use the same button, but every time I tried to turn, the spin attack executed instead. I couldn't turn anymore unless I put down the controller and used the keyboard. Second, once you reach the coal mine (3rd level), you're forced into a 5 minute long near impossible sequence of trying to outrace a drill. This segment is Battletoads racing level maddening. Once you get past that, it's a bunch of jumps that require perfection to get past. If you die, it's all the way back to the beginning. This game was never fun. It's just getting endlessly "dinged" and 80% of your focus is spent on fighting the camera trying to disorient you so your biker flips over onto his head.
The original Mask of Arcadius was great for a free game. A pretty decent turn based space ship strategy in the flavor of Advance Wars. Special mention to the amazing music that's better than 90% of AAA games. Sadly, this entry was botched. It started point in the wrong direction, and it's terribly obvious it was rushed. The battles and framerates are much worse. They removed the options for battle animations. You're forced to bone the most boring character (yes, that one). Even the choices you do get to make, none of them matter. Out of all the choices in the game, the only things they ever affect is whether or not one character will wear an eye patch, and getting an extra ship added to the store. That's it. Not one single other choice will ever matter. The story is massively botched. Characters are now either crazy or boring, or crazy boring. You get 2 into battles, 3 side missions, and then the game goes STRAIGHT to the final confrontation of the occupied homeworld. It's positively jarring. The ending itself is jaw droppingly bad. You'll lose count of the number of times you say, "Seriously?" A couple things were improved. The weapons are a bit better balanced (no more kinetics ruling everything). The great music is still there. And that's about it. This sequel is so rushed and botched that you would swear that the original was the polished retail product and this game was the rough free release. The only way I would ever recommend it is as a way of giving the developers some money for the excellent Mask of Arcadius. Buy this game, then go play MoA instead.
Someone liked Earthbound and wanted to make their own, but are they're the kind of person who gets all their news from Buzzfeed and lack the ability to communicate with other human beings outside of Homestuck references. The most hateable protagonist ever and obvious self-insert. Even fans of the game hate the main character. Think about that. I could go into detail, but all you have to do is watch any given clip on YouTube. Inane 5 minute conversations before every fight that are so banal they feel like 20. In fact, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UIcy86Pbmg If you're still on board after sitting through that, by all means buy the game. God speed.
People bash Cum Laude a lot, but there was some great comedic writing in it (when you weren't forced to do repetitive mini games). This...has no jokes. 15 minutes and no jokes. You approach some hipster girl (who doesn't look one bit like a hipster) and she asks you if you're on "Instacrap" and "Farcebook". Are those the jokes? Can you even count those as jokes? This is sub-Rockstar levels of satire here. I'm not sure how much further I made it, but I do know there weren't any jokes before I gave up. When it's not throwing "wacky" parody names at you, the humor is so non-present and the dialog so awkward that you quickly realize that this game was not made by English as a first language authors. I would rather go through a dozen Cum Laude mini-games than hear another wacky social media parody pun like the "Timber" dating app.
I wanted to love this. It looks like a gorgeous boss rush version of your typical Devil May Cry swords+gun play. And it seems like that at first. The fights are split between that and "bullet hell" modes, and I was okay with that. The problem is the bosses are too similar and scripted. Furi follows the old school mechanic of bosses being invincible until the game says they're not. They will always parry or dodge unless you hit them during the correct stages. Dark Souls and Devil May Cry have long showed us how much more fun it is to let you constantly get in a boss' face and disrupt them if you were good enough. And it doesn't extend fights in a fun way. It just drags them out. The worst is one VERY unfun boss where his first stage is sloooooowly shooting down layers of shields. It's not challenging. There's no danger to the player. It's just tedious and time consuming and you have to repeat it. Then there's the repetition. 1/3rd of every boss is being forced into a small dueling circle with them, where they alternate between combo hits and a big wind up area attack. You hit them when they whiff these or you parry them. This is EVERY boss fight. It is the same EVERY boss fight. One boss might do 3 punches instead of 4. That's it. Enough has been mentioned of the cutscenes. It's like they took Afro Samurai and decided it needed to be ten times more pretentious. You cannot skip the cutscenes. You press a button to sloooowly auto walk through them. Terrible. The action can be good between the tedious drawn out parts, the samey "duel circle" parts, and the awful cutscenes. It just really starts to wear on you after an hour or two. It drags this game down from excellent to so-so. It is gorgeous though with a great soundtrack. If it's on sale and you have to experience every Devil May Cry type brawler game, it might be worth it.
Volgarr is supposed to be a retro tribute to old action platformers like Rastan and Ghosts & Goblins, but somehow manages to capture most of the bad and almost none of the good of each. You have the sword attacks of Rastan, but the enemies are too fast to rely on it alone so you have the spear for a projectile attack. Except the spear is clunkier than the Ghosts & Goblins attacks so it still feels awkward. Then you have the jumping, oh the jumping. Jumping was a rough part of Ghouls & Ghosts, giving you a very clunky unguided jump that tried to compensate by making it double. It's even clunkier in Volgarr and you have to make some precision landings with it. Again, Volgarr sets up obstacles requiring a mechanic to get through them, but makes the mechanic inadequate. Ask yourself how bad the control for jumping is to make Ghouls & Ghosts seem like Mario? You throw spears to make jump platforms. This part is annoying and adds nothing fun. On top of it already being the most annoying and tedious part of the game, they make it even worse by adding all these ridiculous restrictions to it. Spears will not stick into walls when thrown at close range. There will be tiny gaps you have to throw the spears perfectly through (which requires perfect jumps using the awful jump controls). It's just layers of unnecessary crap to an already boring process. WHY? And that's the big question. "Why?" I kept asking myself. "Why aren't I just playing Ghouls & Ghosts instead? On an emulator for free?" Unlike Shovel Knight, Volgarr decides to be a retro tribute without not improving on what came before, but actually making it worse. There's no reason to play this. The controls are worse than classic platformers, the mechanics more annoying, and it's downright ugly (they couldn't even be bothered to provide SNES launch era graphics).
