If you enjoyed the base game of Planet Crafter, you'll likely enjoy the Planet Humble DLC. The DLC has a few small mechanical additions - some new ores and a machine for breaking them down into other elements, and some explosive charges to use on things harder to mine. The "story" here is pretty barebones, pretty similar to the base Planet Crafter - you'll find a few scattered messages around the map that don't have any bearing on the game itself, it's just for flavor. However, the enjoyment I got out of the base Planet Crafter game was never in the story - it was about the exploration of different environments, building bases in cool locations, and watching the planet start from a lifeless rock and be transformed into a paradise through my efforts. In that instance, the Planet Humble DLC is perfect for what it sets out to do - it gives you a new planet with a bunch of different cool environments to explore and to build your dream base in. I now have a secret ice cave lair, launching rockets out of a giant ice volcano - very fun. tl dr; If you enjoy the base Planet Crafter experience, aren't looking for major gameplay changes, and are looking for a new environment to explore and build in - this DLC should have everything you need. If you're hoping for significant new gameplay mechanics, this DLC doesn't provide that.
This game feels to me like it's really riding the knife's edge when trying to blend together a few genres - imposing a RogueLite framework around a resource management focused city builder. I do think Against the Storm is largely successful at what it wants to do. After 50+ hours, I can say the gameplay is still engaging, and it's got plenty of challenge in the normal gameplay loop, unlocking new buildings and buffs, and then starting over again. Each settlement you build is a race against time to maximize its efficiency through resource management, trade, caring for your citizens, defeating the environment, etc. However, there are a few tradeoffs to gameplay that the format requires, that may put you off from truly enjoying the game: *Every settlement's end goal is to maximize your reputation, and that can be done only by three ways - fulfilling orders/requests, making your citizens happy, or exploring and using resources to resolve map events. These pathways generally have multiple alternatives that can be used to satisfy them, so the restriction of certain base goods doesn't really change how you build your city most of the time (basic goods -> building material and trade buildings -> luxury goods and services). The challenge of the game is timing everything and adapting to what the RNG presents to you, as opposed to a Sierra city builder style of maximizing a city's limitations. *While the biome is chosen by you, the game will RNG what buildings are available, trade, and where the predetermined resources spawn on the map. This can derail plans pretty fast. *The time limit ensures that you never get to produce grand settlements where you can marvel at a whole city bustling with energy, every game is more like a sprint to the finish line, which can be exciting, but also unfulfilling compared to other city builders. I'm still giving this game 5 stars and enjoy playing it, but be aware that the mix of genres might not satisfy for a true city builder.
Like many of the other reviews here, the closest analog to this game is playing Subnautica without any enemies to attack you. You'll gather minerals, build up your base, unlock newer crafting recipies which allow you to explore further afield and find rarer materials that feed into building better bases, etc. Where this game is different is the terraforming aspect. Where Subnautica's base building was a means to an end to explore more of the environment, Planet Crafter's main goal it gives you is to terraform the planet. To accomplish this, you need to build terraforming machines that focus on creating oxygen, heat, water content, plants, etc. These machines function all the time (barring power failure), so you'll set them up between your exploration sessions. As you play, you'll slowly turn the dusty orange world you landed on into a lush, green planet with cascading waterfalls and sparkling lakes. The core gameplay loop of explore, collect, build, terraform is very satisfying, but the terraforming adds an additional layer of ownership to the planet while you're playing. The only problem with the game right now is that it's not finished. There's some small narrative elements and messages you can find in abandoned ships and other bases, but it's just flavor text and doesn't have an influence on the game. Expanding on these will make the game world feel more alive. There's also a point where you can reasonably explore all of the biomes and wrecks, but the final goals of the terraforming and end-game research are quite a ways away. When this happens, you can either stop playing, have it idle, or do nothing but build more machines and launch more rockets. Once the mid- and end-game parts of the game are fleshed out and balanced, this will be a full fun survival and base building experience. As it is right now, there's still a good 20-30 hours of solid gameplay, and I can't wait to come back and play it when the game is finished.
Obduction starts off great - so much potential. It has all the elements from Myst and Riven that made them classics: intriguing story slowly revealed over the course of the game, mysterious atmosphere and immersive soundtrack, puzzles that integrate the game environment, several moments of "Ah ha!" where you know exactly what to do to unlock the next part of the game. The pacing is slow, but it's deliberate and fits the nature of the game. But Cyan also brought back (with a vengeance) the only bad element from their excellent earlier games: tedious, obtuse puzzle design. For the most part, you don't see this show up in the first hours of the game. The main hub level is designed excellently, with areas that become interconnected as you progress. After you progress enough in the main hub world, you start to run into teleporting puzzles, which require a lot of backtracking, a lot of trial and error, and a metric ton of patience. Remember that godawful "underground maze and you can only navigate by sound" puzzle from Myst? Those puzzles where you flip one switch, and know it must have changed something, but there's no logical clue to tell you what? They're back with huge levels where to even try some puzzles will require backtracking that takes minimum of 5 minutes for each attempt using fast walk, probably double that if you're using point and click or are not using a SSD. You start to realize you'll need to not only switch teleports, but make sure everything is rotated correctly before doing so, all while taking a circuitous route each time, going back through the entire game over and over. Riven cut this down by interconnecting all the areas, and slowly allowed you to realize the solution to the final puzzle through understanding the environment. Obduction throws nothing but tedious and lazy puzzles at you instead. It's quite a shame, this could've been a really great experience if the puzzle & level design was tightened up in the final half of the game.
The best way to describe this game is 'Slay the Spire' combined with 'Darkest Dungeon'. The diificulty is variable- no there's no need to punish yourself if you don't want to. There's several modes available depending if you want permadeath for your heroes or the ability to resurrect them in town. Each of the seven (as of now) heroes has their own skill decks that you build while playing, and within each hero class are three sub-category decks where you can refine your builds, which leads to quite a bit of experimentation and replayability. You can generally steer your heroes towards certain skills, but there is randomness involved, so you might change your plans based on what skills you draw. The addition of kitting out your heroes with items and runes expands the depth even further. There still needs to be some balance passes, as some heroes, items and specialization combos work much better with each other, and if you discover those combos, the late game becomes fairly trivial. The good news is that each "late game" is contained within each region/Act (currently there's two, planned four), you start over with new characters/decks (with some carryover bonuses). New mechanics appear in the second Act as well, which are planned to be expanded as each Act is added in the game. Since this game is 85% battling monsters, the battle loops can get repetitive if you stay with your same teams doing the same actions. Right now, there's enough here to keep players busy as they add more content. Once the game is finished, this game should definitely give a rich combination of deck-building and turn-based party dungeon crawler gameplay.
Right off the bat - if you're the kind of player that loves playing XCOM in Ironman mode and revels in punishing and complex turn-based tactical combat, this game has it in spades, and you will most likely love this game. But, the problem is that getting to the juicy meat of this game takes the patience of a saint (or Sigmar?) to get to, and even when you do the RNG will still foil triple redundancy plans, and then due to the AI pathing, the gameplay can flip between really easy or really hard. In many instances it will seem like the game is actively lying to you about percentages you're shown (XCOM players should be familiar). I really want to love this game, it's got such great elements going for it like the lore, the warband management and deep tactical decision making, but the game itself is so inconsistent in difficulty and gameplay that the great moments to be had are not worth the effort it takes to get there for most gamers. This game is made for those that love to crank the Darkest Dungeon difficulty to the max, who like nothing better to play The Long War modded XCOM, etc. If you're more of a player that gets attached to your random party characters, and wants to play every mission perfectly and ends up save scumming to negate bad rolls, do not buy this game... it will only bring you rage and pain.
Most other reviews for Battle Chasers: Nightwar are very focused on the issues of "grinding" and the difficulty curve. While there are some issues with these, I didn't feel like they detracted from my overall enjoyment of the game. I did have to replay through one dungeon in order to complete a set of "lore" books to boost the passive stats of the team, but other than that, I was able to steadily get enough gear and items to progress without much grind. Where the real grind comes in is if you want to keep all six of your characters at the highest level. Since experience is only shared among the three active team members, you will have to grind if you want to play with all six. You're not penalized by leaving three teammates behind... I was worried that there would be battles where you'd have to play with both teams, but that never happened. There also are some nice choices you'll have when leveling up your crew. While stats are automatically upgraded, you'll have a variety of perks to choose from and different kinds of accessories and enchantments to favor some stats over others. After playing with all six characters, I settled into three mains with specific perks and gear that made the rest of the game a cake walk, even on legendary. That's where the difficulty comes in... the game can be quite tough or quite easy depending on your characters, their gear and perks and what level of dungeon you pick. As long as you play at the level of difficulty your characters and gear is at, you shouldn't have too many problems. The art style throughout the game was well done, and I felt there were just the right amount of side quests and secrets in the game. I felt the game was well worth the sale price I purchased it at.
Sin Slayers is an exploratory team-based RPG, in the same vein as the Darkest Dungeon. You have a maximum of 3 team members out of around 8 or 9 classes (you start with three basic classes and uncover more heroes as you play) and use them in turn based combat to defeat the forces of evil. Exploring is done through a grid on random maps. Each class has a special ability to use during the exploration phase. You'll run into plenty of monsters (there's no respawning, but you can repeat levels if you wish) and events, where if you decide to loot corpses and tombs, you'll increase your "sin" level, much like increasing the darkness mechanic in Darkest Dungeon. The more sin you have, the tougher the monsters but the greater the rewards. Each of the 7 deadly sins have their own arena, each consisting of two levels. The core gameplay loop is enjoyable - you level up your heroes, complete quests, gain new abilities and get better gear. However, even after 5 hours its become pretty apparent that this game does have some minor problems that keep it from becoming a 5-star game. 1) It's too easy. After the first two levels I've found some "endgame" level gear and have unlocked most of the abilities from my starting group. Bosses tremble before my might, much less regular random monsters. There should probably be some balance passes or separate difficulty levels available (or like Darkest Dungeon - have your Sins slowly increase after every move). 2) It's very grindy. Each level will contain upwards of 20-30 random monster fights which you can handle with ease. 3) Gear & inventory - each character only has one slot for an offensive weapon and a defensive item, and your inventory will start to fill up fairly quickly, and you have no option to sell your items, only crafting. Things will get cluttered soon. The graphics and music are good. Overall Sin Slayers has a lot of potential if the developers can give the game just a bit more polish.
Sword and Souls: Neverseen gave me a good 16 hours of fun. It was relatively easy to beat, but be warned that it does involve quite a bit of leveling up your stats via minigames that are all twitch based. While it's not necessary to ace all of the minigame challenges to beat the game, you might get annoyed at the repeated failures as the challenges get harder the more you level up. Even at the highest level, the challenges still start slow so you can still gain stats, but you'll be making mistakes as the challenges gets faster and faster. If you're the type of gamer that loves twitch challenges with a dash of RPG, this should be a fun time. I was able to fully complete about half of the mini game challenges, but at the top level, some of them I realized it would take me a very long time to finally complete, so I dropped it (since I had already beaten the game). There is quite a bit of grinding on those challenges, so if you don't enjoy those, you probably won't enjoy this game. As for the other part of the game, the battles are fairly simplistic, and the other extras like getting pets and fishing are easy to do. It's very casual twitch game with RPG elements that can be a relaxing time as long as you don't let yourself get frustrated by the upper levels of the training minigames.
I held off on buying the original Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep because of a litany of complaints about the technical issues with the game. Reviews pointed to simultaneously great old-school RPG fun was to be had if you could navigate through the morass of bugs, crashes, quests not working, etc. AFter buying the DIrector's Cut of Bard's Tale IV and playing for about 12 hours, I'm happy to say I haven't encountered anything except a whole lot of classic Bard's Tale fun. There was one time my Rogue's skills were accidentally replaced with my fighter's (which was kind of hilarious watching my rogue buff up his armor class and become immune to physical damage for a fight), but was fixed in short order. Other than that I haven't encountered any bugs, so far all the quests properly activate and finish. No crashes, no techincal difficulties, etc. By all means I've had a blast so far, but the game isn't perfect. It does seem very weird to have a system of save points that you can "consume" for minor XP boosts and a heal, but in doing so you're not actually saving at that spot. It adds busy work for those min/maxers out there (especially since so far, I haven't seen any respawning enemies, so XP is likely few and far between), since you can consume those points for XP and then usually backtrack to an older post to save. I get that the developers probably wanted to put some more risk/reward elements to venturing forth, but it doesn't really work. That being said, I love the combat and the class skills, each of the four classes can be specced in different ways. The combat mechanics are fun to play with... sometimes it almost reminds me of Into the Breach where you can bait the enemy into attacking and then mess up their position/movement and have them kill each other. The story so far is fairly bland and the graphics are suitable. I am enjoying the music, which seems like they put a fair amount of effort into. Overall, I'm having a great time with this new edition of BT4.
