This could have been a pretty good tactics game along the lines of Into the Breach. It's not as good as ItB even conceptually (the balance is nowhere near as tight), but on the plus side, it does have a stronger theme and more difficulty options. Unfortunately it has been released in a totally unacceptable state and barely seems to have been tested at all. Variously I have encountered soft-locks, missing tooltips, many instances of mouse-clicks not doing what they're supposed to first time, and miriad cases of abilities not working as described. One special ability only sometimes deals any damage as it's supposed to (no obvious pattern); two more (on the same character) are supposed to give bonus dodge, but one never does, and the other does only sometimes. For some reason most of the other reviews are pretty glowing. The games problems, while glaring, are not *very* obvious in the first few hours of play, as the three starting characters and their loadouts *mostly* seem to work, as does the first region of the game. But by your second run, you will be drowning in bugs. Basically uplayable. Also, there is a patch out (it fixes many bugs, but there's a long way still to go), but predictably, it doesn't seem to be available on GOG yet. Caveat emptor
I wasn't able to play it for long enough to really assess the gameplay, but... * parts of the interface are too small to read properly on a relatively small desktop screen. You can change the resolution, but there are only two options and they're almost the same- there is no option to scale the UI. * Hovering over weapons in certain circumstances causes their card to appear off-screen so that it can't be seen. * The same key (Esc) is used to end certain encounters and bring up the menu. * The music is very repetitive. * The tutorial has a bug where the last message persists for much longer than intended, making it impossible to click a button to decline a new card. This in about 15 minutes of gameplay. Maybe I was very unlucky, but that doesn't inspire confidence. I don't think I'll play any more.
I'm honestly not a huge fan of the physical card game either- the theme feels rather pasted-on; and I do think the luck of the draw regarding which cards you get given initially has too big an effect on the outcome. But it's OK- it's certainly competent. The New World birds used turned me off a bit, as aside from some of the waterfowl and a very few of the raptors, they're all completely unfamiliar to me as a European. The digital version is... nicely done, but largely devoid of interesting single-player content. There's no campaign (like the Galaxy Trucker digitial version) or interesting challenges (like Through the Ages), or progression of any kind. The AI seems competent. There's a special single-player mode copied from the physical version, but it was clearly designed for the board game and doesn't really work well in a digital adaption.
Well, the first thing to note is that this is strictly a puzzle game. There are no sim/management elements whatsoever- just a series of puzzles. You have basically no agency- there are about five binary choices throughout the game (more on that later), and you often have some flexibility in what order you tackle puzzles, but that's it. The puzzles are... OK. Mostly quite easy, the odd genuinely interesting, a few a bit obtuse, but nothing terrible. They are a bit repetitive, especially the map puzzles, which are of only a few basic types. The game is quite short- about 5 hours. The plant identifying puzzles are marred by interface/mechanical issues, especially as you progress through the game and collect more and more plants and pages in your plant guide. One odd thing is that even when your customers can't name the plant they need (they just describe it, or explain what they need it to do), the game usually tells you anyway. This feels off, but it's actually necessary because there's no way to search the plant guide by anything except plant name (and if the plant has multiple names, you can only find it under one of them). So when you do (as you do occasionally) have to hunt for a specific effect, or a name that isn't the primary one, there's no alternative but to look through the whole guide. There's also no way to find a plant in your greenhouse that you've already identified besides remembering where you put it, or hunting through all the labels you've attached manually. This quickly becomes a chore. The story is... again... OK. The writing is competent, but the story isn't that interesting, and the characters don't feel very real. Oh, and... this is a puzzle game. As such, it has zero replay value, of course. Yet despite this, the game has multiple endings (thanks to those binary choices). Since there's no way you've ever want to play through it a second time, this doesn't really add anything.
It's a pretty good implementation of the boardgame in general; especially aesthetically- all the (excellent) art is there and the sound and animation work very nicely. And the boardgame is certainly good; it's perhaps worth noting that it's not really a wargame, for all that it may look like one. Slightly minor point is that there hasn't been a lot of effort to allow customisation; there's no option for a modular board, for example, which really couldn't have been hard to add (there is a physical expansion for it) in a digital version. There are a few setup options, but not many. Main complaint, though, especially for someone like me who's not much of a fan of online play, is that the bot AI is *really* bad. I can easily beat the "hard" AI with only three games total under my belt (I've never played the physical version). So I definitely wouldn't recommend it for single-player. There's also very little meta-progression (e.g. single player challenges)- there are a few card-unlocks, but you'll have those within a couple of games, most likely. Possibly I've been spoilt by the last digital boardgame I brought, which was Through the Ages, which is excellent.
This really isn't an RPG in any meaningful sense. It's a pure tactical combat game. There's no plot to speak of, no NPCs; virtually no inventory, and the game is almost entirely linear. But it's a very good game if you're looking for tactical combat. It uses a real-time with pause system, and requires you to pay a lot of attention to what your opponents are doing and your characters' positioning. Interrupting and dealing with enemy abilities is critical. There is an interesting skill progression system where you decide in what direction to develop each character's main abilities and which to focus on first. I only really have two complaints. One is that it's not particularly well optimised; the graphics are decent but unspectacular and I experienced significant slowdown. I have a 7 year old PC with no physical graphics card, so this likely won't worry most purchasers. And it was still playable, because it was real-time with pause. The other is actually that, while I actually appreciate the streamlined nature of the game system (I'd rather play a game that does one thing well than one that does a lot of things badly), I actually think it wasn't streamlined enough. The residue of an inventory system (you can equip items of jewellery to give your characters small bonuses) is actually more annoying than interesting because it affects so little. And the game has a few very weak puzzles that don't really add much to the gameplay either.
It's a nice little platformer. Very cute, and the art-style is lovely, if you like the retro-look (which I do). It's also generally fun to play. The characters are charming, and the dialogue occasionally funny (it's not 100% top-notch wit, mind you, but it's pretty decent for a computer game). It is undeniably short; 5-6 hours for a "normal" playthrough (glitch-less speedruns have been done in around an hour), but that's not really a critcism per se; just bear it in mind when deciding how much you're willing to pay for it. You can only save a pre-determined checkpoints, which is normally a big deal for me; I often play very short sessions and resent loosing progress if I quit. But the checkpoints are consistently close together; you'll never have to wait more than about 15 minutes at the most for one, so this is one game where that didn't frustrate me too much. My biggest complaint I suppose would that the game is really pretty easy. There is no very hard platforming (the very hardest section in the game took me about 20 attempts to complete, and that was the most by a large margin), but the platforming difficulty was about right for me (I'm rubbish at platform games, though, I should say). If you fall into a pit, you respawn at the entrance of the current screen, losing 1 hit; if your fall takes you to 0 health you die and respawn at the last save point. This is pretty generous, and does nicely avoid a problem you get it some platformers where enemies do 1 point of damage, but falling into a bit kills you instantly. The real problem, though, is the combat, and especially the boss fights. You effectively start with about 12 hits (3 hearts, but most attacks only deal 1/4 heart). Over the course of the game you can double this to 24. You can also carry around up to 9 (very cheap) healing potions that restore all health. So you have effectively around 200 hit points. This makes cheesing any boss fight trivial- just drink healing potions until the boss is dead.
Well, it's definitely a good game, if you like the GTA-style sandbox crime genre at all. This is largely about technical details; and I've only ever owned the GOG version. There are some technical issues. Some people seem to have had trouble getting the game to run at all; this isn't the case for me, though. The cutscene framerate was initially terrible (I don't normally care much about framerate, but when we're talking 3-4 frames/second even I notice), but I fixed this by turning down the resolution (low resolution doesn't bother me either; YMMV). The car handling is not great, either, in fact it was intially nearly impossible to control. I did a few things; installing the GOTR mod, cranking down the horizontal pad sensitivity, learning how to use cruise control; and it's quite playable now although I'm not sure which change was most useful. Still not the best driving sim you've ever experienced, mind you. Not encountered any crashes as yet. I'm running Windows 7, if that helps anyone else.
Well it's different. I've never played anything very much like it, though from what I hear FTL has some elements in common. It's a sort of combination management-sim and random-events/ choose-your-own-adventure. And it works. The artwork and music are lovely. It's not perfect. I have doubts as to it's long term replay-value; the random-events are most interesting the first time you encounter them (there are a lot, of course, and they're not totally random- they occur with reference to what's going on in the game: what you're doing, who you're feuding with, how happy your people are, and so on) and the heroquests are most fun when you're not entirely sure what's going on. It *is* replayable; it's not like a point-and-click adventure. But it's not replayable like, say, Civilisation; there just aren't enough options. Definitely worth the asking price, but don't expect to be playing it for months.
It's one of those games I really wanted to like. It's also experimental; open-world, procedurally-generated stealth games aren't an over-subscribed genre. But I don't feel it works very well. The visuals, sound, art, theme and general atmosphere are all fine. It's just that the gameplay and especially the save-system don't work together very well. You can only save at five specific points; your progress is otherwise lost if you die or quit. This leads to a strong incentive not to stray further from these points than you can help, which interferes rather with the exploratory spirit of the game. There's also a strong reason to return to these points as soon as you make any significant progress, which is tedious and time-consuming. Then there's the way the enemies ramp up in power quite rapidly over time, meaning you can't take your time easing yourself into the game mechanics. One or two more minor poor design-choices (labeling items "junk" rather defeats the purpose of having them), but the two above are the main ones. Overall, I wasn't really a fan, but I did appreciate the attempt.
