Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: 007 First Light · 4 days ago
I can't get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I…
I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and…
Mainlining could have been a good, comedic antidote to Orwell’s overt political warnings. As it turns out, it’s got as many flaws as an outdated Windows operating system.
The result is something that’s… average. Average, the most boring of the conclusions to reach, to write about, to read about. So sorry about that. But as you’ll know, not the most boring to play – it just means it’s fine, it passes the time, it could be a lot better with a clearer interface, the removal of its gibberish plot, and much fairer windows for the timing challenges, but none of that would raise it much past “above average”. It’s just an average idea, done reasonably well. And sometimes that’s enough.
Were it to have the greater depth of a Puzzle Quest game I could see myself getting really drawn in, but as it is it’s a really neat example of the genre that still feels disposable enough that I’ll not be bothered once it finally does want my cash. It waited too long! If they’d an ounce of sense they’d drop the IAPs and just stick a £5 charge on the game. But until they cotton on to that new-fangled notion, if you’re after a smart implementation of Threes-like input and tile-based battling, Tiles & Tales does that, and is free!
It’s free, it’s short, you didn’t know about it before just now and now you do and you know I think it’s not very good. I don’t feel good about that, you likely don’t feel good about that, but perhaps you’ll have become intrigued and decide to take a look anyway. Perhaps you’ll offer them some money after finishing it when prompted. I dunno. Death sucks.
Sanctus Reach’s unit and faction design and flexible mechanics deserve a much better campaign and fewer constantly recycled objectives.
By sticking on a rigidly deterministic (and, thus, politically questionable, however well-intentioned) reading of two centuries of European history, Urban Empire fails to tap either of those joys, revealing its incessant march towards the present is not an ongoing process actively shaped by individual players, but a foregone conclusion simply waiting to be ushered in.
It is lovely, though, and one of the friendliest, warmest logic puzzlers I’ve played.
There’s greatness here, and damn, it’s so funny and cutesy-sarcastic. The puzzles are top notch, and the dungeons, when properly equipped, often a pleasure to plough through. But there’s just so much annoyance layered on top for absolutely no discernible reason, beyond presumably a fear that their sequel didn’t feel sufficiently different. The silly thing is, it was.
Ladykiller does a lot of good, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook what it gets wrong.
It’s definitely got a place in my games library, and it’s a really good way to play a version of the board game my friends and I enjoy even though we’re rarely in the same city at the moment.
I’m very glad it exists. If it is simply interactive fiction, it’s a wonderfully inventive take on it. I love its symbology and mystery, its citations of fictitious scholars with their disagreements and lapses, the way you can interpret a culture as deeply pious or vaguely threatening through nothing but squiggles assigned meaning – its exactly the kind of story that makes me think that if Borges was alive today he’d be fascinated by videogames.
Don’t be fooled by screenshots to this effect. Glittermitten Grove is nothing but misery. Build, wait for meters to refill, endure, repeat, self-loathe.
Pick through the shit and you’ll find the nuggets of gold, but if I hadn’t sucked every last drop out of Afterbirth, I’d rather be playing that than Afterbirth †. As it is, I’m just about won over by the promise of new things, many of which are solid additions, but there’s a lot of dreariness to tolerate.