Recent reviews by Cosmic

Really great! American Arcadia, while not an entirely unique concept, is a fantastic story game about Trevor Hills escaping from 'Arcadia', a big dome/city run by an evil media corporation.

Something that really set it apart for me is the interesting switching between the two protagonists throughout the story. Trevor typically plays in a 2.5D sidescrolling perspective while Angela you play in first person, the game constantly bounces you back and forth between them both as the story advances, and it keeps the game feeling fresh and fun! Both sides have their own exploration, adventure and puzzles but nothing felt particularly difficult.

The art and sound is absolutely brilliant and all the parts of Arcadia you explore both as Trevor and Angela look great and are fun to discover. The voice acting of all the characters throughout the game is top notch too, it can often feel like you're watching a TV show at times it's so good and the humour is also often on point. Honestly I'd recommend American Arcadia to pretty much anyone, there's a lot of ideas here and everything comes together really well. It's not a particularly long game, taking roughly 10-12 hours but it felt the perfect length to me.

(I have finished it, not sure why Steam doesn't show many hours).

I've played Horizon for a good 10 hours or so and honestly, after seeing loads of other positive reviews, media coverage and discussion about this game a few years ago.. I don't get it. I've really tried to give this game a good go but it's just not grabbing me.

Horizon certainly isn't terrible, the world looks beautiful, the characters are well voiced and animated.. it just feels so bland. In the hours I've played, it feels exactly like any typical Ubisoft title. I know it's not a Ubisoft game but with the watch towers (now reskinned as large machines!), the bandit camps, the collectable resources and crafting, the empty feeling open world with random pointless tasks and challenges to do on your minimap.. I'm so tired of it. In the time I've played I've yet to find anything at all interesting or unique about the gameplay, it's like I'm just doing Far Cry in a more futuristic/nature-y setting with fewer guns.

Maybe I'm missing something or maybe the game gets super exciting after 10 hours..? Some people love that Ubi formula I get it, but having moved on long ago from Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs etc. I was a bit disappointed that there's not much more to this. I don't know why I'd ever play Horizon over Witcher or Red Dead or even Skyrim feels more interesting these days.

This game is absolutely wack.. in a good way! In a nutshell it's a racing game akin to wreckfest, with a bit of a mix of Burnout/Flatout/NFS: Most Wanted thrown in. It's the kind of game where everything is so ridiculous, the massive destruction, the story makes no sense, the characters are absurd and over the top, and yet.. it's so much fun!

Trail Out has a lot of ideas, many of them amusing and most of them work well, from a huge variety of vehicles to some really crazy and absurd game modes, most of which involve blowing up or destroying other racers. The voice acting is terrible but it's amusingly bad, the main player character is an angry Russian dude with a love for destruction and dancing. The game looks great and runs well but seems to bug out occasionally with my xbox controller while in the menus, it just seems to lose the controller for some reason.

Overall I'd definitely recommend it if you're looking for an arcade racer, it has splitscreen too which is a long-missed feature of most games nowadays so great for local and online multiplayer!

Great party game, very similar to the Jackbox games but focused on trivia. Works very well for a lot of people and like Jackbox, only one person needs to own it and can stream it through Discord or a laptop if you're face to face. It's a bit silly but always a laugh with the dancing and funny characters. My only complaint really is that it always follows the same format; it's super fun the first few times and it does remain fun still, but it would be nice if there was a little variation each time, the rounds mix up or there's more than 5 types of rounds etc. But overall it's really great and absolutely worth the full price.

It feels like it needs a sequel and I'd absolutely purchase it if one existed!

I'd honestly have to be insane not to recommend this, BG3 feels like it builds upon Larian's previous excellent games Divinity 1 and 2, and completely takes it to the next level. Similar to the others, it's a massive (mostly linear) RPG with large open 'zones' for your to explore. It's only once you really get into it though, that you realise the ridiculous amount of freedom you have in regards to character builds, ways to approach quests, paths you can take throughout the world, massive branching choices and dialogue trees.. it almost feels overwhelming at times.

Due to this, I probably wouldn't recommend BG3 to everyone. This is a very long game that requires the right kind of person to delve into all it's systems to get the most out of it. Each class is complex and requires time to learn the spells, abilities and ways to play them. Quests aren't difficult but have many ways to go about them rather than your usual 'follow the marker and murder anything en-route'. BG3 isn't really a game you can just jump in for a quick 15/20 minute session during your break, it's a massive story based adventure, and better for it! This game rewards you for having the patience to put lots of time into it, just make sure you're prepared for that.

On the other hand, if you do have the time, this should already be in your library. This is one of the best games of the last few years, definitely the best in 2023, you'd be crazy not to have at least tried it.

In case it wasn't obvious by the other reviews, Astrea is very reminiscent of Slay the Spire and Monster Train, being a deckbuilder where you advance through harder and harder encounters eventually arriving at boss fights. It uses dice rather than cards which certainly freshens the formula up a bit, and combined with the great art style and visuals, feels unique and interesting. I played during the beta and the game feels as good as it did then, it keeps the same fun and addictive feel as other games in this genre. The randomness is certainly a thing, but it doesn't feel any worse than drawing a bad hand of cards and you have a good degree of control over how random you want your 'deck' to be.

I would say that Astrea doesn't feel quite as polished as Slay the Spire and can seem a bit confusing at first, the base idea is simple enough, but understanding how the effects work together and what die are good to pick can take a bit, more so than Slay the Spire (where I found myself immediately understanding it). It can also get a bit messy later on, with you having multiple little followers and there being 3 or more enemies, and every single character on screen has multiple different effects happening and complex dice.. it gets quite difficult to keep up with what's going on and to me, feels a bit like a math lesson where you need to spent 2 minutes calculating all the damage before you can actually take your turn...

But overall I'd definitely recommend it, I think if it gets a few tweaks, Steam Workshop support and maybe a DLC here or there, it will absolutely be a must play! If you like Slay the Spire and/or Monster Train, you will really enjoy this!

Honestly I bought this because it looked super cool, but I found it kinda boring. I even enjoy unique puzzle and programming esque games.. but maybe this one is just not for me. Once I'd got the gist of it and experimented with a few different words and letters, I found it got old very quick and I wasn't interested in playing more. The idea is awesome but there just didn't seem much to it; there's only a few 'factories' you use to make all the letters, and the only way the game gets harder is by limiting what factories you can make, resulting in a lot of annoying guesswork. I don't know, just didn't grab me.

A minor annoyance too is that it seems designed for 1080p resolutions and has no options to change to anything else, so it's a bit blurry on 1440p screens and probably worse in 4k.

Honestly, despite a 'No' to recommending this, it's more a neutral review. I don't dislike the game, but honestly I don't really love it either. I've really tried to like it and am approaching 10 hours in, but it's just not grabbing me.

I don't have a huge amount of experience with this genre, I played Advance Wars for my Gameboy back in the day and really loved it, so I kinda purchased it off of that. However while it's like Advance Wars in many ways (and is fun in those ways), there's a lot of added stuff on top that I'm not that fond of.

Probably my biggest criticisms are of the lack of any decent tutorial and the UI is just kinda 'eh' at times, at least on Steam Deck. The game gives you a very bare-bones tutorial which I could have worked out with my eyes shut, how to move, attack etc. But what it doesn't explain well are all the different stats of units, the classes and promoting stuff, and just in general what different parts of the game are. There is a 'Help' section, but it's like something taken from a game 20 years ago, one of those in-game digital manuals with different pages that you read yourself. It's super boring and I just wanted to play, not sit and read the manual for 30 mins.. Then only recently, almost 10 hours in, I worked out that you could promote units. Surely there could have been some proper explanation mission or something for this?

The UI is also kinda mediocre, it feels like it was designed for a phone or tablet first and PC second. On my Steam Deck it's quite frustrating navigating through the Organize Army screen and my items and artifacts etc. When you have more and more squads, it just compounds this. I want like a nice spreadsheet or all my units and their squads so I can click through and optimize!

Issues aside, the actual fighting and maps are quite fun, I like the unit variety although I'm not really liking the way battles are heading with more and more squads, it just looks like battles are going to end up taking forever..

It's not a bad game, I think I was just expecting something different, I can absolutely understand some will love it but I think I'm done for now.

Deadlink is a fantastic cyberpunk roguelike FPS. If you've ever played Isaac, Hades, Dead cells, Risk of Rain, Enter the Gungeon etc etc. Imagine that but an FPS. There's multiple zones and each zone is split into rooms. You enter the room, blast everything in sight and then move to the next room, with each zone having maybe 7-8 rooms and a boss at the end.

What I think really sets Deadlink apart though is the intensity, graphical style and awesome sound effects and music. Being honest, Deadlink isn't easy; from the get-go there's a lot of enemy spawns that damage you very quickly, stop moving and you'll be dead in a few seconds. I probably wouldn't recommend this to those who haven't played a good number of FPS's before, Doom and Doom Eternal are probably the most similar. While playing you also unlock 'implants' after most rooms - a variety of different buffs from enhancing your gun, movement or abilities. While this system starts out a bit shallow (and I wasn't sure about it at first), play a few runs and Deadlink starts to open up and massively builds upon these systems, giving you more interesting and more powerful implants, and allowing you to level them up.

The gunplay feels awesome, every single gun feels incredibly impactful and enemies fly across the screen or get chopped to bits if you can hit accurately and consistently. The bosses are also some of the coolest bosses I've genuinely ever fought in an FPS game, especially the 2nd and 3rd boss which have awesome dialogue and seem to remain challenging even after you've learnt their entire move-set by heart. The music is also great and makes me feel like a super badass while dashing around headshotting enemies in mid air.

The only complaints I'd really have is I wish there was a bit more stuff! It does take a while to get through each zone and especially the first few times, the next zone feels crazy hard, so getting all the way to the end is really challenging. Buuut.. with how good the bosses and enemies are, I can't help but wish there was more of them! If this game releases a DLC maybe with a couple more zones, bosses and/or routes to take, I'd be the first to buy it!

Dave the Diver is, as you can probably guess, a game about diving and collecting fish.. it's also a management sim as you run the sushi shop, run a fish farm, a crop farm, hire and train staff etc.. but it absolutely doesn't end there. This game surprises you with new mechanics so frequently that I'm often left stunned by the sheer amount of stuff to do...! Sometimes the game is about diving but then suddenly it'll shift gears into a big boss fight, or maybe it'll switch to a visual novel for a bit, or maybe you'll have to do quests kinda RPG style, there's tonnes of minigames, a 'collectathon' card game, customisation and there's even a third person stealth section..

That's not even getting started on the quality of the art and animation too. Most of the characters you meet and interact with have their own little comedic intro scenes which help to add humour and depth. The music is good and (especially once you get deep) gives quite a spooky foreboding feeling of exploring the deep dark depths! The whole game is very hard to criticise honestly, there's one or two objectives that felt a little unclear to me but a quick search online put me back on track (probably just me being dumb!).

Absolutely fantastic game and thoroughly recommend. I've never played an Indie that has quite so many different genres and ideas smashed together, it's clear a lot of love was put into this!