Recent reviews by C.

Drova - Forsaken Kin was an impulse purchase for me; not something I am prone to. However, I'd had my eyes out for a new RPG to try, and the moment I saw Drova I knew I had to try it. Drova is large enough to provide you an awesome experience, but small enough that you'll become familiar with its different locations. Combat is engaging; there's a lot of room for skill. If you find yourself struggling, you can often gain advantages through exploration and leveling up. I'm naturally averse to using consumable items, but Drova's crafting system reinforces helps make the opportunity cost seem far less steep; and you'll really need them for some of the most challenging fights. Many encounters are wholly optional, though advantageous. I like the experience and skill system, and that you can change allocations, though it's a bit of a process. Drova's characters are engaging and its story rich, and although I disliked a few elements I quite enjoyed it as a whole. I think Drova's ties to Celtic mythology are really neat, and I thoroughly enjoyed its implementation as someone not too familiar with it. Drova's aesthetic is quite unique, and I believe Celtic folklore is a major piece of it.

I'll echo the advice of another review I read prior to writing this: buy maps. Besides their brilliant art, maps are massively helpful in navigating Drova, as you would expect. Most of your questions will be answered by looking around in the game (sometimes literally, use right click searching frequently). I did look up a few things that were rather obscure, but most of those ended up being things I had kind of figured out but either misunderstood or forgot. It's a great game to play blind. I'll also echo another criticism I read: Drova has you backtrack a lot, and it can take a while. Travelling the map gets easier the further you get into the game, and that helps a lot, but sometimes its frustrating. Sometimes, however, its quite satisfying. I played the game in Iron mode and Classic difficulty. Classic seems like a "Normal" difficulty whereas Explorer seems to be "Easy". As the tooltip will tell you, Iron mode just has the game save (quite often) rather than you making your own saves. I think Classic and Iron mode are both well balanced; I only had 2 or 3 times I was frustrated by Iron mode setting me back a bit more than I expected. I've played many games with Ironman modes, and frankly Drova's Iron mode is more generous than many of those. You can also change modes at any time, but I didn't do so as I thought that may impact certain achievements. For the completionists among us, know that you'll have to play the game twice to get them all.

Drova is an excellent game, with minor flaws. Easily worth the price, and worth the time to play it. Perhaps even more than once. 9/10.

Balatro is an excellent game. Before I played Balatro, I'd have told you that there was no room for innovation in any game resembling Poker; it seemed to me that every gimmick had been explored, similar to a game like Chess. I would have been wrong. Making Poker into a roguelike deck-builder sounds preposterous, and making it so incredibly fun that it captured all of our attention is simply astounding. I could tell you about the incredibly fun mechanics for chips, mult, and multiplying your mult that make Balatro so engaging. I could commend the amazing balance patches that improved the game where I didn't even see room. I could tell you about the cool cross-promotions with the alternative arts for cards based on other cool games on Steam--for no additional price.

Instead of reading any further nonsense, you should really just play the game yourself. If you're interested in Balatro, the only reason I can see for not purchasing it immediately is already owning it.

With newfound experience, I thought it'd be fun to settle by a river, above ground, and in a savage land for a challenge. What I thought was temperate land turned out to be a frozen waste--my Dwarves died to the merciless beasts a few seasons in, unable to tend their wounds as the river remained frozen year-round. In most games, this would be the end. But this is Dwarf Fortress.

We retook the fledgling fortress, and in force. We reinforced our foolish structures in defiance of the trees (the Elves weren't up this far north), building walls and channeling the power of the very aquifer that denied my warriors steel to form their life-restoring well. After years we built great walls to protect ourselves, broke through the aquifer to forge steel, and made a fortress worthy of both the living and fallen.

The game is not without quirks nor bugs, but it is tremendous fun if you have the time to invest in learning how to play it.

Plagued by a bad launch, it’s a good DLC overall, one I consider worth the price. If you’re not going with the subscription pass and want the full EUIV experience, I think it is a must buy.

It’s good. There were some bugs as always, but it would seem everything has been ironed out. The new mission trees seem cool, the rework to Judaism is neat, I’m pleased overall.

If you have all the other DLCs, I’d recommend picking this up. Otherwise, maybe wait for EUV, play multiplayer, or get the subscription pass/buy the rest if you want to sink hundred of hours into the game.

Wanted an ingame reason to validate--or necessitate--those "easy" mountain bases? Or something to push you to play any other way? If you`re like me and the answer to both is yes, I think you`ll like Ideology. The dressing of the symbols, icons, and memes is also quite cool and fresh, I wouldn`t have expected it and yet it feels like it fits the game very well. Goes great with the mods updating to not only support it but enhance it. If you liked the base game I recommend it.

Edit 6: Enough time has passed that the game can be played, and the additions are mostly positive. I now recommend the DLC. Just be wary before you purchase, and wait for DLC

Edit 5: Only the multiplayer lag or at least some more bug fixes separate this from being good. I`d like concentrate development to be more balanced, but it`s okay as it stands.

Edit 4: 1.31.4 has released. As a person testing the closed beta, I was disappointed to hear no bugs were fixed between the initiation of the closed beta and its release, making me wonder as to why either there was a closed beta to begin with, or why it was released now. Singleplayer is still plagued with more minor issues such as those with AE, and I felt lucky we only had 4 crashes trying a 2 person multiplayer. And that`s ignoring how awfully slow the game is now. At this point I am not even sure 1.31.5 will do enough to bring this back, may need 1.31.6+. We will see.

Edit 3: Many issues have been resolved with 1.31.3, and I`d say singleplayer is relatively playable now if not unbalanced, but as many have noted it seems when one can even get multiplayer to work, it is really rather slow. Unbearably so. At this point if neutral voting were a thing, I would do so. Hoping for one last fix so that I can recommend this DLC (but remembering what happened here before).

Edit 2: I`ve been having fun with the DLC but there are still major issues. Non-functionality of multiplayer and semi-randomly deleted saves being the biggest among them, with so many smaller issues as well. While I may soon be able to recommend this DLC, to any who reads this let it be a lesson in patience; I lost an entire Aboriginal game to this bug, and while I was had decent fun to playing them it isn`t the most interesting to play more than once in a while (or in this case back to back).

Edit 1: This is an evolving situation, a fixes patch has been posted which improves many areas of the update and DLC, but between the remaining issues and bugs I still cannot yet recommend you purchase yet. Given that we`ve been told there is another patch on the way I will likely be changing my review, but no matter the changes it will be important to watch for signs of this happening again (the same happened with Emperor, but for me the issues were then negligible). Now? Even if the release was on this new patch, it would have probably been more broken than Emperor still. When a game has this many DLCs, and each DLC is the price of a good Indie game (maybe a few even) the expectation for a quality product should be satisfied. Delaying release would have alleviated Paradox and their playerbase a great headache.

Do not currently recommend, both the newest update and this DLC are broken. The issues are too many to enumerate, you may find them mentioned across reddit, along with the Day 1 Community patch. Multiplayer is non-functional. If you really think you can brave through it, go for it (I thought so too). I wouldn`t recommend it though. Really hope to be able to change this review in the (near?) future.

Europa Universalis IV is one of the most deep games you will ever play. The learning curve is a cliff, and just getting the DLC to play it will probably nearly bankrupt you, but for a game of conquest in a historic or semi-historic setting from 1444 until 1821, there is no other. There are people who have played for tens of thousands of hours without experiencing all of the game`s content. With almost 600 hours at the time of writing this myself, I have played only a handful of nations. The game can be extremely frustrating, but the feeling of reaching your wild goals--such as conquering Europe as an OPM (one province minor) in Ireland--is incredible. If you want to play it, wait until the best sale available, and search everywhere you can for information--there is an enormous deal to learn, both for you and me.

Crusader Kings II is probably the strangest RPG I`ve ever played. I love it. Developing a medieval dynasty while managing your realm is incredibly fun, and the newest patch + DLC (Holy Fury) have seemingly improved almost every aspect of the game. Well worth playing despite its age.

Unfortunately seems to be abandoned, and due to some issues with the game detecting my controllers I haven`t even been able to really play it. I have however seen some footage of the game; it seems pretty fun if you can get it to work. Wouldn`t recommend you try though, as even if you get it working I doubt it would be much fun for more than an hour or so.