Recent reviews by Netbug

Cute little clicker game is charming, but its slow feedback loop and taking a bit too much sweet time before allowing me to automate anything kept me from truly getting engaged. Could also use a bit more graphical polish, and the mechanics can be a bit confusing.

There's a lot I liked about this game and I went back and forth on the "no" recommendation for a while, because there is some great stuff here. Creating your own civilizations is fun and the amount of detail in the political elements is really neat. Unfortunately, the game also has quite a few flaws, and two of them ruin it more than anything else: The minimum time for a single game is extremely long, and the tutorial is useless.

So my playthrough went a little like this: I put my best effort into doing everything the tutorial was telling me to do, expanding my empire, building stations, examining anomalies, and then I started to run into other races. At this point, I had to exit the game to look up on a wiki how the heck I was supposed to make my fleets more powerful, because the AI had decided to tell me 5 times how to colonize worlds but 0 times how to defend them. I started building up my armies, and all my resources and everything looked good, and I won my first war... only to immediately and unceremoniously be stomped down so badly by my neighboring nations that I lost all of my routes and pretty much any opportunity to advance or have any more fun.

Maybe if that had felt like the climax of the game, I wouldn't have minded so much - my dumb xenophobic race flew too close to the sun, hahaha they deserved that, game over - except I looked at the in-game clock and realized I was barely halfway through the time allotted. Am I thinking about this wrong? Am I supposed to just quit at that point and start over? Because the idea of another 10 hours of hopelessly trying to claw my way back up wasn't sounding very fun, and the idea of starting over only to risk a similar fate wasn't very appealing either. Even playing on the fastest setting, there was still just so much waiting involved.

In the end, I didn't close Stellaris feeling like I'd witnessed a grand space opera. I closed it feeling like I'd put in a lot of drudgework - survey world, build station, build ships to fight enemies, wait for all of those commands to be done - and then got curbstomped for my efforts. I felt disheartened and was thinking about all the TV I've been meaning to binge that I could have gotten through in 12 hours. No matter how many aspects of Stellaris I liked - how long I stuck with it says a lot, I know - I can't recommend a game that I close feeling worse than how I felt when I picked it up, especially when I don't even have buyer's remorse as a part of that because I played it on a free weekend.

Also... I just know someone is going to tell me that if I was so confused, I should have read the wiki that little "help" button lead to, and and to that I say since when do we let 40$ games outsource making an actually understandable tutorial to the fans? Or at the very least, why include the tutorial robot who claims he's going to guide her players on the game's basics if you'll inevitably just have to go read the full wiki anyways?

I have a love-hate relationship with how hard this game is on single player. On one hand, some balancing or an easier mode would be nice. On the other, finally passing those levels sure is rewarding. Regardless, I had a good time as a struggling single parent. Now I just need to rope my friends in...

The amount of content and little details in this game feels like both a love letter to - and arguably an improvement upon - the Harvest Moon games, with a little Minecraft tossed in.

Game Corp DX is an amusing romp for the price, but it's hard to recommend it when its interface needs polished and there's a variety of glitches that need ironed out. Overall, it kept my attention for about an hour, but I don't see myself playing it much in the future.

There's not much to say that hasn't already been said about UNDERTALE. The game boasts a good story, interesting gameplay, and every. little. choice. matters.

It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like; anime-themed jigsaw puzzles. The controls are decent, although the fairy can be annoying. It's a nice diversion, but there's no way I would have paid full price for it when similar games are available for free all across the internet.

The story (at least the version I went through) feels rather cliche, and a lot of the time I disliked the character I was playing which made it hard to feel immersed, but it's hard to deny that Emily Is Away has an interesting concept. I'd be up for trying more "chat-based dating sims" or whatever you wanna call this.

It's easy to find literature about the making of a film, but books for video games are much more scarse. I hope more developers of iconic games take a cue from this great book!

In case you haven't already heard from everyone and their sister, Portal is a great game! It's a unique take on the FPS genre with its own sense of humor.