Recent reviews by dogrobot

Best combat in the series. It suffers from having poor character availability due to the way the game is structured (requiring multiple playthroughs before characters can be recruited, and even then not available on every playthrough after that), and at many points you don't have much in the way of free battles if you have to grind.

So many explosions.

cool I guess

Still an offbeat classic.

Fantastic homage to classic shmups, with the developers continuing to add new content.

Humans are animals that live in a society
Gauntlet Knights rise up

Ciconia is quite different than its predecessors, Higurashi and Umineko. Rather than being a murder mystery set in the 80s, it's a futuristic post apocalyptic magical steampunk battle series influenced by current trends in politics/news/social media. Ryukishi's goal with CIconia is to write something more in the vein of Evangelion, with the teenage protagonists entrusted with the most military might in the world yet are still powerless to use it as they wish or "save the world" like in other battle series due to politics, public opinion, corruption spread by the older generations.

While it's a solid enough entry on its own, I still feel that the first episode of CIconia is worse as an introduction than Higurashi or Umineko episode 1 in terms of being focused and establishing the core mysteries and themes. Ciconia episode 1 already has almost 30 characters, and while Higurashi/Umineko were mostly set in smaller locations Ciconia takes place on the world stage with multiple factions and there's also a lot of technology/terminology/concepts that needs to be introduced due to the future setting.

can't wait for episode 2 to come out, ignore the next episode preview from the previous episode, and be about Miyao and Jayden playing the piano.

It's not really a bad game, it just all kind of blurs together into one continuous stream of bullets with very little to distinguish one level or boss fight from another and ultimately kind of drags on too long. So there's not much reason to suggest getting it over other games either (besides the low price).

Life's a breach, then you go back in time to try again.

Spacechem has one of the worst tutorials ever. It doesn't really help much in terms of teaching you the controls or how to play the game or the concepts that you need to think about to solve the puzzles. It even unintentionally teaches you some bad habits that unnecessarily clutter up your solutions and make things harder on yourself.

However it's still an amazing puzzle game if you're willing to put the effort into it. While many puzzle games are designed to require a very specific order of steps to solve them, Spacechem is more of a sandbox. You work on your own to learn new mechanics hands on through experimentation, then you can try to think about how best to apply the concepts with meticulous planning or just try to work through it with trial and error and gradually refining your solution until you find something that works. And as long as it works, it doesn't really matter how efficient your solution is (though you can always try to improve your work). So maybe the tutorial being bad isn't as big a deal as it might seem at first (assuming it doesn't turn you off the game completely).