Recent reviews by Shaaria

If you played Factorio, and liked it, but thought "Man, I wish this was even bigger, and harder, and about ten times more complicated"...

...then Factorio: Space Age is for you.

Manage interplanetary logistics! Figure out how to build and place many, many rocket silos, keeping them all supplied with parts and cargo! Build multiple spaceships that get progressively more complicated to lay out during the game! For practice, try doing the logistic challenge puzzles, since you'll want to minimize space usage.

Visit scenic Fulgora, where you craft your way DOWN the tech tree through recycling, and you always end up with way too much of something, even if that 'something' keeps changing.

Or swampy Gleba, where most of the products you deal with will spoil over time and you can't just leave them sitting on belts like you would on Nauvis. Hope you're good at balancing ratios!

There's also Vulcanus, and I sure hope you like interlacing pipes and properly setting up high-throughput belt layouts.

Finally you get to go to Aquilo where almost every building needs to be adjacent to a heat pipe or it'll freeze and stop operating. It's like having an additional type of pipe you have to lay out between everything, everywhere!

And you can make it even MORE complicated if you start to dip into the new Quality mechanic at any point. It's an additional layer of complexity on top of an already very complicated game and even more complex expansion, but the reward is straight-upgrade versions of any building or entity you want.

Unquestionably worth the $35 asking price, because you'll probably spend at least 35 hours just sitting and starting at the screen figuring out how the heck you're going to do what the game expects you to do THIS time.

I normally like retro shooters, but this one should have stayed in the 90's. Featuring such questionable design decisions as:
- Tank controls in a first-person shooter. You control like a brick.
- Even more cumbersome version of the Hexen style inventory for health/armor restoration (since it was made by the same devs).
- Your weapons have a limited effective range but your only indication of what it is is whether or not things flinch when shot at (and sometimes robotic enemies take damage but don't flinch).
- No visual indicator of when you are taking damage until your health is already critical. No audio indicator of taking damage at all.
- LOTS of completely unmarked hidden walls that you have to find by sweeping your mouse over and seeing if your cursor changes color. And these aren't for secrets - they're required for progress. Ditto for the 'holo walls' that look exactly like normal walls but you can walk straight through them.
- Enemies can drop items that spawn visually under their own corpses. (This would be fine, except for the following:)
- No automatic picking up of items when you get close enough (like in every other game in the genre), you have to put your cursor exactly over their sprite and right-click.
- Items lack any sort of animation or glow (like the ones Doom has) to make them stand out visually and tell you "Hey, this is an item you can pick up". Keycards are literally 3 pixels tall, making them super easy to miss. This also means more pixel-hunting to see if your cursor turns green.
- ...made worse by the Doom-style locked camera so you literally cannot pick up items at your feet.

Leave this one in the past.

11/10. If you like Phoenix Wright games, buy this one. Don't even wait for a sale.

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is basically if you put PW in a blender with D&D, and it works -very- well. Prepare to argue about the finer details of how spells are worded, bearing in mind which spells belong to which schools and thus leave which traces. Figure out the importance of certain verbal or somatic components, and be sure to read the fine print on each spell. This is on top of all the usual Phoenix Wright elements of investigations and courtroom battles, with a very well-written over-arching story following the main characters and exploring their motivations and backstories. It's not a thin reskin; the game makes full use of the originality of its setting, bringing its own ideas to the table to set itself apart from the games that inspired it.

It also doesn't waste your time. There's no 'healthbar' in most courtoom sections, so you don't need to save-scum before every guess. It's more like the classic Phoenix Wright games in its style, where the animations are snappy and don't make you wait for the overly long animation you've already seen 30 times to play out like in the more recent PW games.

So, super strong recommendation, and I eagerly await a sequel because this developer clearly knows what they're doing.

Kubifactorium is a colony builder more than it is an automation game - it doesn't even introduce automation elements until a few missions in. It's very chill and low-complexity and is a game you can take at your own pace, making as much or as little spaghetti as you want.

The setup is a series of missions on different islands, with the meta-progression element that when you finish an island, every building on it gets automatically deconstructed and you get to bring all of the resources you collected with you (up to a certain amount per resource). This gives you a head-start on the next island as you can rebuild your higher tier houses or fancier machines and workshops immediately without having to crawl back up the entire tech tree again. So, even though you start over on each island with no buildings at all, you can skip chunks of the progression to get back to where you were before faster, and build/organize your structures better than last time.

Definitely a fun little game even if there's not much replay value, and a nice take on the genre and formula with its own ideas thrown in. Plus the gradual transition from manual to automated tasks helps really *feel* like proper progression as the more things you automate, the more colonists you have available to do other stuff instead.

Wait for a sale, but do give it a try.

The Surge is a soulslike for Ultra Greatsword Enjoyers, as combat is not fast and twitchy but rather more cautious and methodical. You definitely want to bait attacks and wait for openings, as enemies leave themselves wide open after most attacks. There are fast weapons, but they honestly suck in comparison to being able to deal big damage and stagger just about anything with heavy-duty weapons. If you - like me - went through DS1 with Havel's set and the dragon tooth, you'll be at home here.

If I were making a tier list I'd put The Surge in B tier:
- Excellent theming, 10/10, very creative
- ...but everything looks the same once you're in the interior areas, it's all heavily industrial and easy to get lost.
- Pretty understandable weapon and armor mechanics
- ...though most of the armor set bonuses are underwhelming.
- Very creative new ideas like dismembering enemies for their gear - you steal their weapons and armor by slicing it off them.
- ...but this disincentivizes trying out different weapon types as you'll be invested in both crafting materials AND weapon proficiency ranks.
- Large-scale area design is fantastic, with tons of shortcuts, elevators and one-way doors used to make areas quickly traversible once you unlock them
- ...but there are some serious "Where am I meant to go???" moments, particularly in the first and second areas.
- Good options for customization through "Implants" which are basically the equivalent of rings but also stat boosting
- ...though make sure not to underestimate the max HP boosters as there are some extremely hard-hitting enemies.
- Game does a good job of maintaining an atmosphere of mystery
- ...but leaves a lot of questions unresolved at the end of the game with an obvious sequel hook.

I had a bit of a rough start but once I found my feet in the game I enjoyed it, aside from occasional running around trying to find whatever random door I had missed in order to progress. It's pretty forgiving since you can bank tech scrap (the equivalent of souls/runes) once you get to a safe zone, and it won't be lost. The progression curve seems quite well-tuned, and you never need to grind for materials deliberately if you just do it while exploring by cutting enemies' limbs for materials via finishers.

So, while it does have some issues, I think the end result definitely deserves to be checked out for fans of the genre.

Criminally underrated. Even the most common achievements have rates of around 5% which indicates that people who buy it aren't playing it, and they're missing out. (Update: The dev informed me that achievements were added relatively recently, and this is why the rates are so low)

Indemon Tales is like if you took Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (you're part of a guild, doing quests in randomly-generated dungeons, and more locations become available over time) but not written for children. Oh, and the actual dungeon gameplay is more like *checks notes* ...Stardew Valley? You have swords for melee and you mine stuff for materials along the way. You also have various ranged options such as throwing rocks (damage scales with your mining skill), crossbows, or magic. It's also party-based, and your AI companions are VERY competent. They can use whatever skill you make the active one for them and whatever item is in the leftmost slot on their hotbar. If you give them magic or ranged weapons they are extremely accurate and know how to lead their shots and will be an enormous help as you control the frontmost character. The game also has a unique mechanic of switching between party and solo mode, where the latter makes the non-lead party members disappear, which you can strategically do to avoid taking damage.

Technically you play as Generic Human #45768454 who has absolutely no dialogue or personality and barely any story relevance to such a degree that I can't help but wonder if it's a deliberate jab at other games that do this. Also, this is fine because almost immediately you get the -actual- protagonist in your party, and you can immediately shove the human into the back row of the party and control her instead for 99% of the rest of the game, barring the occasional solo segment.

You have great flexibility with your builds, as all characters get the same skill tree and you can eventually respec if you want to rebuild. You can roll melee, magic, a hybrid, or whatever. No skill or item is useless, it's just a matter of making it good. The game feels very well-balanced as you level up regularly and it never felt too hard or too easy to me.

On top of that, this is a one-man passion project for the developer, who did the entire thing (except the public domain music, which is also great) himself. It's absolutely worth the full price it asks for and deserves to be played. It's well-written, balancing serious moments and occasional comedy, with twists that you won't see coming and a reasonable progression of story. It's well-designed as nothing is ever lost forever and the world map gives you hints about where you still have stuff to discover. Solid recommend.

Easily the worst Doom game I've ever played. A pile of terrible design decisions went into this that all prop each other up:
- You have barely any reserve ammo, even if you upgrade your ammo capacity, and ammo pickups are scarce, because...
- The game wants you to chainsaw enemies for more ammo, which is a good second or two of you not playing the game and waiting for an animation to finish.
- Everything deals way too much damage even on the medium difficulty level, because...
- The game wants you to be constantly glory killing stuff, which is a good second or two of you not playing the game and waiting for an animation to finish.
- Archviles and Buff Totems are absolute cancer and turn the game into hide-and-seek (where everything else is "it" with a huge damage boost), because...
- They want you to use the double jumps and dashes to go find where they hid the awful thing, to justify their existence beyond annoying platforming sections.
- Far too many things like to get right in your face and/or inflict absurd amounts of camera shake, because...
- Other enemies have precision weakpoints you have to hit and they wouldn't want you to be able to reliably hit them without having to use the Slow Time rune, would they?
- Mancubi and Cyber Mancubi in particular are awful to deal with and deal way too much damage, because...
- Eventually you get a one-hit kill move, which there are never enough charges for, but its presence gives the devs the ability to stop caring about balance, which becomes very evident in the final levels of the game.
- The final boss can knock you in basically any direction he wants at high speed, through walls and floors sometimes, and is constantly summoning piles of demons (sometimes as much as 4+ mancubi directly on top of you) so that you never get a moment's breathing room to shoot at him, because...
- Marauders are a terrible addition to the game, doubly so since they can do their dog-summoning counterattack if they get hit by another demon, and it always targets you.
- Level design is often confusing and frequently relies on you finding whatever random climbable wall or monkey bar lets you move on to the next area.

In short, the game designers hate classic Doom players and want them to suffer. I got the game on a free weekend and I still feel ripped off. And I haven't even played the DLC campaigns, which I hear are even worse.

Wait for a sale.

En Garde is absolutely oozing with charm and is a ton of fun to play, but it's incredibly short. It's only 4 levels long - and one of those is the tutorial.

In yet another case of everyone else doing FromSoft's formulas better than FromSoft, En Garde is basically Sekiro but 10,000% less frustrating. Mostly this is because the game actually tells you what you need to do to defend yourself: a blue circle means 'parry', a red X is 'dodge', and a white circle is 'either'. You also take a set number of hits to be defeated and don't need to heal (your health refills at the end of an encounter or if you use a special attack move), allowing you to focus on swordplay.

The game's premise is mostly that you are almost always greatly outnumbered. You need to make use of your environment by fighting dirty to isolate, stun, or temporarily remove enemies so that you can duel them one at a time. 1-on-1 is very much in your favor, 2-on-1 is an uphill struggle, and any higher is basically impossible. The maps are made with this in mind and leave plenty of tools around for you to work with, and this also requires a very aggressive play style; if you are too defensive, stunned enemies will rejoin the fight eventually.

It's a fantastic game only marred by how incredibly short it is, so definitely give it a shot. Even if you're terrible at Sekiro-likes, that's okay, because the game has multiple difficulty levels and some assist modes if you need them. But even on Hard it's still a very fair challenge.

Recommended on sale.

Herald of Havoc isn't long or difficult, but it IS fun. It's a Quakelike that understands that you want to shoot hordes of enemies with awesome weapons while exploring a variety of locations, and it provides. It has a great variety of weapons and a decent variety of enemies, gives you enough ammo that you don't have to be stingy while not giving you enough to use only one weapon, and is happy to scale from small encounters with weaker weapons to whole groups of squishy enemies that you can annihilate with more powerful guns, or tougher enemies that justify busting out the heavier weapons.

Plus it has nice QoL: enemies flash black when they are killed so you know you can stop shooting them even if they're still moving, as it's just their death animation. It autosaves at sensible points and loading back in after a death is very quick.

And by far the most interesting choice is for it to reset you to starting weapons (sword and/or blaster) at the start of every level. In Doom & Friends the levels were always designed to be theoretically beatable this way in case you finished the previous level with 1 HP left, but here, HoH puts you back at 100 health and default resources every time. And it WORKS. Really well! It lets the levels be tailored to the weapons you get, letting you blast shotguns down tight corridors, fire chainguns at range, or pull out the lightning gun on a horde. It also lets it do ridiculous things like giving you infinite ammo on a few levels to let you really go all-out against huge and incredibly strong enemy groups, so that it really feels like an epic showdown. Extra credit for the final boss design, which locks you into specific weapons and has attack patterns that make it more than just "shoot it until it dies".

And it's honestly nice that the supposedly-unfair Havoc difficulty level isn't really -that- unfair. It spawns more, nastier enemies earlier on, but it doesn't do stuff like make them react instantly or take out your whole healthbar in one shot like other games in the genre might. It ramps up the challenge to significant but still approachable levels.

My only real complaint is that I managed to go through the whole game without learning about the special attacks of some weapons, triggered with the middle mouse button. Some of them are incredibly useful and were invaluable on my Havoc playthrough.

If you've ever wanted to shoot a crypto-bro in the face, this is the game for you.

More seriously, it's basically SGW:C but in a desert biome this time. If you liked the first game, you'll like this one. If you didn't, you won't like the sequel. It's got some nice little improvements here and there, but at its core it's still the same game with new maps.

One notable difference is that some of the new maps are "long shot contracts" where the mission areas are located at least 1000m away from the sniping point and require you to use heavy sniper rifles and powerful scopes, while others are more up-close and personal and incentivize the shorter-range gear.

My only real complaint is that the drone jammers feel way too prolific and make the drone almost useless in many situations, which is a pity as it's a fantastic reconnaissance tool when you actually get to use it. There's plenty of other cool toys to play with though.