Recent reviews by Shaaria

I will give praise first: This is the best game in this genre I've played. The Portal elements added to the bridge construction mechanics are easy to understand, but make for interesting level design. The game decision to not restrict you to an arbitrary amount of money is a good one that helps you to learn and experiment. The game also gives a much, much better explanation of its mechanics and how to succeed in it than others in the genre which generally have a few tutorial levels and then throw you in the deep end with "Good luck, figure it out yourself!"

Unfortunately, it still has all the same problems of other games in the genre. Past the initial levels you get little to no hints on what very specific solution the level designer had in mind, leading to trial and error gameplay. Anchor points are placed in ways that seem pathological, requiring solutions you've never seen or used before, or crazily abstracted variants on things you've seen. The game tells you how to build sturdy bridges, then never gives you a level where that advice would be applicable - how often do you actually have the space to build a raised arch bridge? How often do you have anchor points positioned to allow you to redirect tension with wires? The answer: Almost never.

But, to the game's credit, I got halfway through this one before giving up. That's more than I can say for Bridge Constructor, World of Goo, or When Ski Lifts Go Wrong, each of which I bounced off of very fast because of the exact same problems.

This feels like so much wasted potential.

The engine? Solid. It's the classic Build engine but modernized. Runs like a charm, great retro feel, works great. No complaints.
Gameplay design? It's a Doomlike; you can't really go wrong with the formula, and this is a fast-paced run-and-gun like any other.

The problem here is the game itself. Specifically the lack of variety in the environments, and the even more shockingly poor enemy variety. The original Doom had more enemy variety than Ion Maiden. *In Episode One*. Ion Fury is a game that seems to mostly consist of killing the same machine cultists over and over and over in drab environments, with a few of the most annoying little spider robots ever to disgrace video games thrown in every so often for good measure.

Now, hopefully, the potential here is for the general public to mod it and produce a billion WADs just like with the original Doom. While new textures probably won't be an issue, I sure hope the mod support adds ways to add new enemies because otherwise the community maps will be just as dull and uninspired as the main game.

I also found that it was unnecessarily difficult to determine where to go next on multiple occasions, a level design issue. There's a fine line between promoting exploration, and omitting visual cues to the player entirely, and Ion Fury is on the wrong side of that line.

(For a stunningly good example of a modern Doomlike with variety to its environments and weapons, I'd recommend Project Warlock, which has more varieties of enemies in its first few levels than the entirety of Ion Fury)

So, I'm going to compare this to Ascension, because it's made by the same people and has some REALLY obvious inspiration.

Think Ascension, except instead of fighting monsters, you're attacking the other players to eliminate them in a last-man-standing setup. That's basically Shards of Infinity. And it works really well. It's like if M:TG was a deck builder.

Games are generally quite quick because by the time a player actually gets eliminated, the game is almost over. Furthermore, even though you can heal and block damage with certain cards, the game never stalemates because of the Mastery mechanic; Mastery is a stat you have that only goes up (except for one card that can lower it by 2). If it hits 30, and you play the Infinity Shard that everyone has in their starter deck, you instantly win the game. This stops the game from stalling due to someone turtling, but it's also really obvious to see coming once you see someone with 20+ Mastery (Mastery powers up many other cards too, so you have other reasons to raise it). Plus, even if someone HITS 30 Mastery, they don't win until they get to the Infinity Shard, which might be at the other end of their draw pile, so you have time to react by either taking them out (which progresses the game) or lowering their Mastery (delaying the inevitable).

There are some other new features, like Mercenary cards where you can optionally get their effects as soon as you buy them, but they go straight to the bottom of the center deck. The dynamic is a bit different than Ascension because of the faster pace; banishing cards is less important because it's unlikely you'll be able to purge all your starter cards, and Champions (the replacement for Constructs) get destroyed much more easily because anyone can blow them up with enough Power.

At the moment there are no expansions, but given that this is basically a PvP reboot of Ascension, I can imagine they will roll them out sooner rather than later. And they are sorely needed; without any monsters, and no Always Available cards like in Ascension, it's quite possible to exhaust the entire center deck in a 4-player game at the moment. But the game has a solid foundation on which to build and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

At the time of this writing (March 2020) the game loads and plays lightning fast; if there were previous stability or latency issues it appears they have been fixed.

While I recommend the game, take it with a grain of salt. Automachef is a perfectly palatable automation game, straightforward to understand and encompassing the Conveyor Belt Spaghetti type of logistics. However, it has a lot of half-baked ideas that just take up space in the pantry and don't add much, if anything, to the game.

For instance, kitchen disasters are something you have to deal with eventually, such as fires and infestations. However, because one of these occurring typically ruins a recipe AND reduces your reputation (if it hits 0 you fail the level) it spoils the level anyway, so the machines that fix these problems (doubly so as they will almost certainly happen more than once) won't save you from a restart. An extra helping of shame goes to the Sprinkler which puts out fires but ruins ingredients in its radius.

Then there's Salmonella, which might as well not exist because it disappears as soon as raw chicken is cooked, and the direction of assembly is inherently linear, so you have to be TRYING to contaminate other foods for it to be a problem.

Then there's the splitter which lets you divide ingredients between two belts, except that it runs about as slow as molasses in a game that is constantly pushing you to make recipes as fast as possible, AND also pushes you to use the optimal number of ingredients.

And don't even get me started on the AC-16 or AC-32 which let you program your machines using assembly. I have been a professional programmer for 7 years, and learned assembly in university, and I don't want to touch these machines with oven mitts on. How is the average user on Steam expected to use these things? At least it seems perfectly possible to beat the game without them.

Fluids in recipes show up masquerading as a new level of complexity but because the pumps can be placed anywhere in the level, they add nothing to the difficulty of the logistics puzzle. Especially as there's literally no reason to ever not start a storage tank at 100% full, and no reason to not constantly pump liquid into the assembler machine.

All this aside, the core of the game is solid and it's a fun and enjoyable automation game. The devs just skipped one of the steps in the recipe: "A game is complete not when there is nothing more to add, but nothing left to take away" so expect to find quite a few features you will never use.

It's got rough edges. Let's cover those first: Some minor glitches, but nothing that can't be fixed with a load or restart (once, an agent got stuck in a wall; sometimes it would bring up the tutorial dialogue long after I had finished the tutorial). Sometimes, achievements fire at the wrong time (mostly the pacifist achievements). Once or twice my Hacker would wander off into the sunset while hijacking a mech.

The game also has a heavy stealth component but doesn't do a proper Stealth Game job of communicating information to the player such as enemy vision ranges or notifying you of alerted enemies before they sound the alarm (unless you're already staring at them). It gives you some neat tools but it could be better.

With all that out of the way: The game NAILS the Cyberpunk atmosphere. A grimy city lit with neon where many buildings openly exploit sex, blatantly evil megacorporations duking it out while the 99% suffer in poverty, laser beams, body augments, the works. And it's okay if the stealth part isn't too refined because the combat is straightforward to understand and you get plenty of options for equipment, and there's not -really- much penalty for failure beyond potentially losing prototypes you haven't absconded with yet.

Overall, while it could be better, it's pretty solid. If it's on a decent sale price then it's worth grabbing.

This is an exceptionally good Doomlike. It runs on a modern engine, and while it has a pixel retro style to it, the animations are top-notch with tons of frames to each. It has a pretty standard selection of weapons, but you can upgrade them, which usually fundamentally changes the weapon into something else; for instance with the basic shotgun, you can have it fire slugs, or have it autofire; with the dynamite it either becomes frag grenades, or proxy mines you can pick back up.

What sets it apart from other Doomlikes is your spells, as you have a few that you collect throughout the game and can buy and cast. There's a decent variety and some of them are extremely useful, and available at a single right-click if you need them in a pinch.

Compared to the original Doom there are more episodes but they are shorter, which is much better, honestly. Throw in a rocking soundtrack and great overall sound design (the sound of spent shotgun casings bouncing away makes an already extremely satisfying gun even more of a pleasure to use), and $12 is a fantastic price for all this. Definitely worth buying if you like the genre. I just beat it on the normal difficulty and am raring to play again on something tougher.

Overall, this is a better game than La-Mulana. It has very nice QoL improvements, the puzzles make more sense, the overall flow of the game is better, and both the platforming and the combat feels better (the primary weapons are easier to use and you get more of them earlier). It's quicker to list the things I don't like: Over-reliance on NPCs as a means of progression (with little to no indication that they do so), and overall weaker boss design. That said, the core of the game is much better than in LM1, and I only encountered one "How the hell was I meant to figure that out?" puzzle instead of the numerous ones in LM1.

Playing LM1 isn't required. I honestly don't think it helped me with the puzzles, it mostly helped me avoid death traps, and also made me aware I needed to take proper notes as I played. As with LM1, if you don't want to deal with tough puzzles, it's still a solid action platformer if you want to play spoiled or with hints. The game is somewhere between linear and nonlinear; there are certain progression checks but within each 'block' of the game you need to do some number of things in any particular order. I definitely recommend the game.

An interesting puzzler with deck-building elements that's more complex than it appears on the surface. The campaign has an excellent learning curve, steadily introducing new elements to you until you're ready to forge ahead on your own. Only real complaint is that the campaign leans heavily into the Versus mode, which I feel is the least interesting game mode, but you can set up custom games of the solo modes.

You're basically an air traffic controller for an aircraft carrier. Each individual part of your job is extremely easy; the difficulty comes from having to do so many things all at the same time, rapidly context-switching from one task to another. It's a classic formula, but this is a very fun execution of it, very well-explained in-game. The learning curve is quite fair, and the game is very forgiving early on and slowly becomes less and less so (without ever being unfair about it).

There are a few small bugs, some harmless (animation errors when actions get interrupted) and one annoying (you can move an elevator while an aircraft is getting on it, and it gets into a glitched state where it's stuck until you give it another order). But overall it's a good game and worth the $10 asking price. While the campaign missions are all fixed scenarios, it has Quick Play and Survival modes which are (or at least appear to be) randomly generated for more longevity.

My only real complaint is that some game elements are heavily under-utilized, like the non-Seahawk helicopters and the Spec Ops missions.

It needs a little more work but the premise is solid. (EDIT: The game has been abandoned by its devs, fortunately it is in a feature-complete state and I still recommend it.)

This is an excellent entry into the automation-game genre, with a lot of Floor Space Tetris like in Big Pharma, and logistic management that shares some elements with Factorio, in the unique twist of a car production line. Like a real production line a new car will be starting as one rolls off the lot, but how you lay out the factory is critical because different steps take different amounts of time, so you have to balance it all. Which is hard, because most upgrades alter the amount of time a step takes, or split a long multi-step segment into multiple (and thus parallelizable) segments. You'll need to constantly rearrange and restructure the factory layout; it's very much NOT a fire-and-forget affair.

Although you kind of get thrown in the deep end right away since you HAVE to build an entire production line completely from scratch, there is a decent enough in-game tutorial that gets you started, and the other mechanics are either simple enough to pick up, get their own popup when they are first encountered, or feature an entry in the in-game help guide. Plus you start with no upgrades and thus the simplest possible setup: one car, no split-out stages, no extra mechanics to grapple until you're ready.

All the game really lacks now is depth. Not in terms of complexity - it's got just the right amount of that - but in terms of game content. There are only five maps included, only some of which have an associated Scenario, which doesn't even track if you complete the objectives on the menu screen or anything. If they added any sort of campaign mode, or more scenarios (like how Big Pharma keeps presenting different objectives and starting conditions) or challenges (restrictions or extra requirements), then the game would be perfect. As it stands it just doesn't have the depth that, say, Factorio does to be carried wholly and entirely by its sandbox mode, because you'll eventually reach a stable state where you don't -really- have anything to do, and a new game wouldn't offer a new challenge.