Recent reviews by Shaaria

For a game that frequently goes on a 90% off sale, it's pretty good. Not amazing, not game of the year, but good for the price. It's a mildly tongue-in-cheek reference to oldschool NES games, right down to the game manual which looks like an old NES instruction book complete with broken English (but it's still understandable enough to act as a manual).

It's also quite simple to understand for the most part; you play a hero trying to find five gems and the five shards of the true sword so you can summon the boss, fight him, and hopefully win. But as you progress the game upgrades the enemies and takes away some of your resources to make things harder.

It's got some decent replay value, a single game doesn't take too long, and it's got pretty good chiptune-style background music.

(It also has a bow-wielding flat-chested female lizard character called The Huntress, who is easily the best character in the game, and is almost identical to the D&D character my alias is based off, so I may be a *little* biased but I assure you the game is worth a few bucks.)

It's basically Theme Hospital, but better in every way. Definitely recommended.

My only complaint is that it can be rather difficult to select specific items inside of a room that are behind others, even if they are fully visible. This makes rearranging items unnecessarily annoying sometimes.

It's another Kingdom Rush game. If you like the series, I recommend it. If you don't like the series, I don't recommend it. If you're unsure, you can start on this one if you want as they're all pretty interchangeable.

A new feature in this iteration is special terrain elements like plants that periodically allow you to activate them for some effect on nearby enemies, either dealing damage, poisoning, slowing, or freezing, depending on what it is. There are new variants on the old tower themes that work out quite well. It also feels better balanced than Frontiers as far as the bosses go. And as usual it contains a few bonus stages beyond the main campaign that were added for free.

It's kind of like FTL, except ground-based, and with some very interesting ideas.

You control a small (1-5 vehicles) convoy of vehicles as they roam the landscape chasing objectives, occasionally getting into combat and often getting into various dialogue choices. Combat is interesting as there are several types of weapons, the main convoy vehicle has its own special set of equipment, and it has the unique mechanic of being able to ram vehicles to knock them into terrain hazards or mines. Fortunately, just like FTL, you can pause at any time and issue orders while paused. There's multiple difficulty levels and a ton of alternative vehicles to unlock, but the game is simple enough to pick up fairly quickly (with a straightforward tutorial). I definitely recommend it if you like FTL-like games.

This is a wonderfully made automation game entirely built around ONE mechanic. Literally everything in this game is about manipulating a number from 1-20 by increasing or decreasing it in various ways. Each machine you can build does something different; initially you get +/-1 and +/-3 machines, but then it gets to halve/double, reduce to 1, etc. The machines can be rotated but not flipped, and must have belts connecting inputs/outputs (can't be directly connected). The fact that it's all built around one core mechanic makes it absurdly simple to understand; all the little restrictions (primarily arranging machines on factory space) turns it into a deviously challenging combination of logistics and Tetris.

If you're looking for an entry to the automation game genre, or if you bounced off of something like Factorio due to its sheer complexity, then give Big Pharma a try. I am writing this having just gotten 100% of achievements after ~120 hours, so I think it's definitely worth the listed price.

A rather fun game where I had a mildly unfair advantage by already being somewhat familiar with Unix command-lines (it was ever so slightly annoying but not at all surprising that I couldn't simply use vim to edit files). It's got just enough real terminology to sound authentic while not really teaching you anything about actual hacking at all, except for the importance of securing your damn servers, not leaving passwords lying around in plain text on production servers, setting up firewall whitelists... *ahem*

It doesn't really require any technical knowledge, so as long as you're not deathly allergic to command-lines you can play it and have fun. The Labyrinths DLC is practically a second game in the same engine, too, in terms of its depth and complexity, and certainly worth it.

This is a wonderful real-time tactics game. It does an excellent job of communicating information to the player, in terms of your current status, enemy sight ranges, what your characters' abilities are, how they work, what their ranges are, and so on. It's a difficult game, but not only does it let you quicksave and quickload at will, the quickloads are lightning-fast, meaning that a small mistake is just a keypress and an eyeblink away from being undone. The game even reminds you to quicksave if it's been more than a minute with a subtle little timer at the top indicating time since the last quicksave.

The story is about as Japanese as it gets, but to be frank, the gameplay is the real draw - enough that I'm interested in playing it again on the hardest difficulty. It plays wonderfully, every mistake feels like your fault, and it barely matters because you can quickload at a moment's notice. It's a game that really makes you think, and has a huge degree of nonlinearity to it in terms of how you approach the game's levels. Definitely recommended.

Ascension is a fantastic deck building game - probably the best. I've had the mobile app for quite some time and now having it on Steam makes it easier to play with friends. $10 gets you the base game and all expansions except the most recent one and the latest promo pack; considering the physical copies of these would probably run well into hundreds of dollars, and that this is an exceptionally well-made video game adaptation, it's 100% worth it.

If you're not familiar with deck builders, they're kind of like Collectible Card Games minus the "Collectible" part of it. Everyone begins the game with the same awful starter deck, and over the course of the game you obtain better cards to build your deck (hence the name) into something better. You can also banish cards out of your deck to get rid of those terrible starters.

Ascension works super well (and better than Dominion) because the randomness is both heavy, AND symmetrical. All buyable cards are in a center area that all players work with, so the randomness of the center row affects all players equally. The randomness of your deck is what you make of it; if you have a bad deck, it's because you made it that way. The extreme amount of randomness in the center row means you MUST adapt; you cannot simply rely on one cheese strategy to win like in a CCG. Not only that, but if other players spot you trying to set up for a specific combo, they can just buy or banish the cards you need, and prevent it. It's a game about thinking on your feet, coming up with new combinations on the fly, and adapting.

The expansions are well-made too. They add new mechanics, but nothing that drastically alters the base game, so much so that you can play with any combination of expansions (or even drop the base game decks entirely!)

Definitely recommend. Even if you've never tried the genre, this is a fantastic way to get into it.

Let's clear one thing up right away: this is not Hammerwatch 2. If that's what you are expecting, you'll be disappointed.

Heroes of Hammerwatch is more along the lines of a spinoff. Instead of a huge, massive campaign requiring numerous hours of group co-ordination to get through as you collect and lose lives, HoH is designed with smaller gameplay sessions in mind.

You get no lives. When you die, you can be rezzed, but whoever rezzes you gets their soul linked, so if anyone in a link chain dies, everyone in the chain dies.

Maps are randomly generated, and are much smaller than Hammerwatch maps. You collect ores and money that you send back to the town at certain points in the dungeon, that you use to acquire permanent upgrades. The game encourages you to spend the money you get as soon as soon as you can by imposing a heavier and heavier tax based on how much money you have at the town.

You can skip ahead through the dungeon through portals that throw a gauntlet of enemies at you, and give you a bunch of items to make up for what you're skipping, so you don't have to endlessly replay the first few floors.

You can alter the game with fountain effects, so for instance if you hate corridor traps, you can just remove them, either by paying money or by making other parts of the game harder.

Numerous other changes have made the game much more oriented towards pick-up-and-put-down gameplay. Whether it's better or not is entirely up to the player, so if you played the first Hammerwatch and wanted a version that didn't require hours of investment at a time, HoH is the title for you. The replay value and the run customization makes the title very much worth it, in my opinion.

I initially gave this a positive review, then changed it to negative. I'll put it back to positive now because they've been working on it. The devs have not only been adding more content but they have also been balancing the heroes, making their powers generally more useful, and also improving the ability to interact with and command the bots.

My primary reason for a negative review was the lack of a true AI director; this still holds. Items are still placed very algorithmically ahead of time irrespective of your performance. Hordes still come on time intervals. Bosses, hordes, and piles of specials can still all spawn together randomly.

The main reason I'm willing to let this slide now is that the game gives you more tools to deal with it. It's easier to stagger enemies with the right build, letting you keep hordes off your back. There are more shields to go around to kite bosses with. Hero abilities are just generally more useful. A higher level cap makes you more powerful and better able to fight off these threats.

So while I still think the lack of a true director hurts the game, I no longer feel it is a game-breaker. It's gone from "total luck-based BS" to "tough but doable", and I can live with that.

The rest of my original review, sans the director comment, follows:

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All complaints about the original have been addressed. Annoying loot drops? Fixed; the whole loot die system is gone and you get set upgrades to loot quality distributions based on tomes/grimoires recovered, plus you get three items per level completed instead of just 1. AND you get bonus items every time you level-up in the form of commendation chests.

Power stagnation? Fixed. Every item now has a numeric "power" value and a set of tags (wide sweeps, shield breaking, etc) that determine what it does. Your actual damage dealt is based off a Power value calculated from the average power of all your equipment, plus 10x your level. New equipment is earned at +/-10% of the highest item power you have ever seen.
If you get a party wipe, you still get a very reasonable amount of partial EXP. The game is set up so that you are constantly getting stronger.

Annoying crafting system that requires grinding? Fixed. You get so many items now that you'll get duplicates to scrap. Plus, since you can't upgrade item power, you'll be scrapping old items that were good once you get better ones. You can re-roll item properties and orange item traits separately. You're limited with how much Dust you have but you get that by scrapping items, which you were going to do anyway.

Useless weapon qualities? Fixed. There are way more armored enemies in the game now so armor-penetrating weapons have a reason to exist other than Stormvermin. Even the maligned Damage Over Time weapons are actually useful now as the DOT effects go through armor, and the weapons that inflict them hit an area. The hagbane bow even stunlocks!