Recent reviews by Shaaria

Whether or not you liked the original Kingdom Rush will determine whether or not you like its sequel.

There's nothing really different about the mechanics - there's just new, fun variants on the old theme. The tower specializations have differed (and are quite interesting) but the basic purposes are still the same. The enemies are different but the general premise is unchanged. There are new heroes, but the purpose of having a hero on the field is the same. So if you liked KR, you'll like KRF; and conversely if KR wasn't your thing, KRF is not sufficiently different that your opinion will be altered.

So, assuming you enjoyed KR, you'll find KRF an enjoyable revisit. It's got plenty of new challenges, interesting new towers, and incorporates a subsystem of certain enemies' abilities being "magical" so that you can negate them with a particular tower upgrade.

Forewarning: The final boss of the campaign is kind of BS (spoiler: it can just straight-up delete a few of your towers and there's nothing you can do to stop it) but that's mostly just going to cause you to retry the stage and adjust your strategy (namely: keep leftover money instead of spending it all on upgrades at the end of the last wave).

It's fun with literally any number of players except 3.

It's in the same vein as other economic hostile-takeover games like TTD but it's much faster-paced, so instead of a game taking days to complete, it's over in 20-30 minutes. This is a good thing. The time between "It's obvious who the winner is" and "The winner is declared" is very short. Games don't last very long after the first buyout, so if you're playing multiple rounds with friends, you won't have to sit out long.

The basic premise is to acquire resources and sell them to get money to repeat the process. Resource prices change accordingly every time something is bought or sold, and there are various market manipulations that can be done. There's plenty of ways to mess with your opponent there, and you can buy usable-once-only sabotages for further shenanigans.

It has its problems - the first buyout practically doubles your stock price, so in a 3-player game the first buyout determines the winner; the remaining player has a 0% chance of catching up and should just concede immediately. The Offworld Market is a necessary evil on Mars (as otherwise all resource prices drop to 1, but whoever has them is basically guaranteed to win) and utterly useless on Ceres (as all resource prices eventually become 1000). The AI is WAY too good at the game, as it makes no attempts to hide that it can and will react instantly to situations, inputting commands faster than any human possibly could.

Overall though, it's an excellent strategy game that doesn't take nearly as long to play a round of compared to others in the genre. A good game to grab if you like economic games or quick strategies.

Highly recommended if you like co-op games. It's an incredibly polished game that's relatively easy to pick up but has a great deal of depth. It comes across as well-balanced; none of the characters seems useless or overpowered, and it never feels like you never stood a chance from the beginning. It's playable with anywhere from 1-7 players but the game changes drastically with the number of players since you have more skills at your disposal but each role takes fewer actions. It's full of replay value and doesn't take long to play. It's exceptional at keeping you on your toes and maintaining a tense atmosphere without making you feel helpless. An outstanding game.

A Rockstar Games product that encourages you to drive safely and responsibly? What is this?

It's a mystery game set in the 40's, and an enjoyable one. You play a detective solving crimes just like you might in any other game in the genre, but things are kept fresh by switching you between desks (traffic, homicide, arson, vice) so that it's not just a long parade of murder cases - which is a notable flaw in, say, the Phoenix Wright games.

The game is very well-designed. It's easy to know where you're going, and they followed classic concepts of good design such as using light to draw the player's attention to places they are meant to go. Plus there are nice quality-of-life features such as Partner Driving, which skips you straight to your destination if you don't want to drive there yourself.

While hints are available (from your partner detective or the Intuition system) they're optional, so you're free to actually try and think your way through a problem, and you don't get solutions shoved down your throat. In fact, after the tutorial, there's so little railroading that you can reach the end of a case and progress to the next one even if you have completely screwed everything up (it's passed off as you being put on the beat as a punishment before you get back to your desk).

Your Mileage May Vary on the game's story, as you'll see by checking other reviews. I think it's acceptable, but it's not the point of the game; the point is to work your mind on solving cases, piecing together clues, and figuring out when witnesses are telling the truth and when they're lying. In the regards of actual crime solving, it's fantastic.

A fun little game mostly based around the precise movement of a cute (and customizable) dinosaur with rocket boots. You have to touch, or shoot at, all the rings in a level and then reach the exit. Doing this without dying, and doing it in under a (quite reasonable) par time gains you extra recognition in the form of Stars marking your completion of the main game objectives.

The final stage aside (trial-and-error is not good game design, guys) the game is relatively forgiving; I beat it on Normal with all 129 stars and hidden items after about 10 hours (so its $9.99 price tag is fully justified) but if you like to 100% games there's way more left to do after that. It would also be a good game to speedrun, as there's almost no randomness at all (enemies either follow fixed global-timer paths or move based on how you move) and it's reliant on your execution.

I never beat Turok as a kid, so this was a great opportunity to pull up a classic and conquer what I never could before. Perhaps the nostalgia makes it seem better than it is, but it's still an entertaining first-person... platformer.

Joking aside, the notorious platforming sections aren't all that bad, and serve as a good way to break up the shooting so that you're not just doing one thing over and over. The levels were supposedly redesigned for the re-release, though it's been so long I don't remember what the original ones were like, but it wasn't overly difficult to find all the keys or the Chronoscepter pieces - however, only a few of them were in plain sight (and I even managed to miss one that was) so there's still plenty of room for exploration.

You might want to wait for it to go on sale, but if you're interested in a classic, it's worth picking up.

Factorio is a game where every time you solve a problem, you create at least one more to replace it.

You start the game with a handful of iron plates. So first, you need to gather some resources.
But mining resources by hand is slow and boring. So you craft some mining drills.
But they need fuel. So you mine some coal to start the drills, and even automate that.
But now you just have raw ore. So you make some furnaces and start smelting.
But now you're running around moving coal into machines by hand. So you use some conveyor belts to do that for you.
But now you've made basically everything you can. So you have to start doing some research.
But right now you're just crafting science packs by hand. So you research the assembly machines to automate that.
But now you need electric power for your machines, so you have to go set up some boilers and steam engines. And a conveyor belt of coal to keep them going.
Your starting drills are slow and you have to fuel them, so you upgrade to the electric mining drills. But now you need more power, so you add more boilers and steam engines.
But now you've actually researched some stuff and need to build it. You've hit the first tech gate where you need to make the green science packs, which require more complicated ingredients. So you expand your factory.
You're getting tired of handcrafting conveyor belts all the time, so you automate that.
But now you need more iron. So you expand the ore fields' drilling.
But now you're getting attacked by the local wildlife. So you research some military tech and place turrets.
And now you're coming up on another tech gate where you need oil. Is there even any oil around the starting area? You're going to have to hunt for it, and bring it back, and then process it.
Did I mention you've done all this but you're still in the "early game"?

There is so much to do in this game. Your first game will probably take you several dozen hours at least. And along the way you'll make mistakes and learn from them and realize how you can do better next time. Maybe you'll do some challenge runs for the achievements. Or you can use the absolutely FANTASTIC in-game mod portal to mod up your game however you like and replay Factorio in a whole new way.

Multiple times.

Absolutely, 100% worth it at full price. If you feel intimidated by looking at screenshots and videos, don't be; the game has an exceptionally gentle learning curve, and YOU are the one in control of the direction of the research tree. You introduce yourself to new concepts at YOUR pace and in the order YOU want. Mistakes are cheap and provide great learning opportunities. You can freely experiment with things in your save files or in the sandbox mode to learn how stuff works. It's a fantastically made game all around and I wholly and emphatically recommend it.

It's a good game, a great game, but it's not as good as the games that inspired it.

It is absolutely worth playing, and it's fun. It has a great soundtrack and presents you with important questions and choices to make that will let you look at yourself critically, and it alternates between Strange and Hilarious at will (at least on a Pacifist route). It deconstructs the entire RPG genre and the nature of completionism and just how willing you are to hurt people for your own curiosity.

But, it's not the greatest game ever. Anyone hyping it that much simply hasn't played enough of the types of games that inspired Undertale.

For me, I can say this with 100%, absolute certainty for one simple reason: Mother 3 brought me to tears, but Undertale didn't even come close.

But at the end of the day...

Play it. It's good!

Word of caution: It's short. Really short. Like, 2-3 hours short. Most levels are going to take a few minutes at most to figure out, so wait for it to go on sale first. To its credit, there is Workshop content, but the base game is very small.

That said, it's still a fun little adventure into an ill-titled stealth platformer that's mostly about wiring objects to each other to get the desired effect. You're free to play whatever style you want (the game explicitly tells you your pay isn't affected by your rating) so you can be stealthy and nonviolent or just punch everyone in the head. It's extremely easy to understand but is quite open-ended in how you can approach problems and work around them.

Also you get to kick doors into people. What more do you want?

I almost want to recommend Gone Home, because it hit very close to home for me on a personal level. If I could give a medium/indifferent rating I would, but there's a few factors that force me to have to give a thumbs down rather than a thumbs up:

- $20 is a LUDICROUS price. It takes about 2 hours to complete at most and has basically no replay value. I got it in a Humble Bundle for about $2.50, which is far more reasonable. It'll have to go on like a 90%-off sale to be worthwhile.
- It is way, way overhyped on its page. It is definitely not 'epic', and absolutely not 'the greatest story ever told'. The 'mystery' is low-end as mysteries go; you get time to speculate on what happened but the revelations aren't earth-shattering. It's definitely no expansive exploration game; it's a small (and potentially enjoyable) trip through another family's experiences that will be familiar on some level to anyone who has been a teenager and lived with their parents.
- The story is inherently one-sided. It basically forgets that you're a character too - you're not some impartial observer, but a member of the family in the story; inherently, and deeply, involved. But we never see a reaction from you (well, not to the events themselves, anyway) or hear the parents' side of the story. It didn't have to be in a positive light, but it should have been there.
- The whole "horror mystery that really isn't" problem: when you play totally unspoiled (as I did) it feels like a horror game at first. (I'm glad it wasn't, as I don't like horror games.) You've got the tagline ("You arrive home after a year abroad. You expect your family to greet you, but the house is empty. Something's not right. Where is everyone? And what's happened here?"), the note on the door, the answering machine messages from the mother begging the daughter to pick up the phone, the 'psycho house' inherited from an uncle, secret passages and hidden compartments, all the lights are off, bits of occult, persistent rainstorm in the background, etc... depending on your viewpoint, it's either a brilliant bit of narrative misdirection, or a total shill selling itself on false premises. I lean more towards the former, personally, but can imagine the latter if you have certain expectations.

In short, while I enjoyed playing it, it's a very specialized experience that really, REALLY oversells itself. The RPS review says it best: "Approach neither from the position of hype or hatred." Just take it for what it is.

And don't pay $20 for it. Seriously. That's insane.