Recent reviews by Shaaria

Great idea, poorly executed. Sure, it's an Early Access game, but it has a long road ahead of it, mostly in usability.

The controls feel very floaty; you have momentum as you move, which is never a good thing in an FPS. There's no descriptions saying what any of the items in the game do; you have to figure it out for yourself if you can't guess. It's incredibly dark and difficult to see, which may well be deliberate. It's very repetitive, mostly due to small variety in the monsters. I'm not sure why there are two bosses on each floor since you only seem to have to fight one to move on.

It's confusing and difficult to play, with nothing to really draw you in to stick with it. If you want a realtime roguelike, there are better entries in the genre.

While it's definitely a good game (albeit with only a tangential relation to the Bioshock setting) it's incredibly short. It only took me about 10 hours to finish on the normal difficulty setting, and I hunted around a lot for supplies and lore items. It doesn't really have any replay value either due to the way the story turns out, so you should wait for it to go on sale - then snap it up and spend a couple days fighting giant robotic Thomas Jeffersons and giant robotic Abraham Lincolns.

Better than any Civilization game.

The combat mechanics are explicitly exposed: Units do some amount of damage, which is partially mitigated by various resistances. Targetting the weakest resistance is a big part of being successful in combat. However, you can't just pile on resistances; you get diminishing returns, so you will always take -some- damage from a powerful attack.

Units can't stack, either. There's none of the Civ-style nonsense where 1 low-tech unit can indefinitely fend off mountains of high-tech units (1 pikeman vs 5 tanks, pikeman wins, gg).

And then you have the spells, which are balanced by how rarely you can cast them. Which spells to cast is a major strategical decision.

I highly recommend it if you like 4X games. The DLC adds interesting things, too.

Played it once, and I got reasonably far but still learned a lot to use in later runs - the core of a roguelike. Certainly fun, and easy to pick up, but full of interesting possibilities. The squad-based approach is new to the genre and is done well. All in all, certainly an interesting addition to the list of Roguelikes, and highly original in the setting (steampunk spaceship).

Still under development too, so it can only be improved from here.

Honestly, after SR3, this is kind of a let-down. It's the exact same map, with a few small edits. Vehicles are made obsolete about 15 minutes into the game. The story, such as it is, is pathetic and predictable. It's crashy and unstable, to boot, and one mission is impossible to complete in co-op because you get stuck in the loading screen forever.

It feels like the Saints Row rights got sold to Sonic Team, because almost all the content is optional and the game itself revolves around doing sidequest events for almost no justification and hunting for collectible things in every corner of the world.

While it does have a few redeeming qualities - superpowered Insurance Fraud is hilarious, and the Dubstep Gun is the best weapon ever - it is most certainly not worth $50 and has practically zero replay value because the story is completely linear. At least SR3 had branching paths and choices on major story points; that is completely gone here.

Take a roguelike and a modern game, put them together in a blender, and what do you get? ToME: Classic turn-based fantasy mixed with modern features such as highly impressive graphical effects, achievements, content unlocking, etc.

While it doesn't go beyond the usual set of boring fantasy races, it DOES have a massive selection of classes that act in extremely different ways to each other. Even the default fighter (called a Bulwark) isn't even close to the usual "bump until it dies" fighter of other roguelikes.

Even if you're new to the genre, ToME can be a good way to get yourself in with optional lower difficulties. If you're an old hand, the variety of classes and the optional higher difficulties can still give you a challenge.

Even though the game is free on te4.org, $8 is a complete steal for a game with this much replay value.

If you liked Ys: Oath in Felghana, you'll almost certainly like Ys: Origin. It uses the same game engine, but with gameplay improvements. There are three characters to play as, with different fighting styles - while Yunica plays much like Adol, Hugo is an entirely different style with a very simple basic attack but more interesting skills, requiring better and more frequent use of them with a more defensive play style.

All the usual highlights of an Ys game come back too - polished art, rockin' music, metroidvania-type exploration, and interesting bosses. Definitely worth it, but if you're still unsure, there's a demo you can try.

This game is a ton of fun with two players. Not only do you have the co-op campaign, but there are various other co-operative modes not available in single player, and there are many ways to work together to accomplish things not possible in single player, and innumerable strategies you can use. Where two enemies might have presented a difficult spot, with two players you can count down and snipe them together and move forward without raising an alarm.

The engine is superb, too. The hit detection is flawless (as you would hope, considering it's the main point of the game), even when playing across the internet. The realism is a nice change from the point-and-click sniping in other FPS games and you can't just Leeroy Jenkins your way through a stage. It's an FPS that makes you think, with the perfect blend of stealth and action in each stage. The difficulty is greatly customizable, and there is tons of replay value.

I love the setting, I love the story, I love the characters, I love the attention to detail... I HATE the combat system.

It is a horridly unbalanced thing rife with cheap one-shot-kills and unavoidable deaths and fake difficulty. Enemies take inordinate amounts of damage to put down while your own allies go down at the drop of a hat, no matter how much you micromanage your inventory and weapons you can never seem to get an edge, you can never tell where grenades are going, and every encounter is scaled to your level so the whole thing is pointless anyway. And this is on NORMAL!

It's not bad enough to ruin the game - far from it, it is still an impressive title - but the combat system really lets it down.

Tower defence games typically boil down to a "fire and forget" strategy - place (sometimes, upgrade) your towers, then move on. FPSs strategy doesn't go beyond the immediate few seconds into the future. Yet, Sanctum takes these two drastically different genres and blends them together, covering or even elminating the drawbacks of each.

In the build phase, you plan long-term strategy. What do I build? How do I counter the upcoming enemies? Do I build, or upgrade? Then during the combat phase, you focus on typical FPS aspects: Run, jump, strafe, shoot etc.

The cherry on top is that these things play off each other. You can build towers just to do damage, or you can build them to give yourself an easier time with your gun by slowing enemies or amplifying damage. Or, you can slow or even stun enemies adjacent to high-damage towers to squeeze more out of them. Path layout is critical, yet many strategies exist. All in all, if you want an FPS that makes you think, this is one.