Recent reviews by Shaaria

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.

Purrsha and the Myagic Labyrinth -Nyarabian Nyaights-...

Okay no I can't do an entire review like that.

Regardless, this is an interesting take on Match-3, where you control a character on the playing field. You can still swap any two blocks that make a valid match, but you can always move Persha one tile, so you are never in a situation where you have no valid moves. Of course, you might not WANT to move Persha; since you can never be in a situation with no moves, the lose condition is Persha losing all her health. Once you collect enough keys (by matching them) a timer starts, and you have to move Persha to a specific tile or you also lose.

There's a decent amount of strategy to it as you can either move Persha towards the goal tile, or move it towards her by swapping it, removing tiles under it, etc. You need to figure out how to safely move - or how to safely tank hits, since you can have up to 1 shield that will block a hit for you. Enemies start simple but get little twists in their behavior.

Each floor of a tower also has an objective, initially hidden, which gives you a one-time powerup of some description. Some will destroy tiles and damage enemies, others give you buffs, some convert pieces. The base game is relatively easy but there's also a B-Sides mode with much harder objectives. It's not terribly long but it's not terribly expensive either, good for a nice little puzzle game.

Fun, but wait for a sale.

CRoD's premise is clearly shown in the trailer: your only weapon is a ridiculously oversized spear, but the dungeon you're in is too small for it. The challenge largely stems from moving around being difficult, as your spear not only will bang into walls, obstacles and enemies, but it can even get you killed if you move out of the way of a falling block trap but the block lands on the spear itself. Enemies initially can't damage you but later pose a threat, further restricting your movement.

The puzzles and mechanics are very well-designed, and the obligatory easy/"gimme" puzzles that introduce each do so very well. There are no pop-up text boxes, signposts or tutorialized voice-overs because the game doesn't NEED them. When a new element is introduced you will immediately understand how it works, and then the game is free to build on that and expand further with more complicated puzzles and by bringing back older elements to mix things up.

It does have an NG+ mode, but all it does is encourage you to solve the same puzzles as optimally as possible (which is another good design element - not pressuring for optimization until the player has beaten the game).

Lots of levels, great mechanics, fun game. It's got a total Excuse Plot but it's a puzzle game, so who cares. Definitely worth grabbing.

Even better than the already-stellar Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Desperados III is basically the same mechanics, with a few adjustments, and in a whole new genre: the Wild West. Most the abilities from ST:BotS carry over in some form or another, such as a thrown coin instead of a thrown rock, or a bear trap instead of whatever Yuki's little trap was.

In addition to new maps, a new story, new characters, and such, there's also lots of cool new features. After beating a map you can see a time-lapse of your progress through the map for a cool little review of it, which is a nice way to round it out. There's also actual nonlethal options now: you can knock people out and tie them up, which not only is an option for pacifist runs or being able to deal with civilians, but some missions and their objectives rely on it. Guns play a bigger part and are more versatile than the flintlocks in Shadow Tactics - as they should be in such a setting. The planning mode now pauses the game, though the highest difficulty undoes this to make the planning mode act like it does in ST.

Not only that but there's vastly more content. In addition to having more maps than ST, there's additional challenge maps to spice things up, and DLC if you want even more maps than that to play with. Everything that made Shadow Tactics excellent has remained, like the optional challenges (that are only revealed after you beat the game once).

Definitely recommended, even if you're new to the RTT genre, as it has flexible difficulty settings.

I thought on this for a while but I ultimately have to give it a thumbs-down. Not that there's anything wrong with Beltex, per se, but in the most literal sense I can't recommend it because it's just Shapez But With Numbers And On A Hex Grid. (And Beltmatic, their under-development game, is this but without the "On A Hex Grid" part)

Shapez is (Edit: WAS) free, has more content (more tools), and has a proper final challenge (the Make Anything Machine). Beltex just did all the easy bits and didn't innovate anything new, so even if you liked Shapez and want to see a new take on it, Beltex doesn't really deliver on that. Its main difference, the hex grid, is more of a hindrance than anything else.

That said, I could recommend Beltex for anyone who has trouble visualizing shapes and would find numbers much easier to work with. Anyone with colorblindness might also find Beltex the better option. But for the average person who wants to play a sandbox automation game focused on conveyor belt spaghetti, Shapez is just the better option in every way.

EDIT: At some point in the past Shapez stopped being free. It's now $10 to Beltex's $5. I would still recommend Shapez over Beltex for having more content and a proper final challenge, but if you're really on a budget you can score a point for Beltex.

It's Grimrock, but steampunk. Also without having to fall down pits, a better magic (well, tech) system, easier-to-control combat, an infinitely better final boss, and the super awesome 'time stop' feature which lets you turn the game into Superhot where time only progresses while you are doing something. Liked Grimrock? You'll love Vaporum.

My only complaint is that the voice actor for the main character reads most of his lines with little to no emotion whatsoever. If that's the worst I can say about it, then it's definitely a good game.

Take a 2D action-platformer, have a parkour emphasis to the movement, add a big map to explore, all done with a comic-book aesthetic, and you've got Treasures of the Aegean. I wouldn't call it a Metroidvania since there are no movement upgrades - but your base movement is very fluid. Getting around the map is fun, which is good, because simple traversal is 95%+ of the game. You can't fight, and there are only a few enemies (with the slowest bullets in history) that just act as a minor obstacle here and there. The challenge is in getting around, grabbing what you need to, figuring out where to go and how to get there, and gradually piecing together the story and the answers to puzzles.

It has some minor issues but no deal-breakers, and the most annoying thing is the typos scattered around the text. You'll always know what they meant, so it's not a huge deal. The game is fun, the gameplay loop is fun, and it's well-designed. It's one huge map, with no (visible) loading screens or other divisions between its areas - yet you can tell when you're in a different area because it FEELS different. No need to announce the name of the zone when the change in palette and shift in the background music will do it for you.

Super fun, very recommended on like a 50% sale or better since it's not all that long, but very worth playing.

If you liked the base game, you'll like this expansion. It's only 6 missions, of which 3 are -actual- full-size missions and the other 3 are much smaller levels with 1-2 characters, or a playable epilogue. However, those 3 main levels are quite large and two of them involve the full crew of 5, something that only happens once in the base game, offering plenty of complexity and multiple routes. Just as challenging as the main game and still fun.

This is the only idler I've ever played. It's not a genre that particularly appeals to me, but I greatly enjoyed Factory Town and figured I could give it a shot. The theming works excellently as it matches very closely to the original game: you have natural resources, resource gatherers, crafters, and markets. The premise is that you keep increasing these, the markets give you coins, you use the coins to get upgrades, and the upgrades make numbers go up, directly or indirectly. Every action also earns XP, and at certain level thresholds you unlock new stuff, so you can make more numbers go up.

It also splits your world into multiple towns, and each town has its own specialization, like in the original game. At first this just means different towns craft certain things faster, but eventually you unlock trading and can have each town lean super hard into specific products and then trade them between towns to be sold elsewhere - just like in the original game.

There's always more you can do to make numbers go up faster, so it's not particularly 'idle', and that really helps it have that "The Factory Must Grow" feel of automation games the original game hails from.

EDIT: There wasn't much replay value when it first came out, but since then the devs have added run modifiers, giving you a reason to play it more than once. Tons of other nice additions too - even more worth it now than it was at launch!

Ocean's Heart is a fun indie Zelda-like. Charming, funny, beautiful, and with a wonderful soundtrack. It's not terribly long, so you might want to wait for a sale, but it's got a good-sized world to explore with secrets and goodies hidden all over the place.

My only real complaint is that it's extremely easy, since you can amass a very large collection of healing items without much trouble. There IS a hard mode you can activate pretty much immediately after the prologue is over, and it massively increases enemy damage, so if you also find the game really easy I'd recommend turning that on. Even without that, though, the game is still very fun and a solid entry into the genre.