Recent reviews by Shaaria

tl;dr: It's Hexen, except good.

It's frankly not all that different from Hexen insofar as you have a hub and sub-maps for each episode, and you need to collect keys and hit switches to progress, but it's infinitely better designed. A lot of this is from having an objective list that simply points you to the right sub-map you need to be in to progress; actually finding the thing you have to do is still up to you, the game simply gives you juuuuuust enough guidance that you're never wasting your time looking in the wrong place for no reason.

It's got a good set of weapons, and has a unique "transformation" mechanic where you can turn into some types of enemies. You're really encouraged to use everything, as every weapon (even the starting ones!) is good. However, ammo reserves aren't very high, though the game happily throws ammo pickups at you all over the place like a good Doomlike should. Since the transformations recharge the power for their attacks over time, your best bet is to use all your weapons and switch to transformations when they are the right tool for the situation. Which, honestly, is fantastic design.

Plus there's also the titular Hands of Necromancy, which you let you bring dead enemies back to life, but fighting for you instead. There's enough of these that you can use them whenever you think it'd be a good idea, but not so many that you can spam them - the quantity is Just Right.

Exceptionally good if you like Doomlikes. Especially recommended if you like them but hated Hexen. $5 is an absolute steal, don't even wait for it to go on sale.

Wait for a sale, but definitely give it a try.

I know nothing about Gears of War, and bought Gears Tactics since it looked similar to XCOM 2. It is, and it makes several notable changes to the formula, some good and some not so good. Compared to XCOM 2 (which has had so many 90% sales and free weekends that everyone should own it by now):
- There's no strategic phase. This game is just a gauntlet of battles and in between them you can manage your soldiers.
- Your soldiers are extremely expendable. Not in the sense of being cannon fodder, but more that the game constantly throws spare recruits at you that level up faster than your units do, so your best bet is to constantly strip all the gear off your old (non-hero) units and toss them out the door to make way for fresh faces.
- You're stuck at a deployed unit cap of 4 (sometimes 2!) for the whole game. However, your characters get 3 actions per turn and there are numerous ways to earn more, including GoW's signature over-the-top executions (doing one gives an action point to every other soldier).
- Overwatch is now a directed cone that you can lay down to cover a specific area. It's also totally overpowered as you can fire once for every remaining action point and it feels like it never misses as long as there's no obstructions. The AI will happily faceplant into your overwatch cones but that's just part of the genre.
- Your units can be revived if they go down but get up with less max health, which I assume also comes from the mainline games.
- It's 'modern realistic': The whole game is set in one location with a Real Is Brown aesthetic, and your soldiers all basically look the same. You could customize them a bit, but see the note about their expendability above: why bother? Driving this home: you're forced to bring 4 heroes to the final battle. Compare this to XCOM 2 where building a character pool and finding favorite units of your own is a huge part of the game that's just not feasible here.
- There's no fatigue system and thus no reason not to field your best units (ie, heroes) to every fight. Especially since you'll need to keep them leveled up.
- Every so often there's a 'side mission' block. This is pure filler and exists solely to give you a reason to have more than 4 units in your roster: you have to complete (X-1) of X missions and you can't use the same units on more than one mission. That part is clever and interesting but the missions are all generic and randomly-generated.
- Your only reward for doing anything, ever, is equipment cases, which just give you a random piece of equipment. It's very unexciting as most of it is trash.
- The writing is meh. Generic soldiers with untrustworthy superiors shoot bad guys while hunting for bigger bad guy. Nothing new or exciting here.

The game does offer a very good tactical challenge, and the different classes of soldiers and their skills are all useful and powerful when used properly. I had to really think about my actions and positioning in order to come out on top and while I didn't have any units die, some did go down here and there and it was able to go to hell really fast if I made mistakes. There's not really any replay value, though, so as I opened: wait for a sale but give it a shot.

> Let's try Escape from Cronos X.
> Bad audio balance on main menu sound effects
> Orange-yellow text on bright background is hard to read
> Character creation doesn't explain what the stats do
> Try the tutorial
> Weird, sometimes nonsensical keybinds for keyboard controls
> Part of the UI is missing; instructions say to drag to the quickbar but there is no quickbar
> The item box for something in my inventory gets stuck to my cursor and won't go away
> Tutorial glitches out and won't activate step 3
> Typos in tutorial instructions
> Voice lines continue when the dialogue box closes
> Explanations are bad
> Not looking good, let's just hit that handy "Skip tutorial, start main game" button
> Graphical fidelity on 'ultra' would be outdone by Warcraft 3 (the original one)
> My inventory from the tutorial carried over
> Enemies approach but stop a few feet away from me and just stand there and let me shoot them
> Weird-ass map design, no minimap
> There's a sprint key but it doesn't make you go any faster, you just hear a panting sound effect after a few seconds
> You can walk up 70 degree cliffs like you're a Skyrim horse
> Piles of gear but no easy way to compare it to what you have equipped

We do not have a winner on our hands here, folks.

WW2 flight sim, but you're a fire-breathing dragon. What more do you want?

Wait for a sale since it's not all that long, but it's definitely worth playing. It starts easy and gets pretty challenging later as some enemies do extremely high damage (the Messerschmitts in particular) but you can generally do pretty well if you're careful about your attacks and picking off enemies to thin them out before going after big targets.

Wait for a sale.

Beard Blade is fun, it's also a bit short. It's basically Shantae with a male protagonist (Mantae, if you will) - it's a brightly colored 2D platformer where you attack things with your hair (facial hair in this case). No belly-dancing, but it still looks great and has an equally great OST.

It's not without its flaws: The hover is a bit finicky to activate, for one. Some features of the game are heavily under-utilized, hinting that perhaps the game had to be cut in scope during development (IIRC it had a failed Kickstarter): there's exactly one invincibility power-up in the game only found in a very unhelpful location, there's exactly one instance of a power being found through exploration rather than just buying it at the shop. Almost all the power-ups are optional to beat the game, and the ones needed for collectibles often are only needed in 1 or 2 places, but that's okay because there's no reward for 100%ing the game other than self-satisfaction.

Even though I was able to 100% the game in a little over 5 hours, it was a fun playthrough. It has a good mix of ideas, pulling in the day/night cycle from Wario Land 3 to give almost every non-boss level two unique variants.

In short, while it's not perfect, I still think it's good - just not $20 good, so hold out for a sale.

Fantastic entry in the automation genre, with a much heavier RTS focus than Factorio. (If you're in the "I want to play more Factorio but don't want to start another game of Factorio" boat, definitely give Mindustry a try)

The game largely revolves around a split between logistics to gather, process, and transport materials back to your core - the starting building which causes you to lose a map if it is destroyed - and unit management. The current map's resources are used for construction, but the global totals - all cores in all maps - are used for research, which is simply a matter of spending resources to unlock stuff. Tech progression is gated by how far you are into the game, giving a nice learning curve. The game starts out simple as a pure wave-based Tower Defense game but it soon gives you the ability to make units that you can order around like an RTS, opening up the concept of attack maps where you face endless waves until you go and stomp all over the enemy base with your army. From there things progress: better units, more materials, more complex recipes, upgrades, and so on.

Mindustry also contains what is effectively its own sequel, added to the game for free, in the form of a second planet. Erekir is very much like a second game in the same engine, except it's actually part of the same game: total shift in gameplay (much heavier unit focus), completely different resources and buildings, new mechanics, rebalancing, anti-cheese measures, and overall a very different experience. It's much harder than Serpulo (the first planet) but in a good way, requiring you to be good at prioritizing, setting up construction quickly, and picking your targets and attacks carefully.

Absolutely recommended, especially at $10 which is criminally underpricing itself.

Worth waiting for a sale.

Mortal Shell is a very creative Soulslike, if short. Instead of DS's plethora of mostly-useless weapons, armor and rings, Mortal Shell cuts to the point: You have four weapons to pick from, a modest set of useful consumables, and four "Shells" - bodies you inhabit to fight in. One's an all-rounder, the other three specialize in something.

Mortal Shell is much more forgiving than Dark Souls, in a good way. When you hit 0 health you get knocked out of your shell, and if you get back to it without being hit (because your shell-less form dies in one hit to literally anything) you get the shell back and a HP refill. But, get taken to 0 again, and you die. It has a parry mechanic that was infinitely easier to use than in Dark Souls for two reasons: firstly, the parry frames are obvious (the thing you parry with flashes brightly), and secondly, you get warned about unparrayable attacks (the thing you parry with flashes red during the enemy's windup).

It's got just enough customization to have depth and let you pick a build, without overwhelming you with options. It does creative things with the areas you have to go through. Because there's no levelling, the game is very nonlinear. It can be a bit rough at the beginning while you find your footing, but it's worth sticking with through to the end for a fun Soulslike experience.

A fun and creative take on the idea of running a shop: Potions are not just simply "combine these ingredients" but are made by moving along a map, where each ingredient draws a different path. The consequence of this, especially early on, is that there are many different ways to make the same potion, which is important when you run out of certain ingredients. Plus potions can have multiple effects, requiring very elaborate recipes, more and more so the later into the game you get.

The reputation grind at the very end of the game is brutal and not at all worth it, so once you make the final legendary recipe you might as well just stop there. But it's just a small blemish on an otherwise fun and creative game.

I can't see ♥♥♥♥.

By design, every level uses one color palette. Everything in it - enemies, interactables, your guns, the walls, the floor, the scenery - is all done in that one palette. Everything blends together into an unintelligible mess. The options let you reduce the saturation (to turn everything grey, I guess) or shift the colors (to turn everything blue if you want) but there's no way to make things stand out better. The last two floors at least make enemies stand out by making them red - but the shrines, chests and other interactables were even worse than before and were completely camouflaged against the background, and I only found them by accidentally bumping into them and having the interact prompt come up.

Yes, yes, we get it; you're an indie dev and you want to stand out, so you put your Aesthetic(TM) above all else. Including good visual design and clear contrast of elements on the screen. It's a pity because it's mechanically sound, has a great soundtrack, and a good gameplay loop, but it's just such a visually confusing mess. It's like a colorblind mode that simulates the player being -actually- colorblind.

Also, it's got Binding Of Isaac Syndrome: It's a roguelike that absolutely refuses to tell you what its items do in anything more than a 3-4 word description. Guns can be bought in the shop but unless you've used them before (AND you can recognize them at a glance) you will have no idea what they are or how they work. Is that big bulky gun a shotgun? A burst-fire rifle? A bolt-action rifle? There's no way to know ahead of time. It's similarly opaque in other areas: What makes the difficulty levels different from each other? How much do those "speed up" boots actually increase your speed? How much does a "damage up" shrine buff your damage? The game won't tell you, so you'd better hope there's a wiki somewhere.

I've seen a few games now attempt the particular style of meta-progression of being an optimization problem in disguise: some sort of high score is used to give you permanent baseline strength increases. I've only seen this done well once (Tactical Nexus) for one simple reason: it only belongs in -puzzle- games. GemCraft is a TD game stuffed to the gills with random factors (damage, bonus effects, weather, enemy movement), yet the intended gameplay loop is to go back and grind for high scores on previous levels so you can eke out just a tiny bit more power because your actual level is based off the sum of all your high scores on each level.

That's not fun. At best it's grinding. At worst it's frustration incarnate.

Now, fortunately, there's an "Iron" mode that does away with the entire meta-progression mechanic and gates your progress entirely on your ability to pop open chests on each level, and once you do them once you have them forever, so you can actually call a level -done- and not need to worry about if you're expected to go grind on it some more. Unfortunately, Iron is the "Hard mode" of the game, and even without that, GemCraft has other problems.

GemCraft's baseline difficulty level is much higher than it needs to be. If you don't have quite the right setup on a level going into it the first time you don't stand a chance. Enemies can have armor, but most levels don't have the armor-reduction gems available, forcing you into creating high-level gems to start the level with so that you're doing more than chip damage. Which plays into ANOTHER terrible design decision: you have skills and skill points, but every unspent skill point gives you an extra 7 mana to start the level with. Not only does this add up fast to a very substantial bonus, but some skills are downright terrible once you do the math because they cost a triangular number of skill points. You have to NOT spend skill points just to have a shot at surviving early waves, so you are effectively punished for trying to engage in one of the game's meta-progression mechanics.

That's not fun either.

In the end it feels like a game designed to make the player suffer. You're either grinding repeatedly for progress in the normal mode, or struggling against an insane difficulty bump in Iron mode. There's a MASSIVE difficulty spike about 22 levels in (right after the first 'boss') which is probably where the game wants you to go back and grind more, but it's just not enjoyable enough to want to do that. I got to that same point in both normal and iron mode and realized that it was throwing huge swarms of enemies at me without giving me the tools to deal with them, and called it quits. There's plenty of better TD games out there to play instead.