Recent reviews by Shaaria

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.

UPDATE: The devs are back from the dead and updating again, but the VN is still unfinished, the previous errors still exist, and even the new additions are still awkwardly translated (though a little better than before) and I found -another- line of Russian in the new scenes. So my review remains as-is.

I'm only going to talk about the VN side of this, because... well, if all you want is the ero, it's there and not hard to find, and it's free.

Firstly, there hasn't been a newspost in over a year, and the last actual content update was from January 2022, so it's a safe assumption that this is not going anywhere any time soon. Which is kind of a problem because it's not done. A VN that doesn't resolve any of its plotlines isn't very much of a VN, especially when the actual plot is barely teased in all but one route and only just started on in the last. Yes, it's still marked Early Access, but see the earlier comment about the lack of updates in a long time.

Secondly, and more concerningly, the quality of the writing is highly inconsistent. Early on it looks good and decently written, and then in later parts on specific routes it looks like something that got shoved hastily through Google Translate without a native speaker proofing it, rife with typographical errors (some on characters' names!), poor grammar, highly unnatural phrasing, high amounts of repetition of words, and other stuff that absolutely should not be present in a visual novel. Heck, one time I found a line that was still in Russian! I suspect that multiple authors were involved in the writing, but without any standardization of the final text.

On the other hand, the art is good and of a consistent quality throughout. The QoL side of things is also good - it has autoskipping for previously-read parts, the ability to go back, save/load anywhere, etc. But good navigation of poor writing is not a winning combination. While technically the poor writing is just one bad thing in an otherwise fine VN, it's like a bad book with really nice cover art - the text itself is supposed to be the main draw.

IF it gets finished, and IF the script gets proofread and cleaned up, then it might be a recommend, but as it stands, pass on it.

This is a one-man project, which is impressive in and of itself. It has a demo that is very representative of the main game, so give it a try.

It's basically a 2D action platformer... with a twist: the walls, floors and ceilings are destructible, but breaking them is a bad thing. Break a few and you lose money; destroy enough or breach a ship's hull and the whole thing starts falling apart, giving you a limited amount of time to run for the teleporter or die.

There's not a lot to the game - in a single run I saw the same ship layouts repeat many times over. But there's lots of different enemy types and your six exterminators all play very differently. Picking the right one can greatly help against a certain foe... if they're still alive. The game's roguelike nature means that if you lose a character, they're gone for good.

It's worth one full play, and the asking price is reasonable, especially on sale. It's light, it's small, but most importantly, it's pretty fun for the amount of time it engages you.

I expected Legally Distinct Donkey Kong Country, and that's more or less what I got in terms of basic gameplay. But Impossible Lair goes beyond that with its clever premise of being able to attempt the final level at any time you want.

Even if you ignore it entirely and just go beat every level anyway, the individual levels are very well-made, and each one has a gimmick where on the overworld you can interact with things in such a way that you trigger an alternate version of a level. These aren't just reskins but are whole new levels with vaguely similar layouts - sometimes changed even more radically, like becoming a water level or an ice level. These alternate levels are different each time (except for the three or so that get turned into ice levels) and are well-made.

Again, they did away with any concept of lives compared to the games that inspired it. But there's still plenty of collectibles, you just have different uses for them - quills unlock tonics (mutators) and buy stuff on the overworld, and each level has coins that you find in order to open more levels up.

If you've played and enjoyed any DKC games, this is a definite recommend.

Firstly, it's got a demo, and the demo is extremely representative of the game as a whole. Try it, and if you like the demo, buy it!

Phoenotopia is a hard-to-spell game that mashes up concepts from several games: Its gameplay generally closely resembles Zelda II, especially with the overworld. It has a Dark Souls style stamina bar as well, and songs a la other Zelda games. But it brings plenty of original ideas too: most items have to be consumed in real time, though you can mash the button to eat them faster, so healing in combat requires waiting for an opportunity. You have a wide variety of tools available and even your mobility techniques are often usable for fighting too.

The game is also gorgeous (Moonlight Ravine in particular) and has an amazing OST. It's good about providing save points and does give you a fast-travel option for getting around more easily later. It's well-written, the fun sort of difficult, and rewards exploration - the game is stuffed to the brim with secrets and items for you to find if you go hunting around for them.

The biggest downside is that there's no map, but I'm sure you can find some online if you really need them. The areas generally are not complicated enough to really need one, it would just be a real nice-to-have.

Still, absolutely great game, and definitely recommended.

Short version: If you liked previous Tropico games, definitely get this one. If you haven't played the series, it'd still be an excellent introduction to this tongue-in-cheek city builder.

I started at 3, and 4 was just 3 but with new maps and an engine upgrade. But 5 is a proper sequel, with improved QoL and an overhaul of many mechanics. Primarily, the game is now separated into four "Eras" akin to the ages in Age of Empires: Colonial, World Wars, Cold War (ie, when Tropico 3 takes place), and Modern Times (when Tropico 4 takes place). Each era gates what buildings, edicts, and improvements are available, as well as what research can be done, because Research is now a mechanic in Tropico 5.

5 also introduces the Constitution as a mechanic, which effectively is your "build" for the island, even though you can change it through amendments after enough time has passed. Previous mechanics like your immigration policy have been folded into it, but it also includes other things like determining who can vote and how much you are willing to give up certain powers to improve the island's Liberty score. Essentially, you can now lean more heavily into being an iron-fisted dictator, a free democracy, or somewhere in between, and get bonuses that help you do it. Just be aware that the less free options come with caveats. (Nothing a sufficiently large and loyal military won't solve, though)

Speaking of the military, 5 makes it a much more important aspect of the game. In 3/4 you could probably get by with ignoring the military buildings by just keeping the population sufficiently happy. You can't do that in 5, and this is a good thing. Besides rebels, you also have to deal with things like pirates or sufficiently annoyed foreign powers; invasions are no longer an instant-lose condition but instead result in an enemy force invading your island that you have to fight off. Plus, more campaign objectives require you to have a large enough army to defend yourself. This can happen as early as the colonial era if you choose to fight for independence instead of buying it.

The campaign is excellent. Instead of every level being stand-alone, you now swap between two islands that progress through the eras, and more importantly, preserve whatever state you left them in before. Also, you now have a "Dynasty" of Presidente and their family members; whoever isn't the currently elected head of Tropico can be assigned to a building. Your Swiss account is no longer just a mechanic for scoring, but can be used for some mission objectives, as well as for improving your Dynasty members, improving the bonuses they give.

While there is an excess of DLC of questionable quality, the base game is fantastic, and the two biggest DLCs - Waterborne and Espionage - each come with well-made mini-campaigns that easily justify their prices.

Definitely a recommendation for Tropico vets and new players.

Oh, Ironcast, Ironcast, Ironcast! You were so close! SO CLOSE to being a great game! You could have been a legend! FTL meets Puzzle Quest plus Steampunk? With great art, great music, good writing? How did you go so wrong? Well...

- Meta-progression. Normally meta-progression in a Roguelike is fine, if it just unlocks stuff. In fact, that's a great way to include lots of content without overloading new players. What you should NEVER do, however, is have your meta-progression unlock permanent stat increases. This essentially means the game is steadily decreasing its baseline difficulty; so success becomes tempered by the knowledge that the game has been lowering the bar for you further and further ever since you first started it up. Even worse, your first playthrough will make it very clear that you are NOT meant to win your first game. Or even come close. And probably not your second, third, or fourth games either; they want you to grind for meta-progression progress. Hell, there's even a loading screen tooltip to the effect of "Keep playing, it gets easier".
- Balance. Enemies scale ludicrously fast. Your first battles will be nearly trivial, and just a handful of missions later they'll have equipment twice as good as yours in all slots. Also, you have two currencies, scrap and "War Assets". What do those do? Each 1 point removes 1 HP from the next boss. The first boss has 5700 HP. Your starting weapons deal ~120 HP per volley. That extra +10 war assets for each leftover turn at the end of a fight no longer looks like a useful bonus. It also means that one Trade mission that turns 60 WA into 1000 scrap is hilariously busted. But this also means...
- Sandbagging and Turtling is the way to go. You can get absurd amounts of XP and scrap by just dragging out the fight. Every single mission has a turn limit, probably because the devs realized this was the optimal strategy. You can roughly double the mission's XP and scrap this way. This is NOT FUN. Unfortunately it also appears to be what the devs expect/want you to do.
- Snowballing. Because enemies scale so fast, and also because repairs are ludicrously expensive (1 scrap/HP doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have 800 HP and get about 600-700 scrap from a mission...) if you start falling behind, you will not catch up.
- The AI does whatever the hell it wants. This is not Puzzle Quest. It does not play on a grid. It is a black box. Sometimes it takes two actions. Sometimes it'll repair three systems, fire twice, and activate two systems all in one turn. Breaking systems is almost pointless because while the AI can't use a broken system, it can just repair it twice and then use it multiple times on the next turn. You can do the same, theoretically, but you have finite resources. The AI does not.

In summary, this is why you don't skip playtesting, even when your art and sound design teams knocked it out of the park. The OST's great, at least.

A competent puzzle game; it explains its mechanics well, ramps up difficulty gradually, introduces enough mechanics to keep things interesting without adding so many as to be overwhelming, and doesn't require absurd moon logic for its puzzles. The trailer shows the premise very well, it's not hiding anything.

I do recommend the game, but you might want to wait for a sale as it's on the short side.

This is a student project put up for free, and while it's extremely short it's got a lot of promise. Interesting concept, well executed. I hope the students who made it go on to make more things as they clearly have a good sense for things like level design and making clear mechanics that are easy to learn and understand.

Dark Souls might have started the genre, but Nioh perfected it.

The QoL alone is amazing; not only can you see damage numbers so you know if your attacks are effective or not, they're split by damage type, making it infinitely easier to determine an enemy's elemental weakness. But there's so much more that is so well-designed.

And where Dark Souls always has piles of completely useless consumables and items, everything in Nioh is useful. Buffs and debuffs are extremely useful, unlike in Dark Souls. Defensive buffs cut damage in half, status effect resistances actually protect you from those status effects, etc. All magic is actually usable in combat since the animations are shorter. You can dabble in multiple weapons or magics without completely screwing yourself over (and very early on you can get access to items that let you respec, if you want to switch). Some magic takes the form of consumables that regenerate every time you die or use a shrine (the bonfire equivalent), which in and of itself makes them infinitely more useful. Every successfully blocked attack deals 0 damage to you; you only take damage if the attack was unblockable in the first place.

The game is hard, but it feels so much more fair because it doesn't hide things from you. Deaths feel like they were your fault, and you learn from them. The effects of level-ups are clearly shown, everything has a useful tooltip. Even when you die, you get back into the game so much faster than in Dark Souls. And the levels are designed so that the run-back to a boss from the nearest shrine is either easy or free, so you don't need to learn speedrun strats just to reach a boss. (None of the Sir Alonne gauntlet corridor nonsense)

The bosses themselves are extremely brutal and even in heavy armor can take out huge chunks of your health each swing, but it's not too hard to learn their tells and formulate a strategy against them, especially since you have more options from useful buffs and debuffs. Struggling against a boss feels fun, rather than frustrating, because you can make much better progress and actually properly strategize.

It's going to be really hard for me to play a FromSoft game after this. I'm not looking forward to returning to useless consumables, terrible and clunky magic, entire spells and weapons that are worthless, and completely opaque mechanics. I strongly recommend Nioh for Soulslike fans - just be aware you might not be able to go back.