Recent reviews by Shaaria

I think X-Morph: Defense might very well be the best tower defense game I've ever played.

The base idea is a lot like Sanctum, in that you can manipulate the enemy path, build towers, and control a unit to provide more flexible defenses. XMD builds on this by making your controlled unit an antigravity fighter plane, so you can freely ignore most terrain (except large buildings). It also lets you destroy buildings and bridges to alter the enemy paths in a more irreversible way. There's a massive enemy unit variety, the levels are well-designed, and the gameplay is set up such that you're NEVER just sitting around with nothing to do; you are always busy doing something.

Plus, the theme of the game makes it even better: You're the alien invader, come to conquer Earth. Humanity is your opponent. And though the plot demands you crush them at every turn, they are crafty, and change up their tactics and strategies between waves.

The game is visual spectacle; there's no shortage of explosions and lasers and taking down bosses feels like a huge triumph. And yet despite all the chaos on-screen, it never gets overwhelming. Projectiles glow brightly so that you'll never be unable to see them against the background. Friendly projectiles are blue instead of orange, so you'll never get confused about what you have to avoid.

And it's just fantastically well-designed overall. The enemy wave compositions vary, sometimes abandoning certain spawn points in addition to adding new ones between waves. Sometimes the map even gets expanded in the middle of a mission! This plays into the 100% refund rate on sold or destroyed towers, giving you huge flexibility in your strategy. You could potentially take down and rebuild your entire tower placement between waves if you wanted to.

It's even got co-op! And an incredibly good Survival mode with a ton of maps! The game is huge fun and I have literally nothing bad to say about it.

I really, really wanted to like Outward. It had a solid premise: Open World game mixed with Soulslike combat, survival elements, and a deep magic system.

And it does three of those things very well. I liked all the survival elements. The limited inventory space with the pocket/backpack split is interesting, particularly since you have to drop your backpack in combat to avoid slow-rolling, so you need to carefully consider what to put in your pocket. I liked the open world setup, since you got just enough guidance to avoid having no idea where to go, without having your hand held. I liked what little of the magic system I encountered because it was very promising with how spells interact with each other and spells also having utility purposes. The game looked visually impressive, with interesting caves, a big purple mountain in the starting area, ruins, a marsh full of huge plants and dinosaurs, etc.

But the combat drops the ball so hard that it ruins the game outright. It is brutal, it is punishing, and it only gets worse. And I say this as someone who beat all three Dark Souls games. At least Dark Souls just kicks you back to a bonfire when you die, but Outward will send you to a semi-random location, and may or may not strip you of your inventory, and may or may not lower your maximum stats, and may or may not inflict extra debuffs on you. And then it autosaves, because there's only one save file, so you can't just reload and try again.

Made worse by this is that when you leave the starting town and run into some bandits, or a bird, you discover very quickly how heavily the deck is stacked against you when everything takes you down in 2/3 hits and you deal chip damage with the exact same weapons enemies are using. On top of this, nobody staggers from a hit unless it completely depletes their stability gauge - so you can wait for an opening, get a hit in, and then have the enemy pull out a quick attack and hit you in the face before your animation completes. And remember, they only need to land 3 hits, you need 10 or more.

Now if this were any other open-world game you could go somewhere easier and try to get more powerful. But you can't, because there's no EXP system, so even if you win a fight all you get from it is any items that were on the foes you took down. The only way to get stronger is to get better equipment and better skills... and that needs money.

And this is the huge deal-breaker of Outward. You need money. You need PILES of money. And the game does not want to give it to you. Anything you can forage, craft or take off enemies sells for single digits - usually just 1 silver piece. Any gear worthwhile other than bandages (at least they had the sense to make those cheap) costs 50 silver at a minimum. Better armor will run you hundreds of silver pieces. Recipes cost 25 or more. Even a stay at an inn costs 25 silvers. You want more spells or combat skills? Be prepared to cough up hundreds of silver pieces... IF YOU HAD THEM!

Any time you think you've made some headway, the game quickly reminds you that you have not. Despite the magic system being a huge selling point of the game, you don't start with any. And when you finally get it you get a weak spell that does nothing unless empowered. And empowering it requires a material component. Which needs an alchemy kit. Which is 60 silvers. Plus whatever it costs for the materials. It's frustrating because magic is very strong and actually practical and useful - but you won't get to use it.

You can travel to another region but it's just as deadly. You can join a faction but they won't actually give you any help. I joined the Holy Mission and my reward was a recipe I couldn't craft and a spell I couldn't use without a buff that I had no means of getting. No money, no gear, no nothing.

Maybe if you can ever break out of the "I need money to get stronger -> I need to be stronger to get money" vicious cycle, Outward becomes good, but good luck doing so.

A wonderful and simple, if short, game where you play as a dragon and learn about how humans ruin everything. 10/10.
(Update: With the Live In Stalagshire update? 11/10.)

More seriously, it's nice to see a visual novel (in the form of an RPG Maker game) with a non-human protagonist and good compelling writing to bring the setting to life. It doesn't really take all that long to play through, even going for multiple endings and using the 'Boop' command on everything interactable. But it was fun, had a good variety of characters, and an excellent OST.

Hahaha, good joke about ending the game after one episode. Where's the rest of the game? ...no, seriously, where's the rest of it?

I -WANT- to give Hellbound a positive review, because it's a solid homage to 90's FPSes. But it's about the length of Episode 1 of the original Doom (ironically, given that it flagrantly references it on the between-level map screen), beatable in about two hours at a regular pace. $15 is way too much to ask for that; the $6 sale price I got it at ought to be the base price (since it does at least have multiple difficulties, game modes, etc).

It's a pity because it's a promising foundation for an FPS but it dropped the ball hard on a lack of content. They even acknowledge it with an achievement named "That's it?" for beating the game.

If you want a good 90's-style FPS made in the last 5 years, go get Project Warlock instead.

What I expected/wanted: Legally Distinct Banjo-Kazooie.
What I got: Legally Distinct Banjo-Kazooie.

Pretty much everything I hoped for! The same B-K mechanics but with new characters, moves, locations, assets, and some QoL to add to it. There's fewer worlds, but they're much bigger, with a bigger total number of plot collectibles.

If you never played B-K then you likely will miss a lot of the references/throwbacks and probably will have less patience for the gameplay and once in a while having to wrestle with the camera, but as someone who did 100% B-K back in the day, I loved it.

The only real complaint I have is that Yooka's tongue's homing is unreliable at best, sometimes failing to grab something right in front of you, yet also managing to target stuff way off to the side at other times that you're not even looking at. This generally is only a mild annoyance (you can go into first person for more precision), but there's exactly one important collectible in the final world where this becomes a major PITA to deal with.

Still, extremely solid, and basically exactly what I wanted from a spiritual successor game.

CSD3 is a fantastic sequel, building on the previous two games' lessons.

CSD1 was focused on its career mode where you picked the menu.
CSD2 pushed that aside for the Cook For Hire mode where the menus were preset.
CSD3 hits "just right" in the middle: your menu is partially customizable in each shift, where you can build it from a given subset of all the possible recipes, grouped together by some tag (for instance, "Salad Envy" is every item that is or resembles a salad). On many levels you have to meet some minimum point requirement, where the points on a recipe are a rough estimate of its complexity. It's generally accurate except for a few things like Calzones being a 5 despite being easier than a few 3-pointers.

This introduces an incredible amount of flexibility and strategy to the player, without giving them -too much- freedom like in CSD1. Especially because you can also now control the number of prep stations, where each one you add (past the initial 7) counts for 1 point towards your point requirements for that level. Adding another prep station can let you take easier recipes, but now you have more slots to juggle.

Additionally, CSD3 has dropped the whole "morning -> lunch rush hour -> afternoon -> dinner rush hour -> evening" cycle from the first two games because of the setup: you're in a food truck. Instead, you deal with anywhere between 2 and 8 (depending on the level) stops. On the way to the stop, Special Orders gradually appear, and can be done in any order and don't start their patience countdown until you arrive. Once you have arrived, all remaining customers will only order food from your Holding Station foods. This is important because Special Order foods are generally more complicated than Holding Station foods, but you generally have to do fewer of them per stop; you just get them all piling in together.

This is enough by itself to make the game interesting, but they've got upgrades for your truck, nonlinear progression through the areas of the game, unlockable foods, and numerous level modifiers like customers having less patience or food truck attacks where a rival will make the rest of the level harder by interfering with your work (never in a way that you can't possibly recover from). VIP orders make a return as Special Orders that can show up in the middle of a stop.

The game keeps you on your toes right to the end, increasing the difficulty curve by steadily increasing the point requirements on its levels, the speed at which orders come in, the number of orders per stop, and the unfriendliness of the food sets you have to deal with. On the plus side, you now have "Auto-Serve" on your side: press Ctrl and everything that is done cooking and requires no further preparation will be delivered instantly. It can be a life saver, and the right menu that leans into it makes things way easier.

Hugely recommended if you liked the first two games: Unlike CSD1 and CSD2 where I eventually ran into an "every day is the same" rut, that never happened in CSD3 because it kept changing things up.

Plus, you can finally rebind keys per-recipe. Not that you really need to - they also made all the keybindings consistent across recipes, so ingredients don't randomly change their letters. (I still use the Mouse+Keyboard setup CSD2 forced me to learn, but it's a nice QoL feature nonetheless)

The only (very minor) complaint I have is that your helpers can be a little unnecessarily savage at times. If I wanted to be passively-aggressively chewed out for making one mistake on an otherwise perfect attempt, I'd pick up the phone and call my mother.

Opus Magnum is a bit like Spacechem, but with a difficulty CURVE instead of a WALL. It also has a much reduced scope since there's no macro-problem to solve at the same time as the micro-problems: you only need to make a particular molecule from its components, you're not chaining together multiple machines.

Essentially an automation puzzle, Opus Magnum gives you unlimited parts, space, and time to produce the required molecule, and then lets you optimize as much or as little as you want. A lot of good design decisions, a clear UI, and some excellent visual polish make it a fantastic puzzle game all around.

It also includes Sigmar's Garden, a solitaire mini-game (the stone-removal kind, not the playing card kind) that's surprisingly fun in its own right. There's a level editor and Steam workshop support too. Great premise executed well at a very reasonable price. Highly recommended.

A Retro FPS Metroidvania with a Dark Soulsy atmosphere - I had to admit I was a little skeptical as it sounded too good to be true. But it manages to deliver on all three fronts; it absolutely has the retro FPS feel, it's a Metroidvania entirely at the Metroid end of the scale (my preference), and the story and atmosphere certainly feels Dark Soulsy.

It is quite short, though; my final IGT was just under 4 hours, so I'd recommend waiting for a sale. But it's a good experience. The short length limits what it can do on the Metroidvania front, but it does the best it can in the time it has.

The best one in the Destroy series. You don't have to eyeball complex angles like the other Destroy games. While most of the levels are easy, the bonus levels added to the end actually require some thought and puzzling out to solve.

Puzzle games shouldn't require frame-precise timing.