Recent reviews by Shaaria

Driftland: The Magic Revival is a game that looks amazing, has a good soundtrack, easily-understood mechanics, and an awesome premise, and completely wastes all of it on a slow and uninteresting RTS with average writing. You'd think it would be hard to screw up "shattered crust of a planet is now in orbit around it, you alter the map by moving pieces around and connecting them to make your empire and build buildings on it", but...

You do not order your units directly (outside of Nomads, which is just an alternative free-play mode). Instead you give them vague orders like "Attack this", "Explore here", "Raid this island". This is fine for noncombat stuff like exploration or surveying. It's cumbersome and tiring for combat. And combat is slow and uninteresting: You have three flavors of units that don't really have much difference between them, especially since they can't be directly controlled. You have a modest collection of spells of good utility but the majority of combat has to be done by waiting for the AI of your units to do its thing, and they like to get distracted.

There are four races in the game: Humans, Dark Elves, Not-Dark Elves, and Dwarves In Name Only That Are Just More Elves. The gameplay differences between them are miniscule; maybe one building, maybe one other tech tree entry of minor importance. The base-building aspect is okay, but not very deep, mostly just centered around gathering resources and assigning workers to make numbers go up.

All that said, if you're looking for a simple and non-twitchy RTS, this might be your jam. But I see too much wasted potential here to give it a recommendation.

It's Starcrawlers, but Cyberpunk.

And without the charm, the enemy variety, the plot, the character building, the consistent theme...

It's kind of a mess because the concept is neat, and the game makes a strong impression at the start. But then it falls off hard when you find there are only six locations and you will see all the enemies you're ever going to see on the first visit. Your agents gain levels, but the bonuses are very minor and don't make the agent much stronger; most of your power comes from your gear and skills. And the skills can be numerically improved but the ones you start the game with are all you get. Since there's so very little plot (and the plot missions are basically just normal missions) you'll see all the content in the game early.

...which wouldn't be so bad... except that even if you complete the game's central objective of "kill all the corp bosses", you still have to play out 75 weeks of the game to finish it up. Screw that.

It's also got some major balance problems. A lot of the bonuses you can get are irrelevantly small; +2% HP (when your base is 50-ish. Oh boy, one hit point!), or +2% damage, for example. But on the other end of the scale you can, quite easily, push an agent to a 100% crit rate very, very early on in the game, and then just curbstomp everything you come across. If you take the soldier (who can recharge shields), the infiltrator (for damage), and any sort of support character, you're basically invincible and combats are over almost as soon as they begin. And you can ignore all the defensive upgrades and just take the "If you have X% of your battery left, get 50% damage reduction" upgrades to make things even less of a threat.

All the game's written lore comes in 20 'echoes' that serve as a money sink and, all added together, make up about one single note's worth of lore from most other games.

In summary, great concept, but incredibly disappointing once you get past the beginning.

Special mention to the drone that follows you around and makes witty remarks that get old very quickly. It's completely out of place in the tone of an otherwise very serious Cyberpunk game and has a pool of lines way too small for the number of times you'll hear it speak. But the devs must have known, because they gave the drone's voice its very own volume slider.

Kingdom Rush: Vengeance has several interesting changes compared to Origins that are notable improvements.

First and foremost, you can now select 5 towers (from up to 18 types) for each map. Towers have a linear upgrade path now, as a consequence of this. The increased flexibility gives you a lot more interesting options for each map, alleviating the problem of previous iterations where it felt like certain maps required specific strategies. This has also allowed the devs to be more creative in their tower design, something they've taken full advantage of.

Also, the devs realized how important hero mobility is and gave more heroes teleport/flight powers, and gave the ones that don't have them additional buffs. Many more of the heroes feel comparable in utility and power and it now largely comes down to personal preference. Plus, in addition to the classic "rain of death" and "sudden reinforcements" abilities, each hero now gives you their own unique, third ability to use during the map, which can also be used even while they are dead.

The boss design also feels much, much more fair compared to previous iterations. None of them delete your towers, instead just temporarily disabling them at worst. Extra regular enemies show up alongside the boss, so the bosses don't have to be ludicrous any more, because you can no longer just sell all the towers not on the boss's path as they're still needed.

This is a straight upgrade over previous titles in the franchise - literally nothing is done worse than in Origins. Fantastic job!

This game's got some major problems.

Let's start with the demo, because that was my initial experience. There were some obvious typographical errors ("Be careful to run out of money"), the tutorial glitched out (by making you go into a state and then disabling the controls to get out of it) and it wasn't even set up accurately (it told you to produce another crop that was more valuable - despite the initial one selling for more). But I put it down to demo jankiness, and bought the game on sale.

Since it had been a while, I re-did the tutorial, which at least fixed the above errors. But it didn't make things any less confusing, especially since it tended to tell you about issues without explaining how to deal with them. Traffic, for instance. Or selling to the state.

The "Career" mode is a misnomer given that in this genre it typically means "a series of missions that steadily increase in difficulty and complexity to introduce you to the game over time". In RoI, the "Career" mode is actually the basic "random map" standalone mode. Misleading, but not a big deal. The end of the tutorial recommends you start on Newcomer difficulty, but all it does is modify things like prices and production rates; you're still dropped into the full game right out the door.

But, it does have an Advisor (ie, in-game tutorial) to 'help' you. I use 'help' loosely because, like the main tutorial, it vaguely alludes to certain game features without fully explaining them, and has you do confusing steps like check what the prices are in neighboring regions (that you can't build in) immediately followed by ignoring the neighboring regions to build in your own. And then it triggers a scripted event to sell to The State. Which is represented by a single random city on the map. With the default worldgen settings, and following the game's explicit recommendation to start in the one city with 3 shops, The State can easily be on the other side of a river... and bridges are locked behind a tier 3 research tech. So, thanks.

The game is poorly explained, and taking it apart it seems poorly designed. The TTD-esque logistics element is lacking since vehicles just appear spontaneously and do their routing for you (often very poorly; I've seen trucks take long, circuitous routes instead of shorter, faster routes). Trains seem almost nonsensical as even with a very clear connection between train depots they will complain about not having a route. (It doesn't help that the ghost for a train depot before you buy it makes it very confusing which direction the train tracks leave from.) And even if you do set up train networks to move stuff around, you still need to use trucks for the 'last mile' to get stuff to stores. Accurate, perhaps, but very much a pain. The whole thing is cumbersome and confusing, which is not good considering it's the central element of the game.

It also isn't very encouraging that as you follow along with the assistant, you can glance into a neighboring territory and see an AI player flexing on you with a much bigger setup almost immediately.

I gave it four attempts, some with the advisor and some without, running into different problems each time. There were other random minor flaws too, like achievements firing at the wrong time. It's really just a bad entry in the genre. Hell, it doesn't even have multiplayer, which is a staple of this genre.

My Time At Portia is an unbelievably well-designed game in the Life Sim genre. I get the feeling the devs are big fans of the genre and know all about its shortcomings and worked hard to avoid them.

For instance, Portia has tons of fantastic quality-of-life features:
- You can access any chest from any other chest on your property. This saves lots of running around to organize/deposit your inventory.
- You can name chests directly, which makes organization much easier, especially when combined with the above.
- An icon appears by your hotbar to tell you when your inventory is full.
- Your HP and stamina are shown as both bars and numbers, making the relevant mechanics transparent.
- When you cut down a tree, break a rock or kill a monster, the dropped resources get pulled to you regardless of how far away you are, so you don't have to run back and forth picking stuff up.
- You can look up what equipment is required to craft an item, before you have the relevant means to do so.
- After giving a gift to a person, how much they liked it is recorded on their page in the menu, so you don't have to keep notes yourself.
- Probably like a dozen more things I can't remember right now.

Also, majorly important: Life sims like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley quickly fall into the rut of doing the same thing every single day. Portia COMPLETELY avoids this problem. The central premise is you are a builder, not a farmer, so the central mechanic is that you build machines and craft items and structures of steadily increasing complexity for the town. You make most of your money (and reputation) NOT by just dumping piles of items at a shop, but rather by fulfilling commissions for specific items. The pool of items is gigantic (and expands during the game) so you are constantly being asked to make different things.

But you're limited to a maximum of 1 normal commission + 1 plot commission at a time, and can only pick up one of each per day, and regular commissions don't get posted on weekends, so even at maximum efficiency you have to do other stuff. This is where the OTHER traditional life-sim mechanics come in: plants, fishing, mining, fighting monsters, gathering resources, etc. You can do as much or as little of these as you like because most materials can be just bought or even commissioned - that's right, you can BE the source of a fetch quest for some NPC who will go do it off-screen and come back with 50 animal hides in a few days for you.

And the crafting itself is fantastically done. It's not just "pick a recipe and instantly make the item". Basic stuff works this way, but everything else either comes from machines that take time to process it (which means this life sim is actually an Automation game in disguise, and I love it) or from the assembly area where you make multiple things and put them together to make bigger stuff like machinery, vehicles and other grander projects that you can only do one at a time.

Mechanically, the game is a masterpiece. The writing is okay, on par with the genre. The social aspect has some improvements too (befriending someone also improves your standing with their friends and family, being friends with people has perks like discounts that the game tells you about, etc), even though it's not -my- focus it's good for people who are heavily into that aspect of the genre.

The only really bad thing I can say is that I turned off all the voice acting pretty much immediately after hearing it. Thankfully, the devs thought of that one, and when there is no VA, you instead get a classic-feeling text printing sound during the character's text box. So even a downside became an upside in the end.

I played one map with two friends and we encountered a whole slew of desync issues:
- Players showing as Ready while not
- The wrong character performing actions
- Characters only seeing a gold total of 0 (making it impossible for them to buy items)
- Players seeing the wrong character assignments

Worse, these issues weren't simply fixed by the affected player leaving and rejoining. They even went as far as to delete their local save files and rejoin, and still had problems. The multiplayer needs major stability work before it's ready.

By the time DS3 was in development, FromSoft knew that their core audience were the hardcore gamer types, and so DS3 panders to them at the expense of everyone else. The mechanics have been set up in such a way that "get good and dodge roll to victory" is the only viable strategy:

- Armor is meaningless, as long as you have something in each slot, it doesn't much matter exactly what you have
- Poise might as well not exist (it only triggers on very specific heavy attacks)
- Sorcery is garbage (so many things are resistant to it)
- You can't upgrade armor (not that it would help even if you could)
- Shields are almost worthless (you can block 2, maybe 3 attacks with a high-stability shield; you can dodge roll 7 times in a row with default stamina)
- Most enemies and bosses come at you with ridiculously long combos, so you have to dodge roll or your guard gets broken
- When your guard gets broken (even by kicks to your shield) you can now be riposted for extra humiliation
- More enemies and bosses have grab attacks that are less telegraphed and have shorter windups compared to previous games
- Many of the grab attacks enemies/bosses come with now involves very long lunging or dashing movements so simply getting out of melee range isn't enough; couple this with the very short windup and these attacks are unnecessarily hard to dodge

In DS1 and DS2, some strategies were more optimal than others, perhaps, but you always had options. There were multiple viable ways to progress past any given roadblock.

DS3 wants you to play it a very specific way, and if you don't want to learn how to dodge roll everything? Screw you.

It's not even a terribly creative game because it's loaded front to back with references to the last two games (mostly DS1). And those references aren't creative; as soon as you see one start, you know exactly where it's going.

The world design is also extremely linear. The only two times the path branches, the 'main' path will have a wall requiring you to beat the side path first in order to progress. Compare this to the 'hub and spoke' of DS2, or the deeply interconnected world of DS1 - it's another symptom of the designers wanting you to play the game in exactly one intended path.

I prefer DS1 over DS2, but they're both good games. I cannot say the same of DS3, and I don't recommend it to anyone, except maybe people who enjoy speedrunning Souls games.

This is more or less a straight upgrade from Spelunky 1, so tl;dr: if you liked Spelunky, get Spelunky 2.

So many of the mechanics carry over from the original, including movement tech, that experience from 1 will help in 2. But, 2 adds so much new stuff that there's still plenty to learn and explore. The main game is longer and features branching paths. There are more items, more enemies, more level features - more content in every way. The secret stuff is just as esoteric as before, but still follows 1's "Do a thing in this area so that you can do a related thing in the next area" pattern.

And wow, they not only followed through on their promise for online multiplayer, but it works -really- well. I've played a few sessions with friends, and it worked great (well, mechanically - we still died horrible/hilarious deaths; it's still Spelunky).

The game is also a little more lenient than Spelunky 1; you have 3 minutes instead of 2:30 before the ghost shows up now, and it's actually possible to get forgiven by shopkeepers. Shopkeepers also recognize the majority of causes of damage to their shop or items that are NOT your fault and will no longer flip out at you for something you had nothing to do with.

So, solid recommendation. The devs succeeded on their goals to make an even better Spelunky.

This review will focus on 2D Pit vs. 3D Pit differences because you probably won't be interested in the game if you haven't played the original.

- Obviously, it's 3D and in real-time. If you're bad at FPSes, don't fret; you don't need to be super precise with your shots because there's no headshot mechanic and instead your damage is increased when you crouch or aim down the sights. The melee works fine as well and doesn't require a great deal of precision. This is NOT a twitchy shooter, it's more slow and methodical, even if it can get frantic at times.
- Crafting is WAY simpler now. Instead of 100-ish crafting ingredients or however many it was, now there's just 8 or so. This also means things like food items have only their face value and can't get turned into other stuff.
- Recipes now must be unlocked through messages before you can use them. It makes starting a bit rougher, especially on the food front, so a few runs with the Engineer on Easy to get some recipes unlocked may be in order for a new player.
- It's still a work in progress; quite obviously so as the UI contains some references to 2D Pit mechanics that are not yet in 3D (such as psionics). But the core of the game works fine.
- Only 20 floors instead of 40, which is for the best since it's got optional multiplayer now.
- Not every floor has a working elevator. Some have broken elevators and instead you have to find a hatch or a busted floor to descend. Doesn't change anything mechanically but it's a cool touch.
- The final boss is a way more reasonable fight. Getting to him is the hard part.
- Status effects stack up now, making poison, disease and radiation much more threatening than before.
- Certain esoteric skills like Traps and Engineering are WAY more useful now because the game gives you more opportunities to use/train them.
- You can disable door traps! Finally! (If only Pit 2D let you do this)

Overall, this is a fantastic 2D -> 3D conversion. It keeps the core of the game intact but changes just enough that it's a notably different game, and both 2D and 3D Pit are excellent games in their own ways.

This is a beautiful and well-written game, with a terrible and confusing combat system. I'll get that out of the way so I can focus on the good bits (ie, everything else): It's a weird elemental rock-paper-scissors where you can only really be strategic in the fights that don't matter (hunting) and you're basically relying on luck in the fights that matter (story fights) because enemies follow a specific pattern, but you can only find out what it is by observing them across many fights... and obviously, story fights only happen once. There were many times where I had no idea why I lost, and a few where I had no idea why I won, and the winning strategy seems to just be "pump Earth Mastery enough to tank attacks until you win, regardless of what you use". I've seen an enemy get healed after I used an attack artifact on it, and I also once took damage by bracing for an attack against an enemy that also braced for an attack.

So, that's kind of annoying, but everything else about the game is wonderful. The art is a series of wondrous watercolor paintings that vibrantly bring to life the story. The music is a beautiful piano soundtrack always fitting to the current scene in tempo and melody. The writing is consistent and truly helps to suck you into your role as an entirely different creature, with their own culture and background and their own words for things. It also carries a number of thoughtful messages with it, primarily about a respect for nature.

While getting to the end was a struggle, it was worth it. Though I wouldn't begrudge anyone for just looking up a combat guide.