Recent reviews by Bumc

Troubleshooter is in a weird spot where I cannot really recommend it to my friends, because every one of them who plays Xcom hates anime games with passion.

From the three base layers (strategy, tactic and story), strategy one is probably the best. You get to tinker around with a bunch of little augments that stack with one another, form sets and often completely alter how a character is played.
Tactic is a bit lacking, especially by the end -- enemies come in swarms and your choices generally boil down to mopping them up or getting one-shot if you fail to do so.
Lastly, the story is fine, most characters are fleshed out well and some even have some sort of development as the game progresses. Unfortunately, it takes a bunch of time before every single mission and is slowed down even more by constant flashbacks. You can skip it in one button, but if you do, you then have no idea what is happening and who are you even fighting.

Overall, solid 4/5 and totally worth the price for the 70-100 hours of fun you're getting even if you aren't going to stick around for the end-game content.

If your fantasy is being a potato mage melting hordes of aliens with 6 flamethrowers, then you've come to the right place.

If your favorite game is Excel, Across the Obelisk will come close second.

Mostly spoiler-less warning.





If you're like me and don't trust the annoying Stout and burn him in fire every time to shut him up, you'll miss quite a chunk of story.
Just sayin'.

This game plays like old-school rogue-likes which is refreshing in the world of meta-oriented rogue-lites.
Your meta progression is you _knowing_ the game better.

Tactical layer isn't too deep, but its solid enough. "Take it slow", "choose your own fights" and "don't be afraid to run away" are the paradigms that surprisingly still found their way in a gun-based game.

Strategy layer consists of managing inventory space, picking a skill build and managing weapons and armor.
This is where it gets a bit hairy.
Having access to all skills in every run and being forced to pick your build-defining Master perk somewhat early means that you'll probably stick to something that works for you and it cuts down heavily on replay-ability.
Inventory space is always lacking and annoying to deal with and only good thing I can say about ammo management is that it organically forces you to slowly migrate from 9mm to 7.62 to plasma as the game goes on, because of the loot tables the mobs have.
Armor doesn't get access to your damage reduction perks and with how scarce repair stations are, you not being able to field-repair it and armor effectiveness going down as it gets damaged, investing in something apparently made of paper that still manages to impede your dodge chance doesn't feel good.
You can mod the weapons and armor mid-game, but it doesn't feel like it affects the game too much as by the end of it you'll find some unique weapons that are both unmoddable and much stronger than any of the stuff you can make as long as they are at least somewhat relevant to your build.

Still, its fun to play and well worth the price tag and I haven't even touched the atmosphere, voice acting and memes.
Go forth and slay the demon hordes!

You're better than that.

This game has 2 programmers and 12 writers listed in titles and it shows.
You will find some unpolished UI and lazy design choices, but you'll also find a huge massive of small stories with light humor and witty characters.

Heroes are fragile and all your failures become their lasting wounds, but sometimes you can manage to steer the random trait-item-infusion-relationships train in the right direction and get a hero you'll remember.
At the end of the first campaign, my alpha-team got absolutely assblasted by a gorgon incursion. in a desperate attempt at saving the province I rallied remaining three heroes and went to fight the final boss. To my surprise, I destroyed him taking little to no damage -- apparently, a ranger with stone bow, return fire and strong rivalry with team's mystic is enough to hold off practically unlimited amount of gorgons.

Overall, if you're looking for a small tactical simulator, buy this game.
If you're looking for stories and making unforgettable characters, buy this game.
And even if you're not really into gaming and I don't know what are you doing reading this review, buy this game, its a good game.

Its a cool 4x game with some unique twists, different races that have completely unique strategies (so loads of replayability) but unfortunately nonexistent AI.
Maybe I was lucky, but I assumed hard difficulty would be challenging for someone trying to figure out the ES2 rather counter-intuitive UI, instead bots never attacked me (including world-devourer AI that spawned right beside me), even though they regularly sent threats. I did a science victory around turn150 without ever engaging in "multiplayer" part of the game.

Play with friends!

I'm not giving the game negative review as it seems to already have worse score than it deserves based on failed expectations from the initial hype, but it still has some issues making it borderline unplayable for me.
* Difficulty settings. Legend seems brutally unfair in first missions while on previous difficulty it feels like I'm still in tutorial after an in-game week. Same "save the bandits" mission is basically over in two turns, on legend all the bandits _die in fog of war_ while on hard bandits fend off enemies practically on their own.
* Active skills. Everything I saw so far boils down to "shoot more" and "run faster" with willpower management to use the skills more often. No cooldowns mean that there is no need in too many different active abilities and overall system looks pretty boring.

Skills that give extra actions are broken with cooldown reduction.