Recent reviews by Ffrog

Balatro has managed what no other game, roguelike or otherwise, has ever managed for me: making it fun to play at higher difficulty levels. I'm not sure how it has done this, when e.g. Slay the Spire and Hades didn't. But I'm 78 hours in and I'm still having fun upping the difficulty. Ask me in another 100? 200? hours whether I managed to beat every deck at the highest (gold) level.

Great fun, all the way through. Most of the challenge comes from the mini pinball areas that crop up every so often, some of these are trickier than others. But most of these shouldn't take more than a few minutes to master.

Took me about 6 hours to complete the main story, but there are lots of areas and secrets on the island i haven't found yet.

I'll probably replay it from the start at some point in the future, it's a relaxing, generous, fun game.

A nice relaxing puzzle game. None of the puzzles are very difficult, and it didn't take long to get through the 250 puzzles that came with the game, as the vast majority of them were solved on the first or second go.

The sound is particularly charming - quiet piano chords play as the lines progress and meet each other.

The original Golf Club had its flaws, but overall the gameplay and the community created courses were good enough to make it an enjoyable experience.

Unfortunately, the Golf Club 2 has not improved the formula, and in several ways has made it worse.

The swing has been altered to introduce more variation, which was needed. However, at the same time three psuedo difficulty levels have been introduced, which have been poorly balanced so that none of them are that fun to play.

There are other areas which were fine in the original game, but worse in the Golf Club 2. The visuals are worse than the first game, with poor lighting and more graphical glitches. The tracking of statistics has been almost completely removed. Putting is even twitchier than it was before. Chipping is even worse than it was before.

The new UI in the main game is poor. The UI in the designer, which hasn't been changed, is even worse. Designing a course is fun, but putting it together using that UI is a frustrating experience.

In the original Golf Club, the positives outweighed the negatives. That is no longer the case in the Golf Club 2.

I enjoyed every minute of the three or so hours I spent on Tacoma. The voice acting and animation of the video logs is excellent, and are pleasent windows into the lives of the crew.

It's very difficult not to compare Tacoma to Gone Home, as they are very similar. In general Tacoma is a better experience, the visual logs are an improvement on audio diaries, but the story doesn't pack the emotional punch delivered by Gone Home.

I was expecting to enjoy it, and it started well. But it got steadily more surreal and metaphorical, and for me less enjoyable, as it went on.

It's a pity, as I think a story in that setting and with those characters, but told in a more traditional way, could be very strong. And the art direction is excellent.

So not really my cup of tea, but if you don't mind a bit of surreal metaphor, you might well enjoy it.

Bought this in a sale a few weeks ago, and I've been enjoying both playing and creating courses. The gameplay is quite pared back, which I think works quite well. I play on a controller, and it's difficult to control distance except with 100% shots, which I think is quite realistic. Worth checking out a guide on the putting though. Easy once you know what you're doing, but control of distance while putting is not explained in the game itself.

Only thing I don't like is the way bunkers are treated, where they just reduce the club distance by e.g. 50%, regardless of whether the ball is plugged or just trickled in.

Best thing about the game is the huge number of user created courses, both recreations of real-world courses and original courses. Creating courses is straightforward after watching a youtube video or two, although the course creater seems to have been designed with a controller in mind rather than mouse and keyboard.

The early game in ADOM constantly asks you to make risk vs reward decisions. Whether to stand and fight, or run away and heal. Whether to kick down a door and risk activating a trap, or come back later with a key. Whether to risk delving one level deeper, or travel to a safer location. Making the wrong call will often lead to an early death, but negotiate these issues and your character will be set up for the challenges that follow.

For newcomers to the game, I advise choosing a stong melee character (e.g. an orc fighter), and start in the tutorial dungeon to get used to the basics of moving around and hitting things with swords. This is what you'll be doing for the majority of the time, regardless of class. You can then let the complexities of the other mechanics seep in over time.

I used to play a lot of the ASCII version, but not so much recently. I'm already impressed with the new graphical tileset and other features which are in this version, and the game underneath is still the exciting combination of exploration and danger it always was.

At the end, I had a tear in my eye. That's all you really need to know. Yes, it looks like bog-standard RPG maker output, but play it for a little while and you'll be living through each moment with the characters and aching to find out where it's going next.

The only real issue I had was in the horse-riding scene, the controls went a bit screwy. But re-loading solved the problem.

I also recommend the two mini-episodes that come with it, which concentrate on the scientists. I don't think there's any way to load the game from Steam, but google it and you can find where they're saved on your PC.