Recent reviews by Rear Admiral Futt Bucker

Hi! Do you like watching Sims bounce from task to task? Boy howdy do I have a great game for you!

It's meth.

If you've come here from Minecraft, you're familiar with the art style and friendly look; music is chill as ♥♥♥♥. You'll get addicted the ability to control resources, input/output destinations. You'll find the Objectives in-line with your curiosity, and it'll spark a bit of dopamine.
If you've come here from Factorio, you're already familiar with the Objective system. You'll enjoy that the resource output is quite literally feeding people and giving them stuff to make them happier.
If you've come here from Ratopia, you're familiar with getting dopamine from making people happy. You'll enjoy the fact that, as everyone pitches in, efficiencies improve dramatically.
If you've come here from Stranded: Alien Dawn, then you're familiar with caring for a community and helping it grow. Don't worry, it looks like Minecraft and the music is soothing and chill. If you walk away while it's paused, no one dies. You're not taking care of survivors, you're helping a community grow. You build automation to improve the community, there's no pollution generation, and no enemies to ruin things.
If you're coming here from Necesse, then I've got FANTASTIC NEWS! THE TEXT IS LEGIBLE FROM THE COUCH! You'll need to do a little rebinding if you're not using an Xbox 360 or Steam Controller. THE DETAIL IS AMAZING. You go from Apples to Apple Jam to Cakes including Apples. There's an economy; sort of. You get to build a TON of automation for providing resources back to the community, and it's literally part of the objectives. Also, clearly defined objectives: just look at the left hand side! And they have a purpose: happiness allows you to build more houses which provides you coins, which can be used to literally improve resource gathering or crafting! and it's 3D!

HIGHly recommend

Path of Diablo: 2 Fast 2 Furious.

It's Dwarf Fortress. It's literally been a part of internet meme culture since internet meme culture formed. "Dark Souls Hard" came from Dwarf Fortress FUN™[\b]. Rimworld was influenced by Dwarf Fortress, which in turn is generating it's own genre of games. Dwarf Fortress is to "Survival Strategy" as Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is to Rougelikes. The definition of "A Work of Passion" uses ToadyOne and Dwarf Fortress as an example.

If you played it and loved it on the PS1 it's worth the $20.
If you've never played it before, wait till it's on sale for around $10; That's what I paid for it at GameStop around 15 years ago.

Everything you remember from the PS1 game is there. Everything.
Including the miserable 3fps Element attacks.
I think they cleaned up the polygons a bit? I'm not entirely sure but it's also been almost a decade since I played.
The music is the same -- this was arguably the most important part for me.
The dialog has more colloquialisms that make the characters actually feel like they're from recognizable "regions".
The combat system is the same -- this was the second most important part for me
And that's about it.

Naval Ops/ Warship Gunner (Or Warship Gunner 2 if you played the PS2 version).
If you don't know what those are, think Dynasty Warriors with boats. And subs. and, like, flying boats. That release subs. which release planes. because ♥♥♥♥ you that's why.

It's buggy. Of course, it's day one in early access as well. It follows the current trend of Strategy RPGs: Two fields of movement; one uses a single action, the other uses two. Some actions end turns, others use an action. The higher in level, the more choices of abilities to use in the field, etc. etc.
It's quite clear that levels and abilities are not quite as important as equipment: having a high leveled Operator or Squaddie or whatever you wanna call it is almost meaningless if the guy on the otherside is able to remove him with a single attack because you don't have strong enough armor equipped.
That example is not a common occurrence. Instead, it typically feels like enemies are bullet sponges until you upgrade equipment. Since there's no "base", equipment is either unlocked as you progress or via roulette: every 24 hours or after a PvP match, the roulette changes what items are available. There's no real discount to these items, just unique things: Gun parts, armor plates to go into armor, etc.
The voice acting is pretty awful, but that's neither here nor there; it can either be modded out later, or it can be fixed during early access. It's very clear that there's a framework in play; either being used as the foundation for the game, or being developed as the game is. This leads to the hope than "Capture the Objective" maps will be utilized in the future.
The Story has plenty of potential, and the "near future" leaves endless possibilities for more content. I think what I've played is a roughdraft, and am VERY intrigued to see it developed further.

In 2011, Front Mission Evolved was released. It was the last time I've played a Front Mission game. Why mention Front Mission? Because this is a spritual successor to PS1/PS2 Front Mission games.

If you've never played Front Mission, I'm not completely surprised: I'm a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boomer, and I remember it fondly. Front MIssion was a Tactical RPG with Mecha; think Final Fantasy Tactics, but Mecha. The draw of it wasn't so much the Tactical RPG portion -- though that was pretty great. For me, the draw was the numbers. Lots of numbers. Between leveling up pilots, replacing parts to give varying bonuses, balancing statistics, specializing units based upon weapon loadouts and experience with specific weapons. And the lore... good god the lore was amazing; somewhere between modern day dystopia and cyberpunk.

Dual Gear takes ALL of that, gives it a VERY pretty face lift, and mucks about with the combat. Rather than selecting a unit and moving it from square to square before counting the number of squares between you and your opponent and guessing at obstacles, Each character is moved and acted from a 3rd person perspective. Once a character has used up all their energy (BP I think it's called), it can no longer move or act. Thus far, combat seems to be a back-and-forth; you move and act all your units, then the enemy moves and activates all of their units. This may change in the future as I remember having to pay attention to Initiative Order was important in Front Mission.

Graphically, it's fairly average as things go; it's no artistic masterpiece, but The color pallets play well with each other, and most of the edges seem fairly smooth. Running a 1070 with i5-6600K -- no overclocking -- and the game's installed on my NVMe drive.

Storywise? the Engrish is currently at Google Translate levels. I was able to follow along for a bit, but once the story started getting slightly complicated, the lack of articles and tenses being thrown all over the place made me lose track of it.

Gameplay: It's fun as hell. I came in hoping for Front Mission, and I was given Front Mission. Parts have armor and health, different weapons deal damage in different methods, parts can be mixed and matched to tweak how you want a character used, weapon xp can be used to unlock weapon-type specific skills, positioning and how you move in combat effects the difficulty to hit, etc.

In all, it feels like an Early Access game: all the necessary components are there, and they all work together. Now it just needs some tiding up and polish. I would give this 8 Golden Narwhals out of 10; the Tutorial's been WELL translated and is VERY descriptive.

I'll admit that I'm playing this in Early Access, and I'll admit it belongs here. There a slight challenge due to Language barriers, but everything else is almost exactly what I'd want in a Giant Mecha game: You can move fast and smash enemies with all manner of weapons, the guns sound nice, the explosion when you boost is pretty great, the pace can go from 10 to 100 in a matter of seconds, and everything you do screams Mecha. There's plenty of customization in weapons and armor pieces, and that's not going into the detail you can achieve with the painting.

Now the things that kinda suck; again, I'm playing this about a month or three after it even showed up in Early Access. There are TONS of statistics for the mecha; this isn't a problem, this is actually really ♥♥♥♥♥♥' cool. the Armor and Weapons all carry a stat as well: Weight. You'd imagine that weight would have an incredibly noticeable effect on said stats, however you'd be surprised. You might also imagine that the heavier the armor, the more protection it provides, and again you'd be surprised. The look of your mecha, and the weight of all its armaments and armor, seem to make to change to these statistics. On one hand, neat! My mecha can look however I want it to! on the other hand, this makes many of the weapon customizations seem empty, for lack of a better phrase.

The reason for this is likely due to the grind. You very likely can spend all your money on developments -- which are how you ACTUALLY increase your stats to make a better Mecha. Again, this isn't a problem, this is actually a pretty neat idea -- and get through the entire game with the one or two items you'll inevitably pick up, and the pieces you receive at start. If you're interested in a specific piece of weapon or armor, that's unfortunate: all pieces of equipment have an equal chance -- again, this is still in EA -- of dropping, and can drop from all levels. At least, I think that's what I've been reading from the developer responses on the Steam Discussions. Oh, yeah, the developer is responsive which is pretty awesome.

In all, If you're looking for a 3rd person shooter with some awesome, fast-paced combat in Gundam-esque mecha, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is perfect. If you're looking for a 3rd person shooter with some awesome, fast-paced combat in non-Realistic Mecha, this is pretty perfect.

A turn-based strategy which unabashedly shows its influences: FTL and the XCOM remake. Movement and actions are done in a two fold manner (as opposed to X-COM's original TUs), and overworld movement is done on a node-to-node basis, with Fuel being the major limiting factor. Unlike FTL, who's progress was constantly being forced by the encroaching "Armada" hunting you down, theres little to keep you from hitting every single node in every single area before approaching the exit or your mission objective.

Overworld movement is done in multiple scales. You select your region to operate in, from which you determine the greater area, in which you determine the individual nodes and areas to move to. You must move through an entire area's worth of nodes before moving a node on the higher scale (i.e., you must move from the start node to the exit node before you can move from the Rose Enclave node to the Iron Fortress node).

There's a form of improvement for each character: allowing them to take classes and improve statistics, which in turn give way to skills and abilities which can be used in combat. experience is done on a two fold basis: one batch of xp for succeding, one batch based upon number of kills. This leads to a problem of your point-man typically having more xp than the others, but this is a problem which you can easily overlook or resolve through personal means.

Due to roguelike nature, death of characters is permanent. There are a few items which can be utilized to bring units back, and there are a few skills which can be taken to raise units back. Cover-to-cover movement is almost a necessity, and trying to figure out or understand the penalties for shooting enemeies from specific covers can be quite the challenge, as this is never completely or clearly communicated (i.e. if moving to the 65% cover block will provide a 65% cover for you or the enemy on the other side. If moving from the 65% cover to the 50% cover provides the flanking bonus that you imagine it would, but then wonder why you just lost 20% accuracy against a target which no longer has any cover against you.)

There are a few tweaks here and there which mostly amount to quality of life adjustments that i could imagine, but nothing is ground breakingly or earth shatteringly wrong with the game. In fact, with AAA games such as Fallout 76 being released, I'd even go so far as to say that its more stable than some modern AAA games.

Is it worth $20? I'd say so. There's enough cotent, both hidden behind achievements/missions and immediately accessible, to drive me to constantly comming back for more. The big thing with the game is to remember to play it like FTL: don't expect to sit down and waste 20 hours in a single play through and obtain most of the items. Play it in smaller batches, from time to time. It's a strategy game with roguelike tendencies that encourage casual playstyles, and as a verbose game of that nature, I would reccommend it.

Space Ninjas in Space doing Space Ninja stuff! What could possibly go wrong!