Recent reviews by Cei

Watched too much Japanese anime? Got a hankering to build an authentic anime school? Then this is the game for you - but it's remarkably a lot better than the premise to boot.

Think Theme Hospital in a school setting, except they've worked out how to enable multiple floors and the students don't get Bubble Head. Management is a case of juggling timetables and activities, ensuring enough classrooms and specialist facilities (eg: chemistry labs, toilets, staff room and so on) exist to fill the needs of the teaching and then filling the remaining space with cleaning supplies. Some aspects are a little clunky, especially class management, but once you understand the Japanese system of three years, each denoted with a number, and then classes having a number afterwards, it makes more sense (so 1-1 means the first class of the first year, 3-4 is the fourth class of third year).

Building is probably most of the fun, along with the usual wait for research unlocks. Most of the environments are charming in their own way, with a unified aesthetic that works well, but the inability to interior decorate does grate a little, especially as the available carpets look so bad. I've also yet to work out whey pupils and staff will just walk through fences...

What Let's School nails is the "one more minute" hook of the management genre. It's 1am before you realise it's time to go bed, with just one more cycle tempting you. For the price, it's an excellent little game with a few ongoing bugs and issues, but if you like management sims this'll scratch the itch.

Infinite is, for all intents and purposes, a Stellaris total conversion to the Star Trek universe. Sadly, despite this being done by an actual studio rather than somebody's basement, the end result is more disappointing and incredibly superficial.

The basic concept is fine. Star Trek would be a good fit for Stellaris after all, but the delivery is lacking. You can build a tiny number of ship hulls (like, five) and the random tech tree means you can easily ignore lore and load Starfleet up with disrupters rather than phasers. Fleet combat is simply dropping a stack in to a system and relying on a bigger number. Speaking of lore, the UFP just sits there and can't declare wars or do anything against aggression, just be a punching bag. Probably on point to be fair, but as a game it just makes it boring.

Flavour text is probably the only well done part of the game. Sadly the music is generic and not even licensed Star Trek themes. The UI is just the standard Stellaris UI, no attempt at LCARS or anything else.

Simply put, don't bother. I won my first game by score. The Borg event chain ground to a halt and there was no end-game crisis to deal with. I couldn't liberate Bajor after the Cardassians integrated the system. So instead I just endlessly expanded and watched numbers go up.

Yeah it's pretty good. Play it with friends, lots of friends!

Only slight downside is the small dev team means updates take ages :(

After FF VII it was always going to be a bit of a task for Squaresoft to make a better game. FF VIII is widely seen as the poor cousin of the PSX era, but this is doing it a real disservice. Although flawed in many ways it has a fantastic soundtrack and a solid plot. Gone are the basic graphics of VII, with characters now rendered in a much more realistic fashion.

FF VIII makes a huge impact. Is IX better? For sure. However it doesn't mean this is a bad game in the slightest. Sit down and be prepared for a marathon of a game that keeps you in the seat,

Strategy on an epic scale, crossing the world from the 1400s to the 1820s. You can take control over a major nation or the smallest single province weakling and develop them in to superpowers that span the globe. Constantly updated with regular patches and semi-regular DLC, EU4 is a finely crafted and enthralling game. Complex? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.