Recent reviews by Henchman 21

Note: Review based largely on playing a campaign on the default city and starting with the Dead of Night tutorial case

When I first heard about this game, I have to say I was intrigued. There was a DOS game I played a LONG time ago called The President is Missing dropped you into the mystery and let you just approach the solution from any angle and gave you free reign to try to find the information from databases and making queries to agents to look into things for you. I had been looking for a mystery game that scratched that same itch for me and I had tried a lot of games that I thought would do so, and I just never able to recapture that feeling... until I played this game. (Her Story was one of the other games that I would bring up when talking about that feeling)

The problem I've had with other games in this genre is you are expected to solve the mystery in a very particular way and if you do not see the case in the exact way the devs has laid it out or the logic of their puzzle, you are going to have trouble solving it, and with Shadows of Doubt, because it is a sandbox and procedurally generated, you have a lot of different routes to getting to the solution of a particular case, which gives the player a lot of avenues to investigate, which makes each case feel more organic and I like that feeling.

You are in a world with hundreds of other characters, each with relationships, jobs, habits and as you investigate cases, you start to recognize the people around you, making each discovery you make potentially helpful later on, you recognize them around town, and things start feeling more and more alive as you learn more about your fellow citizens.

And because of the design, you can investigate in any direction you want, and as one of the loading screens says, if you are willing to put in the work or face the consequences, there is no room on the map that is truly off limits to you, so wherever an investigation takes you, you can follow up on it.

And I have to say, when you are stuck on a tough case, and you have a breakthrough and it all falls into place after that... it just feels exhilarating. I've also had a major case that I solved by happenstance while I was doing a sidejob which, given how the game is designed, also felt satisfying because in the real world, cases get solved like that as well.

After I was deep into the game, I watched a couple of Twitch streamers play the game as well and it was interesting watching how they tackled cases in entirely different ways than I would have approached them, which is also a huge selling point to me. It also allowed me to see some of the mod content which does seem to add some additional flavor to the game.

Is Shadows of Doubt perfect? No. There are some glitches, a bit of jank, and a few things I would love to see it do in terms of functionality and flavor in the vanilla version, but for the things I wanted it to be, it just hits all the right notes for me. I am looking forward to the work that is going to be done on this game in 2025 and beyond based on the current roadmap, but I wholeheartedly recommend this game in its current state. It is the game I wanted it to be.

As a long time Beat Hazard 1 and 2 player, Beat Hazard 3 is a leap forward in terms of depth of play and feature set from the previous games. The new exploration gameplay is fun and I like the interactive nature of tackling a galaxy with other players. I am out of practice, but I've found jumping back in easier that expected.

As someone who is a Marvel fan but not particularly experienced with collectible card games, Marvel Snap has proven to be a winning combination for me and a good starting game in the genre (not to mention, I've seen a lot of veterans of this kind of game express enjoyment of this game as well). As a free-to-play game, I have not felt like I needed to spend money to be competitive (though because I have been enjoying my time with this game, I have made a couple of in-game purchases. If you are reading this in the future, I have played around 50 hours of this game the past two weeks, so it is very satisfying.

Update: So I am writing this update in January 2024, having played it multiple times daily since my previous review (my hours played reflect that certainly) and while I still enjoy it, enjoy the community etc, I do wonder if my experience as a long time player who has occasionally bought season passes and benefited from some of the early parts of the post-beta development cycle in terms of free stuff, both in terms of gold being part of the collection path (so getting bundles and variants of my choosing were easier) and basically Second Dinner having a lot more events where people got additional variants, gold, boosters and credits may be different than what new players may experience. My experience as a long-time player who has most of the cards at this point and my path through the game when I originally wrote my review may be vastly different to the experience newer players may have now.

As such, while I still recommend the game, I now have a few theoretical reservations in doing so.

It reminded me of a much older game called the President in Missing which involved the same mechanics of searching for info by terms. Short but very engrossing.

Very relaxing driving/business simulator. I love to explore and see new things, so both the base game+DLC and the mod community really feed into this desire.

It is also so enjoyable to just listen to the radio while playing this game. First rate game all around.

Strange, short little VN game... but I kind of liked it.

It is well-worth playing for sure. :)

When I heard about this game in early June 2016 from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, described as being a meeting of Dwarf Fortress and Elite, I was very intrigued, and while I don't think it has completely lived up to that description as of yet, over the past few weeks, I've played a game which I've enjoyed and see an ambitious future for.

Even at this point, the game which is starting to create some interesting stories and emergent situations within individual games. It is also an open-ended game that has some predefined suggested goals, but which also has enough freedom for the player to create their own criteria for personal victory. Let's say you pick the goal of becoming wealthy... you aren't prohibited or discouraged from pursuing other goals like political power, becoming a criminal, becoming universally well-known or any other thing you want to be in that particular iteration of the procedurally generated Solar System. With each major iteration, it seems that there are increasing ways to explore and interact with the game to create your own path to personal victory.

The game is also highly moddable (I've been in and played around with a lot of the files to see what I could do), and in the near future, like Crusader Kings II and Mount & Blade: Warband lend themselves to fantasy-based conversion mods, I can see a LOT of conversion mods for a number of different sci-fi universes popping up with this game in the future.

The developer is also very communicative and open to suggestions as well as being quick to deal with technical issues and as of now the game is very stable.

So in short, it is fun and engaging now, and it is getting better all the time.

It started a little slow, but it really picked up steam towards the end. A quality play experience and one which I recommend to people who enjoy RPGs and the Mass Effect series.

I felt like my choices mattered going into the ending.

A classic in the genre, and with the newest graphic mods, it is a beautiful game even by today's standards. Well worth buying.

It is fun, it's free. Seriously, what are you waiting for? And it keeps getting new content.