Recent reviews by Himawari

It's like if you took Terraria and made it top-down, with some basic food/farming mechanics and a skill leveling system added in.

So, pretty great. I didn't find the hunger/farming mechanic too onerous, the music was pretty great overall (especially for the inner regions), and the exploration was pretty fun throughout.

Melee does seem to suffer later on, and some limits on unique/legendary gear per-world could be a bit of an annoyance if playing with friends, but I'd highly recommend Core Keeper to anyone looking to scratch the Terraria itch.

Overall, a pretty enjoyable game. Definitely somewhat harder than XCOM, and the combat mechanics encourage a more aggressive approach (dead enemies deal no damage...well, mostly).

There are some negatives - for the first half of the game, it felt like half my roster was wounded, which was silly when it's Grey Knights in power armor/terminator armor vs... cultists with autoguns.
Also, it definitely feels like a lot of skills don't really have a compelling reason to use them, like the various blind/silence skills.

Still, enjoyable overall, and there's charm to the early- to mid-game scramble where you're just barely staying afloat.

I'm not sure why Grandmaster Kai has to be a complete prick, though.

Rock and stone?

The gameplay isn't very complicated, but it's somehow like crack. I fire up the game to burn a quick 15 or 30 minutes, and the next thing I know it's been three hours...

Easier to get into than Factorio, but not as complex. *Much* easier to pick up and get started/expand to new resource sites though.

Also, watching waves of solar sails get launched towards a star is gorgeous.

It isn't fair that my character gets to pass out at 2 AM while I'm still up playing this damn game.

This is the kind of game that makes me wish I was a good scrum master.
...And good at forward planning...

Disclaimer: I haven't re-launched this since 1.2 or so.

The good:
- I have literally been waiting for a proper tactical Battletech game since MechCommander 1. This fits the bill.
- Mech customization is pretty fun, though things trend heavily towards the meta (in part due to the restrictions of what exists in 3025).
- Overall combat feels pretty good, if a bit slow.
- Campaign's not half bad.

The bad:
- Combat starts getting stale at some point - medium lasers + SRMs are the way to go for most of the game, and heavier is almost always better due to the fact that you're often facing 2-3x your one lance in numbers.
- Mission variety and objectives tend to blur together, since most of the time 'kill everything that moves' is the solution (I think some of the more recent patches added some more interesting mission types, though).
- Animations/transitions take a bit.
- Campaign is akin to Shadowrun Returns, in that it's there, it's reasonably interesting, but it's no Dragonfall or Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Not a strong knock against this, though.

At the end of the day, I get to take a lance of mechs and blow the living hell out of everything that gets in my way in a single-player campaign, which is something I haven't had the chance to really do since Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries.

Bonus points, I get to do it as a mercenary.

Pros:
- Dialogue is amusing
- Gameplay is entertaining
- Puzzles are very much tractable

Cons:
- The name is a lie

This game brings three things to the table, all of which I find to be a vast improvement over Endless Space.

1. Interesting terrain and city expansion. The city <-> hex <-> district interaction isn't, in itself, new (Rise of Legends had something like that for base growth, and other games - going back as far as Master of Magic - have had 'interesting' hexes within reach of your city), but there's something about the way it's executed that makes it interesting. Personally, I suspect it's the district-growth + uneven-terrain that makes me spend abnormally long trying to figure out where to place a city.

2. Tech tree. Tech tree, tech tree, tech tree. You can legitimately have four different players all end up with four different focuses, without something as contrived and incomprehensible as Endless Space's tech tree. The main thing I like about this is that it doesn't unduly punish crossing over and/or changing your mind (as it were) halfway up the tree - since X techs unlocks the next tier and all techs in that tier (except some quest-driven ones) are available, it's entirely reasonable to change tracks to, say, military in tier 3 without having to climb all the way from the first military tech in tier 1.

3. It's pretty and the music is amazing.
...No, seriously, the game is gorgeous. Unfortunately, it's also incredibly hard to identify what things are, because there's a bit of noise as a result...