Recent reviews by LionsPhil

And idle game that doesn't have to be *very* idle. I won on my second go-around (although had seen a friend's first loop, so had some idea what was going on), and I think got all the achievements by the fifth. A lot of upgrades seem really unbalanced against each-other, and the cost scaling seems to prohibit truly runaway growth to get silly numbers (things you expect to get combinatorial are oft not---only a few different factors seem to multiply each-other), but I can see *some* folks out there have managed it, so maybe I'm missing the trick. But it's a weird little quirky thing that makes progress go up and was amusing enough for its sale price.

A delightful little melange of minigames. I never had the consoles to Ware a Wario and the years have slowed my reactions but I still managed to beat it, so that passing bar isn't too high. Got a few good solid laughs out of me. The art is lovely and, hey, more flashygoodness soundtrack!

If you want a standalone expansion for Subnautica, this is more Subnatica. Like Subnatica, half of the stuff it has is...kinda pointless; once your Seatruck has a couple modules that fill in the big feature gaps from the Cyclops, the rest are kind of just like making a big base: slightly awkward, slightly discouraged by actual mechanics, but there if you want to play with them I guess. It's smaller (physically, too---even if you had the Cyclops, you'd never be able to use it much) and the narrative hooks to get you out there are a bit worse but the ending is a bit better. The above-ground bits are deeply shrugworthy. They've added a lot of crutches to help you stay in hostile environments that little longer without the right gear and, you know what, go for it. Fevered peppers are brokenly good crops: grow some.

Also the loading bar has a pengling run across it and fall over every time it catches up, then standing waiting for the bar to move again. A+ touch, probably lost on everyone who installed it on an SSD by this day and age.

Egh. It's Rigs of Rods, but commercialized, which isn't inherently bad. Except RoR has multiplayer, and this has...a very touchy community mod bolting it on. Add more mods on top to have some kind of game mode in multiplayer. And great on the community for doing all that, but they're not where your twenty quid is going. It's prettier and has more complete vehicles, but everything else about is is still incredibly jank, from the controls, to the damage model, to what passes as singleplayer non-sandbox content.

Yes, the damage model. It's neat, but the charm fades as it does weird crash-welds and pieces do the classic videogame stretching-to-infinity. It hasn't improved on RoR from like two decades ago, and that's telling. As a *gameplay* mechanic, 1NSANE did it better back in 2000, with your bent-up chassis making you drive weird...but as an actual game, with multiplayer, with gameplay modes.

Sprinkle on some "the community have to fix everything, so major updates from the dev you're actually paying break the work of those who were making it worth playing", and I can't recommend spending money on this.

A free cute little stealth game that automates, like it or not, the bit where you goof and get spotted and have to kill a witness. The little timers on when they're about to get bored staring at once place and move are a nice touch. It's pretty darn well balanced for challenge, and being able to recover to a passing grade if you don't manage perfection.

Also: Daryl is a Good Boy and barely ate anyone at all.

The multiplayer moved to community servers and remains as good as ever---that there are still active servers for a 22-year old game is a testament to that. Infantry combat is a little rough and incredibly headshot-heavy, which means snipers galore, but the vehicles are still incredibly satisfying, and this game absolutely nailed giving 'vees and buggies just enough traction that they J-turn beautifully with just WASD, not even a handbrake. Tanks feel tanky. Building "destruction" is a laughable retexture job because they either never solved the geometry changes or how to game-design around them, but bless 'em, it works well enough. (Check PCGW for a community patch for modern resolutions and stuff.)

The singleplayer has no right to feel as awesome as it does, at least at first. Even if you're getting this just for the multiplayer, dig into a couple of levels, and enjoy the big, silly early-'00s FPS excess. NOD have gone Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain in this one, and it works; it's still Tib Dawn, not Red Alert 2, just a little bit more bright and colorful and bombastic. Havok is just the right amount of jerkass for the kind of meatbrain hero he's playing, running around with far too many guns making everything explode. It's great. Early levels build a lot of that "midst of battle" sense that Call of Duty would later get famous for, but with a Klepacki soundtrack, a rocket launcher, and a minigun.

...then in the latter half it degrades into escort missions and lots of RNG rolls on if a rocket officer is going to one-hit you, and the final assault reinforcements kinda just stand around where they're dropped. So, eh, coulda ended stronger, but darn if it doesn't pull off a thing that should never have worked---turn this RTS into an FPS---while it's still trying.

God I miss Westwood.

An early-access success story: came back to the finished chapters and find they've built on everything that made that early slice great.

It's a delightful little Thingy-builder, that then gives you a good variety of scenarios to answer "so what's it for?"; it's great at keeping the pace mixed up between manipulating and shoving things, fighting, and navigating, and levels never feel too prescriptive about the solution: it's fun to see if you can win a fight in your largely-unarmed crane, or a pushing puzzle with your war wagon. Fly when you don't need to; try not to when you do. A lot of stuff works, and that's always great.

There's a tiny nit that it looks like really early vehicles don't import right any more, and it's partly for wheels and steering blocks---which still exist---not spawning right. That's a bummer, but by now hopefully they won't make any more breaking changes. :/ Workshop support is also a bit undercooked, with no way I can find to upload a new version of a thing, rather than uploading a second copy. But this is an actual complete, fun game without needing third-party fans to fix it.

Yes, Rambley, my experience convinced me to tell a friend about you.

There are just too many situations in which your decisions are insignificant in comparison to the roll of the dice. I can kind of respect what grand strategy games are trying to do, but realistically they're way too prone to the worst kind of failure: being unable to influence the simulated world much any more. One bad set of RNG plague events---and don't think choosing to prepare for plague will tip the scales that far---and you can find yourself controlling a 5-year-old on fast-forward waiting for the day you can try to do something again and get out from under the regent, if you even have the resources left to do so. Losing is Fun: being told the real-time version of "skip a turn" over and over isn't.

Obviously if you're a history buff and can get your kicks from an alternate-world simulator where Willy the Conqueror pops his clogs before uniting England or something, many larks are ahoy for you here. As a strategy game, though, it's a lousy one. Sid Meier "series of interesting decisions" fans need not apply.

It's good. Saying it's good feels kinda redundant by this point, but it's nice to have an explorey-crafty game with a narrative and good writing and voice acting and a conclusion.

The crafty bits are kind of eh. It's a good job you don't have to do a *lot* of it because they're lacking a lot of quality-of-life features, like even being able to move all of type between containers. Your personal inventory never really feels large enough to big crafting projects. There's big chunks of basebuilding I just never had a reason to do, and it's juuust annoying enough to not do it for the fun of making a big base. This game gave me nuclear reactor tech and I never built one because solar or thermal are readily available everywhere, enough for the things worth running, and lower maintenance.

The explore-y parts are generally great though. There's a lot of quite stressful narrative pressure until you twig it's mostly fake, and some less stress but much more real survival time pressures. Always bring a refreshing drink to sip while you're diving. I love my little nugget Seamoth with its wibwibwibwibwib engine, and my big trustworthy carry-everything "Aurora 2" Cyclops with its coffee machine. The Prawn also exists.

But importantly: Only save when you're safe. Take a backup of your save occasionally (it's under the game install). Losing a few rocks from dying isn't so bad, but respawning inaccessibly far away from your vehicle can be. (There's also a few nasty bugs---be careful of leaving the Prawn sitting down, or of leaving the game paused stood in the Cyclops too long.) It'd really help if you could just do old-fashioned named saves, instead of a single overwriting slot, but at least there *isn't* autosave on death/timer/events/quit, for better or worse---it's always going back to a *manual* save.