Recent reviews by Pod

I played They Are Billions after wishlighting it for a long time, and was utterly disappointed to find I hated almost every aspect of the design.

But then I heard From Glory To Goo fixes most of those problems, and that turns out to be completely true. It's better in almost every regard, with the exception of graphics, which, whilst lo-fi, are passable. This game is actually enjoyable to play, whereas TAB isn't.

Whilst it may be unfair to review a game by mainly comparing it to another one, I don't think it's unwarranted (obvs.) as the developer themselves have stated FGtG is a clone of TAB. What's interesting is how well they've completely surpassed the other game.

Well worth playing. The only downside right now is it's very early on in development, and it appears to be a solo developer, so content will be slow. But even the game as-is is worth playing. I'll try and come back to it when it has a campaign mode.

It’s very short (an hour), it’s pretty barebones in the controls (why can’t I drift my boat around corners?!) but it’s very charming and pleasing to play, especially when watching the (hilariously exotic) life return to the cosy vignette seas you’re cleaning up. It also your classic indie-dev tale of “quit job, buy house boat, work on boat game, run out of money, use kickstarter”, and who doesn't love to support that kind of nonsense?

I’ve been after this game since I first heard about it, so I’m a bit disappointed by the short runtime, but at least it’s cheap!

It kind of runs out of ideas at the end so just has you create some pollution of your own, which makes no real sense. Though I guess wrecks are good reefs? Also it clearly wanted cute animal collectables, but the implementation of "just drive around and suck them up" is too low effort.

ps: I have no idea why a helicopter was paying me to cover up bits of dirt with snow, but I'm a mercenary so I'll take cash for anything

More detect 'em up content for an already stellar game. It's clearly meant to be played by people who are fresh from the base game, because it's as twisted as some of the later levels in that, and I last played it months ago so was a bit rusty! Often you're presented with a wall of blanks, so it can be a bit daunting to start chipping away in, especially if you have a mistake or typo somewhere.

The scenarios are good, if few. And I can't believe what they did to my boy Roy.

I had to use a hint early on and it was frankly useless! I don't remember the hints in the base game being that bad.

Middle thumbs up.

Low budget game with stagnant tactical gameplay that outstays its welcome quite quickly.

The core gameplay here is basically C&C: You spam as many barracks/warfactories as you can in a big conga line towards the enemy whilst spamming out as many units as you can, in the hope that your stream of units overwhelms theirs. All matches seem to devolve into this meta gameplay. But C&C/RA was forgiven for having cool looking units and fun FMV.

Aside from that, the game itself is pretty polished. It has a lot of content, with multiple faction campaigns, skirmishes, multi, coop, all reusing the same maps. There's also some kind of dynamic campaign I didn't bother with.

Looks ok, but has terrible animations. The sound is passable, the music is good. The map design is ok, though it's almost entirely symmetric.

Enticing, but excruciating to play.

The game looks great and has a great premise, but the game is designed for sadomasochists. It desperately needs some kind of fast forward button. I've been wanting to play this for ages, as apparently it's revitalised the Stronghold style gameplay with some massive zombie hoards, but I've been extremely disappointed in what I've played so far.

edit: 0. TAB inspired multiple other games, and they're almost all better as they fix the flaws in this game. I can heavily recommend you simply play From Glory To Goo instead of playing They Are Billions, it's "the same but better" in almost every aspect.

1. Almost every mission follows the same things of: build tents, wait for train, build food, wait for resources, built tents, wait for train, build power, wait, build tents, wait ... etc. It's too formulaic. You're always just trying to build as many people as possible, whilst incrementally pushing up the various resource limits and incomes you have.

2. There's too much waiting. You're always waiting for the train, or for one of the resources to produce. Weirdly the resources come in 100s and 10s, but they delivery in discrete chunks, not as a continuous stream, so you're sat waiting for 565 gold to drop all at once, and then you spend it all, and then you wait for another 565 to drop in a minutes time. I'd prefer a continuous trickle. I feel like I'm playing one of those crappy mobile games where you have to wait 5 real life hours for your barn to be built.

3. I've basically completed the mission and have a base built, but I have to wait X ingame days before the big wave attacks. I have to literally sit there and wait. What a complete waste of time. Missions literally take a few hours each minimum, there is no way for you as the player to speed this up.

4. The entire game is about keeping out the zombie hoard, but it deliberately restricts the player's QOL in doing this: i.e. you can't see an individual zombie on the minimap, you can only really see clumps. So you have to constantly pan around your base looking for a stray walker.

Also:

1. lol @ the cinematics
2. The controls are wacky.
3. The unit barks are tedious
4. Needs font / UI scaling
5. The units have a mode to "shoot closest" or "shoot strongest". Neither seem to work properly as they're frequently being wailed on by a running zombie whilst shooting a slow one futher back.

I think this is the most interesting RTS title currently available on Steam. It's probably also one of the jankiest.

The unit AI is awful and braindead, the pathfinding sucks, the squad controls are wonky, the camera is often wrong, the machinima / marionette cinematics in the latest Airborne DLC are terrible, the artillery balance is out of whack, the enforced stealth sections are hilariously bad, the conquest mode is a chaotic mess, the Steam page is a big pile of nonsense, and most of all the name is absolutely downright awful ...

... and yet it's a glorious game to play. It's the apex of the Men Of War / Outfront series, and is heaps better than the prequel (Call To Arms 1). It definitely holds the most potential of all the current in-development RTS games and I wish it to keep going and improve and maybe one day reach that potential. It has a huge amount of content (single, and multiplayer) and is so much more engaging to play than its most direct comparisons (e.g. Men Of War, COH) and indeed all other wee-men RTS games. The campaign missions are varied and fun. The procedurally generated Conquest mission is much improved from CTA1 and works well to feed hungry players with infinite content (discounting the hilarious movement AI often displayed by the enemy)

The base game is often on sale for a few quid and that's a massive bargain. Once it has its hooks in you'll be desperately buying full-price DLC before you know it as you're too eager to wait for a sale.

If you have even the minimal interest in WW2 or RTS games then it's a must buy. If you're a fan of the (once amazing) Company Of Heroes games, it's a must but. If you long for something to come close to the previous glory of Close Combat, then its a must buy. If you like challenging and engaging games, then it's a must buy

Knows what it does (action with minor stealth) and it does it well.

Like most other Rebellion games, it looks and performs great. It has some questionable, consoley mechanics (e.g. no arbitrary jump, and when you do jump it's player aligned not camera aligned!?), the movement is a bit stiff and awkward, but the game doesn't really care as it's primarily about shooting Nazi's in the fully rendered testicles and eye-sockets and it does that well.

The third-person shooting when you're not using the sniper rifle could use some work, e.g. the guns are inaccurate as hell. I know that's pushing you towards using the sniper file, as that's the main thing in the game, but being able to shoot someone with the assault rifle over distance would be nice.

The game has stealth mechanics, and it tries to confuse you into thinking they're fleshed out and the main thing, but they're not really. The main thing is shootin' and scootin'.

I said I'd stop after a few missions as it's basically more of the same each time, but that same thing is enjoyable as it has a solid shootin' foundational, so I kept going back for one more map. I didn't complete the full thing so maybe there are some surprises in the end, but I doubt it. From what I gather 2-5 are basically the same game, more or less, and this one is so cheap so often that it's definitely a series everyone should play at least one.

I waited 13 years to play this and I'm not sure it was worth it. Maybe it was better in 2008? How much did I pay for this anyway?

I doubt I'll buy the hat DLC, or number 2. I guess we'll find out in another 13 years?

This is a very tenuous thumbs up. The game has a nice core idea, but it needed a bit more polish and editing down, I think, to be a full thumbs up.

edit: Actually, I've made it thumbs down, simply because it's currently at Overwhelmingly Positive and I don't it should be, and so it crosses back over that thin line.


Pentiment is a cross between a Telltale style "they will remember that" point 'n' click adventure, a detect 'em up, and a Historically Accurate Medieval Simulator (HAMS?). Unfortunately it leans into the bits I'm not so interested in (HAMS), and away from the bits I am interested in, detecting.

To not spoiler things, all I'll say is that the detecting isn't as robust or as crucial to the game as I was lead to believe, which is a shame. It's more of a theme and an inciting action than a mechanic.

That aside, it's a decent adventure game, though I found it really started to drag by the end and feel far too long. The game is clearly designed around the idea of replaying it at least once, something I'm not going to do, so I'm surprised they didn't make it snappier to play through.

The game looks lovely, especially the book art and dialogue fonts and things. The use of the various hand-inked fonts was surprisingly not annoying, once I removed the animated writing style.

The controls work, but they're not the most pleasant. There's a lot of excess mouse clicking or joystick pushing just to run around and talk to people.

The sound work is so-so, with the background music and soundscapes being rather minimal but serviceable. The dialog-writing noise is tedious and repetitive, as there's almost no variation, so you keep hearing the exact same sound over and over again, every time you read a dialog bubble, of which there are a lot in a game based solely around talking to people.


The RPG-like skill picking, and the various "choices matter" choices you have to make, all ultimately end up changing nothing much about the game, other than a few dialog options and some people are/aren't present later. I think it all could have been cut, been entirely linear, and I would have enjoyed it even more.

Nuclear Blaze looks cool, and thankfully it's pretty cool to play too.

There's a bit too much "juicing" going on, with excessive slow-mo screen shaking, but if you can get over that you'll find a lovely action game of putting out fires. It has two main difficulty modes: The first time through, then a second harder mode with a slightly different route. There's also a full suite of accessibility filters that allow you to completely undermine the difficulty if you wish.

Amazingly the game features a "kid mode", where the game basically plays itself, and it's aimed at pre-schoolers. I wish mode games had this! I'm struggling to think if I've ever seen a normal game have a dedicated super-easy mode for kids, as opposed to the entire game being aimed at kids.

There's also has some nonsense story about cats and janitors that is probably a meme about some other game, but I refuse to look it up.