Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Review

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie
Developed by: DON’T NOD
Published by: DON’T NOD
Platforms: PC and Switch (June 8), PS5 and XBOX Series X|S (June 22nd)
MSRP: unavailable at time of review

A well-made game like Harmony: The Fall of Reverie walks a dangerous tightrope. On one side, the time and care put into a game can make players instantly fall in love with its plot, characters, visuals, and narrative design. On the other, the unfortunate cracks (as we’ve seen with other titles this year) become glaringly obvious in a well-made game where they might be forgiven in jankier ones. The level of quality is high, but so are the standards. Unfortunately, while Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is a gorgeous, finely tuned visual novel with an affecting story and clear care put into every inch of the game, dissonant mechanics and sometimes confusing narrative choices are that more glaring. The result is, frustratingly, an excellent game dragged down by some of the same things that make it so excellent.

Polly returns to her childhood home after a few years abroad to look for her mother Ursula, who’s vanished without a trace. Finding only a strange necklace, Polly puts it on only to be transported to Reverie, a place where representations of humanity’s drives and underlying desires called Aspirations live and influence the human world of Brittle. Upon her arrival in Reverie, Polly takes up the role of Harmony, an oracle who can flip between worlds at will and see a little ways into the future. Harmony is meant to stabilize Reverie, leading it forward through a new cycle and aiding both worlds. As both the search for Ursula and Polly’s duties as Harmony continue, Polly finds her family drawn into an interlocking web of conspiracies surrounding old friends, enemies, and a sinister corporation called Mono Konzern. The time to choose the next cycle is at hand, but Polly must navigate both worlds to ensure that neither falls to chaos.

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie takes the form of a visual novel with a decision tree. In the story segments, you play Polly/Harmony as she learns about Reverie and bands together with family and friends to take the island and Reverie back from the evil corporation of Mono Konzern. In between story segments, you choose different paths through the Augural, a decision map that shows you potential consequences for your choices in a limited view. Navigating the Augural unlocks more choices, showing you the results of immediate decisions while offering hints for future ones. Decisions on the Augural also give out egregore crystals, a kind of currency that strengthens your connections with the various Aspirations, allowing you to choose the direction Harmony (and by extension Brittle) eventually take. It’s sort of like a narrative board game— you make decisions, move along the map, collect your crystals, and manage your relationship meter with the Aspirations. This leads to larger act-defining choices based on which of the Aspirations you support, and eventually the final choice of how to remake Reverie and save Brittle.

Harmony is gorgeous. The visual novel scenes are fully animated, with characters actually speaking their (fully voiced) lines. Reverie is a suitably bizarre landscape of mazes, floating houses, and in one case a motel that looks like a neon collage, while the island the characters call home is equally as vibrant, if a little more mundane. The cast is on point, with each voice actor bringing their A game, and absolutely no one sounds generic or phoned-in. Each character is unique, the various demesenes of Reverie are distinct and match the personalities of the Aspirations, and you get a greater sense of the world just by playing. There’s also an in-game codex that fills in the more information you get, informing you of history and backstory without info-dumping on you.

Your first-ever node. I didn’t want to spoil too much

The main interface of the game is similarly gorgeous. The Augural is set against a background the color of the night sky, with blue-violet nodes and any pathways and highlights laid out in gold. When you mouse over them, the choices light up, connecting past nodes to future nodes, and even giving you information on what choices are available. It’s an absolute joy to navigate, and it’s useful to see what consequences your choices will have. Want to plan out a path through the act for your desired outcome? You can scroll up and down the Augural and figure out what you want. Similarly, the relationships with the Aspirations are tied to how many crystals you collect, and how many of their decisions you enact. It’s an easy visual reference, even if the nature of the decisions does take some left turns now and then.

The problem with this approach is that you’re fighting the mechanics even as they’re supposed to help you make more informed decisions. Choices aren’t always telegraphed, and it’s unclear which direction you’re headed at times. It’s also sometimes not immediately clear which choices are blocked off, with some choices becoming “inevitable” nodes that you’re forced to play when you get to them, and some pathways looking like they’re multiple choices leading to multiple outcomes, only to lock you into specific outcomes instead. While there are some novel uses of the choice-based approach (one act sees you navigate an Augural map specifically mirroring Polly’s mental state at the time), it’s difficult to figure out somtimes which choices lead where. One map in particular had me following what I thought was a pathway to go with Truth and Chaos’s option for an act, only to end the act with Power instead and no idea how I got there. Similarly, the field of vision leads to issues figuring out where a choice will lead— A choice can arc off into the distance, but once you move your mouse, the links between choices will disappear, leaving you to figure out where it led on its own.

This also leads to an odd way of playing, where you spend more time planning out your choices, managing your crystals, and checking your route through the map than actually paying attention to the story. After all, the individual choices have no weight, just the outcome. It almost makes more sense for there to be a little more ambiguity in the augural, a little more uncertainty about the choices being made. Otherwise, the loop becomes just clicking nodes and collecting crystals, sacrificing investment in the plot for route planning.

Tied to this, (and unusual for a visual novel) there’s also no particular emphasis on playing the game multiple times. Your save file ends at the last choices you make unless you want to start over again, opening phases and all. It’d be a lot better if, like many others in the genre, you were able to fast-forward through the parts you’d already seen, or go through a chapter select after playing the game through once. In a game about seeing potential futures, it seems like an oversight to not go through multiple times and find out more about the plot without going through the process of a new game.

Which is a shame, because this is a great visual novel, one with a lovely story, engaging characters, excellent art direction, and one especially spoilery use of mechanics that’s absolutely brilliant. It’s imaginative, the node map is novel and well designed, and I would love nothing more than to recommend this game without caveats.

The longer I spent with Harmony, though, the more fragile it all seemed.

The Good
- Beautiful graphics
- Fully-voiced and animated visuals
- Distinct visual style
- Novel and intriguing choice mechanic

The Bad
- Route-based choice system means you spend more time plotting routes than caring about story
- No real encouragement to play the game more than once
- Occasional confusing pathways mean choices aren’t telegraphed even when they should be.

Final Score:

An excellent game with one glaring flaw, but an excellent game nonetheless

Sunday Gold Review

L-R: Sally, Frank, and Gavin

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Sunday Gold
Release Date: September 13, 2022
Developer: BKOM Studios
Publisher: Team 17
Platforms: PC
MSRP: To Be Determined

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I really, really, really want to like Sunday Gold.

I should. It’s a retro-futuristic adventure/heist game taking place in a dystopian city based on ‘70s London Gangster tropes. The art style is an odd and impressionistic one similar to Disco Elysium, one of my favorite games of all time. And the idea of planning heists and putting together evidence to take down a megacorporation is brilliant, especially with the setting details placing the monolithic Hogan Industries at the center of everything from shady pursuits to violent sports. Even some of the mechanics are interesting, with various minigames used to represent the main characters’ abilities. But looking at those mechanics reveals the underpinnings of Sunday Gold, a game fighting itself and the player every step of the way. And unfortunately, that brings the whole package down, somewhat. So in the interest of honesty, I apologize, but I have to be true to my impressions.

It was supposed to be a simple job. That’s what Gavin said when he came to Frank and Sally, all they had to do was go to Hogan Industries, use his backdoor into the system to download some incriminating data, then blackmail Kenny Hogan (who’s a malevolent jerk anyway) for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Given that Frank owed a bunch of loansharks and Sally was floundering as a veterinarian and medic given her hemophobia, it sounded like a sweetheart deal. But things got complicated real quick. Gavin’s security clearance was outdated, the security teams are on alert, and there’s the matter of the dead chief of security and the bloodstained office that the trio found upon reaching the 19th floor. Soon the three are plunged into a murderous conspiracy surrounding Hogan Industries and its founder Kenny Hogan, desperate to solve things and stay out of the red the only way they can— by heisting and piecing bits of the puzzle together so they have a chance to survive.

Sunday Gold has something of interesting mechanics. The meat of the game is a point-and-click adventure where each of the characters has unique skills— Frank, the criminal lowlife sporting a Teddy Boy-style pompadour, can find objects easily and pick locks; Gavin, the twitchy tech expert, can hack computers and upgrade items; and Sally, the team’s muscle and medic, can basically bend bars, lift grates, and heal people. All of these actions, as well as searching the environment for supplies and key items, cost AP, which you have to refresh at the end of every “turn.” Each turn taken raises the alert, encouraging you to be quick and meaningful with your choices rather than to do the adventure game thing of sifting through the environment. When you do run into enemies, the game shifts into a JRPG-style combat sequence, where your AP is used for your attacks and skills against a variety of toughs and security personnel. The object is to balance things and figure out which risks you can take to complete the story as your AP goes down, tension ratcheting up as the alert level gets higher and you have to get things just right to progress, each step bringing you closer to high alert.

The problem with this is that the words “action economy” and “point and click adventure game” should not ever be on the same continent as each other. Point and click adventure games require the player to go through the environment carefully, find multiple solutions, and work things out as they go. It’s a genre that requires a lot of trial and error and solving puzzles in a sometimes obtuse sequence so that the player can eventually reach the specific answers through lateral and unconventional thinking. An action economy is all about finding the best and most workable solutions in any given situation with limited time and resources, requiring you to sometimes find the best way out of a bad situation. The result of combining these two things is that you spend a lot of time burning AP to find the very specific path through the story that the game wants you to take, while the alert level balloons to massive proportions. Even things like Frank’s ability to scan an environment, something that could undercut the normal pixel-hunting mechanics of adventure games, costs AP each time to use, with the ability’s highlighting feature vanishing almost immediately after.

This is compounded by the game’s use of a “composure” meter, essentially a sanity meter for the characters, which can go down as they encounter horrible things. This is great for getting a sense of the individual characteristics, because each character has their own triggers to manage and things they can process. It even goes as far as having them hallucinate or making certain challenges harder unless you carefully manage their composure, which can be brilliant under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, this also means they lose composure for examining certain things, which, again, runs counter to the point and click adventure segments most of the game is built around. If you can’t examine everything and investigate, it makes it difficult to do what you’re supposed to.

While you can, of course, use items to boost AP and restore composure, and restore AP in combat using the “guard” function, it still just feels like you’re fighting the game every time you perform an action. Which, when combined with the “find the specific actions” approach of adventure game logic, feels more like you’re being punished for, well, playing the game. Altogether, it becomes a frustrating morass where you have to push and push and push, then reload an earlier save and use what you know to keep from getting stuck in a tight spot. The game should definitely be tense, but it shouldn’t feel like you’re fighting it as it rams you over and over again against the mechanics. Eventually, one finds themselves save-scumming like mad so that you waste less time and experience more of the story.

All of this is a shame, because the game itself, that is, the story and art and even the feel of things, is really cool. There’s an excellent sense of discovery when you get something right, or discover the right item interaction, or unlock the way forward. The story and visuals set up a nice dark sense of humor, with the character portraits even changing based on the amount of damage or composure lost, and a lot of in-setting materials that add to the world— posters, birthday announcements, and even random comments do a lot to set up the characters and the unique look of 2070s London in a very satisfying way. Hogan and Hogan Industries come off as impossibly huge jerks even before the story starts kicking in, with things like employee motivation posters with bland slogans, a murderous cyberdog used for professional racing (the titular Sunday Gold) and a bulletin board offering a sick day raffle. There’s even a codex that fills in the blanks on setting information.

The art is similarly fantastic, blending surrealist portraits, motion-comic movement, and vibrant colors together in its own unique style, something familiar but entirely its own. The whole world looks like an indie comic book, and the spy-thriller soundtrack and horn stings underscore that beautifully. Even the character animations are fun, with characters stooping over when hurt, or victory poses that keep consistent with character dynamics and personality. The presentation is awesome, and I love every second I spend in that world.

Similarly, the RPG parts of the game do actually involve a bit of tactical thinking, with skill trees, interactions, and actions like guard refreshing your action economy making it worth thinking about your choices in any given situation, balancing defense and item use with the characters who are lower in AP, giving the usual static character roles a more rotational feel. Sure, Sally is the team medic, but if Frank’s down AP and has painkillers and adrenaline to spare, Sally can be just as good at offense. Sure, Gavin can debuff, but in a pinch, if Frank and Sally aren’t able to deal damage, his output’s similarly on the level. Skill trees also add a little complexity, lowering AP costs and allowing things like Gavin upgrading more items and Frank to get a scan ability to make pixel-hunting a little easier.

But when you’re fighting the mechanics every step of the way, it’s not worth it. In the end, Sunday Gold is a brilliantly flawed game, one that, if you have the patience to deal with its barriers of entry and contradictory mechanics, has some genuine moments of delight built in. I wish, however, the brilliance that shines through, the careful consideration to the world and wealth of interesting moments throughout, wasn’t ultimately obscured by the clouds of its own systems and gameplay.

The Good
- Excellent world design
- Fantastic art and characters
- Brilliant writing and a dark sense of humor
- Unusual but rewarding puzzles

The Bad
- Mechanics that fight the player every step of the way
- Impossibly tight margin of error that makes save-scumming pretty much mandatory
- Adventure game elements and turn-based elements don’t allow each other breathing room
- Very easy to get stuck without any clear idea of where to go next or what to do

Final Score:

I wish it didn’t have to be this, but I have to be honest

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist Review

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
Platform: PC, Playstation, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Northway Games
Publisher: Finji

Dear. God.

Dys, feeling very much like I did when I finished my first playthrough of Exocolonist

So for some background, normally I try to be a bit more formal in my approach to reviews. That ends this second. Upon receiving I Was A Teenage Exocolonist on Saturday, I have lost roughly two days to the game. I have played three of its twenty-seven possible paths, including the one where, well…it’s probably for the best that you discover that one on your own. It’s weird, and takes a couple of playthroughs, but it is beyond worth it. Between its addictive game loop, methods of drawing in real bonds, some bizarre story choices, and some absolutely gorgeous art and music, I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is the kind of game you can get lost in, right up there with both coming of age games like Growing Up and Chinese Parents (and to a lesser extent, Monster Loves You!), weird narrative experiments like The Yawhg and the Monster Prom series, and vast time-sinks with loads to explore like Cultist Simulator. It’s ambitious, it’s audacious, and it’s incredibly heartfelt, and I can only hope it discovers its audience.

You begin on the colony ship Stratospheric, nicknamed “Stratos,” heading to the planet Virtumna to found the first-ever colony on an alien world through a recently discovered wormhole. As you approach, however, you have strange dreams, dreams of possible futures. And one specific dream of a burning house, a colony lit ablaze, and a creature with very sharp teeth closing in for the kill…

You have ten years. Ten years through your tween-age to teenage existence to unravel the mysteries of Virtumna, to discover the truth behind your dreams, and to save both your own life and that of the colony’s. Ten years to train, explore, build your friendships and relationships. Ten years to live on an alien world. Here’s hoping you can make them count.

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist plays out in a semi-open world. During each month of the cycle, you’re allowed to do one activity: explore the colony and the surrounding areas, talk to people, build friendships (helpfully noted by a heart system on one of the character menus), and do various activities to raise your stats. During activities, the game switches to a deckbuilding format, where you draw a hand of cards and have to put them into the highest possible build for points, either by creating runs of colors, numbers, or sometimes both. You gain new cards from participating in story events and interacting more with the other members of the colony, building your relationships and stats as you go. New stats open up new interactions and story activities as well as new abilities, everything from drawing extra cards, to stat boosts during the card battle sections, to even being able to ignore certain world-map events to save time. It also makes everything feel of a piece, from your desperate attempts to build enough perception and forage for enough food so the colony doesn’t starve, to your combat training going up so that you can save more colonists during the tense “Glow” season at the end of each year when the wildlife attacks en masse.

All of this is presented in a visual-novel style with a variety of gorgeous artwork and music. Glow looks suitably ominous, but there’s a strange beauty to the colony-wide fungus. Pollen season is awash in pink, there’s a lush but downbeat look to Wet season, and Dust season has a shimmer effect that works perfectly with the descriptions of punishing heat. But more than that, important story moments are illustrated in a soft watercolor style that still manages to keep the tone while looking incredibly pretty. It’s relaxing, a game where you’re meant to take your time and explore even as the clock keeps ticking ever upward over those 120 turns you have to do things.

It’s also really transparent with what everything does. Areas are color-coded based on what they do, mousing over a choice tells you what stats you need and who you need to be more involved with, and map markers show you the way to world events. When you know what you want to do on a playthrough, it’s very easy to beeline. But beyond just beelining towards certain things, the game has a gentle enough difficulty curve and is easy enough to understand with its interlocking systems that you don’t necessarily have to beeline. You’re free to explore on every playthrough, figuring out what build and events work for you, and ensuring that you can save as many people as possible.

And save them you will want to. This is a game where, if you’re not prepared for it, any number of people can die horribly, everything from your childhood best friend getting blown up to a creature eating you alive. It’s deeply effective emotionally, letting you know that these people have their fates in your hands, but also that bad things can happen, that the colony you become so familiar with and pour so much love and work into might get trashed, might get fed to fascist bounty hunters from Earth, or might just end up destroyed. But it also creates a sense of accomplishment when you do manage to save someone, when you manage to get things just right, and when the colony manages to coexist, both with their wildlife and their invaders. It’s a game that fine-tunes its emotional highs and lows, so that everything is unexpected but not inevitable. It also helps as you can remember things from previous lives and use them to correct things in the present.

It’s also just straight addictive. The ease of each month and of building your relationships, the satisfying way the numbers go up, the simple-to-learn, difficult-to-master card system (which IMO doesn’t need a hard setting, as it’s just difficult enough), and the way whole months can pass, as well as knowing there’s a specific end, combine to a game you can lose days to, setting up your colonist’s actions, managing your relationships, even exploring day after day until you find something interesting, all of it feels like a choice that matters, and all of it feels rather satisfying.

That isn’t to say the game isn’t without its flaws. After the first time, it can get a little frustrating to nudge at the various tasks, trying to save that one person and help a childhood friend, or figuring out how to keep family and friends from their fates. It could also use some quality of life upgrades, like a map during expeditions so you actually know where you’re going, some sort of quest log for the times when you have to grab specific items or do specific things at certain times, an idea of what perks do what after the first time, and perhaps a little less of a heavy load on the old GPU, as when the snow and pollen starts swirling, my graphics card temp suddenly jumped to 56C and everything slowed down immensely.

But those are nitpicks. If you like life sims, if you like games you can sink hours into satisfyingly, if you like visual novels or weird stories or branching plots, this is the game for you. Jump on board the Stratos when it finally launches, a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies.

The Good
- Addictive core gameplay loop
- Story it’s easy to get invested in
- Gorgeous artwork
- Tons of replay value
- Very easy to figure out the systems, difficult to master

The Bad
- Minor performance issues
- Can be difficult to figure out which things to do in what order to change events
- Could benefit from a map during exploration segments

Final Score:

Sweet Transit - An Early Access Review

Platform: PC
Developer: Ernestas Norvaišas
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: Early Access as of July 28, 2022

Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game.

From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game. There’s a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and the idea of building trains to connect cities and unlock further buildings and advancements is kind of a cool one. You’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and from there, to slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains.

It’s at the point somewhere around building your first train that you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python. Sweet Transit is, you see, a systems-based game, in the sense that you have to work out logistics, gates, and kind of puzzle out where the bugs are in your transit system. Some of this is covered by the tutorials. Some of it remains obtuse, always just tantalizingly out of reach. It’s a game with a rather steep learning curve, and one that remains sweetly deceptive even as you bash your head against yet another logistics problem for the fourth time. It’s satisfying, brain-melting, and somehow intriguing in one bizarre package.

Sweet Transit begins with you procedurally generating a map. From there, you place your first warehouse, first village center, and your first industries before finally connecting it all up with railways. As you fulfill more objectives, you slowly open up more options— successfully building a coal plant means you get access to your first train, because you now have a source of fuel, bringing enough people to your village means you open up a market— and connecting the world through a network of rails and signal gates. As nothing moves without a rail network, it places the emphasis on building trains, routes, learning how to set up if/then statements to get your trains to move along those routes, and building signals to control the flow of rail traffic.

So right off the bat, the game is gorgeous. The areas are lush, the colors are vibrant, and even the deserts look like they’re alive. The trains are usually brightly colored in a way that makes the player feel nostalgic for old-style locomotive engines. Between the graphical style and instrumentals, it evokes feelings of the older Sid Meier series Railroad Tycoon, which ran on a similar premise of connecting supply centers with trains in a huge logistical network. With the bluesy Americana of the soundtrack, it makes everything feel of a piece. It’s an excellent presentation.

It’s also satisfying to watch things work, to slowly build up your villages and watch them bustle around as you slowly build the town, then the first industry (usually a fishing dock) and then move on to mines and your first train line. Buildings are grouped by use, you can simply click on any part of the environment, and it’ll bring up a menu about the thing you clicked, with the list of building options and extensions right there. It’s very easy in those first few moments to get a jump-start on building. Then you fall off the difficulty cliff, and the game decides to show you what it’s really like.

Building railroads is…complex. It’s also very easy to get stuck with something that doesn’t work, requiring you to plot things out in advance. While the game does come with an extensive tutorial that shows you how to build and chain together signal blocks, set up the basic if/then statements for your train routes, and connect your first villages, it is also very obtuse. This is not a game for those who are just getting into strategy of this type, it’s essentially a ‘90s sim builder game given modern graphics and a mildly easier to understand interface. Even with the tutorials, it’s got a steeper learning curve, requiring you to really know what you’re doing before you lay those first tracks. But the good news is, after the first few tries, suddenly it starts to hum along, and you’re juggling routes, finding more efficient ways to lay rail, and it all starts to come together.

But to get to that point, there’s a lot of trial and error. While the tutorials do give some guidance, and there are help messages, they seem a little obtuse at times. It took me three tries to get my first functioning railroad, with at least one complete restart. When I finally did get things running, it took me a while to experiment with signals until the trains I had would actually move on the tracks, and in one case, a train I sent to load up supplies would just…pass the station completely rather than loading, for reasons still unclear even with the (somewhat overzealous) message system pointing out any errors in logistics. This is after going through the tutorials. Similarly, a bug in the logistics can stall everything, frustrating the player and requiring them to check exactly what happened.

Furthermore, if you botch a building placement, there’s no real way to move it or correct that mistake once it’s down without deleting everything attached to it and moving it to the correct place. This can get annoying, especially with train routes, since then the trains now have specific instructions they cannot carry out and things will have to be re-added to the route. Further frustrating the placement issues are some bizarre pathing errors when laying train tracks, where trying to construct a simple curve will result in esoteric, looping patterns unless you use the “precise movement” option to build tracks incrementally. It’s kind of an unforgiving system, even as it does so many things right.

All of this could actually be fixed with a more integrated tutorial. The tutorial section is very well done and informative, though as it’s not actually connected to starting up a game, it becomes an exercise where one can get very good at learning the tutorials, but a little fuzzier on applying that knowledge. If there was some way to take you through the early steps of the game, it would do a lot for newer players, allowing them to get a grip on systems in a more practical and applied way. It’s a game with some great ideas and some interesting systems that actually has a kind of coding aspect to it, setting up if/then statements and building with more complexity from there.

But for right now, if you’re a hardcore simulation fan, then this will be a definite delight, a pleasing and cozy-looking game with a lot of interlocking systems that require prior planning and full knowledge of how things work to get everything moving just right. It’s the perfect game for those who know what they’re doing.

It could, however, use a little more polish if you’re still new to the genre.

The Good:
- Easy and intuitive interface
- Lush, pleasant visual style
- Deep and complex logistical mechanics
- Excellent map variety
- A relaxing game with just enough challenge for hardcore building sim fans

The Bad:
- Huge difficulty curve for newcomers
- Frustrating pathing for a game entirely about building transit paths
- Making a wrong move can sometimes erase tons of work.
- Tutorials separate from the main game cause difficulty applying the knowledge to in-game scenarios

In its current early access state, it’s a delight for hardcore sim fans and a nightmare to those just getting into things.

Cloudpunk Review

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Release date: April 23, 2020

Developer: ION LANDS

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

Price: $19.99

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By all accounts, I should like Cloudpunk. The vast neon-swathed cityscape evokes the best moments of Blade Runner, complete with the murmur of dystopian advertisements in the background. The flight controls are simple and smooth, allowing you to change height and swing through the city with ease, trailing twin neon contrails as you swerve around Asian-inspired buildings and avoid cars. It’s actually kind of relaxing, even at its most tense, sending you through gorgeous neighborhoods and actually letting you get out to explore them, having conversations that serve to deepen the world and helping various people with their problems. And lastly, it’s the kind of everyday-job noir-flavored experience that I’ve always loved, tasking you with doing a relatively low-level job as the plots around you darken further and further, as seen in such games as VA-11 hall-A and Night Call, among others. That’s all really cool.

So what bothers me? Why this feeling that something’s off?

Cloudpunk puts you in the driver’s seat with Rania, a fresh-faced new arrival in a vast multi-tiered megalopolis who has just joined the Cloudpunk courier service. She’s given her own delivery vehicle, an AI assistant she gives the face and personality of her pet dog, and two simple rules: Follow delivery instructions, and never look in the package. The game follows Rania over the course of one night, criscrossing the vast city and cruising from district to district as she delivers packages, helps out lonely postal robots, dodges annoying street harassers, and has to deal with a drunk dispatcher who knows more than she lets on. But something ominous is going on in the city, whether it’s the mysterious ticking packages, the increasingly terse AI running the Cloudpunk service, or the engineers’ fear that the entire city is falling apart. Rania just wants to survive the night, but she might end up doing so much more.

So first, the game has a unique style that works incredibly well for it. It’s got a perpetually raining neon-dystopia aesthetic with pleasantly chunky voxel graphics that looks retro while also keeping a sort of modern edge and makes the best use of its graphics, with buildings seeming to tower off into the distance and buildings full of lights. It’s also smooth enough that you can fly around the large districts and even get out and walk through areas without having to load, save for flying to or from another district. It’s seamless, and in an age where that’s an issue for most triple-A games, that’s impressive. Particularly impressive is that you can fly right up to and even into buildings, as everything in the city is actually there in front of you. It’s really cool, and gives the flight a weight and meaning as you swerve through buildings and around cars.

The soundtrack is also perfect, it’s clear Vangelis’ Blade Runner score was an influence, and it works perfectly over the towering spires of the city and rainy streets. It’s never intrusive, though, instead adding accents to the existing action, ramping up and down as scenes get more or less intense. Usually, I listen to my own music or podcasts after a while instead of game music, and I immediately switched off my audio so that I could listen to the soundtrack. It was that integral to the atmosphere.

The flight is also really easy, just WSAD for direction, and shift/space for ascend/descend. The controls are smooth and don’t really give you a lot of trouble, and work just as easily moving around the pedestrian scenes as much as the city. It’s a very no-fuss kind of movement, with only the annoyance of a fixed camera and its predilection for messing up your transitions from screen to screen to keep from a whole recommendation. Well, that and waiting for elevators. It’s immersive, but sometimes you just don’t want to have to wait for an elevator. I think it’s both a plus and a minus. It’s relaxing and really satisfying zipping around the city and being immersed in the day-to-day of being a package deliverer in this odd futuristic world, meeting eccentric characters, and trying to solve their problems.

But this is a game based on a narrative, and once it gets into that mode, the cracks start to show. The voice acting tends to vary from person to person and even from line reading and line reading, sometimes making the emotion and inflection in scenes feel a little jarring. I finally turned down the voices, because having the text entirely detached from the voices felt wrong somehow, but hearing the stilted conversations between Rania and Camus, her AI dog, got on my nerves. I should say that there are standouts in the voice cast— a lot of the characters you meet are acted wonderfully— but when Rania is really uneven and you have to spend the most time with her, the immersion the rest of the game works so hard on tends to stutter a bit.

Rania is kind of uneven in general, sometimes. She’s not presented as unsympathetic or ignorant in any particular way, and even has numerous encounters with the usual army of male straw-man idiots, from the guy who tries to ask her out randomly to a creep who demands a debate on how women are inferior, to a music-video director who tries to appropriate her look and culture for a pop star he’s working with, that allow the player to sympathize with her. But then whenever she meets certain characters, most notably a human “companion” for a robot and a dominatrix, suddenly she seems to view what they do as exploitative and dehumanizing, lecturing them on their lifestyle and business choices in a way that feels (since they’re doing something completely consensual and not hurting anyone) condescending and wrong. It’s a little problematic, and the sense you get occasionally from Rania that these people and their lives are beneath her. It’s jarring when compared with the character arc that sees her becoming more and more a part of the city as she goes, getting embroiled in the various factions and lives of its inhabitants piece by piece, and really annoying at times.

It’s a small out of place patch in an otherwise perfect cloudy sky, though. The story is suitably dark and noir in all the right places, the smooth flying around the city is incredibly relaxing, and apart from some timed segments, the ability to explore the city at your own pace and even leave the car at some points to explore on foot are all a lot of fun. It’s a fantastic and ambitious game that’s perfect for moody evenings. Put on some low jazz, load it up, and give it a go. Just maybe fiddle with the voice settings a bit first.

The Good:
- Relaxing and deep experience of driving around a futuristic city
- Loads of plot, atmosphere, and an open-ended experience
- Smooth controls and a wide-open map full of collectibles and sidequests to explore

The Bad
- Uneven voice acting can lead to jarring moments
- SWERFery makes the lead character seem kind of unsympathetic
- Lead character can kind of be a jerk
- Occasionally the environments can look a little similar

Fast, Furious, Fun: Dead End Job Review

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Release Date: 12/13/2019
Publisher: Headup Games
Developer: Ant Workshop, LTD
Platform: PC
Price: $16.99

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Sometimes you just need something quick to play. Something addictive and engrossing enough that you can get deep into it, but just light enough that you can disengage if need be. Something that can be played a little casually, but has a lot of depth and action. And directly in that sweet spot is Dead End Job. It’s a roguelike shooter with a ton of style, a good sense of humor, and easy enough controls to learn. But between the variety of enemies, the arcade-style combat, and the large number of perks and items strewn across its levels, it’s far from a basic experience. It’s something fantastic for if you want to get lost for a little while busting ghosts, or if you just need something for a quick burst of gaming.

Dead End Job puts you in the vast overalls of Hector Plasm, a slovenly-looking blue-collar ghostbuster. Hector works for Ghoul-B-Gone, a shady ghost-hunting outfit run out of a small fly-by-night office. When Hector’s partner chokes on a sandwich, he has to save up enough money and complete enough work on a portal to the other side to bring her back from the dead, as outlined in the cheery ‘90s cartoon-style theme song that opens the game. To do this, you go to various locations throughout the city to bust ghosts, shooting them until they’re stunned and then vacuuming them up in your pack. Each ghost you bust is added to your score, represented as an invoice in the corner of the screen. As you try to reach your goal by completing at least one job a “day,” new areas are unlocked at each milestone, allowing you to bust more challenging ghosts and more complicated areas.

There’s a great unified aesthetic to Dead End Job. The dev team set out to make it look as much like a ‘90s Nickelodeon cartoon as possible, and between the loose, gross-out designs and the bold color pallette, it succeeds. Each new level even has its own episode title and credits, popping up as a loading screen as Hector drives his broken-down van to the job site. This is continued in the various stages, all of which have a different theme to them (office buildings, parks, restaurants) with their own variety of ghosts to bust. Even the bosses maintain the theme, with you fighting ghosts possessing sandpits, ghostly babysitters, and huge ice cream cones in the middle of a haunted park. The park’s level design is especially good, with the stage making use of the wide-open spaces and long ranges for some absolutely wild firefights with the destructible scenery adding a nice added dose of mayhem.

And then you add the perks and items. Suddenly what was a simple arcade-style shooter turns into a wild, cartoonish explosion, with things like scenery spontaneously exploding in wads of cash upon clearing a room of ghosts, “coolant holes” that allow your gun/vacuum to fire for longer, or even saving you from losing all your perks upon death. Also aiding you in your quest of ethereal extermination are a variety of throwables, edibles, and extra guns that further clear a room. All of these combine in a variety of interesting ways, allowing you to zip around a level and fill up on ghosts in no time at all.

But there are difficulties, even with such a simple premise. For one thing, movement is incredibly slippery, meaning that you can easily lose control of Hector, even as the game keeps its fast pace. Hector can also tend to get stuck on scenery in places, which in the heat of battle when you have almost bullet hell levels of projectiles coming at you, gets more than a little annoying. While these don’t happen often, it’s enough that when you’re cornered by three enemies, stuck on the corner of a table, and somehow the enemies aren’t similarly impeded. There were also times when my computer forced a quit of the program mid-level only for the game to count it as a loss and start me from zero, and it was really annoying when that happened, even though I get that it discourages rage-quitting. It can also get repetitive in much longer stretches, though this does make it perfect for short to medium bursts instead of sitting down for the long haul. The aesthetic can also be kind of gross, with Hector pelvic-thrusting in the air after every mission, the animation a little too good at showing his movements.

In the end, though, Dead End Job is everything it needs to be— a quick, fast-paced arcade shooter with just enough depth and storyline to keep the player hooked, but nothing that leaves you bogged down or stuck in a grind. It’s fun, with its shabby fly-by-night operation offering a great aesthetic, the unified design of the various stages, and the high score tying into the overall storyline of you trying to raise money so your partner comes back. And that’s not even getting into the co-op, which adds a new dimension to the game and supports local play. It’s addictive, simple, and has a lot of interesting depth and play choices, even if the structure serves short bursts and quick sessions more than longer play. It’s fast, furious, fun, and that’s really all it needs to be.

The Good
- Fast-paced action
- Perfect ‘90s cartoon aesthetic similar to Ren And Stimpy or Klasky-Csupo
- Great level design and some frenetic firefights

The Bad
- Slippery controls, getting stuck on scenery is annoying
- Can get a little repetitive at times

Disgaea 5 Complete Review

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Release Date: October 22, 2018
Publisher/Developer: NIS (Nippon Ichi Software) America
Platform: PS4, PC (Reviewed)
Price: $39.99

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Disgaea is a series that’s been around for a while, an absolute tactical-strategy juggernaut that’s made its bones on unique gameplay, a vast array of characters, and an absolutely wicked sense of humor. The fifth numbered sequel (Sixth game if you count D2) in the series delivers on all of that, with two snarky morally ambiguous heroes taking on the threat of a massive army poised to take over the Netherworlds and rule the afterlife entire. But while you can certainly expect all the usual hallmarks of Disgaea— Fourth wall breaks, snarky heroes, wacky humor, talking penguins— the game introduces some interesting new systems and classes while still giving you all the power to take the fight to the Netherworlds and conquer the lands of the dead in the name of revenge.

The netherworlds are being conquered by Void Dark, a sinister force that seeks to control the lands of the dead entire. As the various regions try desperately to stop this and are summarily crushed one by one, a young man named Killia suddenly appears in the midst of a battle, stopping to eat lunch. Killia immediately wipes out the forces opposing the embattled Princess Seraphina (who is fighting Void Dark partly to stop her arranged marriage), explains his motivations for opposing the conquest of the netherworlds, and they set out to unite the Underworld’s disparate regions and free things from the grip of Void Dark. But the netherworlds are a vast and eccentric place full of weird denizens and the souls of the dead, and this is going to be far from an easy fight.

By now, Nippon Ichi knows well enough to not tinker with what works in Disgaea. The series is both deceptively simple and deceptively complex, allowing you to easily build up an army and unlock their various personality traits and special skills, the tactical system is a finely-honed beast where ending a turn even when you’re not doing so well is immensely satisfying, and the way attacks can chain together or the battlefield can alter in an instant to turn in your favor, or even the way you can turn your troops into weapons for your characters to hit people with are all excellent mechanics. DIsgaea 5 shows the series at its best, with all the mechanics of previous games tighter than ever and the charming graphics updated nicely for modern systems. It’s a fantastic entry to the series, and if you’re a fan, you know some of what you’re getting already

But while not fixing what isn’t broke is all well and good, Disgaea 5 adds more content and mechanics, further creating a satisfying experience. The new “revenge” mechanic, which fits into the overall theme of Killia and Seraphina enacting their revenge on Void Dark for a variety of crimes and indignities, functions as a kind of limit break that goes up when units are damaged, party members drop, or the heroes damage enemies, leading to a berserker mode where they rack up critical hits and can possibly unleash devastating special moves, on top of all the existing special conditions and arrays of movement. It opens up some amazing tactical options, and kind of softens the blow of having units drop in battle by allowing for massive boosts to turn the tide back in your favor. Adding to this are a ton of new classes to unlock alongside old favorites, further shaking up the traditional gameplay and making sure everything doesn’t feel too samey.

The difficulty curve is also helped by gradually introducing tutorials, something that allows the player to get their head around the more complex systems. There’s still a rather fast difficulty curve, and the game still has the usual issues of grind and the usual micromanaging, but all of these are part of the tactical RPG genre. Anyone who’s experienced tactical RPGs more than a little will know what they’re getting into, and there’s enough here that beginners can at least get their feet wet.

In the end, there’s a lot to recommend. Disgaea 5 and tactical RPG fans will find a lot to like. What low points there are will pretty much be the same things that turn people off tactical RPGs, in which case, well, this game wasn’t for you in the first place. It’s a game that knows what it is, does what it likes, and delivers an excellent experience for fans. There’s even some interesting bonus content where you can unlock higher-level versions of heroes from other games, adding superpowered main characters to your roster for further destruction. If you’re looking for a solid tac-RPG, look no futher.

The Good
- Trademark N1 sense of humor
- Improves upon the classic Disgaea formula
- Deep systems and subsystems that can radically alter the gameplay and turn the odds in your favor
- Lots for tactical RPG fans to enjoy

The Bad
- Occasionally can get bogged down in equipment and unit management
- Occasional difficulty spikes

Thanks to NIS America fro providing a code for review

Monster Monpiece: Maybe They're Learning - A Review

Monster Monpiece, the latest game from Compile Heart, is something of a departure for them. There's no obvious grind, no weirdly implemented combo system, and it feels significantly different from most of their other games. All in all, it's new territory, and at first, it felt like they'd learned something from the process. Maybe, I thought to myself, maybe I've just suffered burnout from too many samey anime-style JRPGs. Maybe this time I'm wrong. 

And then the story started, conveyed through text boxes, voice overs, and static images whose mouths move. And then the onscreen manual popped up. And I remembered what kind of game I was playing here. But thankfully, there's an intuitive enough system, and the stripped-down (pun intended) approach that Compile Heart takes with their games works wonders here. The result is a fascinating card battler trapped within a game that doesn't quite do it justice. 

To Monster Monpiece's credit, there's a lot of good here. The basic gameplay is a simple card-battler system where you play your cute-looking monstergirls against your opponent's cute-looking monstergirls on opposite sides of the field. Your objective is for your cute-looking monstergirls to make it all the way down the board and attack the opponent's castle. Once there, they attack the castle, shave off its HP, and are teleported off the field to go do it again. The battle system has four types of creatures: Melee, Ranged, Healers, and Support, with each having a role to play. The roles are clearly outlined, there's no confusing card text, and there's a very gentle learning curve to it all. 

Even some of Compile Heart's usual tendencies are toned down. There's no real grinding, the usual hub level/world map is nonlinear and allows for a lot more movement, and even gives event spaces here and there where no battles occur. It's a much more satisfying experience than jumping a hundred times with each character to level up their stats in obtuse ways, too, putting it ahead of their more conventional JRPGs. 

But there are still a host of problems. In spite of the relatively easy tactical battle system, it can be a grind to get your monstergirls down the field. Every battle turns into a war of attrition, with your advance halted every time your opponent decides to drop another monster to keep things just out of reach. Granted, you can do the same thing, so turnabout is fair play, but having to flood the field with monsters to win a battle of attrition is about as annoying as it is in those innumerable flash games where you summon units to march across a field. Exacerbating things is the busy design of the cards, which can make it difficult at first to figure out which cards do what and where. 

It's also not really all that great a port. A lot of the guides for touch-input are still on the screen, as is the "First Crush Rub" system, where you rub the monstergirls' clothes off to get them better artwork and level them up. Which...is just creepy and a little tawdry, honestly. It also doesn't really have a place in a bright, cheery, cute card battler about three friends and their monster assistant trying to become the best battlers. It just seems out of place and overall wrong. 

If you think I'm posting actual screenshots of this gameplay, you are freaking high.

In the end, the trappings of the game aren't up to snuff. The creepy rub system, heavily padded story, and some of the grindier aspects of the system just drag a game that mostly has itself together down to the level of something that just isn't as good. as it should be. It's a game with a lot of potential, but not much substance in that. If you're going to give this one a go, at least find a way to try it first, or wait for a sale so that you're not spending full price on it. At the very least. 

3/5

The Reviewer received an early access copy of this game for the purposes of review.

Zombasite Review

A few months ago, I reviewed an ambitious early-access game known as Zombasite. I was quite impressed with it back then, a title with staggering depth and a very low learning curve, where you could participate however you liked. It had an interesting mechanic with warring clans and an impending zombie apocalypse, and it was a lot of fun. It also had a lot of problems, some serious UI issues, and a definite problem with being overwhelmingly huge. It also couldn't quite make up its mind as to what kind of game it wanted to be, instead deciding to be all of them at once. 

I am proud to report that some of these problems have been fixed. While the game itself has changed very little from the beginning to the final project, and some parts are just ridiculous (the huge game world size, for example, even on tiny), Zombasite is pretty much the same as it was back then, but with some major fixes. 

For those who didn't read the earlier review, however, allow me to explain a little about the game. Zombasite is a hybrid 4X, real-time, Action, and Roleplaying game. You lead your clan into battle against other clans on an isometric Diablo-style map, attempt diplomacy, and hope to rid the world of zombies by developing a cure or eradicating the parasite causing the dead to rise. You also have to balance relations between clan members, manage your clan's food supply, and build stronger defenses as you go. 

Further heightening the tension is the constantly ticking clock. There's always a chance that your archnemesis will open a portal to Hell, or that your clan members may inexplicably burn your settlement to the ground, or that the people you're trying to rescue so they join your clan will end up instead getting killed by wild animals, leaving you high and dry. 

I initially said that the game was too large, but for my first release playthrough, I instead decided to set the world to "tiny." While "tiny" is apparently still massive enough to contain tens of factions and subfactions and zombies, I found the reduced map a lot more manageable now that I didn't have to make the trek from Mount Doom and back every time I wanted to complete a quest. Also helping things, quests can now be completed from your questlog, also reducing backtracking.

However, some things are still glaring flaws. The help system will quickly swamp you with notifications, and since there is no tutorial, you are dependent solely on them to figure out exactly what in God's name is going on. The subsystems other than that are kind of byzantine, with no real concrete way to figure out how to advance your clan, war on other clans, or any of that. Durability and repairs are similarly arcane, requiring you to travel all over the place. And further complicating matters, finding a gate back before your clanmates kill each other kind of makes things unnecessarily complicated.

But in the end, Zombasite is a good game. One that will probably lost on most, one that's most fun when you're not trying to make sense of a bunch of things and instead go off to whack a bunch of zombies on the head, figure out how to make health potions cure infections, and recruit a blacksmith or two, but a good game nonetheless. It's weird in a very charming fashion. If you are patient with it, then it's one of the most rewarding titles (and definitely among the most rewarding indie titles) you will play this year. 

4/5

Reviewer received a free copy of this game in exchange for a review. 

Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure: A Big Cynical Review

Having been an aficionado of adventure games over the years, I understand that they aren't without their difficulties. For every Monkey Island or Space Quest, there are four that take the route of Phantasmagoria* and about six different games featuring puzzles with solutions that read like poorly translated stereo instructions. While it's the easiest genre to design for (no combat algorithms or anything like that, clean narrative with a few branches) it's also one of the easiest to screw up. All it takes is one puzzle where processor speed determines difficulty, or pouring whiskey into the gas tank of a car to fuel up a spaceship, or an infuriating pixel hunt and instantly people will throw up their hands and uninstall in annoyance. 

Which is what I felt like doing multiple times with Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure. With its slow-moving plot, absolutely loathsome main character, constant pixel hunts, impenetrable logic, and poorly designed minigames, it feels less like an adventure game and more like someone assembled a collection of exactly what not to do in an adventure game, then decided to show it off in adventure game form. 

Demetrios starts with Bjorn Thonen receiving a phone call in the middle of the night, alerting him to grave danger. A few moments later, he's beaten over the head and his house is robbed, including a piece of a mysterious bird statue he has in his apartment. Bjorn immediately sets out to figure out who attacked him, and who is murdering antiques dealers over the bird statues. Of course, because Bjorn is, in adventure game tradition, an inept jackwagon, he spends his time annoying people and committing minor crimes in an effort to achieve his goals. Adding to this is a tremendous amount of gross-out "humor," everything from fart jokes to a puzzle involving vomit. 

The game itself takes place on static, hand-drawn screens, where clicking on various hotspots will reveal more about the area, or allow the player to interact with various things.  The puzzles are all fairly simple in construction, with a lot of it being "Take item to someone else," or "assemble a recipe" rather than the longer and more esoteric Rube Goldberg puzzles found elsewhere. This does not in any way, however, make them easy. Even with a handy menu to tell you what direction to go in, and reveal what you can interact with on the screen, some things are incredibly obscure. They assume that the player will visit every location, even ones they have no reason to go back to, just to get the next event flag to trigger. Sometimes you have to talk repeatedly to people with no indication that you haven't exhausted all the dialogue, and try every option repeatedly until they give up their information, which they don't always do. 

The hint system is just as obscure, relying on finding secret collectibles by dragging your cursor over every inch of the screen to find cookies, which Bjorn then eats while giving some hint about what to do next. Which means you not only have to spend your time looking for difficult to find collectibles that sometimes don't even show up on screen, and are then treated to gulping and smacking noises (you will hear a lot of gross eating noises on the soundtrack. If anyone gets an ASMR reaction from listening to people chew with their mouth open, have I got a game for you) while Bjorn complains about eating another cookie and then drops a hint that more often than not is about useful as the infamous "FIND DON. GIVE HIM WHAT HE NEEDS!" from the aforementioned Phantasmagoria. 

This would be forgivable if the game was at least the slightest bit funny or clever. There are plenty of games out there that have a similar sense of humor. Deponia has a fairly loathsome protagonist who sells people into slavery and screws over his friends for his own profit, but there's some charm, and the character is actively trying to better himself, even if he's a selfish jackass. The humor is also sharper than just trying to make gross-out versions of hoary old adventure cliches. But after the fifth time I had Bjorn eat something off the ground (seriously, with a single-click interface, it gets really annoying when this happens) accompanied by stomach-churning licking noises, or making some joke about how he pops a boner when his hot neighbor is around (so he better not have any sharp objects in his pocket) it just becomes tiresome and sad. Compounding things, the pacing is glacial, spending two chapters on the beginning of the game, when the plot doesn't even begin to get started until halfway through the second. 

As far as all of this goes, I feel at least the slightest bit bad about bashing a game which appears to be the first effort from French-based COWCAT Games. Judging by the art style, this is a bunch of people who just wanted to put a game together, and then went ahead and did so. But their game being a perfect storm of awful jokes, terrible puzzles, and just poor design decisions goes beyond just first-time jitters and the result is a borderline unplayable mess.

I'm going to have to say that this one's a miss. Unless you really like vomit jokes, gross noises, and obtuse, static adventure environments, in which case COWCAT has captured your exact target demographic. Hopefully COWCAT is just working out their birthing pains and will come up with something a little better. There's a good idea buried under all this refuse. I'll just be damned if I want to go looking for it. 

1/5

*I like Phantasmagoria, really, I do. I love the town of Mpawomsett and its inhabitants. But I'm not gonna defend it. 

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a copy of this game for the purposes of reviewing it

Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart Review

Where do I even begin with this one? 

Okay, so for the past few years, there's been a franchise known as Hyperdimension Neptunia. The general concept is that the games industry is anthropomorphized as a land called Gamindustri, ruled over by warring goddesses who have "console wars" to determine supremacy and games companies are depicted as anthropomorphized anime characters. 

Inexplicably, this has grown into a massive franchise of games, one of which is Hyperdevotion Noire, an alternate universe game where the anime goddess representing the Sony systems has taken over everything. 

It's also not very good.

The plot of the game is fairly simple. Noire, the dark goddess, has conquered Gamarket. All she has left to do is cement her rule, which she tries to do with the help of a traveling fortune teller. Surprising no one, the evil-looking, evil-sounding fortune teller decides to take all the combined power, leave Noire powerless, and forces her to conquer Gamindustri all over again, recruiting friends and allies from her former generals along the way.,

The game takes the form of a tactical strategy game: Each turn, you move over hexes, attacking enemies and trying to complete objectives. Your weapons also do damage based on facing, element, and what abilities you use, as well as what weapons in general you're using. But, problems set in with the basic gameplay soon after, as combat gets kind of tedious when all you do is run around to the back of your opponent, hit them, and then wait for them to run around so you can take your turn again. The optional elements on the battlefield do add something, but it's miniscule at best.

That wasn't even the most egregious thing about the game. That would be the kind of fourth-wall premise to the whole thing. You, the player, are a male secretary assigned to help Noire restore herself to power. You're also kind of a perv. Now, I understand that yes, this game has a target audience, and yes, that target audience has some very specific tastes, but seriously, I felt like making the player a character and that kind of character made me want to play the game less. It just felt forced and cheap. And unnecessary. 

The story also isn't that great unless you're already a huge fan. I can imagine that Noire's story might be something of a treat for the faithful, but I couldn't hit "X" fast enough to get rid of it all. It also didn't seem connected to the game for more than the occasional excuse. While it's true that both the plot and the game open up as Noire begins her conquest of the various lands all over again, it all feels static and linear. This could be excused-- even the worst writing can be okay in the right vehicle (and I'm looking at you, Dark Souls and Fallout 4), but with everything else, the boring mechanics, the arbitrary decisions, and the creepy overtones, it just gets buried under more and more of the same. 

And they're also super-deformed! Thus removing all the appeal of the Console Waifu franchise!

In the end, Hyperdevotion Noire is kind of just airless and cheerless. It's an okay game, but an okay game in a franchise that has seen much better titles is just that-- okay. Spend your money on something that won't put you to sleep, and maybe wait until this goes on sale. Until then, there are probably six or seven visual novels that might scratch your itch much, much better. 

2/5

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a copy of this game for review.

Marble Mountain Review

Marble Mountain, the new game from LightningRock Studios, is relaxing. With its bouncy synth soundtrack, bright color palette, and levels with just the right amount of challenge, it isn't the frustrating grind of most other arcade style games, but offers more challenge and depth than the average casual game. It's the perfect chillout game, the kind of thing you can do when you just need a break from everything. While not without flaws, it's just a low-key, fun game, and that's really all it needs to be. 

Marble Mountain is fairly simple. You guide a marble along mazes, sometimes having to push switches or navigate terrain as you go, occasionally having to solve movement puzzles or navigate around enemies. There are traps and secret passages hidden throughout, and there are optional gold coins to collect for one hundred percent completion. Other than collecting the coins and getting to the end goal, there's not a ton of other things you need to do-- there are, of course, secret marbles to unlock, but overall, it's fairly simple.

And that's all it needs to be. Everything about the game, from the simple controls to the way you're just allowed to explore everywhere, to the soundtrack, is relaxing. Rolling around levels is incredibly satisfying in a way, as it just allows you to slide into a groove for a while as the marble rolls down slopes and around giant gears. It's a game that moves at its own pace, and the dynamic environments allow for that. 

But it's not without flaws, and this is where it's a bit of a letdown. The controls for the marble are beyond slippery, making it a chore to navigate some of the more narrow pathways, and even some of the wider ones. The physics are bizarre, too. Sometimes you can use the d-pad to roll up and down a see-saw, for instance, but other times, the same situation will result in you either falling off for no reason, or send you spiraling to your death. It's also unclear exactly how one is to unlock some of the marbles, other than going through the levels. And while the par time not being any particular object helps the game at a lesiurely pace, it's kind of unclear why it's even there at all.

It's also easy on some stages to get trapped with no way out. There are, of course, ways to restart the level if absolutely necessary, but it's annoying having to go back to the beginning of the level. Further confounding things, switches sometimes go back to being unswitched when you fall off the course, but that isn't a consistent thing across the board, which means that you have to go back and check if you still need to make the necessary movements to progress. It's a lot of annoying backtracking sometimes, and it makes replaying certain parts of levels beyond boring. 

But...and here's where it's going to get a little difficult to explain-- the flaws don't necessarily matter. They're there, sure, but this isn't the kind of game where you play for six hours to get through the levels and acquire more, more, more. This is the kind of game where you spend your time on a level now and then when you need to unwind. It's casual at its most casual-- no breakneck pace, no white-knuckling, just a pleasant time rolling a marble around.

In the end, that's what matters. It's a game you can relax with. It's a game you can unwind with. It's a game that's comfortable. It's relaxing. Marble Mountain may not be perfect, but it serves all your needs that way, and because of that, the flaws kind of take a backseat to how much fun you can have just rolling from level to level. It's satisfying, and in the end, that matters much more than the flaws do. 

Score 3 out of 5

The Reviewer Received a copy of this game for review

Blood Alloy: Reborn Review

                   Blood Alloy: Reborn from Suppressive Fire Games is an arena-style platform shooter with a 16-bit aesthetic. It promises fast-paced gameplay, fully traversable terrain, swarms of enemies, and an awesome soundtrack. And, for what it's worth, it delivers on at least some of those things. But overall, the game is a weird, messy thing. It's an arena shooter that behaves like it's a platformer, a game that requires more precision than either the controls or the game type allows for. But even if this were all, it's flaws far outweigh it's strengths, and the game ultimately falters in spite of itself. But more, as always, below.

                Blood Alloy Reborn casts you as Nia Rhys, a cyborg warrior who uses the BLade Assisted Traversal System (or BLAST) to slide and whirl around arenas and carve up robots. As the combos grow, Nia will regain lost health, de-cloak "kidnap drones" that allow her to rescue soldiers at a bonus, and of course, face more difficult enemies. The BLAST system allows you to slide around the arena, traveling up surfaces and bouncing from point to point as you shoot down robots in your way, even giving you alternate combat options like homing missiles and devastating wave attacks. When it works correctly, it can be really cool as you slide through arenas carving up metal enemies and bouncing from surface to surface as you slide.

                   When it works properly. But the problem is, even with a controller and when played as recommended, the controls are slippery and weird. In spite of the range of weapons, I found myself using the same three or four over and over again, or mashing buttons as I flailed around the arena, the metal onslaught mainly dying out of embarrassment rather than anything I had direct agency over. Maybe it's that I'm spoiled from SUPERHOT last week, but nothing I did felt particularly awesome, or even like it had much impact on the game I was playing. It just seemed like I was sliding around the arena for who knows what ends. And you will slide quite a bit, as pretty much anything puts you into a slide. 

                   Even then, the dodgy hit detection meant that it wasn't all that much fun, either. It's difficult to tell if you've been hit, or sometimes what was even in the vicinity to hit you. More often than not, the ride comes to an end with a measly score, having no idea how or why to continue. If this weren't bad enough, the way you regenerate health is pretty much a nonstarter as well. The game tells you that once you reach a 10-combo or above, you'll start regenerating health. This...strangely did not happen too much. I actually took a moment in the action (the enemy patterns are...bizarre) to watch, and sure enough, no movement. 

                      The graphics are also a bit of an issue. There is not clear delineation between the environments, making some jumps more guesswork than solid. There were several times I leapt at what I thought was a traversible surface, only to find that it was set dressing. Similarly, I would try to rush through what looked like background, only to find out it was all too solid. While in a regular platformer, this is something easily overcome, in an arena setting this kind of thing tends to seriously bog the game down. And while the arenas are large, that combined with enemy behavior means it's a lot of running around, and the gunning is sporadic when it does come. I also didn't notice a ton of enemy variety.

                       In fact, just looking at the title screen, the whole thing feels very rough. With a few updates, I'm sure it'll become polished and play great, but as of right now, it just feels off, unsatisfying. 

                    So in the end, I have to say that this is, while a game with potential, not a game I'm interested in playing until the kinks are worked out. I hope it improves from the early issues into the game it wants to be, but right now, it's far too rough. A shame, because there really are some awesome moments when you're sliding around arenas laying waste to enemies. 

2/5

The reviewer received an early access copy of this game for review.

Overfall Early Access Review

              Overfall is a game with a lot of good things going for it. There is the distinct art style, an excellent modular story engine, some interesting tactical combat, and a very dynamic setting. It's a game that promises a staggering amount of depth, especially when one gets into it. It's a big, expansive game with a big expansive map and big expansive ideas. 

                Unfortunately, this is where things fall a little flat. For a big, expansive game world with an easy to use storyline editor and a lot of cool stuff going for it, the game doesn't exactly deliver on the bountiful promises that it set out to make. It's that failure to deliver that makes everything that much more difficult. What should be an awesome game is only an okay one. 

And this is the issue with Overfall.  But as always, more below. 

                 Overfall is a tactical roleplaying game with procedurally generated elements. In it, you guide a team of adventurers around a series of islands, stopping off at each one for a different story fragment or adventure. The object is to build enough of a reputation to find the lost king who can reunite the world against a group of terrifying barbarian invaders streaming out through a portal. Your heroes solve various problems through a mixture of diplomacy and turn-based hex-based tactical combat, gaining reputation points that slowly build a rapport with various races. This in turn means the races are more likely to help you against the barbarians, and so on and so forth. 

                  Time is also kept by way of a clock in the corner of the screen, as the invaders set up bases and begin to siege the various islands throughout the vast archipelago. The game becomes more difficult as you go, with new challenges and different ships. Overfall makes an effort to make sure the player feels like there's a world, with various factions, ships, fights, and various other factors. You can actually watch wars going on as you sail from village to village and the Vorn become a bigger threat, and that's really cool. 

                When you die (and your characters will die), the game plops you back at the portal with more options unlocked: different party members, new trinkets, various abilities, and other things like that. Thus, the game becomes easier and also gains depth as you go on, with new abilities unlocking and old ones shifting, as the player goes along. The player also gains new classes and characters to unlock as the game goes along, and as your ship becomes more renowned, you can hire new characters for your party to make battles a little easier. You also unlock new weapons, relics, and a ton of other things.

                  Unfortunately, while there is a lot of depth and the game is fun enough, it's very slow. All your unlocks are tied to in-game progress, which is based on the quests you get. As the quests are completely random, it's difficult to make much headway in the plot. You can get completely screwed over just as easily as you can run through a series of all-important reputation missions that allow you access to a faction's homeland. One run may see you getting inconsequential quest after inconsequential quest, others may see you racking up rewards faster than you can spit, and that luck kind of causes the game to bounce off it's players. 

                 Which is a shame, because if you can set up a rhythm, the game is really good. When it's firing on all cylinders and lets you see its depth, it's something amazing. As a shallow time-killer, it can also be pretty cool. But when all you're doing is finding the quests that mean you get minimal rewards and there's no sense of progression, it's really annoying. The game becomes an exercise in gambling and tedium, neither of which really make for a good roleplaying game, as anyone who's played Chinese MMOs can tell you. 

                 And then there's the story editor. The crown jewel of Overfall's engine, the story editor is a crown jewel in the game. A Twine-like interface, it allows you to craft your own miniature narrative and add it to the possible random generation in the game. Furthermore, it allows you to download community adventures, play them, and rate them as you see fit. It's the kind of democratized storytelling that more games should have. It's simple to use, has a lot of applications, and can be used to tell any number of awesome mini-stories. 

                 But between the luck-based content, the tactical battle system that takes a lot to get used to (seriously, some kind of manual would be a godsend), and the just weird nature of the game, Overfall just seems like kind of a mess. In the end, I'd wait for a sale or see how much it's going to be before going out and buying it. It's a good game, but it lacks the vital spark needed to make it a truly amazing one, and I can't fully recommend it based on that.

Final score: 3/5

Full disclosure: The reviewer received a pre-release early access copy for review.

Sublevel Zero Review

There's a very easy test to see if you'd like Sublevel Zero, the new PC game from Sigtrap Games. I'll even link it here. Go on. I'll wait. All right, did you like what you saw there? Then congratulations, this is the game for you.

Joking aside, Sublevel Zero is actually a pretty good game. It's not something I would gladly rush out and buy, but is a good solid game with a decent control scheme and enough depth to be worth the replay value. It also has an aggressive dislike of people who get motion-sick, but then again, considering it's a game with about three hundred sixty degrees of movement range and expects you to dogfight, then you kind of know what you're getting into.

The plot is pretty bare, and advanced through that time-honored plot device: Text logs left around for you to find (as a side note, remember when this was actually used as a narrative device instead of something people could do to just fling around the bare bones of exposition?). Humans have spread all over the galaxy, and have become so tribalized and separated that they have formed "clans" around "warlords" and finding ancient technology. You're a pilot from one of these clans, having found an odd station filled with automated defenses that seems to be responsible for warping the space around it. You head inside, hoping to figure out what's going on, and thus the game begins.

The rest of the game is fairly simple. Fly around neon hallways shooting enemies for parts and currency, find big thing, shoot big thing, collect macguffin, move on to next level for a more difficult course. Sublevel Zero is of course a roguelike (because procedural generation is really buzzy right now), and so each time you die, it will generate a new maze for you to explore at your leisure. It's actually kind of meditative at times, flying through tunnels and performing aerial maneuvers while a soundtrack reminiscient of Artificial Intelligence is pumped through your speakers. 

And then, of course, you hit a dogfight with a bunch of hyper-aggressive turrets and suddenly the game turns into the most dissonant example of a kinetic bullet ballet I've ever seen, with the soundtrack pumping music with a definite chill-out bent while the scores of enemy robots and automated turrets do their level best to make you careen around rooms. With the game's pace, this doesn't seem as jarring as other games with similar themes, but it's still odd to have this ambient world around you and at the same time an absolute blastout with a series of malevolent bots. 

But beyond that, it's surprisingly deep. Bots will explode after they've taken enough damage, so if you cluster another one nearby, they can get hit with the splash effect. In later levels, you can even shoot other surfaces (lava, for one example) to cause splash effects and damage some bots. There's also a wide variety of weapons one can pick up with varying stats, that can then be combined into even more powerful forms to further murder the hell out of the robots in your path (the house recommends anything that calls itself 'room-clearing'.) There are also other ships you can unlock, more powerful hulls, and a variety of goodies to find. 

The one issue I have with the game is that it sits on this depressing trend that, for the purposes of things, I will call "Ernest Cline Syndrome." Ernest Cline Syndrome is what happens when things are retro for not much of a purpose other than being kinda quirky and retro. So. All the precursor logs you find in the game are represented by old-school game boys. There's not really any reason for this, and it kind of took me out of what was actually kind of a cool experience. It also has an issue where it'll build the levels out of pre-set parts, which can be a little annoying at times, with sudden dead ends.

But in the end, a little bit of meh flavor shouldn't scare anyone off. It's a lot of fun, and it's good to start up if you just want to swirl around the inside of the station for a little while. Definitely give this one a go sometime. 

Score a 4 out of 5 

Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review.

The Flock Review

The title screen, with the dreaded population counter

I'm playing The Flock to lose.

The Flock is interesting in this regard, as there is a global endgame condition, and that condition is "lose or make others lose enough times." The count starts at something like three hundred and thirteen million "population." When the population counter reaches zero, the game will no longer be on the market. The more people who play or the more players who die, the more the population counter goes down, and the closer the players get to endgame. 

This is actually pretty interesting to me. I'm always interested when something is difficult to find, or permanently out of reach. I kind of find this more interesting than the actual game itself. So I'm playing The Flock to lose.

The Flock is an asymmetrical multiplayer game. Something like abstract surrealist flashlight tag. In one of several crumbling arenas, everybody plays The Flock, monsters that bound through the tunnels and passageways and hallways of the level, all of them hunting for the Artifact. The creature designs of The Flock are amazing, Creatures with hunched, visible spines and creepy skull-like faces. A lot of thought went into the way they act and the way they move, and even from a first-person perspective, you can tell that there's a unique form of movement and a very creepy aesthetic to these guys. 

When a player gets the Artifact, then they immediately transform into the Wielder. The Wielder runs around the level with the Artifact (basically a massive flashlight) trying to capture points with it while avoiding the Flock, all of whom are trying to become the Wielder. The flashlight can also kill the Flock if one of them is unlucky enough to move through its beam, but if a Flock player simply stands still for long enough, they're "petrified" and immune to the Artifact's deadly beam. The object is to stay alive as long as you can with the Artifact (which gives you points) and then have the most points at the end of the round. Objectives also net you a set amount of points. 

The temple ruins

Now, all of this would be slightly more interesting to me if I didn't suck so hard at the game. I can kind of grasp the subtlety and complexities of the game, of course, and how the Wielder has to watch their back at all times, and all of that. But too often, I find myself getting burned up or ambushed by a corner I didn't check or some far part of the maze. But instead I die a lot. Die, respawn, rush around the map, die again, respawn. Not a lot of fun. 

However, death in The Flock carries something of a boon with it. Each death lowers the population counter. Each time someone dies, the experience clicks that much closer towards being unique. When the counter hits zero, as previously said, that's it. The game has sold out. So if I keep dying, I keep upping the scarcity of the game. I can contribute to that. And that's cool for me. The more I lose, the more people wipe me out, the closer we get to zero. The closer I get to a unique thing.

So I'm playing The Flock to lose. 

I will say that while the game requires a controller, the controls are exceptionally smooth. I loved leaping around and jumping from place to place. I also loved trying to plan the perfect spot to leap and scream at the Wielder. It's a lot of fun to play, and I haven't played many games where controls were so satisfying. I love the fluid movement I can use just before the cleansing light blows me away another time. 

In the end, I'd say wait for a sale. If you've already bought it, though, I'd hope you'd play it the same way I do. It's a cool game, and even when you die, you're contributing to something cool in it. 

3/5

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a press copy of this game

Warhammer 40,000: Regicide Review

I will give the twisted minds behind the Warhammer 40,000 universe credit, they at least know what they're doing with atmosphere. The series, a reductio ad absurdam of pretty much all science fiction and a little fantasy, is known for its rich atmosphere and utterly insane character designs. (Well, and codex creep, but that's for another article). It's a huge, bombastic setting of spaceships the size of former Soviet republics and ten foot tall warriors with six lungs and specially made ribs. 

Queen takes Bishop. Check. 

Regicide, by comparison, is a tactical strategy game taking some of the elements of chess and mixing them with XCOM and Warhammer 40,000. It's not nearly as expansive as the source material it takes from, but in its own weird, restrained way, it does manage to be a lot of fun. 

Given the blitz of games in the Warhammer universe lately, I don't feel as much of a need to recap the plot, but I'll give a primer for those who are unfamiliar. In the year 40,000, humans have expanded all over the place due to the ability to travel through "the Warp," a terrifying dimensional layer filled with things that literally make people's heads explode just by looking at them. This has taken them all over space, and put them into contact with hyper-aggressive race after hyper-aggressive race, all of which they want to kill for various reasons, and who want to kill them in kind. That's all. That's the plot.

A Blood Angel captures an Orc

But chances are, if you've picked up this game, you haven't picked it up for the rich campaign, so allow me to get into the mechanics: This game is weird. It requires a few games to develop a good tactical strategy, as playing with traditional chess tactics and doing things like attempting to weaken the back rank and truck through the opponent's specialized pieces will end your strategy in a hail of bullets. The game's strategy requires more finesse, using good tactical moves and a variety of special abilities to brutally slaughter the enemy's pieces and win the day. 

Every turn is divided into two phases. The first is the movement phase, which plays exactly like chess. You move one piece a turn, and are allowed to capture pieces if they can move on to an enemy space. But where it gets interesting is the Initiative phase. Every turn, you're given a certain number of action points to spend on things like defenses, grenades, and firing on the enemy. What could be a brilliant chess move suddenly turns into a rout when your piece is left within firing range of three or four enemies that then tear you apart. Similarly, I'm a terrible chess player, but with the added dimensions of being able to fling hand grenades at your opponent's well-developed center, I found myself winning a lot more often. (I may have also had the thing on novice difficulty...shhh...)

There's also an added level of complexity with abilities and orders that advance as you win more matches. Some of these can shield your units from damage, add movement, and restrict your opponent's movement around the field. A lot of these, at the beginning, minimize damage for the most part. 

However, there are two issues I have with the game right now, possibly because it's just been released. First, the boards and backgrounds are kind of boring. As far as I've gotten (played a few games to get the mechanics down), I haven't unlocked many more, and wasn't too interested in getting heavy into online play (losing constantly isn't really something that excites me). Second, it can be a little difficult even with the tutorials to find a good balance on the game. This barrier of entry goes away after a few games, but it is there, and it can be difficult to get used to the strategies. More than once, I found myself winning by a hair after concentrating fire on the enemy King, my board devastated.

In the end, though, it's definitely worth it. It's an interesting take on a classic game, and it has just enough replayability to keep it interesting. 

4/5

Full Disclosure: Reviewer received early-access version of this game

The Red Solstice Review

I can see how this might be fun in multiplayer.

I can see how, in the heat of the moment, with all cylinders firing and everyone trying to figure out a tactical position against the alien hordes, it could be pretty cool. Hell, I'm sure there are guilds out there who would do great, shouting orders to one another and locking down a position, mowing down shrieking monsters as they run straight at you.

Then, there's a part of me that thinks it really missed the boat. A big part of me, actually. And it has to do with independence. 

The Red Solstice doesn't seem to have very much in the way of independence. The game takes place in dark, monster-filled corridors where you guide four soldiers through an overrun base on Mars. It's a real-time tactical game where you can pick various equipment, stats, and skills, but there isn't much more than that. You and your team wander through cramped corridors on a relatively linear path filled with monsters. Occasionally, you hold a position against an onslaught of creatures, with your marines holding off wave after wave until you can collapse the lair for good. Then you move on, towards the next objective and another hole. 

And...that's all there is to it. While the game does have differentiation between classes as you go forward, the entire thing's kind of...samey. Hold position, move, hold position, move, mow down the STROL (their name for the insane mutants), move further, mow down more STROL, complete objectives. I don't feel like there's any real independence or method to stationing my bulky dudes at a choke point and then letting them fire until I need them to move to another choke point. That isn't a game to me. Or particularly fun. 

The controls are kind of wonky, too. More than once, I moved my soldiers into position, only to have them then stay there when I needed to move again. The tutorial is incredibly noncommittal on the subject of what to do about things, instead choosing to tell you how to move, and then leaving the rest up to you. Worse still, the controls choose to work at times, and then choose not to work at other times. More than once, I was left in the lurch because the game just decided the explosives hotkeys were no longer necessary. 

The game also conflates difficulty with "more monsters," throwing more and more enemies in your way. I'd have liked an enemy variety, and maybe that happens in the part of the game I didn't give up on, but the same two or three enemy types were boring. I'd also have liked different behaviors than "Run at the PCs from all directions."

In fact, most of the aesthetics were pretty boring. Your marines look like chiseled spam in helmets and I honestly wasn't able to tell the various types of enemies apart (nor did I care to), and the exteriors all blurred together. Not that there was much to see, given that it was all kind of "generic space" and the usual low horror lighting, but there was really no distinction. 

In the end, I'm sure that, had I powered through the boring, repetitive, bland, passive gameplay, I would have found a game that might have been a rewarding experience. But when the part of the game I can play is supposed to be a backdrop to the part I can't, it isn't worth the price of admission. 

Final score: 2/5

Full disclosure: The reviewer received a copy of the game to review. 

Galactic Inheritors Review

I don't like having to pontificate on things like this. I get that it's my job, but it's kind of annoying when I can see the game for what it is, see where it could possibly be, and then be forced to lament that it wound up like this. 

Galactic Inheritors is a game that seems like its ambitions exceeded its grasp. It might just be the way the game presents itself, or it may be that it seems like a very intelligent 4X game with some definite perks to it. That those perks are weighted down with a variety of bugs, strange design choices, and just in general failure to seem like an interesting game is more of a tragedy than a delight.

Galactic Inheritors is more or less a standard low-budget empire builder with a space setting. You have a number of different races at your disposal, including Humans, cat people, frog people, and the like. You choose a race, galaxy size, distribution, and difficulty for your game, and then you're unleashed into the galaxy to conquer, plunder, and colonize to your heart's content. The game starts you off on a large galaxy map, and for the first few turns, the issues with the game are far from obvious. 

For the most part, there are some interesting and innovative touches. You can't immediately start building warships, as you don't have the tech at the start of the game. Instead, you have to buy the warships from various corporations, and then pay a certain amount of upkeep each turn to keep them running. There's also an entire "media" feature to play around with, where you manage your image both internally and towards other empires. Skilfully manipulating your PR gives you bonuses with diplomacy, causes other empires to leave you alone out of fear, or grants other perks. 

I also like the way the advantages and disadvantages are worked into the setting of the game. Each race has a several-paragraph write-up on the character selection screen, and the bonuses and penalties they have are worked into their setting information. Most 4X games I've seen tend to boil these down to the most basic of traits rather than give the complex history, and it's good to see the complex history get its place somewhere other than the flavor text. 

But the game commits a rather large sin. It's boring. It doesn't feel like anything's moving at all. To compare, even in the slowest-paced 4X games, ending a turn feels like something is happening for you. Even if it's just research, even if it's waiting around for your ships, there's a sense of pacing. For all Galactic Inheritors does, you might as well be playing in a vacuum. This is immediately cut with sudden bursts of tension as the various other races in the galaxy make themselves known, usually by suddenly colonizing everywhere near you.

Despite this, the game slows down again moments after making contact. You just sit there, watching your opponents explore the universe and colonize stuff. There's nothing particularly satisfying, and eventually I got bored and turned it off. It felt like I was just waiting for things to happen, like I had absolutely no stake in the game. For a game to have no stakes is pretty much a death knell as far as I'm concerned.

I've spent hours building colonies on gigantic sentient planets in Alpha Centauri. I've spent days micromanaging a burgeoning empire in Civilization. Hell, I'm even a decent hand at Master of Orion, as far as that goes. But I guess I'll have to leave someone else to inherit this galaxy. 

Final score: 2/5

Full disclosure: The reviewer received a copy of this game via Steam

More Like War Crimes: Chariot Wars for PC

This game has broken me.

I've tried every possible angle of attack, from sarcastically framing it as the perfect game for the "offended set" to long pontifications on exactly why this game was made and managed to be released through Steam when it's clearly a quarter of a game. But in the end, I keep coming back to the person whose words have impacted my life far more than anyone's should have, especially his: Roger Ebert. 

All right! Boring menus, ads, and astronomical load times await!

Ebert always started out his critical viewings by asking himself who the movie was for. If you're a genre film freak but hate the French New Wave, for example, you're going to consider The Dead Matter to be superior to Breathless*. If you're the kind of person who only sees movies if they're limited release, in subtitles, in black and white, and about the disintegration of a marriage, you are not the target audience for The Avengers, and your review is going to carry less weight with the people who might be interested in seeing the movie. 

It's the same with games. While games are technically for everyone, intake is kind of specialized from person to person, and quality is kind of relative to what people enjoy.  So when someone critiques a game, it's important to figure out who the audience of the game is, to kind of put yourself in their place and critique it so they know it's the best game for them. Or not, as the case may be. 

Which brings us (finally) to Chariot Wars. As far as I can tell, this game is for people who hate themselves. I cannot fathom this game being for an actual audience other than the easily hoodwinked and gullible on Steam. The only way I can see this being bought by anyone is if they somehow accidentally clicked on it or got it for free from one of their enemies with no way to fob it off on some other poor bastard. 

Ahh, the opening cinematics. State of the art for 1996

The graphics are bland. Not in the sense that they're drab or anything, but in the sense that they have made something interesting incredibly uninteresting. Due to the racing logic being based almost entirely on luck, you will see a lot of samey scenery with really no variation whatsoever. From the back of the pack. It's pretty clear they're using fairly basic backgrounds with a skybox, and I'm glad they found something that worked, but when the sky does not move and the backgrounds are kind of boring and somehow the backgrounds look like walls against the sky, it creates something I wouldn't want to take a relaxed drive around, let alone see in a racing game. Even in games where the vehicle sections mostly suck, at least they try to present interesting scenery to drive around in. This is not the case with Chariot Wars. In fact, it's surprising how limited everything is, since the load times from one screen to another are absolutely astronomical.

Yes, that is me racing against myself. You'd think they wouldn't do that.

The character animations are similarly limited and boring. In fact, it looks like the characters are fresh out of a 3D modeling program and then barely animated-- they stand in the center of their chariots and flap their wrists in a lackluster manner. Combined with the slow movement of the chariots themselves and the bog-standard racing, it's ugly to look at, and not in the interesting way Pathologic is ugly to look at. It's plain, incredibly boring, and I'm actually a little insulted this was called a game.

Sure do love the variety here. 

Which brings me to the controls. Again, things are pretty standard. W makes you accelerate, S brakes, and A and D turn you left and right, respectively. As you roll around the track at a movement speed that would infuriate and offend most snails with its slowness, you can occasionally pick up boost coins that allow a small amount of speed. Of course, all of this is immediately lost when you hit another racer, as you don't just bounce off but go careening off into the side of the track and spin around backwards like collision detection forgot physics existed. While the game does warn against this, at the same time, you'd have thought that they'd at least made some attempt to fix this rather than claiming it as a feature. 

And then there's the way the game will spontaneously switch into "tablet mode" at even the slightest provocation, switching the window size and making the controls stickier. Since the luck-based racing already makes everything difficult, suddenly switching the controls on the player for seemingly no reason is especially frustrating. Oh, and then there's the luck based racing. While you can accelerate and take corners and do all the things required of you in racing games, none of it really matters, as you will quickly be left in the dust and have to make your way around the track in the hopes that perhaps, just perhaps, you will finally catch up with someone.

In the end, the presence of games like Chariot Wars makes me wonder why people are insisting gaming's moved on as a medium. It makes me seriously doubt the need for artistic criticism as long as crap like this is being put out. This game has made me doubt the entire art form of games criticism. Do not give this any attention. This isn't worth it. Find something better do do with your time.

Score: 0 out of 5

Full disclosure: The reviewer received a free copy of this game for review

*For the record, just about any film is objectively superior to Breathless.