Recent reviews by CaelReader

The best economic and political system of any strategy game. Has had a run of strong updates and DLC packs that really improved the game. Still a bit jank in some areas, unexpected behaviors and edge cases seem to crop up at least once a playthrough. Warfare still needs some work, but the fundamentals are good. The deep pop simulation really grounds everything else going on.

Supergiant Games doesn't miss. Exquisite combat and roguelight design. Great characters, great writing, great performances. I had some small problems with the ui and economy of certain resources. Has a little bit of sequelitis, I found the main plot to be weaker than the first game's. Having the two different paths definitely helps add more variety to runs vs the first game. Another banger of a soundtrack too.

A+ characters and voice acting, the core cast carries the whole experience. Amazing soundtrack. Environments are very pretty. Plot is meh. Combat vacillates between frustrating and satisfying and unbalanced. Really bad UI that does not want to give you information.

Good fundamentals, but uses AI art for level assets.

Fun tactics-puzzler with good mechanics and design. Lots of level and enemy variety, never gets stale the whole way through. Writing is funny and with more heart than I expected.

Citizen Sleeper 2 has everything I want in scifi. Cool robots. Spin gravity stations. Mushrooms growing in weird places. Worker Cooperatives. Data Archaeology. Reflections on modern society. Enigmatic artificial intelligences. Zero-G adapted cats.

Art and soundtrack create immaculate vibes. Writing is just as good as the first game, but its more spread out. I liked the increase in mechanical complexity, but there were fewer contracts than I was expecting. Having many locations meant that each location ended up a bit too linear for my tastes, more cycles than not were just "dump all your dice into the one task until it's done". The crew characters are great, but I want more interactions with and between them.

A very high quality DLC. I quite liked spending so much time fleshing out the core cast of characters. An interesting and well written plot that nevertheless highlights the limited roleplaying opportunities of 2077 in general. Had some gameplay hitches mostly around vehicle segments. Dogtown is a cool location but a bit too indistinct from the already existing Pacifica.

Beautiful game. Cool building system. Exploration is too linear. Super grindy and disrespectful of the players time, necessitating 2-3x resource modifiers. Terrible awful UI that lacks basic QoL features. Combat is often clunky and obnoxious. Some cool boss monsters. Huge difficulty spikes all the time. Really needs an overall balance/pacing pass for release. Ships really needs support for proper oars.

A beautiful and engrossing factory game with tons of content. Really strong automation - exploration gameplay loop. The hand-crafted world map is awesome with lots of varied terrain and gorgeous views. Writing is fun and intriguing even though there's not really a story. Fun movement mechanics and passable combat that hooks into the production tech tree. Lots of ways to approach any given production problem: use different construction paradigms, transport methods, recipes, etc.

A fun and intense city builder. The constant pressure feels just right most of the time. There's some UI annoyances that make optimizing your economy harder than it needs to be. The scenarios tend to just sort of end anticlimactically. Great meshing of thematics and mechanics.