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A short and sweet free tactics game. Has some glitches and flaws but it does what it sets out to do and does it reasonably well. Worth an attempt if nothing else.

If you play it, I suggest you make heavy use of healing items instead of relying on the bow. Healing from a bow is just as stupid and impractical as it sounds, especially when the monsters you face have far more mobility than you do. If you fail a quest your items remain unspent, so best to take advantage.

Also the ground snatching event is bugged and messes up your archer's bullseye attack making him unable to heal or damage other units.

A short and snacky experiences with some rather nice artwork. This is also a rare case of a top down hack and slash with a camera to take picture in a first person perspective. Very loverly.

This game is five dollars. I've spent more than 40 hours on it. I have unlocked everything and beaten the main challenges on offer... but I am so far from done.

Currently it sits at an "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam, but I honestly don't think that is good enough. "Universally Recommended" might be a better way to phrase it. Just log onto any digital storefront, this should be one of the top games they just sell to everyone. It should be as ubiquitous and wide spread as solitaire and minesweeper. Seriously, I need this game playable on Notepad. Just because.

As I'm sure you already know, this is one in a long list of recent "minion survivor" titles you've no doubt seen cropping up like mildew in the shower. While most are bare bones (hue hue) mechanically and have fairly uninteresting upgrades, this one breaks the mold and, in my opinion, is the first game in the genre to really define it as its own thing and not just a twin stick shooter where you don't shoot.

The story is as follows: you're one of more than a dozen different necromancers that have been sealed away in your mausoleum after a mild disagreement with the locals of the surrounding lands as to the proper treatment of corpses and the philosophical nature of the afterlife. The common man believes that death should be the end of life. We however, believe that life begins with death. Sadly, before you can share this new lease on life with the world, you and your kin are slain... to the best of the ability of the mundane world.

Unfortunately for the populace of this world, we're on speaking terms with death and we have no intention of leaving this world just yet. Risen again, our mission is to build an army, reclaim our power, resurrect our brothers, and take our vengeance on the crusade of King Gigald. And, of course, collect as many bones as we can along the way.
The basic game play is very simple, you mostly just avoid enemies and collect resources to power up yourself and your minions. Starting out you can't dash and can barely avoid your enemies, but given time, progress, and BONES, you'll be a proper necromancer before too long. The actual "game" part is the choices in minion and upgrades you make during a match, and trust me when I say this is not as obvious as it first seems. Sure, you could summon a hoard of basic melee skeletons - but you already have 3 of them. And they might be enough to fend off a couple of beggars and an uppity rat, but is that enough to save you from a High Wizard, or heaven forbid, a Wayfinder Elf? No. You're going to need to get creative. You need to get devious.

How about melding a few together and make warrior that can slam the earth with his hammer? Or a giant archer? Or maybe you call upon your more esoteric brothers and ask a chupicabra to help you while you raise an army of zombies? Oh no, you died. Where did you go wrong? What can you do better?

So you look at the arena and notice that you can place gravestones before the run begins. Each gravestone gives you bones periodically but also raises the cap of zombies. And zombies create new zombies without your help. And this bone monk you've summoned can help you take less damage. So you get further this time, but die again. What can you do better?

Wait, maybe the bone monk can be upgraded? So now you have the army of zombies and you're more resistant to damage thanks to your upgraded monk *but* then you see it. You can push your monk further. You can turn him into a demon. What's more, this demon can summon *other* demons. *Greater* demons. And he isn't the only one. Every basic summon, has a greater form, and how those forms interact with eachother will eventually lead you to success.

And this is to say nothing of the classes. Maybe you're all about progression? The Depraved Wretch will gladly scavenge every resource he can to free his brothers from slumber. Maybe you favor Giants? Or Melded units? Or Demons? Or Vegetables? There is a class for each. Or maybe you want to use the weapons of the enemy? Do you want to try the Doll Maker or the Beast Tamer? Or maybe you're a more hands on employer? How about a Cyclops that starts out with a whacking stick and gets more powerful with every one eyed unit in your army? Chances are there is a play style for you no matter your preference.

The meta progress of this game is very odd and almost feels broken into two pieces. You'll unlock a few classes starting out, upgrade all the abilities shared between them, discover new minions, deck out your arena to tip the odds in your favor, slowly provoke more factions into attacking you so you can collect more resources so you are prepared for later and more powerful enemies. All of this just to get your first win against Gigald. And then the REAL game starts.

Now you're trading your meta currency in the map to push yourself further. You're spending your resources like water to get a new relic, to field one more minion, to cast one more spell. There is even a late game class, arguably the most powerful of them all, that can spend meta resources once a minute. You don't even think about how much gold you're spending. That mugger took 130? I don't care, I have to sap his life force. A beggar merchant scammed me for a few hundred? That would mean something to a banker - but I don't care about money. I care only about the BONES. Where you once spent resources to unlock new items, now you're locking them away to refine your run. To improve your luck. Which monsters are worth it? Which only slow you down? WHY CAN'T I BANISH THAT WORTHLESS SACK OF GOLD RELIC?

And why? Why push so hard? Simply put, because if I can look at my screen and tell where my character is, I know I don't have enough minions yet. If I am beset on all sides by custodians errant, the knights of the realm, and literal divine constructs, and they are nor instantly reduced to a pile of gems and bones, then my build is not optimal enough yet. And If I cannot defeat King Gigald 3 times in a row on 100%+ difficulty after he has made a pact with powers so dark that even a necromancer starts to question the morality of it, then I am just not trying hard enough.

But even all this is selling that game short as the developer is still doing updates. I really have no idea why as it came out of Early Access months ago, but blessed be the developer he is doing it anyway. This is a 1 in a million game with a dev that actually cares. As such, this is possibly the most deserving of success game of 2023.

So let me close this off by saying that I hate the elves and their poison weapons. Knife eared tree hugging hippies.

Downloaded this game out of curiosity as it has been awhile since I checked on a free indie game. Supposed to be some kind of turn based dungeons and dragons sim where dice drop from the ceiling and the whole thing is meant to be a table top brought to life. Well that last bit certainly is true, as the game is as stilted and wooden as they come.

Not gonna be too mean to the boys at Nerdzgarage as this is the first game I've seen by them, it was free, and it took me less than an hour to complete, but I can't really recommend this to anyone when it barely even works. By all means, please keep making games though - it will be nice to watch a developer grow as time goes on

The glitches are probably the worst part of this game as they make this already mediocre game frustrating to play. The ranger's health looked depleted from the start of the first map until she was hit once - then it was like she remembered her health bar was a thing. Characters sometimes move and attack but don't show they have - resulting in scenarios where empty air is menacing the monster of the hour or where a monster is technically dead but doesn't realize it until they get one last hit in. Or the character eventually catches up to the spot they are suppose to be at by phasing through solid matter. The resolution is kind of messed up, trying to move out of the window causes my desktop to resize for some reason. Characters sometimes have red numbers floating over them as though the universe is ranking their performance and is very unimpressed with their sword technique.

Then there are the bugs that… I'm not sure are bugs or if I messed something up. Like when I found a barrel full of potions and gold in the first map, but the potions didn't heal my character at all even though the text said otherwise. Or when I tried to disengage from a hammer wielding wraith, only for the wraith to decide that the hammer is a ranged weapon and attack my fighter from a distance where previously he had to close the gap. Not that he had any trouble doing the latter though as he just phased through my ranger to get at my fighter while my ranger was too stunned to do anything, locked in place without recourse or the means to resist.

Weirdest part is that after beating both the town and dungeon maps the game sent me to a 3rd unlisted map against a single wraith - had a kind of desert temple theme going on. The only difference being that now the ranger had a spear. I wasn't sure where the game was going with all this but I played along, and bore down on my foe. With both characters at full health and a new weapon to play with it was going to be a quick fight, and I wasn't wrong. As soon as I set my fighter at front with the ranger using the reach of the spear to thrust at the wraith, the game crashed and I had to forcibly restart it.

That's not to say the game was entirely bad, there was a little potential here, like when my fighter missed 5 attacks in a row and just kept getting beat up by cockney bandits as my ranger cleaned house. Or when I formed a choke point to force cockney ghouls to line up so I could fight them one at a time so I could make my way to their cockney wraith lord.

All the characters have the same alert voice, by the way.

The game is short, shallow, has no original ideas, and the few things that made the game interesting were either negatives or unintentionally funny to me. But this is to be expected of a fledgling dev team. Keep at it boys, while smothered by the kind of problems that require a team of workmen and industrial equipment to remove I could see a bit of character under it all, thrashing around in a fit to be free of this mortal coil. This case is terminal, but maybe the next can live a full and long life?

Wall World is one of the easiest recommends of the last few years, a previously 5 dollar game (devs made me a liar) that can keep up engagement and set a few bars while it's at it. Supposedly it has a lot in common with the game Dome Keeper, but I never played it so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that if this game is the "cheap knock off" of Dome Keeper that some reviews have erroneously called it, then the game it is cribbing must contain the secret of El Dorado and the cure to at least one neurological disease.

The story is pretty straightforward, you're dude living in a post apocalyptic landscape - wallscape? You and yours have been living on the wall so long that memory of anything else has become a preposterous notion. And something as novel as a "ground" is only a passing fancy of crazy Jenkins the resident hobo and internet conspiracy theorists. However, not all is well in Fence Firma - the colony is running low on resources and attacks from the mysteriously named Zyrex, a phylum of fragrant flying freaks, are always a threat on the outskirts of the colony. Your job is to go out and collect resources for your village and unravel the mystery of the world you find yourself in all while riding a wall crawling spider bot.

From here on the story is pretty sparse with only occasional glances into what's going on - but I feel the devs take a few too many liberties here. You know how some games have text documents that flesh out the world but take a bit of reading? This has text sentences. Like usually a line or two that normally would be a single document in other games and even when you find them all, they don't explain much. Seriously, this review probably has more text than what's in the game itself. So if there was any area to improve, this stands out the most. The only redeeming factor is that I found new information during every run, that feels like cheating when what is written can fit on a post-it note.

The core gameplay is pretty simple, you scale the Wall, you dig into bioms with various resources and differing levels of toughness. You draw out any upgrades you can get and use them to fight off regularly launched waves of enemies until your 20 minute timer runs out and you have to face the boss. And "the boss" is correct as every time you beat him, he will be back in another 20 minutes, only much harder. It sounds like a dry affair, but you'd be amazed how absorbing it can get after awhile and it has a lot to do with how the game presents itself.

Normally I don't take the time to talk about art direction, but this game has something special going on. The biomes in the background, the presentation of technologies, the way your spiderbot moves and interacts with the world. Just as an example: if you leave your spiderbot in a snowy biome, he will shake off the snow when you come back. And that's the kind of attention to detail you just don't expect in a 7 dollar game - but it's here all the same. Or with the upgrades - every time you get a meta upgrade the art doesn't just have a still image with a slight change but an advancement of the image with full pixel animation - and each one has 4 upgrades apiece! Even the extra work that went into something as simple as a dash - in a lesser game it would be as simple two way thruster or a hook that lets you ascend and decent - but not this game. Instead the hook allows a leaping downward dash and the thruster gives you a straight ascent - when a lesser game would have gone with one or another and just inverted it, the devs said "Nah, let's do both".

If there is anywhere the game is lacking it is in enemy visual variety and quality. It tends to fall back on the trope of "goo and rocks taking various shapes" and sometimes this feels a bit lazy. For instance all the big melee monsters look almost indistinguishable from each other at a quick glance. Also the game's boss while very threatening the first time you see him is less impressive looking with every encounter. But that being said: 7 dollar game. And what is here is way better and well animated than it has any right to be.

But I had mentioned the upgrades before and I feel I should talk about how this game plays: first and foremost, you should know this game is all about meta progression. In fact the game is designed with multiple save files, presumably with the intent of encouraging rolling the dice and seeing where your meta-progression takes you this time. Will you find the shield first? The mole missile? Maybe the combat capacitor? And this is both a strength and weakness of the game. Firstly because it means the shield - which is effectively free regenerating health between fights - could technically be the last upgrade you find. And as a result you may not see it before the game ends - and isn't that a scary thought?

There is also the issue that when I say "meta progression is key" I mean that in the most literal sense. The early game spider bot and late game spider bot are entirely different games. The early game can't dodge, has the resilience of tissue paper, and has the kind of movement speed that would make a senile pensioner thwap you across the skull with his cane. But it is fine since you're constantly unlocking new toys and exploring. Meanwhile the late game spiderbot is a lightning fast destroyer of worlds that can make laps up and down the wall like he's Korean public transport. This isn't really a bad thing, just different. And if you can't accept death and failure is a reality of the early game then you're not going to have a good time. The core appeal is the cycle of exploration, finding new gear, and testing them against the enemy until you beat the game.

Now for some critique: in addition to meta progression, you also have progression between runs with various bits of gear and upgrades you can find and bring back to the spider. The problem is that a lot of this gear is bad and actively hampers you. Even worse is that once you install it on your ship, you have no way to get rid of it, which feels like an oversight. And I know what you're saying: "if the gear is bad, you don't have to use it, not every run is perfect, so what's the problem?" And that would be true if it were not for the fact that the upgrades you find are spawned based on the equipment you have. So if you have a drone system (a useful upgrade) AND a dock system (a terrible upgrade) you never know which one is going to be eating all the pies and which one is going to be out doing all the work with an empty stomach.

This problem also extends to guns *a bit* but you have some idea of what you're picking up in most cases. You have the 3 regular guns you can find and then you have specialty weapons specific to biomes. But the problem comes back because each gun has its own special uses, but the more guns you get the thinner your upgrades are spread. Well… sort of. Truth is, there is one gun in this game that vastly out performs all other, the laser machinegun, it isn't even a contest. Once you figure that out the only objectively correct choice to make is to pick up that gun asap and ignore all others. And I have a rule that states that if a game has a bad shotgun then the game is bad - a rule the game only skirts around because at close range the shotgun is very useful early on and because it isn't fair to compare a shotgun to all the other crazy weaponry this game has to offer.

Lastly: I want more. If not from this game, then another in the same universe - it doesn't even have to be the same genre. The concepts on display are too good to just leave as a short one off and there are too many questions left unanswered for my liking. Are the answers going to be stupid? Probably. But I want to give the devs a chance to light their franchise on fire and dance on the ashes, if for no other reason that I have something to shake my walking stick at. Plus, higher funding means we get to see Jill in higher resolution. And that can only be a good thing.

I am a big fan of Sunless Sea -there is just something so appealing about exploring an eldritch ocean, trying to make ends meet while the elder gods and countless befang monstrosities try to undercut your bottom line by separating your top from your bottom. But there was one thing I always felt was missing from the game: fishing. I know that it likely untenable in a location like the Unterzee, where half the things you try to pull up will likely just pull you under instead, ship and all, but I feel like any game set on a body of water is missing a golden opportunity by excluding fishing from their itinerary. And yes I do think that not having a fishing minigame in Senua's Sacrifice is a net negative on the industry. So when Dredge surfaced from the multicolored and slightly oily waters of Steam, arcing from the water like a beautiful and majestic 3 eyed flying whale with 7 fins, 18 tentacles, and trailing the colors beyond space in its wake, I knew I had to check it out.

Let me get this out of the way for those wondering: this isn't Sunless Sea. There are stories and quests but they are much more cut down and digestible. If Sunless Sea's story telling is eating puffer fish sushi while reciting a ritual of protection from the nether world - a complex experience that is deeply enjoyable if you live to tell about it. Then Dredge's story is like eating a plain old cooked salmon that occasionally sprout tentacles and starts whispering the secrets of the cosmos - much more straightforward, but intermittently maddening, and somehow more difficult to swallow. But I came away willing to recommend, so it obviously did something right.

The story is as such: you're an Angler, come to the region to fish for fun and profit but the Town of Greater Marrow has come under the curse of an evil fog that consumes the sea every evening and is kept at bay only by the lighthouse. People are disappearing, trade is nearly non-existent, and the fish of the region are starting to take on qualities that can only be described as fundamentally wrong. But worrying about such things doesn't bring in the money - so who cares? You're here to fish. Now, how much can I get for this flounder with an egg in place of an eye? Or this mackerel that is literally melting? Is it fresh? Why yes, the melting just means the flesh is tender. Fish flavored ice-cream is becoming all the rage these days - have a little faith and imagination.

Jokes aside, there is a story and a fairly good one that involves you Dredging up certain items for a local Collector while trying to make living as a fisherman on the side. If I have to make a critique of this game and it's story lines: a lot of them don't go anywhere, have very little in the way of choices, and many have underwhelming payoffs. What I mean to say by all of this is don't go in expecting a super long text based adventure with fishing and artifact hunting bridging the gaps as you're just going to be disappointed. This game is primarily focused on a single short and snacky story with a few orbiting goals to meet on the side and most of your rewards will be research parts, money, or gear best sold for money.

In truth, this game's story has much in common with walking simulator horror games - the key difference that there is a far greater emphasis on the*game* over the walking… er, sailing, from point A to B for story beats. The core game loop essentially exploratory in nature. Every night the fog rolls in and puts stress on your character, slowly culminating in deadlier and more threatening eldritch horrors - or sometimes just seagulls that steal your fish… well, the game calls them seagulls. I've never seen a jet black seagull that caws like a crow, but it has been awhile since I've been on the water - so maybe local bird populations are engaging in a cultural exchange program.

And don't think that daylight will save you - yes, the longer you're exposed to sunlight, the more your stress will go down, but if you're stressed, the nightmares of the fog can claim you anytime and anywhere. As such your goal is to earn money, manage your stress levels, and slowly upgrade your boat so you can expand your area of operations. And before you ask, sleep deprivation is a factor - go a night or two without sleeping, if only for a couple hours, and you'll quickly find why driving while drowsy is a crime in most parts of the western world… well, if place of cops you get chased by tentacles instead.

Gear itself ranges from essential to profound waste of time, which admittedly a problem in a lot of games, but seems exacerbated here. The research tree is such that you usually have to unlock different gear to unlock later gear. But some gear is pointless - not even useful in the moment you find it. Deep fishing gear has this problem as you can just progress the story and then rush research in the tech rather than piddle around with early oceanic gear, with the best end game rod being less versatile than the previous tier. The engines are pointless past the individual jet engines, so there is an entire branch that has no use. Crab pots are broken if you drop them off in devil's spine - so why *wouldn't* you research them? And trawl nets are good only up to the third tier, then they take up a disproportionate amount of space relative to utility. There is also the problem of found gear earned from performing special tasks - the only one I ever used was the Fishing pot the Maw of the Deep - the rest just took up space in my inventory as I already had superior gear which in some cases I sought out to make the tasks of getting this gear easier - how ironic.

On the subject of upgrades and gear, there are also books that give you flat buffs after you’ve read them, and I like this system. It adds speed to proceedings without tying up inventory slots, which is always appreciated. What I don't like is that there are 4 books that most players will never see because the quest design is almost set up to insure the failure of a new player. This is my last major critique of the game, and it is the Hooded Figure quests.

Devs, I'm talking directly to you now: if you're going to implement a timed quest, make sure your players know it is timed or can reasonably infer it from the dialog. No one wants to go surfing on the high seas, trying to find that one obscure fish they never knew existed and may only spawn in a handful of locations only for the quest to time out. I'd have bitten my controller in half when it happened to me if I didn't want to pay for the dentist bill after.

Dredge does what I wish more games would do and takes some interesting, if basic, mechanics and uses them to explore a world. And what's more, makes that world feel both dangerous, yet doesn't expect you to engage in combat. Let's be frank: you're an angler delving into things way above your pay grade, you're not going to be fighting off Cthulu with a fish bat and can-do spirit. As such I can give this a recommend to anyone who is in the market for a lightly filling game about mystery and mysticism with the faint odor of fish and incense.

Just goes to show that you don't need to be the smartest, prettiest, most talented, or even the most interesting person to make it on the market - sometimes you just need to do what you aimed to do, make good on that promise, and things will work out. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to bandage my wrist after that particular backhanded compliment.

It's a sleeve and a tan.

Blacksea Odyssey is an amazing concept for a game. You fly around space on a rocket surfboard, tethering beasts the size of planets, wielding spears and runes that allow for a host of amazing builds to facilitate a combination of tactical combat and twitch reflexes. Utterly unique from start to finish and bursting with original ideas like Willy Wonka playing Asteroids: Monster Hunter Edition while listening to Glory Hammer in the background.

There is just one problem: everything I just described is so shaky that it measures on the Richter scale. Don't get me wrong - it is a decent game and I'm going to give it a recommend for just how many unique ideas it has. But keep in mind that unique ideas are often unique for a reason. And just as a pogo-stick made of ice cream or an airplane made of banana bread sound both unique and awesome - they are not structurally sound.

Let's talk about what the game gets right: I enjoy combat. Very fun to fly around fighting a wide cast of imaginative enemies. Going up against some of the big bosses in particular and pulling chunks off of them until they look like they have suffered explosive bouts of leprosy. And I don't know why, but there is nothing like chasing down prey many hundreds of times your size and stabbing it to death with sewing needles that makes me feel like a legendary deep space hunter.

This game is 90% combat, 10% prep. But prep can completely alter how a fight goes. Maybe a particular set of runes are not doing the trick against the monster of the hour, but hey, swap in some water runes and the monster gets mashed. Which is important as a lot of the monsters you face are fairly beefy, with the kind of health bars that are used in gyms to rack weights for power lifters and small to medium sized forklifts.

The problem - by which I mean the problem around which all the game's problems revolve - is that the game is very clearly about luck, the runes you get dictate the kind of enemies you can handle, and yet the game is designed with the idea that skill is the deciding factor. I'm sorry, but there is no answer to certain enemies if you don't have the equipment to fight them. The most glaring example of this is when the game throws something like a berserk reefgoblin at you. How do you handle an enemy that is invulnerable to the front, can't be killed through raw damage, and can survive its body being ripped from its head - and STILL get faster? The answer is that you don't. Even if you boost, you run into the problem where your charged spear is slower than your character's movement - meaning that you've sunken time and resources into an enemy that just isn't worth the effort put into killing it. As the only way to kill it is to get a near impossible shot on a tiny fin going mach twelve and you'll suffer far more damage than any reward that creature can provide.

Even when an enemy is not impossible to kill, there are many cases where they are just tedious to deal with. Puffers, Angels, Starbait, Goblins, Sandchewers, and several other enemies are just not fun to fight and are usually not worth the trouble to kill. It gets even worse when most enemies in the later stages need to have their heads ripped off to have the common decency to stay down. And while fighting any one of these enemies is usually doable, every enemy comes in a group - often making dispatching them dangerous and tedious as you can't even position yourself to do damage without the right rune set up.

And that's really the killing blow. Later enemies just are not worth it. There is a strong argument to be made that if you're lucky enough to have your build sorted out you should skip killing enemies in the last couple rounds and just head straight for the boss of the zone, as engaging with the game at that point will always be a net loss. But even then, it goes back to the idea that even if you have your build sorted out, that doesn't mean you have the resources to beat the boss - as once again, some of the charging enemies are so fast that unless you are geared for boosting, you have no chance of outrunning them. It's to the point that playing against an elite charger boss is a flip of the coin. Sometimes they get mildly annoying enchantments like poison, or fire, or ice. But then you land on that 1 out of 4 chance that the boss whose entire gimmick is hitting fast and hard - you land on the berserk enchantment when makes the boss hit *faster and harder*.

I don't think I'm selling this correctly, so let me expand. There are multiple *normal* bosses that rely on use of your radar to have a chance against. You run along side them for a bit chucking sowing needles at them like an abusive spinster before they tear out of there like speed racer. But Berserk on elite bosses seems to increase their speed by some unknown percentage - and just as 50% faster on a tortoise just turns it into slightly faster tortoise, 50% faster on a formula 1 race car turns it into a interstellar warp missile powered by hate instead of blood. So by the time the monster shows up on your radar he is already helping himself to a space cowboy sandwich. I know at least one has an attacks that... well it isn't an instakill. It's more like an attack that does massive damage and can proc multiple times back to back that it is practically an instakill. It is the "I'm not touching you" of instakills.

But these are all extreme examples. If you play the game right, prioritize keys and drop rates over everything else, and keep runes based on their future utility against certain monsters, then you're going to make it. But here is the problem with that: most of the rewards suck. The best character in the game is Emerald Jones - he is unlocked by killing one of the easiest bosses. The worst character is Xexemoth, and he is unlocked by killing one of the hardest. Even beating the game only rewards a mediocre spear.

You know what the funny part is? One of the best spears in the game is supposed to be unlocked after completing the bestiary - this would require multiple runs beating the same bosses multiple times along with all the worst enemy types until you collect all 60+ entries. But by the grace of God, the programmers had a fit of good sense and didn't introduce the change - as such, the weapon Judgment is unlocked after only 20 entries. Far more doable and actually makes the early game fun past the first few runs.

The wildest part is that Judgment isn't even *that* great a weapon and it would have taken one of the most tedious challenges to complete *AND* you would have no new challenges to test it on. I mean, maybe Elite mode - but you seriously have a better chance of beating Elite mode before filling out the Bestiary.

And that's still not the craziest part of this game. In the weirdest of weird moves, legendary runes are almost never seen in this game. Oh they exist and in the hands of a player that knows their business they can be very useful, but I know for a fact there are multiple players that beat the final boss and never seen one. Again, this is the dev trying to make the player feel like they have earned it, but i'm gonna be honest: unless that rune has the power to one-shot a boss, it is a little excessive to put 10 hours between every rune a player sees. I myself had only seen 1 or 2 in the 40 hrs I put in before I got the key spear and both of them, while powerful, were by no means game changers.

So with all these petty grievances aside, why should you play it if the rewards suck and the gameplay is generally unpolished, often breaking its own rules? To be honest, the biggest reward this game has to offer are the hunts themselves. Just the sheer spectacle of the 4 tent pole bosses justify the asking price. And just like I said at the start, it is a unique concept I haven't seen anywhere else.

Just goes to show: flying in a hurricane with an airplane made of banana bread is a terrible idea, but what a story to tell!

Hyper Light Drifter is pretty fun as games go. It's the kind of game that takes a lot of influence from classic titles like Zelda and Metroid. As a matter of fact the game plays like someone shoved both into the same room and what emerged was a singular gestalt entity. Stronger than both, but also a little deformed. Sadly, as we all know, fusion dances between games often result in debilitating illnesses. Like tedious challenges, underwhelming rewards, and thanking Anita Sarkeesian in your end credits.

I do want to clarify at this point: this is a *GOOD* game. But it is also a game of many petty frustrations. So let's get my gripes out of the way.

The story is kind of useless. Even years later no one knows what happened outside of some broad speculation. There are only a couple paragraphs of text in the whole game explaining anything, and even those are hidden and need to be decoded. And even then they tell you next to nothing. So don't go into this expecting a good story - this game operates purely on vibes. And to be fair, the vibes are pretty nice.

For what it actually matters, the story is such: You're a traveling magician dude infected with sentient super cancer. Journeying to a post apocalyptic land that is trying to rebuild after a war with some giants, in search of some crystallized chemo. Sadly, even when 90% of the world is dead and endemics of sentient super cancer on the rise, the local furry community can't get along with eachother and are in a constant state of genocide, slavery, and light cannibalism.

Fortunately, as a magician you have many tricks up your cloak, which include but are not limited to: an arsenal of guns, grenades, a sword that can cut missiles in half and deflect bullets, and the ability to drift faster than the speed of light: a hyper light drifter, if you will. Using these tools, you must travel in the four cardinal directions and reactivate your local cancer treatment facility. While expanding your tools and equipment to handle each challenge you face.

On the subject of challenges: be sure to unlock your chain dash first and foremost. The chain dash is a finicky and unreliable move that requires fairly exact timing to pull off consistently. However it is also essential for combat, movement, and exploration. I honestly don't know why you even have to unlock this move - as you're pretty much useless without it. Sadly this is a common theme for most moves and equipment in this game - they range from nearly essential to profound waste of time.

Secondly: head east starting out. You won't be able to appreciate this suggestion until you beat the first boss, but trust me: you want to head east. This is another design choice I'm not fond of, and it ties into my previous complains about the unlocks and the story and well... everything.

This game loves secrets. There are secrets and goodies all over the place, but the problem is that you don't always have the means to access them. Or the game hits you with a big challenge inside a hard to find secret. OR you didn't have the means to access them so you have to come all the way back and your map is practically useless for memorizing layout and... you get the picture.

I suppose that brings me to my *big* complaint: there is very little reason to explore. The gear you find in secrets are underwhelming, the lore you find in secrets are underwhelming, the guns you find are objectively worse than the ones the game gives your through story progress, the keys you find (four to an area btw) don't unlock anything of use when compared to the time spent pressing your face to a wall, even the module crystals - these ancient and mystical pieces of tech that are core to the game's story. You only need to find 4 in each area out of 8. Finding the other 4 in each area just gets you more of the underwhelming gear I had mentioned.

Normally a game like this would have a good ending and a bad ending depending on how much of a completionist you are. Like you would get half the MacGuffins and you'd see the villain twirling his mustache at the end slate because you didn't find them all. The game doesn't do that. Finding all is exactly the same as finding the bare minimum - so again, no point. Even if you play the game on NG+, there is no change.

All this suggests that this is a game that really wants to sell itself on the visual presentation and challenge of the mechanics alone. And while the visuals are very nice, some screen shots of pixel art (stellar as they are) does not a 20 dollar game make.

So all that leaves is the combat. This part is admittedly pretty good. You have a fast and fluid combat system that rewards on the fly thinking, aggressiveness, and twitch reflexes. The problem is that it is still unpolished with very clear violations of its own rules. So while a singular playthrough is fun, maybe replaying it again years down the line when the memories have faded - it is not the kind of game conducive to repeat plays.

Also the dash challenge is one of the most boring and pointless time sinks I have ever seen in a game. Worst part is that the devs were very clearly showing *restraint*. They wanted to make it 1000 dashes but settled on 800. Why not 200? Seriously, you made us do 100 for the first reward, why not 200? No one likes the dash challenge - it isn't fun or interesting - it is literally pressing a single button in a metronome. It's funny because they put the only *GOOD* reward behind a challenge no one likes.

I've been pretty negative, but I do recommend this game. It has a lot of flaws but it is presented so well and does so much right that I'm inclined to forgive it. It just goes to show that sometimes it pays not to look too deeply at something, otherwise you start to see the pimples and pock marks. Keep it simple, stupid.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW

Ever get tired of the same old city builder?Tired of researching Science? Tired of trying to make your humans happy? Well say no more! Try Scorchlands! No science to be found, all magic here, yes sir! Oh, also we are an invading army of bipedal birds who are taking the term "invasive species" to a whole new level.

Are we trying to take over the realm of our neighbors? No. Not at all. We are sending an expedition to our volcanic moon to punch extraterrestrials in the face. Our purpose? Terraforming. This moon will be a 5 star holiday resort by the time I'm done with it, complete with a Jacuzzi

What do you do in this game? You set down colonies around a giant terraforming doom machine called the "Nexus". Your one and only task is to refine resources, upgrade your magi-tech, and transfer the resulting high end compounds back to the nexus to begin your glorious terraforming work. And first thing I have to give credit to is the terraforming effect. I like to imagine the local fauna quaking in fear as a blind idiot god tries to find the optimal location for his doom fortress, scribbling its way across the land like a child with a crayon.

There is combat in this game. In the same way that a game of connect four has combat. You command your avatar and any lackeys he may drag behind him and silently peer pressure enemies into giving up and going home. Sadly this isn't a joke. If your combat numbers are higher than the combat numbers of the enemy you win the fight. This system does have some potential though, as every enemy projects a repelling territorial field. You must strategically flank the enemy, retarding their field of influence until you can get close enough to maliciously glare at them hard enough for them to get nervous and go home. Remove enough enemies and you can destroy the crystal that has made the area into an unlivable volcanic hellscape. Enticing more of bird kind to move into the area and increasing your population. Allowing the great Bird Empire to reach out again and consume all that stands in their way.

One thing I didn't realize at first, is that simply removing the crystal is not enough. You have to establish a settlement nearby in order to terraform the surroundings. HOWEVER the settlement doesn't have to stay there. Meaning that you can plop a settlement down, reclaim it at no cost and then do it again - rocketing your population numbers as you bully boy the local wildlife out of their lunch money.

Sadly, the combat is very underdeveloped. At the end of the game, there were still crystals I had no hope of securing due to how the map lay out would funnel the "fight". It is very difficult to flank a massive dragon death worms who is aggressively posing between two mountains and is backed up by an entire posse of dragon death worms - also taking shelter in the mountains. The game as several combat upgrades that take a lot of research and materials to field - the problem is, they suck.... well, kinda.

The basic combat upgrade is essential if you want to get anywhere, but I could never make use of more than five of my units at a time due to how body blocking works. The balloon upgrade for our birds allows them to fly (don't ask) at the cost of valuable attack power - I only ever felt the need to buy one though, as it allowed me the rare sneak attack over lava or the even more devious crystal snatch. Where a crystal is guarded by 4 dozen dragon death worms, but is positioned next to a lake of lava. The balloon upgrade allows me to just fly over the lake and instantly dispatch all surrounding enemies. Very satisfying.

The most satisfying tactic however, is the speed snatch. Where by generating sufficient momentum, you can occasionally blitz past some enemy's territorial repulsion, grab the crystal, and instantly defeat all the surrounding enemies. Is that the way it is suppose to work? No. Not a chance. But that's the way I did it and the way I'm going to do it when this game is fully released. Is the dev going to patch it out? Probably. But I will find new exploits when he does. Why? Because Bird kind does not tolerate being told "no" even by their creator.

If I have a complaint, it is that it can be very tedious to transfer resources and expand colonies. All facilities are limited to your sphere of influence and if you want to pool resources you can only send them via laser beam from point A to point B. While the game allows you to set down mirrors to redirect the transfer laser, the mirror must be *catapulted* from within your influence. And these catapults take up valuable space, have limited range, and extremely limited flexibility. Meaning that if a mountain or menacing bit of shrub is in your way, you will have to build a whole new colony to get around those inconvenient bushes. This isn't a problem early on, but eventually as your operations get larger and larger, you learn that the lasers can only transfer 100 units at a time. Meaning that you have to project multiple lazers over vast distances with no interruptions. And God forbid you accidentally expand one colony border into another and wind up destroying the transfer laser - because now your entire shipment of coal is backed up, and you have to set down another with these redefined borders in mind. But now you have to move a single house, which changes your metal production to a negative value - which means you have to rearage your entire grid in order to get a single point of research material *or* delete your entire colony and set it down a single tile up and to the left, just to build it all over again. And that is just to postpone having the same problem two upgrades from now.

Also, while I beat the game - I never made the final components needed to upgrade the nexus. Instead I just shoved a bunch of secondary materials into a transmutation crystal and funneled that back to the nexus. Why? Because the end game materials are a pain and a half to make. Doubly so when the toxic mushroom biome you set up has nearly as many resource requirements from the desert you put on the opposite side of the map as it does from its own biome. That is to say nothing of the fact that I hade barely any use for all the gold I made. I set up an entire biome to make gold when I realize these flux rocks I tilled over were actually resources and not just obstacles for farming. So by the end of the game I was just sitting on enough gold to shame Fort Knox and no use for it. That and water. I made a quick water facility colony and never had to think about it again.

If there is one design choice I have to praise though, it is that elevation effects lasers. As long as the laser has line of sight, it can fire up or down to any other laser. I just hope that future updates make greater use of this functionality. Like give us a flying mirror or something, seriously. We have balloons and we have mirrors, do the math!

As I said, this is a good game, but some of the design choices are for the birds.