Recent reviews by Nanor

I enjoyed my time with I Am Future even if it did get pretty tedious towards the end. It's a cosy, low stakes fetch and carry game. It's a great game to play and not think. It runs well on the deck and is the ideal companion to lying on the sofa watching TV or listening to a podcast.

It's very pretty to look at. Great art style and models. The music is nice, not much variation but it didn't get repetitive. The sounds are generally pleasant, walking on grass annoyed me. It feels very Sims inspired. Once you see the progress bar you'll see what I mean.

You pick up resources, use them to build buildings, use the buildings to make more efficient tools which allow you to harvest more complex resources and you repeat the process.

You can automate this to some degree by building robot minions who can do things like collect resources and store them in chests, place resources on building blueprints and refill your generators with biofuel. They don't seem very efficient at this, though. I think the idea is you're meant to have an army of them but the process of having to set up the infrastructure was so daunting I didn't bother.

Building anything in the game is unfortunately a pretty tedious process. This isn't like in Factorio where once you obtain an item through a generally arduous process you have a more or less constant supply. Every time you build something, it's like you've built it for the first time. I think this is largely down to the fact there are 3 types of items that don't fit in your inventory and you have to carry; wood, metal and glass. At one point I needed 80 pieces of wood and I could only carry 6 at time. The starting hub had no more wood so you can imagine how tedious this part was.

There is an overworld where you can send a drone to collect resources and interact with some events/shops. This is good for finding some rare items which refresh every few days, but you can also use it to get those basic resources I mentioned that don't fit in your inventory. The problem is the amount you get is so low it's a waste of time. With a fully upgraded drone you could bring back 4 pieces of wood, which is equivalent to 2 trees. Doing this with a drone would probably take you 5 minutes with the animations etc.

Crafting is fine, you can disassemble items into their necessary components at a 1:1 ratio. I would have benefited from being able to craft an item by having them in a nearby chest. Upon reading the wiki I think there might be an upgrade that does exactly that but I didn't get it because the tooltip wasn't clear; I thought you had to wire them up with electricity and I could not be bothered.

There is some combat but it has absolutely no effect on the game. There are a couple of buildings on the map that spawn leeches at night that attack your crops. You can build a sort of bug spray to kill them but it has such a small amount of "ammo" it's too frustrating to use and the spray doesn't stack. You can also build a containment chamber over their nests but it requires electricity and the chamber itself requires an uncommon item so I decided not to bother because there are so many nests. You can build some base defence items too. I built some barricades to keep them out which eventually fell apart. You can repair them but you need a repair gun that uses a similar mechanic to the bug spray and I couldn't be bothered replacing the barricades.

Eventually I let the leeches run wild, they decimated my crops and I discovered that farming wasn't really that necessary in the long term. This was a tremendous relief as watering the plants is the most tedious process I've ever come across in virtual farming. A plant will eventually need water. To get water you take a bucket (which carries 3 units of water) down to the sea, fill it with salt water, go to your stove and desalinate it, water your plant. If you have more than 3 plants then you need to go back to the sea (or carry multiple buckets) and repeat the process. You can build a pump eventually but it initially pumps salt water. It requires upgraded (twice) to filter it. I didn't bother and waited for rain. You can also build a sprinkler, I thought this would use 1 unit of water to water all plants in its range but no, still 1 unit per plant. Eat up leeches, I am done with this agricultural folly.

The game has (I think) 2 endings. When given the choice, one choice suggested I had to do some more building so I took the choice that didn't and the game just... ended. It felt fairly anti-climactic.

Reading over this, I feel like you're probably wondering how I can recommend this. Well, I had fun. It was satisfying when I finally did build something that I needed. It didn't require a lot of thought and I could play it on my Deck without issue. I wouldn't play the main story again but if DLC were released I'd almost certainly pick it up for when I wanted something low octane.

Overall: 7/10

I'd like to preface this by saying that the original Stronghold is my favourite game of all time. I would buy it for £10 from Game 20 years ago and when that CD would get too scratched or I'd lose it, I'd buy it again. And again. And again.

Stronghold: Definitive Edition is the exact same game I re-bought those 20 years ago; warts and all. It runs to a modern standard, it retains it's unbelievable charm, it's challenging and I absolutely love it... but, it's a game from 20 years ago.

Multiple times I've snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by the foolishness of the attacking AI:
- Spearmen entering my keep to attack my lord only to leave and attack spawning peasants while my archers decimate them.
- In the mission where you try to truce with de Puce (that rhymes), the mangonels were built in the valley and were unable to pathfind to the walls correctly, simply marching right up to them and getting peppered with arrows.
- You can cheese missions by building defences as close as possible to the signpost. When the enemy spawns they will stand and take arrow fire until the scripting kicks in to make them move.
- An attacking army which should just rush the throne, stops to break down palisades - even under enemy fire.

I feel bad giving a game and series I love so much a thumbs down but I just know if I wasn't wracked with nostalgia this would be a regrettable buy from me. I was very on the fence about this rating. The price is very, very fair. I commend FireFly on not ripping the arse out of it. Their roadmap is fantastic too and, admittedly, I have't tried any of the new offerings in this... but it boils down to the fact I already own Stronghold: HD and if I launched this the experience and gameplay would be identical.

It's great

Unfortunately I cannot recommend this. I tried to give it the full 2 hours before I refunded it but I gave up. It's a game where you just sit and wait. Hire a soldier, train it up in a stat, specialise it, send on mission. Rinse and repeat. I spent most of the game on the fastest speed just waiting for something to happen. When I dealt with that I'd just have to wait again until I was able to address that.

It reminded me initially of Evil Genius but as I played it the similarities started to disappear. In Evil Genius you have hundreds of minions but you don't need to manage them. In this each soldier must be manually housed and sent to a particular skill training building. Then when you need to train another skill you have to manually re-assign the building.

Also in EG you had enemy agents trying to force there way into your base and you'd have to make use of traps and security doors. I don't think this has that, I believe it has enemy drone attacks but from what I've read in the reviews they're nothing special.

This plays like a mobile game. It takes a lot of time to get to a point where you can do something and that something you do isn't very involved.

This game is phenomenal. My GOTY at this rate. Absolutely stellar on the deck.

It's a very simplified 3D Rimworld. This works well in some respects, for example assigning weapons and clothing is very easy because there are so few types of each and quality doesn't exist to affect an item. So if I want a survivor to equip a laser pistol, I select laser pistol and they equip it. Simple! Hooking up electricity is simple too, you build a generator, connect it to a building with an electricity pole and all rooms within that building have power, no need for conduits.

Simplicity can be hit or miss, too. Stranded: Alien Dawn offers "expeditions", where you put a survivor into a hot air balloon and they just disappear off the map and you get a series of events. It's nice to be able to do something and not have to organise a caravan but on the flip side you lose a lot of the adventure of events you get on a world map with your pawns in Rimworld.

Crafting too is simplified as well as some of the crafting tasks. You don't need a butchery table to butcher things. A workbench crafts most things in the game so you don't need to have a whole workshop of many different types of workbench. Crafting ingredients are really simple. Textiles, for example, are leather, cloth and synthetic cloth. A lot of recipes can take any of them and they don't seem to have any effect on the end product.

Some things are over-simplified. Health, for example. If you're fighting one of the early game bugs they can superficially bite you or take off a chunk of flesh, the former taking HP off and the latter bestowing a DoT effect. Neither of these heal by themselves, like Rimworld so it can make it a bit tedious. Medicine is just healing balm and bandages and the healing skill seems to have absolutely no effect on treatment at all. You treat a wound and it's treated, no treatment quality and with no surgery all you can really do is just treat a wound.

I didn't progress very far into the game to see if there were more types of injury, one of my survivors suddenly died despite allegedly having 2/3 of a health bar. One of the good things I thought about this was my survivors weren't fragile, which if you've played Rimworld you'll know is a source of great consternation. I was going to start another play through but I just couldn't bring myself to, to be honest.

Then some things are just downright bad. The map seems a bit boring with no place looking unique and it's very easy to get lost in when panning the map. The UI isn't great. The stockpile system sucks. With your base stockpile (which you usually lay down first and takes everything), you can only place in straight lines. When you create some specialised storage, e.g. a fridge, you can't change the importance of storage so you need to open every storage object and manually deselect the resource type for it to be moved.

As some other reviews have mentioned the notification system is bad, with important notifications being lost among the unimportant (something Rimworld solves with colouring their notifications).

Combat is a bit basic; shoot, do damage, take damage etc.

The observation system is nice but unless any kind of randomness is introduced you'll know each play through to go to the orange mushroom to get food, blue tree for skinbark etc.

To be fair to the game, it's a solid foundation. It runs well and I think the problems can be fixed over time to make it a non-frustrating experience but it'll need something else to set it apart from Rimworld. Given the game is 3D the obvious answer to this is multi-story buildings and other things which utilise the 3D nature of the game but to be honest i don't see it happening.

I don't recommend this, I would just play Rimworld. Sorry.

It's like Fire Emblem but with army composition and not ♥♥♥♥♥.

I like this a lot.
I didn't like CoH2.
I loved CoH1.

Draw your own conclusions xox

I haven't played much but I'm definitely enjoying what I see so far. I've played quite a few turn based strategy games and it's hard to explain but there's always something missing. Well that game has that something even though I don't know what it is.

It could definitely use a bit of polish. There are a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes, which are minor. It would help if I knew what all icons did and a better tutorial would probably help in that regard too.

Best