Recent reviews by Ozymandias

Into the Breach is truly genius in balance and design. Every level is an interesting puzzle that, especially at higher difficulties, often looks impossible. But the genius is that there are almost always creative solutions available. I can't count the time where I thought I had lost, but was able to figure out a way to barely pull through.

Definitely worth it even at full price and an absolute must-buy when it's on sale.

This is a great idle/clicker with a good sense of humor and an actual ending. It's certainly fun, with my playthrough lasting a couple of days overall with a few hours of actively playing mixed in.

The quirky kind of comedy and some gameplay aspects are a bit reminiscent of Universal Paperclips, but Spaceplan stands well on its own. Totally worth a couple of bucks.

Solasta is fun and easy to get into, but perhaps best of all it is a very faithful adaptation of the D&D 5e rules. There are a few rules that wouldn't have translated well into a CRPG (such as how darkvision should work when the player is controlling a whole party), but the developer made good decisions on how to handle these so that it still feels like 5e.

The storyline is pretty much a straight line and world isn't as massive as a Baldur's Gate or Skyrim, so the game doesn't feel huge. But the main campaign is still a quite enjoyable save-the-world questline.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend Dust to the End. It has a cool premise, but the execution is just... mediocre.

Combat is completely monotonous and uninteresting. There aren't really any tactics or strategy needed. Just do basic attacks and every once in a while do an attack that uses points. This is really inexcusable since there are so many other games out there with this style of combat (Bard's Tale 4 and Darkest Dungeon are shining examples) where abilities and synergy are exciting and crucial to success. Here, combat is just a slog of attacks until RNG decides you're done.

There other poor design decisions that really put a damper on things. Early on it is easy for your cash to go negative on payday, from which there is no way to recover other than to hope you have a saved game from an hour ago to reload and hire less mercs.

My ranged characters have become useless because of the limited supply of ammunition. There is only one town that sells ammo, but not nearly enough to last a month. In theory you can craft your own ammo, but 4 hours in and I haven't found out how... and I've spent the last 1+ hour with all my ranged characters twiddling their thumbs.

There is pretty much no documentation (either online or in-game), which just exacerbates the many issues with this game.

This is one of the best city/colony-building sims I've played. It's got a ton of depth and even 60+ hours in, there are a bunch of tech and strategies that I haven't even tried yet.

There are tons of mods, everything from a few quality-of-life improvements to complete game changers.

I'd definitely recommend this one, even at full price.

Not quite my cup of tea, but I'll give this one a thumbs up because gameplay was solid and it is pretty much exactly what it sets out to be.

I'm no stranger to complicated systems in game, but this one was a bit much even for me. There are literally hundreds of abilities/specialties to pick from. And you have to pick multiples and try to get some sort of synergy going. And that's not even counting the hundreds/thousands of crafting options in a completely different crafting system.

The tactical layer was good, though good tactics don't seem as important as good abilities/combos. It lacks the tactical depth of XCOM, but goes in whole hog on the complex skill tree side.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game, even with only half of the content completed. I'll definitely be coming back to play this one again once it is released.

Even as-is (early access) it's really fun and quite polished. I experienced only a couple of minor bugs in my 3 playthroughs. The camera can be a bit wonky, especially when trying to build underground, but that's really my only complaint. The ability to build multiple floor buildings and to dig multiple levels of basement really added a lot, allowing for some really cool solutions to expanding and streamlining your little village.

Invisible Inc is a solid turn-based strategy with a bunch of interesting game mechanics that compliment each other and make for some really interesting tactical gameplay. I definitely recommend this one for strategy lovers.

It's a rogue-like in that levels and loot are randomized, which can sometimes lead to really amazing combos or sometimes to nearly impossible situations. Having this in a strategy game makes for some memorable moments, both when you manage to squeak past a death-trap mission as well as occasionally calling BS on a level that ends your playthrough.

A winning playthrough consists of 7-10 missions, which makes it pretty easy to want to do another run-through trying a different team and tactics. The difficulty ramps up nicely as well, with the first campaign being on the easy side, but each subsequent difficulty level really adds new challenge.

This is a solid strategy game with some interesting mechanics and TONS of different ways to solving almost every situation. I can't stress how important that is to make a game like this fun. Too often developers make puzzles that require a single solution. Not here! They did a great job of giving each character abilities that give very different options, strengths, and weaknesses. The campaign combines different pairs of characters for most missions, forcing you to come up with neat new ways to synergize!

There weren't actually many 'cons' to the game. I only experienced a couple of very minor bugs. My only real complaint is the way they implemented the Showdown mechanic seems like a mess. A 'pause' function with the ability to queue an action for each character would have been perfect here, whereas the Showdown is the only pause, but it changes all your controls to no real benefit. A good portion of my reloads were due to Showdown mode messing things up.

I love turn-based strategy games and risk-mitigation mechanics, but this game is just way too random. No matter how well you plan, if you get a couple of unlucky rolls and your opponent gets a couple of lucky ones, it's game over.

If a novice can beat a master because of lucky rolls, it's too close to Candyland for my tastes. Sorry, I wanted to like this one, but couldn't.