Recent reviews by Ozymandias

This is one of my favorite tower defense games. It's got TONS of variability, TONS of levels, TONS of options. You can play it casually to just win levels, unlock everything, and beat the (admittedly weaksauce) storyline. Or you can play like a power gamer, learning strategies to squeeze a bit more performance and beat some really tough challenges.

I'm torn on this game. The story is great and very true to the mythos and classic flavor, but there are just too many flaws with the design of the game.

The biggest issue (no spoilers) for me was the 'pixel hunt' aspect, where it seems you can be stuck forever if you miss a clue or you might be able to progress and miss out on huge parts of the story. For example, after completing Chapter 12, the chapter summary said that I had "discovered the truth" about an important part of the story. Wait. What? After finishing the game, I went and watched a playthrough and found out that in the midst of a virtual maze, I missed going into one room that explained a TON of what what going on. The game made it easy to miss that one path, with no indication that anything had been missed, and the next chapters made little sense without knowing the *plot-essential* info I had missed.

Other issues I had with the game are that the 'stealth' levels are just labyrinths where you die a ton until you learn the paths of the NPCs and overall the story is very linear and the choices you make don't seem to matter much.

There are certainly good aspects as well. Some really creative level design made me feel really immersed in the descent into madness. The atmosphere of the game was great and the characters were enjoyable.

So this may be worth picking up on sale, or watching a playthrough video... or just read a mythos book. :)

The tutorial is pretty bad, as it completely ignores some critical game mechanics. But once I got past that initial learning curve (thanks to a few Google and YouTube searches), this turned out to be a really fun and challenging sim game.

There is no pausing, which actually works really well here. It means that when a crisis happens, you have to deal with it at 1x speed. This forces you to plan ahead, being strategic with response teams, appropriate upgrades, shelters, etc. As with many sims, the challenge of expanding while still being able to respond to emergencies is a key part of the balance.

If anything, once you master this game it becomes a bit easy. You've gotten your most dangerous dinos secured, you've gotten more income than you can use, and you're packed with tourists. But that just frees you up to experiment more with the dinos and to try out any of the systems you didn't dive too deeply into.

Overall I'd give it a solid B. It's not the deepest or most complex sim, but it held my attention for 30+ game hours.

The basics of this game are almost exactly the same as Ark with some new shipbuilding stuff and a new talent tree thrown in. Some aspects are interesting, but overall it feels super-rushed. There are a lot of purely *bad* game design decisions that take the most tedious parts of Ark and make them essential to getting started. This takes the grind of endgame Ark and puts it as a blocker to even getting a hut built on a beach so you can have somehwere to put your stuff.

And don't expect there to be an inch of land that you can claim so you can even start building that. Maybe once the initial rush is over there will be some land, but currently every since spot on every single island is claimed such that you can't build there.

There is potential cool group play, with the skill tree being actually making choices important and commerce or tribes essential. The loot system is neat, as are the wide variety of ships.

But overall I can't recommend this to anyone. Even if you loved Ark (or maybe especially if you loved Ark), stay away from Atlas. :(

This is a relatively simple RTS game with the focus on a small squad of soldiers who throw down defensive buildings and science upgrades from time to time. Your dudes respawn when they die and you have to push back (or just survive) onslaughts of bug-aliens with tons of various abilities.

It's not as difficult or strategic as the Creeper World games (which I love), but one thing that I ended up really appreciating about this is that there was no saving in the middle of levels. At first it was frustrating, as some of the levels can be difficult, especially at higher settings. But over-extending, getting crushed, and having to rapidly secure a new 'main' location made for a lot of exciting gameplay and good replayability.

Overall a fun game. Definitely worth a playthrough or two, especially if you can catch it on sale.

'Brothers' is a grim interactive fairy tale that meanders at times, but is certainly a beautiful and touching experience. It took me about 4 hours to finish, which was just about perfect.

Controlling two characters at the same time is a bit of a brain puzzle in itself, but it made for some interesting puzzles, though none were really tricky to solve. The had darker bits than I had expected, and probably isn't suitable for kids.

I must also point out that the game 'requires' a controller pad for PC, but didn't recognize my controller without me downloading a 3rd party tool to get it to work. And for it to work at all, I had to launch it directly from the game directory instead of through Steam. Weird that a game that requires a controller has such hit-or-miss support of them it seems.

The first 90 minutes is nothing but gaggle of hot anime girls desperately and jealously pining over your attention. After beraing through that for the length of a feature film, the game finally does move on to touch on the depression and mental health that are the core of the story, but even then the story moves too slowly and is (intentionally) repetitive. Yes, it is interesting and creepy later in the game, but I didn't find the payoff worth the slow storytelling.

I wanted to like this game, but I can't recommend it unless you already like the anime-dating-sim type of game, in which case you might enjoy the parts that seemed to drag way too much for me.

I've put about 15 hours into this game and I'd give it a healthy thumbs up. It's a fun little simulator and is well worth the $15 price tag if you like such things. Once you get the game figured out it doesn't have quite the depth or replay value of Prison Architect, but I certainly enjoyed my playthrough.

Pros:
* Over the first few years in the sim, the game mechanics evolve a good bit, keeping you on your toes.
* It allows some fun, nostalgic combinations and amusing anecdotes.
* It's simple to pick up and doen't require spreadsheets/calculators to keep ahead of the curve.

Cons:
* The tutorial covers just the very basics. Some other (important) aspects are not explained and can cause repeated failure with no clue as to why. (Just fiddle with stuff until it works)
* Some aspects of the interface are clunky, though none are really deep enough for this to be a huge issue.
* Towards the 'end game' (if there is such a thing) it gets a bit repetitive, but it took me probably 8-10 hours to get to that point.
* There isn't much variety in music, so I turned that off after the first hour or so.

This game is better than chocolate chip cookie dough! (And I take my chocolate chip cookie dough VERY seriously)

After a hankering for something along the lines of a SimCity or Banished (but burnt out on those two), I purchased Prison Architect. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

I was surprised by how detailed this simulation game is. It is certainly complex, but in a good way! The campaign took me about 20 hours to complete (hitting all the side objectives) and was a great tutorial and warm up for the open simulation when I've just started.

There are a few minor complaints I have, like why isn't the list of ~100 buildable items alphabetized or organized? Why does my armed guard sometimes sit down within a squares of a prisoner beating on another guard?

Overall, this is certainly worth the buy if you like this type of game.