Recent reviews by Pocky

Tabletop Simulator is great! There are so many games you can play with it and more are created all the time. If you are a fan of board games or just want extreme bang for your buck, TTS will give you unlimited hours of enjoyment for the price.

There was recently an issue with how TTS interacted with Steam Cloud, which brought most of the mods offline for about 24 hours. Devs jumped on the issue and got everything back up and running very quickly. Goes to show how well it is supported by the Dev team and the community after all these years.

Banger!

My way too late review as I just finished this in October 2023:

Good:
- Voice acting
- Nice art
- Unique game, you won't find an RPG like this

Bad:
- The actual gameplay of the little sport they created is pretty jank. You will miss throws by the tiniest MM that you think were good. You will hit the edge of a banishment aura that you think you avoided. You will miss a block that you think you hit. Controls are just not snappy enough for the speed. It is difficult to switch between characters, there seems to be a sliht lag while doing so, again does not lend itself to the fast paced gameplay.
- There is way too much text to read for a story that is just not that interesting. There are alot of characters to get to know, some are pretty interesting, others just aren't. You can easily guess where the story is going and you just have to slog through tons of text to get through it. Even the end sequence you cannot skip and there are just 100 text boxes to read as your reward for beating the game.

Its not a terrible game at all, its just that there is a ton of effort spent on things that are not game play, which ends up being not that fun.

Cool idea and the game IS fun, but it has some balance problems. Broken decks are too easy to make as there is not a huge amount of cards in the game, so you will always find what you are looking for.
The mechanic which causes you to "push your luck" is easily manipulated which lets you farm enemies for cards and money.
The bosses are as easily defeated as normal enemies because they just have more health or shields in most cases.

Still a fun game, nice simple graphics and sound. Has potential for sure.

Super enjoyable! The game feels good to move around and its weirdly cute for the amount of minimalism. Its short, finish it in one quick sitting on a break at work. Recommend it!

I was hoping this game would be a nice and short game that would scratch the metroid-vania itch, without having to put 20 hours into something. Well, it definitely does that, but leaves much to be desired in my opinion. Some short thoughts:

The Good:
- Great soundtrack, good voice acting
- Relaxing / mellow gameplay most of the time
- Some nice art
- Fine little story, does nothing special
- Lots of weapons and secrets to collect

The Bad:
- The game is trivially easy to progress though. That's fine for some, but its really not interesting. You have tons of weapons and items, but don't need any of them to defeat enemies. You won't die to combat if you are even somewhat careful.

- You WILL DIE to stupid little one-hit things like giant squids in the dark that you can't see because the game blacks out certain areas. Those areas seem like repeating a short section hoping to get lucky not to get hit. Its not interesting and creates weird frustrating difficulty spikes in an otherwise super easy and mellow game.

- The secrets are not very hidden. All are marked on map, and 1/3rd through the game you find an item that reveals all the hidden walls. There are one or two nice little secrets that feel cool / rewarding...out of like 200.

- The progression is very linear though it doesn't appear to be. Not much like the best metroid-vanias in that respect.

- I encountered a handful of bugs, some requiring me to restart the game to fix. There are a couple ares where you can get "stuck" due to bad puzzle / level design as well.

- The physics are cool at first, frustrating later. Often times you know the "solution" to a puzzle and can't execute because the physics are glitching out in some strange way, requiring you to reset the puzzle.

Summary:
Some will like this game. Its cute, not too long, and probably worth the small price tag on sale, but it wasn't for me.

This is a good one. Definitely worth the price if you are into Roguelikes.

Pros:
- Lots of ways to solve problems
- Satisfying combat, weapons, and items
- Decent graphics and music, simple but don't get in the way

Cons:
- The "end game" isn't as deep as I'd like, and seems more shallow than it lets on at first.
- Once you find efficient ways to solve certain problems, you may feel there is no reason to try the other less efficient paths.

Super solid game, check it out.

Short review of a very long game.

The good:
Tons of content, I'd say over 70% of it is good or great content. 30% or so is kinda throwaway or lackluster. Thats top down. So some of the main characters are 'meh', some of the classes are not as fleshed out it seems, and some of the quests and story stuff is just ok. Most of it is great though.

Loot!: The loot is much better than the first game in my opinion. You have more unique weapons and such than the first game and its fun finding new more powerful items.

Character creation: The character creation is super open-ended and fairly deep. There are lots of options and paths to success.

The Bad:
Some buggy quests. Here and there, because the game is so big, you'll run into quests that are bugged out and can't be completed. Alternatively, it happens often enough that you'll sometimes question if a quest is bugged out when it is not.

Maybe too long? Once you are about 80% through the game, you kind of want it to be over, you quit digging into the corners which isn't necissarily bad, but maybe the pacing is off or something.

Overall, great game, play it!

This game is...just fine.

It is well done for what it is, a "tactical" top down cover shooter. There is a mild amount of progression in your characters and equipment. Stats go up, guys get better, you find better loot. Your team does missions, kills aliens, its what you expect.

The bad...well:
- It isn't that tactical. Most of the tactics come down to getting your guys into cover and healing up before they die.
- About half way through the game you will figure out how to trick the AI into blowing their cover. The bad part about that is that it is a VERY time consuming way to play, but if you care about optimizing combat, its the best way to play.
- There is only one good loadout in my opinion, every character should use the same loadout provided you have the pieces.
- About 2/3rds into the game, the enemies change up on you and the stategy that you had been employing will most likely no longer work. There is no warning, and you must double down on one very linear strategy.
- Fights are mostly justs very samey and boring.

That all sounds overly harsh, and I don't mean it to be. There's alot of gameplay here for the price and it is well done. The art is good. Story is fine. It plays well. Grab it for $5.00 or less.

This is an objectively good game if you just base it on its merits as a video game alone. It feels like sort of a mix between Shadow of Mordor and the Far Cry franchise, with some more unique car battle mechanics sprinkled in. What you get in my opinion however, is a flawed version of all of those games.

The on-foot combat mechanics are ripped right from Shadow of Mordor / Batman Arkham franchises. It is a far more clunky and less interesting version of those systems. There aren't many moves or animations, you are often hit off-screen, the timing is wonky feeling.

The basecamp attack/takeover mechanics are another big part of the game. Think Far Cry, but with a car for half of it, and no sneaking. Even the hardest ones are trivial. I found these boring. There is a weird kind of "puzzle" or "maze" feel to the camps once you clear out the enemies. The harder ones have you looking around for gas tanks to blow up. Just not fun.

The rest of the game is the car combat. This probably should have been focused on more. Its Mad Max afterall! In the end, it is really only about 1/3rd of the game time-wise. The mechanics here also feel very shallow. You get a cool harpoon, you can ramming mechanics and some other fun stuff. You can trick out your car in a few different ways. The problem is it feels like it could be more and won't hold your attention for long once you figure out the best ways to kill enemies. There aren't really choices to be made when making your car. Take the best upgrades, go. The downsides for any piece of gear are just gotten rid of when you get better parts. Oh there are like 15ish other driveable cars, but none of them are near as good as the main car so no point in driving them.

Lots of collectibles and other side-missions to do. There is alot of content here. It can be a 40 hour game if you want to do it all. I didn't.

All of these things sound negative, but overall its a good game. Its pretty, it plays fine, it was interesting for 15 hours. Pick it up on sale, its definitely not worth even 20 bucks when there are better games out there in the same vein. If you really like the Mad Max world, you'll enjoy this regardless.