Recent reviews by Silvertongued Devil

Factorio is a monolithic testament to the power of obsession and spaghetti that spawned (or popularised?) a genre. If you haven't played it, you probably should. If you have played it, get the DLC and play it again because the DLC basically adds five more games to it. If you've played the DLC, consider playing it again because you are starting to realise you've developed a tic and that you'll need your next fix soon anyways.

Completely unfamiliar with it? Here's some highlights:
- You can create a base and figure out how to produce a tiny trinket that requires half a civilization's worth of effort into building, then realise that you need to mass produce it and have to redesign your base to consume all of a civilization's worth of industry into manufacturing.
- You can colonise an alien world and then use their babies as fuel because they're a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and genocide is fine when it doesn't look human-shaped
- You can build a space ship with guns and factories and more guns and more factories until you're producing ammunition as quickly as you can shoot and your vessel is devouring entire asteroid belts and crushing them for resources and somehow coming up with legendary quality everything
- Oh god I just remembered the quality system. You're going to go insane with that. It's entirely optional but it will consume your life and soul and there will be no escape.
- You can lay out miles' worth of pipes, conveyors, and everything else, and then lay them over each other, and then lay them over each other again, and then keep layering them until you've completely forgotten what is connected to what and have lost all semblance of a grasp on reality
- You can automate fishing
- Also you can fish
- You can build a tank and blow things up
- You can modify your tank and then blow more things up
- You can build a bigger tank and blow all of the things up
- You can build giant guns that annihilate everything that so much as glances rudely in your direction
- You can then build nuclear bombs not because they are necessary but because you have so much hate in your heart that it can only be resolved by nuclear fission
- You can land on a frozen hellscape and then realise you're trapped and just spent several hours dooming yourself
- You can be utterly terrified of giant worms that are coming to eat everything you love and hold dear and then later come back and one shot them because INDUSTRIALISM, HO!
- You can shout INDUSTRIALISM, HO!
- You can screw up infinite times in infinite ways that you never saw coming, then look online and realise that the solution was actually some super simple basic setup that never occurred to you and then want to die
- You can technically program your base like a computer making 'intelilgent' decisions and manufacturing what you desire at any given time... but honestly that stuff is so well beyond my pay-grade that I can barely make a belt-reader work so as far as I'm concerned it's just techno-sorcery.
- You can get struck by lightning
- You can FINALLY BLOW UP CLIFFS GYAHAHAHAHAHAHA! This has been the case for a while but I can assure you it is still worth getting enthusiastic over because screw those guys. Those guys suck.
- You can lose all sense of perspective and lose hundreds of hours into a single game trying to design, redesign, and then redesign the redesign, and then redesign the redesign, and then nervously start wondering if you should redesign that redesign, and then you'll notice it's 4 am and also you haven't eaten in 11 hours and your wife and family left you three weeks ago and you haven't been to your job in so long that you've forgotten what it is you used to do.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is: it's a pretty good game and I give it a thumbs up. It's also never on sale so just buy it. Don't wait. It's worth the price.

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- State of the art medical techniques to help keep you alive such as; in-field surgical kits, morphine, amputation, fast-acting medical glue, cannibalism, and of course all the cigarettes and alcohol you can possibly consume. We'll even send you down with extras!
- Being free from having to choose who to fight for or what to do because we've already bought you from your owning corporation so you belong to us forever and there is no escape.

Disclaimer: Magnum PMC is not obligated to provide you with ammunition, clothing, accurate intel, medical care, psychiatric services, extraction or human companionship. In the event you find yourself in a blood soaked room slowly bleeding to death while fighting an endless horde of hive-minded half-naked religious zealots you are still required to complete the contract and retrieve the data you were sent there to retrieve. No, it does not matter how many extra-dimensional aliens are exploding out of peoples' chests. You have a job to do.

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The question you're all thinking is: "What does Chrono Ark offer that other games in this genre don't?"

Let me break it down:
- A cast of characters that initially seem shallow and archetypal but rapidly drag you in with narrative arcs that are easy to get emotionally invested in - which given that there are 16 or so characters is honestly pretty impressive.
- Unique mechanics for each character that lend themselves to be used in a variety of ways. You can play a beatstick character as a DoT, a DoT character can be a healer, a healer can use her baseball bat to smite enemies like the fist of an angry god, and all can synergize in ways that you might not expect. No matter what there's enough RNG mitigation (and free deletion of cards from your deck) that you will always end up with the build you want, with only a handful of exceptions due to extreme rarity. Alas, sometimes the stars do not align.
- A surprisingly compelling narrative. Not gonna lie when I first played the game I skipped the intro, fast forwarded through chunks of it, until I started encountering dialogue and cutscenes that got me curious. Then I started over again, from scratch, and while some of the early stuff is a bit dry they kept finding new ways to intrigue me as the campaign progressed, with new developments, twists, and reveals until it finally reaches a climactic finale.
- The music... goes surprisingly hard at times. I usually don't pay attention to the audio in games like these but even lowered in the background I ended up muting other stuff just so I could listen to it. It's subjective, ofc, but it's impressive one the less.
- Pluck. Okay, so maybe this one isn't so tangible, but basically it's pretty clear that they were working with a fairly limited budget - I mean obviously there's no hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into a neat indie game - but they make that money work. Whether it be animatics, simple 3d backgrounds or even little text comments during a fight there's always something charming going on. Something a little "extra" stuffed into every element of the game. As a result you just want to help the developers because they clearly knew what they were doing, at least with the main game.
- Mechanics that force you to adjust your plans. In a lot of these games you just sort of... have the same goal every time you run into a fight. Get max stacks, do a turbo hit, etc. That stuff is still in Chrono Ark, but the bosses and even some regular enemies often interfere with certain tactics so you'll often find yourself having to adapt to situations where your typical strategy might dramatically backfire.
- When you die you aren't necessarily dead. Basically we're going on Darkest Dungeon rules where once you hit the end of your HP you go into negatives and every time you're hit you have a chance to go down. Healers can heal you out of that and get you back up and running, but it also means that sometimes you just get lucky and dodge an incoming attack that should kill you, or have a resilient tank who has just soaked like five deathblows in a row and still isn't giving up. It adds an interesting dynamic to the fight where HP isn't just a hard line - it's a flexible one that sometimes works in your favour.

Now, that's just the stuff that makes it stand out from its competitors. In addition to that it has solid, satisfying combat, extensive lists of cards, relics, and equipment that do everything from making DoT turn into burst damage to making it so you accumulate crit chance/damage and crit chance against you with every attack you make until unleashing it all in one terrifying strike. Sure, mostly it's less awesome stuff, but it's nice that the awesome stuff is there. There are also items that, well, you're going to inevitably learn to use if you want to survive the endgame. Even though your characters can usually heal/use status effects/etc., during a fight, sometimes you need to use an item to have what you need right now rather than waiting to draw it.

So, all that gushing aside, what's the negative?
Well... The DLC.
For how polished and great the core game is - and how much the DLC does add some neat cards and effects - it feels like they haven't quite figured out what they want to do with DLC and sort of extending the life of the game. For the most part the DLC adds relics, new Lucy cards and new animations, along with a new boss that... well, honestly isn't very fun (Beach DLC). I feel like they'd be better served creating a new character, adding new cards to existing characters, adding levels that can replace existing ones (so instead of the carnival you head to, I don't know, a ruined city or something with its own enemies/bosses), and stuff like that. Adding a swimsuit flair to the existing game isn't as fun as actually adding new content to the runs themselves - much as I do love the sex appeal. That said DLC is also entirely optional so it's up to you whether the content is worth buying so that's not really a negative if you just want to enjoy the main game.
- Pressel is spooky AF. I may love her but she's got big serial killer vibes. Lady needs to chill.

All in all Chrono Ark is one of the highest quality games in this niche subgenre of ours and it's clearly got a fair bit of passion put into it. If it looks even remotely interesting I'd strongly recommend giving it a shot.

The game itself is decently fun and entirely worth the price.

However there are two rather significant issues.

First and foremost: every fight is against another player. There's minimal interaction between you, but this results in erratic battles where sometimes you trounce your opponent effortlessly and other times the enemy has four times the army strength you have and you had no chance to begin with. Supposedly you can fight against the AI if a player isn't around, but ultimately this stuff ensures that the "campaign" mode is just a PvP brawl, then there's a solo mode that is PvP, and then there's a team mode that is PvP. For a PvE player like me this isn't really comfortable - but I could tolerate it... if not for...

The premium currency. From what I can tell (not going over the refund hours as a result of this) you can get roughly 150 of this currency per day and can use that to purchase heroes that give your army a theme. Unfortunately the cheapest hero is 1000. That's a full week of grinding for one hero. The most expensive hero, meanwhile, is 5000. That's over a month of daily play - and most heroes seem to cost this price. It doesn't seem like you can purchase this currency directly with money (thank goodness) but the time investment is just ridiculous.

There are some 70+ heroes to buy, as the developer happily promotes, and this means that in order to unlock the hero-related content you're looking at over half a year at least, playing the game every single day. Not for fun, but to achieve specific objectives the game gives you ahead of time.

If these two issues were remedied I think I'd happily endorse the game as a lightweight, fun little autobattler game that is entirely worth the price. Well, maybe if I could start as a certain faction it'd also be nice - just to have weighted draws towards that faction or something.

Right now, though, it's hard to recommend because while it is enjoyable in the short term the long-term investment the developer expects of you is... insane. I will happily change my review if these things change, though.

I am a veteran of automation.
I've built sprawling Factories while besieged by environmentalist insects.
I've Satisfyingly strip-mined worlds to feed the corporate machine.
I've built elaborate underground bases capable of withstanding the Techtonic shifts of economic angst.
I've Crafted Planets and Colonised Astro... space... things.

When I came across Foundry my first impression was: "Oh, it's a simple, polished automation game. Might be fun." Didn't give it much thought. Bought it on a whim after I'd ground out all the more interesting-looking games.

Then midway through our first play session I realised: this was completely relaxing. No stress, no fumbling with balancing or fiddling with awkward layouts. The worst thing was the conveyors and even then it was fine. It wasn't a chore to expand, wasn't tedious to build new factories. Aside from the gratuitous space required for the inserter-analogues (still always place things one square too close) it was just very chill.

Then I discovered the decorations and was like "oh hey I'll probably get some Minecraft stuff, maybe paint it and junk." No. No, the cosmetic stuff is so much more elaborate than that - honestly it's as elaborate as games that are explicitly designed to just make pretty bases. "Okay, that's pretty cool, I thought," but it wasn't quite enough to make Foundry stand out as more than what I expected.

Then we needed to expand mines. This involved explosives. Explosives are fun. Blowing up terrain is lots and lots of fun. You can knock the tops off mountains or dig abyssal pits into infinity. Even had some fun making a spiral conveyor - but then we encountered a mine so deep that it was genuinely 100+ blocks beneath us. Even using explosives and just chucking them into the pit it took several minutes to get there: that's not a sign of ineffective explosives so much as just how far it went. How do we get stuff up from there, I wondered? So I built an elevator... and here's where I turned into a gushing toddler for the next ten minutes.

You see, once you place an elevator you can make a new stop. Okay, I just have to dig down there and make a second elevator, right? Wrong. You tell it the depth (or height) and it will automatically build itself to that area for you. You get to watch as it, section by section, digs through the earth down that 100+ blocks to create a comfy way to travel into a mine so deep that you can barely see it from the surface. I cannot stress how cool this was to see in action. Thanks to the elevator setting up the mine - a process that would've taken dang near an hour if I'd done it by hand, took mere minutes and it was fun the whole way through.

That was only the beginning, really, as we started unlocking other techs that had some similar functions. Modular (aka customisable) buildings, gigantic warehouses and vast resource sinks. Giant transport ships and drones buzzing through the sky to do my will - not in the Factorio sense where they replace all functions, but in the sense that they're building a giant metal wiener jutting into the sky because I can. It's like the space elevator from Satisfactory only built chunk by chunk by dozens of happy little robots.

Basically this game made me feel like a gushing child again and it's so easy to play that I'm just relaxed the entire time. It's not even hard to get resources where you need them because you can build conveyors underground so they never get in the way. Just large highways of the stuff that will never mess with the aesthetic of your base. Or you can do maximum conveyor spaghetti. Whatever tickles your fancy!

Oh, and the best part? Conveyor Belts don't move you when you stand on them. Like, by default. No tech, no fuss, no extra odd and end. Just being a happy little robot blowing up chunks of mountains, extracting vast amounts of wealth, petting your cute robot sidekicks and working towards a brighter future for the human race that is probably super extinct by this point but I don't care because at this stage I'm basically a Von Neumann probe strip-mining the galaxy for fun and more fun.

10/10. If games like Factorio or Satisfactory hadn't polished their stuff up I'd say that this does to the Automation genre what Grounded did to Survival Crafting Open World - that is: take the good bits, polish them to heck and make it cozy as all get-out to play, to the point where you're baffled that it's not the most popular thing in its genre.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. Buy your dog a copy. This game deserves more recognition.

Techtonica has digging, factory sprawls, rewards exploration and weirdly enough has an interesting narrative to boot. It's a pretty fun game, particularly for the price, and I would give it a fairly firm recommendation.

It does have some flaws - some pacing issues mid-game and a distinct lack of polish - but those are mostly to be expected for an Early Access game and one that is essentially mid-production. If that is a turn off for you, that's alright. For me, it just adds to the charm when I accidentally bump my head on the ceiling and am suddenly an omniscient god witnessing the breadth of the universe.

It's also got some very satisfying and clever ideas: Water wheels to generate power ensure that your electrical network is based on the environment and exploiting it rather than tediously ferrying resources from one way to another. The conveyor system is quite well done with a lot of flexibility and intuitive elements. Construction and deconstruction are both integral components to a functioning base. Also the long-distance transport network makes a happy little "ding ding" noise whenever it ships a package and I love it forever and if anything ever happened to it I would kill everybody here and then myself.

My point is: it's a pretty cute game. Incomplete, but with way more content than I was expecting, particularly in areas I wasn't expecting any content at all. It just sort of snuck up on me and was like "oh yeah here's a companion cube" and "btw there's an actual storyline" and junk like that that I won't spoil. Exploring and finding old facilities was really fun. Being able to salvage literally every inch of them was even more fun, too. It's a very easy recommendation. :3

Hades 2 is what sequels should be: take everything people enjoyed about the first game (which, tbf, was practically everything), then tweak it so it's different, then add some additional fun elements on top. It's in early access but, honestly, so far I haven't seen a reason for it to be in early access. Hopefully that means more fun stuff in the future.

So, uh, yeah. If you wanted more Hades, this absolutely scratches that itch.

Honestly I only really have a few complaints so far:
- The Umbral Flames weapon is pretty underwhelming. Shooting ghosts just... isn't satisfying, and the special attacks are often more of a headache to use than they are advantageous. Some tweaking/VFX upgrades would do it a lot of good. Maybe instead of focusing on orbiting attacks you could focus on crescents, or maybe maintain the orbiting but have the straight attack focus on evasion/maneuverability to keep you in close quarters.
- No Dusa cameo so I can give her a snoot kiss yet. I demand the option to further adore Dusa. You already ruthlessly teased me in Hades. Stop teasin'. >:(
- Some of the god designs feel like they were trying a tad too hard to wedge representation into the game. Chaos turning from an androgynous figure of marbled flesh and faces into a normal-looking woman wearing a suit is definitely a step down, despite how gorgeous the art is. Hestia having vitiligo is a bit distracting, particularly given her distinct Scottish accent. Feels like she'd be a bit more fun if they played it off more as scorched flesh or something. Of course, this is stuff they also did in the first game so if it didn't stop you then, it's probably not worth stopping you now. It's just a bit distracting.
- Oh, and Charon looks way less amazing. I don't know why they changed him.

All that said, there's still way more positives than negatives. The second boss is pretty great and, as I said, everything is of equal quality to the original. It's an excellent sequel no matter how you look at it.

What the trailer tells me: Pokemon but with all the grimdark memes
What the gameplay is: ARK + Conan + A surprisingly elaborate Pokemon game

Every minute I spend playing it is a minute where I'm feeling confused. It shouldn't be as good as it is. It's a meme game FFS! It's not supposed to be actually good and arguably better made than most of the open world survival crafting games currently out there.

Like wtf is going on.
I AM SO CONFLICTED.

Basically the game teaches you to be a super awesome hardcore combo fiend one step at a time with minimal inputs and fuss. It makes you feel incredibly cool and competent while being extremely accessible.

You start out with one button per effect - jump, skill, attack, dash. As you progress you gain "Potential": these unlock completely new moves and upgrades to existing abilities, changing their functionality significantly. This is unironically the most impressive upgrade style I've seen in any roguelite.

For example:
My default attack is multiple chained attack button presses - 3 hits, maybe 4.
Through Potential I unlock the ability to launch the enemy into the air by pressing jump after any ground attack. Now my combo is (naturally) 3 hits + one to get airborne + 2 hits for my aerial attack.
Later on I upgrade a juggling aerial move that triggers when I push down + attack while midair. Now my combo is 3 ground hits, + 1 launcher + 1 aerial attack + 3 juggle attacks with a wicked cool downward strike finisher.
My input for all this has been: X X X A X hold down while hitting X X X. It's just that simple. I'm practically button mashing but each input has a different effect that combines with others into an elaborate system that would unironically be at home in an actual fighting game.

By the time I have reached the end of the game I have learned, step by step, to execute elaborate combos in under 30 minutes. They're simple to execute but complex in usefulness and it's outright amazing how well all this is pulled off.

BlazBlue is a fighting game series that (at least to me) is known for trying to make complex combos and fighting game stuff more accessible to casual scrubs like me. BlazBlue Entropy Effect is a shockingly effective extension of that philosophy wrapped up into a comfortable roguelite package. It's fun, engaging, and makes you feel awesome not just by giving you an OP set of abilities (though those totally exist too) but by training you to be a competent fighter with lots of tools in your belt by the end.

It unironically may be the best roguelite game I've ever seen and it's still in early access.
My only complaint, honestly, is that you get too few Potentials and that the storyline is a bit sparse - but honestly you're probably not playing roguelites for gripping storytelling and the gameplay is just so satisfying.

PS please add Taokaka so I can be the bratty catgirl.
Also more traps.
Just add more everything tbh. I want all of the content. Inject it directly into my veins.

Soulstone Survivors, when it was initially released, was a game that I rather quickly dismissed for lacking anything unique or memorable about it. The classes were bland, the abilities were similar to stuff in other games, and there wasn't really anything to make it stand out.

That said, it has been supported for over a year now. Hoo boy have things changed.

Sure, the crafting is still as limited as it ever was (which is fine), but the skill tree got expanded dramatically and now includes things like unique passives for each class that give them significantly altered gameplay, a whole slew of abilities, unlockable runes that let you customise your character each run, and enough difficulty to scratch whatever itch you happen to have at any given time.

The Developer is currently working on some aspects of the game that are still a little wonky, but honestly given their progress I think it's now certainly worth buying. It's a satisfying 'Vampire Survivors-like" with a bunch of content and combos you can employ.

At this point I think the only things I'm really longing for is more uniqueness among the classes. I'm still invariably using (mostly) the same abilities for each class so I want to see them all have a couple of passive abilities that really entrench differing gameplay, even if it's only minor overall changes. I crave asymmetry.

Regardless, it's a solid game and the developer still seems to be working on it, at least for a while longer as there are still several classes to be added to the game.