Recent reviews by Æthelred the UnPreddy

I'm big on train games. I'm also not the most educated on the finer details of signalling and routing, and find the concepts confusing. I enjoy the business aspects of railroad games more, and like games that let me focus on that.

Sid Meier's Railroads does just that. It is a very approachable, enjoyable take on the transportation tycoon genre. Block signalling is automatically done for your tracks, and is easy to understand. You get to focus on the fundamentals: what industries have goods? What industries need goods? How can I get from A to B profitably? That is what the game gets fantastically well.

The user interface is easily approachable, and the gameplay is engrossing. Sid Meier's Railroads takes a more arcade approach to the genre, with small maps, a more cartoonish art style, and dramatic topography. This is what it does extremely well. Maps force you to think outside the box, and you have the tools at your disposal to do so.

The AI opponents and multi-player options create a replayability for this game other modern titles lack. The AI in this game isn't stupid, and is genuinely challenging. The business aspects of this game make competition a core feature, rather than an afterthought. Games are quick--often around an hour with all three AI opponents activated. You can take longer if you're a perfectionist who enjoys creating the perfect system. I've got 78 hours logged, but have had this as a standby title for years. Any time I can't figure out what in my library I want to play, Sid Meier's Railroads has always been a reliable go-to for a quick, fun time.

It is important to note there are serious technical issues with the game. I almost forgot about them because it has been so long since I had to confront them. The fixes were easy, well documented, and haven't failed me. The memory issue was what I ran into, but I haven't had issues with it since I implemented a fix from a guide on Steam. That was years ago and I do not remember the details, but know that the technical issues have easy fixes. It's an older game. Go into it expecting to deal with the issues you would deal with in older games.

I haven't tried out the Hamachi/online/LAN multiplayer, but it is very high on my bucket list. It exists. What a cool feature, especially in an older title! Wish more contemporary transportation tycoons incorporated those features.

After a fair amount of gameplay in Civilization VI, I can say I'm thouroghly satisfied.

I grew up on the Civ series- I remember sitting as a kid watching my dad play Civ III. I've played every part of the series from III forward- Civ IV, Civ V, that awful console launch Civ Revolution, and a number of DLC and expansions.

Civ VI offers extremely interesting new innovations and ideas to the series that I love, personally. To start, let me say that this game has increased difficulty- I've been used to being able to win game after game of Civ V without thought, but Civ VI requires thinking through your plan and strategy. It took me by surprise, and still in most games I catch myself in suspense, not actually knowing if I will or can win the game I'm playing.

The new features in gameplay such as Great People, Districts, and the Culture tech tree make this lanch an engaging and interesting launch as well, as they force gameplay in new and unusual ways. I find the districts idea fun, entertaining, and simple to understand, and as an urban planner myself, I love the nod to my profession, even if it is subtle and simple. Planning out cities has become much more involved than in previous games, encouraging thinking about the future of each settler after you found. Considerng the need for space, the cover of borders, and the need for district bonuses drives a much more in-depth process for determining where to found.

Great person competition is extremely useful and much more compelling, and has become a very competent and competitive gameplay feature. Each great person has specific bonuses as an individual- for example, Darwin, a great scientist, grants 500 science for every tile of a great wonder he is adjacent to, while Carl Sagan grants 3,000 production toward a space race victory project, and Galileo constructs a university and a library in a campus district. Each person has specific benefits that you may want to compete for with other players by gaining Great Person Points, which you get from districts. There are a limited number of great persons, which makes it all the more competitive. For example, Great Prophets are usually all claimed quickly, and only a limited number of religions can be founded because of this.

Religion has had a welcome and compelling overhaul, being transformed into a mechanic similiar to combat, but without war. Missionaries and Apostles debate and duel each other, and make the religion gameplay into a possible victory condition. This has made what was an afterthought in previous games to me a key consideration in this game.

There are numerous other new changes that I won't bother detailing, but the point stands: this is a great game. You'll get your moneys worth.

I was personally rather optimistic about this game, and have invested my time into it as such.

I wish I hadn't; I can't refund it anymore.

This would have been entertaining for the first hour, if it weren't for the fact that it is plagued by performance issues. I can't run this with a superclocked 570, 32 gb of ram, and a top of the line i7 without making comparisons to Microsoft Powerpoint.

Gameplay after that hour concludes has no variation; you jump a half dozen systems, land on a planet to mine for some more resources, then continue. The endgame *spoiler* is that you just start the game again from the beginning, as if it were all a dream, Lost style.

There are better space themed titles available right now for anywhere from a third to half the investment this game asks- Rimworld, Space Engineers, and Kerbal Space Program to name a few. And if you truly want what this game implied to offer, I reccommend looking into Eve Online.

This title, however, was a poor investment and waste of time on my behalf.

Cook, Serve, Delicious is a game I never quite anticipated enjoying. It's a game about running a restraunt. It's a very simplified version of running a restraunt, but it is every second intense, entertaining, and fulfilling, surprisingly so. Is this Cooking Mama, PC? No. This is Quickly Prepare Food For Hundreds of Starving Customers In A Twenty Minute Sitting.

Each meal has a specific recipe, one you get to know by heart. For example, a Chicken Breast is, as follows: tenderize six times, season, cook, serve, delicious. Sounds simple, right? Now cook six in ten seconds flat. It's a bit heart racing (hard to believe, I know).

The variety of recipes is vast. There are dozens of different foods, and hundreds of ways to prepare them each. They also each have there plusses and minuses- for example, there are staple foods which always have a high demand, and there are other foods, like steak and chicken which lose demand and must be replaced on your menu every few days (No worries, this change is not permanent). You're given a liberal variety in your menu- you can design it as you please with up to six items, change them between each day, and feature a meal of the day. Each food has dozens of alternative recipes, and you can upgrade each food to make more recipes available and increase the profit of your meals.

The art and soundtrack for this game are not to be ignored. They are each terrific, and fit one another like a nice hug, and fit the genre like a puzzle piece. The music consists of smooth, jazzy tunes I enjoy listening to outside of the game on a nice rainy day, and the art is complemented by it. The art has a wonderfully individual, indie feel that you'd expect, and is very warm and homey.

Altogether, this game is not a waste, and a game I'd wholeheartedly recommend. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it-surprise yourself too.

Without a doubt, this is one of my favorite games. That comes from a guy with about 200 sitting installed on his PC.

Kingdom Rush offers everything I expect from a tower defense game and more; it takes the genre from the base flash games we all played in the school media center as children (which it once was- thanks to the devs, and congratulations for making it this far! I've been a fan since Armor Games.) and improves upon it to truly make it a genre and a game worthy of Steam.

Kingdom rush gameplay is very entertaining, and the wide variety of towers and options made available to you in upgrades outside of levels provide for an individual experience- you decide what strategy is most important to you. Activated abilities can save your rear-end in a close call, or you can use them liberally and as a backbone of your strategy. Footmen can be deployed and placed at your command to stop incoming enemies and maximize the effectiveness of your towers. Towers all provide a wide variety of upgrade trees, allowing for many different playstyles; do you provide your footmen with stronger melee, or do you provide them with ranged abilities? Do you provide your towers that extra zap potential, or do you instead have them push enemies back down the road?

Though the tower defense is at first glance a seemingly simplistic genre, Kingdom Rush makes it something you can sink days into. I've played through the full flash title, and I bought this copy because I was so fond of it. This Steam copy also provides many more levels and intricacies, such as heroes you can command and chose to fit your playstyle.

Kingdom Rush also provides some astonishing art in my opinion. The game looks terrific, and has an individual indie look to it-and not the hipstery-indie kind, the genuine, we-made-this-for-fun-and-sunk-our-sweat-and-toil-into-this kind.

I can't reccommend this game enough. Kingdom Rush is one of my favorites, and I hope to see more astonishing work from the devs in the future.

War Thunder is positively one of the best available free to play games available on Steam. Among the category of both dogfighting and tank warfare games, it is at the pinnacle. Greatly outshowing other well known titles, such as World of Tanks, War Thunder provides a well balanced title both in gameplay, graphics, and community.

Graphically, War Thunder is wonderfully optimized. I formerly ran a rig with a Radeon HD 7450 (a terrible card), and played the game and all other games on the absolute minimum settings. Stunningly, it still provided beatiful graphics at a rate of 30 FPS at all times.

Gameplay for War Thunder is amazing. Though I find higher teirs to be boring, the reserve fighting for aircraft always is intense, exciting, and fun. Tank warfare, just recently made available to the public, is equally entertaining, and is also still so after the initial tank teirs.

This game is not pay-to-win, nor do I think it ever will be. The game also provides a wide variety of vehicles, each easily accessed.

As a person who enjoys gaming, I have found the most entertainment out of Garry's Mod than any other of my 101 owned titles.

As a person who enjoys sandboxes, I find this to be endlessly entertaining due to seamless integration of the steam workshop (and it's endless modding community) in concert with the source engines capabilities.

As a person who enjoys gaming with my friends, I find this to be a go-to, once more due to seamless integration of the steam workshop, server hosting, and above all the wide range of available game styles.

Garry's Mod is a title which is known for stupidity in the sandbox. It definitely delivers such stupidity, and delightfully so. However, more often overlooked than not, Garry's Mod is a cheap platform to an expansive variety of multiplayer games, such as Trouble in Terrorist Town, G-Mod Murder, Zombie Survival, Prop Hunt, and a multitude more. With over 500 hours on record, I have never grown bored with this game, and continue to find more enjoyable mods and gamemodes.

I greatly recommend this title for anybody looking to find fun and entertainment.