Recent reviews by Smorgasbork

This is a game, you can play it, its cute and awesome and you should play it!

Started the game and basically haven't stopped playing it. When did i last eat? What even is my name? It doesn't matter. The Boron need water.

Played on Medium Difficulty without modifications.

The game has fantastic atmosphere. Like genuinely, it's oozing with it. The only thing dragging it down a bit is that the voice commands of your marines are really repetitive, even after a patch that addressed that.
But the lighting, the level design, the overal design of everything is frikken sweet. The missions are tense. Resources are sparse even if you rifle through every cupboard maybe sans ammo but that i already talked about. For an RTS that is essentially really simple by letting you not fine control single soldiers, it's also doing fantastic and i wish there'd be a coop option where i could tackle missions with a buddy who controls another team.

Gameplay is really fun and its cool figuring out some of the combos and what you can do in any given situation because eventually, you will ♥♥♥♥ up and end up with a hunt. I think people will attempt to Ghost the game and i think its doable but personally the stealth mechanics are not too in-depth for it because it's at heart not a game about stealth but about avoiding combat as much as possible.

You can win fights, but each fight raises the Aggro of the hive which means more powerful aliens enter the map and try to hunt you down, namely the Crusher and the Praetorian. The Crusher is more brute force, while the Praetorian will try to hit and run you while also calling a hunt on you. But i barely saw them, only when aggressiveness got really high later on

I think what's bad is that i sometimes do wish i could give fine control to single soldiers, especially the Recon guy who could step out of cover, headshot an enemy and vanish. I microd the whole squad way too often for these shots in a way that wasn't fun and felt more like me hoping the game would play ball with my plan than anything else

The story is well... it's an Aliens story with a few interesting twists. It does very much feel like it could slot into the movie franchise especially after Aliens: Resurrection, i'd compare it to some of the books i've read way back in the day. There is a few interesting ideas presented but with the ideas we already know they kinda play ball with it. The Weyland-Yutani people are all corrupt, the marines are all genuinely trying to do the right thing and there's another human faction which you can guess does what. You kinda know who is gonna betray you the moment you meet them.

~~ SPOILER ~~
The gameplay finale is mission 11 which i died to once last night so i took a break and then finished it today and immediately you get a cinematic final-final mission. Cinematic in the sense that none of your usual mechanics work, you are practically invincible with only three people who pretty much have unlimited uses of shotgun and grenades and they mow thorugh hordes of aliens and you don't have any hud elements so its kinda "why even bother" as you navigate a maze and then have to run away from the endboss.
~~ SPOILER OVER ~~

The management elements of the game are kind of boring? I didn't feel too attached to any of my marines, none gave me the feeling of "Hey it's the guy who did a cool thing in that one mission and then developed a trauma based on that!" because you control them as singular entity and the game doesn't generate personalities or banter for them either. Which is a REAL shame because its IMO a draw for games who feature a roster of soldiers like that.

Speaking of the management part, the timers were on medium difficulty a tad too easy. Since difficulty is customizeable to a degree, i recommend adjusting these at least one rank up than the difficulty one plays. Shame you can't adjust the difficulty while playing but i get why.

The squads tactical options you get later on are pretty cool but i feel like the Recon classes sniper shot and the placeable mines are the two most useful abilities combined with the sentry guns. The sniper shot lets you take out patroling enemies that haven't spotted you, mines you can just place down to keep command points on cooldown because an enemy will likely march into it, die and give you a bit of respite in a pinch or at least take at least one enemy out until it respawns.

The game has classes but the Sergeant and the Medic mostly just provide passive bonuses to morale and healing respectively. The Sarge also has an ability that freezes the stress level of your squad for a few seconds which can be useful but mostly you keep them around so they can raise your Command Point cap and maybe strengthen morale with some passive buffs. All marines can be equipped with extra pouches for ammo, medical and technical supplies so bringing a Techie with you is only useful if you plan on opening optional doors. Which you can also do if you give a marine the perk "Smartass" which gives them the ability to hack doors without being a Techie. There are some really weird decisions here that i do not understand tbh.

I would say that healing and recovering from Trauma are the two things that in Medium Difficulty were really no problem at all. Like.... barely comes up and even sticks around.

The tl;dr: It's a great game. Fantastic even. I very much recommend it to people who enjoy odd RTS games or are fans of the franchise. It has some things where i go "why is it like that, this is weird/stupid", but overall i had a REALLY good time with the game and enjoyed blasting through it. Easy a 4/5

This game is short. Less than a few hours and you may find that even those three hours are meager in terms of entertainment. If this is not good enough, wait for a sale.

I didn't feel very threatened by Charles at any time. Most often when on foot, but even then i just hid in a house and waited him out. On the train you just hit the gas and unload. It's very basic, which you could call the whole game. Makes sense as the dev team is *really* small.

The voice acting is actually fantastic which surprised me the most. The story is so-so. I read a few people find its surprisingly deep and i am unsure where that notion even comes from.

Get it if you are okay with all of that. It's not a bad game but there could be a lot more IMO and i hope Two Star gets to do a followup with more budget.

This game lets you do some pretty good truckin', i recommend it.

Devs are also super cool folks

I enjoyed my time with HotF. I finished it last night and will dive into it again because i wanna see how much the game allows me to deviate and see some more scenes.

The writing is really good. Especially in the beginning, combined with the atmospheric sounds, music and abstract art, you get a really good feeling of the scene to the point where i wanna analyse the text more to improve my own writing. A very ASMR experience there.

I like the game mechanics too, but i am a bit unsure about stuff like spiritual/analytical being dropped once you find your Auspice. It feels like the more you progress, the less polish you get, scenes feel more rushed and less immersive. I'd almost say the parts before your First Change are more interesting than the parts afterwards and i think that is also partially that i am just so hard into WtA that all the "you are a cub and need to prove yourself" feels rote.

The setting is great. I didn't know about the real life events that inspired the story, but it was a good starter for it.
The decisions you make throughout the story are often hard to gauge and depends a lot on what kind of person you think/want Maia to be. I am actually curious to play Ahroun Full On Rage Maia in my next playthrough and see where it goes.

Anyway, Different Tales gave me 3 enchanted hours. What more can i really ask for than "May i have more?"

I got to be a racoon that puked on the floor, this is amazing.

I am having way too much fun with this game.

Elite is the kind of game that starts on a slow burn but the more you play, the more it opens up and the more stuff you can do. It's great!

Built my first colony back when it wasn't yet on Steam. Now i played it again and had a pretty nice colony going. I even fended off a pirate attack of 10 attackers but then my colony attacked a beaver horde and died of infection and madness because so many loved ones died.

I definitely recommend this game for anyone who looks for a Dwarf Fortress experience, but wants a decent HUD.

Now if Rimworld would allow me to build on several levels, that would be cool.