Recent reviews by [LdD] Coz

A fun clicker that can keep you engaged for hours. Hope they implement a "future" era in the... errr... future. I'm a sucker for lasers...

Can be played with one hand... in fact, only one finger.

Vampire Survivors is for those of us who like twiddling a thumbstick after a long day at work while reminiscing of simpler times...

It gets my "Sit back and relax" award for 2022!

Yet another brilliant piece of programming done by one person. The Creeper World series keeps getting better and better with every game. Most of the time the strategy for defeating the Creeper threat involves building/shoring up your own defences, then going on the offensive by either completely outbuilding/bombarding the Creeper or turtling away at it. It's like any classic RTS in that regard, and I'm fine with that. Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the CW series is definately my go-to strategy game if I want to chill a bit without attempting to break APM records.

Most likely the best "dwarven space miner" themed game around... not that there are many others. DRG is one of the best co-op titles out there at the moment. There is always time for one more dig. ROCK AND STONE!!!

Ah, good old AoE II, aka "Abort other Errands Part Deux", now gloriously "remangled"! That takeaway dinner you just thought you'd get after purchasing this game on a fabulous Friday evening? Forget it! Girlfriend wants you to go out with her to "socialise"? Fuggedit! You really, REALLY need that bathroom break after those two 18" pizzas you ate for lunch? NOPE! FUGGEDABBOUDIT! Being attacked by three different nations that all want your sorry excuse for a castle to crumble to dust is now your full time job. Sorry man/woman/perbeing from another planet... you're hooked now.

Forts is basically a gamified version of what the last 20 or so pages of my middle school notebook looked like back in the day.
Have a good time creating a fort that you believe is inpenetrable and then see it destroy everything in its path, or crumble to pieces in an explosive, flaming inferno...

Killing Zeds with your friends doesn't get much better than this.

This is a surprisingly addictive game. I fire it up once in a while when I have a minute or two, but end up playing it far longer than intended.

"Appropriately minimalistic" comes to mind when trying to describe Furious Angels, but as each battle intensifies, the carnage and explosions become increasingly satisfying to behold.

Like the original... BUT IN HD!!! :D

Wait, you haven't played a Serious Sam title before? Then stop reading this terrible excuse of a review and get it... naaaao!

For even more fun, get a bunch of friends or "not quite" enemies together and have a blast at cooperatively killing hordes of invading alien scum!

Wow! It's been a while since I've played an isometric shooter similar to (and at the same time being as good as) Brigador. When I first saw this game on my "games to keep an eye on" radar, I instantly thought of GT Interactive's Bedlam from waaaaaay back in '96. So, I finally got around to buying it, and it took me a little time to "settle in", as it were, but since then I've become addicted! After having played Brigador for a few hours, I must say... YES! FINALLY!

I've always thought isometric shooters/brawlers that are set to this scale are really cool if they stick to and expand upon the genre-defining gameplay mechanics that can make these games so much fun to play.

First of which (in my mind) is fully destructable environments(!). Acknowledging that every on-screen asset can be smashed, crushed, vaporised or blown into even smaller pixels gives one a great deal of satisfaction! King of the Monsters, the aforementioned Bedlam, a little sprinkling of Mech Commander 2 and the somewhat recent Kaiju-A-GoGo have all given me a similar feeling gameplay wise. Visually, these games are nowhere near the same level of detail as Brigador (obviously), since most of these titles are quite dated in this day and age. It's just more proof that the current number of games in this somewhat niche genre is sorely lacking, unfortunately.

Second most important (IMHO); a fully fleshed-out world with unique locales/scenery/whatnot (that you will, again, inevitably destroy along the way... muahahahaha!).

Brigador has all of this, en masse! The campaign is reasonably long and with a decent storyline. There's also endless mayhem to be had playing in freelance mode, earning money from missions that you can then spend on customising your mech, a-grav or tracked vehicle. Choose pilots (each with their own interesting bio), primary and secondary weapons, defensive loadout, mission area(s) and you're good to go! Then there's the soundtrack... I'm a sound designer/engineer by trade, so... someone restrain me before I write another paragraph of text.

Critique? Personally, I have none with Brigador (I may be biased). It has lived up to and gone beyond my expectations for something I purchased during this years winter sale. I cannot deny that I read other reviews and comments about the control scheme being "unintuitive" before I bought it. As I mentioned earlier, I freely admit that it took me a few minutes to get used to movement and firing in Brigador, even after having tried every configuration available in the setup menu coupled together with my brains vast mech gaming experience that has been accumulating in my cranium since the early 80's. I ended up going back to using the default control scheme, as I believe one should really try playing a game the way the developer intends it to be played. It shouldn't take long before you are effectively stomping around Solo Nobre in your deathmachine and blasting OpFor into bite-size chunks.