Recent reviews by Tiny Subversions

This is my favorite game of the last few years.

I've always wanted a strategy game that feels like an action movie and could never figure out how to make it work -- I think Ground Shatter cracked the code here. I know it's kind of tired and has been covered a bunch but: this game combines Slay the Spire type roguelike deckbuilding with Into the Breach style every-tactical-move-you-make-is-important and it does it with style and depth. I play the daily challenges probably 4 times a week, and I find the base campaign game interesting enough to replay over and over.

This game has been in early access for a while, and usually when I play an early access title I get attached to some early build and then the further tweaks the devs make to it actually feel *worse* to me. But this game is an exception to that pattern: every tweak the devs make has made the game significantly more enjoyable for me!

My only complaints: I wish the animations were a little faster, and I wish the movie-playback mode was more robust. And the music is okay but I usually mute it and put on an old school jungle playlist.

Minor quibbles aside, I recommend this game incredibly highly to anyone who likes tactics games.

Best demo I've played in years. At the time of this writing I've put in 16 hours. I play daily and don't plan to stop until the full game comes out.

This is everything I ever wanted from a Yakuza game: zany side stories, gangster melodrama, and most importantly... no tedious beat-em-up fighting. Instead you fight using perfectly serviceable (and sometimes quite fun) turn-based RPG battles.

The other thing that's great is that this is a JRPG where the main characters are all 35-60 years old and figuring out the second or third act of their lives, instead of your usual 17-year-old-with-a-dream. Nothing wrong with the latter, but it's nice to play someone my own age in a game once in a while.

An utterly charming simulator that is complex enough to be interesting but simple enough to be relaxing. It made me nostalgic for London.

I'd say this game is kinda XCOM-lite -- the battles feel more like puzzles that need to be solved than your typical XCOM battle. I like the focus on characters with, well, character, and I really like the new breach and timeline systems. All that said, if you've ever beaten an XCOM game before, you should probably not play this on Normal difficulty (or at least Iron Man it on Normal). I found the game really easy on Normal, though still a ton of fun to just blow through everyone with my superpowered squad. It feels a little bit like Enemy Within towards the end of that game, except right from the start.

If you want an XCOM game, this is not for you, but if you want a light, interesting, and kinda buggy squad tactics game, Chimera Squad will do the trick.

This game is an incredible homage to the 1993 SNES strategy RPG "Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons". The game dumps you into a massive open world with plenty to do. There's a basic story and some overall goals but you set the pace yourself. Generally your options are: trade, fight, and explore. Trading is kind of a standard "trade wars" type thing so you probably won't 100% focus on that, but rather use it to fund your other ventures. Fighting consists of both sea battles and land battles. To give you a sense of how open this is: I'm on 11 hours of this game and so far haven't fought a single sea battle because I haven't felt like it. I'm focusing on exploring the map and sending landing parties out to explore mysterious ruins. The land battles are a really wonderful tactical turn-based affair with a really varied and fun job system. And the maps themselves are lovingly hand crafted; so many of the places you go have little secrets to uncover, but there's almost no tutorializing about it. You just have to try things that make sense: something in your way? Try burning it or cutting it. Something missing? See if you can repair it. Something out of reach? Maybe there's a skill you can invest in that will let you cover long distances.

This game is made with love, and it's been an absolute joy so far.

Finally, a game that actually captures the spirit and feeling of Jagged Alliance 2. Does it capture that feeling WELL? Not totally... but at least it tries. Allow me to explain:

A lot of games that claim to be in the JA2 spirit focus exclusively on the tactical combat but don't include much of a strategic overworld game and don't even try to include memorable characters. Vigilantes at least attempts all three.

Tactical Combat: C+. AI is almost hilariously bad but the battles are short and you can still have fun optimizing how fast you take everyone out. Controls and core concepts are good though.
Strategic Overworld: B+. Actually done pretty well. The UI is janky but scouting the map, taking over sectors, selecting missions, managing inventory, managing group healing are all good. My main complaint is I'd like more depth, but the breadth is there.
Memorable characters: C+. There are seven characters and you choose up to 4 for your primary squad at a time. They're mostly boilerplate, but they do have their own little story arcs. Nothing to write home about and I'll probably forget everything about them in a week but it was fun while it lasted and I did end up attached to Caia! The writing itself is... wildly variable, some of the story encounters are genuinely interesting, others made me cringe.

Overall though I'd say this is worth the price for a compact experience (finished in 9 hours on normal mode) that captures the spirit of a Jagged Alliance style game.

This game wonderfully combines tactical battles and roguelike exploration. I can't recommend it highly enough.