Recent reviews by Darkie

In solidarity to all my friends who are unable to buy or play this game due to Sony's shortsighted decision, I'll give this game a negative review.
This will change if the policy changes.

Probably my game of the year (though granted, I haven't played Elden Ring).

Seriously impressed by the amount of voice lines for the characters - serious attention to detail.

The combat is a very interesting blend of puzzle game, card battler (like Slay the Spire) and tactical strategy game. Overall there's a lot of clear XCOM DNA in there too, especially in the metagame (with research, the alternating base/mission pace, and generally likeable characters, also in the animation flair).

There are some performance bugs, but other reviews mention how to avoid those. I've only had one crash in my playthrough, which took around 78 hours.

In short: It's a very satisfying game that is still quite rough around the edges. It scratches that itch of wanting to clean something up, with a very nice atmosphere and satisfying mechanics.

Oddly enough, the game reminds me of old-school Doom:
You shoot up trash, you vacuum up what they drop, uncovering various MacGuffin's that work like keys to open up other ares of the level, eventually cleaning up the whole level and opening up the final door to go to the next level. It's also a satisfying shooter, but the trash doesn't shoot back this time.

It would be nice for the game to support higher framerates (currently it's locked at 60), and make an extra pass on the text - there are quite a few typos, especially in the tutorial level. The Australia map has quite a few invisible walls and makes you run around the map a few times, which is annoying. Otherwise, adding more content would be awesome!

Probably the best zombie survival game out there, and constantly getting better over time!

The mod support is part of why there's endless potential as well.

You never know what you're gonna reel in.

If you liked Shadow of Mordor, this is basically a greatly expanded upon sequel, especially in the area of movement and the nemesis system.

If you haven't played, it is a good idea to play Shadow of Mordor first, or you'll be a little lost in the story.

When it comes to the general criticism it has received about the microtransactions - yes, the game has microtransactions. No, you do not need them to get the "true ending" which is actually the normal ending. the 55 hours I've spent in the game was enough to get 100% of the single player elements done.

The EXP booster would have been useless, as I've hit max level before finishing the game. Loot boxes are not worth it since you can sacrifice the orcs from the packs for loot straight up. And the orcs are not necessary because if you're prolific about capturing the orcs you attack or are attacked by, you'll have more than you'll ever need.

What you might get microtransactions for, however, is the online element, which involves storming player forts asynchronously. These attacks are timed. Doing these sieges raises your online rank, which puts you up against forts from higher and higher ranked opponents. The other online element is avenging the death of other players - putting you in a standard mission to defeat the orc that defeated another player - while transporting you to their world, complete with their orcs and their orcs' memories. It gets kinda old pretty quickly, since none of the orcs you capture in those missions stay with you in your game, and if an orc has more than 2 kills, they are usually very difficult to deal with.

The story is a bit uninspired, but it flows well enough, and has some clever and emotional moments. The procedurally generated orcs and their stories are the main draw of the game, and it's what you will get most of your enjoyment out of.

Out of the trio of pixel art programs that I've used (GraphicsGale, PyxelEdit and Aseprite), Aseprite is definitely the easiest to get used to if you intend to do any animation. Gale is great usually but it can be a bit hard to get to grips with. PyxelEdit is great if you want to do tiling, but it's not very good for animation (no frame manipulation, movement, no cels).

On the other hand, Aseprite has all those things and more - it can open anything you can throw at it, it has a very intuitive timeline feature, it even has a fancy pixel-style interface.

It takes a little bit of getting used to, since the controls are quite a bit different than something like Photoshop (which Pyxel Edit's control system is based off of), but once you do get to grips with it, you can come up with complex animation in record time.

Here's a couple of examples I've made in it:
http://i.imgur.com/qtvMqn5.gif
http://i.imgur.com/5GU4hnZ.gif

Another great advantage is that the developer keeps a close eye on what people ask for and does a good job introducing well-tested new features regularly. You can opt into the beta program via Steam, and I recommend doing so, as it allows you to export your animations at larger scales without having to change the size beforehand.