Recent reviews by Jack Attack NZ

An amazing game for those who love automation.

These impressions are after 5 hours of playtime. My video impressions review is available here.

Click here to view this review with images.[docs.google.com]


Renowned Explorers by Abbey Games is an adventure strategy game set in a fictitious 19th century where the aim is to become the most famous adventurer! A playthrough in RE consists of your team embarking on 5 expeditions, upgrading your team, and gathering renown to beat your rival, the French clown, Rivaleux.

I’ve played the tutorial twice, and in my second playthrough we were defeated during the final mission. I would expect a playthrough to be between 3 - 5 hours, but this game can be replayed due to randomised encounters and a large variety of ways to adapt your team.


A game starts with you picking your team of three characters. Each character has unique skills, traits, abilities, stats. I didn’t pay too much attention to the numbers, but I now understand the implications of skills from playing the game, so would spend more time creating a team that suits my tastes. The great thing the game does is recommend crew members from a given character. There are 20 characters to pick from.

Characters will affect how well suited the entire crew is for different attitudes, so it is worth explaining the mood system the game uses.


When you have selected your team you are sent to your first expedition on an island which serves as a tutorial. The tutorial does a great job at covering everything, and is about 30 minutes long (each expedition is generally longer due to the rising difficulty).

Your team has two major resources, resolve and supplies. Run out of supplies and your team with have major issues. Run out of resolve and you lose the game!

You move around the island, much like a board game, and each ‘stop’ on the map may have different outcomes.

• You may find some resources
  
• You may need to pick a team member to handle a situation (think events in FTL). Each character’s chances are shown for success, and the game does a great job of explaining the breakdown of the chance, plus all the possible outcomes. A dice is rolled for the outcome based off the chances.
  
• You may have an encounter (which is their term for a battle).

Encounters are playing on a grid battlefield (think XCOM) using a variety of skills (each character has an skill for each mood to begin with). Each battle has a dominant attitude (based off the number of attacks you used of each type) which may give you greater rewards or change the way an encounter plays out. For example, if you were dealing with some aggressive locals, being friendly with them might encourage them to spread the word about you afterwards.

As you move around the map you gather tokens that are cashed in for certain resources after the mission. There are also extra special tokens which give bigger bonuses. These resources are:

• Gold - Which is used to buy items in shops.
  
• Status (reputation) - Which is used to acquire an Entourage, which can give your team bonuses (like more resources from tokens). Also used to upgrade shops.
  
• Research - Used to unlock technologies (similar approach is the Policy tree in Civilization V).
  
• Insight - Used to get more of the above resources.

After completing an expedition, you are returned to the world map where you can spend your resources, upgrade your crew, and gain your bearings for the next expedition. Different stores are available to spend your resources, and new stores are added depending on which expeditions are taken.

There are still a few other mechanics (like character leveling) but I believe this highlights all major features of the game.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game, here are a collection of my thoughts on why:

- The game is very satisfying, as you built up your massive collection of tokens on your expedition to cash in later. It helps you feel like you have achieved something on your quest.
- The game universe is fun and creative (think Indiana Jones + Tintin).
- Beautiful artwork for a very diverse set of characters and locations.
- Nice music to set the scene.
- It seems impossible to unlock everything in one playthrough. For example, I only unlocked 8 out of 36 possible research items, so there are many strategies to try.
- Variety of expedition locations to take, with it’s events being procedurally generated. You probably could visit all the locations in 2 - 3 playthroughs, but it’s nice to see it’s not the same places every time.
- Game can be played with save/load states, or in ironman mode where all decisions are final.
- Game has great help/reference guide.


- It can be frustrating if all your random rolls fail (but there are upgrades to help this).
- Mood system can take a while to figure out (but it's worth it).
- Each location is essentially the same if you strip away it’s character. Though I do feel like that character is enough to make each location interesting and different (think how in FTL that sectors were different types, and while they were basically the same it does still influence your decisions and the situations you encounter there).
- Some simple UI features missing, like end turn once all characters have taken their actions.
- A playthrough can be quite short at 3 - 5 hours.


I was thoroughly impressed with Renowned Explorers. It has been great fun to play, and surprising with how easy it was to get into, but also contain a lot of depth at the same time. Also it is great value for it’s release price if the game interests you. A solid 4 out of 5 stars from me (possibly 4 ½ with more playtime and UI fixes).

★★★★☆

If you have any questions or comments, you can tweet me on Twitter at @JackAttackNZ

Out There provides a unique experience of surviving the elements and fighting with loneliness in outer space. There is no combat, it’s you against the environment. Strong story elements tie this game together with choices that matter, gorgeous art, high replayability, and management mechanics.


This review is written with 8 hours in the PC version (2 hours in beta and 6 hours in full release), plus another 2 hours on the mobile version. I've avoided any major story spoilers.



I've been producing a let's play series which covers my playthroughs of Out There. Episodes 1 and 2 are from the beta, while episodes 3 onwards are from the full Steam release.

Episode 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5tITImtLEE&list=PLgrLUq0pLmj1iBl3vGWixW31fnR5WexIi&index=1
This video (ep. 8) shows the starting cinematic at the start of the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQR_-GS_CS8&list=PLgrLUq0pLmj1iBl3vGWixW31fnR5WexIi&index=8

Feel free to tweet me @JackAttackNZ questions about the game or feedback for this review.

Edit: Formatting fixed.

Darkest Dungeon blew all my expectations away. Here is a quick summary to why I love playing it:

+ This game oozes theme and style. The aesthetic look and music really matches the gothic dungeon crawler nature.
+ Gameplay mechanics that fit with the game's theme. Relating to the point above, but this game has great smaller mechanics that fit very well together like the stress system of seeing the horrors of the night. The torch mechanic, allowing you to burn up your torches to make things easier or let them burn down for a tougher challenge but greater rewards is great. But what if you run out of torches? Well then you are definitely in for a tough time.
+ Varied characters and classes. Loads of variety here in both combat and camping skills that create charaters with purpose.
+ Loads of content for an early access release. This is what early access should be: I've played 4 hours and I've only defeated the first boss out of nine. There is three areas to explore with two more on the way (I presume for the full release). I've only seen one bug, which was incorrect text and it wasn't gamebreaking at all, and has already been patched.
+ Lots of player choice. This game is tough, everything goes wrong, but is still a lot of choice available to the player as they explore.

This game is exactly my type of game: A game where there is tough choices (like XCOM), short rougelike missions (like Rouge Legacy/Binding of Issac), but have lasting effects and purpose over a longer campaign (like XCOM and Rouge Legacy again).

One point to note:
- This is not a negative, but there is a lot of random generation involved for if you hit or miss, if you do 4 or 7 damage, etc. Some players may not enjoy that aspect, I love it as it creates unique experience and amusing moments when my
occultist healer does more bleeding damage than he healed.

From the start you can see that this game has a lot of love and polish put into it. Every day over the past week, I have always been excited to return to Darkest Dungeon. Highly recommended by me, I'll keep updating the review if something comes up, and when it is fully released.

If you wish to see dungeon gameplay, here is an episode part way through my Darkest Dungeon series that starts with dungeon crawling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFWyMhQYjeM

I've been playing the final build this over the weekend and had a blast playing 4 player local multiplayer. It's a lot harder than I thought as you usually screen cheat to get a general idea of where a player is, but because everyone is constantly invisible (unless they fire) you need to keep track of a lot more!

They have a great game mode called 'One Shot' where everyone only has a one shot gun and can only reload once everyone has fired their shots or a timer runs out (on memory was about 20-30 seconds) so it's a lot more tense. Other game modes like Murder Mystery, Deathmatch and Hillcampers work great as well.

I really enjoyed playing this but I definitely enjoyed it more playing local multiplayer rather than online (you can actually do a combination of both: 2 local vs others online) so if you like local multiplayer games, I highly recommend this. Much fun shouting (and cheating) to be had!

Here is some gameplay footage of me playing with four friends, shows really well what the game can be like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75hCcQ7upKU&list=PLgrLUq0pLmj0Bc_IEyvKkMWKJQNu_drgD&index=1

An absolutely beautiful game that has a lot of love put into it. I've played quite a few hours now and have really enjoyed the bright colourful, great controls, and lovely story. If you love 3rd person platformers like Banjo Kazooie, check this game out! I have some gameplay of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx6KXZ1QdRA

I've played an hour of Mechanic Escape (video link below) and completed the first world (20 out of 80) levels and I can say this is a solid platforming game. The controls are tight, the graphics are wacky, some great level design in some places (some annoying designs in others) but overall this is a great platformer, especially for the price. The difficulty was ramping up nicely towards the end of the first world, supposedly the rest of the game gets pretty hard. If you enjoy platformers, this is worth every cent. You can watch my gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_w5aqVFwNw

For those who love an interesting narrative and playing games with friends, the Yawhg offers a unique experience that I have found to be very memborable. While the game can be played alone controlling multiple characters, it is best with friends. There are some very creative stories within this, that I definitely do not want to spoil. A wonderful soundtrack and gorgeous art complement the 'choose your own adventure' gameplay.

The biggest question for you will be is it worth the price? I have played the game four times now (roughly 30 minutes per playthrough) and have seen some repeated stories (but not always the same outcome!) but have enjoyed every time. The Steam release makes me want to play it again. For such a memborable experience, I say it's definitely worth the price. If you are unsure, how about check out the start of a playthrough (I have one linked below) but don't watch too much, as the best part of this game is experiencing it for yourself!

My friends and I filmed a whole playthrough of the Yawhg, the first episode is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1f9Ux33y2Q

Here is a video of impressions of the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYDYCdVEgc

This game surprised me with being quite simple to understand, yet still engaging and addictive. The core gameplay comprises of placing rooms, unit and time management. It also requires a bit of forward thinking, to make sure you don't get stuck in an economic situation you can't get out of.

There are three modes, normal (from the tablet version), zen mode (no enemies) and hard mode (I haven't beaten it yet, it's hard!). The crisp graphics and sound help to focus you on the gameplay. A couple of achievements are available, I unlocked most of them on normal mode.

Overall it's a pretty fun game, but the starting price might be a bit high for some people, so add it to your wishlist!

A super fun vehicle shooter that has a decent learning curve, but is very forgiving at the same time. Gorgeous maps, great range of weapons and game modes, this is one awesome shooter.

My video review is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiuBlJuC4qE