Recent reviews by Pat (ty cake)

This is one of my favorite games of all time. I have so many fond memories of this game, and I'd recommend it to anyone. They tried to make a Door Kickers 2, but it fell very short of this original. The weapons choices, descriptions, units, their specializations, and art design are all outstanding. This game was an absolute joy to play through, so I think you should do the same.

I think Door Kickers 1 was a masterpiece and I would recommend it to anyone, but Door Kickers 2 is underwhelming. The difficulty feels artificial, your weapons choices are incredibly limited and are confusing, and the campaign isn't conducive to improving your skills as you go, which I'm sure will be very frustrating to a newcomer. Throw all of the money you can at Door Kickers, but wait to buy Door Kickers 2 until you can compare the experience of the first game to the second.

Mini Motorways is all about trying to reduce traffic however possible. You're constantly battling the clock while you try to connect newly constructed houses and businesses and fight the unpreventable traffic. It's really fun to try to use all of the highway bypasses, tunnels, bridges, and roundabouts (even though it seems like there's never enough of any of them) to desperately improve things. There's plenty of strategies and plenty of hours of fun in this game. It's a good sequel to Mini Metro, which was somewhat one-dimensional by comparison. Both are very unique and will hold a special place in my Steam library.

While it says "15 hours," it's really something like 45 because so much time can be spent playing without even opening the game. One person plays the game and translates information from the bomb to the expert, the person with the online manual.
I made a print copy of the manual in a three-ring binder with dry-erase sheet covers and coded bookmarks so that I could be as fast as possible to tell a defuser what they needed to know. I used to stay up for hours on end defusing bombs in the KTANE Discord group. It takes some getting used to, but I fell in love with the optimization of the communication, problem-solving, and use of the manual. If you play this game long enough, you get to the point where you need to have two or three experts for one bomb, and that's when it really gets fun. I highly recommend this to anyone, even if you're not a big gamer! It's a great party game, too!

DEFCON is super fun. At the time of this review, I've player 29 hours, which is roughly equal to 24 matches over the years. This game forces you to understand and adapt to complicated strategies and develop confusing and clever approaches. One of the reasons it's so difficult is that all of your units, your territory, everything, is so vulnerable. If you make a mistake, you will pay a big price for that mistake. And even if you think you have it in the bag, there's still time to be surprised. If it were cheaper than $10, I would recommend it to all of my friends.

112 Operator is one of my favorite games. The predecessor, 911 Operator, set the bar for the sequel very high, and fortunately it delivered more than 911 Operator did. It added a lot of form and a lot of function. I was impressed by the uniqueness of 911 Operator, but I found myself just as impress when I started play 112.
I love setting up all of the units before the shift, figuring out the hotspots in the city for certain calls, and trying to maintain a network of units that can respond to everything in time. One thing is for sure: your plan will always fall apart. The thrill of solving so many issues at once and being rewarded or punished for them is so specific to this game series and it's made me come back looking for it many times.
The developers also clearly care about the community, as the Charity Masks DLC shows, they use proceeds to pay for current emergency crises like COVID or Ukraine. They seem to listen and the DLCs (even though I don't own all of them) are great additions. I think 112 Operator needs to be in most people's libraries, even if it's just to make them respect first responders and dispatchers more!

911 Operator is one of my favorite games of all time. It's incredibly unique, satisfying, and rewarding. If you like strategy games, you'll LOVE this one.
It's so much fun to prioritize which units you want to go to which calls because of their equipment or specialty, and it's so much fun to fix everything when all of your plans fall apart—which they always do. You need this game.

I loved Spintires (legacy Mudrunner, predecessors of Snowrunner) and found the same boyish glee of trudging through the mud and water, tipping and flipping big military trucks over accidentally, winching up hillsides by the trees, taking punishing "shortcuts" I thought would save time, and working toward amassing a fleet of overpowered vehicles in Snowrunner as I did Spintires, and then some.
I love this game, but it is slow-paced. I like strategy games and city builders as well as all of those super fast-paced FPS games, so I can sit here and hold the accelerator as I move 6 MPH through the tough snowy parts, and I'm not just mindlessly holding the gas. I'm wigglin my wheel, too. But my wife is still confused after my 120+ hours why I enjoy this game.
The variety of vehicles is practically insane, you have to work very hard to achieve the goals in this game, everything takes almost forever, and I find myself obsessing over unrealistic optimization of my trips and overburdening myself. But you don't have to do that, though, and you also don't have to try to complete every mission. But, that's how I like to play it. I like to 100% the areas, even if it burns me out. This game will burn you out if you're not patient and don't like big trucks and equipment and stuff, but I eat it up. If you can, you should absolutely try this game out and see how fast your first 5 hours go by!

Multiwinia is a surprisingly complex strategy game. It sucked me in when I first bought it many years ago and it did it again a month back when it got me addicted for the second time. I've spent a lot of time sending squads of my Multiwinians into battle, many of which went unfavorably. They march out to capture spawn points, capture points, carry giant statues for score, repair and refuel rockets, and more. There's plenty of game modes and the AI give it enough variability in singleplayer to learn the basics, but eventually stomp the AI on hard difficulty once you have it down.
I really wish that more people played this game. Currently, only a handful do. It never got the recognition it deserved and once you sit down and play the game you'll find out why. I'm amazed at what these developers have been able to create with a handful of gameplay mechanics. It's truly an impressive and fun game. And if you can get friends online to play, too, I would expect for there to be weeks of fulfilling strategizing. You might wait for it to go on sale though before you try to convince them to buy it, too, because it is a tough sell due to the poor promotion.

Super fun, addictive, engaging, and it can be as challenging as you want it to be. When you work towards a certain move set and route and finally land it, it's really satisfying.