Recent reviews by LtKillPuppy

As far as I am concerned, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is the best RTS game, ever. Originally Cavedog Entertainment created a game called Total Annihilation. At the time it was considered the best RTS game, ever. Chris Taylor later left Cavedog to form his own studio and worked on a spiritual successor to his best-selling TA game.

It's hard to describe to today's generation what SupCom was like when it first came out. It was the first triple-A title that really utilized dual-core (and above) systems; In an era where you had to force most games to run on a single CPU lest they crash, SupCom adored it, loved it, reveled in it. It would drive the top-end system into the ground with its rich, lush graphics and absolutely enormous battles.

It's also the first game that I can recall which specifically had built-in support for multi-display. One monitor could show you the ground fight, and on the second monitor you could either have a different camera view or a scaled-up map view.

There are too many things to list which were innovated in this game. Here's a by-no-means exhaustive list:

* First game to really show what multi-core computers could do with gigantic 1000+ unit battles.

* First pure simulation grand scale RTS, with no RPG-like dice rolls. If a mega-gun launches a projectile at you, you can dodge it if your unit is fast enough and you are good enough at microing. Every missile and bullet is simulated when it leaves the barrel. This made the game a micro-lover's dream.

* First game to support multi-monitor, allowing you to configure each display as you want.

* First use of a wide-scale camera. You could zoom all the way out to 30k altitude and view the battle as a series of stategic icons, or zoom all the way in and watch each individual shell land on the enemy.

* First use of "zoom at where I'm looking" smart camera. Seriously, I wish more people would utilize this mechanic. In most RTS games you had to keep your hands on the keyboard at all times despite the game being 90% mouse driven, just so you could move the camera around. But in SupCom, they made it so when the camera zooms in, it focuses on the point where your cursor is situated. This makes for an incredibly smooth playing experience, where you feel like you have total control over your view of the battle field.

* First RTS where indirect fire is a critical aspect of gameplay. Most units can actually launch projectiles or shells at least 10% further range or so outside of their radar detection range. Other units which had wider radar detection ranges could be coupled with indirect-fire units to maximize your effectiveness. Early scout units were always useful because of this. SupCom was never a case of "build unit X until you win" sort of game, against competent players you had to have a mix.

* Innovative resource system inherited from TA which leads to very intense economy management. Instead of buying units for a fixed cost from a fixed pool of "money," you deal with resources in a producing/consumed sliding scale. This meant that build order was the king, particularly at the beginning of the game, and you had to be careful with how you spent your resources. Your factories would never refuse to build a unit if your resource production level was low; They would just take more and more time. Conversely, if you over-produced but didn't consume enough, you were likely wasting materials and giving an advantage of the enemy who might not be so frugal. Because of this, each match is a constant tweaking of your economy. You had both mass (used for building) and energy (used for powering things) to keep track of.

* Wreckage. Yeah, it's there just to look cool, but it also contains mass which can be reclaimed. Build a mega-unit and send it to the enemy base and -- oh no, it dies! Now, not only did you lose your chance, but you've just given the enemy a huge economy boost. You really had to think about sending in the heavies, as it was possible to give aid to the enemy just by your failures alone.

* Stealth mechanic which allowed you to coordinate sneak attacks and all kinds of fun assassin-style missions against the opponent. One of the three factions is geared towards stealth play. (Cybrans forever!)

* AMAZING control over what your factories and units can do. Want to have a master factory and 6 others which mirror what it does? Doable! Want to have a certain factory to exit a unit and then have it automatically patrol a particular route? Doable! Want to edit patrol paths once they are defined? No problem! Smart engineer units which automatically assist or reclaim wreckage? Ayup!

* Adjacency economy boosting system. Factories placed near power sources get a reduction in their power consumption. But they also get mass-cost reductions when placed near mass sources. This meant you were always search for the most optimal building configuration to maximize your economy, usually altered by the terrain.

* Upgradable commander unit. SupCom had a single powerful hero unit which could be upgraded via research to give it extra abilities. Most of these abilities were mutually exclusive, so you had to think about what approach you would take.

* Pretty decent single-player campaign that's entertaining and fun to replay as different factions. It's no Starcraft in that regard but I think it's held up fairly well.

* (Sadly no longer applicable.) Very active eSports community, with frequent and entertaining matches. Game supports a built-in replay mechanism which allows you to watch matches with ease.

* Tons of really awesome mods which expanded the life of the game, such as Sorian AI (which fixed the fairly braindead default AI) and Black Ops (adds a ton of new units).

* SupCom:FA adds to the already excellent SupCom by introducing a new single player campaign, new experimental units, all new maps, and a new faction (which admittedly, was kinda broken and way overpowered until the bugs were patched out).


Seriously, this game was amazing. A LOT of thought went into its design and implementation. SupCom: FA literally ruined all other RTS games for me. I cannot play them without thinking, "Gee, I wish I was playing SC:FA instead." And then I boot the game up again and take on

RUNNING WITH RIFLES, otherwise known as RWR (and therefore shall be called such during this review) is a semi-RTS fast-paced action combat game with multiplayer. I was initially intrigued about this game because it looked like it could be a spirtual successor to the Amiga game called Cannon Fodder. If you are not familiar with it, it was also a semi-RTS fast-paced combat action game.

Well, aside from the fact you are given command of soldiers during the act of war, the two games have nothing in common. I had hoped to find a game similar to Cannon Fodder with multiplayer, and RWR isn't that, but it isn't why I am giving this game a No recommendation.

There are three factions. They are the Greenbelts (US Army), Brownpants (Soviet Red Army) and Graycollars (German Wehrmacht).

The essense of my problems with this game are minor, but once you add them all up, it really knocks me out of the zone of enjoyment. I want to point out that I only played the co-op campaign map with a friend. We did not try versus mode, which I have no interest in.

To summarize:

* Little sense of progress.

* Some of the early campaign levels are a lot of fun, but later ones are huge slogs.

* Terrible final campaign levels which completely invert the style of gameplay you are taught during the majority of the game. (Why do so many developers succumb to this temptation?)

* Simplistic UI.

* Terrible 3rd person aiming cursor.

That's the LT;DR version of my review. Let me address each of the items in detail.


*** Little sense of progress ***

You have a character level, which the game expresses as an army rank which goes up as you gain XP. You gain XP by killing enemies and capturing territories. This level is used to unlock more weapons and more squad mates that you can recruit to fight for you, and when you die you lose XP.

The issue with this is that you unlock all of the weapons available to your faction fairly early. After that, as far as I can tell, levels and XP become meaningless.

Initially you do not have access to the other faction's weapons, but you can collect and sell enemy weapons in order to "unlock" them.

Unfortunately, this means that you only have access to it for 4 real-life hours. After that, the weapon is removed from your Armory. To regain it, you have to capture more.

This is frustrating. You lose all sense of progress in the campaign when weapons start to disappear. I had great fun hunting down the enemies and stealing their weaponry, but later the game decides to force me to do that all over again. I eventually stopped caring about having the biggest arsenal of weaponry and only bothered unlocking two useful guns and ignored the rest.

I was told by a developer that I should just "buy extra stock of a gun when available" which I feel is totally missing the point of progression. When money is easy to gather in this game, and I have unlimited stockpiling ability -- Why not just give me the weapon forever in the campaign, instead of forcing me to unlock it again every 4 hours?

You can find special weapons in the game, which only last for as long as you can stay alive. They drop when you die and will disappear within 90 seconds. If you die repeatedly (due to whacky enemy spawning, which I cover below), you will lose these special weapons.

So the two progression mechanics the game gives you -- XP/rank gain and weaponry gain -- are fairly hollow and not at all satisfying.


*** War of attrition ***

The early levels in the campaign are misleading. The capture mechanic is easy. You just need a certain amount of your own soldiers near the objective in order to capture it. In the early campaigns this isn't too difficult, because there are natural choke points in order to funnel the AI soldiers.

Later maps, however, lack these points and the weakness of the game's spawning system comes into terribly light.

Parts of the map which aren't your color have a chance to spawn enemy soldiers. That's reasonable, and it isn't too much of a problem when you have plenty of friendly AI soldiers around, but later in the game it appears the friendly AI spawn rate gets throttled. Like, seriously throttled. To the point where it will just be you, alone, walking around in enemy territory.

Enemies are allowed to spawn anywhere within an occupied tile (that isn't onscreen). This means you will commonly fight your way behind enemy lines, engage a bunch of troops and then retreat the way you came -- Only to run into enemy troops that spawned when you had the camera facing the opposite direction! This is immensely frustrating and you feel like you make no progress when engaging the enemy alone.

You can gather friendly AI units and take them into enemy territory, but they are too fragile and if you all die, you will spawn near the enemy territory without back up due to the greatly throttled spawning.

To make matters worse, the AI Commander will direct your forces to conflicting regions. You will be ordered to capture region A, only to go there and capture it and be told to capture region B -- which is where you just came from! This goes back and forth, and coupled with the throttled spawning makes for a very slow war of attrition which is just no fun at all later in the game.

This leads me to...


*** Terrible final levels ***

The first mission of the final level drops you in enemy territory with no backup. You have just one spawn truck, one Armory and one stash. They are located in the far top corner of the map, and you will be re-spawning at this location a lot. Even if you use the spawn truck, you will often be forced to spawn at this point simply because the enemy will advance close enough to prevent truck spawning.

There's no AI Commander. You are given just one objective, and that is to "destroy something something" in the enemy territory. The messages pop up and disappear so regularly, that I missed my objective. There are no map indicators on where to go. I eventually fought my way to all of the radio towers and smashed them, but the level would not proceed and at this point I just gave up.


*** Simplistic UI ***

Too many to cover here, so we're back to bullet lists.

* No indicator showing which is your currently selected weapon. In the heat of battle, it's easy to fire a rare high-damage weapon off into space by accident.

* No damage indicator, nor any indication of what killed you or where it came from. You will often get sniped offscreen by enemy soldiers which spawned behind you.

* No real reload indicator. Your ammo count is shown in the lower left hand corner of the screen, far away from the action. You can reload at any time, but the reload animation will be quietly cancelled by some of your actions (such as vaulting walls). Firing your gun when empty has a click sound, but it's too quiet in the midst of battle. Also your speed is cut when reloading, so you don't want to just keep whacking the R key.

* Lack of minimap or orientation system, which means you tend to get disoriented in levels with the same terrain.


*** Poor aiming cursor ***

The aiming cursor has a red dot which indicates you are on target, then it also has a very small gray plus symbol to show where the bullet will land. It's VERY hard to see this second cursor, and so you will miss shots a lot. Why didn't they just combine the red dot and the plus cursor?

The aiming system seems to be tied to where your player model's weapon is facing. If you quickly switch to an anti-vehicle weapon and fire it before your character has completely shouldered it, the round will just fly off up into space. (Because your character had the weapon pointed upwards when unslinging it.)


*** Conclusion ***

Maybe buy it when its on sale for a few dollars, you might get a few hours enjoyment out of it, but I recommend skipping this game. It was a disappointment.

I bought this a while ago when it was on sale for really cheap.

Almost a year later, I finally got time to sit down and try it out.

Okay, the tutorials are kinda stupid. I have to repeat the same basic "this is how to drive forward 50 feet" tutorial multiple times for different train types? "Here's how signals" work without any explanation of how to use the routing map or read signals remotely. And so on. Alright, bad tutorials but I will just dive right in.

After completing a bunch of tutorials, I was pumped. Woo, gonna just pick a train and drive it somewhere! Wait, I have to select from a handful of trains, on just a handful of routes? Wait, you mean I only got like %1 of the game that I paid $45 (minus sale discount) for?

No steam locomotives provided out of the box? Well, game has DLC, let me go see how much they cost. Twenty bucks for a single loco? What does a new route cost? FORTY BUCKS?

I then look at the Steam DLC page for this game.

FIVE THOUSAND AND FOUR HUNDRED BUCKS FOR ALL THE DLC?!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

This game had a lot of promise but it appears to be completely abandoned by its creators.

It is semi-playable in its current state, but you will eventually hit pathfinding or job-queue related issues which will grind the game to a halt (or send your FPS into single-digits). There are some work-arounds to the bugs, but you will constantly have to utilize these as they haven't been fixed and likely won't be.

Do not recommend. Maybe pick it up when it's less than the cost of a taco or something, as it's enjoyable for a few hours until you hit one of the aforementioned bugs. However, personally I wish I hadn't bought it as it just makes me sad to see what could have been an awesome game, end up in the trash bin.

My short review? If you are a pixel artist who likes uncluttered and straightforward tools, then Aseprite is perfect for you!

I'm no Ptoing or Arnold (in fact, I'm nowhere near close to that level of talent), but I do create a lot of pixel art and I've been using Aseprite for years with both my games and my pixel art. Don't let my hours on Steam fool you.

I used to be a fan of Cosmigo's ProMotion -- which is a near-direct recreation of the Amiga art program called Deluxe Paint. All of my serious heavy-duty pixel'n was done in ProMotion. But in the last few years, I've switched completely to Aesprite.

And every time there is a new release, I find even less reason to use anything else. The addition of new tools such as tiled edit mode and gradient define (plus paint with gradient) are turning ASE into quite a joyful art program to use.

If you are serious about pixel art and want something that doesn't play around and focuses purely on pixel art, then what are you waiting for?

Also: I want to give a shout out to all of the Allegro crew!

Huh. I read a lot of the reviews and they are universally positive. After seeing the screenshots, the game looks quite interesting. The UI looks clunky, and the graphics aren't that good, but I was willing to give it a shot.

And I gotta tell you, this game lost me pretty quick.

The UI is worse than clunky: It is downright incomprehensible at times, and is a serious of confusing beveled rectangles that are sometimes buttons, sometimes radio controls and other times just static text.

I had to alt-tab out of the game and look up hints on the forum on what to do or how to manipulate the UI, and these hints were sometimes very vague. The graphics are jarring and mismatched, as if six different styles of art were crammed together. (Or six different artists worked on the game.) The audio is not very good, with the same 30 second sea sound effect looped over and over. The build mode is clunky and difficult to figure out; Creating just a simple craft required several hours of tweaking and messing about.

The missions are many and varied, but at times it's impossible to figure out what you are supposed to be doing due to the minimal mission-objective UI. Building the right sort of craft to complete each mission takes a while (due to aforementioned tweaking) and I lost patience trying to win each scenerio.

The controls are atrocious. It uses a lot of none-standard, none-intuitative key binds for critical functions, and it's difficult to play the game on a laptop because of this.

There's a lot of depth to this game (ha!), considering how many building parts there and how they can be linked together to make all kinds of vehicles, but it's really just not very playable or enjoyable game to me. Which is weird, because I read the reviews and people are absolutely raving about this game. But to me. From the Depths feels like a very early prototype game, a proof-of-concept that needs a LOT of shine and polish before I would have considered it a public alpha.

I wish Steam let me rate a game using something more expressive than a binary yay/nay system. If it did, I would give the game a 5.5 stars out of 10.

It's Civ V with some new stuff, set in space. That really about sums up my feelings for Beyond Earth. It's not a bad game. If you like Civilization V then you will like BE, particularly if you have an affinity for science fiction. It plays so much like Civ V that if you are familiar with that game then you will have little trouble adapting.

That is what Beyond Earth is. What it is not, is a sequel or re-imaging of Alpha Centauri. If you were expecting an update to that classic game, then I fear you will be disappointed.

My only real big complaint about the game so far is that the setting feels somewhat bland and lifeless. You land on a new planet, and bam you're off to cranking out turn after turn. There is a back story to the game, and explanation of all the various ideologies that filter through the various technological and social choices, but it's all buried the Civilopedia. The other factions that you encounter all blend together and most don't stand out. In that manner, the game feels somewhat chore-like, as if the devs churned it out without much interest or care. BE lacks the colorful depictions of civilization leaders; Everyone looks and acts the same, and the voice acting is component but not paritcularly engaging.

I find that odd compared to the mind-blowing teaser trailer, which really set my expectations high for the game's presentation and story. Expectations which were not met in the least. In fact, overall, I feel a bit underwhelmed by Beyond Earth.

Firaxis had the chance to deliver a game that was as ground-breaking as Alpha Centauri, yet they decided to play it safe with releasing a game that feels more an expansion to Civ V instead of a totally new game.

I recommend waiting for a sale. (Or I guess you could get nerve stapled and buy it at full price without complaint...)

ARGH. Darkout frustrates me. So. Much.

Is it frustrating to play? OH YES. But that isn't what frustrates me. No, what makes me gnash my teeth is that in the grim and filthy world of Darkout, there's a little gem trying to shine its way into existence. At the heart, Darkout is a Terraria-like crafting action game. The platforming action is so-so. It's not as polished as I would desire, but it's workable.

There's crafting, and that's well done. Your crafting devices are even smart enough to pull materials from nearby chests, which something every damned Minecraft-y game should copy. Right now. (Really, why do I have to juggle around 20+ items in and out of my inventory just to build a few things?)

Crafting progression is.. Odd. It's tied to tech level (which controls overall access to receipes), but tech level is independant for each class of item. For example, I could have tech level 2 armor but tech level 4 tools. It's not entirely obvious how these tech levels work together for progression, and it becomes even more complicated when some items or component receipes won't unlock until you either have their base materials available or their base components. The game does not give you a list, but fills in the blanks as you figure things out. Which means it can be frustrating unless you want to pour over the (sometimes incomplete/outdated) wiki to figure out how to build something.

Worse, some items are locked to quest progression. You won't get the component or the receipe until you've triggered a certain quest. And this is where the game basically makes me want to eat my keyboard.

The story quest is broken. Simply BROKEN. And horribly designed. No other way to put it. Items refuse to drop, or spawn. Eventually, you can get the game to spawn the needed items by generating new worlds and exploring them, since like Terraria your character is easily transferred between worlds. It's never clear exactly why you can't proceed in a quest either; There are THREE different places to look in order to determine quest progression. I kid you not. Three different indicators across two different UI screens. Even so, these hints are vague and often don't point to the real cause as to why you cannot progress.

I've given up trying to beat the story quests. Maybe it's doable, with hours upon hours of careful combing and re-loading of games and generating new worlds in order to re-comb them for the necessary item drops, but screw that.

I had fun building my character so he could fly and have laser-guns and chop down trees with a plasma-cutter, but once I tried to actually beat the game, I realized it was totally not worth my time.

Do not recommend this game, even for $4 that I paid for it.

Pity, too, because the game looks rather nice and has an art style other than 8-bit retro, which seems like Every Damn Other crafting game has decided to copy.

Don't recommend. Maybe it will get better as the EA progresses, but so far I found myself binge playing this game once then putting it down and never picking it back up again.

Why? Is it a bad game? No. But neither is a very engrossing game. There really isn't much here that's new and unique. It features a few small touches that are intriguing (such as the wearable holographic mini-map that must be filled in by manual scanning), but largely none of these made me really feel all that engaged.

The art and presentation is fine, if bland. Only real complaint I had was that the high-rez, high-saturation pixel art made it hard to figure out what is an actual user interface element and what are just little visual doodads that serve no purpose. But you learn quickly enough what is clickable and what isn't, so it's not like it prevents you from playing the game. It's just a style I don't particularly care for in a game. (Starbound had the same issue, though it featured low-rez pixel art.)

The trailer showed all kinds of nifty items, such as lasers, flying ships, etc. But after seven hours of play, I had nothing to show for my time save the same standard progression of items that you find in these games. I had yet to craft anything that was cool and exciting; All I saw in my future was an ever-progressing grind. Replacing my copper items with iron, and so on. I'm sure I'd get flying laser ships eventually but the incentive isn't there for me to try, particularly when you die very far away from your spawn and must back-track quite a long way to recover your items -- Without even a marker to indicate where you died. A lot of work for too little reward, IMHO.

Crafting is okay, and like that it's implemented via a list. (Though it's annoying that you cannot mass open or close categories.)

I think this has signs of life (pun!) but for now I would recommend you wait.

Frustrating, tedious, hard. Sometimes SPAZ makes me want to eat my keyboard at times.

Yet I come back to it. Why? Why? Why?

Update: The frustration outweighed the fun, finally. I stopped coming back to this game. Too grindy later in the game.

Actually, I know why. The game doesn't have the most balanced mechanics, nor does the difficulty ramp up all that smoothly (more like, brick-walls on you if you aren't careful). But it's a 2D space combat simulator with a teeny little bit of RPG tossed in for good measure and a heavy exploration element, and by God's Bones, they dun make games like this no more.

There's lots of ships to unlock and lots of goodies to toss onto said ships, so at least if you feel bored using one sort of build you can swap it for another.

If you put in lots of hours in games like StarControl, Escape Velocity: Nova, StarFlight and Solar Winds, then buy SPAZ and enjoy it. If you have no idea what any of those games are, then you might want to pass. Then again, it's on sale at times for just a few bucks, so what do you have to lose? Aside from a few bucks.

Pros:

* Nobody makes these kinds of games anymore, OH WAIT, they did!
* Lots of ships and weapons/upgrades to discover.
* Big universe to explore.
* Nice visuals and sound effects.

Cons:

* Big universe to explore. Becomes tedious after a while since systems must be unlocked one at a time.
* Chunky and slow during big space battles, especially later in the game with lots of ______'s flying about spewing chunks. (*Spoilers!)
* Space battles can end up near-stalemate battles of attrition, which take a long time to resolve.
* Less story-telling versus games like EV:Nova, etc.