Recent reviews by Rookwood

Incredibly written story that would hold up whether this was a video game or not. Very relevant to our modern time and something everyone should play at least once. Modern day Dostoevsky.

Art is great, although I find myself wishing we got some panoramas or vistas with it. Essentially, I just wish there was more of it, but the writing fills the gap and then some.

The music is also excellent and never ceases to be perfectly evocative of the emotions this game is trying to tap into. Play this game if you want to feel something.

Can't recommend it enough. 👍👍

A fun little strategy game where you roleplay as an oil baron without all the psychopathy.

Each round is satisfying and engaging as you strive to get as much oil out of the ground as possible and sell it at the highest price. In between rounds, you'll use your profits to buy upgrades for your oil extraction and storage tools and eventually shares. Shares represent the win condition for the campaign as you seek to acquire a majority stake in the town to become mayor. Strategy and challenge ramp up over the course of a campaign as you unlock new upgrades and oil becomes more difficult to extract. Maximizing your profits and then spending them wisely will be the keys to success. I found this dynamic to be fun and rewarding.

Sound effects, music and art all accompany the gameplay nicely, definitely capturing a mood of the Old West about to turn New West. UI works nicely and I did not encounter any bugs.

The expansion for this game hones the gameplay and balance that saw some mechanics be a little underwhelming in the original campaign. Definitely worth picking up if you enjoy the base game.

Overall, I'd give this game a B, a solid game worth your time if it sounds interesting.

The management aspects of this game get tedious quickly. There's little in the way of interesting decision-making or creative problem solving. I am a dozen hours into this game and already bored of it. Maybe it gets better after a few more and the game opens up, but frankly this game isn't complex to warrant this long of an introductory stage.

You have your basic diagnostic rooms that every hospital needs. You add those until you are able to service the demand of patients then you build treatment rooms as new diseases are discovered, all while hiring staff to service the rooms as you expand. There are multiple hospitals, basically levels, to play but every one pretty much plays out similarly while maybe having a disease that is unique to the area. They could have easily made a single tutorial hospital that briefly showcased every disease and room available. Then succeeding hospitals could have had interesting scenarios that upped the challenge. However, it really seems like they are trying to pad out the content by making every room a grind to unlock, basically requiring you to restart a new hospital to unlock each one.

The game also suffers from a difficulty problem. At no point was I ever in danger of running out of money. I just hired staff as necessary, promoted them whenever it came up and built rooms as I needed. I was rolling in dough, so in that sense it suffers from a Cities: Skylines-like lack of difficulty that makes strategic decisions feel rather arbitrary. Unlike Cities: Skylines however, this game has none of the creative process of designing your own little city. Designing your hospital is much more boring and you pretty much have a selection of rooms to choose from that you will ultimately end up building the same way every time... Draw out your rectangular room, usually by just matching the minimum tile requirements, add the necessary machines for the room, add some decorations to build up the "prestige level" of the room and boom, you're done. Hospital layout seems to be completely irrelevant as well because patients will just wander the hospital willy-nilly while waiting for appointments.

Finally, there's the meta level concept of your healthcare corporation, which owns all your hospitals. This is probably the most compelling part of the game, building up each of your hospitals to bolster your share price, collect stars, and such, but ultimately, as I said, each hospital plays out the same so it again feels tedious. Keep in mind I only played this game 12 hours.

The humor in this game is a miss for me as well. A little too cornball with the diseases and treatments. The radio announcer guy was just weird enough to pique my interest though.

Overall, I'd grade this game a D, remedial time-waster at best.

A great game with a good community. Weekly updates keep the game fresh and evolving. Not your typical gaming experience, but if you're looking for a game where you can enjoy cooperative gameplay with random strangers, this is probably the best game out there right now.

EDIT: I'll update this for 2022. The dev hasn't added content in over a year and the year before that he spent it mostly making controversial balance changes. The game just isn't what it used to be. I can't recommend it to new players as a result. It is still a unique game though.

A solid RTS that can be played effectively with a controller.

The story is excellent and touches on topics of class, power, and capitalism, the setting is heavily based on the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the characters are anthropomorphic animals a la Redwall. That combination works brilliantly.

The objectives for each mission are varied and become progressively more difficult. You'll need to come up with some odd strategies to get all of the heroic objectives. The later missions will unfortunately feel highly based on RNG because the game procedurally generates every map, especially if you are going for heroic objectives. At the same time this makes the game feel less tedious because every map provides new challenges.

Multiplayer is available and is fun as well. This is not a competitive game though. The skill ceiling is fairly low and the community is very small. You will run into the same players often. Still it is enjoyable to play a few games, which are usually less than 15 minutes. Queue times are usually less than a minute.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it and if the setting or RTS genre interests you, you should pick it up.