Recent reviews by Sueness

I'm sitting down to do school work IN ORDER TO play Rusty's Retirement. Game is a huge success in my life

This game has been a lot of fun. If you like Prison Architect type games, you'll like this too. It's not difficult to stabilize a mall creation, so you can play it like a chill idle game too. Not a lot of special events in the 8 hours, but I can see myself replaying this to pass time.

Risk of Rain is one of the best games made. This is a great update to the 10-year old game (wow!) that doesn't take away from the original. It definitely expands what it is. Whether you played it 10 years ago or you're just learning about it, it'll be fun!! Just buy it and play it!

Game is incredibly addictive. I come from playing games like Rimworld (resource management survival...). It reminds me a bit of the ol' Age of Empire games. You don't get to name and love individual pawns, but It is a really robust game. I played nearly nine hours straight on my first run through and regretted not starting sooner.

Strangerville is a gamepack I really enjoyed. The main quest is interesting and fun. Strangerville is a BEAUTIFUL place with a few lots you could live on... My favorite sims live in Sville, there are really cute items, especially if you like that sort of vintage-western-conspiracy style. Definitely do not regret getting this.

This is one of the better game packs to have. If you enjoy playing around families, seeing little ones, this is very sweet. The additional traits are fun and the added interactions will make you feel warm and fuzzy.

You have to know what you're getting into. If you REALLY liked sims 2, this is the closest thing to TS2 on the steam store. But it's not TS2. It doesn't quite have the same goofy heart, but it gets really close to it. There is still a lot to be desired if you spent a lot of hours on TS2. But it's not TS2. Read reviews for expansion packs before you buy them.

Only buy the game on sale. If you REALLY do like it, you WILL spend many hours on it. If not, it really won't be worth the money. Try to get multiple expansion packs if you're trying it the first time.

I got this game at about 9pm on Friday. By 9pm on Saturday, I logged 14 hours of game time and I got up Sunday morning to finish out a year in the game. So, thoughts 18 hours in:

The game isn't perfect yet but it is GREAT! I have a list of suggestions but it's not enough to stop me from recommending this game. I wrote about five aspects of the game that I thought was worth sharing. I will mention the games I've played in my review and make a lot of comparisons to them. If you've played and enjoyed these games too, you will hopefully really enjoy Rise to Ruins! Summary: someone who really likes these types of games made one that's REALLY fun.

1) Learning curve - R2R is a good mix of colony management (Rimworld), population management (Banished), and waves of hordes + defense strategies (Rimworld, Factorio) + a hint of divine magic (no precedent for me). The game this reminds me the most of Banished, and to be honest it's what I wished Banished was. The controls are a little more intuitive than that game. Anyway, if you've played these kinda of games before, the learning curve isn't too steep. I don't consider myself a brilliant gamer and I was able to survive a year on my third try on Traditional. I would even argue that the buildings/resources are a lot more simple and the game logic makes a lot of sense. It's been a lot of fun figuring things out, and I didn't have to google how to bulids or how to creates. If this genre of game is new to you, this would be a great one to start out.

2) AI and Pawns - I would disagree with many and say that the pawn AI is not terrible, it's actually forgiving. They do what you ask them to do. If you're struggling to meet resource/defense goals, it's really not the AI's fault - it's likely that your labor is not distributed well, or things aren't placed efficiently, or your building sequence isn't ideal. Are they stupid sometimes? Yes, I had a few walk straight into the corrupted land get murdered. However once I figured it out, things got built and pawns were fed. The pawns don't need micromanagement (Rimworld/The Sims :P) and as long as you give them a job, they contribute to the colony. R2R's focus is more on the building scale, but the AIs actually do the work, and it's actually fun to zoom in and watch them interact with each other and with their jobs. So fun!

3) Pacing/Time - The default speed of the game is horribly slow that I thought weeks had passed by the end of the first day. However, all of that time is precious because you need it to assess and build. The length of time made more sense to me by the end of the first spring, when the horde started to weigh on my colony more. I did need all that time to gather resources and build strategically. There is also seasonality involved (Rimworld) and aging (Banished), so you need to strategize on preserving resources (food and water) and keeping your pawns alive longterm. (But no need to build cemeteries! Phew..) This all has a turn-based strategy feel to it (although it's just single player) and I definitely bingep-layed thinking, "one more day," "one more season."

HINT: Rations need meat *and* vegetables. =) That one I did have to google. Build your kitchen, farm, animal pens all close to each other!

4) Constraints and Challenges - The main objective is to survive, but there is a clear advantage to taking claim of more land and defending it well. This reminds me a bit of Starcraft in that, you're in a small map with an opponent with limited resources. The horde spawns from the opponent's real estate, so expanding strategically will buy time and make defense a lot easier. There is a limited number but a lot of 'maps' available in the game, and I think Wilderock is an easy one to start because it's basically split in half by water and resources. Anyway, as mentioned in the beginning, population and resource management, along with building defenses will be the challenges. Once you get a sense of how to interact with corrupted land, you can even reclaim land and control their expansion as well. I still have some figuring out to do on that end, but I'm hooked!

Finally, 5) Magic / Progress Saving - Most of the games I've mentioned, all of your progress is basically limited to one colony and savefile. What's different about R2R is that there's a profile that you can save all of your progress on, and you can gain bonuses on that profile that apply to your current and future colonies. There's a list of achievements and rewards that you can achieve on your profile, too, so I will sink a lot more hours to get those. In-game, you have magical powers (with basically a mana pool) that you can use to aid or torment your pawns. The spells are limited but all useful. The magical element definitely feels immersive- your pawns freak out a lot when you use magic (not great) but you can directly help them. It's really fun.

I can't say this replaces any of the games I mentioned above, because they're all so different (maybe except Banished, sorry...) - so R2R definitely rises up to the list of my favorite games! Thanks for creating this!!

I recommend this game but with the caution that you should understand what grinding means in this world. I've played rpgs where I just farmed endlessly just to level up or just to get a weird achievement. It was time consuming, but I knew what I was doing, roughly how long it'd take, and what the end reward was. I really enjoyed Stardew Valley and its constraints and expectations. I love these sorts of games and to an extent I enjoy grinding too.

In this game, there are a lot of parts to kits. A lot of different workstations that produce specific things, and the specific things come from other specific places. You can buy or acquire these specific ingredients to other specific things from specific people, who may or may not appear on specific days. But there is no 'shortcut' to get to point B, when you don't have the ingredients XYZA', and you end up spending game time literally running around to figure out what the parts are, and how you acquire them.

So that's the "grind." Not a single repetitive action, not the same day over and over, but the convoluted ~figuring out~ you have to do in order to progress through the game. This is kinda fun - the game is very well fleshed out, graphics are excellent, flavor text is fun -- all of this only makes you appreciate how beautiful the game is. But it just takes a long time to realize that what you have in your small inventory isn't what you need to create [Workstation A], which you need in order to make [Item], which you need to create [Workstation B] .... and you've lost a whole day.

Thankfully there are a lot of quests and no time limit. You could say ♥♥♥♥ everything and just do whatever you want to do, ignore all NPCs, and just live your farm life or whatever you'd want. ...... But that doesn't change the fact that you need to find [Item] that you need to build [Workstation] which would produce [Item] that is an ingredient of [Item 2] etc.

That's my biggest turn off- I can't enjoy this game without having a guide open, because I just don't want to waste time going to [Workstation] to figure out I need [Items], and while I'm writing that down, the GAME TIME PASSES! and now it's the end of the day, I missed going to see [NPC], so I have to wait a whole game week. But I have plenty of other things to do to pass the game time.

Yes, the game time passes when you have your inventory open! :( I know that there's no time limit or constraint, but I don't want to be penalized for reading flavor text in a casual game. :(

So- objectively I would recommend this game.... But the frustration I've written above is enough to make this game a big turnoff for me. I might give it another try later, but 6 hours in, this game has gotten less and less fun to play.

If you were to purchase 1 of the 3 Princess Maker series, choose this one. Refine's quality is amazing, the PM2 game itself is very well done. You really feel like an active part of your daughter's life. There's a lot of replayability that you could leave up to chance, your decision making, or follow guides to get the perfect achievement.

The only flaw with this Steam game is, the achievements aren't in sync - I got achievements for things I haven't quite done yet! But the game is more important to me than Steam things- so not a problem for me.