Recent reviews by Technopop

First off, this is just amazing. Get it without hesitation. It's fantastic to share this with others if you can rig up your sound and video to a screen a group can watch and hear. My stomach has been sore from laughing at these clowns', I mean, my friends' reaction to it. If you're a developer reading this, please make more. I will pay.

Keep in mind this is not family friendly. Definite bonus.

This is the first time I'm cried while playing a game. You become one with your favorite songs and it's so beautiful. By altering the difficulty and the song genre you can go from fighting off a furious techno-rave attack (Try Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat by Fatboy Slim on hard) to commanding the heavens (try playing the Cocteau Twins or a shoegaze band). The game describes each song as a "ride." This is totally accurate.

My mind is blown and my body is sore. 10/10.

Edit: I play this game every day and have lost 20 pounds and feel great.

It's pretty. It's repetetive. It's pretty repetetive.

At its core, the game has a lot of potential. What they've given us is a universe filled with a bunch of the same stuff over and over. It's a visually pleasing single person sandbox minus the creative elements.

The big picture: It's a $20 concept of game at best. I will be VERY surprised if anyone plays this game thinking they got their money's worth. If you're tempted to get this, save your money for now and just go play the Spore series. It's much more satisfying and you can create your own universe instead tiptoeing through someone else's.

My advice to anyone even thinking of buying this game is to keep a timer going. Make sure you don't exceed two hours so you can get your money back. What you've done in two hours is pretty much all you'll be doing the rest of the game. Don't get conned like most of us were.

This game is warm and wonderful and mysterious and comforting to play. It's like playing a romantic thriller movie. This leads me to a point on the price vs content. Yes, it's rather short. Expect to spend $4 an hour if you play through it once. When you go to the movies, you pay $6-$8 per hour. Yes there are games that will give you more bang for your buck, but this one is solid.

My only gripe is that you are forced to play a character to which you may (if you're a straight, white male) or may not relate to (if you're not a SWM). With the narrative, there's really no way around this. And yes, I know it's not uncommon to play someone of the opposite gender and gay people are often forced into playing a straight character, and it ends up working, though not as it was intended. Gaming audiences are diverse and experiences will differ based on who we as gamers are.

This game is intimate between man and woman. You're asked to make choices based on the gender and sexuality of the main character. Do I respond how I would respond as me or do I respond as my interpretation of the main character would respond? There's a disconnect there that's becoming less and less frequent in gaming, especially within the RPG realm. I wouldn't really say this is an RPG, but since it is first person, you get the feeling that you should be the main character. So it's a little step backwards in that aspect.

I'm not whining. I'm just making an observation I would hope is seen by developers. This is a very entertaining game and worth the price.

This is what you expected (hoped?) SimCity 5 to be like. Cities: Skylines is a must-have for city building and simulation fans. One major thing to mention is that you end up having to deal with traffic and traffic flow. Most of the time this adds a whole other dimension to the game. Sometimes it gets to be a bit taxing, but the more you do it, the more you understand about what it takes to deal with major multi-lane freeway intersections and exits. It's fascinating.

The land available in SimCity 5 was a joke. Do not fear this in Cities: Skyline. As your city grows, you are able to expand your already large plot into adjacent plots and the borders are seamless. You can make several smaller cities linked by highways and transportation or combine them to make huge cities. A fun part of this is is that you get to play with the highway exits and intersections on their own out in open without disrupting your existing cities.

A huge added bonus is the amount of items and mods available in the Steam Workshop. This adds another level of creativity onto a game that focuses on creativity. The game is a delight.

It's basically Diablo meets Clash of Clans meets Dungeon Keeper with a bit of Little Big Planet thrown in. Instead of protecting your castle and loot with cannons and turrets, you're protecting your keep by building your own castle and populating it with monsters and traps. Unlike Clash of Clans, you can attack other castles as often as you'd like. There's no annoying time delay while waiting for your minions to be created or your buildings to be built. If you like games that allow you to express your creativity, you should check this out. My biggest complaint is that you have to validate your castle by running through it after any session of changes no matter how small. It's necessary to test the results of your changes, but it gets monotonous running your own castle over and over.

Pros:
- Solid game with a great sense of humor
- Lots of customization. You get to design your castle and decide how you want to spend your loot. Better traps? Better gear? More powerful minions? And if so, which minions? I've run through a castle with very easy to kill minions and then got to the end only to find a nasty sniper/archer who almost one-shotted me. Some minions also have various powers from which to choose.
- Does level design interest you? You'll definitely like this since you're basically designing (and testing) for half the game.
- You can rate other castles and get rated/get feedback
- There are various competitions going on all the time and they give you more to do than just build and attack
- There are lots of castles designed by devs rather than players
- You can watch replays of your attackers invading your castle.
- It's free. If you want more character classes, skins or boosts, you pay. Payment seems to be optional enough to play the game without paying. I haven't paid yet but probably will to support the game.

Cons
- Validating your own castle over and over can get taxing. It's often a necessary evil though.
- The castle building interface can be a bit clunky. Example: To rotate a minion or trap you have to select the rotate tool and then the item to rotate it. If you select the item first and then the rotate tool, the item becomes deselected. Why can I just not hit R to rotate the selected item?
- You can select the aggro area of each monster. This is great at first, but if you move the monster, the aggro area stays the same. So if you set a minion to attack the area in front of it and then later move it to face the opposite direction, you also need to change the aggro area so the minion doesn't attack what is only behind it now. The aggro area should reset when the minion is rotated.
- Killing an attacker is tough. If it's going to happen, you normally need to have your minions in a big group to stun and do damage all at one. The result of this fault is that castle creator might tend to leave the beginning of their castles empty and then fill a room at the end with everything they can possibly throw at you at once. It can get predictable. To overcome this you need AoE spells. I assume that for this reason almost all classes I see are mages.

This has been a go-to game for me for years. It's a bit dated but it's a wonderful sandbox full of creative potential. You can build coasters and other fun rides and then actually ride them in your park. Expect this: The lack of an undo button (except when building coasters, THANK GOD) can get frustrating, especially for beginners. Still worth it. This never bores me.

This game is definitely worth your time if you like strategy and/or the CCG genre. The tutorial and PvE campaigns do a great job of easing you into the game without spoon feeding you. Just when you think you've nailed down your strategy, they introduce you to new styles of playing that force you to rethink what you were doing previously.

It's nicely competitive. I actually find myself talking to my screen (in either glorious victory or miserable defeat). I tend to shy away from PvP in most games but they do a nice job here of encouraging PvP with increased rewards and making it a condition to move on to the next campaign.

I've found it relatively easy to build my collection without spending money but I'll probably end up buying in because the game is fun and I don't mind rewarding developers for a job well done.

Godus is a very engaging and relaxing game. It's very difficult to stop playing and full of surprises!