Recent reviews by Maddieface

I got Humankind out of the Humble Monthly. I want to like this game a lot more than I do. I don't think it's horrible, and a lot of the ideas in it are very cool and interesting in concept (and sometimes even in execution), but the overall end result feels like kind of a mess.

I'll start with some positives. Humankind took the opening phase of the Civ experience and made it actually really interesting and engaging. You're not settling a city on turn one, you're moving around a big tribe of hunter gatherers, foraging for food, hunting animals, discovering things, and growing your tribe. It's novel, it's fun, and it means you get to actually scout out the map a bit before you make decisions about where to settle. Big thumbs up here.

When you do come time to settle, there's some innovation here as well. You set up an outpost to begin with (costing an increasing amount of the game's Influence resource the more you have), which claims a territory (Humankind divides its map into territories as an intermediate step between continents and individual hexes) but doesn't inherently give you a place to build and develop. You need to expand it to a city to do that, which again costs influence past the first one. But you can also leave it just as an outpost for a bit if you don't want to spend the influence, or alternatively attach it to an adjacent city so that it can work the tiles there too. It's a refreshing alternative to the "spam cities every x tiles" dynamic Civ tends to fall into.

Unfortunately most of the mechanics in Humankind don't come together as neatly.

Strategic resources are a requirement for various buildings and units. You need copper, or horses, or iron, or what have you to build them. Each has a certain required amount, and if you have insufficient access the build time is increased; if you have none, you can't build it at all. It's a nice idea, but it runs into execution problems really quickly. In one game I played my entire continent only had a couple of sources of Copper, and one of my opponents grabbed both early on. This locked me out of a variety of units and buildings. What I hadn't expected was that once I got access to Iron, the copper requirement wasn't lifted. I could build later iron requirement units but not the earlier copper ones.

This might not sound like a huge problem as the iron units are ultimately stronger, but they're also more expensive in terms of production time. There's a building chain that reduces production time that's clearly meant to offset this as you go up the tech tree... but you need to build the chain in order. And the first one requires... yep, you guessed it, copper. Ultimately the game put me in a situation where huge chunks of the building tree were offlimits to me due to a lack of a resource that I had no recourse but warfare to get, but which also put me at an immense disadvantage for said warfare.

Speaking of warfare, Humankind uses a system of grievances and war support to model it. You have to pick a set of demands to enforce (which are generated as options by your opponent's actions) and then you can go to war. If one side runs out of war support, their opponent can enforce all their demands. It's a neat idea, but again the execution is underwhelming. I fought a lengthy war with my copper hoarding nemesis during which I repeatedly destroyed his forces, but I ultimately lost due to my war support tanking. It's not that the game doesn't tell you why your support is dropping, but it doesn't explain why those things are being weighted the way they are or what to do about it, and it's frustrating.

My last major gripe is a lot more subjective, but it definitely contributed to killing my interest. Unlike in Civ, you don't pick a nation at the start; instead you choose a culture on first advancing age, and then can choose a new one on each subsequent age. There's an option to keep your current one, but it's very much presented as a high risk high reward play and the default assumption is clearly that you'll keep changing them. I can see how for some people this is pretty enjoyable, but it just contributed to a lack of attachment to my civilisation. Going from being the Zhou Chinese to suddenly being the Achaemenid Persians, and then the Medieval Franks feels really weird. I'd have liked it more if the culture choices were restricted a bit to make them at least have to be cultures that regularly interacted with each other.

There's other things I could go into here; the UI in general is kind of bizarre, giving you either too much or not enough information and never quite the right amount (the start of turn notifications for instance have two settings, completely minimised or a constant string of large popups that need to be individually dismissed). There's no minimap for some reason. But in general this game just feels like a big swing and a miss, and while there's a lot of potential here I don't think they're going to realise it if they haven't done so in the three years since release.

As a postscript I'm going to strongly recommend anyone who is looking for a Civ alternative to go try Old World instead, which I've been nothing but impressed with.

No I'm not going to learn to do mandatory parrying, thank you. Dodging was good enough for Dark Souls and Bloodborne and I don't know why you've decided it isn't good enough for you.

Given the shortage of big boob VNs out there I had high hopes for this, especially given the price tag. It did not live up.

tldr, protagonist is an unlikeable dumb mediocre creeper who somehow ends up being the object of desire for a cavalcade of incredibly sexy women despite his complete lack of any redeeming features. There's nominally some kind of fantasy storyline going on in the background but whatever merits that has is let down by the fact that it's clearly just a vehicle to get him from one betitted lady to another.

If you want a big boob centred VN with a protagonist you don't want to actively stab to death with a fork, go get Time Tenshi; the whole series combined cost less than this game. If you just want graphic big boob sex scenes, go on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ or botcomics where you'll get infinitely better value for money. This is not worth $20 AUD, let alone the absurd $65 AUD they're charging for it.

If you enjoy the hacking mechanic you'll probably enjoy this DLC. I didn't enjoy it, neither clearly did a lot of other players, and the end result is that it's a frustrating, constantly nagging mechanic that you can't switch off without disabling the whole DLC (which is what I now do). Every other TBS or 4x I've seen has given you the option to opt out of whatever "spying" type mechanic they have if you don't enjoy it, either by not pursuing it or automating it, but Endless Space for whatever reason didn't do this; you can't automate hacking, and ignoring it leads to endless (ha!) "YOU COULD BE HACKING THINGS" reminders each turn that drive you mad and don't seem to be on the notifications list to turn off.

The DLC adds some other things but the added race is all about the hacking mechanic anyway so if you don't like hacking you won't like the Umbral Choir, and the cloaking mechanic while cool is not remotely worth the frustration of being told I could be hacking things every damn turn as though I care in any way.

Buy this if you want to, but realise you're gambling on whether a single new mechanic resonates with you or not, and if it doesn't you'll probably end up disabling the whole DLC.

This review previously stated that the game was fun but the multiple game breaking bugs were unacceptable, and that I'd change the review if they were patched. Well, the devs have done their bit so I'm going to keep my word. If you don't want to support games that were released in a broken state even after they're fixed, that's your call to make, and this certainly qualifies as one, but I'm just going to review it on its current merits.

Chimera Squad is a fun little side game in the XCOM universe (the Firaxis one), canonically following a victory in XCOM2. If you've played XCOM Apocalypse, the setting feels similar; it's one single postwar city that's struggling to integrate the human survivors with the remnants of the invasion (in this case, the servant alien species who're now stuck on Earth). In terms of the gameplay focus though it quickly establishes itself as its own game.

A lot of the strategic mapmode functionality from the previous games is gone; you're not operating a worldwide military force, you're functioning more as a SWAT team trying to stop the city from collapsing into anarchy over tensions between human and alien fringe elements. You have a base you can produce, manage, research (kinda) and equip items between squads, as well as using a map of the city to manage unrest. There's a fair bit of functionality to the city map but in practice I think most of it feels kind of shallow and you're usually going to have a clear best course of action at any given time rather than weighing costs and benefits. That's a shame, but hardly crippling.

The plot so far (I'd guess I'm about 75% of the way through, before whatever the reveal is) isn't bad. It's not the best thing I've ever seen in a game but it's perfectly serviceable. Where the game shines is in two other, related areas. First, worldbuilding. You'll hear radio messages, news reports, and so on as you go through that really paint a picture of what postwar City 31 would feel like to live in; it's very show not tell and I absolutely live for that kind of thing. The second area the game excels in is the characterisation of your squad. Unlike previous XCOM games you've got a preset bunch of characters (humans, hybrids, and aliens) all of whom have their own skillset and personality. There's different chatter in missions from different characters, conversations between missions, and even some chatter based on ingame interactions (I had one technician send her GREMLIN to support another, who responded "SO MANY GREMLINS!" and I had to chuckle).

Tactical gameplaywise... it's a Firaxis XCOM title. If you've played one you know what to expect, and if you haven't there's a wealth of information out there that'll inform you better than I can do here. The one thing I'll note as a difference is Breach Mode. Each mission is divided into between one and three sections, and you'll get to start each section by positioning your squad amongst various entry points then storming in and potentially dropping a few enemies before they can retaliate. Having played with it a bit I think in practice it's not as meaningful as it could have been and there's easy optimal plays to make, but it's flavorful and fun.

With the latest patch the game is stable, with all the genuinely gamebreaking bugs I found seemingly resolved (and I tested a bit before updating this), but there's still a few quirks; for instance occasionally enemies will stop in place through their movement, then seemingly teleport to their endpoint. None of them are particularly serious in my opinion but they are there and there's definitely room for some more polish.

Overall I'd say Chimera Squad is a worthwhile purchase, so long as you're prepared for the fact its smaller in scope than its predecessors; XCOM 3 this is not. If you approach it with that mindset though you'll find a game with a lot of charm and some pretty fun tactical combat.

♥♥♥♥♥♥ save system completely kills any interest I had in this game. Avoid until the devs stop pandering to "hardcore" tryhards to the complete exclusion of anyone else. Would refund if I hadn't got this from Humble. Such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disappointment.

I really, really want to like this game. But I don't. It does a lot right but the things it does wrong it does very very wrong.

So, the good parts. It's effectively a 2D Platformer crossed with a MOBA, and it does the 2D Platformer element well. Very well actually. I've played a fair few MOBAs and I've found this to be one of the most fast paced and fun in terms of its core gameplay.

The selection of characters is good; there's a good number and they're significantly different from each other. They're unlocked gradually as you gain levels but you gain levels pretty quickly; I think I unlocked all of them before I stopped playing. Each character has a few abilities, each of which have a selection of upgrades; you pick a few of those upgrades to be available for you to purchase at the start of each game, so effectively it's a means of customising your upgrade path. There's no item buying in the sense of DotA or League of Legends, but this upgrade customisation sort of takes the place of it. It's simpler but given the nature of the game I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily.

On that note, there's no "experience" as such, just a gold gain (it's called something else rather than gold but I forget what so I'm calling it gold). There's gold pickups on the map, plus bonuses from killing minions and enemy players; gold drops on the ground and you have to physically grab it. A little unnecessary but not a big deal. Gold also determines your character level, based on how much gold you've gathered your level increases.

And here's where the problems begin. They are twofold.

Firstly, there's a severe snowballing effect. Not only do you gain gold from kills and such, you lose it from deaths. So if another player kills you, you end up doubly behind relative to that player; they have more gold than they did and you have less gold than you did. Unlike most other MOBAs, gold is the only real measure of progress; if you have earned more gold you are ahead, because there's no experience as a second currency. I'm really not sure if levels in Awesomenauts actually make you stronger in and of themselves; I've felt more powerful than lower level characters and weaker than higher level characters but that could easily just be the fact they've bought fewer/more upgrades with their lower/higher gold. I don't know. But regardless, there's a bit of a slippery slope where if you get behind you tend to get more behind from there.

This isn't an insurmountable problem in and of itself; DotA has much the same issue of gold loss on death and by and large it deals with it ok. It's a bigger problem here for a few reasons. Firstly, the teams are smaller; one player being behind is a bigger drain on the team as a whole. Secondly, the games are shorter; there's less time to make a comeback. And finally, the second of my big problems with Awesomenauts.

The game does not wait for full teams before starting a match.

This one just bewilders me. I cannot understand why they would do this, but they have. Empty spots are filled with bots but they're bots and they'll never be on par with a real player. If the game launches, and you're the one player on Team B while Team A is full (and boy oh boy has that happened a lot to me) you're kind of screwed. You have three players gunning for you because you're the actual threat and two bots on your team who'll run around doing their own thing and only broadly helping; if anything they're just going to feed more gold to your opponents.

So you're going to die. A lot. And it's not going to get better; another player will join your team partway through, but you're already behind by that point so even if they stick around you're probably going to lose. And they usually won't stick around.

This wouldn't be gamebreaking if it was the exception, but it isn't. It's the rule. I've rarely seen a game start with three players a side, or get three players a side early enough to be reasonably even. I've rarely seen a team win with a 2v3 start. I've NEVER seen a team win with a 1v3 start. It's that bad.

And this just makes me so angry, because this game has so much potential but it squanders it with this idiotic matchmaking mechanic. I cannot fathom what they were thinking.

So yeah, I can't recommend this until and unless they fix that.