Recent reviews by Ol' Mudboot

After a strong start, Nodebuster overstays its welcome by forcing you to purchase a long series of skill nodes which do nothing.

The first half of the game has you uncovering a fairly large tree, and there always seems to be something to buy after coming back from a run of massacring floating shapes, with new levels introducing new enemy types. Bosses drop a special currency which at first is spent on chunky upgrades, but is soon only spent to increment across an empty area of the tree to a final node you pour your main currency in to for the credit roll. By this time you will have such a glut of money that the tree is completely purchased, long after new enemies have stopped showing up. I no longer had to move the cursor to annihilate everything on screen, and there were no more skillful decisions to make or new systems to explore.

I had beaten the game, but the designer felt the need to extend its playtime arbitrarily, which is a real shame because the several bucks you'll spend is well worth the first couple of hours.

I wish Steam had a more nuanced score system than GOOD or BAD; the game is neat but deeply flawed in a way that spoils the overall experience.

The game spends the first several hours constantly interrupting you with tutorial popups informing you of all the systems, but none of that matters due to how easy it is to walk over enemies. The characters hype up bosses that are killed in two hits to their weak points, and there's no need to engage with the turn delay system or repositioning your squads to take advantage of bonus gauges because fights end sooner if you just deal attack damage.

You produce better squads if you have higher relationships with the girls, and you level up your base by releasing squad members (children) out into the wild. Relationship growth seems to be limited because you can only engage with 3 relationship events before you need to run a dungeon, but nothing stops you from going into the first room of a dungeon and then immediately hopping out again to refresh the 3 event limit. You can just discard your children immediately to level the city; it doesn't matter if you feed it a level 1 or a level 15 child.

Boring dungeon crawls. Boring combat. The classes of your kids and girlfriends all feel the same because you never have to use their abilities to overcome any great obstacles. I don't feel like I'm planning ahead or strategically creating synergy between my units. The girls are all standard personality archetypes. Good voice actresses, but no surprises in the writing.

Mediocre as a game and as a story.

Recommended if you know what you're getting in to: an exploration-themed beat 'em up, NOT a World of Warcraft or Diablo clone.

Wayfinder is chock full of hidden caves, scenic vistas, and simple puzzles for players who like to wander off the beaten path. Dungeons are compact and filled with events, traps, and secret switches, modifiable by spending components to add additional gimmicks like poisoned mushroom pools or piles of gold that spawn enemies.

Each character comes with a kit of pre-determined active skills, with powerful abilities as equippable drops from bosses. Although there are upgrades and simple skill trees, these passive abilities are almost all statistical buffs which don't drastically change how a character is played. This is not a game for theorycrafting; loot drops are mainly stat upgrade gems which are slotted onto your equipment, but there are an absolutely insane amount amount of cosmetic items to obtain, including for your awesome fantasy penthouse.

A friend and I are having a fun time cutting down enemies and finding hidden treasure chests while occasionally getting stomped on by bosses. He put it best when he started looking around the gorgeous hub: “This is a world that wants to be explored”. I'd say it rewards those who do so.

If you've played any other farming sim, you've played Coral Island.
You plant the same crops, watch the same evil corporation move in, and run around in the same pseudo-random dungeon floor-by-floor. The island theme doesn't change how you'll approach your tasks, and the townies wait patiently for you to give them gifts while you work toward donating all the crop types to a progress bar.
It's not bad, just boring. Competent, but not creative.

The fun concept of building your own comfy graveyard is marred by a fiddly crafting system and repetitive gathering duties.

While it's satisfying to watch your church grow and graveyard become prime real estate, the slog through long refinement chains of raw materials as you manually build each part is simply too tedious to justify the payoff. A simple form of automation eventually becomes unlockable, but must still be micromanaged to be effective. Information is obtuse and scattered not only across different menus, but in different physical locations of the world, to the point that I started referencing a wiki outside of the game so I could track all of the materials needed for the many tasks to complete, from clearing hazards to simply building workshops and crafting materials. You are forced to keep the shops spread out from each other, and are restricted in their placement, so you'll end up spending plenty of time walking back and forth across long hallways.

Loved the premise. Hated the tedium.

Add 4 hours to my Steam play time.
If you've played any other type of skirmish tactics game, you've played this one. Outside of a surprisingly handy squadron and targeting UI, BS brings nothing new to the field. You'll be marching forward and attacking units with stat sticks until they keel over, then be forced to wait X turns to hold out against waves of endless spawns, then spending time mopping up enemies long after you've effectively won the scenario. A Momentum bar tries to discourage turtling by awarding kills and falling off if you overwatch, but I never really considered it because its bonuses only occasionally matter late in a scenario you're already a few turns from completing.
A world conquest campaign tries to add a bit of 4X in, but the rewards for holding a point are just getting a bigger army, and the battlefs aren't memorable (enemies run straight at you across generic maps and don't seem to be concerned with cover).
Only recommended for hardcore WH enthusiasts. Nothing particularly bad about it; just generic.

A pretty, shallow game with a charming UI.

You travel left, then right, then left again, spending coins to expand the border of your town. The building spots, the buildings that go on them, and their upgrades all are pre-determined. The only choice you make is the mix of soldiery, which doesn't require much thought. An outsized portion of the game is spent holding a directional button + the dash command and cursing at your mount for running out of breath. Yes, you can upgrade mounts, yes, you can unlock limited teleportation, but it's just not fun criss-crossing an ever-growing kingdom for the hundredth time so you can build yet another wall.

Worth a couple of hours as a curiosity if you get it on sale, but the lack of interesting decisions and abundance of repetitive tasks don't make for a satisfying experience.

I have tried six different 4X games this month, and this is the one that really grabbed me. Every turn brings an interesting decision, there is no unit micromanagement, you don't have to spend a dozen turns spinning up the local economy in every new city you build, and powerful buildings in your cities can change their entire purpose and even bend the normal rules of the game. As layers of gameplay are gradually introduced, you keep thinking that you've got the systems down and then realize how they further interact with each other. The game is a roguelike of sorts, and you earn meta progression towards new types of buildings and scenarios even if you lose the campaign. It's not especially difficult to win, the real challenge comes in winning quickly and efficiently, which earns meta levels faster. The "one more turn" addiction is strong with this one, and the satisfaction of watching Mars' surface morph over time is great. Absolutely worth the full price.

I'm supposed to be timing my actions around what the enemies are doing, but I just end up shooting ranged enemies or spamming the Wait button until brawlers come close enough for a takedown. The game says the bad guys have different tactics, but they all just walk forward until they're in attack range, slowly sauntering single file over mounds of their comrades' bodies into my corridor of death.

I don't feel like I'm learning anything new or sharpening my skills as the stages progress, and the level layouts don't change my approach to the game at all. It's more like a turn-based brawler than a a tactics game, and a boring one at that.