Recent reviews by Hepatic Portal Gun

Development: I bought the game while it was still in beta, but even then it seemed nearly finished. Since then Supergiant have added a few touches here and there (mostly balance tweaks) which continue to come in. Supergiant is better than most dev teams at taking in player feedback and their discord is a pretty active place.

Gameplay: Isometric view exactly like Bastion or Transistor. The game consists of room after room of various baddies that are in need of a thorough whoopin and that's exactly what you'll give them. The game is very fast-paced, attacks will come at you pretty quickly if you aren't paying attention. You'll start the game choosing one of six weapons, each with four variants, which provide their own unique flair allowing for lots of options in how you fight. Equipment is pretty minimal aside from your weapon, you have a charm and a summon but almost everything needs to be unlocked over the course of many runs.

Each of the four worlds has different collections of enemies and environmental hazards and at the end is a boss fight that can quickly end your run if you aren't ready for it. Fortunately, finishing each room will reward you with one of many different rewards or power-ups. Each reward is randomly generated either as one of the various types of currency, or as a choice from one of several themed pools of power-ups. You'll get a preview of the rewards before you enter the next chamber, so you have some degree of control over how you develop over the course of the run. Before I go into detail about the difficulty, I will mention that at the start of every run you can use the Mirror to spend one of the game's currencies (Darkness in this case) on a plethora of permanent upgrades which provide not only a nice boost to your chances, but ties into the rogue-lite nature of the game in a narratively and mechanically satisfying way.

Difficulty: The pacing of the difficulty is well done, your first few runs you likely won't make it to the end, but you will probably get further each time. Giving you the chance to discover what your preferred fighting style is and how it stacks up against the various enemy types. Tartarus (the first world) isn't that tough, but by the time you reach Elysium (the third world) each and every room encounter can pose a threat to your life-pool. Healing is not that common, unless you're willing to spend some of that hard-earned gold on it at the infrequent shops you come across. If you want to make it to the final boss consistently though, you are going to have to learn the patterns of the bosses and mini-bosses along the way or they WILL end you.

That being said, if you aren't in it for a slog, the game does have an option you can enable that drastically cuts down the difficulty (though I've never tried it out myself). On the other side of things, if you (like me) enjoy a challenge, after you complete the game once you unlock "The Pact of Punishment" and can add modifiers that crank up the difficulty even further, and believe me, they can add some very real challenge to it, even for well practiced players. The rewards for doing so are more of the games rarest currencies needed to unlock and empower your weapons to the max or to learn more about the multitude of characters that populate this world. Which leads us to...

Story: Supergiant put a lot of effort into developing the narrative of Hades. You'll begin the game in your home, at the bottom of the Greek underworld. Ruled over by the God of the Dead, Hades, who just so happens to be your Dad. Life is not good for our sheltered young hero, and he wants out, but to do so goes against everything your father has built and works towards maintaining. There is an entire bureaucracy established down there with plenty of its own inhabitants, many of whom will not hesitate to voice their displeasure at your aspirations of escape. Over the course of many runs, you will get the chance to discover, speak with and learn about them, with the option to dig deeper into each of their backstories, provided you have the right incentive to spend on them. In speaking to others, we learn more about the player's character, Zagreus. Who has some very clear goals, though as he discovers more about the world and himself, he learns that things are not as they seem.

Looking at the story from a more detached perspective, The writing is great, the characters are unique and conversations with them have a depth that goes far beyond stale tropes we've all seen before. What is more, the game does an excellent job of fusing the mechanics of rogue-lites (dying and repeating runs) and the story elements so that they compliment each other beautifully. Though if you want to know exactly what I mean by that, you'll just have to play it and find out :D.

Audio/Visual: Hades is just bursting at the seams with style, every piece of character art, every location, every enemy has a distinct theme and visual flair, add to that the thousands of voice acted lines of dialogue in the game and you have a very strong presentation that, in my opinion, leaves any other competitor in this style of game in the dust. The music has a grungy-rock style to it that picks up during combat and cools off into heavy base notes during those periods in between combat, it never became obnoxious even during the peaks of frustration of dying to a boss.

Tying into the games mechanics, you can spend one of the games several currencies (Gems in this case) to change and customize elements of the "House of Hades", your respawn point, through a few different styles until you land on one you like. Eventually you will be able to choose from menu themes and get access to the entire soundtrack in-game as unlockables as part of the multitude of non-mechanical rewards the game offers.

Final Thoughts: Hades is a well made, fun and challenging rogue-lite. Control is tight, Art and Sound are great making for a very satisfying experience and enjoyable to replay over and over again. If you are a fan of the genre, do yourself a favour and grab Hades, you won't regret it. Supergiant knocked it out of the park with this one.

The single most satisfying and streamlined "Tactics" style game I've ever played. If you enjoy games like Advance Wars or Invisible Inc., there will be a strong pull for you from this game. Made by the same folks that did FTL It has similar rogue-lite elements so if your preference is for long-form campaigns like Fire Emblem or Banner Saga, be warned. This game is meant to be played in runs, trying new squads, new combinations and new tactics each time. Each "map" will last only a max of five turns so enemy damage and unit health are scaled to make each round a tense puzzle. The puzzle then evolves next turn with friendly and enemy positions, reinforcements, priority targets and mission objectives.

Chess with Mechs vs Bugs, what's not to like?

Design and build your own ships, stations and bases from scratch. Open-ended gameplay, self directed objectives with a high degree of customization; very active modding community too. Best played with friends if you want to do a survival run where you'll have to mine resources yourselves, construct machines/vehicles to make your mining more efficient and eventually reach outer space. Or hey, start out there and find a way to survive going planetside, just watch out for alien spiders that want your tasty engineer face to lay eggs in.

Excellent take on the metroidvania genre, very well crafted Art and Music but the best part is the controls are tight and responsive, I anticipate every new enemy type and get super pumped for boss fights. I'm only partway through my first play-through but everything about this is great so far. I bought the game and waited on playing it for a while, but I should not have. A very satisfying single-player experience.

Development: I bought in while it was in beta and I have got to watch System Era continue to put dedication and effort into improving Astroneer and I looked forward to every update. Now that it is at full release the full game is a fun, addictive sci-fi romp. You are free to play however you want: race to shuttles and establish colonies on every world or devote your time to burrowing to the centre of your homeworld (yes you can do that)!

Gameplay: Splits between exploring the colourful landscapes and environments of 6 planets/moons to collect resources and find technology; and crafting, organizing and expanding your modular bases and array of vehicles and tools.
What makes Astroneer fun is how malleable the world is, every piece of "earth" you encounter can be touched, shaped and crafted like you were shaping clay. Explore, harvest, craft is a familiar formula but in Astroneer it's a very distilled one, this is a good thing. Basic resources are abundant and the player has a lot of ways to use them, the need for oxygen and power supply will drive players to salvage fallen tech or collecting and researching objects in the world for "bytes" which the player spends however they want in a catalog of technology. You are free to upgrade however you like but between platforms, base modules, vehicles and tools you'll soon discover that going off-world is needed, in pursuit of new research objects and for resources unavailable on your starting world. The devs made the gating in the game intuitive and with proper planning and execution you can progress quickly without a need to "grind", they did this by splitting the need between research and resources.
Example: Want a bigger shuttle? Sure the research cost isn't that high, but where you gonna get that titanium alloy you need?

Audio/Visual: A simple, ambient soundtrack is filled in with a wide array of sound effects for each tool equipped or resource collected. Aesthetically the game is simply beautiful, I have often stopped in the middle of my hunting for resources to climb a mountaintop to see the view and was rarely disappointed. Cloudscapes, sunrises and sunsets are a delight, and I feel my stomach drop out on me when I'm delving deep for resources and break into another chain of underground caverns.

Final Thoughts:: Make your own fun in this great crafting game! I have made a challenge to myself to make a perfect colony ship before I explore the last world... Get your friends in on it and colonize the solar system or carve out a planet into a Ringworld and ride the gravity! Enjoy this fun sci-fi sandbox

Overview:
I am a big fan of all different kinds of strategy games (RTS, 4X, Turn based) and I really enjoyed Northgard. It has a nice aesthetic, simple but fitting music and a good single player campaign designed to introduce all the basic mechanics and differing clan types. Most games take an hour on the medium map. I'm not a huge fan of charging for new clans but such is a sign of the times and they are a smaller studio so I can understand, it's not a big mark against the game.

You control villagers produced by your town hall and assign them various roles by building structures and assigning (or re-assigning) a villager to work there turning them into a woodcutter, farmer, healer, loremaster, soldier, etc... Gameplay consists of managing your clan year by year through generating enough wood and food to survive, expand and develop your structures and survive the sometimes harsh climate and yearly events that can throw your plans for a loop, forcing you to adapt.

Different routes to victory mean you can play defensively and focus on trade or research to win or varying combat bonuses (from the different leaders, technologies and new combat research trees) support different syles of offensive play from subterfuge, hit and run to attrition or overwhemling tankiness. Nothing comes for free though, training army takes villagers and gold, and gets expensive as your forces grow meaning less villagers and workers to sustain your people so choose wisely when getting aggressive.

A note on warfare: the game features smaller skirmishes instead of large army clashes: your forces will consist usually of 8-14 soldiers of different types with some unique warlords and occasionally a neutral faction mob. You can split your forces into smaller groups but there are no control groups to support that style so you'll be jumping around with the minimap a lot (hopefully the devs add this eventually).

Gameplay:
There seems to be less of a "build order race" like in more popular games like starcraft 1/2. How you play is partially determined by what tiles surround you and how you choose to spend your resources (Food, Wood, Gold, Lore), Victory can be achieved even through exploration and colonization of tiles meaning you might not even need to draw blood to be victorious. The game gates you by limiting the number of buildings per tile (unless you choose to invest some hard earned gold) forcing you to expand if you want to keep growing, but the increasing costs of food for larger clans means each investment requires consideration even in the later stages of the game.

How you choose to divide your time and energy between exporing, colonizing, attacking, developing technology & resources, interacting with neutral factions and fighting off monsters that wander the maps all mix together every time I load up a new game means I don't tire of the gameplay. Little touches like nice voicework on units and good animation on your units provides a great bit of polish onto an already solid game. The devs have even released a new mapset featuring more aggressive and hostile environments and new yearly events if you prefer a faster-paced style of gameplay.

tl;dr:
It's a norse-themed, fun and new take on RTS that has you spinning a few plates to stay ahead of your opponents, lots of different paths to end-game and many different victory conditions mean it doesn't get too stale. I liked it and if you like RTS I think you will too.

Same minds behind Bastion deliver another beautiful creation. This one set in a cyber-utopia that unravels around the protagonist. Great music, art, sound and an intriguing combat system. Replayable at least once (if not more) this is a fantastic single-player experience, I couldn't stop once I started.

Bots seem to be fixed, and it was much more fun again!