Recent reviews by Olleus

A decent turn based strategy / tactic game, but with substantial shortcomings. I'd only recommend it to those who really like this genre.

The game mixes together a few different elements. There's the large scale strategic map spanning a continent, where you build movable outposts and explore with armies. There's aspect-based crafting where you turn the resources you find in this world into powerful tools. There's the base building where you upgrade and customise your mage's tower. There are the RPG-esque plot lines where you help out different communities to gain various advantages. And finally there are the turn-based battles where you control individual units within an army when those clash. This is a good mix, diverse enough to feel fresh for a long time, while still being well enough integrated to feel cohesive.

There are some flaws however. The balance isn't great, and it's easy to abuse synergies to the point where battles become boring as early as the middle game. There is no quest log so the map quickly becomes full of quest markers that mean little. The game only keeps track of crafting recipes you've used, not one's you've discovered. This all adds to a little bit of friction.

The real problem, however, is that it suffers from the same bloat as many 4X games do in the latter stages of a play through. There's so much of everything (crafting resources, armies, units, heroes, outposts, etc...) that simply keeping track of who's doing what where becomes tedious. Each battle and even each unit promotion is exciting in the early game, but there's quickly so many of them that I just stopped caring. Expansion goes from being a daring push in a new direction, to endless whack-a-mole all around a disjointed territory.

The game swamps itself from the endless quantity of stuff the player has to manage, which is all repetitions of what the player has already done. If I do finish my first play through, it will be because of my completionist streak; at the moment reaching the end feels like a chore. Which is a shame, because the start was great and there seems to be a decent amount of replayability with the choice of starting archetype.

I'm hoping the main game will be better, because Subnautica in space sounds right up my alley, but this prologue is completely lacking in charm.

There's no motivation provided to do anything, besides the game telling you it's what you should do on the top right of this screen. I never felt there was a threat I had to counter, growth that I needed in order to explore somewhere, or new item I needed to solve a puzzle. Not only does this make building feel pointless, but the interface is clumsy and lacking some obvious features (like being able to move stuff). It's also lacking any character: there's only the vaguest hint of a story, but no explanation for why we are where we are or doing what we're doing. The game could have developed its own unique feeling in places (ie by having proper physics in space, without magic gravity and drag), but it doesn't even attempt that.

As it stands the prologue just a box ticking exercise: collect X to build a Y, which lets you make Z with which you can mine more X in order to make W, etc... ad nauseam. It's like if someone took all the charming bits of Subnautica out, and set the water transparency to 100%, without adding anything to make it worthwhile.

A long way to go before this becomes interesting, let alone fun.

No single killer flaw, but it's death by a thousand cuts. Critically, the game is very unstable, I'm getting a CTD every hour or two of place; it's also poorly optimised going by the noise of my fans. And this might just be me, but there's something about the tiny fonts and undifferentiable sprites on a low contrast, drab background that makes my eyes water profusely if I try to play the game for more than an hour at a time.

In terms of gameplay the main problem is that the battles aren't really tactical; they just involve getting swamped by the same 3 enemies every battle (shield dude, archer dude, two-handed dude). The options to fight back are limited, uncreative, and barely change from one battle to the next. The "mission" maps (a layer between the campaign over world and the turn based battles) involve clumsily walking around drab terrain filled with invisible walls in order to stumble into battles or click on loot as you see it. The base-building at Camelot is an uninspiring exercise in clicking through skill trees for the sake of it, and the same holds for party management generally. Because you have more heroes than good equipment, the game encourages you to redistribute it between every mission to have the 4 you'll embark with outfitted well. When the most effective way to play the game is also the dullest, that's bad design.

It's not just the mechanics that are disappointing. The dialogue and world-building give the impression of a 13 year old trying to be as embarrassingly emo as possible, while the voice acting is painfully over-exaggerated. I burst out laughing when some zombie knight, with a voice so gravelly it would put Batman to shame, said "we will drench the earth with your blood". Even in a caricature of grimdark fantasy that would be too much, in a game trying to play it straight it's ridiculous. And it's constantly like that, with characters reminding you of how they're massive edge lords at every opportunity. Only to then go "ouch, that really hurt" when hit in combat.

It's not all bad however. The 2-axis morality system seems like it might help replayability some what, and interacts with the base-building events reasonably well. The ability to have the heroes who are "off-duty" go on missions or train on there own is an interesting idea. The two-tier HP system where some recovers after every mission but damage beyond that carries over to the world map is a nice balancing act.


The game doesn't do anything terribly (beyond being critically unstable), but it doesn't do much right either. None of the 3 tiers of the game (battles, missions, world) work particularly well. It's just about good enough for me to keep going when I'm very bored, but that's a much lower bar than me actually recommending the game to someone. If you want a low-fantasy turn-based tactical RPG, I'd say check out "Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark" first.

A cross between Skyrim and the Jedi Survivor games, except that the only combat build is stealth archer.

The game doesn't particularly excel at anything (combat, exploration, narrative, visuals, etc...), but it's also free of major flaws and annoyances. As far as story-driven open world games go, it's a solid 7/10.

I just can't get into it, despite my best efforts. I see what it's trying to do, but I can't help but feel that it falls flat at every turn.

There's too little player agency for it to be a good strategy game. This could be forgiven if the game was more about role-playing and the unfolding of a story. But the story is bland, full of tropes about a war of the gods (which, unless you want to memorise long lists of gods, will make little sense anyway), and devoid of any clear narrative. On top of that, the actual gameplay loop is incredibly repetitive. Choose one out of a handful of actions per turn, one turn after the other, while a very limited number of random events pop up with dull regularity.

The game lured me in with the promise that, once I got into it, I'd understand the mechanics and would be able to play it strategically. Or that, once I'm immersed in the lore, I'd enjoy the story-telling aspects of it. Neither of those happened. The longer I played, the more superficial I found it. It's simply an poor combination of dull fantasy writing mixed with a limited and obtuse strategy. Something like Vagrus: The Riven Realms has a similar vibe but a much better execution. Perhaps making the player feel like they have no agency and are being ground down by random forces they don't understand is part the intended ludonarrative experience of the game: but it's one I didn't find fun, or even mildly interesting. I'm left regretting not just the purchase price, but the ~20h I poured into it.

A moderately-well disguised spreadsheet. If you're prepared to spend multiple hours reading the fandom wiki in order to learn how the game works (no tutorial of any sort to help you with that), devote your entire long-term memory to keeping track of faction politics, and keep a database worth of notes about your crew and ship management; then you'll probably enjoy the game. Apparently, I did enough five years ago to play some 70h on this game. But trying to get back into it now, it's clear that this feels more like work than play.

It's partly the pixelated text with low contrast colours, which is a pain to read. But mostly, the whole thing feels like a coat of paint on a discrete optimisation problem and, if I wanted to work on that, I'd do it as part of my job. The procedurally generated world isn't interesting enough (despite the clear inspiration from Dune) as sole motivator. The game is very close to something I'd absolutely love, but the aesthetics are too dry, the mechanics too obtuse, and the content too overwhelming a mass of table after table.

A worthy successor to Everspace 1, taking the game from a roguelite to a fully fledged out loot-and-shoot.

The game isn't perfect: the story is completely linear without any player choice to make any decision at all, so you're forced to go along with the extremely naive main character and all the one dimensional NPCs. The puzzles get repetitive, mostly because they're not puzzles, but hide-and-seek simulators that require you to find the hidden square peg to put in the square hole (or round peg to put in the round hole) for the umpteenth time. While that does give a motivation to explore the many beautiful maps, the fact that many of them are foggy and that there's no minimap or compass makes this exploration needlessly frustrating. Flying in open space, inside giant space ships, in the atmosphere, or even under water is cool, but that flying works exactly the same in all situations is a missed opportunity - as is the general disregard for any vaguely realistic physics.

But, sometimes, all I want is to fly fast and shoot stuff so I can get new upgrades that make numbers go up - none of the surface exploration of Starfield or management sim of X4. And the game delivers that brilliantly. Not only is combat great with a diverse range of enemies, but there are also many different tools for dispatching them and a plethora of options for ship customisation. The whole package is incredibly well polished, with every aspect of the UI full of QoL features, and optimised to run beautifully smoothly.

It's not the most innovative game (Star Point Gemini is very similar), but it delivers a classic gaming experience with modern graphics and features flawlessly.

Half aquatic shoot-and-loot, half restaurant manager, and full of fun. It has some pacing and UI issues that make the latter third of the game a little tedious as you have to wait days for NPCs to do their thing without any new content to explore, but that's a fairly small complaint. The light-hearted, self-conscious, neo-retro vibes that seep through the whole game combine well with the very forgiving game play for a relaxing (but occasionally tense!) experience.

Playing this game is like scratching an itch I'd forgotten I had.

It's a turn based battler, where you have to manage both the tactics during a battle (who moves where, uses what ability, on which target) and the strategy of long term party management (who becomes which class when, which abilities to they learn, what kit do they wear, what gear to craft). Both have layers of complexity and there is plenty of room for creativity and making powerful synergies. Which you'll need, because the AI is actually pretty decent most of the time and you can't rely on it making mistakes in order to win. Despite this, the game feels relatively easy to learn and does a good job of slowly increasing the scope of player choice over the first few battles. The battles themselves are a little repetitive, but there's just enough variety in objectives, map layouts, and enemies to stop it getting stale until the last 20% or so of the story. The balance was just right for me to never have to restart a mission more than once, but rarely being able to complete one without any injury, and not feeling like I had to backtrack and grind just to level up.

Crucially, the game is full of small but brilliant design decisions. Losing someone in battle means they ought to sit the next one out, but they don't die forever, so there's no feedback loop of getting forever weaker as you lose. It's almost impossible to die (or kill) with one hit, so you'll almost always have time to retreat or heal unless you planned poorly and got yourself surrounded (but also means you have to plan around the enemies doing just the same). That characters who weren't in battle still get to level up, and so do the classes that they weren't using, removes a lot of tedious grind and prevents too much party imbalance building up. That MP starts at 0 and builds up slowly gives the fighting a nice rhythm, rather than a one-turn blitzing. It's also all rather well balanced, with everything having a counter, and all counters having a way around them: success comes from combining things intelligently, rather than spamming the most powerful attack. Put together, this makes the tactical side of this game stand head and shoulders above things like War Tales or X-Com.

Outside the mechanics however, it is a little disappointing. The art is generously describable as nostalgic, and the music is present, but no more. The story is predictable and cliche with flat characters; there's no player choice in how the story develops at all. The UI/UX is functional, but not very smooth. It's clearly designed with a controller rather than mouse in mind, which means scrolling through menus, sub-menus, and sub-sub-menus rather than just clicking on what I want. Similarly, there's a complete lack of tool tips explaining what things are (which would be super helpful, eg, for status effects); instead, there's a contextual help menu and you have to scroll through 20+ text bubbles until you get to the relevant one.

While, inconvenient, I didn't find that those flaws seriously detracted from the game. If you want turn based fantasy battles with deep mechanics that interact with themselves in interesting ways, I doubt you'll find better than this.

It's free, so I can't complain. But I can say I wouldn't recommend this to other players. It's more of monotonous screen saver that occasionally asks for your input than a game.

The first thing that struck me is how weird the writing is. It's not so much the grammatical mistakes, but the structure of every sentence that feels off, as if it was a product of bad AI translation. Sometimes I genuinely struggled to understand what it meant: it says "+X when a passengers is full" when it means "+X if a carriage is full of passengers." There are plenty more examples like that.

Secondly, the aesthetic is kind of nice, although the setting is pretty absurd. You're a train going through a frozen wasteland for... reasons? Flying drones come and give you more carriages for ... other reasons? Keeping the people happy on board this sole remaining bastion of humanity is the only thing required to keep them alive for... yet more reasons? Whatever it's a simple game, I'll swallow any premise if the mechanics are good.

Thirdly, there's an almost complete lack of mechanics. There's an over world map where you choose the next destination to drive the train to. In the main screen itself the only thing you can do is add carriages to the train. These give happiness every few seconds. Each carriage also belongs to 2 categories, and if you have enough carriages for a certain category you get a bonus - which gives you more happiness. This is it, the only thing that requires player agency is deciding which carriages to have in order to maximise happiness from those two effects. Oh, and sometimes you have to click on a pop up bubble to get a tiny amount of happiness. If this sounds like it isn't particularly engaging - you'd be right.