Nylige anmeldelser av Lark

Have you heard of or played a game called 'Startup Company', where you create websites and manage a team of staff with various disciplines?

Yeah, this is that game. This is exactly that game, right down to the list of website 'features', potential users limiting growth and marketing. The entire system, just shamelessly ripped off (And arguably made worse, since the near-identically named staff roles don't develop components, they just add 'points' that can be spent on exactly the same junk you'd spend components on in Startup Company.)

The 'added features' here are a thematic (But ultimately shallow and meaningless) focus on illicit drugs, a bafflingly odd inclusion of multiple cryptocurrencys (I wonder if the dev(s) are crypto-bros?) and exactly the sort of lazy mobile-tier 'castle crashers' attack/defend mechanics that you'd expect from a company willing to clone a much better game and sell it as their own with virtually no mechanical changes besides adding a crime theme, dumbing down the stolen mechanics and adding extra currencies based on reddit punchlines... Oh right, and they ALSO added a premium microtransactional currency for... Honestly, I didn't stick around to see what it was for.

Sketchy, sketchy, sketchy. Nothing here promises anything more than cashgrab laziness from the devs. Save yourself the time it takes to get a refund and keep scrolling through the shovelware: This ain't no gem.

GPU spikes. It's a miner.

I don't think the devs got their priorities right on this one.

It's a neat concept, and the gameplay is reasonable enough... But... Okay, have you ever heard of the movie 'The Room'? The game feels a little like that, with a mixture of seriously odd bugs (P triggers an in-game pause, but only if you hold shift, or the caps lock is on. That's right, it requires a CAPITAL P to trigger pause), some truly baffling design choices (There's no menu that lists staff or band members, but you're still expected to interact with them. You're supposed to find them yourself and click them) and the UNMITIGATED ARROGANCE to RATE THE PLAYER WITH A PERCENTAGE SCORE when they submit bug reports.

Seriously, that last one rankles far more than it reasonably should for me, but to put things in perspective, these Wiseaus amongst game developers took the time and effort to create a bug report screen that demands FULL QA TESTER QUALITY BUG REPORTS. Three text tabs for 'Expected Results', 'Actual Results', and 'Step-by-step bug reproduction'.

Seriously. They're SELLING this crap. And as a reminder, this is NOT an early access title.

But my unprompted and let's face it, entirely unreasonable nerdrage over the fact that the devs managed to put together a complex menu for reporting bugs, while refusing to provide a usable menu for most other management aspects aside, let's talk about the gameplay.

In short: There's a good game here. Somewhere under a large pile of idiotic 'innovation'.

The pause feature, as I touched on before, works off of the P key, rather than the usual 1-2-3, and will automatically unpause (But only ever to the lowest speed) the moment you try to do anything. Why? Hell if I know~ Oh, and yes, running on the fastest speed, then pausing and unpausing will also reset it to the lowest speed. And the pause slider IS locked behind an unnecessarily large tab that's slow to open, how did you guess~?

You're expected to clean up rubbish yourself, despite hiring a janitorial staff. You're also expected to 'greet' bands individually at gates and assign them housing and assets if they required them... And yes, they do of course look exactly like every other little visitor on the field. Good luck.

Staff patrols ARE a thing, but unfortunately there's no menu for this, just a selection of four unlablled and irritatingly similar buttons that hover over 'squads' of staff. Oh, and your nameless, indistinct staff members with different areas of effectiveness can be snapped up into another squad at the touch of a button, meaning that the janitors with a tiny radius can and will get pulled into the bouncer squad and locked into their patrol route if you push the wrong button. Good luck with that too.

Bands have certain 'requirements' that you can bribe your way out of for the most part. For instance, some band members want an RV or a Green Room to hang out in before performing. The game automatically checks to determine if you have enough facilities for the bands that'll be arriving, and warns you if you've messed up and haven't placed enough (As you can't place buildings once the festival is underway. Despite the fact that a lot of them are TENTS, and festivals can last for three days or more. Don't think about that too hard). HOWEVER, during gameplay you're still obligated to find band members bumming around once they enter your festival ground and manually assign them to an empty support building.

Honestly, that's the story of this one. The game COULD clearly handle a lot of the repetitive busywork automatically and allow players to interact with the genuinely interesting 'balancing bands and sponsors as they rise and fall' mechanics, but instead the designers chose to dump it all on the players.

TL;DR: I'm writing this review two months after Festival Tycoon was released as a finished game, and the pause button is still bugged. That alone should tell you what you need to know.

So! This is a text-based RPG with text that looks like it was ground through Google Translate. Apparently the interface is also available in French, so my guess is it's a French dev team that didn't think that a compromised first impression of their game's core system was worth the price of hiring an English-speaking writer to translate the auto-translate into legible text.

Apart from that, it has sections of the interface locked behind microtransactions. Kinda hard to imagine how a free player only being able to assemble a party of 4 characters will be able to reasonably compete with a paid player that has six party slots. My guess it that in lieu of any creative or interesting financial mechanics, the entire system's likely just a pay-to-win cash-in on mechanics that I swear I saw decades ago.

This one's probably not worth the effort of getting invested in, even if they fix the garbled text.

It's another clunky wannabe-MOBA that tries and fails to capture the fun aspects of other melee games. It's slow, poorly paced, repetative... Oh, and it uses a program called "Easy Anti-Cheat that prevents non-AI play unless you actively hunt down and disable multiple programs on your PC, ranging from anti-virus software and assorted security aspects, to gameplay hardware and controller drivers.

Average, slow gameplay with a focus on spectacle over fun, a poorly-thought-out metagame and restrictive and borderline psychotic anti-cheat systems. What else were you expecting from Ubi?

Fair warning: Conclave is a browser-based game with major bugs (The 'close window' button doesn't consistantly work for a significant number of the game's pop-ups), no resolution/fullscreen options and less character development than the average World of Warcraft-era MMO.

The setting is mildly interesting, but the stories ultimately come down to 'Option A, Option B or Option C due to a bonus skill' and don't seem to offer much more than generic fantasy drivel that's about on par with your average homebrew setting dossier.

There's a 'demo' available in the form of a F2P mode not mentioned on the Steam page, which allows players to try out the first couple dozen or so missions and get to grips with what the game offers... I urge you to try that before buying the game on Steam... In fact, due to the numerous bugs in the game's UI, playing via the browser is in fact EASIER, since you can just F5 to get around what would otherwise require you to restart the client from scratch.

TL;DR: It's a buggy browser game that takes the worst aspects of modern MMOs (Pre-determined builds, overreliance on random players) and tabletop games (Decidedly average homebrew settings, achingly slow character progression and glacial box-text-based pacing) and combines it into one messy experience. Better to stick to Roll20 for now.

TL;DR: Foul-mouthed, buggy tactics game with a slow progression curve, deliberately confusing mechanics and aspirations to be a console port.

It's got potential... But it's crude, in every sense of the word. The dialogue reads like a 14 year old's fanfiction (Which may or may not be caused by the dev having a European language barrier, it's not that clear) and the menus are awkward and seem to be designed exclusively for console controllers... Considering that this is a turn-based RPG, you'll be spending most of your time in these menus too, so it rather quickly moves from a minor annoyance to a major issue.

There is a large variety of tactical options and elements available, but it's often unclear which elements apply to which skillsets. Lightning is attached to Lightning, for instance, which is a mixture of Special and Physical, whereas Wind is attached to Agile, and is primarily Special... It gets confusing quickly, and discovering after generating a fire-mage main character with massive levels of Special that it's best move deals Physical damage is fairly disheartening.

Progression is an issue too. Those of us that play tactical RPGs in this sort of vein tend to enjoy the sense of achievement as units grow from single-ability rookies into perfectly-statted murderhobos... But in Street Posse, units barely grow at all. The first multi-fight dungeon of the game offers 10xp per fight... And fights are a serious time investment. With your units requiring 100xp+ to grow (Or more if you picked the 'slow learner' drawback), things can feel a little slow... And as far as I can tell, there are no random encounters in the early part of the game, if at all.

The final issue I came across was a fairly significant game-breaking bug. One of my units died, and the game hung without presenting a menu. Now yes, this is Early Access, so it's sort of expected... But there's no visible save menu, and when I booted up the game again, I discovered that there's no autosave feature either. By examining the keyboard-layout image presented to the player before the menu, I discovered that the save menu is attached to the ALT key, but by then, I'd sort of had enough.

Now the above may not seem like a huge issue for an early-access game... But the developer released an Alpha version of Street Posse on a website (You can find the link in the Discussion forums at the time of writing) and the exact same bug was present. This is a demo that is over a year old, and is vastly different to the finished product... With the exact same game-breaking bug that I ran up against multiple times in the demo.

I hope I'm wrong, but that's a huge red flag to me, that perhaps the developer isn't all that serious about finishing Street Posse... I'll be back on release to see if things have improved, but right now, Posse isn't worth it's price.

D'you know what? DUST isn't realistic.

Yeah, I said it.

What to say...? Dust is extremely disappointing. It's a multiplayer-only game with no community... Which is understandable for an Early Access game. However, the servers won't start without a minimum number of players, which makes the game unplayable. Entirely.

Add to that a complete lack of educational elements and a control system MIRED with bad design choices (Say what you will, but clicking and then rolling back a scroll wheel is NOT a realistic representation of pulling a trigger.. It's just deliberately -awkward- in a misguided attempt to generate artificial difficulty. What's wrong with pushing a button to simulate pushing a button?!) and you get a fairly unplayable game... And I realise I have no right to complain about bugs in an EA game, but the combination of a complete absence of an 'escape' menu in-game and a four minute respawn time make dealing with one of the many game-breaking issues when a server IS available an exercise in frustration and delays.

Oh, and the only map is a giant desert with no cover save for a large, poorly textured compound that seems to be designed exclusively to generate spawnkills. I'm sure there'll be other maps eventually, but still... This is what you're paying for now.

Ugh. If this is realism, I want to go back to Quake.

At this stage, PGM just can't be recommended. I honestly think it was released to Early Access too early.

The core concept: A single gamer growing through the rankings, creating a team and eventually winning at the highest level is a fun idea... But everything beyond that seems to be mired in bad design choices.

I know, that sounds unfair... but let's examine the first few minutes of gameplay.

Alright, I've started a game. Oh, hey, my player has been randomly generated. Name, appearance and nationality. Well, that's okay. At least I got a name I can pronounce. Okay, so we play FOBA? We FOBA player now.

Huh, this pick/ban phase is a little strange. There are three bans between two teams, and the layout makes it impossible to ban out AD champions. Huh. I guess that'll make more sense later on, when I start running the pick/ban phase myself.

Wow, these champions look a bit silly. Still, that's understandable, it'd take far too much effort to come up with a ton of unique champions. Hell, they're probably randomised too. Everything else seems to be so far.

Alright, I lost the game. It's okay, everyone loses their first game. Especially when they have to play support. But still, I'd like to know more about those champions...

Wait, where's the champion info page?


I think you can see where this is going... And it doesn't get any better. Nothing about FOBA is explained. All I can assume is that we're supposed to guess at how the game it played based on our pre-existing knowledge of MOBAs. Which is reasonable for a player like me, right?

What, for instance, is the difference between a Chaser and an Initiator, or a Soaker and a Protector? What do these choices do to alter the game? NOTHING is explained about the results of your games, either in the soloqueue stage or in the later team stages.

Ah. The team stages. Okay, bear with me, this is gonna get a bit meta.

Pro Gamer Manager is realistic.

No, really. In PGM, during what I'll call the 'bedroom' stage, you can choose to NOT play FOBA, and instead play one of three alternate games for stream potential. (FPS, Troll and Minecraft respectively). This will award you quite impressive amounts of money from your fans.

You don't get money from streaming FOBA. Apparently MOBA players are stingy.

And the best part? You can rack up way over a thousand credits in a single day while streaming, whereas you get virtually nothing from participating in the team stages... Hell, setting up advertising revenue or an eshop can result in tiny amounts of money.

So an HOUR of streaming can net you 300 credits with 500 fans via donations and subscriptions... But a shop where you can buy stuff with that same money, and have it go to the same place? That generates 100 credits a WEEK with a thousand fans. And this is at the stage where you can no longer stream for some bizzare, non-existant reason, thus cutting off your only reliable source of credits!

The funny thing is, that sounds realistic. A lot of the popular streamers (IE: The ones making the serious bank) AREN'T esports professionals.

So... The moral of Pro Gamer Manager is... Don't be a Pro Gamer? Just stream. Then you won't go bankrupt.


This game needs so much redesigning is a little bit sad. Here's hoping Early Access works. I'd quite like a good game based around this concept.

On first glance, this looks a bit like settlers.

It's not. It feels somewhat like a F2P title that somehow managed to get itself released onto Steam. There's no real fun to be had out of this one, I'm afraid.

Don't get me wrong. It's polished, the music is passable and apart from the slightly pathetic dialogue, it certainly seems functional... But the simple fact that the gameplay boils down to "Click here, watch as the same thing that's happened a hundred dozen times happens again, or don't click here and fail the level" really sort of ruins the experience.

It claims to be a 'fun time management/strategy game'. It's just a giant time-sink... You can practically smell the skinner box.

Don't be fooled by the Settlers-like screenshots. This isn't worth your time. Avoid.