Recent reviews by Ellie Lockhart

As a big fan of FTL, I expected an excellent experience from the developers' next game. I also love themes of time travel and mechs, so INTO THE BREACH promised to be right up my alley. I actually initially thought I'd be disappointed, but that proved to be an early difficulty curve I wasn't prepared for - much like FTL. Ultimately, I'd say this is a flawed but excellent game that will get you a good 40 hours of gameplay.

It's honestly after that 40 hours that things get sketchy. The thing is, there's this awesome incentive to pull off weird stuff by unlocking more squads with achievements. But the final squad is in fact the ultimate achievement, and it takes *grinding*. Like, a LOT of grinding. You have to get every other achievement. And that might even be worth it - except that there's no achievement for then beating the game with that squad.

Overall, I really like this game and recommend it heavily. I just think the endgame balance could be stronger.

<I>Analogue: A Hate Story</i> is one of the most "literary" games of recent history, in a recent history which includes a great deal of games with significant literary merit, from <I>Night in the Woods</i> and <i>Gone Home</i> to <i>Undertale</i>. There's been, to understate the issue <b>vastly</b>, "controversy" around literary games, or as a certain toxic subset of the gaming community terms them, "SJW" games - usually called such because they have the audacity to include a queer character or characters of color or to critique some trend in dominant gaming culture.

I am an unabashed "SJW" or "social justice warrior." I have a full page dedicated to doxing me on a prominent alt-right website. I also think that while it <b>absolutely</b> deserves its place in the "canon" of video game history as a game which managed an impressive amount of storytelling with an incredibly small amount of art assets, and indeed made a fairly impressive effort at social critique, Christine Love's <i>Analogue: A Hate Story</I> ultimately fails as a game and as a social critique.

Before elaborating, I do want to warn people who don't know what they're getting into that <i>Analogue</i> is more or less a space opera retelling of Margaret Atwood's <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i>, a harrowing novel about rape and misogyny. Both of those things exist throughout <i>Analogue</i>'s narrative and intentionally discomfort the player. The game also has an undercurrent of fetishistic sexuality which is not something I find objectionable in itself, but which is handled in ways that seem quite hypocritical given the narrative the story is telling. At one point, for instance, one of the artificial intelligences who delivers the majority of the narrative in <i>Analogue</i> becomes angry with the player's character if the player chooses to dress the character in a particular outfit - an outfit which the game provides and which the character invites the player, in character, to dress her in.

Full disclosure: my distaste for this game is absolutely driven by a personal dislike of the out-of-game politics of its creator. Christine Love has been a vocal spokesperson for transgender people and is perhaps the most visible openly transgender woman in gaming. She has also shamed a young transgender woman for having the audacity to praise Love for being a trans woman in games, because she has had "the surgery" and considers that part of her life over with. The games she writes are filled with transgender themes, but as the author she is downright condescending and insulting to anyone who wants to examine how these themes are dealt with.

Do I recommend the game? Yes. Am I a fan? No. <I>Analogue: A Hate Story</i> is one of those terrible literary books you have to read in high school, and you should totally read/play it, but it's still not very good.

I was given this game as a gift, or received it from backing the Kickstarter -I can't remember which. In any case I certainly don't deny having been predisposed to like it, but I should note that it goes some deeply intense places, and yes, I'm going to use the term "trigger warning." The plot is not only likely to *literally* trigger freaking out (I jumped a lot, which is to be expected and probably desired in such a game), but child abuse and neglect and childhood alcoholism are major themes.

That said, it's *really* well done. I had enormous trouble with adventure games as a kid, and yet this has a lot of point-and-click (in 3d) puzzles that fit the themathics and imagery of the game. Highly recommended,

So, full disclosure: I'm an RPG gamer at heart. However, I have a deep and abiding love for games where ridiculous stuff happens and it ties into real world conspiracies. The first few Assassin's Creed games were just too... one note for me personall,y which isn't to say that they were bad.

This game is Pirates of the Caribbean, but without Jack Sparrow. I'm not the first person to say that, I know. But like... go in expecting that - and a heck of a difficulty curve - and you'll probably enjoy it.

Two things: the culture is toxic. Toxic as hell. This is Star Trek and I came across a debate about whether transgender people are real. It's like, guys, do you think cisgender Vulcans are real? Second, the microtransactions are on the pricey side. All that said, it's REALLY, REALLY fun to customize your ship and crew so I vote yea.

I'm a transgender woman who rarely plays online games other than MMOs I can solo, and especially not games where voice chat is important and I might be outed as trans. I got into the game because a few fellow trans players had a sort of informal guild, but I got super into it, and I started playing random PUG squad games and in a bizarre way, it's inspiring. Like, I haven't got hit by transphobia once - I'm sure it'll happen at some point, but it's like being put in a fictional situation where you have to work together or fictionally die really builds enough tension that everyone works together.

The key thing I'll say is this: I have an anxiety disorder and PTSD, and I find this game to be a therapeutic tool. It's like I constantly feel this pressure IRL that something horrible and life threatening could happen, and this game lets me... blow off steam? Anyway, I love it, it's like IRL Hunger Games, and it's awesome.

As a certified goat expert I can confirm that this is a very accurate goat simulation. It portrays all everyday behaviors of goats like sacrificing humans to Satan, murdering pool parties, and solving geometry puzzles. If there were to be, say, a new version - Goat Simulator 2019 perhaps - I would suggest from my background as a certified goat expert that goat's ability to form tactical squads and emit electromagnetic signals to draw goat hordes be included for maxinum accuracy.

Let's be honest, folks: if this game interests you, it's probably because you loved Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. This game is not a successor, spiritual or otherwise, to that game, and it's absurd that the designers apparently expected it to be. I didn't expect the exact same experience with better graphics (and being honest, the graphics aren't meaningfully better) but this fails where Alpha Centauri triumphed in so many places.

- there's no overarching metaplot
- the factions are based on Earth race and geography, when the whole appeal of a new planet is that you can form societies bsed on ideology
- ultimately it's just a poor reskin of Civilization V. The expansions did not change this view.

If you love XCom, you will enjoy this game. Pouring hours into it is very doable as my play count shows. It is HIGHLY fiddly and replicates the older XComs far more than the current Firaxis series - not because of graphics but because it doesn't handle as many things automatically as the new games do. I highly recommend installing the Community Edition and mods (although be aware that they will not function on Linux/SteamOS).

A classic, and with the new patch restoring content that had been cut, this game is highly recommended, especially for Star Wars fanatics like myself. I generally have stopped playing games that have non canon "Legends" storylines that won't be referenced in the films or new canon material,but someone at the Lucasfilm story group has a liking for the KOTOR series - Star Wars Rebels and Rogue One both directly reference the series and KOTOD2 specially.

One recommendation, coming from a female player who usually prefers female avatars: the game still has design flaws and one of them is that you see a less interesting part of the story if your character is female. I recommend playing a light side male character to get the experience in full, at least the first time through.