Recent reviews by Jackeea

This is the closest I've come to giving a neutral vote for a Zachtronics game. It's alright! It's VERY easy - easier than Opus Magnum or MOLEK-SYNTEZ - and very quick - 4 hours and I'm done. The skill comes from fiddly interactions. It's much more like Opus or Infinifactory than any of the programming games, since it's just "move around these arms and put things in the right place". And most of the depth comes from figuring out "where will this box go if I flip it?" It doesn't really stretch your brain, but it does stretch your spatial reasoning. Even if you can bludgeon your way through via trial and error.

The ending also hits you like a truck, in that it's unexpected and leaves you wishing that it wasn't over so unexpectedly. The story is nice, the characters are interesting, but eh.

Eagerly awaiting the usual post-release Really Difficult Puzzle Expansion that previous games in the series have had.

Is this a game to put 1000 hours in? Probably not! Is this a niche, specific amalgamation of genres that REALLY scratches a specific itch? Absolutely! It's as addictive as an old flash game - you pick it up, play your run, lose, and think "oh &#@%, I shouldn't have died there. again!!!"

Reasons I'm convinced this game is secretly 20 years old:
* The graphics and music are adorable and obviously from that era
* The gameplay is absolutely phenomenal - super easy to pick up, but super in-depth
* Runs are fairly easy, but there's some absolutely brutal difficulty with the later challenges
* Fairly sure this game is going to take up a significant portion of my life
* It's super cheap and 100% worth it

A very interesting demo! Looks super deep with plenty of ways to customize your bots; I can't wait for the full game to release. Definitely going to be snatching this up on day 1

This is AMAZING. IXE is easily one of the best games in the series, hands down. This is the first Creeper World game to *really* ask "okay, what are the ramifications if the enemy is a liquid?"

Let's have a quick recap through the series. The first game was a fun experiment with a fluid-ish enemy. It was novel, it was inventive, it was amazing. CW2 was a side-on view and has you dealing with verticality. The enemy is still more like a gas. Mixed reviews but it'll always have a place in my heart, I love it. CW3 is a reinvented CW1 with a shedload of polish and nuance added, and it's the series' high point. CW4 was "what if we mostly forgot about the creeper and made the main threat a generic tower defense mob?" Particle Fleet has the enemy be solid blobs which gel and move together in weird and wonderful ways. IXE mixes up the best of these in SUCH a fun way.

One of the main complaints I have with the series is that turtling is very easy. You build up a force which can shoot down creeper. You wait for the backlog of creeper to die down. You advance slowly but surely. You put down emitters/connect to totems/etc etc. You win the mission. If you try that in IXE, you probably die. Because this time, the creeper has waves.

Rather than "this is an emitter which spews out creeper", most levels instead have "this is a moving physics object which propels liquid all over the place, which explodes into creeper. Which doesn't sound like much of a difference, but instead of having to chip down a huge wall of fluid, the huge wall reverberates and splashes. Which either means you've got to pull back your towers, or weather the storm. It's a small thing which totally redefines how you have to build your front. The limit on ships also helps matters - you have to position them *just* right, or micromanage them to hell and back. It's so engaging! Not for everyone, but this is PEAK Creeper World in my opinion.

There's also very limited chemistry - water and lava make stone. Sulfur and water make acid. Oil and nitron make explosives. It's fun and charming, and is a lovely inspiration from games like Powder Toy or Noita which adds a bit more strategic depth to the game. Arguably a bit of a distraction, but having to manipulate the environment for *your* liquids to get where they want - that's the point of the series!

It's not all 100% flawless of course, the typical wonky hallmarks of a Creeper World game are here too - Generic Tower Defense Enemy Which Requires You To Build SAM Towers And Otherwise Does Not Improve Gameplay (phantoms and coilships) is introduced early on. Atmospheric but somewhat forgettable soundtrack which nonetheless keeps you in the zone. Charmingly wonky UI which reminds you "hey, this is mostly one guy doing all this". The performance can also get a bit choppy if there's a lot of action at the start of the mission, but I'm on an absolute potato of a PC. I could probably run this on a decent enough laptop.

And there's the AI "controversy" - to be honest, it's an accessibility feature. The voice actors in other parts of the game were hired and paid and everything; a cloned AI voice (of the developer!) only appears in the help menu. Could the dev have used a text to speech narration? Sure. Is this the best use for AI? Probably not. And yeah, the voice sounds a bit wonky and not quite right, but of all the dangerous genAI usecases out there - this is fairly innocuous.

All in all, I would thoroughly recommend giving IXE a go. Maybe not as your first Creeper World game - go play 3 if you want an amazing experience - but this is still an incredibly enjoyable game.

This was a great game. The original game, by the way. Think Hearthstone, except on a hex grid, with super interesting gameplay and with characters that were bubbling with personality. We never really got to see that game - while in early access, some investors pulled out, leaving the devs in the lurch, forcing them to cease development. However, they left the servers up and even did some community-driven balance patches, out of the goodness of their heart. This was a lovely gesture, and this game was still fun, despite being very barebones and mostly against bots. It "I'm here!" voicelines and default textures aside, the gameplay was simple but deceptively deep, everything coming down to strategy. We'll never know how the game would have evolved, or how it would have been monetized, but whatever would have happened would be better than the current version.

In March of 2023, there was a big announcement - the developers were handing the reins over to another dev team, who were going to bring Shardbound back. Holy hell, this was huge! After SIX years of downtime, it was coming back. Spirits were high, until we looked a bit closely and saw that you needed to accept Immutable (some web3 crypto site)'s TOS to pre-register for the game. Okay, that's fine... and then they did an AMA and the "actually, we're crypto bros" floodgates opened. Which - okay. I don't like those things, but at least they're keeping the gameplay fine? Oh, no, now there are card upgrades and RNG. Actually, your card does 3-4 damage. Better hope you win that coinflip to win the game! Of course there's RNG inherent to every card game, but baking it into your cards - ugh. But don't worry, you can upgrade your cards to make them even better, to sometimes reduce the amount of RNG there! They took a good game and turned it into a steaming pile of ♥♥♥♥.

To be clear, this is nothing against the previous developers. Keeping the servers open for half a decade of "we literally cannot financially justify working on this game" was a brilliant gesture, and they could have easily pulled the plug at any point. Giving control of Shardbound to a different company - totally understandable. The game had a lot of work put into it and it's a shame to see all the code and the designs go to waste. But "pay to win" and "RNG" don't begin to cover what's happened.

The old version was playable on Steam until today. An update dropped a few hours ago which took away the old game, and dressed up its corpse for money in this new godawful version. There's better card games out there that don't need you to make a crypto wallet then drain it dry, just to have a chance to compete.

Absolutely fantastic roguelike (lite? does it matter?) that tests brainpower over RNG. Coming up with wiring patterns that get all your module effects off is such a satisfying feeling; this game is full of "oh, wait, if I do X and Y, then things get SILLY" moments, while still providing a challenge.

Definitely going to be sinking a load of time into this!

If I had to sum this game up in one word, it'd be "Nice". Because that's what this game is, it's just a lovely, charming, nice experience.

You start the game with 3 crewmates, each of which contributed some cards to your starter deck. You pilot a ship that you can move back and forth, fire its cannons from, build up its shields - the usual tactical stuff. But what really sets this game apart is its elegance. Most cards aren't even words, they're symbols. "⚔1 🛡1" (sword 1, shield 1) is one of your starter cards, so it's easy to tell at a glance what it does - deals 1 damage and gives you 1 shield. It's so simple, because it can be! There's "8" characters to choose from and 5 unlockable ships, all of which are fairly easy to do. You get the first 6 characters by winning games, you get the ships from winning games or finding artifacts, there's no ultra super duper hidden weird stuff. The game lays everything out for you - that's a running theme through this game, there's no need to overcomplicate anything.

The visual style is simplistic pixel art, with every character having their own little quirks. The soundtrack is calm and quiet for the most part, with some really banging tunes for the boss battles. But one of the most adorable things about this game: the characters talk to eachother about pretty much everything! Expect your shield technician to boast when you block damage with your ship's armor. Your pilot will be thrilled if you just scoot totally out of the way of the enemies' attacks. And your drone specialist tends to give all of his drones names, and gets a bit emotional when they die! It's so charming, and never feels overly repetitive.

The story is pretty basic and is very gradually dripfed to you: there's an experimental ship that suffered some accident. It's turning into a black hole. You need to destroy it! It isn't that simple, of course; each character has a bit more to tell about their part in what exactly happened. Each of the characters is easily memorable: Dizzy is careless but protective, Riggs is haphazard and forgetful, Peri is resolute and doesn't take crap from anyone, Isaac and Max are two sides of the dork-geek spectrum, and Drake is mean. It's just a really charming story with an interesting plot twist or two baked in. After every run, you get to learn a bit more backstory about one of your crewmates. To unlock the "true ending" you need to do this 3 times for each of the first 6 characters. So at about 1 hour per run, expect this to take ~20 hours to get the true ending. To collect every artifact, see every event, find every card? Probably quite a bit longer!

Does Cobalt Core have the apparently endless replayability of something like Slay the Spire? The unforgettable soundtrack of something like Dicey Dungeons? The intense tactical decisions of FTL? Not quite, but it's damn close. This game does a lot of things very well, doesn't outstay its welcome, and is overall just really nice. I would absolutely recommend this game for someone willing to sink a few dozen hours into it - you'll love every second of it.

You ever pick up a game, and think "This is it, this is what I'm spending the next few dozen hours of my life playing"? That's the sensation I got when I set eyes on Bombe. This game is INFURIATINGLY addictive and I absolutely love it. Once you get your head around the not-great UI, what's within is an amazing game that strips away the luck of Minesweeper, and replaces it with raw logical deduction.

Let's set the scene. You're playing Minesweeper. There's a cell with a 1, which has all but 1 cell around it revealed as being safe. What's the remaining square? Obviously, it's a bomb. This is an observation that anyone can make. It's also tedious to scan the grid, go "okay, that's a 2, that has 1 bomb next to it, and 1 free square, so it's a bomb" a bunch of times.

Bombe cuts all that out. It's a game about setting rules. You see a cell marked as a 1 which has 1 bomb surrounding it. There's some empty cells around it. The game groups those cells into a region for you, telling you that there's obviously no bombs there. You make a rule that says "If there's a region of unmarked cells, with no bombs remaining, mark them as empty". From then on, you never have to clear out empty regions again.

But that's trivial. You make a rule that says "If there's a region with 1 bomb, and that region is 1 space wide, mark it as a bomb". You make a rule that says "If there's a region with 3 bombs, and that region is 3 spaces wide, mark them all as bombs." You make a rule that says "If there's a region that has 2 bombs and 3 spaces, which fully surrounds a region with 1 bomb and 2 spaces, then the other cell in the 2-bomb region must have a bomb in it".

Before you know it, you're defining your own regions. "If there's a 3-bomb region which has a 2-bomb region inside it, the extra cells in the 3-bomb region must themselves be a 1-bomb region". The game throws more roadblocks into the mix - what if instead of telling you how many bombs surround a cell, they were vaguer? How do you interact with a 2+ bomb 4-cell region intersecting with a 1/2/3 bomb 5-cell region? Maybe you can cordon it off and generate another region from it.

Before you know it, you've got literally hundreds of rules working under the hood. You don't know how they work. You don't care. The only thing on your mind is how to condense a 6-region interlock into something your rule constructor can handle. You figure out an additional 3 regions you can make. You build more rules. Your machine grows.

Levels fly past by the hundreds. Your machine is perfect, it handles every case flawlessly. The whirl stops. The game offers another instruction. "What if the clue was "there's not 0 mines around this cell?"" You get back to work defining rules. Your state machine grows.

If you're the kind of person who's memorized the 1-3-1 corner pattern, or who loves churning through possibilities to arrive at a conclusion of "aha, THAT mustn't be a mine!" - this game is 100% for you. If you're logically inclined, and like thinky puzzle games, this is a no-brainer. It's a puzzle game that's constantly throwing new situations at you, new edge cases you haven't squashed, new ideas to ponder.

£0.00 is quite a steep price for all this stuff!