Recent reviews by Miraglyth

A decent social deduction game and a worthwhile modernisation to its longstanding Flash-originated predecessor, adding a ground-up reworking of both the primary evil faction and removing several anti-fun mechanics. Within the core gameplay TOS2 improves on TOS1 where it was needed and leaves the parts that were already good intact.

Social deduction games are always reliant on their players and TOS2 suffers in this area; most games are fine, but some are spoiled by players leaving if they get a role they don't like, making baffling poor plays or just ignoring the basics of gameplay. To a lesser extent some players spam or use abusive chat; to the game's credit the Ignore and Report functions work.

Sadly in 2024 the developers started aggressively pushing ever more forms of monetisation. This review was initially updated and switched to negative on the day "Season 3" launched, adding the THIRD entirely new form of monetisation in a 30-day period; a $25 battle pass.

This volume of monetisation was something I'd find acceptable if the game was supported as much as the collection of price tags would suggest. Sadly that "off-season" period saw overdue balance adjustments given to a minority of troubled roles on its first day only, with no intention to do any more. Some roles had been awful for over a year were left to wait at minimum another 3 months. This made the rampant monetisation very difficult to accept.

Update, December 2024:

The backlash from this was so severe the publisher sold the series to a new one who have removed the battle pass but left the rest so far.

After initially hopeful messages of delaying any new seasons to allow a full round of reworks for the most problematic roles, they instead dropped a single round of reworks that left many of the game's worst issues alone and are now scheduling another season to lock those issues in for at least 4 months.

To make matters worse, criticisms of the changes on the official Discord are being deleted and sometimes their writers also insulted by a particularly overzealous moderator, whose deleting of non-constructive messages is being used as a shield from being called out on being generally toxic to constructive users.

So in addition to the game being locked into multiple issues for 4+ months that would spoil any social deduction game, the experience of attempting to give feedback towards solving these issues is quite unpleasant now as well. For these reasons I sadly cannot recommend this game right now.

An excellent catchy base-builder with roguelite elements and multiple forms of satisfying inter-playthrough progression.

Its main game mode is a little long and can involve some choices that are best remembered so you can take advantage of them, so a playthrough is ideally played over an extended (2+ hours) session rather than putting it down and trying to remember things when you pick it back up. But there are speed controls for when you become more confident with playing, and there are also alternative game modes including a condensed game mode added in November 2023.

The gameplay itself is principally layered resource management, but there are also multiple types of supplementary minigame-sized gameplay types such as network hacking (a Gunpoint-style troll mode), defending the base (a tower defense mode) and warzones (an RTS lite mode). These all happen occasionally (and sometimes optionally), adding a lot of variety to the overall gameplay while also not happening frequently enough or lasting so long that they start to become unwelcome or tedious when they appear.

This used to be a decent simple laugh with friends. Now it's corporate, boring and annoying to play. Several courses are (HUGELY overpriced) DLCs that they're probably only adding as a way to make a quick buck off invested completionists - "But you can play when someone else hosts them!" you might say, which would be true if anyone ever played this game online.

All of the newer courses have poor physics, anti-fun design and take WAY too long to make the ball respawn when it gets smashed out of the course by maliciously-placed obstacles.

There are ways to make fun hazards, and the newer maps do none of them, instead favouring just spamming obstacles all over the place. The recognised ONLY way to play this game "well" is to use guides spoon-feeding you exact shot directions and strengths, and that's pretty damning.

The game launched with Denuvo DRM after a lengthy pre-order period where it wasn't mentioned on the store page. It has now been added to the store page several hours after release. I've confirmed that without a valid Denuvo phone-home token, the game will not start (the error window also blames Steam for being offline, which is a cheap way for Denuvo to shift the blame). This is all the more galling considering it's a Unity game and Denuvo on Unity is notoriously easy to pirate. Paying customers are going to be inconvenienced for nothing.

Upon startup the game screams at you to log into an Epic Games account, interrupting the game's intro movie. It says you "need" the account to play; you do not; if you click the almost hidden X in the login prompt, you can play the entire game except the online version of its multiplayer Battle Mode. Even players that do have an Epic Games account are demanded to log in every time they start the game up, which is a nuisance design.

By default the game automatically installs Epic Online Services to your PC, without warning or acceptance. This manner of installation is borderline malware. It can be prevented if you rename or delete the installer prior to launching the game, but it will return if the game is reinstalled, or updates, or if you use Steam's "Verify integrity of game files" feature.

It's a lot of frustration and upset for players considering it's completely unnecessary; I've played other cross-platform EOS-using games that needed no personally-identifying Epic Games account or the installation of any EOS software on my PC.

Lastly the game has upset players by making one of its DLCs - the Comic Book Skin Pack - available for a ridiculously short 24 minutes and 3 seconds when it launched. After that the DLC has been made inaccessible and most players who've spent upwards of $60 on the "Superstar Deluxe Edition" have been unfairly left with an incomplete product.

A sleeper hit from 2018 that blew up in 2020, and a very good take on the social deduction genre.

Provided you have a good lobby, anyway. Many public lobbies default to seriously unbalanced settings and are filled with selfish players who leave immediately if they aren't an Impostor. If you don't have a large enough friend group to play this with voice chat, it can take a bit of effort to foster a lobby that gets the most out of the game. But if you have or can, it's definitely worth it.

This is a slight overhaul of the Game Jam 2015 winner, probably to improve compatibility and make use of any programming efficiencies KaMiZoTo has learned in the intervening 4 years.

As part of the rework, some (all?) of the original voicing has been redone, which eliminates some of the rather infamous pronunciations from the original version.

There are no gameplay changes and I don't believe any extra voice lines for trying unique things or sequence breaking - I think they were all present in the original which remains quite an impressive feat for a Game Jam. Then again, it did win.

It's actually kind of astonishing that Steam has this labelled for limited profile features; the non-game has been played over 3 million times elsewhere and accumulated millions of plays elsewhere. It probably suffers on Steam's usual play stats because it is a short but complete self-contained experience that doesn't help its average playtime or concurrent players metrics.

That definitely doesn't make it bad though - it is certainly worth the small time spend! If you are unsure what to play but feel like playing SOMETHING, I'd definitely recommend giving this one a playthrough.

A hilarious but surprisingly deep turn-based grid-set roguelike that you can play at your own pace. Having first played most of a decade ago and replaying recently, most of the humour stands the test of time.

The game features a boatload of skill trees, which alongside items, enemies, optional extra dimensions and dungeon sizes have been increased further by three expansions. And then on top of that an expansive set of Steam Workshop mods have added even more of all of those.

In short highly replayable, and with many of the skill trees being both useful and interesting there's a lot of incentive to replay it too.

The game launched as a fun multiplayer game where a small group could play as most combinations of the four available classes (Squire, Huntress, Monk and Apprentice) and progress through the campaign maps with reasonable comfort and a lot of fun. If any defense fell it wasn't a big deal, use your combat abilities to plug the gap and rebuild next wave.

Fast forward to the expontential escalation of intensity and extreme difficulty with the game's DLCs and updates, that friend group has quit the game in disgust and you probably will too. If you happen to be a completionist, what was originally 50 hours of wonderful enjoyment will become over 800 hours of grinding, frustration and overall misery.

The game has its community, small though it now is. It has players that like the type of game it's become. But most of the literally millions of players who first bought into it to make it popular back in 2011 or so are not this. It's a shame.

Awesome platformer, tight and fluid controls in the main levels, and an entertaining explorable overworld that expands with the secret collectables from the levels making them have a purpose beyond completion doodads.

There's 15-25 hours of solid fun here which to me is more than worth the full price of the game. If anyone saw the original trailers boasting 4 exclusive tonics, don't worry about the game being incomplete now - those tonics weren't exclusive at all. They're available as the "Trowzer's Top Tonic Pack" DLC. You can still get the full game.

The 3D control scheme of the original Yooka-Laylee has been well-ported here, with the signature upgrade moves like the roll and buddy slam retained while obvious game-breaking ones like flight are out. Gliding after jumps is replaced by the hang time that is provided by the twirl move, and the ability to jump after rolling off an edge is a staple that keep the game fun.

Best of all, for 2019 the game has done well to avoid some huge pitfalls: It didn't upset fans by jumping over to the Epic Games Store. Meanwhile the titular Impossible Lair can be taken on at the start of the game without any of the up to 48 extra hits you can get from playing the game. This is an unreasonably tough challenge and Playtonic have done well to give recognition to those who manage it (both in-game with a special ending and outside it with Tweets) without ruining the game for everyone else by having an achievement require it.

In short, I pre-ordered it the day it was available for purchase and thoroughly enjoyed it. Overall, highly recommended!

Simple and easy to get into, great fun for reasonably-sized groups sitting around a screen. The fun content is largely player-driven but this formula really works well.