Recent reviews by Scifer

I played the hell out of the original coinmuncher back in the days of the 90s arcade, so I was a bit sceptical about this studio taking a classic arcadey action title and condensing it down into a roguelite grid-based strategy game along the lines of Enter the Breach or XCom, but I'm still really enjoying it! I do have a few gripes here and there, but they are pretty nit-picky.

- I have been playing this for 24 hours now and I haven't seen one single RAWKIT LAWNCHAIR

- The pixel art and animation is nowhere near as smooth and fluid as the original games, but those titles were INSANELY detailed in terms of pixel and sub-pixel work. What's here is perfectly acceptable and mimics the style of the originals very well.

- It's not as gory. The original had all the horrors of war, as well as cartoonish zombies that made arcs of projectile blood vomit. However, I can understand why this one went a bit more PG to appeal to a wider audience!

- There are still plenty of bugs. There have been several times where I've seen the visuals, sound and music glitch out, but nothing gamebreaking, yet.

- The characters feel a bit 'waifu-ized'. They looked like a bunch of dorks in the original pixel art and part of me misses that, but I'd imagine the vast majority of players would prefer the massive tits (on both the men and women characters!)

- The boss fights are cool, but might start to feel a bit stale, after a while. However, the game is constantly throwing new mini-bosses at you as part of optional objectives.

- This is one of those games where each run seems to get easier as you progress. The hardest part is the early levels where you start out with very few abilities and can't do much damage. But by the end of each run, every character is extremely tanky and can take out entire squads of badguys with very little thought or planning. Maybe that's part of the fun though!

Overall, the look and feel of Metal Slug has been captured brilliantly and applied to an extremely pick-up-and-play game style. Plus, there are tons of unlockables to keep things feeling fresh. Really loving this one and I look forward to playing more.

I really wanted to like this game. But I have a mantra when it comes to trying to decide whether or not a game is for you. "What aren't they showing you in the trailers?" I should have followed it for this one...

In the case of this game, what I wasn't seeing was the actual gameplay process of building anything, or the utterly atrocious UI. I was warned by some friends that this game has a 'steep learning curve', but I was undaunted by the challenge. I like learning new things. However, if you're going into this game expecting any sort of streamlining in the building process - forget it. The primary block-placement controls are keyboard based. There is apparently a way to place blocks with some mouse control, but couple that with a terrible placeholder-looking UI that doesn't look like it's changed since the alpha build ... and I was having an utterly infuriating experience before I'd even got halfway through the tutorial.

Maybe I've just been spoiled by good building games with a streamlined build system like KSP, Space Engineers, etc. But those games are enough of a timesinc already without having to fight the software to build the thing I want to build. In the over 2 hours worth of tutorial (bad move when steam's refund window is 2 hours, btw), the game calls it's building system 'novel'. I call it 'antiquated, unintuitive and frustrating'.

Refunded this one.

Also, maybe don't have blaring Hanz Zimmer music playing over the top of the tutorial prompt voice that I have to turn down manually? Felt like I was watching Oppenheimer.

A classic apocalypse survival runner. You're a little dinosaur who needs to outrun the pyroclastic wave from the KT extinction meteor! I played the hell out of this when I was a kid and it's just like I remember it. Twitchy physics, unresponsive jump controls, unavoidable obstacles, obstacles that are sometimes the same colour as the background and screechy 8-bit fartcore soundtrack ... and I wouldn't have it any other way. Maybe fix that stuff in the sequel, though ;)

TLDR up front ; Medieval Cities Skylines? YES PLEASE. 😍✨

There’s something incredibly cathartic about watching a tiny set of tents in an empty field turn into a bustling feudal hamlet as you gather resources, fend off packs of marauding bandits, expand and upgrade your territories by earning influence and taxes from the population.

Be aware though, this is still an early access game, so there will be bugs aplenty. It’s difficult to tell what is a bug and what is me, not understanding how the game wants to played. The crop rotation system had me scratching my head for a while. Only took me a couple years of famine, but I got there eventually. 😓

I also must applaud the combat, even in its current state. If you’re expecting the epic, instant gratification of Total War or Lord of the Rings style combat with thousands of disciplined, fully-armoured infantrymen charging towards each other – too bad. Your armies are generated directly from the population of a town, or by hiring mercenaries. So, earlygame fights will be a bunch of peasants arming themselves with sharp sticks, standing in a field and awkwardly punching each other like a highschool playground brawl; which is honestly much more rewarding because it feels authentic. If you want a giant army of dudes with swords, shields and armour, you first have to build a town capable of supplying that army!

Despite my best efforts and a really robust endgame economy, I kept running low on food and firewood even though I had multiple people working on both. Can’t tell if the AI pathing is a little buggy when it comes to some of the logistics, or I’m doing something wrong. I also had a bug where my retinue just wouldn't spawn, or allow me to edit them to add more men. But given that this is all the work of ONE dev, I am incredibly impressed overall and I can absolutely see a lot of potential for this one. The game looks and performs gorgeously.

Also if you’re reading this, Greg – please please please co-op multiplayer against AI opponents? Thx babe. ❤️

One of the nicest chill games I've played in a long while. I've seen a lot of reviews trying to call this a puzzle game or an eco-restoration simulator. It has a little bit of both, but ultimately it's just a nice relaxing ecosystem creator, with a bit of layered gameplay to teach players how those ecosystems are formed.

You start out with a barren wasteland, then use little machines and buildings to remove toxins from the land and the ocean, plant grass, raise or lower the temperature and humidity, etc. Good advice I can give to new players would be to not worry too much about getting all the grass planted perfectly or the ground detoxed in the most ideal way possible. Once you raise the humidity high enough, it will start to rain naturally, wash away all the poop and the puzzle will solve itself! It's a nice feeling to lay out your toxin scrubbers and grass planters for maximum efficiency, but not vital.

Also seen a lot of people complaining about the price. I 100%ed this game over 20 hours and I would quite happily dip into it again, just for the fun of making a little custom landscape from scratch. If you're not that sort of person, either wait for it to go on sale or just play the demo. I wouldn't say the pricetag justifies giving the whole game a negative review.

If I was going to suggest improvements for any future development, the animal stage could be a bit more in-depth. Currently, you just plonk a building down and look for animals that, (in the game's logic) are already there, you just need to confirm they exist. Might be fun if you needed to tailor the landscape in order to balance the population of certain predator/prey species. Example - too many deer will munch up all the grass in an area before it can grow back and go extinct. Too many wolves will over-hunt the deer and both species will vanish, etc.

tldr; Friendly Nature Tetris. Good game. Worth the time.

This game really annoyed me. It’s a shame, I enjoyed the voice acting, the art style and the characters and some of the ideas in the gameplay, but in execution, it just made me feel like I was trapped on a Mobius strip.

The player is given multiple ‘location piles’ for each mission/quest, where each pile represents a place you can go or a person you can interact with. The final card you need to complete the quest is hidden somewhere within the deck, with multiple ways of reaching it (violence, persuasion, threats, bribes), but there’s no way of knowing how far away the ‘victory card’ is. So often I found myself spending valuable action cards to gather loot or explore each deck, only to find that I had gone round in a circle. There’s no sense of direction or depth to any of the location piles. Sometimes the same location or NPC will show up in a completely different pile. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if you could experiment, but your action cards are finite. To replenish them, you have to rest; and you only have a certain amount of rest periods before an automatic game over. I get that this was done to add some replayability to the game, but in execution it just feels like I’m being punished for experimenting with card combinations.

On the other hand - I got an achievement, first try, for freeing Leo from prison without raising the alarm. Didn’t plan to do that, I just stumbled blindly into the circumstances which allowed me to do so. It didn’t really feel like I earned or accomplished something cool because I couldn’t see the end goal before I’d already tripped over it.

Sometimes you’ll get into combat. I like that you can bargain your way out of fights with the use of food, fame, bribes, infamy, NPCs etc. That’s a really cool mechanic. But I’ve tried doing multiple versions of each game where I play violently versus pacifism and there doesn’t seem to be any difference to the outcome. The game told me that there’s a moral high-ground element, but it doesn’t really reward you for choosing either path.

Oddly enough, I feel like this adventure game has the same problem that plagued a lot of early adventure games. Where the player is hopelessly going around in circles, rubbing things in their inventory against things in the game world in the vague hope that something will react appropriately and turn into progress. It’s just happening with cards instead of a DOS cursor.

If I was going to offer constructive critique, I would suggest giving a sense of ‘depth’ to each location pile, so the player at least had some vague idea of how deep a loop they are about to dive into. That could give a better sense of economy to the action cards and it may give a bigger sense of risk versus reward? Also, maybe treat each location pile as a cardinal direction on a compass, rather than having the same cards and locations and people showing up in different piles. Might help give the player a better sense of where they reside spatially, within the abstraction of the card-generated world.

TDLR ; fun story-driven game with some neat art, characters and concepts. I didn't find the Gameplay very intuitive.

Had a lot of fun with this one and it's gained a lot of comprehensive building tools in the time I've played it. But in it's current state, Sprocket doesn't have much in the way of gritty tank combat gameplay to fully push your creations to their limits. All of the gameplay scenarios are big open landscapes with ideal weather, very few obstacles and very little opportunity for tactics and mobility to triumph even if your vehicle is outgunned.

A lot of games like to focus solely on the hard factors of tanks. The golden trifecta of speed, armour and firepower. Whilst this is a good place to start, there are hundreds of tank combat games that only use hard factors. What could help this game stand out from its' competitors would be an additional section that focuses on the soft factors of tank design. These have an effect on the production of the tank just as much as the hard ones.

-What level of tools did the tank factory workers have access to?
-What temperature was the steel treated at in order to harden it?
-Has the tank crew been trained effectively?
-How high is their morale?
-Has the country the tank was designed in been deprived of things like steel, rubber and tungsten by trade sanctions?

All of these factors could be put on sliders and would play a part in the overall survivability of the vehicle. It might also be fun to have a little side-section where you can custom design the type of shell the tank delivers (with disastrous effects if the player tries to pack too much explosive power into the charge!)

At the moment, the most fun I'm having with this game is by breaking it and building things that it does not have the functionality for (yet). Making things like armoured cars, halftracks and MRLS vehicles. However, there's a lot of potential on display here and I look forward to watching it develop.

Oh, and this game NEEDS the addition of multiplayer custom tank battles. I would not stop playing this if it had multiplayer.

Had my eye on this for a while and I'm really glad I picked it up. You play the role of an AI that has been tasked with terraforming Mars. The devs made a smart choice by adding story elements (and even a little combat), because let's be honest - terraforming is boring. It's a slow process of watching numbers go up and can take decades, even at peak efficiency. The game forces the player to focus by answering philosophical and moral questions amidst their normal duties of managing resources.

It's not perfect though. I've done multiple playthroughs now and there are massive pacing issues where story elements happen all at once, interrupting my builds. There is a part where you are forced to fill out a 10 page questionnaire and can't click back to main game to slow down the speed. This was a problem when I finished the test, got back to my base and realised I'd left the game on x16 speed, hadn't stopped importing ice and half of my base was now below sea-level. Either that, or you'll experience vast stretches of time where no story elements happen whatsoever. No one will speak to you for decades, then contact you after 30 years of research as if you just spoke to them yesterday.

I feel like it would be much more impactful if you get to see the humans who created you ageing right before your eyes. The generations that follow them either normalising the concept of having an AI in charge of their survival, or becoming more suspicious about the player's motives, depending on the answers they give to the moral questions posed.

On top of that, the micromanagement systems aren't great. You can set a priority on which construction buildings are most important, but it's either 1 or 0, there's no in-between. So don't be surprised if you run low on worker robots and the remaining ones can't work out how to provide the resources to build more of them. I've tried multiple approaches to combat this, but it's happened every time I'm played, so I'm forced to come to the conclusion that the resource-pathing is just a bit dumb.

Overall though - fun experience, good story with multiple endings and some genuinely thought-provoking moral philosophies that I was not expecting. Points off for reminding me that elon musk exists when I researched hyperloops, though.

(REVISED 24/03/2022) The most recent update has added some longevity to the game, but I still cannot recommend. Turning empty flats into comfortable living spaces is fun and allows you to get very creative with even the limited amount of initial furniture and decorations. But I found the actual ‘meat’ of the game boring, repetitive and grindy. Most of the time that isn't spent playing the odd minigame is waiting for contracts to refill so you can decorate the same lot of housing templates over and over again. I appreciate the studio making this game is quite small, but there simply wasn't enough variety (or the illusion of variety) to hold my interest.

You can buy and sell properties now, with the exception of the tutorial RV. I presume this was done in order to stop players softlocking themselves straight off the bat, but it feels a bit redundant to have this property permanently in your possession when you are in control of houses that can bring in 4 times its' income.

The property managers are still inconsequential. If you don't do what they ask, they call you an a$$hole … and then pester you again a few days later. As far as I can tell, there are no other negative consequences, so I ended up just ignoring these messages completely.

I also noticed that you as a landlord don’t have any of your own personal needs, or bills to pay. It would give a much better sense of progression if you could see your own home improving along with your property empire. Maybe past residents that viewed you as a great landlord could send you small presents, or letters about how they have a great job now and have bought a house, all thanks to your support in their earlier life as a young adult.

The game still hovers somewhere between a simulator and an idle game. I found it far too boring to focus 100% of my attention on, but residents and your bank balance require far too much babysitting for it to just sit in the background while you go and do something that’s actually fun. I also noticed that layout is of no concern to clients. So you can just jam in whatever they specify in random locations in the property and still get a 5 star rating. I wonder if this could be solved by having hard-points within each properties. Gas pipes for the kitchen, waste water pipes for the bathroom. This would give an extra sense of challenge for the player to layout a property to the original specifications to save money, or have to spend extra cash to fit piping extensions.

At its best, I could see this game being something excellent and subversive. It presents itself as a Houseflipper game, but slowly attempts to turn the player into the villain of their own story. It could show them what happens to an area of poor housing over time if the player slowly gentrifies it, pushing properties out of the price range of those who need to live and work there. This feels like the perfect game for the greed and contempt of the player to have long-term consequences, if they don’t see them coming!

So yeah, lots of potential and hard work on display ... Still needs a few updates and hooks in order to be truly addicting. Look forward to watching this one develop.