Recent reviews by Swift

If you like DOOM and you like roguelikes then you should try this game. Definitely one of the better modern roguelikes. It throws you straight into the action, doesn't waste your time on unnecessary fluff, nor does it hide behind an impenetrable UI, and it has kick ass music to boot.

Factorio sets the gold standard for the factory, logistics, and supply chain management genre.

It does an impeccable job giving you a sense of progression as you learn how to scale your factory up from manually constructing everything, until you have automated the construction and production of everything.

And if that's not enough, the customisability and moddability means that if you're willing to tinker for a bit, you can tailor the game to exactly your favourite mix of building, exploration and combat.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough to the simulation game crowd.

Ever wondered what it would be like to play a city builder where you had to plan your expansion in phases because construction work *actually* takes time?

Where you need to ensure that there are service roads which flat bed trucks can use to haul your excavators to site, while your cement mixers are slowly crawling across from the opposite side of the city because you only budgeted for one cement plant?

Is your idea of fun attempting to micromanage the semaphore signals on your train line to try and squeeze as many trains into a schedule that doesn't grind to a complete halt every 5 minutes, all because you were too stingy to build additional rail corridors?

Do you dream of ingenious ways to ensure that every glorious member of your proletariat can find joy and purpose in catching the bus to the construction site, and spend their days constructively, contributing to building a beautiful soviet republic?

Then, maybe this is the game for you!

A hard game that is challenging, instead of being merely obnoxious.

The cassette rewinding "That's not how it happened..." mechanism makes failing feel less like an unfair punishment, and more like experimenting and perfecting your skill.

Between the excellent pacing that this gives you (less downtime waiting for control to handed back to you), and an above-average soundtrack that meshes well with the combat, it's easy to get into the zone even when you're making mistakes and retrying over and over.

Cons would be the occasional annoying stealth sections which feel totally out of place, and the trickier environmental challenges that make most of the bosses seem like a walk in the park.

Overall I enjoyed the game and would recommend it to fans of the genre.

One of those games that appear simple at first, but end up fiendishly complex once you realise you'd played yourself into a corner. I'm not usually a fan of puzzle card builders, but I'm enjoying this one.

This is the VR rhythm game I've been waiting for.

I am told that Frostpunk provides the authoritative experience of what is known in Finland as "VMP weather". Regardless of whether or not this is true, what you have here is an excellent survival city builder that combines the best of both genres while managing to skip most of the busy work.

The game presents just the right amount of having to balance resources and research without making it feel like you're juggling progress bars for the sake of it. It rewards foresight but without entirely dumbing down the optimal choice to rote calculation.

As for moral choices, the game does a decent job at presenting you with choices that are more fleshed out than merely "Saintly hero" vs "Evil villain". The game is set in desperate times, and often you as The Captain are stuck between making an unpopular move in the present, versus setting the entire city up for failure in the near future.

On the technical side, the controls and UI are decent, and the game performs well, both performance and stability wise.

To wrap everything up, you have stunningly beautiful music and graphics.

I highly recommend this game for fans of the genre.

You stand in the center of the colosseum as the crowd jeers at you. The brute in front of you swings his axe and you step back, the blade missing the skin of your nose by inches. You duck down, grab a sword from the clutches of a dead gladiator lying next to you, then spring up to your feet, swinging the blade in a vicious arc, lopping off the top of the skull of the savage in front of you. Suddenly, you hear something behind you, and as you spin around, a barbarian caves your face in with a morning star.

GORN is a perfect example of a VR game done right. It plays to the strengths of VR, works around the shortcomings of the current gen of VR headsets, and focuses on one mechanic and hones it well: melee combat.

Outside of fighting games, it seems everything else over the past years has done a complete disservice to melee combat, relegating it to the bottom tier of balancing, combat which you only resort to when you have no other option.

It’s thrillingly refreshing to play a game where you get to duck and dive and throw your punches in real life, and see your actions replicated live on the screen. It may not seem like much, but just seeing your digital hands move and turn and clench in sync with your real ones adds an extra dimension of immersion.

GORN gets a lot of praise and recommendations, and it’s easy to see why. Instead of trying to mix together half a dozen half-baked mechanics, the game focuses and excels on being an arena brawler, nothing more, nothing less. The play sessions throw you into the action straight away, and are kept short and sweet. Prone to nausea or discomfort after long VR sessions? Not a problem! The weird locomotion style of swinging your arms dramatically as you swagger around to move definitely seems silly at first, but it actually works to help reduce motion sickness.

A trap that lots of VR games seem to be falling into, is trying to replicate the experience of games on a flat monitor, ultimately leading to an unsatisfying experience. Games like GORN show what the potential of VR gaming is when you design your game from the ground up for VR. Providing a tactile, hands on experience, with physics that react to your touch, combined with the immersion of 360° stereoscopic vision and room-scale positional tracking.

In closing, this game is great, and I recommend you go and punch a gladiator in the face.

tl;dr: Mechs, lasers, jumpjets and stomping your opponents to death. What more could you ask for?

The combat is fun, and the core gameplay loop is solid. However, the experience is marred by an abysmally insufferable plot, replete with characters flaunting the personality of cardboard cut-outs, who manage to come across as more shallow than villains from a children's cartoon show. Every new dialogue continues to build up an impression ranging somewhere between forgettable, and obnoxiously abrasive.

Instead of leaving it to the player to form their own opinion about characters, the story deigns to constantly dictate how one should feel disdain for the villains and pity for the heroes. Rather than building up interest in characters who the player feels compelled to get to know better and engrossed with, they end up being reduced to convenient props whose purpose is to solely push forward the plot with as much condescension as possible.

If the storyline were skippable none of this would have been an issue, but unfortunately most of the map is locked behind story milestones, as are the difficulty levels. Luckily, modders have been working hard to remedy this.

An even bigger shortcoming perhaps, is the out-of-battle, strategic/management layer. The universe just feels rigid and static. Your mechwarriors could fight tooth and nail in battle, returning all ragged and tattered, clutching their well-earned C-bills and salvage in victory, but that is about the extent of the impact to which their mission just had on the world.

Each individual battle feels completely divorced from the world at large, as if it happened in its own private little universe. With every fight and every encounter, it’s painfully obvious that they are spawned out of the aether solely to provide a fight, completely disjointed and unconnected from anything. And once they’re concluded, they evaporate like a reverie, with the only evidence that they ever happened, being your profit.

The experience of being a mercenary is ruined when it doesn’t matter who you work for, who you cross paths with in your work, or whose toes you step on. There are no hard choices to make nor moral choices to ponder over. No building friendships, forging alliances, plotting betrayals or ruefully making sacrifices.

Each world takes on the impression of being nothing more than a glorified mission board (and shop and hiring hall) built out of a few dice rolls, with no persistence, no events, and not even the faintest illusion of being a living and breathing world. The reputation system has so little impact that it can be dismissed as nothing more than just a number which influences the negligible shop discounts.

Each node on the map blends into a sameness, with the only differentiating features being a handful of traits which nudge the dice-rolls in one way or another as they decide which biome your next fight will end up on, or whether the store will sell you equipment slightly better than the previous world.

All that said, the actual battles are without a doubt, definitely and absolutely fun. It’s just the case that the rest of the game built around it feels barebones and lacklustre, belying an extraordinary amount of untapped potential and opportunity.

We can only hope that HBS carry on the good work of putting together a cohesive mercenary experience, and make Battletech the definitive turn based strategy game for mech fans.

I like Furious Angels.

It doesn't do anything spectacularly original or amazing, but it takes what it is, boils it down, distills it, removes all the fluff and filler, and just focuses on that, and it does it well.

Fly your jet. Shoot other jets. Die. Repeat.

There is no complex weapon upgrade tree, there's no XP system to progress from scrappy rust bucket to chromed war machine. There aren't procedurally generated enemies with ten thousand possible combinations. Just you, your jet (in its three forms), several enemies, and a boss type enemy. What makes it engaging is how you choose to prioritize and deal with them when your screen is full of enemies, without it resorting to full on frantic bullet hell.

My biggest fault with the game is the audio. The sound effects lack a lot of oompf and feels more like you're popping bubblewrap than making things explode. And likewise the music feels anaemic and doesn't (IMHO) do a good job of getting you into the "zone".

So, have a look at the video above, and if that tickles your fancy, I'd recommend giving the game a go. Just don't expect a 60 hour deal with a fleshed out story, multiplayer lobbies, crafting systems and economies and sandboxes and and and. The game is exactly what it says on the tin: a $5 score attack shooter.