Recent reviews by Maxion

Fun and whimsical idle game with more particles than you can shake a gnorp at.

Smash hit of the year.
Death comes for everyone, only the best fight back.

Still the best space ninja simulator.

Fascinating finale to the Deponia series, with some rather well made dives into portals that traverse both time and space.
If they make another one after this I can't even imagine what that would be like.

Note: I am not associated with the developers in any way, I've just been playing a lot recently.

Screeps is a game for programmers.
But it is possible for someone without any previous programming experience to learn it with enough dedication, though I recommend at least learning some basics of programming/JavaScript from somewhere like codecademy first. And try the free tutorial before you buy the game (I am still running code that started out based on the tutorial code, 2 months later).

The game has deceptively simple visuals, but a lot of increasingly complex systems that you gain access to as you progress within the game, providing interesting challenges for your programming ability. How complex it ends up getting depends in part on how much of it you end up wanting to automate. Pretty much anything you can do, you can get your code to do for you.

Like most programming, you are going to want to look things up in the documentation, which covers all the different elements your code can interact with, and has examples for most functions.
I also highly recommend joining the excellent and helpful community on the Slack chat.

I recommend that new players spawn in the green novice areas around the edges of the map, so that any combat you get into is at least with someone of relatively similar power to you, instead of getting wiped out on a whim by an established player. You will want to get a tower and some defensive code up by the time your safe mode ends, and remember you can activate another safe mode from your controller if you have any available.
Your main progression is your continued improvement of your code, most players respawn a few times.

As for what I think of the game, I love it!
This game has really reignited and fueled my passion for programming unlike anything before it.
The learning curve may be a bit steep, but that is part of the fun/challenge.
The community is great, and I spend a lot of time chatting on Slack and helping people with their questions and figuring out problems with their code. :) (helping people is optional of course, but I enjoy doing that)
The developers are pretty responsive, and are continuing to improve the game, and fix issues that may be raised by the players.

I find the subscription model fairly reasonable, and it is even possible to fund your subscription through your in game activities if you are reasonably good/developed. Though some choose to take on the additional optimization challenge of playing without a subscription and the additional limitations that gives.
Buying the game on steam also gives access to private servers, which is an alternative/additional way to play the game, and is a good place to test your code before deploying it to the live server.

Edit: A year later, I'm still really enjoying this game. It continues to get updates, and even some pull requests submitted by players get merged. Recently I have been enjoying implementing more complete automation in my code to participate in community-arranged bot arenas where players spawn into a small map with all interaction disabled except for the initial code upload, and the code has to do everything on its own and try to beat the other players' code at what ever the goal may be for the round. :D

This is full of Win! A must buy for anyone who likes music of these genres. And Danny B's version in the other pack too!

As the trailer suggests, this game is a humorous cross between puzzle platformer and lemmings, where you take advantage of the deaths of your predecessors to progress through the different levels.

With an unlimited number of knights at your disposal, you control one until it dies, then another, and so on, and on each try to die in a way that your corpse will be of some benefit to your next knight. But doing well at a level means using fewer knights (wouldn't want them to die in vain, right? ;)

Progressing in the game uses more of your puzzle skills than your platforming skills, and for considering you will only be using 3-4 buttons, the game gets surprisingly complex.

Completing the various levels and achievements feels reasonably satisfying, and it can be amusing to overcome any obstacle by throwing numerous knights at it in various ways.

The game contains several references to other games, most of which I found quite amusing, but more than anything else I found myself laughing out loud at many of the messages describing how varyingly successful I had been at the end of each level.

This game takes about 1-2 hours to beat on normal difficulty, and by then it has already gotten quite repetitive.
The voice acting is terrible, assuming you can even hear it, because the cutscenes are a lot lower volume than everything else, with no way to turn the voice volume up.
The graphics style seemed appealing at first, but it is easy to get stuck on the corners of things, and some of the enemy projectiles are almost impossible to see over the background.
Many of the weapons are almost useless, and the hitboxes of normal enemies seems to be only the circle below their feet.

There is also some talk about the devs being scumbags toward past customers, but I don't know enough about that to take it into consideration for this review.

In summary, maybe if you find it for a dollar it would be worth it for an hour of shooting zombies, but at any price above that this is an avoid unless they apply some serious fixes.

Almost like playing D&D (though as a 2D platforming RPG), especially with friends. Amusing references, enjoyable story, and challenging in a satisfying way.
Beware the second multiplayer boss is very challenging, especially with fewer people, but still doable (bring a lot of arrows).

For anyone who has ever enjoyed a Dance Dance Revolution kind of game at any level, there is an appropriate difficulty setting in here for you. And on the easiest setting it may even appeal to fans of RPG without any sense of rhythm. It caters to the whole range very nicely. And since it lets you change the difficulty as much as you want for the first few levels, you can play around until you find what is comfortable for you before it is locked. But keep in mind the tutorial is the same easy difficulty regardless of what you have chosen, the real level starts after it, of course. :)
And the music is pretty nice too.

I enjoy this game, and recommend it for any and all of the above.