Recent reviews by Thunderbat

An excellent and surprisingly immersive little toolbox for creating and designing your own galaxy-spanning catalog!

The controls are very easy to understand and it's a lot of fun to just make up planets and solar systems with their own lore and conditions, perfect for creative writers or GMs homebrewing their own galaxies.

The music fits perfectly, and the little details such as the HUD elements popping up when selecting your planets paired with the digital beeps of your "ship"'s scanners as it pulls up information make the experience quite immersive, like you're selecting your next destination aboard your very own spaceship.

Personally, I would love to see some extra tabs for each planet to add in some more custom data, such as a tab specifically meant to display info on the fauna and flora, significant locations but that may be treading into more than just a star system map creation tool.
Some extra tools to customise the planets themselves would also be nice, but what's here is great and a lot of fun to play with.

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys homebrewing your own sci-fi lore or as a companion for GMs running sci-fi tabletop games!

Excellent pseudo-MMO with a nice vintage style.

Sea of Thieves is a very unique game, it has the perfect blend of beautiful visuals, sound design and is one of those rare games (heh) where you can just walk around and take in the atmosphere.

It's a big pirate sandbox with many things to do, from fighting skeleton ships, hunting megalodons, digging up treasure... anything that comes to your mind when you thing "pirate game" well, this game has it, and does it really well.

I've played the game since it came out on Steam, done everything there is to do in the game, so I can safely say the game is amazing and there's no better time to pick it up then now, since most recent updates have added more and more systems to make the new player experience a breeze.

Personally, I'm waiting for Rare to add new things to do in the game, as the past few seasons have simply added in more ways to progress but by doing the same things that have been in the game from the starts. Adding a new type of chest you can just find in a shipwreck isn't exactly a new mechanic after all.

If I were a more jaded person, I'd give it a thumbs-down because "They're not adding anything new." or "They don't listen to the players" but truth be told, starting this game at this point in time would probably be an amazing experience.
So much to do, so much to see, so much to experience... If I could re-do the first-time experience with my friends at this point in time, I absolutely would.

In short, Sea of Thieves is not just a pirate game, it is THE pirate game.
Grab your friends, sail the seas and make memories together, you won't regret it, matey!

This is both a game and an experience, sending you back to the early wild-west era of the internet, complete with sparkly gifs and bit-crushed MIDI tracks on homebrewn websites.

Just perusing these sites brings you nostalgia if you happened to have grown up during this age, and it perfectly captures the vibe of the era.

If you ever wanted to be an internet-cop moderating the internet of the 90's, there's no better game for you than Hypnospace Outlaw.

A game no one expected to be as good as it is.

Some of the best art direction I've ever seen in a game with extremely diverse and beautiful environments, a fun story that really feels like you're playing through a Guardian's movie (though they do quip a bit too much at times) and as expected, a great 80's soundtrack to boot.

If you're looking for a fun 16-hour RPG with amazing visuals and a surprisingly fun story, I highly recommend this game!

An excellent real-time tactics game where you control your squad of marines through various lore-friendly environments.

This game manages to keep you on edge, from the excellent lighting, constant pings of your motion tracker and the grimy atmosphere of the colony buildings you slowly creep through.

If you're a big fan of Alien and squad-based games, there really isn't a better game on the market right now!

This game is the ultimate story generator.
You'll experience heroism, overcome impossible odds and deal with the loss of precious colonists.

They'll develop relationships, rivalries and develop their own stories, and which type of story you want to play out is completely up to you!

Frontier outpost? Bio-engineering scientists? Military base? Medieval settlement?
All of these and more are possible both in the base game and with its DLC and mods.

No other game besides Dwarf Fortress provides the fantastic sandbox experience this game does, and it is infinitely replayable due to the incredible modding support and massive modding community!

I can not recommend this game enough!

Right from the start i'll tell you this : i love this game.
XCOM 2 took everything from the previous game and improved on it in every way, and as of now, i haven't found anything they did worse then the last game, but my opinion asside, here's the review!

REVIEW :

XCOM 2 is the successor to the tactical, squad-based, turn-based, strategy game XCOM : Enemy Unknown and the expansion Enemy Within.
I have put hundreds of hours into the previous games on console and i loved it to death.
The combat was exciting, the strategy layer lets you make difficult choices and the feeling you get when you lose that high-ranked soldier you named after a friend due to a random crit is horrible, which makes the game even more interesting!

XCOM 2 is all of the above, but improved in every way.
The combat is, in my oppinion, more challenging then the previous game, the addition of more alien species and buffs to the classic ones really make them more of a challenge to take down.
In the previous game, seeing sectoids or thin men on a map wasnt really a big deal, their abilities weren't all too dangerous and in the late game they just become cannon fodder for your troops.
In XCOM 2 the sectoids have way more health and can mind controll your men right from the second mission and the poison spitting thin men?
Well, they're snakeladies now with the ability to drag troops towards them with their tongues and binding them, rendering them unable to move or act.
They can also spit acid and dodge bullets, so they're anything but cannon fodder.
The "replacement" for the cannon fodder would be the regular ADVENT troops, human-alien hybrid soldiers acting as a police force, yet if these fellows flank your low-ranked troops you can be sure a crit will kill your men right away.
With all these aditions, the enemies are waaaay more powerfull then their predecessors with more abilities and variation in strength.

But don't you worry, your own troops got some neat upgrades as well!
Your classic 5 classes are still in the game under another name, Heavies being the Grenadiers, Supports being Specialists etc...
All of them have a new set of skill, divided into two subclasses, for example : you can spec out your Sharpshooter to be your good ol' sniper, taking down aliens from far far away with squadsight, or turn them into gunslingers, granting them skills with their sidearm like free shots or shooting at all enemies in sight with your pistol.

Customisation!
Yes, customisation is even more fleshed out then the previous game with tons and tons of gear to kit your troops out with.
Going from bandanas, aviators, helmets, cigars and even hockeymasks if you'd like to add in Jason Voorhees with a machete, go right ahead!

Mods mods mods.
Firaxis did a great job of supporting the mod community with the addition of the Steam Workshop and giving the modders access to ALL assets they used in creating XCOM 2.
Yep, all of them, the full 50GB of sounds, buildings, textures, models... all of it!
They even partnered with Long War Studios, a modding studio that made the famous mod for XCOM Enemy Within : Long War, which added a more lengthy game, items, classes and abilities.
I was also surprised to see a few abilities from the Long war mod incorporated into the game itself like the Aim ability for the sharpshooter, which was in Long War under the name of Steady Aim as well as several other mechanics.
the mods will only lengthen the lifespan of XCOM 2 just like mods did to Skyrim and i forsee tons of interesting additions to the games mechanics.

In short :

XCOM 2 is a fantastic game, i have already finished the story in my first playthrough which took around 26 hours, the final mission being really challenging and feeling more like an end game unlike the headshot-the-uber-ethereal-and-win ending of the last game. The story itself is way more engaging and interesting, explaining why the aliens came here in the first place and why they are abducting people.
If you liked the last game, buy it, just buy it, you'll love it just as much as the previous game.
But if you didnt like it, i wouldnt recommend buying it since its very similar (in a good way) to XCOM : EU.

As for a score, i'd give it a 9.8/10

Vigilo Confido and long live the Resistance!

Imagine this :
You send a squad of eight, somewhat experienced troopers to a shot down UFO which you have never seen before nor do you know who or what's inside.
It's night, pitch black to be exact.
Your squad moves away from the security of the helicopter and slowly move forward, checking around every corner for any sign of aliens, their morale slightly lowering due to the darkness and the strange sounds.
They reach a cornfield, the UFO probably located behind it, so ofcourse you order them to enter the field as a sudden burst of plasma nearly hits your rifleman who took point. A big reptilian alien was hiding behind some strawbales and was waiting for you to take the bait, luckily a well-placed shot in the head took care of him quickly, good thing you brought a sniper along.
The troopers start throwing flares all around, watching every part of the field carefully as your pointman suddenly finds a patch of blood on the floor next to an empty shotgun, presumably of the farmer who lives here, yet no body to be seen.
A silhouet suddenly passes through an opening, only visible for a brief second, but enough to notice that that thing was something new.
Your heart starts to pound as you order your troops to stand ground, watching every possible entrypoint for that thing to come through.
You gunner suddenly opens fire, unleashing a hellfire of bullets to the opening you first came through, the large, bug-like horror flinching as it falls to the floor before it could reach them.
So now that's dealt with, it's time to breach the UFO...and that's where the true horror starts...

9/10 would get scared ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ again

First of all, don't let the Metacritic score decieve you, it deserves waaaay better than a 44.

This game reminds me of those good, old flashgames where you pick your clunky, pixelated troops and let them roam around the map to invade and destroy the enemy's base, i loved those!
Well this game is one of those, but sooo much better in every way!
This game focusses on building your own bunker to protect your dissembodied brain from the hostiles invading it.
You pick your rooms, walls and barricades from a wide variety of different models and easily place them down.
Then you choose your starting units from a large list, ranging from zombies to T-1000-ish killerbots which you can customise freely to wield a huge amount of different weapons.
Once you've done that, you can switch to any of those units and controll them untill it gets eliminated or you switch to another unit. You can also put it in patroll mode to guard your base, sentry mode to guard a specific area and brain hunt where it will go towards the enemy's bunker and find its way to the brain. And if needed, call down a V2 rocket piloted by a drunk pilot who will probably crash, but still deliver your fully-outfitted troops roughly where you wanted them (or you just lob them from space in a box and let it crash a few metres deep in the sand, forcing them to crawl out of the gaping hole while hostiles throw molotov cocktail inside, fun times!)

I must say, this game is very fun to play, Its simple, creative and action packed!
Hell, i had a soldier once who faced off agains three other robots, his legs got shot of and his rifle got destroyed, so he switched to his pistol and killed all three of them before bleeding out.
It's these awesome moments that make this game so great! Shooting down a dropship and witnessing the soldiers under it getting flattend by it or a squad heroicly fighting off hordes of crash-test dummies while trying to block their entrypoint with a concrete launcher, and all of this happened in those few hours i've played!
Worshop makes it even better, adding in units from other games like Warhammer 40K or Halo makes it much more interessting, even adding in a few new maps is always fun!

The only downsides i've encountered is the clunky menu, the poor UI, lacking tutorial and the fact that there is no Free camera mode.
There barely is a UI besides the circular hold-the-right-mousebutton one which is a little confusing at first, the tutorial is very minimum, but you learn the basics of the game pretty fast anyways. And the camera, well, thats permanently focussed on the unit you are using, so no looking around the place, which is annoying if you hear a dropship nearby, but you can't see it.

But for my final verdict, this game is a must-buy for people who like customising their own troops individualy, who like games that tell stories about how badass the units were in that one battle against those 100 crabs and for those who just like building giant, trap-filled bunkers for the CPU to breach (which it will, he'll just dig into the brain's bunker right away)

I give it a score of 8.5/10, take that Metacritic!